Even though I’ve gone on record as being unimpressed with the French New Wave, I still feel totally justified in my rental of Le Samourai. Movies with the word “Samurai” title have rarely let me down.

And listen to the Netflix description (with most intriguing words highlighted by me):

A little bit gangster film, a little bit samurai flick, this 1960s French masterpiece from Jean-Pierre Melville introduces the memorable anti-hero Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a contract killer with the instincts of a Japanese warrior and the features of Adonis. After offing a nightclub owner, Costello has two big problems: his double-crossing employer, who now wants him dead, and the dogged police investigator who’s determined to rein him in.

Now listen to my description:

Ninety-five minutes of attractive but vacuous people opening and closing doors and walking into rooms. Our expressionless hero spends great stretches of time lounging on a bed smoking and occasionally feeding his pet bird. The action begins with a 45-minute long police lineup, continues with a barrage of shots of the hero parking tiny French cars on Paris streets and walking into convenience stores, and culminates in a climactic 20-minute long sequence being casually pursued by old men and young women on the public transit system!

I suspect that my issues with Le Samourai are pretty much the same as my problems with Breathless: the movies it influenced are 10,000 times more interesting than the original. After watching the movie, I attempted to read more about it online to see if there was something crucial about it that I’d missed, some justification for its being called a “masterpiece” and warranting a Criterion edition. The writing about this movie is even more soporific than the movie itself, but the bits that I can glean before I nod off are always the same: it’s influenced dozens of other directors; and it’s not about action, but cinematography.

I can appreciate a filmmaker’s attempt to go for style and establish a mood over plot. Sometimes that approach even works. But whether it’s because Le Samourai has always been painfully dull, or because it’s had over 30 years of movies and TV expanding on the concept, the attempts at style here seem as forced, self-conscious, and self-important as a student film. Pointing to this movie as groundbreaking or influential seems pretty silly, since there are plenty of contemporary and earlier movies that do more interesting things with both the storytelling and the filmmaking.

So here you end up with a pretty and whisper-thin guy with an OCD fixation on his hat who lives alone with a tiny parakeet (c’mon, even Baretta had a cockatoo) and keeps all his car-stealing keys on a gigantic ring and reacts to a bullet grazing his arm by running back to his apartment and very carefully dressing the wound with a comically oversized bandage before hopping on Le Metro for a polite and relaxed ride through the Paris suburbs. When you try to sell me that as being a “samurai,” you just come across as being a poseur.

Helvetica is an hour and a half of people with bad hair and bad accents talking about fonts.

I don’t want to discourage people from seeing it, really. It’s a very well-made documentary, doing all the things a documentary should do. It stays neutral throughout (like you’d expect from the subject matter), but a couple of sections are downright clever. You can find plenty of reviews from people who never expected to be at all interested in a documentary about a font, but came out pleasantly surprised.

My problem with it is the same thing that pleasantly surprises people about it: it’s not quite a documentary about a font. They do a great job of giving you the history of it, and the intention behind its design and use, and showing how ubiquitous it’s become, and gauging all the different reactions to it.

But to do this in a film without its turning into a dry History Channel-style documentary, they have to interview a lot of people. People who have strong opinions about fonts. In other words, the kind of people you really wouldn’t want to be spending much time around in real life.

Part of my problem with the movie is that I like to believe that geekery is a contained phenomenon, and not some global pandemic that’s all part of the human condition. It’s like Sanctuary for the people inside the city in Logan’s Run* — I know that in the circles I travel in, people obsess over comic books and TV series continuity and the efficiency of algorithms; but I want to believe that there’s a better world outside where the people are free of that.

But this just perpetuates the idea that because of the Original Sin or something, we’re all mired in our own little worlds of pointless obsessions. I have to hear insufferable people claiming that they know they won’t be popular for this, but The People simply must hear their opinions of “Battlestar Galactica” or BioShock or “Sam & Max”. And now I realize that others have to hear insufferable people saying that Helvetica represents corporate oppression and war, or that they realize they are being iconoclasts and their views might not be popular, but they cannot condone using more than one typeface in a publication.

