Best Friends Forever

I'm not a psychic, but I am more perceptive than you. When I say that I fucking knew that Dexter would shit itself inside out when the first two seasons' cocaine barrel ran dry, I'm not bragging, I'm just using my powers for the good of the land.

The first season tracked Dexter's interactions with another serial killer, getting into his head in a very talky, meticulous way while the second season made Dexter the protagonist of a thriller, engaging his character with more action and suspense (more my syringe of poison). Now we're apparently out of angles to go at Dexter's character with, and like so many dramas the writers need to find new things to keep the audience's attention. Cheap gimmicks and violence porn will take the place of the well-written, meticulous character study we've all gotten used to streaming off the finest television pirating websites that 1997 can buy.

The writers' and producers' gimmick is the best friend one. A best friend that Dexter can go golfing with and talk about power tools with and make friendship bracelets with and slit throats with and one that he can eventually drive to the brink of sanity with violence and secrets. Which actually sounds like a good way to approach a story, but there were fundamental flaws in that idea that the show was never going to get around. It's my inclination that Miguel Prado (the best bud in question) being more sympathetic and wanting to help Dexter control his urges but eventually being driven mad by the evil that is only just below Dexter's skin would make for a far more interesting arc. It's unfortunate that the writers opt to make Prado a scheming villain instead, presumably as a quick way to ultimately dispatch the character once the season is over. That gives us nine or so episodes of Prado being a good guy and getting through to Dexter's inner demons, and then throwing him away by making him evil, even contradictory towards his established character once his character has run its course, which strikes me as terribly cheap. For one, it's hard to buy Prado's deception when he's been more like a little kid than a brilliant assistant district attorney. Also, he doesn't seem to understand how being a district attorney works, or at least he has a thirteen-year-old's view of it. After fourteen years of being an ADA, he still hasn't figured out why defense attorneys are there and thinks that district attorneys are the untouchable kingpins of Miami that cannot be stopped even by death.

There's a completely separate case that all our favorite Miami Metro Homicide team is on while Dexter dicks around at sleepovers, and it could not be more lame. It's like an episode of CSI Miami stretched out over twelve episodes. There's just nothing of value or substance in this plot line and it's the worst, most obvious sign that the writers were out of material. They're hunting a serial killer who is looking for a drug dealer that disappeared (Dexter killed him, setting off a string of murders that effects him in no way! They never even mention it!) and that's it. There's nothing else to it. They talk to witnesses who give them clues that, with their police resources, they use to tighten the gap between them and the killer, which like listening to someone describe an episode of Law & Order for two hours. And when they run out of boring police procedural shit, they go to Deborah, who's having a retarded interracial romance with some punk, which is cool because last time we saw her she was balling a Peter Fonda lookalike.

The show is aiming to make Dexter more normal, which is at least an arc for him to go through, but I'm not convinced it's for the best. It's easy to relate to him getting married and having a baby, but him pretending to be normal or doing routine stuff has never been what makes this character interesting. Thankfully, Michael C. Hall is still up to the task of making his character compelling. I've realized that the way Dexter interacts with people when he's preparing to kill someone requires an actor with a complete and comprehensive knowledge of every social grace of every group, ethnicity, age and whatever. Hall understands his character very well. It's a performance with a lot of ticks and sudden changes in demeanor. There are shades of classic movie spies in it, strangely. Also, and I don't know whether to accredit this to Hall's performance or his anonymous looks - I suppose both - but the scenes where he kills are by far the best things about this season. It's a shame there are fewer of them this time, but Hall's performance is very intense. So many of his emotions are faked, and faked so well that we often forget he's faking, but one of the few times we get any real, genuine emotion from Dexter is when he has someone on his table and his words come out in a controlled hiss of pure fucking evil that plays so well against his happy family man/mild-mannered blood spatter analyst image and for just a few moments the show lets Dexter become the villain. There's something deliriously macabre about his apron and his clothing in those scenes, with their muted greens and grays and crisp, freshly laundered look.

I don't know if this season really is host to better acting from Hall or if I just never really grasped that aspect of the performance before now. I'll lean towards the former so that I can credit this ass train of a season with less and I can end with a statement to the writers.

If you run out of story ideas for your show and you don't want the swimming pool to stop getting filled with cocaine-basted roast chickens every morning, you're going to have to make the executives in charge understand that your show needs to stay on the air. And since you've been freebasing Oxycontin off script pages all morning, you're going to have to come up with something fast, but that thing you come up with fast should no longer be "we'll waste such great performers in such great roles", because a savvy studio executive will see through that and have you fed to alligators and your former body parts will spend the rest of their existence being set dressing in Australian comedies. Although I wonder if I could get another Jurassic Park film made with that logic.

3/10

Puppy Love

Let the Right One In is a film that I've been interested in for a long time. During its initial theatrical run, it didn't come to my state. When it was released on DVD there was a great deal of controversy about the dumbing down of the subtitles and I opted to wait for the original translation to be released on DVD before I viewed it.

It was thus brought to my attention that my best friend, Netflix Instant Watch, had a copy of the film with the original translation intact and. Unlike many foreign language films Netflix Instant Watch pimps, they don't force a dubbed version on me like the public school system completely failed me. Watching a dubbed film is like having my dad cynically half-describe a movie to me from the other room. In other words, it's for children. I know people my age who refuse to watch films with subtitles. The first film I saw with subtitles was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon when I was ten. Maybe I was born for this, but I think it's more likely that you should read a book sometime.

I digress. Vampire films have a spotty history, and the best comparison I can make is to pirate films. The best pirate film ever made is obviously The Crimson Pirate, but ever since then there have only been a handful of pirate films produced that are even worth watching. While I'm an Interview With the Vampire apologist (I love production design, okay?), I could probably count the great vampire films on one hand. The genre isn't exactly known for being fresh. So few vampire films did anything different since Bram Stoker introduced vampires to sexuality. And pop culture. And we've been watching vampires make out sensually for the eighty years since.

Let the Right One In trades in sexuality, but it goes at it from several fresh angles and it trades in more than just that. To its advantage, it really isn't a vampire film so much as a romantic (I use the word loosely) thriller with a vampire in it. It's loosely plotted and mostly concerns a 12-year-old boy named Oskar who is viciously bullied at his school and his relationship with Eli, a girl who looks to be about his age but is quickly revealed to be a vampire. Mostly we follow their lonely worlds as they expand to include each other.

The film's violence plays into that as well. Easily the best blood-sucking or vampire-related imagery I've ever seen in a film, it's especially effective because Eli doesn't just appear innocent, but is innocent. There are several big, floating question marks around her character that not only have to do with her past (where there are several big, scarred question marks floating) but with her character. Despite her age, she is clearly very sheltered and is in most ways a 12-year-old, but killing for survival brings with it a certain maturity that only appears in flashes. Her character is handled with a logic. Lina Leandersson plays Eli with the characteristically vampiric flourishes, but at a different angle. Mostly we think of vampires as calm, collected and cold monsters because they've lived for so long and rejected emotion in a way that we think is obvious to assume a person that old would. Eli is calm, collected and cold, but it comes from a place of innocence and curiosity rather than one of cynicism. It's an extraordinary performance.

