Earn This

“Silence is the enemy.”

At some point on this past August 11^th, at Jiffy Lube Pavilion in Virginia, it all went away.  At some indefinable moment, while realizing that time had seemed to stop as Green Day obliterated tedium on their way through a legendary, two-hour-and-45-minute show, while observing that Billie Joe Armstrong is a frontman in ways that few are today, while deducing that this band had become much more expansive and adventurous than their critics would admit, all of the Green Day hate that I used to store up in my head had drifted away.  It had been eradicated by the firework-propelled opening of the title track to their last album, by the seamless transition from songs written 16 years ago to ones written less than 16 months ago, and by the connection and genuine love felt from the audience to its entertainers.  There was nothing left but admiration.

In my formative music years, I had to deal with an internal Green Day disapproval meter that pointed to red less because of actual knowledge than from some nebulous perception that they were too popular.  I wasn’t enamored with many of their songs that enjoyed radio love, and so, outside of “Basket Case,” I gave their music little attention.  When the trio teamed up with U2 to re-make “The Saints are Coming” for the New Orleans Saints in preparation for the 2006 NFL season, I loathed the pairing.

Shortly after that, I felt inexorably drawn towards something I had tried to resist.  “Saints” turned out better than I expected, but, mostly, Fugazi happened.  I wore out their discography in that fall of ’06 (my freshman year of college), and Dookie was next in my iTunes library.  Every time I got to the end of The Argument, I would prepare myself to stop the music…until I heard “I declare I don’t care no more / I’m burning up and out and growing bored,” heard the band start running, and suddenly the pause button was the furthest thing from my mind.  The revolution was underway, propelled by the inescapable fact that over a half-dozen songs off that album had implanted themselves in my mind without conscious intention—indeed, probably despite some conscious intention.

And so, for much of college, my interest in Green Day slowly expanded, albeit reined in by the cognitive dissonance engendered by that fall and the knowledge of my earlier distaste.  As such, it took until the last 12 months to see them as more than a one-album band.

When 21^st Century Breakdown was released last May, I was compelled to listen only because a friend played it for me.  My initial thought concerned my inability to get “Know Your Enemy” out of my head after just two listens, and then I observed other details about the album that didn’t jibe with Green Day stereotypes—that songs were often broken down into sections with disparate sounds, that the band was incorporating elements from all sorts of musical genres—and some that should always have been apparent—namely, that Billie Joe has one of the most underappreciated gifts for melody of our time.

Rolling Stone put it well in their review of Breakdown: “What’s more bizarre: the fact that they sound so ambitious and audacious on their eighth album, or the fact that they even made an eighth album?”  And therein lies Green Day’s walking contradiction; punk bands simply don’t last as long as they have.  They don’t evolve the way they have.  Dookie dropped just weeks before Kurt Cobain killed himself; what other bands of their genre are still relevant?

And a large part of Green Day’s evolution has been their thematic interest.  American Idiot shocked everyone; the joke went something like, ‘Wow, things are so bad, even Green Day are writing protest songs.’  Yet, paradoxically, that album was the most ‘punk’ of their career.  And the rants against the Bush administration and 2004’s political climate enlivened critics and fans alike, cultivating a career renaissance that happened even without a sharp decline.  Without a massive change in sound or a fall from grace, their seventh album redefined their career, a more impressive feat than you’d imagine.

In fact, Idiot became so recognizable that I longed for more people to go back and listen to their earlier work, to understand that 2004 wasn’t the first good year of their lives.  And before this month’s concert, I hadn’t even bought the album, my youthful resistance still holding a bit of ground.  But the show did many remarkable things, not least of which was converting me to Idiot.  In the last couple weeks, I’ve determined it’s indispensable to own alongside Breakdown, both because the latter naturally follows the former and also simply because the former is stellar.

Both these albums’ strengths were amplified live; Green Day and Billie Joe, now at least, convince you that they take themselves and their music seriously.  In an age of insouciance and apathy, bands that do so stand out; this is a substantial reason why the Arcade Fire are the new media darling.  Green Day’s contradiction can be summed up as such: they a shit—about the world around them, with or without Bush in office—and don’t give a shit—about people’s expectations for them, about their genre’s constraints, about their history.  I mean…9-minute, 5-part suites?  Over a minute of quiet piano slowly introducing songs? 

The show also furthered a key point of Breakdown—how far the band has progressed from their punk roots (in all ways except their politics).  The genre’s ideology emphasizes minimalism; it would never approve of the elaborate, sweeping show GD put on, not the lengthy interludes during songs or the flames bursting forth during the loudest moments of the most impassioned numbers.  Billie Joe channeled the spirit of all great frontmen by running around like a controlled drunk, always emphasizing inclusivity.  Someone threw me a lei?  Sure, I’ll put it on.  Want one fan on stage?  Why not 30?  It all worked, splendidly, and it proved to be done by a band living on its own terms.

Over the course of the nearly 3 hours, GD pulled, by my count, four tracks from Breakdown (the singles: title track, “Enemy,” “East Jesus Nowhere,” “21 Guns”), several from Idiot, occasional quirky deep cuts like “King for a Day,” and, of course, juicy Dookie standouts.  I would have loved me some “Nice Guys Finish Last” or “The Static Age,” but the band threw out more than a few bones, namely “She” and Warning’s “Minority.”  Would I have preferred one or two additional songs to be played in lieu of some of the mid-song interludes?  Perhaps, but it’s hard to complain about anything in the presence of such energy, such ferocity, such charisma.  GD have entrenched themselves as a peak live band of our time, possessing the ability to transport audience members into another world, the way great films and books do.

Really, though, a look back on the band’s discography reveals a few patterns that might have clued us in to their potential longevity.  The music and lyrics are consistently smarter than one would imagine, every song managing to sustain independence from its brothers while yet maintaining propulsive drive. (Dookie, for example, is one of the great energizing albums out there, but it has a heart and soul.) Throughout their career, they’ve written indelible breakneck rockers (“Burnout,” “Nice Guys,” “Idiot,” “Enemy”), effortlessly smooth power ballads (“Having a Blast,” “Redundant,” Worry Rock”), and then occasionally pulled back for change-of-pace slow-burners (“Good Riddance,” obviously, plus “Are We the Waiting”: “Last Night on Earth” still blows, however).  Their albums are typically too long, over-loaded with trimmable filler, but that’s sort of the point: with nothing to lose and nothing to prove, they always seem to be tossing off ideas just to see what sticks.