It’s movies like this that make me think humanity was just better off back when we had to spend all our time worried about finding food and not being mauled by large animals.

* The fact that I used Logan’s Run as an example merely proves my point.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why I never got around to seeing RoboCop until tonight.

I vaguely remember at the time being scared off by stories of how ultra-violent it was. Later, I just dismissed it as being another 80s action movie. After that, I put it in the same category as Total Recall — I was sure it’d be entertaining enough, but stupid. Even after seeing Starship Troopers and (after a month or two) finally realizing how brilliant that movie is, I still wasn’t that interested in RoboCop.

I think my crippling fear of Ronny Cox had something to do with it, too.

Whatever the case, I finally know what all the fuss was about. What a great, bizarre movie. I can’t even imagine the confidence it’d take to pull something like that off — there’s absolutely nothing subtle about it, and yet you spend the whole time knowing that they’re in on the joke and still wondering if they’re taking it all seriously. It’s kind of like a quantum movie: simultaneously a straightforward, sleazy, cheesy 80s action movie and a satire of those movies and the 80s in general. (The movie has a guy instantly mutated by toxic waste, and Miguel Ferrer snorting coke off a woman’s chest!)

I mentioned it took me a while to get what was going on with Starship Troopers, and that movie was even more obviously campy, plus it came ten years later, after the audience had plenty of time to get used to deconstructionism. I remember watching True Lies and thinking it was such a clever spoof of action movies, but it didn’t even survive two years before seeming clumsy, vapid and obvious. RoboCop feels like it has after-burners: ride the initial launch as a super-violent action movie that seems a little smarter than average; ride through the irony wave of the 90s as a part of pop culture, surviving references and attempts to make fun of it; then gain a new appreciation two decades later, when viewers can marvel at seeing Laura Palmer’s dad as a hip club-goer and Eric’s dad from “That 70s Show” dropping f-bombs and shooting off people’s hands with a shotgun. And even with the jerky stop-motion and the barrage of 80s hair and glasses, you still have to watch it and think, “that’s just cool.”

I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have understood RoboCop in 1987, since 99% of the movies and TV made in the 80s was exactly like that, with no sense of irony. At the time, “Moonlighting” was still a years-ahead-of-its-time masterpiece of self-awareness and post-modernism, and looking back at those episodes now is almost painful.

The genius of RoboCop (and Starship Troopers, to a lesser degree) is that it still works as an action movie, even if you’re not in the mood for satire on urban decay, the evil that corporations do, and the emptiness of the media. It’s pretty ballsy to make movies that unapologetically say “screw you” to everyone, including the movie’s main characters themselves; to do that and make it not angry and pointlessly cynical, but actually entertaining, takes a hell of a lot of talent. And it leaves you vulnerable to so much that can fail from concept to execution — as Basic Instinct and Showgirls both prove.

Best of all: I finally get another reference from an old episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” In “Catalina Capers,” there’s a scene where the bots are saying their bedtime prayers, and Crow says, “and God bless ED-209, although I don’t know why you’d make a robot who couldn’t walk down stairs.” I’ve made it my goal that by the time I die, I’ll have gotten every reference the MST3K guys ever made. There’s still only a few thousand left.

The way I see it, there’s two different groups of people who wouldn’t be completely bowled over by the movie Once:

1. Musicians living in Dublin, who wouldn’t see what the big deal is, and
2. Unholy creatures cursed to walk the earth for eternity after having their souls ripped from their rotting corpses.

I’d been hearing about the movie for what must be months, since it’s gotten nearly universal praise, an Oscar nomination for its song “Falling Slowly” (the second best song in the movie), and fairly frequent breathless write-ups in Entertainment Weekly claiming it was impossible not to like it.

So I had a combination of high expectations and the feeling I’d get around to watching it eventually. I expected a painfully earnest, small and sensitive indie film about two singer/songwriters who find each other against all odds. Two very different people, joined together by their music, their hearts would soar onto the screen, the strings of their acoustic guitars pulling the audience into the screen and casting a spell of heartfelt enchantment on young and old.

