Upstream

Upstream (John Ford, 1927) Somewhere in New Zealand, there was a film archive that contained a spate of nitrate films that were not returned to the United States after their initial showings in the 20's. They sat there, waiting to either disintegrate or explode in flames, until they were discovered in 2009.  Among the treasures were one of the first films ever to be worked on by Alfred Hitchcock, as well as one trailer and one feature directed by John Ford for the Fox Corporation (before their merger with 20th) that up 'til then had thought to be lost.

Early Ford is still deeply Ford country.  This backstage drama takes place in a players' boarding house, where touring performers could rent lodgings for their seasons in vaudeville houses.  The current residents are a motley troupe: a mother-daughter "sister act," Irish vaudevillians Callahan and Callahan (Ted McNamara and Sammy Cohen—yes, you read that right, it's part of the gag), the faded Shakesperean (Emile Chautard), the medicine show jugglers (and distillers), the "Star Boarder" (Raymond Hitchcock)—his reputation gained by inserting himself into every situation, the least talented member of a famous acting family, the Brashinghams (Earle Foxe), and a knife-throwing act with the Castillian expert Juan Rodriguez—real name Jack La Velle (Grant Withers)—and his lovely target Gertie Ryan (Nancy Nash).  

Any community in a Ford film is complicated and this one is tangled like a cat's cradle.  Jack's in love with Gertie, but Brashingham is on the make as well.  Everybody is in everybody's business, but when one word comes from London that a Brashingham (even a lousy one) must be booked to play "Hamlet," it throws the whole household in an uproar.  The vain Brashingham couldn't act his way out of a wet paper sack, but the experienced thesp' gives him lessons that seem to bring out the best in him as an actor, while bringing out the worst in him as a human being.  There are the various tactics to avoid paying rent with the Landlady, the torn loyalties of Gertie, and the "Star Boarder's" proclivity to flirt with anything in a skirt—it's Ford affectionately poking fun at the phoniness and the keeping up of appearances of show folk, but also of how a disparate group of individuals can still mutually raise each other up.  The performances are remarkably restrained for a silent film (and one about a bunch of hams), and Ford pulls a couple of tricks with a smoothly moving camera that impresses, considering how bulky the things were back then.

Made three years after his landmark The Iron Horse and a year before his first talking picture, Upstream is worth seeing for an atypical prototype of what Ford would produce later in his career.

Emile Chautard, Earle Foxe, and Nancy Nash all have things
that need to be discussed Upstream

United 93

United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) "The War on Terror" turned the tide before it was even declared.  The efforts of the crew and passengers of United flight 93 insured that, as they assessed the situation quickly, made decisive plans and executed them unselfishly, in the process saving an unimaginable number of lives.  Who knows, besides the dishonored dead, what the target was?  We don't know.  We can't know.  But, after that, every airline passenger became more vigilant, and everybody who didn't put their seats in an upright position (or try to light their shoes) was seen with suspicion.  Anyone who attempted anything—short of hogging the overhead compartments, blocking the aisles in conversation, stealing somebody else's honey-nuts, or (god forbid) talking incessantly about themselves THE ENTIRE FLIGHT—against the common good, would be taken down and taken down hard, if not by security officers, then by the passengers themselves (and you had better luck with the security officers).  Flight 93 was when the terrorists started losing 55 minutes after the battles had begun.

Greengrass' ingenious attempt to recreate the events on 9-11 leading up to and during that horrific flight (in real time, one might add) crackles and pops with a cinema verite energy that makes the most mundane of the circumstances take on an ironic heft.  We all know how the story went-only if merely how it ends—and it makes all the participants victims and their every action and utterance weighted with irony, their moments, being finite, that much more important.  The dawning realization that their rudimentary transport had become part of an organized plot to turn their flight into a weapon of targetted destruction is both horrific and inspiring, moving fast through the stages of grief, they decide to make the best of the situation in which they suspected they would not survive, and acted unselfishly to at least stop any further loss of life wherever they were heading, and, maybe, doubtfully, save their own.  In an unfolding world of uncertainty, they acted for the greater good.  

