In the heat of the night

It's going to be 105 or something degrees today here in Portland. No air conditioning.

People told me that when I moved to Portland, I would grow weary of the cold rain and the clouds. This has not happened.

End of Days

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Lakeview Terrace

When I saw the trailer for Stealth in 2005, I was absolutely delighted. From this preview, it looked to be a perfectly silly B-movie of the highest order. The premise, the characters, and their attitudes just screamed a goofy good time, no more so than when Jessica Biel, after seeing the new AI-controlled super-plane, says, "What are they going to replace us with a bunch of machines?" Throw in the old "lightning strike turns robot into a self-aware killing machine" plot and I'm already giggling. There's something about a ridiculous, high-concept premise like this played seriously that promises a logically challenged, but internally consistent work. Something that feels like it may have been produced by computers trying to approximate human art.

I never saw the movie. At the time I wasn't seeing many movies, but I was also protecting myself. If Stealth had been anything but a cracking, silly ride, made competently but ignorantly, it would have crushed me.

The Trailer in Question


But wait! Here comes Lakeview Terrace, a film that, from the trailer, looks to be as goofily serious as Stealth. The premise is high-concept, thin, and ridiculous, but the execution looks completely earnest. And among the plot mechanics, there seems to be something going on about wildfires that inspires actual interest.

Lakeview Terrace


I probably won't see this movie either. I've already seen both of them in my mind. They're both directed by John Carpenter, and they both make me happy on cold, rainy days.

The Pineapple Express

The Pineapple Express is a mid-80s buddy action film as filtered through a haze of pot smoke. The characters are stoners, but after one of them witnesses a brutal murder, they're forced to run for their lives. As they evade the bad guys and the law, they bicker and fight, but eventually become good buds, ready to take on the local drug kingpin in defense of each other. It's not even remotely believable to watch these two go from pothead to action hero, and, were the film a better concoction, I might not have a problem with this. But the movie wants to have it both ways, wants to convince me of the characters' incompetence and then show them blasting away with automatic weapons, emerging victorious in fisticuffs, and etc.. The tone of this thing is so off-kilter; it wants laughs from looney tunes violence and sentiment from honest pain. Other films have succeeded in walking this line between comedy and tragedy--Midnight Run and Hot Fuzz spring to mind--but this one fails miserably. It's such a delicate balance between the two, that it's hard to know where Pineapple fails. But fail it does and it squanders a lot of good will along the way.

It certainly is funny, particularly during the first two-thirds of the film. Watching the two knuckleheads escape from harrowing situations while stoned provides more than one belly laugh. Facing certain-death situations, they come up with far-fetched, logic-free plans to save themselves and then execute these ridiculous solutions with the complete and utter conviction of children. Giving these two so much to do is helpful; the movie mostly avoids the lazy, counterculture insularity that pervades other drug-celebration films (though an opening prologue featuring army experiments with marijuana feels like it's playing directly to those "legalize it" people in the audience, the ones who would tell you the many uses of hemp if you gave them a chance). As they run from one high-stakes situation to the next, it's hard to avoid developing a great deal of affection for these two losers, particularly James Franco's Saul. Franco's performance is a delight. He's got it down pat--the leap from one random idea to the next, the continual need for approval, the "I love you, man" smile. As the straighter man in the duo, Seth Rogen is competent and funny, though his work here feels rather one-note. This may be why the relationship between the two never quite gels; they're clearly having fun, but when the movie asks them to be upset with one another, it's as unconvincing as their marksmanship. To be fair, I think the script has failed the moment more than the acting. They've just evaded death and serious injury in gunfights, fist-fights, high-speed chases, and more, all while completely stoned, and Rogen's character has the gall to shout at Franco, "We don't function well when we're high." Dude, lighten up. If anything you're doing better.

Of course, the character has a reason to be so sour at the moment--his girlfriend's just broken up with him--but, here and in the whole film, there's no connective tissue from one moment to the next. So, while some scenes are funny and work by themselves, the film doesn't work as an entire piece. But, the film is undisciplined and sloppy anyway. Scenes habitually go on far longer than they need to and outwear their welcome. While these scenes play on, you can imagine everyone cracking up on set or in the editing room, but on screen the rhythm is off (probably due to the previous scene going on and on). It sometimes veers into the pathetic "anything-for-a-laugh" mentality that so alienated me from Walk Hard. And, I especially grew tired of the way it relied on overdubbing a funny quip from Rogen over wide shots or cut-aways. All this is ignoring the action set-piece that ends the film, a sequence that goes on for (it must be) 500 years, drains away everything that was funny or endearing about the two leads, and seems to want to both lampoon and be a genuine entry in the buddy action genre. Again, this can work (and again, Hot Fuzz springs to mind), but here it falls flat. Mostly, I just didn't believe the film. It hadn't convinced me that the villains were genuinely threatening or that there were any real stakes in this sequence. It's like watching someone else play a video game, and a not very good one at that.

There are bright spots to be found--Kevin Corrigan should be showered with candies and treasure for his turn as a domesticated henchman. Whenever he was onscreen, I wished the film was about him--and there are some very, very funny high-points, but The Pineapple Express is clunky, disappointing. Translating the tropes of an action film to a couple of pot-addled protagonists seems like a great idea--what do action heroes do, but follow their gut with the conviction of children?--but it misfires. Its failure reminded me of the success of The Big Lebowski, a film that translated the tropes of the hard-boiled mystery novel to a similarly drug-addled protagonist. When The Dude recounts the Raymond Chandler-esque events of the film to the two squares in the back of the limo, it's hilarious and almost a welcome critique of the crazy, unmanageable plots of these mystery stories. You try to explain The Big Sleep to someone who hasn't seen it and see if you sound any more sober. I think a similar sort of transcendence could be found by having two completely stoned action buddies fighting in an action movie plot, but it's not here. The climax of The Pineapple Express is a huge explosion when it should have been a bong hit.

Would be a good double feature with: The Big Lebowski

The Ruins

I find most modern American horror films to be dispiriting rather than frightening, and while watching The Ruins, I had an epiphany. At its core, the genre has always had a close relationship with fairy tales, and in this way, it's always been moralistic, wagging its finger at the arrogance of those who would dare cross societal boundaries. Of course, the subject of its moralizing is ever-changing with the times--horror films of the 30s had, among other things, a fascinating ethnocentric dread (beware the swarthy Romanians!), the horror of the 80s punished those who indulged in the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll lifestyle of the 60s (ladies, stay chaste!), and so on. In The Ruins, the decision to explore the ancient culture of Mexico, rather than remain shallow, uncultured tourists at a beach resort, is the decision that dooms its college kids. By itself, this is an anti-intellectual message (another staple attitude of the genre), but pair it with other recent films like Hostel where characters are punished for their exploitation of foreigners by remaining shallow, uncultured tourists, and you have the beginnings of what seems to be the modern horror movie's message: Don't do anything at all. Stay where you are.

