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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I saw all the reviews for Bridesmaids calling it The 40 Year Old Virgin for ladies, I’d assumed that was just typical movie reviewer laziness, desperate to come up with a pithy one-liner. But sure enough, it is pretty much exactly what it says on the box: a Judd Apatow movie with all the genders reversed.

Which is weird, because Judd Apatow movies already struck me as kind of girly. Lots of guys chatting with their friends about their feelings before finding their soulmate and going on to a happy ending. And for all the raunchy reputation, they were predominately conservative: a story about the value of abstinence or maturing into a responsible father and husband (and avoiding abortion). They already seemed targeted at all of us guys who weren’t being properly serviced by all the Jason Statham and Vin Diesel movies. Basically: romantic comedies with all the genders reversed.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I liked 40 Year Old Virgin well enough and Knocked Up a lot. And Bridesmaids is pretty funny and enjoyable. And it’s enjoyable for exactly the same reasons: the marketing emphasizes the raunchiness, but there’s nothing remotely transgressive or subversive about any of these movies. Even with Melissa McCarthy shitting into a sink and Maya Rudolph taking a dump in the middle of the street and the other women vomiting on top of each other.

What is unusual about Bridesmaids and these other movies is that they have likable, semi-realistic characters stumbling through otherwise formulaic romantic comedies. Kristen Wiig gets plenty of opportunities to do almost all her schtick from Saturday Night Live, but there are just as many scenes where she’s having conversations that don’t sound written, with people she has a genuine chemistry with. Sure, I’ll pay to watch Wiig hang out with Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd from “The IT Crowd.” Those moments are the real appeal.

Well, those moments along with any scene with Melissa McCarthy, because she pretty much runs away with the whole movie. (I didn’t realize that her seatmate on the plane is played by her real life husband, which is kind of awesome).

You still end up with those semi-realistic moments pumping up a formulaic structure that’s threatening to collapse in on itself. I started to wonder whether they put so much emphasis on Kristen Wiig having written the script with a Groundlings colleague because if it were written by a man, it’d be laughably sexist. Granted, I’m one of the least qualified people on the planet to speak about “what women like,” but so much of the movie seems like videogame companies’ attempts to pander to female players by putting in more shopping and making everything pink. Bridesmaids has: a career woman with low self-esteem, having sex with Jon Hamm, planning her best friend’s wedding, jealous of a (ostensibly) younger and prettier woman who eventually gets her comeuppance, and finding a cute and funny cop she can fall in love with and also he has an accent.

(One of my favorite things about the movie is that they just cast the charming guy they liked and didn’t spend any more than a token attempt to explain how he could be Irish and a cop).

Of course, the romantic comedies for him show dudes getting stoned, playing videogames, spending all day at work, and going out to bars to try and get laid. So maybe at some point you’ve just got to relax and and stop getting so hung up about reinforcing stereotypes.

By the time they got to the extraordinarily conventional ending of Bridesmaids, I’d already gotten enough genuinely pleasant entertainment out of it to give the rest a pass. But after two hours (it’s really too long), plus an additional 15 minutes of trailers so clearly not directed at me that I’d considered slinking out into a cartoon or another screening of Thor, I started to wonder if I was witnessing the white dwarf-like implosion of an entire genre of movie.

All of the trailers (except for Super 8) were for interchangeable, near-indistinguishable chick movies, plus the inspiring story of a woman writer who overcomes a rich racist white woman, and a movie where womanizer Ryan Reynolds does a Freaky Friday with married man Justin Bateman after they both piss in a magic fountain. So: girly movies that are advertising themselves as being edgier than girly movies.

The worst offender was for a movie with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake as friends-with-benefits who — gasp! — might actually be falling in love. The characters deliberately set out to defy “Hollywood romantic comedy cliches,” and the trailer even has a scene with Kunis complaining about Katherine Heigl movies and screaming at a poster of The Ugly Truth. In a movie that has exactly the same premise as No Strings Attached, a near-identical romantic comedy that came out just this year.

It’s a kind of self-loathing that pervades these movies. Bridesmaids is also being packaged and sold as an antidote to the typical chick movie, even though the most appealing scenes, the only scenes that make it feel unique, are the ones that are the girliest: two women having a genuine conversation with each other.

Talking about this movie requires me to be a little crass, so be forewarned: Watching Sucker Punch is like getting an unwanted erection.

