Bayhood: 6 UNDERGROUND

Michael Bay’s 6 Underground gives him the opportunity for breathless Bayhem at its most gleefully cool and cruel. It has bullets, blood splatters, and bodies splattered and splayed — a crooked general killed in slow-mo with a gunshot through a cigar he’s smoking; every car crash sending bodies flipping out of windshields and side doors. It has large-scale stunts and impressive high-speed driving, every angle chosen for velocity and carnage stunningly shot and staged. In the rare down times we see, lovingly photographed, Bay’s other recurring images: product placement, ladies’ long legs, glowing screens, and dazzling architecture flying by in whip-fast establishing shots that linger and leer just long enough to get the visual pleasure. It tells you everything you need to know about the film’s aesthetic that, after one of the film’s team of protagonists is speared by a forklift, the group’s funeral dinner is Captain Morgan and pizza. Or that there’s a car chase through an art museum scored to a dubstep “O Fortuna.” Not since Bad Boys II has this vulgar auteur been extended a free hand for a blank check hard-R pulp action vision so untrammeled. He spent the last twelve years in franchise land, helming five Transformers movies (some good, others not) that bent the kids' toyline mythos to his style, with brief detours for a bombastic satirical true-crime picture (Pain & Gain) and a gory militaristic siege movie (13 Hours). Here he’s back in the world of macho braggarts, fast cars, machine guns, and mini-skirts that made his name back in the mid-90s days of The Rock and the first Bad Boys. This movie has a simple story told convolutedly. We have a ragtag quasi-vigilante black ops team of experts who’ve faked their own deaths to move around the world secretly. (When asked if The President signed off on the plan, one quips, “No, he can’t even spell it.”) There’s a tech guy (Ryan Reynolds, now in a permanent state of semi-Deadpool energy), a spy (Melanie Laurent), a doctor (Adria Arjona), a hit man (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a parkour guy (Ben Hardy), a sniper (Corey Hawkins), and a driver (Dave Franco). There’s an evil dictator (duh) in a stereotypically vague faux-Third World country, and the protagonists are gonna take him down. Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese’s screenplay has a whole lot of repetitive rigamarole between just three action sequences of incredible duration and complication, with lots of cross-cut suspense and violence and all manner of stunt work at the highest level of skill. Explosions! Profanity! Geysers of blood and sparks and water and smoke! Dizzying heights and incredible combat! It’s cranked up and spat out—fast movement, vibrant colors, collateral damage—at the audience in balletic brutality and eye-popping intensity. So loud and splashy it’s a shame most will stream it on Netflix, it proves Bay remains one of the only maximalist stylists operating at this budget level who can wield the effects for maximum impact while still allowed to foreground his own preoccupations, for better or worse, in every frame.

His Own Worst ENEMY

Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled college professor. We don’t know the source of his anxiety, but he enters Enemy distracted and a little jumpy, his hair slightly mussed, his posture defensive and slouched. He’s on edge, ignoring calls from his mother and behaving inattentive in his encounters with his girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent). Life doesn’t get any easier for him when he spots an extra in the background of a movie he happens to watch one night. He rewinds and pauses. The extra looks exactly like him. Rattled, he googles his way to the extra’s headshot. Why, he’s identical. Adam calls the actor. They have the same voice. Adam stalks the man until finally he sees him. The actor’s name is Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s kind of freaked out about their doppelganger status, too. His wife (Sarah Gadon) suspected him of having an affair, but this is a whole lot weirder.

It’s never clear why the two men are so disturbed. They behave immediately as if they’re in a thriller, skulking about, looking over their shoulders, nervously circling each other. At one point they decide to meet up in a hotel and for a brief moment I wondered if the movie would be about the perils and attractions of dating your doppelganger. No such luck. Apparently Adam and Anthony have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day or, even better, Tatiana Maslany’s great work on the TV series Orphan Black. The point is, there are plenty of reasons to suspect nefarious somethings are afoot when you’re confronted with your exact duplicate, down to the same scars. There’s some unidentifiable connection there that’s so painfully obvious on a visual level. It remains unanswered, a mystery to them and to us as they slowly freak out while spying on each other. Each even covets the other’s significant other. Both women are similarly proportioned blondes, so I guess the men’s tastes are duplicated as well.

