The Bourne Legacy

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damons

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity.  We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently).  Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.***  It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window."  These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them."  They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them.  The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them.  Legacy has none.  It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

The Bourne Legacy is a Rental

  * You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

The Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs  (Jonathan Demme, 1994) "I will NOT go see a movie like THAT!"

My client was adamant. I knew what he meant. I was repulsed by the idea, myself. After all, it was based on a novel by Thomas Harris, the most ghoulish and cruelest of thriller writers. I'd read "Black Sunday" and it had an image I wish I could sand-paper out of my mind. I'd read "Red Dragon" (and seen it's Michael Mann movie adaptation, Manhunter), but I hadn't read "The Silence of the Lambs." After "Red Dragon" I swore off his novels. Harris went places I just didn't want to go...ever...not even in a pulp entertainment.

But the "buzz" about The Silence of the Lambs was so good, I had to go. My wife didn't want to see it ("UH-uh"). But a female colleague heard I was going (and her husband was "in no way" going to see it), so we agreed to meet up at the theater—almost like a dare—and satisfy our morbid personalities.

See, I'd seen Manhunter (starring pre-"CSI" William Petersen and Joan Allen), and the most intriguing thing about it was the introduction of a character named Dr. Hannibal Lecter* (played in Manhunter by Brian Cox). Lecter was an über-villain, like Dr. Mabuse. An insane genius psychiatrist, far more twisted than his clients, and he seemed unstoppable, uncontainable. Indeed, he was portrayed as a criminal so dangerous, he was kept in an impenetrable transparent cage of perspex. Cox played him agitated, and as a cannibal, he perpetually chewed gum, as if to satisfy a craving (or to keep his jaw strong).

A study in contrasts: Brian Cox (left) and Anthony Hopkins (below) as their respective Lecters


Anthony Hopkins famously played him in The Silence of the Lambs as an unblinking, supremely confident being of stillness.  When we first see him (after an extended build-up talking about how dangerous he is), the camera slides him into view—and he's already waiting for us.  That's a bravura move (done in silence, purely visually, pure cinema) in collaboration between Hopkins and director Jonathan Demme (who has never been so "to-the-bone" instinctual in his set-ups).  Our first sight of Hopkins is a shock; he's not doing anything. Nor does he have to.  In a dungeon-cage with a tranparent front (not bars, as they're too penetrable, but more like a zoo for observation), he still is in control of the situation and knows it, and his "laser-like intellect" has already begun profiling his prey, FBI Agent Clarice Starling (a bird's name, indicative of small, tremulous life), played by a subtly vibrating Jodie Foster (who's brilliant).

This is a horror movie.  And the best horror movies don't just scare us.  They touch a nerve, grab on tight and slither up into our brains and take root, never leaving us.  They know what scares us, right down to the DNA in our collective alligator brains, and individually to our unbidden (but specially created) nightmares.  And like Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs serves up one of the special horrors to our conqueror species:  fear of being eaten...consumed.  It's not just the dying and the reduction to meat, but it's taking away ourselves, our "souls," our specialness and uniqueness (like Gene Hackman's Sheriff in Unforgiven blurting down the echoing cave of a gun-barrel: "I was building a HOUSE!"). "Deserves got nothing to do with it."

And that's a horror.  A true horror.  A viscerally twisting fear of humankind, that we don't matter, everything that we are, that we do, can't hold off Death.  Any Death.  Every "snuff" makes us just dust in the wind.  And everything we are amounts to nothing.  "Tell her to paint an inch thick.  To this favour, she must come."

"Make her laugh at that."

Sure, it's a horror movie.  But becoming carrion is one thing.  This is about skin-suits. Bad enough to be turned into a meal, yes.  But apparel? 

Yeee-EEE-eee!

So, that's the reason so many people might NOT want to go see The Silence of the Lambs.  What is there, of such value, to see it?  To face your fears and walk into the darkened theater to face these horrors?

There is a subtle sub-text in the film and a not-so-subtle-visual one.  One of the travails of Agent Starling is to go through her rigorous FBI training, the obstacles, the paths, includes making her way through a traditional world (and institutuion) of men.  She is often under-estimated (except by, of all people, Lecter, who is intrigued and challenged by her: "People will say we're in love" is his witty reversal on it) and must point out to the officious males she's dealing with (and it is dealing) that they are treating her in a subordinate manner ("You know, we get a lot of detectives here, but I must say I can't ever remember one as attractive."), even though she calls everyone—her superior Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), Lecter, even the serial killer she's seeking (the terrific Ted Levine, whose brave work in this film should never be unacknowledged in any review) "sir."  

