No Good Movies

Things I learned from Crazy Heart:

1. Jeff Bridges just needed the right role to win him that Oscar, because, honestly, he did the same thing in this movie that he does in every other movie.  I bet if his character in Tron Legacy had been a burned out alcoholic programmer/guru then he would have won for that.

Bad Blake

Mad Blake

Pad Blake

1b. Who’s idea was it to reference the Big Lebowski in the bowling alley scene at the beginning of the movie? What the hell is that about? Is this kind of *wink, wink* movie making supposed to set the tone?  Supposed to make me like the movie more?  To show how smart you are?  Do you think this movie is ironic, or post-modern in any way?  Use some restraint, you assholes.

What movie am I in?

2. Scripts are passe — a good outline is all you need!  Just think of some plot points.  And some subplot points!  Don’t worry about connecting them, or resolving them, or justifying them.  When you get tired of one just cut to the next one; you get way more movie that way!  Want to throw some things in just because? Without worrying whether they have a purpose?  Now you can!  You want an estranged son?  Check!  A car accident?  Check!  Robert Duvall?  Check!

Stupid Old School Storyline for Worriers

Cool New Style Story Line with Robert Duvall

3. Children:  A – love strange sweaty old men who reek of alcohol as long as they make buscuits and talk football, B – never cry, even when strange sweaty old men upset their mothers, C – are cute.

Why am I here?

4. No matter how bad your life may seem, no matter how deep your depression goes, no matter how much you fail your friends and family, one thing can always save you.  How, we ask, does Bad Bad Blake get his life back together?  It probably takes years of false starts and some deep self-examination and re-invention.  Sure he may have a strong start, but as Robert Duvall warns, it’s just a start.  The hard part will come when he’s back in the bars, back in the familiar patterns, after he realizes that not all bridges are reparable, when the old emptiness sets in.  Well, FUCK YOU, Robert Duvall!  What we need is the love of a good wom– no, fuck that–what we need is a montage, and suddenly, Bad Blake is transformed into Enlightened Otis, with levels of self awareness and acceptance that make all other characters around him seem like shallow hulls of human beings (which I think says something about the writing).

Hi, I'd like to order a montage.

5.  Boring movies are boring. What makes it so boring?  Perhaps its because the stakes never seem very high.  Perhaps I don’t care about Maggie Gyllenhall (sorry, Maggie, I know you cry in almost every scene, so obviously, I’m supposed to care).  The only relationship that has any real juice is the one with Blake’s former partner, but all the tension deflates after the first encounter, where it becomes obvious Blake’s just a bitter asshole who wants something he doesn’t deserve (namely, Tommy’s success).  Maybe it’s because I don’t care if Blake dies, or I don’t believe that he really is in danger.

I still have staples in me.

Compare this with The Wrestler, a similar story, told in a similar human-scale kind of way.  In The Wrestler, every decision seems fraught with tension.  Each choice has consequences, and those consequences escalate.  Crazy Heart?  I can’t even tell whether anything the characters do matters.

The Book of Eli

(spoiler) Denzel Washington kills people across wasteland America and then at the end we find out he’s blind (I think). I almost want to watch it again, knowing this about him and marveling at how he accomplishes stuff. But then I would have to see the movie again, and I don’t think I can make it through (among other things) another vision of Malcolm MacDowell there at the end. Through glint of eye and beam of face he screams “Hello there! It’s me, Malcolm MacDowell! Sort of sci-fi icon and evidently jolly has-been! Funny meeting me here, eh? Do you like my mullet?”

Hi, Malcolm. No, I don’t.