Elsewhere, the cinematography seems to be influenced by Asian, and specifically Korean, and even more specifically Chan-wook Park films. It's not aggressive in its beauty, but holy fuck it's beautiful. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema has a marvelous aesthetic, framing his shots symmetrically with slow tracking and a bleak color palette, mostly devoted to blacks and various shades of white. The production design is obsessed with squares and harsh angles, and maybe that's characteristic of Communist Sweden, and if it is I'd like to high five the shit out of whoever designed that gulag of a country at the same time as sort of be scared of ever going near it. It's such a perfect match for the cinematography, and if you ever want to discourage someone from being a Communist, all you have to do is show them this film.

The visuals do so much to push Let the Right One In as a horror film, and they do a damn good job of it. As I noted above, it's not really a horror film at its heart, but director Tomas Alfredson seems intent on showing us that if he had wanted it to be a horror film, he could have made it a horror film. There are a handful of scenes that, aside from the visuals, are extremely effective minimalist horror, and none of them directly involve any vampiring, as if to further prove the director's talent.

It's been years since we've had a worthwhile vampire film, much less an essentially perfect vampire film.

10/10

Yes, Father. I Will Become a Blogger.

You may have noticed sparse updates recently, and that's for a few reasons. First, I still haven't found a steady source of income and robbing a movie theater for viewings of popular films is not only a complicated idea to explain, but an even more complicated one to execute.

Second, I'm lost at sea with only my Michael Bay retrospective to keep me anchored in the harbor of sanity. This is an official statement: I will accept requests. Something you'd like to discuss? Hear another opinion on? It can be individual films, an entire series of films or, fuck, nothing to do with film at all. If you want a co-pilot on something blog-related, just ask. Most of you know me on Facebook and my email is burnbeforereading@gmail.com. I have no intention of painting myself into a corner with this blog and am open to any and all suggestions. The original intention for this blog was for it to be community based and request oriented.

If all of you turn out to be total chumps and can't come up with something cool, I'll probably do a Kevin Smith retrospective.

Isn't It Good

It's a curious thing to watch something slowly but swiftly move into greatness, and there's nothing more satisfying than seeing a great creative individual or team turn their failures or missed opportunities into greatness. Every shortcoming of Dexter's first season has been used as a trampoline to grab onto the treebranches of excellence, and the excellent second season would not be possible without those very specific shortcomings. I know in my boners that the writers and producers of Dexter knew that their first season would be their weaker season, but if they could succeed at making it a hit, the second season would be their great achievement.

That said, it has a great deal of surface flaws that could have been fixed quite easily. That it's rife with flaws is just something one has to learn to respect about serialized drama, and that these flaws are so wildly specific to the need for twelve hours of drama lest ye die is disappointing. It's the eternal reminder that, as a product, film and television is always going to be hamstrung by its need to meet certain requirements for the sake of marketability and longevity of investment. I'm more willing to forgive these flaws, though, because television offers a venue for serialization at the same time as long-form drama and while certain concessions are necessary, they're not concessions made by the creative team but rather by the medium they're working in. Television is a flawed medium and that's not going to change until televisions themselves are entirely replaced by the more malleable streaming content or until a mad genius figures out how to work commercials into a narrative.

For those of you who haven't seen the first season, I'll be discussing plot points for the second season that tie into the end of the first season. Also, you may want to know that the show is about a blood spatter ANALyst and sociopath who murders bad guys. In faggot's terms, spoile4s hehe.

After dispatching the Ice Cream Sandwicher, Dexter has become distraught. For almost a year the personal mindgames he played with another serial killer gave his life verve and meaning. His sister is a shaken mess and living with him after her intensely intimate encounter with the Ice Man Cometh and Sgt. Doakes is suspicious of Dexter and following him at night. Oh yeah, and a scuba diving team uncovered the dozens of dismembered bodies Dexter has been dumping in the ocean for years.

On the lame side of things, Dexter's girlfriend Rita thinks that Dexter is a heroin addict and sends him to Narcotics Anonymous where he meets a fox named Lila who, like all attractive women, is totally out of her mind. This is where the series shows its allegiances. When given the choice between being an intense thriller slash dark comedy and being a soap opera, it jumps into the neon jean shorts of soap opera with no shame.

And god damn the writers for taking the easy way out, because they strike dogs about halfway through the season only to give it all up like they couldn't wait. As the first season flirted with dark comedy and horror, the second season becomes a full-fledged black-as-the-heart-of-Africa comedy and we get a scene or two of such knee-shattering horror that it became heartbreaking to watch the writers and producers cop out for the sake of tits. Everything aside from its meandering narrative is an improvement over the first season. Every character is fleshed out and given dark, rough angles, especially Angel, the loveable brown spot on Dexter's rainbow of political correctness who gets a comic and tragic angle and goes through a very sympathetic arc. Deborah, Dexter's sister, is given the most complete arc that also falls victim to some soap opera writing towards the end, but her story is incredibly true to her established character, which goes against the time-honored tradition of destroying a well-established character and rebuilding it for the sake of the plot.

But really the best character on the show was Sgt. Doakes, the endlessly intense, borderline psychopathic police officer who is obsessed with proving that Dexter has some kind of secret. This is the dynamic that allows the second season of Dexter to become the best thriller I have ever watched on television. All those stupid asides that focused on Doakes last season that I complained about are given purpose. Without his character fleshed out, and without his background probed, we would never understand the transformation he goes through and we'd never sympathize with the horrors he goes through.

What makes Doakes such a spectacular antagonist is not only the way Dexter's heroism (in that he's the character we follow, and therefore the hero of the story even if someone else has the moral highground) is established against the Ice Tray Cracker (who is pure, swamp monster evil) in the first season and then challenged by Doakes in this season. Doakes is an asshole, for sure, but he's also a good cop who plays by the rules and gets the bad guys the right way. Dexter is an evil little bastard who hopes Doakes fails so that he can kill the criminals that slip through his fingers. Like all great hero-villain relationships, the conflict is tied to our own sense of morality and we choose sides based on that. If a film or television show understands that, they have the viewer by the balls.

I misjudged Dexter based on its first season and want its forgiveness. I take back everything mean I said about the first season and only stick by my criticisms of the second season. It's a strong argument for not passing judgment until you've seen every episode of a television show, but mostly I'm pleased that Dexter called me out on my lack of patience. It's a show with patience and I'm glad I stuck with it. I encourage anyone considering starting with this show to approach it with the same patience.

9/10

MLK Jr. Day Special: A Brand of Magic That Never Fails

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The Tightening Noose

I've just finished the first season of Showtime's Dexter, which I started watching shortly after I discovered how much was available to watch on Netflix Instant Watch, and holy shit there's so much to watch on Netflix Instant Watch. I was completely unprepared for it. When the option was first presented to me, I quickly looked through the available films, saw a handful of good titles and even watched the first few seasons of The Office on a bender with a friend's Xbox.

So Dexter became the ultimate test of this Instant Watch service. And what can I say? It's streaming content, so it's certainly not HD quality or anything, but that's a worthy sacrifice if, like me, you tend to want to ingest TV shows all at once instead of waiting for individual discs to arrive in the mail, and especially if you're sharing an account with a family of seven and you have the two-at-a-time service and every time you get something you're renting a Michael Bay film.

