The American (2010), Before Sunset (2004), and Pirate Radio (2009)

“The American” is a spare, tense film, focusing not on plot, but on the escalating anxiety of an assassin, played by George Clooney. He’s Jack to his wizened old handler Pavel (Johan Leysen). After Jack is almost killed by several men in Sweden, Pavel curtly sends him to lie low in the Italian countryside.

Jack, now calling himself Edward, settles in the picturesque hillside village of Castel del Monte, a labyrinth of cobblestoned alleyways. Pavel gives Jack an easy job to pass the time: make a customized rifle for a woman named Mathilde (Thelka Reuten). As the film establishes Jack’s daily routine, two other new figures enter his life: a prostitute, Clara (Violante Placido), who he regularly visits at the local brothel, and Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), a local priest.

As far as hitman films go, this one’s unusual; the killer is never once ordered to kill. The film unfolds the typical hitman narrative to look at the space in between high-profile contracts, where the protagonist isn’t conveniently furnished with opportunities to take a dramatic moral stand, but is left to agonize under the devastating day-to-day emotional cost of his lifestyle. How interesting could the contract killings be, anyway? For Jack, I’d imagine each new contract is just another job, another life reduced to numeric values, currency. When you’re a hitman, the only murders that are significant are the ones no one asks you to commit.

After the attack in Sweden, Jack is gripped by mounting paranoia and dread. Pavel initially gives Jack a cellphone and a prearranged hotel room in Castelvecchio, but Jack doesn’t trust his handler enough to accept them, so he throws the cell phone away as he drives to the next town over, which is Castel del Monte. Jack soon comes to believe he’s being followed – there was a blond man watching him in the market, and there’s a car that’s frequently parked outside of his favorite café. Could it be the Swedes? At night he makes his way home through the yellow glow of the alleyways, alert and agitated.

The secret of Jack’s profession ensures that all of his relationships will be blighted by a feeling of isolation, but those feelings are now intensified by his current circumstances. At the beginning of the film, Pavel reminds Jack: no making friends. It is, says Pavel, a rule Jack once understood. We know that Jack is keenly aware of the danger his presence brings to the priest and the prostitute, and we know he will feel terrible guilt if anything should happen to them. After he becomes close to a particular character, we realize that a different, more insidious development has occurred: his thoughts have been infected by the possibility that this character is trying to kill him. He can never relax, even in sleep, jolting awake from the slightest noise. A gun rests in a holster attached to his bed, and as he wakes he instinctively draws it, aiming at phantoms in dissipating nightmares.

The film also follows the procedural aspects of his craft as he passes his time in the village, and these are perhaps the only moments he is at peace, concentrating on repetitive exercises like pull-ups and push-ups, as well as the complex but undoubtedly familiar task of assembling a gun. But how will he obtain the necessary tools? And how will he disguise the noise of the process?

There’s a curious lack of villagers and police forces in certain scenes, and I read one critic who believed this was a major flaw. I disagree. The deserted alleyways emphasize Jack’s isolation. And I see the lack of law enforcement as an acceptable simplification of events, in which the film dispenses with extended chase scenes in favor of a greater focus on quieter, more subtly emotional plot developments. (Skip to the next paragraph to avoid a spoiler for “The Town”.) If the writer’s motivation for the absence of police and bystanders was to avoid moral complications, where innocents get caught in the crossfire, it would have been unacceptable. This sort of emotional evasion was deployed in “The Town” where, as Roger Ebert points out in his review, there’s an awful lot of machine gun fire for there to be (if I remember correctly) not a single definite law enforcement death. Ben Affleck’s character and “The American’s” Jack are both criminals that are prepared to kill (or in Affleck’s case, let others kill) innocent people in order to escape the consequences of their crimes. “The Town” avoids confronting the selfishness and cruelty of such a philosophy. “The American” doesn’t.

I also read a review that suggested love plays an integral role in the film. I do not believe there is love in “the American.” It may float through Jack’s thoughts and feelings in some vague, nascent form, but what is far more prevalent is the absence of love, the desolation of that emptiness, and the paranoia, guilt, and fear that reside there instead.

“Before Sunset” is writer-director Richard Linklater’s 2004 sequel to his 1995 film, “Before Sunrise”. I suggest you skip down to the next picture and read about “Pirate Radio” if you haven’t seen “Before Sunset” or “Before Sunrise”, and just trust me when I say they’re great movies. You should see them. Spoilers ahead.

For those of you who didn’t listen to my advice, here's a little recap of the first film, "Before Sunrise". Twentysomething strangers Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who is American, and Celine (Julie Delpy), who is French, decide to hop off a train in Vienna and spend a romantic night wandering the city. The next morning, they resolve to meet at the train station again in six months. They exchange no contact information, no last names. These strange conditions of their departure are a compromise between contradictory impulses: they set a date to meet because they desperately want to see each other again, to push their relationship forward in some manner, but they also foolishly seek to protect their idealistic memories of each other, hold everything frozen and unsullied by the mundane, unencumbered by any sort of epilogue they’ll have to create neural detours around, in which a long-distance relationship fizzles out. So what do they hope to gain from another meeting in six months? Maybe the time will give them a chance to gather their courage and commit to a real kind of love. Or maybe they think they’ll each be satisfied with simply making another memory.

“Before Sunset” opens nine years later in a Parisian bookstore (Shakespeare and Company) with Jesse promoting the novel he’s recently written. It soon becomes clear that the novel is essentially a detailed account of his night with Celine. Some journalists pester Jesse to reveal what happened at (or, more accurately, after) the end of the book. Do the two lovers see each other again six months later? He has already, begrudgingly and obliquely, admitted the story is autobiographical. Did he ever see his lover again? After some twitching and twisting and dancing around the point, Jesse replies that answering the question “would take the piss out of the whole thing.” This sequence partly serves as a self-conscious nod from the filmmakers at the possible pitfalls of creating a sequel to the first film. Whatever we see in “Before Sunset” will irrevocably change our perceptions of “Before Sunrise”.

Mid-press-conference, Jesse gets flustered when he sees that Celine’s at the bookstore. She lives in Paris and saw the event advertised earlier in the month. Do they have time to catch up? He only has about an hour and a half, until seven-thirty, and then he has to take a car to the airport, catch a flight back home. But until then they can wander the city and talk, can’t they?

“Wander” is the wrong word. Our curiosity, and their curiosity in each other, is focused and confined, no matter how padded their conversation is with other topics. The revelations, the points we eagerly anticipate on the plot’s map, are, in succession: did Jesse and Celine meet six months later? If not, then why? Are either of them married? Are they satisfied with their lives? And how much, exactly, has that one night meant to each of them? The filmmakers spread the answers expertly across the film.

Near the end of “Before Sunrise”, Jesse observes (after sunrise) that they’re entering “real time” again – the night before was dreamlike, a private, momentary escape from the lives they were “supposed” to be living. This time, in "Before Sunset", their entire encounter takes place in real time, literally and figuratively. Literally, in that there isn’t a single elliptical cut in the film that condenses or distorts diegetic time. Figuratively, in that Jesse and Celine aren’t allowed a furlough from their “normal” lives during this meeting – their obligations (to careers, to family) are greater now, their time together is shorter, and any potential escapism is grounded by a mutual need to reconcile their devastatingly ideal encounter in Vienna with the “real” lives they went on to lead. These high stakes, along with the confining time limit, strike a tone that’s more emotional, more dramatic than that of Linklater’s other talk-a-thons, where either the plot boundlessly, leisurely meanders (“Slacker”, “Waking Life”), or the young characters are more optimistic about life and less aware of events’ significance (“Dazed and Confused”, “Before Sunrise”).

Richard Linklater co-wrote the original film with Kim Krizan, who had appeared in two of his previous movies. Krizan just has a story credit this time, and Linklater’s actual screenwriting partners are the film’s actors, Hawke and Delpy. At first I thought they were credited solely because of any improvisational material they might have added to the film, but the making-of featurette reveals they contributed sizeable amounts of material during the scripting stage. These actors’ high degree of creative involvement isn’t odd considering, as Linklater points out in the featurette, that both Delpy and Hawke have had past experience writing and directing films (she, the fantastic “2 Days in Paris”, and he, “The Hottest State”, unknown to me). Jesse and Celine’s dialogue is smart and natural, following a realistic conversational logic (in the way topics flow and transition to other subjects) that isn’t often seen in movies. Your average film just doesn’t let conversations carry on so long, often isolating individual topics with shifts in time. The script went on to be nominated for an Academy Award.

