Ocean's Eleven

The original Ocean's Eleven was the first of the Rat Pack films, a star vehicle meant to turn its stars into even bigger ones. Steven Soderbergh, indie darling that he is, found something appealing about that. Hot off the heels of his two most mainstream films to date, Erin Brokovich and Traffic, the director of sex, lies & videotape and Schizopolis went for the whole hog, creating what would become the star vehicle franchise of the decade. Whatever became of the sequels, though, Ocean's Eleven still holds up as a deliriously fun, completely self-aware heist comedy, a sleek but engaging trawl through the Las Vegas underworld, which is just as unremittingly glitzy as the surface level.

We are even led into this shimmering criminal world by a refined gentleman. Danny Ocean (George Clooney), a thief who got sloppy after his wife left him, is released from prison on parole which he wastes no time violating. Ocean travels to Los Angeles to find his old partner Rusty (Brad Pitt), now laying low and fleecing clueless celebrities of their money by teaching them poker -- nothing else in the whole movie is as funny as Topher Grace triumphantly laying down his hand and declaring "All. Reds." to the whistling awe of his equally moronic buddies. Ocean looks somewhat deflated by his time in prison, and he's simply too dapper to make you think of him as a thief, which makes it all the more surprising when he announces his intention to rob the vault containing the money of three casinos, the three casinos: the Bellagio, The Mirage and the MGM Grand.

Rusty and Danny know that the heist will be the biggest in history, and they need to lock down the best damn crew in the world. Somehow, perhaps through sheer charm, they convince nine men -- demolitions experts, confidence men, bank-rollers, electronic wizards, and one very small, very talented Chinese acrobat -- to participate in this suicidal venture. The payoff? A cool $160 million, which judging by the continuing spiral of the U.S. dollar might be enough to buy a Pepsi ten years from now. The heist is particularly dangerous because robbing these casinos means indirectly robbing their owner, Tony Benedict (Andy Garcia), a ruthless businessman who sees any attempt to cheat his casinos as a personal attack. Soon, we learn that Ocean wants to rob this man not for the massive payout but because Benedict "stole" his ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts, here pretty much in name only).

You may hate this film's sense of self-assured cool, but there's no denying that Soderbergh clearly understands the "Vegas movie" and he shoots Ocean's Eleven accordingly. His camera never seems to stop, mounting a blitzkrieg of Michael Mann-like technical details, witty banter, swanky five-star hotel rooms, casino backrooms filled with walls of surveillance monitors, and the mad jungle of the casino floor, a hive of desperate gamblers swarming to and fro losing their children's college funds.

It's the sort of surreal world that's stranger than fiction, befitting the over-the-top personae of the characters who seek to shake it up. Scott Caan and Casey Affleck play two Mormon man-children with intense sibling rivalry that explodes often making for great distractions in the casino but equally annoying outbursts among the crew. Bernie Mac slides headlong into the wearisome role of the Angry Black Man, but the idea that Mac's character is the one playing that card, combined with Mac's innate ability to make the most tepid and hackneyed material in the world sound as funny as a Bill Hicks rant, takes the sting out of that egregiously overused stereotype. My personal favorite of the 11 has to be Matt Damon's Linus Caldwell, a crack pickpocket who becomes the tail for whatever mark he assigned. Linus always finds himself in the middle of the minor but openly acknowledged power struggle between Danny and Rusty: like the child enduring his parents' messy divorce, Linus must field the feelings of distrust one has for the other, even as neither Danny nor Rusty gives poor Linus an ounce of important information. Damon is one of the most underrated actors working (along with his admittedly less talented buddy, Ben Affleck), and his portrayal of Linus as equal parts clueless dope and capable member of the team is the only aspect of the franchise that remains interesting through all three films.
Ocean's Eleven is meticulous, far too meticulous for such an implausible scenario; Danny and Rusty's plan for the heist makes The Joker's schemes in The Dark Knight seem about as complicated as finishing a half-solved Sudoku puzzle. Yet somehow Soderbergh makes it work, and there's actually a bit of fun in seeing the film a second time and looking out for all the barely noticeable setups for the ultimate payoff. For all its sidelining details, Ocean's Eleven maintains a constant level of fun that makes revisiting it a nice, relaxing experience rather than a tedious exercise in dramatic setup leading to an unsatisfying conclusion (that film has already been made, and it's called The Usual Suspects).

In my review of The Girlfriend Experience I mentioned how I often got bored at some stage. Even for a film as upbeat as Ocean's Eleven, that's true; this film moves as such a brisk pace that whenever it slows, even for a moment, it feels like the entire plot comes to a standstill (I believe this is called relativistic momentum, but looking at the precariousness of my current grade in Physics II I am unwilling to comment at this time). Nevertheless, Ocean's Eleven is a hip, finger-snapping salute to the city that defines American artifice. Compared to its glossy sequels, this often comes alive, especially when Soderbergh inserts brief shots of hand-held camera movement that act as adrenaline shocks just as you're thinking that the film is settling into too comfortable a groove, a groove that the sequels wore out until they cut clean through the vinyl. My biggest single complaint with the film is Julia Roberts' inability to do anything other than stand around in a few scenes; she would receive a bigger part in the next film, which sounds great on paper until you get to the matter of her playing a character who at one point poses as Julia Roberts, a failed gag that tried to go meta and nearly brought down cinema with it. But in all the places that its sequels created a noxious cloud of smug, Ocean's Eleven is bouncy and fun, and if there's something wrong with that I don't want to be right.

