Bernie

Bernie

I quite honestly didn't know that this was based on a true story until the very end of the film.

Ok, now that that's out of the way, I want to talk about this film from a few different angles.

1.) Performances.

I don't know if I can adequately express how nice it was to see Jack Black actually acting. As in doing honest-to-God character work. Like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey before him, Mr. Black seems to have realized that he can only push his particular brand of schitck so far and the time has come to grow as a performer or get out.

We see in the end credits a brief mute clip of Black meeting with the real Bernie in prison and it's pretty clear that the characterization we see on screen is rooted in the real life energy and mannerisms of Mr. Tiede.

This isn't Mr. Black's first attempt to stretch his range, but the less said about Peter Jackson's wank-fest "King Kong" the better. Put Black into a role where he has to be conniving or rebellious, and all the old patterns and tricks come to play. By embodying someone the opposite of his regular persona, someone who up until the turning point of the film is accommodating, giving, meek, and quietly gifted, the actor was forced to truly do the work of an actor instead of being a Personality.

Shirley MacLaine's role is actually much smaller than I expected, but she manages to be much fairer to Marjorie Nugent than even her own nephew was in his story for the New York Times Magazine. MacLaine shows Nugent to be, yes, bitter, cruel, controlling, and harsh... but she also lets us see the fear, the gratitude, and the self-awareness of exactly how unlovable she is.

I knew someone like this many years ago. She was convinced that she could not be loved, and she worked diligently to prove that she was right. This isn't my opinion, but her own confession. The real life Bernie saw that pain and thought he could help, but no one person can meet such a savage and cruel inner darkness. I tried, and eventually got out with a shattered sense of self-worth and several years of depression. Bernie didn't, and utterly snapped.

Ok, I've moved afield from talking about performances and have moved to the meat of the film. This is a movie about someone who murdered an 81 year old woman. That sentence should tell you who the villain is, right? But the story of Bernie Tiede is not so simple. This is the story of a model citizen who tried to help someone who everyone else in the town has written off as being purely evil, and eventually snapped under the pressure.

But even that betrays. Not everyone in the town though that Bernie should get off, or get a reduced sentence, despite how the film portrays the town's mood. Nugent was not utterly unloved, as can be attested by her surviving friends (although she was estranged from her family to the point of lawsuits). Tiede has admitted that the lure of the first class lifestyle was a factor in him staying in the abusive relationship, but also said that fears of her retaliatory vengeance also kept him from leaving. Tiede himself was a victim of sexual abuse and continual bullying as a child.

Ultimately, Bernie the movie tips the already heavily weighted scales towards sympathy for the killer and away from the victim. A slightly more balanced approach might have served it better. Having even two or three people other than the D.A. expressing a desire to see Bernie rot in prison for what he did would have made for a more compelling and interesting film. As it is, the total absence of that perspective throws a pall of suspicion on the film's veracity. In was only in digging further into the case did I discover that the film was actually extremely accurate, if slightly imbalanced. It's such a minor thing, but given how rightfully suspicious audiences have learned to be about "ripped from the headlines" films, this small adjustment could have done wonders to boost the film's credibility.

All that said, is it a good film? Yes, I think so. It got my wife and I extremely curious about the real life case of Bernie Tiede and Marjorie Nugent, curious enough to look up news articles and essays by her family. It got us talking about the legal system, and the appropriateness of punishment. (We both agreed that Tiede should have gone to prison, but that the sentence, Life with no chance for parole for 30 years (50 in the film), was excessive)

It's not an edge of your seat film, it's not a shocking expose. It's a quiet film about complicated morality that hopefully gets the audience thinking about the many shades of grey involved when action/circumstance/and motivation collide. It's a "comedy" mostly in that the director chose to keep things brightly lit, and to let the small town residents speak their own often flippant minds on the subject. It's a comedy because the situation has marks of the absurd about it. It's a comedy because the director didn't work hard to fill it with threatening music and dramatic lighting. It's not a comedy because it's particularly funny.

And nor should it be.

