Zero At The Bone

The Hunted has a curious little scene, early on. We see Tommy Lee Jones getting out of a helicopter. We already know that he’s the hero of the movie, because he’s Tommy Lee Jones. We already know that he’s a skilled tracker and a serious mountain man from an earlier scene where he helps an injured wolf in the Canadian Rockies. We already know that he’s there to track a killer in the Oregon woods for the FBI. So what’s the first thing he does? Check the killer’s tracks? Follow the clues? No, he puts his hands on his knees and throws up. Jones’s character doesn’t like heights.

If you’re making a movie, and you go to the time and trouble to cast Tommy Lee Jones, and the first thing you make him do is throw up on camera, you had better have a good reason for that. You had better follow up. You have a moment when you have your hero weakened and vulnerable; it’s important to use that moment, use that weakness, use that vulnerability. Because, if you don’t, you will end up making a crappy movie like The Hunted that nobody cares about. Which is what happened.

You have Tommy Lee Jones as the best survivalist and knife fighter in the world. You have Benicio Del Toro as, say, the second-best survivalist and knife fighter in the world. Jones has disadvantages; he’s older, more likely to tire, afraid of heights, and he doesn’t like guns. Del Toro has disadvantages, too; he’s an animal-rights purist, and he’s convinced that government-controlled robots are out to get him.

So this is your plot. Jones vs. Del Toro, and may the best man win — that is to say, may the man who does the best job of controlling his weaknesses win. Because if both men are vulnerable, if both men have weaknesses, then that’s your plot. That’s what drives the story, that’s what lends it drama and purpose.

However, when it gets down to cases, The Hunted fails because it doesn’t take advantage of the weaknesses of its characters. Jones never shows his age; he climbs cliffs and swims fast rivers as though he were Vin Diesel or something. And he doesn’t even throw up once the rest of the movie; even though he has good reason to. Del Toro’s madness doesn’t affect him at all, and we never see him jump into danger to save the life of an innocent bunny rabbit or anything creative or interesting like that. All you have here is two expert survivalists going toe-to-toe out in the woods. That’s it. That’s all. The Hunted has drama and purpose the way that Richard Gere has singing and dancing talent.

So what you have here is a chase movie. That’s fine. But your well-written chase movie involves a subplot. It’s not just people chasing after each other; you have to have people chasing after different, and clearly defined, goals. That gives the movie creativity and unpredictability. The Fugitive is the clear role model for The Hunted, right up to the casting of Jones in the part, and it’s a good example of how you do a chase movie. Jones was chasing after Harrison Ford, but Ford was chasing after the one-armed man and the proof of his innocence. The underrated 1988 thriller Shoot To Kill is another source, involving a desperate chase through the same Pacific Northwest scenery; the FBI agents were chasing after a jewel thief, who was in turn chasing after a cache of diamonds. Here, Jones and Del Toro are just chasing after each other. We know they’ll find each other, because they have to. We know they’ll fight each other, because they don’t have anything else to do.

There is exactly one scene, one moment in The Hunted that is interesting in any way. It’s the scene where Del Toro, seeking to find his way back to the woods, runs down into an underground sewer complex. We see him down there for a split second, face in full light, and then there’s a chase through the sewers. It’s a very well-done scene, and it would be even more interesting if it wasn’t a complete rip-off of two scenes in the far superior The Third Man. This is what passes for creativity in The Hunted.

If you want to go see this movie, you need to ask yourself a question or two. Do you have anything better to do? Can you spend your weekend in a more productive, more interesting way than watching Jones and Del Toro cut each other up? Of course you do. Of course you can. You don’t have to go see every movie that comes along, and you shouldn’t see this one. You shouldn’t see The Hunted because you’ve seen better movies than this, and God willing, you will again. You shouldn’t waste your time on something that is so completely lacking in creativity or energy or spirit. Moreover, you shouldn’t reward a movie that shows such shocking contempt from its audience as to present you with nothing; no interesting characters or situations or chills and thrills or even a good old-fashioned explosion or two. There’s nothing here; nothing that is worth your time or energy or even your six bucks. You’d be better off doing almost anything else.

The Trenton Redemption

All things being equal, my favorite line from the movies of the 1990’s is probably still from Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. The incomparable Samuel L. Jackson is in the office of bail bondsman Robert Forster, and Jackson is trying to intimidate his way out of paying money owed. “Is white liberal guilt,” Foster glowers, “supposed to make me forget that I’m running a business?” Jackson flinches; probably that sector of the audience afflicted with white liberal guilt did too.

I flinched a little when I saw the previews and reviews of The Hurricane. On the surface, The Hurricane is little more than a direct appeal to the bleeding hearts of the guilty white liberals in the audience. It is the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington), a contender for the middleweight boxing crown who was convicted of a crime he did not commit by an all-white jury, aided by racist cops and prosecutors. Carter was sentenced to life in prison, where he briefly became a liberal cause celebre and a subject of a song by Bob “Minnesota Mud Throat” Dylan. (Dylan appears in a brief film clip, looking absolutely ridiculous.) Carter was eventually cleared after twenty years in prison, and now is a fixture of the movement to oppose capital punishment.

I was skeptical of The Hurricane, as you might imagine, and even more skeptical after press stories which pointed out fictions and exaggerations in the script. However, I finally convinced myself to go, primarily on the strength of Denzel Washington’s Oscar nomination. I gritted my teeth, preparing for the onslaught of wave after wave of white liberal guilt crashing on the ironbound coastline of my consciousness with the powerful force of… er… a mixed metaphor or something.

I was totally unprepared for what I saw: a good, if not great, movie about core traditional conservative values like faith and courage and redemption and the healing power of hope and love.

The Hurricane starts off rather slowly, naturally enough, with a great deal of exposition designed to convince the audience that Hurricane Carter is innocent, combined with a fine eye for period details by the set designer. We see quite a bit of details from Carter’s early life, enough to let us know that the cards in the deck of the criminal justice system are stacked against Carter and that Detective Della Pesca (the reliably sleazy Dan Hedaya) is dealing from the bottom of the deck. We see Carter’s relationship with his wife and his feelings about the civil rights movement. We see Carter losing a chance at the middleweight crown in the ring through hometown bias.