The funny thing is: that’s pretty much exactly what it is, and it totally works.

It’s filmed not like a musical, or even an indie-film Sundance-ready romance, but as a “behind the music”-style documentary. In a making-of documentary on the special features, the director says that he didn’t want actors who could half-sing, but singers who could half-act. He got better than that, because their performances are completely believable and their musical performances are astounding.

The scene where the two stars perform “Falling Slowly” in a music shop is pretty much the defining scene of the movie, but my favorite is “If You Want Me.” The girl (both characters are unnamed in the movie) walks back from a corner store in the middle of the night, in her pajamas, where she’d gone to buy batteries for a CD player so that she could listen to the guy’s music while she wrote the lyrics for it. It’s the closest the movie gets to a traditional movie musical, while still feeling so natural and so genuine that it fits in perfectly.

What finally completely won me over was a scene at a party, where all the guests are required to perform songs for each other. Now, any claim I could make to knowing what life in Dublin is really like, would be hopelessly false — I spent a total of four days in the city, visiting only the most tourist-laden places, and I was half-full of Guinness the entire time. But it’s what I want Dublin to be like — dark rooms packed with indiscriminately friendly people sharing drinks and some of the most incredible music you’ll ever hear.

In another part of the making-of documentary, Glen Hansard says that he and his costar, Marketa Irglova — who recorded an album in 2006 that provides several of the songs in the movie — were friends, so the most difficult parts were acting as if they’d just met. My favorite quote from the documentary is when he describes the casting; he says he recommended Irglova for the part because he knew she could act, only because she can do everything else so well.

You seldom get the chance to see the characters’ relationship as anything but genuine, since it’s so simple and straightforward. And there’s absolutely no question that their music is genuine — if I had just heard it, I might’ve dismissed it as overwrought Coldplay-style pseudo-folk pop. But when you see how music just seems to flow out of Irglova as if it were simply another language, and when you see the passion for these songs played out on Hansard’s face, it strips away any sense of artifice.

I have only two complaints about the whole thing: first, that they overused the song “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” when there are at least three other songs in the movie I would’ve preferred to hear more of. Second, there’s only one false moment in the entire movie, when the gruff recording engineer at a studio has dismissed our plucky band as talentless oddballs, but is quickly won over by the passion of their music. But both of these are nitpicks, brief and barely perceptible flaws that keep the movie just short of perfect.

It was a perfect time for me to watch this movie, because I’ve been getting more and more discouraged at the state of pop culture lately. The internet is a hateful place, and spending too much time on it has a corrupting cynical influence — to the point where you could even read a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a father’s relationship with his son and the nature of goodness, and just start picking out faults in it. I was starting to wonder if it’s even possible to make an earnest, sincere movie anymore, without its getting dismissed as schmaltz. As it turns out, it is possible, and the result is amazing.

Last night I went to see Cloverfield again. Surprisingly, it’s still as good the second time, and I highly recommend seeing it in Digital Projection if possible, because the clear picture and better sound system make it awesome. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in all the backstory and alternate-reality game stuff surrounding Cloverfield, there’s a wiki page summing all of it up).

When I got home, I watched the RiffTrax version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The casual observer would think these two incidents are completely unrelated, which is why the casual observer is lucky to have this blog to point out the similarities:

Raiders and Cloverfield both have the same basic inspiration at their core: filmmakers paying homage to a pulpy, shallow genre of movies they grew up loving. They’re not spoofs or parodies, or self-important “re-inventions” or “re-imaginings,” but sincere attempts to get the feel of the originals in a contemporary movie.

I’m not for one second saying that Cloverfield is going to become the classic that Raiders of the Lost Ark is. But watching them back-to-back does show what advances we’ve made in self-awareness in the past 26 years. Watching Raiders in 2007 is a little bit like visiting Tomorrowland before the well-intentioned but poorly-conceived rehabs: you’re struck with this weird sense of double nostalgia, seeing a dated homage to an even more dated source. For all the perfect set designs, costumes, props, etc., it feels more like 1981 than 1936. And not just 1981, but Steven Spielberg’s version of 1981.

