The Movie Vampire

            In this brave new world of digital cameras and youtube we’ve been hearing people talk at length about the notion of amateurs making films in their backyards completely removed from “the system.”  I’ve never really been a believer in the concept.  Sure there have been a handful of very good micro-budget movies in the past few years but the chances of them really breaking out into the public at large seems to be about the same as they were before all this new technology when people like Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Richard Linklater put out similarly budgeted movies to similar success.  But, if there’s ever been a clear example of the new system working it’s got to be the new thriller Paranormal Activity, which was made in seven days on a budget of fifteen thousand dollars by someone with no formal film training. 

            The film takes place entirely in the house of Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston), a young couple that is “engaged to be engaged.”  Katie has been hearing strange noises in the night and feels it is part of a pattern of odd occurrences she’s been sensing occasionally since she was a young girl.  Intrigued, Michah buys a professional grade camera he hopes will help them to better document what’s been going on, especially while the two of them are asleep.  As their project goes on they do indeed start to pick up some strange occurrences on the tape like a door moving on its own and a few odd noises.  They are not sure how to react to what’s been going on but as the nights go by the events the camera picks up start to become more and more threatening.

            This is essentially a haunted house movie, but in a way it isn’t.  It’s established early on (by a psychic) that the force behind this disturbance is not a ghost, but a demon.  Further it is established that this demon is not linked to the house the couple is living in, rather it has been targeting Katie since long before she found her way to this luxurious San Diego residence.  This is a very smart bit of exposition because it eliminates the thing that almost always sinks haunted house movies: the notion that the characters could solve all their problems by simply moving.  The choice of a demon rather than a ghost is also smart, something about the idea of a demon (which is distinguished as being a non human force as opposed to a deceased human spirit) just conjures up creepier images in the mind. 

            This plot is actually remarkably similar to a horror movie of a much different kind from earlier this year, Drag Me to Hell.  Both films are about women who find themselves targeted by demons and must seek assistance from various paranormal “experts.”  The difference of course is that Drag Me to Hell revels in its silliness; it’s a fun, loud, movie and all of its thrills were right in your face.  There’s nothing wrong with any of that and I don’t make this comparison to disparage Sam Raimi’s film, but Paranormal Activity takes almost the exact opposite approach with a similar concept.  The approach in Oren Peli’s film is decidedly minimalist in comparison.  Here the titular activity comes slowly into the film, the demon does things that are clearly beyond logical explanation but which seem oddly more disturbing because they are done in a way that is still oddly close to reality.  Of course this approach would have quickly become tedious if Peli had remained too subtle for too long, thankfully he knows just when to start making the demon more daring in his appearances.  This is not like the Blair Witch Project where they wait until pretty much the last shot to actually have something happen.

            Which I suppose brings us to the fact that this is yet another “found footage” movie.  Ever since the aforementioned  phenomenon of a film there have been a lot of these movies, and after each one gets made everyone feels like they’ve just seen the last film that will get away with the format before it becomes lame, and yet more and more come out to prove there’s still life in the technique.  Between [REC], Cloverfield, and this film the ante just seems to keep going up.  Perhaps the main appeal of filming a movie like this is that it requires less of a tech budget and less formal training to accomplish, after all, when trying to emulate an amateur a certain lack of professionalism actually helps rather than hurts your film and even the more heavily produced examples of the genre like Cloverfield are cheaper than their competitors.  To a mainstream audience crappy film stock is a pretty big distraction unless there’s a narrative reason why what they’re looking at is a lot uglier than the latest Platinum Dunes splatterfest.  But let’s not take that to mean that anyone could have made a movie like Paranormal Activities, because trust me, everyone is trying and there’s a reason why Oren Peli’s movie is the one in more than a thousand theaters right now and everyone else’s isn’t.

            Of course, like many types of genre film, these found footage films need to establish their rules early on.  For example, both Cloverfield and [REC] took the approach of having the movies (sort of) play out in real time, with cuts only occurring when the camera operator choose to turn his device off.  This film and The Blair Witch Project instead choose to suggest that the people who found the footage edited the film together. Perhaps the bigger (and decidedly more meta) decision that must be made is how to present the film.  The Blair Witch Project made the mistake of presenting the material as if it were a real documentary telling an authentic story even though it was quite obviously fake.  The thing is, absolutely no one really thought that movie was real, they were just having fun playing along with the fiction the filmmakers had created.  However, there were plenty of people who thought they were surrounded by morons who really did believe it and the result was a backlash perpetrated by those who thought they were smarter than everybody else.  That’s why Paramount pictures has been pretty carefully avoiding any claims that this is anything other than a scary movie and selling the project more on the communal experience of seeing it in crowed theater full of screaming people.  However, once people have entered the theater the movie still operates in a way that will accentuate the illusion of reality.  The film actually has no studio logo at the beginning (an almost unprecedented rarity) and even more surprisingly it has no credits, something I didn’t even know was legal in this day and age. 