Il Divo

The opening text scroll of Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, ostensibly a biopic of seven-time Prime Minister of Italy Giulio Andreotti, is a fantastic piece of misdirection. It creates the sort of severe, faux-tense mood we're accustomed to with the life story of the seedy and infamous. Then the director pulls the rug out from under us: Il Divo is, above all else, a riotous black comedy. Oh sure, it tackles serious themes such as corruption and the skewed justice system, but the joy of watching this off-beat biopic comes from how much it ignores the rigidity of the genre.

Imagine the last five minutes of The Godfather and expand them to two hours, and you've got the basic conceit of Il Divo. After a brief and inventive montage of Andreotti's political enemies through the decades meeting their ends, Sorrentino properly opens on the minister on the eve of the start of his seventh term. His unofficial cabinet looks more like an entourage, PR agents and the über-wealthy. Even a fellow politician, Paolo Cirino Pomicino, acts more like a lackey than a respected member of the Christian Democratic Party: sent ahead of his boss like a herald, Pomicino uses fast-talking and coercion to win over potential dissidents within the party. Andreotti does not seem to need real advisers, only people who have the money or the skill to bury something. They've been accompanying Andreotti for so long that they handle potential scandals as trifles; in their jovial presence Italy's governmental buildings seem more like country clubs than executive and legislative landmarks.

They represent a toxic corruption of postwar Italian politics, yet they are but child's play compared to the ringleader. Andreotti is nothing if not fascinating, a gnomic, slouching collection of flesh without an iota of charisma who has somehow managed to sit uninterrupted in some position of Italy's parliament since 1946. He never became president though, as he tells us in the film, only because Italy does not decide that position by direct election. He said a few choice quotes that toe the line between wit and sinister intent, but my favorite would have to be what he reportedly once said to the Pope: "Excuse me, Your Holiness, but you don’t know the Vatican.”

His legend shall only deepen with this film, thanks to a commanding performance by Toni Servillo. In recent years, the United States has reshaped Richard Nixon into a Shakespearean character as the incessant biopics of the 37th president have wrung every ounce of tragedy from the man's life. But if we at last break down and accept Nixon as such, then Servillo's portrayal of Andreotti plays like the evolutionary missing link joining Nixon to Richard III (he also, at times, looks uncomfortably like the vampire of Murnau's Nosferatu). Though he slouches and looks down all the time, at no point does Servillo project an aura of sloth; no, he appears to slouch to present less of a target, some preternatural instinct of self-preservation heightened greatly by a lifetime of skulduggery. He knows what people think of him, because he's too busying planning about more important matters to care. "I have something else too," he tells us in a voiceover: "A vast archive in place of an imagination. Every time I mention it, those who should shut up do so, as if by magic."

Like the best villains, including Michael Corleone, his most obvious cinematic antecedent, Andreotti is too interesting to hate and too twisted to root for. Some of his alleged actions give him pause, but that doesn't stop him from planning the next chess move. So controlling and manipulative is he that his narration can shift the film itself. In the film's most brilliant scene, Andreotti fantasizes about confessing his sins to his wife: and the revelation of the raging torrent of the minister's inner thoughts contained behind that blank slate of an outer façade places Servillo's performance in frightening and astounding context.

It must be said, however, that Italian politics are confusing as hell. I don't know a thing about them, and I suspect the majority of you don't as well. This results in the film's biggest, for lack of a better term, flaw: made by Italians for Italians, Il Divo assumes its large chunks of background as read, thus leaving American audiences with the task not only keeping track with the seemingly endless list of names that pop up on the screen every few minutes but knowing why those names are important without being given any information. As Andreotti is still alive, which makes the film a fairly bold move on Sorrentino's part, one might assume that Italians know all of the backstory, even that many remember some of all of it.

It's unfair to single out this aspect of the film as a weakness, as I never have to judge an American film based on how I think it will play outside the States. Still, Sorrentino's madcap, pulp vision of Andreotti's life, at times the film's biggest stylistic strength, wore me down with its deluge of unexplained events, to the point that I started to drift near the end, brought back only by Servillo's intoxicating, spellbinding performance. If my overall rating seems low compared to my written thoughts on the film, it is, but I couldn't help but feel that the utter lack of context for so much of the film distracted me too often from the dizzy fun of its merciless deadpan comedy. At the end of the day, though, eff the rating: everyone should watch this film, both to see Michael Corleone's life as a comedy and for the sublime work Servillo contributes, the finest I've seen all year.

Fight Club

My decision this year to revisit some of the more notable films of 1989 had obvious personal connections ('89 being the year of my birth), but had I decided instead to pick another anniversary I could have chosen one of two particularly bountiful years for cinema. The first, 1939, is often heralded as the greatest year for the movies, period (as a side note, the highly talented and perceptive Tim Brayton over at Antagony & Ecstasy has being doing just that all year); the second, 1999, sent the 20th century out in style. I even considered running a '99 retrospective concurrently, though I suppose it's for the better than I decided against it as I cannot even regularly update the ones I have now -- I swear I'll be getting back to '89 and to John Carpenter's oeuvre soon. Furthermore, most of the finest films of 1999 are still fresh in my mind, save for some of the foreign films I still need to see, and while I certainly enjoy revisiting films from, well, it would be absurd for a 20-year-old to say "from my youth" but you understand, none of the films I've seen and enjoyed from 1999 offer any sort of challenge for me at the moment.

