Catching Up: Tell No One

Yes, it's in French, and yes, it has subtitles. Don't let those things scare you away from Tell No One, a film that has at its heart a very American sensibility, as betrayed by its taut chase scenes and the English pop tunes that dot the soundtrack. The story, based on an American novel, is simple: a doctor (Francois Cluzet) and his wife go skinny dipping in a country lake; they are attacked and the wife dies. Years later, the doctor receives a mysterious email, featuring a video of a woman who looks like his wife. As the doctor's obsession with getting to the heart of the mystery grows, unknown forces fixate on him, and on the unidentified person who is sending the messages.

Cluzet, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a slightly younger Dustin Hoffman, sells us on the obsession without losing our sympathy. Kristin Scott Thomas and Gilles Lellouche stand out as two friends who stand by him even as it looks like he's going over the bend. Even though the story is a bit convoluted--OK, more than a bit--this is a fine opportunity to get credit for taking your date to a foreign arthouse film, that happens to be, in most respects, a commercial American film. A very good commercial American film. Highly recommended.

Movies: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

If you read the Scott Tobias's interview with Woody Allen, you'll find out that Vicky Cristina Barcelona was basically a situation where the financing came in search of a project. He was asked if he would make a movie in Barcelona if someone else picked up the freight, and he said "sure." To fit the bill, he confected a fairly simple story of two American twentysomethings on holiday in an exotic European city. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is the uptight one, who craves stability and is set to marry a dullish but moneyed man; Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is the artistic one, who's a little more adventurous, but is never happy with her creations or her relationships. We know all this a few minutes in because an omniscient narrator tells us, which is a bit of a problem with the movie. We're sometimes told things we could easily have been shown, or worse, told things, then have those same things explained through dialog by the characters on screen, then--in addition--the same things are shown to us in flashback.

Vicky and Cristina meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a painter whose explosive relationship with his ex-wife made waves in the Barcelona art scene years before. Bardem, who starts off playing a stock role of the tall dark stranger who challenges the Americans to live life to the fullest, reminds us that before he stole Pete Rose's haircut to play death incarnate in No Country for Old Men, he was considered more sexy than scary. In their first meeting, he propositions both Vicky and Cristina, simultaneously, to go away with him for a romantic getaway. He delivers his lines of seduction in such a way that even as we're rolling our eyes at the corniness, we understand why a girl would go with him.

Even with Bardem's considerable talents, the story to this point is pretty rote, and as the focus falls more on Cristina than Vicky, you might find yourself checking your watch. But then Penelope Cruz shows up as Juan Antonio's ex, Maria Elena, and saves Woody's movie. Cruz doesn't just give the best female performance I've seen all year, but Maria Elena may be the most interesting female character in any Woody Allen movie. She sweeps through her scenes, all rage and manic energy, buoyed by the twin qualities of being as mad as a hatter and of always being right. She's part muse, part oracle, part raving psychotic.

While not everything in the film rises to the level of Bardem and Cruz's strange relationship, the acting--with one exception--is extremely fine. Hall, who'd previously played Christian Bale's wife in The Prestige, is a discovery; she holds her own given the most Woody-like dialog, but also shows great ambiguity torn between exotic Barcelona and her not-so-exotic fiance (well played by Chris Messina). Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn are great in small roles as Vicky and Cristina's hosts in Spain. Um, who does that leave?

Oh. Johansson. She might be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, but her acting is weak enough that it's even commented on in the movie itself. This is the second time Woody has cast Scarlett as a less-than-convincing actress--maybe this is a clue? She's not as wooden here as she was in Match Point, but limits of her skills, plus a role that could best be described as the "vaguely dissatisfied girl" make her stick out in an outstanding cast. Regardless, this film rates a pretty strong recommended.

Catching Up: Iron Man

No, not Lou Gehrig or Cal Ripken, the movie. Had every reason to think it would suck: I was thoroughly unimpressed by the trailer; the director, while a nice enough actor, was no one's idea of an A-lister; and the character is, in terms of public recognition, a second-string type. Tony Stark doesn't command the mindshare that SpiderMan, or the Hulk, or the X-Men do. Still, it was a nice surprise, near perfect for its intended purpose. The film is accessible, brisk and fun, and Robert Downey Jr. does a great job of both having a good time with the role, and leveraging his own history as a troubled but extremely talented person to bring to life the genius inventor who builds a suit of armor with which to fight evil. Like his summer superhero competition, Bruce Wayne, Stark is a multimillionaire (billionaire?) crimefighter. But unlike Wayne, he isn't pretending to drink too much and womanize as a cover for his crimefighting activities--he's actually drinking and womanizing, as well as inventing things, running a Fortune 500 company, and, um, fighting crime. Oscar winner Gwynneth Paltrow and multiple-Oscar nominee Jeff Bridges do fine work as Stark's assistant/love interest and mentor/enemy; Terrence Howard (another Academy Award nominee) is a bit wasted in a rote "responsible best friend" role.

The 21 Project/Non-Baseball Ramblings

I'll admit, I haven't been too optimistic about the prospect of LaTroy Hawkins in pinstripes, and his performance Friday's game has me desperately hoping I'm wrong about him. Mini-Moose (and sadly, I don't mean that nickname in a good way right now) nibbled and got shelled (4 BB and 6 runs in 2 1/3 IP); then, after a four-run third inning rally and 4 2/3 sterling innings of relief by Jonathan Alabadejo, Ross Ohlendorf, and Billy Traber, the Hawk came in and coughed up six runs of his own, and couldn't even get out of the inning.

The extra bit of salt in the wounds was that Hawkins made this craptastic appearance wearing Paul O'Neill's old number, 21. No Yankee had worn the number since O'Neill retired, but Hawkins wanted it because it was Roberto Clemente's number. Supposedly, Hawkins can't comprehend why Yankee fans would mind him wearing O'Neill's number.

Now, the natural reaction from fans will be to help him comprehend by booing him whenever he takes the mound. If he keeps performing like this, that'll be an easy choice. But here's an idea: what if, instead of making Hawkins's life miserable, we just asked him nicely to pick a new number? I'm thinking of something on the level of Steve Lombardi's Project P46, just rather than trying to convince a beloved Yankee to return to the fold, we'd be asking a new Yankee to respect the 0ur feelings about about a team favorite, and give up his uniform number.

It's pretty easy. Get a card, postcard, or regular letter stationery. Write LaTroy a pleasant note, explaining what Paul O'Neill meant to you, and why you think no one else should wear that uniform number for the Yankees, ever again. Ask him nicely to give it up, and maybe even suggest another uni number he'd enjoy. Affix a stamp and mail your letter/card to:

LaTroy Hawkins
Yankee Stadium
161st Street and River Avenue
Bronx, NY 10451

If you want to get some extra credit, you can also try to ensure that no one else ever wears O'Neill's #21 on Yankee pinstripes again. You can do this by buying a couple of extra postcards and letting higher-up members of the Yankee organization know that you think the Yankees should retire uniform number 21, in honor of O'Neill and/or Clemente. While I think that Paulie O is enough reason all by himself for the number to be retired, the fact that it's also Clemente's number makes it an absolute no-brainer: retiring the number would be special not just to all those fans of the late-90s Yankees, but also to loads of Hispanic fans throughout baseball. Many forget that the same segregation that kept African Americans out of MLB until 1947 also kept dark-skinned Latinos from playing. Clemente was the Latino Jackie Robinson; and honoring him is a way that the Yankees could be ahead of the curve. Anyway, you can write a note explaining why you feel the Yanks should retire #21 to Brian Cashman, at the same address as Hawkins, above, or you can just send your complaint straight to the top:

Hank Steinbrenner
George M. Steinbrenner Field
1 Steinbrenner Drive
Tampa, FL 33614

I suspect that you could also address a letter to Hank's brother/co-managing partner Harold Steinbrenner at the same Tampa address. If you want to learn more about the overall effort to have Clemente's #21 retired throughout Major League Baseball, you can visit Retire21.org.

***

Speaking of 21, I hadn't previously mentioned here my experience sitting in for Joe Sheehan at the AL Tout Wars draft. Tout Wars is an expert fantasy baseball league, in which all the participants are pretty much fantasy baseball professionals. The AL Tout league had been the subject of a bestselling book called Fantasyland, and this year, was the subject of a documentary by the same name. If you want to know what the draft was like, you can read my column on it over at Baseball Prospectus. Just don't needle me too much on the fact that the player I spent 10% of Sheehan's budget on, Mariners reliever J.J. Putz, just got injured and is likely to miss close to two months of the season. I hear that often enough from Joe.

Anyway, after the draft, the participants and a few others went out to a restaurant to socialize, which was tremendous fun. I always enjoy hanging with a crowd that knows more about baseball than I do, and it was great to hear behind-the-scenes stuff about how MLB.com's Gamecast system works, and anecdotes about the Atlanta Braves, and that kind of cool stuff.

At one point in the evening, one of my fellow-drafters sheepishly confessed that he's a big devotee of blackjack, and that he counts cards in Vegas. Which was funny, since the guy was sitting about five feet away from perhaps the most famous card-counter in the country, Protrade founder Jeff Ma, who was going to participate in one of the other Tout Wars drafts the following day. Ma was the main subject of a bestselling book about an MIT card-counting team, Bringing Down the House, which had just been turned into a movie, 21. As of last weekend, 21 was the top movie in the country. Small world.

