BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 10: FIND ME GUILTY

Vincenzo Gasolina and Tyrion Lannister. Boosh.

With a handful of notable exceptions, Sidney Lumet's career as a director was characterized by his tendency to make very good movies that it never occurred to anyone to watch. This, to be clear, was never Mr. Lumet's fault. (Well, almost never: Q&A was terrible.) It was merely a function of his valuing character and story over all else, his refusal to (intentionally) lean on melodrama for cheap effect, and—maybe most important—the humility with which he carried himself personally. If you want people running around sucking your dick about what a genius you are, you need to plant the seeds by acting like one. Of course, this can backfire if you aren't one. But Sidney Lumet never seemed to care about that, always talked up the importance of the work above all else and the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, and as a result he never won a competitive Oscar (he was given an honorary one when he was old, and his speech was pure elegance and class; Sidney Lumet was a men among men, believe) and even among the list of all-time classics he directed, all are associated primarily with their leading actors. His careful preparation, empathy, and humble commitment to the work above his own personal glory (and a number of other things associated with being awesome, surely) led to a vast array of actors giving either the best or one of the best performances of their careers working under Lumet's watch, among them Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Paul Newman, River Phoenix, and many many others. So too, in the second-to-last movie Sidney Lumet would ever direct, did Vin Diesel, in Find Me Guilty.

That's right, Vincenzo Gasolina himself. And it's not like “oh, sure, wow, he turned in a better performance than The Fast and the Furious, xXx, and The fuckin' Pacifier, big whoop.” Vincenzo's amaaaaazing in Find Me Guilty. He's out of his mind good in this. There's a grand total of one moment the entire picture when he's not perfect, and that moment is like two seconds in the Annabella Sciorra scene an hour or so in, even then it's just a moment of his composure cracking because he doesn't know what to do with his hands, and even then it's something you can rationalize as “well, maybe it's not that Vin doesn't know what to do with his hands, maybe it's Jackie” except, sorry, it is Vin. But that's okay. The whole rest of the picture Vincenzo's in this fucking wig looking like Jerry Orbach except radiating Movie Star, and it's like “Holy shit, Vincenzo has star power even when he's not flexing his guns driving two hundred miles an hour doing sex with Asia Argento?” If ever there was a moment for Sidney Lumet to pop his collar and be like “Oh yes that's right, y'all,” it's this. Making Robert Duvall look good is one thing. Making Vincenzo Gasolina look like something other than a guy who throws grenades by flexing his biceps is another matter entirely. It's not that Lumet waved a magic wand and turned Vincenzo into a good actor, it's that he knew enough about what acting actually is and was forward-thinking enough to say “I'm going to make a picture with Vin Diesel playing the lead where nothing blows up and he never drives a car.” And he did. And it's a massive amount of fun.

Based on a true story (and purporting to consist to great degree of actual court transcriptions), Find Me Guilty is the story of Jackie DiNorscio (Vincenzo), a wiseguy from the Dirty Jerz whose fuckhead cousin tries to clip him, unsuccessfully. Once he recovers, Jackie's luck takes another turn for the shitty when he gets pinched trying to buy a suitcase full of coke from an undercover cop. Not to mention, he has racketeering charges hanging over him. The US Attorney's office (represented by oily Linus Roache, who did an NY/NJ area accent so well I had to check who he was, only to be like “Holy balls, that's Linus Roache?”) swoops in and offers Jackie a deal if he rolls over on The Boys, only Jackie's a stand-up guy and won't hold with such rubbish. He tells the US Attorney, “Hey, you got a brother? Fuck him, too.” And thus Jackie and practically everybody he knows and has worked with go on trial.

The trial, a massive clusterfuck (it would go on to be the longest criminal trial in American history), is the bulk of the movie. Judge Sidney Finestein (Ron Silver, who is pick-your-jaw-up-off-the-fuckin-floor great in this, in a reminder of how great he could be when not simply noshing on scenery in an exploitation movie for a paycheck) does his best to keep all twenty-something defendants and their respective lawyers (the de facto leader of whom is played by the mighty Peter Dinklage, who rules beyond the capacity of the English language to describe) in line. And he'd have done so perfectly if not for the monkey wrench of Jackie deciding to defend himself. Jackie's wildly inappropriate, blithely ignorant of proper procedure, yet charming debut as defense counsel completely overwhelms the entire trial.

Storywise, that's all there is to Find Me Guilty. The narrative has occasional telling-rather-than-showing problems with conveying the massive amount of time over which the trial took place, and despite being based on a true story elements of it are really, really farfetched. It's the kind of material that in the hands of anyone other than an absolute master—and I really think it's time we start putting Lumet in with the all-time greats, if we aren't already—would be ridiculous nonsense. But in Lumet's hands, it's a delightful bit of entertainment.

Beyond the performances, which are simply tremendous, with countless beautiful little human moments, Lumet's direction is pristine classicism, with meticulous framing, long takes, actual medium and long shots that aren't either establishing shots or panoramic landscapes, and invisible edits. In spite of this it never feels conservative, or an example of a relic of a bygone era clinging to an outmoded way of working because it's all he knows. I feel like kicking myself in the balls for even suggesting such a thing. No, this is a director who trusts his actors to be all the flash and dash the picture needs. That trust derives from careful preparation, years of experience, and the confidence those combine to create. Maybe the result only seems so good because no one makes classical American cinema anymore, but it's still a wonderful little movie.

It's a movie that's been done wrong by history, too. Due to one of the absolute worst marketing campaigns in the history of human endeavor—like, “Kilgore Trout's SF appearing in porno magazines” level bad marketing—Find Me Guilty was gone from theaters before anyone knew it had come out, and was a non-factor in 2006's Oscar race, which I mean yeah I know, “Oscars? blow me,” but imagine if Harvey Weinstein is running the picture's campaign. Suddenly we've got Sidney Lumet going up against Marty Scorsese for Best Director, with both of them trying for their first. You've got Vincenzo getting a nom against Forest Whitaker; I mean, Forest Whitaker still would have won, but then we get the Fast and Furious trailer hailing “ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE VIN DIESEL.....and paul walker” a couple years later, which would have been considerably lulzier than Vincenzo returning to the franchise having failed elsewhere.

Anyway. Fuck the business. Find Me Guilty still exists, and can be watched. And I'm here to say, with all the authority given a random asshole on the internet with Proustian Tourette's that it goddamn well should be. So there. At the very least, people fiending for a Game of Thrones fix should watch this to get a hit of some Dinklage. Or if you feel like winning a bet with a friend of yours who refuses to believe that Vin Diesel could ever look like Jerry Orbach. Or, if you just want to plain want to see a good movie. Sidney Lumet was the truth, ladies and gentlemen. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX VOL. 9: IN TIME

I'm telling you nothing new when I say, and you no doubt have guessed from the enthusiasm that pervades my writing over at Tor.com, I rather like science fiction. As literature it provides an excellent framework for everything from social commentary to philosophical meditation. We're long past having to defend science fiction as serious literature. Kurt Vonnegut put a hollow point behind the ear of that argument, after Robert Heinlein tied its shoelaces together and Ray Bradbury kicked it to the ground. Stanley Kubrick similarly made the case for science fiction as serious cinema, for all those people with short memories who forgot about The Day The Earth Stood Still (to say nothing of Metropolis, or shit, Journey to the Moon, aka one of the first fucking movies ever). But SF cinema is a slightly iffier proposition. It's not that it can't be great (see Kubrick and many, many other examples) it's just that the difficulty curve is high; a book can stop in its tracks and take a couple paragraphs to explain shit, but too much of that kind of thing can make for a really dull movie under the wrong circumstances. This is why there's an occasional disconnect whereby SF movies can be good SF or good movies while failing somewhat in the other half of the equation. Sometimes, to quote The Wire gratuitously, things just be that way I guess. But, on the upside, that means, in a way, that SF movies have two chances to be good. That's why it's a shame that Andrew Niccol's In Time flunks both halves of the equation, in a weirdly reciprocal (to say nothing of paradoxical) fashion: it's bad SF because it's too committed to being a movie, and is a bad movie because it sacrifices too much of its connection to this world out of a mistaken belief in the profundity of its one-trick SF premise.

It's not like In Time has nothing to go for it. It sucks, but it sucks in a way that demands in examination into exactly why that is so. IN A WORLD that, despite being at least a hundred years in the future, still looks pretty much exactly the way downtown Los Angeles looks today (I kind of blame a recent viewing of Thom Anderson's fascinating Los Angeles Plays Itself for making me as sensitive to that; the only thing really wrong with the way Niccol uses his locations is that it simply doesn't look like it's that far in the future in any appreciable or convincing way), science has completely conquered the process of biological aging. Everyone, once they reach the age of 25, stays 25, in perpetuity. The catch is, everyone's given an allotment of time, which has replaced currency. Goods and services are exchanged for their value in time. When one's clock—located in a glowing green subcutaneous LED readout on one's left arm—reaches zero, one's body functions immediately cease, and one dies on the spot. There are haves, who are essentially immortal, with hundreds and occasionally thousands of years on their clocks, and have-nots, who labor daily for enough hours to be able to wake up alive the following morning.

Our hero here is one Will Salas, played by Mr. Justin Timberlake, a working-class lad living with his ma, Ms. Olivia Wilde, who due to the nature of this whole eradication of aging, looks basically JT's age, because she is. A few minutes of world-building ensues, until one evening out at the bar with one of the guys from The Big Bang Theory, JT encounters a rich guy on a bender throwing time around like a drunken sailor. Some dudes come in, led by Alex (I Am Number Four) Pettyfer (who can, amazingly, be seen to be giving progressively less of a fuck in every single one of his scenes in this picture) and make like they're going to fuck the rich dude up and roll him. For no apparent reason whatsoever, JT intercedes and helps the rich dude escape. Once they're clear of Alex Pettyfer and his thugs, the rich guy lays a suicide trip on JT, who doesn't quite know what to make of the guy and his angst; not having to worry about suddenly dropping dead at any moment is kind of a First World Problem. They drink some of the rich dude's good booze out of his schmancy flask and pass out. JT wakes up, alone, to find that the rich dude has transferred all his time (over a hundred years) to JT's clock, and JT looks out the window to see the rich guy's clock expire, after which he swan dives into the L.A. River.

