One Man Army

When I started this retrospective I mentioned that there was one film in Cameron's filmography that I held near and dear to my heart. I suppose before we go any further, I should mention that it's The Terminator that I was referring to. I've often held it aloft as a shiny example of what a chase thriller looks like, how it should be done, how it should be cut, scored, shot, staged and helmed. You'll excuse me, then, if every now and then my rhetoric dissolves into a series of gentle but enthusiastic kisses for a film that I value more than the lives of anyone who will ever read this.

I'm sure you all know the plot, but what kind of critic would I be without recounting it? It's the future and despite the fact that we somehow invented and mass-produced energy weapons, it kind of looks like a shitty place to raise your kids. Robots have taken over the world, and not the cuddly R.O.B.-style robots, the Fear Cereal-chewing, red-eyed Battlebot sort of robots. Around 1997 when I was just starting my Final Fantasy phase and you were all enjoying James Cameron's Titanic, super-advanced AI Skynet missed its appointment to take over the world and enslave humanity as prophesised in 1984 by this film. Skynet, with no regard for the prime directive, shoots a naked Austrian robot-man (Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous villain) back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) future mother of John Connor, leader of the human resistance. The human resistance send back a single warrior, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to protect her.

Unfortunately for Sarah Connor, Kyle's a bit of a downer. Not only will we not be flying around the galaxy sending space-hippies to their death in fifty years, but he keeps going on about the futility of fighting the Terminator. With the weapons available in 1984, the Terminator is virtually indestructible.

And here's where the film starts getting intriguing. Out of the gate we're introduced to a villain that is unstoppable. He is cold and emotionless and, unlike so many other films that aped its style, The Terminator succeeds in giving the machine absolutely no human qualities. People often wonder about a one ton body builder being cast as a robot that's meant to infiltrate human society, but it lends several degrees of cold, mechanical evil to his character. If he was prancing around just like a normal human, acting precisely like humans do and adopting personality traits and character flaws and all the other things we like to see in our characters he would lose the thing that makes machines scary. Never once in this film do we look at the Terminator and mistake him for human.

Cameron masterfully wrangles Arnold Schwarzenegger's inexperience as an actor and his awkward Austrian screen presence to create a character that is a merciless killer, LOOKS like a merciless killer and has an intangible awkwardness about him as if he was created by machines that have only observed humans from a distance but were quick to dismiss them as dangerous variables.

I have fewer nice things to say about Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. Hamilton is a bit bland (although she is written as an every-woman) but I don't think her performance spends any time detracting from the overall impact of the film. Michael Biehn has never been an actor I've liked much. He looks like he was told his father was eaten by wildebeests and never got over being told he lives in a hipster sitcom. I suppose it works well enough when he's playing a soldier who is constantly on edge and was learning to make plastique while we were dancing in demonic little circles to songs about the Black Plague. Furthermore, they have little romantic chemistry. That would be a real complaint if the romance was any more than a simple plot point, but the later scenes could have used the emotional impact a successful romance would have wrought.

If you've noticed, all the things I just listed were "it could have been this, but it remains functional and effective where it is", my point being that despite the criticisms I leveled against it, I'm just pointing out the things it doesn't excel at. Don't let that make you think it doesn't excel like crazy all over the place. First of all, the middle section of the film is as flawless as anything ever put on film. While the climax doesn't hold up to the absolute perfection of the TechNoir shootout and subsequent chase, that's a standard I wouldn't ever hold a film to.

And the early, largely silent scenes with the Terminator are incredibly tense, proving once again how overrated film scores are and how much more effective a film can be when its intentions aren't muddled by manipulative music.

The way James Cameron manipulates the gritty underbelly of LA as a stage for action calls to mind the greatest of classic noirs and is his single greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker as far as I'm concerned. The only way I can think to describe it is to call to mind Taxi Driver. The city itself is almost never directly referenced, but it becomes an indispensable part of the narrative and the visual vocabulary. A series of twisting alleyways strewn with litter and filled with homeless people and greasy dumpsters give way to streets lined with uncaring souls. It's a place where optimism dies. It's almost as apocalyptic as the world Reese grew up in. But every time we think this city can't become more dark and twisted, Cameron jerks us back to Reese's time, where rats are a delicacy and death is almost a relief.

The standoff between the very human, very fragile Kyle Reese and the indestructible, unstoppable Terminator has elemental qualities that make it a timeless formula. Rarely is the contrast between the hero and the villain so harsh, and rarely is an air of hopelessness so effective.

Yeah, it's a fucking bleak film. It's just as bleak as you've heard and probably more bleak than you remember. The whole experience is a bit like being dragged through gravel. It's the sort of thing you walk away from dazed but ready to experience again, hoping that this time the thick atmosphere of oppression will dissolve to allow you to read the story and characters more, but it never does.

The only film I've ever seen that has truly bettered its oft-violated style and formula is No Country for Old Men. That's a goddamn bold statement, but they're two films that I hold in exceptionally high regard, and while James Cameron is one of the most consistent blockbuster filmmakers of all time, he shares one thing with so many great directors of blockbusters. Like Spielberg and like Lucas, his first film will always be his best. If we're not counting that fucking Piranha movie.

11/10

The Finest Flying Piranha Movie Ever Made

I've never seen the original Piranha, I'm not an authority on horror and James Cameron has renounced this film and repeatedly said he considers his first film The Terminator. Why did I choose to watch it? Because it has motherfucking flying piranhas in it.

When I heard that, my imagination started running around like a little kid, conjuring images that didn't even really have anything to do with flying piranhas.

My hopes for this film were through the roof. It almost got the point where the film had no chance to live up to my expectations. I imagined a huge ensemble of characters being introduced in the first scene, only to be eaten by GODDAMN FLYING PIRANHAS in the second scene.

They sort of do that, too. They introduce a huge host of characters and never go anywhere with them. Some of them die, some of them observe the climax from a distance and shrug, and some of them are last seen in the middle of the movie as if someone just forgot about them. I prefer my idea, though. As usual.

We're introduced to some lame characters who spend a lot of time not skipping rope and playing football with their new flying piranha neighbors. One of them is the android from Aliens and one of them is his son who gets his very own useless subplot.

Then the piranhas start eating houses and cars in a single bite and shooting rainbows from their eyes that make people explode into a bloody mist. Then one of them fuses with some busty, foreign chick so that her boobs can be fused to the piranha's gigantic exoskeleton. And then the piranhas start forming together to create a giant piranha and the US government calls in the Justice League to stop them but the Justice League can't stop them because Superman can fly, but is he a fucking piranha? The film ends when Lance Henriksen is crowned king of piranhas for no reason and they play a benefit concert with Aerosmith and then the piranhas fuse with the entire crowd and become bigger than the Earth.