Billie Joe’s lyrics, from 1994 until now, are stronger than casual critics will give him credit for (Dookie wrings humor and mischievousness out of nothing, and the last two have many quotable lines), and his gift for hooks is borderline criminal (“Basket Case,” obviously, but also “Coming Clean,” “Scattered,” “Jesus of Suburbia,” “The Static Age”).  But it was only Breakdown that allowed me to see all of this, that allowed me to go back and listen to everything that came before, to realize that there was much more there than meets the eye.  That album’s staying power, frankly, stunned me; but it shouldn’t have, not with its diversity, smooth flow, and abundant creativity, hooks, color, and intelligence.

They’ve just never hit these peaks before—the epic bridges of “Static Age,” the second “Gloria,” “21 Guns”; the release when Billie Joe cries, “My generation is zero / I never made it as a working-class hero!”; the titanic drum lead-in back to the final chorus of “Enemy”; the passionate, inimitable Green Day gallop of the first “Gloria,” “Christian’s Inferno,” and “American Eulogy.”

On Nimrod’s “Worry Rock,” they declared, “Promise me no dead-end streets / And I’ll guarantee we’ll have the road.”  Well, Billie Joe, you should never fret about not having that road.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

Earlier this year, Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up with Martin Scorsese for the astonishing Shutter Island, a profoundly disturbing foray into the mind of someone who didn’t always know what was real.  Now, a few months later, he’s paired himself with Christopher Nolan for Inception, a profoundly dizzying foray into dreams and reality.  From the guilt-ridden memories of a dead wife down to the nature of illusion and perception, Inception shares more than a few similarities with Shutter, and, while Inception is a very different type of film, the quality and impact are very nearly the same—which is extraordinary praise.  All told, DiCaprio has put together one of the best years for an actor in the past decade.

Inception’s plot, enveloped in secrecy as hype mounted before its July 2010 release, seemed labyrinthine when the teasers and trailers were leaked, and watching it once hardly clears everything up.  To sum up as much is necessary: Cobb (Leo) practices a form of theft called extraction, whereby he breaks into a person’s mind, invading their dreams to exploit their subconscious at a time when its defenses are lowered.  He’s recruited by a wealthy businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) for a more dangerous, more captivating, idea: “if you can steal an idea from someone’s mind, why can’t you plan one there?”

Thus, the “Inception” of the title represents planting an idea in someone’s mind, while he dreams, that is subsequently believed to be self-conceived.  A fascinating concept, to be sure, and it’s one that, the film implies, Cobb has been toying with for years.  He’s most attracted to Saito’s offer, however, because he’s promised the ability to return to America, something that hasn’t been possible since the death of Cobb’s wife Mal (Marion Cotillard).  So he enlists long-time associate Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an architect named Ariadne (Ellen Page), and other merry men, much like Danny Ocean assembled his team of thieves.

Soon, Cobb and his team are hurtling themselves into dreams within dreams within dreams; before seeing this movie, I already thought that ‘false awakenings’ were perhaps the creepiest thing I could contemplate, and here, the subject would have to ‘wake up’ 3 times to actually return to reality.  And in the process, Nolan creates some of the most astounding, awe-inspiring visual sights I’ve ever seen: a Parisian city folding over on top of itself like an Origami creation; water bursting through the sides of a building in a dream as a person is dropped into a bathtub; a freight train barreling down a highway, tossing aside cars as though they’re flies; structures that disintegrate, piece by piece, into the ocean; and, above all, that zero-gravity fight scene that has left me and everyone else jaw-dropped.  It simply has to be seen to be believed, probably should have been longer, and—along with everything else—should ensure that Nolan has all of the technical and visual Oscars locked up for 2010.

The idea that Cobb’s team are instructed to plant concerns the heir of a wealthy corporation (Cillian Murphy) dissolving his father’s empire, but Inception truly advances the motif of family devastation and reconciliation through Cobb, in his motivations for accepting the job and his own subconscious guilt that has been dogging his work.  Nolan, who spent 10 years working on the script, drives the plot forward with a remarkable amount of efficiency and stability—upon subsequent viewings, the film feels more coherent, not less, and everything just seems to fall into place precisely where it should.  The notion of dreaming, of invading someone else’s mind, of challenging the idea that everything that occurs inside our head is ours and ours alone, faces stricter and stricter tests as the film progresses.  And, simultaneously, Nolan ratchets up the action as the climax approaches, helping obliterate the potential torpor that could be engendered by a two-and-a-half hour running time.

I won’t get too bogged down in discussing theories and deciphering plot details; that’s not the subject of a movie review.  But I’ll say a few things to indicate how much I’m fascinated by this discussion.  It’s critical to note that it seems that Nolan, in the world he created, did not actually give us/his characters a way to differentiate dreams from reality—only to differentiate being in someone else’s dream or not.  Unless that top was a special type of totem (which I haven’t ruled out), it can’t differentiate reality from a person’s own dreams.  Because of that, and because the top may not have been Cobb’s actual totem (since it was his wife’s), the final shot—fascinating as it is, theoretically—is more a red herring than anything else.

I’ll say that I’m immensely intrigued by the scene where Cobb tests out his chemist’s (Dileep Rao) sedative, wakes up and tries to spin the top, and doesn’t actually do so—was he still in a dream from that point onward?  And I’m essentially convinced that the last scene does not represent ‘reality’…a position that, of course, hardly limits the number of possibilities of what did happen.

At first, I thought that Inception, though great, had a bit of an inherent ceiling built into it, since it was more of an action-packed thriller than an intense psychological study (compare with the superior Shutter).  And several reviewers noted that it resonated more strongly on an intellectual and visceral than an emotional level, and that may be true.  But, upon further reflection, I realized that I was fascinated by the notions that Nolan floats: that, once it takes hold, an idea can rarely be eradicated or changed within someone’s mind; that we have no way of knowing whether our world is real or not (Descartes’s “Dream Argument” that also informed Shutter) and, critically, that it doesn’t matter whether that top was about to fall over or not.

That is where Inception truly hits me like a ton of bricks; the more I’ve debated it with people afterwards, the more I’ve come to accept a very similar theme to Shutter.  We wonder what was real, and what was just in Leo’s head—and we debate theories proposing that everything we saw was a dream, or that someone was performing inception on him—and we decide that the distinction doesn’t matter.  Scorsese’s film emphasized the blur between sanity and insanity; here, the blur between dreams and reality is used to tell us that what’s ‘all in our heads’ can be real.  In Cobb’s mind, he had resolved his guilt, had moved his way past the stress that was infesting his life, had forgiven himself to the point where he could see his children.  His turning away from the totem at the end indicates that he doesn’t particularly care, that he shares a philosophy put forth about halfway through the film, a line that when I first heard I immediately stored in my brain as a potential movie theme: “Their dreams have become reality; who are you to say otherwise?”