A lone exception is that controversial, hotly debated wrecking ball of a film: Fight Club. Upon its release, Fight Club found itself in the center of a frenzy, surrounded by fans who took to its pitch-black comedy and the finest example yet of David Fincher's relevancy and innovation in contemporary cinema as well as detractors who called it fascist, misogynistic and childish, and those were some of the kinder pans. Now, it's an indelible part of our pop culture, its twist ending beloved by those who worship such things -- as I scanned over some old reviews of the film's theatrical and subsequent DVD release I was surprised, and distressed, to see its name mentioned alongside The Sixth Sense on numerous occasions -- and that line, that line, so endlessly quoted and parodied that its mere utterance should, in reality, warrant a genuine beating. But what is it that makes Fight Club so simultaneously alluring and abhorrent? Are its fans mongoloid Hitler youths reveling in the fascist orgy that shall be our undoing, or are the haters simply projecting this image because they themselves cannot or will not read into the film any deeper than its surface level?

Upon revisiting the film, I know on which side of the fence I stand: Fight Club, sensory overload that it is, is one of the finest and most complex satires of the '90s. Of all the films concerning the alienation of Generation X, none so perfectly captures its existential listlessness. Told from the fractured perspective of its unnamed Narrator (whom we shall call Jack, after his twisted synecdochical statements such as "I am Jack raging bile duct"), Fight Club builds a mood of post-Reagan miasma around its protagonist, a suffocating poison cloud of Ellisian soulless consumerism.

Jack (Edward Norton) works for an automobile company ("A major one," he darkly tells someone after regaling her with horror stories), traveling across the country to assess catastrophic design failures and decide whether to order a recall for that particular model. Jack suffers from insomnia and, trapped in the bleary stage between awake and asleep, he absent-mindedly fills his condo with all the latest furniture and accessories from IKEA. So obsessed is he with the Scandinavian DIY-retailer that he pores over catalog entries like centerfolds.

The sick embodiment of Gen X, Jack is so desperate for something to latch onto, something that will allow him to drop the artifice of his corporate-crafted identity, that he finds himself gravitated to support groups for the disease-stricken. At a meeting for testicular cancer, Jack at last lets go, weeping into the enlarged bosom of a man who had both testicles removed. He becomes addicted to the sense of belonging, and the acceptance allows him to sleep at night. Until Marla shows up, that is. Another "tourist," she is a beautiful but morbid creature, as warped in her own way as Jack. Her presence destroys Jack's narcissistic and vampiric need to feed off these people, so they divide the various meetings as if haggling custody rights. Nevertheless, the damage is done, and Jack needs to find another way to cope with his hang-ups, and he finds it in Tyler Durden.


Tyler, the irrepressible id to Jack's neurotic superego, is free of society's consumer-based values system: he works a number of odd-jobs around town simply to wreak minor havoc, from splicing in frames of pornography into children's films to peeing in the soup he cooks at a restaurant. He lives in a dilapidated house that he casually allows to fall even further into disrepair; a Fincherian nightmare of the place, the walls do not leak so much as pour, and the running water looks a lovely shade of brown. In Tyler Jack finds an idol, someone who's broken free of the system that tortures him and has crafted an independent lifestyle ungoverned by the norms of society. The two create Fight Club, a place for other disaffected men to vent their frustrations with the emptiness of the world around them. Once a week they come and beat the stuffing out of each other, and on Monday they go back to their jobs as file clerks and waiters.

The very conceit of Fight Club is one of the most deeply satiric creations ever to grace contemporary literature/cinema: these men, so shiftless in their lives, are the dead-eyed wanderers of America's spiritual post-apocalypse. That the people who are so deadened by anomie that they beat each other to feel alive are yuppies only makes it funnier. The accusations of misogyny here seem meaningless, as Fight Club represents the bizarre need of some men, and men specifically, to experience pain to feel alive. That inherent need explains why the number of attendees appears to have compounded each time Fincher takes us back to a fight, and soon the yuppies prop up Durden as a hero, spurred on by his anti-materialistic screed: "You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis."

Under Tyler's tutelage, Fight Club morphs into Project Mayhem, directing that drive for self-harm outward into a mixture of masochistic fascism and social revolution. It starts with general vandalism: Tyler and Jack take bats to the sleek new VW Beetle -- the symbol of '60s youth repackaged by the sell-out baby boomers to foist upon the new youth both as the ultimate corruption of their values and their lingering, narcissistic infatuation with those abandoned values -- and the makeshift army loots a Blockbuster (prominently displaying a poster of Independence Day, no less, a cheeky reflection of the freedom these men feel).

But it soon escalates into threatening police commissioners and, ultimately, planning some mysterious bomb plot that might be what would have happened if Timothy McVeigh had led Jim Jones' cult: no other scene in the film is as funny and hopelessly pitch-black as the one where a squad comes back after a "mission" carrying with them a dead Bob (the large-breasted man from the testicular cancer group). A stunned Jack cannot believe what Tyler's escalation has led to, and he tries desperately to break the men of their insane conditioning. Tyler, like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, destroyed these men to rebuild them into a tool of destruction, and they no longer have names when they meet. So, when Jack screams that Bob was real, that his name was Robert Paulsen, these fascist idiots accept this as Jack, (co-?)founder of FC, elevating the dead to a position of honor, that in death they truly become worthy. Anyone who dismisses the film as the ramblings of fascist teenage morons -- as did Kenneth Turan -- must simply have left the theater before this scene, because it makes explicitly, hilariously clear Jack's horrified realization and disdain of the end sum of Fight Club.

