Close, and a Cigar

I have to admit that prior to seeing “A Dangerous Method” my definition for “Freudian” went something like: “having to do with sexual stuff or everything reminding you of a dick,” and my definition for “Jungian” something like: “uhhh…collective unconscious?” It turns out their ideas were a little more complex than that. So it was good to have my knowledge base bolstered a bit, and good to have it bolstered by a great story like this one, put to film by David Cronenberg.

After cursory Wikipedia research upon my return home, I’ve decided that the movie sticks pretty close to the truth, resorting to postulation only when it comes to the questionable sexual nature of the relationship between Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient, friend, student, and eventual influencer, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley, in need of some calzones). That is, it’s not a fact that Jung took her virginity then engaged in some light S&M relations with her. However, given Spielrein’s history of fatherly abuse and subsequent arousal, you might call it an educated guess.

All this professional misbehavior is prompted by a series of conversations between Jung and another student of Freud’s named Otto Gross, historically an Austrian but here played by Frenchman Vincent Cassel. And while this may seem like a miscast at first, it works wonderfully. An unrepentant lothario, Gross lounges about, smokes, and rails (convincingly) against monogamy and the suppression of our “most natural desires.” “Never repress anything,” he says. And it’s SO much more effective with a French accent. The last time we see him, homeboy is wearing suspenders with no shirt and jumping over a fence. It made me want to put his face on a T-shirt. Too bad he starved to death in real life.

While the “dangerous method” from the film’s title probably refers generally to the practice of psychoanalysis, which at the time was new and radical, I think it’s hinted that it also refers to Jung’s “method” of, shall we say, “field research.” As Jung begins his affair with Spielrein, there is a disturbingly clinical look on his face. He seems to have the same demeanor as he had in the exam room, jotting mental notes as he repeatedly applies the belt to his mistress.

Despite this, Jung is not exactly portrayed as cold. There is a child-like fascination with what he’s studying and there’s an open-mindedness to him. Unlike the aging Freud (Viggo Mortensen), he does not seem content to sit on his laurels and chuck swords at dissenters for the rest of his life. He listens to people, allows himself to be influenced. Being listened to, perhaps, was what really cured Speilrein of her mania—in which case it could be argued that their love affair was benign, in net.

Cronenberg seems to leave his moral stance on Jung’s philandering out of the film. He wisely does little more than roll out a story about fascinating relationships within the European intellectualscape of the early 1900s. The only tragedy he addresses as such is the one of the stand-off between Jung and Freud. If they had kept their dialogue open, could they have contributed even more to their field than their already towering individual achievements? We’ll never know. Maybe it was for the best. With all that tweed and friction in there, it could have been a fire hazard.

“A Dangerous Method” amounts, in the end, to a learning experience. This is not a film that is emotionally jarring or epic or sweet or funny. (Except unintentionally when, during a dramatic shouting match between Jung and Speilrein, Speilrein screams “That’s what she said!”) It’s a historical document with a touch of feminism here, a touch of eroticism there, and some strong performances from Knightley and Fassbender (who actually kind of looks like Jung). I’m going to guess the book is pretty good too.

On another note, I hope Mr. Fassbender is done making dirty movies for now. He needs to chill out for awhile, maybe do a Shrek 6 voiceover or something. All this wear and tear could de-magnetize the man.

Morgan Freeman needed. Apply here.

I went alone to see Steve McQueen’s new NC-17-rated movie “Shame” after work in downtown San Francisco and sat through it very grateful that I had not brought anyone along. This, just so you know, may be the worst date movie ever. Ranks right up there with “Requiem for a Dream”—another movie, one might note, about Addiction and its annihilation of good-looking people.

“Requiem” is probably our closest point of comparison here, but even that resemblance is lacking. “Shame” has an entirely different structure. There’s no gradation; it’s not a “descent” or a “decline” or a “downward spiral” like “Requiem” is. If you were to plot this one out, it’d probably look more like a printout you’d get from a heart monitor or a TI-86 rendering of y=cos(x). It’s Man vs. Addiction, the back-and-forth battle, in very realistic, brutal terms.

Well, structurally, anyway, that’s what it is.

Here’s what goes on: Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a highly functioning citizen of New York City. He has a window office and a highly paying job. He is single and very good looking and in top shape. But he’s a little preoccupied with his sex addiction–has been for awhile. When he doesn’t have a hooker over, he’s drowning in internet pornography or out at the bars seducing someone. All this is interrupted, though, when he comes home to find that his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), has moved into his apartment. While his affection for her is obvious and real, he also desperately wants her gone so that he may continue to feed his addiction with no one finding out. But she, a singer by trade, has no money and nowhere to go. Oh, and she’s also suicidal. Thus, the conflict of interest.

