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I have a strong desire to see Shutter Island again. I’m hoping, in desperation, that something will be there to validate this film. I’m going to resist this urge to prevent further disappointment. If Martin Scorsese did not direct this film than this desire would not exist; I’d have written the film off as trivial fun and moved on with my day. Yet there are some directors we hold dear to our heart, and want every new film they make to be important. We desperately try to inflate meaning into what is ultimately amusing, second-tier work. This fondness I hold for one of America’s greatest directors has elsewhere translated into adoration or derision. Those who like the film are over praising it precisely because it is Scorsese, and those who don’t care for the film are severely panning it, which often happens when a great filmmaker does not make a great film (see Spielberg).

Unfortunately the film is pointless. (To continue with this review I need to decide whether or not to reveal specific surprises in the plot that could be considered tantamount to twists. Revelation of plot is irrelevant in a work of serious intent. This begs the question: is this a work of serious intent? I certainly hope not. I’ll split the difference and speak in revealing ambiguity.) The film takes place at a mental institute and its principal theme deals with psychosis. U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is looking for a missing patient. What is real in both the present and the past becomes questionable as the film progresses. This is a familiar theme for Scorsese, except he has always dealt with it more subtly and interesting, most famously in Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle is psychotic, to say the least, but he lives in the real world, in Manhattan no less. Bickle is frightening because he is alone, loose among a society that he deems more worthless than himself. In Shutter Island the psychotics are as alienated from society as possible. They are at a mental institute, under the care of doctors, on an island. Unlike Travis Bickle they pose no real threat, so we watch them with amusement instead of wonderment.

To state the extraordinary level of craft, both technical and in the performances, is a redundancy, since I have already stated that this is a film by Martin Scorsese. In Shutter Island the collaboration with cinematographer Robert Richardson doesn’t quite equal their prior work (Casino, Bringing Out the Dead, and The Aviator, which is probably Scorsese’s most stunning work in color), but they do manage to create an intriguing palette of dark tones in the present day sequences and a more lively mixture of contrasting colors in the memory/dream sequences depicting Daniels’ family and wartime experiences. These flashbacks, mostly without dialogue, are in fact more intriguing and sustaining than the principal story. Scorsese has always been a director of action and movement. The flashbacks, particularly a stunning tracking shot of the mass extinction of a group of Nazis, affords him the opportunity to exercise his talent. Most of what happens on Shutter Island is a series of plot driven conversations. Not to say that Scorsese cannot direct a conversation. His first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, has one of the most originally edited conversations, between Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune on the Staten Island ferry, which opens the film and sets the tone for the remainder of the film. And of course Raging Bull has some of the most intense, frightening conversations imaginable. Except those were conversations built upon improvisation and human naturalism, creating an energy upon which Scorsese feeds. These conversations are just an endless series of interviews concerning the missing patient and then a long revelation scene at the end. Ultimately the high level of craft and the very fine performance by DiCaprio cannot hide the fact that this is a thematically hollow genre exercise by a great filmmaker.

-Jason Bardin

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the flighty American girl Patricia reads William Faulkner’s anti-nihilist statement from The Wild Palms that, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Michel, the happy-go-lucky gangster, responds, “I will take nothing–grief is a compromise.” Lars von Trier’s latest controversial drama, Antichrist, is like a response to Michel, as if to say: grief is hardly a compromise and nothing is not even an option. In von Trier’s film grief is the subject at hand, along with pain and despair, collectively referred to as the three beggars. Von Trier has crafted a reinterpretation of the beginning of Genesis. He continues where Ingmar Bergman left off in dealing with humankind’s relations with both God and the opposite sex. While Bergman dealt with the silence of God in films like Winter Light and The Silence, von Trier suggests that in our moments of greatest pain and agony not only is God silent, but Satan is very present and joyfully active.

In the film, this theme of suffering is expressed through the only two characters: a man (Willem Defoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg); they are nameless in the film, but appropriately referred to as He and She in the credits. In the beginning, they are having sex, which brings about their son, as this act often does. They are still fornicating passionately well after he is born. They do this in super slow motion, black and white, where the cascading droplets in the shower are indistinguishable from the falling snow outside. While the lovers swoon, their son Nic, a toddler, falls out of the window, crashing, along with his teddy bear, to an immediate death. The parents will grieve, the mother in particular, who has a mental collapse at the funeral, blaming herself for her son’s death. But perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Nic sees his parents in coitus; the same two people, performing the same action that led to his own birth and life, and perhaps actively decides to leave this world. He climbs a table, knocking down statues of the three beggars as if to pronounce his escape from a world run by cruelty and misery where even an act of creation seems unnecessarily violent, and triumphantly takes his life, escaping the pain of misfortune that will soon overcome his lusty parents.