The acting by Delpy and Hawke is excellent as well, and they once again share an easy, involving chemistry. However, their performances are modulated differently this time, because their characters’ personalities have changed with age – Hawke’s Jesse is less cynical and has shed the faintly defiant air he carried in the earlier film, while Delpy’s Celine is more neurotic and less guarded in expressing her more passionate emotions.

What haunts me most in the movie relates to something Celine says: when you’re young, you think life will afford you many opportunities to meet people you can really connect with. Jesse and Celine find that’s not always the case. So it’s good that “Before Sunset” was made, because it brings a new sharpness and clarity to the former film. Does “Before Sunset” “take the piss out of the whole thing?” Yes. It should take the piss out of the whole thing. Planning a meeting in the same spot, six months later, no last names, no addresses, isn’t a hopeful ending to a romantic night. It’s a tragedy about two scared young people giving up.

“Pirate Radio” was originally released in the UK as “The Boat that Rocked” to middling reviews and lackluster box-office returns. Focus Features later picked it up, trimmed thirty minutes off its two and a half hour running time, and renamed it “Pirate Radio”.

This is the second film directed by Richard Curtis, whose first was “Love Actually”. Like that film, “Pirate Radio” is an ensemble comedy with an impressive cast, featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans, Kenneth Branagh, Rhys Darby (the manager in “Flight of the Conchords”), along with Emma Thompson, January Jones, and Gemma Arterton in some small roles. But unlike “Love Actually”, “Pirate Radio” is bumbling, shallow, and messy.

Back in the sixties, the only stations that played rock and roll in the UK broadcasted without any government regulation or consent from international waters miles off the coast of England. These stations met the national demand for rock and pop, which was never played on BBC Radio. “Pirate Radio” follows the antics, tiffs, good times, and sexual escapades of the men (and woman) broadcasting from one fictional station, Radio Rock. Another plot follows a stodgy government minister who hates rock and roll, presumably for its notable lack of stodginess, and is determined to kick these “pirate” radio stations off the airwaves. That all sounds very dramatic and fascistic, but the film fails to mention that, in reality, BBC Radio created rock and pop stations only two months after offshore radio was shut down, and many of these stations were DJed by former “pirate” jockeys. But hey, the movie’s not a documentary.

We’re introduced to life on the Radio Rock ship through the eyes of “Young” Carl (Tom Sturridge), who has been expelled from school for smoking. His mother sends him to stay on the boat with his godfather, station manager Quentin (a cordial, slinky Bill Nighy). Two among the many other characters comprising the boat’s community are “The Count” (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is the current star DJ of the station, and the apparently sexually irresistible DJ “Doctor” Dave (Nick Frost), who decides to help Carl lose his virginity. There’s a strict “no woman” policy on the boat, with the exception of Felicity (Katherine Parkinson) because she’s a lesbian. Unfortunately, Curtis separates Felicity from all the radio fun and is forced to be the cook.

The events on the boat are episodic and the plot’s loose, with the most significant story threads relating to Carl’s virginity, “The Count’s” rivalry with wildly famous DJ Gavin Kavanagh (Rhys Ifans), and an important development for Carl later on which I cannot reveal here. Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh’s storyline runs largely parallel to the action on the boat, with both plots hardly intersecting until the film’s climactic scenes.

As I watched the film I could sense strange blank spaces in the story. Maybe my judgment was influenced by the fact that I knew the film was edited down from its original version, but I felt there were important elements missing (either cut away or left unwritten) that gave the film an uneven rhythm. There’s a point where Branagh seems to have the perfect plan to defeat the radio stations, but then the momentum is dashed in the following scene by an unclear obstacle. Later, his plan shifts suddenly into place near the end of the movie in an unexplained turn of events. Why are these scenes featured in the movie if we aren’t allowed to gauge the severity of the threat to Radio Rock and feel any suspense? The film’s also missing a necessary scene establishing the status of the relationship between Carl and “Doctor” Dave after a pivotal point in the movie, as well as any sort of development leading up to a certain marriage announcement. (How did the groom meet the bride anyway? At no point does the film establish that the jockeys ever go ashore.)

Those strange omissions aren’t nearly as damaging to the film as its uncomfortable juvenile tone, which surfaces intermittently. Take, for example, the surname of the man Branagh enlists in the crusade against rock and roll: Twatt. GET IT? That’s all I can think of when I see a joke like that. In big, capital letters: GET IT? There’s also a scene involving Carl that’s intended as adolescent sex farce, like “American Pie”, but really it’s just Carl almost raping a girl. What’s the girl’s reaction when she realizes this? We cut away from the situation too quickly to know.

Three of the four female characters in the film are caricatures defined only by their sexuality (the fourth is simply defined by her sexuality), including Quentin’s niece, Marianne (Talulah Riley, who you may recognize as Eames’ female forgery in “Inception”). Carl and Marianne have a quick scene together in the first part of the film. After little conversation, Carl says that he “loves” her. It made me cringe: even the movie’s conception of love is immature. Is saying you love someone, just like that, supposed to be cute or appealing? Wouldn’t most girls find it creepy? I believe he’s being genuine when he says it, but saying it shouldn’t be a compliment, because he doesn’t love any of the parts of her that it means something to love. It’s like saying you love a fashion model after you’ve seen her picture in a magazine. And when Carl says he loves Marianne, it sounds like an explanation, an entreaty, rather than something that’s given with kindness and care. Marianne, we soon realize, is not an actual person, but just a sexual fantasy, a plot device.

Those are the worst aspects of the film’s adolescent tone. There are other juvenile elements in the film (an anecdote about diarrhea, giddy on-air swearing, double-dog dares) that would be acceptable in any other movie, but here are a reminder’s of the film’s shallow, immature approach to some of the events it depicts, like they’re stories told by a careless teenager. In addition to the attempted rape, there’s a cruel, elaborate con perpetrated by a sociopath, and an action that amounts to attempted murder. These are sad subjects, with the script focusing mostly on the awkward comedy it attempts to manufacture from these situations and not on motivation, consequence, or emotion. I’m also bothered by another, less obvious, obfuscation of negative feelings. Whether Richard Curtis intended this or not, the major crisis that arises at the end of the movie acts as misdirection, a narrative sleight of hand so that we forget the larger problems of the characters and leave the film on a note of triumph instead of defeat.

There are, however, two subtle, well-observed scenes in the film. One demonstrates how music and a simple friendly gesture can alleviate anger and sadness, and the other is an important scene near the end that actually handles some heavy material with consideration, quietly and without retreating into comedy.

That’s not really enough. Even disregarding the film’s other flaws, the movie may be hobbled by a single miscalculation. In Branagh’s efforts to end “pirate” radio he comes across a piece of information that could work to his advantage: there was an incident at sea, in which a vessel was unable to call for help because an offshore radio station blocked their distress signal. That’s a pretty convincing argument against “pirate” radio, and it’s never refuted. Why should unsuspecting innocents have to die for rock and roll? Why should we care about the radio station if it could kill someone? Later, Radio Rock’s distress signals go unheeded, essentially forcing them into the same terrifying position as that unassuming vessel whose calls for help were nullified by blaring guitars. I assume this irony is lost on the filmmakers.

Review: Oceans (2010)

Take a look at this clip about penguins from Discovery’s “Planet Earth”. You won’t find this much information on any single subject in “Oceans”, a visually stunning nature documentary from Disney that’s resolutely stingy with facts and figures. Narrator Pierce Brosnan doesn’t talk as frequently as other commentators do in this type of thing, but when Pierce does talk, expect him to coo flowery nonsense to you like you’re five.

“Oceans” does, however, have the best of intentions. It urges us to appreciate and protect our planet’s sea life, and with its astounding cinematography, I’d say it succeeds in that respect. The film gets surprisingly close to its subjects, using sweeping, improbable shots to show us, in outstanding detail, an abundance of life and a natural beauty it would undoubtedly be a crime to destroy. In one extraordinary scene, the camera moves toward an underwater lizard with uncanny fluidity. We then follow the lizard as it swims up to the surface, the lens seemingly inches away from its tail.

The next shot of the lizard seems a little strange: from dry land, a camera photographs its head poking up through the surface water. You usually see that sort of editing in a conventional narrative film, not a documentary where, if we are to believe that this is the very same lizard, the filmmakers would’ve had to position another camera knowing exactly when and exactly where the creature would emerge, and the underwater cameraman would’ve had to somehow come to a dead stop in the water to avoid appearing the other shot. There’s quite a bit of that kind of editing in this movie. I also wonder if all the underwater sounds are authentic. Can microphones really pick up the subtle swishing noises of a dolphin swimming by? If so, great.

