Shooter

Shooter (Antoine Fuqua, 2007) - B-

Holy crap! Mostly, I wish this worked better as a straight-ahead genre film, but I'm willing to forgive a movie a lot for being so angry, and political, and -- yes -- brave. No, I don't actually believe, as this film blatantly suggests, that Donald Rumsfeld ought to be shot in the head, but the fact that a big-budget shoot-'em-up has the balls to come out and say it is significant. This is an incendiary blend of '80s-style one-man-against-the-world action (think Commando) and modern political paranoia, existing in a world where every facet, nook and cranny of the state is corrupt to the core and merits absolute distrust. There's a scene late in the film where our falsely-accused protagonist enters a DOJ boardroom to plead his case, and five years ago that would have been that -- he would have presented his evidence, justice would have prevailed, and Danny Glover's sneering villain would have gotten his richly deserved comeuppance. But here the DOJ honchos can only throw up their hands, leaving Mark Wahlberg to, predictably enough, take matters into his own. The film is, sadly, kind of incompetent -- the second act sags; there are some bizarro edits and time-jumps I'm still trying to figure out; Fuqua never really seems comfortable with the action set-pieces -- but that may have worked in its favor, since were it actually good, it may have bought Fuqua and Co. more controversy than they bargained for. The last lines of Shooter are simply stunning, and the last shot suggests that the only viable option is for sensible people to leave civilization and retreat to the mountains, preferably after we hire Mark Wahlberg -- excuse me, "Bob Lee Swagger" -- to take most of the inside-the-Beltway population the fuck out.

The Host

The Host (Joon-Ho Bong, 2007) - B+

The first real appearance of the Creature -- not the brief glimpse of it hanging under the bridge, but immediately after that -- has to be the best genre film moment since... when? I don't know. Maybe ever. The way Bong lets us glimpse it -- following an ominous shot of the horrified protagonist, we see it galloping almost merrily toward him along the bank of a river, bowling over the hapless humans who don't catch on and run for their lives fast enough -- makes for a moment that's so big and so subtle at the same time that it took my breath away. Bong gets a lot of mileage of how matter-of-factly he shoots the creature -- no hide-the-ball set-up, no portentous reveals; the camera seems placed almost casually, affording unassuming, sometimes straight-up, sometimes partially-obstructed views. It's a monster movie liberated of the genre's stylistic trappings, and it's wonderful to see. As much as I hate to denigrate ambition, I do think that the film gets carried away with the political allegory that comes to dominate the second and third acts, if only because it winds up stretched a bit too thin; still, this is surely the year's best genre film to date.

I Think I Love My Wife

I Think I Love My Wife (Chris Rock, 2007) - C+

Nope, still don't like Chris Rock -- that ever-present smirk makes me want to deck him, and I wish he would stop yelling every line; he's like the live equivalent of someone who TYPES IN ALL CAPS. As a writer and director he shows more promise: his humor is unsophisticated, relying a lot on tonal contrast, repetition, and tried-and-true gags, but he can be genuinely clever, and for all his goofiness, he takes his stories seriously. My Wife is interesting for a while, mostly because of Rock's sneaky recognition of the way people perceive any interaction between a married man and an attractive woman; it's too bad that he moves away from this notion in the third act, preferring to veer toward more traditional themes of temptation and redemption. Ultimately, there's a little too much in the way of Viagra jokes and Chris Rock smugness for this to really work (the gimmicky ending, while it sounds good on paper, bombs simply because Rock is so freakin' annoying), but there are also enough laughs and surprising nuance to keep the proceedings respectable. In particular, Kerry Washington is great in a role she could have played as mindless seductress.

Zodiac, Black Snake Moan

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) - B+

Different interpretations abound; I think it's about the way we try to process evil, subject it to rules and regulations, then prefer to forget about it, push it aside, with the inevitable result that our hands close on air. People have complained about the last scene providing an unsolicited solution to the whodunit, but all I could think was, why couldn't they bust out that photo line-up years earlier? Answer, I take it: because of petty jurisdictional bullshit, cops fighting over territory and struggling to consolidate information, hampered at every step by egos, red tape, and the Fourth Amendment. The implication is that we set up this framework to avoid dealing with evil face-to-face, something Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith finally does in the film's most powerful scene; everyone else who gets uncomfortably close bails out for the sake of their lives and families. Fincher loads the 2:40 film with detail -- it's the most intricate police procedural in years -- but our knowledge that the Zodiac was never caught makes everything seem sadly quixotic. Meanwhile, what lurks behind curiously ungrammatical letters and cryptic ciphers -- the killer we never meet (or do we?) -- is genuinely scary.

Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2007) - B+

I'm tempted to accuse Brewer of being too willing to ditch his daring conceit for more conventional redemption story elements, but the whole thing winds up working so well that it's hard to complain: the final scene, in particular, is a rare movie moment, striking such a powerful chord of hope and sadness, regret and determination... it's just perfect. Amazingly, the story functions on its own terms, lest you think that a black man chaining a white woman to a radiator in Tennessee is only good for metaphor or commentary; the film gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its characters' sparse backstories, even while Samuel L. Jackson is literally dragging Christina Ricci back into his house, hand over hand. Noodles around too much in the second act, but rallies big time in the third; Jackson and Ricci are extraordinary.

Raising Arizona

Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987) - A-

The Coens do wonders with the English language ("We got a name for people like you. That name's called 'recidivism.'") and with comedy -- they revel in contradictions, making their characters quintessential white trash bumpkins who exhibit unexpected but consistent bursts of erudition and eloquence, alternating obstinate applications of logic to the absurd (questioning the coherence of "Freeze! Get down on the ground!"; H.I. trying to reassure Ed by telling her that she resigned as a police officer before setting off to steal the baby, and thus need not worry about breaking her oath to uphold the Constitution) with non sequiturs ("They say he's a decent man, so maybe his advisors are confused."). They are masters of tone -- it is so easy for this sort of idiosyncracy to become irritating -- and even wrap up all the silliness with an epilogue that's genuinely lovely, giving substance to what had seemed like perfectly selfish characters living in a perfectly amoral universe. It's not amoral, we realize, just unfair: the Arizonas have "more than they can handle," after all, while everyone else in the film has nothing. But that's beyond the call of duty: if you haven't seen this, rent it for the Coens' effortless command of everything they do.

Breach

Breach (Billy Ray, 2007) - A

Details, details, details -- Ray gives away the plot with the very first shot (real news footage of AG Ashcroft announcing Hanssen's arrest for selling secrets to the Russians), and what's left is the interactions, the psychological pas de deux, the cat-and-mouse games. Stunning how thrilling all of this is despite taking place in an office and consisting largely of people walking around in suits; it's because it's so carefully observed, full of wonderfully unnecessary little bits, like the way Chris Cooper's Hanssen walks down the hallway, constantly ramming the bewildered Ryan Philippe into walls without noticing, or the downright predatory way Hanssen tells the latter to "pray more." Loved the obsessing over minutia (did he put the PDA back in the right briefcase pocket?), and the notion of a global conflict playing out on an administrative scale -- surely it actually happens this way. September 11th subtext is potent, too: the film posits Hanssen's ego as the source of all the trouble, and the notion of men's egoes fucking up international affairs seems vaguely familiar for some reason.

Ghost Rider; Norbit

Ghost Rider (Mark Steven Johnson, 2007) - C

Johnson runs into the same problems he did in Daredevil -- all the nifty comic book conceits don't coalesce into a compelling (or coherent) mythology, so there's no sense of stakes, importance, or scale. Starts out strongly, with the sort of grand, broad-brush storytelling I was hoping for: the devil appears in the form of a black-clad Peter Fonda and immediately demands Johnny Blaze's soul (no, seriously: "Name your price," says Johnny when the devil offers to cure his father's cancer; "your soul," replies the devil); the film moves furiously for a while, and doesn't blink until Nicolas Cage shows up as Adult Johnny. Then the tone goes to hell (ha... ha...) -- Cage hams it up; the screenplay starts winking furiously and attempting broad comedy -- and the storyline sprawls in a half dozen different directions, trying to cram in as much of the comic as possible: Blaze seems to be both the devil's bounty hunter and an all-purpose avenger (he goes around smiting the wicked, kind of like Daredevil); Fonda's Mephistopheles is inexplicably dumped in favor of a generic and boring sub-villain played by Wes Bentley; Johnson lingers on Blaze's tiresome psychological crises and the obligatory journalist love interest. None of it matters, the film drains of momentum, and by the end what could have been a kick-ass geek-out becomes as ridiculous as everyone feared. A movie about a bike-riding superhero with a burning skull for a head walks a thin line, and Ghost Rider isn't calibrated right. Rent The Punisher instead.


Norbit (Brian Robbins, 2007) - D

It's not the fat suit or the mean jokes; it's not even Eddie Murphy as a small Asian man, or the unspeakably obnoxious attempts at a catchphrase ("How YOU doin'" as an expression of contempt). It's the stupidity of it that's offensive: the moron characters, the hacked-together, barely-there story, the one-note emasculated caricature that is Norbit himself. Murphy remains a talented performer, and Norbit is sometimes kind of funny (the absurdity of the monstrous Rasputia made me laugh despite myself), but it adopts a demeanor that is so aggressively formulaic and cloying that the idiocy seems almost purposeful. It made me want to shower.

