Gravity

Push-Me, Pull-You
or 
"I'm Tellin' Ya, It's a Hell of a Story"

Gravity may just appear to you the shortest movie you've seen in awhile.  It lasts all of ninety minutes, but it rips by, despite long, leisurely takes where nothing much is happening (The opening shot alone is 17 minutes long without a traditional edit).  In that, it gets the yin-yang of space travel just so—floating at a relative leisurely pace while simultaneously moving at 16,000 mph, or as one test pilot describes the job—hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Gravity pushes that out a bit, with many moments of sheer terror, but without some trumped up space monster hiding in lunar rocks (Apollo 18) or below the ice (Europa Station).  No, it doesn't need anything fancy.  It goes for the basics—a limitless indifferent Universe.

Up in space, aboard a futuristic space shuttle, terror comes by every 90 minutes or so, as a catastrophic collision between old Russian communication satellites causes a debris field hurtling by tearing holes through what ever fragile life-sustaining contraption we can put up there. Director Alfonso Cuarón (and his co-scenarist son Jonás) put the stakes right up front.  "Life in Space is Impossible."

They, then, spend the next 90 minutes destroying whatever faith in technology and science you might have.  It's an evangelist's dream come true.

That debris field starts out with a few little pieces, but like a cosmic game of "Asteroids" every collision creates more junk, sprays of it, and that just makes everything worse.  Space is our garbage field—Cuarón underpins the point by showing us all the junk—pens, screws, cuff-links ("cuff-links??")—floating in zero-g inside the space stations and capsules we put up there in some sort of mad attempt to make normal life in space.  It's a cosmic joke that after years of polluting the Earth, our garbage is making space uninhabitable (as if it ever was), too.

But, that's a lot of deep thought for after the film is over (as are some anomalies and plot conveniences).*  In the watching, Gravity is a fun-ride on so many levels, a visual romp and roller-coaster—the dialogue being mostly tangential and matter-of-fact—as the crew of the shuttle Explorer must deal with the fact that every 90 minutes their equipment is going to take a debilitating series of hits that might burst their protective bubbles just to survive.  The film is in mostly long, swooping stretches (the edits, interestingly, in dialogue situations), floating from one aspect to another, sometimes even violating the space of the astronaut's helmet, moving through the screen to get their perspective.  The novel aspect of this one is that the zero-gravity that science fictions films have recently taken pains to re-create or avoid has no restrictions in this scenario, there are no walls to bump into; if you go, you go until something stops you, slows you down, or retards your progress, and everything you do, pushes you in the opposite direction.  You can swim, but you'd better have an exit strategy for stopping, and spinning in place to turn around isn't going to help, because you're going to keep spinning.  And the series of catastrophes, hardships, and just plain pains-in-the-ass keep piling up one after the other, you would think it was Harold Lloyd up there.

Speaking of which, Gravity, besides the scrupulous pixelization of space, also boasts a dynamite sound experience.  In space, no one can hear dynamite, of course, but also no one can hear your thrusters whoosh-by, either, really. And Gravity is scrupulous about making sure you don't hear sounds in airless space, unless you absolutely have to.  Sounds are restricted to radio chatter (and interference) but also, only those sounds that would transmit through an astronaut's space-suit.  So, there are scenes where they're using power-tools? Only you don't hear the metallic grind of power-tools, you hear the vibration of the power-tools motors spinning.  But that's it.  Satellites get punctured, solar panels are torn off in bursts of shrapnel, but the most you hear is a muffled fwump if something impacts an astronaut, or vice versa.  And the theater I saw it in makes use of a Dolby system called ATMOS that pin-points where to put each particular sound as it careens through the theater.  It truly is an immersing experience in the theater.

For this space kid, despite some hokum here and there, it's the most fun I've had at the movies this year,** and someone is going to have to do something really exceptional to have better sound than this one.
  
Gravity is a Full-Price Ticket (Not only would I spring for 3-D, but try and see it in Dolby Atmos, for one of the craziest sound mixes I've ever heard).

* Three things, quibbles, anomalies, that are SPOILERS: 1) Sandra Bullock's hair is not plastered down on her head, but it's short, and would float around more than we see here (not a big deal, really, just a tech glitch, so the movie could get made); 2) At one point, we spend 10 minutes showing precisely how the whole friction-less world of Newton's laws of motion acts in zero-g, and then creates a cliffhanger situation that completely erases it, unnecessarily; and 3) Every 90 minutes that debris field shows up—IF everybody's in the same orbit, but one is STANDING STILL (which can't happen if you're actually orbiting) or they're going in opposite directions (at which point it would be every 45 minutes and very violently because they're colliding head-on).  As far as the plot conveniences, those are fairly obvious.