The cops, led by the always awesome (he walks away with this movie, twirling it on his finger like a gun) Cillian Murphy, show up and immediately conclude that JT rolled the rich guy, just like Alex Pettyfer's dudes were planning on doing. A series of events that includes one of the most shamelessly melodramatic scenes ever filmed (I'm not exaggerating; “the scene when Olivia Wilde starts running” should replace “Lilian Gish on the ice floe” from D.W. Griffith's Way Down East as the cliché shorthand for melodrama) leads JT to the utopian New Greenwich, where all the rich fucks stay. JT encounters an intriguing young lady in a truly horrible wig (Amanda Seyfried), who it turns out is the daughter of the head evil white guy in charge (Vincent Kartheiser, reinforcing his ability, as first demonstrated in Mad Men, to wear the fuck out of a well-cut suit), who initially rather likes JT, and is impressed by his ballsy pursuit of wealth. Evil White Guys In Suits are drawn to their own kind, after all. Only JT's not evil, and Cillian Murphy's a good cop, which means in short order everything and everyone goes apeshit.

Now, none of the above is anything that wasn't in the trailer, so I'll stop the plot recap there. In any case, everything the movie is trying to say about the importance of living one's life in the moment and being appreciative of all life has to offer, and about social justice and how Evil White Guys In Suits manage to adapt to any sociopolitical scenario and stay in charge fucking over proles is all set up by that point in the narrative. The rest of the picture is just noise anyway (and a half-reprise of the above mentioned Most Melodramatic Scene In The Fucking Universe) until it ends in kind of a limpdick sequel setup, with nothing really resolved and no particularly deep conclusions to any of the picture's Big Questions. It ends up being silly and disappointingly fluffy given the potential beard-scratcher posed by literalizing the time-is-money conceit. And though the cinematography is pretty sweet (by the great Roger Deakins, natch), the things being photographed are kind of unimaginatively conceived; put it this way, I was really surprised to find out that Andrew Niccol had a $40 million budget, as it looks like he's trying to scrape by on about 10 at most. 

More than that, though, the thing that really fucks In Time up is the way things happen because the story needs them to. When JT saves the rich guy, okay, let's say he does it out of the kindness of his own heart, all right, maybe I'm just cynical. But him subsequently being able to outwit, outrun, and make fools out of a bunch of armed gangsters is a little convenient. As is the fact that apparently the cops of the 22nd or 23rd century or whenever this is, despite having far more reason to reinforce the societal status quo, have inferior surveillance technology to what would be at their disposal today. Even if you presuppose that, having essentially conquered death, the ruling classes would stagnate intellectually and pursue nothing but their own pleasure, you have to think that self-interest at least would lead to them setting up some kind of at least half-assedly fail-safed system to ensure that any potential Justin Timberlakes who might come along and challenge their hold on power at least have to sweat a bit. Because, come on, when Timberlake decides to go to the Evil White Guys In Suits' motherland, he gets all the way there and almost fully insinuated into the good graces of the most Evil and Whitest of them all before anyone even knows who he is or what he's done. Not only would it make more logical sense for it to be a lot more difficult for JT to do so, it would make the movie more suspenseful too. Even if, as it begins to appear by the third act, the whole time thing and the movie in general is just a parable for living in the moment, it'd still be nice if details rendered secondary by that being the case to not be as dumb, or as brushed past. Having the villains be this incompetent and weak weakens JT as a hero.

And yet . . . in spite of the fact that it fails as a movie and as SF and has The Single Most Melodramatic Scene In The History Of Cinema (not only once, but twice) In Time isn't that much of a chore to watch. Justin Timberlake does a damn fine job with what he's given in the lead; his getting-there-slowly-but-surely acting skills are more than up to the task here, as what the role really requires is star power, which he, of course, has in spades, though his character's so thin it isn't really worthy of his talents. Cillian Murphy is so good as the cop, now I want to see him play the hard-bitten grizzled cop with weekly heart attacks and monthly divorces and all other essentials in a good movie. And, of course, I'd watch Amanda Seyfried read the phone book. It's not just pretty and talented actors, either. Despite the movie's bilateral failure, it has its moments that work in between the things that don't. At times, when the lo-tech future isn't presenting fundamental challenges to the entire premise of the story it allows for isolated, engagingly real moments with the characters, specifically between Cillian Murphy and his other cops.

All of which leads to the kind of reductive kind of contradictory state of affairs where In Time sucks, but I didn't hate it. I don't know what to tell you. Timberlake can carry a picture even if it isn't necessarily this one, and I'd rather see a good director (see Gattaca for reference) swing and miss than see a shitty director's best. Sometimes things just be that way, I guess.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 8: THE TOURIST, THE FIGHTER, AND AMITABH BACHCHAN

Before we get to the main thrust of this post, a bit of preliminary venting (and I am well aware of what a First World Problem this is, shut up and let me do my thing): fucking Netflix has sent me two separate discs of Zanjeer, both of which have been irrevocably fucked up. This pisses me off because a few weeks ago I saw Amitabh in Sholay, and for those of you who don't yet know, Amitabh Bachchan is basically the guy who when John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Toshiro Mifune, Charles Bronson, and Chow Yun-Fat finish beating Chuck Norris to death and they're trying to figure out if it's even theoretically possible for anyone to best them in either combat or general badassery, Amitabh walks in and they're all like, “right, that guy. Well, shit, fellas, we're all competing for second place.” Sholay is so fucking good you have to start bringing people like Sergio Leone and John Ford and all the above-mentioned leading men into the discussion to explain to people, and it's not even like Amitabh's the coolest motherfucker in the picture by any kind of wide margin either. Co-star Dharmendra's so fucking cool in it he's the one who gets the girl. There's decades-long vendettas, mind-blowing action set pieces, and you'll never hear the phrase “How many men were there?” without shitting yourself the rest of your life. So, naturally, I wanted to see the picture that made Amitabh a star, and from what I've heard, in Zanjeer he plays a cop who doesn't play by the rules. Fuck and yes. Done. Bring me that movie, modern society. So listen up, and listen good, you red-envelope so-and-sos: send me a non-broken copy of Zanjeer.

So that's me last night. I was all set to watch Zanjeer only to have those dreams cruelly snatched from me. Since I was already in movie-watching mode, I decided I'd give the other two DVDs a shot. They could not have been more different from Zanjeer, but had some superficial connections with each other, both being 2010 releases by major Hollywood studios. One widely panned, one widely praised. I decided to watch The Tourist first.

The Tourist has a lot of assets at its disposal. Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie are two of the biggest movie stars in the world, and the two of them together is like exotic sexiness critical mass. Add in the fact that it's set in Venice, it's directed by the genius who made The Lives of Others, and the story sounds like straight up Hitchcock, and you got yo'self a whole mess of promise. Or, if you fuck up the execution, you got yourself a mess.

It'd be tempting to take that very contrived build and cap it off with “The Tourist, sadly, is the latter.” But the thing that's weird is that it doesn't totally suck. It's nearly crippled by an awkwardly stitched-together script, Angelina looks like she was rendered by a state-of-the-art sapience simulation program, and some truly stupid things happen. And yet, The Tourist has its charms.

It takes a while to get to them, though. The first ten minutes of the movie are wheel-spinning horseshit, and weaken the movie, because at least six of those minutes are spent trying to figure out whether Angelina's an android, on Valium, or needs a sandwich, and going “when the fuck's Johnny Depp gonna show up?” It's like the writers were in a morning-after coke coma and the designers and camera crew were like, “fuck it, somebody's gotta make this movie.” And they do their jobs really, really fucking well on this movie. Everything the entire picture looks absolutely gorgeous. (Well, except Steven Berkoff, but we're not there yet).

Ten minutes in, we have what really should have been the opening scene: Angelina made up and dressed immaculately, slowly walking through a train looking for a patsy, and coming across . . . Johnny Depp. The entire opening ten minutes of exposition are conveyed in the one shot of Angelina gliding through the train; there would literally be nothing of any value lost if you chopped the first ten minutes out of the picture. And Johnny is by far the best part of this whole movie. He's been in a couple dipshit Tim Burton movies (and a couple good ones, which feel like a while ago now), and the Pirates things are incoherent and oppressively frenetic, but Johnny fucking Depp is a movie star. He's an actor of great skill, to be sure, but like most true movie stars, there's a point at which you can't buy him as an ordinary person, because he's an otherworldly entity.

This is why the three biggest lies I've ever been told are:

1—“Yeah, dude, this shit is totally straight from Amsterdam.”
2—“I swear I won't get mad if you tell me what you really think.”
3—“Johnny Depp is a dorky, unworldly math teacher from Wisconsin.”

Now, let's be clear. I'm not knocking Wisconsin; they have enough trouble these days with that lunatic union-busting fuckstick governor of theirs. Math teachers either, I had one in high school who was an actor when he wasn't teaching (this meant he never slept and frequently got emotional and would rant at us in this half-Paul Lynde half-Yiddish patois that more often than not ended with him letting us read for the rest of the period while he went outside to exorcise the dybbuk with a cigarette; that dude was fucking awesome). I'm not even knocking unworldly dorks. The latter isn't something you have any power over, and neither is the former, most times.