***

Now, despite the box office success, the reviews haven't been kind to 21. Not having seen it yet, I can't comment on whether they have the film pegged right or wrong. The one thing I will say is that the movie seems to have bothered the New York Times's Manohla Dargis enough that she invented a new term for her review:

Ben ogles the chintzy glamour and the chesty blondes spilling out of their dresses, and the movie does exactly the same. He particularly likes it when his skinny school crush, Jill, clambers aboard and offers him a lap job, for which I hope the young actress Kate Bosworth was well compensated. Like everything else in “21,” Jill can be bought for the right price, as of course can Ben and, by extension, us.

Now, Dargis is a great reviewer; but if you're going to be judgmental and snarky, you need to get your terminology right. If you google the term "lap job" you get a bunch of references to people overclocking computer processors. Since Bosworth's supposed to be playing an MIT genius/nerd, this might not be out of character. But that wouldn't explain Dargis's comment that Bosworth's character "can be bought." Obviously, Dargis thinks that a "lap job" is more than just trying to give the boy she likes a more efficient heat sink.

I've, um, heard of lap dances. As someone who tries to keep up with the language of perversity, I'm also familiar with various fine, intimate terms ending in --job, which I won't enumerate since this is a family blog. However, among what Padma Lakshmi would call the "Job Family of Products" I've never heard of the lap job. Is it new? The whole thing sounds like the scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where Steve Carrell tries, and fails, to describe what a woman's breast feels like.

Movie Review: Cloverfield

If you can get over the issue of the way the story is told, you'll likely enjoy Cloverfield. Cloverfield belongs to a genre, along with Blair Witch Project, of movies told in the first person, as video footage of "real" events captured by someone who just happened to have a camera at the ready. Typically, movies of this genre present two particular obstacles to the suspension of disbelief. First, the shaky camera movements can take you out of the cinematic experience by making it too hard--and sometimes too nauseating--to follow the action. Second, you have to believe that a person would be so dedicated to documenting their experience that they would keep the camera rolling, even in situations where they're in grave personal danger and it would make more sense to turn the thing off and just concentrate on running away.

If you can get over those two things--and for the most part I did--then there's nothing to keep you from enjoying an exciting disaster/horror flick, that, after a very slow beginning, is relentless and well-paced. Sure, there are other problems, but I tend to look at them more as features than flaws: the characters are fairly unsympathetic, and they make poor decisions, but you pretty much don't have any horror flicks these days without those elements being in place. In this case, the unsympathetic characters are yuppies who live in Tribeca, who've gathered together for a going-away party for their friend Rob, who's taken a Vice-President job with a company in Japan. If you've ever heard of the term "viral marketing," it's likely you already know that Rob's party will be disrupted by the arrival of something terrible enough to send the Statue of Liberty's head rolling down the street like a bowling ball, and that the rest of the evening will track a handful of the partygoers' struggle to survive the catastrophe.

The result is a lot like Titanic, with all the extraneous junk scraped away--the unbelievable love story, the awkward "eighty years later" framing device, the various clinical dissections of what went wrong and how--and everything is just pared down to people reacting to the danger of near-certain death, just of a more fantastic nature. The camcorder's-eye-view of Cloverfield traps you in the perspective of these characters, who have extremely limited information about what peril they're facing or what they should do about it. The story never cuts away to a briefing at the White House (a typical scene in this kind of film) to get a dose of exposition about the situation...and distance from our imperiled main characters.

Because of the lack of exposition, there really isn't much of a message to Cloverfield. Although the film appropriates some of the imagery of the September 11 attacks, it's not about our fear of terrorism; nor is it about Iraq (like last year's horrible 28 Weeks Later), ecology (The Host, The Day After Tomorrow, and the original Godzilla films), hubris (Towering Inferno, and many other similar disaster movies), racism (the original Night of the Living Dead), class warfare (Titanic), or man's inhumanity to man (28 Days Later, among many others). In Cloverfield's case, a monster is just a monster--and that's one of the things about it that worked for me. Recommended.

****

As an additional review, I'll fess up that I've been watching the clunkily-named weekly series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX. The idea of the show is that, after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the eponymous Ms. Connor and her savior-of-the-human-race teenage son, John, continue to have adventures while battling to keep the artificial intelligence known as Skynet from ever existing--even though at the end of T2 it was believed that Skynet had been retroactively destroyed, thereby creating a hopeless paradox (how can robots come from the future to kill you/save you if you've eliminated the system that created the robots?). The series pretends that the second Terminator sequel (2003's T3: Rise of the Machines)--(SPOILER ALERT)in which the paradox is essentially undone, and the robotic apocalypse occurs as scheduled (/spoiler)--never happened.

Maybe it's because I've spent the past few weeks acquainting myself on DVD with a show with similar man-against-robot issues, the SciFi version of Battlestar Galactica, but I'm unimpressed. Chronicles, for all the cachet of its heavy-duty license and expansive special effects budget, isn't terribly deep, so far. In its mythology, time travel is much more common than in the films--and while that discovery opens up possibilities, it also weakens the premise to the point of flimsiness. The cool thing about the earlier Terminator films was that the protagonists were left on their own, without hope of backup or relief. This development throws those elements out the window, and opens up the way for all sorts of Deus Ex Machina b.s.

For the second time in a TV season, a network has turned over its most-hyped property to a relatively obscure British actress. When NBC did it for the Bionic Woman, it was a fiasco--Michelle Ryan, an actress who sounds smart and confident using her own accent, was whiny and unfocused as a Californian twentysomething-turned superhero. Chronicles' leading Brit is Lena Headey, and although her accent is better than Ryan's, she's still not entirely right for the role she's playing. Linda Hamilton reimagined the role of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, turning the disco-era waitress she played in the first film into a grim-faced warrior woman. She was buff, ruthless, and more than a little crazy. You were scared of this woman--she had no compunction about harming people if they endangered her son or simply got in her way.

Headey, on the other hand, isn't scaring anyone. Her Sarah Connor is a fairly generic action heroine. She looks athletic and is credible in the show's action scenes, but she isn't the physically imposing presence that Hamilton was in T2. Headey's take on the character talks like someone ruthless, but she's also emotionally fragile and conflicted--qualities that might make her character more sympathetic than Hamilton's Connor was, but they also make her less interesting. Summer Glau is more intriguing as the latest friendly Terminator model: the girl's become a science fiction fan favorite by being pretty and having a strange affect, and both of those qualities are still in evidence here. There's some promise in the relationship between Glau's Terminatrix and Thomas Dekker's savior-cum-teenage-whiner, John Connor; but the first three episodes haven't really placed the focus there.

If it weren't for the writer's strike, it's likely that I'd dismiss Chronicles off-hand as something that isn't, for the moment, worth the space it would occupy on my DVR. Right now, however, it doesn't have much competition in the scripted drama category, so I'll keep watching it until I lose interest or it gets superseded by better shows. Mildest possible recommendation, for now.

Small World

My parents aren't really baseball fans, except for by relation to me and my brothers. Still, having one casual fan and two stark-raving insane Yankee fans for offspring, they absorbed a lot of baseball by osmosis. The ballgames were always on the tube, or the radio. So when it comes to the national pastime, my parents know more than they think they know.

So it wasn't that weird when my dad brought up Bernie Williams last night, out of the blue. We were at dinner, and we'd been talking about my writing, and the whole Roger Clemens mess, and just at random Dad asks me about Bernie, as if he was one of my high school friends I still keep in touch with. So I filled my parents in as well as I could about the last year-plus: the un-vite (as Seinfeld would say) to Tampa for Spring Training, his kinda-sorta retirement, the speculation that he might be invited to camp with the Dodgers, his Jazz guitar work.

So that wasn't weird, but what happened today was. My parents were flying to Puerto Rico, and since they practically live on planes these days, they get upgraded to first class. Since these are the seats left over when first class isn't booked full, they often don't get to sit together, but you don't complain when you get bumped up. Anyway, my dad goes to take his seat, and who's he sitting next to? You guessed it, Bernie Williams.

Sometimes small doesn't even begin to describe the world.

****

Saw Michael Clayton last weekend, and it was phenomenal. It's a legal thriller that meanders a little bit on the way to where it's going, but the performances are so compelling you're unlikely to mind a few digressions. George Clooney plays the title character, a big-firm lawyer who doesn't fit the profile: he's a Fordham Law grad in a sea of Ivy League suits, a guy who's been with this giant legal machine for 15 years without making partner. He's the kind of guy who can't ever be a partner--you could say he's the lawyer in charge of non-legal solutions. When the law firm's top litigator goes crazy in a deposition, Clayton's the guy you send to smooth things over with the cops and the client. The litigator, Arthur (Tom Wilkinson) is off his meds and out of his mind, and his timing is lousy because the firm's representing a big corporate client in a billion-dollar class action suit.

How things play out with the suit is a bit predictable (what, you thought the big corporate client was going to be innocent?) but that's kind of beside the point. The point is how Wilkinson, clearly out of his mind, suddenly snaps back into clarity to explain why no one's going to successfully have him committed. It's how Tilda Swinton, as the big corporation's head lawyer, seems constantly on the edge of jumping out of her skin, even when she's in control of the situation. It's the honesty and seriousness with which Michael tells his son that he won't grow up to be a screwup like him.

Clooney's performance straddles the line between the deglamorized character he played in Syriana, and the typical, smooth, Clooney persona--streetsmart and cynical, but without the smug smile when he pulls one over on the powers-that-be. Wilkinson, a Brit whose American accent usually annoys and distracts me, is dead perfect in this role. The nasal drone of his accent works well with a character whose manic rants rarely give him a chance to breathe. If I were doing my Top Ten list now, Michael Clayton would make the top five--maybe the top three--and Wilkinson is neck-in-neck with Javier Bardem for the best supporting performance of the year. Very highly recommended.

Top 10 Movies of 2007*

* That I saw...