I'm sure you all know that Dexter is about a blood spatter analyst cum serial killer played by Michael C. Hall, but he's a serial killer with a catch: he only kills bad guys. How does he determine who's good and who's bad? Cold logic. He's a sociopath, after all. And why is this film so different from all those shows and movies about subverting the law and murdering to satisfy your personal code of morality that I hate so very much? Not enough, honestly, but Dexter is a sociopath who kills first and foremost to satisfy his desire to murder; I just wish the show would keep that in mind when they deviate from the main story line to have Dexter pornishly execute a drunk driver. Dexter is a sociopath who has the same relationship with a code of morality that I do with the process of making a tequila sunrise. If I mix all these things together I can have a tequila sunrise, which has tequila in it, so hooray. I could drink the tequila straight, but that's not how it's done, I'm supposed to have something larger and I'm supposed to take it slower. The writers take a more commercial approach to the murders, trying to appeal to the audience's love of violence and disgust with criminals. The more interesting approach would be Dexter's hatred of the code, but continued obedience to it out of respect for the man who taught it to him.

Aside from the show's antiquated hatred and misunderstanding of marijuana, there's one scene that's very tellingly constructed from a morally conservative standpoint. Spoilers for the rest of this paragraph. One episode follows Dexter's disposal of a couple who bring Cubans into America and kill the ones whose families can't pay the activation fees. A child hiding in a car trunk gets a front-row viewing of Dexter sedating and dragging the wife off. Dexter has to investigate his own crime scene (rote and you knew this would happen from the moment you heard the premise, but come on, it's still pretty cool) when the police discover the child. They get him to talk to a sketch artist and together they produce an immaculate drawing of JESUS CHRIST. It's like having sugar poured directly into your tear ducts by Glenn Beck. I almost stopped watching the show right then and there. If Dexter was going to become the symbol of the heroic that catch the wicked on behalf of those damned liberal courts that never seem to catch them themselves, I wasn't going to be a part of it. I pressed on, mostly out of curiosity for Dexter's character. Despite what happened in that episode, I was getting invested in the character, despite how hard large portions of the show were working against it.

And in spite of all that they did, the character, remains intact and interesting. The most interesting portions of the show are his interactions with the police officers he works with as a blood-spatter analyst and his personal interactions. Now, those personal interactions are best when he's with his girlfriend Rita, but I'm not convinced they couldn't be better with his sister, a detective who he also works with. In fact, Rita and Dexter's relationship is a sub-plot I'm not entirely sure I like. Rita's a well-written character, but her relationship with Dexter is played out, especially since we get the same pieces of character from his relationship with his sister, and his relationship with his sister tends to be pertinent to the plot.

But what would they do with forty hours of freed-up time getting rid of Rita would give them? More introspection and more fantasy sequences. Being a sociopath, it's difficult to get to know Dexter through his interactions with others, and the writers, for whatever reason, only use his narration and fantasy sequences in conjunction with his interactions with others, rarely to reflect on the world around him. He even says he lives his life in his head, and being in there with him would be a billion times more revealing than trying to figure out what he's thinking while he interacts with people and pretends to be normal.

The biggest offense I think the show commits is to take us out of Dexter's head and give us entire subplots about the world around him, especially the fucking cops he works with. Every time we have a subplot about them, it drags us away from the best part of the show and into the land of boring, Law & Order police procedural bullshit. I don't see why the show needs to create all these salt-of-the-earth characters and put us in their presence for so long. I assume it's because they think we won't be able to relate to Dexter and need to fall back on boring stock characters. And they're right. Most of their audience aren't sociopaths and can't relate to what Dexter is going through, but that's only one way to connect to a character. Just because he's not relateable doesn't mean he's not sympathetic or interesting. And if we can relate our everyday struggles to a character, chances are he's not terribly interesting. Dexter's head is an interesting place and nothing else the writers come up with really compares.

Excel though it may when we're inside his head, the show's approach to the mind of a serial killer isn't exactly original or unique. It's seriously indebted to the writings of Bret Easton Ellis, and even manages the most excruciating homage to his work in one scene that's like being hit over the head with a pole made partially hydrogenated stupid. After all, Ellis' stuff has been brought to life on film really well only once and I think it has a lot of life left in it.

In any case, I just watched the first season. Perhaps all the problems I have with the show are solved further down the line, but based on what I've heard, they aren't.

6/10

Set Phasers to File

It's taken me nearly six months, but I finally finished my trek through the Star Trek canon. I've watched all eleven films released over 30 years and watched half-interested at all sorts of intergalactic turmoil.

It's unfortunate that these films were, by and large, not very good. In fact, this series was consistently mediocre or sub-par. Only three of the original ten films I'd really consider rewatching or giving much thought to, however I reserve the right to reevaluate my scores in light of my newfound appreciation for the Star Trek canon, the magic of hindsight and the ever-changing tastes of a nubile blogger. In chronological order:

1. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Original Score: 7/10

I'm a sucker for hard sci-fi and the Original Series struck the perfect balance between mass-appeal gadget porn and real existentialist pondering. Also, I'm a sucker for operatic shots of space and gorgeous sci-fi production design. If it weren't for the effects and production design this would be a pretty empty film, though. Even the cast seems disaffected by the script. It is, however, a great capoff for the Original Series. The rest of the films don't resemble it that much and could easily be any space adventure with any cast. While The Motion Picture doesn't do a lot to preserve the cheap aesthetic of the series, it's a great reunion show for the cast.

Revised Score: 7/10

2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Original Score: 4/10

For all the hype surrounding this film, it was even more static than the notorious The Motion Picture. The conflict was slow and unengaging and the characters spent the movie sitting in chairs and doing little to interact with their environment. There was never any sense of urgency or danger, but there was Khan, who was a fantastic villain and probably the only reason I can see to watch this movie, and that's more than some of the later films will offer.

Revised Score: 5/10

3. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
Original Score: 3/10

It's meant to be an exciting space adventure, but the cast always looks like they just woke up and are waiting for their coffee to be ready. And without Leonard Nimoy, the film loses its best actor. And, if stories are to be believed, when casting the Klingon villain they went with Christopher fucking Lloyd over Edward James Olmos. That just might be one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

Revised Score: 3/10

4. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Original Score: 5/10

Discussing this film with a Trekkie friend of mine, he suggested I might get better mileage out of the film if I stop thinking of it as a comedy. I realize that my preconceived notions about the film and what people had told me about the film got in the way of my critical duties, because it's a perfectly fine movie if we ignore all the easy fish-out-of-water comedy. But the whole thing is so fucking safe. The cast doesn't seem to have any energy. It's just a routine space adventure with nothing at stake and no reason to get invested.

Revised Score: 5/10

5. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Original Score: 2/10

This film is like straight vaudeville. If I didn't know any better, I'd think it's an experimental film made for the sake of weirdness. It certainly held my attention the best of any of the films up to this point and it's hard to deny that it's the most unique of all the films in this series. Still, the shoddy filmmaking and my suspicion that weirdness wasn't the intent and it was just the result of an inexperienced rush job conspired against it, giving it a score that would imply that I hate it. On the contrary, I quite like it and, damn it, this is MY blog and if I like something, I can give it an appropriate score.

Revised Score: 7/10

6. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Original Score: 7/10

The first film in the series that really starts getting anything right comes a little bit late. It's a fun space adventure with aliens, far-off planets, space battles and exciting drama onboard the Enterprise. The drama of the film is unique to the characters and they have things at stake. The cast has more energy here than they've probably ever had and Nicholas Meyer keeps things bounding in his second outing as director after Wrath of Khan.

7/10

7. Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Original Score: 3/10

It was just an episode of the TV show. It was all stupid. I'd much rather watch the TV show. At least the TV show tended to be well-written.