The only problem is, Johnny Depp. If he was a math teacher, it would be in like fucking Sri Lanka or Suriname, or some such place where the women are brown, the weather is gorgeous, and everything is like one of those paragraphs in magic realist novels where you're just like “All right, already, my life is prosaic, stop rubbing it in.” (Ed. Note: if you're keeping score, no such place actually exists except in a Johnny Depp movie where he fucks some woman who's so beautiful you can't even fap to her because it would be rude). He's not a normal dude. This isn't a hierarchy thing, normal people are fucking great. Johnny just ain't in that genus.

So there's that. But here's where Johnny the actor manages to prevail against Johnny the movie star: he does all his “oh shit I'm a dork in over my head” business so goddamn well he shames anyone who's ever had to play this kind of role. Well, except Cary Grant. But dude. Cary Grant. Johnny's so good he keeps making you forget how retarded the rest of this movie is whenever he's on screen.

How retarded is the rest of the movie? Very. Some mysterious ex-lover of Angie's is sending her cryptic notes telling her to be places at certain times, and seemingly every cop in Europe has her under surveillance, led by Paul Bettany in full-on shithead mode. You ever notice how the bigger a prick Paul Bettany is, the worse the movie ends up being? He was a really cool guy in Master and Commander, Master and Commander was great. He was something Russell Crowe could do without in A Beautiful Mind, A Beautiful Mind was a movie we could do without. He was a useless psychotic turd in The Da Vinci Code, The Da Vinci Code was a useless turd of a movie. The Tourist falls somewhere mildly favorable but still hugging the middle on that spectrum, as Paul Bettany is kind of a shithead, but he's not malignant. Seriously, if you read about a movie, and Paul Bettany is playing the heavy or some random shithead, wait for the DVD. If he's playing the good guy, watch it. Unless he's playing a priest. He needs to stop playing priests.

So on top of the cops, Steven Berkoff and a whole bunch of Russian henchmen are after Angie and her mysterious ex. Angie tries to get everyone to think Johnny Depp is the mysterious ex, but the cops don't fall for it, except Steven Berkoff's man inside the cops tells Steven Berkoff that Johnny's the guy. So everyone starts chasing everyone else and Johnny and Angie look hot and Angie looks more and more like a computer-generated character and blah blah blah.

Right when you think the whole movie is going to be a total pile of bullshit, it springs a motherfucker of a third-act twist on us, that would have made the whole movie so much better if we'd known about forty-five minutes earlier: Johnny Depp actually is the mysterious ex. And he and Angie sail off into the sunset. What makes this so frustrating is that the whole movie you're like, “these two things would make this movie actually be good.” And you have to wait til like, what, five minutes left for that payoff? After a whole lot of inelegant scripting and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck playing the part of Sisyphus trying to overcome the shitty script and actually make the kind of movie the script fucks up at being? Sigh. So close. And yet . . .

After a brief intermission, I put the second movie in: The Fighter.

I remember seeing Micky Ward fight on TV a few times. I think I saw him lose to Zab Judah (back when Zab Judah was good, it was hard to tell one fight from another, he just beat the fuck out of guys), I know I saw parts of the epic career-concluding Arturo Gatti triptych, and the isolated highlight from the rest of his career. I knew little bits and pieces about him—he was from Lowell (which rhymes with prole), sportswriters liked him because he was white and not very athletic (the biggest boners recorded by science are the ones sportswriters have for short, slow white athletes), and his not inconsiderable success was attributable almost entirely to balls.

If the above sounds negative, I should clarify that I didn't really know anything about the guy that I didn't learn from sports media, which is a singularly frustrating beast. Mainstream sports writing is dominated by a very cloistered, sentimental, white, middle-aged, heteronormative male perspective unaware that any other perspective exists. This has eased up a bit in recent years, but only a bit. The irony of my distaste for the prevalent tone in mainstream sports journalism is that I am a white guy, I'll be middle-aged someday, and most of these dudes who get all teary-eyed whenever a five-foot-six-inch white guy bunts have seen way more of the world in person than I have in my life. I should be just as bad as they are. But sorry guys, David Eckstein is a shitty baseball player.

What this has to do with Micky Ward is that the media coverage of him was basically slashfic, and since so many of these little white fetish objects (of whom David Eckstein is basically Angelina Jolie in Gia) suck at sports, one sometimes assumes they all do. The three Arturo Gatti fights went a long way toward dispelling this impression of Micky Ward, as those fights were legitimate boxing legend, and Ward was damn close to winning all three of them.

So I was interested in seeing The Fighter, especially since practically everyone I know who saw it was like, “Holy fuck, dude.” And that was the first time some of them had ever said “fuck” or “dude,” so I knew they were serious. I popped it in, preparing myself for the worst—sports movies tend to be written from much the same perspective as sports journalism, and almost all of them adhere to some form of the “underdog overcomes adversity and wins the big game/race/fight at the end” formula—and hoping for the best.

What I wasn't prepared for was . . . holy shit Christian Bale. The Fighter is one of those movies where you need to watch the making-of doc afterward because otherwise you'll miss the fucking eerie way he became Dicky Eklund. Every last mannerism is right there. Despite the fact that Christian Bale is about fifteen years younger than Eklund and his hair hasn't gone gray, people who had known Dicky Eklund all their lives occasionally thought Bale was actually him. It's as a good a Method performance as you're ever going to see.

The fact that the rest of the cast manages to not get blown off the screen by not only Bale the Method actor but by Dicky the character is an enormous credit to the force of their performance. Mark Wahlberg is sneaky good as Micky: he spends almost the entire movie having other people speak and act for him, and it never reads as weakness in his acting. Every last insecurity and moment of fear reads clearly on his face and in his posture. If you want to do the Method dick-measuring contest between him and Bale, well, after you go fuck yourself I'll concede the point that Mark Wahlberg (and yes, he's good enough in this I'm suspending Marky Mark jokes for the duration of this post) doesn't transform himself into Micky the way Bale does Dicky, but he gives the performance this movie needs, a rock-solid movie star performance that serves as an anchor. Some roles need the Christian Bale Method Magical Mystery Tour, some roles need a movie star. Christian Bale is a Serious Ac-TOR, Mark Wahlberg is a movie star. If they were trying to out-Method each other the whole shithouse would go up in flames and it'd be a plodding wankfest, and if Bale didn't plumb the depths and go to the scary places he had to go to become Dicky and just spent the whole fucking movie posing for the trailer, it would have been pointless. Each does what he needs to do, and as a result each is as great as the other.

The whole rest of the cast is right up there on the same level. Jack McGee, a character actor of not just “That Guy” but “holy shit, THAT GUY! I fuckin love that guy!” status (it's a fine distinction, but a distinction it most certainly is), plays Micky's father, and is fucking great. He adds to his portfolio of great lines, which include these gems—

“Get the guy with the penis!” The Doors
“She makes me want to go out and buy rubbers.” Lethal Weapon 2
(Michael Douglas asks him “He had a girlfriend?”) “No....she did.” Basic Instinct
“Sorry man, John Wayne time. You're on your own, boss.” Backdraft

—with a fine assortment of terse quips about being afraid of his wife. There are two reasons Jack McGee is able to do this without seeming like a pussy. One is, he's Jack fucking McGee, fuck you. Two is, the wife in question is Melissa Leo, about whose performance one can only sit there not blinking for about an hour with smoke slowly wisping out of one's ears, murmuring faint unintelligible shit that might be language.

Melissa Leo, as the mother of not only Micky and Dicky but a truly terrifying armada of Massachussetts-accented daughters, is just unbelievable. It's hard to talk about just where she's coming from without sounding like either a sociology textbook or a condescending prick; suffice to say her violent distrust of anyone who isn't blood family is rooted in class insecurity, fear, and a ferocious maternal instinct. She's the general, and those daughters of hers are the army, and if you fuck with them you are on your way to the past tense.

Amy Adams, as Micky's girlfriend Charlene, manages to fuck with this group of women simply by existing. This highlights one of the great truisms of class warfare: no one openly cannot fucking stand each other like two ever-so-slightly different members of what appears to any la-di-da outsider to be one homogenous group. Amy Adams is from the neighborhood, she works at the local bar, she's a redhead just like a few of Micky and Dicky's scary sisters . . . but she went to college and she's prettier than they are, so she can do no right. Not to mention once she takes up with Micky and starts speaking for him (because he won't), shit is on.

The thing that particularly impressed me about what Amy Adams does in this is that she manages to play someone who isn't always a particularly nice person—Melissa Leo and the Leoettes are actually right, she does put on airs and talk to them like insects, and it isn't all due to their provocations—while still making it perfectly clear what Micky sees in her (beyond the obvious fact that she looks like Amy Adams). She's every bit the equal to all the other acting heavyweights in her midst, which is especially welcome in a role that in a lesser movie would be the textbook Annoying Girlfriend Role.

A certain amount of credit for all this great acting has to go to David O. Russell. It's one thing to assemble a bunch of really good actors, it's another thing entirely to actually get all of them together in the same movie. Russell grounds everything in a vividly realized Lowell, achieving a really impressive level of verisimilitude, selling the audience that this world he's created is real. And really, if you take away what Russell and the cast (and the brilliant choice to shoot all the fights with the same TV crews who shoot actual fights on TV) bring to this movie, you're left with a script that's pretty straight-up sports movie formula: Micky's an aging fighter not really getting anywhere, his ne'er-do-well brother drags him down, the brother gets locked up and rediscovers purpose, Micky rededicates himself to boxing, the brother gets out of jail and working together, Micky wins the title. The producers repeatedly say, without a hint of irony, that their inspiration was Rocky. Even if you like Rocky—which I really, really don't—you have to concede its formulaic structure, where the only thing keeping it from being simply unacceptable is the climactic fight itself (wherein Rocky really brings it, and though he loses he puts up a good fight, literally).

