Song Sung Blue (5/5 Stars)

“I’m not a songwriter. I’m not a sex symbol. I just want to entertain people.”

Mike Sardina (played by Hugh Jackman)

“I want to sing and be happy and feel loved. And I don’t want everything to be such a big deal.”

Claire Sardina (played by Kate Hudson)

There is something special about this movie in its unabashed earnestness. The main characters, a married couple named Mike and Claire Sardina, have been through troubles in their respective lives before they meet each other. Mike was in the Vietnam War, utilized as a tunnel rat, crawling over dead bodies. He spent his early adulthood as an alcoholic, ultimately undermining his first marriage. Claire is also divorced, middle-aged, also with kids left over from her previous marriage.

But the movie does not find these people in the depths of depression. Mike is celebrating his 20th Sober Anniversary at Alcoholics Anonymous. He sings to his group Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue, a song about how having the blues, putting them into a song, and singing them out again makes you feel a whole lot better. Mike moonlights as a singer named “Lighting” and a guitar player in a local Mo-Town band “The Esquires”. Claire moonlights as a Patsy Cline impersonator. They meet at the local state fair and become attached both romantically and professionally. They have lived long enough to know what is important to their lives and recognize that the other is on the exact same page.

What Mike and Claire Sardina decide to do is form a band and get married. The band will mainly rely on cover songs of Neil Diamond. As Mike is already “Lightning”, Claire will be “Thunder” and they will be known as “Lightning and Thunder.” This is a real band and it was apparently beloved in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin region, enough so that it became the subject of a 2008 documentary of “Song Sung Blue”. Hugh Jackman, as good of a song-and-dance-man as he is an action star, is great as Mike in both acting and performances. Kate Hudson, recently nominated for an Oscar for this role, is in her best role and movie since her first nomination in Almost Famous (2000), 26 years ago.

The musical biopic is a relatively stable and conservative sub-genre of movie. Take an up-and-coming actor and marry them with a musician that they kinda look like (say Timothee Chalamet and Bob Dylan, Jeremy Allan White and Bruce Springsteen). Drawing on the star power of both, you can then sleep-walk yourself through the screenplay of the artist’s life punctuating it every 10-15 minutes with well known songs. “Song Sung Blue” is unique in that it is a musical biopic with Neil Diamond songs, but is not about Neil Diamond. (It is also not entirely fictional like ABBA’s Mamma Mia) Instead, it is about some real people that were deeply touched by Neil Diamond’s work, then went out into the world to spread the joy like evangelists. Imagine being Neil Diamond and waking up one day to realize that you had a part in this story without ever meeting the people in it. What better tribute could there be to an artist’s music than this?

“Song Sung Blue” is directed and written for the screen by Craig Brewer who has had an interesting career. He started with two very good movies, “Hustle and Flow” (2005) and “Black Snake Moan” (2006), the former of which is one of the better movies ever made about making music from scratch. Although these two movies achieved some critical acclaim, Craig Brewer didn’t become one of those directors that gets to choose his next projects. Instead, he became a television episode director (most notably Empire) and made some movies for other people (a 2011 remake of Footloose, Eddie Murphy’s My Name is Dolemite and Coming 2 America). In a way, “Song Sung Blue” after a period of almost twenty years, is his next movie. Craig Brewer saw the documentary in 2008 and has been wanting to make this movie ever since.