            Something that probably gives this a leg up over its underground competition is that it has managed to snare a pair of actors that know what they’re doing.  In many ways, trying to act in a mockumentary seems to be as distinct from acting in a scripted film as acting in a scripted film is to acting on stage.  The people acting in movies like this have to achieve a special level of naturalism while working with dialogue that is not flashy and they don’t have the luxury of perfect camera angles.  Moreover, the actors themselves need to be both anonymous and average looking, while still trying to make the audience empathize with them.  Brian De Palma’s film Redacted gives an excellent example of what not to do when acting in a movie like this, and yet there’s probably yet to be an example of such acting that’s so overwhelmingly good as to provide a high point to compare other films by.  Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston (the characters share their names with the actors) are for the most part just the kind of actors that a film like this needs.  Both look just like the kind of people you’d run into on the street, they talk like average Joes, but they also have personalities you can sort of latch onto.  Featherston in particular makes for a very pleasant screen presence, she feels like that friend of a friend you have and this kind of familiarity helps breed a lot of empathy for the character.

            There are however some problems that do hold this movie back from minimalist perfection.  In particular, I was a bit annoyed by the way the characters acted in order to deal with they’re situation.  Katie desperately wants to call a demonologist to help with the situation while wants to dissect the situation further, mainly through the use of the camera.  Both of these seem like workable plans, but neither of them are mutually exclusive, and yet each of them is openly hostile to the other’s plan.  Micah’s refusal to call the demonologist is particularly frustrating, I can understand why he’d be wary of the notion when the haunting seemed less than real, but there’s a certain point where the existence of this phenomenon becomes undeniable and at that point the two would do any and everything that they need to do in order to solve their problem.   Even after this point Micah refuses to call the one person who by all accounts can deal with the situation, claiming that he’s going to deal with the problem himself.  What?  It’s a frickin’ demon, what the hell does this guy expect to do?  Punch it?  And Katie’s refusal to examine the video evidence is at times just as silly.  You’d think that these people would be desperate enough to accept any help they can get and the notion that there’s some sort of conflict of interest between the two approaches doesn’t really make any sense. 

            Another problematic element emerges when the movie begins to try to explain what’s been going on.  Throughout the movie, there are a lot of hints and clues as to a larger explanation of what’s been going on to Katie.  Other cases are found, a history is established and photographs are found.  None of these are particularly obtrusive except that they’re complete red herrings that don’t really add up to much of anything.  The nature of this haunting is never really explained, in fact that give the movie a lot of its creepy feeling.  In fact I’m glad they never explain the nature of this beast, but in establishing a mystery without a solution they are sort of setting the audience up for an anticlimax.  Don’t get me wrong, the ending itself is quite good and the last shot is a real doozy, but it feels particularly abrupt because they’ve made it seem like we’re owed a few more twists before this finale.

            Is Paranormal Activity just a product of clever marketing? No, it’s the real deal.  But that’s not to say that it’s some sort of classic of the horror genre.  The movie is not a perfect gem, nor was ever likely to be one, there’s a certain risk/reward payoff to filming a movie like this and this has gotten about as much out of the concept as it possibly could.  Like The Blair Witch Project before it, this will probably be remembered more as a triumph of marketing than as a triumph of filmmaking, but the people in the marketing department aren’t rainmakers and this triumph of marketing would not have been possible were it not for the important fact the Paranormal Activity works.  Oh, and don’t listen to the people telling you that this is best enjoyed when watching it with a theater full of screaming douchebags, I saw it at three in the afternoon in a theater with maybe ten people in it and it worked just fine.

***1/2 out of Four

            I feel really sorry for filmmakers who try to make crime movies these days, the standards for that genre are unbelievably high.  No matter how great a movie about gangsters gets, the bar has been set so high by the likes of The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface that it has become hard to call even the best examples of the genre being made today “great.”  Take for example 2007’s American Gangster, a film which is element for element a pretty damn good effort, but when compared to some of the above mentioned films it’s hard to really get too excited about it.  Still there have been a few exceptional films like The Departed and City of God which have found their way into the pantheon in spite of the sky high expectations, and one such exception was Michael Mann’s Heat, a sprawling cops and robbers epic which paired Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in a thrilling cat and mouse chase through L.A.’s underworld.  Because of this and the presence of A-list talent like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, Mann’s new film about the legendary John Dillinger, Public Enemies, comes with a level of anticipation above the already high standards of crime epics. 

            John Dillinger was not a gangster in the way Al Capone, Frank Lucas, or even Henry Hill were.  He didn’t run any vast criminal conspiracies from dark mansions nor did he hold any legitimate covers.  Rather, he was a bank robber in the vein of Bonnie & Clyde; and was, in spite of his massive fame in the eye of the public, considered “public enemy number one” by the newly formed FBI.  When the film begins, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is already an established criminal and the film is about the last few months of his life.  Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, an FBI agent fresh off the apprehension of Pretty Boy Floyd, who has been put in charge of a task force set up to capture or kill Dillinger.  Meanwhile, Dillinger is basking in his infamy; he has the fastest cars, the nicest clothes, and he’s also hooked up with a beautiful woman named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard).  But as Purvis begins to close in it becomes clear that the good times aren’t lasting forever and Dillinger must be increasingly careful in order to survive as public enemy number one.

