Back in Time: Arlington Road

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Back in Time: Very Bad Things

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Back in Time: EDtv

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Back in Time: Analyze This

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Observe This!

I don't tend to appreciate pull quotes attached to stupid raunchy comedies and/or hipster slasher movies that read something like: "Sick, twisted fun!" or "Nasty, gross...and lots of fun!" It makes me ill reading nonsense like that.

But what else can I say about Observe and Report other than, very simply, this is Psychotic, Deranged, Out-Of-Its-Mind Brilliance?

Make no mistake about it: this film is off its rocker. It is nearly as nuts as its main character. But that is its radical, chaotic joy. Not many films dare to shift tones so wildly, to depict psychosis possibly at the peril of its comic stride. Observe and Report goes for broke, and it's a deranged piece of genius.

The easy, consistent tag for the film is, "An R-rated Paul Blart." And...yeah, it sort of is. But the extent to which this film lets its freak flag fly is remarkable. I've talked before about the difference between "true punk rock" and "poser punk rock"--the true punks aim to carve out their own place, while the posers stand preening with a scowl on their face. Observe and Report is real punk--it wants to fuck things up, turn them inside out.

Seth Rogen plays Ronnie Barnhardt, the "Mall Cop"...but he isn't just a guy with humble dreams who eats his feelings. He's a bi-polar, power-hungry freak with violent tendencies. Rogen is fearless in nearly everything he does, and as Ronnie is at his most fearless; he is completely different from anything we've seen before. He is not playing Seth Rogen...he's playing a nut-job loser on a mission. The actor's new, streamlined look makes it easy for me to congratulate him on letting himself appear at his fattest and most ugly in this film, which was the right choice for this very singularly tacky character.

In a nutshell, Ronnie takes his job all too seriously, is obsessed with the skanky department store makeover artist (Anna Faris), has an impossibly alcoholic mother (the great Celia Weston), and wants to join the police force so he can bust some heads open. But he's crazy, so he can't join the police...and that's about all you need to know. From there, the movie goes off the rails, and I mean that in the best way possible. It would be easy to say the movie is a mess, because it is. But all these choices were intentional. This is off-the-wall filmmaking at its most aggressive; it is at once funny, tense, sad, and completely, eerily awkward. You will either revolt at first sight, or you will feel the rush. I felt it all the way.

The film was written and directed by Jody Hill, who first directed last year's indie-sleeper comedy, The Foot Fist Way. That film was a godsend for bringing the genius of Danny McBride to the masses, but overall was a sloppy, stupid little movie that started out funny and turned into a long, unfunny, misogynistic bit of crudeness as it went along. With a track record like that, Observe and Report is kind of a revelation for Hill. It stays true to the anarchic spirit (and in reality, it rachets up the anarchy level quite a bit) of the earlier film, but is a huge stylistic boost in every way. This guy can actually make movies, and well--the synergy Hill finds in telling this gonzo story, isolating random moments of hilarity, hitting the right adrenaline cues, and fusing music with image is startling in its proficiency. The movie has a rhythm all its own, and for me it worked on nearly every level.

**BONUS ANALYSIS** (mild spoiler warning)

There is actually an ongoing war of opinions going on over this film among critics and audiences alike: is all this stuff really happening, or is this just a portrait of an irredeemably psychotic mind on overdrive? Is the film a subversion of the "Apatow Brand" of lovable losers who start as bad boys but then learn their lesson, or is its own wacky construction? Is the film misogynistic and hateful, or is its extreme humor a gonzo commentary on the nastiness of a certain segment of the population? Most important of all, is this stuff funny, or is it merely uncomfortable garbage?

My answers: any film this cracked could easily be interpreted as a crazy character's delusion. In the case of Observe and Report, I tend to think it would be a cop-out to suggest that the film's third act, or nutty finale, or whatever portion of the movie is "all in Ronnie's head." Such a construct, unless it's pulled off brilliantly, is very nearly as soulless and empty as the ever-infuriating "it was all a dream" bullshit. Observe and Report is completely off its hinges. The film isn't some psychotic character's delusion, but it is a fever dream through-and-through. Everything that happens in the film could possibly exist in the reality of the movie, because the movie constructs a world in which anything, no matter how barbed, uncomfortable, or offensive, is possible. Typically I recoil when a film so unabashedly celebrates nastiness, but in Observe and Report, the filmmakers and the actors intend not to "celebrate nastiness," per se, but to celebrate the glorious experimental realms of extreme filmmaking. The filmmakers and the actors don't try to moralize, empathize, or sugarcoat anything. If they were to hedge, to shift from psychotropic, antisocial farce to redemptive, soft-spotted hero comedy, I would be offended--don't try to pretend that anything in this film can be redeemed. In Observe and Report, nothing is redeemed, and it's all the more effective because of it.