And we see some savage murders in a New Jersey nightclub (one is reminded, somehow, of the Night Owl murders in L.A. Confidential). Carter and a friend are picked up by the police, identified (sort of) by a witness or two, and sentenced to life in prison. Carter, protesting his innocence all the way, is almost immediately thrown into “the hole” (what’s called “administrative segregation” these days).

Carter’s placement in “the hole” triggers a scene that’s astonishingly good, though a bit overlong. It’s a scene that sets the stage for Carter’s redemption and ultimate vindication, and more than that I will not say. I will say that while Carter’s redemption in Trenton State Prison doesn’t quite approach that in The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke or many another great prison movie, it is in that tradition and in that league. (By the way, Clancy Brown, who played a sadistic prison guard in Shawshank, shows up in The Hurricane as a sympathetic guard.)

Washington is superb as Hurricane Carter, and proves once again that he deserves better from Hollywood. Carter is a difficult, if not impossible, task for any actor, but Washington conveys Carter’s changing moods and changing fortunes skillfully. The audience is convinced of Carter’s innocence because Washington is convinced; buys into Carter’s spiritual redemption because Washington makes us believe. After a string of forgettable parts as cops in forgettable movies (Fallen, The Siege, The Bone Collector), Washington turns in a stellar performance, worthy of the Oscar nomination he earned.

Interspersed with the tale of Rubin Carter is the tale of Lesra Martin. Martin, a young man from Brooklyn living with three foster parents in Toronto, buys Carter’s book The Sixteenth Round at a library sale and cannot put it down. Swept up in the power of Carter’s words, Lesra convinces his Canadian friends to travel with him to Trenton to meet Carter, and eventually they work together for his release.

Most of the last part of The Hurricane focuses on the Canadians (John Hannah, Liev Schrieber, and the underrated Deborah Unger) and their efforts to get Carter released. However, for me at least, the proper focus of The Hurricane is not when or how Carter will be released; we know he will be. The question is; what sort of man will Carter be when he is released? That story, if you will, is the eye of The Hurricane, and the calm center of the movie is worth waiting through the swirling torrents of white liberal guilt that surround the movie.

When Animals Laugh-Track

Rico is my neighbor, and Rico is a curmudgeon. Rico is a bulldog, and Rico barks at me no matter what I do. Every time I walk by Rico, I say hello, try to be friends, but Rico will have none of it. Rico is steadfastly committed to being unhappy and standoffish. Rico is my neighbor, and Rico is a curmudgeon.

Rico would not appreciate Ice Age, even if he could afford to buy a ticket. Ice Age is not a movie for curmudgeons. Ice Age is one of those movies that doesn’t want anybody, even the curmudgeons in the audience, to dislike it. If Ice Age was a character in another movie, it would be Roger Rabbit, eternally asking Eddie Valiant why he’s such a sourpuss. Ice Age is perky, bouncy, sentimental, eager to please, and everything that curmudgeons like Rico and me don’t like in movies.

Ice Age has two curmudgeons as characters, and predictably spends most of its time trying to talk those characters out of their attitudes. Ray Romano is the voice of Manfred, a misanthropic wooly mammoth, who spends half the movie saying the Curmudgeon’s Motto: “Leave. Me. Alone.” Romano here is called on to deliver his trademark whiny schtick mixed in with snide, smart aleck comments; it’s a part that plays to his strengths, if nothing else. This works very well on television, come to think of it, mostly because everyone else on his TV show is more miserable than he is. Here, the only place he can go with his character is to give into the movie’s sentimentality and round off his sharp edges, so he’s only half as funny as he ought to be.

If Romano is not as sharp as he should be, Denis Leary is practically narcoleptic by comparison. Casting Leary as the conniving sabretooth tiger was brilliant, but he doesn’t ever get the chance to be really, really bad. (The Ref is one of the best movies of the 1990’s; check it out.) Leary gets to say nasty things in a mean snarl, but he ends up spending a fair amount of his time playing peekaboo with the movie’s requisite endangered tot.

The third character in the mix is John Leguizamo playing Sid the Sloth, and (it pains me to say this) he is not nearly as annoying as you might think he is. He’s the cruise director on this little jaunt, and serves to balance out the movie’s depressive and mean-spirited tendencies. He’d be the perfect class clown for Ice Age, were it not for a little hard-luck cartoon squirrel that steals the show (and is the best tribute to the late, great Chuck Jones you’ll likely to see this year).

This is my analysis, however, I realize that it isn’t relevant for most purposes, so I’ve included some information that should be more helpful:

• Is it funny? It has its moments. The squirrel is very funny, likewise a scene in an ice cave involving things frozen. And the last line is a hoot.
• How is the animation? Perfectly servicable computer-generated stuff, not quite Pixar quality, but that’s an impossibly high standard.
• Will the kids like it? I don’t see why not, unless they are very young. I would balance Ice Age out with a good dose of the Discovery Channel so that they can see what predators really do, though.
• Is it cute? Yes.
• Is it adorable? Aggressively so.
• Is it just precious? Oh, yeah.
• Is it just totally oontsy-boontsy wiggly-woo cutesy-wootsy? Stop that.

You can see my point. Ice Age is very well done, entertaining, and fun, and it’s probably worth your time. Curmudgeons like me and my neighbor Rico will resent its attempts to cheer us up, but then you know what we’re like.

A Pattern Language

As of this writing, I am currently in the process — the slow and laborious process — of writing my first novel. I mention this not because I think that there are a lot of literary agents reading these reviews, but because one of the characters in this novel has a problem that you may have experienced yourself. He is constantly being confronted by people who assume that he has seen some movie that he has not, in fact, seen. You could say to him, for example, “Show me the money” or “You had me at hello”, and he would, not having seen Jerry Maguire, literally not understand what you were talking about, or why.

(Movie people tend have the same problem in reverse. I’ve seen probably 200 movies in the last four years, but never once seen an episode of, say, Survivor or The Sopranos. I couldn’t tell you the difference between Dr. Melfi and an immunity challenge to save my life, other than one is Lorraine Bracco and the other is probably not.)