What Russell and the actors do with The Fighter is inject that same basic formula with such intensity, grounding it in a recognizable reality where the people are three-dimensional, that its only after you're done watching it, charting the sequence of events, that you go, “wow, yeah, that hit every single boxing movie beat except it hit them all so well I didn't notice.” Or maybe you do, but I got so caught up in the movie that I didn't. I ended up just repeating “wow” a whole lot, especially then when I watched the making-of doc and went “Goddammit, what the fuck did Christian Bale do? He fucking turned into that guy!”

Ultimately, one thing jumped out at me about this double feature. These two movies, watched consecutively, are an object lesson in the importance of execution. The Tourist has two of the sexiest movie stars who ever existed, a premise and setting tailor-made for two sexy movie stars, and yet is undone by an ever-so-slightly off-key tone and a script that seems like it started off shitty and then underwent a number of frantic, dissonant rescue rewrites done by too many different writers. And then there's The Fighter, which seems like it should be just another scrappy underdog boxing movie, and through sheer force of execution comes damn near the Body and Soul/Raging Bull caliber of boxing movies (the fight scenes really bring those two to mind; some of the shots are total James Wong Howe on roller skates shots, and Mark Wahlberg takes some hits that feel even more brutal than the ones De Niro takes in Raging Bull).

Execution. You can have all the assets, or all the liabilities in the world, but it's the work done with those assets or liabilities that makes the movie. You can have it all and blow it, or you can turn “meh” to gold. Sometimes you even make a movie so good it makes up for the absence of Amitabh Bachchan. But per that last point, and I cannot stress this enough, do not press your fucking luck. If that third copy of Zanjeer doesn't play in my DVD player, shit . . . if I'm not back by dawn, call the president.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 7: THE EXPENDABLES

In the summer of 2010, the NBA was thrown for a loop when LeBron James, by any measure one of the two or three best basketball players in the world, and an athlete of astonishing and brutal grace, joined fellow All-Star Chris Bosh in signing with their mutual friend and fellow superstar Dwyane Wade on Wade's Miami Heat. It was widely considered that the teaming of three of the NBA's ten best players (evaluating Bosh generously) and two of the top five essentially made Miami the favorite to win the next several league championships. Wade, after all, had already won one. With such an array of talent in a league that, more than any other team sport, is a league of stars (phrase © FreeDarko), how could they not?

Though they've had some spectacular moments, reality proved a little more complicated. My beloved and long-suffering New York Knicks left a sizable testicle print on Miami's collective forehead on Oscar night, and Miami's current five-game losing streak is the top trending topic on Twitter as of this writing. Merely assembling big stars has not translated into instant success. You still, as the poet said, have to play the games. And this leads us, naturally, to The Expendables.

Long-time readers of this blog—I love all five of you dearly—will remember the odd mention here and there of The Expendables last summer and early fall. When it finally came out, life and finances prevented me from seeing it, and the generally lukewarm reviews made me not particularly care. Still, it's not as though I wasn't going to see it, it simply became the sort of thing I waited to receive in a little red envelope.

Much like the 2010-11 Miami Heat, The Expendables subscribed to the philosophy that one could achieve dominance through the collection of stars. Sly Stallone, a man whose very name conjures fond memories of explosions and violent death in the mind of the sophisticated cineaste, co-wrote, directed, and starred. Sly decided to take advantage of being Sly to call as many large and/or muscular practitioners of the fine art of ownage as he could think of, the idea being that an all-star team of swaggering fucking badasses could win the movie equivalent of a championship, which is to say, that it would own that much more, by the strength in numbers theory.

There are two flaws that present themselves even before we get to the movie. The first is, in Sly's desire to get EVERYBODY, he failed to convince two very important members of the genus “everybody,” namely Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, to participate. Van Damme, hilariously, declined the role he was offered because he felt the picture lacked significant redeeming social value—which is why Jean-Claude Van Damme is so goddamn fucking fascinating, the man is so sublimely strange—and Seagal, also tellingly, passed because of a beef with the producer. It wasn't as though as Sly wasn't in charge of this shit; if he'd been thinking, he'd have shitcanned the producer in favor of Seagal and rewritten Van Damme's character so that he was running a Boys and Girls Club in Watts or some such.

Flaw 1a, while we're on about casting laziness, not securing Danny Trejo immediately and irrevocably disqualified The Expendables from being the kind of movie it aspired to be. Stupid action movies where shit blows up have Danny Trejo in them. He was in fucking xXx, for shit's sake.

But even if you take flaws 1 and 1a as subjective and unfair—which they are—there's still flaw 2, which is the identical problem the Heat find themselves having this season: you still have to play the games. You can get Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lungren, Randy Couture, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Terry Crews, you can get Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to make cameos, Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke for non-ownage scenes, and the underrated David Zayas to ham it up in the Danny Trejo role (it's to Zayas' credit that he even comes close to Trejo-level awesomeness), and sure, hey, that's enough testosterone to make any shit you need blown up officially on its way to kingdom come. But you still have to play the games. In this case, write a script that makes sense, and point the camera in the right direction so that the ownage is captured on camera.

These two qualifiers are not, to put it mildly, fucking rocket science. Writing a screenplay isn't as easy as it looks, but writing a screenplay for a stupid action movie is easier than a lot of genres. Sly, don't forget, has been nominated for an Oscar for screenwriting (for Rocky), so it's not unreasonable to expect him to know how to do stuff like creating characters and map out beats and create something at least coherent. As for the directing, that's an iffier proposition, but you would think Sly had at least been part of enough successful action movies, and movies in general, to know that the whole point of a movie is that you see what the fuck is going on.

You would, if you thought that, be wrong. The Expendables fails on every conceivable level on which a movie can fail. Even the most cursory glance at the rest of this blog should make it perfectly clear that I'm not pulling some snooty film critic bullshit. I damn well know better than to expect thought-provoking works of sensitivity out of Sly. But I don't think I'm amiss—especially as an ardent defender of the staggeringly fucktarded yet unfailingly entertaining Tango & Cash—in expecting Sly to at least deliver a presentable action picture. WHERE YOU CAN FUCKING SEE WHAT'S GOING ON.

This is the most puzzling and infuriating aspect of The Expendables. You can't fucking see anything. I was restlessly screwing around on Twitter while the movie was on, trying to regulate my breathing and not break shit. Here's how it went:

I think I'm going to watch The Expendables tonight. Whether it sucks or rules, it should still be fun to tweet/blog about.

All right, Sly, don't suck, or it's straight to your room with no steroids.

Things, however, went downhill quickly:

The Expendables is like a Dogme 95 picture shot on location in Sly's subconscious: badly lit, simplistic, and not as good as you'd think.

If the whole picture is this underlit I seriously might stalk Sly and ram a light meter up his ass.

My friend Abe chimed in at this point, informing me that there was going to be a fight scene between Jet Li and Dolph Lungren that would set a new standard for visual incoherence and editing; “watching it is like rolling down a hill.” Since we weren't there yet, I continued slogging through:

There's nothing wrong with The Expendables a good writer, director, camera crew, and editor couldn't fix.

I think Sly let his plastic surgeon edit this movie: "Hey, it's called Final Cut, he'll know how it works mumblemumble."

Hey, another one of those explosions that only kills people who don't have speaking parts! (Ed. Note: you know shit is fucked up when I—I, for fuck's sake—am complaining about explosions)

Damn shame Statham's trapped in this piece of shit. In a real movie, the scene where he owned all those guys on the ball court woulda ruled.

This whole movie, David Zayas is grumbling to himself "if I was still on OZ, I woulda killed the shit out of Eric Roberts in the 1st scene."

Another really bad sign: Mickey Rourke isn't the biggest plastic surgery casualty. WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, SLY????

Christ, what fucking bullshit. Jet Li does NOT need Sly to save him from Dolph Lundgren. Jet wipes the floor with any of these guys.

(At that point, I replied to Abe's thing about the Li/Lundgren fight, which was even worse than he'd said: “I think the editing in the Li/Lundgren fight took five years off my life”)

Podcaster, and fellow sophisticated cineaste, Asim Burney then, rightly, pointed out: “more importantly what's up with Eric Roberts' teeth?” A damn fine question. Eric Roberts' teeth are certainly fucking bizarre in The Expendables. My theory: “Must have fucked them up chewing on scenery.”

By this point, we were past the point of no return anyway (by which I also mean that The Expendables is worse than Point of No Return, that stupid Bridget Fonda remake of La Femme Nikita):

So....I guess we never find out whether Sly or Stone Cold won that fight. Woulda been nice to know, in an action movie. (Ed. Note: if that fight was resolved in any fashion whatsoever, I have no idea; all I know is Stone Cold was beating the fucking fuck out of Sly, and then I blinked and Sly was running away and we never saw Stone Cold again. I swear, I was paying attention. I was totally squinting at the screen trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with the lousy lighting and the shitty editing, and I have no idea what happened to Stone Cold. This is not good.)

Sly makes Michael Bay look like Yasujiro Ozu. (Boosh, motherfucker. What has two thumbs and knows how to name-drop? This guy, madames et monsieurs)

Sly spent $85 mil on this shit and forgot to bring a tripod and lights. (Ed. Note: actually $80 mil, but the point still stands)

Wow. The Expendables really sucks THAT bad. You'd have to replace the Ghostbusters twinkie with a dick to really get a sense of the scale.

Which is basically all you need to know about The Expendables. It sucks a dick of a size that took Harold fucking Ramis' intellect to calculate.

I'm really kind of stunned by just how bad The Expendables actually is. It wasn't even like I was expecting it to be good. My standards for this kind of picture are not ambiguous, nor are they exacting. I want to see men with muscles deal violent death. I want large explosions; in certain cases one well-executed and well-timed explosion will suffice. And in the intervals between violent death and explosions, I want the men with muscles to be cool. For this last, you don't even need to write dialogue for the motherfuckers. Better yet, shut the fuck up. Michael Dudikoff didn't talk a lot, and he was cool (I don't want to hear any shit out of any of you, American Ninja 1 & 2 were both quality entertainment, and Avenging Force rocked). Danny Trejo doesn't flap his yap. Hell, even Alain Delon managed to hide the fact that he was kind of a shitty actor by shutting the fuck up, and Alain Delon rode that clever bit of strategy to status as one of the great icons of international cinema.

