The Siege

The Siege (Edward Zwick, 1998) Creepily omniscient film made three years before 9/11 (notice the WTC in the poster) in which terrorism comes home to roost in America, specifically with well-timed, somewhat improvised suicide bombers blowing up buses, theaters, and populous areas in the heart of New York City.  Zwick (and screenwriter Lawrence Wright, with dialogue tweaks by Zwick and Menno Meyjes) showed us something that Americans didn't want to see (and believed impossible): America under terrorist attack.   

No one went to see it, and critics attacked it as being xenophobic and unrealistic.  After 9/11, it was reality.  And one of the last films to feature radical Islamists as terrorists.  Now, studios shy away from such depictions because, in their infinite bravery, they're afraid of reprisals. 

But, here, they weren't, not even when the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Council on American-Islamic Relations started picketing the theaters, for the film being offensive and promoting stereotypes of Islamic terrorists.  

Evidently Al Qaeda didn't get the communiques.  Might've helped "the cause."

And despite some lip-service to Islam and Arab-Americans being just as aghast at terrorist activities and giving their full cooperation with the investigation—and Tony Shalhoub plays a Islamic Arab on the FBI task force—one gets the distinct impression that some of the film's best friends are Arab-Americans.  

But, that's the sideshow.  

What the film boils down to is not who's doing what to whom, but in meeting the enemy and it being ourselves.  New York becomes the target of accelerating attacks when a bus is hijacked with no demands—and no explosives it turns out, the passengers are merely splattered with blue dye. The FBI's lead investigator Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) thinks it's more than a prank, or, as it's dismissed, "assault with a deadly color."  He knows two things that worries him: "they" know explosives and "they" know the FBI's response time now.

Inserting herself into the investigation is Elise Kraft (Annette Bening), an NSA investigator who doesn't like to share information, as much as take it. She and Hubbard spar over jurisdiction and ownership.  The FBI is new to the investigation and Elise has been at this for quite some time. "In this game, the most committed wins."  While they're bickering and throwing down threats, another bus gets hijacked, and negotiations begin.  But the results are different, attracting the Feds, especially the Army in the person of General Devereaux (Bruce Willis), who we have seen earlier overseeing the investigation of an Arab cleric (of whom the United States does not officially know the whereabouts).  He's nosing around just to make sure that, although the NSA and FBI seem to bungling and out of their depths at this point, his operation isn't compromised. 

But, the atrocities accelerate and get bigger—The FBI's New York headquarters is attacked, resulting in 600 victims, many of them Hubbard's colleagues, and at that point, the President declares Martial Law. 

Despite his earlier protests in committee ("The Army is a broad sword, not a scalpel. Make no mistake, Senator. We will hunt down the enemy, we will find the enemy, and we will kill the enemy. And no card-carrying member of the ACLU is more dead set against it than I am. Which is why I urge you - I implore you. Do not consider this as an option. Trust me, senator - you do not want the Army in an American city.") Devereaux heads up the operation, cordoning off Brooklyn and gathering up all Arabic-speaking young men and detaining them in Yankee Stadium.  Profiling isn't second-guessed, habeas is suspended, citizens are marched out to camps, and torture is the order of the day—specifically water-boarding.

Must have seemed pretty nightmarish in 1998.  Now, that the "ethics" of water-boarding have been discussed endlessly by the cable-news pundits (to the point where I want to drown them), Guantanamo (or the more friendly "Git-mo!") has been holding prisoners for...how many years now?...we've been living with no-fly lists, and even gone to such silly extremities as taking off our shoes at airports (while "they" have gone the way of planting underwear bombs) over the last eleven...ELEVEN...years.  And a lot of people have died, and Americans—loyal Americans—are coming back to a backlog of unanswered help, and we're now losing more of them to suicide (as we did in Vietnam) than to the actual war.

The crackdown will be televised

"We have met the enemy, and they are us."  That was the message of The Siege and no one listened.*  And here we are, on the anniversary of 9/11, and the longest war in our history, and conflicts have not been resolved.  They're only getting more complicated.  The situation has gotten even more fractured, and the wars are internal as well as external, looking more like the Mexican stand-off that ends the film. 
Now, here we are, a dozen years after the fact, and there are folks amidst the current host of Syria chatterers, who want to bomb Damascus, take out their leader, and replace him with the rebels opposing him, and in the glib words of Willis' commander "be back at base in time for the play-offs."

Trouble is, some of the factions among the rebels are Al Qaeda, who we've been fighting over these last dozen years and trillions of dollars.  As the movie says "It's easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. What's hard is choosing the wrong that's more right." 

Orwell is in his grave...creating his own spin zone.

* Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: [upon learning Devereaux's plans to torture Tariq] Are you people insane? What are you talkin' about?

