Top of The Heap: WALL-E

Meet WALL-E. His name is an acronym for his function: Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth-Class, which basically means that he’s a trash-compacting droid. Fitted with tank-tread feet and regarding the world around him via a pair of camera lens eyes that sprout from his boxy abdomen, WALL-E is part No. 5 from Short Circuit, part ET. And he’s all heart. He stars in the first directorial effort of Andrew Stanton – the writer behind previous Pixar hits like Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo – who creates what could very well go down as the most touching, and dare I say passionate, love story of the year.

Yet as much as WALL-E is glowingly heartwarming, it’s darkly haunting too. The movie opens in a world so bleak that Stephen King might have wished he’d depicted it in The Stand. Within a lifeless cityscape that must be Manhattan, skyscrapers are lost behind towering piles of cubic rubble that have been methodically stacked like children’s blocks by WALL-E and his scrap-compressing cohorts. Of this robotic cleaning crew, only WALL-E remains. The rest of his make and model broke down some time ago, becoming part of the junk they were charged to eliminate. WALL-E’s only company then is a resilient cockroach, dutifully by his side, and some canned music, specifically “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” dubbed from a warn VHS copy of 1969’s Hello, Dolly!

Hello, Dolly!? You’re right: it isn’t a conventional choice for roping in the kiddies who might, at best, know The Wizard Of Oz or Mary Poppins. But WALL-E isn’t a conventional family movie. Its initial setting is as apocalyptic as any sci-fi creation you’ve ever seen, not just in concept but in construction. Blues and greens, the colors associated with life on earth, are virtually nonexistent, scraped off the palette in favor of rusty reds and browns. This setting isn’t as magical a sight as the Paris of Ratatouille or the undersea gardens of Finding Nemo, yet the Pixar animation remains typically jaw-dropping. If the dust and corrosion were any more detailed, WALL-E would require a tetanus shot.

Yet the movie’s most unconventional touch isn’t its throwback soundtrack or its grim outlook. It’s the film’s scant dialogue. The first 20 minutes of WALL-E rival the first 15 of There Will Be Blood. Throughout the entire adventure, our robotic hero speaks only a few words – in large part because he has so few opportunities to speak to someone or something else. Watching the picture unfold, it hits you that this minimalist approach is a stroke of genius for a studio secure in the knowledge that WALL-E’s beeps and whistles will translate effortlessly across the movie’s global marketplace. But it’s daring just the same; funny-voiced green ogres having proven to be so profitable and all.

Is it possible in these attention deficient days that an animated movie could win over audiences by turning back the clock to the silent film era? With Pixar at the controls of the time machine, sure. Start to finish, WALL-E isn’t the strongest movie of the Pixar canon, but WALL-E is Pixar’s greatest creation. He thrives in the way that Chaplin and Brando and all the greats have: by showing us his emotions. Cartoons have long relied upon physical expression, but perhaps never before has animation been so subtle and yet so profound. Consider that WALL-E, like so many great cinema characters, seems to let his heart shine through his eyes – and yet he lacks those very organs. Computer animation, as advanced as it has become, so often requires effort on the part of the audience to believe the unbelievable. When it comes to WALL-E, though, the hard part is remembering that he’s make believe.

On that note, it’s impossible not to feel disappointment that WALL-E the picture isn’t as strong as its titular character. After an unforgettable first 30 minutes that suggest WALL-E is as ready for instant-classic knighthood as was No Country For Old Men last year, the picture plays it safe. Following his love interest EVE – the slick, unblemished Mac to WALL-E’s battered Commodore 64 – WALL-E winds up on a space cruiser that’s as bland as his earth wasteland home is gritty: endless hallways abuzz with speeding robots and lethargic humans wearing identical jumpsuits. Yawn. A romantic zero-gravity waltz between WALL-E and EVE invigorates the movie when it’s ready to flatline, but it shouldn’t come to that. Pixar’s biggest error seems to be spending its entire creative budget in one place, frontloading WALL-E and leaving us wanting more.

Then again, the movie’s emotional journey, modest in scope though it is, is so sincere that it satisfies. Fully. You’d expect that adults would be rapt by WALL-E’s yearning for companionship and by the less-than-optimistic portrayal of our future. What surprised me, however, on two viewings of the movie, is that the kids in the audience sat silent and still. If giggles are a measure of an animated movie’s success, then Kung Fu Panda is king this summer. But WALL-E appears to work on a different and, one hopes, deeper level. Kids won’t understand the numerous allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey. They might not feel the bite of this fanged cautionary portrait. Heck, they might not have the first clue why WALL-E nearly blows a gasket when EVE unspools his archaic VHS tape. But they’ll identify with WALL-E’s need to belong. More than any other animated movie since Dumbo, WALL-E evokes the enormous power of touch.

Will the movie sell record Blu-ray DVDs this holiday season? It should, but I doubt it. Parents still make the purchases, and, sadly, all too many of them resemble the obese, oblivious humans who are openly ridiculed in this movie. Not to mention that while we like to imagine talking toys and bugs and aquatic life, there’s nothing so romantic about picturing WALL-E’s world realized – because for it to exist, our known universe has to wither away. For many, WALL-E will hit too close to home, providing an extreme funhouse-mirror reflection that some would rather avoid. For the rest of us, WALL-E is a welcome reminder to cherish the simple beauties (from plants to silent films) while they still remain.