He is a therapist and at odds with his wife’s medical doctor’s insistence on pills to cure her depression. Instead he asks her to reveal what she fears the most, and she says the forest where they have a cottage. In his least wise decision, he forces her to return to the cottage. The forest is named Eden and it is here where Satan rules, where the trees produce not fruit but hailing acorns. Von Trier begins to distort reality almost immediately upon their arrival. Standard, well-balanced, medium shots are intercut with distant, shaky, hand held shots as if to suggest they are being watched. The frame distorts from time to time, suggesting a hallucinatory state; depression has taken over and paranoia has been firmly established. In the biblical Eden, God gives to man and woman dominance over the animals and plants. In von Trier’s Eden those animals and plants retaliate against their lords. The ground burns her feet and she fears the tall grass and a stream. While he is trying to sooth her at the hospital, the camera looms slowly over a plant in a water vase, which seems to encapsulate a world of terror and madness, foreshadowing everything to come. He has surreal interactions with animals; they seem to be both in cahoots and at war with each other. In one shot an army of militant ants devour a dead bird, yet in another it is revealed that a talking fox, a deer carrying a half delivered still born, and a violent raven all seem to be working together against the man, standing by each other staring menacingly at him. This talking fox says precisely two words: “Chaos reigns.” It’s not unusual in parabolic fiction for a fox to talk. Foxes appear throughout Aesop’s Fables and later in Medieval literature, most notable in the tales of Reynard the fox, who makes his most famous appearance as a character in Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, refers Reynard as a dialectician, in his discussion on Socrates. It is therefore appropriate that a fox should pronounce the mantra of life’s pain.

Most critics have casually dismissed Antichrist. They call the talking fox ridiculous and the sexual violence of the movie unpleasant and unnecessary. It seems that once a year the major critics band together to take down one challenging, prestigious film. This mode of action seems to be a way of proving to the general public that they have a common bond, that they too don’t like artsy films like Antichrist, which are about the meaning of life, and instead sell the public on easily digestible, but vapid and manipulating films like Slumdog Millionaire or this year’s Precious. Last year they cruelly took down Charlie Kaufman’s magnum opus Synecdoche, New York. This year they have their targets set on von Trier. A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, “The scandal of ‘Antichrist’ is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.” Dull? Appreciate the film or despise it, it is anything but dull. Here we have a film that deals with the problem of biblical interpretations of woman, violent sexual mutilation, wild passionate sex, all of which are playing off themes concerning life in depression, in grief, in a state of nothing, where life has no meaning. Scott is using a common ploy. By calling a film that one does not like as thin and dull is an attempt to strip it of its power. This can often be embarrassing. In his review for the release of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov that, “If God does not exist everything would be possible,” which is proven by the mass circulation of A.O. Scott’s premature review. However, von Trier objects to Dostoevsky’s theory and instead marks that in the absence of God there is depression, desperation, and insanity, and without a guiding force outside that of the knowledge of men, of a therapist’s Freudian logic, there is not nothing; we are left to grieve.

-Jason Bardin

To adapt a work of classical literature is just about the most unnecessary burden to which writers and directors force themselves to succumb. One can only wonder what John Huston was thinking when he tackled Moby-Dick. In his decision to simply ignore the encyclopedic chapters concerning the anatomy of the whale, he focused solely on the bare structure of the novel, which obscured Melville’s themes and vision. It became a story about a bunch of lunatics on a boat. Poets, in general, have been absolved from this bastardization. Every once in a while Homer receives a disservice or a director throws a poem up on the screen as an epitaph, but overall the works of the great poets are safe from the murky waters of film adaptation. So when Jane Campion became attracted to doomed Romantic poet John Keats, her only choice was to tell the story of his life. Unfortunately, Bright Star is not about Keats (Ben Whishaw), but instead focus on his love interest, Fanny Brawne.

Brawne (Abby Cornish) is an early nineteenth century socialite. She dances with all the men and makes her own clothes, which are of a colorful, if not flattering, austerity. In talking about Brawne, the word ‘bright’ can only be used to refer to luminosity, not intelligence. She can’t even properly lie about her literary pursuits. When talking to Keats’s boorish friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Brawne claims to have read all of The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and Paradise Lost over the previous week. Falling in love with a Romantic poet is perhaps her most ill conceived notion of all. The lifespan of the Romantic poet was considerably short and they are not the most desired lovers. On one end of the spectrum you have Lord Byron, whose principle character, Don Juan, parallels his own lecherous sexual conquests. On the other end is John Keats, who is alluded to as a possible virgin. Keats confides to Brawne that women, including his mother, confuse him. By the time of his death at twenty-five, despite being engaged to Brawne, their relationship never progresses past a kiss. But what a kiss! The first kiss between Brawne and Keats is a moment of high erotic tension and power. They’re lying on the grass, Brawne is elevated above Keats, and their lips just connect. While not quite matching the moment in Campion’s The Piano when Harvey Kietel fingers a hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking, this bit of eroticism in Bright Star is still enough to shame most other films in their gratuitous, un-erotic use of nudity, which desensitizes our perception and appreciation for true pleasure and beauty.