Every guy has had to deal with it: you’re walking along, perfectly content with your high-minded Dr. Jekyll life, and then you see or hear or taste something that makes Mr. Hyde assert himself, and you’re left with nothing but a disappointed, “Oh, man. Really?!” (And I know it happens to every guy or else there wouldn’t be Catholicism).

Sucker Punch isn’t a very clever or thought-provoking movie. I don’t even think it was all that original; I kept having the vague sense that all the imagery already exists somewhere in a pop art gallery or a sci-fi magazine. But despite that, you cannot deny that it has reasonably hot women fighting clockwork zombie Huns with railguns in alternate-history WWI trenches and a battle mech styled like a WWII bomber.

Against my better judgment, I’m hard-wired to like this.

Other things I’m hard-wired to like: “Army of Me” by Björk. Samurai. Giant samurai who shoot light out of the hole when you slice them up with a katana. German blimps over a ruined cathedral. Orcs, goblins, and dragons, and orcs getting cut up by helicopter blades. “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles. Space trains on the moon of a ringed planet. Studebakers. Jon Hamm.

Sucker Punch is only — self-consciously — a list of those things. It’s got a framing story that should be just an excuse to string all those things together. A young woman’s wrongly committed to a mental institution by her wicked stepfather, and she plans to escape an impending lobotomy by distracting her captors with passionate dance sequences that we never see, but which take her into a series of fantasy worlds. Also the institution’s a brothel, somehow, or maybe it’s not. And the whole thing is either a fairy tale story or a stage play.

That framing story is 90% of the problem: it’s a half-assed effort to make a adolescent male fantasy T&A movie that makes a commentary on T&A movies. I left the movie thinking that I just didn’t understand Zack Snyder at all. Which would be worse? If he genuinely thought he was making something significant, or if he knew exactly how insignificant the movie was, but added the framing story in an attempt to defend himself against making something so shallow?

This interview with Synder on Movieline sheds a little light on the creative process, and it’s pretty grim. It sounds like he was making a completely sincere, genuine attempt at the standard movie-audiences-as-voyeurs theme.

Except it’s all kind of clumsy and ham-fisted. Symbolism is fine; symbolism deliberately simplified for adolescents is pandering. The movie starts out with a curtain opening on a stage and a voiceover about stories and then segues into a dialogue-free backstory music video, all to make it clear that you’re watching a story. A short time later, a montage showing what’s going to happen to our heroine shifts into a rehearsal for a stage play. One of the characters angrily walks off stage, asking what kind of audience would want to see a beautiful woman be lobotomized. It doesn’t come across as cleverly self-referential so much as Synder covering his ass.

There’s no sense of discovery or interpretation. It’s not like art, but more like Cliff’s Notes of art. It smashes together all the elements that usually add depth to movies — self-reference, implicating the audience, using imagery and symbolism — but then leaves them lying there, inert. By the end, it’s all just muddled and meaningless, defying any attempt to make sense of it. There’s a lot of gross violence towards women towards the end of the movie; is it genuinely misogynistic, or is it just intended to be a contrast to the girls-kick-ass fantasy of the last hour and a half? I honestly couldn’t tell.

I hate the whole concept of the “you just have to turn your brain off” defense of bad movies. But I actually wish Sucker Punch had abandoned the pretense of commentary and just embraced its role as spectacle. This isn’t like Transformers or National Treasure; movies like those are doomed to failure, because they’re too literal. They insist on aping real movies, they don’t have enough imagination to turn into pure fantasy, so they fail as both story and spectacle. If Sucker Punch hadn’t tried to make a weak attempt at absolving itself of being T&A, it could’ve landed safely in the zone of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow-style spectacle.

Instead, it gives up any notion of Sky Captain‘s self-aware fun, and tries to have Kill Bill‘s self-aware significance. But while the fantastic imagery of Sucker Punch works on a gut level — again, it’s a really pretty movie, even when it’s being ugly — it doesn’t feel as innovative or exhilarating as Kill Bill. Both take images they’ve seen elsewhere and throw them together onto the screen, but one feels as if it’s creating something more out of them, the other feels like it’s just regurgitating them. There’s not the same sense of inspiration.

It’s such a retread that I spent the whole movie being creeped out that they’d somehow CG-reanimated David Carradine, only to get to the credits and realize that the part of David Carradine was being played by Scott Glenn.