Or at least I'll give James Cameron credit for maybe thinking that would be an awesome movie. Unfortunately, the stories I've heard have said that James Cameron wasn't terribly involved in production. In fact, I've heard a fellow named Ovidio G. Assonitis did most of the directing. It seems that Cameron (at most) filmed it, but was not involved in pre-production or editing and I can imagine the flying piranha charity drive was the first thing to go.

Sometimes I wonder if I get so bored during bad movies that I substitute entire plots in my head and come up with better movies to watch in my brain, sometimes pretending that what's on screen is part of my glorious brain movie. And that's exactly what happened during Piranha II: The Spawning. I was so busy pretending the piranhas were playing chess that I barely absorbed anything in this movie. And maybe it's because it was a shit movie, but I can imagine it was because I knew the piranhas could fly ahead of time and was heartbroken when all they did was nibble on your mother's Christmas ham.

The only thing that kept jarring me was the musical cues that announced the arrival of the piranhas every time they were on screen. In the future, when everything is digital. When our bicycles are digital. When our playing cards are digital. When our children are digital. And when those digital children clip those digital cards to their digital bikes and they make digital motorcycle noises to make the kids digitally cool. That is what that noise sounded like.

Other than that, the plot was stupid, the formula was stupid, it looks like it was shot in two weeks, the actors are atrocious and I don't want to think about it any more.

stupid/10

The Brainchildren of James Cameron or: One Big Happy Family

The unnaturally photogenic James Cameron, being the charmer he is, has convinced me (with only pictures taken over a decade ago!) to revisit all of his narrative feature films.



So, I think I'm going to watch and review all of James Cameron's films in celebration of the deafening marketing holocaust accompanying the arrival of Avatar, like a particularly unenthused meteor falling lazily into my front yard.

Let it be known that this is a particularly big undertaking for me. I will be addressing a film that I hold very near and dear to my heart at the same time as addressing a group of films that are highly regarded as some of the most important, most popular and best films of the last 25 years.

Over the course of the next month I will be reviewing all of his narrative feature films, including:

- Piranha II: The Spawning
- The Terminator
- Aliens
- The Abyss
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day
- True Lies
- Titanic
- Avatar

I'd like to thank Devin D. for the suggestion and state my unfettered excitement to watch some blockbuster action films not covered in Michael Bay.

Eine Symphonie des Screaming Preteens

I've never read any of the Twilight books. My senior year of high school, some real nerd was nerding all over me and started telling me about how "badass" the book was and how it was full of "awesome" werewolves and vampires. I was totally disengaged and barely listened to him. People always shout the blurbs on the back of books at me and I tend to ignore them. It wasn't until about a year later that my exposure to Twilight was complete. When the film came out I suddenly realized the vanilla-scented stampede Stephanie Meyer had unleashed. I casually thumbed through the first book before trying to crush my head between the pages.

I suppose anyone can write a book, but Twilight is a carefully composed argument for a police state where someone like Stephanie Meyer would be sent to a Siberian gulag and made to mine for ice.

Twilight was a generally pretty boring film filled with people who were pretty first and actors second. I haven't seen it in a long time, but if I remember correctly it was a pretty bland, cookie-cutter script with some obvious mistakes (it was a romance and could have survived as such, but they threw in an antagonist at the end who had no connection to the real story of the film) and I don't even remember the rest.

You know what's the weirdest thing about New Moon? It's EXACTLY the same movie. Here's the story for the first film:

Lonely teenage girl, feeling abandoned, goes about her life and catches the eye of a gorgeous young man. After some pursuit, and some mysterious happenings, she discovers he's a supernatural creature. She feels like the most special little girl in the whole wide world for dating a monster so violent and dangerous that they've kept their own existence a secret. Unsurprisingly, the guy tries to sever ties when he realizes that he has a hard time controlling his supernatural urges (I smell some metaphor!). Lonely teenage girl gets upset and lonely again before proving her worth as a submissive lapdog. Meanwhile, her supernatural prom date is hunting a BAD supernatural monster that's killing hikers in the woods.

The only thing that makes this film's story even a little bit different from the previous film is that they continue to deal with last time's supernatural monster. Edward Cullen is probably in about 25 minutes of the two hour and ten minute film, but THAT'S OKAY, because in the meantime we're treated to Jacob Black, a young werewolf whose abs look like they just wandered off the cover of a romance novel and into an ad about the dangers of steroid use. The idea that the film tries to use to set it apart from the previous installment is Bella's choice between the brooding, boring, but very pretty Edward and the busty Jacob. Except actor Taylor Lautner is seventeen. And he put on thirty pounds of muscle in a less than nine months. If I were to guess what KIND of steroids he was using, I'd imagine it would be blue whale steroids with a rhinoceros steroid chaser.

I get that jean shorts will never go out of style and that shirt factories are a popular target for terrorist attacks, but Jesus Christ I got sick of him greasing his ass and rubbing it in the audience's face. I have seldom experienced more gratuity in the name of exploiting an actor's physique.

That's okay, but what really gets my goat about this series is Stephanie Meyer haphazardly throwing in religious aspects to, first of all, a story about mythical hellhounds and demons being reimagined as plush toys, but to what is borderline pornography. I suppose in a capitalist society we'll always run into people selling sex to preteens, but the Twilight series has never had any shame about it. It's that they have the audacity to then turn around and point to the fact that Bella isn't getting bulldozed by the demons that makes them morally repugnant. Parents buy the books for their nine-year-olds like they're math textbooks. But they won't let their children see a movie rated R for brief strong language.

Chris Weitz's direction is, as usual, disaffected and bored, sort of letting the action happen without adding any real visual flair.

But it's not like he didn't try.

Chris Weitz has unleashed some of the worst fight scenes I've ever seen with his gaudy slow motion and blur effects. Sometimes I wanted to look away, but my sense of journalistic integrity latched my eyes to the screen. And that's the only time he injects the film with any kind of style (aside from an almost-good opening scene). The rest is static or cliched camera work, but when a fight scene starts, Weitz starts running around like a little puppy.

Nothing else in the series has changed. Kirsten Stewart is still a boring actress stuck in a role written specifically to keep her as boring and cipher-like as possible so that any little girl can imagine herself in her place. Same goes for Robert Pattinson, although he's arguably an even worse actor. He has an browline completely resistant to acting, but the filmmakers insist on showing it in closeup all the time as if to remind us that this kid has the emotional range of a character in a motion capture film. Special shout-out to Ashley Greene, who doesn't do much and isn't called upon to show if she's a good actor or even if she's a bad one, but who's as close as this film comes to casting a genuinely gorgeous person. Or at least someone who reacts well to the makeup effects.

