Blue Valentine (4/5 Stars)

You always hurt the one you love,

The one you shouldn’t hurt at all.

You always take the sweetest rose

And crush it till the petals fall.

You always break the kindest heart,

With a hasty word you can’t recall.

And if I broke

Your heart last night,

It’s because

…I love you…

Most

Of

All

One of the most memorable descriptions of divorce I’ve heard is that it’s like a death in the family. The twist is that it’s you who has died. All the memories, all the moments, they are all part of some past life distantly remembered. You’re dead and the one you loved has moved on.

“Blue Valentine,” documents the death of the marriage between Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cynthia (Michelle Williams) over a particularly blue weekend. This is interspersed with poignant scenes from their early love six years before. Little by little things are revealed, stuff is said, and mistakes are made until finally it’s all over. Both Dean and Cynthia are decent people so it is fair to ask why this isn’t working. They ask themselves the same question. The structure of the story has many layers. At times we like one person more than the other. Than something happens. We switch sides. Something else happens. We oscillate back and forth. And then finally there are just so many things that it becomes impossible to tell who exactly is at fault. In the end, everybody and nobody is to blame. It’s just sad, that’s all. 

The Writer and Director of “Blue Valentine,” is Derek Cianfrance. This is his debut feature film. He has a talent for natural yet articulate dialogue. The movie tends to enter Terrence Malick territory at times. The words sound like things that people would ordinarily say but at times they float above the scenes, the sounds and mouths don’t exactly match, creating this ethereal poetic quality. At times the movie is more a meditation on love than a story about it. And then at other times the realism is truly cutting. Fights between parents are inherently disturbing. Cianfrance presents them at a distance usually behind windows, doors, and shades, almost as if the camera is a child who is afraid to watch. There is a particularly perfect scene that should be instantly recognizable. It contains the sort of argument where the people endlessly repeat themselves at successively higher volumes. The problems aren’t getting worked out. They’re just sort of exploding everywhere. Thankfully there are other moments that take place in the past which are just as nice as the bad things are bad. At one point Dean serenades Cynthia with the above song. (An odd song choice but still a good one.) And at another time Cynthia has a particularly good joke about a child molester and a kid who go for a walk in the woods. There’s a discussion over whether it is funny or not. I thought it was.

The performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are both great and equally matched. They are two of the best actors of their generation. Michelle Williams in particular is always interesting to watch. She is one of the most tragic actresses out there. I don’t believe I’ve seen her in a movie without some sort of unrequited love going on. (Shutter Island, Synecdoche New York, I’m Not There, Brokeback Mountain). This goes all the way back to “Dick” when she had the misfortune of developing a major crush on Richard Nixon. Talk about a curse. It’s been over a decade and her characters haven’t seemed able to ever get over it yet. Congrats on the Oscar Nomination. What with this movie and “Shutter Island," earlier in the year, she has earned it. 

p.s. The fact that this movie initially got an NC-17 rating I find rather insulting. Sure there are sex scenes but it should be obvious to anybody with a working sense of empathy that they are neither intended to be nor in actuality are prurient. Logically, you would think the rating system for movies would have something to do with morality, but really it seems to be based solely on mathematical measurements of the amount of skin showing or seconds of heavy breathing. This is decidedly not pornography. It is a genuine and sincere movie about a serious subject and everyone involved deserves an apology. 

  

Buried (4/5 Stars)

Six Feet Under the Ground and Dealing with a Bureaucracy. The Horror.

The first thing we see is nothing. Just a black screen and some breathing. It sounds like a person sleeping. Then it sounds like that person has waken up. And then the person seems confused. And then very worried. And then frantic. And then finally terrified. Then a glimmer of light from a Zippo Lighter is set off and we see a close-up of Ryan Reynolds face. He is bound, gagged, and bleeding. Worse, he has been encased in a box of wood with no latch or lid. Nobody can hear his screams. He has been buried alive. Why? We aren’t sure yet. We know only as much as Reynolds knows, and right now, he doesn’t know anything. This movie, directed by Rodrigo Cortes, is told entirely within the point of view of the prisoner. There is no score. There are no scenes that take place above ground. There isn’t even any lighting. When the Zippo lighter goes out, the screen goes entirely black. For all intents and purposes, Ryan Reynolds is the only cast member. The movie is 95 minutes long and played in real time. What this means is that we, the audience, are essentially stuck in the box with Reynolds for the entire movie with absolutely no distractions. If you’re claustrophobic then maybe you should skip this one. Unless of course you’re claustrophobic but also like to get the shit scared out of you. Than this is a must see. It sort of proves the old maxim that the better a horror movie is made the less enjoyable it is to watch. This is a very good horror movie. Having said that and I don’t ever want to see it again.