Dubya & The Dark Knight

According to a recent poll by American Research Group, a mere 21 percent of Americans approve of George W Bush’s performance as president. Meanwhile, over at RottenTomatoes.com, 93 percent of participating readers approve of The Dark Knight. Go figure. If you think those numbers have nothing to do with one another, think again. Though the latest Batman flick, written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, can’t be blamed for some of the catastrophes that have soured Bush’s favorability – a capsized economy; a troop-mauling, money-sucking, never-ending war; lies, damn lies and violations of the Geneva Conventions, etc. – The Dark Knight is likely to go down as the most pro-Bush-policy blockbuster to ever come out of Hollywood. Working together, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Roger Ailes would struggle to come up with anything so slyly propagandizing.

So be it. There have been a handful of implicitly (and explicitly) anti-Bush movies in recent years – though fewer of them than O’Reilly & Co like to suggest – and there are surely more to come. Yet the case of The Dark Knight is especially interesting on a few levels: 1) because this box-office-hungry summer blockbuster is pro-Bush at a time when most of the country isn’t; 2) because you wouldn’t expect a comic book flick to be so allegorical; 3) because if my experience is any indication, an anti-Bush moviegoer can be perfectly aware of all the Bushian ideology and not feel dirty walking out of the theater.

Then again, talk to me in a month, by which time Bush will have requested that his secret service codename be changed to “Caped Crusader.” At that point I might feel differently. Thing of it is though, that nickname wouldn’t be far off in terms of an allusion to The Dark Knight, and certainly it would be more appropriate than Bush’s other favorite heroic self-comparison to Abraham Lincoln. Why?

Before we get to the ways The Dark Knight equates Batman to Bush, we must first note the film’s many parallels to the events of Bush’s presidency – though they aren’t always flattering.

(Nothing but spoilers ahead.)

The Dark Knight: The Joker strikes Gotham City with boldness previously unseen. Batman, still focused on the old enemy power structure, decides that the Joker “can wait” and goes after other criminals.

Real World: Osama bin Laden orchestrates the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. invades Afghanistan but then quickly turns attention to Iraq, where the familiar Saddam Hussein remains the itch they haven’t been able to scratch.

**

TDK: Batman succeeds in landing his lesser targets, but he underestimates the influence and reach of Public Enemy No. 1. He believes he can get to the Joker by determining his motivation. Alfred notes that the Joker might not have motivation beyond wanting to “watch the world burn.” Batman soon finds himself in a war with an enemy he doesn’t understand.

RW: The U.S. lands Hussein but underestimates what it will take to bring stability to the Middle East, which is overrun by chaos, terrorism and religious fanaticism. The intended carrot of Western-style democracy and “freedom” prove ineffective. The U.S. finds itself in a war with an enemy it doesn’t understand and can’t influence without brute force.

**

TDK: Batman is hamstrung by his ethics. Threatening a mob leader he is told that no one will cross the Joker because the Joker has no rules.

RW: Attempts to infuse the Middle East with Western-style democracy are complicated by the ruthlessness and unpredictability of Islamic terrorism in the region. Chaos reigns supreme.

**

TDK: Batman compromises his supposed ethics when the mood strikes him. He “questions” the Joker in an interrogation cell by using his fists and slamming the Joker onto a table and into a window. To get another criminal to give up the Joker, Batman drops the mobster to the concrete from several stories up.

RW: America compromises its supposed ethics by resorting to torture, calling its treatment of prisoners permissible in wartime (among other justifications).

**

TDK: Using similar anything-goes logic, Batman eavesdrops on all of Gotham’s cell phone calls in order to find his terrorist. When the terrorist is located and the surveillance device is no longer necessary, Batman allows for its destruction.

RW: The Bush administration implements warrant-free wiretapping of Americans, citing the need to protect its citizens from terrorism. The Bush administration more or less asks Americans to trust that their wiretapping will be used only for its intended purpose.

**

TDK: When the trickledown effect of terrorism claims the life of one of Gotham’s heroes in less than flattering circumstances, Batman decides that the public can’t handle the truth and fabricates a story of pure heroism.

RW: Pat Tillman, the most well-known soldier in the “War on Terror,” dies by friendly fire. The initial story released by the government claims that Tillman was killed by the enemy making a heroic charge.

**

How does that add up to a pro-Bush message?

1) Because when Batman is ready to pack it in as things turn ugly, Alfred encourages him that the heroic thing would be to stay the course. The following might as well be a conversation between Bush and Dick Cheney about Iraq.

Bruce Wayne/Batman: People are dying, Alfred. What would you have me do?

Alfred: Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make. The righteous one.

2) Because after Batman elects to follow Alfred’s advice and be the bad guy in the court of public opinion for the good of Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon issues a Karl Rove-worthy explanation of Batman’s actions:

“He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not a hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight.”

In other words, Gordon is saying, we’re lucky to have him around. Somewhere, Bush looks in a mirror, nods his head and smiles.