I didn’t enjoy this movie. But make no mistake, this is not a movie meant to be enjoyed. McQueen is looking to make you squirm with this one, and he does that rather well. However, there was another factor contributing to my lukewarm feelings: just like its main character, this movie has identity issues.

Is this movie really about a sex addiction? Or is it about family/siblinghood? Or is it emotional retardation that is the real underlying issue here? At one point, Brandon seduces a coworker for whom he might have genuine feelings and finds himself unable to perform. There’s also several points where he shuns his sister when she tries to ask him some real questions. All this suggests there’s more than just Man Vs. Addiction going on here. But what?

And if it is about the travails of sex addiction, what is sex addiction? Personally, I have trouble believing it’s simply an addiction to sex. It’s an addiction to some element of it, isn’t it? Pleasure? Dominance? Connection? Transcendence? All of the above? The film never really answers that question. For having seen a movie that’s supposedly about sex addiction, I found that I left the theater still knowing very little about sex addiction (and knowing way more than I ever wanted to know about Michael Fassbender’s anatomy).

It’s almost as if the movie were made for people who are themselves similarly addicted. Yes, they’ll say, that’s exactly what it’s like! Meanwhile, the rest of us are squinting our eyes, trying to make sense out of Brandon’s quest for skin—that is, what he’s getting out of it. We want to empathize, but there’s a barrier. It’s like trying to empathize with a derailed train.

So am I calling for a dumbing-down, then? Am I the asshat who’s saying to da Vinci, “I don’t know, man. I just can’t tell what she’s thinking. Can’t you put, like, a caption or a thought bubble or something…”? Shit, I guess I am.

But the fact is that I just watched a movie where a guy has a bunch of regular, irregular, and autoerotic sex, then feels bad about it, then does it again, then feels bad about it again. If I wanted to see “footage” of addiction—with no explication or analysis, no prodding or exploring—I could go to a halfway house or the Tenderloin and just sort of sit in the corner with a notepad, make sketches and write conjectures. But that would be cowardly and unrewarding.

It’s the observer who really digs in and interacts, asks questions, get answers, that will ultimately produce the most formidable report. Instead, “Shame” simply shows us a man struggling with a problem and goes no further than that. So (somewhat ironically, considering the main character’s browser cookies) the movie amounts to empty voyeurism. You could say it’s flattened sedans with no Godzilla, penguins with no Morgan Freeman.

Uneasy lies the neck that bears the lei

Listen, I’m only in my twenties. I can’t handle stuff like this. Father-daughter stuff. Husband-wife stuff. Inheritances. Bad publicity. These things are beyond my scope of experience, so you probably needn’t take anything I say about “The Descendants” in this review into serious consideration. Were I the Bureau, I would’ve rated this about NC-35. There’s no explicit content. I just don’t suspect anyone under that life-experience level will truly “get it.” However, please allow me to go ahead and miss the point here.

Our weary narrator is Matt King (George Clooney). He has a law practice in Hawaii, and he is also the sole trustee for a valuable chunk of coastline on the Big Island. He and his cousins have inherited sickening amounts of money and real estate from deals made several generations back (hence the title), and as the film opens, they are finally looking to sell and stand to make a very large profit from the deal. The King family has been in the papers recently; this is, after all, lush, virgin Hawaiian coast they’d be developing.

But souring the profit potential even more than environmentalist consternation is the fact that Mr. King’s wife Elizabeth has just been in a boating accident. She is in the hospital in a coma, and Mr. King, a distant parent until now, has been placed at the wheel in steering his two foul-mouthed, rebellious, underwear-stealing daughters into adulthood. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he knows that.

It would be painful enough to deal with his daughters’ rejection of his all-of-a-sudden care, but on top of that, he soon finds out that his wife will not be waking up—ever. So the grief begins. And immediately afterward, his elder daughter reveals that his wife had been cheating on him in the months just before her accident. So the anger begins.

In most films, the dying or comatose seem impervious to ill will–kept innocent and sacred by circumstance. But here, the woman we see lying on a hospital bed, unresponsive and being kept alive by machines, is sort of demystified. How could she? Well, she can’t exactly answer that.

What “The Descendants” does really well is show that life is enormously complex, that no one really knows anyone, and that people are inexplicable, million-sided creatures. So what can one do but laugh? It’s a funny movie about human fallibility and personal entanglement. Writer/Director Alexander Payne, as most people know, has done this once before in 2009’s “Sideways.” I remember having the same lukewarm feelings about it, even while I recognized its quality and complexity. Perhaps there is a mid-life sagacity to his style that I just can’t relate to.