Unlike another recent nature documentary, “Life”, “Oceans” isn’t divided into episodic narrative vignettes. Sometimes “Oceans” depicts a dramatic sequence of events, like the feeding frenzy we see involving dolphins, birds, whales, and sharks. Other times, it parades a series of animals in front of us who just happen to live in the same area of the sea. In other instances, Pierce will start talking about some vague idea, like how animals enjoy playing, and we’ll see a seal chasing a puffer fish.

I read one review where the critic called the movie “meditative.” I might’ve been able to relax long enough to feel that way if I wasn’t so frustrated by “Oceans’” narration. As I noted earlier, Pierce doesn’t talk all the time, and these stretches of silence contain the best moments of the movie. Although it wouldn’t have been to my taste, maybe I could’ve accepted a nature documentary with minimal factual commentary. In that case, I’d at least like to get a little solid, concise information when the narration does occur. At first it seems like "Oceans" may be a film like that, but the movie eschews an informative commentary almost altogether. When Pierce talks, he hardly says anything at all that adds to our understanding of the film’s subjects, besides maybe their names, and whatever else he does say is immensely distracting.

Pierce is typically forced to make one or two, maybe three, comments about each animal, in which he identifies it and ornately describes what we can obviously see it’s doing. I really don’t need a narrator to tell me about how “exquisite” the blanket octopus is. I don’t need a narrator tell me about the “grace” and “beauty” onscreen. That’s my job, right here. As we watch the film we can see the beauty for ourselves, and all those grandiloquent descriptions just divert our attention away from what we’re actually feeling and to what the film so intrusively says we should be feeling. It's no big deal when someone tells me how I should feel before or after a movie, but during the movie? I like the solitude of my thoughts. At moments I saw Pierce less like a device of the film and more like an annoying guy sitting behind me, offering enthusiastic comments to his tolerant friend about the images onscreen.

There’s a point in the movie when the filmmakers overtly attempt to justify this approach to nature documentaries, this approach in which factual information is deemed virtually unnecessary. They even seem to imply that this approach is superior to others. The moment occurs at the very beginning of the film, when Pierce wonders about the best way to help a small child understand the ocean. “You could hit him with a bunch of statistics,” Pierce says, but goes on to conclude that, in the end, “you have to live it.” “Living it” is all well and good, and probably essential, but don’t minimize the importance of facts and figures. Please, “hit” me with some statistics. Bludgeon me with knowledge. Cudgel me with data. Do something to satisfy my curiosity.

Not everything Pierce says is disappointing, however. There’s a moment where he tells us that the clownfish is uniquely immune to the poisonous secretions of the sea anemone, so the clownfish tends to hide in the anemone’s dense mass of tentacles. That’s interesting.

But then there are the other frustratingly oblique things Pierce says, which all could be suitably explicated by a couple of well-written sentences. The filmmakers really do seem to be willfully, stubbornly vague. Take, for example, Pierce’s description of the leafy sea dragon (which looks like a Water/Grass type Pokémon come to life, or the genetic abomination that would be produced if seaweed could somehow mate with a seahorse). He says it has to live in one “patch” of water its entire life, or else it will die, and I initially thought this explanation was satisfactory. Then I wondered why it would die. Is it the temperature change? Predators? Come to think of it, what are the limits of this “patch” it can’t venture beyond? Later I found a site that said the sea dragons “are most commonly found in water 4-15 deep, but have been found deeper.” Hmm.

Then there’s Pierce's description of the asian sheepshead wrasse, with its bulbous, Joseph Merrick face. Pierce alludes to the fact that the fish live for a very long time, saying it takes them a while to grow that “wise mask” of theirs. Okay. So how long is their typical lifespan? Can you at least tell me that?

There’s also the two “battalions” of spider crabs, as Pierce calls them. We see countless numbers of them, split into two factions, marching towards each other. When the two sides meet, Pierce suggests that the ensuing scuffle is a fight. Is it really? Why would so many spider crabs organize themselves into two distinct groups for a skirmish? Seems awfully sophisticated. Is it over territory? Food? Mates? Please, Pierce, tell me something.

Alright. I’ve been pretty hard on “Oceans”. I’ve gotten it out of my system. Now let me say I hope my complaints don’t lead you to believe you should completely avoid this film. In spite of the narration, there are lots of wonderfully enchanting, technically brilliant sights to see, all supported by an affecting score.

Some of what we see is cute, like the mother walrus cradling her baby. Or the sea otter rubbing its eyes with those little paws as it floats on its back on the water. Or the sea lions, lazing on the beach, letting out yawny sighs, basking in the sun.

Some of what we see is exhilarating. There’s the feeding frenzy I mentioned before, a flurry of activity above and below the water, as dolphins, birds, sharks and whales each compete for a meal, churning the ocean’s surface into a bubbly froth. Or what about when the great white sharks attack some sea lion pups at the shore? There’s also that tremendously exciting sequence where the underwater cameras race along with a group of dolphins, somehow keeping up with the creatures’ staggering speed. One other sequence is almost unbearably suspenseful, as we watch birds pick off some newly hatched sea turtles scrambling across the beach and to the relative safety of the water.

Some of what we see is novel and majestic. We see humpback whales sleeping upside down. We see them feeding on red clouds of krill. We see scores of jellyfish, stretching far out into the misty waters. In one gorgeous, awe-inspiring moment, we see a massive school of fish swirling around into the shape of a sphere. We also see a man swimming, side-by-side, with a great white shark.

Honestly, as frustrated as I was, as disappointed as I was, I’m glad I saw all those things. I’m glad that I saw the leafy sea dragon and the asian sheepshead wrasse. I’m glad that I saw the ribbon eel “unfurl” and the mantis shrimp attack. Who knows, maybe Pierce’s narration won’t bother you at all, or maybe you’ll like the film overall much more than I did because now you’re prepared for its approach. Maybe I’m recommending “Oceans” when I say it’s a great compilation of images, but not a very good movie. Who knows. I’m just giving you as much information as I can about the film and the experience I had watching it.

Review: A Serious Man (2009)

The Coen Brothers like to make movies about people on the verge of being completely overwhelmed, usually by chaotic, convoluted, or mysterious events. There’s always a feeling of helplessness or confusion that’s emphasized – sometimes the characters feel those emotions themselves, sometimes we do it for them. It’s no different in Larry Gopnik’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) story. He’s a suburban Minnesota husband in the 1960’s, a father of two, and a physics professor, whose middle class comforts are all suddenly threatened by a deluge of misfortunes. What separates Larry in “A Serious Man” from the buffoons in the Coens’ darkest comedies, “The Ladykillers” and “Burn After Reading”, is the fact that Larry understands he is out of his depth – he knows he can’t do much to fight destiny’s onslaught – and he desperately struggles to find meaning in the chaos.

Everything’s fine in the beginning. And by the beginning, I mean about the first minute or so of Larry’s screen time. At work, he’s up for tenure. Then a colleague on the tenure committee comes into Larry’s office, says that Larry has a right to know something: for some time the committee’s been receiving anonymous letters disparaging him. The way the colleague says it’s “nothing to worry about” is troubling. And it would be wise for Larry to submit any published work for consideration. No published work? “Don’t worry,” the colleague says. “Doing nothing isn’t bad.”

Larry then meets with Clive (David Kang), a foreign student who failed a recent exam. Clive was somehow unaware he would be tested on mathematics in physics class. “I believe the results of the physics mid-term were unjust,” he says. “I understand the physics. I understand the dead cat.” Later Larry finds an envelope on his desk containing hundreds of dollars. Apparently he just accidentally accepted Clive’s bribe.

At home, Larry discovers that his wife (Sari Lennick) wants a get, a Jewish ritual divorce. He’s dumbfounded. Of course, as his wife says, “there have been problems.” But leaving him? And divorce? So she can be with their neighbor, Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed)? “This is not about whoopsy-doopsy,” she says.

“Where will I sleep?” asks Larry. He can't sleep on the couch, since that’s where his brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping. Arthur’s wife left him. Arthur has no job. He routinely retreats to the bathroom to drain a cyst on the back of his neck, using a strange little machine that makes repellent sucking noises. Larry’s daughter (Jessica McManus), in her late teens, fights a constant battle with Arthur for bathroom time when she’s not stealing money out of her father’s wallet. Or, more accurately, she’s the one who fights, while Arthur calmly repeats, minute after minute, “I’ll be out in a minute.”

