88 Minutes, The Dark Knight, My Kid Could Paint That, Stop-Loss, Walk Hard, Bill, Lions for Lambs, Savage Grace, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jumper

88 Minutes (2007, Jon Avnet)
"88 Minutes" is completely implausible, but it's the epitome of a star vehicle, the kind of thing that only gets made because Al Pacino agrees to do it. And he's still a good enough actor -- despite all the criticisms leveled against him that he's been doing the same thing for years -- that his line-readings are never boring. It's genuinely entertaining for the first while, and pretty funny in the way that Pacino approaches his character as a guy caught in a big mess. It's not an overly violent movie and it mostly focuses on Pacino, so if the plot is ridiculous, so what? I laughed out loud frequently and I had a pretty good time.

The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)
The plot is often preposterous -- Ledger's Joker continually and accurately assumes what seemingly everyone in Gotham will do next, and plans accordingly so they fall into his traps; even his mistakes are considered. The movie is filled with multitudes of "ingenious" sequences, such as the Joker implanting a bomb inside a living person, and they're the kinds of things that you can find thrilling once, but they serve no real purpose other than to astound the audience. Scenes are introduced and then tossed away -- we see the Scarecrow at the beginning of the film, never to be seen again. The Joker manages to break into Bruce Wayne's penthouse (referred to as the safest place in Gotham), and when Batman jumps out of the window to save someone the scene ends; but what happens to the Joker and his henchman who are still inside the penthouse? Scenes like that are just ignored. (Other scenes make no logical sense at all, like when passengers on a ship targeted to explode vote -- by putting their votes on paper and into a hat -- about whether to detonate a bomb on another boat to save their own lives.) The relative implausibility of Batman's gadgets -- he pretty much maps the entire city with sonar (and Morgan Freeman can find one person out of thirty million) -- could be forgivable, because the gadgets are part of the Batman myth. But they have none of the fun of the ones in the James Bond movies. Many of the performances are good, in particular Gary Oldman and Heath Ledger, who has a truly amazing scene where he's dressed in a female nurse's outfit. But Christian Bale's Batman is pretty much just a gruff-sounding voice. Nolan's directing seems highly influenced by Michael Mann's epic "Heat" -- note the opening bank robbery sequence. But he has none of the sleek, icy efficiency of Mann's film. (Although Nolan's film is the kind of thing that babbles about "chaos" in a city that looks like New York, to make it seem up on world issues.) Nolan's Batman isn't an epic so much as it's a movie loaded to the brim.


My Kid Could Paint That (2007, Amir Bar-Lev)
The idea that a kid could paint abstract art throws a wrench in the movement in general. If all you believe in is the end result, and if those results are the same whether authored by a kid or an educated, trained adult, then the kid truly is just as good an artist. If you believe in narratives in art, then the backgrounds of artists -- whether it's their private lives or their images (the way you "imagine" the method of painting in a Pollack painting) -- then the end results aren't all there is. If Marla's parents painted her paintings for her, then the greater question of the value of authorship comes into play -- that people are purchasing hype. The Marla brand may sell because Marla is such a young artist; however, the stand-in in art has existed at least since Warhol, Warhol himself saying that many of his works were actually developed by other people, his "name" serving simply as a generic brand -- an artistic act in and of itself. The Marla case may not be that sophisticated. Towards the end, the movie brings up a genuine sense of unease, because the mother seems honest and the father less so. (It's possible that the mother is unaware even if the father really is painting the paintings, since the two work opposing shifts.) The father is implicated, awkwardly trying to cover up why his daughter asks him for help on camera, or scrambling to expound on the brilliance of one painting that was via film proven to be painted by Marla (a painting that a gallery viewer thinks looks nothing like the other Marlas). As far as the mystery about who paints the Marlas, consider the way that the walls in the Olmstead's house are painted and compare them to Marla's paintings. Then consider the titles of her paintings ("Ode to Pollock"). The movie works on both the level of mystery and abstract art expose, and both are good.