Give it credit, even while indulging this sort of xenophobic terror, The Ruins manages to make flowers kind-of scary. Not "I'll never feel safe at the florist's again!" scary, but, at least, "Hey, Main Character, look out behind you, there're flowers there!" scary. The Ruins is about a group of college kids who, while vacationing in Mexico, take a trip to an ancient Mayan pyramid that lies unexplored and uncharted. It's not, we're told, on any maps, so the knowledge of its existence is passed along like a bootleg concert recording, with rudimentary maps passed down to the curious from insiders. When the youngsters get there, they're forced to the top of the pyramid by some gun-toting Mayans who then set up camp at the pyramid's base, killing all who come back down. Thus trapped and with no cell phone signal (this lack of a cell phone signal has become as trite as the invader cutting the phone lines... can we find something else to do with cell phones, please?), the collegiates must fend for their survival, find water and food, and wait for rescue. Meanwhile, the local foliage seems to be trying to eat them.

These carnivorous plants are, by far, the best part of the film. The flowering vines delight in blood, and they move, indifferent and innocuous, toward each freshly-spilled pool. Their casual, reliable reaction to the suffering of the humans is (I'd wager) intentionally funny; the film is aware of the silliness of a group of vines slithering toward a freshly severed limb, so what could have been a laughable attempt to scare instead becomes darkly comic and even endearing. Goofier still is the narrative invention that the flowers of these vines have gained the ability to mimic the sounds around them, but this too emerges as more creepshow fun than implausible stupidity. The reveal of this trait happens in a nifty bit of sound design--each flower, by itself, seems to sound off just a fragment of the noise being mimicked, so, the full sound is achieved when all the flowers noise in unison. It's not all laughs, though; they're creepy little creepers. They're ubiquitious and unceasing. After spending a night on the pyramid, one of the college kids wakes up to find that some of the vines have crept upon her overnight and inserted their stalks into some recently-sustained wounds. Worse, the plants are thriving, reproducing within her bloodstream itself. The inexorable threat of the plants is about the only thing that pops up above an otherwise formulaic survival horror story. It's certainly a much better eco-threat than the one in The Happening, anyway.

Nevertheless, the film is suffused with the sense that nothing matters, that the characters have no agency. Each idea they employ to deal with their predicament is about equal in terms of whether or not it's a good or bad idea, and the success or failure of their ideas seems entirely up to the dictates of chance or, as it were, the screenwriter. In this case, the screenwriter is a punishing fellow, and none of their ideas have any degree of success (up until the last one), and so the movie just hops from one kind of hopelessness to another. There's no sense of building action or increasing horror, just a steady drone of people screaming as each fresh, random horror is visited upon them. This is getting increasingly typical--The Strangers, for all its craft, had the same problem--and it's why the net effect of modern horror films seems to be saying, "Give up. Stop trying. Whatever you do, it's going to result in the same thing." That there is, eventually, a plan that works seems as much an accident as anything else in the film (it's also a betrayal of what we've been told about the Mayan force at the base of the pyramid), and, so, The Ruins falls flat on even providing a catharsis.

What we're left with is another film that sees the very act of doing things and going about your business as a punishable act of hubris. Rather than being frightening, these films just leave me numb--as in the rancid, unforgivable ending of The Mist, the twists of fate are often as absurd as an old Warner Brothers Cartoon. Characters are punished not for any transgressions, but for lacking omniscience. They turn left instead of right and, so, get eaten by goblins. Someone bites into a cracker and an anvil falls on their foot. If only they'd have known! Bad, arbitrary things happen to people all the time, it's true, but most modern horror films seem to be content to simply state this and then nod knowingly. "Whaddya gonna do?" they say, shrugging. They don't provide us with stakes through the heart or "shoot them in the head!" There's nothing to be done. The bad guys are out there, and they will get us no matter who we are or what we might learn. In a world in which the earth that once nourished us turns noxious and the government unapologetically tortures in our name, it's pointless--these films show us--to do anything. The Ruins and its ilk offer us a justification for surrender to the perils of living, a way to excuse one's apathy in the face of violation. Ok, now I'm scared.

The future is here.

http://www.neave.com/television/

This is how we have all begun to watch. Death to videodrome. Long live the new flesh.

In Bruges

It's been nearly 14 years since Pulp Fiction re-popularized and re-mythologized the hitman for its generation, and through this time, cinema has seen more than its share of men (and sometimes, rarely, women) executing people for money.  Anyone who was paying attention to such things can remember the tiring glut of mostly abhorrent, jokey crime dramas that followed in Pulp's wake, so much so that it often seemed that the film's legacy would be the forever tied to these lesser pictures.  And, of course, in many ways that's true.  To this day, Pulp Fiction represents a change in filmic paradigm, but it paved the way for both its lesser imitators as well as those that exceeded it in quality.  Without it, it's hard to imagine No Country for Old Men winning its well-deserved Best Picture Oscar, and it's even harder to imagine the existence of In Bruges, a wonderful film that unearths a surprising amount of truth and humanity from this genre (and should maybe win a statue of its own).  With a similar cynical, but humane tone that vacillates from wrenching drama to high comedy, it's a perfect counterpoint to Tarantino's opus: the crime film in thoughtful mid-life crisis compared to Pulp Fiction's adolescent swagger.  