Project Mayhem eventually becomes the ultimate attack on the society these men just cannot accept. Consider the brilliant extended metaphor of the soap that Tyler sells: the soap is made from liposuctioned fat, taken from people who got fat through consumerist gluttony then paid to have it removed because of society's perception of beauty. Tyler then sells it back to the people who, in a way, made it. Finally, the soap is used to make the bombs to bring down credit card headquarters, a symbol of the consumerist world that emasculates them. It is utterly insane, yet perversely ingenious.


Palahniuk's depiction of these men, perfectly refined for the screen by Fincher and writer Jim Uhls, works precisely because the satire of the men of Fight Club/Project Mayhem favors neither the anarchic revenge fantasy nor the sadomasochism of a bizarre subset of men that truly drives it. Fincher finds a perfect balance between the two, one that only fully reveals its brilliance on a second viewing because it's, dare I even say it, subtle. The yuppies fight to free themselves, if only for a few minutes of bloody pain, from their vacuous lives, yet they prove just as slavish in service to Tyler Durden as they do the corporations they so virulently hate. More so, even, because Fight Club offers them a psychosexual outlet: remember that Bob, who lost his testicles to cancer, takes to Fight Club with vigor. Through pummeling other men, he and the others find a solace that takes the place of sex.

Which brings us to the funniest aspect of the film's humor: the rampant, unyielding homoeroticism. Palahniuk, now openly gay, has long been the subject of debate for the perceived "macho" quality of his writing, but here all of the posturing and sweaty fisticuffs only feed an atmosphere of nascent homosexuality. Of course, now we all know the truth of Jack and Tyler Durden's relationship, but Fincher misdirects from it for most of the film by suggesting a borderline homosexual relationship between them: Jack sits in the bathroom while Tyler bathes, he appears to be as mad at Marla for sleeping with Tyler as he is with Tyler for sleeping with her. The first flashback places Jack in the support group, where men hug each and other and cry because they're no longer sexually active, and the members of Fight Club often clasp hands and embrace after a slugging match. Of course, the reveal of Tyler Durden as nothing more than Jack's id turns that particular relationship into an off-kilter demonstration of pure narcissism, a lingering shade of the consumer vampires that populated Bret Easton Ellis' work, but even in the end, as Jack looks forward to a relationship with Marla, Fincher has one last bit of fun by splicing in a few frames' worth of a shot of a man's penis, both a nod to Tyler's "editing skills" and a final reminder that what you just finished watching was gayer than gay pornography.


This week marked the ten-year anniversary of the film's release, marked by the release of a gorgeous Blu-Ray that brings out Fincher's jaw-dropping visual craft more than ever, and it's interesting to note how opinion has changed over the years. Roger Ebert initially questioned the clarity of the film's message and gave it two stars, but he has mentioned in passing how going through the film shot-for-shot at Boulder College with a room full of intelligent film buffs turned him around on the picture. In the current IMDb ranking of its 250 highest-rated films (not, of course, a concrete source of a film's quality but an interesting gauge of the "average Joe's" opinion), Fight Club comes in at an impressive #18. I cannot help but feel, however, that the overall shift of opinion in the film's favor is not necessarily positive, as I'm quite certain that a sizable portion of the people who voted Fight Club up the charts of IMDb merely think that it is cool and has a wicked ending -- by point of reference, The Usual Suspects, a film that lives and dies on its twist reveal, comes in at #21. In 2003, the magazine Men's Journal so thoroughly missed the point that it placed the film on a list of "The 50 Best Guy Movies Ever Made," and one of the features on the Blu-Ray consists of Mel Gibson bestowing the Guy Movie Hall of Fame honor to Fight Club at Spike TV’s 2009 Guys Choice Awards. It would seem that Fight Club has been fully assimilated into the materialist pop culture it so mercilessly mocks, "The first rule of Fight Club" being the "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" of the modern era in terms of joke-killing ubiquity.

I do not, however, believe that the perennial inability of some people to get this movie constitutes a failure on the filmmakers' part not to slam on the brakes to make its message (even more) inescapably clear. Fight Club is many things: a frenetic slice of pop-Nietzsche. An attack on consumerism and evil corporations, but specifically on the IKEAs, Apples, and Starbucks of the world, the companies that insidiously posit themselves as "one of us" and use youth's hipness against itself. A homoerotic revenge fantasy carried out by emotionally stunted morons who pin their problems, consciously or subconsciously, on their mothers and make a play at macho posturing to prove their manliness in a metrosexual world that frightens them. At its heart, however, Fight Club is a romantic comedy. Like all the other Generation X rom-coms, it's about a nerdy, neurotic loser who nervously tries to get with a beautiful, often slightly quirky, woman. Hell, the whole reason Tyler exists is because Jack envisions him as a reaction of his sexual terror over meeting and confronting Marla. Fight Club: Woody Allen meets MMA. That's why the ending is so happy: it's romance!

The Grapes of Wrath

There may have been better America directors before John Ford, and there were certainly better ones after, but no other director so completely epitomized that vague yet long-enduring image of "America." Indeed, no other director of any nationality likely represents that country's image quite like Ford. He was the one to bring majesty to the Old West in cinema, reviving the romanticism of its mythology after talkies sidelined the Westerns for a decade; with Stagecoach, he not only made the genre popular again but brought it for the first time into the level of high art, and subsequent efforts only solidified his indelible mark in the Western and cinema as a whole.

