unfinished blog entry - Puss in Boots, In Time, Melancholia

Puss in Boots carries some of the humor of the Shrek films, for which it's a pseudo-prequel, but it has a bit more gravitas perhaps than... well the memory of those films if not the actual films--when I think about the first Shrek, there were a few sequences that tried to turn the drama up, put some real emotion into it, but it seems like the series depended more on amusing sight-gags and jokes more than, say, character growth. Puss in Boots is no less plot-driven, but the character of Humpty Dumpty, for example, has more depth than one might expect from these films. Still, he's available for simple jokes--his Golden Egg costume, for one obvious one (that probably should have been in the trailers... was Humpty Dumpty even in the trailers?)--as are Puss and Kitty Softpaws. There are some nice visuals here that would probably look good in 3D (though I didn't see it in 3D). The plot, while straightforward, isn't simplistic. All in all, a good family film, with a few good jokes for the adults.

In Time is a fairly straightforward critique of capitalism--one character even refers to the use of time as money as "Darwinian capitalism." The film has something serious to say, or a few somethings actually, but it's prettied up with a nice sci-fi veneer and the plot-necessary 25-years old cast. Still, I wonder if there isn't a big part of the potential audience that a) won't get it, or b) won't agree with it, so much so that the audience that might do both is limited... and, being science fiction, the film's audience is already limited. Many who saw The Truman Show might not have noticed commentary on our obsession with television, and many who see this won't get the capitalism thing... or will get hit over the head by it without quite recognizing it for what it is.

There are some good performances here, though some interactions between Timberlake and Seyfried draw attention to the triteness of some of the dialogue. There is some fault in the writing in taking a rather obvious metaphor and trying to work around it without outright commenting on it too often... that isn't to say they don't comment on it, but it's not like there are long monologues about the evils of capitalism... more like an assumption that capitalist greed=bad, rebellion against the system=good. I'm simplifying more than the film necessarily does, but the film also simplifies more than it necessarily has to. Still, this isn't a shallow action film but rather a thinkpiece pretending to be one.

Melancholia, on the other hand, does not pretend for even a moment that it's a shallow, audience-friendly film. It's first half, focused on Kirsten Dunst's Justine, is an extensive exploration of depression and the effect it can have on those around you, and it's about as bleak as one can get from a feature film. It is worth mentioning that this is not an American film, of course. Though filmed in English, this is a Lars Von trier film, a European film (for all that label usually means). The film takes its time (and, most people in the audience will think it's taking theirs as well) and at the point the subject turns to metaphor--a planet hurtling toward Earth effecting Justine and her sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg's Claire (the focus of the second half of the film)...

Reviews: The Ides of March and Real Steel

The problem with both The Ides of March and Real Steel is that neither one does anything particularly original or exciting. There are some great performances--the entire cast of The Ides of March is amazing--but the sums are less than their parts.

The Ides of March reminds me of Good Night and Good Luck, makes me wonder if George Clooney ought to stick to acting (and producing) over directing. His direction only rarely does anything notable... oddly enough, the most interesting moments, as far as direction, also include the most interesting use of music, while Desplat's score otherwise is quite mediocre and forgettable. Those moments involve a few scenes that begin a few beats behind where another film might get going... if you can understand what that means. Anyway, the acting is great, Clooney, Gosling, Giamatti, Hoffman, Evan Rachel Wood, even Marisa Tomei, Jeffrey Wright and Gregory Itzin in smaller roles. But, the storyline, which ultimately--SPOILERS AHEAD--involves the corruption of a guy who starts the film quite ideological and optimistic, should be darker, should be more powerful, shouldn't come across so rote.

Similarly, Real Steel, which crosses a boxing film with a father/son movie, reminiscent of Stallone's Over the Top--except far better--is certainly entertaining, and it hits all the expected notes, but it doesn't hit them in any way that's too unique. Again, some good performances, but overall, the film just comes across as something that's been seen time and time again. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's good to watch things over sometimes (plus, as I said, this film is reminiscent of Over the Top, except done quite a bit better... plus, well, fighting robots).

There's a weird sort of subplot in Real Steel that never quite gets anywhere, also. There are hints that Atom (the robot) is perhaps self-aware but ultimately, that doesn't matter much as--SPOILERS AHEAD--in the end, he doesn't have to fight without someone controlling him, which would have made more sense, that father and son had trained the robot to go beyond his programming and adapt on the fly... instead, Jackman's character effectively fights the big champion robot in the end, controlling Atom through his "shadow" function. This ending fits better with the father/son storyline, of course, but it detracts from any sense of character for the robot that may have come before.

Despite the lack of profundity in these two movies, it was a good morning at the theater. A bunch of good actors with good performances, a couple entertaining films, but nothing too... special.

movie review: DRIVE

(quick note: over the summer, i kept trying to get long comparative reviews written, and apparently that took too much time to get... what was it, one that i actually did? but now that school is in session and days are more methodical, i figured i'd start writing at least a short review for each movie i see... well, at least each movie i see in theaters.)

Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, is not necessarily a "great" film, but it is a very good movie. It gives off a vibe reminiscent of Heat or Collateral, a sorta '70s crime drama feel. This is a movie about a getaway driver by night, stunt driver by day, so in this day and age, it's actually quite remarkable that it isn't a fast-paced, action-packed thing but rather a relatively slow, deliberately-paced, almost meditative piece. Gosling's character barely speaks in many scenes, and he puts on a calm, patient demeanor, even when in the middle of a chase or a shooting scene.

The supporting cast is good, notably Bryan Cranston as Gosling's boss, Carey Mulligan as the SPOILER unrequited love interest, and Albert Brooks as the surprisingly menacing antagonist (of a sort). All of these actors do well with silence, sometimes better than with dialogue; Mulligan can get more across with a look and some deep breaths than many actresses can with whole soliloquies and Brooks' calm menace is possibly scarier than a real villain would be... SPOILER COMING... when he shakes hands and slits a guy's wrist at the same time, he's both scary and comforting at the same time, and maybe I haven't seen Brooks in enough films, but I didn't expect that from him. I expected good things from Gosling--I've liked every movie I've seen him in (and, though I haven't seen The Notebook, I'm sure that if I got in the mood to watch it, I'd probably also be in the mood to like it)--and from Mulligan--I recently saw an early screening of Restless, and I like Mia Wazikowska, but the more I see her, the less impressed I am by her; quite the opposite is true of Mulligan.

Drive isn't particularly complicated, but it also isn't necessarily predictable. All in all, a good time at the theater.