Revised Score: 2/10

8. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Original Score: 8/10

A smashing artistic and financial success, First Contact introduced elements of horror and amped up the action, giving a certain six-year-old boy nightmares for months. It's exactly the sort of gamble on tone that the series needed and everything is the better for it. The metaphysical pondering is the most effective yet, the story is the most exciting and the actors never did better work (that I've seen, I'll bet Patrick Stewart making breakfast every morning is a harrowing experience). Unfortunately there are some problems, mostly that the filmmakers don't want to make the film TOO exciting. Am I allowed to deduct points for missed opportunities? Hell, I'm doing it.

Revised Score: 8/10

9. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Original Score: 3/10

It's got pretty much all the same problems that Generations had. It's not even a noteworthy failure. It's just terribly boring. The exciting new directions they went in with First Contact have been mysteriously abandoned. Patrick Stewart's god-like acting seems to be on vacation and we have to listen to bullshit about some group of old people who don't want to be sent to a retirement home even though their shuffleboard court is on top of the solutions to many of humanity's most desperate fears. I didn't get it, I was totally on the Federation's side the whole time.

Revised Score: 3/10

10. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
Original Score: 4/10

I'm pretty much subtracting six points for missed opportunity here. This was a film desperately trying to be great, but stuck with a director who didn't know what he was doing and a cast too tired to bring any life to the film. It's like a great musician taking a final bow and then getting his violin strings wrapped around his neck.

Revised Score: 4/10

Even if I liked hardly any of these films, I think I'll miss doing them. It was always interesting and there was always very little accumulated wisdom of the films going in to skew my perspective. Goodbye, Star Trek. You were probably never right to be a film franchise.

Looking Up

Two things:

First, that's not the theatrical poster over to the right, it's an alternative poster done by Eric Tan, whose blog can be found here.

Second, I most admit that I have made a mistake. A week or so ago I wrote up my top seven films of the year with Up at #6. Upon rewatching it for this review I have realized how wrong I was. I regret not watching it again before writing that because I hadn't seen it since May and its effect had dimmed in my memory. I would like to make amends and declare Up my second favorite film of 2009, making my official list:

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Up
3. A Serious Man
4. The Princess and the Frog
5. Observe and Report
6. Coraline
7. Star Trek

It seems like madness that I would put Up so low on my list when I so vehemently declared it the best film Pixar has yet produced. Oh, yes, I know that's a big statement, and after all, there's no genre-bending or gap-bridging or technology-striding in Up. It used to be a pretty solid punch-out between Wall-E and The Incredibles for the title of Best Pixar Film, but I think Up manages to come out on top . Maybe I need to watch Wall-E again; after all, I keep a Wall-E figurine on my desk.

Picking a favorite Pixar film is stupid, though. To watch a Pixar film is to be shot in the head with quality and have your brains paint a wall that is exuberance. Up is simultaneously Pixar's most emotionally potent, most fun, most exciting and funniest film. It's the tale of a lonely old widower named Carl Fredricksen. The world is moving fast around him and he has no reason to change. When his wife died he lost not only his wife, but the person who had been his life partner since they were children and the more willfull half of his existence. In his depressed stupor he commits assault and ties 20,000 balloons to his house in honor of his wife's memory. He kidnaps a child named Russell and escapes to Peru. Little does he know that the United States has had an extradition agreement with Peru since 2001, but that never really comes up.

Mainly the narrative is thus: Man lives entire life promising himself and his wife adventure. They lead a happy, if ordinary life and then she dies. He goes off to find adventure and has adventure. He feels rejuvenated by the relationship he has with a young boy, bereft of fatherly influence.

The opening of the film is very realistic and then we introduce the unrealistic Adventure! aspects to bring Carl's arc together. This would be an easy pitfall for any creative team that wasn't Pixar, but they manage to ground the Adventure! and merge it with the more tragic elements of the story. Sure, it's jarring, it's meant to be jarring, but the film never loses sight of its story or characters and is all the richer for managing a huge tonal shift right in the middle and knowing that the best way to do that is to anchor the film with strong characters.

Carl himself is a wonderfully squatty little creature, seemingly composed entirely of squares. He's introduced in that most emotionally wrenching of opening montages that you've obviously heard praised endlessly, so I'll avoid analyzing that particular scene. I hypothesize that his entire character, and therefore the entire film (remember that we established the entire film rests on the shoulders of the characters to keep the mad tone shift from tearing it in half like a smilie face earthquake) rests on this montage. If we didn't feel and understand every bit of Carl's pain, it would be easy to dismiss him as a crochety old fucker and an unpleasant protagonist (a common critical loophole if you haven't gotten your quota of negative reviews filled for the month).

The supporting characters are all magnificent, including Russell, the innocent, excitable wilderness explorer who stows away on Carl's house, Kevin, the giant multicolored bird that Russell adopts and who speaks in squawks and whose movements provide some of the funniest physical comedy I've ever seen, and Dug, the dog who has been given the gift of speech and says exactly what a dog would say if a dog could speak, which is so fucking awesome that I want to kick every filmmaker that made a movie with a talking dog and it wasn't like this right in the fucking shins.

Rounding out the supporting cast is my favorite Pixar villain, Charles Muntz. I have a special place in my heart of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast because his stake in that film's plot is purely emotional. Similarly, Muntz has spent decades hunting the mythical Beast of Paradise Falls (Kevin) and is the owner of Dug and the inventor of the collar that allows him to speak. The Adventure! plot is just so damn well-constructed and so full of exciting action sequences and so well connected to the rest of the story. Dug and Kevin are easily my favorite Pixar comic relief characters.

And those action sequences, oh my those action sequences. With so many films trying to be throwbacks to 1930s adventure serials, it seems a stroke of simple genius to set the film in present day but employ elderly characters using antique machines, allowing the filmmakers to posit the showstopping climax on top of a zeppelin. I don't remember thinking that the climax was so marvelous when I saw the film in theaters, but it's received three individual viewings since I rewatched the film this morning. The most shocking and effective moment in this scene is the reveal of the gun, which works for a few reasons. First, how common is a gun in an animated film? Second, not a single weapon is shown throughout the film. It is, after all, an adventure film, not an action film (learn the difference, Hollywood). But I don't want to demean the actual reveal, the use of music and cinematography, the reactions of the characters, the soundscape. All of these things work in harmony throughout the film and appropriately peak at the climax.

Of course, that's the case with all Pixar films. Up is stupidly, ridiculously gorgeous as as piece of cinematography and is the primary argument for those retarded awards ceremonies to share some of that Cinematography gold with animated films (the cinematographer's guild just gave a nomination to Avatar; we may be getting somewhere). That is, if Wall-E didn't already convince you. And as always, Pixar gives us the best original score of the year, this time courtesy of Michael Giacchino, one of the best composers working today.

But I'm wasting my time. You know all this, you don't need me to tell you. Pixar doesn't make bad movies. They just don't. If Cars were a Dreamworks film (and that's a fair criticism), it would be Dreamworks' masterpiece. Every time they release a film it's a masterpiece to topple their previous masterpiece. If you don't like Pixar, you're fucking stupid.

10/10

Yes, Father. I Will Become a Starship Captain.

