Sunday night, the Castro Theater ran a double feature of the classic Sweet Smell of Success with The Duellists, Ridley Scott’s first feature release.

The first time I saw Sweet Smell of Success, it was in a double feature with Ace in the Hole, and it was such a perfect pairing it became one of those transformative movie-going experiences for me. Both are dark, nasty movies with big performances and some of the best dialogue ever delivered in a movie. One of Ace in the Hole‘s standout lines: “I’ve met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you… you’re twenty minutes!”

(Both Sweet Smell of Success and Ace in the Hole have Criterion editions that are highly recommended).

I spent the first half of The Duellists looking for anything it could have in common, thematically, cinematically, contextually, or otherwise, before I just gave up. Then I started trying to think of all the ways the two movies are the opposite of each other, and gave up because there are too many to list.

Apart from “both run at 24 frames per second” and “both have music,” the most charitable thread of connection I could come up with was that both are very much movies of their time. (I do actually know the real reason they ran together: they showed Sweet Smell of Success because it’s a classic to lead into the upcoming Noir City run, and they got a 35 mm print of Ridley Scott’s first film and they really wanted to show it off. But I’m trying to make a point here).

I wouldn’t say that The Duellists is a bad movie; it actually has its moments, and to an extent I can appreciate its attempts at authenticity. But it is overwhelmingly a 70s movie. It’s packed full of 70s cinema tics and cliches; it proclaims itself as a product of its time as loudly as David Fincher’s movies scream “1990s movie.” (Or more accurately, say “1990s movie” in text scratched onto magnetic tape with Nine Inch Nails music playing and bugs crawling over it).

It’s especially remarkable how much The Duellists conveys the 1970s when you consider that it’s a period piece, set in Europe and Russia in the early 1800s. The color of the film, the languid pacing, the scenes that have two lines of dialogue before ending abruptly, the smoke and fog piped in from just off screen, the presence of Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine and Tom Conti, the “realistic” lighting — all of it date the movie squarely in a narrow window between about 1973 and 1982. No one who’s ever seen a movie or television show from the 1970s would believe that The Duellists was in the era of Napoleon and not the era of Jimmy Carter.

That’s probably my most useful takeaway from the movie — finally I can identify what it is that’s always bugged me about movies from the 1970s, why I find them all (except Star Wars and Annie Hall) creepy, unsettling, and unpleasant. So many of them try for a kind of neo-realism, making a point to reject the glamor and over-production of pre-60s Hollywood and the experimentation of the 60s, and instead just be straightforward and tell it like it is. But it resulted in its own language of mannerisms and flourishes that today seem even more artificial than the most conventional Hollywood movie. For all of its effort to stay true to the costumes, hair styles, historical accuracy, and locations of 19th-century Europe, it’s telling that all of the stylistic flourishes of The Duellists end up being even more dated and distracting than casting Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as French military men.

There’s no question that Sweet Smell of Success was made in 1955: it’s in grainy black and white, newspapers not only exist but are important, jazz quintets play in nightclubs, and the plot’s biggest scandal involves marijuana and allegations of communist sympathies. And yet once the bombastic opening music dies down, it never once feels dated. Instead, much like His Girl Friday, it feels as if it’s been pulled from an alternate universe where time doesn’t exist, everything happens in a perpetual now, and everything everyone says is really cool.

The first time I saw Sweet Smell of Success was much like my first time seeing Miller’s Crossing; I was so swept up in the dialogue that I was barely able to process anything else. (“Hey Falco, come down here so I can chastise ya.”) Each time I’ve seen it since then, I’ve noticed something new. This time:

• There’s more subtlety to Tony Curtis’s performance than I ever gave him credit for. (And I already thought it was a great performance just for being able to deliver all those lines and make them sound natural). It’s made explicit that he’s an unscrupulous social climber who’ll do anything to get back into J.J.’s good graces. It’s even made explicit that he’s so duplicitous that even the people who know he’s lying to them can’t tell when he’s lying. But what I’d never noticed is how quickly and subtly Curtis had to shift gears from scene to scene and often within the same scene.