Stop-Loss (2008, Kimberly Peirce)
It has a good heart -- its sympathies are with soldiers, and even though a character says "Fuck the President," it's not particularly political in the right-left sense. As a movie about former soldiers it's a fine enough statement; none of them are heroicized for easy sympathy (they're not Tom Hanks). But it may be too close to the Iraq war to make an overall coherent narrative. And while the movie is dedicated to real human beings, to make a war movie while the war is still going on and give it a feeling of immediacy it may need the added outrage of agitprop.

Walk Hard (2007, Jake Kasdan)
While I think it's written with a bit of mean-spirited mockery -- is it really that funny to send-up "Walk the Line," a movie about a real person who really did witness his own brother's gruesome death? -- it's also an antiquated comedy and that's kind of interesting. (With references to Elvis, Johnny Cash, and The Incredible Hulk TV show, this is a movie aimed not at teenagers but at audiences in their 50s.) What's good about it is that it's not quite as forced as other recent comedies (and there's a genuinely hilarious moment when John C. Reilly and Kristen Wiig compare their dreams; he, to be a musician; she, to live in a house made of candy). What's lousy about it is that it's a one-joke comedy. But John C. Reilly has such a truly lovely voice that at least it serves as an example of why he should be cast in a musical that doesn't think life is one big joke.

Bill (2007, Bernie Goldmann, Melisa Wallack)
Perhaps a hard sell because it's not really a comedy and it's not really an "indie" movie; it's one of those movies about a guy going through an identity crisis, and in this case happens to concern itself mostly with a budding friendship between Aaron Eckhart and the teenage Logan Lerman. Although it treads similar ground, it doesn't have the pretensions of "American Beauty."


Lions for Lambs (2007, Robert Redford)
Although it may not be a great movie, Robert Redford -- never someone I've cared about particularly -- has a genuine interest in story, even though his film is unconventional for a Hollywood drama in the sense that it's essentially a triad of debates. That in itself is enough to make it interesting, and Redford is intelligent and caring enough to make the debates worth listening to. In a general sense they deal with the apathy of Americans about this war, which has taken longer than World War 2. But what makes it particularly successful is that it's a movie where no one knows exactly what to think, but still care and look for answers regardless.


Savage Grace (2007, Tom Kalin)
A movie that combines elegant finery and decadent melodrama, it gives Julianne Moore, the fiercest American actress, her long-overdue "Mommie Dearest" role. The movie isn't a bungled art movie like that one -- it's craziness is intended -- but it's a Freudian statement if ever there was one. What could be titled "The Creation of a Homosexual," Moore's character doesn't view homosexuality as an aberration, she associates it with Proust. And even though some people may take the movie as associating homosexuality and insanity, I think it's closer to the idea of homosexuality as an evolutionary form -- Boulez, fashion, and sexual hedonism. (Moore's son, at about 12, invites another boy over while his parents are away. And the clothes in the movie -- Moore's blotchy blood-red dress; her son's lined sweater and above-the-knee shorts -- are enough to maintain interest.) The movie is marvelously cast, not just Moore, but the impeccable Stephen Dillane, the otherworldly Eddie Redmayne, and I was delighted to see Barney Clark, the wonderful child actor from Roman Polanski's equally wonderful "Oliver Twist."

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nicholas Stoller)
Although filmmakers should be allowed to stretch and we as audiences shouldn't relegate them to churning out the same movie year after year, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is not only overlong (a trait in the Apatow tradition) but an uneasy mix of relationship drama and comedy. (It's also neither written nor directed by Apatow himself.) You can admire how the makers want a comedy that focuses on the human element and one that isn't afraid to spend some time doing it, but the laughs are few and far between, and the insights are few. Russell Brand and Mila Kunis are relaxed, open performers, but the movie seems adrift, and the only truly inspired moments -- aside from Brand's performance -- come from irrelevant scenes of Billy Baldwin as the star of a "CSI"-type drama who specializes in gruesomely awful one-liners.