So, yes, there are a couple tiny flaws within Inception; I still wonder if it could have been more philosophical, but, as I have to tell myself, not every great movie has to be brooding and contemplative.  Inception has it—that indefinable trait that enables it to still floor you, still leave you drained and tired, still make you want to remain planted in your seat during the credits, after 4 viewings in 3 weeks.  It’s the trait that makes it stick in your mind long afterwards, that keeps you awake at night as you toss and turn its ideas around in your head like a spinning washing machine.  It’s not just a complex plot that invites discussion about ‘what happened’; it’s more than that.  It’s not just filled with delectable visual treats.  It’s all of those things—and my, is it those things—but it’s a classic, a 4-star movie instead of a 3 or 3.5, because it has it.

Made in a time when movies simplify themselves, cater to the least common denominator, and bank on re-makes and sequels and adaptations, Nolan’s movie is an incredibly creative work, and every aspect of it is performed with pristine crispness, as though everyone involved realized its potential and didn’t want to be the weak link.  The cinematographer (Wally Pfister) and film editor (who at one point has to piece together scenes from 4 different locations and dreams states while still keeping us on point) have to be recognized at Oscar time along with Nolan.  Hans Zimmer’s score is an outstanding touch, something else that buzzes around in head long afterwards.  From the actors, there’s not a bad performance here, as supporting characters from Page to Watanabe to Cotillard to Tom Hardy enliven the screen.  But at the center of it all, in almost every scene, is DiCaprio, who trims his performance of any movie-star fat yet still commands the screen.  In a scene at the end, when he closes his eyes and makes his entire body sigh, feeling the weight of his guilt leaving himself, he imparts a bit of his character into everyone in the audience.

The world’s strongest virus, Cobb says, is an idea, because we can’t forget having thought something, and we can’t deny what we believe, even if we rationally think otherwise. So, in your mind, is your top still spinning?  And do you care?

Boys Like Girls (2006) – 2.5 stars

Love Drunk (2009) – 4 stars  

In the mid-to-late 00s, Boys Like Girls have piggybacked onto the pop-emo scene trail-blazed by bands like the (the infinitely more talented) All-American Rejects.  A genre that has now almost completely abandoned its Rites of Spring roots, emo’s path of change has traversed Sunny Day Real Estate and Weezer and Jimmy Eat World, coming to rest somewhere in between Fall Out Boy (ugh) and AAR, with an eye turned ever towards mainstream acceptance.   

In between those two is BLG, whose self-titled debut proved that there was a healthy market for such music, one likely appealing most to teenage girls.  A fair number of them ate up the predictably over-the-top emotions expressed on said album, which featured a couple sharp, exhilarating tracks that lifted off (“The Great Escape” and “Five Minutes to Midnight” most prominently), but which sank without a trace by the end. 

A 12-song work that should have been 2-4 shorter, with that many more re-worked, Boys Like Girls, at its nadir, exemplifies the worst traits of this kind of schmaltzy pop-rock.  The lyrics sustain that kind of immature, woe-is-me attitude—“Who said it’s better to have loved and lost? / I wish that I had never loved at all,” etc—that, apparently, people still find poignant.  When the melodies fade away, there’s not much left in the songs’ originality or sturdiness to make up for it, and lead singer Martin Johnson’s voice just gets thinner and thinner.  The aforementioned two opening tracks, plus a couple more, are worth downloading, but that’s about it.

All of which makes their 2009 sophomore release, Love Drunk, that much more surprising.  This is a massive step forward, though not via a significant musical shift.  Indeed, it’s merely the other end of the spectrum, projecting the best feelings in emo-pop.  This is what they should have always gone for, the kind of loud, hyper-melodic, blood-pumping, Top Gun-style-campy music that’s best belted out loudly from the car.  When they sing “We’re heading for a heart, heart, heartbreak” or “I used to be love drunk, but now I’m hung-over” or “I wish that I could turn this car around, but she’s got a boyfriend now,” they sound carefree instead of overly caring, closer to delighted than despondent, loose rather than lost. 

And THAT is the critical distinction—and the philosophical bent that really makes the album work.  Self-misery would have sunk this project—and it wouldn’t have fit with the music—but the freewheeling thoughts blend together perfectly with the anthemic choruses to actually uplift you.  When I saw some of these song titles (particularly “She’s Got a Boyfriend Now”) I nervously foresaw some Pinkerton or Narrow Stairs-esque lyrics; instead, they treat such situations as opportunities for freedom and novelty.

And they marry such sentiments to songs whose ability to withstand repeated playings, I’ll be honest, stunned me.  Thanks to the playfulness and energy, the vastly improved hooks, and the fact that the songs are now drenched in color rather than projecting the same boring hue, they’re able to stir up that feeling of grand romanticism to which many similar bands only aspire.  Despite re-using some elements (start-stop basslines, falsettos), their previously-dormant sense of songcraft masks flaws: Tracks like the opener and “Chemicals Collide” are as good of stress-relievers as I’ve heard. 

No, Allmusic, “Two is Better Than One” (sung with Taylor Swift, but whatever) isn’t the worst of the ballads on here, for at least it has some punch and a decent grip on melody.  It has tangible flaws, to be sure, but the real penetrating stares should be directed at the tracks that most recall the second half of their debut: “Someone Like You” and “Go,” which commits that crime of all music crimes, the limpid album closer. (Why, oh why, don’t bands just dance with what brought them?  I’m looking at you, Jawbox.   And Placebo.)

So, on some level, Love Drunk is what it is, but deep down, it’s not.  Much as the snobby will hate it, this kind of music can be bad or good, depending on its execution, just like all rock can be.  Their career has proved that.  But for the most part, this is very well-executed—and fun.

In a lot of ways, this kind of music compares with country.  There’s not a ton going on, musically, which redirects attention onto the vocals and lyrics.  And, perhaps for that reason, the attitude and philosophy of the genre—the culture, if you will—is presented so forcefully as to feel like it’s being shoved down your right.  Your appreciation, therefore, will be highly dependent upon your approval of that culture.  But if you’re OK with it—and you’re finished with all 3 All-American Rejects albums—turn here.

Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of 5)

Neon Trees opened for The Killers in 2008, inviting a natural comparison to a band they clearly respect.  A couple years later, the Trees are playing a gig at the upcoming Lollapalooza concerts, their lead single “Animal” gets some radio play, and…they’re also plugging Las Vegas vacations.  OK, so they haven’t become Killers-level huge yet, but there’s enough on Habits, their debut LP, to suggest they can.  