(The Mystery of) Rampo

I don't think I am this film's target audience. I've never read any of the works of the real Rampo, so I am sure I am missing some fanboy joy over references, characters, scenarios and themes. That said, I found Rampo to be interesting, but not entirely engaging, and ultimately not super enjoyable.

The film is visually sumptuous, but also rather incoherent. It's as if someone gave a first year film student and a huge budget. There's some anime, some newsreel footage, some pseudo-30's pulp adventure, some erotic thriller, some 60's adventure with mediocre green screen, and some highly questionable negative and color work. It's all very evocative and moody, but I couldn't stop wondering if I was missing some cultural information that gave it meaning.

Story-wise... well, this isn't really a film with a story. Famous author discovers that his stories are coming true is the elevator pitch, but the film doesn't seem terribly interested in exploring the existential issues that concept raises. It's actually handled rather clumsily, with Rampo's assistant out and out telling him "hey, your stories are so powerful, they are coming true. You should deal with that."

The redeeming aspect of this is that there is a periodic narrator, clearly intended to be that or Rampo, commenting on the actions and experiences of the film version of Rampo and the doubly fictional Rampo stand in. Thus, the entire film excuses itself from any attempt to restrict it to things like logic or realism. The film is not about a real author discovering that his fictional works are becoming real, but a film about an invisible author and his own obsession with his work and his fictional world. Of course, the fact that Rampo died in the mid 60's makes this a bit less poignant. So, really it's about a fan of Rampo's pretending to be an his literary idol and role playing that idol's presumed obsession with ... well, you get the idea.

This gets me back to my initial impression. This is the work of a fan-boy, first-year film student with a large budget... and as a cursory online check indicates, it is the directoral debut of an established producer.

This doesn't change the fact that this was a smash hit in Japan when it came out. Not a mild success... a HUGE hit.

I think that ultimately, American audiences (such as myself) are lacking some important cultural context. Audiences that grew up reading Rampo's stories and watching Japanese television and film are seeing something here that I'm simply not.

Men in Black 3

Let's go back in time for a moment. Shortly after Men in Black 2 was announced, I knew I had the perfect plot outline. A vicious alien breaks out of prison and comes to Earth to murder the man who put him away: Agent K. Agent J needs to save K, but since K doesn't know that he was ever an Agent, J has to do it without K knowing.

Then Men in Black 2 came out... and it was a tired retread of all the fun moments of the first film, run relentlessly into the ground.

So, when Men in Black 3 came out, I wasn't too excited. I heard it was better than 2 (but then, it'd kind of have to be), but I still wasn't straining at the bit to see it.

Well, I finally did... and it's the movie I was hoping to see all those years ago. A vicious alien breaks out of jail and is after the man who put him there, and K has to save him despite the fact that K doesn't know who he is and has no memory of everything they've done together... because it hasn't happened yet. Ok, I didn't think of the time travel aspect of it.

This film gets everything right. We have just enough connections to the first film for it to feel tied into the franchise. We have the walk through the lobby, the interrogation of the unwilling alien, the worms do something funny, famous people are aliens, and we even get a brief callback to Frank the talking Pug. But the movie isn't about those things, and it doesn't dwell on them. This isn't a retread of MIB greatest hits.

What this movie is about is interconnectedness. Interconnectedness between events, certainly... but mostly about interconnectedness between people. It's really about friendship. This gets a little ham-fisted at moments, such as when J is about to do the time jump and Jeffrey says "You must really love this guy." Yeah, that might be true, but it also might be about the giant fucking alien jellyfish that are eating the city. So, yeah, a little much at times.

But for every time the film tries to club you over the head, there are a dozen wonderful moments. The time jump itself is surprisingly awesome. If he had simply fallen back in time, it would have been cool, but the idea that the works more like a bungie jump... that you go WAY back and then drop off at the designated recoil point... back and then forward to your destination— that's just brilliant. The butterflies released in the Factory as Griffin talks about the near infinite possibilities was a lovely way to bring in chaos theory.

