Earn This

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?

Taking a break from my month of animation posts, here is a semi-review of Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, Inception. Grant will probably have a more eloquent interpretation and analysis ready in the near future, but here’s mine for now.

Before you read on, I should warn you that this post is spoiler-heavy, and even if it wasn’t, there’s not much intelligent discussion that can be had about Inception until you’ve seen the film. Also, I’ve deliberately not rated the film out of four stars, simply because Inception is so dense that I couldn’t cut to its core enough to fairly evaluate it. Though I loved it, I need to see it again before I can decide whether the film is a masterpiece or simply a convoluted ruse. (The truth is probably somewhere in between.)

Now that I’ve had a day to process my first viewing of it, after the jump are a few takes I had on the film, from the plotting to the subtext, and more.

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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.

Rating: **** (out of 4)

Sorry, Shutter Island. Toy Story 3 is my favorite movie I’ve seen this year, and it’s not even close. I’m an unashamed Pixar fanboy, so you should probably take my reactions with a grain of salt. But here is my attempt to persuade you to see Pixar’s latest masterpiece, in bullet points:

• The design and creativity of Toy Story 3 is just on a higher plane than any animated film from any other studio. Pixar remains committed to visual storytelling, not far removed from silent films. The level of detail is stunning.
• The film’s ending is one of my favorite ever. After the third act twist, this film is on storytelling hyperdrive.
• Rarely if ever have I seen a film so thematically rich. Different elements of Toy Story 3 work as metaphors for all types of big concepts and struggles: love, community, death, capitalism, aging, family, cloning, and — more than anything else — loss. (Also, it has weird parallels to the holocaust.)
• Before last week, the king of blockbuster trilogies was either classic Star Wars or Indiana Jones as far as I was concerned. Others preferred the overwrought and overrated Lord of the Rings, and classic cinema enthusiasts sing the praises of the Man With No Name. But we have a new Best Trilogy Ever. Each of the films has a distinct flavor, yet the sum of the parts works greater than the whole. Simply phenomenal.
• The movie parodies and influences in this film are spectacular. Any film buff (especially prison escapes) will be in heaven here.
• The older this series get — or maybe just the older I get — the better these movies get, and the darker they appear. This movie (intensely) contemplates a variety of toy deaths and afterlives.
• Every character gets his or her moment. In the centerpiece adventure of the film, all eight or so of the central characters contribute in substantial ways.
• The new villain (whose identity remains ambiguous until about the halfway point, so I will not reveal it here) is excellent, perhaps the best of the series.
• Pixar nerds will be in Heaven — there are Easter Eggs galore.
• I was somewhat shocked
• Mr. Potato Head, usually content to be a smart-aleck with a couple of good sight gags, gets one of the funniest sight gags in the movie, one that humorously ponders what the “essence” and body of a Potato Head is.
• Three friends of mine who claimed to not like the second Toy Story admitted to loving the third one, to the point that they’re ready to revisit the second film and reevaluate. So if TS2 didn’t do as much for you as it did for me, don’t be scared to check it out.
• Trust me that there’s a satisfying, conclusive conclusion to this story arc that brings the series’ central conceit — toys that come to life and are loyal to their owner — full circle.
• Everyone in the theater over the age of sixteen was on the verge of tears, if not bawling. (And I’m not ashamed to admit that I felt tears streaming down my cheeks.) This film is as much a love letter to nostalgia and childhood as it is an animated adventure.
• Just see it. Even if you don’t end up as enamored with it as I did, it will surely evoke some response in you. Plus, I pretty much guarantee you’ll like it. Almost everyone does.
• A telling quote from the IMDb boards: “Seriously. Did anyone else just feel like their childhood just ended right before their very eyes?”
• Right now, the film is ranked #11 on the IMDb top 250, with a nontrivial chance to peak in the Top 10 or Top 5 (before inevitably dropping, as always happens on the IMDb list). My point is not that it’s one of the best movies ever, but that pretty much everyone adored it the way they adored movies like The Dark Knight and LotR3. My guess is that you’ll love it too.
• Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the closing credits includes a Spanish version of You Got a Friend in Me by the Gipsy Kings. So unspeakably awesome.