General William Devereaux: The time has come for one man to suffer in order to save hundreds of lives.

Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: One Man? What about two, huh? What about six? How about public executions?

General William Devereaux: Feel free to leave whenever you like, Agent Hubbard.

Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: Come on General, you've lost men, I've lost men, but you - you, you *can't* do this! What, what if they don't even want the sheik, have you considered that? What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we're doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture him, General, we do that and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for is over. And they've won. They've already won!

General William Devereaux: Escort him out.

Looper

Killing Time
or
Maybe You; Möbius

The trouble with time-travel movies is the really good ones (that is, the plausible ones—if such a thing exists) require a flow-chart to make any sense, and once you're doing that, you take a lot of the fun out of it.  That would be the problem with going back in time—you'd be spending so much time making sure you didn't disturb anything and cleaning up after oneself that you'd hardly have any time reliving the past in the present if you hope to have any future.  As one of the characters says "This time-travel crap, it fries your brain like an egg."

Fortunately, Rian Johnson (who made the rather precious Brick, and the entirely commendable The Brothers Bloom) has already done the muck-work for Looper, a tough-as-nails-time-travel noir set in the year 2044, where thirty years hence (2072) time-travel will be invented...and instantly made illegal.  Well, if time-travel is outlawed, only outlaws will have time-travel, and so organized crime uses it—not to increase the fortunes, but to dispose of their garbage.  "You can't dispose of a body in the future," narrates Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the long explanatory opening voice-over).  "I dispose a body that technically doesn't exist."  The future-hoods (dressed like Leone gunfighters) kidnap a "disposable," throw a hood over his head, hog-time him in a vest lined with silver bars, and toss him in the time machine, where he quickly appears in 2044, is just as quickly "whacked" and the silver mined as payment by the executioner, called a "looper"—local-time kids, who are given rich rewards, a steady cache of drugs, and rental of a woman of his choice.  They live like sociopathic kings in a Karl Rove dreamscape, where the meek don't inherit nuthin'—the middle class roaming the streets, pushing shopping carts, while the killers drive jet-cycles.  Overseeing this mob is Abe (Jeff Daniels), recruited from the future to manage the loopers and keep them in line, which include a rather draconian retirement policy (don't these guys read their hiring contracts?) that forces them to "retire" their older selves when they are sent back in time for disposal—you get your gold-watch at the start of your career and a gold lined cement overshoes at the end.  

That's the set-up.*  Things get complicated, when Joe stands in his chosen field, waiting for the body-to-be to show up on the blood-tarp, and when it does, there's no hood, and when he looks into his target's eyes, they're his.  Joe has to kill himself from the future.

You know that already.  You've seen the set-up, read the poster.** But the implications, why that is, why "Old Joe" shows up with no hood, and what comes next...and next...and next...and then back...then next, would be revealing any of the surprises the film has in store.  It's enough to say that, in surface detail, it's quite an ingenious little ride, and the plot-holes are kept cleverly out of sight and out of mind, and one has to assume a lot, such as evidently time-travel only exists as a form of going back to the past, and not forward into the future, as one of the characters does it "the old-fashioned way."  And one has to accept a lot of "fuzzy mechanism" mumbo-jumbo for things happening to Joe that ultimately affects "old Joe"—for instance the rather painful form of communication between the two, that is further demonstrated in the extreme by another looper (played by Paul Dano), which is just a damned clever device, but also grisly to the queasy point.

Lots of violence...in some interesting forms, and one of the alarming things is how fast people get shot in 2044—you appear(BOOM!), and Johnson is doing some very clever things with the camera these days that aren't so derivative of other directors.  That's good.  His sense of timing in editing is still as razor sharp as it has always been, and he's not afraid to mess with aspect-ratios for effect.  The ideas are good, and one thing Johnson has always had is a clever way with dialogue, which is where Looper shines, time after time.

Looper is a Matinee.  And it might be worth seeing again some time.


* ...except for one little tidbit of information that some of us have mutated to have telekinesis, but it doesn't amount to much—"no superhero stuff." says Joe  "We can float quarters.  That's it."  Yeah, but...  It wouldn't BE there if it wasn't necessary.  And it is, but only semi-so.

** And if anybody is wondering why JoGo-Levitt looks weird in this movie, it's because he's been given a prosthetics make-over so he has Willis' nose, eyes, lip-line, and theinning hair and does a rather inspired Willis-routine throughout the movie, especially in an interview with Abe where the resemblance and mannerisms are uncanny. 