The point I am trying to make here, probably not successfully, is that the movies are a language all their own. The movies are not a foreign language for most of us — the way that, say, Portuguese is — they’re too universal for that. (There is a movie jargon, an insider’s lingo that’s essentially the same as Legalese or techno-speak, but that’s not what I’m talking about, either.) The movies are a pattern language, standing apart from what we commonly think of as language. The movies have their own syntax and grammar and shades of meaning.

A small example, but an important one. One movie that always gets treated badly in a real-world analysis is Independence Day, the 1996 thriller about a hyper-unrealistic alien invasion. In one scene, the main romantic interest, her son, and their dog are trapped in a tunnel, trying to evacuate Los Angeles. Miraculously, the woman and her son escape a giant wave of fire, but then go back for the dog, who is then even more miraculously saved. Nitpickers point out here, and rightly so, that the fire would suck all the oxygen out of the tunnel, killing all three. True enough, but this is a movie, which operates on movie syntax; killing these characters at this point in the story would break all sorts of unwritten rules. The movie, as illogical as it is, operates in a reality that is largely created by the expectations of the audience and their experiences with other, similar movies. Killing these characters at this point in the story would break faith with the audience. You can’t violate the rules of that reality, even while you break the rules of boring old regular reality. The pattern language takes precedence.

This brings us to where we should have started, at Identity, and its use of the pattern language in telling its story. Identity starts on a dark and stormy night, and not by accident. Dark, of course, because darkness inspires more fear than daylight, and stormy, because rain looks really good in the movies, and you need prophetic claps of thunder, and, well, all sorts of reasons. We have an initial incident, a car accident that leaves a young mother bloodied, a family in emotional shock, and brings in a snooty actress and an honorable limo driver. This brings in violence, blood, and emotional conflict, and these all mean different things in the language. That they are all introduced in the first few minutes tells us something else. This is going to be a thriller, a suspense flick, maybe even a horror movie.

Our setting is important, too. It’s a remote motel, on a desert highway, in the middle of nowhere, chosen for its isolation, and for its resonance in terms of other movies — The Postman Always Rings Twice, say, and definitely Psycho. For a more modern sensibility, there is the little twist that radios and cell phones don’t work, and that the hospital is too far away, and that all the roads are blocked by swollen rivers. This tells us something else; we’re in for a long night.

More and more people arrive at the motel, and it’s interesting to see who they are and where they come from, and how they all seem to fit into little slots. We get sweet Amanda Peet as the Hooker With A Heart of Gold, which works, mostly because she has the same edge she had in Changing Lanes. We get Ray Liotta as a cop, but we’re less likely to trust him because we’ve seen him, maybe, in Unlawful Entry and know he’s got a dark side. We see Jake Busey as a murderer, wearing a prison jumpsuit, and that means something too, and he’s played a bad guy, and so has his old man, for that matter.

And then people start getting separated from the group, and then people start getting killed, one by one, in traditional horror-movie style, each in part of what seems to be a greater pattern, which we assume that the movie will, in due course, reveal.

What makes Identity so much fun for most of this process is that, somehow, the movie seems to be perfectly aware that it is utilizing these patterns, and brings the audience in for the joke. When we hear a loud banging sound, and it’s revealed that the sound has nothing to do with the killer — the “it’s only a cat” moment from ten thousand horror movies — it’s as though the movie is winking at us, and we’re winking back. Identity is just transparent enough that we see the patterns, but it’s also just intriguing enough that we want to follow along, see where the movie leads us.

The problem at this point for the reviewer (and the aspiring novelist, for that matter, especially those who would like very much to hear from a literary agent, and you know who you are) is that the process of movie reviewing has its own patterns. One of those is that you don’t reveal surprises, you don’t let the audience know exactly where the movie is taking them. What’s important — and what actually happens in Identity, thank goodness — is that the movie stay consistent with the patterns it has established. The plot twist, when it comes, has to keep congruent with all that is gone before. It can continue the overall fabric; it cannot rend it. Identity succeeds spectacularly in keeping faith with its audience while at the same time confounding its expectations. More than this, of course, I cannot say.

Or at any rate, not much more than this, because the movie reviewer patterns dictate that I talk about the acting (first-rate all around, including a road-weary John Cusack) and the set design (a triumph in the sleazy arts) and the cinematography (echoing the rainier scenes in Se7en and Road to Perdition). Although none of what you see here can be called original, everything you see fits into the larger scheme of things, designed to surprise and to startle and to, eventually, delight you. Identity is thoughtful and smart and aware, and it is everything you should look for in a scary movie, even if — or especially if — you’ve seen a thousand of them before. But more than that, it’s a careful exploration of the language of movies as well, and how that language can be skillfully and carefully used to communicate even the most unlikely of things.

Things Are Tough All Over

It was in the New York Times, and it didn’t have Jayson Blair’s name attached to it, so it must be true. Apparently, America’s newest put-upon minority group in the vast national mosaic of put-upon minority groups is — wait for it — the idle rich, inheritors of vast sums of money from their parents, and feeling more than a little guilty about it. “Money may be many things to many people,” saith the oh-so-sincere Times reporter, “but it is never neutral. Americans in particular seem uncomfortable with the notion of having “enough” money; there is only too little and, for a growing minority, too much. Having too much may solve certain problems, but it tends to create others, some of them purely emotional.”

Oh, the horror! Oh, the anguish! Oh, the heartbreak! Just imagine what life would be like if this would happen to you! Unthinkable! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “New wealth also presents the practical issue of fending off the multitude of opportunists, speculators and hustlers who would gladly be your new best friend for, oh, just a 1.5 percent commission,” the Times reminds us. Imagine!

(Do not worry, there is, thankfully, a support group — “More Than Money” — out there so that all these poor lost souls can help themselves.)

In the meantime, here I sit, in a basement apartment in Atlanta, eating peanut butter sandwiches, trying to scrape together enough money each week to maybe see a $6 matinee at the Landmark Midtown, waiting for the Gray Lady to point out the tragic plight of third-generation Czech-Americans or Texan expatriates or civil rights lawyers instead of focusing on the extreme mental tension of our nation’s new heirs and heiresses.

And I get to review Igby Goes Down today. Imagine my delight.