Regarding the bit about subverting Apatow: I don't think this movie is intended as a subversion of anything other than typical audience expectations. If that now includes Apatow's brand of raunch-redeemed-by-sweetness, then so be it. Was it meant to be a stark contrast to the warm-and-fuzzy security Apatow provides fat, lonely pot-smokers? Not necessarily, but it succeeds in that vein without even trying. Adventureland is more the sweet, funny, wonderful upending of everything Apatow has come to represent simply by doing what Apatow used to be great at--telling sweet stories with lots of heart. Observe and Report would sooner shoot an Apatow character in the foot than try to subvert one. And I like that. There are no apologies made for a crude, hateful character like Ronnie...and that's the way it should be. Ronnie is essentially a character without an arc--he learns nothing, never changes, and the only part of him that experiences any "growth" throughout the entire movie is in his pants. Maybe that should offend me as a lover of film; maybe I should be craving rich character arcs or dramatic twists. But I find the lack of any redeemable qualities one of the freshest, most interesting, diabolically humorous aspects about the film. Hill allows his characters to stay true to their convictions...Apatow would allow Ronnie to run rip-shod for an hour or so, and then pull back and try to turn him into a lovable hero.

Thankfully, that is not Observe and Report's M.O. It is hardcore, balls-to-the-wall, freak-nasty for 86 straight minutes. It is, to quote the best line from a movie I didn't like (guess what it is), "Scorsese on coke." And for me, that's pretty damn great.

Back in Time: Thelma & Louise

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Back in Time: Baby Boom

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New on DVD: Not Easily Broken

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He Said, She Said "It's Friday" Video Picks

She Said: Frozen River




“Throw the bag out. It can’t be anything but trouble.” Never again will I so quickly utter anything at my television set without thinking more complexly.

Frozen River is about as real and honest a film as I have seen--not just in a long time, but ever. It’s about women, it’s about motherhood, it’s about the power of what ultimately connects us all. It has stark beauty in the ugliest of places and it has the empowerment of humanity.

Courtney Hunt's debut film is a triumph; it is gripping, compelling, and invigorating. Frozen River is a tense story of abject poverty and the inevitable heartbreak such economic despair causes. Melissa Leo's portrayal of a mother in utter desperation deserves every accolade she earned, for her performance anchors the urgency that is the film.

The female centered, "female solidarity" plot line is as important as it is refreshing. This film should not be missed, and since it is on DVD, no one has to!


He Said: My Kid Could Paint That




My Kid Could Paint That begins as a portrait of a child prodigy and the fame that consumes her family. It is entertaining, well-made, and informative.

The film then morphs into a potential expose investigating the validity--the 'truth'--of the child's artwork. In this stage, it provokes anger, stirs passion, and invites us to question the truth and decide for ourselves.

And finally, the film ends as a open-eyed, ponderous meditation on the truth of any artform, especially documentary filmmaking. At this stage, My Kid Could Paint That becomes a brilliant piece, one that immerses itself in the documentary form, yet also stands to the side, questioning the very tools it so seamlessly utilizes.

I have never seen a documentary which so clearly presented the blurred lines between truth and fiction that define the art of documentary filmmaking. And so, in its questioning of its own form, the film masters that form.

In many ways, My Kid Could Paint That is the most honest documentary I've ever seen.

I Hate Racing

Race to Witch Mountain is one of those inevitable modern remakes of classic family films. The Witch Mountain series is a franchise Disney has obviously held onto for decades in the hopes of turning the family-friendly adventure into a souped-up action flick starring a guy who used to called "The Rock" and directed by the freakin' associate producer of Anaconda. To be sure, they still get the PG--as Disney always strains to do in any film that doesn't have "Pirates of the Caribbean" in its title--but that has more to do with how boring and tepid the film is than how kid-appropriate.

Dwayne Johnson headlines the film, which is the second in what must be a three-film Disney contract (the first was The Gameplan, which wasn't anything special, but was way more special than this). I posit this "contract" talk because there seems to be no other reason for this film to exist other than The Rock in the lead and the obvious use of the beloved "Witch Mountain" in the title. Without those two elements, the film would mean precisely nothing. It's hard to imagine Johnson participating in this film out of anything other than contractual force.

Of Johnson's work, let it be said that he has not run out of energy, but that he has run out of material; he is clearly a talented guy, but there is only so far he can carry this film on his sense of humor alone. After all, this is a movie that positions itself as a four-quadrant action extravaganza. But how engaged can one become in an action film whose action scenes are conceived by a director ridiculously out of his depth and whose plot is so murky and convoluted that it's nearly incomprehensible?