Jumper (2008, Doug Liman)
Skillfully directed by Doug Liman, "Jumper" could have been a perfectly entertaining adventure comedy, but instead we're given a movie where specially gifted young men (they teleport, essentially like Nightcrawler in the X-Men movies) are hunted by a vigilante who doesn't think they should have that power, so large chunks of the movie are about them evading their captors. The opening, where a boy first discovers his power, could have set the stage for a pleasant children's adventure, but the boy gets older, and when he gets older he becomes much duller, in the form of Hayden Christenson. Luckily we have Jamie Bell, in a supernatural Angry Young Man role, to liven things up. I think Liman's directing has some fun to it, but the script is a let-down.

Mixed Blood

Mixed Blood (1985, Paul Morrissey)
There are so many conflicting tones in the work of Paul Morrissey that it can seem hard to reconcile them. There is little difference in the gentleness here -- the ending image of the sad-eyed stud -- and in "Flesh." There is a relaxing optimism, heightened by the use of ethnic music (Morrissey equates rock and roll with drug suggestion), and yet the subject matter concerns a mother hen and her group of underage drug dealers, convinced that their way of life is acceptable because there are "no laws to stop us." Morrissey's film is thoroughly absurd, an anti-drug satire, and yet it is not an un-serious film. When the kids sell drugs on a street corner like a lemonade stand it's like a metaphor for the brazenness of drugs in the society. He presents a kind of hopeless comedy where kids, among them the impossibly beautiful Rodney Harvey, "go drink beer, break someone's teeth, and go party." And a party? "Drink more beer, break someone's head, and go home." One character describes their life as "so fucking boring you could puke and die."

Morrissey provides a vision of a community of drug users wallowing in squalidness, complete with the dealers who provide it. And yet the conservatism of his morality as it pertains to drugs goes against his liberal inclusiveness and comedic, non-dogmatic, gentle, and religion-free films. (His films may be religion-free because they present his view of life in the absence of religion and other forms of social order.) Even in a squalid den of drug dealers, murder, and addiction there are core elements of assumed families.

His formal qualities are largely influenced by his open-if-still-stylized approach. In his unobstructed visuals -- neither light nor dark, with a tendency towards rot -- and the exaggerated differentness of his characters he recalls Mike Leigh. His films are so intently focused on personality that they defy traditional ideas of acting. His performers don't act, they exist. The stagy fight scenes aren't realistic so much as they are gruesome punch lines. What may be perceived as bad acting is the lack of actual "acting" -- it's Bressonian but with an overripe satirical bluntness. When characters here say "nigger," it doesn't have the usual power-dominating force the word carries in most movies, it's simply blunt casualness.

WALL-E, Criminal Justice, Seed of Chucky, The Savages

WALL-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)
It's as visually impressive as I was lead to believe, but I think the comparisons to "2001" are based mostly on the intended references rather than similarity in achievement: a lonely bot in space, a villainous robot that looks like HAL, classical music pieces borrowed from the same Kubrick movie; "Hello, Dolly!" in space instead of "Daisy Bell" sung by HAL in "2001." It's easy to generate an audience's feelings for robots when you give the robots human features -- eyes, fingers -- so I don't think that's much to write home about. I had heard conservatives disliking the movie for its environmental aspect -- how Earth is abandoned when no more plants can grow -- but what I found more suspect was the insinuation that robots are lovable but people are all fat idiots. I'm not offended by the environmental doom, but rather the lazy cynicism. The movie ends with chasing and robots fighting each other, and that doesn't live up to the lonely opening. There's a lot about the movie to admire, but the hype overtakes the actual achievement.


Criminal Justice (2008, Otto Bathurst, Luke Watson)
Although the miniseries starts off as murder investigation and trial, eventually, though the nature of its length, it manages to make broader points about the court and justice system, albeit never straying from its sole case of a wrongfully convicted murderer. We're mostly sure that he's innocent from the start, even though the incident isn't quite clear and the evidence points towards him (a splendid Ben Whishaw). A large part of the emotional content is from the verbal abuse the suspect is dealt in court from the people who believe he did it. The series doesn't take any cheap shots, and while I wish that when the new evidence comes into play for an appeal that the filmmakers would have reentered the court, it's understandable why they didn't want to repeat themselves. In prison, as the suspect waits for his trial to finish, the series mostly manages to successfully portray the solitude and danger of prisons without resorting to pop psychology. (These sequences involve Pete Postlethwaite, which may remind viewers of "In the Name of the Father.") The ties between the prisoners and the police that are discovered near the end of the series make the scope of the series larger, but for the most part it focuses plainly on the tragedy of how institutional justice reduces people into things, even while admitting that it's the best system there is.