Moonrise Kingdom

A Troubled Young Person's Guide to Themes of Defiant Youth (ala Antonioni) with Kubrickian Stylistics (as interpreted by Wes Anderson)
or
Full Metal Jackasses


Moonrise Kingdom might be my favorite Wes Anderson film yet.  The films of Wes Anderson have gotten more and more juvenile, regressing in sensibility, but progressive in terms of connecting with a child-like world-view.  Like his dark companion in film, Tim Burton, Anderson chooses subjects and styles that appeal to his inner kid, pulling in favorite things from his growing up years  to include in his films.  But, unlike Burton, he doesn't concentrate on the dark and morose, focusing instead on a sense of wonder, even if in his world-view the adult act like children and the children try to act like adults.

So, Moonrise Kingdom, co-written by Anderson and Roman Coppola (Francis' iconoclastic kid), set in the mid-60's and involving an East coast island community.  There are two factions, the authorities, represented by island law enforcement—Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) and the troop leader of a group of "Khaki Scouts"—Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton).  There is a dysfunctional family, the Bishops (led by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand).  Both factions represent authority, and empty authority at that.  Their worlds are controlled, regimented, but still subject to outside forces and acts of God, like weather—there's a storm approaching as the film's exposition expert (played by Bob Balaban) is only too quick to report.

Into this mix come a pair of star-crossed likers, outcasts from both houses, like Romeo and Juliet.  Sam (Jared Gilman) is an orphan with enough issues that his foster parents no longer want him; Suzy (Kara Hayward) is the oldest child of the Bishops and already is labeled as a "very troubled child."  They meet at an amateur production of Benjamin Britten's "Noye's Fludde"*—he's on a scout outing, she plays a raven.  They begin corresponding in secret, and then both escape their cloisters, he from the Khaki Scouts camp, she from her family home.  They live off the land, he with his survival skills and supplies, she with her books and records, a mutually dependent family with different roles.  It doesn't take long for their disappearance to be discovered and the search parties form, the police led by Sharp and the Scouts, led by Ward, with the Bishops poking, prodding and threatening lawsuits.  The kids lead them all a not-so-merry chase, and there are casualties along the way. But, the fugitives press on, despite the fact that, on an island, they can never really escape.

It's a romantic's version of 'the barefoot bandit" story, but without the issues of ego, narcissism, and general public nuisance, and Anderson couches it all in an idiosyncratic format with scrupulous Kubrickian stylistic fluorishes—the measured tracking shots, the hand-held shots of freedom and chaos; the stylized expressionless acting, the structured mise en scene, perfectly balanced on a central fulcrum.  On top of that, it's hilarious, with dialogue that's formal, distinct, played absolutely straight, betraying no irony, delivered in a deadpan lack of elevation.

It's charming-no wonder these kids want out, left to their own devices.  They still want structure, just their own structure, and, although self-imposed outcasts, seem far more together than those of their "betters."

Fun, odd, and rebellious in Anderson's over-stated understated fashion.  Wonder what he'll do when he grows up.


Moonrise Kingdom is a Full-Price Ticket.


* Britten is the classical composer-thread rolling throughout Moonrise Kingdom, and his "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" is the starting theme for the film's opening sequence—a gliding, tracking tour of the Bishop's house.  They'll also do a version of it over Alexander Desplat's closing music over the credits.

What Just Happened

What Just Happened (Barry Levinson, 2008) Ben (Robert De Niro) is a producer in Hollywood and he has a tough life.  His new movie starring Sean Penn just previewed and the cards don't look good.  The director, wanting to be "edgy," has a scene where the bad guys shoot Penn's dog, then kill Penn.  Audiences are upset about the dog.  The studio (run by Catherine Keener) is upset about the audiences and wants to re-cut the film, the director is upset about his "vision" being changed and refuses to cooperate.  Ben wants the to keep the director happy, the studio happy, the audiences happy, the two ex-wives (including Robin Wright) and three ex-children (including Kristen Stewart) happy, while still worrying about where he's standing in a Vanity Fair "Power in Hollywood" photoshoot.

On top of that, he's got a big budget movie starting its shoot on Friday and the star (Bruce Willis playing Bruce Willis) is being payed $20 million to star in it, but there's one little hitch—he's grown "a Grizzly Adams" beard, and the studio is panicking—people want to see Bruce Willis when they see Bruce Willis and they want Ben to coax the temperamental star to shave it off, which he refuses to do for "artistic reasons."*  Ben's life is an endless soliloquy of superficial arguments, hastily-composed rationalizations and insincere ego-stroking in the gamesmanship of Hollywood, played over a Blue-Tooth behind the wheel of a constantly in-motion Lexus. 