1. Once -- I'd expected that one of the Fall's heavy hitters would take this plucky Irish musical out of the top spot, but it persevered, and takes the crown as my best movie of 2007. I missed quite a few of the challengers--particularly There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, and Atonement--but I still feel comfortable with this pick.

2. The Wind that Shakes the Barley -- A savage tale of the Irish fighting for independence against the British, and once the British are gone, against each other. Cillian Murphy, starring here as a med student who decides to join his brother in the IRA, might actually be too good-looking to be a star in Hollywood, but he's definitely got the acting chops to go with the face. This film featured the single most heartbreaking scene I saw all year, although that might say more about me than about the movie.

3. No Country for Old Men -- This was the one that I expected to knock Once off its perch, and from that standpoint, I'm disappointed. Mind you, it was beautiful. Javier Bardem was mesmerizing as the villanous Anton Chigurh, Josh Brolin actually managed to make me forget his dad's married to Barbra Streisand, and Tommy Lee Jones gives a gut-punch of a performance as a Texas sheriff left to process the carnage in Chigurh's wake. But I guess I wasn't as blown away as everyone else was by the scene with the dog in the river, or by the plot, which doesn't go much farther than a simple (and not incredibly satisfying) chase film.

4. Ratatouille -- Brad Bird is the man. Who isn't leery about the idea of an animated movie about a French rat who hallucinates conversations with a great chef, and who lives his cullinary dreams by acting as a puppeteer to an unskilled kitchen apprentice? Just trust Brad Bird, the guy behind The Incredibles. More imaginatively directed than any other movie on the list.

5. The Lives of Others -- The first time I'd heard of this film, it'd just beaten Pan's Labyrinth for best foreign film, and I was indignant. I still don't think it's better than Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece, but it's another lively take on the death-throes of the Soviet Bloc, and the perils of a surveillance culture.

6. Breach -- We discussed this one when it first came out. I still don't think I've seen a lead performance as good as Chris Cooper's Robert Hanssen, except maybe Bardem's turn in No Country. Strange that Cooper's work here--much like Forrest Whitaker's in the Last King of Scotland and Denzel Washington's in Training Day--is considered a lead performance even though he's a villain and not the main character, but Bardem's being pushed as a supporting actor.

7. Hot Fuzz -- All told, the funniest movie I saw all year, although it took a while to pick up speed, spending much of its running time setting up jokes that pay off only in the last 15 or so minutes. A better film than Shaun of the Dead, but less accessible--unless you're well-versed in '80s and '90s American action films, much of what's on the screen won't register.

8. Helvetica -- A documentary about a typeface? That's right. The filmmakers managed to tap into a genius discovery: graphic designers, whose work straddles the line between art and the written word, often combine the eloquence of writers with the insane passion and conviction of artists (those of us who know Jay Jaffe already had an inkling of this). What that gives you is some very intelligent and off-beat discussions about how a font can affect your world. Don't think I've seen a documentary this good since Capturing the Friedmans or Fog of War.

9. The Bourne Ultimatum -- Another one discussed previously. Gets downgraded because of the veritable drinking game you can play by taking a shot whenever someone incredulously asks Matt Damon's Jason Bourne "You really don't remember, do you?" Still, it had to make the top 10--otherwise, I'd run afoul of "The Asset."

10. Waitress -- We start with a chick flick, we end with a chick flick...what's happened to this blog? It seems like 2007 was a pretty slim year for female performances--Keri Russell has the best female performance I saw last year, and I can't think of enough good lead performances to populate a decent top five.

Others from 2007: Darjeeling Limited didn't quite make the list--I enjoyed it, but didn't fall in love--and I'm not even sure I liked it more than its companion short film, Hotel Chevalier, which has many of Darjeeling's virtues, a 100% reduction in Luke Wilson playing his stock Wes Anderson character, and a nice helping of Natalie Portman in various states of undress. The Host just missed inclusion by much less than Darjeeling; it was my favorite horror film of the year, but the only competition was the annoying 28 Weeks Later.

Any thoughts? Suggestions about other films I should watch? Put 'em in the comments.

******

Now that the Holidays are over, and most of my big writing assignments are done, I should be able to get on more of a regular posting schedule. Back when I started this blog, four years ago today, I never imagined that I'd have to interrupt writing it to work on the Baseball Prospectus annual, or any of the other stuff that's been going on in my life. One of my resolutions for 2008 is to figure out if I can do my minimum of three posts per week here, or else consider shutting down shop...but that's talk for another time. In the meanwhile, Happy Birthday to the WTDB!

Movie Review: Once

Let's just get the negatives out of the way up front. If you'd told me that my favorite movie this year would a) be less than 90 minutes long, b) feature non-professional actors, and c) be a musical...well, I'd a told you that you were nuts.

But nonetheless, that is the case. Somehow this movie doesn't have me thinking of eighty-someodd minutes as short, but rather slender, compact, or even lean. The acting isn't amateurish, it's earnest, or better said, heartfelt. And it isn't a musical, but rather...um, no, it is a musical.

The musical is a powerful genre. I live in a city that has an entire industry dedicated to it on the stage, and recent year-end award nominations and wins for Dreamgirls and Chicago show that it's still viable on the big screen. But it's tricky. Done right, music and film form a feedback loop, where love for one increases appreciation for the other. But if any of the elements go wrong, it's a disaster. Spending time with lackluster music is no fun, no matter how dynamic the characters are or how splendid the visuals (I haven't seen Dreamgirls, nor would I see Hairspray, because the songs don't really get me where I live). But at the same time, we're looking for more than a music video--the film musical has to be a good movie, too. Look at the recent failures of two revered hit musicals, Rent and the Producers, to find an audience at the multiplex.

The genre also operates under the handicap that we're not really buying the primary conceit of the genre--that is, that Olivia Newton-John just looks out at the night sky and spontaneously belts out "Hopelessly Devoted," with full, invisible orchestral accompaniment. It's no coincidence that few of the musicals you see these days are set in the present. There just seems to be an extreme disconnect between the world of spontaneous singing and our world full of cell phones and ipods.

Once works because it creates that world, a place where you can believe that sometimes people sing interchangeably with speaking. It's a world where music is so highly valued that you steal from a child's piggy bank to get batteries for a CD player, or walk into a loan officer's office armed with nothing but a second-hand suit and a tape recorder, all so you can pursue the dream of making music. It's a world where girl (Marketa Irglova) meets boy (Glen Hansard) not because of some contrived meet-cute situation, but because she's intrigued with his sidewalk performances of original songs; and where the girl (the lead characters are not given names) doesn't really catch boy's attention until he sees her spidery fingers dancing on a piano keyboard--but when he does, it's a love-at-first-sight moment. It turns out they make sweet music together--but since both of them have long-distance attachments, the question is, will they get to make (ahem) sweet music together?

Hansard and Irglova aren't really professional actors (he'd had a small part in the other famous Irish music movie, the Commitments; she's apparently a complete novice) but they're both professional musicians. Musicians acting can be jarring--even the good ones, like David Bowie, tend to stick out like a sore thumb in a cast of "real" actors. Director John Carney protects both his leads well, by not giving them too many scenes head-to-head with real actors. Bill Hodnet does some nice work as Hansard's dad, but most of the other roles are portrayed by untrained actors, whose naturalistic performances meld well with Hansard and Irglova's.

But just as musicians can rarely duplicate the nuances of acting, actors rarely get music performance right on film. At its best, you have movies where the actors do a beautiful job of mimicking a famous performer's movements or even their voice, but you put that next to Prince doing his thing in Purple Rain, or Hansard singing his heart out on a street corner in this movie, and it's not too hard to tell the real thing from the counterfeits. It's the musical performances that make this movie--the music is good enough that it was downloading from iTunes within ten minutes of my getting home.

Very highly recommended.

Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum

The thing about Matt Damon's Jason Bourne--the main thing, what sets him apart from other action movie heroes--is that he knows the unbelievable stuff he's going to do will hurt. As he leaps through windows and out moving vehicles, and intentionally crashes cars he's driving to escape or disable pursuers, there is almost always a moment where you see Bourne steeling himself, preparing for the pain, bracing for impact.

Human beings don't just experience pain, we fear it. Many of us avoid going to the dentist, we talk our way out of physical confrontations, we delay breaking up with people who are obviously wrong for us, all because we don't want to experience pain. In the movies, those principles are forgotten--behaving as our normal cowardly selves isn't terribly cinematic, so the human pain avoidance mechanism is overridden. Not only do people in movies willingly or even willfully put themselves in harm's way, they often seem to shrug off pain as if they were loaded to the gills with Vicodin. Even if they do get hurt--usually for plot-specific, drama-enhancing purposes--they don't seem to worry too much about it, before or after.

There was a notable exception to this in the first Die Hard movie. There's a moment in that film where the protagonist, John McClane, is in a firefight with his enemies, and he has to retreat. The problem is that he's barefoot, and the floor all around him is covered in broken glass. You get a second where it registers on Bruce Willis's face that this is his situation, and you wordlessly get the normal, human reaction, "Run across broken glass? Screw that!" before he's forced to go through the rest of the movie with shards of glass embedded in his feet.

Throughout all three of the Bourne movies, that type of moment happens repeatedly, and it helps remind us that Damon's car-chasing, ass-kicking superspy is human. That, in turn, adds some needed spice to the series' many action set pieces, which in this installment includes chases by car, motorbike, and on foot, in train stations, on roof tops, and on the streets of cities in four continents. The chases themselves are exhilarating and well-shot, but the main thing is that the audience feels affinity for the ultracapable but always outnumbered Bourne. If you don't empathize with Bourne's pained expression as he executes yet another agonizing-but-necessary stunt, you probably won't enjoy the movie.

