The Box

Richard Kelly made a big impression with his first feature, Donnie Darko and then began digging a hole for himself.  The first misfire was the Donnie Darko Director's Cut, a version of his film that explained all the mystery and dulled the edge of nearly everything good about the original.  The second misfire was the inscrutable tragedy of Southland Tales.  I sat through a short question and answer session with Kelly after an advance screening of the movie and it sounded like the film's lack of focus and sprawling, dense narrative was a product of his writing process.  There are enough good ideas in Southland Tales to make a good movie, and the film is certainly interesting if a little un-watchable, but it fails in so many important ways that I wondered if Kelly was going to make it back to directing.

The Box could have been a simple, tiny movie based on the short story Button, Button that was also turned into a Twilight Zone episode in the 1980s.  The premise doesn't require worm holes, dopplegangers, time travel, or anything too out of the ordinary.  In fact, the film could have easily gone down the Tell Tale Heart path where there's nothing going on outside of the characters' minds.  Instead, Kelly takes the simple idea of a button that when pushed has one positive and one negative consequence, and he complicates it almost to the breaking point.  Somehow the box ties into NASA, the NSA, a mission to Mars, and yes, a worm hole.

Honestly, I would have been a little disappointed if the movie didn't somehow work in a worm hole sequence, and yet I'm glad it stopped short of a man in a bunny suit.  There is no occular trauma in The Box but Frank Langella does walk around with half of his face melted off which is effectively creepy.  Kelly thankfully dialed back the stunt casting, the meta-film commentary, and the narrative outlandishness of Southland Tales with his new effort, but he couldn't simply make a psychological thriller.  It's strange to me that Kelly doesn't see that the psychological drama inherent in some of his ideas is enough for a compelling story; that the scope of the movie doesn't have to get so broad that it requires 'answer man' scenes that explain what's going on.  I genuinely liked the places where The Box went, but when the story focused more on its own intricate plot mechanics than on the characters and how they deal with the situation, it seemed to lose focus.

Still, Kelly managed to squeeze a lot of tension and creepy drama out of The Box.  The music is fantastic, the film is shot with a soft focus to make the period-specific details look more authentic, the design is spot-on, the performances are uniformly good, and the seemingly-random moments all have a purpose.  It seems that every time the protagonists turn around there is someone staring at them, following them, or telling them something crazy with a nosebleed.  All of that works wonderfully well.  When Kelly is dropping quotes from Arthur C. Clarke and Sartre, the movie kind of gets dumber than it needs to be, but it's still a worthwhile ride.  I hope he can bring back some of the mystery and ambiguity of his first feature and pair it with the film-making chops he shows here.

A Serious Man

The Coen Brother's latest film is so anchored in Jewish culture that I'm not sure that I'm even supposed to 'get it.'  At a basic level, I do get what they are after here--this is a loose retelling of the Book of Job and it's easy enough to track where the story is going.  The film's hero, Larry Gopnik, is a meek but honorable man with a job and a family and a faith that he isn't really sold on and from there, his life begins to fall apart quickly.  His wife wants to leave him for an obnoxious widower, his kids could give a shit about Hebrew school, his boss has an uncanny way of leading him to believe that he might not get tenure, one of his students is bribing him, he's getting sick, and his shut-in brother is a sweet nuisance.  Those are the basic threads that start to unravel, and the movie revels in that downward trajectory.  There's a certain amount of black humor in all of it, but by the end, it kind of just feels like a downer.

If this is the Coens' expression of atheism then it's pretty effective.  Where Job is put through the ringer to prove his love and obedience, Larry Gopnik seems to go through it just for sick laughs.  There's no light at the end of the tunnel, no scene where things really look up for Larry, and no point at which Larry or the audience are led to believe that God is involved in the situation at all.  If you are expecting Larry to be rewarded for his dedication to God, you'll be sorely disappointed.

Then again, there's a moment at the film's end where Larry finally makes a bad decision.  He crosses the line and goes against his moral compass (which frankly, hasn't gotten him too far up to that point) and that might just be the point of the movie.  Either the Coens are fiercely skeptical of Judaism or they firmly believe in it and they are telling the story of Job where he finally cracks and therefore loses the game for the good guys.  Maybe we should all be rooting for Larry--in a way you can't help but like him despite the fact that he doesn't exhibit much of a spine--and maybe if the film made you root for him more overtly, the ending would have a punch.  Instead, it seems like the obvious conclusion so when the screen finally goes black, you just have to shrug and maybe nod and say 'yep, that's about the size of it.' 