The film succeeds the most during the limited portion of when the two are happily in love. Campion provides her boldest images in this sequence. Keats lying on top of a tree bathing in sunlight; a room full of butterflies that creates a poetic sense of elation. However, most of the film deals with Brawne in despair and Keats dying. Individual moments of story evaporate and the second half of the film becomes an exercise in tone, creating an indistinguishable narrative of utter despondency. The film, which promises to be an authentic recreation of love, becomes one of dread and loss, which is fine, and in doing so more or less succeeds, but it sacrifices narrative. Nothing notable happens in the second half of the film outside of some minor character development of Charles Brown. Keats is absent from the second half too, so we’re stuck with Cornish, who’s emotional range is limited to sad eyes and hysterics. Cornish needs Whishaw’s Keats to stabilize the film. Whishaw plays Keats not as any person or individual, but as the human embodiment of Keats’s poetry. He longingly looks into the sky, fails to express himself in simple emotions, and has the countenance of a dying puppy. In one scene, Keats, because of his lack of funds and resources, explains to Brawne that they cannot marry. Cornish’s crying reaches levels of histrionics, but the scene works because of the amount of thought behind Whishaw’s heartbroken eyes. Later, after Keats dies off-screen and Brawne is informed of her lover’s demise, she screams, and King Kong is nowhere to be found.

-Jason Bardin

Gaze up at a bright moon, and then follow a line of moonbeams down from the sky, away from the horizon, across a lake, and into the enraptured blue eyes of Sérephine (Yolande Moreau), who is digging up muck with her bare hands. From this first shot of the film it’s hard to tell whether the plump middle-aged woman has found something or is still looking, if she’s in agony or in ecstasy.  Next, watch the red and orange glistening sunrise on the Gothic cathedral that in the summer of 1914 still towers over the French town of Senlis, but has lost its spiritual power over the citizens—except for Sérephine, who quietly and joyously sings a hymn and burns an offering.  It has been less than two minutes, and you already have peered into Sérephine’s soul.

Sérephine (based on painter Sérephine Louis) keeps a careful guard over her inner life so that she can work as a maid in a boarding house without calling attention to herself.  Her biggest complaint about her job isn’t that it’s strenuous and demeaning, but that it takes up so much of her time.  She wants more time to climb trees, pick flowers, and most of all, to paint frantically late into the night. Wilhelm Ulde (Ulrich Tukur, also based on a real person), who stays in the boarding house, also tries to keep a low profile so that he can have some peace.  Parisian socialites fawn over him because he’s the art dealer who discovered Rousseau and Picasso.  Less sophisticated folks taunt him because he’s German.  Germans won’t accept him for being gay.

Sérephine and Wilhelm can fool everyone but each other. When they first meet, Wilhelm takes a very brief glance at Sérephine’s ankle, almost as if he were aroused by her.  Willhelm tries to get to know Sérephine better and she also seems curious about him, but the social barriers are too strong to overcome.  He tries to make conversation, and she keeps answers as short and obedient as she can.  When he finds out that she’s an artist and sees her work, he thinks that she can become a famous artist in the “naïve” untrained style.  He somehow knows that her paintings of plants have been inspired by past misfortune.  He grows upset with her in a very master of the house kind of way, and sits her down for a lecture.  When he realizes that he is quite literally talking down to her, he bends down, looks up at her, and continuous to talk condescendingly.

Both the boarding house and the woods lack electric light, and there seems to be a clue in every corner, behind every shadow.  As she cleans Wilhelm’s room, Sérephine uncovers the books, papers, and drawings that mark him as at least an intellectual, if not an artist.  While Wilhelm doesn’t hug and sing to trees like Sérephine, he takes a stroll, and finds her bathing in a stream deep in the woods.  These silent moments of discovery, are when the relationship between Wilhelm and Sérephine is at its best.  As a side note, I hate how the word “relationship” has become so heavily associated with romantic relationships.  A romantic relationship ought to be called a “romance”—it sounds much nicer, and it frees up the word “relationship” to describe what there is between Wilhelm and Sérephine, who are very close to each other but are neither friends nor lovers.

Sérephine is a lot of what I wish I could be.  She is simple but wise.  She is a steadfast believer in the God of the Bible.  She is in touch with nature.  And most of all, she is an artistic genius.  As Wilhelm becomes her patron and moves her to Paris, part of me wants her to continue scrubbing floors in obscurity, as if the purpose of her life were to live out my bourgeois fantasy of the starving artist’s life.  This is an unfair expectation.