No one in The Expendables knows when to shut the fuck up. They bicker like retards. Jason Statham has this whole underdeveloped subplot with this woman—because no matter how bad a movie The Expendables is, it's not so divorced from reality that it would ignore the fact that Jason Statham has not gone an hour and forty minutes without having sex since his movie debut 12+ years ago—and Jet Li has this laboriously dwelt-on, and ultimately false, backstory about needing money for his family. Now, I know Statham has to get laid because he's Statham and Statham gets laid, but we didn't need to torture Jet with long dialogue scenes when we all know goddamn well his ingles isn't that great if it doesn't have any fucking point. Look, when I'm telling you you talk too goddamn much, it's time to take stock of your entire existence because holy shit. That's like Julie Taymor cracking on you for wasting money.

Sly's central fuck-up—I was about to say “original sin” but the movie wasn't that bad—is his failure to understand that language, be it verbal or cinematic, has meaning. His characters' idle, pointless chatter undermines their status as badasses, and he waves his camera around in an equally idle and pointless fashion. Even if he did hold his camera still, there's about five minutes total in the entire fucking movie that's lit well enough to even see. And even if he'd lit properly, the action is cut so that it is literally impossible to see who is doing what to whom at almost any point. That tweet about Sly making Michael Bay look as restrained and elegant as Ozu (famous for his long takes and exquisite compositions), that's only barely an exaggeration. At least in Michael Bay movies, the compositions are legible enough for you to realize, oh, yes, that's Megan Fox's ass. That whole fucking stunningly awful fight between Jet and Dolph, you never see Jet complete a single move. It's like Sly let a four-year-old with a severe cognitive impairment edit the entire picture.

In the wrong sort of mood, I'd interpret the fact that Sly's making a sequel to The Expendables as a sign that he was personally trying to get me to start taking heroin. But making sequels is what Sly does. And, shitty as The Expendables is, it made $200 mil. So, sure, it can exist. But fuck if you're gonna get me to sit through it unless Sly stops off at Home Depot for some clip lights and gets an editor who isn't tweaking his tits off while having a seizure on rollerskates (EDIT: Looks like, per Total Film, someone other than Sly will be making that call, as he won't be writing or directing! I HAVE INFLUENCE, PEOPLE! Ha ha HA!!!).

Remember. It takes more than stars to make a movie. It takes enlightenment. Heh heh heh . . .

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 6: CRANKFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE CHELIOS

Ordinarily I wouldn't do another one of these posts for another couple months, but hey, writer's block is a bitch, I've been workin' for The Man, and I accidentally ended up with—theoretically—the greatest double feature ever. And, considering that they're both (apparently) unnecessary sequels, let's do this now:


Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen

Okay, first of all, why the fuck is the title of this movie like a 70s samurai movie after a lobotomy? The title was one of the reasons why I talked myself out of going to see it in the theater, along with my longstanding pissiness re: Michael Bay, and a knee-jerk reaction against a movie based on a line of toys (even though I had them all when I was a kid, and the comics, and watched the cartoon, but hey, I wouldn't want to see a fuckin Voltron movie in my 30s either). But hey, this kind of thing is what Netflix is for.

Now, we'll recall that upon its release, Transformers part deux was met with some of the most violently scathing reviews in living memory. Roger Ebert called it “a horrible experience of unbearable length” and went on to unfavorably compare it to The Rock (jeez, remind me to never piss Roger Ebert off). Peter Travers anointed it the front runner for Worst Movie of the Decade (and what a decade for it, wow). Just about ever major media outlet took a gigantic shit all over it, and to top it all off, lead actor Shia LaBeouf even said “We got lost. We tried to get bigger. It's what happens to sequels. It's like, how do you top the first one? You've got to go bigger. Michael Bay went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie. . .You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn't matter. Then it's just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”

Shia's last observation was actually the thing I most disliked about the first movie. There were a lot of agreeably weird elements, and as much as I want to hate the little fucker, Shia's got something as a leading man. Nuance? Depth? For the gays. Shia cracks wise, doesn't look like too much of a dork running from explosions, and can plausibly nail attractive broads, and that's all he needs to do in his job. To be a serious actor, sure, you need a little more than that, but he's not a serious actor, he's a guy you get to play the lead in a dumb movie that makes money. And he does that well. Disturbia was fun. Eagle Eye was too. Sure they were stupid, but they weren't too stupid. The first Transformers teetered a little closer to the brink, and it seemed like the last four hours were indistinguishable robots destroying shit. I was a little worried, before I saw it, that the sequel would be more of the same.

Now that I have seen it, I say with a very large smile on my face, that I was absolutely right. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen goes full retard during the fucking studio logo. It opens with Optimus Prime narrating a fight in 17,000 BC between a bunch of black guys with flaky paint on their faces and a bunch of Transformers. Or maybe it's just one. Doesn't matter. It closes with Optimus Prime declaiming on the deck of an aircraft carrier, with blithe disregard for the George Bush semiotics.

That's the thing about Michael Bay. Some people get on his ass for being right-wing, or for enabling right-wingers, and it's true there's a lot of military shit in his movies, and the adoration his constantly-moving camera has for the military and the men in it verges on masturbatory. But I submit that this has nothing to do with politics. I think Michael Bay faps to the military because they're the guys who have the wherewithal to blow shit the fuck up.

And yes, when shit blows the fuck up, it is awesome. Mr. Bay's foibles as a director (a list as long and over-the-top as his movies) have to be taken with the grain of salt that the man has a near-mystical respect for the aesthetic beauty of the explosion.

Transformers: RotF might be the most perfect sequel ever. It takes the very concept of “full retard” and goes full retard on it. There are about eight or nine different movies co-existing under its umbrella, none of which make the slightest bit of sense, and every single one of them has been made before in less caffeinated form. Hell, let's not beat around the bush. This entire movie is fucking tripping on cocaine.

The plot has something to do with a really old Transformer who wanted to destroy the sun. Somehow Shia LaBeouf is, yet again, the one human being with the key to the whole shmear, some little piece of metal shit he gave to Megan Fox as a keepsake. Shia's extremely horny parents are sending him off to college (Princeton, which the writers apparently researched by watching Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle) where some badly lit Victoria's Secret model is being as obvious as she can in a PG-13 movie that she wants Shia to put his penis in her vagina (in the biblical sense), except Shia resists because he's technically still going out with Megan Fox, who in a parallel plot line develops a really weird sadomasochistic relationship with a Shih Tzu-sized Decepticon who talks like Bugs Bunny. Shia acquires a nerd friend for comic relief. Marines Josh Duhamel and Tyrese are off having trouble with an evil white guy in a suit (who, because this is a Michael Bay movie, turns out to be a gigantic fucking pussy). Robots periodically destroy massive amounts of shit; in one sequence where the Autobots, in collaboration with Josh Duhamel, Tyrese, and Aaron Pierce, on a covert mission in Shanghai, apparently succeed in keeping things covert by only destroying half the city.

Oh yeah, there's a whole bunch of casual racism in the form of an Autobot named Mudkip or something and some other one whose name I didn't catch (they all look alike to me . . . see what I did there? Oh, how I amuse myself). This, rather than being terribly offensive—he says, as a white guy—just kind of adds to the general avalanche of batshit. Because why not have two Autobots who transform into Mini Coopers talk like a WB sitcom?

Anyway, it's a little hard to think about shit in a movie where nothing makes any rational sense whatsoever. Shia, Shia's nerd, Megan Fox, and Megan Fox's sexually obsessed Decepticon take their act on the road after the bigger Decepticons destroy a bunch of shit (and kill Optimus Prime), and they find John Turturro—the government alien hunter dude from the first movie—working in a deli, and he's apparently Shia's nerd's father or something. John Turturro abandons his deli to go looking for . . . something . . . okay, when Shia was in college for five minutes, he had this weird nervous breakdown in Rainn Wilson's physics class (watching the Victoria's Secret models in the front row get all squirmy over Rainn Wilson is both one of the funniest fucking things I've ever seen and probably part of his contract for taking the part: “If I'm going to be in this fucktarded movie I want hot girls eyefucking me”) and started drawing weird, Asianesque symbols all over the place. Which I think has something to do with the thing they're looking for. Which John Turturro can somehow help them with . . .?

Megan Fox's robot sub has what looks like a Benedict Arnold moment when he leads them to some long-asleep Decepticon, except it turns out he's not a Decepticon, and the non-Decepticon teleports them all to “Egypt” (it could not be Arizona more clearly if there was a truckload of Mexicans getting jacked for their passports by cops), which just so happens to be right by where Josh Duhamel and Tyrese are. The robots all start commence destroying the Pyramids, because the thing that's going to destroy the sun is underneath them, except John Turturro takes Shia et al to Petra (in one of a million out of nowhere Indiana Jones references, including Rainn Wilson's eye-gangbang at the hands of his nubile students) where they find some dead Primes. A whole bunch more shit blows up and Shia gets killed and communes with the souls of the dead Primes, who give him some obvious advice (revive Optimus Prime, don't let the Decepticons win). So Shia comes back to life, sprinkles some robot pixie dust on Optimus Prime, who wakes up and kicks ass, and we all live happily ever after. Until the third movie.