Based on producer Art Linson's book (sub-titled "Bitter Hollywood Tales From the Front Line") and adapted by him for this film, it's a nice study of how removed from reality, logic and best practices the industry is.  But, at the same time Barry Levinson's film of it, while duly making note of the sliding loyalties Ben displays, also seems to expect you to feel sorry for him.  One would, if one didn't want to have this life.  There is no tragedy here, merely minor inconveniences that whittle away at Ben's soul and career.  But, he still has a roof over his head.  He has a car (and the insurance for it), a cell-phone, a blue-tooth, a fancy-schmancy espresso machine, the ear of many Hollywood players, and the phone numbers of ambitious actresses.  Boo to the Hoo.  Yes, Hollywood's crazy...but it's not homeless and crazy.

That's why backstage dramas in tinsel-town are really only good when played for laughs, and should only be reserved when the writer-director-producer has completely run out of ideas (and when that happens, they should read a book, instead).  You look at movies like The Oscar, or The Big Knife, with the hand-wringing of the elite, and you can look right into the soul of industry people who have lost touch with their audiences**...like Norma Desmond screeching about her woes.  It's why Sunset Blvd. is such a classic gem of a movie.  Norma is crazy...and pathetic...and clueless.

Howard Hawks had it right.  After awhile, he was making movies about making movies—but, they were well-veiled allegories.  Anytime Hawks had a group of disparate people coming together with a single goal in mind, he was talking about what he and his crew did for a living...only they were flying the mail, or capturing live rhinos, driving the cattle, getting the headline, or battling the monster at the research station...anything but making movies.  That would be as much fun as watching sausages being made.  If you want to complain about being in the entertainment industry, try pumping gas...then, have a drink or climb onto the shrink's couch.  Don't get "meta" on the audience.  They go to the movies to escape their troubles, not hear about yours.

But, like Fellini, pretty soon the writers start penning their autobiographies.  Linson might be thinking that he did a good job changing the names to protect the innocent, but listening to  his DVD audio commentary with director Levinson, one hears the vagueness, the "rote"-ness of his expressions, as if he's just passing through, and once the credits come up, he's already out the door (he's gone before the "A Barry Levinson Film" credit comes up).  The two were in separater facilities recording their tracks, and as Linson gets up he says "Good seein' ya, Barry" "uh...talking to ya," says Levinson.  "Oh.  Yeah...well..." says Linson.  "We should get together when you come to New York."

Yes, we "really" should.

* True story, although I won't mention the movie or the star (it's easily found, actually).  But, it reminds me of the struggles Richard Donner had while making Superman, the Movie—making a man fly was easy compared to star-negotiations.  Donner had a meeting with Marlon Brando, where the actor was pitching character ideas that would keep him from having to appear on camera, like playing Superman's kryptonian father as a suitcase or "a green bagel," and Gene Hackman didn't want to shave his moustache to play Lex Luthor.  Donner finally said to Hackman on-set. "Look, Gene, you shave yours off and I'll shave mine off."  Hackman agreed, shaved and came back on-set.  "Okay, now it's your turn."  Donner then peeled off the fake moustache he's been wearing, which delighted Hackman.

** (The same could be said for politicians—anybody in Washington looking at cutting the health-plans for those in the legislative branch...if not, why not?)

Red

"Better Dead Than Red"
or
"Who Wouldn't Want to See Helen Mirren with a Sniper Rifle?"*

Cute.**

That's the word for Red.  Not good.  Not bad.  Just "cute."  I mean, what's not to like?  A movie top-heavy with talent in front of the lens—in fact, there are so many Emmy/Oscar-winning actors (including Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfuss buried in the credits) that one wonders why there wasn't a better project for them to do than this.  Yes, it's entertaining (if you turn the brain off).  Sure, it's occasionally funny—it's especially nice to see Bruce Willis back in his lighter mode, reminding one of how damned good he was in his "Moonlighting" days, and John Malkovich taking full advantage of his "crazy coot" part without pretensions of doing anything serious.  And it's nice to see a full cast of "mature" actors in a movie based on a comic book series, so that the potential audience demographic is as wide as Morgan Freeman's smile.  For a reviewer of my advanced age (55), it is a little disconcerting to see these storied thesp's I've grown up watching (often from their first filmed roles) being sold as "old farts in the pasture,"*** despite how easily they deal with their younger counterparts, like fine actors Karl Urban and Mamet collaborator Rebecca Pidgeon, though it's presented in a somewhat condescending manner.

The main problem I have with the movie is that (timing aside), it's just another in the series of "Dirty Dozen" discarded mercenary movies we've seen so many of this year, and it's an uninspired entry, at that.  Oh, sure, it's tricked up with animated post-card location bridges (that get tedious), a coy break-away editing style, and a pyrotechnic fetish that mushrooms every explosion into a lens-searing extravaganza, and the occasional "see-this-wonder-how-we-got-this" shot that is, basically, the director trying to draw attention from his actors ("I'm helping!!").  Wish he's paid a bit more attention to what was going on in the script, rather than in how to present it.