Cowboys & Aliens, Captain America, and a little bit of The Last Airbender

I had to look up the status of the Dark Tower film (based on Stephen King's series of books) after watching Cowboys & Aliens; Daniel Craig would make a great Roland Deschain. Turns out--and I think I knew this already, but forgot--Javier Bardem is playing him. Really, if we got a string of westerns coming up (though I don't think we do), they wouldn't do wrong to cast both Craig and Harrison Ford. They've both got good western faces, like Eastwood does (and did way back when). Anyway, both men not only look the part for a western but do great service to a film that despite its blatantly non-western premise plays out almost entirely like a western would. Favreau doesn't direct the film like a science fiction story but like a straight western in which the villains just happen to have flying ships, look like monsters, and are called "demons."

That is perhaps the best thing about Cowboys & Aliens, that it plays out as a Western, and doesn't play anything tongue-in-cheek, winking at the audience for knowing exactly what the cowboys are facing here... although, on that note, the film probably should have played up the fear levels a bit. Sure, the preacher calls them "demons" but no one really spends any time dealing realistically dealing with the notion of a) demons actually existing or b) flying things abducting townspeople. Then again, the tone fits with what would probably be in a classic western in which, instead of aliens, Indians are kidnapping people. Still, the film is far better than its graphic novel base deserves. I hated that book when I read it a few years back, not just because it stalled my own mini comic with the same title, but also because it was so poorly written, badly drawn. The film actually has some depth to it, taking its time to draw some 3-dimensional characters--side note, even Noah Ringer does pretty well as the sole child character... I only recently got around to seeing Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, which was a horrid, badly put together thing, and Ringer's Aang couldn't emote a bit. He wasn't an actor when he was cast for that film, but he's almost one now.

The rest of the cast is good, though Olivia Wilde's character, prior to--SPOILERS AHEAD--her burning, could have been played a little less overtly mysterious and peculiar. Another actress could've probably done the job better, but Wilde was serviceable. The various minor roles, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Walton Goggins, Clancy Brown, Paul Dano, Keith Carradine (those last three in fairly small, but important roles), are all well done. All in all, the film works on more levels than one might expect given its appearance as a simplistic summer effects-heavy blockbuster. I think, for this year alone, we've already had a better western film in Rango, but Cowboys & Aliens works well as a western and works ok as a science fiction piece. Favreau knows what he's doing.

Backing up a bit, one of last summer's movies, The Last Airbender, continues the trend of Shyamalan's films getting increasingly bad as they go along. Important note, The Happening is still entertainingly bad, while Lady in the Water is offensively bad, so those two could be switched on the list rating how bad Shyamalan's films are. The Last Airbender is not entertaining, is not well acted, is poorly written, makes changes to its source that, minor (some pronunciation issues) and major (Aang never gets to full-on Avatar mode, destructive giant), serve no good purpose, and wastes some pretty good visual effects and guarantees there will be no good film adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender... unless someone pulls a Hulk and remakes this thing before anyone lets Shyamalan try a sequel. Meanwhile, the three seasons of the series are available on Netflix Instant and the new series, Legend of Korra, had a panel at Comic Con and looks to be airing sometime next year. Perhaps we can just put Shyamalan's version behind us and pretend it doesn't exist.

Visual Effects are getting cheap enough that bad movies like Shyamalan's The Last Airbender can have great ones and still be filmic shit. The Effects in Cowboys & Aliens are great in the darker scenes, a little lacking a few times in the daylight shots, but overall pretty good. Captain America also makes use of some great visual effects, including a rather unique effect, making Chris Evans look scrawny for his pre-Captain scenes. This effect has a few notable weak points, making his head and body look a little disconnected in certain shots and lighting. But, overall, the visual is a success. The color timing of the film, a little stylized for the World War II-era stuff, covers what probably wouldn't have worked as well in a realistically-colored sequence. Plenty of other stuff in this film has to be visual effects but doesn't come across as such--the Exposition, the various Hydra bases (though, obviously, parts of those were practical sets).

The acting in Captain America is good, and the film is a lot of fun (like the first Iron Man was and like Thor should have been more), getting plenty of humor in. I was never much of a reader of Captain America, and I'm not very familiar with Red Skull as a character or the various Howling Commandos (who were associated, apparently, with Nick Fury, not Steve Rogers, but the Marvel films can get away with Steve Rogers being frozen and coming back, as he's got the super soldier serum in his system, but Fury is a harder sell for being World War II-era, so the change is understandable). The various commandos, seem designed specifically for the comic nerds who will identify each of them individually, but the film really doesn't give any depth to them or spend much time with them, except as background to Captain America. The montage of the lot of them taking out various Hydra bases has little important content to it and almost comes across as a setup for a video game or a spinoff tv series or something more than an important part of this story.

Bucky gets a little more time than the Commandos, but I've already seen complaints--SPOILERS AHEAD--about his death not having the right tone for such a major character... Of course, when briefly I did follow Captain America, it was long after Bucky was a character, so again, I am not familiar with him. The film, I think, sets him up well enough before going to war, and brings him back fine enough. Inappropriately, as it turns out, when Rogers finds him in the Hydra base, and he's on what looks to be a lab table, I thought he was going to be turned bad as one of Red Skull's experimental soldiers or something (which would probably be a far cry from who Bucky was in Captain America history), but then that wasn't the case. He was not in the cells with the other soldiers because, well, he just wasn't. He does have a good moment just before his death, when he uses Captain America's shield.

Tommy Lee Jones and Stanley Tucci do well with their parts. Despite the importance of her role, Hayley Atwell's Agent Carter is such a one-note character that it's hard to judge how well she does with it. While Tucci's scientist role allows for a bit of depth, his counterpart Toby Jones is never given much to do but toady up to Red Skull. As for Red Skull, Hugo Weaving is wasted on a role that really doesn't even give him much to do, not even any good mustache-twirling (which would have been fitting the tone of the film, actually)... though, of course, Red Skull has no mustache. Dominic Cooper's Howard Stark does have a mustache, and he also has a meatier role (though not so important to the plot), and Cooper does a good job of creating a character related to Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark, where one could understand the two being father and son even though they aren't in a film together.

The film sets up for The Avengers next year, though the framing sequence has little weight to the film as a whole. When--MINOR SPOILER--Rogers learns how much time has passed, and he simply laments that he had a date, I almost wished Agent Carter would be back as an old woman, they'd get to dance, and while cheesy, their relationship would have had a nice coda (which also would have put more weight on Atwell's role). At this point, the Marvel films are so deliberately tying together in the lead up to The Avengers that it wasn't even surprising that the after-the-credits bit was not a scene but a trailer. So, the framing sequence here is important (and it's important, of course, to know that Captain America isn't dead), but the cut to Rogers waking up in the fake 1940s room seems like a lazy transition for something that could have been far more dramatic, showing them actually get him out of the ice.