One other thing about inspiration: when I first saw the posters and trailer for Sucker Punch, I made up a version of the movie’s origins that has nothing to do with reality but is a lot funnier. I imagined that Zack Snyder had just made 300, an unabashed, balls-out fuck-yeah war movie for MEN. And he was stunned to release it and discover he’d just unintentionally made one of the gayest of gay movies ever. (Right down to the obligatory self-loathing bits).

So, undaunted, he tried to overcompensate by making a movie that was nothing but hot chicks in all kinds of skimpy outfits shooting guns at monsters and zombies. And he borrowed from all the least homo sources he could think of: Women in prison b-movies! War movies! Dragonslaying epics! 90s sci-fi action! (I’m assuming the only reason there’s not a drift-racing sequence in Sucker Punch is because of studio interference). It’d be a mash-up of his own visual style with Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction and The Lord of the Rings and Aliens, and all he needed was a distinctive style for the framing story of his totally not-gay adolescent male fantasy…

Moulin Rouge! Perfect! I’d known that I was just making shit up based on a poster, but my theory was totally blown out of the water when Sucker Punch started out just like a Baz Luhrmann movie. Which may be part of why I was predisposed to like it. In retrospect, it was wrong of me to make unfair assumptions, because for all its grossness, there’s really not that much to feel strongly about. If anything, it feels so slight partly because it’s so sheepish and ashamed to be objectifying women and showing so much gratuitous T&A&E (explosions). I hate to go out on a blurb-ready closing line, but: it’s got all the punch of the posters in a teenage boy’s bedroom.

This is in response to my friend Matt Dessem’s comments on another post, but it got too long for a comment box and stopped being about The Adjustment Bureau, so I’m starting a new one. Read the comments for context, along with the article that started the conversation: “The Day the Movies Died” by Mark Harris.

First off, I think the fact that The Rock is coming to the Criterion Collection is more evidence of the death of Hollywood than anything else. (I actually liked that movie, for what it was, which was Sean Connery chewing scenery and Nicholas Cage before he totally lost all his appeal. But it is most definitely the lowest of low art).

I’m not saying that I want the theater experience to go away completely, because even a mall multiplex gives a movie the feeling of an Event, even when there’s nobody else in the theater. But I do believe that a movie’s got to “earn” it. If it costs me $25 to see a movie in San Francisco (including parking and such), then I’m just not going unless it’s got lasers or Coen brothers. (Or both, which would be awesome).

You could make the case, as Mark Harris tries to, that that means I’ve given up on entertainment as Art. That I’m a man-child who’s abandoned any pretense of quality and am complicit in the death of movies. (Based on what I’ve been watching and reading lately, you could make a pretty convincing case). But I say that I’m just acknowledging that the media have changed in the past 30 years. It doesn’t make sense to cling to this outdated notion of a hierarchy of entertainment, with cinema resting comfortably at the top both in quality and in revenue.

Here are some of Matt’s comments, out of order:

And we agree that the most interesting work in drama is being done on television, and the audience is there in that format. I’m not going to get all weepy about the communal experience of going to a theater (I guess I will if pressed) but okay: drama’s still there, and TV has an unecessary stigma (although it’s not just self-important people in SoCal: remember that HBO’s slogan is still “It’s not TV. It’s HBO”). Of course, Mad Men, a pretty expensive TV show, has a budget of less than $5 million per hour; AMC couldn’t produce The Social Network if they wanted to. Not without a theatrical release, anyway.

Although it may sound like it, I don’t want to lose the communal experience of going to a theater, either. I just think that the idea of the cinema being the pinnacle of entertainment, with everything else being inferior, is an idea that needs to die.

Why couldn’t AMC have made The Social Network? I haven’t seen it, but I’m pretty confident that it didn’t have a super expensive post-production, or any particularly exotic locations. I think that it’s all based on inflation — it’s expensive not because of anything inherent to the movie, but simply because it’s a movie.

So many people in Hollywood and observing Hollywood seem to take this as a given, but then go on to make arguments about quality as if it were somehow related. But a movie like Avatar would be expensive even if James Cameron weren’t attached. A movie like The Social Network is expensive only because David Fincher’s attached. (And, I’m guessing, Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake and even Aaron Sorkin now that he’s not slumming in television).