  Whenever one of Falco’s schemes goes awry, you can see the flashes of expression change on his face: a moment of panic, a recalculation, and then he snaps back into character. Sometimes, when it’s crucial to the plot (like when he’s trying to blackmail a columnist, or when he’s trying to trick a hack comedian into becoming a client), the change in expression is almost silent-movie obvious. But he’s doing it constantly — trying one tack, panicking, reconsidering, and then popping into a new character. One of the best is when Falco’s confronted by Steve in his office, and Falco is simultaneously posturing and trying to play all of the characters against each other.

• The scene in which J.J. is finally introduced, at a dinner table with a senator and Falco trying to get back into J.J.’s good graces, is one of the movie’s most famous. And with good reason: there’s a ton of nasty dialogue showing just how ruthless Hunsecker is, and it’s Burt Lancaster’s chance to establish just how dominant his character is. But Curtis is still doing his whole range of Falco’s dramatic shifts in mood, desperately looking for an opportunity in anything that’s been said, trying to measure how much he can get away with, and scavenging like a hyena for any information he could possibly use to his advantage.

  And he has to do it all from his carefully-staged lap dog position behind Lancaster’s right shoulder, and all without taking any of the attention away from Lancaster. For all of its good points, Sweet Smell of Success is not a movie you go away from thinking, “Man, that was subtle!” But Curtis’s performance in that scene does so much, while seated, in the background.

• The still above, taken from that scene, is a great example of what I’m talking about. Curtis has that expression through most of his interaction with Lancaster’s character: Falco absolutely despises Hunsecker, but at the same time worships him as an example of someone who’s achieved everything that Falco wants for himself. That expression combined with his body language are a perfect combination of hatred mixed with admiration and fealty.

  The best illustration of that dynamic, however, isn’t subtle at all. It’s a fantastic moment from later in the movie, when Hunsecker tells Susie and Steve that he wouldn’t hesitate to take a baseball bat and break it over Falco’s head. He then raises a cigarette, and Falco immediately jumps up with a lighter to light it for him.

• Curtis also gave Sidney Falco a tic to show that he’s in a perpetual panic for fear of losing everything: in the moments where he’s most desperate, he bites his fingernails. He doesn’t do it constantly, and he doesn’t make a big show of it, but it’s a clear signal that everything is about to fall apart unless he thinks quickly.
• To really appreciate what a balancing act it is to pull off subtlety in a movie whose style and dialogue require such broad performances, contrast Tony Curtis’s performance with Gabriel Byrne’s in Miller’s Crossing. Both are playing characters who are playing both ends against the middle, and both are having to deliver fantastic dialogue in a way that makes it sound, if not natural, then at least plausible. But the character of Tommy in Miller’s Crossing has to be not just cool, but completely impenetrable. We can’t ever know what he’s really thinking, or else the entire movie falls apart into nothing more than snappy dialogue, cinematic flourishes, and a really cool gunfight in a burning building. The only indication we ever get that Tommy is anything other than cool and composed is when he loses his hat.

  Curtis, on the other hand, has to play a despicable, obsequious, and ruthless character and make him sympathetic. Otherwise, his crisis of conscience makes no sense. And the only dialogue he gets to convey that with is his speech to his secretary at the beginning of the movie (and even then, he’s having to posture as a world-weary tough guy). So we need to see his expression changing throughout, for it to read as desperation instead of cold-bloodedness.

• I wouldn’t call the movie a noir, exactly, but the high contrast and the lighting sure do make a solid case for it. In particular, the shadows from Burt Lancaster’s glasses frames perfectly complement his I’m-boring-deep-into-your-soul squint, making him look more evil and intimidating than any stage makeup would have.
• It’s easy to believe that everybody in Sweet Smell of Success speaks in the same otherworldly, impossibly hip banter. But there’s a clear class divide separating the “normals” from the people who’ve immersed themselves in the world of newspaper columns and press agents. Even the older couple that Falco tries to blackmail use the same expressions, as if they’ve been in that world too long to stop talking like that. But Steve and Susie are the couple we’re supposed to root for, the ones who are free of all that corruption, so they talk more or less like normal people. (Even though Steve’s the leader of the jazz quintet, he’s supposed to be the least hip).

  Contrast that with His Girl Friday, where Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell’s banter establishes them not only as a couple, but as a couple fully immersed in the news world. Ralph Bellamy’s more straightforward dialogue makes him not just a dullard, but an outsider.

  And again, contrast it with Miller’s Crossing, where everyone speaks in deliberate Coen-ese. In that movie, the dialogue isn’t supposed to establish character so much as build a fantastic world where everybody’s corrupt. (And still, Garbriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Harden’s characters get the best lines because they’re the smartest).