Really, everything involving Griffin made me happy. He could have simply been a plot device, pushing the Agents into making the right decisions, or a theme device to talk about the potential in each moment, but Michael Stuhlbarg's performance made him a character I wanted to see more of. Griffin is the last of his kind, and there is sadness there, but there is also a sweetness and a generousness of spirit to the character that is has been missing from the franchise.

It isn't just Griffin though. Will Smith brings some real love to Agent J, with him seeming close to tears at multiple points near the end of the film. You truly understand what K has meant to him over the last fourteen years, and how desperately he wants to connect with his mentor, partner, and friend. You see how much K's reticence has hurt him.

Throughout the film, the question is asked: What happened to K. We get a little bit of it at the end, but I don't think that the film expects us to tie K's personality change to that one event. Rather, we see the young Agent K begin to make decisions that hurt, to lose people that he likes... in time this will close him off more and more. I appreciate the idea that K had been watching J long before he recruited him. I like the implication that over the next few decades, K would slowly realize who that boy is growing up to be.

Ok, I've expressed my admiration enough. Let's quibble. Time travel stories are troublesome at the best of times, and pretty much every writer trips over their own feet. Really, only two things bothered me with how MIB3 treated time travel. The first is the time travel device only had controls for date, month and year... and even the son of the inventor lacked a sense of how to really fine tune it. So... how did J get it to take him only 30 seconds back in time? Also, how did he remember what just happened but Boris didn't? And why weren't there then 2 Agent Js and 3 Boris'?

The second thing is that K kills Boris. Why? By killing Boris, K creates a time paradox. The moon prison now will never be built, and J will never need to go back in time to prevent the failed assassination. K never needed to kill Boris. If he had arrested him again, the plot would still have failed and everything would have still gone back to normal. Not that it matters, because when J gets back... all the recent events in K's life seem to have happened anyway... down to phone calls that were precipitated by Boris' attack. 

Thematically, did we need to see that K was going to do things differently from this point? Maybe. But it didn't have to be by having him kill Boris. We don't ALWAYS have to kill the bad guy at the end. We really don't.

Rango

Rango is a strange film, in that it's too smart to conceal how dumb it is. It's too real looking to allow for suspension of disbelief. It's deeply confused about what it is... which is kind of appropriate.

Rango is a chameleon with no name, a dreamer who has spent his entire life in a terrarium with only props for company. Yet somehow he manages to have masterful social skills that allow him to entrance everyone around him. He's a chameleon who doesn't know who he is, but we really only see him try to be one thing, and he's quite successful at it.

We have a mariachi band that acts as a chorus that exists both within the story and outside of it. We have almost frighteningly realized animals, but our female lead is a lizard with long flowing locks and bizarrely brown and white eyes. The world building clearly indicates that this is a world of humans, but most of the accoutrements of the cast are just little versions of human clothing and tools... but every now and then we see something human sized that has been discarded and reinvented. Rattlesnakes are enormous, but Gila monsters are about the size of groundhogs. Also, there are squirrels in the desert. Oh, and armadillos can apparently have their internal organs squashed to paper thinness without any ill effects.

Now, some of these wouldn't bother me if they weren't so beautifully and realistically rendered. The fact that the characters have reached the uncanny valley with their textures, their fur and scales, and their dirt... it makes it extremely jarring when we are thrust into Looney Tunes territory. Give me a cartoon world and cartoon rules and I forgive a lot, but Rango is *too* well done, and utterly and completely uncertain about its own internal rules and logic.

Then there are times when logic just flies out the window. A family of Appalachian groundhogs apparently needs to sneak and scheme and steal and avoid capture by the townsfolk of Dirt, who seem to number about thirty souls total. But the family seems to have fifty to sixty members... who have tamed bats... and have machine guns. Also, the bats blow up if they crash into things.

Now, sure, many things in this film are homages of other classic westerns and war movies and ... well... anything that the director and writers grew up with... but that doesn't mean you're excused from it making sense. If this was Yakko, Wakko, and Dot; then sure. Go for it. Be as random and insane as hell. But that isn't the game that we're playing here.

Also, the bit with the bullet at the end is so stupid that it's insulting. It's just ... I can't even think about it.