** There are some nice little in-jokes along the way.  My favorite: the unseen voice of Mission Control is Ed Harris, who played Flight Director Eugene Krantz in Apollo 13.  I could imagining him having conniption fits down on Earth: "Failure is NOT an option!" "Not on MY watch!"

The Descendants

"Finding Grace in Paradise"
or
"Keeping the Kidneys and Other Vital Organs Working and Hoping for the Best"

There's a lot of water in Hawaii.  It's an island, after all, a string of volcanic mountains surrounded by water on all sides.  Plus, there are the myriad rivers that course through, invading the land, falling off the mountains combined with the torrential rains that sometimes beat down with such ferocity that they turn highways into flood corridors, making negotiating trails on the islands difficult.  All that water does have an advantage—it turns the volcanic soil green with lush verdant beauty.

And it also hides the tears.

Alexander Payne's adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel The Descendants is something of a miracle, a nearly perfect adaptation, much like James L. Brooks' transformation of Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment (and if there's any justice...or taste...in Hollywood this awards season, Payne's film will be awarded as much gold as Brooks').  It retains Payne's way of nailing a particular culture, as he has with right-wing religion, high school politics, retirement wanderlust, and the pretentious pseudo-culture of Napa Valley.  In The Descendants, it's the extreme casualness of the privileged Howlies, who have invaded the island culture, overcoming it like a tsunami.

But, there's a difference here.  All of Payne's films have been a trifle dodgy, askew or off-kilter.  Not The Descendants. It is a fine distillation of the book, taking the best of the dialogue, a perfect cast of vets and unknowns and bringing it together with polish, exquisite comic timing and poignancy.

Attorney Matt King (George Clooney) is the last in a long line of Kings of Hawaii, who trace their roots back to King Kamehameha, a family history that has held in trust 25,000 acres of undeveloped, still natural Kauai'i coastline which will be out of trust in seven years.  Matt is the sole trustee, but is in negotiations with his family on how to deal with the land.  A decision is to be made soon.

But, that's the least of Matt's concerns.  His wife, Elizabeth, has been put in a coma from a boating accident.  He is left with her medical decisions and the caretaking of their two daughters—Scottie, 10 (Amara Miller), and Alexandra "Alex," 17 (Shailene Woodley, I hesitate to mention he performance as a standout, because everyone is great)—a difficult task as the aloof and professional Matt is, for all intents and purposes, "the back-up parent."  Scottie is starting to react to her mother's hospitalization in odd, destructive ways...and Alex?  She's already been shipped to another island to a strict boarding school for dabbling in drugs and older boyfriends.  "What is it with the women in my life that they want to destroy themselves?" Matt asks in one of the many narrations that dominate the film.

Good question.  And the answers to that one aren't even explored in depth here.  Let's just say that Matt is responsible, and must be more responsible if he is to save his family, nuclear or extended.  However diligent he might be as a man or a person, he cannot prep for the emergencies that life hands to him.  He cannot research what to say or argue before the court of his kids, and absolutely must find a way through the briarpatch of mercurial emotions that has nothing to do with reason or law.  There is no precedent to draw upon for what he is going through. This is life, not jurisprudence. There is no preparing for that. Life is off-the-cuff, on the wire, winging it because life is what happens (as John Lennon said) "while you're busy making other plans."  In the film, Clooney's character must deal with both death and life and find the personal grace to do both, simultaneously, letting go of the past and dealing with the essential unforeseeable future. 

There are two axioms that I hold dear in life as true, and recently they came up again, in my life, to steer me to a clearer, calmer path. The first is "actions speak louder than words." Words are fine, nice, even comforting. But they are useless, and can be even considered lies if not backed up by a concurring action.* The other is one of the few things I take as absolute truth from the Bible and that is that "love never dies." I realized that with the death of my parents, but it is only reinforced to me, day after day. Like energy in science, once it's generated, love never leaves the Universe. It can change, sometimes savagely, turning into hate (at least, temporarily, because the opposite of love is indifference), but it never goes away...never "vanishes." And The Descendants, in its funny, quirky way, eloquently speaks to those truths.

I love this movie.  There are choices that Payne and his co-writers have made in the presentation of Hemmings' novella that are oddly poetic, even beautiful, and with the clear-eyed collaboration of his actors, have made up some of the most memorable scenes in a film that have moved me this year.  It is certain that many of them will show up as "Moments" in the year-end wrap-up of the best of 2011.  This one might be the best film of the year.

But, the movie-year, despite being deep in its 11th month and on the cusp of the 12th, is still young.  Who knows what lies ahead? 

The Descendants is a Full-Price Ticket.

Matt looks over a hedge—one of the many quirky directorial choices
Payne makes that makes this film so enjoyable.