For that matter, Transformers was an inherently expensive movie. But the thing that all of us hate to acknowledge is that it made all its money back. (According to IMDB). I agree that Transformers — and I’m assuming the sequel, although I didn’t and will never see it because the first one was such an abomination — was a steaming pile of shit. (It’s a little surprising that Michael Bay and Shia LeBeouf both thought the sequel was crap and perversely charming that Bay sees it as a misstep in an otherwise artistically valid franchise). But I disagree about what it says about the movie industry:

You write that “a theatrical release, and the huge marketing budget that it requires, demands a certain level of spectacle.” I think you have it exactly backwards: a certain level of spectacle demands a huge marketing budget, especially when the film has nothing else to recommend it. It costs a tremendous amount of money to convince people, even for one weekend, that chicken shit is chicken salad, and that money crowds everything else out of the theaters, because every other movie has to open wide, and there’s no way to get the kind of press you need without spending a fortune, and an actor who’s just been paid $20 million to be in a film that they knew was shitty might take less to be in a great film… but not much less. It’s a positive feedback loop, and it’s not just crowding out dramas, it’s devouring its own tail.

I think you’re overestimating the box office draw of quality, and even overestimating how much power marketing has over audiences. Few things annoy me more than the “you just have to turn your brain off” defense of movies, but again, that’s talking about quality, which is near irrelevant to a discussion about the Bay-Bruckheimerization of Hollywood. People start off with a valid complaint about these movies as being assaults on the very notion of goodness, but then they invariably throw in money as if the two ideas were at all related. I think that a lot of the complaints about Bay being a shitty filmmaker are actually complaints that he’s such a good businessman.

I will definitely agree that Hollywood has become too obsessed with judging success/failure on the basis of first weekend box office, but I don’t agree that spectacle necessarily obviates quality and therefore demands a larger budget. Your Transformers 2 example proves that, in fact. The people who went to see Transformers 2 didn’t want a good movie; to hear some of them talk about it, they would’ve been distracted by a good movie. They wanted cars and hot chicks in cut-offs working on cars and robots fighting and helicopters and explosions. That stuff attracts audiences to theaters, but it’s expensive.

I don’t believe that the marketing money was designed to convince audiences that Transformers 2 was a good movie; I believe it was to tell audiences that Transformers 2 exists. To drown out the billions of other things fighting for their attention, to say “hey look lasers and robots are here.” If anything, it was for the studio’s benefit, not the audiences’. The studio spent millions on the lasers and robots, and they’re going to spend millions to make sure that nobody blames them for not marketing the movie sufficiently.

And I actually think it’s more condescending to say that Hollywood is tricking audiences into believing that “chicken shit is chicken salad,” than it is just to acknowledge that there’s an audience that just plain doesn’t care about the distinction. That doesn’t mean that that audience is stupid — many of them are, surely, but not $400,000,000 worth. But to claim that they’re being hoodwinked into watching cars turn into robots assumes that they are all stupid enough not to see through the marketing hype, even though everyone our age and younger has been trained since adolescence to pride ourselves on seeing through marketing hype. I think it’s a lot more reasonable to assume that you’re just underestimating the inherent draw of cars turning into robots.

For all I know, 90% of the audience left the spectacle they paid good money for, and went home to finish reading Infinite Jest. A novel I could probably have finished reading in the time I’ve spent complaining about how dumb it is for people to pay to see Transformers 2.

…by the time Bay is making Armageddon, the economics are such that you can’t make an R-rated spectacle film, not if you want to make your money back. Big spectacle movies are crowding out other big spectacle movies. You couldn’t make The Rock today, which is no great loss, But you also couldn’t make Alien, or Aliens, or The Terminator or any of the big scifi films of the 1980s (except for the ones with Jedis). You’d have to make them PG-13, and that’s new in the last fifteen years. You don’t get to make In the Mountains of Madness, the screenplay for which reads like an 80′s horror/sci-fi film. I’m not surprised, but I don’t like it.

But here’s the thing that so many of us forget, because the world in the 1980s is so alien to us now. I can still remember in around 1986 when I first went into a Blockbuster video — there was only one in the metro Atlanta area, and it was a good 20 miles from my house — and it absolutely blew my mind. They had hundreds of movies, and I could take any of them home to watch as much as I wanted for two whole nights!

Now, of course, I’ve got 10 movies I’ve ripped sitting on a hard drive waiting for me to watch them, plus a DVD from Netflix that I’ve had out for over a month, plus about 8 movies from HBO that I’ve got sitting on the DVR yet to be watched, plus all of Netflix’s Watch Instantly catalog, plus a few DVD’s that I’ve bought and are still in the shrink wrap, plus Amazon and iTunes and Xbox and Sony all trying to get me to download more. Not to mention the five channels of HBO that are showing full-length unedited feature films right now, while I choose to read and write plain text on a 15″ laptop monitor.