As A.O. Scott points out in his review, a story about an artist’s response to success runs a huge risk of not saying anything new, but this one does.  Sérephine does have her time in the spotlight, but it’s the type of short stint that makes someone hungry for more attention but only able to get it from oneself.  At first I thought that Sérephine’s newfound self-love was overemphasized.  Her quiet, charming hymns sung to herself become booming off-key oratorios that everyone in the house can hear.  Her thankfulness to God for inspiring her becomes a love of herself for being the inspired one.  She stops making her own paints.  She begins to strike poses, looking the way she thinks an artist should look.  She wants a big house, fancy things, and servants of her own.  Her transformation may seem too extreme to be believable, but this is only because she hasn’t completely lost herself.  When compared with the arrogance expressed by Wilhelm and his protégé/lover Helmut (Nico Rogner), we find that Sérephine’s arrogance lacks nuance because it’s unnatural for her.  No matter how much she changes, she can never get to the point at which she can get lost in it and start spewing nonsense like Wilhelm’s “I sell to collect.  I don’t collect to sell” or Helmut’s “I don’t care about fame—that’s for after I’m dead.”  But neither can she return to her naïveté.  I want to say that she’s been corrupted but I can’t.  Wilhelm may be a bit full of himself, but he treats her very well, providing her with whatever she needs both for her work and for her personal satisfaction.  She may not have been hurt or corrupted, but she has been put into a situation in which there’s nowhere for her to bare her soul with that ambiguous stare.

-Robert Henderson

Inglourious Basterds is without a doubt, one of the most beautifully composed films ever made.  The camera swoops unpredictably around sets, subtlety emphasizing the tone of every confrontation.  Every set is convincingly historically accurate, but complete control over color is maintained in every shot.  Tarantino demonstrates a masterful command of every aspect of filmmaking; every sight and sound presented on his screen is calculated to make the viewer feel absolute exhilaration, absolute drama, and most impressively, absolute empathy with his characters.

In essence, Inglourious Basterds is a film about persecution and revenge; each subplot follows this arc.  The first scene is a confrontation between Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet).  A perfect scene in every sense, the audience gets to witness both the civility and degeneracy of Waltz’s expertly crafted “Jew Hunter.”  Next we are introduced to Lieutenant Aldo Raine’s guerilla band of Jewish Nazi hunters.  Together, the Basterds represent an entire race’s rage, and viewers quickly identify with the ruthless avengers.  Lastly, we meet Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French theater owner seeking her own revenge on the ruling party.  The rest of the plot is simple: everyone tries to kill the Nazis before the Nazis kill them.

Seemingly in tribute to the diversity apparent within the Basterds, Tarantino has assembled a huge variety of actors coming from a whole slew of international filmmaking backgrounds.  Each and every one of them is perfectly effective within their roles.  Every character is so believable, that even the tiniest throw away lines seem to steal the scene, and go on to compose some of the movies most memorable moments.  A particularly mundane moment that stuck with me occurred as the Basterds are disguised as Nazi officers in a French bar; a local Nazi officer sits down with them and proposes a game of twenty questions.  Quickly realizing that he only has one pen, he asks the bartender for more pens, who then proceeds to hand him several pens.  This small touch of realism amid a moment of the utmost dramatic tension serves the realism of each scene.  Even in the most unrelatable of circumstances, we still see characters acting completely human.  Fueling this incredible sense of vitality is Tarantino’s completely familiar, yet wholly unique sense of dialogue.  Gone are the days when his best developed characters were the quick talking, street smart thirty-somethings of his early works.  Each member of the incredible diverse ensemble consumes the audience.  Even Sosanna Dreyfus’ seldom seen love interest, Marcel (Jacky Ido) succeeds in carving out a residence within the viewer’s gut.  Each shot of him simply existing fuels a need to know more about his character.  Considering each of the dozens of characters was able to accomplish just as much, this movie could have been hours longer, and each minute would have still been a joy to experience.

To my knowledge, the action sequences in Inglourious Basterds are simply the best action sequences ever to grace the screen.  It’s not hard to understand why this might be, though; great directors seldom touch true “action” scenes, with few exceptions (i.e. Scorsese).  When a story they wish to tell requires moments of action in order to move along the plot, it is typically done with a concentration on the perspective of one or two characters, so their feelings and motivations can be observed throughout.  By forcing the audience to concentrate on what characters are feeling, instead of the specifics of the situation, a director can emphasize the dramatic implications of any excitement, rather than the spectacle.  This approach is partly the reason why every exciting moment in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction was so engrossing.  In Death Proof, Tarantino attempted to ignore this convention, focusing on the spectacle over all else.  In Inglourious Basterds however, Tarantino has managed to find an optimized medium between focusing on the characters versus the spectacle of an event.  The oft forgotten key is contained entirely within the minutes preceding said action.  There’s a great scene where Sergeant Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel) has been captured by the Basterds and is awaiting his execution at the hands of Sergeant Donny Donowitz, a.k.a. “the Bear Jew” (Eli Roth).  For what feels like an eternity, we experience Rachtman’s perturbation as Donowitz clanks his baseball bat against a wall off-screen, then proceeds to slowly stroll towards his victim.  In this way, when action is planned or anticipated, the audience experiences the contemplation and anxiety with the characters beforehand.  In this case, the audience connects so much with Rachtman they can begin to forget that his punishment is deserved.  Once this point is reached, whether or not the action actually follows this is inconsequential.  Conversely, when an action is a surprise to those involved, it must surprise the audience as it does the characters involved.  Only by catching both off guard, can true empathy be established and maintained.  Keeping in line with this, if those involved are confused by their surroundings, then the audience must also be confused.  The scene in the French bar contains a shootout that couldn’t last more than ten seconds, but it all happens in such real time, that no sense can be made of it until after the fact.  No gimmicks are needed at this point.  A dead body should speak for itself.  After the smoke has cleared, then there can be breath: a chance for all involved to process everything that has just happened.

