The Graduate

The greatest scene in The Graduate (1967) is the final scene. Elaine and Ben have escaped from the church where she has just gotten married. They run after a bus and board it. It looks like a school bus, clearly not the kind of transportation these upper middle-class white Californians would normally favor. The bus is full of laborers, Mexicans, lower-class whites. They are headed somewhere—some destination the film doesn't divulge. Ben and Elaine are flushed with excitement and victory. They have broken away from the lives their parents had planned for them, from the marriage Elaine's parents had forced her to. But as the final seconds of the scene pass, the mood subtly changes. The excitement fades. Ben and Elaine begin to look a bit uncertain, even regretful. The future is beginning to dawn, and what it holds we cannot know, but it certainly holds more difficulties and complexities that they had not begun to anticipate, until now. And then the film ends.

The fading looks on Ben and Elaine's faces speak volumes. What can they mean?

The Graduate is one of the five movies discussed in Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris. It effectively represents the schism between generations that Harris is concerned with, though The Graduate in and of itself isn't concerned with Hollywood, it's concerned with the United States, with the developing culture wars, especially the generational conflicts for which the 60s are so notoriously famous. It's not that those conflicts developed in the 60s—they just became more evident.

Much of the film, especially the first half, is devoted to illustrating the gap between Ben Braddock and the generation of his parents. He returns home from college, newly graduated, a long list of campus achievements and awards trailing clouds of glory behind him, and he has no idea what he is going to do with himself. This in and of itself doesn't particularly concern him, though it certainly becomes a concern for his parents.

The future that Ben's parents envision for him is encapsulated in the most famous line (or what I recall as the most famous line, a one-word famous line) from this film: "Plastics." This is what a friend of Ben's father tells him is the future. "Plastics." What he means is that Ben should get involved in the field of plastics — there's money to be made there. From the film's viewpoint, "plastic" is a way of describing the entire generation of Ben's parents: their affluence, their swimming pools, their opulent and sprawling houses, their extravagant gifts (red sports cars, scuba gear), their bragging over the exploits of their offspring. One of the grotesque moments in the film is when Ben's mother demands that all the people at her party be quiet so that she can read from a list of Ben's achievements.

The Graduate strikes me as painfully dated. When I first saw it in 1967 I felt the excitement of the film. I knew what that word plastics signified. I certainly identified with Ben. I sat through the film twice the first time I saw it. Then I saw it again after I graduated from college, probably five years later. Suddenly it seemed not so current, and next to the film playing with it in a double-bill, Easy Rider (1969), it seemed even more out of date. Easy Rider still strikes me as a film that speaks with a kind of primal if contrived authenticity—it's about the failed American dream.

Probably the reason for the anachronistic quality of The Graduate is Ben and Elaine themselves and what they yearn for. They want each other, of course. They want marriage with each other—at least Ben wants to marry Elaine—it's not quite clear what she wants. Their entire drama is acted out in the context of their parents' wealthy lifestyles, without which the film could not exist. Elaine attends an affluent mostly white university. Ben graduated from such a school. For a graduation gift he receives a swank red sports car. Both of them apparently do not have to work. Ben travels to Berkeley to be near Elaine. His income source is unknown—it's probably his parents. All the faces we see in this film, especially the faces at the university Elaine attends, are white faces. Essentially this is a film about mid-twentieth century white early adulthood angst. It may also be, at least from the 2008 perspective, a film about how Ben and Elaine are going to end up like their parents.

In a certain way the film is aware of this fact. Ben is fascinated with the story of how Elaine's parents first met and had sex together—in the backseat of her father's car, when they were in college. He revels in this story. One reason must be because in the back of his mind he can see the possibility that this story could be his own story. Change a few details, the time and place, and it might be his story. Of course, he is wholly alienated from everything Elaine's parents signify—their wealth, their privileges, their swank lodgings, their dissipated sense of cultural and social fatigue. Sex with Mrs. Robinson for him is just another way he can make his alienation more complete. Shortly after the film was released, an interviewer asked Mike Nichols what happened to Elaine and Ben after the picture ended. His answer: "They grew up to be like their parents."

Has anyone ever noticed that although the music of Simon and Garfunkel helps to create the mood and tone of the film, it really has virtually no connection with the plot, with the story itself? As famous as the song "Mrs. Robinson" may be, the lyrics don't make a whole lot of sense, especially when they're set against the events in the film.

Technically, the film is fine. Mike Nichols as director is at his best in this film. He has never been better. Dustin Hoffman at the age of 29 gives an utterly brilliant and convincing performance as the 21-year old Ben Braddock. It's difficult to believe he made this film when he was on the verge of becoming 30. But separate the brilliance of his acting (and that of Anne Bancroft) from the film and separate Mike Nichol's excellent handling of characters and the technical and creative expertise he brings to the film, and what is left is a social melodrama that probably would not make sense to many 21 year olds these days, most of whom are running as fast as they can towards the lives that Mr. and Mr. Robinson embody.

Magnolia

One might say, "No film with a plague of frogs can be all bad." But in fact P. T. Anderson's Magnolia is is a good film. It is marked by its day, like any film, and its obsessive preoccupation with self seems dated now, given what has transpired since 1999.

Magnolia on the one hand illustrates the effects of serendipity, of seemingly random and unrelated acts that become related in an arbitrary way and have an impact on our lives. The effect is as if there is some divine hand out there, controlling events, shaping destinies. But I don't think divine intervention is what the film means to imply. On the other hand, one could argue that there is a strong religious or spiritual sentiment in the film.

Magnolia gives us an array of examples of human misery and suffering: incest, addiction, parent –child estrangement, disease, abuse, loneliness, suicide, adultery—especially loneliness. The characters as the film progresses appear increasingly desperate. In terms of the film's symbolism, Earl Partridge, an old and dying father played by Jason Robards, is a center. He suffers throughout the film, always on the verge of death. Everyone in the film, either actually or by implication, is somehow involved with him. He is the central image of human suffering, and of the possible redemptive or transformative effects suffering can bring.

At a key moment late in the film, the character Jimmy Kurring, a religious police officer, is driving down a city street and a large frog falls on the windshield of his car. Soon frogs seem to be falling everywhere, throughout the city—an unnatural, inexplicable event. A veritable plague of frogs. Once again, serendipity. One could speculate over the meteorological reasons for the event—and P. T. Anderson gives us a world in which there are always explanations, even if unlikely ones. But the plague of frogs in Magnolia functions as if it is God's judgment on the living and the dying, on all that suffer.

To confirm this effect, soon after the frogs stop falling all the main characters, individually, join in singing "Wise Up," a song written and sung by Amy Mann. It is as if to say, "We all suffer." The first time I saw this film, I was deeply moved by this scene. Now, it is still moving, though it also seems stale and slightly contrived.

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson

Albert Einstein, as Walter Isaacson shows in his biography Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), was an individual, an iconoclast, all his life. He resisted authority in whatever form, resisted pressures to conform or to operate in any way other than according to his own sense of what he should do. This extended from his unconventional personal life, his relationship with his wives and children, to his relationships with colleagues and the public. His professors in undergraduate and graduate school did not like him especially—they found him diffident, arrogant, or just lazy--and this made it difficult for him to find work, even for several years after the great essays of 1905. Isaakson does a good job of separating Einstein myth from Einstein reality, especially the myth that Einstein was a failure as a student. His scholastic performance was uneven. He did well in the classes he enjoyed or that interested him, and average in other classes. Some of his early teachers recognized his potential brilliance, but based on his performance in school no one could have predicted what was to follow.

Isaakson also explains persuasively how Einstein's willingness to question the authority of the scientists and research that came before him was a key to his discoveries. Newtonian law was so firmly entrenched that it took someone willing to follow apparent inconsistencies and deviations to discover the reasons for them.

Einstein was an accomplished violinist. He played throughout his life. He had an especial fondness for Bach but wasn't so fond of Beethoven, whom he found excessively emotional.

Einstein from an early age preferred to think in visual rather than mathematical terms. That is, he used visual thought experiments rather than equations to develop his theories. An early thought experiment involved envisioning a man running down the road next to a beam of light. By contemplating this image, the relationship of the man to the light beam, he was able to formulate in his mind all the aspects and implications of his theory. Once he had worked out a particular theory, he enlisted friends to help him develop the equations that would explain it mathematically. Later in his life, especially as he began struggling to develop a unified field theory, he relied increasingly on mathematics. When he died, equations he was working on were found with him.

The two great years in Einstein's life were 1905, when he published four groundbreaking essays, one of them on the special theory of relativity. Another was about light as quanta, which became the basis for quantum theory. His next big year was 1916, when he concluded work on his general theory of relativity, which he had struggled with for nearly a decade. Although he made other contributions in his lifetime, they were mostly minor, building on his earlier work. He spent the rest of his life—39 years--in an increasingly quixotic effort to devise a unified field theory. Time after time he would think he was about to find the answers he sought and then for one reason or another they would slip away. Although his attempts to find a unified theory were not successful and did frustrate him, he did not seem so much frustrated by the fact that his greatest work came early in his career. Instead he felt bemused. He came to feel increasingly out of place and out of touch as his career progressed, and scientists who had committed to quantum theory found him increasingly a thorn in their sides. They respected him and his early work. But he resisted the full implications of quantum theory to the end of his life—even though he was partially responsible for the development of quantum physics. His efforts to discover a unified theory was based on his firm belief that the universe functions according to specific, concrete laws that are observable, verifiable, and predictable. If he could find such a theory, he thought, he would be able to discount the unpredictability that remains a basic principle of quantum theory.