Also: the Video Toaster wouldn’t be released for another few years, and that would be the first exposure anybody in the consumer market had to “industry-quality” CGI. Now, people are throwing The Last Starfighter caliber effects into YouTube videos. Hell, I’ve got a still camera that shoots HD video. And people with talent can produce stuff to rival Hollywood of 5-10 years ago, at least, on a meager budget.

So the stuff that was inherently expensive about making Terminator or Alien (if not Aliens) is stupid cheap now. And there are dozens of channels to distribute it, not just a wide theatrical release. So is the problem really that you don’t get to make it, or is it that you don’t get 50 million dollars from a studio to make it?

That’s what I mean when I say that these are complaints about money disguised as complaints about quality. You can indeed make a good, intelligent R-rated sci-fi film these days, if you’re dedicated to what you’re making. And it’ll most likely barely recoup its cost. And you can blame that on its getting crowded out by higher-profile sci-fi movies, or poor marketing from the studio, or the fact that it was an R-rated movie, or that audiences were too stupid to appreciate it.

Or you can acknowledge that theater audiences weren’t in the mood for late-70s style psychological science fiction. But it would’ve been an amazing TV movie for the cost of what you quote as one episode of Mad Men. Or hell, Charlie Sheen’s salary alone for 5 episodes of Two and a Half Men. I think the audience is totally out there; it’s just not in the same place it was when Terminator got released. (Not to mention, of course that Terminator is a better film in a lot of ways, as well as being an easier sell. As lackluster as James Cameron’s post-Aliens movies have been, you have to admit the guy knows how to put a movie together).

Being risk averse isn’t new, the 70s were an anomaly, and in twenty years the only movies from 2010 anyone will know are the great ones. I do think it’s funny that you used Barton Fink to illustrate that it’s always been this way, because I don’t think that movie gets made today. The Coen Brothers directed 10 original features between 1984 and 2003. Since then, they’ve directed two more original features, but also two remakes and one adaptation of a novel. Their next film is a remake. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great remakes and adaptations, but still.

But still… what? While I disagree with the idea that wide-release film is the pinnacle of entertainment, I can at least see where the idea’s coming from. But the notion that adaptations, sequels, and remakes are somehow inferior to original stories is one I just don’t get at all, and it keeps getting trotted out as the downfall of the medium.

Just for the Coen Brothers: O Brother Where Art Thou was an adaptation of The Odyssey, and apparently Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski are loose pastiches of Raymond Chandler stories.

Almost all of Hitchcock’s best movies (except North by Northwest) were based on books or short stories. One of his best movies was a remake (of his own movie, sure, but it still counts).

11 of my 25 most favorite movies are either remakes, sequels, or adaptations (or some combination thereof). (I’m counting Airplane! and Young Frankenstein because they’re both parodies of other movies). And 9 of the 16 runners-up are, too. Take a look at the IMDB Top 250 and as far as I counted, it’s got a pretty similar ratio. Most of the other “best movies” lists I’ve been able to find on the internet (apart from Roger Ebert’s, which only has 2001: A Space Odyssey) are the same.

There’s nothing new about remakes or adaptations, or even having a rash of them in the same year. Granted, the current trend is to have a glut of them, most of them unnecessary, but Hollywood does trends. We all know that. The tornado fad was short-lived, the Western fad lasted forever, luckily we all survived the first fad of disaster movies and later the subsequent remakes. In Barton Fink it was boxing pictures, if I remember correctly.

And it’s no secret that I think the Coen Brothers are the greatest living filmmakers, but they’re also my go-to example of why we should be optimistic whenever anybody talks about the death of cinema. Because they prove not only that talent makes all the difference, but also that having enough talent and business sense can prevail in a business that doesn’t particularly care about quality.

I’m assuming that making a successful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel is what allowed them to make their Existentialist Midwestern Jewish Dread movie. But True Grit doesn’t feel like they sacrificed anything at all. It’s not just that it’s a better movie than the last adaptation of the novel; it’s that it’s so good, it makes the last movie seem laughably unnecessary and even makes the book it’s based on feel like a novelization. Seriously: it is such a Coen Brothers movie that I still have a hard time believing the book was written in 1968. (And based on the very little I’ve read about Portis’s other books, I feel as if I’ve stumbled onto a treasure trove of unfilmed Coen Brothers movies).