Because the movie’s limited pov basically constrains the suspense to come solely from plot development, an extensive review of the plot will essentially ruin the movie. Therefore, I will only briefly describe things that are in the first fifteen minutes. The Ryan Reynolds character finds a cell phone (not his) that was placed in the coffin with him. He starts calling people up and informs them that he was a truck driver working for a contractor in Iraq delivering kitchen equipment when insurgents attacked his convoy. He was knocked unconscious and woke up in the coffin. He doesn’t know where he is or whether there are any other survivors. Then the bad guys call him up and demand ransom money by a certain time or they will leave him to rot there. Without giving too much up, here are also three general things I learned. First, navigating a government bureaucracy in order to get in contact with the appropriate rescue personnel is a lot more aggravating than usual when you are buried alive. Being put on hold and having to listen to elevator music doesn’t help. Second, depending on the context, trick answering machine messages are not as funny as people think they are. Third, even if you happen to be buried alive, things can always get worse. Much. Worse.

In many ways this is a stunt movie. The makers are betting that they can realistically tell a feature length story completely within a coffin without the audience getting restless or bored. It’s a pretty big leap of faith (the upside is that there was probably a very low budget), which essentially relies entirely on a creative screenplay which gives the prisoner logical and creative things to do for the entire running time and a performance good enough to pull off what is essentially a one man show. It works. Chris Sparling wrote a watertight screenplay and Ryan Reynolds has never been better. Normally you would think a role like this should get a lot more award buzz than it has. The reason it hasn’t probably has to do with the fact that James Franco plays a very similar type of role in “127 Hours,” and he is getting the entirety of the buzz instead.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that James Franco did a better job. They both did very good jobs. When it comes to this sort of thing you really start to see the subjectivity of an awards season. For instance people may feel that only one “stuck and unable to move for the entire movie,” performance should be nominated in a given year even if they think both are worthy. Or they may take into consideration that Franco has had very good performances before (Pineapple Express, Milk) and Reynolds, best known for “Van Wilder,” and “The Proposal,” hasn’t and conclude that Reynolds can wait until next time. Or it could have simply been because Franco’s performance is more memorable because “127 Hours” is a better movie. In that case some of the credit for Franco’s superiority should be attributed to the director Danny Boyle and crew and all the special effect they employed to help the story along. As far as I know there aren’t any complicated special effects in “Buried.” (There are always some performances that get nominated simply because the movie is good, not because the performances are all that great. What’s the name of that one woman who was nominated for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Oh that’s right, I didn’t bother to remember her name.) It’s too bad. This role looked like it must have been a very rough thing to pull off what with the whole being buried alive thing. That sucks. I'm sorry Paul, I'm sorry.

True Grit (4/5 Stars)

Papa Ross must have been one hell of a man.

It’s a good thing. Joel and Ethan Coen have now made four movies in as many years. Earlier in their career it always took them two or three years to string together a movie. This was because they always insisted on Creative Control and made movies that never made a lot of money. But that has changed. The word has gotten out that the Coens make good movies. They may be oddball at times but always good. I would suspect that people going to see True Grit (which is the Coens highest grossing movie ever) aren’t going because they fondly remember the original 1969 version or the book it was based upon or even the stars (Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon). I would suspect they are interested because it is a Coen Brothers movie. There are some filmmakers that plain don’t suck. The Coen Brothers are a couple of them.

It is an unwritten rule of the Coens that each movie they do should be unlike any movie they’ve already done. “True Grit” is no exception. It is purely Coenesque in that it isn’t. Get it? It’s an outright Western. It stars Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl out to avenge the death of her father by the hands of an outlaw named Tom Chaney, played by Josh Brolin. She sets out to hire a U.S. Marshall to go after Chaney. Given a list of names, she decides upon the roughest one, a man by the name of Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges. He is a man of True Grit, a whiskey guzzling grizzly bearded cantankerous itchy-trigger fingered old fool. A real character as they say. Jeff Bridges, aka The Dude aka the most comfortable actor in the world, is the perfect casting choice for the role. Also on the trail of Chaney for a completely different murder is a Texas Marshall named LeBeef, played by Matt Damon. Damon plays the role as if he's never seen a Western. Here, he’s striking surprised and neurotic nuances that rarely come from cowboys. Then again his character has to deal with Mattie Ross, one of the smartest and most confident girls ever to exist in a western. She’s throwing everyone for a loop here. That includes the bad guys too, both Tom Chaney and the Pepper Gang, led by none other than Mr. Pepper, played appropriately by Barry Pepper with the help of a really nasty set of dentures. Chaney by the way is one of this year’s stupidest sounding bad guys. Brolin plays the guy as if he’s more likely to use a book as toilet paper than read it. He murdered Papa Ross for the stupid sum of two gold pieces. There are no qualms about going to kill him.

“True Grit,” is true to its name in that it has a lot of grit, but let it be known that this movie is also very funny. It’s not a Comedy mind you, but most of the characters are what you would call witty and their different styles make conversation a minefield of quick insults and comedic insights. Cogburn is blunt, abrasive, and clumsy. Mattie is saracastic and a smart-aleck. Damon seems to have self-esteem problems, which regularly pokes holes into his Texas Ranger Pride. They spend most of the time on the trail arguing with each other. Mattie regularly gets the best of Damon. Damon picks on Cogburn. And Cogburn, well he’s got a bottle of whiskey and will not be ashamed.  All of this is done in 19^th Century Western talk, which is different but still decipherable if you listen closely.