The narrative in this film, the real “journey” of it, is a moral and emotional one. It’s Matt’s attempt to figure out what the right thing is to do and, perhaps more importantly, what the right thing is to feel. Grief? Anger? Helplessness? Regret? He cycles through them like Uno cards, trying to decide. The character was written very much in need of someone with Clooney’s talent.

Externally, there’s hijinks. Matt has no idea how to parent. An empty-skulled teenager gets punched in the face by an old man. The family, looking for answers, takes a road trip to stalk the man with whom Matt’s wife was cheating. The kids say a lot of bad words. Unexpected ties are unveiled.

The movie is on the line between funny and sad, and that’s where my favorite works of art usually lie. But the sources of laughter and pain here are foreign to me. Payne relies on the audience to sort of know what he’s talking about, and to do that, you almost need some offspring and some marital frustration. Quite literally, I don’t know if it’s worth it.

Preview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWHNXJ1K4yA

Whatever, Apocalypse

Thanks to “24,” we’ve grown accustomed to watching Kiefer Sutherland save the world/country pretty much annually. So when he ceases his self-assured running around and swallows a bottle of pills in the horses’ stables instead, you know something is wrong.

In this case, it’s the eponymous planet in the latest Lars Von Trier film, “Melancholia,” that is about to collide with Earth and kill all living things. He decided to get out a few hours early.

While director Lars Von Trier may have surprised his character with this collision, he does not surprise us. The opening of the film is several minutes of footage of the event itself—or, more accurately, the moments just before. It is highly stylized and extraordinarily gorgeous. And it lets you know right off the bat: everyone dies.

But the first casualty is a wedding.

Justine (Kirsten Dunst), a young woman with a history of depression, is the beautiful bride getting married to her earnest, lanky groom, Michael (Alexander Skarsgaard). He loves her very much and has just bought them some property—an orchard. Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her wealthy husband John (Sutherland) are hosting the ceremony and reception at their lakeside mansion. In attendance are Justine’s smarmy boss, the girls’ father and his two mistresses named Betty, the girls’ mother (Charlotte Rampling) and her spectacular omni-hatred, the butlers, the henchmen, and the rest of the friends and family. As Justine self-destructs, teetering on the edge of another bout of depression, the wedding unfolds disaster by disaster. Sometimes it’s comical, sometimes it’s devastating.

The audience’s feelings toward the groom become parallel to our feelings toward everyone else: sympathy for impending doom. We know about it, and they don’t. We see the bride’s disengagement, her efforts—and ultimate failure—to act how she knows she’s supposed to act, and we know that the groom is in for some heartbreak just as we know that everyone in the film is in for some fiery death. Ms. Dunst pulls off an amazing performance (never thought I’d write that)—expressing a very yucky thing lying just beneath the surface of a very pretty thing.

After the wedding, Justine plummets into a deep depression and goes to live with her sister. It is here that we get to see the vast differences between the two girls. Claire is your typical, practical, responsible woman. She helps her sister bathe, cooks her favorite meals for her, and tucks her into bed, all while managing her own son, Leo. She is somewhat worried about what they’re saying on TV about Melancholia’s slight chance of collision with Earth. Justine, on the other hand, can barely feed herself, has lost her job, and has checked out of life completely. She has no worries about Melancholia or the destruction of Earth, which seems to know as imminent. “Life on Earth is horrible,” she says. “No one will miss it.”

Toward the end, though, as disaster approaches, it is Claire who is made to look helpless. Justine’s resigned calm is a far more practical response in this context, and she is the one who leads the remaining three (after John’s suicide) through their last few minutes.

This movie is great for getting you to think about death. We don’t really think about it often, especially in our youth. The approaching planet, they say, has been “hidden behind the sun” until just recently, and now it is looming as large as the moon in our sky. This, if you think about it, is essentially the same path death, as a concept, takes on the consciousness in the course of a human life: invisible at first, then more and more visible as time passes. Von Trier uses the characters in his film to illustrate the different ways people deal with it. Some, like John, can’t handle it and cut out early. Some, like Claire, struggle absurdly to avoid it or delay it, and some, like Justine, accept it as they would a parking citation and then go lie naked on the edge of a riverbank. Some, like the horses, neigh.

What if we could see death in this way, Von Trier asks, as a physical presence on the horizon? Would we act the same, if we just had to turn our heads to see our own personal apocalypse up there in the sky, getting bigger and bigger? His elbow to the ribs with this film is that the only real differences between the horror that transpires in the movie and what happens in all of our lives are the mode and the scale.