Now, you may say, "Hey, it's a kid's movie. Lighten up." No. Sorry. But the second that you have a character with an arrow going in one eye and out its jaw, you've left kiddie territory. The film is too slow paced and occasionally horrifying for a kid's movie, and too insulting of intelligence to be an animated film for adults.

I was looking forward to Rango. I had heard good things about it, and it looked gorgeous. In the end, I found myself just wanting it to be over.

Brave

When I first saw this in the theater, I thought it was a solid if somewhat predictable fairy tale. Not one of Pixar's best, but utterly enjoyable in its own right.

On a second viewing, I'm much more impressed. This time through I was able to soak in the epic grandeur of the location, pay more attention to the relationship between Elinor and Merida, and observe the deft plotting and character nuance. Part of it may be the difference between a first viewing, where (after spending weeks of viewing key moments in trailers and commercials) my mind was more focused on "oh, this must be where the bit with the three little bears comes in, oh, this must tie in with that bit that I saw yesterday", and a second viewing much later where I'm just... you know... watching the film.

So, all that said, let's talk about the film itself. As mentioned before, it's gorgeous. A lot of attention was paid at the time to Merida's hair, but it's incredibly easy to overlook the accuracy and the detail of the landscape itself. The moss, the trees, the water, the play of light, the changes of weather. From a technical standpoint, it's awe inspiring what they were able to accomplish. From an artistic standpoint, it's mind bending. Animation, I think, allows directors to more closely create on film what they have in their minds.

The character animation is also first rate, especially with Merida. I love the fact that she's cute, but she's not a "Disney Princess." She has a full range of facial expressions, to start with. Watch the film and watch her face. In most Disney films, if you freeze frame at any point the princess will look beautiful. Distressed and beautiful. Angry and beautiful. Amorous and beautiful. Sleepy and beautiful. It doesn't matter, they always look perfect. Freeze frame on Merida and you get goofy, cute, blubbery, derpy... for all that she has a bit of a doll face, it moves like an actual human being's. The animators and director have been very clear that they wanted to create a character that was a more real option for girls, and in my mind they absolutely succeeded. Not only is she the hero, not only does she have interesting and relatable character flaws, not only does she have interests other than cute boys... she is more interested in expressing herself than in looking perfect.

Let's look at the Bechdel test for quick moment. Yes, this film passes... but despite being focused on a mother daughter relationship, it might not have. The main plot point, after all, revolves around an arraigned marriage. The film could have quite easily been all about their relationship with their men. Fortunately, the writers clearly established that the whole suitor thing was just the tip of an iceberg in this relationship. The true power that held this kingdom together was the power of the queen... and that was what was truly at stake in all this. Yes, they talk about the suitors, and about the fear of marriage... but for a film set in 10th-13th century Scotland, the men are fairly unimportant to the story.

The film, in my mind, is ultimately about growing up, about understanding the need for compromise, about family, and about taking responsibility. Merida spends a good portion of the film denying responsibility, both her responsibility to the kingdom and her responsibility in what happens to her mother. Only at the end, when all her attempts to fix the problem have failed, does she finally move from it being the witches' fault to it being her own. In many ways, what Merida did was worse than what Mar'Du did. Mar'Du tried to change his fate by changing himself. Merida tried to forcibly change someone else. Mar'Du's reasons were for power, while Merida was ultimately trying to avoid power... so their reasons were opposite, but Merida's action was much more selfish.

This is getting long, so I'll just make one quick observation with this and the last film I reflected on: Paranorman. Both films had major themes about the importance of stopping and LISTENING to the person you were in opposition to. Elinor and Merida both have significant problems with listening to each other, and in my mind the true climax of the film in terms of their relationship is Merida's speech to the Lords while Elinor coaches her from the back. Everyone is listening. The Lords are listening to the Merida, Merida is listening to Elinor, Elinor is listening to Merida, the Lords listen to their sons... in many ways, the story ends there: the kingdom has been saved. All that really remains is the big action climax and showdown that the plot demands.

Paranorman

I had heard that Paranorman was good, but I wasn't expecting it to be this good.