J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot is only sort of like a Star Trek film. If it were a real, tangible item, you probably couldn't get a grip on it without it slipping through your hands like it was covered in afterbirth. In defense of the filmmakers, and I guess this whole review will be my defensive position on Team Filmmakers, the Star Trek series has been covered in duct tape for a while and has really needed a greasebath. It's a new direction for the series, yes, but it preserves the characters and it's the only way the Star Trek series was going to continue. I don't imagine the nerd scum would be happy seeing their favorite daydream blown off the cultural radar and into little tiny pieces of shrapnel called "Family Guy spoofs of William Shatner's voice".

J.J. Abrams has done so much to make this Star Trek film that it needed to be. It's fast-paced, shiney and fun as opposed to the last few films, which were like playing with a rusty pair of scissors. And while he may not have preserved Gene Rodenberry's original intentions, he's preserved his characters in a way that pays tribute to the original ensemble with new actors that don't have to be forced into the script to appease the hoards of bloodthirsty Trekkies. Despite a few lapses in narrative logic (okay, gaping plot holes, are you happy?), the script is exciting and fast-paced and each copy was probably lit on fire before being handed to the actors.

Even if this is the second time I've reviewed this movie here, allow me to summarize the plot. It's futuretime once again and Earth is as gay and boring as ever, while there's all sorts of excitement to be had in space. The USS Kelvin is attacked by a massive Romulan ship, commanded by the delightfully evil Nero (Eric Bana) who spear-guts (In the future? Hot damn!) their captain, leaving first officer George Kirk in charge of escaping certain death. His pregnant wife goes into labor (women!) as weapons systems and autopilot fail, leaving Kirk to pilot the Kelvin into the Romulan ship and buy the escape pods time to escape, creating a sassy 9/11 subtext.

Mrs. Kirk gives birth to Baby Kirk who grows up to be Big Poppa Kirk (Chris Pine) who enlists in Starfleet and meets Leonard McCoy (Pathfinder) and begins a rivalry with Spock (Zachary Quinto). When Captain Nero appears for the first time in 25 years and takes the Enterprise's captain, Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) captive, Kirk and Spock must learn the true nature of friendship to overcome a villain they both have vendettas against.

But let's focus on that first paragraph for a while. Star Trek's opening is another in a long line of perfect opening scenes this year. Abrams is king of this scene, stacking one horrible revelation on top of another and buttfucking the audience into nosebleed with suspense. It's almost an argument for short films, strangely enough, where this ten-minute sequence outclasses an otherwise excellent film on every level, mostly because the writing doesn't have to spend time connecting the dots and the characters are established in such quick strokes. Maybe it's an argument for good writing. I don't know. The film never maintains that momentum, and I don't blame them, really, but that one scene is an action/suspense masterpiece that, surprisingly, preserves the slow, naval feeling of Star Trek space battles.

As an action film and as an adventure film, it is fast and jaw-shattering, but it never again manages to be king of suspense mountain and the construction of individual scenes becomes rather more pedestrian.

None of that's too much of an issue, a film two funzos lower on the fun scale than that first scene would still rock your cocks. The only grave mistake this film makes is with James Kirk himself. First, Chris Pine is miscast, but the role is also written wrong. I'm all for reinterpreting a classic character, but Kirk is at odds with the logic of the script. How can this cocksucker ever inspire loyalty in a crew? That's suppsoed to be the defining aspect of Kirk: he inspires loyalty. Chris Pine does the film no favors by playing Kirk as a smug bastard, instead of making him charismatic and forceful in spite of his dickheaded behavior, he's just brash and dickheaded in spite of his dickheaded behavior.

Treatment of other characters elsewhere is way better. Doc McCoy gets a perfect performance from Pathfinder, Spock is less sad-looking thanks to Zachary Quinto (who was always my favorite part of the perpetual shitwagon Heroes, Lost's bumbling little brother), Scotty gets Simon Pegg in his best performance since Hot Fuzz, and seeing that is worth the fact that you'll never make out with the ticket girl now that she's seen you buy a ticket to Star Trek. Uhura least resembles her original character, and is played by an indistinguished Zoe Saldana, which is a depressing thought, going back to her work here after her work in Avatar blew my mind all over the wall.

Elsewhere, Eric Bana is great in a role that's a bit too small for him, playing an evil wizard. There has been a lot of derision aimed at his performance and how it's one of the weaker elements of the film, but that's something I haven't even begun to figure out yet. He flies around in a giant spaceship that looks like a petrified squid and turns planets inside-out. He also made a spaceship that can only be navigated by Olympic longjumps, unlike the sterile white Plexiglas of the Enterprise. Really, the design is top-notch. It maintains a very 1960s-futuristic feel while at the same time updating it to something we recognize as futuristic (phones the size of feet!). It's not terribly subtle, but it's pretty sweet and it'll make any smelly Indiana viewer think that he's an expert on production design.

Okay, okay, LENS FLARES. I thought the lens flares gave the future a look of brightness and optimism and gave the film a totally unique look. It's a self-conscious move: lens flares, after all, are only produced by a camera. I don't think that's too different from modern films being shot in black and white or any amount of flashy cinematography. After all, any of those techniques are reminding the viewer, in a very deliberate way, that they're watching a movie. Maybe I'm missing the real reason that lens flares are the devil's tool, but for what it's worth, I thought they were great for what they were. As a technique to give the film a memorable look, it worked, and it worked on a thematic level.

Similarly, it's a good aesthetic to capture the action and translates well between the action and interactions between characters and between the ships. As I said before, the space battles are played as fast-paced naval battles and are shot with verve and style. The action between individual characters harbors one of the film's best tricks to keep the film flowing quickly. That is, none of the action sequences last very long at all. They're all shot and staged excellently, but that tendency for them to go on for ages and burn the audience out is ignored. Instead the action bleeds into the next scene seamlessly (watch the drill scene closely to see how each individual scene is attached to a much different sort of action scene) and the tension never even begins to fade.

So, let's recap. Great opening, looks like it was rubbed with ham, terrible lead performance, good supporting performances.

Take that, Star Trek canon.

9/10

Waking Nightmares

I'm not ashamed to say that if I'm asked what I thought the scariest movie was of 2009, I say Coraline without any hesitation. For this review, I watched it with my four-year-old brother and ten-year-old sister and both of them nearly wet their skulls in terror. While my ample body hair will weave together and crush my skeleton as a defense mechanism against fear, I understand the sensation from a scientist's position and think Coraline would be the best candidate to inspire the sensation should I be a weaker man one day.

Horror for children sounds a bit derogatory, so let's clear something up: films should not be made with a demographic in mind. The marketing campaign is the one that decides the demo, but because a film is animated, or features a child as a protagonist, or isn't rated R for extreme skull fucking, doesn't delegate it to being played on repeat in an orphanage until rug pirates do something made of chocolate.

Coraline is the very Gaiman-esque story of a little girl who encounters a magical creature in her house, one that assumes the form of her mother and populates a world almost precisely like her own. But where Coraline's home world is as dull and boring as anyone's (except she lives in a STOP MOTION WORLD, which would be cool, the little brat), this Other world is a fantastical world where everything is tailor-made to Coraline's wishes. Before long, this Other world starts to show its seems and Coraline's Other Mother begins to show some nasty intentions that would get her reported to CPS by any responsible neighbor.

The film is based on a Neil Gaiman book from 2002, and while I'm not familiar with that particular book, I'm familiar with Neil Gaiman and I'm familiar with Dave McKean's cover art, and I'm familiar with the crushing disappointment I felt when I discovered that the film wouldn't be in the style of McKean's art. As much as I love seeing stop-motion animation, and I love stop-motion, I can still lament what a visual handjob this movie would be if it had been done with traditional 2D animation in this style.