Seed of Chucky (2004, Don Mancini)
I can't imagine the reactions of audiences who went to see this as a horror movie; its main concerns are a family breakdown between Chucky, his wife, and their gender-confused puppet-child. You can't really call it a satire, but it's certainly a comedy long before it's a horror movie. The comically exaggerated deaths come in completely irrelevantly to the plot, which is mostly jokes about Jennifer Tilly's B-movie career, John Waters hassling her as a paparazzo, and movie references to "The Shining," "Chinatown," and "Rebel Without a Cause." It's not a badly made movie, but it's the kind of movie you'll only enjoy if you think a puppet that looks like David Bowie dressed in drag is funny.

The Savages (2007, Tamara Jenkins)
Both Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are extraordinary actors, so it's their level of artistry that helps them escape from the general tone of charming contempt that this film exudes. Linney's character in particular is slathered on thick: not only does she have an affair with a married man, but she pops pills and steals stationary from work. That married man is played by Peter Friedman, which audiences may remember as the director of the retreat in "Safe." That may seem insignificant until you notice a few scenes that directly ape those of "Safe" -- Laura Linney doing aerobics badly in her hotel room (this mirrors a similar scene in "Safe") and a sex scene between the two shot from above, with the receiving partner looking incredibly disinterested, which is a famous scene from "Safe." The slight tone of mockery of nursing homes and their fraudulence -- preying on the guilt of families -- is not unlike "Safe"'s examination of New Age healing, although with much less austerity and, well, horror. At its best "The Savages" shows the indignity of old age, but it's a distanced movie, and it doesn't bother to fill that distance with anything that will make you think.

Paranoid Park, To Die For, Broadcast News

Paranoid Park (2007, Gus Van Sant)
Like Van Sant's three other most recent films in the same style, nothing much happens in "Paranoid Park" but it's his sweetest film since "Mala Noche." Although a murder investigation drifts into the film, and in casual chopped-up memories the night in question is shown to us (including an alarmingly gory and thankfully brief image of a dying man), it's much more about Van Sant dropping in on this skateboarding subculture of slim, laid-back teens and their relaxed lives, while making room for observations about their insecurity, fear of commitment, and possible sexual confusion. Van Sant is a director who has openly and, at his best, honestly concerned himself with fashioning poetic odes to young, beautiful boys who he clearly loves, and this is his latest exercise in gentle adoration. His boy of choice this time around, Gabe Nevins, is a doe-eyed, open-faced naif, and he's attractive and pleasant enough to draw our attention. His narration at first sounds like a boy reading out loud but fits when you realize it goes hand in hand with his journal writing.

To Die For (1995, Gus Van Sant)
Although somewhat juvenile in its contempt for its main character (we're meant to laugh at what a ladder-climbing fraud she is, not least of all when she plays "All By Myself" by Eric Carmen at her husband's funeral) and all-too-fashionably critical of the media, it nevertheless serves as a solid example of Van Sant's power as a straightforward storyteller -- and with enough idiosyncrasies to keep from being boring (in particular a ghoulish ending featuring David Cronenberg). Nicole Kidman gives one of those campy performances of buffoonery, the kind of thing that makes audiences love Norma Desmond and Mommie Dearest, but it's Joaquin Phoenix who shows the most emotional range and sensitivity.

Broadcast News (1987, James L. Brooks)
Mostly bland and mediocre, I would be hard-pressed to describe what style of film James L. Brooks makes. Albert Brooks is barely funny and William Hurt is almost likable. It effectively shows the chaos of a newsroom in two scenes (Holly Hunter talking into Hurt's ear piece; Brooks sweating profusely) but aside from that the only memorable scene in this two hours plus movie is of an underused Joan Cusack who jumps over a baby to deliver a tape before airing.