No Laughing Matter: The Dark Knight

Hair tangled and greasy, face white, eyes black, cheeks stained red in a wicked grin, Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s latest Batman flick looks like a Guy Fawkes/Black Dahlia hybrid. Or like Marcel Marceau passed out in a gutter after a long night of drinking. There’s nothing clownish about him, not even with the purple suit. Cesar Romero on TV and Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman played the Joker as a jester first, scoundrel second; having a good time always took priority over sinister specifics. But in The Dark Knight, written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, the Joker as embodied by Ledger is something darker and more demented. Here the Joker is a genuine monster, a symbol of evil as much as an agent of it.

If there’s been a more psychopathic character in a comic book adaptation, I can’t think of it. Most assuredly, I’ve never seen a more arresting performance within the genre – by a villain or otherwise – than the one Ledger provides here, and it would be an insult to the actor to only regard this portrayal so narrowly. If the merely semi-serious nature of comic book flicks makes them hard to criticize, the flipside is that we sometimes don’t take them seriously enough. Ledger’s fervent turn – as uncontainable as Ennis Del Mar was inward – rivals some of the best baddies in cinema history, from the theatrical Hannibal Lecter to any of the gritty Martin Scorsese thugs. (And, yeah, that means I’m comparing Ledger to Robert De Niro. Bring on the lightning bolts.) That there might be any level of debate about the effectiveness of Ledger’s Joker stems from the fact that The Dark Knight frequently undercuts him. That’s the film’s tragic mistake.

(Spoilers ahead in rest of review.) Within the comic book genre, and maybe outside of it, no hero and villain are as inextricably linked as Batman and the Joker. Even non-fan-boys and -girls can name that rivalry, the same as they could Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. The Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman, oh, we know those foes of the Caped Crusader, too. But the Joker is the ultimate nemesis in Gotham City, and that’s precisely why he deserves his own spotlight. Alas, he doesn’t get it. Before The Dark Knight concludes, Two-Face joins the fray providing a subplot that feels both thin and rushed, despite a whopping 152-minute running time. The cost is twofold: 1) time spent away from the Joker is considerably less interesting, causing some of the movie’s momentum to leak; 2) the implication (though certainly unintended) is that the Joker isn’t villain enough to terrorize Gotham on his own, thus snuffing out part of the inferno Ledger works so hard to ignite.

Does it ruin the film? No. Thanks to Ledger’s twisted creation there’s a level of menace to The Dark Knight rarely seen within the genre, and he successfully resuscitates the plot after every ill-advised diversion. But it’s an opportunity missed, both in the short term (The Dark Knight would have been a more gripping picture, not to mention a more straightforward one, at a comparatively lean two hours) and in the long term (If the Joker can’t fight Batman alone, what villain can? Are we a sequel away from going back to the vapid Joel Schumacher days when the bad guys were so numerous that there needed to be a roll call before fight scenes?). By giving us more villains we ended up with a lower percentage of mesmerizing villainy. Only the Joker delivers.

Even then though, The Dark Knight dissolves as it goes rather than finding its focus. One of its most expressive scenes, and certainly its tautest, is the picture-opening bank heist – part Heat, part Point Break – that announces the Joker’s presence with authority. (If that scene doesn’t do it for ya, another one shortly following it, featuring the Joker and a pencil, will do the trick.) The longer the movie goes, the more words it relies on to underline its ethical wrestling match (almost every character gets at least one chance atop the soapbox to ponder right and wrong and Batman’s place between the two). Meanwhile, the Joker’s terrorist campaigns become bigger but not weightier. Somewhere along the way, the Nolans seem to confuse complicatedness with consequence. The only reason the Joker’s final terrorist act is at all climactic is because the movie ends soon after it. Once Two-Face is born, there’s no time to adequately build suspense.

Still, The Dark Knight works even though it might have worked so much better. Christian Bale once again instills a ferociousness in Batman – sometimes too well – that makes him refreshingly different from so many other superheroes. Maggie Gyllenhaal brings some depth to the Rachel Dawes role previously played by Katie Holmes. Gary Oldman continues to be surprisingly flat (in a good way) as the plain James Gordon. Aaron Eckhart looks and talks the part as the cocky golden boy Harvey Dent. And Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman provide the grandfatherly gravitas as Alfred and Q, er, Lucius Fox, respectively.

Visually, The Dark Knight is hit-and-miss. Though it’s often obvious where special effects were required, the application of CGI is mostly seamless (an escape from a Hong Kong skyscraper would be an unfortunate exception, and I’d have preferred old-fashioned makeup for Two-Face’s gruesome half). Most important, when Batman flies through the cityscape, he appears to have weight, something the hero in the Spider-Man movies often lacked. But on the downside, several of the action sequences are confusingly staged, with the key blows happening off-screen, probably to preserve the movie’s PG-13 rating. On top of that, the sets of production designer Nathan Crowley are remarkably repetitive, with lots of large, modestly furnished spaces. But my biggest disappointment is that Gotham City has never looked so small. The Dark Knight was filmed in Chicago and it looks like it was filmed in Chicago. These exteriors contrast not just with my understanding of what Gotham City should be (at least as big as Manhattan) but also with the world created in Batman Begins. Too bad.

Yet these are quibbles, and given the dreck that we’ve suffered through of late (namely Indiana Jones and The Happening) it’s a poor time to quibble. Within its genre, The Dark Knight is a great film despite its faults. I’d appreciate it even more if only I could get past the nagging voice in my head telling me that the Nolans blew their chance at something more significant, something classic. A few hours after seeing The Dark Knight, I exchanged text messages with my brother, who contemplated what a sequel might entail. Catwoman, I predicted, noting that with Rachel out of the picture Bruce Wayne and Batman are ripe for some conflicts of the heart. “Good call,” my brother texted back. “But whatever it is, nothing can beat the Joker!” Exactly, I thought. If the Nolans had realized as much, their film might have lived up to Ledger’s awesome performance.