• All that said, I do wish the character of Susie in Sweet Smell of Success had been given more to work with. You can’t fault the actress, since it’s clear she was portraying a character who’d been all-but-broken by her creepy relationship with her domineering brother. She just wasn’t given enough dialogue other than “Steve…” to be able to make her character seem anything but insipid. Every time I see the movie, I forget how it ends, because I can never read what exactly her character is thinking during the final scenes. That’s partly because as in the rest of the movie, she has almost nothing interesting to say during her final scenes.

After going into cinema studies student mode for that long, I’ve realized that Sweet Smell of Success and Miller’s Crossing would be another excellent double feature. Look into your heart, Castro Theater!

When I was younger, I used to wonder why the Muppets’ movies always started with them getting together or back together. They all met in The Muppet Movie — I saw it! — so why were they acting like strangers in The Great Muppet Caper, and why did The Muppets Take Manhattan need to have them singing about how great it was to be Together Again?

I’m sure there are all kinds of screenplay-driven justifications: setting up a conflict for the first act, making sure each character gets an entrance, giving room for a song about friendship. But after seeing the version in The Muppets, I suspect there’s more to it than that. It’s to let all of us shed the parts of ourselves that are self-conscious and mired in cynicism and irony, and let us get reacquainted with the parts of ourselves that just want to be joyously goofy.

The Muppets is joyously goofy, and it’s unabashedly a love letter to the Muppets themselves. A cynic could say that it’s nothing more than a feature-length advertisement for the franchise, but lucky for us, cynicism stopped being a thing years ago.

The movie follows the basic template of The Muppet Movie, but the gang isn’t starting out as unknowns working for their big break; they’re already famous. Recognized by everyone, but still actually loved only by obsessed weirdos. When they find Kermit, he’s living alone in his Bel Air home having lost touch with the rest of the gang — in an interview for the press kit, the director mentions the setup as like Sunset Boulevard, which is a brilliant connection I hadn’t picked up on. The Muppets stayed big; it’s everyone’s hearts that got small.

The problem for the Muppets in this movie isn’t recognition but relevance. Everyone loved the Muppets as a kid, but there’s no audience for them anymore. The world’s outgrown them. Normally, basing so much of your story’s premise on the idea that your characters are no longer relevant would cross the line of “self-aware” and go straight to “defensive.” But The Muppets treats the issue just like everything else: by saying it’s silly.

So many attempts to make family entertainment make the mistake of targeting parents by taking children’s material and making it more adult. But who wants that? It’s far better to make something that lets adults remember how awesome it is to be a kid? The movie shows that the Muppets’ hipper, edgier counterparts seem laughably dated, and it’s the decades-old, shamelessly earnest original Muppet Movie that’s had the real staying power.

Those of us who dismiss the 70s as a painfully un-self-aware dark age in which someone as schmaltzy as Paul Williams could become a bona fide trans-media celebrity: this isn’t the movie for us. It’s mode for those of us who still cry at the final chorus to “Rainbow Connection.” And if you don’t tear up during The Muppets‘s version when Animal finally loses it, then you’re made of cold, hard stuff.

But then, I had tears in my eyes for the whole thing, from the short (which was a brilliant, unexpected surprise) all the way to the end. It’s at the same time a celebration of being silly, and it’s a reminder that there’s no reason we shouldn’t be silly all the time. (Speaking of being silly, I never would’ve realized how Muppet-like the Flight of the Conchords already are without seeing Bret Mckenzie’s songs performed Muppet-style. I was skeptical that it would fit without being jarring, but the songs are the best part of the movie).

When the Castro Theater did a special presentation of Labyrinth, they had a great Q&A with Dave Goelz (far too unassuming a guy for someone with his history) and Karen Prell (who has the most amazing resume of any living human). For me, it was kind of a reality check: “I’ve loved you people for years and hadn’t even realized it!” The outpouring of love from the audience made it clear that the Muppets never stopped being relevant; most of us just let ourselves forget how miserably grown-up we’ve gotten.

And everybody should go in as unspoiled as possible, so skip the rest of this if you haven’t yet seen the movie. What happens at a me party stays at a me party. Or, the first rule of The Muppets is not to spoil any of the enjoyment of The Muppets.