Only a year after Stagecoach, however, Ford made a film set in the wide expanse of the West but wholly antithetical to his typical, romantic vision. The Grapes of Wrath, based of course upon the beloved John Steinbeck novel, trades the open, inviting beauty of Stagecoach's endless landscapes for an engulfing, foreboding perversion of it. Through this vast emptiness blow shrill winds that kick up dust, massive clouds of dust that swallow the characters more than the environment.

Tom Joad enters this terrible new world after his release from a four-year prison sentence. Incarcerated for murder, albeit in self-defense, Joad emerges from prison aiming to see his family for the first time since his trial. He hitchhikes all the way to the old dusty trail that leads home, and we can immediately see that something is wrong. Ford frames Tom in an extreme long shot against dry, infertile farm ground. Once he gets to the Joad family farm, he finds it deserted, save for fellow sharecropper Muley, who tells Tom what happened in a flashback.

Both Ford and producer Darryl F. Zanuck were conservative, which makes their decision to film the most famous left-wing publications of the time baffling. Ford certainly doesn't compromise Steinbeck's original vision with this flashback: the company that holds the deeds to the Okies' land comes around to announce that the farms are losing money because of the dust storms and the company is evicting the residents to hire a handful of tractor drivers to do the same amount of work. These farmers are second, even third-generation descendants of the people who signed the sharecropper agreements. They don't understand that the land they grew up on doesn't belong to them, and one farmer is so outraged that he asks the rep who is doing this. It's not a person, it's a company, the rep replies. No point in killing the company president, though; he just does what the bank tells him. However, the local bank is run by a manager who doesn't remotely have the power to make such decisions. "So who do we shoot?" the farmer seethes. "Brother, I don't know. You find out, you tell me." This scene is The Grapes of Wrath in a nutshell: the rich have created a system that allows them to survive even in a depression, one that works by completely casting aside the working class to starve.

Tom finds his family at his uncle's house, which is next on the chopping block. He is welcomed back with open arms, and he finds the family teeming with excitement over a letter they've received promoting jobs in California, with positions for 800 crop pickers. Oblivious to the full implication of this impersonal message sent en masse throughout all of Oklahoma -- possibly the whole Midwest -- the family speaks of California as if the promised land, and each of the family members sits at the bare table thinking of all the delicious fruits and sweets that await them.

And so, like the hopeful, naïve optimists a century ago, the Joads head west in search of prosperity. At every step, tragedy abounds, at all times revealing Steinbeck's original leftist messages. The grandparents die of old age and malnutrition. A man returning from the empty promise of California bitterly attacks the Joads' bumpkin sunniness with a gruesome description of his family's slow death from starvation. In California, the Joads shuffle through a series of worker camps, where land owners have refined class oppression to an art form: they drive wages down, charge outrageous prices at the only stores in town. Hell, even the cops are in on the shakedown. No matter where the Joads turn, they find only destitution and corruption, all of it brought on by the lingering stench of unrepentant capitalism. Even when the Joads at last stumble onto a clean and just camp, run tellingly by the government as one of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the corrupt deputies from the other camps come to wreak havoc on those who would find happiness in a community not run on greed.

The epic tragedy of America's collapse is perfectly accentuated by the photography of Gregg Toland, greatest of the cinematographers. Compared to the softer photography of most classic monochrome films, The Grapes of Wrath looks as real as if it were made today. Toland would help revolutionize cinema a year later with his work on Citizen Kane, but here he displays a command of the craft no less impressive, and Wrath contains some of the most strikingly realistic cinematography since Dreyer's 1928 opus The Passion of Joan of Arc. The film is on the cusp of its 70th anniversary, currently available on an old DVD master, yet in some shots you can practically count the pores on Tom Joad's face clogged by grime and dust. Those who believe in hell mistakenly describe it as a place of fire and brimstone, forgetting or simply neglecting that the Bible makes no mention of such a place until Revelation. No, a fundamental definition of hell is simply the absence of God, and the starkly photographed sparsity of the desolate western farmland interspersed with America's children reverted back to the humbled masses who spawned them is as chilling a depiction of the falsity of the American Dream, even of the notion that God blesses America, as anything in the Godfather saga.

For all of Ford and Toland's gorgeous and haunting visuals, however, they place all of the emotional and metaphorical weight on three steadfast and basic symbols. The first is the Joad family vehicle: they ride in a sedan converted into some garish flatbed truck, a revolting blob of warped wood and rusted metal, to house the family and their few remaining possessions. Due to The Beverly Hillbillies, this image is now a parody and a symbol of the stereotypical hick, but here it's as tragic as any of the stories of starvation and destitution. This rickety, decaying eyesore is the sad aftermath of a once-beautiful product of American ingenuity and prosperity, representative of America's shambolic descent in the Depression. Nevertheless, it must be noted that, for all its instability and obsolescence, the car always pulls through in the end.

The second symbol is Jim Casy, whom Tom meets on the way to the abandoned Joad farm. The preacher who baptized Tom, Casy is now an alcoholic disgrace who lost his faith after (consensual) liaisons with some of the young women of his congregation as well as the psychological strain of the Great Depression. In that sense, he recognizes this wasteland as hell and acts accordingly, but this is merely the start of Casy's rebirth, a religious conception, as a secular social reformer. In the camps, he deflects a worker's assault on an officer onto himself, and later he organizes a worker revolt, only to be killed by camp guards. Tom says of his friend's sudden drive to action, "He could have been a preacher, but he seen (sic) things clear," and indeed Casy's human concern for the oppressed workers is the most forceful, as well as ideologically Christian, action in the film.