* It's especially true of politicians.  Think of that during the next political campaign.

The Ides of March

"'The Situation' in The Situation Room"
or
"A Little Problem with the DnC"

The bobble-head version of George Clooney is back in The Ides of March, the new film directed by...George Clooney.  You remember the bobble-head Clooney, don't you?  It was the loosey-goosey version of the actor that was popular during his "ER" days, a combination of looseness and arrogance, and it made up his persona in his early film career, before the time he decided that he'd get serious about his career after the debacle of Batman & Robin.

Well, that wobble of the head returns in Ides, adapted from the play by Beau Willimon (by Willimon, Clooney and Grant Heslov) called "Farragut North."  I've always seen that wobble as an indication that whichever character he played with it had a lack of moral rectitude, an imperfection of the spine or sensibility that disconnected the head from the rest of the persona—a flaw that lent unpredictability to what actions they'd take, a toss of the head like a toss of the coin.  And it is one of the ways that Clooney telegraphs what his Governor Mike Morris, candidate for President on the democratic ticket, might be capable of.  It keeps you guessing, whatever the words from his mouth might indicate, about the actions this man might take in his run for power.

It is tough to express surprise at the roads political films—or films about politics—might take these days.  It's all about disenchantment with the process and how power—or even the quest for it—corrupts.  It's an old saw that goes back long before Shakespeare and back to The Greeks.  And very few films—or plays—about the Court of Kings, fact or fictional,  can look clear-eyed at the process, thinking that ideals might remain intact.  Even Mr. Smith Goes to Washington deals with the innate corruption of government and pleads for a clinging to of ideals from our public servants...or even an acknowledgment that they are servants, rather than our Masters.  What was nice about things like "The West Wing" was that, despite the maneuverings, manipulations and moral morasses that went with the job, public service was declared an altruistic aspiration, a noble thing, however down and dirty things got to accomplish anything.  Most, though, like The Candidate or All the Kings Men (any version) have it as a "given" that compromise of purpose, process and principles are par for the course, that it is next to impossible to determine the true measure of a political man.  The only variable is how corrupt that man (it's usually a man, and white) can be.  Post-Watergate and The Lewinsky Affair, even a film like Absolute Power assumes, without doubt, that The President of the United States is capable of the most craven of murders.  The Ides of March doesn't swerve from that cynicism.

The film begins with Morris' Head of Communications, Stephen Myers (the ubiquitous Ryan Gosling—if his Drive performance is a "1" and Crazy, Stupid Love is a "10," in dramatics, this is is an average "5") approaching a microphone, coming slowly into focus, a process that is completed when he is at the podium—the shot will be mirrored later in the show.  He begins to slap-dashedly spew homilies about his religion, and then the speech deteriorates into babble.  Not that it is important, he is merely a stand-in, checking a microphone for his candidate at a technical rehearsal for a televised debate.  It would pass without much notice, except at the real debate, Morris uses the same lines words for words defending his lack of religion when challenged on the point.  It is clear, at that point, that Myers is Morris' surrogate, putting words in his mouth, articulating the governor's message, packaging the man to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the highest number of registered voters.  

The campaign manager is Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a jaded veteran of the political trenches, spinning, manipulating and point-man for acquiring the parties' nomination a few months down the road.  Zara is the Big Picture Packager, Myers is Dr. Details.  On the other side is campaign manager Tom Duffy, who is played by Paul Giamatti—and let me just say what a pleasure it is to see Hoffman and Giamatti, two of the best character-spinners in movies today going up against each other.  It is a match made in Political Purgatory.

Before too much gets underway, Clooney introduces another character in a shot that tracks her movements, flouncing, buffed, polished and toned, towards campaign HQ: this is Molly Stearns, intern (Evan Rachel Wood) and just the way Clooney introduces her puts you on alert that she is important to the drama, far more than her job of bringing coffee would indicate. Wood is a fine actress, and as with Down in the Valley, she's able to convey twin faces of innocence and corruption, the theme of the film at which she is the fulcrum. Already one sees where things are going, but one wonders if Clooney has the directing chops to make it fresh.

He does...kinda.  There are nice little touches of how the film seems to bifurcate into twin halves reflecting each other,* the actors make the dialog snap and there's just enough "play" in the film to keep you guessing about what is "real" or political theater. And there's one scene that's shot very simply—a tension-inducing pull-in to a black van that makes you suspect the worse (which, for some it might be) that is rather nifty.

Ultimately, though, as well as the film is presented and played, it is not telling us anything we don't already know...or fear...that hasn't been said for the last 60 years, when, post-Eisenhower and the star-struck Kennedy years, we ditched the notion that politicians are concerned with the People, rather than their prestige and perks.  The Ides of March has no spine of its own to speak of and brings us nothing new, offering no solution (not even providing dramatic satisfaction)...but merely more of the same, just like every election season.