It’s all so very creepy for sure, and the film takes on a nervous, fuzzy vibe that moves lugubriously through waking nightmare territory as reality bends around these men and their mental states. We’re talking full on nervous breakdown, the kind where you hallucinate a naked woman with the head of a spider walking on your ceiling. There’s some undiluted nightmare fuel here. The final sequence, with a sudden shift in the boundaries of all we think we know about the world of the film represented by one very wrong thing is an especially great shock. The film has jolts of imagery that in their suddenness and eerie calm recall the terrifying person stepping out from behind the dumpster in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a far superior film involving doubles and disintegrating reality. Enemy doesn’t go far enough. It kicks up so much unease that’s it’s hard to ignore, but remains so straight-faced and dull that I found myself cherishing it’s surreal interjections all the more for their infrequency.

Director and co-writer Denis Villeneuve (loosely adapting a José Saramago novel with the help of screenwriter Javier Gullón) worked with Gyllenhaal in last year’s Prisoners, a solid dread-soaked missing-child mystery. Enemy has some of the same sustained intensity of tone, but often seems to miss how funny it plays. The Gyllenhaals glower at each other, alternately intrigued and terrified, jealous and repulsed by each other. It’s never clear why they feel the way they feel, their more intense outbursts cause for suppressed snickers, at least from where I was sitting. Only a cameo by Isabella Rossellini, as one of their mothers, seems to have a sense of humor, and even then it’s only funny in the way she appears to puncture the film’s self-serious pulpiness. He explains the doppelganger predicament and she calmly waves off his concerns with a stop-being-so-silly shrug. Maybe this overburdened germ of a good idea would’ve played a bit better with a stronger pair of performances from the lead. Gyllenhaal is a fine actor, but here gives a one-and-a-half note performance stretched across two characters, like a blanket that’s just short enough to leave a limb hanging out no matter which way you contort yourself.

The experience of watching Enemy is not unlike stumbling across a yellowed used paperback with a great cover and a fun hook in the blurb on the back, then actually reading it and discovering a slow slog of motifs and incidents, wrapped up in sensational luridness that’s too little and too rare. Repeated spider imagery runs throughout, from the spider-face woman to a dream of a monstrous arachnid floating over the city and the opening context-free scene of men watching a stripper methodically crush a tarantula under her high-heels. This underlines the ickiness of it all, but doesn’t seem to come to much beyond conflating spiders with women in a way so half-formed it’s neither potent nor offensive. As I left the theater, I overheard an elderly couple solemnly discussing their bafflement. “Seems to me,” the man told his wife, “if you figure out those spiders, you’ve figured the whole thing.”

Vanished: NOW YOU SEE ME

If you had stopped the heisting magician thriller Now You See Me halfway through, I’d have been just as happy with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, I’d have been a smidge happier, since that would mean I got to leave the theater an hour earlier. Everything about the movie feels arbitrary to its core. If, at the midway point, you’d asked me to explain who the characters are, I’d have been at a loss. They’re given absolutely no characterization outside of what the plot demands of them, which is very little and up to change with the whims of the twists. If you’d asked me to describe the plot, I would’ve vaguely muttered something about stolen money and investigating cops. What happens makes little to no sense in the moment and less when you stop to think about it. By the movie’s conclusion, it’s easy to tell that Important Things are cohering, but awfully hard to figure out why or why we should care.

Within the first few scenes, it’s clear the movie has already failed Siskel’s lunch test: Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? When you see the names in the cast, it’s easy to think a filmmaker can start with this much talent at his disposal and end up with at least a mildly diverting film. (You’d be wrong, by the way.) Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play magicians who are given the blueprints for an amazing trick under mysterious circumstances. Michael Caine plays their bankroller (and a reminder that The Prestige is a much better magic thriller). Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are detectives who enter the picture when the magicians appear to heist millions of Euros out of a Parisian bank during their Vegas act. Finally, there’s Morgan Freeman as a magician debunker who exists herein as Mr. Explanation. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when I actually forgot he was in the movie when he wasn’t in a scene.