All in all, Cowboys & Aliens and Captain America were a good double feature. The former took itself serious enough to work, and the latter had fun enough with its setting to work. I'm not sure either one will be winning any awards, but they do what they need to do as big summer movies, and sometimes that is plenty.

a lot of movies in a very short time (or rather the last two months)

I haven't wanted to just post quick, brief reviews on this blog, but then, busy with school and life, i've not put up a longer post in two months. I really meant to write a long review of the documentary Marwencol (4/29), if for no other reason than to get a few more people to have even heard of it--it's about a guy who deals with mental disability by building and maintaining a Barbie-scale World War II-era village in his backyard and photographing it. Source Code (4/2) and The Beaver (5/5) each had me interested in writing a blog entry about opening titles--the former's titles reminded me of north by northwest, the latter's had an interesting take on one of its themes (everyone's lives being interconnected) in the opening titles. I could have written an entry about unnecessary 3D (using Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides (5/22) and Thor (5/7)) or good use of 3D (using Kung Fu Panda 2 (5/28) and Cars 2 (today)). I could have compared Bridesmaids (5/24) and The Hangover Part II (6/10), or explained how X-Men First Class (6/5) tried to be a few too many things at once but still was pretty entertaining (and Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy were great). I could have written about a couple small movies I rather enjoyed--Everything Must Go (5/13) and Beginners (6/5). I could have finally put together a review of the various Jean-Claude Van Damme films I've watched in the last few months--I believe I've mentioned watching these to possibly do an interpretation of a bit from JCVD next fall in a speech competition, and in the past two months (when I've gotten past a lot of his obvious ones already) I've watched The Hard Corps (4/26), Lionheart (5/10) Universal Soldier The Return (5/12) (since watching JCVD (1/2), I've already watched several other Van Damme movies: The Order (3/11), Maximum Risk (3/13), Universal Soldier (3/16), Second in Command (3/21), Replicant (3/24), Nowhere to Run (4/1), Knock Off (4/2), and The Quest (4/8)). I watched Downfall (5/21) again for History class, so I could have quite easily pasted that review here. I certainly could have written a review of The Tree of Life (5/29)...

Actually, I will comment a bit on The Tree of Life before I go today. Though some people were put off by the birth-of-the-universe sequence, I thought it was amazing and could have actually been longer (and maybe should have been, if only to get to primates before jumping back to the main storyline). The main storyline, the acting, and Malick's direction especially were all great. I did think the afterlife sequence was a bit lacking (and like the afterlife ending in Lost, a bit arbitrary in its representations of the characters and their interactions). But, like Malick's earlier films, this one is very watchable.

Also, the negative Cars 2 reviews are wrong. The film is a good spy movie, a good action piece, and a surprisingly fitting sequel to the original Cars... of course, many say that was the worst of Pixar's films. Then again, being the worst of a group of films as great as Pixar's have been--that's hardly an insult.

And, I will try to keep up this blog more over the summer, like I had it going as the Oscars approached.

Darth Maul’s weird little brother… AKA Insidious

The opening shot of Insidious promises lame visuals the likes of numerous online websites purporting to have evidence of ghosts, you know blurry shapes in the background of photos, shadows in windows (except the opening shot of the film doesn’t bother to let us know that there’s no one there to cast this shadow, so this is in no way scary or even necessarily interesting), an old grandfather clock at the end of a hallway… because clocks are so scary (and, SPOILER alert: the clock is never relevant to the plot in any way).

The opening titles, and the music cues (with screeching violins that someone thought would be reminiscent of old gothic horror films but which in practice was taken too far) are lame. For no reason other than maybe the director thinks older horror films are cool, the shots during the title sequence are in black and white, with red smoky titles, you know the kinda stuff that would be cool to add to your homemade video maybe but that was silly anywhere else for at least a couple decades now… if not forever.

And then, the story begins. Mother and son have matching pajamas… no reason, and she never wears them again, it’s just something to make cute a scene that isn’t already, shouldn’t be, and really still isn’t even with the matching pajamas. Insert Chekhov’s photo album—for those who don’t get the reference, Chekhov’s gun, aka the gun on the mantle, is a fairly basic trick of drama. You introduce the gun in the first act, it goes off in the final act. Of course, the real trick is to not make the gun so obvious, but oh, no, there are no photos of your father as a child, at all, is such a silly detail that there’s absolutely no way that won’t come up later.

But, anyway, on with the story. Seems, a couple who seem to be barely middle class—he’s a high school teacher and she, well, briefly it seems like she’s a songwriter, but that is a useless detail inserted to add some depth or something (and to have one of their boxes go missing and have it matter to these characters… except she barely seems concerned, finds it like one scene after she’s noticed it’s missing and husband can’t be bothered to care it’s gone, so I guess he doesn’t care much for her songwriting… except there’s an attempt at a “cute” bedroom scene in which she asks which of her songs is his favorite, he suggest she write a song about him, laughter ensues and if there’d been a cinematically appropriate sex scene to follow, maybe there would have been something good in this film…

Anyway, backtracking, there are boxes (one of which went missing and shows up in the attic) because husband and wife and three kids, one named Dalton, and the other two named extraneous and superfluous, have just moved into a new house. And, despite random box from moving showing up in attic, the attic is in no way scary. Still, Dalton  finds his way up there when the door opens itself, which really doesn’t jibe with the rest of the film, as the spirits don’t need him up there, and his going in the attic serves no actual plot purpose… seriously, though he falls off the broken ladder (another Chekhov’s gun set up maybe two scenes earlier when wife ventured into the attic and found her box of sheet music, even though she will only be seen near the piano once and that is probably just because the filmmaker thought it would be more interesting than her doing something housewife-ish) and hits his head—somehow hurting the front of his head even though he obviously hits the back of it, by the way—this ISN’T the cause of his coma… oh wait, “it’s not a coma, they don’t know what to call it,” as the line in the trailer goes, except yeah, it’s a coma, the doctor says it’s a coma, he just doesn’t know what’s caused Dalton to go all comatose. But, “not a coma” is so much more mysterious than “coma of unknown origin” I guess.