Igby Goes Down is, of course, about the Idle Rich, about a scion of a fashionably social Power Couple on the loose, cutting a swath through the prep school universe and summer beach houses at the Hamptons and trendy artsy-fartsy lofts in SoHo with hot-and-cold running starlets. Kieran Culkin (yes, from that family) is Igby, our anti-hero, seventeen years old, footloose and fancy free, skating by on looks and family money and attitude. He’s been kicked out of every Protestant prep school on the East Coast and is starting on the Catholic circuit. He’s lazy, pseudo-intellectual, vain, and stuck-up. He is, in every sense of the words, a spoiled brat. And the movie is all about him and his various sexual exploits and concomitant heartaches, and about how tough it is to be a wealthy teenager in Manhattan.

You can just imagine what I, as a proud graduate of Grand Prairie High School (”Home of the Fighting Gophers”), scholarship student, and wage slave to the Student Loan Marketing Association, made of all this. Which is to say, not much. If that.

The best way — perhaps the only way — to enjoy, or at least appreciate Igby Goes Down is in context, preferably in relation to a film like the dull and preachy All Or Nothing, about the essential worthlessness and pointlessness of the lives of a family of South London yobbos. Things are tough all over in both movies, but given the contrast between Igby’s wealth and advantages (not to mention close physical proximity to Clare Danes and Sweet Amanda Peet) and the pit that the British cabbies find themselves in only reveals how shallow and supercilious that Igby Goes Down actually is.

To be fair — against my better judgment, mind you — Igby Goes Down has a fair share of life’s little horrors. Igby’s mother is Susan Sarandon, which, come to think of it, would be grist for a wide and diverse array of psychiatric mills. His father is Bill Pullman, who quite understandably develops a mental illness as a result of having both Sarandons and Culkins in the house. (Pullman actually comes up with a very understated, brave, and vulnerable performance, maybe the best thing in the film.) Igby’s rich and overbearing godfather (no, not that kind of Godfather) is Jeff Goldblum, who is not playing a painfully geeky part, and is therefore worse than useless.

From most perspectives — certainly from my parochial, lower-middle-class, East Texas movie critic perspective — Igby Goes Down is essentially a waste of time and money and attitude, snide and snarky and pretentious. And yet, there’s still a tiny kernel of hope to recommend it, even if ever-so-slightly. That is Kieran Culkin, who against all odds turns out a smart, edgy, and downright decent performance as Igby. Culkin turns his character into what is basically an anti-Harry Potter — right down to the Gryffindor scarf — small, bookish, but able to use his magical powers to get both Amanda Peet and Claire Danes in the sack, not to mention free rent in a trendy Manhattan loft. And yet, amazingly, we never hate Igby, we never really grow tired of his amazing luck and childish antics, we secretly hope that he won’t grow up to be just another rich jerk in a suit. Igby Goes Down works, to the very narrow extent that it does, in fact, work, because Culkin is subversive enough to make it work.

Still and all, I didn’t like it, and if that is just class prejudice talking, then so be it. You can like what you like and I’ll like what I’ll like, and we’ll say no more about it.

(And, just to let you know, I just happen to really like peanut butter sandwiches, and if a basement apartment in Midtown Atlanta was good enough for Miss Peggy Mitchell when she was writing her little book, it’s good enough for me. You’re not going to hear me complain, no sir.)

Super, Man

I know — or rather, I have heard — that someone out there does not like The Incredibles. I won’t reveal the name of the person — although, actually, I don’t think I remember it, or was ever told it in the first place. No matter. The fact is out there; someone out there that is related to someone I know doesn’t like this movie for some reason I don’t really understand.

This surprised me, although it should not have. I know not everybody likes everything. There are people out there that don’t like Dr Pepper, just for example. Lots of people — Up North, let’s say, or in France — wouldn’t ever think of drinking iced tea. (Note:  I have since moved Up North, and they do drink iced tea up here, and it’s horrible.)  It’s not completely unreasonable or illogical to think that someone out there wouldn’t like The Incredibles for some reason.

Or maybe I’m wrong about this.

What, after all, could there possibly be to dislike about The Incredibles?

Certainly not the animation. This is a Pixar movie, of course, and the first Pixar movie to show humans as principal characters. Humans have hair, you see, and wear clothes, and that presents problems for animation. (Remember, for example, Woody the Cowboy’s painted-on hairstyle.) Pixar has licked these problems, mostly — check out the flexible mane of hair on Violet Parr, the oldest daughter in the Incredible family.. With The Incredibles, we get the best of both worlds — all the advantages of animation to create impossible characters and weird settings, while still having the characters look and act as though they were real.

Certainly not the voice talent. It’s true, now, that Pixar is cutting costs here with The Incredibles, and can’t cast A-list talent for its voiceovers anymore — but that’s a secondary concern. (Witness the fate of Shark Tale, even with Will Smith and Jack Black and Robert DeNiro.) Craig T. Nelson has the lead, and he sounds nothing like he did in the Coach TV series, where he was overstressed and hyperactive all the time, and whiny. He is serious and stolid, and doesn’t have the sneer in his voice that Patrick Warburton would have brought to the proceedings. He is upstaged, though, by the female members of his family, and a good thing, too. Holly Hunter is Mrs. Incredible, and it’s a pleasure just to hear her voice in a role where she doesn’t have to hide her delicious accent. But it’s Sarah Vowell who steals the show as Violet, the oldest child; the NPR host’s voice defines what distinctive is, and her tortured consonants mesh well with the character’s teenage angst.

So, if it’s not the hardware, or the software, it must be the design — that is to say, the plot, or the story, or what have you. The Incredibles starts in medias res, with the dashing Mr. Incredible and the intrepid Elasti-Girl racing along the rooftops to catch a wicked (and very French) villain before their wedding ceremony begins. The Incredibles, thankfully, doesn’t mess around with the tedious “origin” stories; its characters are extremely strong or flexible, and that’s that.

However, along the way, Mr. Incredible rescues — and injures, slightly — someone who very much doesn’t want to be rescued, and litigation ensues. It turns out that superheroes, and the cities that call on them in time of need, are deep pockets, and pretty soon an entire class of superheroes are exiled to the suburbs, there to live out their lives in anonymity and disgrace. (We never get to meet Mr. Incredible’s neighbors, but it would have been appropriate if one of them were an ex-mobster or someone else in the Witness Protection Program, it’s the same deal.)