 

In Bruges has a sickly, diseased charm.  The experience of watching it is not unlike those times when you lie awake, unable to sleep, contemplating all the harm you've done other people, and feeling oppressed by the associated guilt (the film may lose those who don't experience such moments in their lives, but I contend that they're worse off).  In such dark, personal moments, one might be tempted to abandon everything by hopping on the next train out of town or even committing suicide, and this film looks those temptations square in the face and examines them through the good-natured, but confused lens of the following morning.  All of its characters harbor life-draining, bottled-up secrets and regrets, but they get through their days with a dose of old-fashioned cynicsm, physical exertion, and mind-altering substances.  It focuses on two hitmen who are holing up, on instruction from their boss, in the small Belgian town of Bruges after the younger of the two (Colin Farrell) botched a hit.  They're instructed to lie low and wait for instructions.  The older hit man (a scream-to-the-rafters good Brendan Gleeson) is delighted to take the opportunity to sight-see, and he drags the indignant Ferrall to a variety of the town's historic destinations.  During these excursions, the father-son dynamic between the two men is perfectly played; Ferrall comes off as a pouty, incurious teen, more interested in drinking and hitting up the local women than Gleeson.  The older hit man clearly understands where the younger man is coming from, but, feeling his years, is nevertheless interested in matters of a religious and historic nature and wishes to impart his young companion with the important lessons these things provide.  

 

This good-natured, but contentious relationship between the two men is established efficiently by the actors and the script, and, by itself, it's a marvel.  They're so good, you could watch Gleeson and Farrell chat and bicker their way while grocery shopping for two hours and never feel less than entertained.  But part of the thrill of the movie is in how writer-director Martin McDonagh pushes this relationship to the breaking point.  Farrell is torn by guilt, suicidal even, and desperately wants help or advice from Gleeson, but the older man has no answers for him.  Gleeson carries his own pain around with him, but years have calloused him to the emotional complexities of his life as a hit man.  And while Gleeson tries to convince Ferrall to stay alive while they wait for further instructions, it's suddenly clear that In Bruges is using its hitmen to tackle an exploration of the very meaning of life itself, using their high-stakes, hard-lived lives to ponder the question--to be, or not to be?  And while, like Hamlet, In Bruges doesn't come up with a definitive answer that we can all take home and apply to ourselves, it, like Hamlet, shows us how that it's hard, but worthwhile and important to arrive at an answer.

 

But, lest it seem that the movie is a moody, muddy work of tears and ruminations, it should be noted that In Bruges is a hysterically funny film.  McDonagh has written some clever, rancid dialogue for his sleazy characters.  From Ferrall's scathing condemnation of American tourists to the racist drivel spewed by a coked-up little person, the film pulls no punches.  At times it seems like the movie's about to go off into shock-for-shock's sake offensive humor, but it's much more clever than that.  Unlike, say, the worst episodes of South Park, the script holds the characters responsible for the inevitable consequences of their attitudes, and the bigger laughs in the film come from showing the ignorance behind their offensive gibberish.    But, even better, is the funniness of the McDonagh's plotting.  There's a perfect, dark joke somewhere in the middle that also serves as a plot point, a botched suicide attempt that forces both men to confront a new wrinkle in their relationship and their own respective attitudes toward their lives and their work (I would love to go on about this moment, but I wouldn't dream of giving it away to anyone, not now, not 100 years from now, and, so, I remain coy).  It's a moment of absolute genius, as confounding and contradictory (and thereby hilarious) as life itself. 

 

If In Bruges has a flaw, it's only in its immaculate structure.  The drama is nice, tidy, and economical, and, while these are all good things, it may be a bit too tidy, too pat.  As the film nears its conclusion, it gathers up all of its loose threads and begins to tie them off, weaving all of them into the final beats of the story.  It does this marvelously--everything that has happened in the film has some effect on the ending--but the machinery behind the scenes does start to groan and strain a bit to fit everything into the final location and the pacing slows as McDonagh moves all of his pieces to the appropriate positions on the board before kicking-off the finale.  It's interesting, though, that the plot of In Bruges is so tidy, while the emotional and philosphical ramifications for its characters are not.  With its fractured narrative, spontaneous digressions, but tidy morality, exactly the opposite is true of Pulp Fiction, and this, to me, is a clue as to why I prefer one or the other depending on how I spent the previous night

Would be a good double feature with: Pulp Fiction   

Robo-NO

Rumblings of a Robocop remake/sequel/whatever have been flitting about for a while now, and despite Darren Aronofsky's attachment, the whole thing makes me sour. Complaining about remake-itis and sequel-itis is common practice these days amongst film folk such as myself, but, as I have such strong personal feelings about the original Robocop, this one pains me on a gut level. Anyway, I guess it's moving forward as stated here at the Hollywood Reporter. Jerks.

Briefly Noted: Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs

Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs is good, funny stuff for about 45 minutes, and then it sags under the weight of its plot. There are some key problems like the fact that a lot of the jokes feel like recycled business from previous episodes and there's not a very clearly defined "A" story, but its biggest problem lies in the pacing. This 90 minute movie has the feel of TV act breaks running through it, and the repetition of climactic builds (that would precede a commercial break were this a string of 30 minute episodes) soon wears the viewer out. As a fan of the show and these characters, I can't help but enjoy the extra life this property has gotten through these direct-to-DVD movies, but I hope that the next one shows a little more understanding of the unique demands of feature-length storytelling.

It is a sign

RING THE BELLS! WARN THE MAYOR! PROTECT MCCLANAHAN AT ALL COSTS!

THE TIME IS UPON US! GOD HELP US ALL!

FROM THIS MOMENT ON, NO ONE WILL SHOOT IF YOU DON'T STOP!

ESTELLE GETTY IS DEAD!

ESTELLE GETTY IS DEAD!


ESTELLE GETTY IS DEAD!


ESTELLE GETTY IS DEAD!


ESTELLE GETTY IS DEAD!

The Dark Knight

Batman Begins, the reboot of the Batman franchise that precedes The Dark Knight, was a novel take on the whole Batman mythos. It spent most of its running time justifying the wackiness of a dude putting on a costume and fighting crime in real-world terms. It was also the first Batman movie that (finally) correctly identified that Batman does, in fact, have a super power, after all--he's rich. Playing with themes of noblesse oblige and grounding the action in the landscape of an urban crime drama, it found a new, welcome spin on the character and justified its re-telling of the Batman origin story. It also barreled past a perfect ending about an hour or so into the film and went on and on through some ho-hum plot about supervillains poisoning the water supply or something. Now, on the heels of that film's success and amidst a huge cultural footprint comes The Dark Knight, a film even more overstuffed and overplotted than its predecessor. It goes even further in the attempt to remove Batman from the arch, exaggerated comic book universe and place him in the middle of a modern American city, and also outwears its welcome by going on far longer than its plot deserves. The film is two and a half hours of superbly produced scenes of dour, sweaty machismo, but features little-to-no dramatic tension for most of this time. It's weird, because the script has the air of a well-structured and nuanced procedural with motifs and themes that bounce off of one another, reflecting the ultimate larger purpose of the film, and the chief villain is a wondrous, relevant rendition of modern day anxieties. But the film is, ultimately, a dreary experience puffed up with unearned self-importance, and, while there's a lot of chaotic movement and things blow up real good, it's monotonous. Everything is always happening at the same level; each scene and each gesture is as grand as the last one. As a result, The Dark Knight congeals into a puddle of pretty goodness, its ambitions encased in the ceaseless drone of the execution.