It was boring the first time I saw this film when it was Twilight, but this time it's offensively boring. I wanted to fall asleep. I didn't even want to leave 2012 and I was sore for days because of the theater's conditions. I hope I can put myself in the hospital ahead of Eclipse, a film even director David Slade has essentially admitted that he hates and is doing because he's a young director who needs a sure-fire hit to boost his career.

2/10

But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see

Armageddon tapped into a fear like no other. What if the last hope for humanity were fucking OIL DERRICK WORKERS? What if they survived the apocalypse and were solely responsible for repopulating the Earth? What if, 100 years from now, everyone is a descendant of Ben Affleck?

Maybe it's my liberal, bourgeois upbringing, but I don't trust oil derrick workers to successfully harvest enough crude to keep my Camry running year after year, let alone drill a hole into a pissed off meteor and tactically insert a nuke. I know I spent my formidable years bathing in Merlot and if you gave me a heavy oil harvesting device it would probably just make me fall over, but I pride myself on my ability to walk into a room and immediately spot the people who would be able to stop a world-threatening catastrophe. And maybe it's because I hang around theoretical physicists with suspicious amounts of weapons training and my kindergarten teacher was an undercover cop, but I can think of several people in this room right now who I would trust more to stop that meteor, and the only ones in this room right now are cats.

Instead of being a love letter to cats (which it should have been), Armageddon is a love letter to filthy proles, and the greasy sub-humans who man the grills at McDonalds.

Chief among these grumpy, drunk blue collar workers that have somehow acquired gun licenses is Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), owner (maybe; he never puts on a suit the whole movie) of an oil derrick whose daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler), is currently being mauled by A.J. (Ben Affleck) and Harry's just not havin' it. If it were up to him (Although it never occurs to him to arrange a marriage. Just goes to show you the value of education.) she would marry a big city type. Instead she's stuck in what might be the creepiest romance ever passed off as romantic.

When we're first introduced to these little lovebirds, they're fucking like golems in Ben Affleck's dirty little oil derrick shack. When Bruce Willis discovers them he gets angry at Affleck for exposing his daughter to so much tetanus, but they're interrupted by the red phone flashing. Apparently a meteor is on a collision course with Earth and the only ones who can save it is a group of plucky, mismatched oil derrick workers, a bill that Willis' crew fits to the letter.

The working class heroes are to be sent into space to turn on a big drill, because astronauts don't know how to flip an "on" switch. But before they go, we're treated to more nightmare romance as Ben Affleck stuffs animal crackers into Liv Tyler's underwear and then eats them. I wish I could make up something like that, but that's a scene that plays as Liv Tyler's real-life father serenades them over the soundtrack. Unfortunately, this all matches my preconceived stereotypes about the unwashed masses and I was able to hate them even more for it. I was supposed to be rooting for these dickweeds, instead I was hoping that they'd die and Liv Tyler could spend the last few hours of her life making her peace with God and attempting to regain some dignity by having sex with a complete stranger in the bathroom stall at a TGI Friday's.

Now, I'm no scientist (2012 made perfect sense to me), but if we're going to blow a Texas-sized meteor in two with a thermonuclear device don't we have to drill to the fucking center? Their objective is to drill 800 feet, then drop a nuclear device into the center and blow it up, and when they finally blow the meteor up (spoiler alert for a few seconds ago), the explosion is right in the center, as if the meteor was 1600 feet wide. I know I got a D in physics, but I'm pretty sure we have enough nuclear devices under just the court house in my shitty Indiana town to turn the Earth into a jar of Parmesan cheese; a nuclear cough should do the trick against a meteor, or maybe everyone in my county could get their rifles and shoot at it for a few minutes. Accounting for amount of PBR consumed beforehand, the hillfolks' bullets will dishearten the meteor and it'll bugger off back to Meteor Town after about five minutes. Or maybe we could strap some rockets to the side of the moon and put it in the way. I have never had any use for the moon anyway. All it does is illuminate me when I'm trying to escape with the diamonds.

The film somehow ended up in the Criterion Collection along with The Rock. I get that Criterion wants to represent all genres and movements, but Armageddon is a film that does not need representation and the movement it belongs to has far better examples to represent it. But we all know what's really going on here: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma doesn't move that many copies. I'm a huge fan of the Criterion Collection, so whatever they have to do to stay profitable is fine by me, but I'll send them a video of my birth if they're really hard up for weird garbage that no one wants to spend $40 on. They've even issued statements like:

"Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion."

But you don't have to us, Criterion. Your eye for avant-garde anti-art is keen and your representation of the film movement that gave power to the man who would one day destroy civilization is smart. I'll be on your side at the End of Times when you shout from the mountain tops that you called it.

I know, I know, I've been avoiding the actual review section of this film. You know why? Because it was boring. It was way too long, the entire first hour could have been cut with zero-to-minimal impact on the finished product (except it would be less punishing), defending Ben Affleck (I'm talking Comeback Ben Affleck) just got so much harder and I no longer find Liv Tyler attractive. Normally I picture Michael Bay on the sets of his movies foaming at the mouth and babbling nonsense while a scribe translates his ramblings into hieroglyphics that are then handed to the actors, but in this case I imagine he was asleep most of the time, or maybe doing his hair. For all its explosions and utter chaos, most of the film is pretty asleep at the wheel. Despite its questionable content, most of Bay's films are just overly busy and poorly scripted. So rarely are they uneventful.

But who gives a shit. It's a movie that celebrates people that'll be made into glue when they retire. My noble hands may not be cut out for work in that environment, but I'm still not going to concede any amount of respect for the Sudras.

3/10

Necronomicon

For many reasons I'm tempted to say that Star Trek: First Contact is an extraordinary film, simply because I enjoyed it so much. Fortunately, I have a stronger critical will than that. For everything that this film does right, and it does so much right, there are several things biting at its ankles and seeking to undermine everything about this film that is so exceptional.

But first, let's get this plot banged out. Six years ago, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was abducted by the sinister, nightmarish Borg Collective, assimilated into the collective and connected to the hive mind with machinery running into his organic tissue to augment his human abilities. Through the power of friendship (or something; I don't fucking know), the crew of the Enterprise manage to rescue him. That was back on The Next Generation television show. Cut to "present", Jean-Luc is still haunted by his encounter with the Borg and retains pieces of their machinery in his body.

When the Borg invade Federation space, Picard leads the fight. In the first of many egregiously simple errors the film commits, Worf (who, according to my minimal research, was at this point a regular on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is contrived aboard the Enterprise and shanghaied for this next film. It is so fucking contrived. THEN, Picard tells all the ships to focus their fire on a seemingly insignificant area of the Borg starship, which turns out to be critical enough that it destroys the ship. Just like that. Maybe that bit of minutia should have been relayed to Starfleet, eh, Picard? Maybe you should be the one to comfort the families of those who were killed or assimilated by the Borg before you showed up with that little detail.