It's an amazing story—civilians becoming warriors, victims not settling for that role.  And Greengrass' version is done without stars, no grand-standing, just the director's insistence on verisimilitude and energy, not enhancing the story with false heroics, but only the genuine ones, enhanced by its own choice not to editorialize.

Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives

"The Thais That Bind"
or
"Personally, I Think it's Something in the Tea..."

Maybe it was me.

What I know about Thai culture, cinema and such can fit onto a plate that holds a decent portion of Phad Thai.  Very little.  But wait a minute.  Is that required?  It shouldn't be.

It is the responsibility of the film maker to use the language of film to communicate their ideas to the audience.  That's their job.  If they're too obscure or hiding their point behind a wall of technique (or lack of it), that's their fault, not mine.  Film should be universal.  That doesn't mean it should aspire to the lowest common denominator in its means of expression.  But, it would be nice if it met us half-way, so we don't have to make a field-trip into the director's head, or depend on some (God help us) Entertainment section interview with the director to explain it all to us cretins.

So, if the 2010 Palme D'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives leaves me cold, that's why.  It's not that I mind the long takes of shots (I like that, actually), the glacial pace (ditto), the banal dialog (it's the visuals that really matter), or the odd subject matter (sex with a catfish?...uh...okay, I'll buy that, read any fairy tales lately?)*  It's just that the film is episodic, the segments unrelated, and never really comes to its point.

Boonme is a farmer in a Thai forest, and he's dying of kidney failure.  He is visited by his sister-in-law and her son, who are there to spend time with the dying man in his last days.  But, other guests arrive, as if, with his demise approaching, tying up some of the loose threads of his life.  His wife shows up.  His dead wife, looking considerably younger than at her death.  Then, his son who went missing many years ago, shows up, transmorgrified as one of the Ghost Monkeys who inhabit the forest (this occurred by taking a Ghost-Monkey wife).  They talk, tell their stories.  Then we go to the story of the Princess who is given the gift of a young, beautiful reflection of herself at the base of a waterfall.  The catfish spirit of the water offers her that beauty if she joins him in the water.  And, if I interpreted this correctly, she turns into a catfish (Well, if the son can turn into a Ghost-Monkey...).  Then, Boonme and his two corporeal relatives go spelunking, where they find a cavern of bright iridescent rock that resembles the stars in the night-sky...and a pool of water that contains blind colorless fish.  Presumably, in this segment Boonme dies, as he stops moving.  We see his memorial service.  Then, after the sister-in-law and her son, in monk's robes, sit and watch television in their hotel room, with her other child, a daughter.  At some point, Mom and son decide to go to a restaurant that has karaoke, but the daughter doesn't want to go.  So, the spirits of the mother and son go off to eat, leaving the bodies watching TV (spiritlessly...now THAT part I "get.").

It's about the mystery of the Spirit.  It's about how we change in a lifetime.  It's about how the closer we get to death, we become more of the spirit than the corporeal.

It just doesn't say it very well.  I found it a drag.

Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a Rental, I guess.



* Yeah, I can't let that go unexplained, and lest you be alarmed, Boonme in Not Rated, but has no nudity, and things are merely implied.  But the segment reminded me of the variation of "The Frog Prince" that was put out by the Aurora Model Company when I was a kid:  The Frog holds a sign that says "Kiss Me And You'll Live Forever.  You'll Be A FROG, But You'll Live Forever!"

The Usual Suspects

"The Usual Suspects" (Bryan Singer, 1998) A truck hi-jacking occurs.  As a result, a motley collection of grifters are called together for a police line-up in an effort by U.S. Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) to frame one of them, Dean Keegan (Gabriel Byrne). Instead of proving there's no honor among thieves, the five criminals decide to collaborate on a defiantly ingenious crime-spree, which eventually runs afoul of a major international organization run by the legendary crime boss Keyser Söze.  Before too long all but one of the collaborators is dead, and the remaining is in police custody, for once unwilling to talk for fear of his life.  Ironically, his name is Verbal.  Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey).