Matrix Trilogy

Is this too easy? Probably, but I figured I’d weigh in. The inexplicable vampires (seriously, what in god’s name do they have to do with anything?) and insufferable conversation with the eye-poppingly named “Merovingian” are my most painful memories of Part 2. (I looked up Merovingian for this post and, sure enough, it means one who is given an ostentatious name so as to suggest relevance and, perhaps, villainy, where none would otherwise be apparent.) And in Part 3 I am most tormented by the spectacularly corny Burning-Man-ecstatic-dance-intercut-with-Neo-and-Trinity-doing-it sequence and by the total abandonment of the original Matrix’s relatively slender scope in favor of an oversprawled and totally bland “last stand of freedom” thing. Screenwriters should form a buddy system in which anytime someone’s buddy writes a rally-the-yokels-before-we-face-a-terrible-enemy speech prior to the climactic sequence in an action movie, the other buddy forcibly checks him into treatment.

The original still stands up, I’m betting. But I have to say that Lawrence Fishburne purses his lips with almost circus-freak audacity (See! The Man With The Perpetually Slurping Face!), and his introduction of the token non-athletic gizmo guy is borderline Yankovickian. “The little one over there is Mouse,” he says. Of course it is. Of course this troop of ragamuffin freedom fighters has a mousy little tech twerp, and of course his name is farking “Mouse.” Every group of ragamuffin heroes has one of these twerps, and every one of these twerps is named something twerpy like Mouse or Rat or Widget or Skittle. The next ragamuffin band of heroes I see better have a thick and virile hulk of a man named Brunt or Boulder or Jam or Flex running diagnostics or I am done with muffins forever.

50/50

Apparently, no one writes anything actually funny anymore. They just place supposedly funny people in front of the camera and ask them to babble. Or they trade in mere imitations of jokes. Viewers can recognize that something like a joke is happening–the actor inflected those words the way one does a wisecrack, or the look on that girl’s face suggests something crazy is going on–and are therefore cued to laugh. But nothing truly wise or crazy happening. The word I would have to use for what is happening, the deadliest word in comedy, is obvious. (I did laugh sometimes. Sometimes funny people are funny. Usually, though, they try too hard.)

I think the worst thing about this movie, though, is the music. Protagonist and therapist/orbiting love interest ride in a car together and jam out to something peppy (so that we understand that these two people are getting along). Then protagonist says “pull over” and goes to work emptying the trash from the car’s footwells. This is a kind gesture and a bonding moment for the two of them. We know that because we’re not idiots. Just in case we are, though, the peppy music we’d just been force-fed (and which has only been around for a few seconds) is suddenly overtaken by a swooning and tender orchestral thing. Now all the sofa lint and other animate things watching the movie with you are also aware: “something romantic is happening.” Or rather, it was, until you hit me over the head with that heart-shaped boot.

Bronze medal: Cate Blanchett, whose accent is different in every scene. (Honorable mention: me, for figuring out that it was supposed to be Southern American.)

Silver medal: Eric Bana’s character, for his inexplicable maneuvers leading up to the final fistfight. First he sprints toward the bad guys and punches them in their SUV.  Then he runs away, but only to ambush them when they catch up to him. Why would you confront, flee, and then confront again? Because you’re in a stupid movie.

Gold medal: the filmmakers, for that sequence where Hanna, who was raised in the tundra all by herself so she knows everything about combat and survival but not much about the real world (except what her dad read to her from books), is terrorized by modern conveniences. First the water kettle starts steaming, then the ceiling fan looks scary, then there’s a sound on the tv, and then she falls into the wash basin and accidentally triggers–look out!–the shower. It’s shot with all the intensity of the shower scene in Psycho, and, uh, doesn’t quite deliver.

the time to cut loose was 1984

The dancing was exciting. And brave, in a way, cause the main guy had the sweeping arms and pointed toes of a modern dancer, which is definitely risky in a small southern town, dancing ban or no. Nonetheless, the movie sucked.

Bronze medal: tie between every attempt at humor and every attempt at sentimentality. The only moments that worked were direct quotes from the original screenplay, and the only reason they worked was because for a moment in your mind you remember how it happened in the original version and you think, “yeah, those were good times.” Then in your mind you return to this version and you’re like, “man, am I old.”

Silver medal: the set for the quaint little cotton factory where the Kevin Bacon character gets a job. If the drifts of billowy cotton and sacks of burlap filling the margins resemble anything in the actual cotton industry then Normal Rockwell was a photorealist.