To quote my friend—and better writer—Matt Freeman: “Transformers 2 is one of the only truly grandly bad movies made in years. It achieves levels of absurdity that are wild and unruly and boggling.” That just about sums up Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Sure it's bad. But it's bad on such a scale, with such disregard for rational sense, taste, and everything except the worship of size and explosions, that it becomes something oddly beautiful. It's impossible to say until the third Transformers movie is unleashed on us next year, but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may be the perfect crystallization of everything Michael Bay is and means to people. Which makes the fact that he officially apologized for it all the more hilarious.


Crank: High Voltage

“In a story so bizarre I can scarcely believe the event I'm reporting, and yet corroborated by at least a dozen eye witnesses. A white male apparently fell from the sky above downtown Los Angeles today, landed in the middle of a busy intersection, destroying one vehicle and hospitalizing its elderly driver, and then was removed from the scene even before emergency personnel could respond. Without a body the police have yet to piece together the events of the day. It can only be described as implausible. Reports of a second body landing in the Boyle Heights area have yet to be confirmed, and are being treated as the bullshit they most likely are.”

What's this? Self-awareness? In my post-rational cinema of the visceral? That's right. Crank: High Voltage is another sequel whose progenitor left me kinda cold at the end. While admirably concise and free of unnecessary exposition other than “This is Jason Statham. His name is Chev Chelios—presumably because someone already used the name Rex Roenick and because Gert Gretzky would have been excessively effeminate—and he is a hired killer. These bad guys want him dead,” Crank was nonetheless really fucking stupid, and was shot and edited in such a hypercharged, adrenalized, cartoonish fashion that the action scenes were almost redundant, as they differed from the rest of the movie insufficiently.

Much like Transformers, the sequel to Crank seems almost relieved to not be a first movie, and that it can get on with the proper business of being a retarded sequel. It's almost like, now that we're in the age of sequels, remakes, reboots, and the like, that being the first movie in a series is something dirty that should not be spoken of, and not until the first sequel does a franchise truly exist. Weird, but hey, the modern age is always weird and inexplicable, because due to the selective editing inherent in cognition, the past always seems nice, neat, and orderly.

I didn't even know how the hell they were planning to make a sequel to Crank, since Jason Statham dies at the end. Would they use the Better Tomorrow 2 gambit, having Statham Secunda be the twin brother of Statham Prima? Would they do the prequel route, to wit, how Jason Statham pissed off all those Mexican/Chinese gangsters enough that they shot him full of that poison shit in the first movie? Or something wholly different and heretofore unknowable? That's right, one hot heaping plate of wholly different and heretofore unknowable: Crank: High Voltage has the balls to sell us on the premise that falling out of a fucking helicopter thousands of feet above Los Angeles did not kill Jason Statham. Well, then, Crank: High Voltage, go on. You have my undivided attention.

A bunch of shady Chinese guys peel Jason Statham off the ground with a shovel (no shit, one of them literally has a shovel) and throw him in the back of the van. They proceed to shlep him to a filthy, poorly lit surgical facility where they remove his heart and replace it with a mechanical one. Why? Shush.

Statham, of course, escapes and kills a bunch of dudes. He leaves one alive with a shotgun rammed up his ass (again, literally) and hotwires a car, whereupon he feels a bit drowsy, whereupon he discovers he needs to give himself electric shocks to keep his new temp heart beating.

Not much else actually happens over the course of the movie. Jason Statham chases down the guy who has his heart. Shit gets broke in the process. Writer-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor bring back a number of elements from the first movie, like comic relief Efren Ramirez (who is the brother of the character he played in the first movie, who was killed), and girlfriend Amy Smart, who once again has to have public sex with Jason Statham to keep him alive, this time in a racetrack in the middle of the track during a race (a horse jumps over them, and Amy Smart marvels at the size of its dick). The movie ends with Jason Statham again apparently about to die, except this time around they know better than to imply to us that he's dead. It's Jason Statham. We know he's not dead.

Crank: High Voltage is an entertaining hour and a half, and calling it brain-dead or retarded isn't quite accurate. If Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is tripping on cocaine, Crank: High Voltage is tweaking its fucking tits off. From the grimy cinematography to the “full body Tourettes” Efren Ramirez has to the very title of the movie, Crank: High Voltage is cinematic crystal meth. This, of course, means it's not for everyone. Downers people will find it bewildering. Asians and Hispanics may not be pleased with the caricatures.

Most importantly though, it's not really a picture for women. I hope Amy Smart and Bai Ling got paid for this movie, because holy shit. All they do the whole picture is either melt into liquified g-spot at the sight of Jason Statham (in itself not all that implausible, he's a handsome fellow) or—and this is the bad part—get abused and humiliated. Every single other woman in the movie is either a stripper or a hooker (or both), and there's this shot in the middle of a gunfight where a stripper gets shot in her breast implants and the camera lingers on her deflating rack (I don't know, I think it was supposed to be funny). Sure, the deus ex machina at the end is a bunch of strippers and leather queens with machine guns, but I don't know, dude. It's just self-aware enough as a movie that you can't simply write the misogyny off as a facet of its stupidity.

Of course, Crank: High Voltage is not meant to be thought about too much or too hard. It is, after all, post-rational. The problem with this is, people who don't think are going to watch it and instead of thinking “Wow, either Amy Smart is a really good sport or NOW needs a paramilitary wing” they're gonna go “Yeah, that bitch got owned, bro.” Don't get me wrong, I'm not getting PC on you or anything, but seriously, when a Michael Bay movie (a Michael Bay movie where Megan Fox gets her leg humped to the point of orgasm by a robot, no less) looks good compared to yours in its treatment of women . . . you done fucked up. You know you done fucked up now, right?

All that being said, Crank features the usual rock-solid Jason Statham performance. All he has to do is grimace, look sullen, and growl a bit, but he does these things so well. The Transporter pictures are more my cup of tea, with the European settings, the suits, the calmer—yet still intense—filmmaking, but Crank, in spite of its flaws and ghastly oversights (casual racism and misogyny, etc), is interesting, if a distant also-ran in the retard epic sweepstakes, since Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is now the gold standard.

Seen in tandem, these two pictures don't really have anything to do with each other except shitty lighting, a severe case of attention-deficit disorder, and feverishly, melodramatically stupid high concepts (“Evil robots from space want to steal the sun” and “Jason Statham has to literally retrieve his stolen heart”). They are both fun. They are both kind of upsetting if you think about them for too long. I don't really need to see either one of them again, but they both provided some good laughs. I do, however, want to see something that's actually good next.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX VOL. 5: A MYSTERY GUEST

Ordinarily, I would eat somebody alive for panning a movie they didn't sit all the way through. I'm getting around that by not talking about the movie itself, but rather the overall DVD experience. As it so often does, it starts with the trailers:


Did You Hear About The Morgans?

Let's clarify. This movie doesn't actually exist; it's actually a bleeding-edge multimedia art project/political statement about the stupidity of Hollywood. The proof is right in the trailer. There's no way this is actually a movie. It's too perfectly calculated a trailer—that opening bit with Hugh Grant and his bitch-boy is a joke with a narrative arc, beginning with a lame, contrived set-up, allowing Hugh to flash some sandpaper wit, all concluding with a reference to a “relationship.” Because OMG U GUISE ITS A ROEMANTIK COMEDEE LOL.

So let's see . . . somebody gets killed and Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica O'Horseface have to go into the witness protection program. In The Country! Sarah Jessica McFuckball makes a Sarah Palin joke (edgy!) And Hugh Grant and SJP fall back in love. It all gets very frantic and splintered by the end of the trailer, just like the third acts of the movies this avant-garde experiment is satirizing.

Here's the kicker, though. Because the movie itself is of so little importance in modern Hollywood, the centerpiece of the experiment was its original release date. Yes, that's right, DYHATM? was “released” the same day as Avatar. And sure, Avatar ended up being fucking terrible (Ed. Note: Avatar is really, really, really, really awful) but if there was one thing you could set your clock by in the industry, it was that anyone who went to a movie that weekend was going to see Avatar. It had been marketed just right, with just the right level of cultural saturation, and managed to convince people that they were excited.

And this is the final, clinching piece of evidence for Did You Hear About The Morgans? being an experiment commenting on bad marketing campaigns: everything about it fucking sucks. Has anyone given a flaming rat's ass about Hugh Grant in 15 years? No. Does anyone actually like Sarah Jessica Blah-Blah-Blah? Sure the show was a hit, but Kim Cattrall was the one everyone was actually interested in. The bit about giving away the entire plot in the trailer is but the capstone on the whole experiment; why would anyone want to spend two hours what they just saw in a minute and a half?


Ice Castles

Promising young skater gets injured, comes back triumphantly? I really can't tell. Drowning under mountains of goopy sentimentality, kinda pissed about this being another trailer that gives the whole movie away. But there is a place for a PG family movie with an unchallenging, diagrammatic structure about a nice girl “positive role model” type. That place just happens to be elsewhere than my DVD player.


Sleepless in Seattle

Okay, what the fuck? Bear in mind, at this point, I have literally forgotten what DVD I put in the player. It's late, I'm a little addled (actually just plain old exhaustion rather than booze or drugs), but still, it's a little alarming that I can't remember what movie's going to be coming on in 5 minutes. I also am at a a bit of a loss as to why a trailer for a movie that came out in 1993 is in front of the same movie as something that came out last December (and whenever the Ice Castles thing came out, it looks recent too).

Eventually, I get distracted by remembering how good Sleepless in Seattle was. Oh, that bygone era, when Tom Hanks had just become the massive movie star he always should have been, when Meg Ryan was Meg Ryan, and the romantic comedy formula had yet to devolve into the disturbing mess that it is today. Though, in a way, Sleepless in Seattle established the template for the “this isn't romantic, these people are actually out of their fucking minds” modern rom-com. Meg Ryan happens to hear Tom Hanks talking about his late wife on a talk radio show, falls in love with him, and kind of starts stalking him. Meg Ryan was only able to get away with this because she's Meg Ryan, but Sleepless in Seattle was a hit, so dozens more movies with lesser movie stars were made where the insanity of the heroine's actions wasn't offset by Meg Ryan's preternaturally adorable Meg Ryan-ness.