The story flashes forward from here; Mr. and Mrs. Incredible are Mr. and Mrs. Bob Parr, with their three children — the moody Violet, the obnoxious Dashiell, and the baby Jack-Jack. And, of course, the family is called back to duty, with new, bright-red superhero outfits, and that’s about all you need to know going in. (But rest assured, everything else about the story is cool.)

What, then, could motivate someone not to love The Incredibles?

I have a few guesses, nothing more.

1. The Incredibles is unfair to the insurance industry. The scriptwriters, you see had to put poor Bob Parr in the least superheroic job they could have imagined, so they placed him as a claims adjuster for a large insurance company. The insurance company, like all insurance companies in movies, is predictably evil, and Bob fights the evil by giving all those whose claims are denied the forms they need to appeal the decision. Pfui.

2. The Incredibles rips off the “Fantastic Four”. Guilty. There are only so many superheroic abilities to go around, you know, and most of them have been dealt with by the Marvel comics universe. Mr. Incredible has the same powers as The Thing, although he never says “It’s clobberin’ time”. Elasti-Girl may be Mr. Fantastic’s daughter, who knows? That would make Violet the granddaughter of the Invisible Girl, which also makes sense. Young Dash is clearly modeled after The Flash. (I will leave it up to the viewers to spot the Human Torch reference.)

3. The Incredibles dabbles into the weirdsma of superhero politics. This is mostly ground that has been plowed by Bryan Singer’s X-Men movies, all of which have the subtext of treating superheroes as members of an oppressed minority group (with the added bonus of smacking around the Republicans for a bit). Mr. Incredible switches from a blue super-suit to a red super-suit about halfway through the movie, which is apporpriate; he’s a red-state guy in a red-state movie. His politics, though, are the mirror image of those of the X-Men; he’s not oppressed because he’s superior, he’s depressed because society celebrates the inferior. He objects to the idea, for example, that Dash shouldn’t use his super-speed on his middle-school football team, because it would draw too much attention to the super-ness of the family.

It’s hard to know what to make of the politics of The Incredibles, mostly because it’s an argument about nonexistent superpowers. Not to say you can’t have a political discussion about things that don’t exist — the supposed threat of global warming, the supposed problems with genetically altered foods, the bravery of the French military, or Celine Dion’s talent — but that it’s pointless, and weird. It says something about the politics of your average movie critic that the ethos of The Incredibles tends to show up in reviews, overshadowing the other, wonderful elements in the movie.

But none of this matters. The Incredibles is superior in every way, balancing the excellence of the Pixar craft and the brilliance of the storytelling. Even the most minor of quibbles — including the underutilization of Samuel Jackson, yet again — cannot distract from the quality and style that we’ve come to expect of Pixar. The Incredibles does the one thing that it needed most desperately to do — live up to its name — and more.

Smoke and Mirrors

One day, years from now, some intrepid chronicler will write the definitive book on the trial lawyers’ war against the tobacco companies. It will be the tale of a long, twilight struggle without heroes or honor or courage or any of the other things that ennoble the dirty little business we call war. It will be a tale of unbridled greed, cynicism and callous disregard for the rule of law and the good of the public. And it will be a classic tale of evasion, bad faith, and failure to accept responsibility, eclipsed in this decade only by the sad and sorry case of the Clinton Impeachment.

The Insider is not that story. It purports to be the tale of two men, a reporter and a scientist, caught in the crossfire of brickbats thrown between the two opposing camps. Al Pacino is the reporter — a “60 Minutes” producer, to be accurate — who is seeking out scandal in the tobacco industry. Russell Crowe is Jeff Wigand, a research executive at Brown & Williamson, fired for proposing changes to B&W cigarettes to make them less addictive and less carcinogenic. The Insider is their heroic attempt to expose those evil, awful, suit-wearing blowhards of Big Tobacco as phony nicotine-peddling sleazebags.

Wigand knows the secrets of Big Tobacco; knows how they increase nicotine content and add ammonia and other chemicals to speed the path of the drug to the brain. However, he’s signed a confidentiality agreement which bars him from revealing these secrets; failure to keep this agreement leads to the loss of his severance pay and his family’s health insurance. Nevertheless, he wants to blow the whistle on the unethical acts of B&W, wants to get back at the company that unceremoniously dumped him… and Pacino wants him to do it on 60 Minutes despite the potential cost to his career.

If you buy the premise, I suppose, The Insider is a lot of fun; two renegades trying to beat the system, or, if you like, Erin Brockovich without the short skirts. I didn’t, and don’t, and here’s why: When we see Wigand for the first time, he is cleaning out his desk and driving home. As he pulls into his upscale suburban sidestreet, we see that he is driving an Audi. Well, when I saw that, I about fell out of my seat, trying hard to stifle a horselaugh.

The Wigand affair is accurately presented by The Insider as a low point in the history of 60 Minutes, but it is not the lowest point. Some years before the events in this movie, Ed Bradley aired a segment focusing on what he termed “sudden acceleration syndrome”, the worrisome tendency of Audis to suddenly launch themselves into brick walls or oncoming traffic or what have you, causing injuries to drivers and passersby. 60 Minutes even showed a scientific test simulating how engine pressure could overpower even the most careful driver and cause the Audi to lose control and slam into solid objects at high rates of speed.

A classic 60 Minutes expose, correct? Wrong. It turned out that:

• The test had been rigged, with Bradley’s car expert supplying the “engine pressure” from a bottle;
• The whole story came about because of a too-cozy relationship between the “60 Minutes” producer and the trial lawyer seeking to gather plaintiffs for a massive class-action against Audi.
• Please see Peter Huber’s masterful “Galileo’s Revenge” for the details.

Despite the acting skills of Crowe and Pacino, The Insider is little more than a brief for the defense. It portrays the tobacco industry in the worst possible light. Whenever someone involved with tobacco is onscreen, he is making either a direct or oblique threat directed at Wigand, or he is testifying before Congress about how tobacco is non-addicting. The latter, a dramatization of actual testimony, is repeated over and over again; it’s The Insider’s touchstone.