Einstein used the metaphor of God or of "the Old One" to represent his belief in a logical universe, one that worked according to standard and predictable laws. His argument with quantum physics was a reflection of his belief in a predictable and logical Universe: "God does not play dice with the Universe" was his way of expressing his disbelief in the world of quantum physics, even though his work in 1905 was fundamental to its development.

Einstein's search for a unified field theory paralleled his support for a world governing body, to which nations would surrender a degree of sovereignty and, after the Second World War, their nuclear weapons. He lent his name to numerous causes, often without carefully considering them, which meant that in a few cases they had associations with communism that he did not know about. In fact, Einstein was always suspicious of the Russian government and even avoided visiting the Soviet Union because he feared that his name would be used in a political cause he did not agree with. He was a strong pacifist until the rise of Nazism and the Nazi persecution of the Jews, when he began to modify his pacifist views, recognizing that in some circumstances pacifism didn't work. Ultimately he helped make the U. S. government aware of the potential for a nuclear bomb. Later in his life he regretted that he had not done more to control its use, but he never returned to his earlier pacifism. He also early in his life avoided associating himself with Judaism, either as a faith or an ethnic identity. Although he never quite embraced it as a religious heritage, he did increasingly identify with Judaism as a cultural heritage. He was even offered the presidency of Israel in the early 1950s, but turned it down, much to the relief of David Ben-Gurion, who recognized after making it that the offer had been ill-considered.

Isaacson covers these and other aspects of Einstein's life in his biography. He is especially effective at explaining Einstein's theories. He makes a compelling and even moving case for the genius as well as the broadly based humanity of Einstein.

Letters from Iwo Jima

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) is an excellent film. What makes it unusual is the historical context. Made by an American director, Clint Eastwood, it attempts to imagine the battle of Iwo Jima from the standpoint of the Japanese soldiers who were fighting the Americans. In most World War II films made by American filmmakers, the Japanese are portrayed as the Enemy—as brutal, soulless, and anonymously hostile. This film doesn't ask its audience to side with the Japanese, but it does ask them to see the Japanese as human. Told more than sixty years after the battle it dramatizes, Letters from Iwo Jima argues, among other things, that more than enough time has passed since the battle that we can view it for what it was—as a battle in which many men fighting for their countries lost their lives in moments of carnage and terror

The entire film is told from the Japanese point of view. Soldiers speak Japanese. English subtitles translate the dialogue. The only time we see American soldiers is from the perspective of the Japanese, as soldiers advancing towards their hideouts, as soldiers menacing them with gunfire and flame throwers, as wounded or captured soldiers, as corpses. This film isn't really interested in the American perspective—hundreds of other films have given that perspective. Instead, as an act of compassion and imagination and understanding it seeks to view events from the perspective of the Japanese.

Eastwood isn't interested in this film in the underlying causes of the war that Americans and Japanese are fighting against one another. He's simply interested in war, in War, and in the perspective of men who are waiting to fight a battle they know they will lose and in which they fully expect to die. This is in that sense a film about how anyone confronts mortality, and a film about the horrors of war in general.

A key scene in the film comes when a commanding Japanese officer reads a letter he has taken from the pocket of a dead American soldier. Because he can read English, he translates the letter for his men. The letter is from the American GI's mother, and in it she tells him the latest family news and also advises him to "do the right thing . . . because it is right." The soldiers are moved. One of them later talks about how the letter forced him to view the soldier as a human being—the letter he says was like a letter his own mother would write to him. The scene is a bit stagey and contrived, but at the same time it's moving and it makes its point.

Eastwood humanizes the Japanese soldiers in a number of ways. First he shows us their individuality. Some of them have willingly joined the army to fight for their country. Others have been drafted and forced to fight. Some are fully committed soldiers and others are half-hearted patriots. He also shows disagreement among commanding Japanese officers—one in particular, a man who lived for a time in California and had American friends, believes in modern warfare and is constantly thinking about strategy, about how to win the battle despite the odds. Other commanding officers are more traditional. Some commanding officers are bullies who abuse their men.

One of the points of Letters from Iwo Jima must be to encourage awareness and understanding of the differences between the two cultures at war. The film shows several scenes in which Japanese soldiers, convinced the battle is lost, commit suicide so as to die honorably rather than to be captured or forced to suffer defeat. Yet we also see scenes that stress the similarities between the warring nations. The letters from home that the Japanese soldiers value so highly are akin to the letter the commanding officer finds in the pocket of the dead American soldier.

We see one scene in which Japanese soldiers brutally beat and then bayonet a captured American soldier. We see another scene in which two Japanese soldiers who have been taken prisoner are shot down by the GIs assigned to guard them.

Letters from Iwo Jima is a companion film to Flags of Our Fathers, another World War II film directed by Eastwood and made at the same time as this one. Letters from Iwo Jima is the better of the films. Its refusal to be interest in the ideology of war and its insistence on focusing instead on the suffering and brutality of war, most especially on the plights and individual perspectives of the men who are fighting in the war, makes it a truly remarkable film. To describe it as an anti-war film is in fact to underestimate and devalue it. It is much more. It's a film that calls for cultural understanding and appreciation, that argues for the irrationality of war by focusing on the commonalities between the warring sides.

Akeelah and the Bee

Akeelah and the Bee (2006) is a film whose parts are greater that their sum. It's a predictable film that relies on effective acting and a winning plot for its success. It's about an African American girl in the Los Angeles projects who is mired in unpleasant circumstances and knows it. Her father is dead; her mother is distant; her older brother runs with a gang. She's pretty much ignored and on her own. Her solace is her passion for spelling. When her teachers discover her talent, they begin to think she might do well in the spelling bee. And of course she does do well, moving from her school competition to the regional and state and national competitions.

Akeelah is an unlikely competitor. She's at first afraid her friends will make fun of her. Her mother isn't supportive, and her older brother doesn't take her seriously. Her principal talks a college English professor (Lawrence Fishburne) on sabbatical into coaching Akeelah. He agrees, after much grumbling. He has his own issues, dark secrets, to worry about.

Everyone in this film has issues. Akeelah's mother (Angela Bassett) dropped out of college because she felt insecure and unworthy. Akeelah's spelling coach still grieves over the death of daughter and the failure of his marriage. Her principal struggles with inadequate funding for his school—he hopes Akeelah will bring attention and more support. Everyone in Akeelah's neighborhood comes to see Akeelah and her prospects in the spelling bee as a symbol of hope and success and escape. Akeelah herself, played by Keke Palmer, gives this film life and passion and raises it above and beyond itself as a basic feel-good film.

This is also a film about character. At first Akeelah spells simply because she enjoys doing it. She enjoys spelling so much that she lets her other classes slide. It's a means of self-gratification in an environment that give s her little to be happy about. Later, spelling becomes a source of pride and accomplishment. Finally it becomes an achievement she is willing to forfeit so that her main competitor, an Asian boy whose tyrant-father continually berates him for coming in second, can win. But this is not exactly the outcome in the film.

Akeelah seems heavily influenced by a documentary entitled Spellbound (2002), about eight teenagers competing in the national spelling tournament. Several individuals in that film resemble characters in Akeelah and the Bee, including a black girl as well as competitors bullied and pushed around by their parents.

There are elements of schmaltz and the unlikely in this film. How many teenagers stuck in the projects have a chance of escape by learning to spell long words no one uses? Yet the film works. It's inspiring and stirring. We cheer along with Akeelah's neighborhood when she wins her victories. Everyone's redeemed, in a sense. Everyone transfigured.

Perhaps it's not in the spirit of the film to ask what follows Akeelah's final victory. Will her success allow her to escape from the projects. Will it give self-confidence to her mother and a better future for her brother? Maybe. But the film's message that hard work and determination and a dusting of luck can pay off is worth consideration.

Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is not technically about the American South. It's really a film about the southwest and the middle-United States—the regions in which Bonnie and Clyde were active during the 1920s and early 1930s. But Bonnie and Clyde are a Southern tradition and heritage. I remember my grandmother, in her last days, rambling on about two young hoodlums in Texas who held up banks and shot people during the 1920s. it took me a while to realize that she was talking about Bonnie and Clyde. Though the actual province of the film may not be the deep South, it certainly feels Southern—the accents of the primary characters (not that authentic) and the Homer and Jethro soundtrack.

The new book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris discusses how screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman wrote the original screenplay with Francois Truffaut in mind, and how they even managed to interest Truffaut in the idea of directing a Bonnie and Clyde film. Truffaut seriously considered directing the film and made detailed notes on the screenplay. According to Harris, Truffaut significantly influenced the shape and style of the film. At the time, Truffaut's attention was mainly focused on Fahrenheit 451, which would be his first English-language film. He apparently discussed the Bonnie and Clyde screenplay with Jean Luc-Goddard, who also considered directing. Ultimately, the task fell to Arthur Penn, whom Truffaut admired. This information led me to look at and think more carefully about the film. I had not watched it all the way through since its original release in 1967. At the time the film had considerable shock value. It was violent and bloody, and it presented the exploits of Bonnie and Clyde in a relatively sympathetic context. Their deaths in a brutal hail of gunfire at the end of the film were incredibly graphic and shocking. Though that final scene still has its power, it no longer delivers the shock it carried forty years ago. The realism of the film has suffered as well. There's an air of glamor surrounding the two main characters as portrayed by Beatty and Dunaway. The film often shows photographs of the real Bonnie and Clyde, who were considerably less beautiful that the movie versions. The originals were sallow and hard in appearance. The film versions seem well fed, full of curves and smooth lines. They wear nice clothes, even before they start accumulating money by robbing banks. It's difficult to think of a character as goofy as the Warren Beatty version of Clyde robbing banks and killing folks.