Gold medal: since when do women have to rub their crotches on a car or a guy’s leg to count as dancing? And since when is it fun to stand there while a woman squats on your foot? Do guys feel cool during that? Do girls feel sexy? Since when did dancing get replaced with straight-up dry-humping?

It’s not good.

Here is the plot summary:

 Here are some laughs for you:

RW: "You just got kicked in the balls!" -- JT: "So did you!"

 I just want to say that if I see a movie in a foreign language (without subtitles) and I’m able to understand every single nuance, every joke and every plot twist (okay, except for the part where they borrow Bernie Mac’s robot suit so that John Travolta can remote control Robin Williams so that Robin Williams can have a tea party with his daughter because apparently he doesn’t know how–I admit it, I didn’t understand that part) then, well, yes, it’s a bad movie.  I guess that probably goes without saying.  I’m just wasting my breath here.  I was on a bus, okay?  Give me a break.

Part 1: X-Men First Class

Compliment #1: I like Michael Fassbender.

Complaint #1: Kevin Bacon looked unconscionably stupid in his telepathy-blocking helmet, and so did Beast (in general).

Complaint #2: The role of Emma Frost was performed by a marionette.

Compliment #2/Complaint #3: The role of Mystique was performed by someone who was really really good in a different movie (Winter’s Bone).

Complaint #4: Magneto’s henchmen were obnoxiously unoriginal, uninspired, and unimportant. One guy, obviously, was just Nightcrawler with a sword and red skin, and the other guy made boring old tornadoes in the palm of his hand (which tornadoes were “really believable and cool-looking” according to my cousin who has never seen a tornado or a movie and whose eyes are made of cheese). This villain never spoke and was never named on-screen, which makes him someone that should have been cut from the script.

Complaint #5: that scene when all the young mutants sit around, show off their powers, and give each other nicknames. It was like a scene from a Nickelodeon series, and also like a movie executive running into your room while you’re sleeping, stuffing C-notes up his nose and shouting “My super power is making all foods taste the same! My nickname is Flavornull!”, and then diving through your window into his private helicopter.

Complaint #6: when Professor X reads Emma Frost’s mind. He asks her “Where is Kevin Bacon?” and then he enters her thoughts, and what she’s thinking about is Kevin Bacon standing in front of a giant map and placing a toy boat in the vicinity of Cuba, then turning to the camera and giving the facial equivalent of a thumbs-up. Then she imagines Washington DC in flames, with rows and rows of unhappy, dirty people standing around while KB and his annoying posse look on approvingly. It’s hard to describe how corny this sequence is. Suffice to say, a montage of Kevin Bacon playing golf with Fidel Castro would be only slightly cornier.

Complaint #7: Everything else about the movie sucked, too.

Part 2: Tron Legacy

Compliment #1: Obviously, it looked cool. Kudos.

Complaint #1: the acting. Jeff Bridges (may he rest in peace) speaks his lines like he is demonstrating emotions for the benefit of an alien anthropologist. Michael Sheen commits admirably to an obnoxious  stereotype (the flamboyant, hedonistic club-owner who is secretly a fierce capitalist and bad-guy-collaborator; you can imagine it precisely, can’t you?). The guy playing Jeff Bridges’ son is a total dweeb. The original Tron, now silver-haired, thinks he’s an action figure with a voice-activating pull-string coming out of his back (even though he just stands around in a button-up shirt and chats about computers and genealogy). The girl isn’t expected to do much besides wear her sexy costume, so I suppose she did fine and Hollywood is a misogynistic hell-hole.

Complaint #2: the script. It’s mostly a blur, but I seem to remember the good guys escaping Michael Sheen’s exploding club in a runaway elevator, landing in the middle of digital nowhere, and stressing about how they need to get to the Mid-Paramater Market Post but it’s hopelessly far away and for a moment all seems lost. But then they realize that the big dragonfly-shaped freighter nearby (which is in fact the only thing nearby and is two feet away–i.e., they landed almost right on top of it) IS GOING RIGHT THERE AND IS LEAVING THIS VERY MINUTE! Whew. That was a close one.

