The Doors

Oliver Stone might have fallen to the wayside this decade, but I have already made my feelings clear on the level of talent he displayed throughout the '80s and '90s. There was one black sheep from this period, however, that I knew I had to confront some day, Stone's biopic of Doors frontman Jim Morrison. Indeed, that Stone would call his film The Doors is the first offense of the film, as he doesn't give a damn about any of the other members. Unfortunately, it is not remotely the last, and after I suffered through this empty display of fandom I wanted to run back to JFK or Platoon to remind me that Stone could mix technical flash with something, anything, of substance.

The Doors opens with Morrison at UCLA's film school, weathering both criticism and accolades from his peers over his avant-garde short film. When the professor asks Morrison for his own thoughts on the picture, the young man stands up and announces he's quitting. Later, he tells his buddy Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan) that he's off movies; he wants to be a musician now. Stone goes through the motions of introducing guitarist Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) and drummer John Densmore (Kevin Dillon), and before we've even had time to care about any of these characters we are meant to celebrate them landing a record deal after shocking audiences at the Whiskey a Go Go in L.A.

At least the pacing of this initial segment suggests that this glorified piece of fan service will be over quickly, a fluff piece that annoys those who want something of substance but its inoffensive in its brevity. If only that were the case; no, Stone suddenly slams on the brakes to pore over the minutiae of Doors mythology, much of which, according to Manzarek, is a fabrication. He distorts infamous incidents such as the band's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show or the Miami concert were Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure. No real reflection exists, other than the constant focus upon alcohol and its destructive influence on the singer.

Val Kilmer received considerable acclaim for his performance as Morrison, but the only impressive facet I can identify is that he sang the songs himself. Well, I should blame the screenplay, but Kilmer clearly took to it as if it was a great piece of writing, because he does his best to sell Jim as a tragic hero. Instead, Kilmer and Stone inadvertently paint Morrison as a drunken, narcissistic fool; Morrison is his biggest fan, and he buys into his own image as the Lizard King with such fervor that he not only lashes out in drunken arrogance but places himself above petty human feelings. His mounting obsession with death is not so much morbid as grating and vain.

Therein lies the ultimate irony of Stone's vision: in a quest to paint Morrison as a dreamer undone by vices, he instead created a damning portrait of the vacuity of the hippie ideology, one whose good ideas of freedom, love and peace were snuffed out by its own buried sense of objectivistic greed and drug-induced mental stagnation. Ebert compared the film to "being stuck in a bar with an obnoxious drunk, when you're not drinking," but that hardly scratches the surface of what makes Morrison so unpleasant. Alcohol does not turn Morrison into a monster; it is merely the monster's beverage of choice. The band, understandably, grows to resent him almost as much as we do. Their producer, Paul Rothchild (Michael Wincott), gives an obviously rehearsed spiel about how he watched Janis Joplin ruin herself and won't sit by and watch it again, but he does not follow his words with actions. One senses that the band just wants him to go away, and if he dies so be it. I must confess that I have rarely wanted a character to die as badly as I kept waiting for Morrison to finally snuff it in a bathtub.

The only moments I enjoyed involved Morrison's mistress Patricia Keneally (Kathleen Quinlan), a rock journalist who engages in various rituals of witchcraft, including drinking blood. Her weirdness cures Morrison of his alcoholic impotence -- itself hilarious when juxtaposed with his sex god preening -- if only for a moment. But this is a minor part of a seemingly endless film, and instead of this warped, off-kilter romance we must focus on the frightening one between Morrison and his partner Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan).

Stone's camera pans through the Père Lachaise Cemetery at the end are meant to enshrine Morrison as one of the key figures of his time, but as the director runs over the grave markers of such artists as Proust and Rossini, he only emphasizes the dark irony of Morrison's life that he brings to light. I have to question my own belief that Stone wanted to paint an ultimately supportive portrait of Morrison, because by the end of this film only a madman or a fool would think of Morrison as anything else than the drunken lout he detractors always took him for, a sophomoric poet whose crap lyrics made for great rock precisely because -- if we all break out our degrees from the Lester Bangs School of Rock Appreciation -- they were simple-minded, chauvinistic, and made to be played loud. Stone wanted to make a eulogy for the '60s, and instead he crafted its most damning condemnation since Gimme Shelter.

Howards End

In the accompanying booklet for Criterion's new Blu-Ray for Howards End, Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan bemoans how time has forgotten the movie, which was wildly acclaimed and received nine Oscar nominations (and two wins) upon release, has now faded into a sort of obscurity. I confess that I myself never heard of it until Criterion announced it some months ago. Turan calls it the apex of "a cerain kind of filmmaking, a landmark example of movies of passion, taste and sensitivity that honestly touch every emotion." Indeed, this deceptively clichéd story of British class warfare -- itself a genre that has largely been explored top to bottom in romance, period drama, verité, even comedy -- weaves such a rich tapestry of allegory and visual splendor that it commands our attention from the start.

The film, tightly adapted from E.M. Forster's novel, centers on the titular house, a large country estate that proves hugely important in the lives of three families. It is the first of many symbols in a script made entirely of them, clearly representing the quaint, idyllic perception of the "Britishness" of Britain. It is an august château, made of strong brick with interiors of rich, strong wood, with windows that look out upon fields of almost impossible green.

Through a series of misunderstandings, the Schlegels, a middle-class family of bourgeois intellectuals, find themselves connected to this symbol of rural tradition: the young, brash Helen (Helena Bonham Carter) gets engaged to the youngest son of the house's owners, the Wilcoxes, but the two break it off the next day. To sort out the embarrassment, Helen's older sister Margaret (Emma Thompson) visits the Wilcoxes in their London townhouse several months later and enters into an unlikely friendship with Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave in a minor but vital role), the matriarch of the Wilcox family. Compared to the progressive, outspoken Margaret, Ruth is hopelessly old-fashioned; she even expresses an opposition to women's suffrage. Yet Ruth sees something in Margaret, and Ruth spends many of her final days with her new friend rather than family.