Johnson plays a cab driver with a criminal past (how generic is that?!) who stumbles upon two seemingly normal human kids who happen to be from another planet. Cute! The trio go on the run from sinister forces both governmental and otherworldly, all in a pursuit to get back to their ship, which crashed at the titular mountain. Exciting! Of course, such plot details could be figured out without even watching the film's trailer, but there is literally nothing else to the film other than the vague skeleton of a story idea. There is no revelation that deepens viewer engagement, there is no nuance beyond typical screenwriter machinations--this film is an avatar of an exciting sci-fi adventure.

Andy Fickman, who apparently is under contract to direct all of Dwayne Johnson's Disney projects (he also helmed--magnificently!--The Game Plan), directed Race to Witch Mountain, and he does about as good a job as you'd expect a career-long director of lame comedies to do with sci-fi action material. The action in the film is inept in its direction, scatological in its editing, and outright lame in its visual effects--which, for a movie angling to be a cutting edge update of a classic Disney franchise, is distracting at best and unforgivable at worst. Fickman's failure--as he's previously shot no more compelling cinematic action than people walking around an apartment--to understand the ins and outs of action filmmaking is not really his fault, save that he delivered a limp, lazy film...and that, you know, he actually accepted this very out-of-his-league assignment. Disney's failure to hire a strong action director, or even a non-action director whose visual skills are up to the challenge, to helm this film is the company's fault--ditto the fact that this screenplay is completely DOA, offering not an interesting plot and compelling characters, but merely a bare bones high-concept on which cliched jokes and derivative action scenes are hung.

Good family films are always hard to come by, and Johnson is a good actor with some natural comedic ability--he fits right into the family film mold. Disney was right to use him in that vein, and the studio has certainly done its part to broaden the family viewing landscape, delivering quality animated film after quality animated film. But live action is another story--and until the studio is are able to put the kind of care into all of its live action films as it put into Pirates of the Caribbean, the live action division will continue to pale in comparison to the truly groundbreaking work done in the animation division. As for Race to Witch Mountain, it is just more of the lame-brained, hum-drum status quo.

You Can Find Me....

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I have hit the big time...well, I am not big time, but the website is. FilmCritic.com is a fabulous, respected source for quality film reviews and discussion. I am honored to join their ranks.

Check out the website...and check out the bio page for more info on little ol' me. 

Of course, keep Cinema Squared bookmarked. We are still going strong, and we aren't going anywhere.

WATCHMEN

Apparently I had a very busy weekend, even though I don't feel like I actually did much. I attended the Watchmen screening at midnight Thursday night, then had the review all but done by Friday afternoon. Then I went away from the computer...and failed to return until today. So sorry for my procrastination. And sorry, too, that I didn't get to use my quip about staying up until past 4am Thursday and having to take a nap Friday afternoon...oh well...anyway, here's a big, long commentary on the year's first gargantuan release.

I will be very up-front about this simple fact: I am not a Fanboy. I am not a Watchmen devotee. I haven't even read all of the damn graphic novel. I came into this highly-anticipated spectacle with a knowledge of the legend of the book, but not a ton of knowledge of the book itself. I am, for the most part, a Movie Guy. My reading skews toward humor, politics, and social issues...not men and women traipsing around in fancy suits and fighting crime.

I will admit, however, that this superhero film genre has created a very specific and interesting niche. Most of the filmmakers who attempt these big comic book adaptations have the right combination of love and skill to pull them off with gusto. I enjoy big-budget comic adaptations. I guess that makes me a Comic Movie Geek Fanboy.

All that, however, is merely set-up for my review. And, to be fair, a film like Watchmen, which is so dense and ambitious, and is based on such a legendary literary source, necessitates something more than just a simple "review." So, like the film (and the book before it), I may go off on certain tangents. But hopefully the central theme will remain the same.

That central theme is this: Watchmen is imperfect...but is nonetheless a huge, powerful, incredible achievement. Not merely an achievement of filmmaking, but an achievement of storytelling. So credit must be passed not simply to "The Visionary Director of 300," as the film's ads denote--but to Alan Moore, who created the graphic novel on which the film is (very slavishly) based. It is interesting to note that the best ideas in the film come directly from Moore's brain, and yet he so despised the notion of this film that he asked to have his name removed from the credits. But the story lives on, and speaking from the viewpoint of a person who has now experienced more of Watchmen from the film version than the original literary version, I can tell you that the ideas are still there, still vibrant, still unsettling, still powerfully thought-provoking.