The Ides of March is a Rental.

* Clooney did a good interview with Charlie Rose about the film—Rose has a cameo for verisimilitude, as do a few other familiar talking heads—in which he said "The first half of the film is for democrats and the second half is for republicans." Exactly right.

From Dusk Till Dawn

From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996) Quentin Tarantino had just won an Oscar for co-writing Pulp Fiction, and followed it up by writing this mocking over-the-top vampire movie.  He grabbed Desperado director Rodriguez to direct it (so he could concentrate on his acting—and he's not bad here), starting a career-long association, and George Clooney used it to re-start his movie career while still in his "E.R." bobblehead days, back before he decided he'd take his movie choices seriously. 

He wasn't doing that here.  This one's a black-crested lark of comic violence and obscene intentions, a nihilistic exploration of...well, absolutely nothing.  It's what Rodriguez and Tarentino do at their worst—make crap they like, but is so "inside" as to be a private joke for their own giggling pleasure.

The Gecko brothers (Clooney, Tarantino) are nihilistic criminals trying to make their way over the Mexican border.  After an incendiary one-stop robbery, they kidnap a family, the Fullers (Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, Ernest Liu), to smuggle them across the border where they end up at the infernal strip-club, The Titty Twister, which holds a deep dark secret once the sun goes down—it's run and jobbed by vampires.  Yup, an 24 hour-a-day joint filled with blood-suckers.  But, for some reason, opening up the saloon doors doesn't eliminate the staff and add a new layer of dust to the floor.  Nor, would the nightly slaughter of customers fail to attract a new clientele.

Odd, that.

But, it does provide a lot of bulbous make-up effects, a lot of ultra-squishy violence done to living and dead alike, and appearances by B-movie stalwarts Fred Williamson, Cheech Marin, and make-up maven Tom Savini—who didn't do any of the make-up.  By the end, there are so many holes in people that it almost outnumbers the holes in the plot (QT's Richard Gecko sustains an early gunshot clean through his hand—you can see through it—and yet he keeps using that hand in the film, even though the bones in his palm have been blasted through, which is a nice trick—howdy dood that?).  Richard's a creepy sleezoid, while Clooney's Seth Gecko is just a cocky little bastard.  It must have felt good to get that out of his system, but the results are so thoroughly hackneyed and cock-eyed and cartoonishly vile that one has to have a pretty bad day kicking puppies to get any real enjoyment out of it.  A highlight is Salma Hayek's stripper performance—where she doesn't strip. 

Fortunately, nearly everyone in the movie has gone on to better things.  So should you.

The American

"It's Endangered"
or
"Good-Bye, Mr. Butterfly"

After a Main Title trip through an appropriately myopic tunnel, the "mechanic" ("I'm no good with machines," he says to several people, quite rightly) emerges into a wide, scenic Italian landscape bi-sected by a winding motorway, then stops at a phone-booth on a narrow cobble-stone street in a rustic Italian town.  He's boxed in, surrounded by two-story piazzas with open windows, with only two directions he can go—forward or backward. 

But the bullets can come from anywhere.  Because that is what he would do.

He stands half-way out of the open door of his rental car, standing at the transom.  He sees an man fixing a tractor, an woman sweeping her stoop, watching him, and a caffe habitue peering at him over his newspaper.  The bullet can come from anywhere.  He has only an Entrance and an Exit.

Stay or Go?  Commit or Run?

"The American" harkens back to a kind of film they don't make anymore: the art-house action film, where the locales and the characters are more important that the edit-to-shot ratio.*  Where today's action films feature the locales as a blur, the soundtrack overwhelms, and characterization is defined by the quality of quip after a kill, this one, with its long lens shots, its whole blocks of time without any dialogue (or explication of any kind) and unknowable character-cyphers is a challenge to the ADD'd afflicted audience, who expect all suspense films to defy that description and merely be FPS's.**

"The American" of the title is a "Man with No Name" like the many anti-heroes of the Sergio Leone films.*** He is also a man of many names: to his phone-contact, Pavel (Johan Leysen), he is "Jack;" his "client" calls him "Mr. Butterfly"—he's into lepidoptery, and he bears a stylized pappilon tattoo between his shoulder blades; he signs into his hotel as "Mr. Clarke;" his voluptuous Italian hooker-lover (Violante Placido) knows him as "Edward."**** 

But, nobody knows him.  And he doesn't reveal much.  George Clooney plays him much the way Cary Grant played his government op in "Notorious," bland, cool, serious, not reacting and never risking a smile.  Not even the requisite 
smirk.*****  Clooney's gunsmith-for-hire is thin, wiry, sports the same chopped salt-and-pepper hair-cut that, when worn by Harrison Ford, signalled that his character was "repressed," and is addicted to routine—the better to spot something out of the ordinary that might come hurtling at his neck.  There may be nothing but doubt there behind the hooded, suspicious eyes, that are always searching, searching, searching for the muzzle flash (which he might survive), or the echoing discharge (which he probably won't).  All he knows is that he can't let down his guard.  It's the rule of most men on the run: Suspect everyone.