Whooshing through in a breezy 29 minutes, Habits is a fairly by-the-books dance-pop-rock album, with lots of nods to imperfect relationships and some endearingly catchy hooks.  Yet the Trees manage to sound both mainstream and independent—like they’re doing their own thing, and it just happens to sound like this.  “Animal” is suitably indie-quirky, with dance-friendly synths and a come-and-get-me refrain—“Oh, oh, I want some more / What are you waiting for? / Take a bite of my heart tonight”—but it tends to grate a little under heavy repetition.  Fortunately, quality-wise, it’s really only in the middle of the pack here. 

The real stand-out is the follow-up, “Your Surrender,” where U2 meets Rooney, with a hint of the Arcade Fire thrown in underneath. (If this sounds as appealing to you as it does me, buy this album; otherwise, don’t.) It works primarily because the refrain eschews that annoying sense of worthlessness found in too many of these songs, adopting instead the same kind of mischievousness as “Animal,” but with more confidence—“How long till your surrender?”

What truly sets Habits apart from its contemporaries in the somewhat-amateurish danceable post-punk scene, what makes it sound less pre-packaged than you’d expect, are the surprising shades of gray lurking underneath the songs.  Neon Trees manage to infuse these songs with more than a few traces of muffled darkness, as though coming from just under a pillow, a technique that works effectively against their natural pop leanings.  Songs like “Sins of My Youth,” “Girls and Boys in School,” and “Our War” bring forth cloudier arrangements than one might expect, which helps them sustain repeated plays.  Of most interest is closer “War,” a touching near-ballad both uplifting (particularly in the vocals) and tantalizing, as one can envision it having been further developed at the hands of a more refined band.

Other worthy tracks include “1983” (sometimes, they don’t hide their influences all that much), with legitimately striking twists and turns; but, the thing is, with an eight-song album, you’d better have a very high batting average.  Allmusic calls “Love and Affection” pure Bloc Party, but all it sounds like to me is a forced melody and those aforementioned irritating attitudes—the “I just don’t understand why my love isn’t good enough” kind. 

That’s the only truly skippable song here, but a fair number of tracks combine traits with faults (formulaic ‘soaring’ choruses, uninspired lyrics, similar sounds); they’d do well to freeze-frame the “Fuck all the rest and forget the rules!” coda of “Girls,” their strongest boundary-pushing moment here.  In the meantime, though, if you have an itch for this kind of music—and especially with Rooney’s Eureka looking like a disappointment—feel free to enjoy Neon Trees for what they are, rather than asking them to be something else.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

“With Inception hitting theaters, we take a look at movies that take a dark view of the future.”  So declared the Rotten Tomatoes website today, and in the same spirit, I revisit 2006′s criminally underappreciated sci-fi classic.

Every once in a while, a movie comes out that puts together every aspect of cinema so magnificently that you can’t imagine how it could be better.  Such movies don’t remind you why you go to the theater; any solid one can do that.  Such movies instead remind you of the transcendental power of cinema, the life-affirming revelation that all great literature, music, and movies can possess when constructed by masters.  Children of Men is such a movie.  Upon its release, this was the best film to come out since 2004.

Based on the science fiction book by P.D. James, Men is set in Britain in 2027, when the world is exactly like ours but for one crucial difference: humans are infertile.  No one under 18 years old is alive.  The government passes out suicide kits with the slogan, “You decide when.”  With no prospects for long-term survival, anarchy is the rule around the world.  Britain arrives at the most successful method for handling the situation by prohibiting immigration, deporting and locking up any illegals, and enforcing a police state.  A walk to work is an opportunity to be attacked by a rabid police dog.  A visit to a coffee shop in the morning might be your last.  Is it the lack of innocent children that corrupts people?  Or the sheer fact that there’s nothing to live for?   

Clive Owen prefers to play amoral characters, and he has a particular affinity for people who derive strength from destruction occurring around them (see Croupier, Closer).  Yet here it is the rest of the world that has fallen apart while he ultimately finds a measure of decency and redemption.  He plays Theo Faron, an ex-activist now resorting to mindlessness.  He carries too much suffering from his past to be bothered by the death of the youngest person alive, which captivates everyone else.  His ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) takes him out of his shell by arranging for him to be the caretaker of Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey, solid), an African woman who miraculously is pregnant.  The government wants no part of any foreigners, and rebel groups want to use the baby for political purposes, so it is left to Theo to keep her safe and deliver her to the Human Project, an organization dedicated to planning for the future.   

The set-up might seem a perfect opportunity to lionize Theo, but the movie never makes that mistake.  He’s a broken-down man who fights for Kee because she reminds him of the child he and Julian had together who died at the age of two.  Children of Men, though, is less a character analysis than a study of the human condition.  Theo speaks to both the ways that society and culture can shape an individual’s behavior and to the extent to which one can forge his own path.  Theo, having endured too much pain at the hands of fate, has withdrawn from life at the beginning, but the arrival of a baby transforms him, most notably in a stunning scene in which he delivers the child.  But there are also smaller decisions he makes independent of fate, which together are the main reason you walk out of the theater feeling good about humanity amidst the terror and carnage.

In many respects, Children of Men is an adventure story, as Theo and Kee, with a midwife named Miriam (Pam Ferris), have to escape and evade the violence surrounding them, but it is filled with so many rich scenes and tender moments of humanity that it transcends its genre.  Though a violent rebel group named the Fishes wrecks their plans more than once, there is no battle against a specific enemy here.  This is a battle against the world, against our human flaws, against apathy, against dangers that we bring upon ourselves. 

Director Alfonso Cuaron allows us to see small measures of goodness amidst the carnage: how people try to replace children the best they can with pets—dogs, kittens, sheep, roosters, goats, and birds roam the squalid streets and buildings—as though they must care for something.  After Kee’s baby is born, it is Theo, not the mother, who knows how to care for the baby; he’s done it before, but no one Kee’s age has even seen a child.  And Jasper (Michael Caine, also impressive), Theo’s best friend who deals with the end of the world with strawberry-flavored weed and classic British music, provides some levity but also deeply cares for his catatonic wife, a former journalist who was tortured, probably for exposing the nasty ways of the government.  In both the sunshine in his scenes that belies the generally grey and dark blue hues of London and in Theo’s rare laughter around him, viewers can observe how much joy Jasper brings.     