Viscerally, the movie is completely engrossing.  There were long expanses of time in which it was truly impossible to blink, and eventually all I could do was shake.  By the time the credits rolled, I felt an orgiastic release as I thanked God for this piece of beauty that doth exist in the world.  To all this, only one reasonable conclusion could I reach: Quentin Tarantino has undoubtedly created a masterpiece that will seal his place as one of the greatest auters of all time.

-Paul Brinnel

After Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) loses his girlfriend Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), his buddy and coworker McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend), whose main role in life seems to be to support his friend, quotes Henry Miller, advising Tom that they way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature. The film opens with an author’s note alluding to one Jenny Beckman, who is apparently a bitch, as the one person who serves as possible inspiration for a character in 500 Days of Summer. It’s probable that director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have adapted Miller’s dictation and applied it to film, although it really doesn’t matter. That opening author’s note is a poorly executed and rather banal gimmick, surprisingly ineffective in a film that thrives off wonderful, risky, surrealistic touches: some of which are funny and others which are profoundly sad.

500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy with a fractured time sequence. It is wisely less concerned about how Tom and Summer get together as it is with their time spent as a couple and the aftermath of their break-up. This separates it from the majority of romantic comedies, which mostly take about ninety minutes getting two people together through the most convoluted situations imaginable. Here we have a film that knows that it’s easy for two young, good looking individuals to start dating each other. Tom and Summer work together. He writes greeting cards, she’s the assistant to his boss. One night the whole office goes out to karaoke, she falls in love with him, watching him perform, the next day they kiss by the copy machines. Boom, bang, done.

The film that 500 Days of Summer is comparable to is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, another film showing the development and fall of an interesting relationship, from the point of view of a male protagonist. It too uses surrealistic touches. However, in Annie Hall those moments are used to portray Alvy Singer’s desires. He’s either romancing the queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, discovering what his former classmates have become, or pulling out Marshall McLuhan from behind a poster to prove a point to a total stranger. These moments compliment Alvy’s self-centered persona. The use of surrealism in 500 Days of Summer is to portray heightened visuals of Tom’s inner emotions. When he is feeling elated and confident, it appears as if everyone on the street is smiling at him right before they transform into Broadway showmen and break out into a choreographed dance number. When Tom is feeling anxiety over an upcoming interaction with Summer, a split screen parallels Tom’s expectations for his evening with the actual encounter. This technique simultaneously reflects his hopes and dreams while showing the façade he must present amidst tragic disappointment.

When Tom isn’t in fantasyland he’s at his job, writing greeting cards. He wears sweater-vest and tie combinations or t-shirts that promote bands like The Clash, who haven’t needed promotion since they broke up in the mid eighties. That’s the problem with Tom, who like most hipsters, is living in a time warp. Upset by modern culture, he constantly pontificates about how horrible it is that women don’t dress like they did in England in nineteen sixty-four or how he hates to live in a world where no one has heard of an alternative, indie rock band that he happens to like. This hipster mentality borders on fascism as Tom, the failed architect, confides to Summer that if he were in charge he would make people notice the beauty in Los Angeles. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom with equal amounts confidence and nervousness. We like him despite his trendy, social attires and worldviews. He’s funny and spontaneous, but fragile too. And in all fairness, when he does don a suit he looks totally out of place. After all, how bad can anybody be when their heartbroken dreams transport them into Ingmar Bergman films?

Summer is not as easy to understand. She could have used the guidance of a female writer on her side. When the often annoying narrator isn’t condescendingly telling us how we are supposed to feel about the characters, what the characters are thinking, or just blatantly stating the themes of the film, it serves a purpose in relaying Summer’s back-story. The narrator informs us that Summer has some sort of inherent knack that makes every man attracted to her, and she knows it. She’s like Christine in The Rules of the Game: every man wants her; we’re not exactly sure why. At least Christine had a famous composer father, which justified Octave’s fascination. Summer just has long, black hair, and beautiful blue eyes. Well, I guess that’s enough. Summer, too is a hipster, which explains Tom and Summer’s mutual fascination with each other. When she proclaims her favorite Beatle is Ringo, I was just surprised that it wasn’t Pete Best.

After these two get together the movie really starts cooking. Despite the jumbled chronology, the film is more or less in order. Harold Pinter would probably just call this a straight forward narrative. Anyway, the relationship between the two expresses the joy of early love. They play house in a department store; he draws the skyline on her arm. The conversations never run too deep. Their break-up comes along at the moment when they would begin to confide more to each other. After they break up, the film hits a perfect note. They’re still friends. Tom’s still madly in love with Summer, but she’s moved on. We move deeper and deeper into Tom’s head, as we share his sadness and longing in a way that we couldn’t really share his desires or happiness. He’s with Summer, but not with Summer. Their moments together become painful as they get on each other’s nerves, and gradually separate. This all leads up to a moment when they go see The Graduate together. Never has that last shot felt so sad and empty; Elaine and Ben Braddock, sitting next to each other on the bus, with their future ahead of them. But what future? How far can love take two lost souls? This open-ended ending will continue to haunt generations of alienated teens. 500 Days of Summer, should have paid a bit more attention to Mike Nichols’ film, and ditched it’s cutesy epilogue segment, which is not in tune with the rest of the film, providing closure for these characters. I don’t need or want closure, I want these characters to be suspended in space and time, immortal.