Because there's a lot of space, visual and aural, in the film, unaccompanied by exposition, director Anton Corbjin ("Control," which I've never finished watching) has enough respect for his audience to let the pictures do the talking.  The film may reference Leone, but it's the style of Michelangelo Antonioni that Corbjin is emulating, and there's enough symbolic cinematography that one has a hard time distinguishing dream and reality, just as Clooney's gun-smith has difficulty distinguishing suspicion and reality.  So much of the movie depends on "the unseen possibility," that pretty soon you're sucked into the mind-set, watching the corners of frames, searching out the change of expressions (among the circle of assassins it happens rarely) that might signal an ambush.  That also jams it into the magazine-clip of "paranoid thriller" films popular in the 70's, post-Watergate.

But, like many of the art-house suspense films it reminds one of, the pace allows a great weakness: heavy-handed symbolism.  In fact, the final scene (which, if one thinks about it, strains credulity) is so over-layed with symbolism, that it actually undercuts the seriousness of the scene, evoking chuckles from the audience I saw it with.

Be that as it may, for most of its length, "The American" is compelling film-making, even though, in its dour staging, it tends to take itself too seriously,  a trap that film-makers have been trying to avoid since film-making began.  It's hard to determine whether it's a step forward or a step back.

"The American" is a Matinee.   

* This caused a lot of consternation to the Tacoma audience I saw it with: the three-some in front of me grumbled at the end, and the hip-hop wannabe's next to me loudly cursed their contempt.  "I slept through half that m*****-f*****!"  "That was SHIT!" said the other (he'd missed the best part to take a phone-call in the lobby, after dropping his cell under his seat—which I helped him find).  "It was good!" I defended, "just a little heavy on the symbolism is all."  "Man, you are stu-pid," said the guy I'd helped.  "F*****' stu-pid," said the other.  I was going to mention that they'd both paid full-price for it, while I'd gotten a discount, to base my idea that stupidity might have economic consequences, but I demurred.

** And I know that I only have to explain this to the older half of my audience—an FPS is a type of video-game, described as a "First Person Shooter."

*** (Leone is paid prominent and unsubtle tribute in this film, as a classic scene from "Once Upon a Time in the West" appears on a tv-screen, and the soundtrack in moments of high stalking suspense pays tribute to Ennio Morriconne's (and Jerry Goldsmith's) esoteric "thumping" suspense cues).

**** Heh.

***** Grant's agent in "Notorious" was "Devlin," (or as Grant pronounced it "De-ve-lin"), as if to point out that, if he DID have a soul under that icey manner, it probably belonged to darker forces.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

"Pure Wild Animal Craziness"

Tough to peg Wes Anderson. Idiosyncratic and gifted, sometimes he becomes so involved in his worlds on-screen that he forgets his audience. Sometimes, his films become trying—show of hands out there for everybody who liked "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou?"—although there are some folks who just can't warm to Anderson's culture clashes no matter how pop he gets. But, he keeps experimenting, pushing how unsympathetic or dysfunctional his characters could become, milking as little information from his frame set-ups as possible (calculate how much of his screen-time is associated with a character staring at the audience and you'd get a high percentage). There are the experiments in form, like the "Hotel Chevalier" prequel to "The Darjeeling Limited" that lent nothing— absolutely nothing—to the film, but because it was released to the Internet, it generated some "buzz."

Anderson goes out on a limb, too, with "Fantastic Mr. Fox," a stop-motion animation version of Roald Dahl's children's story,* Anderson's pop-culture sensibilities are rooted in the 1960's and 70's,** and one can feel tangible echoes of Rankin-Bass television specials, even the animation has a slight, clunky "Gumby" feel to it.*** Yet he manages to make a sly (like a fox) adaptation that speaks to both kids and adults in skewed ways.

F. F. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a notorious chicken thief, who upon hearing his wife, Mrs. Fox (voiced by Meryl Streep) is pregnant (at the inopportune moment a trap has been sprung on them) makes a promise to her that he'll give up his chicken-pickin' ways and provide a stable home for his family. He becomes a newspaper writer ("Does anybody actually read my column?" he frequently asks), and although its a stable enough environment for a fox, its got none of the thrill of his old life. Appearing to go through a drastic mid-fox-life-crisis, he decides to buy a tree-house against the advice of his badger-lawyer (Bill Murray). And then, with the arrival of his nephew Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson)—an act that aggravates Fox's son Ash (Jason Schwartzman)—the domestication makes him snap and he decides to go for that "one big last job" (linking this George Clooney character to the ones in "Ocean's Eleven" and "Out of Sight"). The results are short-term windfalls, but at a cost, putting his family and the entire local animal kingdom at risk.**** Mr. Fox must learn complacency with domesticity, and life, such as it is.