Bonnie and Clyde is not seamless, it suffers from certain logical flaws, and it is broadly drawn. It has more energy and force than skill.

The film attempts to portray the two outlaws as depression-era heroes. During one bank robbery, Clyde decides not to take the money of an old man because he is a farmer who needs it. Yet in other robberies he shoots people who are little better off than the old man.

Penn's outlaws are not rebelling against social injustice or poverty. They're rebelling against boredom. At least this is the case for Bonnie, who wants escape from the heat and emptiness of her bedroom, where we first see her lying naked at the beginning of the film. She also wants sexual adventure, and at first she thinks she has found it with Clyde. Their first bank robbery together is clearly a sexual thrill for her, though she soon discovers that Clyde is unwilling to respond to her advances. Clyde at first glance is not the kind of rebel Bonnie wants to be. He's an ex-convict, of course, recently released from prison, but he's not in revolt against much at all. He comes across as a dumb brute, at times, and it's only his unstoppable vigor and momentum that gets him through the robberies, which he carries off more by impulse than by plan.

It's not always clear what Bonnie and Clyde really want. Clyde at times seems willing to settle down into a traditional husband-and-wife relationship. Bonnie chafes at these moments, yet she also longs for her family and her mother—who knows very well where Bonnie's prospects are bound. Mostly the two don't know what they want. They just want to be themselves, and they don't want to give much thought or time to self-justification.

Contrasted against law enforcement officials in the film, especially the sheriff who devotes himself to bringing Bonnie and Clyde down after they take embarrassing photos of him and then throw him in a river after he spits at Bonnie, these outlaws don't look so bad. The film shows Bonnie and Clyde doomed to failure almost from the start. As their fame spreads, more and more law enforcement people want to catch them. The better known they are, the more likely it is that people will recognize them and report them to the police. The last half of the film dramatizes the downward spiral of their exploits.

To what extent do the rampages of Bonnie and Clyde answer to the dreams of the 1960s-era audiences that flocked to see the film? Surely there were numerous films that catered to the youthful American audience desire for escape from middle class conformity and blandness.

Across the Universe

The songs of the Beatles are signposts by which I measure events from my life over a ten-year period, from 1962 to 1970. They are the songs of my adolescence and early adulthood. I listened intensely to the Beatles for much longer a time. Only the songs of Bob Dylan have for me the same intense personal meaning. The same must be true for millions of others in my age range. It is no surprise then that films such as I am Sam and Across the Universe use the Beatles as a soundtrack in order to appeal to people of a certain generation. Of course, the Beatles remain popular, and numerous people younger than me enjoy their music. But it is mainly people in my range for whom the Beatles have such a powerful personal significance.

Across the Universe (2007), directed by Julie Tamor, seeks to be a musical in the same genre as Moulin Rouge (2001), directed by Baz Luhrmann. It tells the story of a love affair set in the 1960s, when the Beatles were recording and performing. The development of the music itself, which is featured in the film in the general order in which it was composed, helps to trace the progress of the love affair. Moreover, the film also traces the rise and fall of the band by paralleling events that we generally associate with the rise and fall of the Beatles with events from the love affair. Early in the film characters attend performances in a smoky nightclub where performers who faintly resemble the young Beatles are performing an early Beatles song. The scene could have come from a nightclub in Liverpool or in Hamburg, Germany, where the Beatles performed early in their career. The climactic scene in the film is a musical performance on the roof of a city building, much like the one where the Beatles gave their final performance in 1969, a scene presented in the film Let it Be (1970).

There are also characters in the film who vaguely approximate Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, although the resemblance is not close. Historical events of the 60s range in the fore- and background of the film. One of the characters works for an anti-war movement, and her increasing radicalism parallels that of the movement in general in the late 60s.

All of these devices and historical markers are props, and I mean mere props, for the love story. There is no depth at all in this film's representation of music and events. Characters break out into song at various points to express their emotions. Sometimes these moments are quite effective, as in the final scene, and a number of others. Sometimes they are quite ineffective, dull, saccharine, and flat, and there are enough of these moments to bring the film down.

Across the Universe has some wonderful moments, but as a whole it lacks passion and force. It is more like a series of rock videos than a coherent narrative. The characters are broadly drawn. Most of them are named after Beatles songs—Jude, Lucy, Rita, Prudence, and so on. Much of the setting of the film, especially those portions involving urban New York and London, remind you of the stylized and sometimes surreal urban world that gave birth to the wonderful songs on Revolver and Sergeant Peppers. But the film never takes off. Just when it seems to soar, it always comes back down to the ground.

10,000 BC

My son Charles sent me the following commentary on 10,000 BC, which he prefers to think of as 10,000 BS:

"I'm hoping I'm writing this to a group of people who haven't yet wasted their time on the movie 10,000 BC. My opportunity to prevent you from having to waste money and time at that movie is the only good thing that will come from it. It was written by a 14-year old. I don't think I'm kidding either. This movie is based on a paper-thin plotline that attempts to exploit every old story and parable from the bible and old fairytales to the Michael Jackson "Black and White" video. There is a hot chick in this movie . . . , but by the end, I was so %#!*&& that the movie was still going on and that she was part of it that it wasn't even relevant. Relevance. There's a term that should have been defined to whoever decided to greenlight this cheesefest. At one point, the main guy befriends a saber-toothed tiger by saving him from a pit that was filling with water. He told the tiger not to eat him so it didn't. The guy fell in the pit because he was hunting for food for his friend who was dying. His friend had been hurt bad, and he dragged his friend on a stretcher across miles and miles of desert. This guy was in bad shape. He couldn't move or anything. Dude left his broken self alone in the middle of the wild and went hunting, fell in this hole, and weathered a night of torrential downpour in the hole. When he came back to the dying guy, the guy was perfect and had been doing recon around his campsite. No mention was ever made about the mortal wounds he had sustained earlier. I've named the style of story-telling that these jokers decided to use the "and then" narrative style. The entire story can be told with no back story in a completely A to B fashion and possibly in one long sentence. In this case, the sentence would involve misspelled words, it would lack all punctuation and capitalization, and it would be written in crayon. (Possibly a little doody would be on the back of the paper too.) e.g.: there's this guy and he knows this girl and they were kids before but now they're not and he has to kill these wooly mammoths but they're not wooly mammoths--there called something else and the guy's dad goes away and then later the guy kills the mammoth and he gets to take the girl and then he gives up the girl but he still wants her and then bad people come and take her away and then the guy says he is going to get her and takes his friends but there's a kid that wants to go and they say he can't but he goes anyways and they see him and then they all go and they meet a tiger and the tiger and the guy become friends and then they make friends with everyone in Africa and attack a really advanced civilization where the bad guys took the girl and then they make all the slaves fight too and there are more wooly mammoths and the girl gets hurt but then an old mammoth fixes her and they all say bye to their friends who are all from Africa and then they go back to their shitty houses on the top of a freezing ass mountain that was a terrible place to live anyway . . . and then I walked out of the movie. The only thing i took from that film was half of a diet coke. This movie makes such a laughable attempt at leeching the collective plots of Gladiator, The 13th Warrior, Ben Hur, 300, Jurassic Park, Stargate, and other otherwise decent-to-good films that I was surprised I never saw a cameo by Snoop Dogg or Shatner. The only thing that bothered me more than this movie was the creep show that had to be the crowd at the 9:55 PM showing of Horton Hears a Who. I've seen some weak movies this year (Fool's Gold) and I've seen some wonderfully awful films this year (Rambo) but this $%^& of a film should have gone straight to beta max. Not Blu-Ray, not DVD, not VHS...Beta Max. You can play the game when it comes out for TurboGrafx 16 later on this week. This movie would have actually been more understandable if Leslie Neilson had appeared at some point. To conclude, and I'll probably never, ever say this again, this movie might actually be more entertaining in a Broadway musical format."

"Sorry for the rant, but I had to get it off my chest."

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

The premise of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is so obvious that the film is at a disadvantage from the start. It is highly self-referential. In the opening scene the narrator, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), who is also one of the main characters, starts talking to us, the audience, about what is going to happen in the film. He pauses at several points in the film to do the same again. Towards the end, he discusses whether the film will have a happy ending and points out that the formula of many such films is to ensure a happy ending. He offers us two versions of the same scene. The film is much concerned with a mystery writer from the 1970s whose novels have been a source of fascination for one of the other main characters in the film, and for her father as well. These novels, or at least one of them in particular, prove to contain the plot or plots that the film itself is enacting.

This film is a kind of film noir and a kind of buddy film. One is especially reminded of the Lethal Weapon films, and not coincidentally the director/writer of this film--Shane Black--was also a screenwriter in all four of the Lethal films, so that there is another degree of self-reference here (a film colleague pointed this out to me), although there is no real parallel between the buddy characters in this film and the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover characters.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is as full of strange twists and turns as LA Confidential or The Maltese Falcon. When Lockhart, who robs toy stores, is confused with an actor who is auditioning for a part in a detective film, he gets the role of a detective. At his director's party he meets a gay detective, Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), who offers to train him for the part by enlisting him in his investigation of a man he has been hired to survey. Murders ensue, and for at least one of them Lockhart appears to have been framed. A beautiful aspiring actress whom Lockhart meets at a party turns out to be a girl on whom he had a high school crush years before.