Perfume

Perfume (2006, Tom Tykwer)
Tom Tykwer definitely has a sense for audio and for visuals. At the opening of his film, he intersperses snippets of dead fish being slopped on the street, villagers vomiting, and pigs being gutted. At first I figured he was interested primarily in putting forth disgust to the audience, as if that was something desirable. And then there's a scene where an orphan baby is almost killed by older children, who smother the baby with a straw pillow before getting caught. The disgust I felt in these scenes almost made me quit watching. But while I resent that way of generating effect, it does allow Tykwer to set up his world: a rotting, ugly Europe and a child no one cares about. For a movie about a perfumer, and a boy who obsesses over it as if it's the only thing that makes life worth living, Tykwer makes a solid point.

Not only does Tykwer sustain interest in his storytelling for two-and-a-half hours, but he does so at times with a talent for sweeping awe, successfully passing on the feeling of experiencing a new sense, and the desire to make beautiful things.

As far as serial killer movies go, Tykwer's film is not "Seven" or "The Silence of the Lambs." We're not reacting to the gory genius of a Lecter character nor to the police thrills of Fincher's investigations. "Perfume" is about a character who is without; his killings are a twofold tragedy: he must kill to feel alive, to "preserve" love via the only thing he feels gives his life meaning, his extraordinary sense of smell. (And even though I don't think "Perfume" aims to be "realistic" about serial killing, I imagine most serial killers would sympathize with the "need" to kill.)

Like a less precious Peter Greenaway, Tykwer's film is closer to a sensual tragedy than a thriller. It may also be the ultimate depiction of fetishism, seeing people not as people but as a series of parts and sensations. Tykwer does bring home the horror of killing -- particularly in one exchange between Grenouille (an amazing, mostly worldless Ben Whishaw) and his most sought-after prize -- but through poetics (a soprano on the soundtrack, a flash of searing light) rather than grungy awfulness. His glorious, surreal ending is a sequence about bringing ecstasy to a terrified, filthy world, and it's the kind of balls-out filmmaking we're used to expecting only from the European art masters from decades ago.

Angels in America

Angels in America (2003, Mike Nichols)
"Angels in America" isn't an empty pleasure -- it's a thematic wonder and, thanks in part to Thomas Newman's score, an often rousing film. It's by its nature political, and I don't just mean left and right American politics -- although there's certainly a lot of dialogue spilled on that -- but rather the debating nature of argument. Tony Kushner said the following about the relation of scriptwriting, novels, and playwriting: "Screenwriting is primarily a narrative art -- and I don't think that's true of playwriting, which is dialogic and dialectic, and is fundamentally always more about an argument than it is about narrative progression."

That pretty clearly explains Kushner's interest in "the argument," how his plays are like long, drawn-out essays. He clearly intends that, and I think it's his mistaken view of art in general. He's so wrapped up in the differences of mediums that he fails to realize that all great artists are interchangeable. Of course the mediums of Edward Hopper, Miles Davis, and John Cheever are different. But the effects they have on a human soul are very much the same.

There is a great deal to admire about Nichols' version of Kushner's play, not least of all in how he refuses to play it safe. He routinely lays it on the line with big statements: living statues, hospital rooms cracking open for angels. And his approach isn't humorless. Meryl Streep in particular has a couple of zingers. But it's not enough to make me view the film as anything other than a folly, despite my increasing eagerness during the first few episodes.

You can't necessarily blame Nichols for the novelty of actors playing so many roles -- it was that way on the stage -- but the result is the astonishment we're meant to feel at how they adopt so many visual and vocal disguises. Emma Thompson as a psychotic homeless person! Meryl Streep as a man! Nichols allows his actors to embarrassingly chew the scenery, and ironically it's the three most revered actors that do the worst of it: Streep, Thompson, and Al Pacino. Thompson's and Streep's performances are overly fussy and yet shamelessly broad. Thompson in particular doesn't play people at all, but rather constructs for the play. Al Pacino has a lot of energy, but thinks the best way to play a horrible disease is to start jerking his body around at various moments. Jeffrey Wright and Justin Kirk give the best performances in the film, Wright's nurse loaded with attitude and style complimenting Kirk's gentle, funny performance as an AIDS victim.