Summarizing the plot of Watchmen is a fool's errand for a variety of reasons. First, for the graphic novel's legions of fans, I need not remind them of what they know more intimately than do I. Second, for the uninitiated, any attempt to neatly describe such a complex, deliberately convoluted, heavily philosophical labyrinth of a storyline in a convenient cube of synopsis would more likely confuse than intrigue. In as bare-bones a manner as possible, here are the essentials. The film takes place in an alternate version of 1985, where Richard Nixon is in the midst of his fifth term of office, costumed heroes once roamed the streets but have now become outcasts, and an unmatched level of gloom and fear grip the citizens of the world. It is almost as if the world is on the brink of an apocalypse, and indeed, the film's Doomsday Clock rests as 4 minutes to "Midnight," or Nuclear War. The Watchmen are a group of vigilantes who dress in elaborate costumes to fight crime. All but one of them possess no superhuman abilities, and nearly all of them have dropped out of the public eye and live in some form of private, isolated turmoil. But when one of their ranks, The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is mysteriously murdered, the shockwave reignites the buried feelings of the former heroes, and perhaps could bring about a re-emergence of the Watchmen. There--still confusing and convoluted, but somewhat easily digestible, no?

What's great about the construction of Watchmen is that its heroes are clearly, debilitatingly human. We see at least 3 superhero movies every year, but rarely do we stop to think about the fact that we are rooting for a regular person who plays dress up, goes out on the street, and kills people. Watchmen dares to reveal the tragic humanity that exists behind the curtain. The Comedian, for example, is a murderer and rapist who commits atrocities against women, children, and other various innocent souls (including, in the film's mythology, JFK). Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) is in a dead-end relationship with a completely disconnected (literally) partner, and has unresolved conflicts with her mother, Silk Spectre I (played by Carla Gugino; and try to keep up, please), who led a very tumultuous life. Silk Spectre II's "boyfriend," Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), is the only member of Watchmen who actually possesses superhuman powers after one of those Freak Scientific Accidents permanently altered the chemical makeup of his body. Essentially, he is the most powerful superhero ever created, with the ability to destroy, rebuild, read minds, see the future and past simultaneously, exist in several places at once, copy himself endlessly, and escape to Mars whenever he wants (you'll understand when you see it). He is entirely non-human, however, which dictates one monumental weakness: the ability to empathize with humanity. Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) was once the elaborately-costumed engineer and pilot of "Archie," the land-and-air-and-sea vehicle used by the Watchmen in their heyday. Now, he has reverted into a reclusive dork who retired from superhero-dom and lives as a shell of his former self. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is the World's Smartest Man, and one of only two former Watchmen to reveal his true identity. He has now become a flamboyant megalomaniac of sorts. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) wears a mask that displays a shifting set of inkblots, mainly because his deep emotional scars have left him with nothing but a predilection toward psychological symbolism. And he is brutally--dare I say "awesomely"--lethal in every way. But make no mistake: Rorschach is the beating heart of Watchmen--both the group and the film. He is fierce and determined, the only hero who truly lives by a code of truth and honor above all. His "Journal Entries" are a roadmap for the entire film, and his character is our emotional entry point into the heart of this story.

The genius of Watchmen lies in the boundless ambiguity of the title itself. "Watchmen" obviously indicates "those who watch over us" in the simplest sense. But pealing back the layers reveals further complexity. A continuing symbol that runs throughout the book and the film is that of the gears of a clock. Dr. Manhattan is the son of a clockmaker, who then gains the ability to split all matter--including human matter--into its individual parts, and reassemble them in whatever order he sees fit. Nite Owl always has his trusty watch on his wrist. And, of course, the Nuclear War clock that sits at 4 minutes to "Midnight." The symbol of clockwork--or watchwork--underlines some of the philosophical underpinnings of Moore's original work. Again, I claim to be nothing but a Watchmen novice, so this may be common knowledge to the comic book faithful, but it seems very intentional that Moore chose a title that could also relate to the "Watchmaker" interpretation of a Deity--one who sets the gears into pre-destined motion, like a clock (or a watch), but who then steps away and does not intervene in the natural life of those gears. Watchmen dares to show us a world that may just be going through the motions no matter who or what intervenes. The heroes in this film attempt to fight crime--and they do it all the right ways, like in cool costumes and with specialized weapons and fighting moves--and yet humanity sinks deeper and deeper into a hellish state. Now these "heroes" have become just as angry, depressed, and jaded as the average everyday schmuck, only they must also live in the shadow of the mythic alter-egos they once embodied. Do heroes really make a difference? That is the unabashed belief of someone like Rorschach, and is the eternal dilemma for Dr. Manhattan, who sees the inner workings of every piece of the natural and mechanical world, and can't grasp anything worth saving.