And if you were to tell me that Raising Arizona was based on a book or was a remake of some obscure European comedy, it wouldn’t do anything to make it less of a brilliant movie. So great filmmakers can make great films out of just about anything, even comic books.

So maybe the argument is that in today’s Hollywood, studios are only willing to invest in the known selling power of remakes and adaptations, and even proven geniuses like the Coens aren’t immune to the system. But: we’ve all heard of the John Wayne True Grit, but is there some big-market draw to Gambit that I’m just not aware of? Or for that matter, The Ladykillers? After The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Hudsucker Proxy, I’m more inclined to believe they’re methodically working their way through all of the film genres that they love, and whether or not there’s actual source material is kind of an afterthought.

I can believe that Barton Fink could get made today. A Serious Man — another weird, R-rated, high-concept, hard-sell movie — got made two years ago. For that matter, Black Swan got made last year (although, granted, the promise of Natalie Portman making out with Mila Kunis probably helped with the marketing). The only part that worries me is that the Coens already, back in 1991, ruthlessly mocked the idea of the tortured cineaste fighting valiantly for Art against an industry that only cares about money (and they were making fun of themselves!), but we still react as if it’s a tragedy when people try to sell a product that no one wants to buy.

Every few years I read an article about the imminent death of the movie industry because of insert current trend here. And every year there are unique movies that somehow get made, but they’re either not mentioned, or they’re treated as a fluke. A fluke that repeats every year. I’m no Hollywood insider, but the only trend that I see as permanent is that wide-release theatrical movies are getting more and more expensive to make. (Big surprise there). But it’s not a crisis, because wide-release theatrical movies don’t have the monopoly on entertainment — filmmakers have the option to fight the system or work within the system to champion an idea they believe in strongly enough, or to get over their egos and release it on a channel with less resistance.

The Adjustment Bureau is the best movie I’ve seen based on a Philip K. Dick story. Yeah, I went there.

I haven’t read the story it was based on, but the synopsis provided by Wikipedia suggests that there’s little in common with the movie apart from the most basic premise. And it’s not particularly surprising that Dick in 1954 wrote a story of existential dread, while Hollywood in 2011 made a love story with undertones of a mediation on free will. It may be an example of a new genre: the romantic thriller.

The movie is significantly more grounded, a little less imaginative, and a lot less European than Wings of Desire, but I thought there were a lot of similarities. Angels working behind the scenes — I’m a total sucker for a setup like this, especially when there’s a glaze of old-fashioned sentimentality over the whole thing.

And the romance actually works. The angels in fedoras [note: they're not overly explicitly called angels in the film] are a neat enough visual, but the movie really depends on the chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. It really works, and it feels genuine. Even Soderberghian.

Something I’d never quite realized about romantic comedies or dramas in the past: in almost all of them, you’re rooting for the relationship because you like the characters. (Or they’re bland enough that you can project whatever personality you like onto them). But while I wasn’t particularly charmed by either of the main characters in The Adjustment Bureau, I was charmed by their banter with each other. So it’s the kind of couple that you really want to see get together, and then go away and never hang out with you.

Also of note: the movie couldn’t quite decide whether to use John Slattery or Terrence Stamp, so it cast them both. Weird.

Last week my friend Matt Dessem linked to an article by Mark Harris in GQ titled “The Day the Movies Died”, which complains how animation and movies based on comic books are both catering to and perpetuating a market of young males in a constant state of arrested development. As a result, Hollywood has killed the adult drama and, by extension, the entire film industry.

I’ve got more problems with that article than I have time to cover now. All I’ll say is that a movie like this is a perfect example of how the article misses the point. Harris sees a rigidly divided hierarchy of media, in which the highest tier of cinema is being overrun with infantilizing man-child fantasies, driving intelligent films to the wastelands of premium or even basic cable. I see a billion different media channels fighting for my attention, each capable of its own highs and lows. It’s a pretty significant investment to make the trip to a theater except for the spectacle that only a huge screen and overpriced concessions can provide. I’m not paying ten bucks plus parking to see The Kids Are All Right if I can get the whole explosion-free experience on my TV screen.

The Adjustment Bureau isn’t cinéma vérité, but it’s a novel idea that doesn’t patronize the audience, and it’s not overloaded with effects. In terms of fantastic visuals, it’s about on par with an AT&T commercial. But it is the type of story that’s improved by seeing it in a theater. Show me more of that, and I’ll keep making the trip, even without 3D or IMAX.