Here’s a good question: Is the character Mattie Ross realistic? Forget that she’s a girl. What fourteen year old do you know, boy or girl, can intelligently discuss areas of the law with adults, negotiate deals with horse traders and bounty hunters, or have the confidence and wherewithal to hunt down their father’s killer upon their own initiative. What were you doing at the age of 14? Parents back then must have expected a bit more pluck and self-reliance from their kids, that and Papa Ross in particular must have been one of hell of a educator. Give credit to her church as well. Most of her righteous confidence comes straight from the Bible, which she quotes many times. Anyway, someone somewhere did something right.

“True Grit” isn’t one of the best movies of the year, but it is a good one and may get some Oscar nominations simply because it does an extremely competent job at being good. It would not surprise me if the Coen’s longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins got his 9^th Oscar nomination or if the movie itself got a Best Picture nomination. Don’t ask me if this is better than the original movie because I haven’t seen it.

Black Swan (5/5 Stars)

Excuse me while I catch my breath.

Suppose that you wanted to be perfect. What would it take? Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a NYC Lincoln Center’s production of Swan Lake. It’s an incredibly difficult role, one of the most challenging in ballet. The Swan Queen is simultaneously two characters at once, the innocent and pure White Swan and her evil twin the sensuous and seductive Black Swan. The story of Swan Lake is simple. An evil beast casts a spell on a woman that transforms her into a swan during the day. The spell can only be broken by true love. Her prince see her at night, learns her secret, falls in love, and promises to use his true love to break the spell. But before they elope, the evil beast presents the evil twin of the woman to the prince. The evil twin tricks the prince who pledges his love to her instead. Bereft of true love and left with no hope that the spell will ever be broken, the woman kills herself.

The only way I think to understand the horrific things that happen to Nina Sayers in this movie is through the prism of a performing technique called Method Acting. Method Acting is employed when an actor seeks a great performance by not acting at all. Instead of pretending to be character, they attempt to become that character. For example if an actor were to play a taxi driver, a method actor may actually get a license and drive a taxi for several months before the shoot (which is exactly what Robert De Niro did to prepare for his role “Taxi Driver.”) The most ridiculous preparer of all is perhaps Christian Bale, who was to play a thin person in “The Machinist,” and of his own initiative dropped his weight to an awfully unhealthy 110 pounds for the role. But lets say that you wanted to try Method Acting out for the role of the Swan Queen. Well, you would need two things. 1) You would need to be a Swan, and 2) You would need to be Split Personality Schizophrenic. How else are you going to be two people at once? And this is basically what happens to Nina Sayers. She goes insane. Nobody catches it in time because the deeper she descends into madness, the better a performer she becomes.

Helping her through the downward spiral of perfection are several other people. The first is Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey. She gave up her own ballerina career to have Nina and now lives vicariously through her daughter. She makes sure Nina’s life is ballet and only ballet. Nina eats grapefruits, takes the subway to Lincoln Center, practices all day, goes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep. It is a workaholic life bereft of all pleasure. Then there is her tough instructor played by Vincent Cassell. He mercilessly informs Nina that her dispassionate perfectionism is perfect for the White Swan but terrible for the Black Swan. She needs to let go and feel the music. His idea of the best way to help her achieve this is through sexual harassment, both psychological and physical. The harassment doesn’t seem to bother her as much as the fact that her instructor doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself while doing it. All she wants is to be perfect. A fellow ballerina named Lily, played by Mila Kunis, has a much more common sense way of going about it. She invites her to dinner, gets her drunk, gives her a rufi (which Nina sees being put into her drink), and takes her to one of those clubs where you can’t see or hear anything but strobe lights and a rhythmic pulse. This works. The result is well, ahem, the result is a sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. There is heavy breathing...among other things. Meanwhile Nina keeps seeing a doppelganger of herself dressed entirely in black pop up in the most inconvenient places. First on the subway, then on a city street, and then in the mirrors of her dance studio. Seriously scary shit. 