Song Sung Blue is an exceptionally well directed and edited movie with a deep technical knowledge of how to utilize music in a narrative framework. Take for example the song “Play Me”, which starts as a rehearsal between Mike and Claire Sardina in Claire’s home with the two characters providing voices and instrumentation for the song in the scene. The movie then cuts to a scene at the state fair (earlier in the day, I think) where Mike and Claire are walking along and talking about their past marriages. While they are doing this, the song (their voices and instrumentation) continues to play in the background of the scene. And then the movie goes back to the rehearsal even though this technically does not make temporal sense. But because it works so well emotionally, it does not seem obvious the leaps in movie logic that the director is making. Music is very much like that. Another example is the montage that accompanies the song “Sweet Caroline”, which covers at least a year of narrative development. (Mike and Claire are the type of couple who get married and then provide the entertainment at the reception. Hundreds of people attend their wedding, which is one of many events that takes place during that song.) Other songs like “Forever in Blue Jeans” and “Soolaiman” are straight up stage musical numbers. The latter is not a well known Neil Diamond song, but Criag Brewer uses it as the big musical finale. He does a good job of setting it up throughout the movie with Mike Sardina consistently referring to it as a great Neil Diamond song that is not “Sweet Caroline.” By the time it starts, you genuinely want to hear what it sounds like. All of this work. And the music. Listen, I knew about half the songs. The others I heard for the first time and they were all great and seamlessly worked within the narrative framework of the movie. I’ve been listening to the movie’s soundtrack on repeat for the past two weeks.

Because of the real life contours and detours in the lives of Mike and Claire Sardina, including employment gaps, unpaid bills, and a bizarre car accident that claims the leg of Claire Sardina, the movie does not need any human antagonists. Everyone in this movie is on the same team. Fisher Stevens plays Mike Sardina’s dentist/manager. Jim Belushi provides logistics. Even Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam comes in and lends a hand. The result is one of those movies where the drama is all the characters against the world as opposed to the characters against each other. This makes for several beautiful moments. I especially liked the scene where Mike Sardina puts on a one-man performance for the owner of a Thai restaurant that employs him three times a week utilizing the karaoke machine. The night happens to be the birthday of the owner’s recently deceased wife. So Mike trades singing sad songs with him (Neil Diamond’s “I Am…I Said”) while the owner gets drunk. This reminded me of the one-man performance Llewyn Davis gives to his father.

I looked into the real life story of Mike and Claire Sardina after watching this movie. The documentarian of the 2008 documentary, Greg Kohs is credited as a co-writer here. Like many movies based on real events, there are certain changes made to achieve a more cohesive storyline. For instance, instead of opening for Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder invited Lighting and Thunder onstage for an encore performance at Milwaukee’s Summer Fest. Then they sang “Forever in Blue Jeans” together. It makes sense for them to present that differently in the movie. I am very happy to report one of the main differences between this movie and real life. In the movie, it appears that the events take place within the space of a few years. Notice the lack of age progression in the children. In real life, Mike and Claire Sardina started singing together in 1989, married each other in 1994, the car accident occurred in 1999, and Mike died in 2006. That means the good times encompassed a much longer period in real life, which is a great thing to know.

Logan (5/5 Stars)

The resiliency of comic book franchises rests on the enormous wealth of material that subsequent installments of the franchise may draw upon. Whereas a franchise made originally for the screen like a Rambo or a Die Hard often face a narrowness of choice (in chronological order and with bigger explosions), something like the X-Men franchise has an extraordinary versatility in the types and time periods in which the story-lines take place.

After three movies that took place in the early 2000s (X-Men in 2000, X2 in 2003, and X-Men: the Last Stand in 2006), the next movie took place in the 1960s (X-Men: First Class), another one simultaneously in the 1970s and the apocalyptic future (X-Men: Days of Future Past), another in the 1980s (X-Men: Apocalypse) and two Wolverine centered movies (X-Men: Origins Wolverine, I think in the 1980s and The Wolverine (set in 2010s Japan).

Now we have Logan, which is set in the future in 2029. Logan, like all the others, is based in part on a comic book. Like all the others, it does not feel like the intuitive choice for the next movie in a franchise (i.e. in chronological order and with bigger explosions). It’s tone and style is very different, more Western than Superhero blockbuster, which says much about the incredible diversity in X-Men literature. I’m sure there are nerds out there fretting what the presence of “Logan” does to the canonical X-Men Universe. These movies don’t always fit together. (In fact, I think because of the time paradoxes of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the events of the third movie X-Men: The Last Stand has now officially never happened.) Who knows what the installment of “Logan” will do to the status of the overall story, given that it is particularly dark and according to its plot, all the mutant X-Men are dead.