I think the message, then, is that the most appropriate reaction to Melancholia, the planet, is Melancholia, the condition. While Von Trier may have gone cosmic with this film, no one could ever call him “sunny.”

The O’Briens, the Quarks, and the Nucleotides

It’s becoming more of a risk these days to take oneself seriously. God knows I rarely do. It’s a form of self-exposure, self-seriousness is, a surrogate nakedness before the world. It’s much easier to win praise for a spoof or win praise for a nod, easier to hide behind conventions, hide behind humor, and easier to not make non-narrative films with solar-flare montages and breathy voiceovers and sandy afterlives and CGI dinos. Now that everyone is a critic, creating a movie that is so rich with things to ridicule tees its creator up for the hearty swing of bitter, iconoclastic aspersion. Even a title like “The Tree of Life,” sounding like some kind of Elven residential fixture or Land Before Time sequel, can be poked at.

I think it’s a safe bet, though, that writer/director Terrence Malick wasn’t kidding. There’s an undeniable and unapologetic gravitas to this movie. So the only way to ingest this film is to swallow it whole—or maybe, if I may correct myself, be swallowed whole by it. Your other option, if you don’t feel like thinking, is to shirk the whole thing and have a few laughs at its expense. Your choice.

There isn’t much to say about the “plot.” Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) are parents to three boys. At age nineteen, one of them dies, ostensibly away at war, but details are never given. The bulk of the story takes place just at the painful cusp of their adolescence, as Mr. O’Brien fakes his way through fatherhood, psychologically severed by combating convictions about what a father should be and what a man should be. The eldest of the boys unravels before us, and his two brothers hide away under the lacy parasol of their mother.

Flashing forward every now and then, we see a grown-up eldest brother in the form of Sean Penn, whose voice over indicates that he misses his deceased brother and seems to wander about, ruminating on his troubled past, in his beautiful home and his loveless marriage. It appears that he has trounced life, forgotten to live it.

This is a film that could only be a film, not plot-driven, not dialogue-driven. The old Eisenstein ideas of montage, that images strung together can work to do more than advance a story, are very much at play, colliding images and sounds to form a whole much greater than the sum of the parts.

Interspersed with the history of this family is the history of the Universe: The raging inner turmoil of a troubled young man captured at its infinitely creepy essence, then slammed against an image of the Sun’s chaotic and perpetual inferno. The birth of a child against the intricacies of day-to-day cellular miracles. Shots of draconian, rust-colored galactic clouds. Shooting strands of DNA. A comet hitting the Earth. A giant waterfall. A spiraling rock formation.

Malick’s universe is not lacking in symmetry. He’s exploring a sort of reflexive oneness of all things.

Unfortunately, the subliminal effect of all this mashing and layering is almost incommunicable. You’d almost have to make another film in order to review this correctly. Near the film’s end, even though nothing was really happening on screen–guy riding in elevator, guy walking in desert, waterfall, ladder, guy walking around on beach–I was blown back, wringing my hands, my eyes bulging out of my head, too choked up to even speak.

Some of it, yes, was the cinematography, some of it the soaring operatic score, some of it the acting, but most of it, I think, came from the filmmaker’s uncanny ability to simply put everything in the right order.

Which, if we want to get really corny and poetic about it, is the real miracle of the universe itself–the order.

But I don’t want to get corny or poetic about it. You might think I was taking myself seriously. So instead I’m going to end with: DO NOT WATCH THIS ON A TV. Normally, I find a more graceful way to say this than putting it at the bottom of a review in all caps, but I feel it is terribly important, because of rare achievements in sound and visual beauty, that you see this one in theater.

Greco-Roman Malaise Strikes NJ

It says something about the times we’re living in that there are as many films about malaise as there are about robberies. ‘Boredom’ has almost hit genre status–just about ready for that clan of spoof-making idiots to make “Boredom Movie.”

Has something been coined for this yet? If not, I hereby submit “Cinemapathy” and “La Nouvelle Blah.” Most often, they’re stories of professionals stuck in a somnambulant day-to-day existence, devoid of thoughts and feelings, their fires doused, their trousers wrinkled, who suddenly encounter someone who snaps them awake and drives them to do great things. It’s an old story, to be sure, but the contemporary version’s primogenitor was probably “Lost in Translation“–a groundbreaking film in its portrayal of modern boredom–followed closely by “Garden State” (twenty-somethings can be bored too!) and then recently by movies like “The Visitor” and “Smart People.”

Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), weary protagonist of “Win Win,” isn’t just bored, though. He’s also kind of desperate. His practice as a legal counselor has not been doing so well lately, and neither has the high-school wrestling team he coaches in the evenings. Now, with two young daughters and a mortgage, he’s struggling to keep his family afloat but is too proud to share his stresses with anyone, and he’s having anxiety attacks. That’s when he decides (under questionable ethics) to become a legal guardian for an old man with a lot of money. This way, he’ll receive a caretaker allowance and not have to tell his wife exactly how bad things are.

Things take a turn when the old man’s grandson, Kyle, shows up in town looking for the pappy he’s never met. He’s run away from his home and rehabbing mother in Ohio. And now, with the grandfather in a nursing home and Kyle’s mother debilitated, the Flahertys are forced to take him in. Fortunately, as Mike will soon find out, his house guest is a hell of a wrestler.

Eventually, this movie stops being so much about mid-life malaise and just turns into “The Blind Side“–only with financial instead of racial concerns. That sounds like a dig, but it’s not quite a dig. They’re both sort of touching in the same essential way if one opens oneself up to it.

The young prodigious athlete at the center of this one, instead of being sickly sweet and downcast and unassuming like its predecessor’s Michael Oher, is more walled off and rebelliously independent. Somehow, though, he’s just as likable in the end. It just takes longer because he smokes against Mrs. Flaherty’s will and speaks in monosyllables.

The slow unfolding of Kyle’s personality is very much in tune with the slow unfolding of the movie itself. The film spends just a bit too much time establishing the portrait of Mike’s life pre-Kyle, and early pacing issues make for annoyed audience members. And the jokes aren’t quite funny enough to rescue it. (A five-year-old saying “shit” is only amusing once.) This one has a Comedy billing, but it’s not primarily that, despite the heroic comic effort put forth by Bobby Cannavale as an overzealous divorced banker with no filter.

Paul Giamatti, director Thomas McCarthy, and the rest of the cast did a great job of remaining invisible and allowing the story to do its thing. No one will cite clarity issues. Whether or not it “did its thing” is going to depend on the audience. It may win, but only by decision.

Maggie & Jamie do Ohio

So I hear Anne Hathaway is hosting the Oscars—she and this guy Jim Franco. It seems like an odd choice. It’ll be sort of a reversal of who’s picturing whom naked when it comes to the norms of public speaking. Because if her audience has seen “Love and Other Drugs,” they’ll know exactly what that looks like. Personally, I would be reluctant to present to all my industry colleagues just after they’d all seen everything I have to offer.

Anyway, the movie: it could have been really good. It had potential. But, while still superior to most of the saggy vegetation in the RomCom wetlands, it doesn’t manage to fully emerge into open air. To pull a Frost—as long as we’re doing nature metaphors—in the end, it neglected to choose “the road less travelled by” and instead fell square into the wagon ruts of a more familiar, commercial-friendly path.

It’s a superior setup; the central issue in this movie is, for lack of a better term, real. For once, it isn’t a woman’s shopping addiction or a love/career choice or a long-distance romance or confusion over a treasure map. Maggie (Hathaway) has early-onset Parkinson’s disease. This alone gives “Other Drugs” a certain gravitas that’s absent in most of the genre. From the first time we see Maggie’s hand tremble, we know that this is not going to be all sunshine. (That’s probably why the disease is completely absent from the trailer.)

Jake Gyllenhaal, in all his juvenile, sunken-eyed charm, plays Jamie, a “wayward” son in a wealthy family of medical success stories. He’s not exactly unsuccessful, beginning as an electronics salesman with much verve and then nabbing a lucrative job selling pharmaceuticals, but he channels most of his intelligence and energy toward other pursuits—often in heels. His archetype is no stranger to romantic comedies, the potential-laden Lothario with a handsome, vivacious-but-impermiable exoskeleton just waiting to be pierced by a special lady.

He finds that lady in Maggie, a barista/artist with heaps of lovely curls on her pretty head and heaps of prescription bottles on her tiny sink. The two play each others’ games and manage to add quite a sum to their tally of unconventional venues for intercourse started way back in “Brokeback Mountain” in the back of a truck. Alleyway. Mop room. Bookcase. Floor. You name it. They’ll do it there.

All is montage-y, beautiful-couple-fornication fun until the seriousness and the ramifications of Maggie’s disease begin to burst forth. Miss Hathaway’s efforts render Parkinson’s in absolute full-color—whether it be an accurate portrayal of the disease psychology or not, the authenticity of her frustration hits you right in the face.