Ruth's death serves as the catalyst for the film's action; in her will, she leaves Howards End, a house that's already taken on a sort of mythical quality as it's only been alluded to thus far, to Meg. The Wilcoxes are furious. They only let the house themselves, but that doesn't mean that someone can just move in and stay. Henry (Anthony Hopkins), the husband, burns the will, but he feels a tinge of guilt for his actions. When he visits the Schlegels, Margaret informs him that they can no longer afford their London house, and Henry offers to help them. Eventually, he asks for Meg's hand in marriage, albeit in a hilariously stiff fashion, standing awkwardly at the top of a staircase trying valiantly to put forward a romantic treatise without betraying any of those plebeian weaknesses known as emotions: "Do you think you can be induced to share?" he asks, and Margaret immediately picks up on what he's really asking and accepts with a similar sense of elite detachment.

With this arrangement, the Schlegels find themselves in the center of the class struggle that emerged in the Edwardian era of the early 1900s. Margaret marries Henry and her personality is slowly absorbed into the rigidity of the Wilcoxes, representatives of the new wealth of industrialism and the successors of the old aristocracy. Their greed is plain-faced and grotesque; Charles, the eldest son, is vacuous and feckless, traits that exist also in his wife Dolly. When they discover Ruth's will, Dolly is as hysterical as the "real" Wilcoxes, and she chirps in her airheaded voice, "It's only in pencil! Pencil doesn't count!" The children react to the news of their father's engagement to someone less prosperous than they (though we never see any of the kids do anything approximating work) as if their father admitted that he'd killed Ruth.

On the other end of the spectrum, the impulsive Helen takes up the charge of the Basts, a couple initially set in the lower-middle class range who slide down due to misfortunes. Helen meets Leonard (Samuel West) when she carelessly grabs his umbrella upon leaving a music recital, leading to one of the most beautiful, wittiest and revealing scenes of the film: Helen, rash and impatient, brushes up with the poor (in this case by using the ratty old umbrella) without having to suffer any consequences, while the constantly put-out Leonard must traipse through the rain after yet another of his meager possessions is snatched away by someone rich -- it also suggests that even the middle class who wishes to help the less fortunate can be just as harmful in their own way. Nevertheless, Helen and Margaret are taken with Leonard's intelligence and his plight, and they invite him over on occasion for conversation and, one suspects, as a sort of social experiment. Henry gives the Schlegel sisters an inside tip that the bank Leonard works for is about to shutter, so Leonard quits, only for the company to turn record profits. Soon, his new employers fire him in a staff reduction, and the Basts are plunged into starvation.

This happens as Magaret is adapting her personality to fit with her new social status, so when Helen brings the Basts to the wedding attempting to wring some sort of repayment from Henry for ruining this couple, Meg shoos her sister and her "protégés" away forcefully. Before they can leave, though, a drunken Mrs. Bast recognizes Henry, and we learn that he had an affair with her some years ago when she had to prostitute herself for a time. Margaret feels shame for her deceased, cuckqueaned friend, yet she forgives her husband freely.

The shifting paradigm of the Schlegels' social existence reshapes the family and creates rifts between the sisters, yet this swirling torrent of emotion and uncertainty is restrained marvelously by Carter and Thompson. At the time of shooting, both Carter and Thompson were known but hardly household names: Carter had starred in another of Merchant Ivory's Forster adaptations, A Room With a View (as well as a cameo in Maurice), and Thompson had appeared with then-husband Kenneth Branagh in Henry V and Dead Again. Yet both display prominently the aspects that won them international attention, and both give a masterclass here on the amount of emotional weight the eyes can carry. Carter exhibits her off-beat sensuality through body language and simply by speaking her mind when everyone else shoves all of their impulses into their upper lips.

It is Thompson, though, who walks away with the movie. Margaret has always been more measured than her sister, and she largely suppresses her liberal politics for the sake of polite conversation with Ruth and, later, out of bridal expectation with Henry. Yet where Carter can use her entire body to display her passions, Thompson communicates hers through her deeply expressive eyes. Turan calls Thompson "an actress who can break your heart just by widening her eyes," just about the perfect summation of her power; Margaret is not wholly unhappy in her marriage, but the emergence of Henry's two-faced, callous nature along with the general abhorrence of the Wilcox clan bury any sense of independence until only her eyes betray her true feelings.

At last she has her moment to unleash all the pent-up emotion, when Helen returns from Germany pregnant with Leonard's child. Henry is outraged, refuses to allow Helen to stay at Howards End even for a night and demands to know who "seduced" her so that he might be punished. Margaret cannot contain herself: "Will you forgive her, as you were once forgiven?" and this sudden bluntness could move mountains. Margaret, whom we met as a seemingly flighty young woman and later became a model Edwardian wife, proves her wisdom with this shocking denouncement of Henry's hypocrisy.

When Margaret first came to Howards End, the housekeeper breathlessly noted that she walked around the place just like Mrs. Wilcox, absorbing its idyllic beauty and ethereal grace. By the film's end, she has completely replaced Ruth as not only the head of Howards End but, symbolically, the leader of the new England, a liberal who shall use the wealth of industrialism (Henry) to aid the poor and the future generations. A simplistic vision of a future utopia, perhaps, but a hopeful one, and one that certainly seems popular as Margaret walks around her new kingdom.

Howards End combines all the best aspects of what one might consider "English" filmmaking, from its perfect casting to art design so meticulously recreated that it seems perfectly natural. Period dramas tend to be pretty but vacuous, with the amount of effort ceasing once an attractive woman has been placed into a corset and then into a mansion or palace; how strange, then, that the two period pieces that have struck me as tangible and realistic lately are this film and Bright Star, two movies that feature a particular set as a matter of paramount importance. Yet the chief appeal of Howards End, beyond its design or even its acting, is its lasting relevance to the world. When Helen first approaches Henry with news of the Basts' misfortune, Henry waves her off. "The poor are the poor; one is sorry for them, but there it is." How often have we heard a more gently phrased version of this, delivered with the same hypocrisy and two-faced greed, in the current health care debate?