It is only when Söze's name becomes known to the police that Verbal begins to babble, filling in the many gaps that Kujan and local police sergeant Rabin (Dan Hedaya) don't know, starting with that fateful line-up of Keaton, McManus (Stephen Baldwin), the almost-incomprehensible small-timer Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), smart-ass chopper Hockney (Kevin Pollak, never better), and Kint, and the ever-more elaborate coups they pull off, ending with the death of nearly everyone on a freighter that has blown up the night previous.  As Keaton has eluded him before, Kujan is convinced that he's the one behind it all, but Kint swears he's wrong, as he was the only surviving witness to Keaton's death at the hands of Keyser Söze.  And Kint's tale is the proof of it.  Keaton is dead.  Keyser Söze lives.  And Kint is terrified, convinced that, now that Söze's name is known, he'll be accused of being a rat.  And because he's seen Söze's face, he won't be allowed to live.

Meticulously cast, directed just-so, with a ribald sense of language, irony and black humor, The Usual Suspects is a fine example of editorial legerdemain, one of the neatest tricks to pull off in the movies—especially considering that audiences to mystery films are usually five steps ahead of the movie.  How can they not, as the director Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich) says in Targets: "All the good movies have been made," and all the plots have been used, and all the tricks have been revealed.

Well, almost.


IF, gentle reader, you have not yet seen The Usual Suspects, PROCEED NO FURTHER, please. As much as I try to dance around the issue not revealing too much, I have to concede that, beyond this line and, indeed, for the rest of today's post, THERE BE SPOILERS, and they will irreparably destroy any first viewings of The Usual Suspects. Trust me on this, I am not kidding, and don't come whining to me if you are so unwise as to not heed this warning!!!  (The only worse fate would be having to transcribe Benicio del Toro's dialogue).

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."

There are a lot of great lines in The Usual Suspects, but that one is a key one. What is it saying, actually?  It's hard to penetrate its meaning, and after staring at it and parsing it (but not going so far as to "diagram" it), I finally gave up with an aching head and just said "It's a black-hole of a sentence."

But, then, so is the movie.  All of it.  A double-negative with a marked-for-dead "X" at its center, The Usual Suspects is constructed like a tight thriller, when it really is not.  The answer to the riddle is there, almost from the beginning.  But, we, the audience, never see, it even though we have.  And we probably don't even realize we were told after the movie is over.  It comes down to one shot.  One shot at the center of the situation, and like a black-hole, and like any unsolved mystery, there is nothing there...but what we put into it.

It is a pull-in of wharf jetsam—pallets, rope and crab-pots discarded pell-mell on the San Pedro dock occupied by the freighter, as it, and what remains of the Keaton gang, goes up in a big ball of flame, illuminating the night-sky and the junk on the dock.  The shot continues slowly boring in on the circle of ropes in the center of the frame.  What we see is junk, complicated, random, but the devil is in the details.  Since the director is taking us there, this shot must be of some import.  It is, for the movie (why wouldn't it be?).  I remember, sitting in the theater, watching this stretch of film, as it moved ever closer, thinking: "Who's behind the ropes watching this?"  At the end of the shot, it might even be revealed who it was, behind this, the witness to the events, the guy with the knowledge of the events that were unfolding in the heat and the flash. 

Nothing is revealed, ultimately.  The scene goes into a long, slow, lingering transition to Verbal being interrogated.  We won't be told why we're there until later in the picture, once all the names are known, and the ultimate triumph of Söze is at its end-game.  For the moment, though, that empty shot is just another piece of the puzzle at its center.  A lot more pieces must be placed before we can be given the context of what lies at the empty center of this shot.