There's a little too much reliance on exposition that telegraphs what will happen in the movie (and it doesn't help that the actors tend to "wink" the importance of those lines at times).  And if there's a script problem, the director just figures out a way that he can draw attention away from it, rather than make it better.

Take, for example, an early shot of a line of gun-men—a nice, easily raked-over straight line of gun-men (wouldn't even need to go through a whole clip!)—advancing on a house that Willis' character Frank Moses lives in a quiet suburban neighborhood.  It looks impressive, until you realize how damn dumb it is.  These jack-booted thugs (and in a NRA wish-fulfillment, they are government ops) advance on the house, not breaking formation, swiss-cheesing the house back to its foundation in the dead of night.  Wow!  Cool!  One could make a case for "stylized comic action," if it wasn't so stupid-looking at first glance.  But, remember, I said "quiet suburban neighborhood?" You actually, earlier, do see neighbors.  So, where is everybody?  No one comes outside, the sequence goes on for many minutes, without a dog barking, a siren in the background, someone clappering-on the lights, or an actual NRA member shouting protest.  That's just dumb.  And it's the first of many "fish-bowl" sequences where things happen in only a world where this movie exists, as it has nothing to do with how "the real world" works—despite playing on the populace's paranoid things about "how the real world works."  One wishes that one could forgive the contrivances, but you can't, as the movie hinges on them.  And as sure as a bullet wound that was excruciating a few minutes ago, will be forgotten in the next few minutes, the director will find a way to wave something shiny at the camera (right before it explodes) to make you forget.  I don't mind having my disbelief suspended, so long as someone isn't constantly cutting the cable to sabotage it.

Director Schwentke (The Time Traveler's Wife) is more interested in the kill-shot (with minimal blood-loss) than story-logic.  But, lest one think I'm unappreciative, there is a neat shot, however it was done, of Willis stepping outside his skidding car firing his gun as the vehicle cantilevers around him.  Nice.

That's fun and all...even cute...but, I tend to like my spy stories to have a little more substance than cotton-candy to it, a bit more fiber, something at risk, so that when folks do go in harm's way, they do so because it is necessary to do so and the personal risk matters.  So that they matter. Or else, what's the point of all the point-and-shoot?  I'm not interested in watching a bunch of good actors having fun picking up a paycheck.

Still, want to know the coolest thing about Red?  Seeing Helen Mirren firing an automatic weapon without so much as a flinch or an eye-blink, deliberately keeping those flinty eyes wide open, while the burly male extras playing the disposable agents firing back are fluttering their eye-lids right and left.  Now, that's a Dame.

Red is a very cheap Rental.

* A quote from "Red" comic series writer Warren Ellis.

** Tommy Lee Jones revealed this (with a sneer) to be his least favorite word on "Inside the Actor's Studio."  Yup.

*** The title refers to the group's designation as "Retired: Extremely Dangerous."

Surrogates

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meat-Bags"

To sell a science fiction concept for a mass audience, you can never stray too far from the norms of established genres. Or else it won't pass the audience's "laugh test." Hit them with too many crazy concepts, like melting ice-caps or human civilization replaced with robots (as in the case of "A.I."), and the audience giggles because it's so far beyond their ken.

Give them the concept in little nano-drips and drabs and couch it in, say, a detective movie, or a western (as in "Outland" or "Serenity") and there's enough comfort with the familiar to cushion the "out-there."

So, here's "Surrogates," a comic book movie with no spandex,* set in a world where nobody is whom they seem: the populace is plugged into synth-robots, who go about their daily lives—their hosts' daily lives, mind you—and hit the pavements, their actions controlled by the drones from home. Fully 98% of the world's population is represented in this phenomenon, which was created to able the disabled, then as cannon-fodder in the country's war-games (there's a chilling shot of surrogates going into combat, controlled by Army hosts, who, when their boy-toy gets whacked, they inhabit another one--there are rooms full of computers waiting for The Big One), then as "the latest thing"—you don't have to be "present" to be present, just lay around the house all day with your thoughts and your surrogate's actions.

Okay. That 98% spread number is probably unrealistic, but the concept is pretty brilliant, evoking the present day's capacity to relegate their lives to "social networks" hiding behind screen-names and false personalities, and the human capacity to take a good idea and over-do it...to death. And the film-makers (writers Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato** and director Jonathan Mostow—not the best of directors, but actually displays some swatches of style here) do some ingenious work with a film that could have turned into merely a recycled "I, Robot" but emerged from the factory a great deal better than that mis-fire. For instance, the robots are all super-modeled with controllable hair, perfect skin, the healthiest blue in their corneas, small waists and big bouncy boobs. At home in their "stim-chambers" everybody schlumps around in their underwear, unshaven and unshowered. Their wax-works stride down the street, with arms only perfunctorily swinging and no hesitation of step, no paralyzing self-doubt. GPS is their co-pilot.