It's truly an all-ages film, in that adults have as much to enjoy as kids do. Unlike many all ages films, however, it doesn't do that by slamming as many pop culture references as possible into a kids story. Paranorman is far more canny. It relies more on sly insights and clever framing and deft acknowledgement of human interactions than snark and sarcasm.

And yes, it's about bullying... but not just schoolyard bullying. This is the brilliance of the film. It is ultimately about fear, and what fear does to people. It's about how fear can make good people do evil things. It is about how fear can change you into something horrible. How fear makes you the thing to be afraid of.

I love how violence is not the answer, but it's the thing that people turn to as a solution. I love the connection between the puritans and the modern townsfolk, and I love the horror of the puritans at seeing what their village has turned into.

I think that special note should be taken of the character design. There is something so visually appealing about LAIKA's style: Norman's perpetually frightened hair, Mitch's torso while standing next to Courtney's hips, the gentle eye pouches on Sandra and the stocky goateed midwesternness of Perry. As caricatures, they're simply wonderful. Everyone is so gloriously imperfect. There isn't a Disney princess in the lot.

I greatly enjoyed Coraline, but I loved Paranorman and I can't wait to see what LAIKA brings us next.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

I quite enjoyed this, but it's not so much a movie as an excellent pilot for a series... or it deserves to be. Too many characters, with too many storylines, in too short a time. It's adapted from a Novel, which I imagine has much more room to breathe.

On the strong side of things, there are the wonderful performances of a stellar cast at the top of their game. At this point, I believe that it is impossible for Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, or Tom Wilkenson to turn in a less than mesmerizing performance. On the weak side of things are plots that telegraph their endings so blatantly, that it's not a matter of knowing what is going to happen but hoping that the route to the inevitable is somewhat interesting.

Fortunately, it is.

Let's break these down one plot at a time.

Judi Dench is a widow whose husband took care of everything, and now that he's gone no one believes that she can take care of herself. Within the first few scenes we know that this is going to be a life affirming journey in which she will find that she is resourceful and resilient and come to some important understandings about being her own person. What makes her story really work is her role as cultural advisor to a call center. Her scene with the phone jockeys, teaching them to ignore scripts and relate to people as ... well ... people is an absolute joy. There is no judgement that the ultimate goal is to sell people something, but rather to recognize that they are reaching out to human beings and not just sales targets. She brings some humanity to an extremely impersonal business.

Tom Wilkinson's story is the most compelling, and it is the least telegraphed. All we know at first is that he's not looking forward to retirement, then in the midst of a farewell speech... he declares that this is the day and walks out. We learn that he lived in India 40 years ago, and he's clearly trying to reconnect with something, but the details are doled out bit by bit, slowly revealing a complex and sorrowful man. Time constraints cut short some potentially wonderful scenes, such as the off camera discussion between Evelyn (Dench) and the wife of Graham's (Wikinson) old companion. Had this been a series, the end of this story line would have been a season closer, or a devestating mid-season shake up.

Bill Nighe and Penelope Wilton give us the Ainslies. She's status obsessed and he's browbeaten. He sees life and beauty and all she can see is poverty and loss. These characters really needed their own movie. Wilton is a master at being utterly horrible while also being profoundly sympathetic. Everything that comes out of her mouth is just wrong, but you can clearly see where it is coming from. You see the pain behind that smile, the desperation in her voice, the need and fear that run through her. When the crux of her crisis comes, it's heartbreaking. Indeed, her story bucks convention the most. We expect her to realize her shallow outlook, and release her negativity... but that isn't who she is. She cannot, and will not thrive in this place and her exit feels utterly true to who she is. No one will be rooting for her character, but the world is not populated with saints.

Nighe is not exactly a saint, although his character is clearly a martyr. We wait for him to stand up to his wife, to help her see the world around them the way he clearly does... and he sort of does that. In the end however, he is who he is. His wife says not to follow her to the airport... but he does. He's too late, but it's one last perfunctory act of loyalty, as deeply ingrained in him as his knife slash mouth. I wish we could have followed him into India, seen the places he was going, experienced the city through his eyes. Even more, I wish we could have seen more of him and his wife being real with one another. There is a history and a relationship there that could have made their ending much more striking, as opposed to kind of a relief.