Foster's Starling is a victim, too, although she won't succumb to victimization.  She fights it.  And she fights the battle for the women whose lives have been lost through the pathological extension of that subjugation, and, with her work, might be saved.  Reduction of the human being is the tough theme that runs through The Silence of the Lambs, and it is perpetrated by serial killers and officials alike, anyone who assumes more authority than they are due.  Or more superiority than they deserve.  We all covet that to some degree.  Look in the mirror.

What looks back?

"The eyes are the window to the Soul" they say (although it's difficult to trace who originally said it).  And director Demme makes sure we see them, both eyes and souls.  Frequently, even in conversations, he will photograph the actors looking straight on, their eyes on a direct axis with the center of the camera lens (and thus, the audience).  A lot of directors do that (Spike Lee and Woody Allen, for instances), but more often than not, those uses are to have the characters speak directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall between player and played.  Not Demme (and this is what makes Silence unique).  Whole conversations happen, with the actors looking out at us, as if we are the ones having the conversation—we connect with them, those flickering phantoms on the screen, making them more than casual phantoms, the ones we merely observe as if they were any passer-by on the street.  We look into those windows, see the Souls (even those of the Soulless) and immediately those beings have value and worth, not just victims of our gaze, but true intimates, more than the mere shells that envelop their spirits.

And this is what separates The Silence of the Lambs from the many serial-killer/slasher movies that stalk through the genre—separates it a full 180° from the other films, in fact.  So many of those use the POV subjective shot of the killer observing and hunting its prey (and Demme uses it, too, in the nerve-jangling final confrontation between Starling and "Buffalo" Bill).  So many used it, in fact, that it became a cliché of the type, putting us in the uncomfortable position of seeing the world through the victimizer's vision, rather than the victim's—the hunter's, rather than the hunted's—accompanied by the rasping inhuman breath of the coveting, rather than the pleadings of the coveted.  "The Silence of the Lambs" breathes new life into the form, elevating the victim, the genre...and us.  It gives value to the human being, and in so doing, raises itself up, as well.

---------------------------------------------------

"So," the client began tentatively. "I went to go see Silence of the Lambs... 

"And?" I offered. "Wha'd ya think?"

He blurted. "Ya know, that was a REALLY GOOD movie."

Yes, it is.  Still is. Repulsive, still, certainly. But a great movie.

And it still has the distinction of being the only horror movie to win the Best Picture Oscar, and, even rarer, to win the Big Five categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay), all deservedly so.

* In Mann's film, he's Hannibal Lecktor, a more oral-associated mad scientist name.

W.

"Somethin' 'Bout Bein' in the Barrel"

The Writer's Prejudice Up Front : I've never liked George W. Bush. He's the type of guy I'd like to sit down and have a beer with...thrown in his face. I've always considered him woefully unprepared to be President: a rich man's son who aspired downward; a dilletante who'd never had a successful business that his Dad's cronies didn't bail out; an oil-man, who excelled at digging dry holes; the most bald of hypocrites, pious when the microphone's on, but profane when they're off; who believed in sacrifice as long it was somebody else; possessed of the ethics of a snake-oil salesman, he'd made so many promises and held so many I.O.U.'s that putting him in charge of the Treasury was like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank. Or as Maureen Dowd once famously wrote: "He's the guy who would rent a hotel room, and then ask you to the prom." One by one, Bush and his co-conspirators undermined every aspect of American life to the point where his own Administration, which contained so many of them, should be considered its own National Disaster. There isn't penance enough in this world to make up for the harm that this vain-glorious underachiever did. And once he leaves office, he'll go back to the only job he's had success at: Influence-peddling. Writing about him in the past tense is the only pleasure one can take in writing about him.

He is the Shame of our Nation.

Having said that, "So, Mrs. Lincoln...how'd you like the play?"

Oliver Stone is no one's idea of an objective film-maker, if there is such a thing. Once a screenwriter puts pen to paper, they've already started manipulating the movie to their point-of-view, whether it's from the left, right, center or upside-down (Why do you think they're called "directors?"). So, no one should be surprised that Stone has an axe to grind, with "W.".