Eventually, when Maggie’s condition worsens a shade, doubts and insecurities surface and taint the relationship. Maggie fears eventual abandonment, combined with a fear of being a burden to someone she loves. Jamie, after an unfortunate buffet-line conversation with a jaded husband at a Parkinson’s convention who tells him to run for the hills, fears a life spent with only half the person he’s come to adore. So after a crusade to find a cure for his girlfriend that in any other RomCom would have seemed noble, Maggie is smart enough to realize that the implication here is that Jamie’s not accepting what she will become. So they part. This is where, for me, “Other Drugs” gave up on being good.

Dramatic car chase. Impassioned plea. Love conquers all. Life changes. Happily ever after. OK, so I guess we’re back on the recipe card?

What happened? It’s not often one sees a movie veer off so suddenly.  It was on track to be sort of unclassifiable–the only comparison I’d come up with was “A Walk to Remember,” which, while thematically similar, was nowhere near as smart, modern, or weighty–but at the end, it seemed to panick and seize hold of the nearest identity.

Why? Probably so it could make more money and so the marketers could recycle some previous campaign strategy. I get it. It’s hard to sell without precedent. But couldn’t they have just looked within? I mean, Viagra did pretty well. And what came before that? Viagra’s precedent? Well, I guess it was movies like this.

Holy War for Dummies

Those Brits. They think they can get away with anything. I took in their latest stunt, “Four Lions,” last night: a comedy about a group of inept Islamic suicide bombers in London. Doubt reigned, I admit it; a comedy on this decidedly unfunny topic is nearly suicide in itself. As I said in attempt to convince my friend to come along with me to this movie, “the degree-of-difficulty is, like, off the charts.”

But should the degree of difficulty be factored in to the evaluation of a movie? Is this the Olympics? Do I have a numerical placard, a dour physiognomy, and glasses? No. Well sometimes in the morning. But still, a challenging concept, if it doesn’t absolutely bomb (ha!), often yields more interesting results.

In this respect, movie-making is somewhere between the X-Games and Cooking. In the X-Games, if you simply land your jump–even if your landing was so soft as to whomp up just three little snowflakes–you’re not going to get the same score as the guy who landed his jump after a Back-Double Half-Danish Woebegone Monkeybucket Twister. Conversely, in Cooking, you’re not going to get extra love from your family for using only a soup spoon and a candle flame to prepare dinner.

It’s process versus result. In snowboarding, the only “result” is that you, having started at the top of the slope, end at the bottom. You’re evaluated on the process. In cooking, the end consumer is blind to the process (excepting teppanyaki), but experiences the result fully. With movies, we’re seeing the results and the processes—which is I think why challenging oneself as a filmmaker or a writer is more likely to pay off, but is nothing to bank on in itself. For more on this bullshit I’m spewing, see “The Five Obstructions.”

“Four Lions,” for being so conceptually unconventional, is actually pretty formulaic in its execution. It’s a proven recipe, which we see over and over in Ferrell, Wilson, Carell, and Apatow movies: start with four imbeciles.

Imbecile #1 is an older, British facsimile of Jonah Hill, a doughy, white Islamic convert whose misguided strategy is to mobilize area Muslims by bombing the local mosque and pinning it on non-Islamic Londoners. The second is the clueless, big-hearted Faisal who, seeking alternatives to self-detonation, occupies himself with a side-project of training pigeons to fly with explosives strapped to their bodies. The third is the young Hassan, recruited along the way after he breaks into a rap at an Islamic progress forum with fake explosives strapped to his torso. The fourth (and dumbest) is Waj, a semi-handsome and utterly vacuous hand puppet of a man, animated by the roiling ministrations of his best buddy, Omar, the gang’s leader.

Omar is the movie’s “straight man,” the only one with any sort of coherent thought processes, who spends most of his time with his face in his hands, trying to wrangle his nimrods into productivity. We laugh at him because he’s dealing with idiots, much the way we laughed at Larry in Perfect Strangers because he had to teach that silly foreigner that things just don’t work that way.

Where this film gets really interesting is in the way the audience sympathizes with him: the poor guy has to deal with all these idiots in order to accomplish his dream. One just forgets about the nature of this dream—killing innocent people in a holy war—until the end, when it’s just on the horizon. It creates an unusual sort of awareness—a sense that “I shouldn’t be feeling what I am feeling” and a discomfort about what you’ve been laughing at this whole time. It’s like someone switched on a light and you realize you’ve been dirty-dancing with your cousin. Back away slowly. Never mention this again.

In Omar’s talks with his son and wife, too, one can sense that something very bad is just below the surface. On one hand, there is obvious love present, but dangerous ideas are being tossed about. It was enlightening, at least for me, to see a more modern, assimilated Muslim like Omar, who openly shows affection for his wife and allows his son modern conveniences, be the violent one, whereas his brother, all caught up in textual orthodoxy and unwilling to be in the same room as a woman, swears by nonviolence. The writers capitalize on this reversal of assumptions in a smart twist toward the end.