That said, it's still often a mesmerizing film. When it's working and everything is clicking (which is about half of the time), it's a magnificent crime drama about a desperate, rotting city. A large part of this success is due to Heath Ledger's Joker. The late actor's performance is crazy-good or good-crazy; like Johnny Depp in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, his performance elevates the entire film. As written, this Joker is an anarchic terrorist, a self-described agent of chaos (...calling Maxwell Smart...). He may have a purpose, but whatever it is, his methods eclipse his politics and render them irrelevant. It's a perfect villain for the times, an exaggerated version of America's terrorist bogeymen whose methods and beliefs can seem so utterly foreign and impenetrable. Ledger's clearly having a good time with this; he employs a bunch of crazy tics and grimaces, and intones most of his lines with a chilling deadpan. A less capable actor would have gone too crazy, but Ledger imbues the craziness of the character with a palpable sense of masochism and self-loathing. It's soon clear that Batman's use of force and technology is no match for the sheer psychological guile that this villain possesses. All of this informs the best scene in the film (and Ledger's in most of the movie's best scenes), an interrogation scene where Batman is free to pummel and torture the Joker, but finds himself powerless nonetheless. It's the first and only time in any Batman film that the villain and the hero seem completely equal, flip sides of the same coin, and the only moment in this film that truly embraces the scarred, freakshow nature of its characters.

What a shame, then, that Ledger's buried amidst the movie's rambling, listless plot. The movie has a lot going on, enough to fill a few episodes of a weekly TV series, but it doesn't find any traction until around the halfway mark, when things begin to get a bit personal for the characters. As mentioned, it's all very smartly written with its themes of scarring and despair and loss and so-forth. And I liked the way it cared enough about characters on the periphery to give them their own mini-stories within the main plot, but a lot of the film's subplots don't work and just wind up as padding to the runtime. Early in the film, Batman goes to Hong Kong to capture a money launderer, but the whole thing just rings of a pretty diversion, an excuse to shoot some cool exteriors and throw in some exposition about a pivotal piece of technology. And, for all of the work the screenwriters did to foreshadow the eventual corruption of Aaron Eckhart's District Attorney, Harvey Dent, his transformation is rushed and sloppy. This is doubly disappointing because Eckhart is also crazy-good in his role, but he's hampered in his most interesting moments by a makeup job that looks like it belongs in the Halloween display at Spencer's gifts. There are buried hints of greatness in the script, but the movie spreads itself too thin and the plot becomes so convoluted that it distorts anything resembling a coherent or intelligible or relatable story.

The most troubling aspect of the film is its use of Batman himself. For one thing, someone chose to give this hero an unintentionally hilarious vocal effect, like someone accidentally pressed a reverb button on the sound board when mixing in his dialogue. His unnaturally deep and echoy vocal presence is just silly. He sounds like an incompetent lead singer of a Goth band who covers up the inadequacies of his voice with audio effects. This would be easily overlooked but for the fact that Batman is quite chatty in the film--he seems ready to invite characters over for tea at times. Anyway, Christian Bale isn't exactly the most commanding of presences here, and his life as Bruce Wayne is all but ignored in favor of the corruption of Eckhart and the Joker's preening. Batman is forced to make several choices throughout the film, choices with dire consequences for his character, but it makes no difference, no impact because it's not clear who Batman is anymore. Frankly, the character seems to be about as confused and random in his own morality as the Joker. He sees killing as the ultimate taboo, the one thing he won't do, but when he's perfectly content to smack people around, violate civil rights, and wantonly destroy property with barely a second thought, it just comes off as an arbitrary rule. The movie tries to exploit this by having the Joker force Batman to confront the futility of ideals in the rotting, festering world of Gotham City, but, while the confrontation is fun, the filmmakers do very little with it. They basically turn Batman into a square, like Kevin Costner's boy scout Elliot Ness from The Untouchables, lamenting his impotence under the threat of the sexier bad boy. But, really, the character is just ignored. You could quite easily remove Batman from this movie completely and have a much tighter and probably better film about a valiant District Attorney facing the perilous evil in himself while trying to stop a sadistic madman. This is bad news for a film that ends with Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon monologuing about Batman's mythic importance to Gotham City.

But, look, all of this complaining about the shortcomings of The Dark Knight is really a bit of scolding. The movie isn't bad, really, just disappointing. I find myself wanting to wag my finger at it to set it on the right path. There's quite a bit of good, grim fun in the film, and while the overbearing sameness of the execution is wearying, the film is nevertheless commanding. If you're willing to ignore the awfulness of the film's climactic showdown which features Batman utilizing a really stupid-looking (and, after a time, unnecessary) SONAR technology to fight the Joker and a drama on two cruise ships that plays out like the worst disaster movie from the 70s ever made, the film moves from scene to scene with an appealing confidence, indifferent to the muddled script. It's easy to get swept away by its briskness. The cinematography and the use of Chicago locations are grand; Gotham is not a cartoon here, but a stand-in for all modern urbanity. It renders the despair and hopelessness that marks city life rather beautifully, though it, of course, ignores any positive aspects of living there... you know, things like a symphony or good bookstores. It's frustrating because, with all of its strengths, the film has assembled many of the right ingredients, but just drops them into a pile onscreen. Despite the magnificent, handsome production and Heath Ledger's classic performance, the movie only works in fits and starts. Besides, there's a limit, I think, to how much real-world verisimilitude you can employ in a film about Batman before the arch, crazed nature of its main character starts to feel out of place, and the movie pushes right past it to the point that the whole thing unravels, becoming nearly as absurd and cheesy as the 60s TV series.

Would be a good double feature with: Thief

Forget it, It's Chinatown

Nothing this week. Can't be helped. Dry your eyes.

