2009: We survived, and so did the cinema

What a glorious year for movies! The good ones found audiences (Hurt Locker) and the bad ones were panned, even by their hardcore fans (Transformers 2). I feel like that’s justice. To finish off 2009, here are the best films of the last year. See you in 2010.

— Michael Clawson

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10. The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock is a talented actress. She so rarely gets to show that off, though. In The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock’s captivating human drama, Bullock presents the beautiful skills she’s been squandering in rom-com garbage. She plays a wealthy and white Tennessee socialite who plucks a poor and black teen off the street and adopts him. Race is a minor theme, as is football, but the movie has more important messages: it’s about the lengths people are willing to go to help those in need. Blind Side is also exceptionally cast with great performances by country singer Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron and child actors Jae Head and Lily Collins. It should also be noted that Blind Side is one of two movies this year — the other being Invictus — that did something I've been asking from sports movies for years: it showed the action on the football field without using omnipresent sports commentators. Audiences don't need voices to narrate sports, yet it's a Hollywood staple that is rarely ever absent from sports movies.

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9. Knowing
Instantly perplexing and feverishly debated earlier this year, Knowing was either loved or hated with no room in between. It stars Nicolas Cage as a college professor who uncovers the fate of the universe in a string of numbers pulled from a time capsule. Besides being a convincing thriller, with some horror-type scares thrown in — not to mention a plane and a subway crash that are so realistic they’re scary — the film has actual dogma woven into its philosophical themes. Are events random, or are they part of a grander, more dreadful scheme? Knowing knows, but director Alex Proyas (Dark City) doesn’t bonk you on the head with the answer.

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8. Coraline/Fantastic Mr. Fox
Stop-motion animation is not going away. In fact, with these two films, it did better in 2009 than hand-drawn animation, which only had one release (The Princess and the Frog). Coraline, about a little girl getting sucked into a fake version of her own world, was creepy and a visual delight. And Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s quirky tale about a thieving squab-eating fox, was hilarious and intoxicatingly brilliant. Both films are based on children’s books, but both work because they don’t speak down to children. They speak up to them.

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7. The Hangover
No comedy from this year can even get close to The Hangover, a rip-roaring comedy powerhouse that sunk its teeth into our funny bone and never let go. Starring a bunch of underrated funnymen — Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper — the Vegas-set movie told a familiar story: men go to bachelor party, party too hard and then wake up with blurry visions of the previous night. As they retrace their steps the next day they come across Mike Tyson, a tiger, taser demonstrations and overacting goofball Ken Jeong. Classic comedies are few and far between, but this one made it look easy.

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6. Avatar
I wrote off director James Cameron for more than a decade. Who didn’t, really? But he proved me wrong with Avatar, his long-awaited, super-expensive sci-fi fantasy. Told using massive amounts of computer animation, as well as motion capture suits, Avatar is about a man who uploads his brain activity into the body of an alien being. And as that alien, called a Na’vi, he falls in love (with the sexiest of alien women), becomes a member of the tribe, rides a dragon and redeems his sins when man tries to mine the beautiful planet all this takes place on. The animation is incredible and awe-inspiring, the world is gorgeous, the characters are fully realized and complete, and the action is everything you’d expect from the guy that gave us Aliens and two Terminator films. James Cameron, you’ve proved me wrong.

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5. (500) Days of Summer
Relationships can get messy. It’s not pessimistic; it’s reality. (500) Days of Summer is the most realistic of romantic comedies, or maybe it’s a romantic drama. Featuring star players Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Summer is an exploration on how fragile the human heart is, but also how resilient it is. It begins on Day 1 — or is it Day 500 — and jumps around from there to points through the 500 days our stars are in love. But a word of caution: “This is not a love story.” No, it’s so much more.