Of course, what gets lost in this moment is this: the tobacco industry folks who were ordered to appear before Congress were caught in a bit of a dilemma. If they told the truth — that nicotine was an addictive drug, something everyone already knew — it would inevitably be used against them in every class-action trial brought by every Armani-wearing trial lawyer in the country who wanted to upgrade the Suburban to a Range Rover; not to mention that the FDA would take the opportunity to strangle the tobacco industry in its voracious, entangling regulatory grasp. (When it was President Clinton in this situation, his defenders called it a “perjury trap”.)

I am not saying the tobacco industry are angels of sweetness and light. I have no doubt that the destruction of Jeff Wigand’s life happened much as described. What I am saying is that The Insider tells only the side of the story that it wants to. It all but canonizes Pacino’s sleazy left-wing radical reporter character. It gives Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore, who started the state lawsuits against the tobacco industry, a walk-on part as himself (where he gets to show his sincere side), while it only briefly touches on the personality of the other trial lawyers, while assigning to them the purest of motives.

Like I said, if you buy into the premise, The Insider can be a lot of fun. If you have your doubts, though, the whole thing can be an excruciating experience, especially if really, deep deep down in a place you don’t want to talk about, you really, really don’t care about internal politics at 60 Minutes. That’s about all the last third of the movie covers, and I had to jab myself in the thigh with a ballpoint pen just to stay awake.

The only good part of the movie was the previews, where newly-minted Academy Award nominee Russell Crowe showed up in the preview for Gladiator. One only hopes that in that movie, he won’t say that the Surgeon General has shown that fighting tigers to the death is hazardous to your health. Or at least not in the same way that The Insider is a hazard to your sanity.

A Bad Country for Vampires

Sometimes, a movie does nothing more or less than shatter a movie cliche, and sometimes that is enough. The stellar Men in Black featured a scene with a Climbing Villain, the kind of stereotypical bad guy who, when chased by policemen, instinctively climbs up tall buildings for no other reason than to set up the stereotypical Rooftop Confrontation with the hero cop, in this case, Will Smith, N.Y.P.D. The twist here was that the Climbing Villain was an alien, and was able to leap off the roof of the Guggenheim Museum in a perfect example of a good movie mocking the derivative conventions of bad ones.

Something like that happens in Insomnia. There are exactly two reasons to see Insomnia, and one of them is the way the movie treats the Talking Villain. The Talking Villain is a familiar sight for moviegoers, the murderer who relentlessly taunts and teases those assigned to bring him to justice. This favorite source of exposition for lazy screenwriters haunts many movies. Recent examples include the yappy burglars in Panic Room, a talkative Matthew McConaughey in Frailty, and the loquacious Denzel Washington in Training Day. The worst Talking Villain in recent memory, of course, is the loathsome John Travolta, who sneered his way through box-office poison like Swordfish and Battlefield Earth in recent memory.

The Talking Villain here is Robin Williams, playing against type as a two-bit thriller author who tries to hide the brutal murder of a young fan. Williams, of course, is such an unlikely murderer that the only way the police could possibly consider him as a potential suspect is if he talked his way into it. Thus, we have Williams in his very first scene calling up imported L.A.P.D. detective Al Pacino, and all but confess to the crime. (And it’s not too much longer before Williams turns into a Climbing Villain, at least briefly, although this is probably the first appearance on screen of the Log-Rolling Villain.)

The hook to Insomnia is supposed to be the concept of Robin Williams playing a villain and turning in an understated performance. But it’s not much of a hook. Williams turned in two of my favorite performances in the last twenty years in dark roles in fave-raves Dead Again and Good Will Hunting. Clearly, he has what it takes to be a gifted dramatic actor. Here, though, he has repressed his natural manic tendencies so much that his character seems flat and narcoleptic. This is more of an acting school exercise than anything else for Williams, and it’s not terribly effective. As weird as it is watching Robin Williams play a nascent serial killer, it’s even weirder watching him try to act like a normal, colorless human being. It’s a spooky performance, but the less so for being so seemingly unintentionally spooky.

Anyway, the focus of Insomnia is not the Talking Villain, but who he is talking to, and why. Al Pacino has the main role here, a fish-out-of-water Los Angeles detective sent to help a former colleague solve a brutal killing in the backwater Alaskan town of Nightmute. (Nightmute is nowhere near as quirky as television’s Cicely, Alaska, and too bad.) Pacino here looks like a physical and spiritual (and ultimately moral) wreck; it’s almost brave for him to be photographed this way, looking like twenty miles of bad road. He is so drawn and pale that he looks like a vampire in the opening sequences. This effect is compounded by the relentless midsummer Alaskan sunlight, which explains why there are no great vampire movies set in Alaska.

We know Pacino is a great detective only because Nightmute’s junior deputy sheriff tells us so. (That’s Hillary Swank, and she is unaccountably wasted in a Nancy Drew role, and one wonders why.) Pacino is sporting a hideous Howard Cosell hairpiece here. He is talking in an unaccountably lame Foghorn Leghorn accent for most of the movie, but managing to sound weak and frail, too, at times. He is unable to sleep (hence the title) because of the constant sunshine. Pacino’s character ought to be pitiable, but Pacino turns in such a strong performance that he makes us respect the character and trust him a little, despite his evident flaws.

Insomnia is the first studio movie for director Christopher Nolan, hot on the heels of Memento, the best film of 2001. Insomnia is not nearly as interesting or as well-told as the former film, and there are moments when you wish that Nolan would abandon the linear style of Insomnia and fiddle a little with the space-time continuum again. Nolan nods in this direction with a series of short flashbacks, as quick and as telling as Guy Pearce’s Polaroids in Memento, but there is nothing else here quite so imaginitive. Nolan does his best work in using the relentless Alaskan sunshine and lovely Northwest scenery to memorable effect. There’s a wonderful scene where Pacino is sneaking around the back alleys of the town at midnight, but the sun is still shining and Pacino’s furtive slinking does him no good.

I said there were two good reasons to see Insomnia. I can’t really give away how the movie uses the Talking Villain except to say that it’s original and interesting, although the typical Hollywood ending detracts from the movie significantly. The other good reason is one scene, where Pacino is on the phone, talking to the one character he cannot lie to, and telling her lies anyway. It’s a great scene, and the best acting job Pacino does in the movie, and it’s the perfect antidote for someone despairing about the acting craft after watching (in quick succession ) Woody Allen ham it up in the dreadful Hollywood Ending and the abominable performances turned in by all the non-Samuel L. Jackson cast members in Attack of the Clones.