Maggie Smith is one of the few people who can make a racist shrew enjoyable to watch. This is another plot whose end seemed inevitable from the beginning. Old woman who is loudly and unashamedly racist will end up in India and discover that brown people are not very different from her and become a warm and new person. What makes her story remotely interesting is, well... it's Maggie Smith... and understanding what is behind her racism, and her bitterness. Her interaction with the woman, once of the untouchable caste, is such a stark reminder of her own status in Britain as a house servant, of how she was tossed aside, of how the love and devotion she gave to her family was treated as just a business relationship by them... it's heartbreaking. Muriel (Smith) has been treated as nothing and nobody by those she cared for, by those she sacrificed for, and so her bitterness and venom gets turned on those she can see as beneath her. Race is such an easy marker for people to use when looking for a target. 

This story offered one of the most poignant moments of the film, when the interpreter tells Muriel that the girl wants to thank her for her kindness, and Muriel... shocked... replies "I haven't been kind to her." As she says those words, you get the sense that she hears them herself for the first time. How often do we face that kind of self-confession.... that we haven't been kind to others... and for no good reason?

If if seems like this is a lot of plot threads, it's not over yet. We also have the barely existing storylines of Norman (Ronald Pickup) and Madge (Celia Imrie). These are characters who could have actually been dropped from the film for all that they are used here. Norman wants to revitalize himself with a younger woman... and he does. Madge wants to revitalize herself with a husband... and she doesn't (but kind of is on her way in the closing montage). The only real surprises here were that they didn't end up with one another. Again, their relationship had such potential, and in a series format so much more could have been done. They feel like characters who had a lot going on in the book, but here are just filling out the ensemble. This is by no means the fault of the Pickup and Imrie, who take what little they are given and run with it. It's just too much in too small a time frame.

Indeed, more justice could have been given to them by shrinking down the story of Sonny (Dev Patel) and Sunaina (Tena Desae). Sonny as the overly optimistic and hyperactive hotel manager is excellent, and Suniana is quite lovely... but we really didn't need an "overbearing mother who doesn't approve of her son's life choices and this girl who he wants to marry" storyline here. We could have had Sonny's story, and the danger of losing the hotel, and the timely rescue plot without the threat of family bit. The time could have been better used fleshing out some of the other storylines. And the old man speech that suddenly makes the mother remember her own history... I mean, come on. Seriously?

I'm complaining a lot here, but mostly because there was so much good here, such good characters, such an amazing cast, so much potential... but turning it into a movie was a mistake. As a BBC series, it could have had the room to breathe, stories could have gotten the depth of treatment they deserved, and we could have seen more of India than the "third world" decay and squalor.

Such a nice film, but such a missed opportunity.

Iron Man 3

First impressions:

I came into this one with a little trepidation and a lot of curiosity. New writer and director, the controversy over an English actor (even if it is Ben Kingsley) playing the Mandarin, the way that the film universe has changed so much since Iron Man 2...

So many things could have gone so very wrong.

In the end though, I really enjoyed it. What I liked most of all was the idea that the events of the Avengers had impacted Stark way more than was immediately apparent in that last movie. I liked that for all his confidence and snark, his encounter with gods and monsters and aliens deeply freaked him out. I liked that flying through a hole in the sky to confront a whole fucking armada of spaceships in deep space (while holding a nuclear missile was giving him nightmares. I liked that ultimately, Steve Rogers' accusation that he was nothing without the suit actually hit home.

I'm extremely curious about where they will go with this now. Stark no longer needs to be in the suit for Iron Man to operate. He no longer needs to put himself in physical danger. He has remote controlled drones now. He no longer has the shrapnel, so he is no longer a walking metaphor. In many ways, he seems poised to become the Reed Richards of this modified Marvel Universe.

They did interesting things with his fame in this. He put himself out there as Iron Man, but up until now he's been in complete control of that celebrity. Putting him among the people who are getting Tony Stark tattoos and kids with Iron Man toys was a really nice way of grounding him, especially as he's unraveling and unprepared to deal with the attention. Marvel's always been good at continuity, and keeping those last moments of the Avengers in mind was a very nice touch.