-Henry refuses to accept any blame for encouraging Leonard to quit; "The poor are the poor," he flatly states, "One is sorry for them, but there it is."; reflects health care debate

Let the Right One In

Of all the various niches of cinematic genres and cross-genres, perhaps the most tragically underutilized is the realm of children's horror. By that I do not mean films that place children in horrifying situations (though these films certainly do that); no, I'm referring to that special sort of movie that is as much a child's imagination and the stress of growing up as it is the monsters that they perceive, be they real or illusion. When Guillermo Del Toro released Pan's Labyrinth in 2006, he put forward the greatest depiction of fantasy/horror as filtered through the eyes of a child since Charles Laughton's masterpiece Night of the Hunter, a film released over 50 years earlier. Happily, we didn't have to wait very long for the next classic to roll around, as only two years later we got Let the Right One In.

John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own novel for the screenplay, which is all the more surprising given how much of his material he was willing to omit. Lindqvist's novel is full of gory bits and extraneous themes, but his screenplay is refined, culling from his story the best elements and leaving out the gratuitous pulp and some themes director Tomas Alfredson felt wouldn't work in a film, such as the story's pedophilia subplot. Here, Alfredson cares only about the relationship between Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a shy, morbid tween and Eli (Lina Leandersson), a 200-year-old vampire forever trapped in the body of a child Oskar's age.

The most important aspect, really the foundation, of children's horror is atmosphere, and Let the Right One In has it in spades. Compared Night of the Hunter and Pan's Labyrinth, Alfredson's film has the most blatantly horrific feel. Set and shot in Sweden, the movie had half its work done before it even started; the blanketing white of the omnipresent snow and ice in some ways recalls the Coens' Fargo, and indeed the sight of spilled blood in this movie has largely the same jarring effect as it did in the Coens' first masterpiece. Yet Let the Right One In is also a claustrophobic affair, boxing in the vast sense of hopelessness and unsettling blankness of Fargo into places like a cramped apartment complex courtyard, or a school that manages somehow to be bleaker even than the endless snow outside. Alfredson maintains a touch of realism where Laughton and Del Toro delved deeply into fantasy, and the results are infinitely more unsettling.

Appropriately, for an atmosphere such as this, Alfredson does not move from one point to the next in a hurry; in the opening shots, the rail-thin Oskar brandishes a knife, ordering some unseen, likely nonexistent object to "squeal like a pig." He looks out his window to see a man and a young girl move into the complex, and the first thing the man days upon getting to his new room is cover the window. The next day, Oskar reveals a surprising knowledge of forensics when a police officer comes to his class, and a large kid sits beside him tapping menacingly. That night, the old man who just moved into the complex heads into the woods, finds and kills a loner, then attempts to drain his victim's blood into a bottle before he is discovered and must flee.

All of this leads up to Oskar meeting Eli in their courtyard one night, a moment as enigmatic as everything that came before it. These first 12 minutes are so are fascinating; Alfredson sets up almost everything we need to know about these characters and overtly points toward the vampire route to the point that even some schmuck who randomly wandered into the theater could see it coming, yet he manages to take the time to linger on each of these shots, suggesting and prodding with tiny nuances.

Upon meeting Oskar, Eli flatly states that they cannot be friends, yet a bond soon forms anyway. The boy asks his new friend how old she is. "Twelve. More or less." He gives her a Rubik's cube, which she solves easily, and they learn Morse code so they can tap messages to each other through their shared wall. Oskar, who collects newspaper clippings of various crimes, monitors the growing number of murders around the town, and he links them to Eli. When he fits the pieces together and asks her if she's a vampire, he does so with a matter-of-fact pragmatism; her responses are equally casual. Oskar does not judge her, and Eli is just happy that it doesn't seem to affect their friendship.

I see that Let the Right One In is generally billed as a romantic horror film, a classification that is spot on but also misleading; the relationship between these two kids certainly touches upon the idea of first love, but at its core, Let the Right One In is about two lonely children finding their only solace in each other. Oskar, feeble and weird, is incessantly bullied at school and reserved at home as he's still adjusting to his parents' divorce. Eli, forever trapped in a child's body, detests having to kill to stay alive and knows that even if she could form some sort of friendship with a person, there would always be the risk that she'd be so hungry she couldn't contain herself.

Alfredon's visual choices reflect the isolation of these characters against the stark backgrounds. He routinely places his characters in frames and windows, and he even separates them within the same shot: one of the film's most chilling images shows Håkan on the far left, hiding in a gym shower, as a group breaks into the room displayed on the right where his would-be victim is screaming for help. Aside from this touch, Alfredson's take on the source material succeeds because he mainly alludes to the novel's graphic violence. Eli's vampiric attacks are largely shadowed, and even when she dismembers a poor soul we see only the peripheral effect. In fact, the film's only weak moments directly depict overt violence: one of Eli's victims survives and slowly morphs into a vampire. Alfredson communicates this to us with a scene in which obviously computer animated cats swarm her in a frenzy as well as a sunlit suicide. These scenes are, in comparison to the rest of the film, too conventional (or, in the case of the cats, too unintentionally funny).

Yet these are small quibbles. Alfredson took a great risk with the project, as the entire weight of the story rests on the shoulder of two 11-year-olds. It's a recipe for disaster, but Hedebrant Leandersson give commanding performances. Perhaps concerned with exposing the children to such a serious story, Alfredson never let them read a full script, instead reciting their lines to them before each scene. I suppose, then, that one could assign him the credit, but no amount of instruction behind the camera can fully create the character in front of it. Both Hedebrant and Leandersson work with somewhat clichéd character types -- the reserved child shuffled between two awful parents, the self-loathing vampire who views her existence as a curse -- yet each brings layers and emotion to this story without ever lapsing into the sort of facile, borderline campy vampire fiction of late( even Buffy and Angel had their questionable moments). Leandersson in particular gives an award-worthy performance, and it's no mean feat that I preferred her to both of Kate Winslet's '08 performances combined. The young girl paints a heartbreaking portrait of a child vampire who finds her first connection in God knows how long, and it's interesting to note that the only violence that Eli engages in with outright hostility is in defense of her new friend.