But aside from this, and the one really clever twist to the script, Insomnia turns out to be a bland, cerebral thriller that falls a little bit short of its considerable promise. Insomnia is not a bad movie by any means, but don’t expect that it will keep you up nights, either.

Cry, The Beloved Continent

What is the proper moral response towards genocide in Africa?

If you’re asking me, I can’t tell you, or I can’t tell you much, and that’s after seeing The Interpreter and Hotel Rwanda basically back-to-back. (The movie in between was a rental of Starsky and Hutch, but that hardly counts.) I don’t know what to think, and I doubt that you do, either.

Having said that, it is terribly easy to move on from the question. I don’t know what to do about genocide in Africa, so let’s move on to the next question. What do we think about the filibuster of judicial appointees? What do we think about the Yankees paying Kevin Brown all that money to suck as badly as he’s doing? Isn’t the new Star Wars movie coming out?

There is so much going on in the world to distract us from what is important, and one of those important things is genocide in Africa. And you can’t get around it, you can’t avoid it, because it is still going on, right this minute, in Sudan. (The Hotel Rwanda DVD starts with a message from Don Cheadle about Sudan, and he co-wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to that effect.) And before it went on in Rwanda, genocide went on in Somalia. Black Hawk Down portrayed how that particular Western moral response to genocide went — badly. Hotel Rwanda has its Western ambassador, an impotent Canadian colonel played by Nick Nolte, point this out to explain why the Western countries won’t have their soldiers set foot in Rwanda to stop genocide.

(I suppose, in a way, it’s at least comforting to know that even in Africa, they don’t know what to do about genocide. In checking up on the current news out of the Sudan, I ran across this item in afrol News where they had a big-time regional summit to decide what to do about Darfur, and the only thing anyone could agree on was that the US should not send troops to do anything about it. And if that isn’t insane enough for you, apparently the main peace broker between the rebels and the government is going to be Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi, who is, famously, a few stripes short of a full zebra.

So what is the proper moral response towards genocide in Africa?

Well, one of the possible moral responses is to make a movie about the whole appalling subject. This is what Terry George and Sydney Pollack have done, respectively, with Hotel Rwanda and The Interpreter. The problem of African genocide links both films, but there’s more than just that superficial resemblance. Both films feature as their main characters enigmatic, stylish, middle management types who are drawn into dangerous and life-threatening situations through cryptic code words. Both the ficticious Sylvia Broome of The Interpreter and the real-life Paul Rusesabagina of Hotel Rwanda are safe, boring, middle-class functionaries. His job as the assistant manager of a large luxury hotel in Kigali is to be obsequious; hers, as an interpreter at the United Nations, is to be invisible. Both are fundamentally outsiders in their chosen environments. (Rusesabagina’s home is very American; Broome’s New York apartment is very African.)

Both characters are, of course, played by great actors. Don Cheadle got an Oscar nomination, and Nicole Kidman might have scored one if her movie had been released during Oscar season, in a lean year. And though their situations and stations are vastly different, they’re surrounded by some of the same characters — hard-bitten, world-weary types assigned to defend them (Nolte’s Canadian colonel and Sean Penn’s hangdog Secret Service agent) as well as smooth African politician types (Fana Mokoena as a Rwandan general and George Harris as a smooth exile politician).

But one of the characters is real, and that makes all the difference. (Anyone who believes that the events in the last five minutes of The Interpreter could have happened, just that way, needs to have their reality sensors checked out.) The reality-based Hotel Rwanda begins with the cusp of the conflict between the Hutsi and the Tutus. No. Wait. That’s not right. It is the Hutu and the Tutsis that are fighting one another. It’s an understandable mistake; the movie itself sets up the idea that there is no difference between the two groups, that any difference is totally attributable to the negative influences of colonialism. As long as people of goodwill predominate, the differences between Hutu and Tutsi are miniscule. (They certainly seem that way to Paul Rusesabinga, who is a Hutu married to a Tutsi.)

But — for no explicable reason — those differences are enough to kill over. As the murderous madness starts (incited by a local pirate radio station inciting Hutu violence), Rusesabagina’s neighbors show up at his house, asking for protection. As the movie progresses, his hotel becomes a sort of sanctuary for refugees — at first, because the United Nations contingent is there, and later, even though it is not.

Hotel Rwanda, wisely, chooses not to focus on the death and destruction and genocide, but on the moral courage of one man, and that it does spectacularly well. Rusesabinga starts the movie out as the next thing to a collaborator, looking the other way as a neighbor is dragged to his death by police. He is forced into the role of a protector when his own life, and the life of his family, is threatened, and grows into the role, to the point where he is the only one holding back the forces of darkness and ignorance. And Cheadle’s down-to-earth performance — descending at times into a shaking nervous breakdown — keeps the proceedings on an even keel. Cheadle never allows Rusesabinga to ascend to saintliness, but reminds us again and again of his ordinariness in extraordinary conditions.

To say too much about Hotel Rwanda in terms of a plot is to misunderstand things. Horrible and awful things happen, and horrible and awful things are said, and everything about it is so terribly compelling and riveting because we understand that it is real. For The Interpreter, though, everything is flapdoodle. It is inferior not only because it is phony but because it is pretentious as well.

The Interpreter begins in Africa, with scenes of a small genocide in a fictional country. The action takes place in a deserted soccer stadium, and one is reminded not just of African genocide but of the Taliban’s use of a soccer stadium for executions, and of the torture of athletes under the Hussein regime in Iraq. But the scene quickly shifts to New York, with Nicole Kidman watching the proceedings of the General Assembly from a luxury box, translating meaningless speechifying in Spanish to diplomatic gibberish in English. (Kidman here has to pull off a South African accent, which she manages nicely.) After a security scare, Kidman returns to her luxury box to pick up her bag. She overhears a conversation on the floor of the deserted General Assembly, in a language that she (almost alone) understands, and it frightens her. Later, when she finally figures out the full import of the conversation, she reports it to the authorities.