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[Consider this a spoiler warning for the entire comments section.]

Jack’s Wild Joker

At midnight tonight, The Dark Knight hits screens at theaters across the country. Finally. Buzz for Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins sequel has been considerable ever since photos of Heath Ledger’s Joker began pinging around cyberspace more than a year ago – long before the trailer was released – and it’s been at a fever pitch since Ledger’s death in January. Did the Joker role take such a toll on Ledger that it led to his drug overdose? Is his performance good enough to win him a posthumous Oscar? Is this the best comic book film of all time? People are already asking these questions and the movie technically isn’t out yet.

The paid critics have started to weigh in on such topics (not that I’ve read any reviews yet), but discussion of the film is just beginning. In the coming weeks you’re sure to read raves for Ledger and tributes. And some will suggest that the performance is a window to a tormented soul. And then others will criticize the picture and be accused of cluelessness, heartlessness, or of being contrarian just for the purpose of being contrarian (see: White, Armond). You know the drill. And so before this wave of Batmania overtakes us, I’d like to pause a moment to reflect on the previous portrayal of the Joker, by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.

He’s a grinner, a lover and a sinner – and he sure does want to hurt someone. That might be the best way to describe Nicholson’s Joker. Or maybe it would be this word, which is lobbed at him during the film: crazy. Notice that villainous isn’t one of the first descriptors to come to mind. Nicholson’s Joker is a showman, an oddball, an evil clown. He’s the villain, sure, but only by default. And in Burton’s Batman the Joker’s sinister plot is a MacGuffin bigger than Gotham City. Batman isn’t about what the Joker will do. It’s about what the Joker is doing. Style is his substance.

To that end, Nicholson’s performance is brilliant – and no role, ever, has been better fit for the icon’s trademark (often grating) extreme Jackness. The genius of Burton’s film is that it dedicates more time to examining the twisted psyche of the Joker than it does to creating the legend of the hero. Which doesn’t mean that the Joker is ever really explained, because insanity can’t be defined. Watching the film again recently I noticed that a good percentage of the Joker’s dialogue is entirely nonsensical. Nicholson sells it so well that we hardly notice. The shabby writing feels almost clever.

Given the deluge of comic book movies in recent years, it’s becoming difficult to get excited about them. Superhero movies may have gotten bigger and flashier, but they haven’t gotten much better. For my money, the best superhero movie of the past decade is M Night Shyamalan’s genre twisting Unbreakable. A close second would be Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, which checks off all the comic book tenants without confining itself to the mold. And third would be Batman Begins.

So there’s reason to believe that The Dark Knight might indeed live up to – or at least withstand – its massive hype. I hope Ledger’s performance is a triumph deserving of high praise. But if the acclaim comes, I also wish that folks will remember that falling in love with Ledger’s grittier, edgier Joker doesn’t have to mean spurning Nicholson’s zanier one. If nothing else, between Cesar Romero’s classic clown and Ledger’s monster, Jack’s Joker is the bridge.

I suspect that Ledger’s Joker might be the most wicked comic book villain I’ve ever seen. I hope it terrifies me. Still, there’s something to be said for a nemesis so perverse that the only appropriate response is to stare back at it like this:

The Myth, The Legend: Gonzo

Hunter S Thompson’s death was both premature and overdue. In February 2005, the trend-bucking journalist opted for the cliché when he took his own life with a gun – upset, perhaps, that decades of drug and alcohol abuse hadn’t done the job for him. He was 67, and fortunate to have lived that long. Many of Thompson’s admirers considered his exit a noble one, or at least an inevitable one; he’d talked about suicide for years. However, one of Thompson’s supporters, his first wife, thought it cowardly. In any case, Thompson is gone now, and thus Alex Gibney’s documentary about him, Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, feels like exactly what it is: a tribute to a dead guy.

Gonzo is polite to a fault. It’s two hours of mostly praise and admiration for Thompson from people who knew him intimately (two wives, a Rolling Stone editor, artist Ralph Steadman, etc.) and from famous figures who knew him intimately enough (Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Pat Buchanan, etc.). It’s telling about Thompson’s charm that none of the film’s talking heads can speak of him without smiling. Over the course of the film Thompson’s friends recount his colorful and unorthodox career: his big break infiltrating and writing about the Hell’s Angels in the mid-1960s; his experience at the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; his campaign to be elected sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; and his episodes of Fear And Loathing – in Las Vegas and on the Campaign Trail. On the subject of the latter, it is said by one observer that Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 Presidential campaign was the “most accurate and the least factual.” Alas, Gonzo frequently feels like the opposite.

It’s not that Gonzo avoids Thompson’s more unpleasant aspects. How could it? Thompson’s substance abuse, egomania and cantankerousness are as well known as his prose. Perhaps better known. How long could you discuss the man without mentioning the foibles that made him such a singular American character? Not long, I suspect. Thus the film deals with all of it, but it doesn’t really confront any of it. Author Tom Wolfe calls Thompson a jerk and laughs as he says it. Others chuckle with amazement as they talk about Thompson’s profuse drug use. Laila Nablusi, a friend and movie producer, discusses Thompson’s volcanic temper with the starry-eyed glow of a teenager in love. “Aw, shucks,” they all seem to be saying. “That was just Hunter being Hunter.”