The film is certainly entertaining, but the whacky and spontaneous atmosphere it cultivates, where anything can and will happen, is forced and predictable and stale. Val Kilmer is fine in his role, as is Downey.

Grindhouse

Grindhouse (2007) is a set of films directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarrantino, in apparent tribute to B-grade films of the 1960s and 1970s that specialized in depictions of ultra violence. I watched Machete, the film directed by Rodriguez. A virus is released that infects everyone with whom it comes in contact, turning them into flesh-eating zombies. A ragtag group of hooligans and hoods band together to fight off the zombies. In numerous scenes various appendages of the human body, including heads, are cut, chopped, bitten or sawed off. Blood gushes in torrents. The special effects are intentionally low-grade—the blood looks fake, the severed limbs look plastic—that is supposed to be part of the fun of the films. Tarrantino appears in a minor role as one of the bad guys. Bruce Willis also appears in a minor role: just before he swells up to the size and appearance of a grotesque cucumber and explodes, he confesses to killing Osama Bin Laden.

Grindhouse attempts to simulate how it would have been to sit in some sleazy, b-grade movie house or drive-in theater watching one of these films. The print is full of intentional defects and scratches, a reel is actually missing (its absence does not detract from the coherence of the plot), and the faux-trailers at the beginning are hilarious.

The two Kill Bill films were Tarrantino’s tribute to the old kung fu films that influenced him. Are we to think these B-grade grindhouse films to which Rodriguez and Tarrantino pay tribute deserve similar honor? The outpourings of blood and violence become boring after a while. One of the most memorable moments involves a young woman whose leg is torn off by a zombie. Her boyfriend attaches a large machine gun as an artificial limb, and she uses it to great effect, killing zombies (can zombies be killed? Apparently so, if you shoot off their heads) and other bad guys with zeal.

One can appreciate the realism and attention to detail in this recreation of an old 60s/70s-style schlock film while at the same time wondering what is the point and what is the benefit.

The Kingdom

The opening sequence of The Kingdom (2007) offers a newsreel-style history of Saudi Arabia from its founding in 1932 to the present. In briefly shown images, some narrated by the voices of recognizable American news broadcasters, we see the major figures and events in Saudi history. The focus is mainly the nation's relationship with the West. Specifically emphasized are the paradoxes of the Saudi kingdom: it was organized by tribesmen hostile to the west, but the discovery of oil in 1933 made an alliance with the Kingdom essential for the West. U. S. support for Israel complicated Saudi relations with the West. When the United States cemented its alliance with the Kingdom by offering half a million troops, the Osama Bin Laden was forced out, along with his followers. At the end of this introductory sequence, a rapid series of images show major terrorist events of the last decade or so. The last image is of a jetliner approaching the New York Twin Towers on the fateful day on September 2001. A message on the screen reminds us that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists that day were Saudis. The opening sequence emphasizes the many contradictions of U. S./Saudi relations. The point suggested here is that the nature of the West's involvement in the Kingdom was at least one factor leading to the attack on the Twin Towers and, presumably, the current state of affairs regarding Iraq, Iran, Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan. We are thus prepared for a film that investigates the causes of those events, along with the ironies, paradoxes, and contradictions of U. S. relations with the Kingdom. Unfortunately this opening is the most incisive and interesting element of the film.

Directed by Peter Berg, The Kingdom concerns a fictional terrorist attack against Americans living in Saudi Arabia. Terrorists enter an American compound, shoot down Americans standing in their front yards, then shoot down members of a crowd at a softball game. A man dressed in what appears to be standard Saudi military garb blows himself up. As ambulances and emergency personnel gather to treat the wounded, a truck bomb explodes, two hundred die.

Although Saudi policy forbids the presence of American agents in the Kingdom, in this case a small team of F. B. I agents is permitted to investigate the attacks. They are allowed five days for their investigations. They are interested in going to Saudi Arabia partially out of a desire for revenge—a fellow agent died in the attacks. A female agent, Janet Mayes, played by Jennifer Garner, weeps when she hears of his death. Another agent, Ronald Fleury, played by Jamie Foxx, leans down and whispers something to her—she stops weeping. One of the points of the film is the argument that Saudi Arabia on the one hand appears to be an American ally and on the other hand harbors, if not funds, terrorists. The attacks in this film are carried out by men wearing standard Saudi military uniforms, a fact suggesting that Saudis, perhaps even members of the Saudi military, were involved in the attacks.

The Kingdom builds on the notion that Saudi Arabia has managed to survive by supporting both American interests and forces that oppose American interests. This particular issue has occasionally been debated in the media and by politicians, but for the most part it has been avoided. The film acknowledges the issue but for the most part avoids it as well.

The Kingdom uses Saudi Arabia as a backdrop for a standard suspense story about American agents attempting to discover the perpetrators of the attacks. It is told clearly from an American perspective, in a form that American audiences would find comfortable. It does not, for the most part, except in the opening sequence, question the American role in Saudi Arabia but instead considers the possibility that Saudi Arabia supports or at the least acquiesces to the presence of terrorists within its borders.

What the film uses most clearly is the theme of cultural contrasts. Ronald Fleury in particular is portrayed as an ambitious agent who goes on the mission to Saudi Arabia only because he is assigned to it. Only gradually, as he learns more about Saudi culture and the Saudi people, does he develop a personal interest in and commitment to the mission. As a parallel to Fleury, a Saudi police sergeant, Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, is assigned, against his will, to assist the American agents. They don't like him, and he doesn't want to assist them. In the course of the film, Al Ghazi comes to respect and like the Americans. Gradually they come to like and respect him.

In the climactic scene of the film one of the American agents is kidnapped by the terrorists responsible for the attacks. The Saudi sergeant and the American agents work together to find and rescue the kidnapped man. They accidentally run across the hideout of the terrorists, whom they kill in a gun battle. The real point of the film is how people from different cultures come to discover what they share in common, and this is the basis of friendship. Unfortunately, the Saudi sergeant dies at the end of the film. Contrasted against the friendship the Americans share with him is the statement of the dying terrorist leader to his grandson that eventually all the Americans will be killed. The film makes a point of letting us know that these same words were what agent Fleury said to agent Mayes at the start of the film to comfort her: "we are going to kill them all." The film suggests the deep hostilities that underlie the relationship between Saudi and American culture, and the difficulty of bridging them. It suggests as well that hatred for the West is passed down from one generation to the next. Without delving into the causes of that hostility, The Kingdom argues in a superficial and fundamentally platitudinous way for mutual understanding. It thus avoids more difficult issues.

The Kingdom is a police drama set in Saudi Arabia. It is not a film in the same class as Syriana or Munich.

Resident Evil: Extinction

The best that can be said of this film is that it does, eventually, end. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) builds on the story introduced and prolonged in the first two Resident Evil films. It also borrows heavily from video games and the Mad Max Road Warrior films but lacks their grit and vigor—it relies too much on poorly rendered digital effects and not enough on story and character or imagination or logic or intelligence or basic filmmaking skills. But what more should one expect? This film surely wasn't conceived with the purpose of creating art or of making profound statements about humanity and the world. Surely it was conceived primarily in hopes of making a profit, of wrenching the last dollar out of the concept introduced in the video game and the predecessor films.

What is most interesting about this film? My answer would be the actress Mila Jovovich, who plays the main character Alice. She brings exotic energy and life to the film, furtively, haphazardly. At the film's beginning we see that a clearly evil and power-hungry scientist has cloned hundreds of copies of Alice in an effort to discover an antidote for the virus that has turned most of the world's population into flesh-eating zombies. He periodically brings one of the cloned Alices to life for reasons that are not quite clear—the clone always dies in some grotesque way. He also spends most of the film tracking the real Alice by satellite—her blood contains an antidote to the virus. He's somehow programmed her so that if the satellites issue a command she will obey it. She has unusual psychic as well as physical abilities for which the film offers no explanation (perhaps one of the earlier films explained). She discovers her cloned other selves at the end of the film, which leaves open the possibility of still yet another sequel in which they will play a role. This prospective sequel was perhaps the least heartening aspect of Resident Evil: Extinction.

The Mad Max link is a caravan of survivors wending their way through a desert in the American west, trying to survive in one way or the other, trying to avoid hordes of ravening zombies. Many of these survivors predictably lose their lives in the course of the film. At one point the caravan travels through an abandoned and wrecked Las Vegas, covered with sand, evoking "Kubla Khan" but also evoking certain images from the Planet of the Apes films. Of course, the Las Vegas monuments half-covered in sand in this film—the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, others—were replica monuments to begin with, pallid ironic tributes to the great works of the West. Perhaps this film is aware of the irony, and of the symbolic potential of Las Vegas as a metaphor for the lost and broken western world—brought down (presumably) by its own obsession with unfettered experimentation, science, and technology. At least I think this is the message the film wants us to carry away.