The Director of this picture is Darren Aronofsky. If you’ve seen any of his other movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “The Wrestler,” you will notice that no other director is so artfully mean to his characters. The same is true of “Black Swan.” There are plenty of similar techniques from both of those previous movies. Like “The Wrestler,” this movie shows the real physical costs of a performance. Nina breaks a toenail in one scene. In another she has to pry her toes apart. Weird scars start forming on her shoulder blades. And like the drugs in “Requiem for a Dream,” the scenes of ballet are shown in spectacular fashion, hallucinations included. The score was done by Clint Mansell, the same person who composed the Requiem, and like “Requiem for a Dream,” the climax of this story (the performance of Swan Lake on opening night) matches incredible visuals and super-emotional acting with a very powerful piece of music (Tchiakovsky played very loudly) that goes on for about fifteen minutes and left me emotionally exhausted. Truth be told, my heart rate and breathing had actually accelerated so much that I had to wait through half the credits in order to calm myself down. If the Great Intellectual Experience of the year was “Inception,” than the Great Emotional Experience of the year is “Black Swan.” It should easily receive nominations for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Makeup, Costumes, Score, among other things. Natalie Portman, who trained for an entire year and did most of her own ballet, has pulled off the performance of a lifetime. She would be a lock for the Oscar in almost any other year that didn’t also have Lisbeth Salandar lurking around in the background.

One thing people repeatedly tell me when I recommend movies such as “Black Swan,” is that they aren’t in the mood for a “good movie.” They would much rather just unwind on the couch and watch junk. In the past the best I could do was simply persuade people to not watch anything at all. For instance, I would argue that if you don’t want to hear a good story or be affected in any way, why don’t you just stare at a blank wall or meditate. Better yet, if you’re too tired to watch a good movie, take a nap. But that line of reasoning only stops people from watching junk. So let me rephrase the argument in this way. Lets say you are at an amusement park. Junk TV is like the merry-go-round, the Tea Cups, the bumper cars, etc. “Black Swan,” is the highest roller coaster in the park. Now you have a choice: You can take your good money and precious time and spend it all day on the merry-go-round doing something you’ve done a thousand times before or you can stop being a wimp and go see the ballerina movie. True the height of the drops should make any reasonable person apprehensive and true it may be “hard to watch” as you are racing toward the bottom at very high speeds but, come on, everyone said it was fun (Black Swan has a 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and inside you know its just a movie. You will be exiting the ride alive and intact with but a sense of giddiness and awesome that is perfectly normal given the adrenaline rush. You may even want to experience something quite like that again. Perhaps skydiving next time. (Have you seen “Requiem for a Dream”?) If you’re embarrassed to be affected by something so deeply with other people around, I suggest you go and see the movie alone. And if it takes you awhile after the movie to compose yourself before exiting the theater, that’s fine too. That’s what the end credits of good movies are for.

The Fighter (4/5 Stars)

About Mickey who can't get a word in.

Director David O. Russell’s new boxing drama is about the real life Mickey Ward’s fall and comeback to the World Welterweight Championship. But to say it is about Mickey, played by Mark Wahlberg, is to assume something else. It is also about his family: his brother Dickie, his mother and his five sisters. Mickey may as well be synonymous with them as he can hardly ever get a word in whenever they are around. Mickey may be in the ring but he isn’t in charge. Several times he even says, “Dickie taught me everything I know,’ or “I won that fight because Dickie told me what to do.” The problem is that his family is telling him the wrong things to do, like say fight a guy twenty pounds heavier than he is with absolutely no preparation. And then there’s the fact that Dickie is a crackhead and that his sisters really don’t do anything but sit around the house, smoke cigarettes, and agree with their mother no matter how obviously wrong she is. Mickey’s future success depends on ditching his blood and finding other smarter people to tell him what to do. Is this movie anti-family or just the least pro-family movie you’ve seen in a long while? There’s a good topic for discussion after the film. A Gold Star to anyone who has balls enough to take their family to see this one.

The most impressive thing about this movie is that it is full of great performances. Leading the pack is Christian Bale as Dickie Ward, the motor-mouthed, crack-addicted, sparring partner and older brother of Mickey. The effect is almost immediate. The first frame shows Christian sitting on the couch talking very fast and his eyes nearly bugging out of his emaciated frame. I couldn’t believe it. Christian did it again. He completely transformed his body to play a role. For those who unaware, Christian has been putting on and taking off weight for the last ten years as if his body was made of Play-Doh. Take a look at his perfect body in “American Psycho,” which turned into thinnest man outside of a concentration camp in “The Machinist” which turned into the muscled action star in “Batman Begins” which turned into the starving prisoner of war in “Rescue Dawn” which once again turned into an action star in “The Dark Knight,” and is now the skinny shriveled figure of a crack addict in “The Fighter.” To think all he could have been looking like Patrick Bateman (“You can always be thinner, look better.”) all this time. The man has no ego at all. He is pure dedication and self-discipline. His poster and movies should be passed out as inspirational devices in all WeightWatchers. As far as his performance goes in this movie, it is perfect. Dickie looks and talks like he’s on crack and all his self-aggrandized tales of the past and deluded plans for the future pretty much steals every scene. He is being followed by a documentary crew, which he thinks is making a movie about his comeback. In reality they are documenting the perils of crack addiction. Dickie doesn’t get that until about halfway through watching the HBO special. In many ways, Christian is playing against type in this movie. He usually has the role of the boring straight character that holds together a movie like say Batman as opposed to the Joker, or the non-showy magician in “The Prestige,” or Patrick Bateman who isn’t even there. Here he proves that he can play the wild part and yet in perfect Bale style he still does a great job of helping everyone else give great performances as well.