What is left in the dusty world of bleak 2029 is an aged Wolverine who is slowly losing his powers of indestructible healing, a now dangerously senile Charles Xavier (played again by his old counterpart Patrick Stewart), and their albino housekeeper named Caliban (played by the comedian Stephen Merchant.) They live right across the Mexican border on a dusty farm. Charles is being housed in a giant steel tank and takes knock-out medicine. His mind is too powerful and unstable to focus. Technically the government now considers it to be a weapon of mass destruction.

Everything is bad and then it gets worse. Logan is found by a nurse who has absconded with a child that was created with mutant powers by an evil corporation with the evil intent of patenting the mutating genes. She asks Logan for help, Logan is reluctant to help, Logan reluctantly helps, and many people die in the aftermath.

“Logan” is a great movie masquerading as a comic book blockbuster. It directly reminded me of the Christopher Nolan “Batman” movies in style and tone. There seems to be almost no digital effects. Everything is down to earth and gritty. The movie was written and directed by James Mangold who has shown before the ability to not confuse spectacle with drama (“3:10 to Yuma,” “The Wolverine”).

Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine, puts in his best performance out of the now nine times he has played the character. He also has never looked so much like Wolverine. Patrick Stewart makes a great case for why a man of his dramatic talent should be in a superhero movie at all. Stephen Merchant, best known for being a comedian, is an inspired choice of casting for the dramatic role he plays. And then there is Daphne Keen who puts in a performance that should not be possible given her age. I feel like I need to see a documentary in the quiet revolution of child performances in the past twenty years that make something like Ms. Keen possible. For those of us who remember Macauley Kulkin being the best child performer of his time, it is a revelation to see children pull off the myriad of great performances in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Looper,” and now “Logan.”

Over the soundtrack the sound of old Johnny Cash plays. It is a fitting end for a great character.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (5/5 Stars)

The Great 20^th Century Mythos

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the seventh X-Men film and like nobody has ever said before, the sevent movie finds the series really hitting its stride. It is made special not only because on its own particulars but also because it feeds off the goodwill of several previous good films and because it seems to completely ignore (as if it didn’t even exist) the worst movie in the series, “X-Men: The Last Stand.” I actually wrote a review for X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006. Here is what I wrote then, “This movie, the third installment of the X-Men series, literally killed the franchise. I mean seriously, everyone's dead.”

What an astute observation, Max, because in that movie several very main characters died amongst them Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Professor Xavier. So many died in fact that the next several movies either focused solely on Wolverine while he was not part of the X-Men or took a trip back in time to when everybody was still alive. Now ten years after that fateful movie, Bryan Singer, the original director of the very good first two X-Men films, has presented the audience with a bit of revisionist history. “Days of Future Past,” simply pretends that “The Last Stand” never took place. There is Professor Xavier still alive and breathing as if he wasn’t torn to a million pieces ten years ago. Does anybody care? The answer: a resounding no. “The Last Stand” has faded like the general multitude of inferior movies into the world’s collective amnesia unmourned. This is a hopeful thing. I think we can all think of a couple of movies in our favorite series that were just plain bad and should never have existed in the first place. And now “The Last Stand,” doesn’t. Thank you Bryan Singer.

The Last Stand’s inferiority stemmed from its assembly line of mutants and lack of depth. It had plenty of special effects but had no moral weight. It broke the promise of the X-Men series made when Bryan Singer decided to open the first X-Men movie in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Magneto, as a young child, realizes his powers for the first time at the moment his parents are taken away to the gas chambers. He reaches out to his parents and the metal concentration camp gates between them twist and bend to his budding mutant power of magnetism.  That scene is strong serious stuff and it is also acts a promise that the following movies will be good enough to deserve such drama because if they turn out to not be very good movies it is a dishonor to the memory of the Holocaust.