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

The key to Tree of Smoke (2007) by Denis Johnson is confusion, ignorance, unawareness. The key question, in a sense, is whether confusion and ignorance absolve one of culpability. The main character is Skip Sands, a young CIA officer, who is assigned to Vietnam in 1966 and who hopes to be in the center of action. His uncle, Colonel Sands, is famed for his exploits, and Skip hopes his uncle's reputation will get him the kind of assignment he wants. Instead his uncle assigns him to live in a house miles from the action, and Sands spends much of his time in Vietnam doing nothing, reading the notes of the French doctor who once lived in the house and who was killed when a booby-trapped underground tunnel he was exploring exploded and collapsed on him. Sands is always on the outside of events, and somehow on the inside. He's like one of those souls forever imprisoned in Dante's limbo, guilty of moral indifference, guilty not of a failure to choose correctly but of a failure to make any choice at all, guilty of choosing ignorance rather than knowledge that would make him responsible.

Peripheral vision, confusion, uncertainty—these are the viewpoints from which Sands and Tree of Smoke view the war. It's also the perspective from which the reader engages with the novel.

The scope of this novel is expansive. It begins with a hundred-page narrative, set in 1965, of CIA activities in the Philippines and the assassination of a priest suspected (wrongly) of collaborating with an obscure enemy. Focused specifically on American involvement in Vietnam, it engages the totality of American foreign policy during the latter half of the 20^th century. In scope it might approach the momentous visions of Delillo's Underworld or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. But there's a lack of detail here, a narrowed focus on Colonel Sands and his nephew and the people surrounding them, that vitiates the potential for depth and mythic import. There's much spectacle and intrigue here—the novel comes specifically to life in its descriptions of the Tet Offensive, in many ways the centerpiece of the book—but there's small opportunity for insight and understanding. Maybe the point is that Vietnam makes little room for such knowledge.

Tree of Smoke also concerns the issues of character and of guilt. Skip Sands is always on the periphery, mostly a witness to events of the war, but at the same time somehow deeply implicated. His uncle's renegade exploits, which he is not wholly aware of himself, implicate him as far as other CIA operatives are concerned. But implicate him in what? In criminal behavior, insubordination, acts of treason? We never clearly know. Maybe even Sands never knows. He just knows he's suspected. The novel gives the clear sense of a war that generates its own energy and momentum. No one is in charge. Everything is chaos. Depending on who you are, your national allegiances, your situation in a given moment, your view of the war and your place within it varies wildly. Is Colonel Sands an American hero, flaunting pointless bureaucracy, taking brave and courageous steps when no one else is willing, or is he a renegade, half-mad, driven by ambition and greed? No one knows. (Colonel Sands in this regard suggests Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1978)).

At the least, Tree of Smoke portrays a war in which issues of morality, of what is wrong and what is right, even of national policy, matter not a bit. The war lives outside the dimensions of justification and reason. It is its own phenomenon. Beyond it, the world doesn't exist.

When the novel ends, in 1983, we encounter Skip Sands as a wholly compromised individual, condemned to death in Malaysia for illegal weapons sales and other activities. He's been destroyed by the war as fully as others who died from gunshots or mine blasts.

The novel reminded me of two recent films about the CIA and American involvement in wartime espionage: The Good Shepherd (2006) and The Good German (2006).

For All Mankind

For All Mankind (1989) is perhaps the best documentary made so far about the U. S. expeditions to the moon. It is not especially long, only eighty minutes. Instead of focusing on technical details, the development of the mission, the scientific aspects of the moon flights, it focuses instead on impressions—visual and aural impressions, the thoughts and reactions of the men involved. Most of the footage is taken from official NASA archival films. There is no narration. There are no recreated scenes. Instead the participants in the mission talk for themselves. The documentary covers everything from the minutes immediately before the first launch to the moon landing itself and then to the ascent from the moon and the rendezvous and docking with the command module orbiting the moon. We see just a brief glimpse of a command module parachuting through the atmosphere and landing safely in the ocean.

For all Mankind is a simple and straightforward visual narrative. Without overtly making clear that it is doing so, it takes the eight lunar missions, including two lunar orbital flights that did not involve landings, and combines them into one narrative, so that the story of the lunar expeditions is told from the perspectives of all the men involved.

The film tells its story with awe and even reverence. It treats the moon flights as the landmark events they were, epical extensions of the human presence from beyond the sphere of the earth to another world. The soundtrack by Brian Eno for the most part contributes effectively to this purpose, though occasionally it becomes a bit unfocused.

This film would benefit from a wide-screen, high-definition treatment. My only major complaint is that there is not enough footage of men walking on the moon's surface, riding around in the moon buggy, talking about what they are doing. Sometimes the comments of the astronauts are too prosaic and mundane—they make jokes, sing, drive golf balls (Alan Shepherd), jump up and down, run, pick up rocks. If it were not for the occasional comments they make that show their awareness of the transcendent significance of the event, you would think they did not understand. But they clearly did.

Forty years after the first lunar landing, the image of the blue-green earth floating in the void still astounds.

Biloxi Blues

Neil Simon's plays about bleached out New Yorkers are not to my tastes. Biloxi Blues (1983), based on the play of the same title, may be the best Neil Simon play (in film form) I have seen. It's essentially a memoir of Simon's days in basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1945. Directed by Mike Nichols, the film focuses on a small group of young men in their first days and weeks of basic training. They are young, fresh, and just out of high school. They all believe they are headed towards mortal combat in the Pacific, and maybe even death.

In many ways there is nothing particularly remarkable about the film. Matthew Broderick is good as the main character Eugene Morris Jerome, obviously based on Simon, who records his impressions of his experiences in a journal. Late in the film one of his friends finds the journal and reads from it to assembled friends—giving Eugene's opinions about every man in the group. Christopher Walken as the basic training sergeant Toomey is the most interesting character in the film. He demands total obedience from his recruits and has a streak of cruelty in him that takes aim at the more vulnerable boys in the group. He claims to have a silver-plate in his head, the result of a war wound, and at the end of the film, when he is apparently called to Fort Dix, NJ, for surgery, he appears to go crazy and threatens to shoot Eugene.

Despite the title, the South in Biloxi Blues is incidental. The South means humidity, mosquitoes, heat, swamps. It offers some slight local color. In one interlude Eugene has a budding romance from a young Gulfport girl he meets at a USO social. But what's more important in the scene than her Southern background is the fact that they both are young, this is their first romance, they both know they will never see each other again. The best scene in the film involves Eugene's first sexual experience, with a prostitute from Gulfport. The scene is hilarious, but the character of the prostitute with her gentle Southern accent and her lackadaisical attitude is the real source of humor. The South as a place in this film is relevant for its Otherness—it is not the place the characters in this film are from; it is not home; it is somewhere else, thus strange and foreign, though with a few exceptions the most one sees of it is from within a military barracks.

It's obvious this film is based on a stage play, and certain scenes seem taken straight from the stage. But the film is entertaining enough.

The March, by E. L. Doctorow

In The March (2005), E. L. Doctorow follows the 1864 movement of Northern troops commanded by William Tecumseh Sherman from just north of Milledgeville, Georgia, down through Savannah, and up through Columbia, South Carolina, into North Carolina. Since many tend to think of Sherman's march in terms of the city of Atlanta, Doctorow's approach covers less familiar territory. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and of the Pen/Faulkner Award for 2007, The March is beautifully written, always interesting, and somewhat pointless—though pointlessness is not necessarily a defect.

The narrative method in The March is reminiscent to that in Ragtime. Using what appears to be meticulous historical research and a narrative method that interweaves without unifying the lives of various individuals involved, Doctorow creates a panoramic sense of the march and of what the times must have been like as Sherman's forces passed through Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina.

A number of characters emerge as important: the slave girl Pearl who follow the Northern troops as they leave Macon; Emily Thompson, the young daughter of a Southern patriarch who dies as the Northern soldiers occupy his house; a Northern officer; Dr. Sartorius, a brilliant field surgeon devoid of feeling, a British reporter, a photographer, two no-count Confederate soldiers who change allegiance from North to South and back depending on the needs of the moment. And of course there is Sherman himself. Some of these characters we follow from beginning to end. Others enter for a time and are killed or simply fall out of view. All engage in a continual process of personal redefinition—as their circumstances change, especially as the war brings about such change. For the Southern characters this may mean adjustment to the dissolution of their familiar world—they often become entirely different people, engaging in behaviors they would never have considered prior to Sherman's arrival. To the Northern characters this may mean confronting personal successes and failures, the disappointment of personal ambitions, as the war progresses. The two Confederate soldiers Arly and Will, constantly changing their allegiances and, essentially, shifting their shapes in response to the demands of a particular moment, are good examples of this forced redefinition.

Doctorow portrays the march as loosely organized anarchy. Sherman has some control over the direction in which his troops move, but little if any control over their individual behavior (especially evident when they violate his orders and run amok in Columbia, burning the city). He is an interesting character. He desires greatness, wants to be acknowledged for his military achievements, and feels overlooked, especially when he is blamed for a disastrous battle over which he had little control. Although I wish Doctorow had paid him more attention, to have done so would have violated the essential premise and structure of the novel, which gives none of its characters prominence over the others.

War is evil. It changes people's lives. It causes their deaths. It's a naturalistic force that destroys landscapes and nations. It roils on in chaos and disrepute, and people caught up in it, voluntarily or not, as in a landslide or avalanche, become part of its surging mass. This seems to be Doctorow's point. Although he occasionally acknowledges the political and historical causes of the war—such as slavery—more often than not he shows war as an event that has little linkage to historical causes and political movements.