Let's talk about Pepper for a moment. To a certain extent, she was still the damsel in distress, but in each film they've given her more and more to do. First she's the one who actually pushes the button that finishes off the bad guy. Second she's the CEO who puts the actual finger on Hammer and sends him off to the cops. Now she's briefly in the suit and then given super powers and once again deals the coup de grace to the main villain. It's a really interesting take on the old cliche. The damsel in distress who strikes the final blow. I don't know that it's ever been done before. I also liked that this Iron Man actually passed the Bechdel test, with that lovely scene between Pots and the "botanist."

Rhodey got more to do as well. He doesn't get to do much in the suit, but gets to display some impressive bad assery on his own. I quite like that Rhodey is actually a little diminished inside the War Machine armor, and is much more impressive on his own. He really doesn't need the suit to be awesome. The suit hinders his effectiveness more than anything else, turning him into a PR device more than anything else.

Ok, the Mandarin. I was a little concerned at first that the Mandarin was just this vague threat... almost a Batman villain, really. All psychopathic behavior, but nothing underneath. The big reveal on the character worked really well for me, but ultimately resulted in him feeling even more like a Batman (film) villain. He suddenly became Rhas Al Gul. That the Mandarin was a front for someone else... it would have been so much more impressive before the Christopher Nolan Batman films. It was done with much more humor here, but it didn't feel nearly as innovative as it could have been. Still Kingsley was absolutely golden in the role, switching back and forth from dramatic and menacing to pathetic and comic without making it seem at all false.

It does put the first film into an interesting perspective. AIM was the funding source behind the group that kidnapped Stark in the first place. This means that AIM was building up terrorism or the express purpose of driving up a need which they could then fill. The old con game of inventing a need while being the one person in a position to meet that need that you just created. Deleted scenes indicate that the shadowy agent who gave Vanko his fake passports at the beginning of IM2 was part of the Ten Rings, so Killian has been coming at Stark for a while now.... so why the direct route now?

The answer seems to be that up until now AIM couldn't move into the void left by Stark and then Hammer, because the government wasn't willing to look into their methods... but with the return to Cap, and the alien invasion.... ethics are going out the window. All scruples are being discarded in the name of safety. This is addressed directly at the end of the film. We start off pure, but then we look up and we've wandered so very far from our intentions.

I really hope that they can maintain this. I want to see how Captain America deals with a government that was prepared to embrace AIM. I want to see Rhodey and the Captain. I want to continue to see how this world continues to reel and react to the events of the Avengers and the continually changing reality of the super-humans. I want to see how the SHIELD series ties into all this.

Yeah, I'd say that the film succeeded.

The Extra Man

First Impressions:

There is a good movie inside The Extra Man, but plodding pacing and a few significant missteps work against the premise. But before I look at those, I want to look at what I see as the main theme of the film: Shame.

Louis is ashamed of his urges towards lingerie, and deeply uncertain of his sexuality. He loses his job. Henry is deeply ashamed of his poverty and his advancing age. Gershon seems ashamed of his high and girlish voice, which would explain the menacing appearance he adopts for most of the film.

This lack of comfort with oneself runs through the entire film, and could have made for a compelling narrative... but it doesn't.

The film doesn't seem to know what it is. Is it a showcase for Kevin Kline? Is it about Louis and his struggles? This is a core issue. Louis in the novel is probably a deeply interesting person, but his meek demeanor causes him to almost vanish into the background for most of the film. Henry feels more like the star of the film, and the poster art conveys that as a selling point. The problem is, this isn't Henry's story.

I love John C. Reilly's work, but something that probably worked well in the novel falls flat here: Gershon's girlish voice. They would have been better off dubbing him with another actor's voice if they wanted to commit to the incongruity, but Reilly's falsetto feels so put on that it's impossible to buy it as Gershon's natural voice. Having Reilly sing in his natural tone only accenuates the falsity of it, and Henry's explanation of "Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? When he sings he has a human voice," rings so false that I wanted to smack the director.