None of this, however, can obscure the movie’s darkness.  It makes a statement about what would happen with no children to keep us innocent and no accountability for adults’ actions to keep our base desires in check.  It’s not political, but the implications of the anti-immigrant policy reverberate, particularly in a startlingly close to home depiction of a refugee camp that would not be out of place in today’s news.  In another poignant scene, Miriam explains to Theo what the gradual awareness of infertility felt like, in an abandoned school where the playground is desolate except for the quiet humming and singing of Kee, reflecting her divorce from the rest of society.  “I was there for the end,” Miriam says, and Theo, watching Kee swing, replies, “And now you can be there for the beginning.”  He wants her to relish that, but this movie informs us that this wouldn’t necessarily be enjoyable if we continued to acted like this.

All the touches from the hand of Cuaron, who collaborated with four others on the screenplay as well, have a revelatory effect: the chilling music that underlies a cold shot of a London alleyway before Theo and Kee traverse it; a camera shot that lingers for a moment on a kitten crawling up Theo’s leg; the high-pitched ringing noise in Theo’s ears, reflecting his proximity to a prior bombing, that ominously plays periodically throughout the movie.  Even when you don’t think Cuaron’s doing anything, he is, be it through purposeful background music, a camera splattered with blood, or a vivid, single-shot presentation of a car attacked from all sides using a hand-held camera.  He understands the power of creating a world in which you can lose yourself for a couple hours.  So many movies fail to take advantage of scenery and background, existing in nondescript places, but cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and Cuaron create a London 20 years from now—complete with houses literally barricaded from the outside world, billboards declaring that avoiding fertility tests is a crime, and bone-shattering explosions in coffee shops—that stays with you long after the credits roll.

And the last ten minutes are by themselves more emotionally affecting than most movies taken as a whole, one of the top five most affecting segments I’ve ever seen on film.  From the moment when the cries of Kee’s baby silence a squadron of government troops pounding a rebel hangout to the concluding scene in a boat, Children of Men goes from being a great movie to an exceptional one.  Hope mixes with despair, as the desires of the soldiers to get a look at the baby are diverted by a bomb from the rebels and as Theo shows Kee how to hold the baby amidst fighter planes lighting up the morose sky.  In his face as he carries the two girls away from danger, it is also, once again, apparent that Clive Owen plumbs emotional depths that few other actors can.  He resists the natural urge to look sanctimonious, or foolishly proud, or smug; instead, he cares about nothing more than protecting them, and his eyes simply gaze outward, as though looking towards the future.  He looks real—battered and bruised but finally stable.  For the first time in many years, he’s happy that he opened his eyes in the morning—just like us.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

Taking a quick break from Dan’s animated movie series to present a film I watched in theaters last summer and again recently.  I’m sure Dan will have you back to your regularly-scheduled programming shortly.

On first glance, The Taking of Pelham 123 could be yet another insipid Denzel Washington movie; certainly it inspires comparisons to Inside Man, where he likewise played a hostage negotiator.  But Pelham gets a lot more right than Inside, or Denzel’s previous collaboration with director Tony Scott (Man on Fire), or, for that matter, many of Denzel’s recent popcorn-y flicks.  It generates much sharper tension and feels much more mature and weighty, and, propelled by its two lead actors, it captivates one’s attention for its entire running time.

A remake of a respected 1974 thriller, Pelham stars John Travolta as one bad dude—Ryder, a Fu Manchu- and neck tattoo-sporting guy who, along with a few associates, takes control of a New York Subway car underground and parks it in the tunnel between two stops.  After disconnecting all but one car and 18 hostages, he makes contact with the train’s control center, where self-proclaimed “civil servant” Walter Garber (Washington) happens to get the call.  So begins the chess match, with Ryder demanding $10 million from the mayor before he starts killing hostages.  A NYPD hostage negotiator expert (John Turturro) is eventually brought in, but we know that Ryder will want to talk only to Garber.

It’s an inherently interesting if somewhat recycled plot line, but this film doesn’t rest on its laurels.  Writer Brian Helgeland, who penned Man on Fire (not to mention, ahem, Mystic River), helps Scott and the actors generate moments of genuine suspense and tension.  For much of the film’s midsection, with Ryder on the subway car and Garber on the phone trying to talk his way through everything, I felt myself consistently on edge.  A sequence with money in transit to the subway as the clock ticks is crisply executed.  What’s more, the fact that Ryder proves willing to actually kill if people don’t obey him adds to the level of suspense—one might expect, coming in, that he won’t win, in the end, but seeing an early shooting tells us that we can’t always predict what will come next.

A sequence culminating in Garber revealing the details of a bribe he recently took pulses with energy.  Ryder, who has access to the Internet and can do background searches, intuits that a man of Garber’s stature would not be operating a layman’s job unless he had slipped up somewhere along the line.  He’s also intrigued at the thought of his seemingly decent counterpart paralleling himself in one way: trying to make a dishonest buck.  Thus, with a crowd gathering around Garber’s speaker as the situation escalates, Ryder grabs a teenage hostage and vows to kill him unless Garber spills the details of his scam.  The cuts between the kid, the gunman, and the gradually sadder Garber are exhilarating, and Washington’s few tears at the end strike the perfect note. 

The moment also illustrates another interesting point about the movie—nobody comes out unscathed.  Aside from Garber’s indiscretion, the mayor (James Gandolfini) has recently faced a scandal (of the sexual variety, we infer) and really just wants his time to expire so he can retire to an island somewhere.  These touches—particularly as Ryder makes comments about the dirtiness and sleaze of the city—help elevate Pelham above most thrillers. 

On a somewhat related note, it was also nice to see that Washington’s character was no great hero.  He’s almost passive, a reluctant participant, clearly embarrassed about his previous misdeed; and he delivers no grand, Denzel Washington-style pronouncements or shouting matches with his adversary.  It’s immensely enjoyable to see Washington pull off this kind of role as skillfully as he does, in the aforementioned confessional scene and throughout the rest of the movie; what’s more, and critical for the movie, is that his character, and his acting, compliments Ryder and Travolta well.  Travolta eats up the role, over-the-top in a calculated and intentional way, but he never falls into caricature.  He looks legitimately scary, and he acts that way too, always with a sense of rage (largely stemming from a previous conviction) and carelessness—and intelligence—that elevate him from most cinematic villains.  And the supporting cast further enhances the film—John Turturro and James Gandolfini illustrate the value to be had in casting legitimate actors in ‘entertainment’ movies.