We also briefly follow Larry’s younger teenage son, Danny (Aaron Wolff). It’s interesting to know that the Coens originally based the story around him, but then began to focus more on Danny’s father as they continued writing the script. Recently Danny borrowed twenty dollars from a tough kid at Hebrew school, and now, for reasons too complicated to explain here, he can’t pay it back. Danny doesn’t seem to mind that the tough kid subsequently chases him home everyday. That fact, coupled with Danny’s minimal screen time, may make his story seem unimportant. However, his thoughtless detachment is essential for the tone of the film, and it all leads to two especially funny scenes – one involves a certain kind of kid I remember talking to on the school bus, and the other involves the point at which we are able to recognize danger in certain situations (it doesn’t always sneak up on us). We also see Danny memorizing the prayer for his upcoming bar mitzvah. That’s another thing, along with the mortgage, the divorce lawyer, and some other unforeseen expenses, that Larry has to pay for.

As the film plays on, Larry’s problems multiply and escalate and twist around in unpredictable ways. “A Serious Man” is a new kind of film for the Coen brothers, since the problems Larry faces are so mundane. Just think – in every other Coen brothers movie, the characters’ crises hinge on murderous plots or vast sums of cash. I suppose “Intolerable Cruelty” is the exception, but that film seems to exist in a sort of slick Hollywood alternate universe. The world of “A Serious Man” is achingly ordinary.

It’s quite an accomplishment then that Larry’s seemingly much smaller problems create an atmosphere that’s just as bleak and suffocating as Anton Chigurh’s pursuit of Llewelyn in “No Country for Old Men”. Take, for example, the moment when Larry gets a call from a record club and the representative says Larry owes them a minor sum of cash. It doesn’t matter that it’s a small amount of money. Larry knows he didn’t sign up for any record club, and there’s no way he’s going to pay for it. The conversation becomes fraught with tension and suspense – he’s gone so long without even the smallest of victories that one more defeat right here seems as if it could be enough to break him. Larry might have been able to handle just one of the problems he’s faced with, but all of these travails combined are a complete assault on his identity. His wife is leaving him; his kids ignore him; his job is in jeopardy; he’s forced to live in a motel with his dead-beat brother. What is there left in his life to be proud of?

Integral to the film’s plot is the Coens’ decision to start their story right when Larry’s life falls into crisis, and not a moment before. Consider how surprised Larry is to learn about the divorce. By not letting us see any prior moments in Larry's relationship with his wife, the Coens ensure we share Larry’s confusion. In my review of “Kick-Ass”, I called the filmmakers’ decision to ignore the earlier stages of Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s relationship a mistake, a cowardly shortcut to avoid issues and themes they weren’t prepared to handle. “A Serious Man” also ignores aspects of its characters' lives, but the device is implemented with entirely different intentions, which happen to be the right intentions because, compared to "Kick-Ass", they produce the exact opposite effect.

As I mentioned earlier, Larry struggles to find meaning in his misfortunes, and he does so primarily through conversations with several confidants. These conversations also function as necessary reprieves from his anxious life. I liked “Burn After Reading,” but I’m glad that the Coens allow their protagonist here to talk about and understand the kinds of problems he’s facing. Instead of just looking down on a bunch of oblivious fools racing headlong into inevitable tragedy, Larry’s introspection lets us identify with him to a greater degree, and so we may then more readily apply his questions and thoughts and fears to similar situations that we have, and probably will, experience.

You can especially see the Coens’ commitment to creating a more thoughtful protagonist during a scene at a lake, where Larry has an important conversation with a woman. I’m not trying to conceal her identity when I call her “a woman,” it’s just that, since this is the first and only time we see her, I have no idea who she is. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t conventionally introduced, or even identified. Larry needed to talk about his problems, so the Coens gave him someone to talk to. Additionally, Larry speaks to a few rabbis. The significance of each visit is underlined with intertitles like “The First Rabbi” and so on, probably because Larry so desperately yearns for these visits to be significant. Larry’s trials have fractured his faith, and he beseeches the rabbis to offer clues to a greater design – why would Hashem want him to live through this? What could He be trying to say? Is He saying anything at all? You can see the rabbis' intriguing responses when you see the movie.

I’ve read a couple reviews that call “A Serious Man’s” supporting characters one-dimensional. They aren’t supposed to be people, the critics argue, but utilitarian facsimiles only intended to evoke various flustered responses from Larry. That may be true of a few characters in the movie, but for others it isn’t. The Coens allow these certain characters the emotions befitting their circumstances, and that’s something an alarming amount of comedies, like “The Hangover” and “Four Christmases,” don’t do. One character in particular is given what may be the most unabashedly emotional scene in any Coen brothers film. It’s certainly the first scene of its kind in a Coen brothers movie where the anguish at its core isn’t motivated by fear. Also, I’m not saying exactly how, for your benefit, but this scene is important. Very important.

“A Serious Man” is, above all, a masterwork of story construction – its pacing, its intensity, its humor, its focus on certain scenes and characters is all an elaborate orchestration that subtly builds to the film’s final pay-offs. These last moments of the film are extraordinary, comprising a transcendent, illuminating sequence in which the Coens’ themes and designs all suddenly become clear.

And the Coens do indeed build to something. The film does have something substantial to say. Its message is not, as many critics have noted, and I paraphrase here, “Shit happens, deal with it.” The film is not a purposeless exercise in sadism. Of course, the Coens can’t give us the answers to most of Larry’s questions. That would require a direct conversation with God, and few of us can claim to have experienced that luxury. What the Coens do give us is a way to live, a way that goes beyond the quote by Rashi at the beginning of the film, “Receive everything that happens to you with simplicity.” If we could effortlessly accept everything with “simplicity,” if we could even decipher what Rashi means by “simplicity,” then nobody would have any problems in their lives at all. The Coens realize that. I’m tempted to say more, but I shouldn’t. The movie, and its ideas, will be more meaningful if you discover their worth for yourself. This is one of the Coens’ best films, and one of the great movies of 2009.

Review: Kick-Ass (2010) Part 1

“Kick-Ass” is about regular people who put on tights and capes and try to be superheroes, but it is not about what would really happen if people put on tights and capes and tried to be superheroes. To see that you could probably look to Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films. “Kick-Ass” self-consciously pushes the limits of what is technologically, physically, and psychologically plausible. It’s aggressively, messily, and gleefully violent. It wants to be funny, even angling for comedy in a few potentially somber pivotal moments. What I’m trying to say is I get the feeling that “Kick-Ass” does not want to be taken very seriously.

I liked the beginning of the film the most, which introduces Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a high school kid from New York City who’s terrible with girls and spends most of his time playing video games and masturbating. So he’s like a lot of high school guys. In his group of friends, he says, he’s “not even the funny one,” and it’s kind of endearing that he sees that as a shortcoming.

Then one day he decides to use a wet suit as a costume and start fighting crime. As he points out, there’s no real defining moment that leads him to make this decision. He just has the right combination of “optimism and naïveté,” and probably a few delusions of grandeur supplied by the comic books he reads. He’s also regularly robbed by some thugs in his neighborhood, so I assume he also has the pent up rage required to pick fights with random hoodlums.

Kick-Ass, his alter ego, has a disastrous first encounter with some criminals, and this development is the most realistic aspect of the film. What else would happen if a kid with absolutely no training in martial arts decided to take on a couple of big guys with nothing to lose? But the filmmakers also try to make the disastrous encounter seem more comedic than it would be in reality. Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what the disaster is. So Dave gets stabbed, and that’s a pretty serious injury. Not very funny. But then a car comes out of nowhere and smashes into him. It’s overkill, it’s improbable, it’s surprising – it’s ironic. It’s so divorced from what we would expect to happen in reality that it distances us a from the events, enough to maybe make us think it’s a little funny, or at least make us not take it very seriously. Imagine how different the scene would be if Dave were only stabbed – bleeding to death, panicking, desperately trying to figure out a way to get help while also keeping his superhero identity secret. To me, that’s much more interesting.