It’s no wonder Thompson broke so many rules of decorum. He was surrounded by enablers. Thompson’s foremost addiction wasn’t to drugs, I don’t think, but to his Gonzo persona. The latter fueled the former. He was the Evel Knievel of journalism, taking risks with his style and with his substances. Sometimes he succeeded despite the odds, such as when he showed up to report on the Kentucky Derby and to brilliant effect covered anything except the horse race. Sometimes he crashed, such as when he went to Zaire to report on Muhammad Ali’s “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman and covered nothing at all (when he was supposed to be at the fight, Thompson was high in the hotel swimming pool). Thompson’s recklessness was his most alluring trait, but it was also his undoing.

Jimmy Buffett notes in the film that with Thompson “everything was for effect.” At some point, Gonzo reveals (perhaps without wanting to), there wasn’t much to Thompson beyond the effect. That’s the trouble with making your name as a bomb-thrower – you’re only as interesting as your last explosion. In one archival interview with Thompson, in which he must be in his 40s, he admits that he’s losing himself to his persona. This from a guy who despised most politicians because he thought they were dishonest. Thompson was equally insincere – his manufactured Gonzo personality won him fame instead of elections. This irony seems obvious, but Gibney, whose films Taxi To The Dark Side (director) and No End In Sight (executive producer) were thorough in exposing the blunders of our government, doesn’t have the heart to go there.

Maybe that’s okay. If none of Thompson’s admirers saw fit to challenge him before, why start now? The trouble is that playing it safe (or as safe as is possible when discussing Thompson) undermines the very qualities that we’re supposed to admire in the man. One of Gonzo’s strengths is that it’s peppered with Thompson’s prose, read aloud by Johnny Depp, who portrayed the writer in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (how else could one rightly document the work of a writer?). In one of the quoted passages, Thompson assesses: “Some people would say that words like ‘scum’ and ‘rotten’ are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.” In other words, tell it like it is. Bluntly. Gonzo doesn’t.

This isn’t to suggest that Gonzo is a careless profile or that Thompson is an unworthy subject. Radio shock-jocks, inflammatory columnists (there’s a term that’s fast becoming redundant), bloggers, memoirists – they all owe a little something to Thompson. The best example of his influence might be found on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, which filters the news with a blend of wit and common sense, frequently calling out the bullshit for what it is, rather than parroting it in the name of journalistic duty. Yet that’s how Gonzo fails, by doing little more than reprocessing the Thompson we already knew.

Packed with celebrity interviews and backed by a soundtrack dominated by all those “important” rock anthems of the 60s and 70s, Gonzo does its best to make Thompson out to be an American patriot. But it feels hollow. The film notes that when Thompson ended his life, his family was out visiting at his Owl Farm compound in Colorado. What it fails to mention is that Thompson called his wife just before he shot himself and forced her to endure the sound of his suicide over the phone. With Thompson, everything was for effect, right to the very end. True to form, his elaborate funeral, which he designed, included music and fireworks. More explosions from Hunter, so that we might yet again overlook the darker truth.

My Life and My Life

[The following is my contribution Culture Snob’s "Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon," which invites submissions related to “the intersection of movies and life.”]

That I can no longer remember whether I was in the fourth or fifth grade when my parents got divorced should tell you a lot about how unremarkable the whole thing was. Stopping a moment to look back, it was by far the most insignificant significant thing that ever happened in my life. It dissolved one family so that later a larger and more spectacular one could be born. At the time, I didn’t realize that’s what was happening, of course. But now it feels like destiny. And I’ve never once wished things would have happened another way, because there’s nothing desirable about being a caterpillar once you’ve experienced life as a butterfly.

It helps that the metamorphosis was mostly painless. Steven Spielberg was so scarred by his parents’ divorce that fractured-family themes can be found in almost all of his films. I can’t relate. Not once before their divorce did I ever witness my parents arguing with one another. Not once since has either of them disparaged the other in my company. They’ve been classy to the core, determined to see that their failed marriage would never adversely affect my life. And it hasn’t. They had no blueprint to follow and yet made every right move, a flawlessness of execution that I find increasingly amazing the older I get. But that doesn’t mean life as a pupa was always easy. I know this because of John Denver.

Round about the time my parents separated, I was sitting in the living room with my dad listening to the radio on a weekend afternoon. To this day, I have no idea why. If you exclude sports broadcasts, I can’t think of a single other time my dad and I listened to the radio together at home. Yet there we were. And that’s when John Denver’s “Sunshine On My Shoulders” started to play. And that’s when I started to cry.

Bawl, actually, for reasons I didn’t understand. What I did know was that when I was a little kid in the bathtub my dad used to sing that song to me when he came in to wash my hair. (He also used to come up with elaborate adventure stories about characters named Mork and Mindy that had nothing whatsoever to do with the TV series, except that Mork was an alien and had a spaceship “shaped like an egg.”) I’m not sure I’d heard “Sunshine” since my Johnson & Johnson “No Tears” era, and its surprise unveiling stimulated emotions I didn’t know I had. Not sadness, I don’t think. Most likely, vulnerability. My tears were a yearning for simpler times.