In the Coen filmography, A Serious Man falls well below Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men, and The Big Lebowski, but it's still a good deal better than Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.  Ultimately, it feels like an inside joke that I am on the outside of, so I can't say it left much of an impression.  That's OK, we'll always have Fargo.

Where the Wild Things Are

I can't think of many movies from the last few years that I was anticipating as much as Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.  It's not because I love the book or because I love Spike Jonze--it's because I was afraid that the strange and challenging movie that it looked like he was making might not ever see the light of day.  Though I didn't love the finished product unconditionally, I think it's pretty clear that he made the movie that he wanted to make and it's something special.

The central premise is that young Max acts up and gets sent to bed without any dinner, so he runs away to a place that is inhabited by Wild Things.  They make him king, they have a rumpus, he gets bored and hungry, and eventually he goes back home and has dinner.  There's not to work with there, but somehow Jonze finds a complex and compelling story and he brings it to life perfectly.  It would have been so easy for this film to go off the rails into the kind of schlock that we've seen a million times before that I have to marvel at Jonze's genius a little.  Though his films never sweep me off my feet, they always wind up being thoughtful, a little bit absurd, and somewhat unexpected.

I'm not sure this is a movie for kids, though.  I don't have any kids of my own and I'm much too far removed from being one myself to know for sure, but it doesn't strike me as a kid-friendly movie.  It's not too scary, and I don't think that kids need neon-colored slapstick to stay entertained.  Instead, I think the movie is maybe just too complex for kids who haven't yet matured emotionally.  The relationships are a little ambiguous and the characters' motivations are never all that simple.  In one sense, each of the Wild Things is like a part of Max personified, but in another, they are all more complicated and more worldly than Max himself.  The Wild Things seem to have their own, possibly hidden agenda that they don't always let Max in on, which is an intriguing concept.  The Wild Things are clearly figments of Max's imagination, but if that's the case, why do they sometimes act in ways that Max doesn't seem to understand?  This is one of the things I loved about the movie--that it perfectly captured Max's view of the world, even in the way he attributed adult emotions and inexplicable behaviors to the monsters--but that's one of the things I think it would be hard for a kid to get.

Maybe I'm just being more cerebral about it, and not giving kids enough credit.  I'd be very interested to hear from parents who took their kids to this one to see what the kids said they got out of it.  There are some great, touching moments in the film, but they don't strike me as the kind of moments I would have remembered as a kid.  I'm so happy to see a piece of art like this come out of a system that is so geared towards entertainment of the lowest common denominator.  While the film didn't have the emotional impact on me that the trailer did, it was still pretty great and it's a movie I've thought about a great deal more after the credits than almost any other movie this year.  I can't wait to see what Spike Jonze does next--I'm still waiting for his inarguable masterpiece and I know he has one in him.

Black Dynamite

It's important to note that Black Dynamite is not a spoof movie.  It's not like Scary Movie, Date Movie, or even I'm Gonna Get You Sucka.  The best way to explain this fantastically funny movie might be the following SAT style analogy:  Black Dynamite : Blaxsploitation :: Planet Terror : Apocalyptic Grindhouse Sci-Fi.  I had a good feeling about Black Dynamite going into it, but I had no idea that it would turn out to be one of the best times I've had at a theater this year.

Though I've seen Shaft and Black Belt Jones and some Dolemite, I can't claim that I'm student of the genre.  Thankfully, I don't think that you need a lot of experience with Blaxsploitation to simply enjoy this film on its own merits.  Michael Jai White is perfect as Black Dynamite.  He's physical and badass when he needs to be, his comic timing is perfect, and he rolls with the film's subtle and not-so-subtle goofs.  He should, he co-wrote the thing!  Of course the characters are misogynistic, they perpetuate horrible stereotypes, and the heroes are all of questionable moral fiber, but the film itself never feels like it agrees with those things.  I suppose that without the history of Blaxsploitation films, this movie seen in a vacuum might be one of the most egregiously offensive movies to be released in 2009, but then again, it wouldn't even exist without that history.