This is the third time I've sat down with the feature, but only the second that I've seen it all the way through. You see, the last time I watched it I rented the DVD, only to discover that the subtitles had been altered severely. The wit and grace of the original dialogue (or at least translation) was wholly gone, replaced by what I would describe as dialogue summaries, terse, sub-prosaic descriptions of the action. I've been waiting for months for Magnolia to put out a Blu-Ray with corrected subtitles (regular DVDs seem to be fixed now). Of course, they don't exactly give a damn about this issue; when intrepid bloggers brought it to their attention, their PR rep essentially blasted them as nerds with too much time on their hands and that nothing was wrong, agreed to correct it nevertheless, then refused to do so before their current stocks emptied and refused to exchange jilted buyers. It's one of the most stunning examples of a lack of business acumen I've ever seen. Magnolia trades primarily in smaller features, so their only demographic to speak of is the cinephile community; broadly insulting them for caring so much about a product that they protest its mishandling is about as intelligent as lighting a sack of dog feces on someone's porch and leaving some form of identification nearby to link you to it. Now I hear that some of the audio tracks on the Blu-Rays are messed up. Maybe the fact that Magnolia must replace those could put the proper subtitles in the next batch, but then that would be sensible. Those who wish to see the version with the correct subtitles can look for a DVD that lists the subtitles as "English (Theatrical)" or Netflix users can stream the proper version (unless they've updated their DVD stock, though, physical copies are still flawed).

But, as it so often happens, I digress. Let the Right One In is ethereal, heartbreaking, romantic, shocking and all sorts of catchwords that don't do any justice to the final product. The title refers to the piece of vampire lore that states no vampire may enter a residence without the owner's invitation, but it also outlines the core of the film. These two children, or at least two people in children's bodies, are cut off from others, distant from their caretakers and without anyone to discuss their real feelings and thoughts. Yet each lets the other in, a bond of trust that strengthens the two but comes with a certain sense of foreboding. By erasing Håkan's backstory, Lindqvist and Alfredson subtly cast the middle-aged man as "the previous Oskar," someone so driven to be with Eli and protect her that he would even disfigure his face to prevent captors from tracing their way back to her and offer his own blood when he fails to procure it from someone else. This tale of the blurred line between childhood friendship and romance reminded me of Miyazaki Hayao's recent Ponyo, but this aspect of the story, one that suggests that the cycle, however sweet and innocent now, might simply be the first stage of a new cycle recalls Charlie Kaufman's equally unsure conclusion to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Werckmeister Harmonies

"I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another ... All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine -- time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds. And film time has also ceased to exist, since the film itself has ceased to exist. Luckily there is no authentic form or current fashion. Some kind of massive introversion, a searching of our own souls can help ease the situation."

-Béla Tarr

Consisting of only 39 shots, Béla Tarr's 145-minute Werckmeister Harmonies is certainly a sparse film. As that quote would indicate, the director wastes little of that precious, genuine time, establishing a story, and as soon as he goes through enough of the motions to support the film's weight, he dives straight into his characters and their musings and reactions. Yet I fear that by opening with that quote followed by the obligatory mention of Tarr's shot-to-length ratio, I'm already painting a picture of pretentious, insufferable philosophizing, enjoyable only to a film geek like me who must surely be trying too hard to impress people. On the contrary, I found Tarr's technique to be absolutely spellbinding, and though he barely even bothered with narrative, I was as excited and enthralled by his camera as I am by Scorsese's, or Kubrick's.

Take the opening, 10-minute shot. In one unbroken take, Tarr moves in and out of close-ups, establishing shot and differing angles, and he follows the characters in a dilapidated, drab pub with a varying pace as if a conductor gently leading the action through shifting tempos. The film's protagonist, János, a working-class, amateur astronomer creates a model of a solar eclipse for the patrons using some of the drunks on-hand. He has one stands waving his hands about as the Sun, another rotating around the first man as Earth, and yet another spiraling around the second man as the Moon. It's all quite funny, until the men line up properly for János to demonstrate the eclipse, at which point his speech turns darker, even apocalyptic: "Are the hills going to march off? Will Heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open up under us? We don’t know. We don’t know, for a total eclipse has come upon us.”

The metaphor of the eclipse and its frightening undertones is one of the few utilized in the film, yet this works to Tarr's advantage as he can flesh out each of them. The eclipse naturally represents the dichotomy between light and dark, but here that split also reflects the divide between natural and unnatural, as well as pointing toward the coming storm. Said storm arrives in the form of the strangest sideshow attraction ever devised: a huge truck carrying a stuffed whale carcass and an unseen, purportedly deformed, ringleader known as the Prince. The truck's journey through the streets of the town is as unsettling, even suspenseful as any monster film, as the truck lumbers and groans like a great beast and casts a shadow so huge it covers (or rather eclipses) the buildings next to it.

Upon arrival, the circus attracts the curiosity and mistrust of the town's citizens, as news of the circus' strange effects have preceded it. Combined with the extreme cold affecting the town and the mounting problems facing the infrastructure -- telephone lines failing, transportation issues, etc. -- the circus begins to stoke budding tensions among the townspeople.

Also stoking fears and tensions is János' aunt Tünde, who comes to town spouting rhetoric against the country's broken political system. Her polemics have a trace of totalitarianism in them, and soon she shacks up with the town's police chief and sends János to the site of the circus to keep tabs on everyone (the way Tarr so matter-of-factly handles the notion of fascists being in bed with cops is quietly hysterical). Eventually, whether through Tünde's politics, the rhetoric spouted by the Prince, or a combination of the two, the town devolves into chaos.

The key to understanding this turn of events, or at least the film's title, comes from a monologue János overhears his uncle György record. In it, he notes that the Werckmeister scale, from which the modern concept of the octave was derived, is out of tune with nature; ergo, all of the music composed since the late 17th century is not only inherently "false" but spiritually at odds with the world. So obsessed is he over fixing this imbalance that he does not mind his wife's infidelity and even uses his influence to raise money for her political schemes just to get her off his back. This theory raises questions about the film, though, in that Tarr does use a score every now and then. The usage could of course be ironic, and it's interesting to note that the deceptively soothing and emotional score often plays over acts of shocking brutality or in quieter moments to build tension.