Anyway, Dalton into coma, jump ahead a few months, wife is all depressed—maybe that’s why she isn’t wearing her pajamas anymore, except such a detail of characterization seems far too complicated for this script; it’s more likely the costume department lost them. But, she’s sitting at the piano, writing a song and hears a voice over the baby monitor. So, she heads up to baby superfluous’ room and there’s no one there. And, the scares begin… (at this point, I wish that “not” line from Wayne’s World hadn’t gotten old, because that is exactly the lame joke I need)

Some other stuff happens, husband stays late at work (and there’s a drawing of the clown from Saw (a much better film that I now must assume was entirely because of the script, because James Wan is an awful director) just to make us hope Jigsaw will show up, or maybe this film is actually our Jigsaw trap, and we have to chew through our own eyes so we don’t have to see anymore of this) for no reason except wife is annoying, extraneous says he doesn’t like how Dalton walks around at night—oh, forgot to mention, Dalton is now at home, with medical stuff hooked up to him and everything; there’s even a brief scene in which the nurse shows wife how to insert a breathing tube in his nose, and there’s some cheesy line in there, the nurse telling the wife that the universe messed with the wrong woman, or something like that, even though we have no reason to a) think the nurse knows anything about wife, b) believe that wife is at all capable of caring for her comatose kid or c) care.

There are some ghosts, a kid who changes the song on the turntable—yes, wife has a turntable to go with the grandfather clock, because in this film there is nothing new, no new ideas and no new technology—and laughs and runs around, which doesn’t make him scary so much as a) potentially cute and b) mildly annoying. There’s also some large man in a trenchcoat who paces on the balcony then shows up in bedroom to lunge at wife and… well, not make contact because… well, I’m not sure why. Several times in the film, these spirits, be they ghosts or demons are simply scared away by the light being turned on—which really means there’s an easy way to protect Dalton, just turn on the lights in his room, but that’s too obvious—but in this instance, I think he just went away. And, eventually, there’s also the titular (well, Darth Maul’s Retarded Little Brother should’ve been the title at least) Junior Sith Lord,  who’s a demon, who likes to paint half his face red, sharpen his fingers on an old grinding wheel and listen to “tiptoe through the tulips” mostly because, apparently, the filmmaker thinks that song is creepy. Except, combined with Junior Sith Lord, it’s just good for a laugh at how pathetic this film has gotten.

Enter husband’s mother, who tells us about a dream she had with Junior Sith Lord hanging out in Dalton’s room, and she tells us his voice is scary and unforgettable, but we don’t actually get to hear it. But, anyway, husband’s mother calls psychic lady, who is preceded by her comic sidekick investigators, who check out the house… oh, and this is another new house, because husband believed wife just enough to move out of the other house but not enough to trust psychic lady later—his scale of appropriate responses to wife hallucinating is a bit mixed up. There’s still a grandfather clock, which serves no purpose (well, possibly to tell the time, but that is hardly relevant to the plot), and there are still ghosts and demons and whatnot. Turns out—another classic line from the trailer—“it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s your son” or rather it’s loser couple-that-are-trying-to-act-way-too-much-for-such-a-bad-film’s son. Enter psychic exposition lady to explain the plot. SPOILER ALERT, if anyone cares: Dalton can astral project when he sleeps, but he’s gone too far away this time into a place psychic lady calls “the further.” It’s this dark place where the souls of the dead are, all scary and tormented, but I guess “hell” was trademarked, so they couldn’t use that name. And, all these ghosts and Junior Sith Lord are hanging around to take Dalton’s soul’s place in his body. Now, this is a little weird in the case of Junior Sith Lord because, well, what good is it to be in some little kid’s body when you could instead be a demon? A demon can freak people out, maybe even whisper in their ears and get them to make really bad horror films to, you know, ruin the world. A little boy—he tries something and you just gotta smack him around a bit. But, apparently, Dalton’s body is a good place to be… but there’s more. Chekhov’s gun come home to roost, to mix metaphors—seems husband has no childhood photos because his mother stopped taking pictures of him and hid away the few photos she has because there’s some old woman that kept showing up in them; see he was just like Dalton, and this old woman ghost kept hanging out trying to get inside his body when he was young, and so psychic exposition lady made him forget he could astral project and apparently made him forget that normal kids sometimes get their pictures taken.

Husband rightly thinks psychic exposition lady is crazy and kicks her out of the house, but changes his mind like a scene later when he realizes that the same Junior Sith Lord psychic lady’s comic sidekick has scribbled is in Dalton’s drawings on the wall. So, then there’s a séance, with an inappropriately funny gasmask, and some lines about innards being torn out, and I’m wishing these people had their innards torn out, just to make things interesting, but no.

So… the climax: Husband has to astral project all over again, go to Hell, I mean, “The Further” to rescue Dalton. And, Hell is mostly dark and empty, except for a scene with some girl who apparently shot her family to death and they all have smiles on their faces—because smiles are scary—and there’s Darth Maul’s retarded little brother sharpening his fingers and listening to “tiptoe through the tulips” and I’m wishing he was listening to “jeepers creepers” because even in their worst scenes, those two films were far better than this one. So, husband grabs Dalton and runs, because anyone who’s seen any of the Hellraiser films knows that is how one gets away from demons… and how much better would this have been if Pinhead showed up? But I digress. Dalton wakes up, everything is fine…

SPOILER ALERT, but if you’ve read this far, what do you care? Husband seems all normal until psychic lady looks at him weird then takes his photo. He strangles her, but wife and husband’s mother and Dalton can’t hear from the next room because Dalton is gorging on spaghetti, because that is what one needs after a good coma, to fill one’s stomach as fast as possible. Anyway, wife finally hears… something, finds psychic lady dead—which means no more exposition, so wife has no idea what’s going on, until she picks up psychic lady’s camera, because, you know, getting that camera off the floor is more important than, say, calling the police. She sees photo of husband, rather, photo of old woman from his childhood photos, and husband comes up behind her as she’s looking at the camera, and cut to the INSIDIOUS title and screeching violins again and finally, we’re free.

SCRE4M

So, SCRE4M continues the deconstruction of horror films that began with the first Scream film. Craven and Williamson approach this one as a deconstruction/reconstruction of the remake/reboot. For the record, the first one went at the slasher subgenre specifically and the modern horror film in general, the second went at sequels, and the third at trilogies, each of them coming right out with the “rules” of whatever it was, and while some of the basics made for amusing banter, some of them seemed at first like they were being made up on the spot simply to then subvert them afterward. This one has a bit of that in the party scene, suggesting the film has to end at the party, when really, no slasher film that wasn’t specifically built around a party, had that climax. But, Williamson’s script makes it sound sensible, and Craven’s direction makes it work structurally.