Stone is a director of heart, but he frequently by-passes his brain when making his points. So, "Platoon," still his best film, hi-jacks the gritty depiction of grunt jungle-fighting with Stone's own conflicted "Daddy" issues, his "Pvt. Chris Taylor" having to choose between two superiors with different moral ways of engaging the enemy. Lincoln and every fantasist depicting moral choice has put angels and devils on our shoulders. Stone burdens us with His Old Man. That same scenario was transferred to High Finance, with his very next film "Wall Street." I haven't seen every film of Stone's, but most of them are concerned, in some capacity, with paternal conflicts. And because he's a better propagandist than scenarist, most Stone films stop dead whenever we get to each Stone "thesis," invariably a Message being presented by a single character who has center-stage and our undivided attention. "JFK," a dazzling technical exercise of photography and editing, comes positively unglued in its presentation of conflicting conspiracy scenarios for Pres. Kennedy's assassination (Kennedy being another Stone father figure--"Our murdered King," as he's described in the screenplay--completely by-passing any thought that we might, you know, be living in a democracy with a representative government), until Kevin Costner's prosecutor Jim Garrison places in his summation a theory on military-industrial conspiracy behind the Vietnam War--a Stone obsession.* (In "W." Dick Cheney--Richard Dreyfuss clearly enjoys being given the opportunity to play him--stops an Iraq War strategy session to pontificate on securing Middle East interests for oil exploitation for a hundred years). Give the man points for passion, but his movies become such a glut of emotion that the point becomes lost in the gnashing of teeth and the wringing of hands. His bio-pic of "Nixon" was such a slap-dash affair, it seemed like a badly-cast TV-movie gloss-over, skipping from high-light to low-light in time to shoe-horn the next commercial (A weirdly fictional conversation between Chairman Mao and Nixon was Stone's show-stopper there). By the end, with its End-Credits playing over a Mormon Tabernacle Choir-rendition of "Shenandoah," one almost felt some sympathy for the man. Nixon, not Stone.

"W." (his too-early summation of the second Bush Administration) suffers the same problems. It's a gloss of recent events, interspersed with flash-backs to the wastrel days of the young George W. Bush,** drunk with entitlement and just about anything else he could find. Particular heed is paid to his relationship with "Pappy" George H.W. Bush (James Cromwell, though he seems nothing like Bush the Elder, displays quiet bluster and submerged weakness), in which the good-for-nothing son is particularly eaten up, not by his own failures, but by his father's view of them.

The best part of the film--oddly for Stone--is Bush's conversion to The Faith. Struggling with his alcoholism, determined to become a Public Figure (as private industry success constantly eludes him), he is converted by Pastor Earl Hudd (Stacy Keach, playing it straight, and doing some of the best work of his long career), introducing Bush to the second "Daddy," the Divine One, slotting this film into the standard Stone scenario. One knew, as soon as Bob Woodward revealed that Bush, prior to the invasion of Iraq, didn't consult his father/former President, but, instead, relied on the advice of a "Higher Father to appeal to," that Stone would obsess on it and exploit it. The film-maker takes the one relationship as far as it will go, creating a fantasy sequence where Bush 41 challenges Bush 43 to fisticuffs, but Stone doesn't have "the stones" to have W. duking it out with his Savior, J.C.

That battle's still to come.

Stone starts "W." with a Sergio Leone close-up of Bush's steely gaze, what impressionist Frank Caliendo says "like he's always got the sun in his eyes." It's another fantasy sequence, where W. acknowledges the cheers of an empty baseball stadium from center-field--what he'll later reveal as "his favorite place on Earth." The movie will end back on those eyes, searching, confused, disoriented--having lost a pop-fly "in the lights." Those distorted lights show up twice more in the movie--in that previously mentioned conversion scene, as well as when a hung-over Bush collapses while jogging. That's it? That's what we get? A half-assed light show? Is Stone saying he's abandoned by God, or that Bush is overwhelmed by his circumstances? The metaphor's too half-baked to communicate as solid concept clearly.

One could look at W.'s story in Shakespearean terms, as a modern day Prince Hal, whoring and wenching in his oats-sewing days to become the Monarch his father couldn't be. The difference is Hal had Falstaff as guide to the back-alleys of Agincourt. George W. Bush is his own King. And his own Fool.

But Oliver Stone is too busy making room for his "Daddy" theories to create a proper condemnation. As with "Nixon," you start to actually sympathize with the man. Any illumination into the man or the effect of his Administration is lost in the lights. To Stone, he is just another Yalie "poor little lamb who has lost his way."

Bah. Bah...and Bah.

"W." is a weak-kneed, squinty-eyed moron of a cable-watcher.


* Any judge would have gaveled the irrelevancy, but Stone's judge was played by the real-life Garrison.

**Josh Brolin does fine work, but the performance feels a bit "one-note," having to nail the too-familiar Bush mannerisms and vocal tendencies.