The third, of course, is Tom Joad, though perhaps that's less apt than simply saying Henry Fonda. If John Ford is the most American of directors, then Fonda must surely be the most American of actors: in his roles he personified some aspect of the American ideal, from a sense of social and racial justice (12 Angry Men) to the admittedly false image of basic morality in the form of Wyatt Earp (My Darling Clementine). He even played Abraham Lincoln, the enduring symbol of American freedom. Here, in the role that made him a star, he is, quite simply, an American. Uneducated but smart, dangerous yet gentle, Tom stands in the middle of various contrasts, and furthermore in the middle of an intense struggle for the future of America's power structure, between the system that failed and now grabs blindly at the shards of its shattered constructs and a government that wishes to help those sucked dry and cast aside by the previous administrators. When I said that this film seems as real as if it came out yesterday, that is not only for its visual acumen but for its glaring parallels to our current situation.

If The Grapes of Wrath falters, it does so at the end, when, for all of Toland's sharp photography and Fonda's naturalistic acting -- seriously, compare Fonda's convincing readings to Carradine's, who literally proclaims his first lines to the heavens his character no longer believes in despite being in a conversation with Tom -- the script suddenly and shamelessly chucks in dialogue that makes everyone instantly aware that it came from a script. Tom's no dummy, but the idea that this farm-raised Okie could speak so poetically severely tests the tensile strength of one's suspension of disbelief. But no matter: The Grapes of Wrath, like its source material, is one of the towering works of the 20th century, and no single chunk of dialogue, however, contrived, could derail it. To better understand the heart of this picture, I would point to an earlier scene, of Ma Joad quietly turning out a box of sentimental possessions, only to discover a pair of earrings that she holds up to a mirror with a look of nostalgia before quietly saving them in her pocket. The scene is pure poetry, an depiction of an implacable sense of dignity that exists no matter how rough it all gets. As an expression of the basic qualities which make us human and give us our humanity, I have seen none better.

Rudo y Cursi

One must wonder to what degree real life informs Carlos Cuarón's directorial debut. Long the writing partner of big brother Alfonso (the two co-wrote Soló con tu pareja and Y tu mamá también), the younger Cuarón wrote a script for his first time behind the camera about a story of intense sibling rivalry. He has undoubtedly had to weather comparisons, be they positive or negative, to his brother, and casting Y tu mamá también's Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna surely couldn't help. Unfortunately, one need not compare this story of fùtbol and its impact on two ambitious brothers from a poor Mexican village to Alfonso's oeuvre to spot weaknesses.

The brothers are Tato (Bernal) and Beto (Diego Luna). Both are locally renowned for their skills: Tato always puts points on the board and Beto is a brick wall in the goal. They see their chance out of banana picking and small town ennui when a scout's car gets a flat. Batuta watches them play and sees their skill, but he only has space for one more client, so the brothers decide who goes by a penalty shot. Beto, the older, poorer brother, asks Tato to let him block the shot, but Tato wants glory for himself.

Tato wins, thought Beto finds his way to the big leagues eventually. Beto, already embittered by his brother's "betrayal," earns the nickname "Rudo" for his abrasiveness on and off the field. Tato, a natural charmer who returns all the love the crowd gives him, is dubbed "Cursi," though Tato hates its perceived gay connotation. With his face that looks as young now as it did a decade ago, Bernal can't help but ooze charisma, while Luna looks more grizzled: we know nothing of their backgrounds, but one can instantly see a difference in the way life has treated Beto and Tato.

At this stage Cuarón shifts gears away from your typical sports movie to comment on an emotional crisis plaguing Mexico. Tato hits his stride before his brother, and he's hailed as a national hero simply for playing soccer. Batuta fulfills Tato's dream of being a singer by securing a contract for a song and video, a tacky Spanish version of Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me," and he bags a gorgeous TV star (Jessica Mas). Both are symptomatic of a nation that, just like us, values fame, not talent, above all else; they each have stories of fighting their way out of poverty, but neither listens to the other as they're so consumed in the thrill of sleeping with a celebrity. He puts so much stock into his absurd music fantasy and is so distracted by the perks of fame that his game begins to slip, setting in motion the events that will ultimately strip him of that fame.

Rudo, on the other hand, cares solely for the money, and he eventually collapses like a neutron star. He shuts out the opposing team in every match, but he gambles away his money, first at the horse track and then in a makeshift high-stakes casino run by ruthless sharks. To help ease Rudo's sense of caution, these men feed him a constant supply of cocaine in order to enslave him in two ways. Back home, his wife joins a pyramid scheme and even goads him into recruiting teammates, and she just never does seem to get it when the company finds an excuse to take away her "points" just as she's on the verge of winning that completely legitimate Caribbean cruise.

Cuarón has an excellent grasp on the black comedy of his social message, but he fails to tie it back into the story. Tato and Beto suffer a series of setbacks and tragedies, yet we do not feel sorry for them because the satirical aspect of the story requires us to view them as loathsome man-children who dive headfirst into wealth and celebrity. Bernal and Luna give commanding performances, as they do, yet neither character has enough humanity to hang a hat on. Furthermore, everything concerning the futbol aspect of the story -- the rags to riches tale, a rivalry settled by one last game, and a penalty shot, no less -- is clichéd to the point of tedium; we know exactly what will happen long before the characters.