The content of the play, and of the film, is a lot of stereotyped situations and finger-pointing. By the end of it we don't really know a great deal about any of the characters except their surfaces. We don't understand AIDS any better, except that there's some political obfuscation involved and that AZT medication was hard to come by 20 years ago. But we don't have any kind of a profound experience, we don't really "experience" at all. The Pet Shop Boys' "Dreaming of the Queen" does what Kushner's play does and more, with much more subtlety, finesse, formal elegance, and compassion, and in five minutes as opposed to six hours.

Cocteau's theatricality must have influenced Nichols, and there's a scene where Kirk's character is reading a Cocteau book just in case he doesn't think we'll catch the allusion by ourselves. But Nichols rarely achieves any kind of poetry, even with his go-for-broke brazenness. It's an issue movie writ large, political time-stamping. The play itself may be a genuine artistic statement, and I can't imagine the topical impact it must have had on the gay community and the world in the '90s. The idea of the play and its size -- a big red flag demanding not to be ignored -- may be its great contribution. But a great work of art it is not.

Beautiful boys

Beautiful actors have been a reason we've gone to movies since they began. And there's a reason why, when thinking of stars from the silents, the kind of people that spring to mind are Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, and Valentino, partly because we like beautiful things and partly because in a medium of images theirs are faces that stick in the brain. (Groucho's is a face that sticks in the brain, too, but I'm mostly interested in erotics.) But since movies as an artform today rarely achieve the heights of the great silents more and more I find myself seeking out the beautiful actors in smaller films and in television.



It's occasionally the case that beautiful movie stars happen across a major director or an interesting film, but by and large they're stuck in mediocre entertainments. Johnny Depp has had some surprising successes with serious directors, and my admiration for a number of Tim Burton's films notwithstanding, even he has been limited to only a handful of truly marginal filmmakers: Jim Jarmusch, Emir Kusturica, John Waters. (Anyone who knows me knows that "marginalized" directors, for me, hold much greater interest than the prestigious-indie ones such as Wes Anderson.)

Most movie stars in general have a hard enough time attracting the attention of serious auteurs, so it may seem asking a lot for someone to be beautiful, talented, and manage to find themselves in the presence of greatness. Off the top of my head Juliette Binoche seems like the most successful in this regard, having worked with the likes of Louis Malle, Leos Carax, Michael Haneke, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Oliver Assayas, Chantal Akerman, Andre Techine, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. It may be easier for foreign actors to garner the attention of this calibre of directors, I'm not sure. (Catherine Deneuve would be another with an equally impressive roster: Techine, Francois Ozon, Luis Bunuel, Jacques Demy, and Lars von Trier to name a handful.)


While I may find myself entranced by the charm, sophistication, and grace of someone like Cary Grant, I may also find myself desiring to look at the lesser-appreciated stars of the time for their films, whether it's Tab Hunter or Dean Stockwell. While some of these types of stars may not possess the same acting chops or obvious signs of quality of a Cary Grant or a Brando, the nature of their marginalization may allow them to speak more truthfully (or simply more interestingly) about life, by being able to embrace roles unacceptable to stars on the level of Grant, Brando, et al. If you take Joe Dallesandro, for example, you're privy to the work of Serge Gainsbourg, Paul Morrissey, John Waters, Mika Kaurismaki, Louis Malle, and Jacques Rivette in scenes of sexual honesty that makes "Last Tango" seem tame.

A major star today would be hard-pressed to enjoy such company. Jude Law may epitomize male beauty, but he's been limited to mediocrities like Sam Mendes, Martin Scorsese's later work, Mike Nichols, Anthony Minghella, and other eminently "tasteful" directors. Wong Kar-Wai and David Cronenberg are the only ones coming anywhere near true cinematic gift-giving. Law is a European, and so too was Alain Delon forty years ago, and yet he managed to work with talent as disparate as Jean-Pierre Melville, Luchino Visconti, and Michelangelo Antonioni.