Breaking and Entering

Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006) - B+

Seems, at first glance, to have been built top-down, entirely out of themes, messages, and metaphors -- there's a lot about distances: physical, emotional, socioeconomic; the film tackles gentrification, urban renewal, class divides, autism -- but the characters come alive almost despite the screenplay, and ultimately wind up driving the plot. The ending, specifically, which has been decried elsewhere as pedantic and ridiculous, struck me as precisely right, both thematically -- a selfless act closing all distances -- and narratively. Meanwhile, Minghella demonstrates why he was recruited into the big time: this is a strikingly beautiful film, and Minghella's use of the entire frame is so effective and pervasive that I pity the poor saps who watch it in pan-and-scan. Ambitious as hell, sometimes overreaching -- the Russian prostitute, though gamely played by Vera Farmiga, was probably a mistake -- but also moving and downright impressive. Ignore the bad reviews.

Because I Said So

Because I Said So (Michael Lehmann, 2007 ) - D+

My least favorite kind of romantic comedy: the kind where everyone is completely insane. Diane Keaton's character, who obsesses over her daughter's love life to the point of placing personal ads for her and screening potential suitors, and then showing up at her house before her dates, simply needs to be institutionalized; the daughter, played by the (still gorgeous and radiant) Mandy Moore, seems to have zero qualms about dating two people at once while trying to decide which she wants to ditch. The most interesting thing is the way antiquated notions of relationships sort of track each other: the man Mandy Moore's mother finds for her happens to be a vaguely chauvinist asshole, insisting on ordering for her from restaurant menus, and essentially telling her not to think so much. But that little thematic nugget is buried under 100 minutes of unfunny hysteria; there's also the small matter that both Tom Everett Scott and Gabriel Macht are like twice as old as Mandy Moore (her mom's okay with this?), and the question of what Piper Perabo is doing in a role with about a dozen lines, most of them about sex.

Blood and Chocolate

Blood and Chocolate (Katja Von Garnier, 2007) - C

Von Garnier's werewolves don't transform with screams of pain and grotesque morphs; nor do they become gangly, ugly human-canine hybrids; nor are they hampered by such niceties as the lunar cycle. They leap into the air gracefully in the heat of the hunt, and transform into real, gorgeous wolves in a flash of light that may have been used to reduce the effects budget, but ends up being perfectly appropriate to illustrate something that need not really be all that technically impressive. They're hardly monsters at all, really, and the point is that irrational fear "of what we're not" is what turns them into objects of horror. Could have been tragic, except Von Garnier insists on turning the movie into a rejected WB-pilot, with weirdly dull-eyed Agnes Bruckner running off with plucky, unsuspecting Hugh Dancy, their love proscribed as bad for the werewolf community. The film is so invested in this that it forgets about the damn werewolves, who wind up pretty much incoherent: it's suggested that they have some level of superhuman strength and prowess, but all we see is Bruckner skipping off walls Little-Red-Riding-Hood-style, and later Dancy starts dispatching the creatures with a butter knife (albeit a silver one). Also goes on several climaxes too long, mistaking itself for a competent action film. The kind of movie that seems interesting for a while, before you realize it's totally clueless.

Catch and Release

Catch and Release (Susannah Grant, 2007) - C

The kind of movie where all plot progression depends on characters' stunning and improbable lack of tact, or alternatively on characters overhearing insulting things about themselves (the film even comments on this: "It's a small house, everyone hears everything"). Glaringly artificial, in other words, full of awkward screenplay-isms (e.g. people starting conversations with a nonsense line, only to reveal [after the other person says "What?"] that they were making an oblique reference to something that happened earlier -- does anyone actually do that?) and contrived, arbitrary twists; it's all unbelievably manipulative and fundamentally boring despite some nice performances by Kevin Smith (!), Fiona Shaw, and sporadically Timothy Olyphant. Jennifer Garner does a lot of pouting and shocked indignation, making her character more self-important than sympathetic, and Juliette Lewis has what might be the most thankless and impossible task of all time: trying to be shrill, deranged and likable at the same time. But it's Grant's screenplay that's the basic problem -- sickly sweet and clumsy, it never manages to convince us that the dead character at its center actually existed. And the fishing metaphor is retarded.