Visually, however, it must be said that Cuarón's first time in the director's chair is often impressive. He brings out the social commentary without forcing it, and he never loses track of his characters even though there is so little to track. However, Rudo y Cursi ultimately suffers for the unconnected threads of Cuarón's script, and the false emotional weight he places on characters wholly undeserving of it. He even undercuts his theme of the beauty of the simple life at the end, where the brothers return home losers, only to be given a modest form of happiness from their wealthy brother-in-law, who may or may not be a drug lord. You know, the sort of thing that happens all the time.

La Haine

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing charted racial tensions over a single day in a heat wave-stricken New York City neighborhood. His was a slow burner, a subtle but constant escalation that eventually bubbled over into a murder and a small-scale riot. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (meaning "Hate") ups the ante; it opens with a riot. A visceral, incisive and, ultimately, disturbingly prescient look at how a bad situation can, somehow, always get worse, La Haine makes the idea-mongering of American History X look about as insightful as Paul Haggis' Crash.

The director takes us to an area of Paris so close and yet so far removed from the glamor or even the hip artistry of the city. He heads to the city's banlieues, run-down suburbs filled with high unemployment, drop-out rates and immigrant populations. The decrepit, sparse buildings look even worse in the riot's aftermath, inspiring only more hatred in the three protagonists. Vinz (Vincent Cassel), a Jew, rages against the police as Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) tries to calm him down. They visit Hubert (Hubert Koundé), an Afro-French boxer, at his gym, which has been ruined by fires. Compared to Vinz, Hubert accepts this with a certain sense of resignation, though he suspects that Vinz was so caught up in the action the previous night that he might have helped burn the place.

Kassovitz builds the story slowly, through seemingly arbitrary and disconnected threads: the three are concerned for their friend, Abdel, who was injured in the riot and lies in a coma. Other residents mumble rumors that a cop lost his gun in the riot, and whoever finds it can even the odds against the armed cops. As the riot destroyed so many of the denizens' meager possessions, many charge exorbitant sums for the most banal services, a laughable ploy as everyone else is just as poor. It puts people on edge, and the increased police scrutiny brought on by the riot only turns up the heat.

Naturally, each character reacts to these harsh circumstances in different ways. Vinz, who idolizes Travis Bickle and reenacts the "You talkin' to me" speech in a mirror to convince himself of his hardness, loses himself in anti-police hatred. He discovers the lost revolver and vows to use it if Abdel dies. Hubert, on the other hand, has a more measured acceptance of the hand fate dealt him. He regards Vinz's spiral into self-annihilation with sadness a wisdom beyond his years. He doesn't like ghetto life, but he knows that violence and antagonism will not break the cycle. An intermediary between the two, Saïd simply treads water, oblivious to (or consciously suppressing) larger issues facing him, he rants about cops but is far more concerned with getting laid than getting justice.

Kassovitz won the Best Director Prize at Cannes, and his work is indeed remarkable. His mise-en-scène is well-arranged but intentionally disorienting, as he leaps in and out of the characters heads change the POV briefly before leaping back out again as quickly as he shifted gears. For all the severity of the material, Kassovitz offers a wry gag here and there: in one of the first shots, he pans over a exaggerated line of cops monitoring the banlieue, only to finally reach the end to show Saïd tagging their vehicle with graffiti right under their noses. He also inserts random asides where wholly inconsequential people tell long-winded stories to the protagonists. These stories can involve a description of a Candid Camera episode or an old man's bizarre reminiscence of his time freighthopping, but they ultimately comment on the narrative, building tension through their lengths and reflecting on the mounting tension and doom of the story.

La Haine ends on a note about as shocking as anything else that came before it, with one of the trio dead by cop and another ready to shoot the officer who did it. The screen cuts to black, and a single gunshot is heard. Who fired it? It doesn't really matter; it's merely the action that will start the whole thing over again. If the cop died, the cops and the people outside the ghetto will condemn the residents as thugs. If it was the ghetto rat, the other residents will only stir further. Either way, it means more cops and more riots in the future.

Much ado has been made in other reviews of the multiracial cast, but the deep and distressing truth of Saïd, Vinz and Hubert is that, regardless of their families' backgrounds, are all 100% French. That fact makes it all the more shocking and depressing when the boys catch a train into Paris' city limits and step off looking as bewildered as tourists. Just as the majority of the audience looked upon this dark, unseen side of France, so too do these men feel lost and unsettled when exposed to a place they don't know. The tragedy is that the area that bemuses the protagonists is the entire world outside their own.

Devin Townsend Project — Addicted

[This review was also posted on Sputnikmusic.com]

From now on, when someone espouses the opinion that drugs fuel artistic creativity, let us hope that enough people know the name of Devin Townsend to dismiss such repugnant, irresponsible nonsense. Following his 2007 effort, thescattershot, one-man band effort Ziltoid the Omniscient, a weary Townsend announced his intention to retire from touring and take a long break from recording, alluding strongly to a burn-out, drug-induced or otherwise. Now, two years later, he's sober, planning a return to touring in 2010 and releasing the second of four albums' worth of material he wrote in his new-found sobriety.