Complaint #3: Everything else.

I know. Criticizing this movie is like criticizing a football player for having zero on-base percentage, batting average, RBI count, etc. He’s a football player. Those things aren’t part of his game. He is not concerned with them and he doesn’t pretend to be. A football player’s goals and efforts are governed by a completely different set of rules than those governing baseball, so it makes no sense to measure his success or value according to those rules. They do not apply.

Same goes for this movie, and all the ways humankind has ever devised to measure success or value in filmmaking, storytelling, dignity, decency, consciousness, etc. This movie is not concerned with any of those things. It is playing a different game. So the fact that it is a rotten film, poorly plotted, with undignified indulgences and indecent excesses that bespeak unconscious decision-making (and an utter and widespread lack of conscience), is beside the point the film is trying to make.

Which is, I believe: This Is Cool/Fun. While this movie makes no attempt at all to be smart, logical, coherent, humane, emotionally relevant, or even interesting, it does want – desperately – to be cool. And I have to admit, the first twenty times a speeding vehicle sprang off the pavement and transformed into a robot commando while somersaulting through the air and slashing/shooting its enemies, I thought it was pretty cool. I will say it again, because it was cool enough to say it again: it was cool. Got to hand it to ‘em.

So at first it doesn’t matter that every inch of physical set and every movement of the camera is blatantly masturbatory, or that the screenwriters go so far out of their way to create “funny” scenarios in between robot explosion orgies that they are not even in this movie anymore, or that in fact every single word uttered by anyone is so moronic it makes morons everywhere scream “make it stop! please! make it stop!” The robots look cool, and that’s enough for a while.

But soon the magic wears off. And all that other stuff starts to matter. And the amazing animation becomes annoying, even nauseating. Not because it diminishes in quality, but precisely because it doesn’t. It never lets up. Even though you’re incapable of being impressed anymore. Cool robot graphics quota is FILLED, thank you very much. And yet you have 90 … more … minutes … to go …

It’s like eating cake for every meal. Watching this movie makes your brain feel like it has had nothing but cake for three weeks.

It’s obscene. Every minute of this film cost more money than I could even think about if all I did was think about money for ten straight years. And it’s obscene in other ways: leading up to the first shot of our protagonist (Shia Lebeouf, whom my dad wants to strangle but whom I actually find fairly winning), we get a tracking shot of his girlfriend’s ass going up the stairs. Of which there are many. And she does not hurry.

I saw this movie with my parents and my 40-something brother and sister-in-law, and as the person closest in age to this movie’s target audience*, I constantly felt like apologizing. Like, every time the knee-high “comic relief” robots (who sport East Coast accents that are as inexplicable as they are ghastly) stepped on screen and engaged in some “shenanigans.” And every time those other two robots came on screen with their stupid accents (Scottish? Irish? the Autobots are quite the melting pot this go round, but for no reason other than mangling accents, apparently). And every time Shia Lebeouf’s intolerable parents stepped on screen (see: above comment about screenwriters and “funny” scenarios). And every time a human purported to pose any kind of physical threat to a robot that was twelve times as tall, nimble, and metallic.

I admit I am now criticizing the movie according to rules I said it never even pretends to follow, but I can’t help it. Couple more things:

It’s really hard to accept that the bad guys’ whole terrible plan – which involves nothing less than merging our planet with the giant robots’ planet and enslaving every last living human – is powered in startlingly make-or-break fashion by a single magic rod the size of a baby dolphin, which any able-bodied good guy (including a human) can easily break. It is equally hard to accept that, when said magic rod is busted, not only does it instantly cockblock and reverse the bad guys’ plan just seconds before consummation (the robot planet is fully breaching the Chicago sky, and then it just goes poof) but it somehow also teleports every last robotic bad guy out of the picture for good. That was never a power ascribed to this magic rod**, it is just something that miraculously happens at the end of the movie when it’s time for an all-encompassing rout by the hopelessly outnumbered good guys. And finally, after the first time the good guys interfere with the magic rod, it makes no sense at all that evil human Patrick Dempsey somehow re-boots the damn thing because (a) as a human being he wouldn’t know its re-start button from the goddamn sneeze guard, and (b) the whole “plot” of the movie is based on the magic rod having exactly one master and operator, that being the geriatric robot voiced by Leonard Nimoy(!).