So many sequences in this film are so extraordinary that it's impossible to list them, but apart from that masterpiece of an opening scene, the destruction of the town's hospital is particularly seared into my mind. Once the mob is fully unleashed, they ransack the city; the hospital is the only building Tarr actually shows being torn apart, but it's more than enough. The mob shuffles through the city streets for what seems like an eternity, until they finally reach the hospital and start killing all of the patients. As with the rest of the film, Tarr combines strikingly realistic photography with ethereal elements; gradually he mutes the diegetic sound, until the patients are scream in silence and assailants topple equipment without a sound. At last the group breaks into the final room, only to find an old, naked man standing and waiting for care that will never come. Suddenly faced with this stark display of mortality and frailty, the mob stops and dissipates. It's a powerful moment, and the zombie-like procession that leads to it is more thoroughly unsettling than anything I've ever seen in a Romero film.

I don't have the first clue what political situation, if any, in Hungary might have informed Werckmeister Harmonies, but Tarr's messages apply to broader senses anyway. In the aftermath, Tünde appears to have emerged as the dominant power, one of the middle class who spends the entire film indoors engaging in bourgeois activities such as sex and speechifying and venturing outside only when the working class destroys the system and clears her path to the top. János, the one character who could wander between the classes and the film's sole source of optimism, is struck catatonic by the sight of the hospital ransacking (yet another aspect of that sequence that recalls Night of the Living Dead), while György, first seen so feeble that he needed help to go to bed, is now virile and reassuring. The Prince's rhetoric, partially overheard by János, states that only in utter destruction is something truly complete, and György, who spent the whole film wracked with obsession and fear over the danger of our musical structure, is now freed by an apocalypse. Nowhere to go but up, I suppose.

There's also an implication, one that borders on satire, that the film is really about man's how humans can be so threatened by that which they don't understand -- even a piece of art, for lack of a better term, like the whale -- that they can devolve into madness. János is the first person in town to venture inside the opened circus vehicle to look at the whale, and he is clearly affected by its enormity. He believes it to be beautiful, while the townspeople regard it with suspicion and anger and, eventually, hostility. At the end, György heads to the town square to see the whale, now fully exposed as a perverse (and perversely beautiful) moment to nature's reassertion of power over the environment, he walks up to the mammoth creature, looks in its dead eye as János did, then walks away, wholly unfazed. If you count the mob as a single character, then we can see the three responses to art: indifferent appreciation, fanatic love, and bitter rejection.

At 2-1/2 hours, Werckmeister Harmonies is considerably easier to digest than his 7-hour Sátántángo, which I have not yet seen as I cannot set aside the time until the end of this semester. It's been on my list for a while, though, and watching this only strengthened the desire. It's common to look for similarities to other works when one watches a film, and for the film's entirety I was reminded of Ingmar Bergman's Spider Trilogy (there might even be open nods to both Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence with shots of a black helicopter and tank) and the microcosmic political apocalypse of Robert Altman's Nashville. And if that isn't a glowing recommendation in and of itself, I don't know what is.

Fired Up!

Fired Up! is a film so desperate to telegraph its jokes to the audience that even its title has an exclamation mark. Cheeleaders in the film like to shout the title by chanting "F! U!" and if you think that joke is clever, please buy a gas oven so you can place your head in it. Then again, given how the camera constantly frames these teenagers as if they're trying to cheer at the film's audience, these chants appear to be aimed at those who would lay down good money to watch this, and frankly, we all deserve it.

Fired Up! concerns two coagulated sacks of douche resin contained by the sewn-together flesh of Chinese workers who died in a sweatshop owned by Abercrombie & Fitch. Their names are Shawn and Nick, and I shall withhold the names of the actors who portray because I'm feeling particularly charitable today. That any woman would sleep with them is inherently sexist, but the girls of their high school are so uniformly stupid that one wonders if these boys aren't crossing some severe ethical boundaries as well.

Shawn and Nick are on the football team and have hooked up with every girl on campus. Except, apparently, any of the cheerleaders. As such, Shawn and Nick decide to quit the football team -- over the perfunctory threats from Phillip Baker Hall, who deserves some civilian medal of courage for this, or at least some sort of fundraiser to prevent him taking these roles again -- in order to go to cheerleading camp to score some of these fine ladies. Comedy!

To compensate for the staggering inanity of these two idiots, the cheerleading squad has about as much flexibility as a group of wounded veterans undergoing arduous physical rehabilitation. Neither Shawn nor Nick does much for the team other than do their damnedest to ensure that the next generation of cheerleaders will soon be on their way, yet Carly, the head cheerleader ostensibly too smart to fall for these dopes' tricks, mentions that the squad has never been better, leading to a love connection. Well, maybe she is sufficiently intelligent to spot Nick's come-ons -- Shawn by this point is of course in love with her -- as anyone could see through his shtick.

The accredited screenwriter for Fired Up! is Freedom Jones, the only funny aspect of this film as I felt trapped by the barrage of clichés and a sorely misguided appraisal of wit. At one point, Carly's pre-med boyfriend Rick (who looks like some horrible experiment to cross-breed with David Hasselhoff and Nick Cave) boasts that he's taking her to Red Lobster where, "We've got a seat behind a plant so people can't see how much we'll be all-you-can-eating. If you know what I mean." Is that a double entendre? And then Rick mimes hip-thrusting. Well, whatever half-assed euphemism he just used for oral sex doesn't even apply anymore. However, I've found absolutely nothing on this Freedom Jones; hell, I can't even find this person's gender. Is it possible then, that the real writer took a gander at the final draft and suffered a crisis of conscience? If Freedom Jones is a false name and it continues to appear on films such as this, it could prove a match for Alan Smithee in no time.