It was interesting to read this novel shortly after reading Phil Williams' A Distant Flame, which concerns Sherman's march as it approaches Atlanta. The books are quite different from each other, yet also complementary. Williams writes more or less from a Southern viewpoint. Doctorow writes from a Northern viewpoint (though he pays attention to Southerners as well). Both novels offer graphic, powerful battle scenes. Williams seems more effective in his portrayal of battle, especially from the individual soldier's point of view, while Doctorow gives a deeper, broader sense of war as a movement and phenomenon.

A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeleine L’Engle

I somehow escaped reading Madeline L'Engle's Time Trilogy as my children were growing up. We certainly did read Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. This one escaped me, though one of my sons read it on his own and said he enjoyed doing so. Recently I read the Time Trilogy: A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978). These books concern the Murry family--four children and their scientist parents who live somewhere in the United States at the time of the Cold War. In each of the three books the family confronts some sort of crisis involving a threat to the earth.

A key figure in the novels is Meg Murry, who in the first book is a gangly 12-year-old girl self-conscious of her appearance and convinced that she isn't very good at anything. Also important is her 5-year-old brother Charles Wallace, who is exceedingly bright for his age and who seems to have psychic powers. In the second novel these two are two years older, while in the third one Meg is married and pregnant and Charles Wallace is fifteen.

In A Wrinkle in Time dark, evil cloud is enveloping the universe, sapping life and free will from all living things. The threat manifests itself in both a political and covertly theological. Characters travel through the universe by a process called "tesseracting," which seems more a matter of magic than of science, real or theoretical. In A Wind in the Door a dark force called the Ecthroi is consuming the universe and threatening to consume and nullify the earth. It has sickened small particles called "farondolae" that live in the mitochondria of every living being: and all life is threatened. Charles Wallace, who himself is ill from this threat. has to confront the forces that are causing the menace. And in the third novel Mad Dog Branzillo, the dictator of a small South American nation, is on the verge of starting a nuclear way. (Time travel plays a major role in this novel, as Charles Wallace and his sister try to avert the crisis by altering events over the course of human history).

All three novels have a strong Christian understructure, though the resulting allegory and symbolism is more fractured and arbitrary than in the C. S. Lewis books.

All sorts of mythic creatures appear in these novels—flying horses, angels, sentient snakes, witches (who are really ancient alien beings), and so on. Characters teleport and time travel all over the universe, face various threats and challenges, almost suffer defeat at the hands of a dark enemy, and ultimately prevail. In the first novel, Meg manages to defeat the enemy by repeatedly professing her love for Charles Wallace. I could almost hear the Beatles singing their song.

At the same time, in all three novels science and cosmology play a significant role. This is often more evident as an awareness of science and cosmology than as a real use of science. These books may acknowledge and pay homage to science, but they are basically about the struggle of good against evil. For all their high reputation, these novels are really children's books, and not especially good ones. The writing is dull and the narrative is crudely rendered. Characters are basically flat, and the only really interesting one is Charles Wallace, whose special nature and abilities are never really explained. Events sometimes happen almost by caprice. The symbolism and allegorical elements are contrived, forced, and arbitrary. L'Engle seems to feel free to manipulate the laws of the world she writes about to suit her needs. Compared to Tolkien, Lewis (whom I do not like), or Phillip Pullman, Madeline L'Engle seems to be in a different and less distinguished league.

There are actually two additional books about the Murrys, and the Trilogy is actually a Quintet, but the books my children owned were in a slip case labeled the Time Trilogy. The remaining two Murry books are focused on other members of the family.

My Cousin Vinny

The opening moments of My Cousin Vinny make clear that the film is taking place in the deep American South. Seeming to echo (unintentionally) the opening images of Huston's Wise Blood, this film shows us scene after scene of Southern imagery: a roadside hubcaps stand, a roadside fruit stand, a hand-lettered sign advertising "Dirt for Sale," another sign offering "Free Cow Manure," a columned mansion, a barking dog, a unpainted wooden store with a Confederate flag, and a rundown convenience store called "Sac-o-suds." The result is that the setting is established as a stereotypical South. What's more, two teenagers from the North are driving towards Florida and, shortly after entering Alabama, are arrested, by mistake, for robbing a roadside store and killing its owner. The local law enforcement officials are convinced they have the right suspects because, in part, they are Northerners, Yankees. The judge and the prosecutor assume the case is a no-brainer, that no one will question the evidence, and, believing the boys guilty, do not bother to look past the obvious facts of the case. Corruption and ineptitude are also stereotypical traits ascribed to Southern policemen and judicial systems.

Unlike other films which use similar scenarios, My Cousin Vinny makes the use of stereotypes a two-sided affair. When Vinny, the second cousin of one of the arrested boys, shows up to defend them, he is the incarnation of a Brooklyn character—heavy accent, swagger, garish leather boots, and a purse-laden and loudly dressed girlfriend who has probably never been outside the borders of New York City in her life. At first it appears that Vinny's appearance is not going to serve the interests of the two arrested boys. Eventually, he proves his mettle.

Undermining stereotypes, using them for the sake of humor, is the point of My Cousin Vinny, an amusing film. Vinny proves he can be a good lawyer. His girlfriend proves she is intelligent. The Southern prosecutor and judge prove they are human beings after all. Once all these characters break through the obscuring façade of their outer stereotypical surfaces, all is peace and light.

Persepolis

The animation in Persepolis (2007) is basically black and white, two-dimensional and high contrast—few shades of gray. Even so, the stylized figures are well rendered, and as we watch the main character Marjane Satrapi grow from early childhood to adulthood, she seems as real and fully realized as any character played by a live actor.

The film is autobiographical, based on the graphic novel of the film's co-writer and director Marjane Satrapi. We follow her from the last days of the Shah in 1977 to the late 1980s. The film is told retrospectively, from the viewpoint of Marjanne sitting in an airport lobby in the late 1990s, contemplating what appears to be her decision not to return to Tehran.

As much as this is a film about the life of Marjane, Persepolis is also about the changing political and cultural climate of Iran after the Shah's death and the advent of an Islamic republic. Marjane's family goes from a state of wealth and affluence, where people can complain with some freedom about their dislike of the Shah, to a state of repression and persecution, where freedom of expression is basically impossible, where women must wear the veil, where dissenters are carted off and imprisoned or worse. In short, Persepolis is about living in a repressive, totalitarian regime. Its ancestors include 1984, Darkness at Noon, Cancer Ward, and other works about individuals repressed by an authoritarian government.

Marjane is an outspoken and intelligent young woman who shows her nonconformist personality in early childhood. When her parents begin to fear this personality will get her in trouble, they send her to private school in Vienna. At first she is happy there, but eventually, after bad landlords and errant love affairs, things go wrong. Marjane spends months living on the streets before she calls her parents and asks to return home. In Vienna she is free to be herself, but she struggles with her Iranian identity, sometimes pretending to be French, sometimes repressing her Iranian origins because she fears the reactions of people around her. But when she returns to Tehran she finds that she is not at home there anymore either , is not free to speak her mind, in one way or other is under constant government scrutiny, and she becomes depressed.

The film is full of satirical jabs at the Islamic republic. In an art history class, Marjane listens to a lecture about Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." The professor uses an image of the painting to illustrate his lecture—all vestiges of nudity in the painting have been blotted out. In a painting class devoted to the human form, the female model is clothed in heavy black clothing—there is nothing to paint. Marjane is the film's symbol of individualism, of free expression. She blazes brightly, and as a result the republic threatens to obliterate her. When we first see her in the film, she is a tired, worn older woman, clearly showing the strain of the life she has lived. The film does not offer a happy outcome.

Persepolis was made in France, and the dialogue is in French. The film drags a bit after Marjane's return to Tehran from Vienna, but all in all it is a compelling and distressing document.

La Vie en Rose

La Vie en Rose (2007) totally ignores the German occupation of France and the accusations that Edith Piaf somehow collaborated with the Nazis. There are different explanations for her behavior during these years, and they may or may not be persuasive, but the film makes no attempt to reach a judgment and simply ignores the period entirely.

La Vie en Rose is no white wash of its subject, however. It is critical in many ways of Piaf's lifestyle, personality, and personal relationships. She could be difficult and unpleasant, an egotistical, misbehaving diva, and the film shows a real discrepancy between the sometimes sordid details of her life and the beautiful voice when she begins to sing.

The film tells the story of Piaf's life by switching back and forth between the latter days of her life, as she collapses on stage, later as she seems to wither away in a nursing facility, and her early days, beginning in early childhood and gradually moving forward through her life and career. The back and forth narrative structure can be jarring, discordant, and it prevents too much emotional involvement by the viewer—that is, as soon as we may be swept away by a scene of Piaf's singing, we are moved to a wholly different scene in which an ill and much older Piaf sits suffering in a wheelchair.

Piaf's life was one of suffering, heartbreak, and tragedy, punctuated with numerous moments of triumph. The film chronicles myriad scenes of misery: abandoned first by her drunken mother and then her father, left to be raised by prostitutes, then taken away to live and work on the streets with her father, working as a street singer and maybe a prostitute during her late teenage years, the mother of a child who dies of meningitis at two, befriended by a gangster and accused of corruption after he is gunned down, permanently injured in a car wreck and suffering from pain for the rest of her life (she limps, walks with a decided stoop, is addicted to alcohol and painkillers as a partial result), falls in love with a prizefighter who dies in a plane crash, a long and painful decline, dying at the age of 47. In ways the film seems more concerned with Piaf's miserable existence than with her seemingly miraculous talent as a singer.