If anyone sees this one, let me know your opinion on it. I don’t know how to respond to the “how was it?” question with anything other than “Good” followed by, “…it messes with you.”

Great clip from this one:

Death: now recyclable!

As an English major, I was always told that when writing about whatever we were reading, I should do my best to “divorce the work from its creator”—that the whole contextual criticism thing is sooooo OVER and that the modern way to look at something is to have it standing by itself to be examined, probed, disassembled, etc. But the indoctrination failed, because I can’t ignore that Clint Eastwood, at 80 or so, would elect to make “Hereafter” now. I mean, it would be on his mind. Let’s just face it. Nobody’s as baffled as they’re putting on.

It goes without saying that this is a thematic departure for Mr. Eastwood; I can’t think of much else in his portfolio with even a hint at anything Beyond This Realm. And it’s also something fairly new for the film’s writer, Peter Morgan, who tends to write scripts (Frost/Nixon, The Queen, Last King of Scotland) about prominent figures and their assorted trespasses–but now finds himself having written about the Afterlife and how it plays into the lives of figures of relative anonymity. Well, it’s good to try new things, boys. Usually.

What’s laudable about “Hereafter” is that it truly is a departure, and not some dainty foray. Both writer and director refused to use the excuse of being “new to this” to shy away from the inherent opacity and universality of the topic. They went for it—the buzzing, lo-key glimpses of an alternate dimension, the ghost-blown headwear, the depressed psychic intermediary, the works. What emerges is an ambitious, affecting, but in the end disappointingly Frankensteinian movie, assembled from parts of previous death-and-then-some pictures. It’s what might’ve happened had Alejandro Iñárritu done “Ghost.”

It opens with a tsunami. That’s not, like, a metaphor or anything. Literally, a big wave comes and sweeps up a semi-famous vacationing French news reporter and most of the coastal town she’s in. She nearly dies, but is rescued at the last moment and left to wander the wreckage. However, when she attempts to reengage in her normal high-profile life, she’s haunted by visions and can’t properly concentrate on dismantling her politico guests. So she starts writing a book… called “Hereafter,” and this confuses all her friends. (So this is obviously Peter Morgan writing himself into the movie in beautiful-woman form.)

Meanwhile, George Lonegan, a blue-collar denizen of San Francisco is enrolled in an Italian cooking class. He’s lonely. He’s hiding the fact that he’s a psychic (what color collar would that be?) and therefore has trouble with interpersonal relationships because every time he touches someone, he has visions of all the dead people trying to holler at whomever it is he has touched.

And back across the ocean blue, in what is the most gut-wrenching narrative, a pubescent English boy loses his beloved twin brother to an oncoming van. To make matters worse, the death forces the already unstable mother of the two into giving up the remaining boy to foster care, where he refuses to speak but does manage some impressive internet research on communing with the dead.

These three threads, while each meaningful in its own way, dangle and sway for far too long before they tenuously connect near the film’s close. Unfortunately, the movie feels long and its culmination feels ad-hoc. The best colliding-narrative films are the ones where there’s actually a collision–a feeling of power and inevitability at the end. The threads of this one are more, shall we say, busheled.

That said, the degree of implausibility that gave the ending its improvised feel may have been intentional, set there to imply the presence of Divine foreordination. The movie is, after all, a hopeful one. The point is, I guess, that the characters were there for each other and that perhaps God uses fellow man to do his Work. Which, again, is not an original idea.

Death is a difficult topic. To say it’s “well trodden” is an enormous understatement. It’s getting to the point where there are yellow warning signs about erosion. However, “Hereafter” failed to even take a unique perspective. At least “Meet Joe Black” and Japan’s “Departures” and–shit–even “All Dogs Go to Heaven” had interesting points of experience. Eastwood’s latest, while being without question emotionally engaging, seems like recycled material. Unusual for this guy.

Execution-wise, it’s a decent effort. The disaster scenes feel very real in that they avoid becoming spectacle. It’s not a 100-foot wave; it’s a 15-foot wave. It’s not a nuclear bomb; it’s a small subway bomb. One moment during the opening made me audibly gasp–something that has not happened in a very long time. But some of the dialogue could be less hackneyed (“It’s not a blessing, it’s a curse.”) and the courtship between George and the woman in his cooking class could have been far less erotic. (That was over-promise and under-deliver if I’ve ever seen it.) But Mr. Eastwood knows how to play his instruments, so technically it was very commendable. I hate to say it, but any mistakes were sort of “old-man” mistakes. I mean, Youtube does not look like that.