Sometime soon after that, my mom moved into a rented house two blocks away that would be my every-other-week home through my middle school years. My dad provided us with a housewarming gift: one of those wooden cases to organize audio cassettes with one tape already in it – John Denver’s greatest hits. “Sunshine On My Shoulders” was on it, and for the next few years I would wear it out. Playing, rewinding. Playing, rewinding. Just that one song.

I’d cry every time. The catharsis became almost addictive. For the first year or so, the opening plucks of the guitar would do it; my cheeks would be covered with tears before Denver sang a word. But after a while I started to make it through the first verse. Then the second. Eventually I made it all the way through the song without being able to turn the lump in my throat into actual waterworks. Dismayed, I rewound the tape and played the song again. This time even the lump was missing.

Ironically, losing my go-to catharsis stimulator left me feeling more lonely and depressed than I’d ever felt crying my eyes out during the song. But within a few days that passed. I told myself that like an aging Christopher Robin I simply didn’t need my Winnie the Pooh escapism anymore. The tape disappeared into the closet and later, like all cassettes, disappeared altogether. I moved on.

But I never left that emotional part of me behind. Music rarely makes me cry anymore, but movies do. I tend to respond not to sad things but to overwhelmingly happy ones: poignant moments, thoughtful gestures, triumphs of the spirit. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Field Of Dreams makes the room feel a little dusty every time I see it (if the firm handshake between father and son doesn’t do it, the game of catch does). But I might be the only person willing to admit that Tin Cup gets to me, too (that moment of elation when his shot finally goes the distance). A few weeks ago I caught Love Actually in progress on TV. I left it on in the background because within the immensely schmaltzy movie I think Emma Thompson turns in a sincerely heartbreaking performance of the highest order. And, wouldn’t you know it, when that blond drummer boy gets the lead singer girl and leaps into his father’s arms, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.

But no movie has ever made me cry like 1993’s My Life. I was in high school when it came out and thus young enough not to be offended by the uber sentimentality of its plot, which finds Michael Keaton’s Bob Jones, terminally ill with cancer, filming instructional life videos for his child, whose birth he doesn’t expect to live to see. These days, whether this marks personal growth or regression, I’d probably skip the movie altogether. Instead I saw it with my high school sweetheart and we blubbered through the latter half together. It wasn’t the main character’s imminent death that affected me, it was his vulnerability as he breaks down the walls around his heart and learns to love and be loved again (not to mention the scene late in the movie when a gruff father gives his too-weak son a shave).

A year after that first viewing, my girlfriend and I rented the movie on VHS and watched it a second time. The tears came even more freely. Ever since then, I’ve cherished My Life, yet I never recommend it to anyone, in large part because tear-jerkers created from a deck loaded with tragedy have a way of crumbling like a house of cards. They feel cheap at best. Shamelessly manipulative at worst. And My Life fits that design. (Roger Ebert, in his 2.5-star appraisal, notes also that My Life includes some “unforgivable” comic relief. I can’t argue with that.)

Still, about eight years ago, when I stumbled upon a copy of My Life on DVD, I bought it. I’ve watched it twice since, my third and fourth viewings overall, and though the emotional response hasn’t been on par with my initial viewings, it’s been significant. Now, on nights when I’m alone and I go to my DVD collection to find something to settle in with, I look squarely at My Life and then look away. I remember John Denver. I don’t want the movie’s effect to wear off.

A few months ago, My Life came off the shelf again. My uncle had sent me a DVD with footage from his ride on a bi-plane, edited to music. I thought I recognized the accompaniment, but I couldn’t place it. The answer, it turned out, was that the music came from Hans Zimmer’s Pearl Harbor score. At the time, though, I thought it came from My Life. I loaded the DVD and let it play, hearing just enough of John Barry’s score during the opening titles to realize that I had it wrong. Then I stopped it. Already, the lump was there. The DVD went back on the bookshelf.

Someday, I might need a good cry. It makes me happy to know that My Life will be waiting.

Where Have You Gone, Mastrantonio?

When my mom arrived for a visit last week, one of the first things she requested was that I help her update her iPod. She didn’t need assistance synchronizing her Apple device – she has that part down. She wanted new music, which was convenient because back in May I’d been at a loss for gift ideas and so had promised to buy her a Mother’s Day present during her visit. That’s how it came to be that mother and son went CD shopping last weekend.

I picked out a few things I thought she’d enjoy (the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album) and she picked out a few things on her own (Kelly Clarkson, Mom? Really?). The latter bunch included a CD of movie tunes by guitarist John Williams (not to be confused with composer John Williams). Before my mom left town, I uploaded the Williams album to my iTunes library and have listened to it here and there since. As movie music tributes go, it’s a hit-and-miss effort: for example, Williams’ adaptations of the lyric-free themes from The Mission and Schindler’s List go over wonderfully, but his versions of “Kiss From A Rose” (Batman Forever) and “Everything I Do” (Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves) make me feel like I’m stuck in an elevator. Not that it keeps me from listening.

Of course, unless I’m deeply immersed in a project, it’s impossible for me to listen to movie music without at some point reflecting on the movie itself. And that’s how it came to be this week that I’ve been thinking of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who in Robin Hood made for a sweet if not necessarily typical Marian.