I mean, it's not like the writing is all that good. As far as plot goes, it's amazing how little things moved along over the entire three-film series--given how many dance steps are repeated from the second film, you almost have to wonder why that film, the Bourne Supremacy, was even necessary. You get repetitions of some chestnut-standard scenes--chase through the rail station, cops summoned to European CIA safehouse, the "I'm talking to you on the phone while observing you from afar scene" which is always followed by some CIA bigwig saying "Oh my God, he's in [insert name of city here]! Seal off a ten-block radius!"

Oh, and while we're on this thing with the ten-block radii, you've also got some seriously hackneyed dialog. Three movies into the series, enough people are still saying "You really don't remember, do you?" to Bourne that my brother-in-law was mocking it during dinner afterward. And then there's the CIA bigwigs yelling out things like "I want his bank accounts, credit cards, phone records...I want to know what he's thinking before he thinks it."

Um, good luck with that. Somewhere along the line Hollywood got the idea that running covert operations for the CIA was a bit like directing live television. For all our sakes, I hope that this is just them being imaginative.

Now that I've spent some time panning the writing, let's get back to what Bourne Ultimatum did right. Julia Stiles, who was a bit of tacked-on window dressing in the first two movies, finally gets something to do in the third film. As pointed out by the guys at Filmspotting, there are some great echoes of previous installments in the series, which add a bit of depth. The film also features an undercurrent of commentary on the moral responsibility of Americans who volunteer to serve their government uncritically, then get pointed at all the wrong targets in the name of "saving American lives."

That aside, we don't see the Bourne movies for plot or subtext or even for Stiles. We watch for the actions scenes, and the set pieces in this film, hold up remarkably well. There's one of Bourne leading a civilian through an obstacle course of surveillance that is truly masterful, and there's a wonderfully detailed rooftop chase that's very impressive. Actually, the only action scene in the movie that was disappointing was the much-vaunted final car chase through Manhattan. While there have been a lot of complaints about the use of "shakycam" in this film--the perpetually in-motion handheld camera that shakes as its operators follow the action--I wasn't bothered by it. I've criticized the use of shakycam before, but here I thought it was used effectively to emphasize the frenzy of some of the scenes. Then again, I was forewarned about the cameras shakiness and made sure to get me and mine seats at the back of the theater, so I'm sure that others' mileage will vary.

I saw this one with La Chiquita and her family, and the reaction was mixed. Surprisingly, the big endorsement came from my wife, who wants me to refer to her from now on simply as "the Asset." When you can get my foreign-and-independent film-loving honey to buy into your big summer blockbuster that way, I'm happy to say that it's recommended.

****

A quick update on my summer TV shows:

Mad Men gets more and more impressive. The fifth episode featured one of the most suspenseful moments I've seen on TV since the Sopranos. Since we've been talking about the Asset's reaction to things, she's totally creeped out by this show, and doesn't even want to be in the room when I watch it.

The Bronx is Burning's run ended, presenting absolutely no argument as to why it shouldn't have been half as long, and focused only on baseball. With the "this was 1977!" subplots out the window, the last three episodes were hopelessly thin, often giving John Turturro little to do other than static reaction shots to archival footage of games from the '77 playoffs. The final scene, however, was poignant.

Part of the fun of mentioning the Bronx is Burning Comes from the inevitable appearance by Daniel Sunjata's cyber-stalker in the comments section. I have no idea who the DSCS is, or if there is any veracity to her/their myriad claims. Obviously, I do not endorse them in any way. But it looks like Daniel should definitely keep better control of his baby-mamas.

I gave Saving Grace a second chance, and, surprisingly, it didn't suck. While the mix of religion and entertainment is uncomfortable, specially in a show where the characters use strong PG-13 language, recent episodes were less heavy-handed and included more of a role for Laura San Giacomo (another pint-sized actress I had a crush on in the late 80s and early 90s).

My Boys has remained maddeningly inconsistent. Every time it looks like the series will hit its stride, you get a huge misfire--like the too-obvious spoof of Sex and the City a couple of weeks back. Why spoof a show that was canceled a few years back, and therefore isn't topical? Because TBS has paired My Boys with Sex and the City reruns on their schedule. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't cast stones, and My Boys criticizing Sex and the City as unrealistic, shallow, and provincial goes way past irony.

Separated at Birth?

Bronx Banters's Emma Span brought this up the other day, about people people remarking on Shelley Duncan's looks (or lack thereof). Personally, I think that there's enough of a resemblance that he could have been Matthew Lillard's stunt double in Summer Catch. Actually, considering the weak cuts that Lillard took in that movie, you can make that "should have been."

[For anyone that hasn't had the pleasure, Summer Catch is one of a trilogy of movies released in 1999-2001 which were lightly remodeled youth remakes of good 80s movies, just starring Freddie Prinze Jr. this time. So you had Wing Commander, a/k/a Freddie Prinze Jr.'s Top Gun, you had Boys and Girls, a/k/a Freddie Prinze Jr.'s When Harry Met Sally, and finally Summer Catch, Freddie Prinze Jr.'s Bull Durham, just set in the amateur Cape Cod League. The highlights of Summer Catch are few, but I've taken the time to catalogue them for you:

1. Brian Dennehy in a phoned-in role as Prinze Jr.'s manager. Dennehy's a multiple-Tony winner for his work on Broadway, but I'd argue that, as good as he is on stage, he's actually much better at this kind of phoned-in "look, I had to make a mortgage payment and this was the only offer my agent had" kind of role. If "Best Phoned-in Performance in a Lousy Motion Picture" were a category at the Oscars--and it should be--Dennehy would be a two-time winner for this movie and Gladiator...the one with Cuba Gooding Jr.

2. An uncredited John C. McGinley as a scout for the Phillies who, for no good reason, speaks with a thick Louisiana accent. If you ever meet McGinley, please ask him to repeat the line, "He trow de hebby ball. And de hebby ball ain't gonna find many bats."

3. Jessica Biel as the awkwardly-named Tenley Parrish. There's a shot of her getting out of the pool in this movie that's nearly worth the price of admission all on its own.]

Since getting whooped by the Rays Friday night, the Yanks have been on the warpath, doing what they need to do in Kansas City while two of the four teams ahead of them--Boston and Cleveland, trade body blows in Jacobs Field. The Red Sox lead is down to 6 1/2 games, but I'm still only keeping track of the Wild Card standings, where the Tigers (who beat ex-Yank Jose Contreras like a rented mule last night) have a 4 1/2 games lead on the Yanks, and the fading Mariners (losers of their last six at a time when the Yanks have won six in a row) stand between the Bombers and Detroit, but lead by only a half-game.

So tomorrow, Alex Rodriguez--currently sitting at 499 homers after an eighth-inning two-run blast of Gil Meche--and Kei Igawa lead the Yankees against the Royals one more time, before heading off to Baltimore, where they'll have an odd double-header on Friday. First, at 7:00 PM they'll complete the game suspended by rain on June 28th, which was left with the score 8-6 and two outs in the top of the eighth inning. Then, at that game's conclusion, they'll play another one at Camden Yards. Let's hope neither of those games goes into extra innings...

On Racism, and Sheff

I've been troubled by Gary Sheffield's comments, both to GQ earlier this season and to HBO's Real Sports this month, and I've wanted to respond...but I've held myself back. I try not to write angry, specially when the issues involved are as...touchy as the topics Sheff's big mouth has kicked up this time. I just couldn't figure out how to approach this, and my blogger account is littered with unpublishable drafts, trying to approach this and failing.

Then, fortunately for me, a young lady decided to comment on a throwaway remark I made in yesterday's post about the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam. I'd mentioned the fact that Lee got racist hate mail from the residents of Throgs Neck, and noted that in turn, his portrayal of the members of that community was a gruesome caricature, which I considered was also racist. Eve Montana, of the Evie Does It blog wrote in the comments section:

Please stop using the term racist so easily. Racism is the system in which a group of people in power use economics and politics to repress another group. African-Americans in this company don't have the POWER to be racist. Prejudice, yes. Racist, no.

Usually, I hate it when someone quotes the dictionary to me in a discussion. I find it a condescending way to make a point. But, since I make my living in words, when someone tells me I don't know the meaning of a term I usually turn to my good friends at Webster's:

Main Entry: rac·ism
Pronunciation: 'rA-"si-z&m also -"shi-
Function: noun
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
- rac·ist /-sist also -shist/ noun or adjective

Neither of these definitions support the "only white people can be racist in America" theory that Eve sets forth. By the second definition, racism is racial prejudice, so I don't see where drawing a distinction between racism and prejudice makes much of a difference. Moreover, the idea that African Americans don't have the power to affect others through their feelings of racial antipathy is a little dated. Power isn't just controlling the national government. There are all sorts of power relationships in society, which means all sorts of opportunities to put their ignorant attitudes on display to the world. If someone denies you service at their restaurant because of the color of your skin--I don't care what the color of your skin is, or what the color of their skin is--you've been subjected to racism.

Getting back to Summer of Sam, to imply that Spike Lee doesn't have power is just plain silly. He's one of America's foremost filmmakers, and by the standards of most folks, he's pretty darn wealthy. The idea that he's on even footing with the people he was skewering in that movie is absurd--they may be white, but he's the one with the big pulpit. So yes, when I look at the portrayal of characters as racial and ethnic stereotypes, with no intelligence or redeeming qualities, I don't think that calling said portrayal "racist" is out of line. You might look at it, and disagree, say maybe Lee wasn't being unfair, or that I'm overreacting about the portrayal...I'll admit it's not as clear-cut a case as the portrayal of African Americans in Birth of a Nation or Mickey Rooney's turn as a Japanese landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

But if it's not racist, the reason isn't because African Americans (or any other group, for that matter) are unable to exploit whatever power they might have to express prejudices and/or feelings of racial superiority. Honestly, I can't figure what purpose re-defining the word racism as Eve proposes serves, other than to selectively excuse prejudicial conduct.

