You're gonna need a bigger budget

Of all the motion pictures I've seen from all the decades and all the world my favorite is still Raiders of the Lost Ark. Its constant companions are Empire and Jaws; the movies that made me love movies in the first place.

They tell me of a drive-in theater, and I'm not altogether too young to remember the sacrosanct lots of old, but they tell me of one especial immemorial night when the Perseids fell and small Tiberi-chan was parked before God and God lit up with the Empire Strikes Back. Something of that experience — of popcorn power chords struck at a significant place, a ground like to a baseball diamond where intersect the ley lines of Americana — must have been imprinted upon the courseless mush of my wee brain, a signet pressed into the wobbling raw Spielbergus et Lucas, simultaneously claiming and creating a blockbusting fanboy nascent.

Those two wayward sons of New Hollywood conspired to undo the progress made since the late 60s toward a less bloated, more artful American cinema. They invented a more profitable business and restored the imperial might of the studios. In particular, Spielberg elevated Universal Pictures from a third-rate manufacturer of budget and genre pics and television, never respected by the exalted likes of Paramount, MGM and Warner, to the stature of theme park-operating behemoth, which we nowadays take as a given. Studio fortunes in the 80s came to revolve around movies-for-boys, which is to say around me. It was the golden age of creature effects. The wizardry was mostly analog, toolshed cobbling of snips and snails, muppetry and dwarfs, with computer enhancement to excite Atari junkie kid genius. Was I supposed to lament the lost refinement and grit of the 70s? When rallied about me were mogwai, skeksis, slimers, krites, deadites, poltergeists, rancors, rock biters and toons? When I had heroes like Ash, Mad Max, Dr Jones, Pee-wee Herman, Baron Munchausen, Boba Fett, Doc Brown and Sloth? The 70s didn't give a crap about kids. The Bad News Bears, Star Wars and Meatballs are the exceptions, the harbingers, that prove the rule. Spielberg and Lucas oversaw the only decade of great and enduring movies dedicated to being a kid, and they were my heroes too*.

Which is not to say S & L are the foremost masters of their dubious craft. No one has done better work in the blockbuster/fx era than James Cameron. It's not even a competition. And before I consent to hear your appeals on behalf of Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson, let me remind you that all of Cameron's films are based on original screenplays written by Cameron himself. By design his radical fx are always an integral and purposeful component of the narrative, made indispensable servant to the story — never an end unto themselves. I wouldn't say the guy's writing has quite the psychological depth of Bergman, but he has been a student of physics and philosophy (The Abyss is a great underappreciated work of science fiction) and as a disciplined and conscientious showman Cameron is unsurpassed.

And so I graduated from E.T. and Willow to Aliens and T2, and by high school I aspired to become a CGI fx artist (at least prior to junior year when the intoxicating truth of physics re-centered my world). I pored over a monstrous glossy christmas tome: behind the scenes at Industrial Light & Magic. I was too dazzled to be cognizant of the fact that the kind of vigorous, joyful filmmaking I wanted to be a part of was already over, set to devolve into the sterile, routine and gratuitous. A decade of genuine heart had absently bumped into nineteen ninety-too-cool-for-school, and the kids once briefly indulged are now denied that wondrous admixture of respectful regard and frivolous fun. The tail end of the 80s creature movies (...Tremors, Dead Alive, Army of Darkness) petered out in 1993; what Spielberg started with one mechanical squalus he put to a halt with a stampede of digital dinos. Hollywood was dazzled by ever cheaper CGI that yielded ever higher revenues by its ever more careless application. Lucas publicly revealed the already advanced stage of his dementia in 1997 when, to my ultimate horror, Greedo shot first. That same year Spielberg dropped the first Jurassic Park sequel, the Cretaceous Turd, and so embarked upon his ongoing series of ill-conceived and unnecessary misadventures, misfires and inexcusable mistakes. To date: Lost World, A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds**, Indy 4. Dear Stevie has lost his rudder, at least in the waters of sci-fi and pulp; possibly it was eaten by a four and a half foot baby thresher shark. My milk has gone sour.

Cameron went into hiding in 1997 after Titanic, which is a great movie but lacking protein, like waffles. In his absence and with S & L bent wretchedly to the dark side it has been dark times for the blockbuster. Every season they make gobs of money and they stink. Gladiator and the latter Matrix and Pirates movies are only the most prominent heaps among the decade's catch of execrable garbage. But there have been freedom fighters. The original Matrix remains a worthy achievement, and Peter Jackson has kept the whip cracking with Lord of the Rings and King Kong; with any luck his protégé, Guillermo del Toro, will soon produce a masterwork. Sam Raimi (of all people) brought new respectability to the superhero flick with Spider-Man 2, bettered by Christopher Nolan's two Batman pictures and Watchmen. And most miraculously have appeared a pair of ragged knights, somber and quick in the dusk like Picasso's Quixote: two great, invaluable new movies about childhood that will last your whole life. On the shelf where you keep a Chewie figurine and the game ball from a little league glory, alongside the Goonies, the Neverending Story and Stand By Me, you may put Terry Gilliam's Tideland and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are.