It really does hurt, this movie. It overdoses you on the one good thing it has to offer, and pumps up what in other movies you would call story, character, and tone/atmosphere to such steroidal extremes you hardly recognize them. All you recognize is volume. All you understand is gluttony. And all you feel is empty.

 Here’s how to have a good time:

"Fuck me."

0. Buy a bottle of booze and invite friends.

1. Watch the movie Margin Call.

2. Every time someone says “Fuck Me” take a drink.

"Fuck me?"

3.  Every time the characters talk about how much money someone makes, take off a piece of clothing.

4.  Any time someone says “Be Careful” do a sexy dance.

5. Every time you meet a new “boss” in the heirarchy, make out with someone.

Spoiler alert:  You’ll make it about halfway through before you’re drunk, naked and making out with everyone.

That should make up for having to watch this awful movie.

Oh David Denby. I thought we had something, but I was wrong.  I can still recall how every week I would rush to open the New Yorker to the movie review section to read your smart, funny and spot on reviews.  I remember how we laughed together at Tom Hanks,  eviscerated The Green Lantern and made Inception cry like a girl scout.  Sure, you thought The Hangover was a landmark film, but I suspect that was only in retrospect after seeing the sequel and realizing how bad the original could have been.  I even forgive your bizarre weak spot for Jonah Hill. What I can’t forgive, however,  is your heralding of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes as the best thing since sliced bread.  I’m sorry David, it’s not even as good as wet bread.

Don’t get me wrong, I know what to expect from a movie like this.  Generally its a simple, driving storyline, high production values and some motherfuckin’ apes.  And, generally, two out of three is a good thing, but in RotPotA, the storyline doesn’t actually drive so much as stagger around looking for its keys for an hour before vomiting on your shoes, backing into the mailbox and punching you in the face.

The first thing that happens is humans capture some chimps.  So far so good.  Our hero, the Brash Scientist, gives them some smart gas, and they get smarter.  One of them gets really smart, so they name her Bright Eyes (itz a refernszw!) and decide to show her to a room full of important people, but little did anyone know, she had a baby.  I don’t know what the Brash Scientist was doing, but I guess it didn’t include doing things like observing the chimps.  So of course Bright Eyes is furious and goes on a rampage to defend her child, which she does by running away from it and making a beeline for the room where the important people are.  Of course she leaves her baby, but no one likes to miss a meeting.

The meeting is a bummer anyways, so the Ruthless Businessman (there’s one in every crowd) tells the Brash Scientist to cancel the program, but the BRASH SCIENTIST CAN’T BECAUSE HIS DAD HAS ALZHEIMERS!  So he steals some serum or whatever, and he takes the baby ape home.  Huh.  That’ll fix it.   Unsurpisingly, it does.

So Ceasar grows up, not quite man, not quite chimp.  Along the way the Brash Scientist meets the Hot Inconsequential Vet (-erenarian, we don’t know if she was in the military or not–in facte, we don’t know anything about her except that she is a vet, and hot).  Unsurprisingly, Hot Veterenarian Girl has literally no effect on anything that happens later.  She just occasionally looks worried.  What’s she there for?  To look at, apparently.

So everyone is happy, except Ceasar, who is mad because he is treated like a pet and gets into trouble with the neighbors, and Dad, who is ends up slipping back into his Alzheimer’s because the medicine stops working, and Brash Scientist, who is worried about his dad, and Hot Vet Girl, who just looks worried in general.

Thus follows my favorite scene in the movie.  I’ll paraphrase, since I can’t be bothered to remember:

RUTHLESS BUSINESSMAN:  What happened to you?  You used to be a good scientist, now no one respects you because you were too reckless.