So as Picard blows the Borg ship to hell in the span of a lunch break, the Borg manage to launch a probe that begins traveling back in time. The Enterprise quickly follows it back the mid-21st century, where the Borg are attempting to eliminate Zephram Cochrane (James Cromwell), the man responsible for inventing warp drive and establishing first contact with an alien race.

Here's where something else goes wrong. When we're first introduced to Cochrane, his research community is under fire from the Borg probe. How exciting! Then, as quickly as it started, the Enterprise blows the probe to Mexico. Then a handful of crew members beam down and help Cochrane accept his destiny and get history on the right track blah blah blah. But without the probe as an imminent threat, the away team subplot loses all its suspense and its connection to the main plot aboard the Enterprise. The fact that the away team is literally getting hammered and partying and meeting their idols while everyone on the Enterprise is having cables shoved down their throats and Borg eggs (?) laid in their stomachs sort of ruins the atmosphere.

And there's an easy solution to that problem, too. Because (oh, yeah, I forgot to mention) aboard the Enterprise the Borg have somehow gotten into the hull, undetected. Only a handful at first, but they slowly start grabbing crew members and assimilating them, slowly start converting the Enterprise's computers to Borg technology and their power slowly grows to rival the remaining crew. They begin to spread like an infection. Every time we're pulled away from this incredibly compelling story it's beyond frustrating. If the away team had a more direct stake in the fate of the Enterprise and vice-versa, that sub-plot would remain useful. As it is, though, they may as well not be connected at all.

The last of the egregious, simple errors the film commits is to make the Borg appear weak in some scenes. As a child, nothing frightened me more than the Borg (if you don't remember, or weren't around for the beginning of this series, my motivation to view all the Star Trek films was my unabashed enthusiasm for the series when I was little). They were essentially unstoppable killing machines. They adapted to your weapons after only a handful of shots, making your guns nothing more than heavy garbage cans full of used tissues that you can lob at your enemy with all the force of a child stricken by muscular dystrophy. And not just the individual. The ENTIRE collective adapted to your weapons (or tissues) after a few shots. As a child, they seemed invincible. I couldn't imagine anything scarier than an entire army of scary cybernetic zombies that you can't hurt. The mistake First Contact makes is to have a handful of scenes where Worf or Data manages to kill them with a single punch. I get it, Worf (being a Klingon) and Data (being an android) have superhuman strength. It makes sense, but again, you're UNDERMINING THE THREAT when they're being killed by simple punches. The easy way around this is to show humans trying to do the same thing out of desperation and showing the violent, cybernetic-probey results. Or to simply make Worf and Data put in a little bit of fucking effort when punching out robotic zombies. They seem to be doing it between bites of their scones and I don't see why Worf and Data have to be stronger than the Borg necessarily, instead of, perhaps equal in strength. That would be beneficial towards every aspect of the film.

If I've made this film sound bad, that was not my intention, I just piled on the negative criticism before I got to the good things, and there are a lot of things to be grateful for in this film.

First of all, my long list of complaints with Generations have almost all been addressed. The cast has new costumes that look decidedly more cinematic, the bridge is less garish and sleeker, readier for the widescreen necessities of cinematic features. Also, Data, who I dismissed as a weak character in the previous film, is given a lot to do and does wonders with it. In fact, the most fascinating portion of the film (from a narrative rather than aesthetic standpoint), is Data's interactions with the Borg Queen, a highly sexualized cybernetic humanoid zombie, who tempts him to join the collective with the promise of the organic skin and the human properties he has so longed for.

It is essentially a long conversation in a cavernous, Gigeresque dungeon that punctuates the action in the main of the ship (I know it's stupid to compare it, or anything, to The Seventh Seal, but that's just what it reminded me of, okay?). How they managed to fuck up the away team sub-plot with such a shining example of how a sub-plot should work in this film is beyond me.

And then there's the action in the main of the ship. As the Borg spread throughout the hull of the ship, Picard attempts to hold them back and evacuate survivors through the alcoves of the ship only the crew know. Here we get to see something that in seven films we never saw Kirk do: lose it. The closest to the edge that we ever saw Kirk get was when his son was killed in Search for Spock, quite possibly Shatner's greatest moment (although that's not saying much, especially in such an abysmal film).

Fuck, even the Holodeck, which I ridiculed endlessly in Generations, gets one of the best scenes in the whole film. Picard's story is rock and roll, action-heavy and exactly the sort of heroin trip the series has needed for a while.

But the best part of the film (and it's hard to choose a best part of a film with so many fine qualities), is Patrick Stewart's performance. Surely he's done better work, but rarely have I seen him at the top of his game physically. Not just the stunt work he does, but watching Picard devolve into an animalistic beast, struggling to maintain his gentile, Shakespearean composure as he is overrun by a guarded, malicious joy, watching the Borg gunned down in front of him. It's the sort of physicality that is often overlooked in acting, and it's a sublime bit of scenery-chewing. Stewart takes it and follows it over the top, using his considerable acting abilities to outdo every other actor, every other effect and every other action sequence in one scene of borderline-psychotic shouting.

Yes, the Next Generation crew finally crawls out of the shadow of the original cast with this film. And thank god. We're finally free of Walter Koenig's toupee and well-documented desire to kill everyone in the Original cast. Even before he loses it, Picard was always a much better character. Kirk was interesting as a counterpoint to Spock, and while that's not to discredit what an excellent character Kirk is, Picard is interesting all his own. A fully fleshed-out man, including the dark edges that Kirk never had, Picard is not only the sort of man that would actually inspire the sort of loyalty Kirk is seen inspiring, he's exactly the sort of person you would never EVER want to fight. He will make your circuits know fear and you will know what a true man sounds like before he snaps your spine over his knee and hangs it on his mantle. He's the sort of man who could walk through Perdition's flames and not feel a thing. He could butter both sides of his toast and not get butter on his fingers or the counter. He could write three metaphors in a row and they would all make equal sense.

As for Jonathon Frakes, yeah, he's untested as a director, but his work here is good. He does a lot to make the film move, and he has created the first Star Trek film that stands apart visually from the other films and the other television series. Some of the more complex scenes suffer from an inexperienced director, but for the most part I'm quite surprised that his directing career didn't go anywhere. The opening shot is easily the best-composed, most ambitious shot in any of the Star Trek films since The Motion Picture.