The film ends, of course, with a competition, following the obligatory Big Misunderstanding. The Tigers face off against the Panthers, who are clad in all-black which is a perfectly ordinary thing. As it turns out, oh who gives a damn? If you like mincing gay stereotypes, sexist depictions of women, nonexistent wit, a little child who swears as if it was inherently funny and repugnant assholes presented as heroes, then have I got a film for you. Also, could you move a bit more to the left? Just a bit more. Near the big X.

Stevie

If Steve James' beautiful, wrenching documentary Hoop Dreams depicted the tragedy of urban poverty and how it could crush the hopes and dreams of the children who sought to escape it, his follow-up, Stevie, narrows the scope. Instead of examining the social constructs that perpetuate the cycle of poverty on youth, James heads back to his rural hometown of Pomona, Illinois to chart the life of one troubled young man, his actions and the motivations behind them. He uses the same extensive access that the Gates and Agee families gave to James back in the early '90s to sort out the Fielding family, a clan that makes the term "dysfunctional family" seem almost a quaint euphemism. But James also places himself in this circle, not only contemplating how a camera's presence might be affecting Stevie à la the Heisenberg Principle but evaluating his own role in Stevie's life due to a past connection.

James met Stephen Fielding when the two were paired in a Big Brother program while James was in graduate school at the Southern Illinois University. He learned that Stevie's mother didn't want him, beat him so severely that he lost the ability to speak at one point, and ultimately abandoned the toddler with the boy's step-grandmother, who raised him as her own not half a mile away from the child's real parent. Occasionally, the mother returned to take Stevie and send him to foster homes, and a psychological report suggested that the child was used as a pawn in the hateful relationship between the mother Bernice and the grandmother Verna. James himself admits that he didn't particularly want Stevie in his life, either; he expected a young, fit Little Brother who loved sports and would like to go to games and such. In other words, he wanted an actual brother, and instead he got a child who needed more help than any other underprivileged or orphaned child in the program. Upon graduation, James fled the small town for bigger and better things, returning 10 years later in 1995 as a success story with Hoop Dreams.

Out of curiosity and perhaps a lingering sense of regret, James seeks out Stevie, and what he finds is disturbing. He's 23, wearing a Harley Davidson shirt (if and when he wears a shirt at all) and sporting decaying teeth, and he's such a frequent offender the local penitentiary might have installed a revolving door for him. He looks and speaks like a stereotypical redneck, but to immediately dismiss him as a hick and a terrible person is to assume that William Gates and Arthur Agee are nothing more than stereotypical ghetto kids who just want to get into the NBA to get rich. Stevie tells James' wife Judy, a counselor specializing in sex offenders, that he married at 19 to a 34-year-old woman, but it ended after a few months because of Stevie's violence. Judy and Steve look heartbroken, but they hug Stevie goodbye and don't return for another two years, at which time we learn that Stevie is about to go to trial for molesting his 8-year-old cousin.

What makes Stevie such a striking film is its structure. Many documentaries about impoverished or unstable subjects -- including, one could argue, Hoop Dreams -- work with a structure of a detached, privileged documentarian uncomfortably examining people to work out some of life's great mysteries. Stevie thrusts its director in front of the camera, and not in the self-promoting manner we'd expect from, say, Michael Moore. James, like everyone else, believes that Stevie is guilty, and he openly admits that he doesn't want Stevie back on the streets. Yet he displays a genuine, human desire to understand just how this could happen. He doesn't care about grand social statements, he just wants to figure out this young man.

The family regards James with a mixture of nostalgic affection and distrust of the camera he now brings to capture their dysfunction. Verna, the grandmother, was the first to show Stevie any kindness, but she reveals a certain Machiavellian streak. Bernice, the abusive mother, has stopped drinking and expresses remorse for her actions, but there is a hint of self-absolution in her sudden compassion. I do not wish to say that she is simply paying lip service, as I saw in one review, but in her efforts to reconnect with the son she abandoned she spends as much time reopening the battle with Verna. Either way, Stevie is so wired to hate her that he pins everything on her, a mindset openly supported and coaxed by Verna. Verna so hates her former daughter-in-law that she even blames Bernice for the molestation, saying that Bernice shouldn't have asked Stevie to babysit in the first place. The only bright spot in the Fielding family is Stevie's sister Brenda, the closest one to normal because, as her husband tells the camera, "They didn't beat her." She tires of Stevie's stubbornness, but her love is unwavering and untainted by family politics like his relationship with Verna. (In a smaller, almost as wrenching subplot, James follows Brenda's inability to get pregnant due to an illness; "People have sex for the first time and get pregnant and don't even want 'em," she laments, "Like Mom." In one of the film's few uplifting moments, she undergoes a successful surgery and is at last able to conceive.)

Also a part of the equation are Stevie's friends, a group of white supremacists. I'm reminded of Shane Meadows' This Is England, a fictive film, though one based on the writer-director's life. In that movie, a young, alienated child found a brotherhood and a sense of belonging in a group of white supremacists he never found with anyone else. Whatever psychological issues left him emotionally, perhaps mentally, retarded made education largely an impossibility, so he spends his days fishing with these good ol' boys because he can't find a real job.

James undoubtedly has his feelings about each of these people, but spending three years following the constant heartbreak of the families of Hoop Dreams has primed him to present these people honestly and to look for the good and the bad. Yet he cannot be so detached with his own part in Stevie's upbringing. As they're driving around town, Stevie reminisces to Steve about the birthday parties his Big Brother used to throw for him, how he'd go on walks and skate with James' family, and even how he had a crush on Judy. With Stevie in the back and James up front, the director barely keeps his composure when he asks if leaving town after graduation made Stevie feel like he was abandoned again. Stevie, the confrontational lunkhead, treats the question with more severity than he does all the legal advice over his molestation trial. "Well, yeah, kind of. But you had your own thing goin', and I understand that."