“Days of Future Past” makes good on that promise. That even though it is a action blockbuster with plenty of special effects and extraordinary mutant powers, it is also a sober metaphor for intolerance whether it be racial, religious, or class. The mutants are beset with persecution by the outside world for their differences. They are viewed as dangerous threats to humanity. Professor Xavier, in a wheelchair like FDR, has a mentality of Martin Luther King Jr. and works pragmatically to heal the divisiveness of the world. Magneto, using terms that parallel Malcolm X, speaks of doing whatever is necessary to achieve protection for mutants even if that means violence with humans. Mutants line up on either side, some attending and teaching at Professor X’s academy and others arming themselves and joining Magneto’s army. Take away all the boyish dazzle of a comic book blockbuster and you have a great 20^th century mythos tackling the most important questions of the last 100 years. How do we live peacefully with people who are different from us?

Of course this is a boyish comic book blockbuster so we also get to have lots of fun as well. There are outlandish spectacles based on mutant powers, big action pieces, and at least one Nixon impersonator. But at its heart ‘X-Men’ is great because it is a series that focuses on character. The mutations work like all great science fiction as an exploration into what regular people would do faced with extraordinary decisions. A person has character and now they are presented with these powers usually upon puberty that expose them to a hostile world. Almost none of the powers are welcomed. In the first movie, Rogue realized her mutant power of power absorption by almost killing her boyfriend with a kiss. Wolverine’s power of regeneration basically makes him immortal, not necessarily a good thing.

Because the characters are so strong and the movie is so big, we are treated to some of the best actors in the world all in the same movie. The movie covers two time periods. One in the future where a Sentinel army with mutant powers are covering the world in epic darkness and one in the past (1973) when the events that brought on the bleak future come to pass. This actually brings together the cast from the first two X-Men movies and the last X-Men movie that took place in 1963. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, giants of great dramatic parts, are the elderly Professor X and Magneto now facing extinction and united in remorse of past choices. With the help of Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) they send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to the past to stop an assination. It has to be Wolverine because he is the only one that could survive such a trip. His mission is to pull together the young Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) at a time when could not have been further apart to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating a scientist named Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) whose work would lead to the Sentinels.

Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and Peter Dinklage are some of the most interesting actors to watch on screen for the past five years. They exude screen presence, i.e. the ability to draw your eyes to their part of the screen by simply being there. Mystique larger role in the story comes from perhaps the rising star of Jennifer Lawrence in general who has become in recent years the largest female star in Hollywood not only by being annually nominated for Oscars (winning one) but also by being a box office heavyweight with the “Hunger Games” series. Perhaps no actress since Sigourney Weaver in the 1980s had this kind of streak and I’m pretty sure it is okay to say Jennifer Lawrence has eclipsed even that example. Unlike many other actresses that have their day and fade away, J-Rentz has a dangerous edge to her. In fact, I don’t remember the last time she played someone who wasn’t desperate or veering off in some wild direction. Like Meryl Streep, she seems to have monopolized most of the great roles in her age group and some outside of it. Her normal state is a skin of blue scales, cat eyes, and wild red hair. Her mutant power is her ability to transform into the likeness of anyone she sees. This makes her perfect for anarchy and at heart Mystique is an anarchist.  

One last thing needs to be about Peter Dinklage but not necessarily about him. Peter Dinklage is a little person but is in this movie playing a character that was not a little person in the comic books. That is to say, the part did not call for a little person to play it but Peter Dinklage got the part anyway. Moreover, upon the presence of the Peter Dinklage in the movie there is not the ubiquitous quip or joke or surprised reaction of another character that generally coincides with the presence of a little person in a movie. Peter Dinklage is simply in this movie as this character, period. As far as I know, that is the first time it has ever happened in a movie before. I remember watching the DVD commentary of the “Manchurian Candidate.” The director, John Frankenheimer, was especially proud of this army psychiatrist that was not written as a black person, but for which he decided to cast a black person in the role anyway. Nobody in the movie pays any attention to the man’s race. Frankenheimer said he was proud because never in a Hollywood movie had a black person been cast in a role that wasn’t specifically black. I think Bryan Singer can be proud of casting Peter Dinklage and yes it fits perfectly into the X-Men mythos of tolerance for those of us who are different. 