Pelham probably would have benefited from a little more background information on the hostages.  The hijacking occurs after no set-up whatsoever, which is a little bit of a nod to the modern ADD generation and isn’t necessary in a movie that’s hardly too long.  And Ryder’s ultimate comeuppance isn’t the most inspired climax of all-time.  Scott, for his part, can’t resist some of his patented visual flourishes that are probably unnecessary (such as the presentation of the opening credits), but, thankfully, he tones it down for the majority of the movie, perhaps being constrained by the stationary nature of the train car.

To that end, Pelham isn’t really an action movie.  The few shots we see of cars crashing are tangential to the main story, which primarily features talking between its two leads.  It’s a psychological battle between someone not really cut out for this, someone with other problems on his mind, forced to constantly listen to instructions from his superiors as he improvises with his counterpart, who’s clearly enjoying the ride a lot more.

Rating: 2 and a half stars (out of 4)

With trailers for Christopher Nolan’s Inception getting me all in a tizzy in anticipation of its July 16 release, I wanted to watch his much-acclaimed Memento so I’d be fluent in all of his notable works.  Not having been a particularly large Nolan fan (neither of the Batmans thrilled me as they did audiences, and Insomnia had a flaccid script), I was nonetheless all-too-aware of the breathless praise that this movie had received, so I figured that I approached it, as I always try to, with relatively neutral expectations.

And as I watched and thought about it, my feelings adopted the kind of contradictory arc endemic in 2.5-star movies.  Little held much interest for me in the first half-hour or so; much of the midsection, though, left me excitedly awaiting the next scene so we could overturn more of the concealing cloth; but afterwards, though a few of its scenes ran through my mind, I wasn’t compelled to ponder it as I hoped I would.  That, in the end, is what limits Memento—it’s a one-watch movie, one that’s not nearly so philosophically fascinating as it should be (purports to be?), one that inevitably keeps you at such arm’s-length from the characters that, once you know all the details of the plot, you have little reason to come back for more.

Guy Pearce plays Leonard, a man with anterograde amnesias suffered after a blow to the head during an encounter that also led to his wife’s death.  The film annoyingly calls his condition “short term memory loss,” but it simply means that one has the inability to form new memories, while retaining the same capacity of memory for events that occurred before the injury.  To my knowledge, most people with said disorder do not ‘remember’ that they have the memory loss, in the way that Leonard does here, but oh well.

Pearce fanatically pursues his wife’s murderer to keep the story moving; but what’s most notable about the film, of course, is its structure: Nolan shows us the last scene, chronologically, and then backs up to show us the 5 minutes before that.  Lather, rinse repeat.  Each brief scene ends precisely when the last one that we saw ended, at which point the film backs up a few minutes again.  On some level, this does provide a bridge to the protagonist, as he of course doesn’t always know what’s going on. (Why am I holding a bottle of alcohol?  I don’t feel drunk…)

But reviewers and fans overstated the connection that the structure has with Leonard’s state of mind.  We, of course, remember what happens in previous scenes of the movie when we see the next ones.  The only time we share Leonard’s confusion is at the very beginning of each scene cut—but then when we see another character, say, we know who they are in the movie, and he does not.  Indeed, a key problem for me with the film is that the structure is merely a gimmick.  It’s a fancy way of dressing up a rather mundane story.  I’m always skeptical of such structures, for one basic reason: Is the story not strong enough to be told chronologically?

That said, that device is what helped me become somewhat interested in the goings-on, what probably turned this from a 2 to a 2.5-star movie.  It’s still a gimmick, but it’s not high on the list of reasons the movie doesn’t succeed—that would fall to the chronological story itself.  There are a fair amount of Shutter Island parallels, particularly in the climax, but the film doesn’t even sniff that movie’s visual richness, thematic breadth, or philosophical provocativeness.

What’s left is much more banal, a conventional murder mystery not given much enhancement by a cast of characters whom we never particularly care about, played by relatively obscure actors delivering fairly rote performances.  (Joe Pantoliano, as the mysterious Teddy, fares best.  Pearce, who projects a sort of Brad Pitt aura but with Tom Cruise’s voice, is fine, but I kept wondering why he never got more intense during Teddy’s climactic speech.)

As the film progressed—particularly as we learned more about the man named “Sammy” who had a similar condition as Leonard—I was indeed eager to see what happened; as I wrote in my notes, the movie “has me intrigued.”  What’s most interesting about the conclusion is not the resolution of the story, per se, but the philosophical/psychological concepts put forth about memory.  Memento doesn’t really advance this notion (when Leonard comments at one point, “The world doesn’t just disappear when you close your eyes,” it’s all said very un-philosophically and brusquely), but it’s all I had to cling onto.  Can one make a conscious decision to forget something?  Absolutely.  Dissociative identity disorder and its concomitant partial amnesia often occur when a person subconsciously doesn’t want to remember something (again, observe Shutter Island), but forgetting can be intentional as well.

Interesting points, but ones not advanced the way they should be.  I know that because, the more I thought about this movie, the less captivating it became.  My interest inexorably faded, frustratingly independent of my desires, like that opening Polaroid or one of Leonard’s own memories.

Arcade Fire, EP (2003) – 2 stars

Funeral (2004) – 4.5 stars

Neon Bible (2007) – 4.5 stars

Within seemingly 5 minutes of breaking onto the music scene, the Arcade Fire lost anonymity.  David Bowie immediately proclaimed himself a major fan, festivals like Lollapalooza snapped them up, and U2 not only asked them to share stages on their Vertigo Tour but also played one of their tracks as the lead-in to every show.  This acclaim within the industry was matched by the feelings felt by both critics and the public towards the band’s debut album, which currently sports a score of 90 on Metacritic.

Overreaction?  Hardly.  The group’s early EP didn’t show much promise, but 2004’s Funeral is the kind of album that everyone should like and yet doesn’t feel tailored to the masses, one that revels in its influences and yet still sounds utterly original, one that makes earnestness and sincerity cool again.  Full of heart and bluster and pain and energy, it’s one glorious and dramatic journey into…death?

Well, yes, as the album’s title, and overall thematic breadth, reflects the passing of several family members within the band, which is headed by Win Butler and his wife Regine Chassagne.  Joined by a bevy of other musicians and vocalists, they create soundscapes with a host of orchestral instruments.  Minimalist, they are not; and their ambitions are so wonderfully refreshing in a age of simplicity in music.  Starting things off is the first of 4 “neighborhood” passages that reflect the band’s wistfulness; on the opener, stately piano underscores Win’s gradually crescendoing vocals about the hope of children to escape family strife through friendship.