Playing against Dickie for control over Mickey is the new girlfriend, played by Amy Adams, who is also playing against type in one of her best performances. You may remember her as the naive nurse in “Catch Me if You Can,” or the Disney Princess in “Enchanted,” or the timid nun in “Doubt.” Here, she is a hard and fierce barmaid who can hold her own against a very large and loud family. There is an unbelievable scene where the mom, played by Melissa Leo (who I didn’t even recognize until I saw the credits), and the five sisters pack into a four-door sedan and take a trip across town to confront Adams. Then they all yell at each other on the porch while poor Mickey stands around looking like he might have something to say if he could possibly get a word in.  

Every now and then you watch a movie with what is called, “Culture Shock.” This is when you are presented with something that seems real but is so foreign and weird you can hardly believe that real people would be doing it. That happened several times while I watched this movie, but one scene really stood out. One of the main problems with the girlfriend as far as the family is concerned is that she went to college. Now the girlfriend actually never finished college, but to the family that is still enough to condemn her into a snobbish elite that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Specifically they call her an “MTV skank.” Like I said, that sort of thing for me goes beyond merely insulting or absurd and into something like disbelief or confusion. It’s just so out there I don’t know what to think. I actually hesitated writing this review because so much of the movie took place in an alternate universe where people are like that. But hey, that is what watching movies is all about. Perhaps now if I were to be called something worse than an “MTV skank,” for actually finishing college, I wouldn’t be caught completely speechless. Maybe.

The movie takes place in the 1990s. Biopics are becoming pretty recent for someone my age. We also seem to be getting into the era where a movie in a theater is not the first, but the second or third time a story is told. In this movie Director Russell does a very good job of dodging all the other camera crews in the story, first the HBO documentary and then the highly televised boxing matches. The world is becoming such a documented place that we are now watching cameras watching cameras. Who knows where the road goes?

p.s. Now that I think about it, here is the retort. I’ll quote Jack Nicholson in “The Departed” after Leonardo Dicaprio has just finished saying that school is done, out. His exact words: “Maybe someday you’ll grow the fuck up.”

TRON: Legacy (3/5 Stars)

If Sam doesn’t care why should I?

Tron is above all other things a visually stunning movie. The artists behind this movie have created an entire new universe stacked with digital skyscrapers, innovative sports arenas, and fantastical vehicles. Clearly, a lot of love, thought, and money went into the design of this movie. The huge problem is that nobody in the movie notices it. The characters walk around nonplussed and unimpressed with their surroundings and that unenthusiasm trickles right through to the audience. If the people in the story don’t care, why should we?

TRON: Legacy has been put in the hands of a first time director named Joseph Kosinski. It brings back Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, from the original movie (which I haven’t seen) and also introduces his son Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund. The story setup is thus: Kevin Flynn is a game designer working on something big that will change everything about technology, philosophy, and theology. It will ‘change the world,’ he tells his nine year old son as leaves the house to make the latest breakthrough at the office. He never comes back. Twenty-one years later, Sam Flynn is all grown up and living the life of the down-to-earth very rich. His apartment is made out of storage containers but is located on the riverfront and has an awesome view. He also has really cool gadgets and a great bike but this is balanced out by having a cute dog. And even though he apparently doesn’t have a job nor has worked a day in his life, that doesn’t mean he’s not smart or ambitious. He’s just not a fan of the big bad corporate men who have taken over his father’s company. So he’s biding his time till I don’t know, he steps into his father’s shoes and “changes the world,” or something.

That is until his godfather gets a page from his father Kevin, asking him to go down to the shop. So after the usual protest that he doesn’t want to, he goes to the office, quickly finds the secret passageway behind the TRON video game, accidentally activates a computer thingamajig, and is warped/digitally rendered into the confines of an infinite universe contained in a computer chip. The universe is bathed in a cool digital blue, everything seems to run on tracks, and you kind of have to see it to sort of get it (see above trailer). Almost immediately he is picked up by this weird “m” shaped ship full of dangerous red robots. They take him straight to a sports arena where he is forced to duel to the death other robots with Killer Frisbees. 

Sam takes all of this remarkably in stride. I wouldn’t say Garrett is a bad actor because he is not much different than your ordinary absurdly stoic male action star. Extraordinary things only slightly perturb him from time to time. (If the above had happened to me, my reaction would be probably be along the lines of: “OMG What the Hell Is Going ON? What is this Place! Don’t kill me! AAHHH!!!” or something like that.) And yes he has never seen a Killer Frisbee before but that doesn’t mean he isn’t confident that he is better at the sport than robots supposedly programmed to know what they are doing.