Hancock

Hancock is a surprising film. For one thing, I was surprised that Jason Bateman, usually a master of smarm and weaselly tics, was able to portray a kind-hearted, genuine good guy with such conviction. Here, he uses his formidable skill at comedic deadpan to deepen Ray, a sweet, gentle boy scout of a Public Relations man. The strength of the film’s action scenes was also quite disarming. Though director Peter Berg’s fidgety, shaky camera often confused the action or diluted the drama, the images in the film had a real weight to them, particularly when contrasted with the murky fuzz of other computer generated spectacles. During a pivotal bank robbery sequence, I felt like I was a child watching a Superman movie for the first time, such was the wonder and excitement wrought by the filmmaking. Mostly, though, I was surprised by the fact that, in a film like this, I actually found myself in uncharted territory. Something of a twist occurs late in the film, and I realized that I had no idea where the movie was headed. Because Hancock is so narrow in scope—it’s really a three-character drama masquerading as a superhero film—the consequences for this reveal felt important, meaningful. It’s quite a wondrous thing in this day and age of cookie-cutter fairy tales to feel a genuine sense of curiosity during a mainstream action vehicle. So, while it fizzles out quite a bit in its final sequences, Hancock is a taut, cheeky superhero film that manages to be both a solid comic book story and a funny lampoon on the whole genre.

The title character, a dissolute superman named John Hancock, belongs to a long line of insufferable, cranky, and lonely men in American movies. Usually, these men reform once they find the love of a good woman, like Bogart in The African Queen. Here, though, it’s Bateman as the naïve, optimistic Ray who provides the unconditional love and support for the aching, angry Hancock. Ray is impossibly sweet; his job involves asking corporations to give away life-saving drugs and food free of charge to those who need help. He’s laughed out of the boardrooms, but maintains his plucky spirit--you almost expect him to exclaim, "Gee Whiz!" at some point. One day, Hancock saves Ray from getting crushed by a train, but causes a massive derailment in the process. Angry onlookers, furious at the superman for destroying everything in his path, unleash a tirade of vitriol at the bumbling Hancock, but Ray, grateful and needing a ride, invites him to dinner. From there, the two develop a shaky relationship, as Ray, over the objections of his skeptical wife (Charlize Theron) begins using his PR skills to help Hancock become a proper superhero.

Along with Iron Man, this is the second movie of the year about a superheroic lout who eventually finds redemption, but Hancock’s approach to its character is much more satisfying. Will Smith’s John Hancock is an abusive, self-absorbed drunk of the highest order. He's indifferent to the suffering of mere mortals and fights crime, it would seem, out of a mixture of boredom and obligation more than concern for the public welfare. His disregard for the law, property values, or the safety of the general public as he swoops in to save the day is fun to watch, particularly in Smith’s able hands. Going all the way back to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Smith has often played the part of a charismatic outsider, struggling to keep up with the arbitrary rules of a strange, foreign world, and the same is true in Hancock. When he’s coached by Ray to make a landing without destroying the city streets or to tell the police at a crime scene that they’re doing a good job, Smith’s confusion is funny and understandable. His powers render him immortal and above the rule of law, so why should he care?

Funny too is the way the film takes seriously the swath of destruction that follows superheroes. Usually it's a throwaway joke at best--an action scene concludes with a car's hubcaps falling off, for instance, or a family of four looking around at the remnants of their formally happy and intact home. In Hancock, the consequences of this destruction are the very point of the film, and have a bit of political bite to them, similar to something from Team America. The movie's character is a heroic power that's above the law, that stumbles into a situation trying to do good but makes a mess out of things, that arrogantly insists people love it despite this tendency. It should sound familiar. Oh, also, his symbol is an eagle. Got it now?

While Hancock is a smart, assured film, it's also a fidgety experience. The director, Peter Berg, also directed last year's The Kingdom, and this movie suffers greatly from some of the unearned sentiment that plagued that film. Berg's got a fine command of staging action scenes and gets great performances out of his actors, but, too often, he tries to orchestrate sympathy using overlong montages scored with mournful music. It's a cheap trick, but where one of these montages may have worked, there's a few in the film. They all begin to stack up and feel redundant. More problematic is the last act of the film. After the fun, nearly incomprehensible twist, Hancock is bogged down with too many explanations, too much dramatic stillness. The pace sputters to a halt as everyone--the audience and the characters onscreen--have to be told this or that or the other thing about things that happened long ago and far away. A key relationship between two characters is the basis for the entire climax of the film, but it isn't developed near enough to work, so the film (almost literally) limps to its conclusion.

Still. In a world choking with a glut of formulaic superhero films, Hancock is refreshing. It fizzles out after a 3rd act twist, but, for most of its running time, it’s a breeze of a film. It’s mercifully short at 90 minutes and manages to do much more with its running time than most movies of this sort do with almost twice as much. But, really, it's all about that bank robbery scene. When the reformed Hancock flies in to the rescue, it's a powerful moment that revitalizes the whole genre. He's not just saving the hostages in the bank, he's also saving himself from a lifetime of arrogance and unintended consequences. Speaking as an American myself, it's somewhat inspiring.

Would Make a Good Double Feature with: Mystery Men

A bit of good news

I have been chosen to be an entertainment blogger for the website for a(some) TV station(s) in North Carolina. Starting with this week's review of Wall-E, my work is being republished at this site:

http://www.news14.com

Today the Wall-E review is on the front page under "features".

Wall-E

While Wall-E is a feast for the eyes and ears, it's, first and foremost, a treat of good, old-fashioned filmmaking. If you see it in the theater, you will undoubtedly be bombarded with previews for other 3D computer-animated films featuring animals that scream, jump about, and act as obnoxious as the four-year-old sitting next to you. Though they leave me with the impression of having lukewarm high-fructose corn syrup drizzled onto my head, I know that these films have their place and provide some measure of enjoyment for undiscerning children and obnoxious adults (I, myself, was quite fond of the wretched Transformers: the Movie at a young age and am glad to say I grew out of it). Everything in these trailers is played big and loud--all the better to milk laughs from the audience--so, it's doubly refreshing when the feature attraction begins and nobody talks for a long, long time. Wall-E develops its story and characters with a minimum of dialogue, relying, instead, on the much more satisfying (and hundreds of years old) convention of editing meaningful bits of visual information together and letting the audience fit the puzzle pieces together.