The most obvious point to make here is that if you’re watching a movie while listening to a bunch of people make fun of it, of course you’re bound to notice flaws. I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t get the point of RiffTrax for good movies, but for me, making fun of the movie was never the focus of “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ or any of the side projects. The movie is just a straight man; it’s an excuse to give a bunch of people 2 hours worth of set-ups for jokes.

For something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the Lord of the Rings movies for instance, it reminds me of when I was a teenager and looked forward to the Mad magazine parodies of my favorite blockbuster movie of the moment. It never “broke” the movie, but was just another exercise in fandom. And like those, the RiffTrax makes all the comments a fan would make during the movie anyway — he totally ate that fly! And how DID Indy hold his breath on top of that submarine for so long? (The one that Mad magazine got that the Riffers missed was: how come those snakes are crawling up the other side of the wall and pushing themselves through mortar?)

But there’s still a good bit of Raiders that seems jarring now, if you’re watching it with a fairly jaded, critical eye and not just letting yourself get caught up in the movie: The Spielbergian reaction shots to Alfred Molina when Indy’s grabbing the idol. The odd expository scene with the feds getting lectured on the history of the Ark. Pretty much all of the comic relief moments. And, as the Riffers are quick to point out, the fact that Indy spends 20 minutes smirking his way through a car chase, something that seemed so bad-ass at the time but now comes across as “Wow, Indiana Jones is kind of a douchebag.”

At the time, they all worked to make the movie feel contemporary; now, they just serve to lock it in a time when Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan ruled the Earth.

I say that Cloverfield is another very earnest action movie, without heavy-handed commentary or clumsy comic relief or pandering to the audience. But watching it after hearing other people talk about it, I’m struck with how high the bar has been raised for suspension of disbelief, how much self-awareness is just built into movies nowadays.

(Very minor spoilers for Cloverfield follow, in case you’re wanting to go into the movie knowing absolutely nothing about it).

It all relies on, and even takes advantage of, the knowledge that the audience is completely savvy to pop culture in general and how movies work in particular. The central gimmick of the handheld camera ostensibly lends an air of believability to the whole thing, but in fact it does the opposite: it distances the audience from what’s happening, keeping it in the realm of fun horror movie instead of just ghoulishly watching real death and destruction as entertainment. It works because we’re all so accustomed to the unreality of steadicam shots that that is now what we perceive as “realistic.”

The character of Hud — well for starters, there’s the fact that it’s the best-named movie character of the last decade, and the name depends on the audience’s familiarity with videogames. (In case you’re not a videogame fan, the “heads-up display” is your health/ammo/etc view in a first-person game, and at this point it’s become synonymous with the camera or the view screen). But making him into a character, instead of just an unseen narrator, was genius for several reasons: 1) It adds another layer of distance, because you know that the guy whose POV you’re seeing is not you, partly because he’s kind of an idiot. 2) The comic relief gets “baked in” to the movie, because you have the cameraman making the comments the audience would usually be making. 3) It adds a layer of “safety” to the movie, because you’re always reminded that somebody is still there with us, filming everything.

That’s not even mentioning the self-awareness implicit in basing your story around a bunch of good-looking, self-absorbed 20-year-olds, the type that call each other “bro” and have seemingly never known a world without video cameras, cell phones, and the internet. They’ve seen these stories, they know how they work, so there’s not a lot of staring in wonder while John Williams flares up in the background. Instead, they’re unrealistic people who react realistically — the characters are actually no more or less interesting than the plot and pacing warrants, a bunch of people who are just pretty enough to hold your interest for an hour and a half, but not so deep and complex that the movie grinds to a halt whenever one gets offed.