After several games, which look like they should be much more dangerous than they actually are, Sam is rescued by a beautiful mystery girl, played by Olivia Wilde, who takes him “off the grid” to his long-lost father’s secret lair. There he meets his Dad for the first time in twenty years and is mercifully allowed by the writers of the movie to have a single tear run down his cheek. They don’t have much to say to each other though. Over a dinner of weird digital food filled with awkward pauses, the father finally asks, “I would guess that you have many questions?” To which Sam responds, “I only have one.” And then I finally had to laugh because the situation had gotten too absurd. Here’s a list of questions that I would have asked: Ahem, What the fuck is this place? How did you build it? How long did it take you to build it? What did you use to build it with? Who designed all of it? Who was the weird evil guy that looked like you? Why have you aged and he hasn’t? How does a stick turn into a motorcycle? Why can’t the motorcycles go ‘off the grid?’ What would happen to if I met with a Killer Frisbee? Do these robots have feelings or personalities? How did they get those personalities? And of course the most glaringly obvious question of all: Who the hell is the girl sitting at this table eating dinner with us? Earlier she had taken Sam on a tour of the lair and showed him the library. She especially likes Jules Verne. Okay, so she just saved your life, is smoking hot, AND she reads books. Now would be the perfect time to ask if she’s a robot. The question Sam asks instead is, “Why didn’t you come home that night?” That’s an okay question I guess, but seriously, is that really the only one? This kid is severely lacking in the area of imagination.

Some of those questions are eventually answered but only until the movie’s second half, and that is where things slow down considerably. Or that they ramp up. Or both in the sense that the movie’s stakes ramp up, but are so off-the-wall that it bored me considerably. In this movie, we are presented with an evil twin villain named CLUE who at one point goes so far as to hold a Nazi-style mass rally. What exactly is he planning to do? Invade the real world and take it over maybe, although how is never explained. Should anyone be worried? Given CLUE’s utter incompetence in using his army of baddies to stop three good guys, not really. Let me make a little contrast here. Last week I saw “Jackass 3D.” In that movie there was a segment called “TeeBall” where Ryan Dunn hits a TeeBall stand that then twirls around and strikes Steve-O in the balls. That segment was more effective than most of the drama in “TRON.” I can definitively say that I know what getting hit in the balls is all about. I haven’t a clue what’s going on here. My point is that it is better to have a villain that does little things that make sense than one who does big things in some vague pseudo-alarming way. If you’re going to make an epic about genocide and world domination, you better know enough about the subject to allow the audience to take it seriously. Otherwise it’s exactly what it is: Hollow and Absurd. And if the movie is like that, all those quiet melodramatic scenes where the actors talk seriously about their feelings just don’t work and take forever. What this movie should have done is gotten rid of the whole “Hitler” thing and just had the stakes tied to the games in the arena. Have a tournament or something with the ultimate prize being a father-son-hot girl ticket home to reality. The heavy drama would be gone, the action would still be packed, and the story would much more effective because it made sense.

This movie looks like it cost a hell of a lot of money to make. There’s nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong however in putting little to no effort into the dialogue or the characters. Jeff Bridges seems to be improvising lines from the Big Lebowski. Garret Hedlund is blank slate. Olivia Wilde looks great but doesn’t do much else. CLUE is creeping around the uncanny valley. The only actor that seems to be enjoying himself is Michael Sheen. I was tempted to wonder why a robot would be British and gay but overall I’m just glad he was there. Too bad he’s the last character introduced and the first one killed off.  And for some reason Cillian Murphy, one of the most accomplished actors of the cast, was hired for only one scene. Perhaps thirty years from now somebody will finally get this story right.

Jackass 3D (4/5 Stars)

Oh HAHAHA Aw-F***! OMG Eww Gross!

Okay well, where the hell do we start with this? I guess in light of the extreme courage/stupidity that went into the making of this movie and I suppose in solidarity with the cast members who risked their lives for my shits and giggles the least I can do is put aside all notions of snobbery and be honest about how I reacted to this movie. I laughed hard and loud. I was grossed out and had to shield my eyes from the screen. I groaned and gasped so routinely and unexpectedly that I sometimes surprised myself by how loud I was being (everyone else in the theater was loud too, so it was okay.) I had been grinning so much that my mouth actually hurt when I left the theater. If it wasn’t for several scenes so disgusting I couldn’t possibly recommend watching them to anyone, I would enthusiastically suggest this movie to anybody I wouldn’t ask for a job or go on a date with.

“Jackass 3D,” is a documentary about a bunch of idiots named Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuna, Preston Lacy, Chris Pontius, Ehren McGhehey, and Dave England. It is directed by Jeff Tremaine. ‘Jackass’ started as a TV show on MTV in 2000. The pilot episode featured Knoxville being tasered, maced, and then donning a bulletproof vest and shooting himself in the chest. Ten years later, he and his friends (now in their thirties) are still doing really dumb and dangerous things, except now they have a huge budget and the best cameras available.