-Jason Bardin

With no explanation The Hurt Locker starts off amidst a moment of extraordinary anxiety.  A U.S. bomb-squad task force is in the midst of weighing their options.  Just a few hundred yards ahead of them on an abandoned Iraqi street lies potential instantaneous death.  It is their job to approach it, disarm it, and return to base unscathed.  This fear of death looms over the scene.  Little noise is heard aside from light dialogue.  Although the set is simple, the visuals are a complex blend of real and imagined anxiety.  The camera, to great effect, is tremendously shaky.  It helps to transport us inside these men’s minds.  The barren landscapes all appear to be minefields, ridden with a million ways to die, and no expectation of forewarning.  Visually, this is without a doubt one of the most immersive war films ever made.

After this first scene we get to meet the characters.  After being made to feel each and every nuance of perturbation from their perspective, you’d think that there would be something equally engaging going on under the hood.  Unfortunately, with lines of dialogue like, “Every time we go out it’s life or death; we roll the dice,” the characters we are made to care so much about quickly devolve into shallow stereotypes.

In between every action scene is one of lockdown dialogue.  Character development is delivered this way in a form best expressed as loutish exposition.  Each of the half a dozen characters has a single dimension developed.  Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is a seasoned bomb diffuser with his own reckless, yet no nonsense approach to his work.  Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a sniveling coward who, after years in active combat, still winces at the thought of actual confrontation.  Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is a by-the-book ruffian who is frustrated by his new CO.  As the movie progressed, these soldiers made startling, yet entirely predictable changes for no particular reason.  The dramatic turning points play out like they were written for the original outline, unrelated to any other moments in the film.  Such are entire subplots within the movie.  James makes the occasional reference to his own mixed feelings on fatherhood.  He then has three encounters with a young boy, which are meant to affect his feelings on his own son.  This is the point where a change is supposed to be observable and a commentary on said change is supposed to be made.  Any attempts at having the characters develop over the course of the film were inconsequentially trite.

As I watched The Hurt Locker, certain patterns began to make themselves painfully obvious.  When two men are gathered together, they talk; when more then two men gather together, they are either fighting, about to fight, or about to blow up.  It’s a pity that each incredible action scene was so easy to anticipate.

At some point even the incredible action turns into clichés, as well.  In order to keep the tension climbing in an already adrenaline filled movie, extra elements needed to be added to later action scenes to make them even more intense than their preceding bomb diffusions.  It becomes harder and harder to connect with the characters as their dealings become more and more overblown.  Case in point: at some point Will James gets sucked into a revenge side plot.  He pulls a sweatshirt on, and then proceeds to chase down run after his invisible enemies in the night.  This action simply feels like it’s meant for a different movie entirely (perhaps one starring Daniel Craig).  Later on there’s a moment where James’ squad approaches a fresh detonation.  As chaos reigns around them, James tells his squad that through pure intuition, he knows that those parties responsible are still in the vicinity.  Like a bad episode of Law & Order, James leads his men through grainy, poorly lit darkness, only to emerge at a fork in the road with three alleyways, a perfect number for three men to explore to ideal dramatic effect.  These moments where James does something reckless and it turns out to be prophetic seem to ruin the entire point of the movie.  One of it’s major theses, “war is a drug,” seems at odds when every time the supposed “junkie” tries to get his adrenaline fix, he ends up having some type of lucky success.  Now multiply that times the hundreds of bombs our protagonist has allegedly diffused.  Every time, William James, the reckless prophet comes out on top.  That’s realism, folks.

Amid these terribly flawed scenes there is one that breaks from the format, and stands out as one of the most brilliant combat moments ever filmed.  Ralph Fiennes shows up as a British contractor for a single scene in which one of the perfect paradoxes of war is on display.  Although vigilant to the point of paranoia, James’ team is completely caught off guard by an enemy sniper.  The scene plays out with the same suspense that is present in the opening scene, and is truly incredible to experience.

In the end, The Hurt Locker falls into the same trap as movies like Requiem For A Dream.  Incredible technique alone might allow an audience to see through a character’s eyes, but if there’s little or nothing behind said eyes, then there’s not really a lot to connect to, is there?