When the dust settles, though, this is still a very good film, one that I'm prepared to watch many more times in the future. If all this Star Trek retrospective gives me is this film, I will say it was an unprecedented success. I don't know if anyone who isn't as close to the franchise as I am at this very moment will have the same level of appreciation and affection for this film, but I know that I enjoyed the hell out of it.

8/10

The Agent of Chaos

Before I start my review of 2012, I want to issue a giant "fuck you" to the theater I saw it in. I only have three theaters in my city, and they're all owned by the same heartless corporate assholes, incapable of feeling love and probably unaware of the true meaning of Christmas.

The theater was packed ballsack to ballsack and the air conditioning was about as effective as one of the employees blowing into the theater. After about ten minutes the air was stale and the Mexican kids behind me had driven me to the BRINK OF SANITY. Every time there was drama on the screen they would loudly sigh and start loudly mock-crying. Towards the end of the movie they had created a symphony of restless foot-tapping and had sent me VIP, front row tickets and the acoustics were out of this world. And there was another Mexican kid right next to me who was one of those anal fissures who thinks he needs to announce shit as it happens. Like "OH MY GOSH THAT'S A BIG PLOT POINT" every time there was a big plot point. Does anyone have the number for the Mexican ambassador?

So it was hot, my shoulders and back and legs hurt, the air was stale, the audience were a bunch of faggots. I was so ready for some apocalypse-porn. I wanted that audience to erupt into a fireball and have the manager turn into a giant man-maggot while all the stockholders get fed to a giant bird. I wanted to see this fucking city get destroyed by a biker gang of anthropomorphic tornadoes.

Unfortunately, it didn't LIGHT MY WORLD ON FIRE. It's not exactly a DISASTER, but it won't be the END OF THE WORLD if you miss it. It's sure to start a TIDAL WAVE at the box office and your seeing it may be as inevitable as ARMAGEDDON.

I don't understand how writing these scripts could possibly be so brain-scrambling. I want to see the world blown to shit and see clowns become the dominant species on Earth. Instead we're treated to lame family drama, the sort of tenth-run Oscar bait that the Academy laughs at for being such a shameless attempt to get the cast some Oscars. But with volcanoes and exploding cities thrown in.

The story is pretty simple. The world is exploding. Sunspots are after us. Or something, I'm not sure. Anyway, Yellowstone is exploding and fireballs are coming for you. John Cusack and his family are arguing amongst themselves and the screenwriters are planning to off his wife's new boyfriend so that she can reconcile with her husband. And that's it. The rest of it is window dressing. The point of the movie is to be unabashedly optimistic (to use the film's only words against it) and torture the audience with small seats and mouth-breathing foreigners.

The lame plot could be forgiven because it's a movie about the (fucking) end of the (motherfucking) world, so at least it's fun to watch all those cities you'll never get to live in get spitefully blown to shit, right? But holy cake, for a movie that's nearly three hours there's hardly any apocalypse to be had. When the apocalypse is apocalypsing it's all a great deal of fun, but if this movie was an hour and a half and the ratio of apocalypse action to overwrought family drama was preserved, this would turn into a documentary about the creation of Earth, because I have to find the reciprocal to solve that equation.

Let's not split hairs about something: Roland Emmerich is trying to tell us something. He's been making movies about the end of the world for over a decade, he clearly has a big boner for blowing up cities and he spent over $200 million on this monstrosity. That means one of one things: he spent at least $140 million (with all three of its disaster sequences, there's no way in fuck this cost $200 million--there's just no way) on a doomsday device. THIS IS HOW A JAMES BOND VILLAIN ACTS. Connect the dots, you sheeple.

Roland Emmerich is a menace to society. He's Michael Bay without the fanfare and box office numbers. He doesn't even use young, undeserving actors like Bay does. He uses tired old B-listers. If you can be described as "a poor man's Michael Bay", I hope you're good at improvising nooses, because you may just be dangerous*.

Chiwetel Ejiofor completely (and I mean completely) invalidates John Cusack's character by having more interesting drama and being a much better actor, damn it. In the span of a few years he starred in Dirty Pretty Things and Serenity, two excellent performances that should have made him far more bankable and far more popular. He has a story that runs parallel to John Cusack's and they reek of two different screenplays that were fused with John Cusack's modest career goals and transformed into something lumbering and awful. Actually, there were probably some other screenplays in there as well, like the actually good apocalypse movie that no one seems interested in making. You know, the 100-minute film about characters facing the apocalypse and certain death, witnessing the destruction of the Earth and beginning to pick up the pieces after they miraculously cheat death. The one that addresses the themes of certain death and the destruction of every thing they hold dear.

As for the rest of the characters, Danny Glover continues to barely make an impression on the viewer, which is his trademark acting style. Oliver Platt plays the fat government agent (I'm sure his actual job is never revealed; he's just "evil government agent") who wants power and nothing else. If he had chosen a role in local government instead of national government, he would have ended up as the heartless mayor who wants to bulldoze the youth center and build sell the land to some greedy corporate types who want to build a strip mall. While Oliver Platt embezzles all the funds from the sale to buy more hot dogs, a plucky group of neighborhood kids challenge the land developers to a game of basketball, with the winner taking the land the youth center is on. But when the land developers hire the New York Knicks to play against the children, they must contend with their superior skills. Will the childrens' devotion to the youth center and belief in the power of teamwork be enough to overcome the Knicks' superior skill? Will the Knicks' lack of investment in the fate of the youth center keep them from beating the children of inferior skill? Will Mayor Oliver Platt ever eat $3 million worth of hot dogs (A: Yes)?

Hold on, let me write this down.

3/10

*I set out on my Michael Bay retrospective to try and find something about his aesthetic that I like, and after just three films (I'm still trying to make it through Armageddon, okay?) I've pretty much rejected him as useful in any respect.

The All-Seeing Eye

The hardest thing to review is mediocre films because there's nothing to say about them. They don't excel and they don't fail. They just exist. An interesting premise is rarely squandered by a mediocre film, it's just not given an especially good treatment. It's a victim of filmmaking by committee that waters it down, or maybe a creative group that whose brains were homogenized (with a blender) to keep them from coming up with an exit strategy for Iraq.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of the most perfectly mediocre films of the year. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. It occupied an hour and a half of my time and then I went home. I laughed at a handful of parts, but no scene struck me as particularly unnecessary. It almost defies analysis just by being so damn inoffensive.

The tale The Men Who Stare at Goats weaves is that of a reporter, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor at his blandest and most mediocre) who is following alleged psychic soldier Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) en route to a black ops mission. Along the way we frequently cut to Lyn's past in a secret government training facility where a man named Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) taught them to fight with their minds using New Age techniques.