We have a compact—we, the audience and the creators of movies.  Their job is to re-create a reality and ours is to accept it as truth.  We come to "buy," not only our tickets, but also the verisimilitude of the flickering images on the screen (itself an illusion, a series of still images run at a speed to fool the eye into thinking it a seamless reality).  That compact is an agreed contract.  We accept that it is not reality ("It's only a movie," "No, honey, the blood isn't real..."), but for the sake of drama we put that aside for entertainment.  It is the director's intention to fool us—presenting artifice as reality.  Yet, to fulfill the expectations of entertainment, audiences must offer a suspension of dis-belief, while, at the same time, having absolute faith in the veracity of the writer-director.  If we are shown something, it must be important, not only to the story, but also the story-telling.  If we are presented something on the screen, it must be for a good reason.  If not, the director has broken his contract.  He has gone beyond manipulating the images...and manipulating us.

But, that is their job from the beginning.  To calculate the equation of Artifice = Reality.  But, it takes a director with the true knowledge of how powerful film is in its effect on the audience to go beyond the usual movie-magic of presenting Reel Life as Real Life, to presenting fiction as fact and getting away with it—to mis-lead us—to break the trust between director and audience and make us smile at the subterfuge.

Like the shot in Rear Window of Torvald escorting his wife (with luggage) on a trip that goes unnoticed by the protagonist, it is superfluous, intended not for the story...but for the viewing audience. It's a little seed of doubt sewn by the director to keep us guessing. Or, in another case of Hitchcock, the elaborate crane shot that follows Norman Bates up the staircase to retrieve his mother in Psycho, a move designed to call attention to itself and not to what is going on on-screen.  A feint.  A slight-of-hand (and camera).

So, what of that empty image that must stand for (or in front of) something in The Usual Suspects? Later in the film, director Singer will take us back to this place.  To put words to the image, as Kint describes his flight from the carnage of the freighter and watches Keegan's execution at the hands of Söze—the only reliable witness to the act.

Kujan doesn't believe it.  He's convinced that Keegan is Söze, the criminal plays all leading to a supposed drug-deal at the freighter—just a ruse for Söze to kill the one man capable of identifying him.  Söze's deals with the Keegan gang are small-time, just so he can slip unnoticed onto that one ship and assassinate the man who has seen him.  His ends justify the means, creating a subterfuge for the ultimate goal.  And director Singer, does the same thing, using our trust and knowledge of movies to include a shot that tells us nothing, and is, for all intents and purposes except of its own, meaningless.

The lesson that we ultimately learn (as also, too late and to a lesser extent, does Kujan in the film) is the undeniable fact of this story, and of movie-making itself:  The devil does exist, and he is in the details.

Even if we don't see him.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."



Unstoppable

"The Braking of Pelham 4-5-6"
or
"So...Now What the Hell Do We Do?"

Tony Scott's last film was the very "meh" update of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 with Denzel Washington as a harried subway supervisor on the day that crazy terrorist John Travolta decides to take a train (and its passengers) hostage.  The movie was hysterical in the "hair-on-fire" way (and not in the "ha-ha" way) where the earlier Joseph Sargent-directed version was cleverly funny, the film-makers leaching colors out of the picture and backing it with a hip-hop beat.  It was a dull and lifeless movie with all sorts of editing tricks and false drama trying to make the thing seem more like an action movie than the material had the capacity to fulfill.  So, what you got was a movie that felt like it was suffering from inappropriate  'roid-rage.

Perhaps they should have skipped Pelham and gone straight to Unstoppable (called that because, presumably, Andrey Konchalovskiy already made Runaway Train in 1985!).  Based on the "Crazy 8's" incident in 2001, where an engineer-less train—train 777, making it apparently that much closer to "the Choo-Choo of the Beast"—carrying dangerous chemicals (the "molten phenol" used in the film), moved unimpeded and under power at speeds up to 48 mph, it has, like Pelham, been ginned up with drama and death and daring-do, and the inevitable "countdown to disaster" that could end Scranton, Pennsylvania as we know it.