Which brings me to Sheff. Like Lee, Gary Sheffield is someone whose work I love. Sheffield's a hitting machine. The player he reminds me of is Paul O'Neill--the slashing stroke, the unrelenting attitude--just most of his career has been spent performing at the peak levels of O'Neill's career. Throughout his career, by and large, his reaction to adversity (whether external or self-created) has simply been to perform, and to keep hitting. During his first two years with the Yankees, he was probably the player I was happiest to see at the plate in a big spot. And this season--as I remarked more than a month ago--he's been exactly what the Bombers have been missing.

That, however, is 20/20 hindsight. When the Yanks traded Sheff this past winter, I understood with and agreed with their reasoning. Sheffield was a 38-year-old coming off a big injury in 2006, whose performance had been off even before he got hurt. The Yankees had acquired a replacement who was five years younger, uninjured, and under contract for 2007. Since they were tethered to the Jason Giambi contract, the Yanks didn't have the DH at bats available that Detroit's been able to give Sheffield this season. Plus, there was the fact that as he always has in his career, injury or no Sheffield was intent on negotiating his next contract in the media.

So, it seemed like moving him was a good idea at the time. The Yankees did well by Sheffield, trading him to a contender that immediately re-upped him to a new deal. The fact that he's hitting like last year's wrist injury never happened, and that he's on the Tigers--one of the teams that the Yanks are now trying to catch for the Wild Card--should be all the revenge that Sheffield needs against the Yankee franchise. But from day one, Sheff's been sniping at Joe Torre, sniping that's now reached the level where Gary Sheffield levels the claim that Torre treats African American players "differently." While he claims to stop short of calling Torre a racist, the fact is that Torre had power over Sheffield and other African American players, and Sheffield clearly implies that Torre showed preference to other players based on skin color.

Anyone reading his comments should be forgiven for thinking that he's calling Torre out as a racist, becoming just the last person to slam one of the best managers in New York City history on what seems to be his way out the door. Classy, very classy.

But who's treating people differently on the basis of race, here? It's Sheffield who's applying the brown paper bag test to his former teammate, Derek Jeter, saying that the Captain (the longest tenured African American on Torre's Yanks) doesn't qualify as "all the way black" because his mother's white. It's Sheffield who suggested that he has more Hispanic colleagues in baseball than African Americans because Latinos are docile creatures who don't demand that their employers "treat them like men."

I'm not just a Yankees fanboy grouchy over the fact that Sheffield's taking on the Yankees' sacred cows--Jeter and Torre. Those two have plenty of defenders. As a Dominican American, it's the lack of respect that Sheffield has shown his Latino colleagues (including, presumably, the Latinos who are keeping his team in contention: Magglio Ordonez, Carlos Guillen, Placido Polanco, and Ivan Rodriguez) that burns me.

For all the garbage that Sheffield's spewing, the outrage hasn't really been there. Hispanics haven't fired back at Sheff, neither have Jeter and Torre. I'm not one for silencing people's views, but I can't help but thinking that if someone where making similarly negative comments about African Americans, players and interest groups would be demanding suspensions or firings.

I guess maybe more people buy into Eve's definition of racism than I thought.

Movie Review: Waitress

The Yankees haven't given me much reason for good cheer this week (one friggin' hit?!?) so after the latest loss, La Chiquita and I went out, first to the greenmarket at Union Square, then to Casa Mono, and finally to the movie theater, in the hope of catching Ratatouille. No joy (Brad Bird's latest wasn't even at the theater) but we happened to spot Adrienne Shelly's Waitress playing on a single screen in the megaplex, playing in less than 45 minutes.

Now, based on the plot summary, Waitress is the kind of movie I'd usually burn rubber to get away from: southern waitress in a bad marriage, with a knack for baking pies, learns she's pregnant, and starts fall for her OB-Gyn; she works in a diner chock-full of colorful characters who'll help her through this ordeal, and maybe she'll learn a valuable less...OK, are you getting that bad chick flick feel? That Steel Magnolias/Fried Green Tomatoes/Spitfire Grill feeling? That "I'm going to be thrown into a vat of pure estrogen; please pray for me," feeling?

So why did I buy tickets for this, instead of distracting La Chiquita and dragging her away at top speed? Mainly, it was because the movie had been recommended by my homeboys at Filmspotting, who said it was the best date film they'd seen in a while. Even with the good reviews, I wasn't expecting too much from this film. That is, until about the twenty minute mark, when I realized I'd been laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. I haven't laughed this much since I saw Hot Fuzz (still my favorite movie of this summer).

The easy answer for why this movie was so good was a pair of strong lead performances by Keri Russell (as the titular waitress) and Nathan Fillion (as the doctor). As a couple, they have good chemistry, and elevate some fairly standard romantic comedy material through sheer combustibility. Anyone who saw Fillion in Firefly knew that he had leading man presence and the comedy chops to pull off this role; Russell is a pleasant surprise in a role that requires her to do much more than just look pretty for the camera.

But the performance that moves this film beyond the ordinary comes from Jeremy Sisto as Russell's abusive husband Earl. Earl could have been a simple bruiser or a cartoon villain--the two options most people go for when portraying the stock character of bad southern husband--but Sisto (and writer/director Shelley) doesn't let the audience off that easy. In Sisto's hands, Earl is the scariest kind of nutjob--one so unmoored from reality, you have no idea what he's going to do next. When you expect him to be happy, he's petulant; when you expect his fists to start flying, sometimes they do, but just as often, he'll break down crying. Sisto brings enough humor to the performance that the movie never hits that Lifetime Movie of the Week level of melodrama, but at the same time, you can't dismiss the character as a joke.

The menace Sisto brings to the movie, and Russell's matter-of-fact reaction to that menace, add more spice to Waitress than you'd expect from a romantic comedy about a pie-making southerner. The ending dents this a bit by wrapping things up a little too tidily. Still, highly recommended, particularly if it's date night.

Movie Review: 28 Weeks Later

After the trauma of watching the Yanks get swept by the Rockies, I needed some relaxing fun, and so my brother T and I went out to the movies. As a married person, my cinema choices are mainly determined by La Chiquita's tastes--the world of movies is divided into the films my wife will watch, and those she won't. Since she decided to stay home, I was left shuffling through the long list of movies in which she has no interest--and nothing was quite as unappealing to her as a gory British zombie flick.

So we went to see 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to 2002's 28 Days Later. The latter was the best horror film I'd seen in a year beginning with a two. The setup was simple: a young man, who was in an accident, wakes up from a coma to find that London is abandoned. He's woken up four weeks into an epidemic of something called the Rage virus, which turns anyone infected into a psychotic zombie. The disease is bloodborne, which is unfortunate since the infected are constantly drooling, vomiting, or weeping blood, and have an awful tendency to want to snack on human flesh.

Yeah, I can hear you yawning. The zombie movie thing has been done to death (no pun intended) to the point that no cliche has been left unturned. But what made Days special was that it worked on several levels. It was a good horror movie, with genuine scares and next to no campiness to dilute the terror. I caught it in a late show on a weeknight near Penn Station, and the walk home after was genuinely creepy. Like most thoughtful horror films, it was really about human beings rather than monsters--following a group of survivors the viewer got to know and care about pretty well, and showing how they and other humans dealt with the apocalyptic events they were facing. And director Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting fame) shot the movie in the manner of an independent art film, using grainy digital cameras and tweaking the color palette to give the whole thing a surreal quality.

So the sequel (which we'll call Weeks, for simplicity's sake) comes along, and none of the (surviving) original cast is in the film. Bad sign. The cast is largely filled with unknowns, other than Robert Carlyle--a good actor, but usually not a leading-man type. Worse sign. And Boyle isn't directing--although he's listed as an executive producer, so it's not like he's abandoned the project completely--and he's been replaced with a Spanish director (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) with a very short resume.

What's that? When the light in the display flashes red like that it's a warning?

For all that, Weeks opens in a promising fashion. We start during the time period of the original movie, and Carlyle is with a pocket of survivors (unrelated to the characters from Days) who've holed up in the British countryside. Everything's pretty normal, up until a few hundred infected come kicking in the walls. The scene goes from domestic comfort to violence, gore and chaos in just seconds, Carlyle escapes, but only by the skin of his teeth, and at great personal cost.

After that bravura opening, the time shifts to the eponymous time frame, when England's been declared disease-free, and a U.S. military force is in charge of rebuilding and securing an area of London to house British refugees who were fortunate enough to be out of the country when the virus originally got loose. When we're first introduced to this setup, through U.S. snipers stationed on London's rooftops, using their sniper scopes to peep on their charges, it's pretty obvious that we're being set up for some form of Iraq allegory. Indeed, the U.S. military is the only authority we see in this repopulated London--apparently, no member of the British government or military was out of the country when the outbreak happened.

Say the fact, the only civilian authority we see, is Carlyle, who has a vague infrastructure management job in the refugee apartment complex, which conveniently gives him an all-access pass...to everything. Think that will be part of the plot later? Anyway, among the refugees are Carlyle's teen daughter and young son, played by Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton, who come to London as the only children living in the "green zone."

[Brief aside: who names British child actors? It's like these kids were named in the hopes they'd be cast in a Harry Potter film.]