Meanwhile, some guy who looks like Batman has been launching attacks on mob boss Frank D’Amico’s (Mark Strong) criminal empire. The Batman lookalike is a costumed vigilante called Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) who’s been planning his whole superhero thing long before Kick-Ass came on the scene. Big Daddy’s accompanied by a sort of demented stand-in for Robin – his own 11 year old daughter (Chloe Moretz), known as Hit Girl, who he’s trained to be a coldblooded killing machine. Their relationship is such that Big Daddy balks when she says that she wants a puppy and some Bratz dolls for her birthday. But she’s really only joking. She actually wants some butterfly knives.

We also continue to follow Dave, whose superhero fantasy culminates very early in the movie, just after he recovers from that disaster I was talking about earlier. This is the best scene in the film, in which Dave intervenes when he sees someone being mercilessly beaten up by three men. What happens is quite moving, because it perfectly identifies what makes Dave such an admirable person – he knows nothing about this man he’s protecting, he just knows it’s wrong and unfair for three people to beat a defenseless person to a pulp. He also knows it’s wrong for the many people watching the fight, taking pictures with their cell phones, to do nothing. Somehow Dave doesn’t see himself as anyone special, but he really is. Here’s a regular kid who’s honestly willing to die for a random stranger, for something he thinks is right. The action builds to a rather clever line from Dave, and it’s a really insightful, satisfying moment.

I do have one complaint about this scene though. The fight seems messy and chaotic, as it should be, but it’s also cut a bit incoherently, so we can’t see how Kick-Ass is actually capable of fighting off three people at once. I was really hoping to see a clearer version of the fight, to see how such a feat could realistically be accomplished, but again, I guess the movie isn’t very concerned with realism.

The video of Dave’s exploit hits YouTube, and Kick-Ass becomes an absolute sensation. He even opens up a MySapce account for Kick-Ass and ends up with 16,000 friends. Unfortunately, this brings Dave into contact with Big Daddy and Hit Girl, and Dave gets mixed up in their war with D’Amico. Soon, D’Amico’s son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a comic book geek desperate for his father’s attention, gets involved as well, and Dave unwittingly becomes an integral player in Frank D’Amico’s plan to take all the costumed vigilantes down.

The war between D’Amico and the vigilantes furnishes the film with a number of incredibly violent, over-the-top fight scenes. Most of this violence involves the 11 year old Hit Girl, as she jumps around saying the c-word and dismembering people. I would probably like “Kick-Ass” if it weren’t for how Hit Girl and Big Daddy were handled. They’re important characters – we spend about as much time with them as we do with Dave – yet the film’s really only concerned with wringing some laughs out of the shocking, ironic idea of a little girl placed in a typically adult role, as a foul-mouthed assassin. The film doesn’t really concern itself with the much more disturbing idea behind that – the idea that someone could turn a little girl into such a monster.

Let me say that I’m not against the violence the little girl commits in and of itself. I’m not against the fact that the violence plays as shameless spectacle. I’m not against the dirty words she says. I’m not even against finding (dark) humor in the situation. But I am against treating such a serious, emotionally-charged subject in a flippant and exploitive way without also integrating, to an equivalent degree, some sober consideration about the reprehensible things Big Daddy has done to his daughter.

Yes, the film does have a character address Big Daddy’s decision to turn his daughter into a killer, but not in a way that would bear any resemblance to actual human thought and interaction. Skip this paragraph if you wish to avoid the origin of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, which is revealed about midway through the movie. We find out that Big Daddy is an ex-cop who was framed by D’Amico. His wife committed suicide while he was in jail, and he’s trained his daughter for the past six years or so to help him take down D’Amico and get revenge. Big Daddy’s former partner finds him at one point and just rather calmly comments about the fact that Big Daddy’s robbing his daughter of a childhood. Really? Here’s the response any actual person would have if they were not a screenwriter’s soulless fabrication of a human: “WHAT? OH MY GOD, YOU ARE INSANE. WHY WOULD YOU EVER THINK THAT HAVING YOUR DAUGHTER HELP YOU KILL PEOPLE WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA? AFTER LOSING YOUR WIFE, WHY WOULD YOU EVER PUT THE ONLY OTHER PERSON YOU LOVE IN A SITUATION WHERE SHE COULD SO EASILY DIE? YOU ARE THE MOST SELFISH PERSON I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. YOU ARE FREAKING INSANE.” Or how’s this for a better movie – the partner says he has to arrest Big Daddy so he can save Hit Girl from a life as an assassin, and Big Daddy is forced to murder his former partner in order to continue his quest for revenge. I imagine that would be the more likely result of a meeting between a level-headed police officer and a sociopath, and it also starkly exposes the moral compromises Big Daddy has made in his pursuit of “justice”. Just sayin’.

Like in that scene I just mentioned, the film essentially operates by obscuring and avoiding any of the more disturbing aspects of Hit Girl and Big Daddy’s relationship. I admit, there’s actually a sort of funny, deranged sweetness in most of their scenes together, and it’s a testament to Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz that they’re able to create such a tone. The problem is, that’s the only tone to their relationship. Oh, ha ha, after Big Daddy shoots Hit Girl to test out a bulletproof vest, they’re going to go get ice cream. But what about when Hit Girl was four or five, and Big Daddy just started to train her? Keep in mind, she’s not so young at that point, so she already has a firm grasp of what’s normal for children and what’s otherwise deeply disturbing. Were things funny then, when this man she never met took away all her dolls and put a sword in her hand, or did Hit Girl initially resist the training and just spend a lot of time crying? What about the first person she killed? Did she really feel nothing, as she does whenever she kills someone in the film? It’s just so very convenient for the film that we never see the earlier stages of Hit Girl and Big Daddy’s relationship, isn’t it? All that stuff is safely out of our minds, the movie can reap the shocking results, and no one involved has to expend any energy thinking.

The fact is, Hit Girl probably just acquiesced to her father’s training because he was the only family she had left and she was desperate to please him. Their relationship was probably very similar to the D’Amicos’ relationship in the film, in which Frank forces Chris to choose between pleasing his father or doing what he knows is right. A better film would be aware of the parallels between Big Daddy and Frank D’Amico, would be aware of the fact that they’re equally villainous, and in similar ways, too. They’re both amoral, greedy, and selfish, but we’re supposed to kind of like Big Daddy because he’s fighting for the fulfillment of his “principles” and all his ugly stuff’s shoved under the rug, while we’re supposed to hate D’Amico because he’s fighting for material wealth and his cruelty towards his son is depicted onscreen.

However, considering the scene with Big Daddy and the character I mentioned earlier, I can see that the film at least acknowledges the idea that Big Daddy shouldn’t have turned his daughter into Hit Girl. And Nicolas Cage’s performance is so unhinged (although it’s almost exclusively in a comedic way) that we can see the film at least implies Big Daddy’s deranged. But without doing more to explore Big Daddy’s relationship for what it is – sick, twisted, and reprehensible – the film just feels too much like cheap exploitation. And there’s so much interesting, challenging material in their relationship that it’s hard for me to see “Kick-Ass” as anything else rather than a missed opportunity. It could have been so much more. Sure, you don’t very often see 11 year olds slicing off people’s legs, but Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s story progresses in a mind-numbingly conventional way. Dave’s plot is fine for the most part, but since Hit Girl and Big Daddy factored so heavily into his story, and into the climax of the film, I stopped caring about what happened to them all. And when the end of your movie is solely about survival, and not ideas or choices, you need to care about the characters, and not consider them artificial creations in a self-consciously shocking technical exercise. It takes a very specific set of circumstances to make characters who thoughtlessly kill people in order to solve their problems interesting.

Director Matthew Vaughn does, however, think of some inventive ways to thoughtlessly kill people. On a purely visual level, he’s crafted a decent action movie, particularly in one sequence where he uses super-slow-motion and strobe lights. Also, although I didn’t like the humor in some situations which I thought deserved a bit more seriousness, there’s a lot in “Kick-Ass” that’s genuinely funny – there’s what Dave does to find a lost cat, how D’Amico spends some of his spare time, the affectations of Dave and Big Daddy when they’re in costume, and the conversations between Dave and his friends, one of whom is the very effective young actor Clark Duke, from “Hot Tub Time Machine” (in Dave’s group of friends, Duke legitimately is "the funny one"). And in spite of the story they’ve been placed in, the three principle actors, Andrew Johnson, Nicolas Cage, and Chloe Moretz, are all great fun to watch. Johnson projects an affable, innocent charm, Nicolas Cage is whacked-out and over-the-top, and Chloe Moretz is convincingly adorable and dangerous.