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Captain America: The First Avenger doesn’t really have an ending. Around about the point where a real movie would end, it just kind of fizzles out and turns into a set-up for The Avengers. And while the rest of the movies setting up The Avengers had a cool story-driven post-credits cameo from Samuel L. Jackson, this one just drops all the pretense and throws a teaser trailer at you.

And that’s really the only complaint I can dredge up about the movie. Everything else is pretty great. Essentially it’s the movie I wanted The Rocketeer to be, way back when. It feels as though instead of cranking out another franchise movie, they started with the idea of making a solid, old-fashioned WWII-inspired movie. And applying the hundreds of millions of dollars that come from a popular franchise to that idea.

There’s absolutely no doubt that this movie had an obscene budget; I can’t recall a single scene that didn’t have some kind of visual effect going on. The first thirty minutes or so have the star’s face CGed onto a stand-in’s body. (I was thinking that the casting in The First Avenger ruled out the possibility of any Captain America/Fantastic Four crossovers, but there was already so much CG in the movie that I guess anything’s possible). But that’s the best example of why the movie works so well without being overpowered by its visual effects budget: the effects are rarely intended to be the focus, but to be seamless and to further the story.

But when they are intended to be the focus, they deliver. There’s an amazing version of the World’s Fair (pushed ahead a couple decades to WWII) that’s exactly what I want to see in a movie like this. Plus train chases and super ray guns and submarines and dogfights with gyrocopters, not to mention the Red Skull’s totally bad-ass car. Everything’s got a heightened comic book surrealism to it, but it remains part of the aesthetic, instead of taking the lazy route of resorting to “comic book” storytelling. (The Busby Berkeley-like propaganda montage was also fantastic).

It’s a great reminder that fantastic visuals don’t mean the story has to be stupid. It delivered everything I wanted in a movie like, say, Sucker Punch, without my wanting to bludgeon everyone on-screen about the head and neck repeatedly for hours.

Marvel has done such a great job defining what the “comic book movie” can be, I’m starting to feel bad for DC. (And I’ve always been a DC guy). The Marvel movies definitely aren’t all perfect: Iron Man 2 was disappointing, both of the Hulk movies were tedious, Wolverine did everything wrong it possibly could, and the third X-Men movie was such an abomination that everybody on-screen looked like they wanted to be anywhere else. But when they get it right, it’s terrific.

I’m skeptical about The Avengers. Everything that makes the individual movies work so well — focusing on a single character, a single villain, and a simple origin story — doesn’t apply when you’ve got so many characters (and movie stars) fighting for screen time. I loved the first two X-Men movies, but that was primarily because they focused on Wolverine and Rogue, or Jean Grey and Nightcrawler. Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men was pretty good, but that’s because it was essentially Kitty Pride as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

On the other hand, part of how the best of Marvel’s super-hero movies have worked where others have failed is that they’ve matched really talented directors with characters that make sense for them. Sam Raimi did Spider-Man 2 (the best in the series) as campy comedy/horror. Jon Favreau did Iron Man 2 as romantic comedy — essentially Vince Vaughn’s character from Swingers in a power suit. Kenneth Branagh did Thor as ostentatious mythic drama. Bryan Singer latched onto the band-of-misfits/what-does-it-mean-to-be-”normal” parable of the X-Men. And Joe Johnston made an aesthetically beautiful WWII propaganda movie inspired by old serials. The only question for The Avengers is which characters Joss Whedon is going to be allowed to kill off.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a movie about an eerily realistic-looking ape creature with dead eyes, who is surrounded by people insisting how smart he is even though he keeps making incredibly stupid decisions.

To be fair, though, I’ve heard he was pretty good in 127 Hours.

It also stars a CG chimpanzee named Caesar, who actually looked really good for about 90% of the movie. I started to wonder if they directed the other actors to be stiff and wooden so that the CG cast would look better in comparison.

Actually, that sums up how I spent most of the movie: wondering just how much of it all was intentional. Because the weird thing is that I really enjoyed it. But only because I tok it as camp where everybody was in on the joke and played it completely straight.

I counted about five references to the original Planet of the Apes (not Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which is more or less the movie that this is trying to remake; and definitely not the unfortunate Tim Burton remake of Planet of the Apes). That’s about three references too many, but it was enough to convince me that they weren’t being completely earnest when they had a gorilla (spoiler!) jumping onto a helicopter from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Because that’d be silly.