BRASH SCIENTIST: Wait.  What you don’t know is that I’ve been testing the serum or whatever on my Dad, and it was working.

RB: What?  It’s working?

BS: Well, it was, but now it’s not so I need to make stronger stuff that’s viral!

RB: You’re a methodical genius.  I’ll give you millions of dollars and a new lab.

BS: I love you, Ruthless B.

RB: I love you too.

(the last lines are non-verbal, but if you look closely, you can see it)

What?!  You’re gonna give him whatever he wants?  The problem with this movie is that no one acts like what they are:  The Scientist doesn’t act very scientific, the Ruthless Businessman doesn’t act like a businessman, the Vet provides maybe two useful pieces of info, and the neighbor who beats up the dad and gets his finger bit off by Ceasar doesn’t really act like an adult at tall.

Oh, yeah, meanwhile Ceasar bites someone’s finger off and has to go to ape jail, lots of other stupid things happen, the apes finally rampage all over the city, the super intelligence virus is deadly to humans, and the movie ends.  Sure the second half is fine, gives us what we want, and is generally coherent, but doesn’t make up for slog through the nonsensical first half, where all the characters act like children and the entire thing feels like a contrived mess.  With such a shaky foundation, the entire movie reels around like it has had one too many, which, I am forced to conclude, is exactly what Mr. Denby did before sitting down to watch it.

“44 Inch Chest” was recommended to me by a friend who later claimed she was only saying she liked one of the actors (Stephen Dillane).  Note to friend: if you like an actor in a bad movie, you have to emphasize that the movie is bad.  “The movie sucked, but I love Stephen Dillane.”  Good for you, I won’t see it.  “Have you seen 44 Inch Chest?  Oh my god, I love Stephen Dillane, he is freaking SWEET.”  Hmm, maybe I should check out this movie …

It’s about a dude (Ray Winstone) who discovers his wife is cheating on him, so he and his friends kidnap the lover, beat the piss out of him, and throw him in an armoir in some abandoned building.  The film begins with the guy in the armoir and the men sitting around waiting for Winstone to do something.  We see the rest in flashbacks.  After an hour or more they bring the guy out and Winstone sits alone with him and we’re wondering “will he kill him? will he let him go?” and eventually he lets him go.  The last shot is of Winstone walking tall and relaxed out of the building, and is totally tacky and unearned.

Now, I’m actually on board with the premise – dude is inflamed with macho jealousy and is totally egged on by his violently macho friends, but ultimately conquers the macho inertia and chooses mercy and still walks away feeling like a man.  Nice.  But the directing and particularly the writing really drop the ball.  There wasn’t enough tension to float all the time we spend in that room waiting for something to happen.  There was also a sort of self-satisfied and -indulgent something in the air – “Look at us and our small little psychological movie” or something.  And overall just a stultifying plainness I couldn’t get into – am I missing something?  is this it?

Take the hallucination/dream sequence 2/3 of the way through.  The weirdest thing is Dillane dressed like a chauffeur, and the subsequent man-this-is-trippy moment (“Why are you dressed like that?”  “Don’t ask me, it’s your dream, mate”) is, again, tacky and unearned.  It’s not weird, it’s bland.  For truly trippy try the stargate sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” or the bowling-themed Julianne-Moore-in-a-Viking-costume sequence in “The Big Lebowski,” and for simple but effective try the fever dream in “Solaris.”  Those are packed full of unexpected and inexplicable twists and presentations, about which the filmmakers and characters don’t feel the need to say “hey, isn’t this weird?”  A chauffeur costume is small farking potatoes.

Plus Winstone slightly overplays his buffoonish cuckold, and either can’t save or makes bad lines even worse: “that’s the thing about overlovers they … [groping for words] … overlove, they … [groping, groping] … love too much …”  I think I know what they’re going for, and I think they failed.