            Another legendary American outlaw was given the film treatment in 2007 with Andrew Dominick’s film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, an excellent film but one which did not resonate well with the public.  That film had the difficult task of trying to subvert the legendary status of the outlaw at the center, to show Jesse James for the moody killer he was rather than the Robin Hood figure the public believed him to be, all the while examining what it was that created that public fascination.  Michael Mann does not take the same approach with his film though one could envision a film where he does.  Generally, Mann seems rather disinterested in the way Dillinger is seen by the public and by Dillinger himself for that matter and instead focuses on how he is viewed by the FBI, the criminal underworld, and his girlfriend Billie Frechette. 

Mann could have depicted Dillinger as a martyred rebel or as a menace that needed to be put down by brave G-Men, but he never settles into a simple groove like that.  It’s almost impossible not to be pretty impressed by Dillinger’s smooth antics but Mann also does not hesitate to show the more violent aspects of his personality. Mann also undermines a lot of Dillinger’s exploits in a brilliant scene where he is told that much more money is made through a secret telephone fraud than by the very public bank robberies he had involved himself in.  On the other hand, the movie is hardly an advertisement for the FBI who are often excessive and cruel in their pursuit of Dillinger, and they seem motivated more by public opinion than a genuine desire to make America safer.  Ultimately Mann’s depiction is very matter-of-fact, he shows Dillinger doing the very cool looking things that history records him having done and allows the audience to judge.  This failure to take sides may seem frustratingly non-committal to some, but I appreciated Mann’s willingness to report without judgment.

            It has become a critical custom to examine Johnny Depp performances by trying to identify the sources of his inspiration, this film will be no exception because he is clearly trying to channel James Cagney.  This is a pretty obvious choice but also an effective one especially from a physical perspective.  Like Cagney, Depp has a certain range of facial movement here, he can be charming Frechette one moment and then have a killer’s look in his eyes as he fires a Tommy Gun the next.  But with a Cagney impersonation comes a certain degree of theatricality that one simply has to accept, and this is particularly troublesome in some of the early line readings.  In fact that’s true of a lot of people’s acting in the first few scenes of the film, which seem to be liberally homageing the acting mannerisms of thirties cinema in a way that the later scenes aren’t for some reason. 

Unlike Depp, there aren’t many reservations I have about Christian Bale, who’s doing some of the best work I’ve seen him do in a large budget film in a long while.  Bale has the Elliot Ness role here; he needs to act like a boy scout but also like a pretty tough and smart agent.  Bale is pretty restrained throughout, it’s like he realized his character was no match for John Dillinger in the eyes of the audience so he never goes out of his way to seem like some sort of badass.  His character is someone who gets results by being smarter, not stronger, than the opposition and he’s not ashamed to ask for help when he realizes he’s outgunned.  But it’s Marion Cottilard who steals the show here.  I couldn’t stand the overbearing work Cottilard won an Oscar for in 2007’s La Vie En Rose, but I absolutely loved her here. Dillinger is a man who could have hooked up with movie stars and singers if he wanted to, but Cottilard’s work makes it abundantly clear why he was taken with this coat check girl.  Cottilard is drop dead gorgeous in the film and sexy but not in a way that makes her look like some sort of fake Maxim model.  She really feels like someone who could verbally go toe to toe with Dillinger and you believe her character when she stays loyal to Dillinger even at personal risk. 

In his last two films Michael Mann had been experimenting with Digital Photography, a decision which didn’t draw a lot of attention firstly because both Collateral and Miami Vice spent most of their running time under cover of night and secondly because they both inhabited very modern settings.  Here however Mann has thrown down the gauntlet and declared a place in the making of large scale period pieces for digital photography.  To shoot with this kind of digital camera is basically the 21^st Century equivalent of shooting on grainy 16mm film stock, it lacks a certain glowing beauty but in turn it gains a certain documentary-style immediacy.  One thing I like about digital photography is that it really seems to see the world the way the human eye does rather than the way movies try to make the world look.  We’re so used to seeing the thirties through orange color filters at magic hour that to see it in this raw form seems kind of jarring.  Basically it’s the exact opposite of what Sam Mendes did with Road to Perdition, but I’d say it’s a reasonable tradeoff.  After all, how many gangster movies that look like The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential do we need?  Because Mann chose to shoot with such a modern and reality tinged medium you really feel like you’re in the same room with John Dillinger, you feel like you’re watching gangland shootouts that were caught on tape and put on Youtube in full 1080p.