-Paul Brinnel

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is pathetic at best, and downright self-absorbed at worst. In these tough economic times, he’s naïve enough not to realize that his orchestra can’t continue playing for near-empty houses, and yet hard-headed enough to sell his cello and abandon doing what he loves. Like thousands of unemployed people, he returns to his hometown, and responds to a “help wanted, great pay, no experience needed” ad in the newspaper. But instead of working hard at a gritty job and being thankful just for making ends meet, he is greeted as the Chosen One by master undertaker Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomo Yamakazi), whose idea of job training is providing extra pay and flattery. Daigo’s new job as a ritual caretaker for dead bodies gives him such a spiritual revelation that nothing else matters to him anymore, including his cello career, his wife (who’s carrying his future child), and his anguish toward the father who left him. Daigo has lots of problems in his life, but he’s so apathetic and self-absorbed that he doesn’t let any of them actually bother him, and they wind up fixing themselves anyway.

In a long montage of Daigo passionately playing a simple song from his childhood, we get the impression that he has discovered powerful new emotions within himself, and plays more passionately. Maybe he has had some sort of epiphany that’s allowed him to play better. He values this sense of fulfillment so much that he’d be willing to lose his wife over it.

While playing the grandest of symphonies before the thinnest of audiences, Daigo at least could have paid attention to the lyrics. In the second verse of the “Ode to Joy” (in internet-quality translation), Schiller writes: “Whoever has created An abiding friendship, Or has won A true and loving wife, All who can call at least one soul theirs, Join our song of praise; But those who cannot must creep tearfully Away from our circle.” Daigo loves his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) dearly, as long as she does everything to accommodate his needs and he doesn’t have to go out of his way to accommodate hers. After his first tough day on the job, I’d expect Daigo to tell Mika something on the order of, “this job is tough but rewarding; I’m happy that we’re making it here in these tough times; working with dead people makes me appreciate you just for being alive, etc.” A loving silence could also convey such emotion. We do get a silence, but of the “I had a hard day—let’s have some quick sex in the kitchen” variety. To Daigo, his “true and loving wife” (carrying his unborn child) is nice to have around, but she is expendable. The pain and yearning for his father causes a little more of a problem, but nothing that a few pebbles can’t solve. Overall, Daigo pursues his mystical journey at the expense of his family.

Which brings us to Ikuei Yamakazi, the carnivorous cleric. I can understand having pride in one’s job and finding meaning in it even if it has a social stigma attached to it. But only an arrogant blowfish would interpret a reply to a “help wanted—good pay, no experience needed” ad as a sign of fate. Even the secretary (who merely answers phones, and does not engage in any of the holy rites) does this not as a decent 9-5 gig with some overtime, but because she also buys into the hokus-pokus. While I was certainly moved by how Daigo learns how to respect the dead and comfort the living (who are the only ones who really matter anyway), we only get to see the most extraordinary of cases, and never business as usual. Whenever the Chosen One performs a funeral, he either turns frowns into smiles and reconciles deep family conflicts or causes anguish by using the wrong kind of eyeliner. These types of extreme moments come in any career, but it is the less dramatic moments that are more interesting and more revealing. Take the office sequences of Ikiru, a great Japanese film that actually has something to say about death, as case in point. And by the way, the off-key song of a monophonic amateur can convey a lot more emotion than the choreographed song of the stereophonic professional.

-Robert Henderson

The opening title card informs us that Public Enemies takes place in 1933, which is apparently the golden age of bank robbery. After reading this note we know what we’re in for. Michael Mann is bringing us back to the Great Depression. Not to a time when hardworking families suffered and the honest man couldn’t get a break, but when bandits ruled America, robbing banks in style, wanting to rule the world. And if it wasn’t for the annoying antics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we might still be privileged to live in a world with great men like John Dillinger. As played by Johnny Depp, Dillinger is the essence of cool. He wears pinstriped suits, perfectly shaped fedoras, and rose tinted glasses. Behind those glasses is a pair of eyes that views the world as his for the taking. They fail to see the boundaries of right and wrong. Behind his eyes is a brain. Maybe. I’m never quite sure what Dillinger is thinking. I know he likes movies, fast cars, whisky, and the dopey hat check girl Billie Frechette. He states these pleasures to Billie in a spurt of dialogue that is delivered with confidence and fluidity. In fact, all of the dialogue is spoken this way. What are meant to be scenes of conversational dialogue, even intimate scenes between Dillinger and Frechette, come across as historical figures in a high school debate. It’s not that Dillinger isn’t thinking, it’s that he was written not to have or need a brain. He’s like the scarecrow without the admirable ambition. When he meets with his associate Frank Nitti (Bill Camp) who used to help him hide from those men with badges who keep chasing him for some reason or another, he finds that Nitti is now running a lucrative bookmaking organization. Nitti attempts to explain that what Dillinger makes from an entire bank heist, Nitti makes every day. Dillinger looks angry and confused. He doesn’t get it. He would realize that he doesn’t need to stick up bank tellers to steal money, if he only had a brain.