“Am I missing something?  is this it?”  - Definitely something similar going on with this one.  Is it slow and obvious?  Or sly and subversive?  Is Jarmusch a gifted, idiosyncratic non-conformist?  Or just a dude on his own trip who lacks the skill and discipline to make a normal/good movie?  What makes this movie “indie,” anyway, and not just a traditional one that doesn’t deliver?  It’s not particularly far out, and it has loads of hallmarks of mainstream plotlines: the hapless hero who gets caught up in a life-and-death affair, the non-white spiritual guide and companion who is agreeably fond of earthly vices, the villain who is so bad he kills his own men.  I didn’t feel stretched to comprehend or get down with this film, I just felt like it was taking the slow train to Sowhatsville.

Is Jarmusch defying my customary expectations or failing to satisfy them?  Or is he not even interested?  (And if he’s not, why should I be?)

In case anyone thinks I’m only aiming at curiously plain indie films, here’s one from the mainstream.  Note to self: if Matt Damon told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?  Of course not.  So why did you see The Adjustment Bureau?  Good point.

This one hurts in all the usual ways.  The heroes are driven by love at first sight, which is like giving money as a Christmas present: always works, but lacks imagination.  The heroes’ obstacle, a corporation of angels who dictate the course of human history, suffers from the classic contradiction suffered by every all-powerful divine/supernatural entity that ever appears in fiction,  which is that they are all-powerful yet still somehow fallible.  The dialogue is bile-stirring, especially the final voice-over.  The training montage (where Damon is briefed on how to use magic doors and which ones to take) is wickedly ill-fitting and laughably earnest.  And the heroine is a dancer, so naturally the film’s painstaking efforts to depict her craft beautifully and reverently result in total shit.  Nothing against Emily Blunt, she did fine.  It’s the choreography that stinks.  Dance on film always looks like it’s choreographed by someone who has only seen dance on film.  Worst offender: “She’s All That.”  (I, um, had to watch it for school.)

Too bad about this one.  I really did like some of it, and some of my favorite people love the shit out of it.

But the thing is, probably 70% of the dialogue is someone explaining the mechanics of dream-hopping and/or what the plan is and how they’ll pull it off, and I still didn’t know what the fuck was going on.  Dialogue like that is lifeless and tedious and more or less directed right to the viewer, so movies generally try to have as little of it as possible.  This movie had tons of it, and it wasn’t even enough.  I mean yes, I understood the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream (within a dream!) thing, and I understand that what’s really important is folding cities in half and skiing.  But wasn’t I constantly being briefed about a bunch of other things?  And wasn’t I confused?

I was definitely unsure who’s dream was whose.  The rainy city world was Yusef’s dream (I looked it up), and the hotel world was Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s dream, and yet Cilian Murphy’s defensive dream agents were in both worlds.  What are one dude’s invisible friends doing in other dudes’ heads?

I also thought Eames’ name was Eaves, and I thought he was astoundingly resourceful and heroic during the siege on planet Hoth.  For a bit player (he’s just the “disguises guy,” after all) he was fucking key.

Maybe I should see it again.  I’ve batted around enough of my own science-fantasy ideas to know how hard it is to close all the loopholes and fill the audience in on everything they need to know (cause, obviously, all they care about is finding faults and ranting about them).  Maybe Mr. Nolan has a complete concept, here, and I’ll catch it the next time through …

… unless I’m dreaming!  Nooooooooooo!!!

I saw this movie because of the hype machine.  I had to.  Uncle Creepy (dreadcentral.com) said so: “Believe the hype.  This flick delivers.”  Also, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone) heralded the film’s “unstoppable imagination,” and Kevin McCarthy (FOX-TV, CBS Radio) told me it’s “one of the most original, mind-blowing, and epic experiences” I will have as a viewer (aside from a double-complete rainbow).