Speaking of the shootouts, the action scenes in this film are numerous and awesome. These robberies, escapes, shootouts, and car chases are smoothly shot and kinetic.  The action is fast paced and immediate like a Bourne film, but they also lack a lot of the more aggressive techniques that have turned some of the people off to that series.  In that sense this is sort of the best of both worlds, it’s intense but I doubt the choreography will confuse anyone.  Particularly strong is the sound design.  Like the shootout in Heat, all the gunshots here are exceptionally loud and realistic which is invaluable in adding to the intensity of the gunplay.  I do not for the life of me know why other directors don’t use Michael Mann’s sound library when putting together their shootouts.  Highlights include a tense prison escape that opens the film, a massive shootout in a Wisconsin woods that ends brilliantly, a couple of great bank robberies, a tense cat and mouse scene in a dark hotel room, but best of all is Dillinger’s famous wood gun escape in which he fleas a heavily guarded prison without firing a shot.  Those simply seeking summer thrills will be just as happy with this movie as those interested in the life of the famous outlaw. 

There are a handful of problems to be found: some of the supporting performances are a little weak, there’s a really bad scene in which Dillinger does something really cocky for no reason (I thought for sure it would end up being a dream sequence or something but it wasn’t), and a there are a couple plot points that never really come to fruition.  But the movie’s real sin is just that it isn’t a masterpiece, and that’s what some people demand whenever a great director and cast try to make a crime movie, but that’s a bit short sighted.  There are a lot of critics who seem to be holding this to a much higher standard than they should and rejecting it just because it isn’t the best movie this genre has ever seen.  That’s a bunch of hogwash; this is better than any Hollywood movie I’ve seen in the last seven months and it should be celebrated for that, not punished for daring to have a good pedigree while not quite being Oscar worthy.  This is an excellently executed and very entertaining movie I recommend to anyone without hesitation.  If you skip this movie to see a two hour toy commercial or something this weekend you should be ashamed.

***1/2 out of four

            My relationship with Hollywood comedy has been shaky at best for the longest time.  I’ve long been at odds with public opinion about 70s and 80s comedy “classics” like Caddyshack, Airplane, and Animal House, which all seemed like half-assed unfunny messes to me; and it wasn’t just those three movies either.  I was about ready to dismiss film as a strong medium for comedy in favor of standup and television… then a man named Judd Apatow came along.  It was with Judd Apatow produced films like The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad that I finally began to laugh at movie theaters again.  And it didn’t stop at Mr. Apatow’s work either, a lot of other comedic talents were given the freedom to follow his example and put out like minded films.  This seemed to reach its peak last year with the release of such films as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, Zach and Miri Make a Porno, and to some extents Tropic Thunder which all seemed to be inspired by this wave to some extent.  But after all that… I was beginning to think I’d finally had my fill of comedies where people curse a lot and talk bluntly about sex.  I skipped a few of these movies like Role Models just because I was getting sick of the formula.  Hopefully I’ve had a long enough rest because it appears that the 2009 wave of these movies is being kicked off by the new Seth Rogen vehicle Observe and Report.

            The film centers on Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen), a mall security guard with delusions of grandeur.  Barnhardt takes his job very seriously and views himself as a real officer of the peace.  These delusions are only enhanced by the emergence of a flasher (Randy Gambill) who’s been… flashing… in the mall parking lot.  Ronnie views this as a call for him to step up and right a wrong in this world, his reaction to this minor sex-offense is disproportionately violent.  Ronnie begins a stalker-ish fixation with one of the flasher’s “victims” (Anna Ferris) for whom Ronnie believes he has a particular responsibility to protect.  It soon becomes apparent that Ronnie is not just a mildly delusional loser, but an increasingly dangerous sociopath; he’s been prescribed to take anti-psychotic drugs and he has a rather twisted (but not incestuous) relationship with his mother (who he still lives with). 

            In case you haven’t noticed, this comedy has a very dark streak to it.  In fact this is probably the first comedy ever made to claim Martin Scorsese’s blood soaked masterpiece Taxi Driver as a primary influence, unless you mistakenly categorize Scorsese’s own very good but decidedly un-funny film The King of Comedy as an actual comedy (which it isn’t in spite of the title).  In fact the parallels between this and Taxi Driver frequently move beyond conceptual inspiration to the point of being an outright parody.  Anna Ferris is in the Cybill Shepherd role, A coffee shop clerk named Nell (Collette Wolfe) is in the Jodie Foster role, her boss (Patton Oswalt) is in the Harvey Keitel role, the movie’s ending is clearly in the same fantasy territory as the final scenes of Scorsese’s film and there’s even a voice-over double take clearly inspired by De Niro’s “listen you fuckers” monologue.   The idea of turning this material into a broad comedy is inspired, but the idea is easier said than done and without expert execution this movie was doomed. 