Back to the crap. Six months ago the great and terrible Ebert, seizing the podium in a hectic fit, proclaimed Transformers 2 to be the abominable terminus of the Luco-Spielberg Folly. One can divine in the froth of his words Roger's wish that it be so. And certainly one can appreciate the fitting arc: As franchise royalty of the 80s Transformers would seem to have the right to spark the immolation of its kind. But alas (sweet mercy) Roger's wishes are not fishes. Them autobots grossed not quite a billion dollars, and so we folly on. If you paid to see the movie you are to blame.

Avatar is counterpoint to everything wrong with the blockbuster movie today. Cameron back from the Jundland Wastes, a new hope.

...

If my own wishes were fishes and copyright laws were stricken from the books I'm forced to concede the irony that Avatar would end up being the actual last of its kind. Absent copy protection the blockbuster would perish from the earth. When movies become free to distribute and exhibit a producer could never recoup a $200 million investment. Can you fathom donation and patronage supporting the summer movie season to which we are accustomed? I think the era would simply be over. Dino extincto. And you know what? I would be okay with that. To every thing a season.



* As a youngster I tended to assume my idols were just like me. When doing a report on Steven Spielberg in the fourth grade I was shocked — shocked! — to learn that he's a Jew. Really? But I thought Stevie was a Scout, like me... Admittedly thereafter the Nazi villains took on an even more sinister air, and I took greater satisfaction in their melting. I remember also my dad handing me the binoculars at a Cubs game and directing my attention to right field where — Sufferin' succotash! Andre Dawson was black.

** War of the Worlds in particular I cannot forgive. The gentle soul who created E.T. and Close Encounters, our two most humane, hopeful and beautiful pictures about making contact, had made a well known vow never to depict malevolent extraterrestrials. He felt it was a moral obligation, a chance to use the cinema not to fearmonger but to engender a more noble spirit of comity and curiosity. This gesture I felt had been Spielberg's most valuable contribution, of greater significance than Amistad or Schindler's List. So what in tarnation happened after 9/11 and the Iraq War? Spielberg reverted to exactly the kind of huddled hysterics I had long admired him for rising above — reviving our most iconic episode of baseless panic, to boot — in a time of national stress when his former clearheaded example was most needed. He betrayed us all.

Avatar

From Beggar's Canyon, March 30:

Looming over the entire year is Avatar. ... James Cameron has not released a picture since Titanic in 1997. He is the greatest sci-fi action director of all time. He has spent the last decade developing 3D camera technology and time travel from his hyperbaric compound beneath the antarctic ice cap.

From an e-mail I sent, December 7:

Remember that this is the guy who gave us The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator and T2; he personally ushered in the CGI era. ... I don't know if Cameron is going to start a second FX revolution with Avatar, but he thinks he is, and if I had to put my money on someone it would be him. If anyone can make 3D a viable technology it is him. However, it is probably easiest to imagine Avatar becoming a $400 million disaster. We shall see.

From Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, 1994:

Noble Savage Syndrome. Thrown into the company of a native tribe of any description, the protagonist discovers the true meaning of life and sees through the sham of modern civilization. Wisdom and sensitivity are inevitably possessed by any race, class, age group, or ethnic or religious minority that has been misunderstood. Such movies seem well intentioned at first glance, but replace one stereotype for another...

Charles Stardom, upon exiting theater tonight:

"Oh man, this ain't no Ferngully!"

Thirst

And here I am endorsing a vampire movie — and it's not even German. Given the sheer volume of bloodsucker cinema out there (Count Dracula alone has appeared in over 200 films, just shy of the record held by Sherlock Holmes) I'm guessing we've had to endure vampire priests on screen before now. Aside from the likelihood that every vampire iteration has been worked through, Christendom does have a particular weakness for baroque portraiture of spiritual confliction. I'm aware of two comics that explore such characters: the American Astro City and the manhwa Priest (both unread by me). I'd like to imagine the premise has been exploited primarily for caustic satire, but apologetic allegory seems more likely.