Les Miserables (4/5 Stars)

This is that rare movie which deserves both a glowing review and a disappointing one. Greatness is in sight that is perhaps the most tragic part, but right next to some supercharged catharsis and magnificent melodies there are these superfluous plotlines and tedious tunes. I should be a big time producer giving blunt notes with a fat cigar and final cut. Okay people, this is what they should have done.

Let’s start with what is fantastic: First of all the story of Jean Val-Jean is pretty incredible. Hugh Jackman plays a man who was sentenced to nineteen years of forced labor for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving nephew. The man who is in charge of him is a steely man of the law named Javert, played by Russell Crowe. On the last day of his sentence, Javert presents Jean Val-Jean with a parole slip that Jean will be forced to carry with him his entire life forward. It is stigmatized piece of paper that announces Jean as a criminal to all who meet him and which condemns him to unemployment and shame from here on out. Then one day, a cold poor and lonely Jean finds himself on the doorstep of a church. The bishop there brings him inside and feeds and clothes him. In the middle of the night, Jean steals the churches silver. The police catch him soon after. Jean lies and says the bishop gave him the silver. The police bring Jean back to the bishop. One word from the bishop and Jean is imprisoned forever more. The bishop tells the police that he indeed gave the silver to Jean. After the police have left, the bishop indeed gives the silver to Jean but tells him that he must use it to become a better man.  And this Jean indeed does, donning a new name, breaking parole, and becoming perhaps the most truly Christian person in a pitiful and treacherous society of industrializing and urbanizing Parisian society circa 1815-1832. Javert searches for Jean the entire time, convinced that criminals do not change and obsessed with bringing him back to justice.

Then there is the story of Fantine, played by Anne Hathaway, a seamstress in Jean’s factory in 1820, cruelly fired for being a single mother (unbeknownst to Jean) and thrown out into the unforgiving streets. In order to pay two sleazy local tavern keepers, played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter (two sublime three named actors who flawlessly fit into an inner city industrial revolution setting whether in Paris or London, see Sweeney Todd) to take care of her child, Cozette, she heads down to the docks selling first her hair, and then her teeth, and then lastly herself as a prostitute. Finally, she is victim to the Cholera epidemic sweeping the city of Paris.

Les Miserables is a musical and a completely sung through one at that. There is as little as actual talking as possible, although since the singing is live, it does not have the stilted nature that say Evita had. For the most part, the music is better too, at least in the first half of the movie. Jean Val-Jean does not have any great songs, but because his story is so strong, and because Hugh Jackman acts the hell out of the songs, and because the songs are so fast, the lack of any particularly great music does not slow up the movie. It is always a gripping and tremendously uplifting tale of redemption. Fantine’s story is utterly depressing with no way out, but it is saved by some great music, the most famous being the solo “I Dreamed a Dream.” That has got to be one of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed. I literally became embarrassed to be part of a theater crowd and really wanted everyone else to leave. The tavern keepers provide some much needed comic relief with the catchy tune “Master of the House.” I’m telling you the first hour and a half of this movie really couldn’t have been better.

The movie inexplicably fails when the story jumps ten years to 1832, introduces a bunch of boring characters involved in a revolution that is never really explained, and the music becomes mediocre at best and yawn-inducing at worst.  