Everything that can go wrong can and does.  The train is under power due to an operator error—he was under pressure from co-workers to move a heavily laden train quickly, and left the cab to try and move a track-switcher—with its brakes disconnected, is on a collision course with another filled with school-kids on a "train-safety" field-trip (Oooooh, the irony!), but there seem to be enough Pennsylvanians on the track that you suspect it was "Go Stand on a Railroad Track Day" in the state (at least, the film-makers kept it free of nuns, widows, orphans and puppies—although one shot of a raccoon crossing the track with the train hurtling at us in the background provoked an inappropriate fit of the giggles).  It's carrying the afore-mentioned molten phynol "used in the manufacture of glue"—and in case we don't get it (a problem with this movie) it is reiterated that it is "very toxic, highly volatile" and the place the train will most likely derail is in the middle of Scranton on a curve that overlooks (conveniently) a large collection of fuel oil storage tanks.  Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is bad city planning. 

On top of that, the corporate heads irresponsibly want to stop it in the least expensive way possible, meaning that it probably won't work, and the two engineers also on a collision course with "a missile the size of the Chrysler Building" consist of a bitter company vet and a kid on his first day on the job with a court appearance that he has to make.

This is one over-loaded train.  Scott pulls out all the stops—he doesn't have any brakes, either—skip-and ramp-editing the train footage to move it faster, swooping around the trains to give everything more momentum, constantly changing perspective to keep one ill at ease (until the two Mutt and Jeff engineers—Denzel Washington and Chris Pine—share a laugh—and a frame—half-way through the film, their conversations consist of separate shots of each speaking their lines from opposite perspectives of the engine compartment), it is a busy, busy movie.  Credit to Scott, he keeps you informed what's going on so you never get lost in the spinning images.  If anything, there is too much information—needlessly identifying various locations at the beginning when they're all 200 miles of each other, and not trusting any piece of information to not be re-iterated (after a terse conversation with the corporate HQ, do we need to have the gal in charge (Rosario Dawson) call her callous supervisor, played "an asshole?").  The entire plot is summed up a couple times during the movie ("So, what you're telling me is....") to the point where you're feeling slightly talked down to.  Still, it is a bit of a fun ride for all the lapses in passenger-service.

One funny aspect of the film is its constant thrusting of Fox News coverage of the event (the film is a 20th Century Fox release and both entities are holdings of News Corp.).  But it may be a bit of a miscalculation: the circling news helicopters buzzing the train seem to not only distract, but also interfere with the rescue efforts, to the point where they're actually one of the things hampering the struggles of the people to resolve the situation.   Fox runs the risk of making one of their own divisions look poor in their attempt to cross-promote, derailing their own efforts throughout the film.

Unstoppable is a Rental.   

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.

Up

"Let Go/Don't Let Go"

First, the important stuff: Go.

Don't even hesitate. This is another of those Pixar films that not only entertains, but pushes the form of animation, the more specific discipline of computer animation...and basic film language.

You do not have to see it in 3-D, as the effects are subtle, though expertly done. 3-D does not make or break "Up" and I suspect it will be just as lovely and dimensional on a cyclopian screen (in fact, it might even be better, as the provided 3-D prism glasses tend to mute the film's Maxfield Parrish-like color pallette).

Though just as rollicking as other animation films, "Up" stays somewhat down-to-Earth—no super-annuated cars or toys, no anthropomorphic mice (however, there are talking dogs, thanks to their master's creating speaking collars for them, in a situation that recalls "The Island of Dr. Moreau"—I kept expecting them to break into "Be Our Guest" at some point), and pains have been taken to keep the natural world natural: water-falls feel wet, however improbably they may be, you can practically feel the spray in a fog-bound scene, sunlight lazes across a wall convincingly, and vistas of escarpments or clouds seem picture-perfect.* It takes your breath away.


But there's a maturity to "Up" in its story-telling that's quite unlike any other Pixar film before it, not that the kids will care. As with the previous "Wall•E," the opening sequences are the killer, as directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson map out the life of Carl (Edward Asner) and Ellie Frederickson, two kids with a mutual passion for adventure, dare-devil Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), and eventually each other. The sequence is done with a moving simplicity (with a stunning attention to detail) and no dialogue, just images telling the story of a marriage in all its depths. That sequence haunts the entire movie, not only for its subject matter but also for the task of trying to top it.