The niftiest idea is employing a digital effect that has rarely worked in movies before—digital de-aging, that staple of prequels that takes an aging star's face and makes it gratuitously waxy (they're very fond of it in the "X-men" movies), but it never convinces. Here, that same technique erases five o'clock shadows, pores and wrinkles, making the stars look, quite properly, like wax-museumed versions of themselves. FBI Detective Greer (Bruce Willis) even has an oddly out-of-place mop of blond hair. His partner (Radha Mitchell) is a spiffy blond and their captain (Boris Kodjoe) looks like Taye Diggs' better-looking brother(!). It's a giggly jape at the perfect appearance of corporate culture.

But in that perfect veneer a couple of dents show up. Greer and Peters are assigned to a case of two surrogates zapped and de-activated in a back-alley. Although it looks like one for the "Recycling" boys, upon investigation they discover that the hosts, too, have been killed (the police call the human puppet-masters "meat-bags"), their brains fried down the link-line. Looks like it's homicide.

And someone's responsible.

The investigation is the weakest part of the movie, because it involves the filthy rich, the military-industrial complex, a missing scientist, and an anti-surrogate cult that likes to "ava-tar and feather" any "robo-pigs" that enter their "surrogate-free-zone"—I'll bet there's a John D. MacDonald novel out there with that exact same premise, minus the robots. Ving Rhames (one of my fave actors) plays the leader of the cult, "The Prophet." You can bet he's in it up to his dread-locks. Indeed, the mystery is almost second-nature, its genre gears openly exposed, taking a back-seat to the societal aspects of the story.

It's been getting drubbed in the reviews, but I found it competent—even a bit inspired—especially in its good sci-fi way of holding a mirror up to society. And Willis, who doesn't shy from a good sci-fi concept—"Twelve Monkeys," "The Fifth Element"—manages to engage both elements of his persona, the good dramatic actor and (in his robot guise) the smart-ass, one gear-shift from winking at the audience. Much to admire, even if one occasionally hears the machinations grinding.

"Surrogates" is a Matinee.


* Based on the 2007 comic series by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele

** They wrote "The Game" and "Catwoman," as well as such paranoid thrillers as "The Net," and know their robots as they wrote the last two "Terminator" movies. They fit the mold of the classic answer of directors asked their favorite movie of theirs: "The next one."

Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation, (Linklater, 2006)

Harry Rydell: It is a sad fact of life, Don, but the truth is we all have to eat a little shit from time to time

Scene 1: We are in a brightly-lit fast food restaurant. Two men are sitting in a garishly-upholstered booth. One is an overweight man with wild, uncombed hair and a three-day growth on his face. He is wearing a faded t-shirt underneath a corduroy jacket with missing elbow patches. The legend on his t-shirt says, ' Roll cameras, action, cut' and he may or may not be a film director. The other is a thin-faced nervous man with stringy long hair and thick glasses. He is wearing a buttoned-down striped shirt and in his top pocket are a collection of pens and pencils. Some of the pens have leaked onto his shirt leaving a multi-colored stain on the front. He is tapping his hands nervously on the table; he may or may not be a writer.

Overweight man: The way I see it, it's all about conscience and free will. You know, whether you really care about this stuff and whether you care enough to actually, you know, like, do something about it.

Nervous man: Right.

Overweight man: So, we need to show it all, the whole enchilada, you know what I mean, the guys that sell this stuff, the schmucks that work in the restaurant, all the crap, how we are all part of this big machine and we don't even know it.

Nervous man: O.K. ...

Overweight man: Could I get another cup of coffee over here?

He directs his question at a young woman dressed in the uniform of the fast food chain. Her name tag says Amber and she looks like she is a high school senior.

Young woman: Sorry sir, we don't do refills.

Overweight man: See what I mean. They just want to screw you over, get your money and get you out the door. Goddammit.

Nervous man: So, how far you want to go back with this?

Overweight man: What do you mean 'how far back?"

Nervous man: Well, it's not just the fast food companies, is it? I mean, where does all this shit come from? You got your meat packers and your ranchers. They're all part of it too, man.

Overweight man: Right, yeah. Then there's the illegals too. We could get a whole angle on the illegals. Show the mules bringing them over and handing them over to these places that don't have no unions, no safety regs. Yeah we could do a whole slant on that.

Nervous man: O.K so now you got your problem but what about your solution? What about this stuff about conscience? How are you going to work that in?

Overweight man: How about this? Let's take your average guy, stuck working for one of these corporations, you know, a family man just like that guy over there.