I don’t think that’s enough, though. That can be enough for some movies, but each movie creates its own set of expectations, and like I said earlier, “Kick-Ass” creates too many missed opportunities. The second we see a homicidal little girl shoot someone in the head, the film is obligated to show us how truly sad that is. When people walk away from “Kick-Ass” I don’t think they’re thinking about the tragedy of a twisted, brainwashed child – I don’t think they’re thinking of Nicolas Cage as a sort of villain. I think they’re thinking about how cool it was when so-and-so did such-and-such, which isn’t an indictment of anyone who thinks that, because part of me felt that too. It’s an indictment of a movie that doesn’t try to make us feel any more than that about such subject matter, when we – as creatures capable of complex thought and empathy – should be asked to feel more than that.

Review: Up (2009)

Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner) probably just seems like an old curmudgeon to anyone who meets him. No doubt that’s how the real estate developers see him. Once his house was in the suburbs, but now he’s surrounded by skyscrapers and sushi restaurants. Construction’s already underway for a new building on his block and, even though he’s right in the middle of the site, Carl’s not budging. Soon he’ll be living in a bizarre little alcove inside a skyscraper, his white picket fence lining the edge of a concrete wall. For the aesthetics of the building, that simply wouldn’t do.

Eventually Carl is forced out of his house and into a nursing home. But on the day he’s supposed to leave, in a splendid, spectacular moment, hundreds of balloons burst forth from his chimney, lifting the house from its foundations and up, into the air. As he floats through the city, he passes by a little girl’s window, filling her room with brilliant pink and blue light. A flock of birds follows him into the sky.

He’s off to fulfill his childhood dream of living on top of Paradise Falls in Venezuela. But he soon discovers that a husky little kid named Russell (Jordan Nagai) has accidentally stowed away on the flight. Russell visited Carl earlier, looking for a way to earn his “Assisting the Elderly” Wilderness Explorer badge. Carl tried to get rid of him, and just Carl’s luck, the kid came back at the worst possible time. Just as Carl starts to cut away balloons, a storm hits the house and it sends them all the way to an almost-crash landing in Venezuela, right near Paradise Falls. “Up” largely follows their adventures through the jungle, as they race against time to perch Carl’s house at the top of the Falls’ precipice.

This movie made me so happy. My chest gets a warm, full feeling whenever I think about it. I could try to describe how beautiful it looks, but that would never do the film justice – I will say, however, that it supplied my imagination with more original and captivating images than any other computer animated film since the genre debuted with “Toy Story”. It seems to me that many of the images in “Up” and “Toy Story” are especially suited to the relative realism of computer animation. There’s a magic in watching the balloons burst out of the chimney, in seeing the house float out of the city, in seeing some toys come alive, in seeing the mundane transform into the fantastic. It’s a quality that hand drawn animation can’t capture.

However, if “Up’s” story didn’t move me so deeply, its beauty would count for nothing. It effervescently whisks us along much of the time, but also it has the wisdom to stop in some moments and take a good hard look at the issues its characters face. The film relates an important lesson about dealing with death and loss, about honoring the memory of our loved ones, and it succeeds by exploring its characters’ troubles frankly and fearlessly – it knows that true happiness comes not from triumph, but from learning to accept that which saddens us by looking at our lives and our problems in a different way.

Pixar can do anything they want now, can’t they? They seem to make movies that would never survive the usual development process. “WALL-E” had no dialogue during its first thirty minutes, and that was likely considered a risk, since Hollywood rarely likes to try something new and few modern mainstream films rely so exclusively on visual storytelling. “Up” must’ve been a tough sell too, since it’s an adventure film starring an old man and a goofy little kid. Kids in the audience don’t want to buy an elderly action figure. And how can they relate to a septuagenarian?

The creators of “Up” wisely begin their story in Carl’s youth, giving any younger viewers reticent to identify with an old man a chance to empathize with someone a bit more like themselves. When you’re a kid, it can be pretty difficult to imagine that adults were as little as you once. We meet little Carl as he sits in a movie theater, a pilot’s leather cap sitting on his head and aviator goggles resting on his oversized glasses. He’s rapturously watching a newsreel about his hero, adventurer extraordinaire Charles F. Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who flew his zeppelin, “The Spirit of Adventure”, to Paradise Falls and discovered a rare bird there. Soon after, as the newsreel informs us, the skeleton of the bird is decried as a fake (this development elicits an indignant, passionate “NO!” from Carl), and a bitter Muntz ventures back to South America in search of a live specimen of the creature to clear his name.

On the way home from the theater, Carl meets a gawky, spunky, scatterbrained little girl named Ellie. She’s a bit of a tomboy, and she shares Carl’s love for Muntz, South America, and “The Spirit of Adventure” – both the zeppelin and the notion. She effusively speaks of Paradise Falls and makes Carl promise to someday go there with her.

Carl regards her enthusiasm with reverence and awe. “Up” clearly remembers how much we value seeing such earnest excitement in our childhood friends. That communal ardor creates a sort of strength you need as a kid, and for a short time, the world is limitless and you aren’t afraid and there is someone to share a marvel with. Somewhere along the way that kind of excitement acquires the potential to become a source of ridicule. At some point we develop a certain self-awareness that stops us from yelling “NO!” without irony, in a crowded, darkened room.

Carl and Ellie get married and, in a montage sequence you may have already heard about, we witness at least seventy years of their life together, seventy years full of joy, fun, love, and some heartache. Composer Michael Giacchino (who also made amazing music for “Speed Racer” and “Star Trek” and still makes amazing music for “Lost”) carries part of the weight of this sequence with his Oscar-winning score. But what’s so important about this montage is the fact that it’s the first indicator of how special “Up” truly is. It introduces a tragedy all too prevalent in real-life, a tragedy that, to my knowledge, has never been addressed in animated films before.

With the death of the mother at the beginning of “Finding Nemo”, and with some certain events in “Up”, Pixar seems to be the only animation studio in recent years that’s brave enough to explore how we respond to some the most heartbreaking events that life has to offer. That’s not to say this film is dour; on the contrary, it is ebullient. And that is not to say the tragic events are horrific, like in “Bambi” or “The Lion King.” In the montage, “Up” depicts Carl and Ellie’s trials briefly and with matter-of-fact solemnity. These moments result in a heightened sense of emotional realism – Carl is aware of thoughts and feelings that mainstream American cartoon characters never experience, that previously only seemed to exist in the “real world”. The filmmakers further push the boundaries of their genre when, in an unexpected development, we see what might be the first depiction of human blood in a mainstream computer animated film. It’s just a small red splotch, and it’s not the result of a serious injury, but the effect is astoundingly jarring, giving the moment in which it appears a certain weight and significance.

The montage ends with Ellie’s death. This is not the tragedy I was speaking of before – that earlier tragedy is never overtly acknowledged, although it is successfully and subtly addressed by the end of the movie. Anyway, Ellie’s death is really the tragedy that drives the film, and it’s around this time that Carl begins to be hounded by the real estate developers. Oh, and I neglected to mention an important point earlier: to Carl, the house and its particular arrangement of possessions are of special significance. It’s where he first met Ellie, back when it was a run-down shack they used as a makeshift clubhouse. They ended up buying it and painting it to look like a house they drew in a picture as children. In the picture the house sits on top of Paradise Falls.

Now Carl tightly clings to the memories held in the planks, boards, and beams of his home. Later on, he begins to speak to the house as if it was Ellie’s anchor on earth, as if her presence in his life was dependent on the house’s existence. Carl can’t let the house be demolished. He can’t leave it. He and Ellie always kept a little fund for going to Paradise Falls, but that fund was always depleted by life’s little obstructions. Bringing the house to Paradise Falls now would fulfill his promise to Ellie and completely realize their childhood dream. It seems to be the only goal left for Carl to pursue.

As I mentioned before, Carl and Russell almost crash land near Paradise Falls in Venezuela. Ordinarily, Carl would try to find a way for Russell to get home, but his dream, his house, is in trouble. The helium will only last for a couple of days, and Paradise Falls seems so close. Why not just bring the house to the Falls first?

This leads to a wondrous image – Carl walking through the forest, pulling along his house, which floats just above the tree line. Carl’s weight is just enough to hold the house down. He’s attached himself to it with garden hose that’s tied around his chest like a harness.