I feel like I’ve been particularly harsh on this one. It’s almost a compliment, though. My harshness is derived from my expectations, which were high given the creators’ previous work. But here I am again, putting it in context. If you’re going to go see it, make sure not to read this review.

“Social Network” more like a Vector to Alone

There’s been talk among critics that this is the story of the new generation—the story of “how life is lived now.” They say it is the “ultimate in zeitgeist”—that it’s “essential” and “microcosmic” and “timely” and so on and so on.

But if audiences are looking for a movie about the societal and generational implications of Facebook, et al, they might just Netflix them some “Surrogates,” (which I reviewed last year as such). David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” while it does obliquely inform the Plight of the Digital Generation, tells no essentially “modern” story. In fact, it tells one of the oldest stories in the world.

It’s Icarus, it’s Macbeth, it’s Gatsby. It’s Caesar, it’s Pip, it’s Citizen Kane. It’s the classic cautionary parable of great ambition, simultaneously constructive and destructive. And it’s the reverberations of history’s and literature’s most bull-headed achievers coursing silently through the script and the leafy mise en scene that make “The Social Network” a great movie.

Unfortunately, much of the discussion about this movie has been vis-à-vis its accuracy: Was Zuckerberg really like that? Did he screw his best friend over? Does Sean Parker really get that much play? Are Stanford girls easy? And of course people are drawn into discussing that; Facebook is something nearly everyone uses, and the truth about how it came about is going to be fascinating. But the accuracy is a non-issue here—or at most it’s secondary. Much as “Citizen Kane” was a piece of art independent of its alleged subject matter, Mr. William Randolph Hearst, “The Social Network” is a piece of art independent of Mark Zuckerberg and his real-life persona.

And for an artistically relevant film, it bears the rare gift of not being blow-bubbles-in-your-Pepsi boring, much thanks to the immensely sharp script from Aaron Sorkin.

The movie begins with a date. It does not go well.

Young Zuck is out at a Cambridge bar having beers with his girlfriend Erica Albright, a student from nearby BU. In an attempt to impress her, he’s expelling torrents of emotionally retarded and offensive rhetoric, digging himself a bigger and bigger hole until Erica, rightly pissed, has to break up with him. She departs, saying (a simple but great line), “You’re going to go through life believing that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that’s not true. Girls won’t like you because you’re an asshole.” Mark, slouching from the weight of his backpack and his embarrassment, jogs all the way home.

This is the point at which Jesse Eisenberg’s brilliant performance as Mark Zuckerberg starts making a difference. Eisenberg, with his firmly held visage and shifty eyes, creates an enormous sense of potential energy in that one wonders how his emotion over this rejection, if not betrayed by his face, if not drained through the eyes, if not hugged out with his friends, might manifest itself. The actor’s ability gives the opening a feeling of a disrupted slumber. The lamp is rubbed, so to speak. What happens now?

Eisenberg’s brilliance does not stand alone. Also beyond himself was Andrew Garfield, who plays what is probably the most sympathetic role in this cast of tiger sharks and remora fish as Zuckerberg’s only real friend, Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo is the one who fronts the money to start the company then goes off to find advertisers. And he’s also the one who, when Facebook’s awarded a large venture investment, is dropped like a Solid Rocket Booster at 45 km up. (You know? Those things that separate from the space shuttle?) Mr. Garfield plays Eduardo with so much likability that it’s not a problem at all to feel sorry for him–him, a top-notch Harvard student from a wealthy family who’s suing his former best friend for millions. That says something.

Likability is what Zuckerberg lacks, and seems to be, at his core, what he desires most. It’s a desire represented by Erica Albright, whom I’ve begun to think of as Rosebud II, but also evident in his jealousy of Eduardo, who managed to get tapped for a “Final club” spot Mark had coveted. He is bitter that likability is important. Ability, without the lik-, is more important for him. And instead of conforming to the de facto universe, Zuckerberg responds by creating a new one–one where he can be King, one where there’s no point in disliking him. There is acquiescence, there is servitude, or there is the door.

The tragic arc here is not the typical one. The wings don’t melt. There’s no falling on swords, no crash of empire, no return to the fishing life. It’s a new sort of arc: an unfinished trajectory, a rise and no real fall. To return to the space shuttle metaphor, this one, this U.S.S. Zuckerberg, sheds its boosters and leaves his stratosphere, gets higher than anyone could ever want. And he sees that it is beautiful up there.  But what to do now? And where is everyone else? Well, he’ll have to check their status.