He points to a man sitting in a booth with a woman and two kids. The kids are eating their meals while the woman is staring out the window. The man is watching a certain area of Amber's anatomy as she bends over to wipe down a table for an older man who looks like he's auditioning for a Marlboro commercial. Or maybe he's a rancher.

Nervous man: Yeah, let's say he used to work for some cable company and now he's got a job thinking up marketing schemes for this burger chain. Only the more he finds out about the product, the more he thinks he's being asked to peddle crap.

Overweight man: So how about if he has to go and look at one of those meat packing places they have around here. And then we could show how those kinds of places are just bending all the rules to make the big bucks, trucking in illegals from Mexico, screwing them over, you know, no contracts, no safety regs, just giving it to them in the ass. But he doesn't see it at first because he just believes what he sees.

Nervous man: Yeah, literally screwing them in the ass. So what happens?

Overweight man: He's gotta find out about what really goes on but who's going tell him? Who's not benefiting from all this?

Nervous man: What about Marlboro man over there. Maybe he's one of those ranchers that doesn't buy into all this. He's got developers leaning on him on the one side and the meat packers on the other.

Overweight man: OK I like it. So we got to find a way to put them together.

His gaze wanders outside to the motel parking lot opposite. He watches as a red pick up truck pulls up and a tall, well-built man gets out and goes up to one of the doors. It opens and a few moments later, he comes back out followed by two Hispanic looking men who get back into the truck bed. He is just able to see the faces of a woman as the motel door closes. It's the face of a thousand women he has seen before, cleaning his hotel room or standing behind the counter of a restaurant like this.

Overweight man: Then, there's people like her.

He points over to Amber who has come off shift and is now sitting at a booth opposite a woman and a man. The two adults look as if they could be sister and brother. The woman is wearing a uniform with a badge shaped like a dog. The man looks like he hasn't changed his style of clothes since he was a stoner at Berkeley in the 60's.

Nervous man: What do you mean?

Overweight man: Well, you think she gets more than minimum wage? You think she likes selling this crap? Maybe she just wants to go out and party or maybe she's one of those animal activists.

Nervous man: What would someone like that be doing working in a place like this?

Overweight man: That's my point. All these people - they are all caught up in the same freaking mess - it gets us all and no one can do anything about it. I mean, even if you went right up to one of those packing plants, cut the freaking fence and let the cows out they probably wouldn't even be smart enough to escape. And we're just the same, man. We're like those cattle stuck in the pens. Sticking together until it's time for someone to blow a freaking hole in our head.

Nervous man: I don't know, man. Seems like an awful lot to get in one movie.

Cast of characters

Overweight man: Richard Linklater
Nervous man: Eric Schlosser
Amber: Ashley Johnson
Man in the booth: Greg Kinnear
Marlboro man: Kris Kristofferson
Pick-up driver: Bobby Cannavale
Hispanic man 1: Wilmer Valderrama
Hispanic man 2: Armando Hernàndez
Woman in the doorway: Catalina Sandino Moreno
Woman with the dog badge: Patricia Arquette
Stoner guy: Ethan Hawke

Fast Food Nation also features:

Bruce Willis
Paul Dano
Ana Claudia Talancón

It is available on DVD from 20th Century Fox.

16 Blocks

"16 Blocks" (Richard Donner, 2006) An odd, efficient little thriller about a broken down cop who gets the bad assignment of driving a police whistle-blower sixteen blocks to the courthouse to testify before the Grand Jury about police corruption. But first he has to run a gauntlet of New York's less-than-finest who all could be sent to the pokey if the kid talks. And after hearing Mos Def's high-pitched, cleft-pallet-patter-way of talking, you start feeling some sympathy for their thinking, too. Cop and whistle-blower have two things in their favor: a populace more suspicious of the police than those running from them, and director Richard Donner, who, though he may have problems with pacing, seems completely incapable of placing his camera in any place but the best position to convey action and meaning, no matter how claustrophobic the surroundings. Bruce Willis is the reliably unreliable cop drinking to retirement, who finds one last thing to fight for, although his persona tends to shift a bit from barely functioning to resembling an older John McClane without a sign of shakes as he draws down on a colleague. Willis is fine, though, as is David Morse as the crooked cop with the most to lose. Of the two endings shot, the one attached to the film is the most "blue sky," and it's not really satisfying. The better down-beat ending, unfortunately, depends on a character turning when he's shown no previous sign of doing so. Neither one works completely, but at least the "Happy" ending strains credulity a bit less. Over all, not bad, really.

Planet Terror

"Planet Terror" (Robert Rodriguez, 2007) I believe in the Jeffersonian ideal of self-improvement. I believe in those tenets born from the Enlightenment, that man, left to his own devices, will grow, fend for himself, and improve himself to make his life, and those of others, richer and more full.