The great thing about the Scream films is that, aside from the genre discussion that makes a movie nerd (and horror film fan) like me happy, real actors (though not necessarily huge or great actors) are in the cast. This isn’t just a bunch of random teenagers who will never show up in anything ever again, or will only get cast in a series of increasingly lesser horror films. There are a few actors from the earlier films, of course, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox (and there’s a nice meta scene discussing the likelihood that those last two would have lasted as a couple that was quite amusing). And, there’s the cameos on par with Drew Barrymore’s or Jada Pinkett’s –Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell. But, the various “teenage” roles are filled by relatively familiar (especially if you watch the CW or pay any attention to tv) actors and actresses that all do quite well with Williamson’s script—Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Lucy Hale, Aimee Teegarden, Brittany Robinson, Alison Brie, Anthony Anderson, Adam Brody, Rory Culkin, Erik Knudsen. The only real false note in the film comes from Marley Shelton who—SPOILERY WATERS AHEAD—plays Deputy Hix like she really wanted her character to be the killer, so much so that when she shows up in the final hospital showdown it might’ve made sense if she came in not to save the day but to help the film continue what could have been a grand case of the bad guy winning.  Hix is a red herring so overtly played and so subtly written that her character ends up serving very little purpose in the end.

Back to the bad guy winning, before the hospital, there was potential for a serious reconstrucionist reinvention of the genre in combining the slasher film’s tendency to favor the villain even though he always loses and something more modern, say the Saw films’ villain focus in that essentially he always wins and really isn’t necessarily the villain as much as society is—if you can get past the grossout so-called “torture-porn” aspects of the Saw films, or even the Hostel films (well, at least the first one), they come across as morality plays even more than most any slasher film does, even though the slasher subgenre clearly carries within it conventions and tropes that, in the past, reward the good characters by letting them survive. In SCRE4M, there is actually direct commentary on that when Robbie, Cinema Club nerd (and representative of what the script suggests is the next step in horror, with his POV camera), says the only way to survive in a horror film nowadays is to be gay, the implied subtext being that just being virginal isn’t enough anymore.

Speaking of virginal, it’s worth noting that the Scream films have remained quite chaste as far as sexual content goes, and seemingly deliberately so, another subversion of the genre. But, this subversion comes at a time when more mainstream films are having more explicit sexual content, so it almost seems a move backward rather than further commentary on the old conventions of the genre.

All in all, the film is quite good, a fitting continuation of the series, and containing some great commentary on the notions of rebooting/remaking horror films. One must wonder if there’s a fifth film possible here, a deconstruction/reconstruction of the endless franchise—maybe a jump ahead to the future, a space station (like Hellraiser Bloodline or Jason X) or a deliberate play on the more repetitive, forgettable aspects of, say, Friday the 13^th VI to VIII. But, Sidney Prescott is running out of relatives.

A final note: something that was missing from this film, given its take of reality versus the fiction of the Stab film-series-within-the-film-series was real brutality. SPOILERS AHEAD Until Jill’s injuries at the climax of the film, there is little harshness to the violence, though is occasionally a lot of blood and briefly some intestines. I think this plotline would have been better served drawing a distinction between the more showy violence of the Stab series and some more brutal violence like that exhibited in the better half (i.e. not that bits with the mother and the horse) of Rob Zombie’s recent Halloween II remake. But, then again, such brutality would diminish a lot of the enjoyment in the Scream series, which can still get away with playing for laughs even in the midst of scenes involving a spree killer slaughtering teenagers.

Still, it would be nice to have a horror film, especially a slasher film, that takes itself seriously on all levels, playing with the brutality, with the real-life horror of having everyone you know killed in front of you (Sidney’s isolation early in Scream 3 hinted at the psychological damage, but didn’t really explore it)… of course the larger audience wants to enjoy this stuff. Any serious exploration is left to lower budget stuff like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (if you love the genre, see the film if you haven’t already), but even that film, in the end, drops its serious psychological exploration for a bit of chase and death. The recent Trick ‘r Treat actually comes at the brutality of the violence pretty well, but also has some quite funny moments, and some quite creepy moments.

Anyway, a paragraph or two past my “final note,” I must say for those who enjoyed the Scream films, SCRE4M should be a great followup. For fans of slasher films, it should also do quite well. For movie nerds who like deconstructionism and reconstructionism, like the earlier films (especially Scream 2, which I think is the best of the four), it should be awesome.

Limitless, Sucker Punch and maybe a little Lincoln Lawyer

Limitless is, despite some key details left out, far better than it should be. It has a great visual style, using some interesting zoom shots and fisheye lens bits to alter the audience’s visual sense of the world within the film. It does  a great visual job putting the audience into the head of the the protagonist when he takes NZT… for those who haven’t even heard of the film, taking this drug increases brainpower, making connections between casual observations, long lost memories and new ideas. It allows Eddie, the main character, to write a novel in a matter of a few days, to make a name for himself in stock trading in less than a week, and to be running for senate by the end of the film when he started as a nobody writer whose girlfriend dumps him, among other reasons, for using her as his bank account. And, that girlfriend (played by Abbie Cornish), when she takes NZT during a key sequence in the film, she manages to make creative use of an ice-skating child that is the best use of a kid as a weapon in any film (not that there are many examples… the only one that comes to mind outside of this is actually from television, from the pilot episode of the soon to be short-lived Mr. Sunshine, in which Alison Janney throws a small child at some clowns with chainsaws—like this film being far better than it should be, that clown scene was far better than Mr. Sunshine is, for the record).

The primary fault with Limitless is that, in the end, we don’t know who Eddie is on a personal level, on a moral level, on a political level; he is at times a mere personification of ambition, a cipher… but maybe that’s the point. Eddie is writing a science fiction novel about a future utopia early on in the film, but we are never told what his notion of utopia is. He’s played by Bradley Cooper, an actor that is very easy to watch for a couple hours, so it’s very easy to be charmed by him and root for him when the plot gets going and mob guys and businessmen are out to get him, but ultimately, when we learn in the end that he’s running for senate, one has to wonder if this is a good or bad thing. Various antagonists resort to violence, so by cinematic shorthand, that makes them bad, but it is certainly possible that our lead killed a woman (considering, I also saw The Lincoln Lawyer this weekend, I am having trouble recalling if with whom he had a one night stand while in one of his high-dose blackouts… these blackouts reminded me briefly of  the Adam Sandler film Click, not necessarily in a bad way, but up until this point Limitless had been coming across as fairly original, so briefly, I was wondering if the film would take this into interesting places. Now, the film DOES take the story into interesting places, giving us easy visual cues (alterations of the color timing) to transition between non-drug periods and drug periods, much as Sucker Punch uses color palettes to differentiate between its levels of reality, but more on that in a bit. It allows Eddie to make huge changes, to take advantage of his NZT-heightened brain but also allows us to see why he makes the choices he makes, shows us how he puts things together, like those brief bits in A Beautiful Mind where the various letters light up and suddenly Nash can see a hidden message except actually a little easier to follow. Eddie knows how to fight because he can recall various martial arts films as if he just watched them. He can deduce that his landlord’s wife is a law student because he sees the corner of a bookcover in her bag and recalls seeing that same book back when he was in college. The film lets us see the connections he’s making, which is not necessarily an easy task. But, it does it, and it does it well, and despite a rather open ending (and for me, at least, a question about whether or not Eddie is lying when he says he’s no longer taking NZT) because we don’t really know where Eddie will take his political career, the movie is definitely one of the better ones so far this year. Robert De Niro doesn’t do anything too interesting with his role (but, then again, since he turned to comedy, he hasn’t done any real acting, has he?), Abbie Cornish, aside from the sequence where her character takes NZT, is wasted a bit. Bradley Cooper gets almost all the screentime, and that’s ok. Despite its flaws, Limitless is a great movie, with a subtle critique of our always-on-the-go culture that occasionally gets lost beneath the stylish veneer…