Sadly, I’m not sure that director Jody Hill was really quite up to the challenge of bringing his inspired vision to the screen.  Hill rose to relative prominence on the strength of his debut film The Foot-Fist Way, a micro budget production that gained a distribution deal after it impressed Will Ferrell and Adam Mckay.  I was not as impressed by that movie as that pair of comedic all-stars, but I did see a lot of potential in its star Danny McBride (who has a very small cameo in Observe).  I was even more impressed by McBride and Hill’s HBO series “Eastbound and Down,” but again I was more convinced of McBride’s talent than Hill’s mastery of comedic structure by that project. 

Finally after seeing this project I think that maybe Hill should stick to writing at this stage, because this movie falls prey to some very inconstant tone that may have been acceptable in another film but which torpedoes the meticulous balancing act this film absolutely needed.  The key decision that Hill fails to clearly make is whether the film conveys the perspective of an omniscient observer or whether it’s showing what’s in the head of its disturbed protagonist.  If it’s from an omniscient perspective then why are there so many bizarre occurrences?  Why is Ronnie able to fight so effectively?  And why are his actions placed on a pedestal at certain points?  But if it’s from Ronnie’s perspective why does he still seem like a buffoon for much of the film’s running time?  Why do we still hear people mock him behind his back?  The answer is that the film wants to have its cake and eat it too.  If the movie began to be told entirely from Ronnie’s it would have stopped being funny fast, because Ronnie doesn’t see himself as funny.  As such the film never really commits to one side or the other in its flawed third act. 

            This is a real shame because in spite of the film can’t commit to a tone, Seth Rogen unquestionably commits to his role and gives what is easily the best performance of his career.  Rogen is hardly the lovable loser here that he is in films like Knocked Up, he’s certainly a loser but he’s hardly lovable.  Subverting your normal persona like that is hardly easy, just ask Jim Carrey how well The Cable Guy turned out, but Rogen clearly understands exactly what this film is supposed to be and delivers what’s needed.  Reportedly Rogen agreed to star in the film under the sole condition that the studio not screw with the darkness of Hill’s vision.  I was beginning to worry about Rogen before this, but now I really think he’s going to have a very long and successful career, he seems to be challenging himself and picking interesting roles rather than coasting on his reputation.    

            I wish I could say as much for the rest of the cast, but I think a lot of the supporting performances are a bit inconsistent.  This is actually the first film I’ve seen Anna Ferris in, she was all right but I can’t say I really see what the fuss is about.  Ray Liotta seems to be capitalizing on his usual barking persona, but I’m not sure he does enough to differentiate himself from his straight performances; the jokes seem to be missing whenever he’s on screen.  Aziz Ansari gives his all but is limited by dialogue that feels a bit like recycled “fuck you” humor from other Apatow-esque films. Finally, there’s Michael Peña, whose character would probably feel more at home in a Will Ferrell movie than in a dark comedy about a sociopath. 

            The movie really does have a pretty decent supply of laughs, and if that’s all you need this movie probably is recommendable (assuming the dark tone is right for you).  However, I really can’t help being pretty damn disappointed by the whole affair.  The concept and performance of a brilliant movie are here and it’s just undermined by some shaky direction the whole way, I just don’t think Jody Hill had the chops to pull this off.  I think that in the hads of someone like Terry Zwigoff, Spike Jonze, or David Gordon Green (who lends his usual cinematographer to the project) this could have been brilliant, but without directorial genius to match the genius of its concept I think the film falls apart.

**1/2 out of four

                I’ve been a huge fan of the James Bond franchise for at least a decade, and my fanatical love for the series will probably show itself in this review.  Bond is one of the few things that I can be a little fanboyish about, but don’t worry, you probably won’t see this side of me again, at least not until Watchmen comes out.  The coming of a new Bond movie is always something I look forward to with excitement, but I’ve had a bad feeling about this one for a while.  The main concern I had about the project was the decision to hire Marc Forster to direct.  Forster is one of my least favorite directors working today, his film’s tend to get bogged down in whimsy and he’s the biggest Academy Award panderer this side of Edward Zwick.  The guy is basically a poor man’s Ron Howard, who in turn is a poor man’s Robert Zemeckis, who is himself a poor man’s Steven Spielberg.

            Another cause for alarm was that this would be a direct sequel to Casino Royale, an unprecedented move for the series.  There was a little bit of continuity in some of the early Bond films, mainly revolving around the villain Blofeld, but for the most part they remained self contained stories.  What’s more, I had a lot of mixed feeling about Casino Royale to begin with.  I was all for making Bond a darker character, and I liked what Daniel Craig in the role, but I was not at all enthusiastic about the notion of “rebooting” the whole series and making Bond a young agent who just now achieved his 00 status.    It turns out; all of my concerns were completely valid.  The newest Bond film, Quantum of Solace, is a mess.