Actually, before the feature presentation even started, during the Sleepless in Seattle trailer, I started wondering about Nora Ephron. In When Harry Met Sally, she did a fairly decent job with her male characters, even though the scene where Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby are talking about Billy's divorce at a Giants game would never happen (dudes talk about chick shit during a game about as often as solar eclipses), though the fact that the dialogue rings true helps.

But Sleepless in Seattle sees Nora slip a little bit more. Rob Reiner, as Tom Hanks' buddy, is a character who simply does not exist. Dudes do not have girl talk with each other. The couple clips of Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner in the trailer consist entirely of them having girl talk. Now, in the movie itself, this actually works, as the movie is a very otherworldly, stylized thing, and is a lot more self-reflexively meta-cinematic than the average early 90s studio picture. But, in hindsight, it's a sign that Nora Ephron was slipping just a hair.

Guy writers frequently get criticized for not writing good women, or writing women who are little more than fantasy objects. Hey, I've consciously written women characters as fantasy objects before, I'm not saying I'm above such missteps. Women do it too, though. A woman writing a scene where two dudes talk articulately about their feelings and ask each other if their butt looks cute (admittedly, a pretty funny scene in SiS) is equally as fantastic as a man writing a scene where two femme chicks spontaneously start making out. Both have possibly happened at some point or other in real life. Possibly. However, as a writer, you should always be aware of how farfetched such a premise is.

Also, let's note another fuckup that doesn't really count because it was funny: dudes don't cry at the end of the Dirty Dozen, much as it worked as a joke in this. Dudes cry at the end of Field of Dreams, which is actually more limpdick, so props to Nora Ephron for letting us save testicular face.

(Ed. Note: all this negativity about Nora Ephron and Sleepless in Seattle is just foreshadowing—Sleepless in Seattle's pretty fuckin good)


Hanging Up

Huh. Another Nora Ephron movie? What the fuck is going on here? (Ed. Note: at this point, the author has still yet to remember what movie he just put in the DVD player). The only thing I really remember about this one was that it took that meta-cinematic feel Sleepless in Seattle had to a whole 'nother level, making the importance of the characters' resemblance to real people secondary to the importance of their resembling movie characters. Which, yeah, is interesting if you're high, and Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, and Lisa Kudrow are all cool, I guess, but really, when I'm high I either want to be watching art pictures from the 60s or John Lithgow invading Earth with a fake Italian accent. Personal prejudice.


And, our feature presentation . . . Julie & Julia

Hey, don't look at me, I don't know why the fuck I Netflixed this. At the same time, they sent it to me, I hadn't seen it, I figured, why not? Maybe it'll be good. The Nora Ephron trailers suddenly made sense, and that odd parallel-universe feeling I'd been having eased somewhat.

But holy shit, this movie wasn't messing around when it decided to suck. From the word go, everything is completely stilted and artificial. Amy Adams' friends seem to have beamed in from some parallel universe where people declaim instead of conversing. Amy Adams, herself, does an excellent job, but she has a bit of trouble rolling the rock up the mountain with this fuckin' dialogue.

Meryl's great, and seeing her and Stanley Tucci so mad for each other is cool, but it can't shake how godawful the Amy Adams & co. bits are in the first half hour or so, which is all I made it through. It was too painful to watch something so completely divorced from reality, and the irony that it was based on a true story made me need a drink.

Now, of course, it's possible that the movie abruptly becomes awesome at some point after I turned it off. Even though I doubt that it does, that's neither here nor there because I didn't actually take the time to find out.

Still, that being said, it's unfortunate that Nora Ephron lost her fastball, because as stylized and non-naturalistic as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle were, they were still really fucking funny. Of course, Julie & Julia isn't a laff-a-minute farce—its intention is to be a story with funny bits in it rather than a straight-up comedy—but even the stuff that's supposed to be funny is strained, and so far removed from actual human experience that it's like “Okay . . . I guess . . .” whereas When Harry Met Sally was like “Wow, I never thought of it that way before!”


The most interesting thing about experiencing the (incomplete) picture in this fashion was the narrative created by the trailers. We started with a great example of the modern romantic comedy—manic, joyless, insane, devoid of both romance and comedy—progress to a feel-good programmer (hey, civilians need shit to enjoy too), then the tripartite Nora Ephron show. All told, it was only an hour or so out of my life, so I don't feel like I totally wasted an evening or anything, but boy it was weird and inexplicably kind of disturbing to see that drift away from reality.

Oh, well. That happened. Moving on . . .

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 4: DARK STAR, AN EDUCATION, & THE INFORMANT!

In this modern age, there's so much to keep track of. I started tweeting (follow me!), there's baseball; and good God have I been getting annihilated at fantasy baseball, this clip is a perfect visual metaphor—

—there are pretty girls to talk to, movies of my own to produce (details forthcoming), theater to see. With all this (and I'm not complaining, except about the fantasy baseball) I've been falling a bit behind on those little red envelopes. These things happen, since even at the best of times the shit on my queue tends to be the kind of thing I've been “meaning to see.” Things I really want to see I see. There isn't all this fucking hesitation that crops up when I'm watching an Oscar also-ran, or something I saw when I was high years and years ago, or some overtly “experimental” picture by a talented yet mercurial and aloof auteur.

But there comes a time when even the most neurotic among us have to man up and deal with our eclectic taste in cinema and get those fuckin' Netflix sent back. Because erudite, profane crankiness loves company, I share the experience with you:


Dark Star (1974) dir. John Carpenter

I saw this years and years ago and remembered it as being goofy and fun. Upon rewatching, it was goofy and confusing. While there are some priceless bits—the 2001-satirizing existentialist conversations trying to convince the cheerful bomb not to blow up, the beach ball alien, having the crew of the spaceship being a bunch of devil-may-care bearded longhairs—trying to listen to the poorly-recorded sound to follow what was going on gave me a headache, so I ended up self-medicating and getting nicely buzzed (strictly legal!) for about the second half of the movie, improving the experience greatly.

This leads to a very important point, that I would like to make as a Movies By Bowes ™ public service announcement: only watch Dark Star if you're high. It thus joins the following restricted list (as in, blaze first at all costs):

Head
Buckaroo Banzai
The Room
Barbarella
Roland Emmerich's entire career (Expert Level)


An Education (2009) dir. Lone Scherfig

Watching this basically on a double feature with Dark Star was an interesting experience, and probably made me like this a whole lot more in a weird way. An Education tells the story of Jenny Millar (Carey Mulligan) a smart, intellectually and culturally ambitious 16 year old in early 60s England who's being pressured by her dad (Alfred Molina) to ascetically pursue her studies so as to get into Oxford.

Jenny meets an extremely charming older man (Peter Sarsgaard, not only rockin a top-notch Brit accent but appearing heterosexual, impressively) who soon sweeps her off her feet and introduces her to a world of parties, and concerts, and cocktails, weekend trips to Oxford and Paris . . . and no small amount of shadiness and criminality. Peter Sarsgaard and Dominic Cooper are sort of like the Kray twins as co-written by Scott Fitzgerald and Christopher Isherwood, so they're not dangerous or anything, but Jenny still doesn't entirely approve.

Impressively (and kind of implausibly), Peter Sarsgaard also seduces Jenny's parents (not in the biblical sense, but in a “wow, our daughter's older boyfriend is awesome!” kind of way), to the point where when Jenny finds out Peter Sarsgaard is married, Alfred Molina is just as brokenhearted as she is.

Over the course of Jenny's seduction, she's drifted from her academic ambitions, growing to see devoted, severe teacher Olivia Williams (whose character I want to drink tea and hold hands with) as dead inside and headmistress Emma Thompson (who is fucking hilarious in this) as a fascistic twat. But, after she splits with Peter Sarsgaard—having dropped out of school before taking her A-levels—Jenny tries to get back on the plan, only to have Emma Thompson tell her no, and it takes Olivia Williams getting excited in an extremely British way (oh, Olivia Williams, I want to quote Coleridge to you . . . ) about getting Jenny back on the path to see that Jenny gets the titular schooling, on the literal level.

But, “an education” works on a secondary level too, to wit the kind of knowledge and life's wisdom one can't glean from books. Losing your virginity in an anticlimactic way. Learning that glamorous people are often shallow. Learning that many art collectors are in it for art's value as a commodity rather than the love. Learning that when you're a kid you should be a kid (and, in Jenny's case, appreciate the awkward boy who worships her more) rather than aspiring to be an adult (and have Rosamund Pike get excited on your behalf that you don't have to read books anymore now that you've dropped out of school).

An Education is an example of the kind of movie that's completely insufferable when Americans try it but for some reason the Brits hit all the notes just right, and although it's totally formulaic it still manages to involve the audience emotionally. Part of that, in this movie's case, is that Carey Mulligan is so unbelievably good as Jenny. Apparently she never acted before, which is astounding, and makes An Education a companion piece to Billy Elliott, which although a much better movie, also starred a novice in the lead, and is also one of those paint-by-numbers Rembrandts the Brits crank out once or twice a year.

Hopefully, Oliver Stone doesn't torpedo Carey Mulligan's career with Wall Street 2: Are You Fucking Kidding Me, because wow.


Oh, and on a random note, fuck Nick Hornby. YOU KNOW WHY, NICK.


The Informant! (2009) dir. Steven Soderbergh

“Four guys in suits meeting in the middle of the day? That's not a business meeting, it's a crime scene!”

—Tony “Buster Bluth” Hale

And, rounding out our trilogy of the long unwatched, we have evil white guys in suits! Hell yeah. Directed by Steven Soderbergh in full-on ironic detachment mode! Ah, shit, Steve, do you have to . . .?