I realize that my enjoying Rise of the Planet of the Apes would seem to make me a hypocrite, since I’ve complained about both The Transformers movies and ironic detachment at great length before. But there are some important differences. Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn’t a great movie, but unlike The Transformers, it’s not a lazy movie. They take the premise and they run with it.

And the self-awareness isn’t the usual tiresome making fun of itself, but having fun with itself. There’s a running gag where everything bad in the story happens to the guy from Stargate Atlantis, but it’s a gag that actually turns into a series of major plot points, plot points that are actually pretty well thought out.

What’s most interesting to me about Rise of the Planet of the Apes is Rain’s comment that the end of King Kong proves that you can make a CG ape that the audience actually cares about. She didn’t care about any of the characters in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, so when (spoiler!) a gorilla dies in Caesar’s arms, it didn’t have any impact.

The scene didn’t have any impact on me, either, but during the movie, it didn’t even occur to me that that was a problem. Action movies use scenes like that as if they were punctuation — it’s like ending a sentence with an exclamation point. I don’t actually mean anyone to get that excited! It’s just the way these things work. (And I should point out that they don’t take it too far; Caesar doesn’t look to the heavens and shout “NOOOOOOO!”)

For the record, I don’t recall crying at the end of King Kong either; knowing me, I very well might have, but it didn’t have any genuine impact on me on the level of “It’s been a tough year, Dad” or the like. And the moments in Rise of the Planet of the Apes that I think were supposed to have impact — no spoilers, but at a key moment, Caesar does something that apes aren’t supposed to be able to do — really did work for me.

So there’s the question: if movies keep throwing in meaningless scenes like this and we all just take it for granted and run with it, is that a case of lowering expectations? Have I become part of the problem? Or have I just been more interested in seeing chimps run down Market Street than in seeing chimps make me feel bad for them, and I finally found a movie that delivered?

I have finally solved the mystery of the Transformers movies. In retrospect, it’s so obvious that I’m embarrassed I didn’t catch on sooner.

First, let me set the scene so that future generations may recount the story like Alexander Fleming and penicillin: I’ve really needed to be working today, but instead have been stricken with a non-stop, straight-out-of-Greek-mythology headache. It’s hit me so hard that I can’t even concentrate on a game about zombies. It’s left me staggering across the internet like a wounded bear, where the smallest offense sends me into a berserker fury, hoping only that rage can cure what Advil can’t.

So instead of trying to work, I decided to read the least challenging and most non-confrontational thing I could imagine: a review of the third Transformers movie on the Comics Alliance blog. “Unchallenging” isn’t intended as an insult; it’s a blog about a subject I’m only barely invested in, with an article that I likely agree with completely.

Anybody who’s seen the internet in the past four years can immediately see the flaw in my logic: you can’t write anything — anything, anywhere — about the Transformers movies without starting an argument. That Comics Alliance post currently has 263 comments, after all. I’ve seen it, too; people who are happy to ignore me otherwise will respond every single time I say anything negative about the movies. This blog averages less than 100 views on a good day, but writing about a Transformers movie will get comments.

And it’s always, always the same response: “It’s an action movie, it’s not supposed to be high art.” “Bay knows what his audience wants.” And, unavoidably: “Just turn off your brain and enjoy it.”

Which is infuriating, of course, to those of us who actually like movies, because “turn your brain off” is not a defense of a movie. It’s like if you told someone his sister was ugly, and he responded by saying, “Shut up, you’re wrong. She’s just really stupid.” It’s presented as if it were an unbreakable finishing move in the discussion but it doesn’t make any sense and oh no the headache’s coming back.

It’s doubly frustrating because it’s got this built-in accusation of being insufferably pretentious and elitist, which is something I just can’t respond to, when I list Big Trouble in Little China as one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s just denial that there’s a wide range of possibility between Terrence Malick and Michael Bay, and that movies have a long history of making enjoyable, accessible entertainment that doesn’t leave you feeling like your brain has been raped.

In fact, based on the box office, thousands of people walked right past a perfectly entertaining, fun, exciting, and completely comprehensible action movie that wasn’t unforgivably stupid — Super 8 — and instead willingly and with malice of forethought paid for a ticket to Transformers 3. There are tons of movies that are not only more intelligent than the Transformers movies, but also have much better action sequences. You don’t have to sacrifice the basics of competent storytelling for explosions and robots; there are lots of movies that have both!