Thirst...I'm not sure which it is. Which is partly why I like it. Chan-wook Park has been artfully playing with blood for so long the vampire genre is a natural, perhaps inevitable fit. He gives us two principals pacted into a yin yang tug and fuck: the conscientious clergymen tortured by his accidental commitment to a liquid diet and the amoral hedonistic minx who mocks him. The superhuman particulars of vampirism are treated with almost throwaway casualness (of a sudden and without fanfare seemingly normal priest hops off a building), which is tasteful because by now we're overfamiliar with it all; Park knows to just get on with the story. It's a simple story poetically told, as is Park's strength, and not without its complement of twisted humor and kink.

The thing I love about Catholic priests is how much they hate themselves. They do my job for me.

Persepolis

Moldering in the depths of my queue is a movie called The Band's Visit. Israeli production, live action, about an Arab Egyptian orchestra trying to get to a gig in Israel. Supposed to be good. Positively lousy with cross-cultural pathos. I'll get around to it, honest.

Persepolis also premiered at Cannes in 2007. A French production adapting an Iranian woman's autobiographical graphic novel to hand drawn animation. So I learned about these two stories of the Middle East at the same time, but the fact of animation made Persepolis inherently more appealing and higher priority. A drawing can distill the essence of a thing, disregard the superficial. I know when I see The Band's Visit I'm going to be looking at eight particular Arabs standing around some particular dirthole village, and the specificity of it will be itself a thing of value, but the message of commonality would be better served by images more abstract and general. Better a little cartoon girl living through warfare, unrest and expatriation in duotone and silhouette.

Avatar, preliminary

I've been accused of not reviewing Avatar in a timely fashion. Seeing as the movie had its world premiere in London just yesterday, and opens in the US on December 18, this is a perfectly reasonable accusation. Therefore I am prepared to put forth an opinion:

Avatar is a load of crap. What, no Ewoks? Horseshit!

Good Night, and Good Luck

A new theater was opening in the south suburbs, one of these premium joints with dinner and drink service, and the owners had the good taste to host the public premiere with a screening of Jaws. In attendance for signing and Q&A was a stormy Richard Dreyfuss, who upon emerging from his holding area to greet the line of fans threw his cap to the ground, glared with furious indignation and shouted a few unintelligible remarks. The fans clapped appreciatively. To see the Orca on the big screen was a thrill, although I felt the busily dining audience was paying rather too little attention to the movie. Afterwards was Q&A as promised and the irascible Hooper took the stage. We sated customers could not have expected the tongue lashing we were about to receive. Dreyfuss had schlepped first class all the way from Tinseltown with an axe to grind and we were to learn from this vituperative ham that we, the American people who'd come to see him fight a shark, were failing to teach our children the value of our civil liberties and the fundamentals of democracy. Apparently our great republic is crumbling because civics has vanished from American schools and our feckless indifference made it so. This went on for some time. Finally the mic was passed to a member of the indicted audience, hand raised. "Do you have any funny stories about working with that shark?"

He obediently responded with a few anecdotes and left. Feathers had been ruffled. I don't know how they run the public schools in Los Angeles County, but I sure as shit had to pass the Illinois and US Constitution tests in seventh and twelfth grade, and the Northwest Suburban Council of the BSA awarded my brothers and me three citizenship merit badges apiece, so the next left coast crusader to make a pit stop in a flyover state should please be aware that the Midwest ain't the San Fernando Valley.

Lucky for us Hollywood has over the years provided the occasional civics lesson, and when not overly condescending we are happy to embrace the message. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is probably the first to come to mind, but the Jimmy Stewart role that actually moves me is in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of several essential Ford films to which I was introduced in a college course on ethics. (The professor happily distributed VHS copies of all films discussed, as if dissemination of valued art should be free.) Stewart is the archetypal pilgrim, come to bring order to the Old West not with a Winchester but with a stack of law books and some crazy talk about the pursuit of happiness; when Jimmy recites from the Declaration of Independence to his gathered pupils I just go all weepy. Maybe it's 12 Angry Men or Atticus Finch that gets your patriotic druthers in a dither.

For as much as he is now a movie star, George Clooney is a television man through and through. So it follows that, to him, integrity in civic duty is a TV newsman named Edward R. Murrow. Hard to disagree.

Clooney's first two films as a director are in love with the roaring heyday of live network broadcast, bringing the spontaneity and recklessness of the 30s newsroom onto the soundstage while at the same time nursing a jaded contempt for its advertisement-driven banality; Chuck Barris and Murrows share a touch of self-loathing, if little else. But whereas Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is all enthusiasm and no discretion the sober follow-up, Good Night, and Good Luck, is as concise and disciplined as if Clooney were not an actor- but an editor-turned-director. (My favorite kind of -turned-director.) The discipline befits the material of course, and I especially admire the restraint exercised in allowing extended sequences of archival footage to do the talking, rather than pointlessly re-staging. All the elements are tasty in this coarse-grained montage, from the journalists' handsome and boozy social scene to the jazz recording studio interludes and period commercials. The creamy black and white set design makes me want to get around to Mad Men in a hurry.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I'm a little worried about Wes Anderson painting himself into a corner. Perhaps you are less concerned, given that Anderson has just departed from live action to release his first animated feature, which happens to be the most unique marquee picture of the year and, as an analog stop motion side scroller, runs rather contrary to prevailing aesthetics. Perhaps now more than ever the Anderson brand seems to you a wildcard.