Russell, meanwhile, is attached to the garden hose with a piece of rope. What a great character. Not only is Jordan Nagai’s performance heartwarming, not only is the character hilarious (consider the heap of spot-on little kid complaints he offers as he’s slowly dragged along face down by the momentum of the house, his initial excitement for the adventure having markedly waned), but Pixar also reveals a heartbreaking emotional depth to Russell that I’m sure other animated films wouldn’t have bothered to include. This development gradually surfaces when Russell mentions a harsh comment that was made about him. The moment is uncommonly sad and enormously moving, because Russell is such a nice and good and hopeful person, completely undeserving of any unkind words, and yet he speaks of the harsh comment as if it had validity.

Carl and Russell soon meet a brightly colored bird (which bears a striking resemblance to the skeleton Muntz was after) and Russell names it Kevin. They also meet one of the great comic creations of the film, Dug, a dog that talks with the help of a special collar. Talking dogs depicted in other films always seem to have the balanced, logical mind of a human. “Up” imagines a much more convincing manner of speaking for canines. Take, for example, when Dug first encounters Carl and Russell. Excited, tail wagging, the golden retriever says in his happy, deliberate, monotonous tone of voice: “My name is Dug. I have just met you, and I love you.” Aw. There are other talking dogs like him in the film, and though they can all speak understandable English, their diction is appropriately bizarre.

The dogs are pursuing Kevin, in the service of the film’s villain, whose appearance is delayed, but certainly not unexpected. As the film goes on, these other characters complicate Carl’s journey to Paradise Falls, and Carl is forced to confront the tension between his single-minded pursuit of his dream and a nagging obligation to help his new companions.

The house propels the plot, but it also factors into one of the most enthralling action sequences I have ever seen. First, Carl and Russell are chased down a mountainside, and they use the house’s buoyancy to float down the cliff face, leaping weightlessly from rock to rock. It gets much more intense from there, and I will refrain from describing things in detail, but I will say that Pixar demonstrates a deep understanding of what makes an action sequence great. They involve numerous characters we care about, each dealing with their own set of obstacles, but all traveling on the same path. The obstacles then escalate in scale and complexity. There’s just so much to think about that we can’t help but feel exhilarated, and yet we never become confused because it’s depicted with such visual clarity. Here, and in the final action sequence, Pixar shows it understands that action spectacles are at their best when they’re really about choices.

The situations in which the characters must decide between multiple paths, in the action sequences and throughout the film, are all very thoughtfully constructed by the screenwriters. “Up” is a movie that knows exactly what it’s about, and it knows how to invest its characters’ choices with meaning and significance. Just compare the choices, conflicts, and themes in “Up” to those of hollow, unfocused animated films like “The Tale of Desperaux” and “Horton Hears a Who.”

If you look closely at the film, it’s not just the choices, but the whole plot of “Up” that’s intricately constructed, brimming with deeper meaning. Consider Russell’s connection to Kevin, and why the little boy wants to help the bird. Consider Carl’s connection to Muntz, and how the choices they are, and have been, presented with are remarkably similar. And consider the significance of what may comprise the next stage in Carl’s life. “Up” is also an animated comedy film, like “Kung Fu Panda,” that toys with expectation, taking elements and ideas that were initially played for laughs and endowing them, by the logic of the world, with unforeseen importance.

It’s no surprise that “Up” has a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But maybe that would be a surprise if you only heard a superficial synopsis of the film. Here Pixar has taken a story that could potentially seem unappealing, and they have created a movie, with their superior storytelling, that has near universal appeal. There’s really no good reason not to like this movie. With “Up”, Pixar has produced a highly original work, a visual feast and a feat of the imagination that creates moments of joy, elation, laughter, poignancy, and just a little melancholy. These are filmmakers with the confidence and skill to take a few certain types of sadness, all uncommonly found in American animation, and successfully uncover true consolation. “Up” is film that teaches us how to grieve, how to look in ourselves, at our memories, dreams, and hopes, and find a way to keep from losing ourselves in tragedy. I can’t give it a higher recommendation. It is a film that will enrich your life.

Note: My father mentioned that “Up’s” basic story bears a resemblance to “The Rescuers Down Under” (which he was forced to watch countless times when I was little). I can definitely see the similarities, but that’s not a criticism. They’re completely different films.

Review: Saw (2004)

According to Rotten Tomatoes, the “consensus” is that “Saw” is “a twisted and gory horror film that’s not for the squeamish.”

That’s always been the general impression I’ve had of “Saw”. I’ve always been prepared to think of it as a sleazy exploitation film, the type of movie that depends solely on gruesome torture sequences for its scares. I was wholly expecting to be offended by the film’s reliance on blood and gore, for reveling in its stark depictions of human suffering. The trailer certainly suggests horrific scenes of violence and mutilation. So I watched “Saw”, and I was surprised to find that I’ve seen more gore in R-rated action movies and more disturbing imagery in all those crime shows with mutilated corpses.

You know what was more horrific than “Saw”? That time when I flipped to the CW’s “Supernatural” and saw a teenager get his hand chopped up in a blender. It was much more graphic than "Saw's" titular scene. And I watched the super duper deluxe unrated uncut version of “Saw”, too.

I don’t necessarily want to see more gore in “Saw”, but the fact that I don’t think the film is gory – even though people are set aflame, shot in the head, disemboweled, shredded by glass, slashed in the throat, and, of course, sawed – relates to the film’s essential problem.

Those scenes aren’t very graphic, but like with some certain sequences in "The Isle" (which are the most nauseating and cringey sequences I've ever seen) an effective film can encourage our imaginations to fill in the visual gaps. If someone thinks “Saw” is gory, then either they haven’t seen much cinematic gore or they were so engrossed in the film that their imaginations did all the work. I, for one, was not engrossed. How could I be, when director James Wan manages to attenuate most of his film’s emotional resonance with hyperactive visuals, silly acting, and illogical characters?

A man named Adam (Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay) wakes up submerged in a tub of water. Gasping for breath, he scrambles out of the tub and into the darkness. Suddenly the lights flicker on, revealing a dilapidated bathroom. In the middle of the room is a dead body. At the other end of the room, by the light switch, is Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes), and Lawrence is just as clueless as Adam. I wonder how long Adam was holding his breath under the water? While unconscious.

So the men survey the scene. It may be easy for them to conceptualize their surroundings, but it’s not easy for us. At the end of the movie I still didn’t have a clear picture of much of the room, and I still wasn’t totally aware of the distance between Lawrence and Adam. We can at least see they each have one of their ankles chained to the wall. Soon they find two saws stashed in a nearby toilet. The saws are not strong enough to cut through the chains.

Adam and Lawrence eventually realize they are captives of the serial killer Jigsaw, who devises deadly games for his victims in an attempt to teach them the value of their lives. With a pair of hidden tape recordings, Jigsaw informs the men in the bathroom that if Lawrence does not kill Adam within several hours, Lawrence’s wife and child will die.

The film is at its best when it focuses on the drama between the two men in the room, but the plot also traces the events leading up to Adam and Lawrence’s predicament. It turns out Lawrence was once a suspect in the Jigsaw case. He met Detectives Tapp (Danny Glover) and Sing (Ken Leung, one of two future “Lost” stars in the film), who had been trying to track down Jigsaw for quite some time. We follow the detectives off and on in their investigation, and along the way we see depictions of three of the Jigsaw murders. These glimpses of Jigsaw’s traps are startlingly brief, functioning mostly as quick flashbacks, only a little more substantial than the glimpses of the murders we see on CSI. The time "Saw" spends on its torture sequences is minimal. It was at this point that I realized "Saw" isn't a horror movie so much as it is a mystery or a thriller.

Just one flashback attempts to create any sort of atmosphere or suspense, and it mostly fails. This flashback, telling the story of Jigsaw’s sole survivor, a female drug addict, also contains the only really graphic material (some bloody intestines and a stomach) in the film. Even then, the entrails are photographed in a clinical way. Yes, the man they are being taken out of is alive, but he is completely paralyzed and can feel no pain. And although the man can see, we never see his reaction to being eviscerated, nor do we even see the actual evisceration. When we do see the organs, we only see them in the female drug addict’s hands, in a shot that completely divorces them from the man’s body. This scene is by no means as graphic as a similar scene from “The Cell”, in which a man screams in pain as his intestines are slowly pulled from his abdomen by a rotating spit.