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: 3 stars (out of 4)

When I finished Dazed and Confused the first time, I didn’t really know what I thought of it.  But after some reflection and a second viewing, I understand its goals and can see how skillfully it achieves them.  Dazed follows nobody’s rules.  It’s flawed, unconventional, funny, and completely outrageous.  That’s the best way to describe it: completely outrageous.  It revels in its absurdity and takes great risks, more than a few of which work.  It doesn’t try to mitigate its outrageousness in the hopes of eliciting a bigger audience, but it knows what it’s doing.

Written and directed by Richard Linklater and starring a host of oh-yeah-I know-them actors, Dazed has virtually no structure, which is part of its charm.  It’s the last day of high school, 1976 (the movie was made in 1993).  Students, naturally, have big plans for commemorating the occasion, from terrorizing freshmen to throwing parties away from unsuspecting parents’ eyes to finding one last hook-up, and the film races almost chaotically from event to event, person to person.  There’s very little character development, not that we care, because there are so many characters that we can’t possibly get to know them well.

O’Bannion (Ben Affleck, lol) and his gang of seniors target freshmen to haze, in particular Mitch (Wiley Wiggins).  David (Matthew McConaughey, before he got obnoxious) is on the lookout for freshman girls, even though he’s well past his glory days.  Michelle (Milla Jovovich) and other senior track stars plan out-of-control methods of humiliating the up-and-comers.  Meanwhile, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) has no interest in signing the affirmation his football coaches are forcing on him that he will not do drugs, drink alcohol, or engage in risky sexual behavior.  I mean, hell, why play football in high school without those things?

There are other characters, but don’t bother spending too much time trying to figure them all out.  You’ll soon understand the designations, understand how the freshmen spend their days in fear of getting spanked by the seniors and plot ways of getting revenge, understand how the parents are predictably clueless about everything going on, and understand what everyone’s point is: to make the end of the school year as memorable as it can be.  That is, as the tagline says, if they can remember it afterwards.

The film follows an episodic structure with several memorable moments.  The best occurs when one popular student, Slater (Rory Cochrane), plans to throw a party at his house once his parents leave on vacation.  Unfortunately, the man delivering the kegs shows up early, when his parents are still home, forcing Slater to tell him that, hey, sorry, you’ve got the wrong house, buddy.  But that’s too late; “unpack your bags, honey; we’re not going anywhere” his father says (Slater’s reaction to which is perfect), and there is a succession of hilarious scenes of students showing up at the house and running away, appalled, when the father answers the door.

These being resourceful high schoolers, though, someone will find a way to gather enough support for a party elsewhere, one that features climbing up a water tower, hopeless boys trying to impress girls, hopeless boys trying to fight obnoxious bullies, and lots of drinking and drugs.  (Note: If none of these things appeal to you, don’t watch Dazed and Confused.  But that’s unlikely.)

Dazed may not be Fast Times at Ridgemont High—the characters are less distinctive and it doesn’t have the heart of Cameron Crowe’s movie, which did a better job of presenting kids that deep down were good people.  But anyone who’s seen Dazed will be able to quote its lines—“If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself”—especially those that are delivered with suave coolness by McConaughey: “You should ditch the two geeks you’re with and come with us, but we’ll worry about that later”; and, of course, the classic: “That’s what I like about these high schoolers—I get older, they stay the same age.”

All in all, anyone’s who lived through high school should be able to relate to something.

Apologies for the protracted delay from posting that our other contributors have more than made up for.  I will return to the fold with a series of reviews of films and music that have some connection to the theme of graduation, the event that has occupied my time recently.

Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4)

The Graduate was recommended to me as a classic American film for years, having launched the career of Dustin Hoffman and (supposedly) portrayed the plight of an endless number of post-collegiate guys.  Thus, I was quite surprised to learn that it’s not about much more than a kid who has an affair with the mother of the girl his parents want him to date.  That sums up a large part of its appeal…and limitations: it is an unusual and often wonderfully funny story, but inconsistent and not nearly as dramatic as I half-expected when playing it.