The arrogantly nonsensical plotting from screenwriters Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt, and Boaz Yakin does nothing to explain why these magicians are suddenly famous. Their act looks lousy with terrible patter and a sparse collection of cheap tricks, the worst of which are clearly aided by CGI. But, they’re famous nonetheless and though we never get a good sense of their personalities or how they relate to each other beyond what we surmise about the actors themselves from other roles and public personas, they’re supposed to be, well, I don’t know. Are the magicians our protagonists? Maybe. Their stunt ends with the possibly stolen money rained down on the audience. How very Robin Hood of them. But then there’s the dogged detectives, who have a slight edge in the sensible, stable characterization department. I liked them more, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the movie was trying to do with them.

I’d have actually gone along with it if it gave the actors more memorable reasons for doing what they do. Maybe the problem isn’t that it’s nuts, but that it’s not nearly nuts enough. Either way, I sat dumbfounded by how little I cared. Director Louis Leterrier, who started his career with promising actioners like The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk before hitting Hollywood junk like Clash of the Titans, films Now You See Me in a blur of fast-moving images that can’t move fast enough to outrun the looming sense of unsatisfyingly unstable plotting. Scattershot plot points, aggressively explained shrugs of twists, and nothing characters all contribute to a singularly mindless two-hour sit in a theater. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to me; it’s that the movie can’t even be bothered to come up with parameters for itself with which it could make sense. At least this movie about magic manages to pull two good vanishing acts. The first was when my money disappeared from my wallet. The second was when the movie’s specifics left my mind almost entirely even a mere 12 hours after leaving the theater. 

Backwards and Forwards: BEGINNERS

It’s never too late to get a new start. At least, that’s what writer-director Mike Mills has to say in Beginners, a semi-autobiographical movie that follows a father and a son, each starting new romantic relationships. It’s a mostly solid effort, a film in which characters feeling boxed in by the lives they are living attempt to break out of them by trying to connect with others, to try and make their new starts last.

The father (Christopher Plummer), a handsome, recently widowered elderly man, sits down his son (Ewan McGregor), a single artist, to finally divulge a long-held secret: “I’m gay.” This surprises the son, but what surprises him more is the joyful intensity and all-consuming nature of this revelation. His father gets new clothes, new friends, and finds a boyfriend. He’s vibrantly alive in ways he had never been before, freed from the constraints of the closet. A few years later, he dies.

While grieving, his son glumly heads to a Halloween party where he meets a pretty young woman (Melanie Laurent) who came to celebrate the holiday despite suffering from laryngitis. They strike up a flirtation. He murmurs his charm from underneath a fog of depression. She writes down her responses in a small notepad, accenting her scribbles with gestures and wide-eyed expressions. From this Meet Cute, they begin a relationship. Mills cuts back and forth between the new beginnings of father and son, creating a film in which the memories of the father slip into the rhythms of the son’s narrative. The man just died, but he remains a presence. The grieving son is moving forward, but, through the film’s structure, he keeps moving backwards to reflect the past.

This is a low-key film of shaggy charms, wistful laughs and gentle sobs, filled with endearing performances amidst spare visuals. There’s a forced whimsy to it all, though. McGregor narrates the film with a super dry deadpan that errs on the side of preciousness, a fussed-over stream-of-consciousness that is interrupted from time to time by little drawings, photographic montages, or, worst of all, subtitles that give us unwanted insight into the thoughts of his pet dog. I could have done without the twee embellishments of such cutesy accoutrements.

Though I have plenty of little quibbles with smaller details, this is a muted film that works slowly and quietly and I can’t deny the power of the big picture. Yet I feel some indifference, some ambivalence, towards the film. I could see, respect, admire, and occasionally feel the impact of Mills’s choices, even if I was rarely drawn into the film. But the emotion of the film filters out through the layer of whimsy and feels painfully, acutely real. The contrast between father and son is the emotional heart of the film, a loving but testy relationship that uses their pasts to reveal emotions and expectations for the future.