With modern actors we have no shortage in the beauty department, but finding them in films you're not embarrassed about watching becomes more difficult. I've tried to like Paul Walker, and God knows watching him take off his shirt isn't a chore, but with the exception of "Running Scared" and "Joyride" he hasn't done anything even half-way interesting. I genuinely enjoyed "Into the Blue" but Walker certainly isn't seeking out work that could be considered illuminating by anyone. The equally hunky Chris Evans gives me a better time with his acting, but the only thing he's done that rises above being merely entertaining is "Sunshine." His co-star Cillian Murphy has fared better, being one of the very few established actors to land in a Ken Loach film.


Murphy, a European, is joined by a handful of other beauties who've managed, or are managing, to carve out interesting careers for themselves. The most major I suppose would be Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Gregoire Colin. Rhys-Meyers has done surprisingly daring work in films by Todd Haynes, Mike Figgis, Michael Radford, and Mike Hodges, while Colin has crafted for himself one of the finest careers of the last decade. Not only is he a regular of Claire Denis, but he's worked alongside Jacques Rivette and Catherine Breillat. (Breillat is certainly no stranger to male beauty, and I'm very curious to see what Fu'ad Ait Aattou does after having starred in Breillat's "The Last Mistress.")


Next on the totem pole you'd have Gaspard Ulliel and Louis Garrel. Garrel may be the benefit of nepotism in Philippe Garrel, but he's also found himself in films by Christophe Honore, Bernardo Bertolucci, and a short by Ozon, while Ulliel has graced films by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Gus Van Sant, and Andre Techine. I would mention the boys in Van Sant's recent films if any of them seemed to continue acting beyond his films, but I hope that Johan Libereau, of Techine's "Witnesses," continues his career. Jamie Bell has worked with both David Gordon Green and Thomas Vinterberg, and there are a handful of other Brits making miniature waves that I've been noticing -- Eddie Redmayne (Tom Kalin's "Savage Grace"), Ben Whishaw (Tom Tykwer's "Perfume," Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There," an upcoming Jane Campion film), and Andrew Garfield (the acclaimed "Boy A," and the new Terry Gilliam film, and while it may be lousy, he's also in "The Other Boleyn Girl" with Redmayne).

The American side of things may not look quite as stellar, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Pitt in particular are little beacons of hope. Levitt made a huge impression with Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin" and went on to make a few noble attempts in "Brick" and "The Lookout" before settling on Kimberly Peirce's newest "Stop-Loss." Pitt is a real daredevil, having worked with Gus Van Sant, Bernardo Bertolucci, Asia Argento, Tom DiCillo, Michael Haneke, and Abel Ferrara. I only wish that Johnathon Schaech kept getting parts outside of the horror movies he's writing now.


While these are the ones I've been most interested in, there are still the others who bring me occasional pleasure: Zac Efron (in the new Richard Linklater movie), Channing Tatum, Adam Brody, and James Franco (who does too many historical bores but who makes it up with Altman, Nic Cage's "Sonny," and new movies by Gus Van Sant and David Gordon Green).

Dexter

Dexter (season two)

While "Dexter" most closely resembles a police procedural, tonally it has more in common with the overarching theme of death that has hovered over TV throughout the Bush administration -- Michael C. Hall's previous "Six Feet Under" and "Dead Like Me." Its deadpan comic tone could be off-putting to some -- not to mention the morally questionable sympathy we feel for a serial killer who justifies his killings -- but there's more to the show than the artfully conceived murders and plot tensions. While its main concern is those who are unable to feel -- it uses father-son psychological simplicity to explain Dexter's need to murder -- it also touches on topicality with degrees of restraint, such as the episode where a former special ops homicide detective has a confrontation with a fellow former operative who's been "fucked-up" by his military service. It also has some kind of idea as to the reality of single life, dating, and relationships -- spanning from giggling children to hook-ups in gyms, and when it concerns inter-generational dating it's decidedly mature.

While its cleverness distances itself from human emotion, it attempts, theoretically, to deal with spiritual deadness. And while my own feeling is that the show doesn't attain the spiritual heights it occasionally ponders about (and while sometimes it uses Dexter's past father-son experience as too much of a present-day indicator) it nevertheless remains thoroughly entertaining as a not-quite-genre piece.