The band clearly wants immediacy, wants to cling to something positive, wants respite from torpor and sadness.  A couple songs submerge songcraft for instrumentation that’s too hard to parse (the second “Neighborhood,” for example, doesn’t stick in the mind); but the revelatory power put forth on tracks like “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” and “Rebellion (Lies)” uplifts listeners, no matter how ambivalent the subject matter—yes, the Fire has that men-from-the-boys quality of being able to make darkness life-affirming.  Butler eschews the kind of detached, stoic cool that pervades much of 2000s music and hit peaks of intensity instead: when he cries on Power Out, “Is it a dream, is it a lie? / I think I’ll let you decide / Light a candle for the kids / Jesus Christ, don’t keep it hid” the feeling is overwhelming.

And then there’s “Wake Up,” the U2 fade-in that inspires no reservations whatsoever about that band’s taste.  An epic, pull-back-on-the reins rock anthem, filled with color and energy, it’s one of those songs that sounds as though it could have been written anytime in the last 30 years—or the next 30.  As he does on “Rebellion,” Butler encourages people to persevere through tragedy, once again expressing nostalgia for foregone innocence (“Now that I’m older / My heart’s colder / And I can see that it’s a lie”).

A few years in the making and less grandiose, 2007’s Neon Bible imparts a cloudier, murkier hue upon listeners, replacing epic feelings with more down-to-earth ruminations.  Like on all great sequels (Joy Division’s Closer, the second and third Bourne movies, etc), they’ve accurately determined just what to include and what to change.  You can hear Joy Division in its (occasionally) cavernous darkness, you can hear U2 in the earnestness and anthems, you can hear Bruce Springsteen (“Antichrist Television Blues”), but you can also hear no one.  Just as with the first album, Neon Bible doesn’t really sound like anybody.  It’s just The Arcade Fire.

I vividly remember my first listen to Bible, being blown away by the effect of the added atmosphere, not believing how macabre and gloomy and thrilling those first four songs sounded.  “Black Mirror,”—there’s your Joy Division ominousness, given liftoff—and “Keep the Car Running,” unleashing mandolins and all kinds of exuberant fun, eliminate any possibility of a let-down.  And when the bottom drops out of the breathtaking “Intervention,” at the 2:01 mark, the same thing will happen to your jaw.

In a somewhat similar vein as Funeral, the band still gets into trouble with their propensity for limpid, virtually guitar-free mood pieces (“Neon Bible” in particular; the best of these is “Ocean of Noise,” in no small part thanks to the excellent line, “You’ve got your reasons / And me, I’ve got mine / But all the reasons I gave were just lies to by myself some time.”)

Indeed, Butler’s lyrics have a way of covering up the band’s minor imperfections.  They’re a little broader than on Funeral, but still personal, still vivid.  The “Power Out” vocal intensity comes on “Intervention”—“Been working for the church while your life falls apart / Been singing ‘Hallelujah’ with the fear in your heart.”  But not every song matches them appropriately; when “Windowsill” accelerates, he cries, “The windows are locked now, so what’ll be it be / A house on fire / Or a rising sea?” an image that conjures up far more emotion than the instrumentation—they need a little less gray, a little more guitar.

But that line resonates with the listener, in part because it’s surprisingly reflective of the band’s career.  Funeral is the house on fire, Neon Bible the rising sea; but they’ve always taken their dystopia with a different bent than most.  Their worldview is best summed up by the top line on ATB: “Into the light of a starless sky / I’m staring into nothing, and I’m asking you why.”  Rather than simply reflecting misery, they’re always asking why, and always staring ahead, irrespective of what looks back at them.  With their pivotal third album set to be released this August, the world cannot possibly predict what they will see next.

Culminating the recent stretch of graduation/high school/transition period movies reviewed with the best film of the ‘Your whole life is ahead of you, but what do you do?’ genre I’ve seen.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

Garden State was the first movie I ever loved.  It was the first film I remember seeing that challenged my notions of what films could do, the first that really made me forget I was watching a movie and think I was seeing someone’s life unfold in front of me.  For those reasons, it will always retain a special place in my collection, not to mention a spot very high on my movie ranking.

Zach Braff drew solid reviews for writing, directing, and starring in this understated picture.  He plays Andrew Largeman, an emotionally blank, little-known actor who, at the age of 25, hasn’t been home in nine years.  That changes when he receives a phone call from his father Gideon (Ian Holm) telling him his mother drowned in a bathtub.  Though it’s clear from the start that something’s not quite right between those two, Andrew returns home.  Yet, possibly because his mother’s disability that contributed to her death was partially Andrew’s fault, the funeral doesn’t provoke much sadness in him.

Strongly sedated by a host of drugs his father made him take from the age of nine, Andrew’s life upon returning home has no meaning for him.  He acts so catatonic that the only roles he’s recently been offered are of mentally challenged people.  When he meets up with former friends who haven’t seen him in so long, he doesn’t seem to care that they don’t notice how boring the interactions are to him.

His friends, by outward appearances, aren’t being productive with their lives either.  Mark (an impressive Peter Sarsgaard) still lives at home at 26 and supplements his grave-digging income with duplicitous but rather shrewd methods.  Another made a ton of money off a clever invention, with the result being that he’s never been so bored.  Andrew’s friends also appear more interested in pitching movie ideas to Andrew than learning about what’s happened in his life for the last decade (shown most clearly with a hilarious interaction between Andrew and a friendly cop).  “I like being unimpressive,” Mark drawls, “I sleep better.”  But, as Andrew slowly perceives, they still enjoy life and care about people around them, two things he’s has forgotten how to do.

The one person who draws this out of him is Sam (Natalie Portman), a free spirit he meets in a doctor’s office waiting room.  She doesn’t have much depth to her, but this movie gets away with that; the focus remains with Andrew, and that’s fine.  Their courtship is sweet and innocent; you can see Sam’s love in the way she says “Shut up” to Andrew at one point in her house or wipes away his first tear in ages in a quietly moving scene in a bathtub.  For a while I was disappointed at the ease with which Sam and Andrew were drawn together, but it no longer bothers me.  It’s one of those things you have to accept; if you can’t, you won’t like the movie.  It works for me because a) Braff and Portman have such chemistry, and b) the movie uses the relationship to develop its storyline and complicate Andrew’s character—it’s not just the end of the line.

As Andrew begins to open up to Sam and his friends and see the value of his life, the movie is filled with delightful scenes, such as when Sam and Andrew go for a late-night swim with some friends.  Andrew can’t swim (“there’s a few normal childhood activities I missed out on,” he says), prompting one of his friends to declare that he looks “like a wet beaver.”  As the others cavort in the pool, Sam joins Andrew in the shallow end, upon which they discuss what it means to realize for the first time that your childhood house is no longer your home and that you cannot recapture that feeling until you create your own family.