Addicted comes six months after his first collection of new output, Ki, and it's about as far sonically from that record as you can get. Ki displayed a heretofore unheard softness in the mad metal genius' work, and this fresh new approach made up for much of that album's inconsistency. Addicted, though, places Townsend back in his most rewarding element: the sort of New Age/Europop/industrial metal mixture that informed his two most accessible works, Ocean Machine and Accelerated Evolution. Both of those albums, for all their immediacy and catchy qualities, displayed darker sides: Ocean Machine is an often-chilling meditation on whatever issues were plaguing him at the time -- the theme of mortality arises more than once -- and Accelerated Evolution can be divided into two halves. The first dealt with Townsend's insecurities over his relationship with his wife as well as general trauma, while the second took the songs in an altogether more positive direction.

In that sense, Addicted forms a perfect progression: if the depression of Ocean Machine informed the first half of AE, so too does that album's second half set the stage for this one. So fresh-faced is Townsend's new outlook on life that all of Addicted's tracks end with exclamation marks, a move that might seem cutesy until you listen to the actual music. For all of the Dev's noodling, use of Pink Floyd-esque ambiance and epic production jobs, he's always been remarkably unpretentious, and his forthright, confessional tone brings a rarely seen depth to the genre (he might be the only artist in progressive metal I would call a singer/songwriter).

The opening title track conveys precisely where Townsend stands with his demons, denouncing and overcoming them through self-control. There's even a flash of his humor in here, as he chants of "Benedictus" gradually morph into "Been a dick to us" in response to the effects of his addictions. This reflective track leads into two of the most overt and unabashed pop tunes Devin has ever recorded: "Universe in a Ball!" and "Bend It Like Bender!" Both are irrepressible fun, but they also have their moments of deeper intelligence, with the former positing "There's a universe in your soul" (the song itself might be literally suggesting that an entire universe of potential life is located in a testicle) and the latter gleefully stomps over the artist's previous predisposition to ponderousness by suggesting we not take things so seriously.

If anything, even these more straightforward tracks demonstrate how Addicted is, lyrically at least, Townsend's most beautiful album. The songs display a dedication to get clean, as on "Supercrush!" where he sings, "I don't wanna save my soul now/I don't wanna lose control/And even if it takes a lifetime to learn/I'll learn." They also depict a sort of cosmic unity and solidarity, and Addicted at times sounds like the musical equivalent of an AA support group.

Contributing to this atmosphere are the vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen. I admit that I wasn't big on the backing vocals of Ki: Ché Dorval wasn't the best match for Townsend, who has one of the most impressive ranges in metal, and I found her contributions to be at best unnoticeable and at worst distracting. But van Giersbergen has a formidable talent, and whether Townsend brought out the best in her or he just knew exactly how to work her voice into the mix (likely a combination of the two), she hasn't sounded this good since she first started with The Gathering. She sings the lead on a reworking of Ziltoid's "Hyperdrive," one of the better songs on that album, and the results are extraordinary.

The only noticeable flaw on the album is the more laid-back "Ih-Ah!" It's not a bad song by any means, but its starkness interrupts the "epic" fee of the rest of the album, particularly after "Resolve," one of the album's heavier tracks. Still, it fits lyrically with the album, and if you're not too caught up in the bouncy mood of the rest of the album it's a perfectly lovely tune.

What comes after it, though, is beyond reproach. Townsend usually starts stronger than he finishes, but the trio of songs that closes Addicted mark his best end run since Ocean Machine. "The Way Home!" lets ex-DTB drummer Ryan Van Poederooyen cut loose as Devin brings out his soaring vibrato, which is put to even better use on "Numbered!" The finest track of the album, "Numbered!" takes all the best elements of the rest of the songs and mixes them into a euphoric climax of Anneke's wordless singing over Townsend's orchestra of multi-tracked guitars before cutting out for a chilling chorus sung in a cappella.

Townsend has promoted much of the album as a light pop record, but that belies the amount of effort he put into this. Certain tracks reference others lyrically and instrumentally , and all roads lead to "Awake!," the album's fantastic closer. With its fist-pumping, hair-raising chorus of "All the world's a stage and we are home again," "Awake!" offers the clearest connection to Townsend's previous proggy noodling in its long, gentle outro . Yet it also uses its extended length to tie not just the rest of the album together but his career as a whole, past, present and future. Thatoutro recalls his twisted masterpiece Terria, and one of the many layers of his vocals at one point screams "DECONSTRUCT!" (alluding to his next album) until it, along with the rest of this effervescent arrangement, fades into an ethereal, ghostly whisper.

By placing his current series of albums under the header of "The Devin Townsend Project," Townsend is opening himself up to criticisms of self-absorption and vanity. Yet the name is fitting, for not only does it represent the artist taking stock of his career and life in sobriety but it applies directly to the music. Townsend appears to be parsing out his various musical styles for each release -- his light-hearted pop here,SYL-like heaviness and technicality with Deconstruction and New Age ambiance for Ghost -- and perfecting each aspect separately. If Ki was more interesting than great, that is because that particular facet of Townsend's style -- the quiet, reflective one -- has never really existed on its own before. With Addicted, however, Townsend has made one of his finest albums and, in the context of his two previous pop-minded efforts, a sort of Bosch triptych in reverse: he started in hell with Ocean Machine, moved into the mixture of agony and ecstasy of life on Earth with Accelerate Evolution, and here he finds, well, perhaps not heaven but a clear and positive state of existence. In a year that already gave us Merriweather Post Pavilion and It's Blitz!, Devin Townsend, of all people, has made the feel-good record of the year.