Plummer is nicely subtle as a dignified older man surrounded by the books and artifacts of a long and learned life energized with the new freedom of living without secrets. He’s so good, in fact, that when we shift back to the present, I felt disappointed that we didn’t get to spend more time with him. This is, I suppose, part of the point. In the present, his son is trying to move forward without him, to start a new relationship while he still feels the pain of losing his father. He misses his father, and so do we. It’s a film about the damages of ending one part of life in order to gain the possibility of beginning again, that is itself somewhat damaged.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is pure bliss, the kind of cinematic magic that sends me out of the theater lightheaded and smiling, thinking all is right with the world. It’s intoxicating, running over 150 minutes, yet seeming to last barely more than 70. It’s bold, rambunctious, and energized from frame one, filled with nothing more than great filmmaking. It’s the rare type of film that’s so pitch perfect, so fully realized in every detail, that it lifted me into an incredibly good mood that has yet to wear off. Just typing these words, I’m getting so excited I need to take a deep breath. I need to see this movie again, not just to give added boost to my excitement, not to mention my good mood, but to get my head around it. This isn’t a movie that gently allows you to slowly comprehend. This is a movie that assaults you with entertainment, kicks you upside the head with pleasure, and sends you reeling out of the theater while begging for more. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Tarantino has crafted an enormous yet intimate World War II action epic that brings his talents and obsessions into good use and tight control. He’s never been more in control over the elements of filmmaking. In his use of sound, color (those reds!), and composition the film, at times, comes across like a sort of dream collaboration between Curtiz, Hitchcock, Godard and DePalma: Casablanca and Foreign Correspondent meets Made in U.S.A. and The Untouchables. But, for the first time since Jackie Brown, a Tarantino film is much more than the sum of its influences. This is a passionate film, full of beautifully rendered and lovingly detailed characters saying and doing memorable things. This is a patient film, allowing for long, sizzling and suspenseful dialogue passages. This is a perfect apotheosis of Tarantino’s filmmaking, a chance for him to, at long last, put cinema itself in the forefront (a film critic becomes a suave spy at one point!), for Inglourious Basterds is, if nothing else, a grand love letter to an art form, a film where the transient yet permanent impact of film can be both a major theme and a major plot point, summed up beautifully with the shot showing a ghostly image of a face projected on a wall of smoke in a burning theater.

Going in to the film, one can be accused of anticipating a pure blood-and-guts, men-on-a-mission exploitation film, given the marketing focused on the elite team of Jewish soldiers – nicknamed “the Basterds” – dropped behind enemy lines to put fear in the hearts of the Nazis. Even though the Basterds, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, in a great, charming, character-actor performance), do their fair share of scalping and bludgeoning in the film, the emotional heart comes from Soshanna (a radiant Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish teen who flees the massacre of her family to eventually become the owner of a movie theater. That theater becomes an important location for the fiery finale, but Soshanna provides an emotional link throughout the film. We follow her growth from a frightened teen to a confident young woman. We care about her and about the plan that she creates in the kind of deep way that only the greatest fictions allow.

The link between Soshanna and the Basterds is the suave and sneaky Nazi detective Colonel Landa – nicknamed the “Jew Hunter” – who comes to us in a brilliant performance by Christoph Waltz, a middle-aged European actor who remains unknown on these shores. He’ll be unknown no longer. In a film filled with great performances, he’s the best. He’s quick witted, hilarious and menacing, delivering Tarantino’s dialogue with perfection. But Tarantino’s strong suit has always been unexpectedly perfect casting which leads to some wonderful performances. Here, he coaxes interesting performances out of such differing people as horror director Eli Roth, Diane Kruger (previously of Troy and National Treasure), and even Mike Myers.

But to get back to Waltz, his Landa (a great character that I loved to hate) shows up in all of the five chapters that Tarantino has broken the film into. Each chapter has only a few scenes, each given a lengthy dialogue scene as its major set-piece. These dialogues – Glenn Kenny has clocked them at about fifteen to thirty minutes each – are tense, funny, suspenseful, riveting and thematically rich. They feature some of the best writing that Tarantino has ever produced, memorable and distinctive while furthering character and plot and, at the same time, allowing the scenes to rise and fall with a sense of natural realism. The dialogue is heightened without being too “Tarantino,” playfully teasing out echoes to films of the 40’s, Leone, and more. These scenes play out like perfectly crafted short stories (chapters, if you will). The dialogue comes in a multitude of languages, all subtitled, and flows with an easy musicality. Often suspense comes from which characters can understand which languages and there’s great fun to be had in following the shifting power structure within the conversations. Through all this talk, talk, talking, the anticipation of the ultimate execution of the main plot grows unimaginably high. There are short bursts of action within each chapter but not until the fifth chapter do all the plotlines – and surviving characters – converge upon a grandly orchestrated and perfectly executed set-piece of suspense and action shot through with humor both quintessentially Tarantino and Marxian (Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, not Karl).