Those dichotomous points of view then prompt the film's bigger philosophical question, which the book and the film leave for the audience to answer on their own. Without giving anything significant away, the surface plot gives way to the revelation of the Uber-Villain and a much larger Evil Scheme that is, as is the case with all Evil Schemes, laborious and complicated beyond description. But it also serves to question the moral ambiguity of heroism--what is hero? What acts are truly heroic? Is the end worth the means? These are the questions Watchmen dares to ask.

Watchmen is, as I noted from the outset, imperfect. I do believe there could be a better film to be made from this material, though it would take the kind of miracle Dr. Manhattan just can't make himself believe in. And this is a staggering work--huge, sprawling, and entertaining for nearly three hours, but also deliberate, meditative, sometimes quiet, and deeply philosophical. There is a reason why many believed Watchmen could and should never be adapted, and there is validity to that argument. It is impossible to fully live up to the brilliance of the source material, and the filmmakers' faithfulness to that source material means that not every element works in a cinematic sense: certain side plots and minor characters are fuzzy and ill-defined, and the delicate balance between the towering intellectual ideas that drive the film's thematic undercurrent and the increasingly complicated superhero mythology--replete with gadgets, creatures, and world domination schemes--that drives the film's surface story never quite gels in a fully synergistic way. But this is a film about terminally flawed people who ponder unthinkable philosophical ideas in a perpetually decaying society...imperfection fits right in.

The performances are truly fabulous across the board. No doubt every last Watchmen-obsessed geek the world over has thought up their ideal casting for a film adaptation, but I have no such frame of reference. So coming from an unbiased point of view, purely from an appreciation for talented actors, the film's casting is flawless--and sort of rebellious, given the type of superstars that could have been filling many roles. The makers of Watchmen went down a more iconoclastic, indie-spirit route. Billy Crudup is a fine choice for Dr. Manhattan, though one can't quite rave about a performance of a character so leaden and straight-faced, other than to say that Crudup does everything he can do with the character. Patrick Wilson is fabulous as Nite Owl, who starts the film as a recoiled coward and ends as a reinvigorated superhero. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, of whom I have never been a fan, is better than he's ever been before as the cynical, nihilistic Comedian--he runs the full emotional gamut in his few scenes, and makes you feel the inner turmoil of such a monstrous figure. Matthew Goode finds the right note of snootiness to pull off Ozymandias, even if he is forgotten for much of the film. Going in, I was unsure about the casting of Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II, but was proven very presumptuous...and very wrong. This is easily the most meaty, interesting, challenging role Akerman has ever played in her young career, and she exudes a combination of toughness and vulnerability that defines her character. She is a fabulous surprise, but the greatest revelation of Watchmen--and I am hardly the first person to state this--is Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. His work is raw and rough and utterly powerful in every way. His character and his performance are the beating heart of Watchmen, and he is even more revelatory on those few occasions when he takes off the trademark mask.

And yes, I also must give many props to Zack Snyder....you know, the "Visionary Director of 300." I hated 300...yes, it looked pretty, but I thought it was so meticulously created to look pretty that I found it quite ugly and boring. I preferred Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, but even that film wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I can say, with a lot of relief, that Watchmen represents Snyder's career-best work as a director. He clearly has more love for and understanding of the material here than he did on his previous projects. And while he uses a lot of visual gimmicks similar to those of 300, they seem more a fabric of the wild world of this story than they do simple stunts (the one that most resembles a stunt is the now-cliched use of fast motion quickly becoming slow motion in mid-action...sort of corny and distracting, but only used for two very quick moments). For the most part, Watchmen is a heavily visual experience, but it is a lot slower, more meditative, and less gaudy (in a filmic sense; obviously all this comic bookery will depict lots of garish costumes and settings, etc.) than one might expect, especially coming from Snyder. And I'll be honest--he still has lots of room to grow as a filmmaker. In many ways, he seems uncomfortable shooting anything other than pure eye-candy spectacle. And while his attempt to dial down a bit for this very serious and important film is admirable and, for the most part, successful, there are certain moments--specifically character-driven dialogue moments--when the direction is neither showy nor inept...it is simply workmanlike, and a little bland. Snyder has yet to put together the full package in a way that, say, the Wachowski brothers have. But it took a huge vision and a lot of balls to take the burden of hundreds of millions of studio dollars on his shoulders and tackle such a beloved, cherished, almost mythic work of art and turn it not only into something watchable, but something that deeply resonates intellectually...not unlike it's source material. And that's a huge compliment.