Like the murder scenes in CSI, these three scenes in “Saw” use visual flourishes that distance us from the action onscreen. Specifically, director James Wan speeds up the action using fast motion. Just as much as slow motion draws us into a moment by allowing us to observe an action more clearly, fast motion tends to separate us from events by almost entirely obscuring the reactions of individuals in a scene. I understand that Wan may be attempting to convey hysteria with fast motion, but actors can usually convey that feeling more effectively. Fast motion also tends to hamper drama because we usually associate it with comedy, where it’s absolutely necessary for the audience to feel distanced from the characters. There’s a reason why sped up silent film images seem natural in Chaplin’s comedies and slightly inappropriate in 1920s dramas. Later in the film, Wan uses fast motion in a car chase. I was reminded of “The Munsters”.

In this way the murder scenes are so hectic, hyperactive, and overblown that I could never take the victims’ situations seriously. I laughed when the drug addict found out she had a “reverse bear trap” on her head, and I know I’m sensitive enough to not think such things are funny.

The puppet certainly didn’t help. For some reason, Jigsaw likes to talk through a weird looking puppet from time to time, and he uses a video of this puppet, its mouth moving in time with his words, to inform the “reverse bear trap” woman of her situation. Dolls and puppets can be creepy when they talk on their own supernaturally, like in that episode of “The Twilight Zone”, but here it’s just goofy. Imagine a ventriloquist trying to threaten you with his dummy. It would probably be scarier if Jigsaw talked and the puppet’s mouth didn’t move at all.

It all leads me to this conclusion: I never thought I’d be saying this, but I think I would have preferred a more sobering or emotionally wrenching depiction of at least one of these murders. I’m not asking for more gore, and I don’t have a sadistic interest in their torturous deaths, but at least give me some time to feel the hopelessness and loneliness of these people’s situations. At least give me the time to identify with these people and develop a hatred for Jigsaw.

Wan does, however, successfully create one disturbing, chilling moment. Jigsaw has tied up Lawrence’s wife Alison (Monica Potter) and his daughter Diana (Makenzie Vega). Taking one of Lawrence’s stethoscopes, Jigsaw listens to the gradual acceleration of Diana’s heartbeat as he puts a gun to her mother’s head. The sequence plays out at an agonizingly slow pace, with both Monica Potter and the young girl sustaining hysterical sobs throughout the scene. It’s visually simple, but it’s the most suspenseful scene in the film. Visceral and heartbreaking, we identify wholly with these characters and recoil with them in disgust at Jigsaw’s sadistic actions.

The performances elsewhere aren’t nearly as effective. Cary Elwes is fine for much of the time, but in the climactic scenes, in the most crucial moments of the movie, his performance lapses into unintentional comedy. Monica Potter has the opposite problem. When she’s hysterical she’s fantastic, but most of the time she’s mysteriously, sometimes comically, stilted. However, it should be noted that Leigh Whannell, though noticeably inexperienced, succeeds overall in creating a guarded yet sympathetic character. He’s obviously an adult, but there’s a youthfulness in the way he carries himself that makes him vulnerable even when he’s bitingly sarcastic.

Though the performances fail in integral scenes, what ultimately renders the film intolerable are the many instances in which characters make stupefying decisions. Our heroes continuously hold their enemies at gunpoint, and they don’t just shoot, even though their lives depend on it. They don’t even have to kill the other person. Just shoot them in the leg or something. At one point in the movie, the cops can surprise Jigsaw and arrest him. Then Detective Tapp makes an excuse to wait and hide. What? No. No excuse is good enough. And it’s unforgiveable later in the film when Lawrence desperately needs an item that's out of his reach and he can’t figure out how to retrieve it. At the beginning of the movie Adam was in a similar situation, and Lawrence gave Adam some sound advice: why not use your shirt to extend your reach? That’s a really good idea. Why can’t either of them remember it later? If the filmmakers really didn’t want Lawrence to retrieve the item, then why not place it a little farther away, where any kind of retrieval would be obviously impossible? It’s just sloppy filmmaking. Don’t give me the chance to think about things like that when you want me to be concentrating on the story. Worst of all, each of these irrational decisions has terrible, irreversible consequences for the characters. If all of this stupidity was benign I wouldn’t care, but I feel cheated when characters’ fates are decided in such an artificial, unimaginative way.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the ending of “Saw,” but it didn’t bother me very much. Perhaps because I already knew the twist I never got the chance to feel cheated. The same thing happened when I saw “The Village”, I believe. With “Saw”, a lot is left unexplained, and I can accept that – I think it all could be plausible, and when the film confronts us with the unknown, it finally ceases to be a thriller and really becomes horrific.

I haven’t really discussed Jigsaw’s moralistic modus operandi, and that’s because the film doesn’t give me much to discuss. Jigsaw sees himself as helping his victims. He makes them fight for their lives to rediscover a certain purpose, and if they die, that’s fine, because he considers their lives not worth living anyway. Is this morally complicated? No. He’s just crazy. He kills people for having problems (in many cases minor problems) that they could probably resolve without his “help”. It’s slightly interesting that the sole survivor, the drug addict, believes Jigsaw “saved” her with his methods, but that’s no opinion a person with a healthy mind would have. You made me kill someone in cold blood, but yes, thank you, I now no longer run a meth lab. It would be much more interesting if there was a scene in which she had to defend her opinion against logical scrutiny.

There’s actually a moment in the middle of the film where Jigsaw’s demented logic is soundly defeated, yet filmmakers seem to minimize the scene’s overall importance. Skip the next two paragraphs if you wish to avoid a minor spoiler. In this scene, Detectives Tapp and Sing pull their guns on Jigsaw, but at the same time Jigsaw sets one of his traps in motion. He has a hostage strapped to a chair, and two rotating drills begin inching towards the man’s head. Only Jigsaw knows how to turn the drills off. The detectives can either let him go so he can save the man, or they can arrest Jigsaw and let the man die. They refuse to let Jigsaw go, so as Tapp holds a gun to Jigsaw’s head, Sing frantically searches for a way to set the man free in time. Suddenly, in a moment of clarity Sing sees the solution, and he simply shoots the drills with his gun. The moment of victory is short-lived, quickly overshadowed by what Jigsaw does to successfully escape, and Sing’s actions never get the attention they deserve. It was a surprising, satisfying moment, since it somehow didn’t occur to me that he could use his gun, even though it’s fairly obvious. A character made a smart decision, and that doesn’t happen much in “Saw”.

However, the scene is really important because it reveals the only way one could possibly defeat Jigsaw. He could be arrested, he could be killed, but I’m sure that wouldn’t bother him very much. To really defeat him, one must destroy his extreme philosophy, his black and white belief that those who do not live well deserve to die, that one can only rediscover life’s meaning through trauma. Sing’s solution reintroduces the shades of gray; it jolts us from complacency. It encourages us to think about alternatives, to look for the best possible solution to a problem before we resign ourselves to the worst. I didn’t think of using the gun in Sing’s situation, but that’s because I had been conditioned by the film to think that Jigsaw’s choices were the only choices. The same situation occurs in our actual lives fairly often. Sometimes we get stuck in a rut because we think we only have certain choices available to us. And sometimes we can solve our problems simply by thinking about them in a different, more creative way. In this respect, Jigsaw’s methods for “revitalizing” people’s lives are very similar to the circumstances that wounded these people in the first place.

Bearing that in mind, what’s really infuriating about Jigsaw is the fact that he thinks what he’s doing is right. And the only way to defeat someone like that is to do what Sing does and show him that he’s wrong. It’s interesting to think about, but unfortunately the film doesn’t want to think about it.

“Saw” flirts with interesting ideas throughout its runtime and it always fails to deliver. It comes close with Sing’s scene, and it also comes close in the scenes between Adam and Lawrence. If Jigsaw is the worst humanity has to offer, “Saw” counters him with those two men, whose relationship gives us a surprisingly optimistic view of human nature. I was expecting them to subtly tear each other apart. I was waiting for their civility to gradually deteriorate and finally reveal the worst that they’re capable of. Not so. There is no gradual moral decay, only a sudden, extreme event that understandably forces a moment to its crisis. For most of the film, they are remarkably restrained and trusting. Oh, they are indeed tempted. But in moments where one has power over the other, in moments where one could even kill the other, they relinquish their power. Instead, they search for an option beyond Jigsaw’s stark choices. They search for the type of option that Sing proved to exist. But sadly, the characters aren’t aware of these ideas surrounding their situation, and I don’t think the film is either.

It really gets me, because the final scene between Adam and Lawrence really could’ve been moving if it were in a slightly different film. Actually, I suppose there are quite a few slightly different “Saw” films. Six to be exact. Well. I have to say I don’t have much confidence in the movies, but it wouldn’t hurt to see how it all pans out.