I have to wonder if a movie like Cloverfield could have been made 10 years ago, and how it would’ve been different. If we hadn’t had Scream come in and wallow in irony and self-reference for three movies, would we have gotten it all out of our system in time for 1-18-08? And is it really even out of our system, or has the bar been raised for how much postmodernism is required in a movie before we’ll allow it to be sincere?

I hope nobody else has used that title to talk about Cloverfield, because I’m inordinately proud of it.

This movie is definitely one that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in, so if you’re interested in it, I recommend seeing it soon and avoiding trailers and reviews. I’ll just say that it’s excellent, I was literally biting my nails and on the edge of my seat (seriously!) for most of it, and I’m already interested in seeing it again. And there is something at the end of the credits, but it’s not all that great, and probably not worth waiting for.

Now stop reading unless you’ve either already seen it, or are never going to.

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I saw Beowulf in IMAX 3D at the Metreon this afternoon. Anybody who has interest in this movie but hasn’t seen it yet for whatever reason, I’d say that 3D, whether it’s the IMAX version or not, is really the way to go. It delivers pretty well on the spectacle, and that kind of thing is pretty much the only reason to leave the house to see a movie these days.

Incidentally, I’ve always liked the pre-show they do at the Metreon’s IMAX better than the actual movie. They start the drums going and light up behind the screen to show you where all the different speakers are; as far as “look how bad-ass we are” marketing goes, it’s pretty cool.

As for the movie itself: did I mention you should see it in IMAX 3D? I think it says something that this one seemed calculated to carry through as a big Christmas season event movie for this year, and the attention has already pretty much worn out. It’s not that bad, in the end; it’s just kind of unremarkable.

The biggest problem is that a lot of the movie is just really, really silly. Not long after Grendel’s mom makes her appearance, it turns into something else, and it becomes pretty obvious that the absurdity of the beginning was intentional. The problem is that the absurd part takes up what feels like half the movie (I wasn’t keeping an eye on my watch, I can only say what it felt like).

You’ve got a bunch of actors from all around the UK and whatever faux-UK part of the US John Malkovich comes from, all done up in CG with paunches added or removed and a fetishistic attention given to moles and hair and stubble. And they’re all so loud that it annoys a really badly-designed Grendel to run in and start bustin’ up the place to get them to shut the hell up already. Then Ray Winstone’s modified head on somebody else’s really modified body comes in and promises to “kill yore mahnstah!” and strips naked for an extended fight scene that seems cut from an Austin Powers movie.

Then a bunch of stuff that’s not directly from the poem happens, and the movie turns into a cross between God of War and a late 90s post-modern liberal thesis on the themes of adultery and the role of man in an ancient poem. It was jarring to see the movie suddenly taking itself so seriously. And I guess if you were just expecting action and spectacle as I was, you could complain about its alteration from hero’s quest adventure story into deconstructionist reinterpretation of the hero’s quest and adventure story itself. But really, Neil Gaiman’s name is right there on the screenplay; being surprised at that would be like going in and being surprised that everything is computer-generated.

The only genuinely weird, complaint-worthy thing about the story is knowing how feminist Gaiman tends to be, and trying to reconcile that with the fact that Robin Wright Penn’s character still just comes across as a dead-eyed, emasculating bitch through the whole movie. Kind of like what you’d get if you crossed Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings with Hillary Clinton.

As I said, the 3D was well done. I’d been a little worried at having to sit through a 2-hour movie all in 3D, but it’s almost never gratuitous or headache-inducing. The CG isn’t quite as creepy as you might think, but for the most part it just seems unnecessary. There are moments where you’ll be impressed, until you realize that you’re impressed that a splash of water looks like real water, or some bearded dude swinging an axe looks like a real bearded dude swinging an axe. A lot of people slaved over a lot of workstations to reproduce something you could get just by turning on a camera.

The more spectacular stuff, that really depends on its being CG, all struck me as extremely competent, but artless. Sure, you need CG to have a guy flying around on the back of a big golden dragon, but in terms of screen time, those scenes are relatively brief and not particularly memorable.