Even with all this subtitled dialogue, and subtle performances, and long scenes infrequently riddled with stylistic embellishments and fast-cut flashbacks (not to mention the score that borrows from Morricone and Bowie), this is the biggest crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a long time. Every scene was received wonderfully by the audience with which I saw the film. It’s always fun to hear over one hundred people reacting to a film in the same way that you are. We all stared up at the screen and laughed, gasped, screamed and squirmed together. Tarantino knows that an audience – an ideal audience – can be trusted to follow complex lines of questioning and long-winded monologues, to laugh at subtlety and jump on command. Is his film manipulative? You bet. But it’s just as much fun as when Hitchcock famously said he loved playing an audience like a piano. When manipulated by an expert filmmaker, one who’s pushing perfectly crafted buttons, who cares if it’s manipulative?

In its unstoppable pacing and relentlessly entertaining style and craft, Inglourious Basterds reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Together, they are two World War II movies, in touch with their filmic lineage, that cheerfully warp historical reality in order to go for the jugular. They are unafraid to entertain, and unafraid to get the crowd stirred up and energized by the sight of Nazis getting beat up, shot up, and melted. (Both of them pull from the long tradition of Nazis as villains in pulp fiction including The Dirty Dozen, wherein partying Nazis find themselves torched).They are both the works of filmmakers in total control and using that control to create total perfection in the realm of pure entertainment.

That comparison also brings me to the common criticism of the film that has been heating around the Internet in the days leading up to the film’s release but seems to have cooled some now. Some have said that the movie’s brutality is amoral in the ferocity with which the Basterds treat the Nazis and in this film’s equivalent of the Raiders Nazi meltdown. That’s not an unexpected criticism, especially given the bloodlust bent of the advertising, but it’s completely unfounded by the film itself. The movie is much tamer than you’d expect, especially if you’ve seen the Kill Bill movies or Death Proof (I say that not as a criticism of the violence in those films, but as a means of comparison). Sure, it has its occasional violent moments, and they do earn the film its R-rating, but they don’t exploit World War II itself, nor do they create an irrational hatred of Nazism. The sense of revenge is well-justified, both within and outside the world it creates.

The movie is made up of earned suspense that builds to quick, restrained, flashes of violence. It also contains a built in rebuke, in its final, and most violent, chapter, to audience members who will get a kick out violence for violence’s own sake. (There are spoilers through the end of the paragraph). The characters are sitting in the theater watching a German propaganda film in which a sniper is killing dozens of Allied soldiers. The Nazis go wild, cheering with a ferocity that’s as frightening as it is morbidly comedic. Then Tarantino allows the Basterds’ and Soshanna’s plans to go into simultaneous effect, pulling a sick joke on the characters who had just been enjoying the massacre on screen by making them the recipients of one. This has long been Tarantino’s unsung gift, to at once rebuke and relish screen violence, and he uses it elsewhere in the film, as well, such as a scene where, preceding a Nazi bludgeoning, Aldo Raine tells the doomed man that it is “the closest thing we [the Basterds] have to going to the movies.” (That it’s Eli Roth doing the bludgeoning adds another tricky layer to the moment).

There’s so much to discuss with Inglourious Basterds, so much excitement attached to the way my synapses can’t stop firing with thoughts and memories of the film. I desperately need to see this again. In fact, I should stop typing what has become the longest review I’ve written for the blog thus far, and just go see it right now. It’s the best, most interesting, most entertaining film of 2009 so far, a film well worth discussing and dissecting. At the very end of the film, a character smirks into the camera and says “this might just be my masterpiece.” It’d be a cocky flourish of a finish to the film if it weren’t totally earned.