Ol' Steve's a tough nut to crack. After he dropped the one-two blockbuster combo of Erin Brockovich and Traffic, he's spent the last decade alternating between Ocean's movies and seemingly deliberately off-putting experimental pictures. Some of them, like Bubble, work (because, amateur cast aside, Steve kept it simple and told a fucking story). Some of them, like The Good German, are hideous. Others, like The Girlfriend Experience, are total head-scratchers (making a movie starring Sasha Grey without any sex in it is kind of like putting Arnold in a Woody Allen movie).

The Informant! actually didn't need a ton of help from Soderbergh to be weird. The guy Matt Damon plays in it, Mark Whitacre, is fucking crazy. He spent years lying to the FBI, taping people, trying to hide his own embezzlement by ratting out his bosses, watching Tom Cruise movies, hiring and firing lawyers, and ending up getting tossed in jail for three times as long as his evil white guy bosses.

Matty Dames lets it fly as Whitacre. His narration goes way past “unreliable narrator” into a whole new category; Matty spends the whole fucking picture yammering at us about Japanese perverts, The Firm, and fictional-sounding exploits while driving the FBI's blood pressure into the 200/160 range and amusing the living shit out of his bosses.

It's a fairly interesting story, but does kind of drag a bit. The whole “corporate shenanigans as comedy” schtick was done a lot better in Barbarians at the Gate, because Steve kind of overdoes it with the jokey-jokes (just about everybody in the supporting cast is a stand-up comedian) and the Marvin Hamlisch music and the 70s-textured images—even though the movie took place in the 90s—and all.

One stroke of absolute genius, though, was casting Clancy Brown as Matty's evil white guy boss' lawyer. Clancy Brown walks into boardroom. Commands respect. Tells you what the fuck is up. Leaves. Possibility for resistance: nil. It's Clancy Brown. Now that he has white hair, he can be the lawyer, where when he was younger he was the guy with the gun, but it's good to see that badass is a growth industry.

Scott Bakula and Joel McHale are both really good as the Feds Matty Dames drives nuts, even if they don't get much to do other than reaction shots like “is this motherfucker serious?” about the increasingly bizarre shit Matty pulls on them. And the woman who played Clooney's sister in Up in the Air is really good as Matty's wife.


You know, as insignificant a thing as it actually is, there really is a sense of accomplishment about finally getting through those damn Netflix that have been sitting around since May. It'd be so much easier to sit around watching movies by myself if I didn't lead such an interesting life . . . grumble grumble . . .

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 3: UP IN THE AIR

I've been a little busy lately (working on a script for a play I'm doing in June) but finally have a chance to catch up on some two-month-old Netflix. Considering that I'm usually twenty-plus years behind the times on this blog, sitting down to write about Up In The Air damn near counts as current events.

Dealing as it does with the unemployment crisis, Up In The Air is still relevant (though of course one hopes it becomes a curio of past troubled times as soon as possible). And in many important senses—it being extremely well written, directed, and acted—it always will be. Jason Reitman is a serious filmmaker. He's three pictures into a career that, barring some sudden decision to deviate into the good ol' coke-hookers-and-apathy egomania trap, should continue to be impressive. He has a brilliant sense of pace, and tells stories economically, but most impressively he never shows off. He's like, here's my protagonist, here's the story, here's some really good dialogue that serves to tell this story rather than show off how clever I am, there we go. What I like about Jason Reitman's pictures so far is that he never seems to feel the need to do all kinds of artificial shit to make the audience like his protagonists. In Thank You For Smoking, his debut, Aaron Eckhart is a fucking asshole: he's a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. Reitman doesn't try and make that look cool, he just shows you this human being with a borderline supernatural ability to persuade, and shows how eventually that guy organically learns how to (kind of) use his powers for good. Juno doesn't really count, since Reitman didn't write it, but Ellen Page kind of fits, as she's a human being who gets irritated, isn't always nice, kind of takes Michael Cera for granted but eventually comes to her senses at the end.

Up In The Air, though, has a higher difficulty curve. In any other hands but George Clooney's, protagonist Ryan Bingham is an irredeemable shit. He's charming because George Clooney is. You resist the temptation to shoot him in the fucking face because, come on, dude, it's George Clooney. Here's a guy who fires people for a living in the nightmare economy created by George Bush (or Dick Cheney, if you want to get technical). He never feels any guilt about what he does. His highest ambition in life is to accumulate 10 million frequent flier miles. And yet . . . he's George Clooney. This should put to rest any tut-tutting about George Clooney's alleged shortcomings as an actor. The fucking guy pulls off alchemy in this role. He makes you care about someone who should be dropped out of one of his beloved American Airlines jets without a parachute. I say this guy's a goddamn genius.

The story opens by showing us George Clooney living his dream life: flying around the country, firing people (in such a way that they almost feel like he's doing them a favor; Zach Galifianakis, in a terrific cameo early on says “When will I see you again?” with such naked, painful need that it's like Clooney's his only friend) and living his life in airplanes and hotels. He meets a woman who's, apparently, “you with a vagina” as Vera Farmiga bluntly puts it. They compare corporate-traveler badges of honor, and subsequently genitalia. By which I mean they shtup.

But trouble, as it so often does, seeps into paradise. George Clooney's gaping asshole boss (Jason Bateman, who's so fucking good at playing total jerkoffs—hell, even when he's the good guy on Arrested Development he's such a brilliantly passive-aggressive douchebag—that he almost steals the movie from George fucking Clooney) brings in a perky young prodigy (Anna Kendrick, who's great in this) who has a new-media strategy that makes Clooney's job redundant. But he will not go gently into that good night, and takes her on a whirlwind tour to prove how irreplaceable his skills are, lest Jason Bateman decide to make him fire people over a computer screen.

The trip ends up not actually accomplishing what Clooney intends it to do, since all he manages to do is make her realize how much firing people sucks. It does show him, through talking with one of those alarmingly conservative young people the world is so full of these days, that his carefree libertine ways are not the only path, and she loosens up a bit, but not unrealistically.

Clooney runs into Vera Farmiga again, and starts to fall for her. When Anna Kendrick's boyfriend breaks up with her via text message (which, after the revolution, I will make sure my Minister of the Interior enforces as a capital offense) Clooney and Vera Farmiga take her out and get her fucked up, and she ends up shtupping some douchebag and leaving before he wakes up. She doesn't much like it, though, upon further reflection.

Clooney and Anna Kendrick continue on their tour, scored brilliantly to Dan Auerbach's "Goin' Home" (the soundtrack is terrific, with the title song over the closing credits a particular highlight). The trip concludes with Anna Kendrick firing a woman who informs her, dispassionately, that she's going to go home and commit suicide, which shakes Anna Kendrick up, but Clooney tells her it's nothing, they all say that. When they return home, Jason Bateman says fuck it, we're going with her teleconferencing idea, Clooney, you're grounded. Clooney finds, much as that kinda sucks, that what he most wants to do is bring Vera Farmiga with him to his sister's wedding. Clooney accidentally convinces his brother-in-law-to-be (Danny McBride) to get cold feet, and Clooney's other sister tells him straight up, you fucked this up, you fucking deal with it, and Clooney gives Danny McBride this speech about the best moments in life being with another person (you see Clooney talking himself into it over the course of the speech, in some nice thesping) and all ends up well.

EXCEPT. When Clooney goes to Chicago to see Vera Farmiga—in a sequence that struck me as being weirdly cliched in its “this is the part of the romantic movie where the guy realizes he loves the woman” vibe, down to him running through the airport, just barely making the plane, before I realized what was really going on—he finds out . . . she's married and has a family. Whoops.

I already thought Up In The Air was a well-made, well-played movie, but that it has the balls to just fuck George Clooney in the heart like that (a subject I personally know plenty about) was really impressive. He just goes home to Omaha and gets back to work, grumpily but dutifully. On the way, he reaches his 10 millionth mile, and the pilot (Sam fuckin Elliott, baby, recognize) comes out and does the whole gladhanding bit. Clooney tells him he'd been playing this moment out in his mind, thinking of what he would say, but that now that it's happened he totally forgot what he was going to say.

When he gets back home, Jason Bateman comes in to say that the woman who told Anna Kendrick she was going to kill herself actually did. Clooney isn't so much bothered by that as by the fact that it made Anna Kendrick quit, so he decides to do her a solid and write her a recommendation letter for her new job. Jason Bateman scraps Anna Kendrick's teleconferencing idea when she leaves, and so the movie ends where it begins, with George Clooney on a plane to somewhere, on his way to fire someone.

Not exactly the happiest ending in the world, but it's honest. I had been a little worried about George Clooney and Vera Farmiga getting together, because while they really dug each other, Clooney settling down with someone would have been stupid Hollywood bullshit. Even if they didn't end up with each other, Clooney completely repudiating his life would have been stupid Hollywood bullshit too. Instead, we end with a guy who's a little more self-conscious about getting older than he once was, who hasn't suddenly, magically learned to get along with people, who probably asks the flight attendant for a couple more cocktails per trip than he used to.

What's encouraging to me is that, ambivalent “George Clooney is an island in the sky” ending aside, Up In The Air made a shitload of money. I had forgotten this; I actually originally started this paragraph by talking about it having been a disappointment at the box office and that being the death knell sounded for pictures by, about, and for adults that don't end conveniently. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you fact check. I mean, sure, it had a major movie star in the lead, but George Clooney movies aren't always hits (matter of fact, unless he's playing Danny Ocean, they usually aren't). Let's hope that Jason Reitman takes those nice box-office figures as a sign to carry on as he has, rather than buying him too much hookers and blow. Though I'm sure he's a smart enough guy and talented enough filmmaker, he could even make an interesting thoughtful picture about hookers and blow. Excelsior, Mr. Reitman!