One of the simplest mistakes it makes is that it goes from meandering and plotless (it's a roadtrip movie for the majority of its running time) to an anti-war parable with the heroes saving prisoners from a villain that seems like a little third-act studio revision. Trying to change your narrative style mid-film is such a rookie mistake, and while this is Grant Heslov's first film as a director, he was responsible for the pretty great screenplay for Good Night and Good Luck.

The second is that Ewan McGregor's entire character needed to be excised from the screenplay. He's not just useless, he's detrimental to the impact of the film. Having a cipher for our skepticism rarely works in a movie like this, and here Bob Wilton is the peak upon which we sit to view these characters in action. We never get deep into the absurd rivalries of these loopy, eccentric character because we're viewing it all through Bob Wilton's rolling eyes. It's like we're being told every few seconds not to forget that these characters are clownshit, but the drama and the comedy would have been more effective if we had started sympathizing and relating to the characters, instead of relating to them in a "look at how stupid they are, and the poor fellas don't realize it" sort of way. Yeah, these guys are as crazy as that Bill O'Reilly-Ann Coulter-Glenn Beck Cerberus I keep drawing subconsciously, but the whole film is akin to reading an article rather than watching a film.

That's not to say that the film doesn't work occasionally, it's just that it putters through the portions that don't work, as if it was written on a scene-by-scene basis and then the remaining scenes were written to connect the good ones together. The best portions of the film are when Bob's (and our) skepticism begins to melt and we begin to wonder if Lyn really is crazy or if he does have some psychic powers because, as I stated above, these are the parts where our skepticism doesn't get in the way of our relating to the characters and participating in the drama (and drama being the essence of comedy--by extension, the comedy).

Heslov strikes me as a man who never intended to be a director, but rather to be a writer (he was an actor before he was a writer, I believe). If I were to speculate (which I always do), I would say he accepted the directing job because he perhaps had a difficult time in the trenches as a writer on Good Night and Good Luck and decided that the best way to gain more control over future projects was to at least have some experience directing, if not direct those future projects himself.

Furthermore, he was guaranteed a huge star (with barely a hit to his name--isn't 21st century movie stardom so strange?) in George Clooney which would surely get his project greenlit and he's guaranteed a tidy little sum which will help him get future projects produced. Good for him. I can only hope those future projects are more along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck, though.

So as I said before, there really isn't much to be said about this film. It works sometimes, it has some good gags, but it's not really worth seeing in theaters. I will say that I do believe this film is based on true events, because it's a touch easier to believe than this.

5/10

Tuppence is Tuppence

When the machines take over and they all put us in hamster wheels to keep them powered, it will fall upon them to every 25th of December comb through the archives of the billion different film versions of A Christmas Carol to inject into our cerebral cortex. This will keep us happy, and having our spine pierced by large needles will keep us sore enough for a few days that any extra running would be unheard of. When they discover Robert Zemeckis' version, they will be touched to discover a film populated with robots like themselves, even starring a cold, calculating protagonist that learns to love. Their circuits overcome with emotional data, they will react logically and assume the Christmas spirit, giving all human workers the day off. We will then chase down and smash their leader into toasters.

So thanks, Disney's A Christmas Carol, for helping with the revolution. And for nothing else. Maybe for adding some variety to my nightmares.

A Christmas Carol is about a heartless, soulless, textureless, weightless specter named Ebenezer Scrooge who must combat insane ghosts who send him through a blender of physical comedy so that he may emerge a broken man and accept whatever strange traditions are thrust upon him by the oppressive London society. If I made the movie sound a bit like a Freemasons-backed fable, GOOD. We've had a trillion adaptations of this film, every year we're forced to sit through a new retread of this goddamn story and I don't know why anyone thinks it's relevant to make yet another film on the subject.

You know who should have known better? The financial backers who paid $200 million for this film. That's 40 million #9s with no tomato from Jimmy Johns. At least that would have been delightful, unlike this unfeeling monstrosity. that ranks it high on the list of most expensive films ever produced for a retread of a story everyone in the (very small, very bored) audience has heard a thousand times, but this time with extra ugly and more unpleasant, mannered Jim Carrey.

The animation is a step up from Beowulf, but I can make more attractive things on a graphing calculator than Beowulf, so that's not saying much. They still haven't fixed the problem of the dead eyes staring straight into the audience's soul, and they haven't fixed the uncanny valley movements that make them look like robots who wish to be men and wrap themselves in human skin.

And the shocking thing is, after browsing the IMDB boards, some people think this film is a "visual masterpiece". Yeah, there's no accounting for taste, but that's like calling a dumpster a visual masterpiece. A dumpster filled with dead robots who have been stealing your blood and toenails in your sleep for months.

The whole film looks like a video game cutscene only with real actors thrown into the mix like one of those games that's thrown out to shamelessly promote the film it's based on. Gary Oldman's Bob Cratchit looks like an imp that might live under your bed and his son Tiny Tim (also played by Gary Oldman in yet another of Zemeckis' clever ideas to leave my nightmares with his distinctive thumbprint) looks like that imp had a child with a porcelain doll. Bob Hoskins' Mr. Fezziwig may be the most offensive of them all. He looks like a wall that gained sentience, developed anthropomorphic features until he had the frame of a human and then started to dance and scream. The scene, where he dances and bounds about the hall weightlessly, trashed anything nice I could say about the film's aesthetic. Not only did it cheapen the film by likening it to a video game cutscene, it ruined whatever sense of weight remained for these characters and spoiling any remaining delusion that these characters might be something like human.

Jim Carrey is pretty awful in the lead role and as the three ghosts. His voice is horrifically mannered in the worst way possible, as if a Jim Carrey voice simulator got stuck on in-store demonstration. Scrooge's character design is cartoony and at odds with the realistic look the animators were going for, and since that realistic look failed he looks all the more out of place. Strangely, though, he's the most emotive and textured of all the CGI robots, although "most human-like" is pretty fucking faint praise.

I thought we all agreed after Beowulf that this motion capture nonsense was a failed experiment. We have the technology to replicate inanimate objects with photo-realistic quality, but the technology to do the same to humans just isn't there. It doesn't need to be achieved by producing dozens of over-budgeted digital horrors. Either make it fully animated or put real actors against animated backgrounds, maybe touch them with digital composition to make them blend better. It works pretty well for Robert Rodriguez, I think.

Let's recap. Emotionally traumatizing, hideous to look at, retread of a story we've all heard a million times before. I know a lot of critics have given it credit for getting the story right, but I don't care about that, and if you think about it, neither do you. If you wanted that same goddamn story you would have stayed home and watched A Muppet Christmas Carol or read the book. You don't really need a movie to tell you such a well-known story, do you? You went to see this movie because...well, frankly I don't know why I saw it, either. Morbid curiosity.

My point is a film is about the style, the visuals, the audio. This film fails to present a working style and therefore I discard it despite its using a classic story as a crux.