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4. Up
Pixar films make the world smile. And Up gives one of the biggest smiles. Carefully animated and expertly orchestrated — from characters and plot to music and laugh-out-loud gags — Up will make you look at the world with warmth and a little bit of adventure. Poor Mr. Ferguson, a widower facing an eminent domain fight, just wants to go to Paradise Falls. So he straps balloons to his house and flies it to South America. A little Boy Scout tags along, along with talking dogs and a female bird named Kevin, and the adventure soars. Up is a pure movie, as are all of Pixar’s movies.

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3. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s wordy and violent World War II film is a hilarious catharsis for everything that happened between us and the Nazis. Yes, Hitler is killed at the end, as is most of the German high command, but Inglourious Basterds is not meant to be historically accurate. It’s Tarantino’s version of events. Brad Pitt plays Aldo the Apache, a renegade soldier stomping through France butchering Nazis. There are other characters, too: Hans Landa, the sadistic Jew Hunter; Donny Donowitz, the Bear Jew; and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a theater owner who plans to use film stock to decapitate the head of the Nazi party. Over-the-top and ridiculous, Basterds is Tarantino having a blast.

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2. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman is the next great director. After Juno no one was quite sure what to make of him: one hit wonder or bona fide filmmaker? Here we learn he’s legit, the real deal all the way. In the superbly written Up In the Air, he gives us George Clooney, a man who lives his entire life in airports, rental cars and from his suitcase. He’s hired to fire people for employers who don’t like firing people; and in this economy business is booming. The movie is so much more than that, though: he gets an energetic young apprentice, he falls in love with a female version of himself and he finds his shaky morals thrown off balance by the world that’s changing around him. A movie for our time, Up In the Air is also a terrific portrait of a lonely man.

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1. The Hurt Locker
I knew Kathryn Bigelow’s realistic and emotionally challenging war movie The Hurt Locker was my favorite movie of the year about 10 minutes into it. And that was in June, before so many other great movies would even be seen. Ignoring all the typical Hollywood action-film rules and choosing actors capable of realistic fear and anger, Hurt Locker stormed out of the gate with raw physical power. It knew what it was about, and it understood its characters in every way characters could be understood. It was about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, but it’s also about why men and women fight, how they cope, and why they second guess everything when they’re out there exposed to enemy machine gun nests, roadside bombs and sniper fire. This is an important film, a film we’ll be talking about many years after 2009.

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Honorable Mentions
Here are some films that almost made the list: Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex drama The Girlfriend Experience, the brutally honest Precious, John Hillcoat’s faithful version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the awesome Star Trek reinvention, the timely and appropriate military drama The Messenger, and Spike Jonze’s delightfully strange Where the Wild Things Are.

A father and son at the end of time

Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see.

But amid all the grisly nihilism and stomach-turning hopelessness is one of the most heart-warming, tender and significant relationships of the movies of 2009. We have a father and a son, and the love they share brightens a screen that starts (and ends) in a pitch-black turmoil so thick it seems to drip from the screen like sludgy ink.

The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors.

In an early scene in the film the father and son look for food in a barn. Hanging from the rafters are the corpses of a family that could no longer bear the world. Notice the young boy: he doesn’t flinch at their decomposing bodies. The Boy, young and innocent, has grown up in this chaos and it does not shake him easily.

Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution.

Because the only real plot point in The Road is getting to the ocean, the movie is very episodic in nature. It skips from event to event, like a highlight reel of Man and Boy’s travelogue. They wander the road from hamlet to hamlet, passing under collapsing overpasses and through burning forests dislodged from the topsoil by unnerving earthquakes. They meet Ely (Robert Duvall), an old man who blindly shuffles along the crumbling road. They are robbed by a harmless thief (Michael K. Williams). They find a bunker with stockpiled food. They bathe in a beautiful waterfall spitting grey water.

They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs.

But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions.

McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen.

McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work.

Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further.

Someone once said that parents raise children to replace them. It’s the truth. A good father only wants his child to grow up to be wiser and kinder than he is. And this father is no different with his son, be it the end of the world or no.