It's clear that Piaf lived a difficult life. What isn't so clear in this film is the relationship of that life to her singing. There's a kind of disjuncture between the two that the film never manages to bridge. There's also a mystery in how the French idolized Piaf as a distinctly nationalistic phenomenon. Not that she didn't merit it, not that it wasn't genuine, just that the film never quite fully explains it. Obviously the stories about Piaf's hard early days--growing up on the streets, abandoned by her parents, discovered singing on a street curb--play into the legend on which that idolatry grew.

Marion Cotillard is excellent as Piaf. She seems to inhabit the role fully—one of those rare instances in film when the actor seems to merge with the character portrayed, when you forget that you're watching someone act and are convinced that you're watching the historical person. The question of whether Cotillard's portrayal of Piaf is historically accurate seems immaterial. Her acting in the film is quite an achievement.

Piaf was probably easier to like on stage, especially when she was singing, than as a person, a human being. The film certainly portrays her this way. And whatever failures La Vie en Rose may be blamed for in its ignoring of the German occupation and its inability to make the life and the art connect, it's a fine film that brings deserved attention to one of the great popular culture figures of the twentieth century.

Stardust

Stardust (2007), based on the illustrated novel of the same title by Neil Gaiman, is an adult fantasy in the vein of The
Princess Bride (1987), though less witty and wry and a bit more earnest. One key to the success of the film and the novel is that they create and play by their own rules. The world of Stardust is clearly and indisputably not ours. Stars that fall to earth and become beautiful young women, teleportation by wishing on magic candles, evil witches, evil princes, long lost mothers, missing sisters, virtuous but simple young heroes—this movie has all of these and more. Stardust relies on modest visual effects and strong acting and characterizations. Robert DeNiro is especially memorable as an in-the-closet Captain Shakespeare whose sky ship captures and sells the electric charges of lightning bolts. Claire Danes as the fallen star Yvaine mainly has only to stand around and look heavenly--she succeeds. The relatively unknown Charlie Cox serves admirably in the main male character's role of Tristan. This entertaining film may lack much in substance but offers much in fantasy and romance.

No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2007), scripted and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, is not a line-by-line adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel. Many if not most of the events in the novel are there, though some significant ones are not. The important characters and conflicts are present, and in general the main thrust and vision of the novel are preserved. But the film, as we should expect, is a different work than the novel. In the novel the tone and mood are a product of McCarthy's prose style, and that prose style is not present in the film, except in a few voice-over moments spoken by the sheriff. The film compensates for the lack of McCarthy's language through pacing, cinematography, and characterization. Landscape cinematography in particular can serve as a partial substitute for McCarthy's prose. Mood is an important element in McCarthy's work. Any film based on his novels must face this challenge of transforming the world created by McCarthy's prose into the language of cinema: adaptations of The Road and of Blood Meridian (Ridley Scott directing) are now in the works.

Three central characters in the film are Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the murderer Anton Chigur (Javier Bardem), and Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Moss accidentally stumbles across a murder scene in the desert where a drug deal has gone wrong and finds a satchel containing two million dollars). He takes it. Chigur is asked by the men responsible for the drug deal to find the money and the man who took it. He agrees but immediately kills them. Chigur's characteristic method of death is an air-powered piston that punches a hole in the skull, exactly the kind of device used to kill cattle in a slaughterhouse. To Chigur, there's not much difference between cattle and humans. Chigur is highly intelligent and crafty and gradually comes to identify the man who stole the money. Moss is intelligent as well, but not intelligent enough. A cat and mouse game ensues.

Sheriff Bell becomes aware of these events and because Llewellyn is from his own town takes an interest in saving his life and stopping Chigur. Bell is the moral center and point of view in the film (as he was in the novel). He often expresses disgust with the state of the modern world, with how brutally murders are committed, without compunction or hesitation. The drug murders in the desert and Chigur himself are a confirmation of what he contends the modern world has become. Tommy Lee Jones is not an actor I would have chosen to portray Sheriff Bell, but he is excellent in the role. Within a certain range, there is no better actor. His beaten pockmarked face, his deep appearance of fatigue, serves him well. He acts mainly with his eyes and his voice. Late in the film, a retired lawman, played by Barry Corbin, reminds Bell that times were as deadly and brutal in the old days as in the current ones. It's not clear how Bell reacts to this pronouncement, but in the final scene of the film he seems to have retired. Perhaps it's not modern times that Bell has tired of, perhaps it's just human kind in general, to which his job as a sheriff has given him more than ample exposure.

The Coen brothers have always excelled in lampooning particular types of human characters, especially character marked by geographical place. We saw this especially in Fargo and in O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coens also have a dark, relentless sense of sardonic, satiric humor. There is no open humor in No Country for Old Men. The Coens use their talent for representing place-marked characters in their portrayals of numerous minor figures in the film—Chigur's victims, law enforcement officers, others. One of the best examples is a scene early in the film where Chigur, who has already killed a deputy and a man whose car has broken down on the side of the road, stops to buy gas at an isolated gas station in the desert. The middle-aged man who runs the store speaks kindly to Chigur, who asks the man to call the coin he is about the toss—heads or tail. The store manager knows he is up against something dangerous and threatening, and he is clearly frightened, but he doesn't know how to act. Chigur, on the other hand, is self-contained and calm. The man calls the coin toss correctly (Chigur tells him that it is the most important call he has ever made), and his life is saved. This is a disturbing and frightening scene not only because of Chigur's demeanor but also because of the store manager's fear and confusion. He works in an isolated little store and gas station. He's never had to face danger of any sort. He's not especially intelligent or experienced in the ways of the larger world. With Chigur, he confronts something otherworldly, something beyond his understanding.

Among the dominating elements in this film were Chigur's single-minded pursuit of Llewellyn and his impersonal, clinical murder of one person after another. Llewellyn's attempt to outwit and elude Chigur is also a focus. As determined and resolute as he is, as we move through the film his efforts seem increasingly pointless and he seems increasingly vulnerable and doomed. Sheriff Bell's meditations and despair over the state of the modern world finally become irrelevant. The modern world is the way it is. He's an archaism, and is out of place, and he recognizes the fact.

Some criticize McCarthy for his portrayal of a male-dominated world in which women have only subsidiary roles. This is the world McCarthy writes about—a world that exists—not a world in which woman have overturned gender-based hierarchies. There are strong women characters in this film, especially the wives of Bell and Llewellyn (played respectively by Tess Harper and Kelly McDonald), but they do have secondary roles. It is Llewellyn's mother-in-law who gives out the fatal information about his whereabouts. Thus the woman who dislikes him, and whom he dislikes, brings him down.

Woody Harrelson has a minor role as a man hired by one of the drug lords to hunt Chigur down and eliminate him—everyone recognizes that he has run out of their control. Harrelson's character explains to the man who hires him that he has a kind of admiration for Chigur, who actually operates according to a peculiar kind of principle. Yet admiration does not save him. When Moss' wife returns home from his funeral, she finds Chigur waiting for her. As he prepares to kill her, she tells him that there is no reason to do so, and he tells her that because her husband has broken an agreement with Chigur, she must die. When she persists, he offers to let her call a coin toss and let the outcome govern her fate: "That's the best I can do," he tells her. But she declines to call the toss. We never actually see her murdered; we only see Chigur inspecting the soles of his boots as he leaves her house, making sure they are not marked with her blood.

Some may find McCarthy's novel or the Coen's film cruel and inhumanly brutal. But it is Chigur who is cruel and brutal, and even more so the world that produced him.

Is this film a masterpiece? Some have said so. Others have found it lacking. The more I consider the question, the more convinced I am that No Country for Old Men is the Coen's best work.

I’m Not There

I'm Not There (2007) is a film about perspective—Bob Dylan's perspective on himself, director Todd Haynes' perspective, the pop culture perspective, the audience perspective. It's also a film about representation—how Dylan has chosen to represent himself, how we have chosen to represent and fabricate and mold him in our own minds and imaginations. Finally, this film envisions Dylan's life through the metaphoric lens of his songs.

I'm Not There is rarely linear and never literal in its narration of Dylan's life. Dylan himself is never named, but people with other names associated with his life and music appear, each representing a particular phase of his life. Although there is a generally forward-moving progression from his early years to his marriage and divorce and his conversion to Christianity and even up to the Never-Ending Tour, the film moves back and forth among different periods of his career. Certain periods receive more attention than others—for instance, the 1965-1966 years as brilliantly portrayed in the figure of Jude Quinn by Cate Blanchett. Certain periods prove more interesting than others—for instance, the sections dealing with Dylan's marriage and family life are the least interesting, while in many ways the greatest excitement comes in the portrayal of a young Dylan by a 12-year old black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself Woody Guthrie and who carries a guitar in a case labeled "This Machine Kills Fascists," just as Guthrie did.

Later in the film the Dylan character, especially as portrayed by Heath Ledger (as film actor Robbie Clark), is not particularly likable. Overcome by fame or ego or ennui, he tells his wife and friends that a woman could never be a songwriter. Away on tour, he never manages to call home often enough, and there is the sense that he is caught up in his own image as an actor, an image separate from the one he fills at home. Also later in the film, the character Billy the Kid, portrayed by Richard Gere, seems lost and out of touch with the world and inhabits what appears to be a make-believe old frontier town full of circus characters named after songs and characters from The Basement Tapes. The citizens of the town are upset that a super-highway is slated to pass through the middle of town, forcing them all to move away. Here it is as if Dylan has sought shelter from the demands of the real world in a fantasy land that makes its own claims on him. The modern world in the form of a super highway threatens to wipe out the American folk tradition, as represented by the town and its people as well as by the songs of The Basement Tapes on which the town is based). As Billy the Kid, we see a Dylan character in middle age, wondering where his career and life have gone, looking for ways to bring them back to life.