Central to this puzzle, however, is Stevie's girlfriend, Tonya. A disabled, mousy girl who speaks with an impediment, she emerges as perhaps the purest representation of what James is so desperately seeking: a redeeming quality of Stevie. Tonya thinks he molested that girl like everyone else, but she sticks by him because he makes her feel special. In the film's best scene, Stevie and Tonya head to Chicago to see Steve and Judy, and they stop to see Tonya's best friend Patricia. More severely disabled than Tonya, Patricia, in a single ten-minute run, smashes whatever initial feelings of discomfort we might have at James sticking a camera in the hospital room of a bed-ridden young woman and gets straight to the core of Stevie. Her powerful speech overcomes her major speech impediment and outlines to Tonya both her excitement over her friend's happiness and a perfect summation and condemnation of Stevie's bigotry and self-absorption.

That self-absorption introduces a great deal of drag in the story, as Stevie's thorough unwillingness to learn from or even regret his mistakes makes so repugnant that he does not justify a two-and-a-half-hour film. But James is not so close to the case that he's forgotten how to craft an engaging story from his subject, and he subtly underlines just how everything went wrong for Stevie: James gives us scenes of Stevie's Aryan buddies angrily coming to terms with Stevie's crime then begrudgingly agreeing to ensure that the white supremacists in prison will protect him, only to juxtapose them with Stevie's reunion with his first and kindest foster parents. In their presence he morphs back into a adolescent, running around the yard throwing food to ducks and so reverent that he begins to list all the bad things he's done over the years, with the first and only sense of remorse he displays in the entire film. He's so ashamed to face them that he can't even bring himself to say aloud his latest charge. Moments like these, along with shots of Stevie holding his new baby niece, point to what he might have had with a slightly different path.

Stevie ends horrifically, with a conviction and a sense of uncertainty not only for Stevie but those who'd been gently reforming around him. But there is also hope, hope that Stevie might accept and regret, hope that Tonya and her blinding -- and please do not read this as an insult -- inner beauty will give him something worth reforming for, hope that the gentle hug he gives his biological mother before he goes to prison signifies the rebuilding of so many burned bridges. There's even a final touch that gives one hope that perhaps Stevie isn't just some ignorant redneck, and that he might emerge with a thirst for knowledge.

The Dark Knight

Has enough time passed for the hype and the resulting backlash surrounding Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for a reasonable evaluation to be made. This wildly ambitious follow-up to the inventive but largely by-the-book Batman Begins certainly struck a chord with audiences -- this reviewer included -- to the tune of over a billion dollars worldwide, but as so often happens, enjoyment turned into poetic waxing, which framed those who didn't enjoy it as much as the herd as virulent haters until, at last, the lambasting riled enough of those people to the point that they did become haters. I saw The Dark Knight six times while it was in theaters, and I say that less an expression of personal triumph and more a lament of that inner flame of geekiness that shall never die. However, I have not watched the film since the end of 2008, so I trust that I've stepped aside from the film long enough to make my definitive opinion of the film: it is, for all the hype, indeed a masterpiece (of genre if not cinema as a whole), albeit one with some key flaws. [This review contains spoilers because, let's be honest, if you haven't seen it by now you don't care anyway.]

Christian Bale's Batman is a justifiable bone of contention (well, not so much the character as the voice he uses), but he brings more to the always-neglected alter-ego of Batman, Bruce Wayne, than all of the previous actors combined. His Wayne pauses for the reflection afforded in comic book films only to Spider-Man, but Nolan and Bale leave out the 2-D camp of Raimi's franchise, instead tackling a traumatized young man's attempt to reconcile his desire for good with the mounting consequences of his actions.

Batman's impact on Gotham is evident an early scene where men dressed as Batman (copybats?) and armed with guns attempt to take down a deal involving Scarecrow before the real Batman bursts in to save the day. Bats ties up his would-be helpers alongside the villains and heads back into the night. "What gives you the right?" asks one pudgy vigilante, "What's the difference between you and me?" Batman dodges the question, but that's the underlying issue of the film, one compounded to the umpteenth degree by the emergence of the Joker.

Superhero films present the hero as the only one who can stop the bad guy, that Lex Luthor or Doctor Octopus or whomever will subjugate all the normal people of the world if the superpowered or at least most-inventive person does not stop them. The Dark Knight's biggest triumph is that it destroys this notion of the necessity and fundamental justice of vigilantes. Nolan, along with his brother Jonathan and their writing partner David S. Goyer, posit that a figure like the Joker exists because of people like Batman. The Joker is nihilism incarnate, a combination of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Hannibal Lecter and insectile tics, and he comes to Gotham not to help criminals reassert themselves -- the first action of the film is his elaborate heist to steal mob money -- but to provide a sort of cosmic balance to the city. When he receives half of the mob's collective money pool, he burns it without hesitation, simply to prove that he does not need such material incentives.

Joker quickly dispatches mob bosses and high-ranking law officials alike, and his unrestrained brutality enrages Bruce. He blames the mobsters who hired this beast to kill Batman, neglecting to note that they did so as much out of fear as anything else. Alfred (Michael Caine) is there to cut through this nonsense: "You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand."

The Joker has always been the perfect foil for Batman, in that Batman differs from his archenemy only because of his code of ethics. Joker sees how ridiculous those rules are, and so he tears through the world like a whirling dervish, killing as many criminals as police officers. The entire crux of their conflict in this film is Joker's desire to force Batman to see the contradictions in his moral code -- after all, how is it that stopping just sort of killing someone is considered inherently heroic? Indeed, all of the Joker's attacks are carefully structured to get under Batman's skin and hopefully provoke the masked hero into revealing the darkness within.

Largely, he's successful. In the course of the film, Batman tortures a mobster for information by throwing him from a height he knows to be nonlethal, indiscriminately causes millions of dollars of damages to the city, beats the Joker to within an inch of his life and even designs his own personal wiretapping system that uses every cell phone in Gotham as both a tracking device and sonar. In the film's best stretch, starting with an inspired chase through Gotham leading through an interrogation between Joker and Batman and its ultimate result, brings this idealistic conflict to a head. I say interrogation between the two characters, because the scene reveals as much about Batman as it does Joker and his plans. With his friend Harvey Dent and his love Rachel tied up in separate warehouses filled with explosives, Batman finally comes undone and starts beating Joker to a pulp. The villain just laughs as he tells Batman, to Wayne's mounting horror, that the hero can do nothing to frighten him.