Kids will like the animation and the jokes, which never stoop to the toilet level of average every-day kid's movies, and parents will like the playful adult sensibility Anderson and co-scenarist Noah Baumbach bring to the story: as an instance, all curse words are thrown into the all-inclusive hamper of "cuss," as in "What the cuss are you saying," and "This is going to be a cluster-cuss." And there's the shout-outs to cineastes (snooty children), including a "Citizen Kane"-based room-clearing that goes deliriously on and on (such destruction is tough to do one frame at a time, or in this case, two at a time). But, that burst of self-punishing annihilation may seem a bit drawn out and pointless to those who've never "seen the cockatoo," and presages some third act pacing problems that the film-makers probably can't see at such "whirr-click-whirr-click" speeds.

Fore-warned is fore-armed. Just let it go, send the kids out for some popcorn if they get restless, and admire how the animators make tears well-up in the characters' eyes, how Meryl Streep is still a brilliant actress with only her voice to fall back on, and how Clooney, without his expressive eyes, sounds a bit like an "empty suit." Adult concerns that you didn't worry about in childhood. Domesticity will do that to ya.

"Fantastic Mr. Fox" is a fantastic matinee.

* Are any of Dahl's books children's stories, really?

** The soundtrack starts off with "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," and goes on to include a couple of Beach Boys standards and "Street Fighting Man" by the Stones.

*** Not that the animation is bad—not at all—it has a jerkily primitive nostalgic feel to it, like an old claymation educational film, with a precise attention to detail, reminiscent of Willis H. O'Brien's original work "handling" King Kong.

**** Message Alert! Message Alert! Woop! Woop!

Up in the Air

"Passing Over"

Down in the lower right hand corner of this review (and every review on LNTAM) there's a space for meta-data to help readers find similar personnel, year of release, director, major stars—basically general stuff.

But I also like to put the genre of where the film would fit, say, at the video store—nothing too specific. Jason Reitman's new film "Up in the Air" is the first one to have me stumped. I lean towards "drama," but it's too clever and funny to meet that description. It's not a "comedy" as it deals with pain and contemporary issues that most comedies (most modern comedies, at least) steer clear of—although it's tempting to say that it's a "Judd Apatow comedy" for adults, taking on his basic "gowing up" arc, but with a more mature, melancholy overtone. Yet it made me laugh out loud fairly regularly. And it made me think of what a sorry mess we're in.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a corporate hit-man for hire. His company (run by a tight-smiled cut-throat Jason Bateman) provides a termination service for struggling companies. Bingham flies to the home-offices and fires the people the weasley exec's are too cowardly to break the news to face-to-face. And business is booming.

"This is the biggest financial melt-down in our nation's history" crows Bateman's CEO. "This is our moment." And to make the most of it, he's hired a new 23 year old tyro named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick, who gets perpetually lost in the lunch-room in the "Twilight" movies*), who hopes to streamline the down-sizing process by doing it over the internet, rather than in person.

This throws the well-managed world of Bingham into a tizzy. No more frequent flier miles which he collects like office-absconded paper-clips. No more stipends and luxury cars for hire, and platinum service lounges. He'll be flying coach rather than first-class. Worse than that, he'll be stuck in a cubicle going nowhere, considerably worse than coach.

Not only will he have to get his own drinks, he may have to get a life. Bingham is in a groove, as personal and as transitory as the swipe of a card-reader. He is constantly between Point A and Point B and prides himself on finding the most efficient route. His life is reduced to a minimum of baggage—carry-on's with wheels that don't squeek, a packing ritual as choreographed as a Fosse number down to the split-second, and little contact with family. He knows the airport routine cold. And as a sideline, he gives lectures on travelling efficiently in the air and in life. "Our attachments weigh us down," he intones to his conference rooms of drones. "The slower we move, the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. We are not monogamous swans. We are sharks."

Clooney's in full smug mode—a variation of his divorce attorney Miles Massey from "Intolerable Cruelty" played straight—he practically marches to the beat of "Come Fly With Me" and his smile is as practiced and measured as his patter...with everyone, business associates and family. His character has a part to play and when the show's over, it's "me" time, like the "James Bond" fantasy of living the high life while doing dirty jobs. Everything is first-class and preferred customer, his one goal being a targeted accumulation of miles over a life-time—his own personal best. He has an apartment, but he's never in it and it has the same empty utilitarian ambience of a Ramada Suite. He's the personification of "fly-by-night" in slip-off shoes.