You haven't been paying attention. Wes's world, like Dudley's, is distinctly and marvelously his own, but from the moment Dignan cuffed a bittersweet farewell in the prison yard it has been subject to an inexorable crayon-drafted procedure for geometric collapse. Fantastic Mr. Fox is the squared, boxed, folded and flattened final product; a wonderful dead end.

Bottle Rocket was the first and last time there were open spaces in an Anderson film — the unbound prairie of his home Texas where the gang shot fireworks on the lam. Rushmore came fully framed as a stage play, complete with title curtain, and more and more Anderson has used the edges of the image to frame reality, to ontologically exclude what lies outside. Margaret Yang flies in on her remote control airplane and the boys don't notice her until she's in frame, even though she's evidently standing right next to them in the middle of an empty tarmac. They don't watch her leave either; camera cuts away and she's just gone. By the time of Darjeeling Limited Anderson had perfected the coupling of this principle to the whip-pan for comic effect. In an early sequence the brothers tour an Indian city and, repeatedly, ridiculous goings-on are revealed just off screen. So he's used framing devices to great dramatic advantage, but steadily the dimensions are compacting and the walls closing in on Dignan's confinement.

One reviewer of Darjeeling described Anderson's sensibility as miniaturist. Exactly. The Tenenbaums' dollhouse was cross-sectioned into the diorama Belafonte, then cropped into a row of boxcar viewing boxes and now compressed into slides of life in an ant farm. Unless this progression ends the next Anderson project will be the gallery exhibit of microminiature paintings from Synecdoche, New York. I miss Texas.

That said, Fantastic Mr. Fox is brilliant. Go ahead and put it alongside the collected Wallace and Gromit as the best in feature length stop motion, superior in energy and wit to anything by Henry Selick or the increasingly banal Tim Burton. (Nightmare Before Christmas is a great feat of imagination, but take a fresh look at the script and execution — aside from a few musical highlights it's rather tedious.)

As a kids movie Mr. Fox follows a trusted recipe for longevity: alcohol, tobacco and firearms. And if every instance of the word "cuss" were replaced with the corresponding vulgarity this puppy would be Restricted. Naturally the soundtrack must be owned; the customary revival of a Rolling Stones tune is Street Fighting Man. And with Clooney on board Anderson could be issuing a challenge to Soderbergh in the caper business. Here are just a few of the key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers — can you see how incredible this is going to be? — hang gliding...

Erin Brockovich

I'm having trouble telling the difference between Albert Finney and Brian Cox.

The Road (2009)

At the end of The Life Aquatic Bill Murray tearfully pardons the jaguar shark that ate his friend and, in the film's emotional climax, his crew members all reach out to touch him with a gesture of comfort. The moment does not work. Anderson hasn't done the legwork necessary to earn it, such tender and unreserved sentiment. At best we wince with slight embarrassment and at worst we snicker.

The film adaptation of The Road is compromised by too many such moments. The ashen world has been sincerely apocalypted by the production design team, and we mutant veterans of Fallout nod in appreciation, but instead of total immersion into the reality of hell we are cheated by single-setup camerawork and a fatally impatient clip; result is only a little more involving than watching a bonus disc slideshow of concept art stills. And so good performances are left out in the cold. Take another look at how the Coen brothers managed to adapt McCarthy in No Country for Old Men: Pacing is everything. The pauses between the notes is where the art resides.

Brüno

What makes Brüno a better movie than Borat is not the quality of the gags, which have actually degraded from zany inspiration (the running of the Jews is a bit to make Woody Allen jealous, and Borat's clucking suitcase is comic perfection) to obvious shock tactics (a talking penis haw haw), nor the audacity of the stunts*, which to Cohen's credit are bolder and more pointed this time around. At play is the Bond principle, by which a movie is only as good as its villain, and homophobia in the US and abroad today is far more insidious than the reclining geezer of antisemitism.

The anger here at the ignorant and prejudiced is palpable, through not only the cruelty with which Cohen dupes and humiliates his unwitting participants but also the overall hostility toward the audience as again and again he rubs your face into his freshly bleached taint. Every bit of it is justified.


* Incidentally, fuck Ron Paul, an absurd secessionist and prolific publisher of bigotry.