After an opening scene to which Garden State paid homage, The Graduate starts with Ben Braddock (Hoffman) sleepwalking his way through his own post-grad, welcome-home party.  Desperately seeking relief from the endless parade of, you know, grown-ups, he hides out in his room, only to be found by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a family friend who needs a ride home.  Ben, in his fidgety, klutzy manner, tries to impress upon Mrs. Robinson the foolishness of such an idea, but she insists.

The following scenes at Mrs. Robinson’s house are some of the most famous in movie history, and they bring out the best in The Graduate.  Everything Mrs. Robinson requests sounds so innocent, unless you place it in context of everything else.  Hoffman’s pitch-perfect approach to the material makes Ben immensely likable without being remarkable in any way; he’s sharper than he projects, but he can’t find the right words or actions to counter Mrs. Robinson’s advances.  When Ben discovers that Mr. Robinson is due home shortly, the scene takes on almost a Shakespearean element of humor, and I applaud the movie for not ruining it by having Mr. Robinson catch Ben.

It was about the point where Ben decided to meet Mrs. Robinson at a hotel that I realized the movie was not going to ever strive for the dramatic setting I anticipated.  That isn’t to say it’s superficial, just that its primary purpose is always to make you laugh.  And it does that well…in spurts, particularly at the scenes at the hotel where Ben plans his trysts.  As he stammers his way through his room request, tries to explain why he has no luggage, or calls Mrs. Robinson from across the lobby, you want to feel sorry for the guy, even though he’s about to do something that would make American Pie-era teenagers tremendously jealous.

He wants to talk about deeper meaning, but she stays clammed up—a dynamic that, given their entrenchment in their positions and the minor difficulty we have in believing that he would want a conversation, grows tiresome.  When they finally do consummate their relationship, he’s really in trouble, because his parents are trying to set him up with…Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine.

After those two start going out, it’s obvious that she’ll find out about her mother.  But even before then, their interactions are awkward; I’m not sure I see the meaning of Ben taking her out to a show with girls dancing provocatively, or why they kiss for the first time after she runs out.  Here, Ben’s lack of social skills makes it hard to accept the attraction.  Mrs. Robinson’s could be chalked up to boredom—with her marriage or life in general—but there is no such explanation here, and this time we need one.

Ben decides one night to bring her to the same hotel where he brought her mother (what is this guy thinking?) and there is a hilarious moment when everyone there recognizes him and addresses him by the name he had previously provided to them.  Given his ineptitude, you know what’s coming, and when the truth comes out, Elaine dumps Ben, and for good measure, the Robinsons leave town—though not before Mrs. Robinson can tell him to stay away from her daughter.  Towards the end, the movie gets not only even more implausible but also a bit muddled.  It’s understandable, for example, that Mr. Robinson would be so furious at Ben, but his wife’s feigned anger rings hollow.  Likewise, the ending feels rushed and inconclusive, with moments like the attempted strangulation and Christ-like posing jolting the tone in scatterbrained directions.

The most enduring image of the movie for me is not the famous line “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” but rather the unforgettable shot of Ben sulking around in the enormous wet suit his parents make him wear for a pool party.  The imagery of an isolated and misunderstood young man, breathing Darth Vader-like from the inside of the suit, staring out dimly through the foggy eye holes as he does someone else’s bidding, is unmistakable.  That’s where the strength of The Graduate lies, but it’s also where it fails to extend itself.  I would have rather it played off this idea more strongly, but the film is still worth watching, if primarily for the cultural context and humor.  And let me just say that if my parents want to set me up with someone who looks like Katherine Ross now that I’m out of college, things will not be nearly this complicated.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

Bull Durham is far and away the best sports movie of all-time, but I hate to classify it as much because it’s also so much more.  It’s a great romantic comedy, a very funny movie, a very poignant movie, and when all put together, an exceptional piece of art.  Refusing to conform to anyone else’s conventions, consistently surprising with its charm and inventiveness, and brilliantly written and acted, it only gets better with repeated viewings.