            The film picks up moments after Casino Royale’s coda.  Bond has the man he captured at the end of that film in the trunk of his car, and he’s headed for a safe house.  An ensuing car chase acts as the film’s underwhelming pre-credit sequence.  The title sequence is not too bad, it has a nice desert theme and the song is all right.  Soon thereafter, it’s revealed that the man Bond had captured was part of a SPECTRE-like evil organization called Quantum.  Bond’s mission is to investigate this organization.  His investigation will lead him to Haiti and Bolivia, where he will track down another of Quantum’s operatives named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who is working with the CIA on a mysterious evil deed.

            Few, if any, of the Bond movies are truly great; in fact they are only great insomuch as they are part of a greater whole.  Every Bond movie is part of a forty year cinematic tradition, and that’s why we’re still interested in these otherwise kind of marginal action movies.  Casino Royale, striped away a whole lot of what we go to Bond movies to see, but it got away with it because of some clever screenwriting.  Most of the mission elements were addressed in that film, but in self aware ways, for example: Bond never ordered a martini “shaken not stirred” in the film, but he did order a number of other drinks that got closer and closer to the famous drink.  In other words, he got closer and closer to being the Bond we all know and love by the end of the film, and by the end he was pretty much the Bond we all know and love.  It was a very self contained character arc, one that was finished.

            Quantum of Solace would have been an excellent opportunity to simply take this fully formed Bond, and put him into a traditionally structured James Bond adventure, but the writers are under the mistaken impression that Casino Royale didn’t finish his arc.  The film plays out like the second half of Casino Royale, which is straight up revisionist history.  Casino Royale was based on a self contained Ian Fleming which more or less ended exactly where the film ended. 

            The story here is simply a mess. Casino Royale benefitted immensely from the aforementioned Ian Fleming I was based on, that story helped ground that movie and kept it down to earth, it’s an element in that film’s success which is frequently overlooked.  Quantum of Solace is not based on a novel by Ian Fleming, or anyone else.  It’s based on a half-assed story the writing team probably though up in a week and never refined.  The film’s plot is very hard to follow, which would be all right if this were some kind of elaborate yarn, but it isn’t.  In fact, if the story were told properly it would be rather simple, that’s the film’s worst sin; it’s confusing rather than complicated and the root cause of this is poor storytelling.  This is the same problem that sunk the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, and it may be for the same reason: they’re trying to make up a direct sequel to a movie that wasn’t really planned out as a multi-part story but which did have a cliff hanger of sorts.

            An unwelcomed addition to the film’s storyline is a political subplot about the CIA playing along with the villains in order to secure Bolivian oil.  The intelligence community working with unsavory elements is probably an unfortunate reality in the world, but there’s really no place for this material in a James Bond movie.  Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with political statements in film when it’s appropriate, if this were something like Syriana or The Constant Gardener it wouldn’t be a problem.  The thing is: this isn’t Syriana, in fact it isn’t even Body of Lies, it’s a James Bond movie.  The setting for this movie doesn’t even begin to resemble the real world, there’s a SPECRE like organization behind everything and there are action scenes so unrealistic it would make Arnold Schwarzenegger blush.  No one is going to take the politics in a movie like this seriously and most of the arguments don’t really stand up to scrutiny anyway, the politics frankly just seems like a distraction to hide the film’s ongoing story problems.

            I maybe could have let the story telling off the hook if I thought the action sequences really delivered, but they don’t.  Many have complained of the film’s use of a Greengrass-esque camera and editing style.  I’m usually a defender of this style of filmmaking, but in this case they’re right.  The think about the “shaky cam” is one has to know when it is appropriate to use the technique and when it isn’t.  In the case of the Bourne series it is appropriate because those are movies about a man who’s constantly confused about his situation, he has no memory and very little control of what’s going on around him.  James Bond may have the same initials as Bourne, but as spies they couldn’t be more different.  Bond is never confused about his situation, in fact his complete control over everything that goes on around him is a big part of what makes him Bond.  As such the “shaky cam” is completely inappropriate.  What’s more the technique  really needs to be done just right or it won’t work at all, in the hands of someone who’s honed the style like Paul Greengrass it can work perfectly, but in the hands of someone like Marc Forster, who’s never made an action movie before, it will fall flat.  The style here has been blatantly ripped off from the Bourne franchise, it feels like a derivative imitation of the real thing.

            I would have been more forgiving of the style if the scenes themselves had been a little more inspired, unfortunately, even without the ripped off style most of these scenes were fairly cookie cutter.  There’s a pretty standard car chase, a middling boat chase, a particularly bad airplane scene.  The final action scene is helped by the fact that it’s at least an interesting location that they are exploding, aside from that the only creative action scene is a foot chase early on which ends with some interesting rope acrobatics, but the aforementioned editing style is particularly badly done in that scene.

            I might, just might, have been a little more forgiving of all that if the film had only stuck to the traditions of the James Bond franchise.  I can forgive a whole lot in this series if only because they are continuing a film tradition.  When Casino Royale ignored a lot of the traditions it opened it up to a much higher standard then the rest of the films in the series, but it delivered the quality required by this new standard.  Quantum of Solace doesn’t.  The film is a mess, it’s a poor film in its own rights and to make matters worse it pisses on a film tradition that is important to millions of fans. 