And, speaking of critique getting lost under the stylish veneer, Sucker Punch, like Limitless, pretty much tells you outright what it’s about early on. In Limitless, early on, Eddie explains what his novel is about, a future utopia except it’s really about the condition of man in society today (or something like that), and Sweet Pea spells out the central idea of what Sucker Punch is about early on as well. She says she gets the helpless schoolgirl act, but wonders if the asylum exploitation (specifically, lobotimization) takes the exploitation too far. And, the film has a tough time balancing between commenting on the exploitation of females and exploiting them itself. Plotwise, the film is a series of setups for putting women (first, just Baby Doll, then she and the four other girls, including Abbie Cornish’s Sweet Pea) into roles usually held by men, playing on cinematic stereotypes and archetypal roles, making an effort to deconstruct them and reconstruct them but not going far enough in that regard. The spectacle keeps getting in the way… but, like with Limitless, that is perhaps the point. Grab the male audience with the awesome visuals, the anime-style fetishized females fighting zombie soldiers, supernatural samurais, a dragon, medieval knights and defusing a bomb on a speeding train, but populate the film with empowered females (except when their depowering is necessary to the plot of course) and males who amount to little more than slavering dogs, intent on committing abuse or getting sex, or more often mixes of the two.

The film is deliberately simplistic in its characterization. Even the lead, Emily Browning’s Baby Doll, has little depth except where the plot necessitates… SPOILERS AHEAD, LOTS OF THEM …in that she doesn’t even really know who she is or what she’s doing until she realizes she’s the fifth plot coupon necessary for the breakout, and this at the point that she and we realize this isn’t actually her story but Sweet Pea’s. Unless, of course, the second level of reality, the orphanage/brothel, is not a good measure of what actually happened in the first level of reality, the mental hospital… though there is evidence presented (the burned out closet, for example, the mention of Baby Doll helping another patient escape) that the basic events of the second level happened on the first, we can’t know the details. As far as we know, the details of the first level are as far from the second as the various third levels (the samurai one, the war one, the medieval one, the train one)…

It occurs to me, though, that the bomb sequence and the level two kitchen scene that frames it demonstrate several direct iterations of events between levels, but this isn’t Inception. The exact ratio of events one level to those on another are not the point. The question is, does inserting these otherwise helpless girls into stereotypical masculine roles, with all the usual phallic weaponry—Freud would have a field day with this film—betters or worsens the female cinematic role. Seriously, this film succeeds or fails, in my opinion, on whether one buys the commentary on exploitation more than the exploitation. There is room for serious study of the various roles from level to level in the film (and the opening for study is a good sign that the film is doing a good job), how Baby Doll connects to Baby Doll connects to Baby Doll, how the female psychiatrist (Carla Gugino as Gorski) whose signature is being forged to lobotomize helpless girls becomes the madam out to teach these girls to survive in a male-dominated world in level two, how Baby Doll has been responsible accidentally for the death of her younger sister in level one, yet Rocket willingly (sort of) sacrifices herself for her sister, Sweet Pea (I’m not sure if the film ever establishes which sister is older here, and, while Abbie Cornish looks (and is) older than Jena Malone, I’m more familiar with Malone so think of her as being older), how the High Roller (barely seen) is the lobotomizer (also barely seen, but given some possibly key dialogue in the interpretation of Baby Doll’s willingness to be lobotomized), how Blondie and Amber are unknown quantities in level one, are expendable in level two, and cannon fodder in level three. And, especially, there is something to explored in how the orderly who is secretly running his own game behind the scenes of the mental hospital in level one is the master of the brothel in level two. The man who should be nothing is really in charge—at least inasmuch as his power over the girls—and so in brothel level, he really is in charge, so much so that the promise of violence we get in level one in the end, is only actually shown here, when he seems on the verge of raping a just-lobotomized Baby Doll.

But, then, one must wonder why Wise Man (played by Scott Glenn) is, well, a man. Gorski is the one ordering and training (though we never really see the latter) the dances, and the dances are excuses for/entrances into the level three fantasy sequences, so why is it Glenn’s Wise Man who is the cliché-spewing captain over the girls and not, for yet another example of sticking a female in a male role, Gugino’s Gorski instructing them? Is it because in level two she is teaching them to survive in their submissive roles rather than teaching them to break out of them? Is it because in level one, she is herself being used by a male to further dominate the girls? Despite being a female, is Gorski’s role actually a male one? And, for that matter, why, in the end, is the final rescue of Sweet Pea by Wise Man and not Baby Doll or, God forbid, her own ingenuity? Is this one last comment on the female role, that even in a film arguably about empowering females, a male has to intervene in the end?

Or, am I overthinking it?

Is Sucker Punch simply a lot of eyecandy, an excuse to get the masculine action with scantily clad females on screen at the same time? The level one sequence before we get inside the mental hospital plays out like a music video, could easily be excised from the film to stand on its own as a tragic short, and the various level three fight sequences also play out like music videos, with almost no dialogue (some subtitled dialogue in the war sequence, and a few rather unnecessary lines of dialogue in the train sequence are all that come to mind), just action and violence and visual effects and cute girls in small outfits… it’s what every geek guy wants and what every geek girl needs. It’s marketed more toward the male audience—and arguably they could use the lesson it’s trying to impart—but deserves to be discovered by the female audience. Director Snyder had to cut some sequences (including, supposedly a sex scene, which could completely upset the balance between commentary and exploitation, depending how it plays out) to get the PG-13, but ultimately, I think the film will be better off having a PG-13 version available, as teenage girls are probably the ones who should be seeing this. Still, I look forward to the R-rated version, hoping the Director’s Cut clarifies the balance a bit more.

In the end, one must wonder if is important that Sweet Pea, the girl most reluctant to escape (and crossing level two to level three, the most reluctant to fulfill the male role?) is the one who actually gets free (if being rescued by Wise Man and getting on a bus home to presumably a paternal household (from which she and Rocket already ran away once) can be called “free”).