The simple truth is that Black Dynamite had me laughing from the opening pre-title malt liquor commercial all the way until the ridiculously over-the-top finale.  The movie delivers on all of the promise of its poster: a guy who fights with a gun and nunchucks, flamboyant pimps, sexy ladies, helicopter stunts, and a nefarious kung fu master!  All of that is accompanied by a superb score that hits the funky soul notes as well as it does the spooky synth notes when Black Dynamite is in full-on detective mode.  Skip the Soundboard, Trailer, and anything that actually shows you parts of the movie and just go in expecting to have your mind blown.  It's much more fun to discover the film's many, many perfectly executed moments than to see glimpses of them before you go.

If you need any proof that you will love this movie, watch this faux PSA that is not a part of the movie but was made to promote Black Dynamite's crusade against Smack in the Orphanage.  If you don't love this, don't bother with the film, but how could you not love it?

Whip It

I like Ellen Page a lot.  She was great in Juno, one of the few good things about X-Men 3, and even though The Tracey Fragments wasn't a great movie, she was one of the best parts of it.  The story behind Whip It has so much potential, I wanted to love it too, and with Ellen Page in the lead role I thought for sure that even if the film was generic, it would still be pretty good.  Having seen it, I wish I could still say that.  The truth is that Drew Barrymore makes a mess of what could have been a great film by squandering almost every potentially great moment.

I don't have it out for Drew Barrymore--she is fine in a lot of movies and I think she's produced some things and she's probably got a pretty decent eye for talent and such, but if this film is any indication, she can't direct her way out of a paper bag.  Everything that should have worked about Whip It fell so miserably flat for me that I wondered how it could have all gotten away. 

The main story is basically a retelling of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun with Roller Derby replacing Dance TV and with an overzealous pageant mom replacing a strict military dad.  I can see why Ellen Page was asked to be in it because there are some elements of Juno in there too, and pieces of pretty much ever fish-out-of-water coming-of-age story ever told.  Yes, we get it that Bliss doesn't want to be in pageants and that she finds herself through the camaraderie of Roller Derby, but there needs to be more to the movie than that.  The script tries, but the scenes never have the weight they need to succeed.

Perhaps its an unfair comparison, but I found Bliss' character arc quite similar to the story of Hannah in the excellent documentary American Teen.  Hannah is a free spirit, a creative soul who doesn't fit into the small, football-centric world of her small town.  She experiences heartbreak, then acceptance, and eventually a kind of uneasy freedom as she makes a break for it.  Bliss is a lot the same, but none of those themes really resonate.  There's one tiny scene where she explains to her parents that she is 'in love with (Roller Derby)' but that's it.  There's one tiny scene where she gets real with her mom, but that's it.  There's one scene where she gets to cry to her friend that feels dissed, but that's it.  None of these scenes mean much on screen even though I think all of the plot points are there for this to be a really great story, and I can only pin that on the director.

One need look no further than Barrymore's own performance in the film to see that she can't do much with actors.  I guess she's supposed to be a wild, out-of-control pothead or alcoholic but all of that is constantly played for laughs and Barrymore seems like she's in the middle of an SNL skit instead of a movie.  Kristin Wiig is actually pretty good in the film, but she's more or less doing a toned down version of a character from SNL too.  Jimmy Fallon is completely unfunny and his in-game commentary actually deflates most of the Roller Derby scenes.  He also gets the unwelcome task of explaining the rules of Roller Derby to the audience about three times so that the mouth breathers can keep up.  Even Page seems like she's phoning it in, and some of that is probably due to the editing that never gives the film the pace and cadence it needs.  In fact, there's one scene with Page dragging some trash bags where the visual gag and the dialogue joke are so poorly timed that something that would have been funny is just wasted.

I don't pretend to know how to make movies, but I can tell you when I see something that just isn't working.  This film is that all over the place, and that's sad because it really could have been pretty great.  At the screening we saw, even the Roller Girls in attendance weren't hooting and hollering which leads me to think that this isn't the movie that anyone wants it to be.  If you cut out some of the cussing and toned down the sexual themes you could probably sell this as a great girl-power movie for tweens, but as it is, it's just a little too bland to work for anyone.