It gets enticingly close many times** and when it doesn't you're usually roaring with laughter,*** but the rest of the movie seems almost prosaic in its predicaments and complications. You don't want this one to end like your typical chase movie, and even though it does, it does so better than the vast majority of them. Even while the hi-jinks ensue you can't help but think that even these situations work best as allegory in setting up the big gambit of the movie, with precipitously floating dirigibles and houses and many, many situations of making the vertiginous decision to let go or not let go.

For technique, creative thoughtfulness and a painter's eye, Pixar's team of magicians and imagineers are unsurpassed in continuing to influence the art of film.

"Up" is a Full-Price Ticket

Update: Glenn Kenny has a concise "halleluia" for "Up" at "Some Came Running" that addresses some of the many joys encountered therein, but also touches philiosophically on the critical ennui of writing about the latest Pixar release ("Ho-hum, another brilliantly conceived and executed Pixar film"). There's no pleasing some people ("Hello, Stephanie Zacharek and Joe Morgenstern!" Perhaps their reviews were "inspired" by a bad meal at Cannes with a snooty waiter...) who have become so jaded with consistent quality that they wouldn't know A Great Movie if they tripped over it in a darkened theater.

* And for me, the favorite sound design element is the sound of the balloons above the house bouncing together, sounding like rubber petals.

* Including a "taking flight" sequence that is among the best in cinema

*** Best line: "Well, that won't work..." The adults in the audience laughed for a full minute. You have to be there.

An Unreasonable Man: Ralph Nader

"An Unreasonable Man: Ralph Nader" (Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan, 2006) A documentary about the uncompromising consumer advocate and gadfly takes a slightly different tack than it might have a decade ago. Nobody but corporate blood-suckers had anything bad to say about Nader before the 2000 election. Well, except for the folks he thought of as solicitous or too political and compromised in their efforts to achieve. But since Nader's run in 2000, ensuring the presidency of George W. Bush, he isn't regarded quite so kindly, or as seriously. In fact, a few interviewees sound like they'd like to roast him over an over-heating Chrysler engine.

Back in the 20th century the documentary tells the familiar story of Nader's victories against GM, the threats from corporate America, the dedicated ascetic life-style that resulted, the all-consuming obsessiveness, the glory days of the Carter Administration, the fall-out with the Carter Administration, the vindictiveness, the mean streak, the expressed thought that "no one's going to do it right until I do it." Once the presidential bid happens, the movie turns into Point/Counterpoint, where bitter literati seethe about Nader's sucking votes away from Gore, and the Nader sympathizers simpering that given the closeness of the election, even the least-vote-getter cost the Democrats the election (I'd counter that 1) Nader cost the election worse, then! and 2) nobody knew how close the vote would be--even if he'd known Nader wouldn't have bowed out). Nader, meanwhile, continues in his belief that things would have been just as bad if Gore was in Office (not sure how he'd know that, other than Gore is one of those spine-less compromisers). The film left me with several thoughts. Number one--consumer advocacy should be like the medical field--"First, do no harm," something Nader always assumes he's doing. Then, there's the irony the film doesn't touch: Nader's tactics are not those of a democracy's, not even a representative one. But they resemble most closely those of the corporate villains he has fought for so many years. When you fight a tiger, you become a tiger. It would have been interesting if the film-makers had made that point, and to see Nader's response to that.

Update 2008: He's Ba-ack!