Exhibit A: dogs go missing, telling the characters and audience that “something is up”

This arc evolves in four very distinct Dog Moments, which occur at roughly five minute intervals during the movie’s first act. DM1 is when a pack of dogs runs by the sheriff while he’s checking out a noise in the woods, DM2 is when hero kid’s own dog goes missing, DM3 is when hero kid puts up a “lost dog” flier and sees that his flier is one of hundreds, nay, thousands posted by fellow townspeople, and DM4 is when Deputy Gomer tells hero kid’s dad (Captain Lostmywife) that all the town’s dogs have been located … two towns away!  By DM4 all we can hope for is that DM5 crystallizes why the dogs are significant–they know something we don’t, and their disappearance can somehow clue the humans into the other weird stuff that’s been going on.  But in fact there is no DM5, and the dog thing is dropped entirely.  Never mentioned again.  So they aren’t significant in any specific way, they’re just running away cause they’re scared of something–i.e., all they do is signify that “something is up.”

In a different film that might be worthwhile, but in this film it is completely superfluous.  Because by the point dogs go missing we have already seen moviedom’s most acrobatic and cacophonous train wreck ever, which spilled billions of albino Rubik’s cubes everywhere and released a barely-seen bug-behemoth and attracted a swarm of shady air force people who hate questions and the people who ask them.  If after all that you need missing dogs to tell you “something is up” then your brain is made of the very poo of a dog.

Exhibit B: the mysterious monster is an alien that we tested and tortured and so it learned to hate us, when really all it wants is to go home

Now, I’m actually glad it wasn’t some sociopathic menace after our brains or resources.  I like rooting for the beast.  But the way this plot point is revealed just crushes the wannabe-screenwriter’s heart: a scientist just flat-out says “this monster is an alien that we tested and tortured and so it learned to hate us, when really it just wants to go home” over a montage depicting said testing, torturing, learning to hate, and wanting to go home. In playwriting and screenwriting class that kind of spoonfed storytelling gets you an F. In Hollywood it gets you unfathomable budgets, inescapable hype, Spielberg, Abrams, and a Fanning (plus someone I can’t believe isn’t a Baldwin [far L, below], and the paramedic from ER [far R]).

Exhibits C-F: a bunch of other stupid things that should annoy anyone paying attention

People disappear throughout the movie too, but unlike the dogs we find out at the end that the people have been captured by the alien and stored in his underground lair, upside-down, alive and unharmed (but … asleep? charmed? preserved?).  It isn’t clear what he’s saving them for.  I think we see him sort of eat one of them, but then when he’s apparently about to eat the Fanning girl and the hero kid distracts him to save her, the beast carefully lays her down like the last thing in the world he wants is for her to get hurt or dirty. Conclusion: people disappear and end up hanging upside-down in the alien’s underground lair because the genre dictates that such things happen.

Before the hero kid finds the underground lair, he has to run a gauntlet of inexplicably haywire Air Force war machines.  I assume they’re going haywire because the alien is building something major out of all the microwaves and car engines that went missing earlier (lots of things go missing in this movie, now that I think about it) and his science project is causing some major electrical interference out there in the local electrosphere, but I’m pretty much drawing on other movies to reach that conclusion, which means this movie was going to have its third-act sequence of mayhem whether it was justified by the story or not.

And are you kidding me with that forgiveness scene between Captain Lostmywife and Drunky Killedherbyaccident?  Their rift was hammered home in no uncertain terms throughout the film, and all it takes to make amends is Drunky saying “sorry” and Lostmywife saying “it wasn’t your fault” (seriously, that’s the entire scene).  Other movies tell me that circumstances sometimes throw enemies together in a way that forces them to get past their differences, but all this movie tells me is “things like this happen in movies.”

And finally, from the train wreck (first 15 minutes?) forward nothing anyone does changes the course of the story at all.  There is opposition and there are encounters, but nothing truly happens.  The alien builds his ship and flies away, and the kids neither help nor hinder this one bit.  Nor do they help or hinder the Air Force, who also don’t impact anyone or anything.  Lostmywife asks too many questions and gets thrown in the brig, and then he breaks out and races to the action just in time to do nothing and watch the alien fly away.

Conclusion: when everyone in your movie is impotent, so is your movie.