So are his relationships, such as they are. At the same time that he is forced to show Natalie "the ropes" of the "down-sizing" business, he's established a "ships that pass in the night" fling with fellow traveller Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga, finally getting a role that has more heft than "girlfriend"). Natalie, who probably has a Power-Point presentation for how her life is going to go ("I should be driving an Explorer by 23"), is horrified at the casualness of it all. She's just out of the starting blocks and doesn't know the pit-falls of the track ahead, with all the confidence and brashness of someone who doesn't know what she doesn't know, and how theory reacts when it collides with reality. It's a crash-course in transitioning, on the job and in real life, and the two veterans try to bring the kid down easy—at least to get her to remember to lock her wheels.

There'll I'll leave it, for to tell too much will ruin it. But I admire any movie that acknowledges the mature adult, that attempts to show that a life is segmented, complicated and compromised, where dreams could come true, but mostly don't, where decency is its own reward and the idea of "soul-mates" is a lot of hooey. A lot of hooey to sell soap.

And movies.

Jason Reitman grew up in movies—his father is Ivan Reitman—and with his first three films (the others being "Thank You for Smoking" and "Juno") he has shown himself all too willing to throw sabo's into the gears of the Hollywood Dream Factory,** making contemporary movies of stylish form about tough choices and compromised principles in today's America, while still keeping them highly entertaining and unpretentious. One hopes he can sustain that promise and not flirt with issues of the elite, as so many of his peers have in the past, and buy into the fairy tale myth of mainstream Hollywood.

One hopes he can keep his feet on the ground.

"Up in the Air" is a Full-Price Ticket. Full-Price and First-Class.

* Kendrick is great, no doubt about it, but one hears a whine of feed-back in the false amplification of her perfromance. It is nuanced and studied, alright, and just a tinge robotic. The joy in the performance is watching the gears seize, the plugs mis-fire, and the LED's in her eyes dim. It's like watching a puppet turn into a real live girl. But she doesn't blow the other stars away, or "steal the movie." There's just a whiff of Dream Factory hype in this talk. As long as it stays in the publicity and stays off the screen, I'm all for it.

** If you do want an unequivocal happy ending and an example of dreams coming true, stay to the end of the movie. Reitman is a very generous man. And the song manages to perfectly distill the movie.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

"If Looks Could Kill"

An odd choice for Veteran's Day, but timing is... everything.

Despite an opening graphic that cautions "More of this is true than you might believe" "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is more of a fantasia based on the reporting of Jon Ronson than an actual true story. Yes, the truth is in the details; during the 1980's there was an army troop training as psychic warriors tasked with perfecting ways of defeating the enemy beyond fighting. These included perfectly legitimate examples of psychological disciplines, like moving past one's fears and one's predilections (it's pointed out that 15 to 20% of "fresh" soldiers usually shot above the heads of enemy combatants—not wanting to kill anybody), heightening one's powers of observation, gaining a psychological advantage over one's adversary by one's actions and thoughts, and moved beyond that into training that was anything but basic.

Ultimately the goal of the so-called "First Earth Battalion" was to make "super-soldiers," "psychic warriors," or "Jedi knights"* who could intuit answers from prisoners, psychically deflect attacks, become invisible, "phase" through objects, and, most diabolically, stop the hearts of their opponents by staring at them.

In the movie, McGregor's Ronson stand-in, Bob Wilton, gets wind of a "New Earth Army" doing some feature work for his local newspaper, but it isn't until he's in Iraq—trying to impress his estranged wife—that "the circle becomes complete" and he meets the closest thing to an adept among the psy-warriors, Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney, looking remarkably like Dennis Farina) who's "been re-activated" on a secret mission to find his former commanding officer and creator of the First Earth Army, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, who perfects his Leibowskish "bubble-off-plumb" hippie personification and manages to make it poignant). Cassidy appears to be legit, capable of cloud bursting and the one Earher who could drop a goat with a look. He's less than expert in the "sparkley eyes" technique, despite being played by George Clooney (who manages to play it completely straight while pulling off some of the strangest actions of his career).

Director Grant Heslov, Clooney's production partner and script-writer for "Good Night, and Good Luck," keeps things moving at a good clip, moving fast enough to avoid analysis or deep thinking. The story is slight, owing much to, of all things, "Ishtar" (two clueless guys, out of their depth in a Middle East war-zone) while waving an anti-establishment freak-flag that reeks of "M*A*S*H" (with Kevin Spacey as Frank Burns). The story, of remnants of the original NEA operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems plausible (given the way those wars have been run), but the story merely exploits true concepts to spin the gauziest of screenplays from, while poking fun at the "Be All That You Can Be" gozo-ness of an Army that's trying "to be wonderful."