This is a particularly delicate subject for Andrew, whose family life was destroyed by an incident in his youth.  Angry at his mother’s constant depression and his family dynamics, he pushed her against a dishwasher when he was nine.  Because the door had become unlatched, she felt backwards on the open door and hit her head on the counter, paralyzing her from the waist down.  In response, he was medicated, then at sixteen sent away to a boarding school, after which he did not return home.

Is the reason for the icy relationship between Andrew and his father the former’s action or the latter’s inability to forgive?  Did the latter try to ignore the problem by having Andrew medicated and sent away, or did Andrew refuse to let his father into his world and tell him what was wrong with him?  To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t present simple answers to these questions.  Even after Andrew finally sits down and opens up the wounds with his father, it lets us draw our own conclusions.

Ultimately, what Andrew determines is that he’d rather be able to feel whatever emotions he has without them being suppressed—he’d rather live life to make memories and accept the negative moments when they come.  Though he might not be able to get his father to realize it, he’s aware that his family was never very happy, but their greater mistake was shutting him away.  “You and I are gonna be OK,” he tells his father in the scene that’s more the climax for me than the actual one.  “We may not be as happy as you always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let’s just allow ourselves to be whatever it is that we are…and that’ll be better.”

What makes this resonate so strongly is not just the convincing message, but also the truth that we understand that Andrew has changed because of what he’s experienced back home.  Braff strikes an excellent tone, capturing the approach that many people that age today bring to their lives.  As the film progresses, the spot-on scenes occur with more and more frqeuency, the actors (Braff, Portman, Sarsgaard) developing more and more depth.  Alert viewers will notice the several clever touches Braff the director adds to show what’s going on in Andrew’s mind—the opening scene, the writing on his chest, the faucets in the bathroom, etc.

I would have appreciated it if the hurt between Andrew and his father (a potentially fascinating character) was emphasized more, perhaps at the expense of some of the brief tangents the movie takes (or in addition to them; it’s not a long film).  A bit too much time is spent trying to make us laugh rather than think.  And the movie really should have ended about a minute before it actually did.  In your mind, envision the movie ending at the 1:34:29 mark and see whether you think the themes hit home stronger.

These flaws swim around in my head every now and then until I re-watch Garden State, upon which point I forget all of them and deem it better than I last remembered.  The genuine heart and intelligence that pervade the entire movie are what stay with me, and not only does everything feel appropriately connected together, it feels connected to my life.  That is what can make a movie overcome anything.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

Finding Forrester is above all a shameless attempt to cash in on phony Hollywood sentimentality.  A distant cousin and knock-off of the infinitely superior Good Will Hunting, it runs on a weak script that provides little more than contrived situations and uninspiring characters.  Gus Van Sant, director of Hunting, can’t come close to saving it.

Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), growing up in New York, is both a basketball star and talented writer.  He tries to keep his intellect hidden, confining his thoughts to notebooks.  William Forrester (Sean Connery) wrote one great novel and then became a reclusive hermit.  He spends part of his endless free time spying on the boys playing basketball near his apartment.  One day, Jamal takes a dare and sneaks into Forrester’s apartment, accidentally leaving behind his backpack in his haste to escape.  Before long, the two become friends, with Forrester helping Jamal with his writing.

This template has been done before, and Forrester adds nothing to the genre.  The Boo Radley persona of Connery’s character feels contrived to me, especially since we never really learn anything about him.  His relationship with Jamal is, naturally, the film’s center, but neither of the characters ever achieves a depth beyond that which you could have learned from a biographical sketch.  The film strives to equalize the two, rather than making Jamal dominate, but they’re both bland.  We’re supposed to believe that Forrester accepts his first friend in decades because he likes his writing, but that doesn’t come through—to me, he just seems bored.

Jamal, on the basis of his strong test scores, transfers to a white-bred prep school in Manhattan, where he feuds on the basketball court with an obnoxious student, flirts with a more appealing one, Claire, (Anna Paquin) and faces derision and slander from a teacher, Robert Crawford (F. Murray Abraham).  Not one of these storylines comes to a satisfying conclusion or enhances Jamal’s character in any way.  The punishment for Jamal’s sparring on the basketball court comes in the form of a free-throw shooting contest that just feels fake.  His relationship with Claire is straight out of screenwriting school and goes nowhere.  And giving Jamal an artificial villain, while drawing the battle lines in such black-and-white strokes, further erodes the film’s credibility.

Many critics compared the ending, where Forrester emerges from his seclusion to defend Jamal, to that of Scent of a Woman; I never made the connection in my mind, but regardless of whether you see a similarity, Pacino’s flick handled the situation much more smoothly.  Sure, the principal in Scent was a bit of a clown, but at least you could have made the argument that Chris O’Donnell’s decision, which Pacino was defending, was in fact the wrong one, which made things more interesting; furthermore, Pacino’s conclusive speech proved what his weekend with Chris had meant to him.  And the prep school moment in Scent was almost an after-effect: the true rising action in the film concerned Pacino’s relationship with Chris.  Jamal’s battle with Crawford, on the other hand, distracts from his relationship with Forrester and becomes the film’s centerpiece, but it neither illuminates his character nor complicates the film in any meaningful or provocative way.

Likewise, in comparisons with Good Will Hunting, Forrester makes all the wrong decisions.  The mentor and protégée in this movie are far less interesting than their Hunting counterparts, and Matt Damon (who, interestingly, has a cameo in this movie) did not have to battle any villains.  His job, with Robin Williams’s help, is to transform his life; Jamal’s task, apparently, is to prove his worth to snotty and curmudgeonly English professors.

Finding Forrester isn’t an awful movie.  But Mike Rich’s script too often produces lines that no one would say in real life, the actors don’t do enough to bring their characters to life, and almost every key moment feels forced.  We’re supposed to believe, for example, that a group of tough black street teenagers would be terrified of an old recluse living in an apartment?  Or that Forrester stopped writing because he didn’t like critics were inferring from the first book, even though it was widely praised?

Such questions are bothersome, but ultimately, the film fails because it tries to be a character study and falls short.  Jamal is far too balanced at the beginning to change much, leaving that burden to Forrester, but he’s shaded too thinly for us to care anyway.

I’m sure plenty of people like this movie.  I just didn’t buy most of Jamal’s interactions with Forrester, or the role of the arrogant professor at school, or most of the script.  Does that make Finding Forrester a bad movie?  You can decide that on your own.