Equally as important as Joker's attempt to corrupt Batman, though, is his quest to do the same with District Attorney Harvey Dent, revealed upon repeat viewings as the film's true protagonist. Aaron Eckhart's performance was largely overshadowed -- as was everyone else's -- by both the mastery of Heath Ledger's performance and the increased pressure/praise placed upon his death, but he's almost on the same level. Dent is the positive side of Batman's vigilantism; while Batman breaks the law and many sets of ethics that go beyond written legality, he can also inspire truly good men and women to action. Dent finds a way to bring up half of Gotham's organized criminals on charges at once, and in his handsome and charismatic face Gotham has a legitimate path to a brighter future, one not forged by an unstable billionaire getting out his demons on the faces of Gotham's criminals. But the Joker's actions bring out Dent's dark side as well, and when Joker's deathtrap kills Rachel and leaves him with a half his face burned off, something deep within Dent fully snaps. He's the tragic hero of The Dark Knight, or one of them at least, a shining hero brought to madness and ruin by the story's end. Some fans were disappointed that Dent dies at the end, but he could not have continued to live in Nolan's semi-realistic view of the Batman franchise. Furthermore, by the end he exists as the Joker's prize trophy, proof of the fine line that separates people between good and evil; he'd served the story as far as it could go.

Batman, on the other hand, has the possibility for self-realization. When he proudly presents his wiretapping device to Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Fox responds with revulsion, threatening to quit on the spot, only agreeing when Wayne tacitly informs him that he will destroy the device once he finds the Joker. As he stands over Dent's corpse at the end, Wayne makes the choice to preserve Dent's legacy and Gotham's budding sense of hope by finally accepting responsibility for his actions. Yes, he's also taking the blame for Dent's killing spree to preserve his friend's image, but Batman comes to understand that he's royally messed up, and allowing the city to align him with the villains is what they need to find a true morality.

If it does all of this so well, then, what are its flaws. For one thing, Christopher Nolan needs to learn a thing or two about editing. Some scenes, particularly a sequence near the end involving two boats full of fleeing Gothamites pitted against each other by the Joker, run far too long, while others cut out without any regard to narrative. Case in point: when the Joker crashes Wayne's fundraiser for Harvey, he chucks Rachel out the window, causing Batman to leap out and save her and then...what? It just ends. We can infer that the Joker assumed that his work was done there, even that he guessed that Dent was Batman after watching the cowled freak jump after Harvey's girlfriend so quickly, but when it comes to storytelling there's artistic ellipsis and flat-out laziness, and this scene clearly belongs in the latter category.

There's also the matter of Rachel Dawes, substituting Maggie Gyllenhaal for Katie Holmes but doing so little with the character it's hard to notice either way. Wayne's potential love interests never have anything to do in the Batman films, precisely because Bruce Wayne is too traumatized to think of anything other than his quest to clean up crime. Oh, he'd like to, sure, but something will always get in the way. The writers know this, which is one of the reasons, I suspect, they decided to kill her. Her death destabilizes both Batman and Dent, but in some way it plays like the writers liberating themselves and the franchise from the convention forced upon it. Nevertheless, they could and should have taken the time to flesh out her or any of the grand total of two women in this film instead of presenting both as plot devices.

These are major flaws, yes, but I still find myself enjoying The Dark Knight more than almost any other film made in the last decade. I devoted no space to Ledger's performance, because at this point I wonder if anything more can be said. To call it a tour de force is almost underselling it, as he so inhabits the core of the character's being that the more impish iteration that Nicholson played seems cartoonish in comparison. The film's detractors tend to love him too, but they shout that no one would care about this movie if not for his performance. I've discussed this argument elsewhere so I'll not revive it here, but let's all consider for a moment that many of the people who say this then point to Iron Man as the superior film, utterly refusing to apply their own logic to a film that is carried wholly by Robert Downey Jr. Ledger's performance is transcendent, yes, but it's one cog in a larger machine. Apart from a boxed-in Gyllenhaal (it's not her fault) and the Batman side of Bale, everyone in the film gives bravura performances, including wonderful minor work from character actors such as Keith Szarabajka (Holtz from Angel) -- and let's not leave out Gary Oldman, who brings levels to Commissioner Gordon rarely seen in any of the comics. Nolan films some scenes a bit sloppily, but Wally Pfister's cinematography is beyond reproach, and he largely distracts us when the editing becomes an issue.

A conservative columnist named Andrew Klavan brought down the wrath of the Internet when he wrote a rave about the film interpreting it as a validation of George W. Bush's presidency, that its hero justifies the use of extreme techniques such as torture and and wiretapping to stop evil. The funny thing is, Klavan's right, just not in the way he thinks. The Dark Knight is a crime epic, with Dent on one side, mobsters on the other, and Batman and Joker in between. Batman fights to capture the mobsters, while Joker works to simply push the line deeper and deeper into Good's territory until no one bothers with petty morality and contrived rules. Batman's techniques are not worthy of praise: they are what moves him almost past the point of no return. If anything, The Dark Knight makes its message too obvious, that the letter of the law must be followed even when times are desperate, otherwise we'll slip into anarchy. Furthermore, if we accept Klavan's belief that Batman stands in for Bush, then we must also consider how Batman inspires the Joker. If we extrapolate plot and interpretation, then Bush is directly responsible for the terrorists he fights. In that sense, Klavan just might be more on the money than any other analyst; how many terrorists did the Iraq invasion create as opposed to how many were there beforehand?

When Gordon explains to his young son that Batman is "the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now," he's acknowledging that both Batman and Gotham are corrupt, that the Caped Crusader's destructive justice is what this town has brought upon itself. Yet this ending is not wholly bleak, as in the end, both Batman and the residents of Gotham display a willingness to accept a sense of responsibility, and that this is merely the darkest part of night before the break of dawn.


**Post-script: I couldn't find anywhere to put this in the actual review, but I love that Alfred, when presented with a boat full of gorgeous young dancers to "watch over," is merely cheesed that rubbing them down with suntan lotion just means more work.