Yeah, yeah, we all know (Maybe. Who are you?) how much I love hand-drawn animation, but its underappreciated little brother, stop motion, is pretty fucking incredible as well. It's also the most labor-intensive form of animation. When I was nine or ten or something, I saw a featurette on the animation process behind Chicken Run where they explained that a really good day saw a little less than one second of animation being shot. I know to this day that I would probably hang myself after the first week, which would give the desperate animators a chance to cut some corners and use my dangling feet as a piece of set dressing.

It's unfortunate that, unless James Cameron's home-theater 3D is the real deal, I'll probably never be able to see this film as it was intended ever again. In 3D, Coraline is truly impressive. As I mentioned in my brief writeup for my 2009 in Review, stop motion offers the perfect venue for 3D: while it fails to add a realistic depth to a cartoony CGI film, and it looks too cartoonish for a live-action film, stop motion is the perfect compromise between animation and live action, and therefore provides the most seamless 3D experience.

And look at that, the 3D does something in this movie. Instead of eye candy, it becomes a visual cue that we have entered the Other world (that's not to say Cameron didn't do something similar in Avatar, but I think that the jungles of Pandora were marked more by a specific color palette than use of 3D, although there was some of that). Our first glimpse of this world is a wide, deep-focus shot of a kitchen, lit with the glowing amber and bright reds that will also come to characterize the Other world, just as the dull blues and grays will come to characterize the real world. Coraline's wonder, in this case, is our wonder.

Coraline herself is exceptionally expressive for a stop motion character, something that I haven't ever really expected from this medium. Her emotions never seem out of place for an eleven-year-old girl and the filmmakers are tasteful enough to not juxtapose moments of inhuman maturity and clarity for the sake of plot-building against more realistic eleven-year-old

Like all of Gaiman's work, it's rooted deep in mythology, and if he has aspirations to be a modern myth-maker, he'll never come closer to success than with Coraline. His inclusion of so many mythological elements, such as talking animals with personalities based on that animal's traits (the laconic cat, the scheming rat), the abundance of the number three, and lots of other stuff that you don't need me to list. As a hero, Coraline is a very typical eleven-year-old (I'm guessing) girl, and the film doesn't jump around that to try and stuff her into the mold of the hero. She's bratty, argumentative and impulsive and has the interests and dress sense of a little girl raised by professional gardeners.

But the real triumph, the real terror of the film is the Other Mother. With buttons sewn over her eyes, she at first appears (aside from, you know, the buttons) exactly like Coraline's real mother. Slowly over the film, she becomes more insect-like and the buttons more like the beady black eyes of an insect. In her final scene, the set dissolves into a nightmarish spider web and she into an enormous spidermonster (?) that will send your children to the therapist for years. Maybe it's because I never expect a movie marketed towards children (I know, I know) to even attempt horror, but that scene has never not given me the fucking spine-tingles.

In the end, my love for this movie comes down to a simple matter of taste. This sort of subdued horror, especially in animation, is something that appeals endlessly to me. There are things in this movie that are truly inappropriate for children, not because of the content, but because of the execution. Some of the creatures designed for this film and the world they inhabit is exactly the sort of thing that inhabits a grown man's nightmares. Where most horror films try to startle you and give you a murder boner, Coraline gives you nightmare imagery and claustrophobic editing, and I'll consider those scares far more genuine any day.

10/10

Virtues for the Vicious

The Notably Unenthusiastic Return of the Michael Bay Retrospective is here, and you guys thought that I'd forgotten all about it. No, I just chose to pretend it didn't exist for a while. Michael Bay Retrospective, you are the troll that lives under my stairs. You know how to twist my loves into something awful and irrational that haunts me for days and your eyes are two pools of terror and rabies. However, you can't slam a Michael Bay retrospective closed in a hardcover book and expect it to turn into cocaine, so instead of being afraid for the rest of my life, I'm going to stand up to this retrospective and finish the shit out of it. At least that's how I felt until I watched Pearl Harbor.

I'd like you guys to know that I'm plunging my face into a bowl made of scalding hot hot sauce and filled with scalding hot lime juice for YOU, even if I consider my ego a reader of my blog. I'll accept your girlfriends as payment.

So I'm pretty over Michael Bay at this point; his movies are just bad. His action is pretty pedestrian and his editors, brave though they may be for working on a Michael Bay film, don't seem to be able to keep up with him. Furthermore, he's now given me two movies in a row with such unabashed sentimentality that it's like being punched in the face by a man made of sugar. Armageddon had that totally unearned death scene with Bruce Willis, and I thought that was bad. On the plus side, there isn't any weird fetishism in this film, but Michael Bay still doesn't seem to get sex.

Pearl Harbor is a controlled, committee-branded attempt to cash in on the real-life events of Pearl Harbor and the flag-waving and country-singing that the phrase itself instigates. That sounds like something any grouchy critic might say, but I stand by it.

That it's artificially lengthened by about two hours, and includes enough flag-waving to bolster the flag industry and push us out of this recession is enough proof to me. The constant speech-making and the indecent amount of patriotism are like the steel bolts in the USS Arizona.

Frankly the scope is just too big. You can't create two characters meant to be heroes and put them in the center of Pearl Harbor and have them continue to be the center of the film without making them single-handedly turn back the Jap invasion and win the war. Bay opts to create an ensemble of characters and follow them around during the attack, which is a common enough trick (but one that rarely works out - see: Bobby). That's okay, but for my taste I'd rather follow one character or one group and get a feel for them and their character and how they react to the situation than getting flashes of 2-dimensional characters doing heroic things and then disappearing into the ether.

But that's just me. Instead of saying what I would like to have seen, I'll just poke holes in what the film did do. For one, the ground-level view of battle, seen through the eyes of our three leads, their friends and squadmates and commanding officers is sort of gimped by us constantly going back to FDR making profound speeches to the Joint Chiefs. Oh, then we quantum leap into the Japanese military and listen to them talk about how America just can't be beat because they've got so much heart and baseball is fun. That sucked, too.

The general thrust of the story is "into the heart of modern Japan, who we will never let live down the events of Pearl Harbor, even though we stole their military and are at their robotic mercy" via Rafe McCawley, played by apple pie (I'm just joking, it's Ben Affleck. But seriously. Apple pie. America. Heart disease. Corporations.) and his best bud Danny Walker. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, they're the stereotypical American fighter pilots/best buds that you would see in any movie made during World War II, and we even get introduced to Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) in the manner of any one of those wartime romances. Unfortunately, this mildly successful portion of the film is at odds with everything else in the movie, with its camp and lite tone against the rest of the film's devout seriousness. We spend a lot of time following Evelyn and her group of girls, who I think are nurses but are shown getting Purple Hearts at the end, so maybe they were secret agents who were putting bombs in the bodies of the wounded and throwing them at the Japanese.

It doesn't take long for Rafe to be presumed dead and for Danny to fuck Evelyn, setting into motion a mindfuck of contrived romantic triangularity and soap opera buttfucking. This in the middle of a fucking (PG-13) war movie that constantly cuts to FDR (portrayed not as the crippled socialist we all love, but as the brash, invincible and still pretty crippled ideal leader by the insane Jon Voight, in full repentance for his hippie days). It's no wonder that when this movie came out, when I was eleven, my image of it was a man-man-lady threesome in the water during the attack. I didn't know what a train was then, but now I think that's a funny image.