Semi-satirical movies are rarely more than semi-amusing. "The Men Who Stare at Goats," however, delivers quite a few belly-laughs.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" is a Matinee.

* The movie earns many—too many—knowing audience laughs by casting Ewan McGregor (the post/pre-Guiness Obi-Wan Kenobi) as the Ronson-surrogate reporter who is more of a "Doubting Thomas" than a "Padewan Apprentice." It's a little too "on the nose" and is, frankly, done to death, like some of the more winkingly obvious in-jokes in the "Ocean's Eleven" series.

Burn After Reading

"Joel, you wanna know something? Every now and then say, 'What the fuck.' 'What the fuck' gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

Miles from "Risky Business" (1983) written by Paul Brickman

Then there's the corollary to those hopeful words, the Coen Brothers' new film "Burn After Reading." It's a comedy, so that means folks who swoon when they're making serious films, like "Miller's Crossing," or "No Country for Old Men" will look at it like it's a red-headed step-child, along the lines of "Raising Arizona," "The Big Lebowski," or "Intolerable Cruelty." Thing is, they're all products of the same sensibility; the perverse sense of the world that informed "Blood Simple," and "Barton Fink," "Fargo," and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" informs "Burn After Reading," especially in this time of national dependence on the Intelligence Community.

But back to "WTF." A lot of people say "What the Fuck?" in "Burn After Reading." In fact, I'd have to see it again (not an unpleasant thought), but I got the impression that every single major character in the story says it at least once. And not in the good way of the opening quote that supposedly produces opportunity (though it might for those wearying "Up With People" souls who see every problem as an opportunity, and every half-empty glass as half-full).

No, it's usually uttered in shocked disbelief at the events that transpire. It's because "Burn After Reading" belongs to that sub-category of comedy (and tragedy) "The Incredible Mess." It's where the hopes and dreams of a dedicated few turn into a nightmare that no matter how hard they try, their efforts to extricate themselves only make matters worse. Fighting it is a losing strategy. "Yeah, sure, it looks like quick-sand; what's your hurry?"

CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) has been fired from his job and he's pissed enough to write a tell-all book blowing the doors open on the Agency. One thing he won't put into the book-as he's ignorant of the fact--is that his wife, Dr. Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with friend Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney)--he's in the P.P. business (personal protection), and he's also cruising the Internet as one of Washington D.C.'s serial daters. So does Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), who works at the nearby "Hardbodies" fitness center and who is now turning to plastic surgery because she's taken her body "as far as it will go." She doesn't have the money for it, but hope comes along in the form of a disk of Cox's financial information that falls into the hands of fellow "Hardbodies" employee Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who thinks he might be getting some sort of federal reward for turning it in, and hey, wouldn't that help pay for those operations?

The fuse gets lit, as loyalties shift, panic arises, priorities change and worst instincts lead to "worser" consequences. That reward turns to a sense of entitlement and then resentment, then to ransom. The events are somewhat monitored in disbelief by the CIA (in the form of the incomparable David Rasche and J.K. Simmons), as things spin out of control.

Everybody's great, besides Rasche and Simmons.

Clooney seems to excel with the Coen's--this is his third film with them, McDormand amps up the energy of her previous Coen-work, Swinton seems less self-contained and goes for the comedy like never before, and Malkovich swings between coiled fury and exploding fury. But the stand-out is Brad Pitt's selfless performance as Chad, the personal trainer who could very well be the stupidest person on face of the earth.* His hair piled high and high-lighted, an i-pod constantly filling the empty space in his head, his body moving spasmodically with its energy, he can be counted on to think he's doing the right thing, when he couldn't be more wrong--he is everyman, trapped in a life that resembles a first home improvement project--quite oblivious to the fact that sometimes you only get one chance to get things right without the benefit of "rep's." There's a sub-text running obviously through the thing of "the self," with the main players obsessed with their bodies and their own interests. Washington D.C. makes the perfect back-drop for it.

"Burn After Reading" is rated "R" for pervasive...you know.

"Burn After Reading" is a matinee, I mean, what the fuck?**

* After Bill Pullman's character, Earl Mott, in "Ruthless People"(1986)

** Sorry about the "pervasive language," but, really--you see this movie, and you know that was the working title of this movie (a move that, if it was carried through, would have crippled the movie at the box-office by restricting advertising and such). I briefly considered not spelling out "the f-bomb" with the comic-standard "f@<#," but I figured...no, I'm not saying it again...but as the word appeared Sunday in the "When Harry Met Sally" Scene, I figured "if I use it there, I might as well use it here," pervasively.