You know it really matters to be able to understand what exactly a really slow unmelodic song is all about. Otherwise you are sort of just waiting for it to end. We have a lot of people singing about a revolution but what is the revolution about? Who are they against and for what? I understood the conflict between Javert and Jean Val-Jean, but I have no idea what the barricades we’re all about. If it was against the monarchy, where is the monarch? If it was a class war between the poor and rich (which I think I remember from my high school class is what Engles and Marx thought it was about) than why is the main character a rich person, played by Eddie Redmayne, slumming it up with the revolutionaries. I remember a rather boring song sung by one of his compatriots that questions whether he is more interested in the revolution or some girl he saw from a distance and fell in love with (this being a grown-up Cozette with a woefully underwritten personality). I think that’s a great question. Where does this guy’s allegiance lie? Why am I watching him in a movie named Les Miserables?

This movie should have done one of three things: Cut at least half of Eddie Redmayne’s songs, make the songs he sings decent un-boring songs, or make the revolution actually about poor people fighting against oppression. You know I saw this same pussyfooting around the obvious in this summer’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” If you are going to walk up to the bell of socioeconomic conflict (i.e. class warfare) then be a man and ring it. Now I doubt you will find many Americans in the audience (me included) for that sort of thing but when it is left out, the conflict has no antagonist and becomes dreadfully boring. Let’s put up some barricades! Who are we fighting? I don’t know!

If I were in charge, I would have also used the melody for “I Dreamed a Dream” more than once. Really, there is no reason not to when the movie does not come up with anything better and yet insists on having very slow solo songs. It helps when the characters are forgettable and their problems are not interesting to have them sing a melody that is by itself worth hearing. There was this inexplicable love triangle between three undeveloped characters. The least known of them spends about five minutes of our time singing about being left out. Change that tune to the Dream one and it might have been a little more bearable to sit through as we wait for the story to cycle back to the interesting characters once again.

One more thing and try to take this as something other than homework. This story, Les Miserables, has gotten flak before for a benign reason. It is about the struggles of the very poor but its audience has been traditionally very rich. Long running lavish Broadway musicals that win lots of awards have much higher ticket prices than the average movie and going to the theater to see an unapologetically cry-inducing musical about poor people is, let’s be honest, a bit of an upper-crust thing to do. This movie is worth seeing, it is true, but go ahead and also see this year’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” another great movie about poor people that was actually made by poor people. Both have abject poverty. Both have disease and death. Both have traumatic events. Hell, both have bad teeth and prostitutes. But see them both. And then think about what you saw and ask yourself: why are they so very different?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (3/5 Stars) June 17, 2009

A great amount of the joy of superheroes with mutant powers is to watch them go head to head in one-on-one combat like some sort of glorified gladiatorial match. When I was a kid, I used to do this all the time with my G.I. Joes. I set up the characters, made up the storylines, supplied the desired sound effects, and then made the figures beat the hell out of each other. To dismiss that, and consequently this movie, as childish is sort of missing the point. Comic book movies are inherently childish. Sure every now and then comic-book movies can be elevated to great art (like say The Dark Knight or Sin City) but they never stray from their original appeal as childish action flicks. X-Men Origins: Wolverine seems to understand that. What I liked about this movie is that it avoided the pitfalls that made X-Men United (The third X-Men film) one of the worst comic book movies ever made. Sure Wolverine doesn’t have the artistic gleam of Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men films, what with developed characters like Rogue, Pyro, Magneto and Xavier. But it also doesn’t have the boatload of heavy-handed moral and political points that are unnecessarily brought up in the third X-Men and left spinning going nowhere in particular. Furthermore, and probably more importantly, unlike the X-Men United, Wolverine doesn’t kill off great characters in unimpressive, badly organized battle scenes. The fight scenes in Wolverine are much more sharply focused than the previous effort. There are no chaotic turf wars between armies of mutants here. Instead we have choreographed duels, which in my opinion are much more exciting and worthwhile. Like a kid playing with action figures it is hard to keep up a large-scale invasion while paying homage to awesome superpowers with only two hands. It is better to limit the battle to only a few figures and several duels. This keeps the fights exactly how they are supposed to be: Personal duels between heroes with powers that are somewhat equal to each other. (Like for instance, a fight between Wolverine and Magneto wouldn’t be good to watch. Magneto, who can control metallic objects, would kick Wolverine's adamantium ass in an instant. It’s much better to match Wolverine up with his brother Sabretooth, who basically has the same powers only he has claws instead of blades. ((My God, I am a huge dork. I swear X-Men is the only Comic franchise I know a lot about. I used to watch the TV show on Saturday mornings.)) The story should always come first of course, but the best story in an X-Men movie will involve duels, hopefully several of them. That is the best thing about superheroes, and the X-Men in particular.
This movie recognizes this and within its convenient storyline there are duels between Wolverine and Agent Zero, the Blob, Gambit, Deadpool, and his brother and nemesis Sabretooth. I especially liked this movie because they finally introduced some of my favorites: Particularly the Blob and Gambit. I had been looking for Gambit for the last three movies. Here he finally is and although I would have liked to see more of him, the part they gave him was cool enough for now (Give him his own movie!). This movie isn’t a must see movie but it does contain some good fights between some of your favorite X-Men. Sort of like the stuff I would come up with as a kid. Oh yeah, and just like when I was a kid, Wolverine usually always won.