The only scene in the movie where doing it all in CG paid off, was the first meeting between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother. That’s the scene that’s in all the trailers and promotional material. It’s got a great look to it, it feels like an interesting place, and it creates a truly memorable image. (And again, they cross the line into silly when they give her high heels).

But you’ve still got to wonder if it was worth the effort, though. Angelina Jolie looks like an artificially-constructed person anyway, so you’d think they could’ve saved some cash and just put her in a gold bodysuit and started the cameras rolling. And I guess it’s encouraging for all of us chubby, hairy guys, that we now have the technology to turn Ray Winstone into a young buff dude. But if you’re looking for a guy with a weird accent, muscles, and a disturbingly hairless body, I’ve got to wonder why you don’t just cast Gerard Butler or something instead?

No Country for Old Men is about as close to perfect as you’re ever going to see in a movie. Not a single shot is unnecessary. The pacing is perfect; both for the movie overall, and for individual scenes that feel as if they were meticulously orchestrated down to a fraction of a second. Almost all of the performances are absolutely dead-on (the mother-in-law felt like she’d just come in off the set of “Mama’s Family”). The dialogue has a perfect rhythm and it perfectly conveys the character. There are no artificial moments; I’ve heard real people use exactly the same cadences and expressions as these characters. The plot stays completely true to the characters and the theme. The sound design is flawless. The suspense scenes are so perfectly executed, they act as a reminder that yes, movies can make you feel something. The movie has enough confidence to show exactly what it needs to, no more and no less. There are no cheap gimmicks, easy outs, or implausibly pat resolutions.

If any filmmaker other than the Coen Brothers had made this movie, it would probably be his masterpiece. The problem is that it was made by the Coen Brothers, so you have to unfairly compare it to their other movies.

And I ended up disappointed, because it just seems superfluous. They’ve made movies that convey all of the “meat” of No Country for Old Men, in a single scene. We already know they have an almost sadistic sense of how to make the perfect suspense scene; they proved that the second the newspaper hit the screen door in Blood Simple. We already know they can convey despair (Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), or blind rage (Miller’s Crossing), or coldly senseless violence (Fargo). This movie just felt to me as if it were made by extremely talented filmmakers who happened to be big fans of the Coens. Because ultimately, it’s missing its soul, that spark that separates very, very good work from genius.

Before I’d seen it, a friend described No Country for Old Men as “kind of like Fargo, but not funny.” That’s pretty accurate, except I’d take it even farther and call it the anti-Fargo.

They’re very similar movies. Both are about honest cops in a relatively simple and peaceful environment, being exposed to genuine senseless evil, all because of a basically ethical character who makes a single immoral decision. But where Fargo had moments of humor, No Country for Old Men is almost completely humorless. Where Fargo is ultimately uplifting, No Country for Old Men is relentlessly nihilistic.

One of the criticisms frequently made against the Coens is that they’re too arch, too concerned about the style of their movies to care about real characters. I’ve always thought the opposite: they genuinely love their characters, they like hearing them talk, they like seeing how they react to situations, and they like seeing them come out stronger in the end. (Except for Blood Simple, which is really just a bunch of suspense scenes taking advantage of the fact that all the characters are impossibly dense). I don’t get that sense from No Country for Old Men; they don’t hate the characters, they just really don’t care that much about them at all. I mean, they’re all going to die eventually, anyway, so why bother?

After the final monologue and the cut to black, I just felt kind of cheated. Definitely not because I was expecting a quick and easy resolution (spoiler: there’s not one), but because it just hung there, as if I were supposed to be impressed that it didn’t give me a quick and easy resolution. It struck me as sophomoric, in the literal sense: I felt like I’d just had to listen to two hours of a talented but pretentious college sophomore who’d just discovered Nietzsche.

And I just sat there in the dark, thinking, “Really? ‘Evil is everywhere, and life is random.’ After all this time, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” For a moment, I thought I saw my father in the distance carrying a horn filled with fire, but as it turns out it was just the usher telling us the movie was over and it was time to leave.