Katie Holmes' character fails to work as well, but I don't blame her for this. Mary is probably supposed to represent the normalicy that Louis craves and the femininity that he thinks he wants to realize... but Mary comes across simply as another user, another person who takes advantage... and isn't eccentric enough to mask it or make it interesting.

This takes us back to the director. Henry and Gershon are in a comedy, while Louis and Mary are in a character drama. The entire film feels muted and melancholy with jarring moments of wackiness.

There's a good movie here about dealing with the shame one feels for not being "normal", or young, or wealthy... a good movie about finding oneself in reduced circumstances... a good movie about holding on to an old image of oneself that no longer applies.

I wish I had seen it.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

First Viewing Reflections:

I want to say it's an exceptionally odd film, but in some ways it seems like one of a string of films about quirky and ostensibly broken people trying to find connection. It's not generally the kind of thing I like. I mean, I can't stand most of Wes Anderson's stuff, which I would place in this same milieu.

By the end of the film however, I grew to appreciate this reflection on fragmentation, isolation, and the desperate need to connect with someone without any of the skills or guidance needed to do so gracefully.

This isn't a film about plot, but about portraits.

A man floundering after a divorce, unable to communicate meaningfully with his children and ultimately reduced to a misguided self-immolation in his panic.

A woman who spends most of her time looking at photos of other people's lives, narrating the words she would want to hear if she was the one living in the snapshots.

A son who moves zombie like through the film, only showing any trace of personality when talking to his baby brother, and in the end with the much younger girl who lives next door.

A wide eyed child, being raised by everyone and no one.

Two girls, driven by vanity and curiosity as they explore their own sexuality. Ultimately willing to lose their virginity to a man they don't find attractive "because it won't matter" ... or because her best friend tells her to.

A man who can only communicate his desires, which he knows to be highly inappropriate, via extremely public signs taped to his window, but when confronted with actually committing to performing them (or being confronted with the reality of what he has written) cowers in fear.

The art curator who dismisses work out of hand, until she finally begins to recognize her own loneliness in the artists work.

A elderly man who finds love so very late in life, with a woman who is about to die.

The film meanders back and forth between these people and their interconnections. They are all tied together by tenuous threads, usually without being aware of it. Real contact between them is frequently anonymized. Cell phones display unlisted numbers, or the numbers of workplaces. Sexual exploration takes behind a screen, or with a couch cushion over the face.

Disfigurement is another repeated theme. The burned hand. The scrawled upon photograph. The work FUCK emblazoned across a car window. The photo of the AIDS patient and the verbal response "email wouldn't exist without AIDS... without fear of contamination."

In the end, the young are forced to find meaning for themselves. The young girl looks at the chaos of the world and orders her own private space with a hotel-like precision. The young boy walks home through a dangerous part of town and has sexually explicit chats online. The father begs his children to ask him questions, and is met with silence. When he himself asks them a question, he discovers talents he knew nothing about.

And above all, there is fear. Fear of discovery. Fear of loneliness. Fear of connection. Fear of being rejected. Fear of being wrong.

Is this a hopeful film? Perhaps. The two teen girls, on the brink of doing something they would most likely regret, escape and run down the street, laughing and smiling with relief and true happiness. The art dealer affirms not the multimedia piece about isolation, but a new piece about love and connection (the artists only work done WITH someone else). The same dealer confronts the person who she feels most understands her and finds a child who gazes on her with curiosity, and ultimately acceptance. The defaced photo of the bird is placed in a tree, as if placed in it's natural habitat (although it is not a bird, but a photo of a bird and so the illusion of finding a home is subverted). The youngest of the cast explores the curious impersonal sound at sunrise (and again, the child is wandering around his neighborhood in his sleep clothes, unattended) to find that it is the Morse Code of another human being... simply passing the time.

In the end, the characters are set free from isolation to varying degrees. But the question of illusion remains. Will any of these more human connections grow? Are they more or less ephemeral or real then the fractured and disconnected acts we've seen earlier?

Ultimately, are all we doing is passing the time?