If Mastrantonio’s IMBb bio can be trusted, she wasn’t the first choice for the role. The princess bride herself, Robin Wright Penn, was set to play another object of man-in-tights affection until pregnancy made her unavailable and Mastrantonio stepped in. At the time, she was a natural choice. Coming off her Oscar nomination for The Color Of Money (1986), Mastrantonio was hard to miss in those days: The Abyss (1989), Robin Hood (1991), Class Action (1991) and Consenting Adults (1992) came out one after another. These days, though, Mastrantonio is virtually impossible to find.

I see from her filmography that she’s done some TV and had some otherwise small parts of late, but Mastrantonio hasn’t been any kind of presence in a major movie since 2000’s The Perfect Storm. Her last role of substance that I’ve seen came in 1999’s Limbo, in which she plays a single mom adrift in Alaska trying to make a living with her singing career. It’s a measured performance and yet an especially vulnerable one, and to see it is to remember why we’re better off with Mastrantonio than without her. (My favorite Mastrantonio performance remains her turn opposite Ed Harris in The Abyss – a movie you might need to watch again in order to accurately remember the raw power of its love story.)

So today I’m hoping that Mastrantonio makes a comeback, even a modest one. And while I’m at the wishing well, here a few other actresses who I’ve loved in one movie or another only to have them leave me.



Iben Hjejle
In High Fidelity she’s sexy, spunky and sensible. And if Rob Gordon (John Cusack) can sleep around and win back Laura, I think we Americans are worthy a little more Hjejle in our lives. Instead the actress is shacking up with Ian/Ray – by which I mean her native Denmark. What a shame.

There’s a girl-next-door attractiveness to Hjejle that’s becoming harder to find in Hollywood these days. Now if only she could be offered a role tempting enough to bring her back to the American big screen.



Emily Lloyd
A River Runs Through It is one of those movies that’s perfect to have on in the background on a lazy Sunday afternoon, providing ample opportunity to stop in front of the TV every now and then to bask in its warmth. I can’t remember the last time I watched the movie start to finish, but there’s one scene I never miss: the moment when Norman Maclean (Craig Sheffer) tells his budding love interest, Jesse Burns (Lloyd), about his job offer at the University of Chicago.

“So what do you think?” Norman asks. “What do I think?” Jesse replies. “I think it’s the berries!”

To this day I have no idea where that expression comes from. What I do know is that it’s a treat to watch the way Lloyd handles the scene as Norman declares his affection for Jesse and her expression changes from one of supportive happiness to one bursting with the inner glow of love.

Have you seen Lloyd since? I haven’t.



Melora Walters
Of all the characters we meet in Magnolia, none of them are as elusive as Walters’ Claudia, a victim of abuse and an abuser of drugs. Manic and tragically insecure, Claudia is as scattered as autumn leaves in the wind. She’s so emotionally cracked, in fact, that I can hardly imagine Walters playing someone self-assured and composed. Which is precisely why I’d love to see it.



Julia Ormond
I’m hardly the first person to marvel over Ormond’s odd career. After her enchanting and heartfelt coming-out as the only woman fit for three brothers in Legends Of The Fall, Ormand found herself with starring roles in lesser films like Sabrina and First Knight. After that she vanished like lost luggage.

I see from her IMDb profile that she’s in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, which I have no intention of watching, and she also appears to have a significant part opposite Brad Pitt again in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, set for later this year. So perhaps things are turning around. Maybe at least one of my wishes will come true. Just not quickly enough for my liking.

Now I kick it to you, Cooler readers: Care to name any actresses you haven’t seen in far too long?

Getting It Wrong Is Right

I had missed the first 20 minutes, but that was okay. I’d seen that stretch of the movie three times before. And, besides, I was channel surfing. I didn’t plan on sticking with the flick playing commercial-free on AMC, or whatever it was, on that lazy Sunday afternoon. I was just passing the time. But then 5 minutes of watching turned to 10, turned to 20, turned to 30. And the next thing I knew the movie was over. Save that missed first portion, I’d watched the entire thing and sat enthralled throughout. And I was stunned.

The movie was Robert Altman’s The Player, and it was love at fourth sight. In my three previous attempts at watching the film – all of them on video – I hadn’t made it more than halfway through. Each time I had found the movie dry and dull. It made me feel as detached as Tim Robbins’ glassy Griffin Mill. At one point in that span of failed viewings I’d even received the DVD of The Player as a birthday gift and promptly exchanged it for something else. For all its acclaim, Altman’s noirish Hollywood satire just wasn’t for me, I had concluded. Until that fateful Sunday, that is, when suddenly it was.

What was the difference? I couldn’t begin to tell you. Perhaps my first three viewings had been spoiled by misconceptions about what The Player would be, although for the life of me I can’t remember what those misconceptions would have been. The movie’s fatal flaw, in my mind, was that it was uninteresting. Simple as that. And yet when I stumbled upon The Player a few years later, on TV no less, I was genuinely and effortlessly engrossed. The film hadn’t changed, and considering that the movie was released in 1992 (hardly olden days) the context hadn’t changed much either. I had changed, in ways simple enough not to be able to identify and yet significant enough to alter my perceptions.