I just don't see how all these pieces fit together. It reeks of a script given a checklist by a studio for maximum emotional manipulation. If you're a communist, you'll still get sucked in by the love story, if you're black you'll be crying at the sight of the first black man to ever win the Medal of Honor, if you love water you'll be devastated by all the splashing and boat sinking. It really does have something for everyone, as long as you don't like things that are good.

As for Michael Bay, his filmmaking is as gaudy as ever, but I don't think his evil has really shown its true form yet. He's still pretending like he's a patriot that isn't planning the downfall of Western civilization.

My favorite of his directorial flourishes in this movie had something to do with Ewen Bremner. Ewen Bremner plays the goofy, stuttering squadmate of our two heroes, and at the beginning he sparks a romance with the hottest bitch in that group of nurses (I think it's Jaime King but don't hold me to that). They eventually get married and are happy and idyllic while Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett fight over the somewhat less attractive Kate Beckinsale. It's pretty nice of Bay to give Ewen Bremner a better, more successful romance than Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, but then Bay unceremoniously blows up Bremner's wife. A lot of people die in this movie, but none of them get the same joyously enthusiastic sadism aimed towards Bremner for being goofy, ugly and stuttery. It's like a cut scene from In the Company of Men.

Michael Bay's fingerprints seem sort of drowned out here; it's so obvious that the film had a billion people working on it during the conceptual stages. The worst crime that the film commits isn't even really Bay's fault. As director, he's liable for the content of his film, but the absurd padding is the fault of the screenwriter(s), first and foremost. First of all, it's an hour of bullshit before the attack even starts, and then that goes on for an hour, and then there's an hour of getting back at the Japs by showing the Doolittle Raid. Meanwhile, we get about ten thousand disconnected sub-plots, like Cuba Gooding Jr. saving the world. He never even meets the heroes. He's only there to get affluent blacks into the audience (a tap-worthy demo if those Madea films are any indication), but is a trainwreck from a story point of view. And there's about fifteen minutes dedicated to Evelyn convincing an officer who she saved earlier in the film to let her listen in on the radios while Rafe and Danny bomb the Japs back, and it adds nothing to the story. It's just more padding to make the movie three hours long. It's embarrassing how badly this film wants to be epic.

One last thing because this is getting much too long. The jignostic attitude the film takes isn't uncommon for war films, but I was really turned off by the way the film refuses to acknowledge that, yes, we got fucked at Pearl Harbor. Instead of offering an ending where America is shaken and disturbed by certain events, it tacks on an hour of Danny and Rafe going back to Japan to get them back and wave the shit out of some flags.

In short, this is a horrible, horrible movie that bored me punch-drunk. I can't believe I have four more movies in this series.

2/10

Nemisees, Nemesi

There's a story that the producers of Star Trek: Nemesis wanted Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to direct their film. He asked to be allowed to rewrite the script himself, and when the producers refused, he turned down their offer. In that moment, the Star Trek franchise ended and would need to be pumped full of youth and lens flares before it would be suitable for human consumption again.

But you can't really describe Nemesis as being fit for human consumption. It's probably the most frustrating of any of the films, because if Nicholas Meyer had been allowed his rewrite and if he had been behind the camera, I have no doubt it would be the best of the original ten Star Trek films.

I don't mean to talk Nicholas Meyer up so much. After all, I don't have much love for Wrath of Khan, and while I quite liked The Undiscovered Country, it's no masterpiece and has its fair share of flaws. The problem is that up to this point, very few Star Trek filmmakers have had any experience behind the camera before making their film. Really, the only experienced director was Robert Wise, who made what is probably my favorite of the original six films. After that we had Nicholas Meyer make Wrath of Khan, his first movie, and then we had Leonard Nimoy for two films, then William Shatner, then we brought back Meyer. For Generations, we had David Carsons, who had never made a film before, and then First Contact and Insurrection, the first and second films of castmember Jonathon Frakes.

Now we have Stuart Baird, who will now be my go-to associative image for the word "hack". He shoots and stages the movie like his kid's first basketball game. Baird is an editor of some note, notably for his excellent work on Casino Royale, Lethal Weapon and the original Omen. He's got Edge of Darkness coming out soon, which looks like an entertaining, straightforward action film with a really pissed off Mel Gibson and directed by Martin Campbell. I'm sure his work there will be excellent as well, but as a director, he's really an unfortunate choice. He's the entire reason this film fails.

In this space adventure, Picard and the Gang run into a clone of Picard named Shinzon, played by Tom Hardy, one of our finest young actors. He has taken control of the Romulan and Reman (I GET IT) empires and is planning to destroy the Federation by killing their favorite sexagenarian. In other news, Data uncovers an evil clone named B-4 that has next to nothing to do with the plot.

Something I'd like to address. Picard's second-in-command, Riker, is retiring to spend more time with his back hair and Data is being promoted to his position. I get that Data is supposed to be this series' Spock, but Spock was capable, badass and Leonard Nimoy. I wouldn't trust Data to lick stamps. He's always malfunctioning and going kill-crazy, and he comes off like a child. I suppose that's the point, but I wouldn't trust him at the helm of the ship should the captain be taken hostage. How about Worf, whose every command would be "furrow brow angrily"? Or the unnamed helmsman afraid to take much action after what happened to the gay helmsman from First Contact. Or the ship's cook.

So Stuart Baird. I suppose we should get back to him. His action scenes are so by-the-books, so unengaging, so uninteresting that I couldn't imagine that he bent over backwards for this directing job, if the stories are to be believed. There's no flash, there's no panache, there's no passion for the art. For instance, there's a car chase scene. What happens in the car chase? They drive, they shoot, they escape. Shot from the middle distance, most likely while the crew was at lunch. There's a shootout. They let a sixty-year-old man fire two guns at once, one of which is a rifle. He takes cover and takes pot shots while Data deciphers a foreign language to operate the door controls. He doesn't pull much out of this excellent cast, especially Patrick Stewart, who has a script that finally comes within swinging distance of his immense talent, but he seems so disaffected and tired of the role, and the director is so incapable of getting anything out of him, that it might be his saddest work yet.

Worse yet is Tom Hardy, a brilliant actor in a very high-profile role, where he was obviously directed to say things quietly and menacingly, stand in the darkest part of the set and be bald. When I saw that he was in this film, I immediately got excited, thinking that we would at least get a good performance from him. It's such a fucking shame that Baird manages to squander the talents of Tom Hardy, but it's almost a feet of incredible failure. That's like making Chuck E. Cheese boring.

And speaking of Chuck E. Cheese, the script still suffers from the same problems, namely we spend a lot of time focusing on side characters just to appease fans, not because they can be effectively worked into the script. We get to address fun themes, like the nature of self and Picard goes up against a real villain who he has an emotional stake against. It has all the makings for a dark film where the Enterprise crew battles their most dangerous villain yet, but everything about the execution is terrible. There's really not one thing that the crew or actors get right, and it's disheartening. If the producers had given Meyer a few months to rewrite the screenplay, the franchise could have had its biggest hit ever, instead it got its lowest-grossing film ever and killed any notion of a Voyager or Deep Space Nine film.

I just wish the producers could have figured out what the problems were. They've had the same problems this entire series, and they never learn anything from the successes or failures. When the Insurrection script was rushed through development and even the director condemned the film, they didn't learn anything. When they hired Nicholas Meyer a second time and ended up with a good, successful film, they learned nothing.