Written and directed by a man who spent many years in the minor leagues himself (Ron Shelton), Durham centers on the single-A baseball team of the Durham Bulls.  Their star pitcher is Ebby Calvin “Nuke” Laloosh (Tim Robbins), whose velocity can match the best of them but who often has little control over where his pitches are going.  A talented but aging minor league veteran, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), is brought on to be Nuke’s personal catcher and prepare him for the majors.  With one man destined for potential stardom and another hoping that single-A ball suffices as a replacement for such, one possessing great physical gifts and one intellect, the two have a complicated friendship, and Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) spices it up even more.

Annie is a baseball nut who chooses one player a year to sleep with, which said player generally follows with the best season of his life.  Sarandon has many scenes with both Robbins and Costner, and the sexual attraction between both pairings, especially with Costner, sizzles.  Annie’s sexualized, to be sure, but she has her principles—“I am, within the framework of the baseball season,” she tells Crash, “monogamous.”  She also has other loves, in particular poetry, which she reads to guys foolish enough to think they might sleep with her on the first night.

As incendiary as the romance is here, the baseball scenes are better.  Nuke sets new league records for strikeouts, walks, hit basemen, and hit mascots in a game.  There’s not a single pitcher in a baseball movie with great velocity and poor command—Wild Thing, anyone?—not modeled after Nuke.  But Shelton doesn’t make him out to be a clown—he’s just a young buck who, as Annie notes, is not cursed with self-awareness.  When he ignores Crash’s advice or slacks off in his game preparation, it’s only because he doesn’t know better, not because he’s trying to make noise.  Robbins’s ability to make him so childlike and yet believable is particularly impressive.

Though Crash and Nuke meet via a bar fight, they settle down, and their interactions drive the film.  Crash ends a fight by telling Nuke to hit him in the chest with a baseball from 15 feet, which he can’t do once he starts to think about it.  “Don’t think,” Crash tells him.  “It can only hurt the ballclub.”  On the field, Nuke has an unfortunate habit of shaking off Crash’s pitches, which invariably results in a home run.  Robbins’ “You told him I was gonna throw the deuce, didn’t you?” after the second tipped pitch is priceless.

With just these components, Bull Durham would be a winner, but the film’s gravity and intelligence sneaks up on you; only by the end may you realize what a serious film it really is.  Note, first off, how Shelton eschews all sports clichés.  The Bulls never bond together to win anything.  No struggling player saves the day at the end, and the manager proffers no long-winded inspirational speeches.  The film, rather, opens our eyes to the often contradictory world of minor league ball, with players who may spend their entire careers there, hoping for a shot at the big leagues, enduring the lengthy bus rides and few fans and small compensation because they love to play.  When Crash recalls his three-week stint in the majors earlier in his career, the other players listen in awe, as though he’s speaking of a priceless jewel that they will never find.

I could write pages and pages listing every great scene in this movie and commenting on the pitch-perfect tone that the actors strike.  There are Crash’s mound conversations with Nuke (“Strikeouts are boring; besides, they’re fascist.  Throw some more ground balls, it’s more democratic.”), his accusations (“You don’t respect yourself, which is your problem.  But you don’t respect the game, and that’s mine.”) subtle teachings (a rant about shower shoes effortlessly illustrates the differences between the two), his rising sexual tension with Annie (“You know, having a conversation with you is like a Martian talking to a fungo”), and on and on.  In almost every scene, I can identify a place where it could have gone off track, where a lesser writer would have taken it, and I’m constantly impressed, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, with Shelton’s touch.

The film’s final act is contemplative and almost somber, as Crash works out his problems for good with both Annie and Nuke.  Though Nuke and Annie are more vibrant and Robbins and Sarandon are lightning in a bottle, Crash is the film’s heart and soul, the character with whom Shelton clearly identifies.  In particular, his philosophy comes out in an exquisite scene at a bar when Nuke wants him to celebrate his promotion to the minors.  When Crash talks about the vagaries of the game and then asks Nuke, “You still don’t know what I’m talking about?” he knows that, at the very least, he does, and that’s enough to keep him coming back.