Had I written a review of The Player after my first partial viewing and called it icy and emotionless, I wouldn’t have been altogether incorrect, but I would have been far from right. As I look back on it now, at the time I had only a tourist’s understanding of the film’s culture. Thus dismissing The Player would have been akin to criticizing the diction of untranslated Dostoevsky. The art was in a foreign language that I wasn’t equipped to scrutinize.

The bottom line is that I had been wrong about The Player. And I mention all of this now because of a recent Q&A with Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times in which he suggests that he never second-guesses any of his initial reviews, because he has no reason to do so. “I am not now nor have I ever been mistaken in my judgment about a film,” Turan says with admitted “unwise bravado.” Then he dismisses the concept altogether: “Let me explain why I feel that asking critics about what they got wrong, or for that matter what they got right, is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is we do and how we do it.”

If you’re a fan of thoughtful film criticism, this is where things get ugly. As a tool to support his argument, Turan notes that “critics were almost unanimously dismissive” of Vertigo when it was released in 1958, but that 44 years later Hitchcock’s tale of obsession finished second to Citizen Kane in a poll to determine the best film of all time. “What happened?” Turan asks. “Were those critics back in 1958 hopeless fools? To say that would be to arrogantly assume that today’s practitioners have reached some ultimate pinnacle of knowledge that neither past nor future generations can hope to equal. The reality is that critics are creatures of their particular time and place, that even the most rarefied criticism is at its core opinion shaped by all the personal and societal forces that shape anyone’s tastes.

“Just as you can’t be wrong or right if you prefer Italian food to Chinese, it’s hard to be right or wrong about what we like in a film, no matter how much we think we can. What criticism offers, ideally, is informed, thoughtful, well-written opinion, an expression of personal taste based on knowledge, experience and insight that helps readers both decide what to see and understand what they have seen. And the closest I’ve come to making a mistake has been when I haven’t trusted my own instincts about a film.”

Then Turan quotes Robert Warshow from The Immediate Experience: “A man goes to the movies … A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man.”

Sounds humble, doesn’t it? It isn’t. Oh, sure, Turan is right on the money when he says that critics must trust their instincts and write honestly. “In the final analysis, you’re a gang of one or you’re nothing at all,” he says. True that. But to acknowledge that criticism “ideally” offers “insight” to the common moviegoer and then to suggest that Turan’s initial judgments have never been mistaken is to reveal that Turan doesn’t see himself as Warshow’s “man” after all. If he did, certainly by now he’d have come across a film that he panned or praised only to read another piece of criticism that changed his mind and set him straight. That’s presuming, of course, that he thoughtfully reads other critics. And if in fact Turan doesn’t meditate on opposing viewpoints and/or has never once been won over by them, he’s operating as if he’s reached that “ultimate pinnacle of knowledge” and values no opinion but his own.

Don’t get me started, by the way, on Turan’s implication that one’s assessment of a film comes down solely to matters of taste, as in preferring Italian food to Chinese. According to that model, Italian food lovers would prefer undercooked Sbarro to expertly seasoned P.F. Chang’s. Turan takes excellence in execution out of the equation. Do moviegoers have tastes, biases, preferences? Of course! Are we influenced by societal or cultural forces around us? Certainly. Should a critic be as mindful as possible of these factors in order to write the most honest piece of argument-driven, evidence-based criticism possible? Absolutely. But to see a critic reduce criticism to an evaluation of whether or not we “like” a movie is disheartening for those of us who seek something deeper.

That said, there’s a degree to which Turan has the right idea by suggesting that his original judgments are infallible, because as reflections of his first viewing experiences such reviews are indeed faultless. Then again, his perfectly honest reviews could still be perfectly misguided, and I’m shocked that Turan is reluctant to acknowledge as much. On his way to dumbing down the essence of criticism and while implying that he’s just one of the masses, Turan reveals himself to be a movie evaluating elitist after all.

Because, let’s face it, we all make mistakes. Fail to grasp a film’s intent and chances are you’ll be left on the outside looking in. I’m thinking now of In The Valley Of Elah, and the rush by many critics to view it through the prism of Iraq War commentary rather than take it as a story of one man’s suffering and disenchantment. I’m thinking of seeing Brick and walking out of the theater listening to two guys slam the movie because they thought Rian Johnson’s Sam Spade dialogue was an oblivious error (“I don’t know any high schoolers who talk like that!”) rather than a stylistic choice. I’m thinking even of No Country For Old Men, which captivated me on first viewing only to absolutely thrill me on the second when I could ignore the MacGuffin well enough to focus on the themes of fate. Sometimes it takes seeing a movie to know what to look for within it.

So while it’s rare for me to do complete 180 on a film, as I did with The Player, I proudly admit that to lesser degrees I get it wrong all the time. I read criticism not to have my judgments validated but to have them challenged, and I am nothing short of jubilant when I come across a contradictory viewpoint argued so effectively that it becomes my own. Accuse me of flip-flopping if you want. Charge me with bending to the crowd, if you must. But in my mind there’s a bigger sin than taste-testing the Kool-Aid from time to time. It’s getting drunk on stubbornness and self-veneration. Try though he did, Turan didn’t demonstrate modesty with his response. Seems to me he exposed his closed-mindedness.

So I ask you, Cooler readers: Care to share a time you got it wrong?