            So, what do I want out of the next Bond film?  Well, what the producers need to do is need to make sure they only make changes to the formula that need to be changed rather then change things just for the sake of change.  To steal a phrase from Barrack Obama, they need to examine the series with a scalpel rather than a hatchet.  For example, they were right to de-emphasize gadgets, they were becoming ridiculous and were often used as a crutch by the writers, but did they need to eliminate Q division altogether?  I don’t think so.  What was the point of moving the gun barrel from the beginning to the end?  There was no reason, they just pissed off bond fans for no reason with that move.  IT was right to go for a darker, more down to earth James Bond, that doesn’t mean turning him into a moody robot.  Bond is a character who’s really a brawler but who wears a suit and a smirk in order to infiltrate classy locations. Also don’t assume Daniel Craig gold out of bad material, if you don’t give him meaty scripts he’s not going to be all that different from Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton.  I put up with this rebooting silliness when it delivered Casino Royale, but this garbage will not do. I want James Bond back, the real James Bond, not this imposter.

*1/2 out of four

            If there’s ever been a genre that critics have (rightfully) had no interest in praising, it’s the stoner comedy.  Most of the films in that genre are incredibly lowbrow works, often madcap in nature, that have no interest in entertaining anyone outside of a selected niche.  I am about as far from that niche as anyone can get, I’ve never been one to “party” and have little in common with the Cheeches and Kumars of the world.  The genre’s low level of esteem made it all the more curious when I learned that David Gordon Green, a director known for dead serious films like Snow Angels, was making a stoner comedy with Seth Rogen.  Seth Rogen and producer Judd Apatow have yet to disappoint me (though the fact that I haven’t seen Drillbit Taylor helps their track record), and David Gordon Green is a true artist.  With all that talent behind the project it was enough to overcome my trepidation about the film’s genre and give the movie a shot, and I’m glad I did because this is yet another quality comedy from team Apatow.

            The film follows Dale Denton (Seth Rogen), a twenty-something process server who spends most of his free time getting stoned out of his mind.  On a break from serving people subpoenas Dale goes to his dealer Saul Silver (James Franco), who’s even more of a stoner type than Dale.  Saul introduces Dale to Pineapple Express, a new strain of weed that Saul describes as “the dopest dope I’ve ever smoked.”  Dale is impressed by this new pot and buys some before leaving to serve another subpoena, this time to someone named Ted Jones (Gary Cole), a name Saul recognizes as that of the local drug distribution lord.  Dale arrives at Ted’s house only to find himself the witness to the brutal murder through the window of his car.  In a rush to escape Dale drops one of the Pineapple Express blunts he just bought on the ground and drives off.  Realizing that Ted could track that dropped blunt back to Saul, Dale and Saul decided to go on the run to escape Ted’s wrath.

            Pineapple Express differs from the stoner comedy in a number of ways.  Most stoner comedies have a very clear focus in their jokes about the sheer quantity of marijuana the characters smoke, there’s none of that here.  In fact there’s not really that much onscreen smoking here after the first act, just a certain knowledge that the characters are acting under the influence through much of the film’s duration.  There are also no hallucinatory images illustrated here, while there are certainly unrealistic elements (and a strange prologue), these are all more a matter of comedic anarchy than drug induced hallucinations.  Here the drugs aren’t really the source of the humor, rather it is the stupid behavior caused by the drugs that are the film’s main joke.  In the long run the stoner categorization is a red herring, the film’s humor has more in common with Judd Apatow’s other slacker comedies like Knocked Up, except that reefer is a bit more emphasized as the source of said slackerdom.

            It’s not just the stoner comedy genre that this film differentiates itself from, it’s far more ambitious technically than 90% of studio comedies.  The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that there’s no need to put serious talent behind comedies because the jokes and the actors should be able to shoulder the film.  This is an understandable position given the horrible results that often face huge budget comedies like Evan Almighty, and with people like Kevin Smith able to bring the laughs on a shoestring there seems to be little need to put real money into this kind of movie, as a result studio comedies tend to be directed by solid but anonymous directors like Adam McKay and Nicholas Stoller. 

Pineapple Express is by no means a large budget production, but it’s not a thrown together affair either, mainly because David Gordon Green is no Adam McKay.  Green is a director who has established major indie credibility with subtle lyrical films like George Washington and All the Real Girls, his work is characterized by long lingering takes and a down to earth connection with working class characters.  This is his mainstream premiere, and he wisely avoids a lot of the slow lyricism which would have been completely out of place in a movie like this, but he has kept his astute visual eye and technical craft.  He and his longtime cinematographer Tim Orr seem to be taking this production just as seriously as they took Snow Angels.  The looser feel of this movie has more in common with Green’s less famous 2004 film Undertow than it does with All the Real Girls, but unlike that 2004 film which never seemed sure what it wanted to be, this is a very focused affair; it wants to make the audience laugh while also telling a coherent story.