These films have ignored very simple doctrines of filmmaking that could have saved them. Almost every one of these films, good and bad, seems to lack even basic filmmaking craft. The producers could have mined the independent scene for talented young sci-fi directors, which there were plenty of in the early 90s, especially, given that the Star Wars generation was just making an impact.

What a waste.

4/10

Dark, Windowless Rooms in Review: 2009

I had an emotional crisis over whether or not to share a top ten list this year. Without access to screeners, theaters showing independent (or semi-independent, or faux-independent) films or money enough for essentials I hadn't seen a lot of the supposedly great films that have been released this year, and my Oscar-predicting capacity is diminished by how little Oscarbait I've seen. Not to mention, my friends don't tend to want to see movies that don't have robots fucking and since I'm 19 there's a dreadful social stigma about seeing movies by yourself, made worse since I see almost all the local theater employees socially.

A lot of the films on this list were seen before I became a semi-published sad person and don't have reviews on this blog, or have reviews from before I started taking this shit seriously. I hope that I'll be able to publish reviews for the really excellent films that come up here.

That said, I convinced myself that I had seen enough really great films to make some sort of list out of them, so, lest I keep stalling, allow me to present my list of the best films of 2009, which isn't an authoritative list by any sort of human or animal logic. Also, I'm going to count them down so that you'll have a chance to not read all of this shit.

7. Star Trek
The Action Film of 2009.

A lot of critics are putting Avatar in this position, and I'm inclined to agree, but I must confess a snare that film faces in my critical gauntlet. It's stupid to complain that it's almost three hours long but it seems to exit the title of action film as a result. I don't want to talk too much about it here, because I hope to review it again soon, but suffice it to say it's fun. And it's got some really excellent cinematography, although I can see how you could hate it if you were a formalist fagstone who thinks that a film being self-aware is the same thing as breaking the fourth wall - lens flares and camera tricks are the same thing as the editing tricks introduced so heavily in the early 90s, but we'll get into this more later, I suppose.

6. Up
The Great Story of 2009.

With anything as perfect and heartbreaking and did I mention fucking heartbreaking as Up's opening scenes, it was guaranteed a spot on anyone's top ten, even before you remember it's a film aimed at children but with the emotional poignance of a far more mature film. That may go to show that a lot of the films aimed at older audiences are more interested in jumping through hoops, and where a story matters less, like a children's film that is mostly about colorful visuals and where the story needs not be dictated by what the Academy will find acceptable, a more developed story with a more mature take on mature themes (in this case, aging) can be found. And people wonder why Oscarbait tends to be so emotionally inert. It may not be the unrivaled masterpiece that Pixar has been making recently, but it's a really wonderful script.

5. Coraline
The Visual Experience of 2009.

Combining beautiful stop-motion animation with the most effective use of CGI ever (despite its thematic relevance, Avatar's 3D was still a bit strange and jarring at times). I will forever be excited to see stop-motion films in 3D. Since computer animation is flat and artificial, the depth looks synthetic, like the rest of the film, and doesn't fit the aesthetic very well (one could say that this will change as animated characters get more photorealistic, but I think that argument is laughable after Robert Zemeckis' last three films - square peg, round hole). At the same time, 3D has an inherently cartoony look (observe the opening of Avatar), and fits strangely with a live-action film. It would seem we have a wonderful technology with no practical application until we wander into the realm of stop-motion, a place that uses tangible objects for animation and gives the film real-world depth while keeping the characters and environment perfectly cartoonish, making them the most excellent objects to interact in a 3D environment.


4. Observe and Report
The Character Study of 2009.

This could have easily been a very important film, and it's sad that it was overlooked. I don't expect everyone to really get it, but it's rare to use such an effective, popular form of comedy to get at something deathly serious and without stopping the comedy for a serious, fixed-camera piece of dramatic exposition. Ronnie is a messed up character, and between the cruel, thoughtless things he does and the strange things he says, he becomes a comic figure, but one you might encounter in the real world. Seth Rogen turns his everyman persona up to eleven to play the Ritalin-addled, socially frustrated and self-deluding hero; a Travis Bickle in a satirical environment.

3. The Princess and the Frog
The Loveliest of 2009.

There's really no way for me to describe my feelings for Princess and the Frog without saying exactly what they are: it's like the most beautiful thing in the world was taken away, never to be seen again, and then brought back to you. The idea of ever seeing it again is enough to make you want to cry tears of joy, and seeing it on the screen is enough to make you want to melt with joy. The film overflows with color and excitement and is everything I want to see in a movie. It even shut up for the second act and let me sit there and think about how tap-dancingly great it was before dragging me through a voodoo fever dream for the last fifteen minutes and ending with a shot of flowing, golden beauty that I hardly wanted to move during the credits.

2. A Serious Man
The Oddity of 2009

It's a strange film, which is pretty typical of the Coens. As such a young person who still has so much to learn about film, I feel that this is something I will grow to appreciate more and more as I get older and as I rewatch it. I don't like being told that I'm not entirely grasping a film just because I'm young, but in this case, it's true. I realize watching it that it's a formalist doggie treat, but the whole film is weird as shit, featuring so many jabs at narrative logic and the sort of people we expect (or require) to see in films and the way we expect (or require) their role or arc to be. People have thought of shorter ways to describe the Coen Brothers' current form, but I don't think any of those phrases ("playing with your expectations") do it any justice. They're doing a better job than most critics realize, such as when they complain about how the Coens don't like their characters. As a fifteen-year-old discovering their films, I realized that they think it's disrespectful to the characters to put them through simple conflicts and have them emerge much better people, so when a Coen character goes through a series of epic trials that only ever illuminate hidden aspects of that character or deposit them on the other side, merely confused is the way they show their most profound love. It seems so odd only because we've had a story that's far too realistic for our liking woven in front of us using cinematic language, editing, flashbacks, to take the place of the reactions and thought processes that the characters are experienced.

1. Inglourious Basterds
The Film of 2009.

A film I can't get over. It's incredibly strange and obviously perfect. It replaces action scenes without intense dialogue, perfectly mounted and played immaculately and exquisitely by a cast that never misses a beat and never fails to completely understand their dialogue, character and scene. It's Tarantino's most perfect cast. If making a film so strange and so given to implication, while at the same time keeping your cast perfectly in tune with each other, the dialogue and the character and playing every beat and cue to undercoat the actors isn't the sign of a great director, then I give up. Tarantino will never top this script and he will always try to figure out the exact mixture of ecstasy and Chinese food he consumed that allowed his actors free reign over his film. The more I watch this, the more I realize that it's about the cast. Christoph Waltz is clearly paramount to the film's success, but without the work of Michael Fassbender, Melanie Laurent, Brad Pitt, August Diehl, and Daniel Brühl, their respective scenes would have been unconvincing and boring. The cinematography is even especially functional, lighting characters faces in subtle ways to reveal all facial expressions. So many of his films have been about the words the actors speak, but Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's achingly genuine love letter to the actors that speak his beloved dialogue and is the last thing to cross off before we welcome him into the big kid's club. He could easily be insane, but his insanity would almost be a natural phenomenon, that his mind is so perfectly in tune with the filmmaking medium and his films make every other film and every other filmmaker seem pedantic and safe by comparison. We're watching a flaming genius stop to prove he's still a genius for a moment before going back to the flaming genius that he engages himself with. Inglourious Basterds is like making eye contact with that genius.

Hail.