Stare into my eyes, Vampire

As if the world needed more skulking, brooding teens, here is an entire film of them doing nothing but staring into the abyss of each other’s eyes contemplating being together for the most miserable of eternities. Why they want to brave immortality together is beyond me, especially when they can’t muster a smile for more than about 5 minutes.

Even in the film’s opening moments — usually the parts of a movie full of happy pre-conflict characters — our hero is reciting Romeo & Juliet, and not the romantic verses either, but the suicide parts. Apparently, his soul is tortured, which is why he tortures the screen (and us) with his overplayed teen angst.

I’m going to just unload on New Moon starting right from the top since the core audience of the Twilight franchise doesn’t read this blog because it isn’t delivered as an iPhone app or a Twitter update. And because if they know better they’ll stay away from reviews, most of which are going to devour this petty, minuscule movie and its unnecessarily loud hype.

New Moon is a teen vampire movie set in the Pacific Northwest. It made me yearn for better teen movies, better vampire movies and a different story in the Pacific Northwest, a setting far too pretty for these gloomy teens. If you haven’t seen Twilight then there’s no real point in seeing New Moon, which assumes you know every scene from the first film and every word, comma and veiled nuance in Stephenie Meyer’s novels, including the endings to sequels that haven’t been filmed yet.

Apparently even the most average Twilight fans read the books multiple times so they can nod in agreement when the films ace the material, and then shake their fists when they get it all wrong. It’s as if the film isn’t a film, but an appendix to the book. Those same fans will say you have to read the books to enjoy the movies, but let me add this: you can skip the books and the movies so you can free up time in your schedule for charity work, organized sports or treehouses. (To be fair, the same can be said about Star Wars, Harry Potter or any other overhyped franchise.)

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is back and this time she wants to be a vampire. The pros are fashionable clothes, overpriced cars and eternal life with Edward (Robert Pattinson). The cons are twinkling ice-cold skin, pail complexion, chronic boredom and eternal life with Edward. Most women at the screening I attended would love to spend just half an hour with Edward (if it even takes that long for the little imp) even if there’s clearly not a single thought in that vampire brain of his. Honestly now, how long could you really talk about how much you loved each other? This is why Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end of their story — they really had nothing better to talk about anyway.

Sensing Bella’s sudden vampire urge (a blatant sexual metaphor perhaps), Edward ditches her “for her own safety.” Taking advantage of Bella’s new single status is Jacob (pudgy faced Taylor Lautner), the local werewolf who reveals himself to be a werewolf about 90 minutes after the Twilight idiots (like myself) have figured it out for ourselves. The fact that he walked around in cut-off shorts and no shirt in Washington’s winter had something to do with it, though. And then after he’s revealed, cue a stream of horrific wolf/dog puns.

The acting is atrocious on nearly every level. Stewart, who I feel has some talent, is required to have bad dreams and stare into empty spaces like Edward's face, which barely counts as acting in a movie not made for girls with Hello Kitty! backpacks. Edward looks clueless in every scene, and Pattinson doesn't help him with the hazed-over wonderment in his moonface. All the best characters are given only brief parts, like Charley, Bella's dad, who says stupid fatherly things, but is generally a sane character if also a little clueless about his free-wheeling daughter. Vampire matriarch Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) is the most interesting of the vampires, if only because he's not 17 years old, yet all he does is stitch an arm then fade into the background. Bella's friend Jessica has a terrific little monologue about zombies and clichés that's so poignant it could be a commentary on the film itself. Jessica's played by Anna Kendrick, the star of one of my favorite movies about teens, Rocket Science. She also keeps up with George Clooney in December's superb Up in the Air. See either of those movies and you'll be better using your time.