Whenever I see a film use these tried-and-true cinematic conventions (usually it's when watching a well-made silent film, but there are other modern examples), I feel as if my brain is being flossed of the detritus of more pandering, shallow entertainments found on TV and in the multiplex. It's no different here; the opening passages of Wall-E are delightful for the elegant and earnest way they ladle out the exposition for the the titular main character and the world he inhabits. Wall-E is set in a distant future where the Earth has become a giant landfill, uninhabitable due to the heaps and heaps of garbage wrought by human industry. Humanity itself has taken to the stars in a giant spaceship named The Axiom, leaving the Earth to the care of a robotic cleanup crew. Wall-E is the last surviving member of these robots, and, some 700 years after the evacuation, he's still dutifully following his programming. Every day he gathers garbage, compacts it into cubes, and stacks the cubes into giant piles, some as tall as skyscrapers. As he undertakes the Herculean task of cleaning the Earth, it becomes clear that this robot has more to his existence than work. He has a penchant for collecting; while sifting through the garbage, something strikes his fancy--an egg beater, a Rubik's Cube, and, one day, a single stalk of plant life poking through the muck--and he takes it to his home where he places it amongst other treasured possessions. One of these is a VHS tape of an old musical, and, as he watches scenes of romance unfold, it becomes clear that this is one lonely robot. He yearns to dance and hold hands with a paramour of his own. All of this is revealed with an expert eye towards efficiency. The details of the world are tucked into the frame as we watch Wall-E on a day's work, until slowly the entire picture is clear. The animation is gorgeous to look at and evokes such a powerful feeling of loneliness and isolation, that it's almost a bummer when another robot named EVE shows up from outer space.

EVE is a probe, sent to find signs of life. At first she's as oblivious to Wall-E as he is smitten, focusing only on fulfilling her mission. But soon, they meet, strike up a budding romance, and, just as it seems Wall-E may have found a dance partner, they are swept away to the deliriously satiric confines of The Axiom. It's here that the film (inevitably) finds its way to a more conventional, yet incredibly endearing Chaplin-esque story rife with sentiment and good-natured comedy. If the second half of the film doesn't quite live up to the timeless, soulful quality of the opening moments of Wall-E's solitude or his courtship with EVE, it's nevertheless suffused with wit. As Wall-E begins to explore The Axiom, he finds that the humans onboard are entirely dependent on robots. They can't move around without assistance from robotic chairs, feed, much like babies, from cups with giant straws provided for them, and live lives dictated by well-timed advertisements ("Blue is the new Red"). They continuously watch television, and they don't even seem to know where they are or the history of how they got there. It's not so much different than watching people in a shopping mall on a Sunday afternoon. It's not the most brilliant or inventive satire of modern times I've ever seen, but it's certainly funny and has a deafening ring of truth to it. Wall-E, bumbling through this world, brings with him the promise of a real life--a home planet with work and problems and, above all, plants. It isn't long before the captain of the ship, delighted to learn of his history, is up all night asking the computer to tell him everything there is to know about this little planet named Earth. Even hoedowns. This leads to a revolution, of sorts, as passengers aboard The Axiom awaken to a larger purpose and reclaim their dominance over the rigid, unbending automatons that run their lives.

There's an underlying message here, of course, about waste and the ecological responsibility of the common man and moving beyond mere survival to something more fulfilling, but, thankfully, the movie avoids the hypocrisy of having a Disney film hammer home a didactic screed about the horrors of disposable junk. Wall-E is more interested in telling the story it wants to tell, and it does this with a deftness that looks deceptively easy. It's pretty much a perfect film, one that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. It scrapes the surface of greatness at times, but it never quite achieves this. I find this is often the case with films as tightly constructed and written as Wall-E; it's like they're powered by clock springs and, as such, there's delight and surprise and magic, but not enough spontaneity or, if you will, life to them. This is just a quibble, though, and a very minor one at that. This is a wonderful film. It earns its laughter and sentiment through quiet, thoughtful honesty about its characters. You will believe a robot can love.

Would Make a Good Double Feature with: Modern Times

This review can also be viewed at: news14.com

Get Smart

Dear Hollywood types,

I really don’t care if you feel the need to labor over the beginnings of Batman, Spiderman, Superman, Zorro, and all manner of superheroes, turning them into mournful, lonely souls whose isolation and despair lead them to carry out acts of vigilante justice. I’m cool with that. But could you, at least as a favor to those of us who enjoy a good chuckle here and there, refrain from burdening our iconic comedy characters with these troubles? Get Smart, the television show upon which this recent Steve Carell vehicle is based, was never, like, great or anything, but it was, for the most part, a consistently funny little cartoon of a show whose Maxwell Smart was a bumbler due as much to his indifference as his incompetence. He was cocksure, steady, and consistent in the face of all manner of troubles, and it was these qualities that led to some genuinely funny moments. In this film version, you’ve, for reasons I can only guess at, saddled Maxwell Smart with unrequited desires, a desperate longing to become a field agent within the spy agency known as Control, and turned him into a bookish analyst who is, we’re told, out of his depth in the field. So, as this wimpy, nerdy version of Maxwell Smart proves himself worthy of Field Agent status through the plot of this film, you’ve given us, yet again, a fucking origin story.

Now that you’ve shown us where Maxwell Smart comes from, what’s up next, guys? Do we get to suffer through 80 minutes of Groucho Marx’s father abandoning him at an early age, leading him to develop a caustic wit as a defense mechanism against a harsh world that clearly doesn’t want him? How about a Naked Gun prequel that details the young Frank Drebin’s ascent through a hilariously hellish Police Academy (Steve Guttenberg could play the tough, but fair instructor who passes the young Drebin because, while he’s stupid, he’s sure got a lot of heart!)? Or perhaps we get to see a jilted young woman wailing at the altar while her father holds her and says, “I love you, Lucy.” I heartily encourage you all to grow a pair. Plant your fucking feet. Please stop telling us how things came to be, and start telling us what happens after.

I didn’t hate this movie version of Get Smart, though it was all over the place. It had a funny bit here or there (most of them came from the original show, but I won’t blame you for sticking with good material instead of coming up with good, new stuff. That’s hard!) The action climax of this film was genuinely involving. It was well-done, the stakes made sense, and it had an exciting, even funny, kinetic energy that propelled it forward to a logical, again, funny, conclusion (I will note that it was way too loud; the blaring of the obnoxious score nearly ruined it). I really enjoyed Anne Hathaway’s performance. I thought she showed very well-attuned comic timing in her role as the straight woman to Smart’s bumbling and that she and Steve Carell had a very nice rapport. This, no doubt, led to my finding the climax being as involving as it was, despite the fact that, for most of the film, I was disappointed that the jokes were so stale and (since the comedy wasn’t working) the narrative was so pat. Good job guys!