This is where Sean Penn comes in, and he makes an entrance — sitting on a barstool, then dragging himself over to a jukebox, turning it off, and then switching it over to a Lyle Lovett song, the better to drink by. We learn, later, why he’s brokenhearted, and why he is determined to press on irregardless, and (maybe) why he is so antagonistic to poor little Nicole Kidman, lost in the big city. Penn doesn’t believe her story, but he is determined to protect her anyway. Kidman doesn’t especially want the protection — or Penn’s attitude — even though she is revealed to be in actual danger. Only Penn can protect her, but she doesn’t trust him, putting her into more and more dangerous situations.

And again, to talk about the plot is to misunderstand things. What The Interpreter is about is Nicole Kidman as a damsel (and what a damsel she is) in distress, and Sean Penn (of all people!) as the white knight that must rescue her again and again from dangers. And since Kidman can’t be allowed to be a passive witness, some of these dangers have to be of her own making — partly by not telling Penn everything he needs to know, and partly by putting herself directly in the line of fire.

While The Interpreter is a perfectly servicable date movie, with its share of thrills and spills and misdirections, it is essentially tame and unserious fare. It would like to be, one supposes, much more serious and high-minded than it is, and make a real point about the problems of Africa and the wider world, but it instead settles for a make-believe unreality. And in this, it is a bit like the United Nations itself. The Interpreter makes something of a fetish of the UN. Indeed, it’s the first movie ever to be allowed to shoot inside the hallowed precincts of Turtle Bay. Kidman’s character tells us that she joined the UN as an interpreter to help make peace in Africa. Hotel Rwanda lets us know just how well that worked out.

What should conclude this review is a conclusion. But I don’t have one, at least not for the question of what to do about genocide in Africa. Hotel Rwanda doesn’t have a solution, just a plea not to let things continue. The Interpreter, sadly, doesn’t have a clue. What we are left with is a boundless void of chaos and murder and devastation, which desperately needs to be filled with… something. And against this void, Hollywood has little to offer, and movie criticism has even less.

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

I suppose by now that it is impossible to make a movie like I Spy without referencing, constantly, all of the other movies that have gone before. Even the title is derivative, referring to a Sixties television spy comedy with Bill Cosby and Robert Culp. There is the requisite scene in the spy laboratory, a copy of the one endlessly recycled by the James Bond franchise. Even the stars of the movie bring in their own baggage. Owen Wilson begins this movie, er, Behind Enemy Lines, shall we say; he plays a pilot in both films. Eddie Murphy has done this sort of thing before, of course; and I Spy isn’t that far removed from 48 Hours, let’s say.

I know that it is hard to make a comedy action movie without referring to countless other movies; I know this because it’s almost impossible not to write a movie review without such references. In fact, the only way you write a movie review for a flick like I Spy is to find one movie reference and stick to it. Otherwise, you’ll never get it down to a manageable length. (Although, come to think of it, this has never been an issue before now.

Very well. I Spy is essentially a slick and unserious take on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It has all the basic plot points from the movie intact. There are kicks to the male groinal regions, as well as some more direct threats. There is a scene where our heroes have to take a leap from a great height, and one where they wonder who the guys are that are chasing them. There is a sizable amount of confusion as to who the good guys and the bad guys really are. And, yes, there is a scene where too much dynamite is used.

That I Spy has nowhere near the quality of Butch Cassidy should go without saying. There is no backdrop of a dying frontier; in fact, I Spy is well-positioned on the High Frontier, with high-tech defense gadgets and whatnot. There is no sense of wistfulness or romance or anything like that. And, Hollywood being what it is, the very idea of a no-chance shootout at the dead end of a glorious road is simply unthinkable. I Spy doesn’t have any pretensions of being anything more than what it is, of saying anything more of what it wants to. (Even its male-bonding scenes are played for laughs.)

Compared to Butch Cassidy, I Spy is a pale retelling, a throwaway piece, a mindless piece of high-concept low-execution studio fluff. But it shares one other element with Butch Cassidy, and it is the element that saves the movie. I Spy has Star Power, has it in every direction you care to name, and if Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy aren’t Paul Newman and Robert Redford, well, who is?

Wilson in particular is brilliant. (It helps, of course, from my perspective anyway, that he’s a Texan, a talented writer, and kind of funny-looking.) Here, he’s not overtly trying to be funny — the way he was in Zoolander, say — but he still manages to hold his own against Eddie Murphy in the comedy department, which is pretty stout. Wilson is a member of a super-secret homeland defense agency, lost in the shadow of a headline-grabbing super agent named Carlos, constantly whining and complaining about not getting enough respect or enough cool spy gadgets. There aren’t that many actors that can take a character that is essentially hang-dog and put-upon and make him, well, cool, but Wilson can and does, with a kind of unforced, relaxed charm.

And then there is Eddie Murphy, who here plays a boxer, a second-generation Muhammad Ali, loud, obnoxious, and charismatic. Murphy’s outsized egotism and boundless self confidence play well against Wilson’s self-effacing charm. Murphy’s relentless nonstop chatter provides the bulk of the laughs, and it is his comic skills that carry the movie. While it’s nothing we haven’t seen before from Murphy, I Spy is still fun and enjoyable and so aggressively silly that it’s more than a worthwhile effort.

What makes I Spy work is that so much of the humor revolves around the concept of manipulation. Murphy wants to help save the day (this involves recovering a stolen invisible Harrier jumpjet), but only on his terms, and only if there is a big parade afterwards. Wilson has to wheedle him along, manipulate him into doing things that he wouldn’t otherwise normally do, and the results are generally hilarious. Not to mention that Murphy is helping manipulate Wilson in regards to his romantic life (with convincingly Hungarian Famke Janssen, playing a rival spy).

I Spy is no one’s idea of a classic action movie, or even a classic action comedy; it’s essentially too light and unserious for that. (The fact that it may be the best movie adapted from a television series since The Fugitive says incredibly little, as you might expect.) But it has just enough Star Power to keep it going through the silly, empty plot, and just enough comic talent in the pairing of Wilson and Murphy to make the experience enjoyable, if not thrilling or memorable. The only real problem with I Spy is the possibility — or the certainty — that it, too, will spawn derivative knock-offs of its own.