I’ve explained some of the plot, but I’m not doing the film justice. What is it about? It’s about Bella waiting for Edward to return. That’s it. She toys with Jacob’s feelings, but he clearly never has a shot, the poor wolf-guy, because Edward is destined to return or Bella will just whither from his absence. The film states all this again and again in tortured sequences of dialogue that will test your patience and the strength of your armrest as you claw at it mercilessly. In terms of content, the vacuum of space feels like a conga line compared to the chilly and unpleasant conversations these characters share during many of New Moon’s 130 minutes.

All this weepy drama can’t be good for women, especially young girls, who are brainwashed by opera this soapy. I hate it when a movie makes me feel like a feminist, but this is one of them. Consider: Bella is defined by the men she’s dating. She’s worthless when Edward’s not around. When he disappears she acts suicidal in hopes that he’ll return and pity her. She’s always in need of rescuing. Watch this movie and you’re being told that women are stupid and meaningless until a man completes them. I expect this from a misogynist like Tucker Max, not a woman. And why does a man have to draw attention to this?

If it hates women or loves them, all I ask is that something happens. New Moon just pretends to have things happening: vampires lunge at open wounds, shirtless boys transform into overgrown wolves, stand-offs and chases in the woods, and Italian castles with a vampire tribunal (in which Dakota Fanning has one line, “Pain”). Break all that down, though, and you still only have a frozen tundra of uncomfortable silences, impassioned gazes and lifted eyebrows all directed at Bella, who’s so self-centered that maybe immortality as a narcissist vampire is an appropriate career path.

Obviously, I hated this movie, but — and this has to be said — Twilight fans will love it. They’ll see Bella and Edward’s bland conversations as modern-day Shakespeare, and all the weepy, detached romance as eternal true love. They’ll eat it up in multiple viewings and then write me to say I’m a cranky old man who doesn’t understand anything. Well, here’s one thing I do understand: skulking, brooding teens are no fun to watch. In real life, or in a movie.

Smile already.

Why Marlon Wayans is cast in garbage

The Internet is full of dumb trivia, but this one is not only dumb, but completely retarded. It was a trivia nugget that appeared on the front page of IMDb, though I think these nuggets must cycle randomly because it wasn't there when I returned. It said, and I quote (because you can't make this shit up): "Marlons Wayans was cast as Ripcord [in G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra] after his performance in Requiem For a Dream (2000). Wayans is also a fan of G.I. Joe."

How the producers of G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra could watch Requiem For a Dream — a serious, honest-to-goodness FILM of the highest order — and come to the conclusion that he's perfect for their absurd, big-budget, stale-popcorn piece of shit MOVIE is beyond all comprehension. The fact that they were even allowed to say G.I. Joe and Requiem For a Dream in the same sentence proves they're absolutely insane, and Requiem director Darren Aronofsky gets to knee each of them in the balls until they are dead. If anything it's a sad commentary on Marlon Wayans, who hasn't done enough work for Joe producers to name-drop. What are they going to do, say "We picked Marlon for an elite super-soldier because he played a terrific man-baby in Little Man"? Or, "Marlon did white-face better than anyone I've ever seen in White Chicks so we had to have him in this lame-ass action movie." Of course not. The producers are going to name-drop the best thing Marlon has ever done, and that's Requiem, a movie he did 10 years ago and has nothing to do — in this universe or any alternate universes — with G.I. Joe.

Now Whip It / Into Shape / Shape It Up

Whip It is a sports movie for women, by women, starring women. It’s more sexy than it is macho and for that I’m not sure how a strident feminist would react to it, although I’d hope they approve because Whip It could be an empowering movie for women stuck in the daily grind of womanhood. After all, men aren’t the only athletes who want to bash in an opponent's nasal cavity with an elbow.

The sport is women’s roller derby. Decades ago male and female versions were injected into pop culture as legitimate sporting events. They never really took off. In the last decade, though, a revival has popped up in major cities across the country. More sideshow novelty than sport — matches are often held in gutted warehouses — women’s roller derby was reinvented for the hellbilly, tongue-in-cheek hipster crowd. And that’s how it’s presented here: as a busty tattooed subculture for the ironic and cynical.