Sucker Punch is a fantastic film, literally, full of awesome visuals and trying its darnedest to really say something about male and female roles, just as Limitless is mostly saying  but occasionally forgetting to say, something about how are brains are being altered by our interactions with the modernizing world, how a crash is inevitable if we aren’t careful. These two movies are good for the medium of film. They are not simple stories out to entertain us. Whether they succeed or fail at it, both of these films are trying to tell us something, trying to get us to think about our society and how we interact with it.

The Lincoln Lawyer, on the other hand, doesn’t have much to say about our world or our society. It includes a lot of the tropes of the modern legal thriller but holds up well because of a good cast and a well put together (though still complicated) conclusion. It’s a great legal thriller, but it is deeply steeped in its genre, doing nothing to break out of its mold, and with a few of its subplots (notably Martinez in prison and Gloria in rehab) it could have taken more time and I’m guessing the book on which the film is based lends more space to these two. Still, like Limitless, like Sucker Punch, The Lincoln Lawyer has a great lead, good looking and easy to root for. And, as far as Chekov’s guns go, a motorcycle gang is a good one.

Gnomeo & Juliet and Rango

Gnomeo & Juliet is, in the end, an attempt to improve on Shakespeare, while also diminishing his work significantly… At the same time, it’s occasionally quite clever in its references to various Shakespeare plays and in its throughline’s occasional detachment from Romeo and Juliet. (SPOILER… sorta) Once Shakespeare is actually on screen, it’s a given that the ending will not be the dual-suicide of the original. But, the happier ending that comes seems incomplete. I actually expected (not a spoiler, per se, but you won’t get this if you haven’t seen the film) the destruction at the end of the film to bring the two humans together as well as the feuding groups of gnomes. I also found it a little odd that somehow the new flamingo female shows up and all is well—she’s not the same flamingo as before, so for a movie that’s relying a lot on notions of romance, it blatantly forgets them here.

Still, the movie is entertaining, and kids should like it. The pace is quick enough. The character designs are nice and the voice talent is good. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s good. It does a good job of skipping along the surface of Shakespeare’s play while finding its own way around various aspects of it, i.e. the notable deaths of more than just those of the titular characters.

Flashback on my recent blog about romantic comedies, and I must mention Gnomeo & Juliet has it’s “meet cute,” and—like Romeo and Juliet—fits the romantic comedy mold fairly well, except the grand gesture bit takes the dramatic tack instead of the romantically comedic one, obviously.

Rango is a little bit Road Warrior (at least in one sequence), a couple parts Chinatown, and a whole lot of parts spaghetti western, though framed in the present day. The titular character dreams of going to Hollywood and being a famous actor, but he gets sidetracked in the town of Dirt (is there a specific (sub)genre for the whole gets sidetracked in a smalltown and it changes him forever story? There should be). He takes on the persona of Rango, impressing the locals with his tale of killing seven brothers with one bullet, and he’s quickly introduced to the town’s mayor and made sheriff.

Now, a lot of the plot is fairly simple—town doesn’t have water because someone’s been “stealing” it, there’s a seeming romance between Rango and Beans (who has a “survival tactic” tendency to freeze in place from time to time), and there’s the usual assortment of old west town characters… but, the designs for these characters are probably some of the best in, well, any animated film, multiple animal types with individual personalities and styles to them all. The film is gorgeous, like any western should be—Roger Deakins, who totally should have gotten the Oscar for cinematography last week for True Grit, is listed as cinematography consultant. The setting comes across quite real, as do the characters, and the plot plays out just fine, nothing fabulously original but slipping comfortably into a beautifully designed package…

Is it too soon to start suggesting nominees for next year’s Oscars? Actually, I saw a post from Tom O’Neil of the Los Angeles Times has already called it an “Oscar tragedy” that Johnny Depp will be overlooked for his voicework here; the Oscars don’t have a voice category and don’t nominate voicework for acting awards. So I guess it isn’t too early. Of course, there are still a lot of good animated films to be released this year: Cars 2, Rio, Puss in Boots, even a Happy Feet 2, just to name a few I’ll be seeing. Rango is on par with your average Pixar feature, so it’s definitely worthy of a nomination…

Now, to end this blog entry, I would like to wonder about something in Rango (or various other films with anthropomorphized animals): how do you pick which animals get to be the most human and which ones still come across like animals? Pigs as the work animals in Rango—I get that. But, why do they ride on birds and bats? Well, bats are creepy and it’s the bad guys riding ‘em, so I guess that makes sense, except bats are mammals, and otherwise in the film it’s mammals and reptiles that show human-like intelligence. Birds, though, are consistently less intelligent. This is a western, so it needs “horses” for the posse to ride. I get that. But, you would think that in a world where animals have human-like intelligence, they wouldn’t go around working other animals like that. Or maybe I’m just being weird.

The King’s Speech (and The Adjustment Bureau… and just about any movie, really) as Romantic Comedy

The following begins with an aborted attempt at comparing The King’s Speech to a conventional Romantic Comedy. Watching The Adjustment Bureau today, it occurred to me that it isn’t just the Romantic Comedy subgenre that has this same basic throughline; really it’s a fairly basic story structure since as long as humans have had stories. But anyway, before expanding that idea, here’s the aborted King’s Speech blog entry:

I’ve complained before about the generic throughline of The King’s Speech. But, I want to spell it out a little more clearly. The King’s Speech, despite its British pedigree, despite its highbrow historic subject matter, is structured like a fairly basic romantic comedy. Allmovie.com’s description for the subgenre describes it simply: “a subgenre of comedy that focuses on the complications arising from the search for romance, courtship or a new relationship.” The King’s Speech fits that last one, if you go for a literal interpretation. But, going less literally, the structure fits; AllMovie continues: “couples usually started off disliking one another, only to slowly overcome such obstacles and fall in love y the upbeat conclusion.” When Bertie first meets with Lionel, he doesn’t care for the man’s familiarity, for the man’s methodology, for the man really.

Backing up, even before Bertie meets Lionel, the film has—in modern critical parlance (which I don’t care for)—a meet cute when Elizabeth comes incognito to Lionel…

I’d hate to steal from Wikipedia (especially since this entry has no sources [note, after the fact, this Wikipedia bit is actually quoting but not citing filmbug.com]), but this description of the basic plot is a good one:

The basic plot of a romantic comedy is that two protagonists, usually a man and a woman, meet, part ways due to an argument or other obstacle, then ultimately reunite. Sometimes the two protagonists meet and become involved initially, then must confront challenges to their union. Sometimes the two protagonists are hesitant to become romantically involved because they believe that they do not like each other, because one of them already has a partner, or because of social pressures. However, the screenwriters leave clues that suggest that the characters are, in fact, attracted to each other and that they would be a good love match. The protagonists often separate or seek time apart to sort out their feelings or deal with the external obstacles to their being together.