As with "Prison Break" it introduces an FBI investigator who livens up the show, although as opposed to the intensity provided by William Fichtner in the former, the agent on "Dexter" is played with relaxed, breezy intelligence, and -- dare I say -- sexiness, a characterization of a father-type figure to Dexter's sister, who muses on the perfection of Chopin and takes time to pause and reflect on exactly which animal cracker he's pulled out of the box. (It came as a complete shock to me when I looked up the actor and discovered it was Keith Carradine; in my head I've always associated Carradine with the shapeless grit of '70s genre movies. It's a perfect example of an actor surprising you and exposing your own narrow-mindedness -- he's extraordinary.)

In the second season, which I've just finished, the show both smartly, and to its detriment, moves away from the mechanics of Dexter's killing and into the idea of "love" and its implications, for the majority of the characters: Dexter's relationship with his girlfriend; his girlfriend's relationship with her mother; Dexter's sister's relationship with Carradine; their boss's relationship with Sgt. Doakes. It serves to bring Dexter's murders close to those around him, and in the process slowly begins to lose the distance the series began with. As Dexter begins to feel, sloppiness ensues; the actions of those around him are affected. The genre ingenuity of the show may not be sustaining in and of itself; with the new, more personal aspect even scenes with Dexter's girlfriend and her mother maintain interest.

We also begin to question the morality of Dexter's actions, even though the show somewhat sneakily allows Dexter to remain a hero while evading his captors. Throughout the show I've never really felt relief from one of Dexter's kills, and I've never really felt complicit, either; but with the storyline of his psychotic girlfriend the writers have effectively provided the first death that we've, as an audience, been anticipating and hoping for; through her annoying British accent and her crazy-bitch conniving she's provided a foil for Dexter that we can't help but despise. There's a difference between what the show's writers do here and what, say, Tobe Hooper does in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" -- in that film, he makes his characters so annoying that you want them to be murdered, even though they're innocents. To my mind that's revolting; what the show's writers are doing with "Dexter" is essentially what Shakespeare had done hundreds of years ago, use death as a nasty punishment for someone who had it coming.

Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson's War (2007, Mike Nichols)
Mike Nichols' films often feel to me as if they're aimed at garnering the approval of the people they're about -- even when they're satirical or critical it's never really ruthless, and it's done in such a way that these hypothetical moviegoers can jab their fellow viewers as they note how delightful a representation it is they're watching; movies made for moviegoers who delight in feeling, as Tom Hanks does as he reads the news as it comes off the wire, that they're a step ahead of the rest of the world, when in reality they're slaves to their own addiction to knowingness.

At its best, "Charlie Wilson's War" has a loose, collaborative feel -- and certainly Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman bring a great deal to the table -- and yet I can't help but feel that Nichols is equally interested in affiliating himself with positions of power as he is with telling an entertaining story (which, with his fidelity to big-name writers, is surely the intent of his moviemaking). Whether it's the casting of empty movie stars like Julia Roberts or the questionably triumphant tone he takes in filming war scenes, there's a quality to Nichols' films that is decidedly middle-brow, and if that's too crude a criticism, then it simply feels like Nichols isn't content on satisfying his storytelling urges -- he wants attention as he does it.

It's often the case that I don't feel Nichols' films have any deep reason for existing -- they don't provide an emotional value of any recognizable sort, and even his most superficially human films -- "Wit," "Angels in America" -- rely on intellectual heavy-lifting, mostly from theater ("Wit" is ostensibly about a cancer patient; in reality it's a filmed play about a professor's love for language). I'd be hard-pressed to think of an expressive moment in any of Nichols' films aside from the Carly Simon song at the end of "Heartburn."

Nichols can, at times, throw in a sensitive line-reading or two -- there's a great one about how America starts games it doesn't want to finish, and then leaves while the ball is still bouncing -- and there are moments, like when Hanks visits Pakistan for the first time, that you can see Nichols is trying to show that politics have the power to change things. And yet surrounding it we've got a director who loves drama so much that he doesn't bother to tell us anything about life.