Texas beauty pageant contestant Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page) discovers the sport in a head shop, where her mom admires a display of bongs and blurts out, “Oh, what pretty vases you have here.” Lying to her parents, Bliss says she’s going to an SAT class, but instead hops on the senior citizen BINGO bus to Austin, the hub of Texas’ underground roller derby league. It’s there she watches her first match and falls in love — partly with the sport, mostly with the rebellious spirit that pumps through the rowdy players’ veins.

After the match, she meets members of one of the teams, the Hurl Scouts, and they convince her to come to tryouts to which she says, “The last time I wore skates they had Barbies on them.” But the derby girls — with stage names such as Smashley Simpson, Rosa Sparks, Bloody Holly, Maggie Mayhem and Princess Slaya — convince her to try out anyway, though 17-year-old Bliss tells another lie, that she’s 22 years old for the adults-only league.

Of course Bliss makes the team. Of course she helps the pathetic Hurl Scouts climb from the cellar to the top of their division. Of course her age is revealed before the championship match, moments before her disapproving mother wanders in late to have her quiet and proud moment in the back of the crowd. Whip It is not short of cliché. Nor is it shy about even hiding them. But honestly, who cares? Whip It is a deliriously fun movie, one of the most energetic and sincere of the year. And it may use cliché to its occasional detriment, but the film is still a complete original.

What a wonderful and cohesive cast, too. Ellen Page, still sparkling from Juno, is a treasure. She’s thrown up against some big personalities here — including SNL genius Kristen Wiig, singer Eve, stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Death Proof) and a hilarious Andrew Wilson, brother to Owen — yet Page never flinches, never misses a beat, and still acts the daylights out of her co-stars. She’s even given her own catchphrase on the derby track after a long pause and a slow camera zoom: “Let’s. Go. Apeshit.” she says, looking as menacing as her petite frame will let her. There’s also an electric performance by Juliette Lewis, basically playing a nuttier version of herself as derby villain Iron Maven, and another by Drew Barrymore, who seems to get grotesquely injured in every scene.

Barrymore, a staple in Hollywood since her big breakthrough in E.T. in 1982, directs Whip It like maybe she’s been paying attention all these years on movie sets. Her film — from a Shauna Cross screenplay and book — is so much more than a sport movie; it’s a coming-of-age story more delicate than all the flying elbows and knuckle sandwiches will let you believe. It’s really about Bliss being honest with her parents (played by Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern), who don’t see the innocent cuteness in the derby antics.

At times Barrymore mounts the camera on a set of skates and takes off down the banked track capturing handheld images of bloody fists, scabbed kneecaps and mini-skirted derby brawlers. And then, on a dime, she can turn around to allow tender moments for Bliss to cry in reflection at the places her lies have taken her, or not taken her. At one point, Bliss gets a boyfriend, but Barrymore doesn’t let Whip It become some kind of inane romantic comedy. And yet there’s a lovely scene in a swimming pool that is probably one of the sexiest non-sex scenes filmed in some time.

Barrymore also has an ingenious way of describing the rules of roller derby: she has Wilson sketch them out on a white board in pictures so simple that the scene ends with the drawing of a smiley face. If only, as a favor to me, she could use the same method to now describe cricket, a sport that needs some simplification.

I enjoyed Whip It tremendously. The film reinforced one belief (Ellen Page is marvelous) and laid the foundation for another (Drew Barrymore as talented director). And if you’re like me, after seeing Whip It you’ll be searching the Internet for the nearest roller derby match.

McNamara, icon of war, bares his soul

This is the fifth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Fog of War plays like a Bond film. There’s political intrigue, black ops, secret meetings, international espionage, coded messages to the Kremlin, a doomsday clock and tape-recorded presidential meetings. It’s riveting on a level far beyond any 007 movie, so it will sound strange to you when I say that Fog of War is a documentary film, a minimalist one, that is filmed plainly and effectively using almost exclusively one camera setup, in front of which a sharply dressed older man talks directly to us.