Seth Rogen is on autopilot here, but that’s not really a bad thing, I like his shtick and it works for his character here.  He’s really playing a straight man of sorts to James Franco’s character who’s the biggest slacker yet to grace a Judd Apatow movie.  Franco’s character sports very long unkempt hair and a t-shirt with a cat in a shark’s mouth.  I might be so bold as to call this the best stoner on film since Jeff Bridges immortal performance as The Dude in the Coen brothers opus The Big Lebowski.  The duo has a definite chemistry with Saul representing a more traditional stoner and Dale being closer to the kind of relatively functioning stoner of other Apatow productions.   I can’t say the supporting cast is as good as the core duo, Gary Cole and Rosie Perez both work well enough as villains, but neither are particularly memorable.  Also present are a pair of henchmen played by Craig Robinson and Kevin Corrigan who were decent, but again not particularly memorable.  There is however a great pair of small roles for Ed Begley Jr. and Nora Dunn that provide some of the film’s best laughs.

Another major aspect of the film is the way it mixes the stoner comedy genre with some chaotic action scenes.  The action scenes share a certain affinity with last year’s Hot Fuzz, except they are not being done to parody Hollywood action films; they’re there more out of a certain comedic anarchy, to put these hugely unambitious stoners into extreme situations.  There’s also a real danger to the violence here, people do die in the movie and the main characters shoot to kill when they’re placed in danger toward the end.  Unfortunately there are mixed results in the violence department here.  There’s a spectacular comedic car chase midway through with James Franco getting his foot caught in the windshield of a cop car.  The films finale on the other hand, while good, simply goes on way too long.

It’s obvious that David Gordon Green’s goal going in was to work on a mainstream field without sacrificing his independent standards of quality and to make the ultimate stoner comedy in the process.  On the first count he succeeded, his style has been altered appropriately to work for the film he’s making, but Hollywood hasn’t forced him to compromise.  He also just might have succeeded at making the ultimate stoner comedy as well were it not for the existence of The Big Lebowski.  In final analysis, this is an Apatow film with a much heavier hitter behind the camera, if Superbad and Knocked Up rocked your world the way it rocked mine you’ll have a whole lot of fun with this.

***1/2 out of four

            Like many people, I found myself digging Anime in the late 90s.  This unique form of mostly adult oriented animation from Japan was like something I hadn’t seen before.  However, anime has recently gone on the back burner for me and many others, and for mostly good reason.  Unlike other types of foreign film, distributors tended not to filter what anime content found its way stateside.  Essentially, every anime program that specialty distributors could get their hands on found their way onto store shelves, and as such it became increasingly hard to separate the cream from the milk.  Of course some quality anime programs, like the works of Hayao Miyazaki, were able to find an audience; but for the most part anime programs tend to look like a whole lot of the same.  Luckily other solid anime works do tend to emerge, and Paprika is one such quality work.

            Paprika’s title comes not from that delicious spice, but from the name of one of the characters.  The film’s sci-fi story is set in a future in which there is a new invention called a DC Mini exists.  This invention allows people to view other people’s dreams to explore their sub conscious thoughts.  Before the invention is ready for mass production, one is stolen and used to enter people’s dreams without their permission.  At the center of it all seems to be an elucive dream figure going by the name Paprika.

            That plot may sound complicated, but in reality the film’s plot is significantly more confusing and impenetrable than that highly simplified summery would have you believe.  However, this confusion is rarely frustrating, after a little while I found myself deciding to just sit back and enjoy the ride.  Furthermore, I got the general idea that this story would be able to stand up to further study if it were watched by someone more inclined to fully comprehend it than I was.

            Part of why I eventually abandoned the film’s story line was that I was too intrigued by the film’s visual style to focus my attention on the complicated storyline.  Technically, the animation here is nothing special.  The movement here isn’t nearly as fluid as it is in something like Spirited Away, and computer generated elements are added in a rather awkward fashion.  What’s really appealing about the animation here is its artistic design.  There are some really cool images and moments throughout the film.  The film allows characters to enter dreams, and this setting gives Satoshi Kon a seemingly limitless environment to bring creative elements to the screen. 

            Because of the dream sequences, many would compare this to the work of David Lynch.  However, I think it has more in common with the work of David Cronenberg.  The film has a very Cronenbergian view of sexuality; there are sexual images here that don’t necessarily show sex.  For example there is one part where a man feels up a woman in a dream and his hand seems to sink into the flesh of her breast.  The film also has a few moments that could be called body horror, like when the side of one character’s body transforms into some kind of tentacles.  The movie doesn’t dwell on this sort of material, but it is their and its one of the film’s most compelling aspects. 

            It’s a shame that quality anime like this doesn’t really get the kind of recognition it deserves, or a wide theatrical release.  This is a very creative, very interesting movie, definitely worth a look for adventurous film goers.

***1/2 out of four