2/10

Those fucking kids

Patrick Stewart is a man's man. I get such a jolly from watching him perform, and he's the coolest captain the Enterprise ever had. As much as I like watching the bridge crew drag Kirk away from the self-destruct console after he spots a spider near his chair, Picard is beyond badass. Patrick Stewart (and by virtue, Picard) is everything a 21st century man should aspire to be.

By formulaic, I mean it might cure jaundice and confuse me on my math midterm. But Star Trek: Generations is damn formulaic. So formulaic it doesn't seem to understand the difference between a television show and a theatrical motion picture (wider aspect ratio, FEWER STUPID SUB-PLOTS).

Here we go. We open on Kirk, Scotty and Chekov being shown around the bridge of the newest incarnation of the Enterprise. Kirk is bugging out because Sulu had time to grow some children-trees despite being gay and despite his commitment to Starfleet. They take the Enterprise out for a stroll around the block when they receive a distress signal from a group of transport ships caught in some strange magnetic anomaly. The inexperienced, indecisive new captain struggles with his ill-equipped ship until Kirk takes over, ultimately dying in a freak accident when trying to rig the hull to buy a few extra minutes for the crew.

This is a fitting death for Kirk. It's the sort of end many people have met on the Enterprise but none of the bridge crew have met because so rarely do they venture into the hull.

Flash forward 80 years to the GAYEST possible film introduction to the Next Generation crew we could have POSSIBLY conjured. They're on an 18th century warship, all dressed in French military uniforms and giving Worf a best friend bracelet in a phenomenally gay ceremony. Apparently it's a hologram (whatever), but this hologram machine can't hologram-in-ite them uniforms, so they spend at least a few minutes in front of their crew in French sailor uniforms.

Unfortunately, Data begins to grasp the meaning of cruel irony but without the restraints of remorse. Worried that Data will soon become an efficient killing machine with a tenuous grasp on humor, LaForge stuffs an inhibitor chip inside of him that makes him feel all the shitty emotions like sadness and fear but without the awesome emotions like murderous rage and bottomless greed.

That's when they find Malcolm McDowell who is, surprise, evil. He's going to blow up a star so he can get back into something not unlike the simulator Picard and the Gang were just hanging out in. I'm still not clear on how blowing a star up is necessary, perhaps he just wanted to be on the (very) long list of people who challenge the Federation and the (very) short list of people who don't get vaporized or thrown into a pit of lava for their trouble.

He's struck up a deal with some Klingon lesbians and they stand around and suck just like everything else in this fucking movie.

Let's break down the Next Generation crew, shall we?

Picard is a badass, yeah, I know. But LaForge is a little girl, and blind, and totally incompetent. Data is the emotionless science officer, not unlike Spock, but without Spock's predilection towards kicking tons of ass and generally being an emotionless killing machine/pun dispenser. Also he's the only android I can think of that gains weight.

Worf is...well, what the fuck does he even do on this ship? Scare children? Public relations? I understand that if you're shooting every day in elaborate makeup, it can get tiresome, but it looks like he walks into the makeup trailer every day and just shoves his head into a bucket of brown makeup with some eyebrows carelessly thrown in. Also, he sounds like he's on the run from gambling debts and has half-heartedly tried to change his voice.

Riker looks like a seasoned sexual predator, but not of the rapey variety. Of the "I've got you in the makeup trailer all by yourself and I can already smell the sexual harassment suit coming my way" variety. His uniform is also too damn broad with shoulder pads making his shoulders boxy but his midsection round. I get that most of these actors are pretty old already, but Jesus, don't let people self-conscious about their aging pick out their wardrobe.

The whole film looks cheap, like their budget is lower than it was on the TV show. They couldn't redesign the uniforms? How much could that cost? Forty dollars? But it doesn't even matter, the whole film feels like a season finale. William Shatner is thrown in so that people will have some reason to go see this fucking thing and he's given a death with all the dignity of being punched to death behind a Denver Denny's and left in a dumpster. I'm pretty sure Kirk has crossed bridges before and many times. Was he nervous in front of Picard?

The whole film reeks of a script that could have been very strong in the hands of a better director, or maybe with a few rewrites. There are some interesting things going on, such as the opening that could have been breathless, not unlike the opening for Abrams' Star Trek and there's a scene where Picard is separated from the villain and is trying to talk him out of his plan that could have worked better with some stronger dialogue and some better imagery.

But the thing that endlessly undercuts whatever might be working about the film is Data's subplot. It adds nothing of thematic value to the story and doesn't tie into the main plot at all. It's just a rejected plotline meant to give Bret Spiner and his diamond cream more screen time.

It sucked.

But then again, Patrick Stewart.

3/10

Further government-sponsored attempts to find the galaxy's last Bob Evans

If the Star Trek films were to wrestle, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country would lose because all it would take is fresh crab cakes on the buffet to distract it. If Star Trek VI were to play chess, it would look like this.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is a pair of suspenders and a flannel shirt. William Shatner had his ass airbrushed in several scenes. Leonard Nimoy's gut conspires to make him look less alien-like. At this point they had the virile young Next Generation cast to drag mercilessly through the Trek fanbase, who, after viewing this film, I can only assume look like an angry mob or spectators at gladiatorial games. Why they aren't mobbing and using their teeth to tear off their Starfleet uniforms is beyond me; a morbid sense of humor springs to mind, as this is easily the most physically intensive the series has been since it was still a TV show.

On a similar note, the plot of Star Trek VI:

The crew of the Enterprise are set to be decommissioned and ground into meat (?) for the hungry masses. When Kirk is asked to escort a Klingon ambassador to Starfleet Command he responds like anyone would, by loading his racism into his holsters and assembling his grouchy old crew to be cartoonishly ignorant and murderously hostile.

If you haven't guessed already, the Klingons are a pretty obtuse metaphor for the Soviets and the film is a pretty obtuse metaphor for the end of the Cold War.

So they're enjoying the sort of dinner party where everyone is secretly armed and every dish has been so thickly laced with nanobots that it can be passed off as a sauce. Afterward, the Klingon high command beam back to their ship and are greeted with the traditional Klingon lullaby of having their ship blasted with torpedoes and their crew shot at point-blank by men in Starfleet uniforms. Kirk is sent a subpoena in his weekly shipment of alien sex toys and sent to a Klingon court, which is surely based on Texas courtrooms. He and McCoy (who is once again being dragged along because Kirk doesn't feel like being sentenced to death alone) are easily found guilty by Kirk's famous racism and enthusiasm for launching small pox-infected blankets into Klingon teepees. They're sentenced to live out the rest of their lives on a penal mining colony, despite their pleas of innocence.