Venus

Venus (Roger Michell, 2006) - B+

I was ready to be the voice of backlash on this, but I must admit it's a lovely send-off (?) for O'Toole, who proves equally adept at heavy drama and slapstick at the formidable age of 74. I could say it's about Dying With Dignity, but that makes it sound more boring and clichéd than it is, and The Sea Inside this ain't: it's more about rising above the depressing situation where death is the default position and anything more than that is gravy. What struck me was the inconsiderate nonchalance of the doctors and the nurses, who seem to think that O'Toole's elderly thespian should leap in the air with glee at any suggestion that he's not about to keel over: one attempts to engage in idle chit-chat while administering a prostate exam; two gossip among themselves while sticking him with needles; a fourth curtly pronounces that though impotence and incontinence are sure to follow the operation, Maurice will emerge alive. It's a nightmare of indifference, which is what all the film's characters seem to be struggling with -- but love is the answer, as it usually is, and the early description of Venus as love and temptation that brings with it despair and foolishness turns out to be way off as to the latter. The movie starts out off-kilter, with an oddly jerky rhythm, but then settles into a tone of wry amusement, cheerfully lingering on the unpleasant details of growing old (toenail clipping, colostomy bags) and then, in a touching display of optimism, turning them into jokes. Sweet, sad, and funny too: "Not yodeling! Yodeling? Modeling!"

Miss Potter

Miss Potter (Chris Noonan, 2006) - B

"To love and be loved in return," etc., but the movie nicely integrates that into the much more interesting question of whether the relationship of an artist with her art can substitute for meaningful human interaction and other more traditional means of personal fulfillment. Answer: probably not, though the bottom line seems to be that true happiness, at least for Beatrix Potter, requires ruffling some feathers, be it of her churlish socialite mother and kind failed artist father, some greedy land developers, or even just an innocent guy strolling in the park as her carriage speeds by, with her insisting that they go faster, faster! The even, almost deadpan tone (it's just as earnest pushing Emily Watson's feminist posturing as it is predictably undercutting the same later) and exaggeratedly genteel dialogue give the movie a stifled air that (unlike its protagonist) it never quite manages to break through, but it's genuinely amiable and nice -- the perfect Sunday-afternoon senior-citizen-cinema, really -- and more thoughtful about the title character than all the clichéd Don't-Bring-Tradespeople-Into-the-House-They-Bring-Dust stuff lets on. If someone can explain to me why Renée Zellweger insists on constantly scrunching her face together in that grotesque way, though, I'd be grateful.

Steve Irwin was wrong

Primeval (Michael Katleman, 2007) - C+

A message movie about Africa: Gustave the enormous crocodile is (or is engendered by, if you prefer) the evil in the hearts of men that turns "the cradle of all mankind" into a famine-ravaged warzone where, as the film helpfully points out, "people shoot at each other" -- the title isn't arbitrary, and nor is the fact that the fearsome local warlord is monikered "Little Gustave." Our protagonists -- a news production team -- come in for the same reasons and with the same attitudes that most westerners have when they turn their attention to the continent: Gustave has just claimed a white victim and thus made it to American tv sets, exasperation quickly outs as characters start saying things like "the more you help, the worse it gets," and their plan to take the croc alive (lasso human nature?) is mysteriously devoid of any inkling of what to do afterward. The movie doesn't know what to do with the enormous crocodile either, shoehorning in occasional horror sequences but forgetting about him altogether for long stretches. The horror stuff doesn't really work, since it's mostly dark and murky and the special effects suck, but Primeval is surprisingly sincere about its subtext (so much so that it repeatedly turns subtext into text), and the degree to which it takes the time to stop and admire the scenery -- literally and figuratively -- is surprising. Had this actually functioned as a genre film, we might have had something; still, I'm intrigued by its notion that the place where humanity began is not coincidentally also a hellish pit of despair.

Annual Counterprogramming

Black Christmas (Glen Morgan, 2006) - C-

The key was to invert the holly jolly Christmas signifiers into portents of doom, but the movie is sloppy and impatient -- it's on to something with the persistence of blinking lights (though those are kind of like clowns, in that it takes but a minor tweak to take them from cheery to eerie) but most other attempts to toy with the iconography backfire, largely because every scene quickly devolves into either typical horror violence or over-the-top baroque absurdity (e.g. the cannibalistic Christmas cookies). The tone is all wrong, too: Morgan goes for sarcasm when he needed solemnity, even if it was of the self-conscious variety; little things like the faux-Christmas font in the title cards give the film the impression of being delivered with a sneer. Worse, it's mostly tension-free, since Morgan is weirdly committed to his silly backstory, leaving the terrorized present-day characters to be interchangeable and irrelevant. I thought Glen Morgan was promising after the lithe, beautiful Willard, but he seems to be joining James Wong and Rob Bowman on the list of "X-Files alums not worth a whole heck of a lot." Shame.