The film gives us seven different versions of Dylan, portrayed by six actors (Marcus Carl Franklin, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw). None of the "Dylan" characters is named Bob Dylan. Instead they have names associated with his songs, interests, or periods of his life. One, Robbie Clark, is a film actor in the style of James Dean—not a song writer. Cate Blanchett (who brilliantly dominates the film) portrays Jude Quinn in imitation (or emulation) of scenes from the Don't Look Back period of Dylan's life. Jude is an allusion to the Judas insult hurled at Dylan during the Royal Albert Hall concert, for playing electric music instead of acoustic folk. "Quinn" comes from Dylan's song "The Mighty Quinn." Blanchett doesn't so much imitate Dylan as she riffs on him, her own version of the singer, a brilliant rendition. Ben Whishaw portrays a character named Arthur Rimbaud, named for the 19th-century French poet whom Dylan admires and was influenced by, especially in the songs from Blood on the Tracks. Marcus Carl Franklin is great as Dylan during his Woody Guthrie years—when he was first learning folk music and capturing attention. He rides the rails, plays for hoboes, and embodies the vision that Dylan imagined and invented for himself as a young man—the Woody Guthrie avatar, taking into himself and trying to encompass the entire American folk and blues tradition. In an early wonderful scene, "Woody" plays "Tombstone Blues" with two black men sitting on the front porch of an old shack. One of the men is Ritchie Havens. In another, he is befriended by a wealthy white woman who invites her friends over to hear Woody play. It's clear she sees in him the unformed and primal genius of folk music—she sees in him a particular image, one she believes she has discovered and therefore holds claim over, already an image that he will have to resist and struggle against, that she and others like her will urge him to fill long after he has moved elsewhere.

Director Todd Haynes focuses on image and representation throughout the film. Not only does he do this in the way he structures the film, and in his choice of metaphoric rather than literal characters who stand for various periods of Dylan's life, but also through his portrayal of the Dylan figures' struggle with what fans and patrons and other admirers wish him to be, with his own continuing sense of entrapment in one persona after the other, his constant desire for renewal and rebirth.

The Dylan that Haynes gives us is a chimerical genius. This Dylan too is a representation, Haynes' version of the real man. Even if this film can't literally explain the real man—the chimerical genius song writer—it intensively evokes his brilliance and makes beautiful use of his words and images and characters.

Much of the joy of the film comes from Dylan's music itself, whether in Dylan's own performances or those of others. The film opens with "Stuck Inside a Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)." Late in the film we hear songs from his most recent album Modern Times. The film never wavers from this focus on Dylan's music, which form the heart and mind of the film.

There is no such thing as a human life that can be easily or clearly portrayed. Who says what we are? What do our acts and words and relationships have to do with the identity we claim for ourselves? How do the ways other people see us constitute a life any less important that what we think ourselves to be? Haynes rejects linear, monovalent biographical identity and instead gives us a multivalent self—the self that we want to see, the self that invents itself, the self that hides, the self that speaks through art.

Live Free or Die Hard

In Live Free or Die Hard (2007) a terrorist cripples the United States by using his personal knowledge of government and commercial computer systems to take them over and shut them down. The nation grinds to a halt. Numerous images of citizens milling about in confusion and panic as stoplights malfunction, electrical power is turned off, and billions of dollars are shipped overseas specifically bring to mind the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. (I was reminded of similar scenes in the 1950 film The Day the Earth Stood Still). The possibility of a cyber-attack by foreign terrorists has been widely discussed. The film plays into national paranoia about terrorism and computers and the loss of privacy—cameras are everywhere. With only a few mouse clicks the most private information is available to whoever wants it. Nothing is secret or private or secure. Whether a cyber attack against the nation would be successful, I don't know. What makes such an attack possible in this film is the terrorist hacker--he is also the software designer who wrote the programs the nation's computers run. The government ignores his warnings that security is inadequate. He protests, breaks into a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and loses his job. He undertakes the attacks as a form of revenge and also as a way of getting rich.

As the fourth installment in the Die Hard series, Live Free or Die Hard offers a familiar plot. John McClane (Bruce Willis), now a police detective with the NYPD, is sent to bring back a man with a record of hacking government computers for interrogation by the FBI. McClane's rebellious, anti-authority nature has not served him well, and after thirty years he has not advanced very far in law enforcement. He arrives at the hacker's apartment in time to save his life—someone has been sent to kill him. (The hacker, who becomes McClane's sidekick in the film, is played by Justin Long, the actor who represents Apple in the witty but effete commercials that compare Apple and Microsoft computers). In a few short minutes McClane is caught up in the government's efforts to find the man who has crippled the nation's infrastructure. Despite his past history, the FBI trusts McClane and allows him full access to whatever equipment he needs. Without help from any of the nation's law enforcement and security agencies, McClane takes on full responsibility for tracking down the evil terrorist hacker and his henchmen. Stunts, gunfire, explosions, and dead people result.

This film is entertaining and fast-paced, though there is little doubt that McClane will prevail. The most interesting aspect of Life Free or Die Hard is its premise of the nation's vulnerability to terrorist cyber attacks. Although it's unrealistic to believe that a single man would know enough about the nation's computers to shut them down so effortlessly, and equally unrealistic to believe that numerous layers of security wouldn't provide at least some protection, the film nonetheless presents a disturbing scenario realistic enough to make you worry. To what extent is our heavily computerized and connected national infrastructure vulnerable to the sorts of attacks this film portrays? Also interesting is the theme (it runs through all the Die Hard films) that official law enforcement and security agencies such as the local police, the FBI, the military are incapable of dealing with terrorism and high-tech crime. Rather, defeating the bad guys takes someone who lacks technical expertise or finesse but who is wild-eyed and reckless. This is officially sanctioned vigilantism in the form of a single man--John McClane. We've seen this kind of notion at work in numerous other films, from the Dirty Harry films to the Lethal Weapon films to the Rambo series to many others. These vigilante throwbacks to the days of the American frontier betray a fundamental distrust of basic institutions in our government--a distrust that, in the wake of FEMA's failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina and the incompetence of U. S. surveillance activities in Iraq (other examples could be cited) seems justified.

Shoot ‘Em Up

Shoot 'Em Up (2007) is a send-up of hyper-intensive action films that itself is a good example of the genre. From the opening scene, when a man casually sitting on a bench sees a woman in labor running frantically past him, trying to escape the gunmen who are trying to kill her, we know two things: first, that the man on the bench, an eponymous Mr. Smith (Clive Owens) is going to play a major role (he's the main character) and that the film itself is going to go as far over the top as it can possibly manage.

We cannot watch Shoot 'Em Up with any concern for realism, logic, or the laws of physics. If we're squeamish about violence and gunplay, this is not the right film for the evening. Rather we just have to watch it, and it's eminently watchable. It is full of violence, guns, bullets, shootings, killings of every imaginable sort, incredible stunts (many enhanced or entirely finessed with CGI), plot intricacies, and flagrant moments of absurdity. It is probably the only film I have seen that uses a baby's dirty diaper as a weapon against a bad guy. It is the only film I have seen in which the hero clutches a newborn infant under one arm while shooting adversaries using the other arm. It is the only film I can recall which features a gun battle between twelve or so men in free fall thousands of feet above the earth—when the hero successfully lands, the ground around him is littered, or should I say spattered, with the carcasses of the men he has shot in mid-air.

In addition to the newborn (whose mother dies early in the film), we have a ruthless and cerebral mastermind who oversees the henchmen trying to kill the baby. His name is Hertz (Paul Giamatti), and he works for an unnamed employer who turns out to be a corrupt United States senator on track for election to the presidency. We also have an embittered and ultimately good-hearted prostitute (Monica Bellucci) whose baby was recently stillborn. We have three women hired to be artificially inseminated so that their offspring could provide bone marrow to save the dying sperm donor's life. And we have a central theme of gun control—a gun manufacturer trying to co-opt a powerful gun control advocate.

And so it goes. There's nary a loose thread in the film, everything's neatly tied together (or should I saw shot to bits) by the end of the film, which doesn't feel that neatly made. It brims over with movement and energy. Shoot 'Em Up reminded me of the Clint Eastwood film The Gauntlet (1977, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood), also a send-up (supposedly) of violent crime films. This film didn't receive as much attention as The Gauntlet, but it is better made.

Paul Giamatti overacts throughout, in a way that is enjoyable enough and consistent with the film itself. Clive Owen plays a generic tough-guy hero. I never figured out who he was supposed to be—some sort of secret operative trained from childhood to be a master marksman. Michael Davis is the director. I'm not familiar with his work. The film has a British feel to it.

If you settle in and accept the basic rules of Shoot 'Em Up, it is entertaining and sometimes mesmerizing--non-stop gunplay, hilarious dialogue, ridiculous stunts, surprising plot turns, thematic ironies, and men who die like animated figures in a Warner-Brothers cartoon. One may complain that Shoot 'Em Up becomes what it satirizes, and that may be the point.