It wasn’t until I passed over a dozen constructive things I could have been doing, in favor of reading an article on a blog about comic books, that I realized what I’ve been missing all this time: the “appeal” isn’t just “this movie’s really stupid.” Non-confrontational entertainment is nothing new or unique to Transformers. (See: Futurama’s episode about the “Single Female Lawyer” series).

No, the appeal of the Transformers series is, “this movie is stupid and I’m completely aware of how stupid it is.”

They’re ostensibly based on toys (although I can’t imagine the bulk of the target audience is old enough to have played with the toys or watched the cartoon), so it seems like it’s a simple case of nostalgia. But that’s just a front — it’s a franchise in disguise if you see what I did there — it’s really nostalgia for the 1990s, the decade that bred the mindset of ironic pop culture appreciation. (I’m really hoping it’s the last death rattle of the 90s, but that’s probably just me being optimistic).

What this means is that Bay has actually accomplished something kind of profound: he’s made hipsterism mass-market and mainstream. It’s no great achievement to make a movie that anybody can understand. But it is somewhat remarkable to make a movie that anybody can understand is bad.

That’s not me being elitist, either: I generally consider myself to have pretty good taste, but I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and got exactly what I’d wanted to get out of it. There are always some people who will find a way to enjoy what you’ve made if you give them even the slightest opening.

Usually, ironic detachment is a pretty hit-or-miss proposition: too much camp is just painfully deplorable, but too much effort just ends up being kind of sad. Bay’s movies satisfy some minimum ratio of moving image to synaptic firing rate that a majority of people can watch them without being bored, and they have enough of a “we’re not taking any of this seriously” vibe so that the most kind-hearted portion of the audience can make fun of them without feeling like they’re picking on the defenseless.

Most importantly, they’re movies that just about anyone can watch and come away feeling like they’re better than what they’re watching. These are, after all, movies that cast actors like John Turturro, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich, and yet it’s Shia LeBeouf who believes that he’s slumming.

As much as I hate to admit it, I suppose that there’s often some primal need to feel superior, or at least to feel completely in control of what’s going on. It’s the same phenomenon that causes the baffling popularity of reality programming: people don’t watch The Bachelorette just because it’s easy to watch, but so that they can feel superior to any of the characters on the show and dismiss the whole thing as a guilty pleasure. And it’s more or less the same reason I tend to leave a movie thinking less about the movie itself and more about what I can write about it. To be able to take it apart and put it back together, to say that I’ve “beaten” it.

But that’s not “turning your brain off.”

Moviemakers are an insufferably self-satisfied and self-important group of people. As if it weren’t enough to hold an annual pageant of self-congratulation and broadcast it around the world, they’re constantly making movies about making movies. Sometimes it’s just a backdrop, other times it’s a metaphor or post-modernist deconstruction or something, and sometimes it’s a cry for help. Even when it’s a satire, it’s making the arrogant assumption that we’re all fascinated by what their world is like, and not that we just want them to shut up and entertain us.

Sometimes, though, it’s a completely sincere attempt by a filmmaker to convey exactly what it is he loves about the movies. Super 8 is the best example of that; it feels like J.J. Abrams’s attempt to recreate a childhood as a nerdy kid on the cusp of seeing his first summer blockbuster. Back before the summer blockbuster got completely overwhelmed by marketing and effects, before the core of the blockbuster rotted away and they became soulless commercial entertainment product.

It’s a shameless love letter to the movies of his co-producer, and it’s an unabashed nostalgia trip. And as it turns out, you can go home again.

Part of the old-school feel comes from the secrecy around the movie, an attempt to give teasers and previews a year before the movie’s release but still hark back to a time before blogs and conventions, when people would go see movies knowing little more than what was on the poster. (A blog post on Wired talks more about that, but reveals more about the movie than I would have, so I recommend not reading it until you’ve seen the movie). That paid off brilliantly — I knew very little about the movie going in, and even what I’d thought I knew was confounded by well-edited trailers. It’s not even a case of going in expecting the shocking twist, it’s just a case of letting the movie gradually reveal itself to an audience that’s not constantly second-guessing it.

I’d recommend it highly, though, and I’ve got a few more thoughts about it for those who’ve already seen it.

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