No sooner do the kids show up than everyone stops acting like they have half a brain. The old horror movie conventions where you're practically shouting at the screen, "Don't go in there! Don't touch that!"--like you're the parent of a demented toddler--are in full effect. Naturally, the virus returns, the infected go on a spree, things get out of control, and the U.S. military is unprepared. Their contingency plan in case of this scenario is simultaneously simplistic, stupid, ineffective and draconian. But seeing this social commentary put into action is none too exciting, either, and it swallows up screen time that could've been used developing characters.

We learn a little about Carlyle's character--we know, based on the opening, that he's fibbing a bit to his kids about why they have only one parent--but midway through the film the focus shifts to the kids, and a couple of U.S. soldiers who are helping to protect them, both from the zombies and from the American army. Sadly, these four characters are made from some pretty thin cardboard, saddled with lines like: "They're executing Code Red. Step 1: Kill the infected. Step 2: Containment. If containment cannot be done then Step 3: Extermination."

Uh, thanks for the exposition, there. It's helpful.

There's nothing in this movie hat approaches the visual aesthetic Boyle brought to Days. Fresnadillo's method for shooting action is to get everything in extreme closeup and shake the camera vigorously, adding a strobe effect and copious jets of blood. At first this is an interesting way to convey the confusion of battle. Later, you're wondering why this guy won't actually let you see what's happening in the film. Later still, you're searching your pockets for dramamine.

I know to horror fans most of these concerns may seem trivial. They say, "Forget the high fallutin' stuff: was it scary?" Well, yeah, parts of Weeks were scary. But then you get the bad decisions, and the plot holes, and the shakycam, and the tension and fear are replaced by annoyance. The film's climactic sequence is so irritating, it's like Fresnadillo is in the seat behind yours, poking you in the back of the head with his finger, saying, "Is this annoying you? [Poke.] Is it annoying you now? [Poke.] How about now?"

Yeah, it's annoying. Overall, the way the Yankees lost on Thursday was scarier than this, so it's not recommended. Unless Boyle takes back the reins, I'd say you can count me out of 28 Months Later...

Movie Reviews: Breach, The Host

Been a while since I posted any movie thoughts here, so here's a couple of highly recommended movies I've seen recently:

Breach -- This is the fictionalized account of the Robert Hanssen case. Hansen was an FBI counterintelligence expert who spent almost 20 years spying on the US for the Russians. Breach covers only the very end of that period, focusing on the events leading up to Hanssen's capture, particularly the role played by Eric O'Neill, an FBI trainee who went undercover as Hansen's assistant.

Like Training Day or The Last King of Scotland, this movie features a younger actor protagonist (Ryan Phillippe as O'Neill) who gets the most screen time, but the focus is really on the veteran actor/antagonist (Chris Cooper, in the role of Hanssen) with whom the younger character finds himself partnered. Cooper, biting deep into the meaty role of the ultra-patriotic, extremely religious, traitor, gives a performance that's as Oscar-worthy as Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker's performances in those other films. What's special about Cooper's performance here is the unrelenting intensity he brings to each scene. His Hanssen is a man who never lets down his guard, and never stops thinking. He doesn't look at things and people, he scrutinizes them. To Cooper's (and writer/director Billy Ray's) credit, no effort is made to explain Hanssen's behavior or put him in a sympathetic light. Cooper just lays the man, with all his contradictions and oddities, out on the screen.

Based on the trailer, it was expected that Phillippe (best known, until recently, as Mr. Reese Witherspoon) would get blown off the screen by Cooper's performance. Amazingly, Phillippe does a better job of hanging in there than his counterparts did in Training Day or Last King of Scotland (and that's no insult to James McAvoy and Ethan Hawke, both of whom are actors I really like). As O'Neill, Phillippe uses his pretty boy looks and lightweight demeanor to inhabit a role that requires everyone, including Hanssen, to underestimate him. Phillippe's line readings, which have always sounded slightly artificial in his other roles, are effective in the role of a relatively ordinary man called on to pull off a huge deception. Overall, the confrontations between Cooper and Phillippe make for a very satisfying movie.

The Host -- Probably the best horror movie I've seen since 28 Days Later, the Host is a Korean import which draws some of its inspiration from a real-life incident in which a U.S. army coroner ordered several gallons of toxic formaldehyde to be disposed of using a normal sink in the U.S. military base near Seoul. In director Joon-ho Bong's imagination (he co-wrote the script, also), this leads directly to a huge mutant creature, looking like a cross between Geiko gecko and the giant worms from Tremors, coming out of the waters of the Han River with a surly attitude and a taste for human flesh.

The action centers on the dysfunctional Park family, who own a riverside food stand. Hyun-Seo, a 12 year old schoolgirl, is the only member of the family who really seems to have her act together. Her father, Gang-du, is a dyed-blond layabout whose main gift seems to be an ability to fall asleep at will. Her uncle, the first college graduate in the family, is unemployed and has an alcohol problem. Her aunt, a competitive archer, seems like an achiever, but her perfectionism keeps her from being a success. The patriarch of the clan raised Gang-du and his siblings, so he's immediately suspect.

When the monster from the river drags Hyun Seo back to its lair, the Park clan doesn't quite pile into a yellow VW bus, but they do embark on a rescue mission while dodging cops, shady health officials who want to keep them in quarantine, and, of course, their surly feelings toward each other. Horror/Comedy is a hard genre to pull off, because most films that try for it wind up simply as limp comedies, which don't function as horror films at all. The Host keeps up the suspense while mining some unexpected situations (such as a scene at wall of remembrance for the victims of the monster's attack) for laughs. The secret ingredient here is a lack of sentimentality reminiscent of the best of Peanuts. No matter how bad the Park family's situation is, or how badly its members screw up, we're never invited to pity them. Not even when they're being chased by a giant amphibian lizard.

Movie Review: The Fountain

I've been all over the map when it comes to this film. When I heard that Darren Aranofsky's next work would be a science fiction movie with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, I was pretty near ecstatic. Weisz and Jackman are two of my favorite actors, and Aronofsky's first two films were simply brilliant. His feature debut, Pi, might have been the capper of the late-90s indie movement, complete with guerilla marketing campaign (folks spray-painting the greek letter pi on New York's sidewalks). It was the story of an obsessive math genius, incorporating elements of Jewish mysticism, corporate conspiracy theories, and repeated references to classical science and mathematics. It was a sharp contrast to the more polished, studio-style math genius indie that came out the year before, Gus Van Zant's Good Will Hunting. Aronofsky's follow-up, 2000's Requiem for a Dream, was basically the film to close-out the drug movie genre. It's probably the most harrowing English language movie I've ever seen. After that, Aronofsky was on the must-see directors list.

But then, we started getting some bad indications about The Fountain. The trailer looked kind of hokey and confusing. Then there were reports of critics at the Venice film festival booing the closing credits. The film opened very small, grossing only $5 million in its opening weekend.

I had to see it anyway, and I'm glad I did.

The story is best explained in reverse order of its three storylines--in the 26th century, Tom (Jackman) is voyaging through space to a distant nebula, in a transparent orb occupied by him and an ancient tree; he is haunted by the ghost of Izzi (Weisz), a 21st Century woman, whose husband Tommy is a cancer researcher who has been making progress through use of a mysterious botanical specimen from the jungles of Guatemala; meanwhile, Izzi is writing a book set in the 16th Century about Tomas (Jackman, again), a conquistador who is sent by Queen Isabela (you guessed it, Weisz again) of Spain to New Spain--what we know as South and Central America--to find the Tree of Life referenced in the Book of Genesis.

The three storylines cohere very closely to each other (unlike, say, Babel), turning essentially, into one man's battle against Death. You see, in the present day storyline Izzi is dying of a tumor, and in Izzi's book, Isabela is threatened by the Grand Inquisitor, who believes her to be a heretic. In both situations the men are fighting to save the lives of women they love. Future Tom's motivations are more obscure, at first--he mainly seems to enjoy practicing Tai Chi in front of a starry backdrop, and levitating in the lotus position. But he, too, is driven toward a goal set on salvation.

If the Tai Chi and lotus position sound pretentious, you've chanced upon one of the issues some might have with this movie. I think one of the reasons the Venice critics were disappointed is because this film is so...sincere. One of the signature characteristics of Aronofsky's other movies was a detachment from his subject matter. In Requiem, for example, one storyline follows the descent of a senior citizen (Ellen Burstyn, who has a smaller role in The Fountain) into drug addiction and madness. Where more sentimental directors would have played that situation for melodrama--Aronofsky set it to music. In The Fountain, the longing and grief of the characters come at us raw, without any detachment at all. This has all led to speculation that love has softened Aronofsky up--he's engaged to and has a child with Weisz--and weakened his vision.

But if you can get past the fact that this film wears its emotions on its sleeve, you're treated to a visual spectacle in the tradition of Stanley Kubrik's 2001--a thoughtful and thought-provoking film, and a critique of our society's phobia about death. Very highly recommended.

Movie Review: Babel

Complaining that a movie called "Babel" is confusing should be some kind of irony. What's stranger still, is that the confusion has nothing to do with the plot, which is fairly straightforward. A couple of Moroccan kids, trying out a new rifle, accidentally shoot an American tourist (Cate Blanchett). The tourist and her husband (Brad Pitt) have left their kids in the care of a Mexican nanny. Their emergency means that they're counting on the nanny to miss her son's wedding in Mexico, so that she can take care of their kids. In Japan, a deaf-mute teen is angry about her mother's death, and anxious about the fact that she's still a virgin.