An Unfinished Life

An Unfinished Life (Lasse Hallström, 2005) There may be no director more genteel than Lasse Hallström. Whether his subject is incest, abortion (The Cider House Rules), depression (The Shipping News), disassociation (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), he manages to sap any dramatic life right out of it, even beating out the Merchant/Ivory films for taking drama and making it blandly digestible. Hallström is a director for the blue-haired old ladies who attend matinees who like to be titilated with racey subject matter, but not shocked. Never shocked. What's Hallström's social drama of the week? It's family abuse. Jennifer Lopez grabs her daughter and flees her abusive husband (the always reliable Damian Lewis, who seems stuck playing heavies now), to her verbally abusive father-in-law (from her previous, child-bearing marriage). He's an old coot (Robert Redford, mussed up) crusty with scabs of bitterness from the death of his only son/her first husband, blaming her for the drunken car accident that killed him. Heaped onto that guilt is his own for being too in his cups to keep friend Mitch (Morgan Freeman) from being mauled by a bear (no, really, that's the story). It's all about taking reponsibilty and letting go of recrimination. By the end, even the bear has a change of heart and is forgiven his trespassings. It's all very neat, and very tidy and well-played by all. All it seems to lack is "Hallmark" watermarked on it. Still, one could do worse watching it.

The U.S. Vs. John Lennon

Yes, We All Shine On

First off, it's a VH-1 documentary, and you know what those look and feel like. Heavy on the art direction, light on the content, "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" single-mindedly paints the impression that John Winston Lennon was considered a threat to the Nixon Administration, and thus, singled out for investigation and action by federal agencies to toss him out of the country. All true to a certain extent. But what the documentary, in its rush to lionize both Lennon as a martyr and rock n' roll as a powerful political force ("Corporate rock n' roll," mind you), fails to point out is that was a far-too-commonplace tactic for that governemnt, whether under the aegis of J. Edgar Hoover, or by the group that was organized by the White House after Hoover decided he didn't want any part of Nixon's dirty work, "The Plumbers"--they of "Watergate" fame. First off, the filmmakers have the disengenuousness to say that John Lennon was unique in that he used his celebrity to advance a political cause.

No! Really? Bet that never happened before! Gosh! I wonder what all those HUAC meetings were for in the 50's?

Nor was Lennon unique being targetted by the Nixon administration. During the Watergate Hearings, it was revealed that Nixon had an actual "Enemies List"--involving such folks as Daniel Schorr and Paul Newman. The only surprising thing about its existence was that the clowns actually wrote the names down and kept copies of it (for the memoirs, no doubt).

Another point of emphasis is Lennon's participation in a benefit rally that saw its benefactor released from jail three days later. The documentary would have us believe it was "The BIG NAME of LENNON" that got the wheels of justice rolling, when it might actually be that John Sinclair was released by a sympathetic judge who came to the same conclusion the rallyers did: that the man shouldn't have been senetenced to ten years in prison for selling two joints to undercover cops; that the charges were trumped up, and having been so trumped were thus dismissed.

Now Lennon is the Beatle that I have the most admiration for (then George, then Richard Starkey, then Pete Best, then Jimmy Nicol, Murray the K, then Sir Paul, the git), and its always fun to see old footage of him, sporting and sparking. What Lennon did do that was unique was to take Yoko's challenging, simple ideas and exploit them as marketing slogans, whether with songs, on billboards, or the various stunts the two pranksters would use to lure in the press. Lennon didn't give a shit if he was thought a fool as long as the message got out--when you were a Beatle you developed a hard carapace. The film is at its best showing the two manipulating the "five steps behind" fifth estate, and clearly enjoying themselves, being very much in love, and showing how the government actions against them (surveillance and threatened deportation) weighed heavily on them.
But its not the whole story. Nothing is made of Lennon's drug abuse (what, they couldn't get rights to use footage from "Let It Be?") or about what has become known as "John Lennon's Lost Weekend." The filmmakers use "Instant Karma" as the End Credits song implying (I guess) that everybody doing dirty deeds got their "comeuppance." Ironically, one of the lyrics from that song is "And We All Shine On...(like the moon and the stars and the sun)." Taking another interpretation of the word "shining," one can say that applies to the film-makers as well, since they "shine on" any embarrassing facts that might contradict their simplistic view of a complicated artist.

"The U.S. vs. John Lennon" is a rental...but you might as well wait 'til it shows up on VH-1, MTV, CMT, or it is morphed into an "E! True Hollywood Story." Googoogajoob.