The Hunt for Red October

"The Hunt for Red October" (John McTiernan, 1989) We're big fans of Alec Baldwin in the LNTAM household, so every so often it's nice to go back and see "serious actor" Baldwin before he stretched his comic chops. "The Hunt for Red October" was a dry-as-a-bone Tom Clancy novel based on a long-rumored incident involving a Russian nuclear submarine accident that Clancy turned into a cat-and-mouse game between a defecting Russian sub commander, and the American and Russian fleets in the North Atlantic. The action was sometimes intriguing, but the characters were non-existent, right down to the motivations of Captain Ramius, and the novel's Clancy stand-in-hero Jack Ryan.
Produce Mace Neufeld (who must have the patience of a saint given his long-term relationship with Clancy) turned it into a first-class film of intrigue top-heavy with male actors (by my count the only females are two stewardesses, Gates --Star Trek's "Dr. Crusher"--McFadden as Mrs. Ryan, and the kid who plays Ryan's daughter). So, here's the run-down: Baldwin, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, Scott Glenn, Courtney Vance (making the most of a geat part), Richard Jordan, Joss Ackland, Stellan Skarsgard, Peter Firth, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Curry, Fred Thompson, plus comedian Rick Ducommun and I swear I see Michael Biehn in the helicopter scene. And as the man everybody talks about, Sean Connery as the Scottish-accented Lithuaninan Comdr. Ramius.


It all works, as a spy/adventure story, as a detective story, a military exercise, and a submarine movie...and a character piece. Nobody comes out and says anything about their feelings but actions define the characters, and with all the sub-time, there's a lot of celluloid of people standing around talking..and for the most part it's good functional talk that propels the movie along. Plus, you'll come away with a gloss of submarine tactics, of sonar capacities, the strategies of "arming" torpedoes, and a healthy respect for difficulties of landing a jet-aircraft on a carrier during bad weather.* Respect also for Baldwin, who managed to make a human being out of the cypher of Jack Ryan through the force of his own personality--his Ryan is something of a geek, like Ben Affleck's later interpretation--and proved himself an adept for actor imitations (nice skewering of Thompson and Connery there, Alec) Plus, a crisp snap to the brim for suggesting and making good on the overhead shot of Ryan cutting his tether from a helicopter to gain entry to an American sub during a violent storm, and looking UP at the camera to make sure we all know it's him doing the stunt.


There was minimal CGI involved--and in fact, due to budget constraints, the filming of the underwater scenes were as low-tech as you could get--model shots of subs were laid-over underwater landscapes filmed in a dry warehouse filled with smoke. Crude particle and wave generation was all that was needed to complete the image. But it's indicative of the back-to-basics approach to "The Hunt for Red October"--an old-fashioned sea-hunt that satisfies.


* But my favorite moment in the movie is a brilliant stroke--the smooth transition in dialog from Russian to English as Firth's Political Officer reads a passage from a bible owned by Ramius' wife: the camera moves in on Firth reading the passage--Revelation 16:16-17--(in Russian) and stops on one commonly-pronounced word--"Armageddon"--and when the camera begins to pull back, he continues...in English. It's a neat trick, perfectly strategized and played.

Silverado

Silverado (1985)

What a Western is, is a picture frame, and you can put any kind of picture you want in there. With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

Lawrence Kasdan interviewed March 21, 2003 IGN.com


"Now, I don't wanna kill you and you don't wanna be dead".


Silverado is like every Western you have ever seen and, inevitably, like no other. It feels like it is director Lawrence Kasdan's homage and reinvention to the Westerns of his past in the way that his screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark seemed to be his updated tribute to the Saturday morning serials of his youth. It has just about every cliché you can remember: the four heroes with their code of honor who come riding across the scrubland; the crooked sheriff; the rapacious cattle rancher; the vulnerable wagon train; the saloon; the whore with a heart of gold; the slick gambler (called Slick); the classic Western town; the final gun duel in the empty street; the gun slinger with his twirling Colt 45's; a rousing score by Bruce Broughton that sounds like every Western score you have ever heard and most of all, 'that' landscape and so on and so on. Copies they may be but ones that have a faithfulness that comes from an appreciation for the genre rather than a mockery.

Kasdan keeps the action going with a shoot-out every fifteen minutes even as it builds to the classic confrontation. The script fairly crackles with cowboy dialogue melded with witty one-liners. Even the anachronisms seem to work: an African-American gunslinger (Danny Glover) and a feminist pioneer (Rosanna Arquette). Yet the movie has a modern sensibility too - the heroes aren't quite the pure 'white hats' - Kevin Kline plays Paden, a drifter, who is happy to casually kill a man for stealing his hat even though he will risk jail to save a stray dog and throws his lot in with the villainous Sheriff Cobb (Brian Dennehy) before he is forced to act on his better instincts. Kevin Costner is surprisingly bearable (given his later outings) as the happy-go-lucky sociopathic brother of Scott Glenn who comes to the rescue time and time again. Added to this you also get John Cleese as an ex-pat sheriff and Jeff Goldblum , the aforementioned Slick as well as Linda Hunt, who comes close to stealing the whole movie as Stella the owner of the Midnight Star Saloon.