Bertie and Lionel actually have a few small arguments—the dispute right up front when Bertie doesn’t trust Lionel’s methods in recording him reading from Hamlet, Bertie accusing Lionel of treason and ridiculing his failed acting career—before the big one, when Lionel’s qualifications are questioned by the archbishop. That’s the big breakup before the end, the big obstacle keeping Bertie and Lionel from being together.

It was at this point in my blog attempt that I realized I really wasn’t very familiar with the more conventional romantic comedies of recent years, the kind that star, say, Sandra Bullock. I was trying to think of those big breakup moments that always come just before the couple realizes they belong together and maybe there’s a grand gesture or maybe there’s mutual epiphanies and they run into each other’s arms (not always literally, of course)… and I couldn’t think of any really obvious ones. Here’s what I had, in no particular order:

It’s Lisa discovering who Akeem really is in Coming to America.

It’s Anna thinking Will betrayed her location to the press in Notting Hill.

It’s Jack’s inability to tell Lucy not to marry his brother in While You Were Sleeping.

It’s Diane choosing her father over Lloyd in Say Anything.

It’s Linda answering the door and calling herself Robbie’s fiancé in The Wedding Singer.

And numerous other (probably better) examples. I realize in recent years I haven’t bothered with any of the more conventional romantic comedies, so…

After a little more brainstorming, I thought of So I Married an Axe Murderer, but I couldn’t decide if that big obstacle was Charlie’s suspicion of Harriet, or her sister turning up at the hotel, or… well, my whole attempt to boil down the structure of a generic romantic comedy was stalled. Obviously, there’s the two people who are total opposites but deep down are just perfect for each other. There’s some story going on as they get to know one another and outside forces (jobs, family members, or though it’s not a comedy, the titular bureau of The Adjustment Bureau, or conversely the Devil in Two of a Kind, or mortality in Love & Other Drugs) get in the way, building up to that huge obstacle/breakup that sets up the final act. And, then you get the grand gesture, say Lloyd holding that radio over his head, Josie getting on that pitcher’s mound in Never Been Kissed… Patrick singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” in 10 Things I Hate About You is a little early in the film, structurally, to qualify, but that’s a good grand gesture kinda thing.

But, anyway. The throughline is pretty basic. Simplify it even more: instead of two people trying to be together, it’s one person or a group of people just trying to do… something. Outside forces get in the way—that is the essence of drama, right? The stuff getting in the way reach a peak, say the destruction of Hometree in Avatar, or, for another James Cameron reference, the ship starting to sink in Titanic. With your basic three act structure of most any film, especially out of Hollywood, inevitably any one of them can be compared to a romantic comedy then. I don’t have to simply pick on The King’s Speech just because I’m still bitter over it winning the Oscar for best Picture over several better films.

The Adjustment Bureau, by the way, is a tragic casualty of Hollywood rescheduling. It’s a great film, touching on some of the same themes as Inception—supposedly, it was delayed from last summer/fall to not be released so close to Nolan’s Best Picture nominee (one of those that was better than The King’s Speech, in my opinion)—free will being a big one of those themes. Of course, The Adjustment Bureau has a different take on it, and doesn’t have us following a bunch of thieves out to potentially ruin a man’s life for a good chunk of money… seriously, the film never actually suggests that Fischer (the son) is capable of making his own way without his father’s business empire. But, somehow it plays like a great idea, the film pulling a good game of suggestion on us almost as well as the characters do on him. There’s a lot of shorthand, universal relationship stuff, father and son, or husband and wife (with Mal and Cobb), without really giving us reason to care about what happens to Fischer in that vault at his father’s deathbed, or what happens to him after all this dreaming is done for that matter. Keep in mind, he’s not our protagonist. Cobb is. Cobb, a guy who make s aliving stealing people’s ideas, and who is essentially as responsible for his wife’s death as his wife wanted him to look (only not for reasons that might necessarily hold up in court), and we root for him, because Hollywood shorthand puts us on his side right from the opening scene. We want to identify with someone up there on the screen, and whoever they give us first, he’ll do.

For the record, I think Inception is a great movie. I even think The King’s Speech is a great movie. But, picking these things apart—this is fun. And, anyway, I was talking about The Adjustment Bureau. It’s take on freewill is more in line with man versus god (or, specifically the “Chairman” of the Adjustment Bureau) in what destiny is. We’re given a likeable enough guy, David Norris, running for Senate (and destined for higher office?) and we get the “meet cute” (that term is kinda growing on me the more I am forced to use it, so I must never again use it) with Elise hiding in a men’s room stall when he comes in to practice a speech (spoilerish but only in a minor way as this is early in the film), his concession speech after having lost this election. This one meeting is supposed to be all they’ve got, enough to inspire him to change his style for the speech, to go off script and come off as the frontrunner for the next senate run and maybe even the presidency after that. But, chance steps in—it’s almost like a Greek drama, chance versus fate, free will or the illusion of it caught in the middle. Outside forces just like any romantic comedy (or drama) get in the way, an ex fiancé, adjustment bureau knowledge making David hesitant to move forward with the relationship, a car crash, and a promise of dreams quashed. The point to my rant against Inception above was that arguably this film should have actually gotten a more positive audience response, since it’s a love story at the heart, not a bunch of thieves taking down an heir to a corporate empire (not that taking him down isn’t a good thing). And, the science fiction is downplayed here. It’s almost omnipresent, but it’s often subtle, such a given for the premise that it’s never really huge. The visual effects are numerous, though often playing on the same element; if you’ve seen the trailer you’d know about the doors opening to places they shouldn’t, and there are a lot of these doors in the movie, a fairly simple visual effect but done expertly and often.

There’s a coup small breakup moments leading up to the big breakup and then (HEREAFTER THERE BE SPOILERS) David has his grand gesture moment when he lets Elise in on what’s going on and makes a run through the bureau’s doors across (if you can apply such a simple preposition to the directionless travel these doors imply) New York, eventually getting into the Bureau building itself, heading for a meeting with the Chairman. Where Inception has its cleverness, dreams within dreams that got a bit too complicated for some viewers, The Adjustment Bureau takes on a bigger idea, effectively debating the existence of and/or the role of god in our individual lives, but plays it straightforward enough that its hardly confusing. It steps past attempts at cleverness and goes right to intelligence, if you can understand the distinction.

Is unfortunate that The Adjustment Bureau got delayed into the doldrums of the movie year. It deserves more attention, and a larger audience, than it is bound now to get… even if it does have a fairly basic structure.