If one of these things doesn't seem like the others, you see where this is going. I must be getting old, because ten years ago I absolutely never would have objected to a cute Japanese nymphomaniac being gratuitously tossed into a movie. But in Babel, the Tokyo-set storyline really belongs in another film. It’s visually impressive and sometimes insightful, but it doesn’t really match the other storylines, despite paying lip service to the themes of language barriers and cultural misunderstanding.

Actually, that’s a little bit backwards. It’s the other segments that are paying lip service to the miscommunication theme announced in the title and in the advertising. Even though Pitt and Blanchett are strangers in Morocco, their lack of language skills never really impacts upon their plight—there is at least one native in their group who speaks English pretty well, and is willing to translate and help. Similarly, the Mexican Nanny speaks English fairly well, as does her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal of The Science of Sleep), and the tourists’ kids seem to understand their nanny regardless of whether she’s speaking English or Spanish. Meanwhile, the Moroccan goatherds who started the whole mess don’t face any language barrier at all—just the brutal local law enforcement officials, who seem eager to prove to the world that the tourists were attacked by bandits, not terrorists. Only Chieko, the deaf-mute Japanese girl, has difficulty communicating with the world around her as the main reason for her problems.

The Moroccan kids are undone by a childish mistake. The American tourists have the phenomenal bad luck of getting shot by a stray bullet while in the middle of nowhere. Other characters demonstrate a complete lack of sense by cavalierly crossing the US/Mexico border even though they're illegal, and driving through an American border checkpoint while drunk and possibly armed, and...I could say more, but then I'd be in spoilers territory. Let's just say that if the director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and the screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, were not both from Mexico, they might come under some fire for the stupidity of their Mexican characters.

Arriaga's script is horribly uneven. There are good moments, such as a scene between Pitt and Blanchett where the conversation takes place almost completely in unfinished sentences and awkward pauses. It's beautifully written and acted, the dialogue coming in fragments as much because they have long-standing issues between them as because they've stopped listening to each other. But in other places, Arriaga's plot just doesn't make sense. Sure, it sounds topical that the U.S. would blame terrorism and create an international incident over an accidental shooting in a Muslim country, but the story wants us to believe that the same day that Blanchett's character has been shot, the U.S. has taken control of the roads in Morocco. I know we're an overbearing, empirialist superpower, and Morocco's a small, poor country, but it would take more than a few hours to stage an invasion, even if we thought Brad Pitt's life might be in danger.

Inarritu's direction makes up for some of this. The film is shot beautifully, and has long stretches with little or no dialogue. When Inarritu's busy showing us how people live, it's a whole lot easier to suspend disbelief. The wedding in Mexico is breathtaking, as are the mountains of Morocco, and just about every one of the scenes set in Japan. But even with these beautiful visual touches, the intercutting of the storylines breaks up each story's rhythm. Things will be building to crisis in one storyline, and then that storyline will be put on the backburner, until you've almost forgotten it, eliminating all the urgency and tension that had built up. Imagine throwing scenes from Lost in Translation into the TV show 24, as a season-long storyline. That's how jarring it is.

Despite all that, this movie is recommended, for its ambition, if nothing else. The performances are solid all around, and Rinko Kikuchi, the young woman who plays Chieko, is amazing. I spent a fair share of time with hearing impaired and deaf teens, and Ms. Kikuchi's performance is flawless. I wish I could say the same for Babel.

Movie Review: Casino Royale

On Filmspotting--one of my favorite podcasts--the co-hosts, Adam and Sam, talked about the trailer for the newest James Bond film, Casino Royale. The trailer starts out in black and white with grittier, more realistic scenes of the new Bond, Daniel Craig, kicking butt, followed by color scenes depicting the kind of sprawling action set pieces, chases and such for which the Bond franchise has become famous.

The question the Filmspotting hosts had is that the black and white segment looked interesting, while the color action sequences looked like more of the same from a franchise that has become stuck in a rut of flavorless, unbelievable, over-the-top action. It was not promising to learn that this new Bond would be directed by Martin Campbell, director of the previous Bond's debut, 1995's GoldenEye. GoldenEye was the very image of Bond mediocrity--not an unpleasant film, but rather safe and generic. So what was it going to be: a new direction for Bond or more of the same?

The answer, happily, is a new direction for our favorite British spy. Casino Royale does a Batman Begins to the Bond franchise, re-starting it, showing an origin story of sorts, and bringing the franchise away from camp and toward a more realistic focus. The plot of Casino Royale is simple. There's a criminal called Le Chifre who's a financier for terrorist organizations. He winds up owing his clients a ton of money, so he organizes a high-stakes (like, $10 million per head) poker tournament to make the money back. The new Double-O agent, James Bond, is sent out to make sure Le Chifre loses the tournament, so that the Brits can squeeze him for information on his terrorist contacts.

That's it. There are no death rays or invisible cars in this film--not even the old laser beam-in-a-watch. When this Bond takes a beatdown--or, even more surprisingly, when he kills someone--there's copious blood and a lot of dry cleaning involved. Not to mention fewer one-liners.

This all works with Craig in the lead, for all the same reasons that so many folks thought casting Craig was a disaster. Craig's face, handsome, but craggy and worn even at the age of thirty-eight, reflects the fact that many of the things Bond does aren't pretty. He's the first Bond since Sean Connery whose presence could really be considered menacing. At the same time, Craig's face is expressive enough that he can show the newbie awkwardness with which Bond first dons his signature tux or registers his first kill. Oh, and the guy's cut like a piece of granite, which helps sell those fight scenes.

His supporting cast is a mixed bag. Eva Green is terrific as the first Bond girl ever to have a realistic reaction to someone being killed in front of her eyes. Dame Judi Dench is predictably gruff as M, the only cast member from previous films to reprise her role in Casino. However, Mads Mikkelsen doesn't really register as Le Chifre--a stony poker face is requisite in poker, I suppose, but not such a big advantage in acting.

As much as I enjoyed Casino Royale, it wasn't perfect. There are some serious pacing problems for the film, which is nearly two and a half hours long. As Brother T says, it suffered from Return of the King's problem, where the movie looked like it was over, then started up again, three or four times. The action sequences, some of which were innovative and exciting, often ran a bit too long.

But the length of the film is somewhat justified by all the exposition they pack in between those action sequences. The main body of the movie is based around the poker tournament, the development of the relationship between Craig's Bond and Green's Vesper Lynd, and lots and lots of talking. It was great to see a Bond film in which they actually bother to develop characters, and I'm happy to say that the most tense sequence in any Bond film in at least a decade has absolutely nothing to do with guns, explosives or fighting. That's pretty cool, and well worth a few slow spots in the film.

Recommended, highly recommended if you're a Bond fan. A few random notes:

• Since it is a vital part of any James Bond film, I have to remark that the opening credits sequence was very disappointing. The playing-card motif looked like something out of the 60's, just without the comforting silhouttes of nude women. Chris Cornell's theme song was just bland, the most forgettable entry since Sheryl Crow's song for Tomorrow Never Dies. Why doesn't someone just put Portishead on retainer for this job? They can't possibly do a worse job...
  

• It's nice that someone remembered that James Bond is supposed to be a spy. During the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan tenures, the character morphed into a paramilitary man of action, who didn't seem to have much use for snooping around in other people's affairs, preferring to stick with violence and extreme sports.

• Martin Campbell has one of the stranger resumes I've ever seen for a director. It includes one movie--a 1991 made-for-cable effort called Cast a Deadly Spell--which I absolutely love, and another--1988's Criminal Law--which is one of the most befuddling and disjointed disasters I've ever seen (Gary Oldman's performance in Criminal Law is so over-the-top that the film is a so-bad-it's-good classic). He directed some of the best episodes of one of the best TV series ever (in season one of Homicide: Life on the Street), as well as some middling, but reasonably enjoyable, action films like the Mask of Zorro and No Escape. The guy was all over the place.

Review: Mission: Impossible: III

There's two stories here, one about the mid-career crisis of a Hollywood star, and the other about the summer's first big blockbuster film.

The first story is kind of stupid. Tom Cruise always enjoyed a charmed existence in that his personal life was never a bigger story than his career; his publicists always kept the public eye fixed on Cruise on the screen--even as he married and divorced Nicole Kidman (albeit, before Kidman became a perennial Oscar contender), converted from Catholicism (he was once going to be a priest) to Scientology, and suffered all sorts of rumors that he's gay.

Now, like Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, and Jennifer Lopez, Cruise is points in the Bill Simmons's Us Weekly Fantasy League first, a superstar actor second. And not in a good way. "Jumping the couch" may just replace "jumping the shark," in our cultural vocabulary.

None of this has any relevance to Mission: Impossible: III, a film more offensive for its overuse of colons than for Tom Cruise's views on Scientology. Actually, the colons might be the only offensive thing about M:I:III, which is a bit of faint praise. The film's a competent popcorn diversion, consisting of chases, gunfights, explosions, and stunts. As they say on the shampoo bottle, "Lather, rinse, repeat." M:I:III exists entirely in the moment, and is forgotten almost as soon as the end credits start to roll.

The requisite plot summary: Cruise's super-spy/aerialist, Ethan Hunt, has gone all Maverick-at-the-end-of-Top-Gun on us, and given up the field for a job training recruits at the Impossible Missions Academy. He's even gone domestic, and gotten engaged to a nurse who thinks that he's a civil servant traffic consultant. Going back to the world outside the movie for just one second, it's a bit unfortunate that Michele Monaghan, who plays the nurse, is a dead ringer for Cruise's baby-momma--just a bit sexier, for certain.

If we simply count the number of summer action films about spies (lots) against the ones about teachers (few) and traffic consultants (none, I think), we get a fair feeling that this won't last. Needless to say, up shows Cruise's spy middle manager, Billy Crudup, to tell Hunt that even though he tries to get out, they keep pulling him back in!