But, I mean, come on. We’re here for the yuk-yuks, and most of your jokes seem like bits that didn’t make the cut from either Austin Powers or The Naked Gun movies. The Get Smart television show has a pretty clear ancestral relationship to both of these franchises, so setting the bar as low as you do and branding it with the legacy of motherfucking Buck Henry feels, not only pathetic, but somewhat malevolent. There’s a moment where Terrence Stamp as the ultra bad guy, tries to blackmail the United States for 200 billion dollars and, despite the fact that the moment is played entirely straight, you could pretty much feel everyone in the theater sharing a chuckle about Dr. Evil’s one millllllion dollars. Did you not care? Are you just tone-deaf? And what’s with the fact that your movie had absolutely zero target for satire? You weren’t lampooning anything, and, in fact, had some weird, almost didactic moments kind-of shoveled in there about understanding that our enemies are human and that being the key to success in war or something. But you didn’t think to, like, ever show the opposite view and how it’s doomed to (maybe, fingers-crossed, if you could be bothered, hilarious) failure? And, forgive me if I'm overstepping here, but why on Earth would you seriously try to play any of this film straight?

Look, I get it. We’re living in the Judd Apatow universe now, the one where it says that comedies require some underlying dramatic tension and honest character work. And this is something I, generally, agree with. There should be, at the very least, a certain amount of "dramatic relief" to the comedies you’re creating. And I’ll give you credit that you didn’t show a teary-eyed Maxwell Smart realizing what a boob he’d been and vowing to change or grow up or whatever, since it’s common for these modern comedies to mistake such unbearable treacle for conflict and resolution. But I also firmly believe that the drama should be absolutely entwined with the comedy you’re making. If you’re working in a two dimensional space, as the character of Maxwell Smart most certainly is, your drama must exist in that same space. Otherwise, you’ve made the mistake of trying to turn a cartoon into a real boy. I submit that you leave that nonsense to the Blue Fairy, and, next time, take aim at something--anything!--before you fire.

Yours,
David Wester

p.s. YOU MISSED IT BY SOOOO MUCH! AH HAHAHAHAHAHA HA HA HA HA!

Long Live Stan Winston

Just adding my voice to the fray. I can't even remember when I became familiar with his name, but his creature creations had a heavy influence on significant portions of my childhood and adolescence. Terminator, Aliens, and Edward Scissorhands would not have been the life-shaping experiences they were without his work. Hell, I even have a soft spot for his directorial effort Pumpkinhead and that beast from The Relic. Hearing that he'd passed was a gut-punch. It's incredibly odd to be affected by the death of someone you've only known through their work, who you would most likely never have known or met or interacted with in any meaningful way. It rings with a slight embarrassment, like remembering when you were a teenager and locked yourself away and cut yourself because The Beatles were breaking up, or something. And yet, the sadness remains, along with the knowledge that any chance you might have had to know, meet, or interact with this person whose work touched you and whose thoughts and insights might have taught great lessons is gone forever.

Thanks for the monsters.

The Happening

From the moment Bruce Willis realized that he was dead in The Sixth Sense, most of M. Night Shyamalan's films have featured a rejection of an understandable, rational universe for a mysterious, magical one. In fact, Shyamalan's films seem anchored to this notion that there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies. Thus far, he has not done much more with this notion but craft increasingly desperate cinematic pleas that we all share this viewpoint with him. His last film was Lady in the Water, and its ludicrous, unbearable fairy-tale plot demanded an entire apartment community believe in pixies or whatever so that a writer could write a book that would singlehandedly make the world a better place (we'll generously ignore the fact that this writer was played by M. Night himself to avoid labored armchair psychoanalysis). While this theme in Shyamalan's films has only worked for me once before (with Mel Gibson's spiritual re-awakening in Signs), these filmed pleas (even the wretched Lady in the Water) have been at the very least compelling, if not ultimately convincing. And so arrives, The Happening, a film where Shyamalan (inadvertantly, I'd wager) points in the opposite direction; the plot awkwardly takes the magical and renders it rational. Poorly.

About halfway through this terrible movie, I gave up. I stayed to watch the rest of the film, if only to witness the disaster, but struggled to keep from shouting obscenities while the movie's idiocy drove me bats. At this point in the film, the main characters, supposedly intelligent adults, tried to outrun a gust of wind. This cannot be repeated enough. In The Happening, a group of people attempt to outrun the wind. And, from all cues, the movie thinks that such a thing might be possible and that, indeed, an audience would be willing to root for its heroes to defy reality in such a way. It was here I realized that I could no longer keep a list of the film's shortcomings in my head. The Happening bested me. I would love to type out a laundry list of this film's failures, pointing out what's wrong scene by scene and cackle with schadenfreude the whole while. Alas, the movie short-circuited my brain with so much mind-boggling awfulness, that I can only shake my head in awe. So, from here, let's all just take it for granted that the plotting, dialogue, acting, and pacing are pretty atrocious for a mainstream release like The Happening, and everyone involved is or will be smarting from a collective spanking delivered by hundreds of thousands of millions of people once they see this movie.

The Happening opens with a bunch of people in Northeastern America mysteriously killing themselves en masse. Though it is marked by the awkward staging and weird, bad acting that permeate the entire film, this is the only moment that actually connects. Images of a group of construction workers plummeting from the top of a construction site or a group of people in Central Park suddenly frozen in place deliver a momentary shudder. However, once the film cuts to Mark Wahlberg as a New York City science teacher, it's game over, man. Here, it becomes clear that the film is going to have something to do with science, but, as written, Shyamalan's conception of science is as confused as a young child's notions of what sex is all about. Wahlberg, in class, asks his disinterested students for theories on why bees are disappearing and when one of them ventures, "It's a natural phenomenon. We'll never understand it," this shaper of young minds replies, "That's right." He actually then goes on to state the creationist code phrase that scientific explanations for natural phenomenon are "just theories," and babbles about forces beyond our understanding. It's not that any of this is objectively false or that I necessarily disagree with it on a philosophical level or that I care what these fictional kids are taught in their fictional science classes. It's that it indicates that the writer-director of the film has no clue what the hell he is talking about. Scientific theories are more than "just theories," and anyone with a modicum of knowledge about science, much less an instructor, will bristle at such a blithe dismissal of the collected, ever-growing understanding of the natural world that science represents. Unless, of course, the Shaymalan twist (unseen in the film) is that Wahlberg is an Intelligent Design proponent, a fact that would make more sense of the character's idiocy and emotional immaturity.