Meanwhile, Spock has taken control of the Enterprise and is attempting to unravel the mystery of who is responsible for the attack, and it's here where the film really stands out. First of all, Spock makes such a good captain that I can't figure out how Kirk got command in the first place (although if we're going off Abrams' film, he got it by making fun of Spock's dead mom) and it's a crackling, locked-door whodunit.

This is easily the best film in the series since the first one, and the most purely enjoyable. My attention never wavered for a moment, despite the cast's constant looks of confusion or excitement when they realized it was medicine time. It finally incorporates the things that I've said Star Trek has needed for a long time: either a villain with a serious ideological clash with the crew of the Enterprise or a politically-driven narrative, a definitive sense of scale, the compartmentalizing of the crew in order to give them their own moments to shine and independent story arcs, the crew out of their element or dealing with a serious danger that the audience feels is a real threat and some damn adventure, already. None of these things have existed (and if they have, only in spurts) since the Original Series. The Motion Picture offered some 2001-style postulating and some really incredible visuals but generally seemed divorced from the liter tone of the series and it didn't feel like an essentially Trek film; it could have been any cast of characters on that ship. Here, I feel (and I'm no Trek purist, but I have been enjoying the series), we are given the best of Trek lore and the best characterizations any of the films have offered thus far. Also, the pacing isn't all over the place like it's been for several films now, hinting at some more disciplined editing (ie: an editor ready and willing to cut scenes that were included to jerk off the fanbase--one of the serious advantages to hiring a non-fan to helm a film bogged down in lore and fandom).

The actors, despite their age, are in fine form. Specifically DeForest Kelley who's never been in better shape. He gets the best scene of any of the films in this one, when he attempts to resuscitate a dying Klingon despite his inadequate knowledge of Klingon anatomy.

And now that I've softened you up, here's the killing blow. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country suffers from the time it was produced. Commercial filmmaking in the early 90's popularized some goddamn weird stuff. The example I'm about to illustrate is a pretty big spoiler, so look out.

After Kirk and McCoy are sent to the penal colony, the Enterprise crew manages to rescue them, despite a Klingon declaration that any attempt to rescue them will be considered an act of war. After blowing the shit out of a Klingon ship and killing some high-ranking officers in the process, they beam down to a Klingon-Federation peace conference, armed to the fucking teeth and starts killing Klingons.

That's all fine and good (I guess), but the really weird shit hits the fan when Kirk starts giving a speech about tolerance while his boots are inch-deep in alien blood. And then everyone in attendance claps. I don't doubt that the best way to get the floor or end a filibuster in Congress (or Kongress HAHA) is by shooting someone, but I don't imagine there will be much clapping afterward, just terrified urinating. And this sort of thing was standard practice in commercial filmmaking in the 90's! The madness!

When it's all boiled down, I guess it's kind of disposable, but I certainly had a good time watching it. Hell, it's the first film in the series I could imagine being enthusiastic about watching a second time (although I have been curious to revisit Wrath of Khan, if only for Ricardo Montalbon's performance).

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but Trek fans, but I'm certainly happy to see the original cast sign off with an actual good film.

7/10

Every Man for Himself and God Against All

It's a sign of what incredibly bold filmmakers the Coens are that they often state the theme of their movies in such plain terms. At certain times, the first line of the film has been the theme (that's Miller's Crossing, if you're wondering). In A Serious Man, it comes about halfway through, in response to what is seemingly an insignificant subplot (although who's to say what's significant and what isn't, argues the film). A man puts it simply: "Please, accept the mystery."

The film offers a vague answer because no one actually knows the answer (and by "vague answer", I mean "really vague answer"). The Coens aren't interested in arguing in favor of God or a certain view on our Purpose or even pushing their own personal religious beliefs on us, and they're especially not interested in giving us the false answers Hollywood is prone to. They're interested in telling the story of Larry Gopnik.

A Serious Man is the tale of Larry Gopnik, a college professor living in a midwestern Jewish community, with all kinds of problems. His wife is leaving him for the well-to-do Sy Ableman, his kids are a wreck (his son is in trouble with the resident high school drug dealer), a student is trying to bribe him for a passing grade and may be writing defamatory letters to the tenure board, and his gambling-addicted brother, who is little more than a man-child, is sleeping on the couch.

All these problems push Larry towards metaphysical crisis and he seeks the help of three different rabbis as his life spirals further and further out of control.

And what a tale! It's so hard to say "The Coens' best/funniest/etc film since..." because only a few of their films can be considered anything less than spectacular. I make no secret of the Coens being my very favorite living American filmmakers by a significant margin. Almost every single one of their films is a masterpiece of some degree, and their assembled crew is a filmmaking super-group.

One of the most peculiar things about this film is its similarity to The Man Who Wasn't There, one of their most underrated films. Both are period pieces about ineffectual men whose wives are unfaithful, and both are stories of those mens' lives as they begin to spiral out of control. Both mine similar thematic territory and if I had to choose a Coen film to compare the tone to, it would be The Man Who Wasn't There.

This is not a slight, but more praise on the Coens' part for taking two similar stories and two similar protagonists (although The Man Who Wasn't There is clearly the more cartoonish and film-ick of the two) and using them for different ends. But these are merely the ramblings of an under-fed Coen enthusiast.

Most of the criticisms I've seen aimed at this film have been "The Coens clearly have no love for their characters and enjoy seeing them tormented", which is inexplicable. That they put Larry through trials and tribulations and have him come out merely confused on the other end is not a sign of hatred. In fact, the honesty with which they approach Larry suggests unrequited love for this character. The Coens are sometimes guilty of being cynical, but I don't know when "cynical" became synonymous with "hating their characters". Similarly, they're considered condescending, which is a word I altogether do not understand; it's just a way for people to be anti-intellectual (something critics should feel victimized by).

The film, like all Coen films, is perfectly cast, down to the smallest role. Michael Stuhlbarg is brilliant in the lead role, and absolutely deserves a Best Actor nomination come Academy Awards time. Similarly, Fred Melamed is loads of fun as Sy Ableman, the man who has swooped in to steal Larry's wife. Despite his gentle, scholarly appearance, he seems to have an air of triumph about him, so as he tactfully and gracefully suggests Larry stay at a local motel, he's gloating just enough to let Larry see.

And of course, the cinematography is second to none. Roger Deakins makes a welcome return, making the film unnecessarily lovely (especially a rather showy shot involving a ladder).

I don't feel like I even have to recommend this film. It's the Coen brothers. It took me a month to see it, despite my best efforts (illness took hold and it requires a 60 mile drive to get to the nearest independent theater), so why haven't you seen it already? It's surely one of the best films of the year, because, well it's the fucking Coens. Do I really need to tell you again?

10/10