One of the main reasons why comedy isn’t as respected as drama is because it is very hard to do comedy on a pedestal. Laughing at somebody is much easier if you feel superior to them. Now this doesn’t mean you have to be stupid to be a good clown, but the best and smartest clowns are masters of perfecting that paradoxical act of being smart and creative while at the same time looking really stupid. In other words some of the best comedy plays as a “joke on accident.” The teller never gives away the fact that they know they are manipulating the audience into laughter. This allows the joke to be unique and creative while preserving the audience’s sense of superiority. And hilarity ensues.

I remarked earlier that I laughed often and hard at a vast majority of the movie. Let us pretend for a moment that the makers didn’t fall assbackward into accidentally telling good jokes over and over again. (And at the same time let us also pretend that I am not a bonehead who will laugh at anything). Now that were pretending, perhaps a closer look at ‘Jackass’ is called for. Warning: the following will not be funny.

The most effective thing about ‘Jackass’ (and where it succeeds where so many other action/comedies fail) is the extreme Clarity and Brevity of what is happening on the screen. The pranks and stunts are explained thoroughly and never hang around long enough for the laughs to die down. Plenty of action movies nowadays involve stunts and spectacles that are full of huge special effects but are not effective because they are hard to follow and understand. Other times producers and directors keep in long scenes simply because they spent so much money on them even when they don't work. Here, when a stunt is to be performed a brief title or a sentence of explanation will describe what exactly will happen (Knoxville in roller skates in the path of stampeding Buffalo) and what is at stake (Knoxville’s health, well-being, and dignity). Reveals that develop levels to a particular joke (like the jet plane or the little person fight) come quickly, unexpectedly, but still logically. The fact that it is a documentary keeps everything in suspense. We understand what is about to happen but not how it will turn out. All of this is achieved in merely seconds. And as soon as people are done getting hurt, or saying or doing something funny or off-the-wall, the movie goes straight into something else. No time is wasted. Perhaps the main reason “Jackass” doesn’t have the usual problems of special effects driven action scenes is because the stuntmen getting hurt are in charge of the movie. They want to get the most out of their bruises and that means making it clear how they got them. Incidentally that also makes it funnier.

Because this is a documentary, it would be weird to applaud the acting of “Jackass.” But again another reason why plenty of action/comedies are ineffective is because the acting isn’t realistic. A huge explosion should really freak somebody out but usually doesn’t. Here, the cast gets scared on a regular basis. A good example is when Dave England tries to pin a tail on a real donkey. He gets kicked in the shin, tries again, and actually starts shaking as he inches his way up. The guy is terrified. And when a cast member in “Jackass” gets hurt, they really get hurt. One stunt involved an NFL kicker named Josh Brown kicking a football in the face of Preston Lacy. He kicks the ball and it hits Preston right in the face. Preston then drops to the ground and writhes in very real pain. In this way, “Jackass” is an incredibly cathartic experience. Because the terror and pain is so real, the audience vicariously feels it. Like I said, the entire theater was groaning and gasping the entire time. Now usually this wouldn’t be funny because it is mean to laugh at somebody who just got hurt. But the ingenious thing about Jackass is that it provides a laugh track composed of all the other cast members who aren’t taking part in the stunt. As soon as somebody gets it really good, Johnny Knoxville will lead a hearty group laugh. The fact that every cast member takes their turn laughing at all the other stunts makes it okay for the audience to join in. The guilt we would usually feel is erased by the knowledge that each cast member is complicit in delighting in all the other cast member’s pain. So in a way they deserve it. This is comedic misdirection in the classic sense. A situation that would normally be frightening or scary is made okay by the fact that the stuntman, though injured, is not “seriously” injured, emphasis on the word “seriously.” We have anticipated real terror. Everything has turned out fine. The subsequent relief gives us visceral pleasure causing us to laugh loudly.

Of course, some of the stuff that goes on here really is freak show, disgusting stuff. (There is a running gag that involves a cameraman named Lance throwing up in the midst of several stunt.) I sort of suggest seeing this on DVD and fast-forwarding the parts where it is obvious things will get really bad. I had to cover my eyes during some scenes, like the ‘cup of sweat’ gag. But there is quite a lot to admire here and if I were in charge of an action/comedy I would look to this movie for tips. It is physical comedy at its most effective. Now, imagine if you had an actual story behind some of this stuff. Wouldn't that be powerful indeed. 

The King's Speech (4/5 Stars)

A model of courage

As it is pointed out by King George VI, played by Colin Firth, a modern monarch has no real power. They can’t declare war or raise taxes or write laws. But they are kept on as figureheads because when the king speaks, the people believe that he speaks for them. “But I can’t sp…speak,” he stammers. The King of England has a speech impediment that routinely humiliates him whenever he must make a public speech, which is often. Meanwhile on the other side Europe is Adolf Hitler, the very most of which can be said about him is that he was a very good public speaker.