What gets me the most, though, is the amazing, scary paternalistic world the characters inhabit. With strange frequency, Shyamalan points the camera at Wahlberg or John Leguizamo as the deadly happenings continue to befall the group of survivors that they've fallen in with. The two men grunt and sway under the pressure as every person in the group looks to them for leadership or guidance, despite the fact that they've done nothing notable to deserve such reverence. One scene, in particular, is crazily bad about this. As several people start dying, Wahlberg is struggling in his foolish quest to (hilariously) use the scientific method to determine the best course of action. The other people in his group who wish to help the affected, scream, "Tell us what to do!" or something like that and also, "People are dying!" at Wahlberg as he remains frozen in indecision. One wonders why these people don't just, you know, do something themselves if they're so invested? There's an assumption behind this, that large problems must be placed onto the shoulders of heroic martyrs. This sort-of thinking made some sense with Mel Gibson's ex-priest in Signs, not least because he was the oldest person around with children to care for, but here it's just nonsensical to watch men and women, presumably no less special than Wahlberg, look to him as if he is some sort of wizard.

All this has wasted too many words on the film. The crux of The Happening is that the plants of the world are suffering due to humanity's rape of the environment, and they've rapidly evolved the ability to make people kill themselves in order to repel this encroaching threat. Fine. While it's best, perhaps, if fantasists like Shyamalan and Roland Emmerich abstain from trying to teach ecological lessons, I'm not opposed to the concept in theory. However, you can call me misanthropic, but I need a reason to think that saving humanity, or at least the characters I'm watching, is a good idea. Judging solely from the whiny, idiotic people that populate this film, I'm content to set down the weed whacker and let the plants take over. At least they don't make movies like this one.

What's Happening?

So, uh... if you're curious about The Happening, just know that it is pretty rotten. At its core. It is rancid. It is poison. Save yourself. Run away from all the wind.

Full review on Sunday.

Jumper

Jumper is the kind of movie that plays much better on video than it ever would in a theater. It's a modest, relatively unpretentious (as far as these things go) science fiction action film, and, with the lower expectations, distractions, and confines that come with home viewing, it achieves a half-shrug of success. Its primary virtue is one of scale; that is, Jumper focuses on one character and keeps its stakes tied directly to its protaganist. At no point in the film is the fate of the entire world in peril--indeed, Jumper refreshingly attributes such "savior of humanity" thinking to its villains--nor does the film's conflict gain resolution via a punching match between two superdudes who differ only in the color of their underoos. So, while the movie's storyline is formulaic (boy becomes man through understanding superpowers? REALLY?) and the acting is shallow at best, I was pleased that this film knew exactly what it was about and scaled its running time to an appropriate 90 minutes. That's backhanded praise, to be sure, but it's a relief to see a film of this nature that is as light on its feet as Jumper.

Not that the film is all that great. The main character, played by Hayden Christensen (he doesn't ruin the movie), has the ability to open wormholes (or whatever), allowing him to jump to any location he wishes. He discovers this super power as a teenager and uses it to flee from his abusive home in a small town to the big city. Once free, he learns how to control his jumping and robs a bank by jumping into the vault, setting himself up (financially, at least) for life. The character lives an easy life, jumping around the world to exotic locales while scoring with the local women and supplementing his income with further robberies. Even though he ignores whatever impulse he might have to use this power for selfless acts, it's clear he's the hero as he's guilt-laden enough to leave IOUs at the scene of the crime, and, you know, the casual sex is made acceptable by showing it as joyless. He's still pining for the girl from high school that he left behind. These are easy, pat answers to making this criminal philanderer an engaging hero, and I wished that the film had embraced the protaganist's hedonism in a more honest, delighted way. It's not as if audiences won't embrace a pleasure-seeking antihero who learns hard lessons (oh, hello Iron Man). The longing for the high school sweetheart, in particular, set my teeth a-grinding, since this fellow has gone all around the world but still can't see what a dullard she is. Love is oblivious, I guess, but dramatic action shouldn't be.

A bigger problem with the film are the villains. Represented by an unsurprising, growling Samuel L. Jackson, they call themselves "Paladins" and, for reasons that are never compellingly explicated, they track and kill jumpers like Christensen. The reasoning, it would seem, is that they believe all Jumpers will go bad, and human beings are not socially or morally equipped to handle the responsibility of this great power. This is a nice flip-flop of the usual comic book movie paradigm (the usual film would have featured the Paladin tracking the Jumper) but not much is done with it. Jackson screams, "There are consequences to your actions!" at Christensen in one scene, but, really, what consequences he's talking about aren't explicated at all. It sounds like he's talking about more than just the victims of a bank robbery, but whatever it is, the movie's too coy to tell. This coyness about the mythology of the movie's superhumans (and the normies who chase them) runs throughout, and it's both a boon and a weakness by the end. It's all intriguing enough at first, but after a while, with no answers, it just makes everyone seem as if they're jumping around and shouting at each other for no reason.

Still, if you're willing to overlook these (glaring, I'll admit) flaws, Jumper has some charm. As mentioned, it's well-paced, moving efficiently through its plot, never lingering too long on the angst of its characters. Furthermore, I confess, I found the "Jumping" visual and sound effects to be endlessly delightful; they're simple and elegant, moving the jumping characters out of the visual space with a minimum of bombast, but with plenty of real-world kick to them--the world around the transporting character reacts to the disruption. I've grown so sick of arbitrary, loud effects that defy any semblence of real-world viability, that these well-considered treatments of the magical elements of the movie's premise were nearly enough to win me over single-handedly. And, truth be told, there's a fun fight and chase between two superdudes about 2/3 of the way through. Christensen and another jumper hop from place to place, hurtle objects from one space into another, and lead the other into spacetime-related traps. It's inventive and comes to a satisfying conclusion, the stakes are clear and personal, and the editing and staging are top-notch.

Around the time of this chase, I realized that I was enjoying Jumper the same way I enjoy certain B-movies from the past. I took the stilted acting and obvious plotting as a given; it's clear enough early on that there will be no relief from these things, after all. But for all its problems, there's an honest-to-God beating heart behind this movie and, even with all the sci-fi hokum, it's plainly presented with a minimum of show-off artistry. All of these observations are, of course, born of the lazy eye with which I watched the film. But if ever a movie was made to satisfy the viewer while watching TBS on a rainy Sunday afternoon, it's Jumper. Take that how you will.