I’m not quite sure what director Michael Mann wants me to take away from this version of Dillinger’s story. There are various allusions to Dillinger as a folk hero. He robs from the bank, but makes sure that the civilians receive their money. Is Dillinger making some social statement against the corrupt powers of the government? Well if he is, he never admits as much. Perhaps he just likes being a celebrity and realizes that if he treats civilians with respect he’ll be better liked. He blatantly tells Billie, “I rob banks.” However, Dillinger is lacking the motivation or general purpose of that line as it was proclaimed twice in Bonnie and Clyde. The eponymous gangsters of that film declared that statement as if it were an honor. They were counter-revolutionary figures, living off youthful exuberance, fetching nervousness, and a distinctly proclaimed social conscience. Dillinger, instead, echoes a different gangster in his proclamation to want to be, “top of the world,” conjuring up the image of James Cagney screaming his lungs out, and about to be burnt to a crisp in White Heat. Mann is just referencing other gangster movies, bringing with him nothing new, besides the fact that this film is shot in a high definition video, and what we’re left with is a protagonist without any ambitions or purpose for existence.

Being a Michael Mann film, showing the gangsters in not enough, we also need a grotesque portrait of the FBI. Mann is obsessed by opposition, whether it be cops and robbers (Heat), Colonial and Native American (Last of the Mohicans), or professional boxers (Ali). Unfortunately, Mann doesn’t spend the time developing both stories as he did in Heat. Instead, we’re left with a portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) as a neurotic mess. A man in a tight-fitted suit, with greasy hair, filled with nothing but rage. His star pupil is Melvin Purvis, who focuses all his efforts on capturing public enemy number one, John Dillinger. Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, or more appropriately delivers his lines forcefully. Bale, as previously shown in The Dark Knight, possesses the uncanny ability to diminish a co-leading role into a marginal supporting one. Little is revealed about Purvis besides that he wants to get Dillinger. Dillinger and Purvis first meet after Purvis initially catches Dillinger, who escapes from two prisons in this film, although Mann never shows him coordinating these plans. They say a few words; Dillinger gets the last laugh, end of story. The next time they meet is in the film’s centerpiece, an elaborate ambush on Dillinger and his associates in the woods. Among Dillinger’s associates include Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), presented to justify the plurality of the title. Nelson is less developed here than he was in the Coen Brothers surrealistic musical, O Brother, Where Art Thou? At least in that feature Nelson was allowed to indulge his inner killer by shooting cows on the side of the road.  In this film he’s barely a presence; more talked about than seen. Overall, the shootout in the woods doesn’t work. The exterior scenes are too chaotic to follow, and the interior scenes in the cabin are just poorly photographed. Mann uses source lighting, allowing the room to be coated in orange, which makes these fearless gangsters look like oompa loompas.

One character, very drunk, makes just about the worst James Cagney impression I’ve ever heard. That’s what this movie is. It’s a Universal film pretending to be a revisionist rendition of the Warner Bros. Gangster films. It’s a bad impression of William Wellman’s film The Public Enemy, starring Cagney. If only it had been more homage than revision. This film could have used the other’s gritty realism, instead of the fantasy world in which Public Enemies comfortably resides. I also wouldn’t have minded if someone had shoved a grapefruit in Billie Frechette’s face when she began to cry.

-Jason Bardin

Science fiction as a genre has pretty much been dead for the past eight years.  Duncan Jones has attempted to revive the genre with his directorial debut, Moon.  Unfortunately, this attempted reinvigoration quickly devolves into nothing more than a regurgitation of nearly every sci-fi movie since 1968.

The movie starts with Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) alone, finishing up the last two weeks of a three-year stint with a lunar mining company.  His only companion is a computer, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey).  Sam of course has the occasional hallucination, but such is moon-cabin fever.  After an atypical event interrupts his established routine, Sam ends up finding himself trapped inside his humble abode with a sickly doppelganger.

At this point in the story you’d really expect some twists.  Unfortunately, none ever come.  The conspiracy is figured out halfway through the film, and the rest is spent boringly pacing around the outpost trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the movie.  Interestingly, the biggest twist is when we find out that a single element isn’t ripped off from another movie.  (SPOILER: Gerty isn’t just HAL’s younger brother, he’s a boring, motiveless computer.)

I can only assume Duncan Jones’ original outline to his producer read something like: “Start with 2001, add a half cup Silent Running, a pint Wall•E, and a pinch of Alien.  Whisk until The Sixth Day starts to take form then just keep pouring in Solaris until you hit the 90 minute mark.  (And if you’re feeling particularly festive, you can even garnish it with a single leaf of Midnight Cowboy.)”

Sam Rockwell tries really hard to build two individually interesting characters that have an inherently conflicted dynamic.  Unfortunately, the movie just doesn’t give him an opportunity to build their relationship in anything more than staggered uninteresting dialogue.  There’s an elephant in the room as soon as the two characters meet, and it’s addressed with complete casualness.  If someone meets an identical version of himself, chances are, they aren’t going to treat them like the new kid on the playground.

In the end, Jones tries to tie everything together with a profound statement, an apparent conclusion we should all draw from this movie: (Sam to Gerty) “We’re not programmed.  We’re people.”  This attempt at dramatic social commentary falls flat.  This whole movie falls flat.  Moon is nothing more than a tepid retread through familiar yet emotionally devoid waters.

-Paul Brinnel