It's not even as dramatic as that, but it brings up a question: if you're constantly meeting with your superiors, what's the point of receiving those mission briefings that will self-destruct in five seconds? Throughout the Mission: Impossible series, Cruise has always brought in Hunt's bosses, usually getting pretty high-profile actors for those roles (Henry Czerny in the first film; Anthony Hopkins in the second; Crudup and Laurence Fishburne in this installment). Now I know that all pretense that this Mission: Impossible has anything to do with the classic TV series went out the window in the second film; all that's left now is the self-destructing tapes, latex masks, and occassional use of the Lalo Shifrin theme music.

But one of the cooler things about the Mission: Impossible TV series was that Jim Phelps was pretty much his own boss. The Impossible Missions Force was America's introduction to freelance work: your employer communicates just by sending you notes; if you screw up, they'll put it all on you; if you need any help, hire it yourself, and they're your problem--the employer isn't going to be withholding social security or paying workers' comp for your guys. I'm not the world's foremost expert on the original series, but I don't remember Jim's superiors ever coming by to chew him out or tell him how to do his job.

Another cool thing about the original series was that they relied less on guns and violence than on deception and cunning. Usually, the gang didn't actually kill anyone, but rather tricked various bad guys into doing each other in. But you can't have the typical summer blockbuster action set pieces that way, so subtlety's out the window in M:I:III.

Most of the gunfire revolves around, but doesn't actually involve, a hammy and vengeful arms dealer, played by 2005 Best Actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and a super-secret...something. The fact that we never discover what the secret thing does is part of director JJ Abrams' contribution to the film, as M:I:III is constantly winking at the audience. We have a scene where Cruise rides a motorcycle onto an airfield that is straight out of Top Gun, a character laughing aloud over the absurd name of Hunt's super-secret agency, and the film's best action sequence involves an aerial assault on a bridge straight out of James Cameron's True Lies.

In the end, Abrams seems to say, what does it matter what the McGuffin everyone's fighting over actually is? It's really just an excuse for an action movie, chases and explosions. And that about says it all. Very mild recommend.

Review: Thank You for Smoking

In 1998, Aaron Eckhart broke onto the scene hard with a role in playwright Neil Labute's directorial debut, In the Company of Men. Eckhart's character, a sociopathic, backstabbing, son of a bitch known only as "Chad," was one of the best villains of the past twenty years--a smiling liar capable of romancing a deaf office worker, and in the exact same tone, mocking her voice in the very next scene. It was a scene-stealing, stand-up-and-take-notice role.

A star is born, right? Not so fast. For some reason, in LaBute's follow-up film, Your Friends and Neighbors, Eckhart didn't get to reprise the role of the sleek predator--instead, he was cast as the onanistic, overweight sap in a larger ensemble piece. While the abrupt shift in character type showed that Eckhart had range, it pretty much doomed the film. With Jason Patric doing a far more typical rendition of the bad guy role, Your Friends... didn't have any charisma to counterbalance the ugliness of LaBute's characters and script. From there he went on to a series of well-received supporting roles, before earning lead roles in flops such as Possession, The Core, and Suspect Zero.

So now, after more than seven years spent trying to break through (again) Eckhart has finally found a vehicle worthy of his talents--as the lead in Thank You for Smoking, director Jason Reitman's adaptation of Christopher Buckley's satirical novel. In the movie, Eckhart is Nick Naylor, mouthpiece for the Tobacco industry. Nick's a bit like what you suspect Chad would be, if he had a soul. Like Chad, Nick is armed with limitless self-confidence and not so much of a conscience. However, Nick isn't malicious--even though he proudly points out to his alcohol and firearms lobbyist friends that his product has the highest death toll--he's just a guy who likes to argue, and influence people, and get paid for it.

In the movie, we follow Nick as he runs errands for Big Tobacco--appearing on talk shows, delivering bribes, and jousting with a Vermont Senator (William H. Macy) who wants all cigarette packs labeled "poison" with a skull and crossbones--while balancing his time as a divorced dad with a young son (Cameron Bright).

Reitman keeps the pace brisk, relentlessly cutting from scene to scene rather than allowing a joke or situation to run past the point where it's humorous. The result is a comedy with relatively few big laughs, but a constant stream of smaller ones. While this approach leaves some of the scenes feeling like they never reached their full comedic potential, the most common crime in 21st century comedies is the tendency to beat any functional gag to death--tune into Saturday Night Live any given weekend if you want to see examples.

Eckhart's supporting cast is excellent, particularly Rob Lowe as an Ovitz-like Hollywood agent, and Maria Bello and David Koechner as Nick's fellow "merchants of death." Bright does a nice, if creepy job as the apple that hasn't fallen far from the tree, but Tom Cruise's baby-momma (Katie Holmes) is a bit over her head as a supposed sexpot reporter.

But really, Thank You for Smoking is Eckhart's show, and he makes the film worth watching. In the hands of many actors, including most of today's leading men, Nick would be a one-dimensional cartoon character, over-played for laughs. Eckhart makes Nick human, without ever letting the story fall into the pit of sentimentality. I heartily recommend the movie.

Review: Match Point

Saw Match Point on Saturday. To say that it's the best Woody Allen film in years isn't saying much. To put it more precisely, it's definitely his best since Deconstructing Harry and probably better than anything since Manhattan Murder Mystery. Match Point doesn't, however, reach the level of Crimes and Misdemeanors, the film to which it is most often compared, because it is pretty much a remake of Allen's 1989 masterpiece.

Now, that isn't a terribly damning statement, since Crimes was one of the best movies of the past 20 years. Here's the setup on Match Point: Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a former tennis tour standout, who's now the house pro at a posh club in London. Dirt poor and living in a studio with a fold-out bed, he's determined to improve his situation, as evidenced by a scene where we see him double-fisting a paperback copy of Crime and Punishment with a second paperback--a study guide with a title like "Understanding Dostoevsky."

Chris's chance comes when he starts giving lessons to Tom, a son of priviledge with a rusty backhand. After forcing into his conversation with Tom the fact that he loves opera, Chris finds himself invited into Tom's world of wealth: the private box at the opera house, the weekend at their country house, and the covetous glances of Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Soon enough, he's shagging the sister, dropping Dostoevsky references on Tom's dad, and being sized up for a spot in the family business, which operates out of a huge Faberge Egg-looking office building, which I guess symbolizes the vague cutting edge of luxury, like the Empire State Building or the late Twin Towers once did.

There's only one fly in the ointment for Chris's relentless climb to the social top, and that's Nola (Scarlett Johansen), a struggling American actress. When Chris first meets Nola, the attraction is instantaneous--he's busy commenting on her "sensuous lips" and on the verge of inviting her to test the springs on his fold-out when he learns that Nola is Tom's fiance.

Obviously, even after Nola becomes off-limits to him, Chris does not stop desiring her. And this being a noir movie, eventually he will have to decide between "the lady and the loot," and the only option he will have if he wants to keep his choice is...murder!

Now, the most refreshing thing about Match Point is the un-Woody Allen-ness of it. Allen isn't in the movie, and unlike every other recent Allen film, there isn't a Woody Allen stand-in character -- that's a younger actor, encouraged by the director to do his best impression of Allen as a performance: see Will Ferrel in Melinda and Melinda, Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity, Jason Biggs in Anything Else. Instead, the characters speak in naturalistic tones and none of them drop into Allen-esque patois of artificial, neurotic, rambling stream-of-consciousness talk. Allen finds a different voice for his characters, and it sounds authentic (although I'd love to hear from a real Londoner who's seen the movie on this point).

You'd pretty much forget that Allen was involved in the movie altogether if it wasn't for the lascivious way the camera focuses on Johansen--particularly in the sex scenes. That's recognizably Allen in his dirty old man mode, which nonetheless feels much more appropriate with Rhys Meyers in the lead than it would if the young actress were getting it on with Woody or one of Woody's avatars.

Getting back to the plot, for any of you who have seen Crimes and Misdemeanors (and if you haven't just stop reading, go rent it, and see it now--the Internet will still be here when you're done) what happens next won't be terribly surprising. Chris's dilemma is much like Judah Rosenthal's in Crimes: he wants a great many things for himself without accepting any of the consequences that come with them. As in Crimes, Chris's plight is viewed from Allen's atheist/nihilistic viewpoint, where there is no merciful God and no cosmic justice. That's appropriate to the film noir aspects of the movie.

However, in the course of "streamlining" the film to be more purely a thriller (which is an odd concept, as supposedly Match Point is the longest movie that Allen has ever made, and its pacing is often sluggish), all the philosophical aspects that made Crimes so powerful--the metaphysical discourses, suicidal PhDs, blind rabbis, and imaginary confessions--have been reduced to a single near-cliche image. It's a tennis ball hitting the top of the net, with only luck--not karma, God, justice, or providence--deciding whether the ball lands on your side of the net, or your opponent's.

The image is used twice, effectively, in the movie. However, "some things depend on luck" is a pretty thin premise for a feature film, which leaves Match Point as a slightly unsatisfying experience, at least compared to Crimes and Misdemeanors. I still recommend it highly for Rhys-Meyers's excellent lead performance, and fine supporting turns by Mortimer, Matthew Goode as Tom, and Brian Cox as Tom and Chloe's father. Johansen, though she looks terrific, is a bit of a disappointment in a role that's a bit unevenly-written, neither femme fatale nor girl next door.

But the bigger story of Match Point is that Allen--a filmmaker a lot of people had written off--is back, reinventing himself and taking a new direction. That's good news, and plenty of reason to see a movie all on its own.