The Prestige 01/10/07

:fresh: Christopher Nolan's film about dueling magicians hit it right on the spot. It is a very clean and complete film. Very beautiful, well acted, and choreagraphed editing wise to a tee. The story is an aptly told one as it is filmed in the present, the past, and the very past, with flashbacks and flashforwards that constantly shift this way and that but never seem forced and seem inseperable from the what the story is. As a constant shifting between who is ahead and who is behind, who we like and who we despise, who has the upper hand? We never know. 

Like I said before this is a very good and decent film. Not once does Nolan misstep. But it is not a great film. Perhaps this is because I saw the twists before they became apparent. (Nolan failed in tricking me with his magic but succeeded in making me enjoy the movie anyway.) I feel that he gave one too many hints as too what lay ahead. But what really made the movie anti-climatic was also one of the main points in the film. In this way I felt dissapointed but enlightened at the same time. It is what Christian Bale says at one point in the film. He refuses to give the secret of a magic trick to his wife for the bullet catching trick saying that if given the magician no longer means anything to the audience. Then at the end of the movie we are given the secret of the magic trick and then suddenly the movie no longer seems so special. And we exit the theatre with the knowledge that an obsession for simple truth and the finding of it is no match for the marvels of one's own imagination. 

X-Men: The Last Stand 05/27/06

This movie, the third installment of the X-Men series, literally killed the franchise. I mean seriously, everyone's dead. LIke most characters in today's blockbusters, they are the victims of great special effects. This movie has some of the best visuals one will ever see, but I don't know about you, I seriously couldn't give a shit about landscapes. That's why I didn't paticularly like Brokeback Mountain and that's why I can't give this one a passing grade either.
They call it X-Men but what they should call it is a freak show. This movie suffered like I thought it would in the absence of Bryan Singer, the director of the first two movies. I don't know who directed this one but he didn't much care about the characters. (Rogue has about 3 scenes, Cyclops dies in the first ten minutes, Pyro is incredibly one dimensional) Any identification with any of them comes predominantly from the first two movies in the series, in fact if I hadn't seen the first two already I don't think I would have the slightest idea what was going on in this one. This movie is a roll call for special effects. Since the effects are mutants, the characters basically show up on screen, give us a show, and then leave. Just like the circus. 
It also is a bad sign when the most effective line in the movie is a ripoff of Shakespeare and the funniest line is an expletive. This movie suffers from the disease called no-more-than-two-syllables-in-a-conversation syndrome. Talk about dumb downed for mass appeal.
Another thing I'll say before I stop complaining. Remember how I said alot of people died. Well most of them are shredded into many many pieces. Kids should definetely not see this movie, and it really should have been rated R. 
Two years ago after seeing the horrible Men in Black II, I promised myself, no more sequels. Why oh why do I betray myself so readily