And then, I see a movie like "Planet Terror" and I want to burn every H-D camera in the world. There are a lot of critics--many of whom I respect--who sang the praises of "Grindhouse," when it briefly slunk, shambling, into the multi-plexes in the Summer of 2007.** All I can say is that if "Planet Terror" is any indication (and I haven't seen Tarantino's "Death-Proof" half of the film), they are seriously wrong-headed.

A critic has an odd job: if they're doing it right, it's a bit like trying to find a pony in a pile of manure. You can find artistry in the unlikeliest places: Spaghetti westerns displayed the amazing eye and burning dramatic sense of Sergio Leone (who influences Tarantino and Rodriguez***); cheap "B"-movies formed the twisted spine of the film noir genre. Artistry can come from anywhere. And it's a critic's job to be on the look-out for it, even in genres considered "low," and by film-makers who one might have a prejudice towards. But that's on a good day.

Example: I've never enjoyed the films of Ed Wood, outed by Michael Medved back in the day when his "Golden Turkey Award" books spawned his dubious movie/social critic career. You'd think that from his descriptions that Wood's films would be a laugh-riot, full of boners and prat-falls. They're not. They're exercises in incompetence that are pathetic and pitiable. Rather than taking any cruel joy out of his films, I experienced a kind of bored disgust, I don't have fun watching incompetence. Tim Burton got it right about Ed Wood; he didn't know quality from a rubber octopus-and loved his own work with a romantic's blindness. He still made movies that suck.

I know what they were going for in "Grindhouse." They were trying to go back to the "C"-movie days of double-bill films that tried to eke out a profit by appealing to the lowest common denominator--the kids-and-cretins-circuit--something that Dimension Films--"Grindhouse's" distributor--routinely does, as well. Some of the greatest directors of movies--some of the brightest--honed their craft in the AIP's and worse. But once they got their chops, they stopped making crap. They aspired. They wanted more. Only someone of limited creativity (or a moron...or a deeply cynical artist) would knowingly aspire to garbage, and so reluctantly, I'm bestowing that label to Robert Rodriguez--the "deeply cynical artist" one, as he's very creative, and certainly not a moron. Left to his own devices, Rodriguez can do some entertaining work--the El Mariachi films, the "Spy Kids" films, and they're made with an economy that's something short of miraculous--but team him with his mentor, Quentin Tarentino and it all turns to shit (QT has a mercifully brief role in "Planet Terror," as an over-acting rapist, where he proves, once again, that he's the male equivalent of Pia Zadora). The guy's got the chops, no doubt about it. But he has one thing missing in his many talents--taste. They don't teach that at film school, and you can't get it at the video store. "Taste" is what you get when you aspire, and it can even be with the schlockiest material known to man ("Touch of Evil," "Psycho," "The Godfather"...I can go on and on about artists who reached to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,****), but to revel in schlock, to aspire to it...and have the results be so...marginal, so...bad, and not even in a funny way, but pitiable, well, you start to wonder what it is you saw in these guys before. There is one "pony" moment in "Planet Terror" and that is the "old man" performance of Michael Parks, who appears to think he's in another movie. Wouldn't be the first time.

Sometimes, critics, in their zeal to be ahead of the curve, or to appear "hip," will go a bit too far and end up over a cliff, or in the ditch. But that's what happens when you start looking for ponies.

Sometimes, a turd is just a turd.
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"Planet Terror" is such an artless mess, with poor performances by some actors who should have known better (Bruce Willis and Jeff Fahey), and a lot of actors who don't (principally Rose McGowan and Quentin Tarentino), goofy, squishy special effects of the fake vomit variety, and a pervasive air of nastiness that the one joke that works--a "Missing Reel" insert at the heart of a sleazy sex scene--reveals the emptiness of the thing, the cavalier disregard for the audience, and the apparent "who gives a shit" attitude of the film-makers. The acting goes beyond camp into the realm of the absurdly arch and hammy. People were employed on this film and hopefully they got paid, though given the meager accomplishments of this film they might have been compensated with a credit for their resumes. "Planet Terror" is a waste of time, both mine and the people involved in making it, and that's the worst thing you can say about any movie.


** I also heard the gleeful anticipation of fan-boys (the kind who post at AICN) that it was going to be "SOO COOOOL!"

*** For that, Leone is probably spinning--verrry sloooowly--in his grave, a place Tarentino seems to be spending a lot of time these days.

**** Jerry Lewis tells the story of one night editing a film when Stanley Kubrick steps into the room, smoking, asking if he can hang out and watch what they do in the process, and Lewis and his editor try to work out a thorny continuity problem. Lewis finally decides to move on and says: "You can't polish a turd." There's a silence at the back of the room, and then Kubrick pipes up: "You can if you freeze it..."