The Director of this splendid historical drama is none other than Tom Hooper, the man behind the incredible HBO John Adams mini-series (something every American student should be shown in school). Some directors you are thankful exist. Tom Hooper is one of them. He not only tells good stories. He is also keeping alive our heritage and history. And he does it in a way that is engaging and easily accessible. The people in his movies, though royalty, don’t seem to be acting as if they are aware of their place in history. They act like real people in their own time period. They are even given throwaway lines that assert personal fears that we know in our time period they shouldn’t be worried about. For example King George asserts that the English royalty should be worried about being done away with. He names the Czar in Russia and Cousin Wilhelm in Germany as examples. It is a reasonable fear but only at that time and in that place. It takes a writer/director who is unafraid of historical accuracy and has faith in the audience’s sense of empathy to allow his main character to say something obviously wrong. Someone who is aware of the faults of history (not those who say look upon the Founding Fathers or the writers of the Bible as omniscient gods) will smile when certain events and characters are brought up in this movie, their human foibles in full view. (Case in point: We get to meet Neville Chamberlain who talks a little about his misperceptions about Hitler.) We are also presented with another old friend from history books, a Sir Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall, always with cigar and drink in hand. This is a great character that surely deserves his own great movie. But that doesn’t mean Tom Hooper is afraid to use him in a supporting role, milling around the background of certain scenes and giving choice quotes from time to time. Hooper gets away with this because he knows enough about the historical period to know when or where he can make Churchill show up and still be accurate. Who knows what anybody actually said? In the end it really doesn’t matter because the audience should know that it is literally impossible to tell a personal story of a historical person and be totally factual. The most any historical biopic can do is get all the details of the period right and make what the characters say and do as plausible as possible through tons of research. This is what Hooper routinely does.

Nobody nowadays can remember this, but King George (or “Bertie” as he was called by his family) wasn’t the big royal story during the 1930s. People were much more interested in his older brother Prince Edward, played by Guy Pearce, and his romance with Wallis Simpson, the woman he would abdicate the throne for in order to marry. Now that was a huge thing. Sometimes though it takes 80 years to realize who was indeed the more interesting person. Edward is the perfect foil for Bertie. He is selfish, uninterested in his duty, and oblivious to the great need of his people for a strong leader in dire times. On first blush it may not seem obvious why King George is a courageous person for giving wartime speeches to the nation while fighting a stammer. But this movie makes clear that he really didn’t have to do it. He could have been like his brother. He could have abdicated the throne. He could have refused to make the speeches. He could have simply not cared. I can only imagine what the people of England felt when they heard those wartime speeches knowing full well that all the pauses were mainly due to the king’s herculean effort to get the words out straight and true. It must be hard for a king, with all his wealth and prestige, to show solidarity with a suffering people. Standing in front of a national audience doing the thing you hate and fear the most is perhaps as close as a monarch can get.

A cynical person would look upon Colin Firth’s performance as “Oscar Bait.” And they would be right. There is nothing the Academy likes better than physical impediments, except of course royalty. This role has both. But that doesn’t mean Firth is undeserving. He really gets the whole thing down perfectly, (and I learned quite a lot about speech impediments in the meantime.) Most of the movie takes place in the office of the speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played cheerfully by Geoffrey Rush. He is an unconventional therapist who insists that he and the king be on a first name basis and that the therapy shouldn’t simply be mechanical. This is awkward because one of them is royalty. But really there is no choice. Bertie has already been to every other speech therapist. Joining them several times or waiting out in the lobby drinking tea is the Queen, played by that woman of unique beauty Helena Bonham Carter. She does a good job too. They all do a good job.

p.s. This movie is Rated R. It should be rated G. The reason it is R is because Bertie doesn’t stammer when he curses and under doctor’s orders he is told that when he feels his mouth clogging, he should curse as loud as he can. (Only in the privacy of the office of course.) So there is one scene where he shouts, “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, shit, bugger, Fuck!” And that is why the movie is R. If there is any movie that makes certain the idiocy of an objective rating system it is, “The King’s Speech,” a noble story about perseverance and duty, which I would argue is fit even for kindergartners.  As a student of law I understand the point of an objective system. It is only fair to put movie-makers on notice as to what exactly constitutes an “R” rating. Two “Fucks” is an R. Everybody knows that. But this standard ignores the most important thing that parents should be considering and that is the context of the story and more importantly whether the movie is any good. These are matters of taste and though any freedom of speech loving person would be aghast at the idea of somebody rating something via such a judgmental prism as “good taste,” I would argue that if the rating system doesn’t consider taste than it is completely pointless and we shouldn’t have it at all. The way it is now, we make no distinction over how the objectionable content is shown or told. Thus, the blood and gore of responsible redemptive movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” or “The Passion of the Christ,” is equal to the most disgusting sadistic torture porn like “Saw I-VII." Nor does an objective standard actually prohibit objectionable content from creeping in anyways. Many comedies make it a mission to find a way to say the naughty things they want to say without actually saying it. Just take a look at the movie “Little Fockers.” The title is a joke and the punch line is “Fuck.” But the movie is PG-13 even though it couldn’t be more obvious. Besides the movie is terrible. Why are we telling parents that this is better than, “The King’s Speech”?