The man is Robert McNamara. To some he’s the architect of the Vietnam War, and thus the designer of 58,159 American deaths. To others he’s a heroic figure; the man who used numbers to help end World War II, the man who, as secretary of defense, provided valuable consultation to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The movie plays both sides, because in McNamara’s eyes he was both, the hero and the villain. It was McNamara, the hero, who sent the National Guard to Vietnam protests with unloaded rifles. It was McNamara, the villain, who was consulting General Curtis LeMay when the decision was made to begin systematic firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II. As a result, more than 300,000 Japanese citizens were killed. “LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara plainly says. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” These are brave questions from a man who has every right to be afraid of the answers.

The film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2004, is directed by Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), a careful and fluent documentary filmmaker. He films his main subject here with a special camera that allows McNamara, still with his trademark slicked-back hair, to look directly into the lens in an engaging, conversational way. The film is essentially his dialogue with Morris, who we occasionally hear setting up stories and asking questions, some of which don’t get answered (“I’m done talking about that,” McNamara says to an off-camera Morris regarding blame during Vietnam). For the most part, though, McNamara shares openly from his past, and from his famous Eleven Lessons, which include: No. 1 – Empathize with your Enemy, No. 5 – Proportionality should be a guideline in war, and No. 8 – Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Since the movie was released, I’ve kept a hand-written list of his rules on my computer monitor and I find it more valuable than my AP Style Guide.

McNamara applies his rules to his own history and offers their origins in Fog of War, which tells his story out of order, from his involvement in Lyndon Johnson’s deteriorating Vietnam debacle to World War II and then forward again to the Kennedy years, when he fought the Soviets and then buried his great leader, to which he sheds a tear and tells the story of how he and Jacqueline Kennedy picked out the presidential plot at Arlington National Cemetery. As if all this wasn’t enough, McNamara was also the president of Ford Motors and head of the World Bank.

The narrative really excels during McNamara’s discussion of the Cold War — “Cold War … hell, it was a Hot War.” At one point, during the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter, he holds up his fingers an inch or so apart and announces, “This is how close we came to World War III.” As McNamara speaks, Morris uses archival footage to show the low-level flyovers of Cuba, the naval blockade, gathering troops in Florida and, using a loup and light table, the negatives of the actual Soviet missiles on Cuban soil from the reconnaissance flights. McNamara hauntingly declares, “There is no learning period for nuclear weapons.” He nearly learned that the hard way during those 13 days in October 1962.

Many of these stories are nearly footnotes in the McNamara biography once Vietnam is brought up. Vietnam was his legacy and curse. He and JFK were worried about Vietnam falling to the communists, but not more worried then getting mired in a war that was unwinnable. As advisors were being sent in, plans were in the wings that could be drafted up to bring everyone home before a full-scale war started. Then Kennedy was killed and LBJ ascended to the throne and began sending young people in by the thousands. In public McNamara was playing the dutiful Secretary of Defense, but behind closed doors he was asking Johnson the tough questions. The film leaves the many comparisons to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush wide open.

Is the film an admission of McNamara’s guilt for Vietnam? I don’t think so. I think it’s his vindication, and maybe his confession. As the secretary of defense he was no doubt running the day-to-day war, but it was Johnson who was so petrified of defeat. The film plays audio recordings of Johnson’s cabinet meetings where he explicitly says the Kennedys (John and Bobby) were all wrong trying to plan an exit strategy out of Vietnam. The falling dominoes terrified Johnson, and McNamara did his best to quell Johnson’s fire to no luck. Eventually McNamara left the Pentagon, though still today he doesn’t know if he quit or was fired.

Of all the figures of the 20th century, I find McNamara one of the most compelling. Some of history has vilified him, as is no doubt warranted, yet the film shows a different character: it shows an articulate and well-expressed man who was put under great pressure from some of the century’s darkest times. He made some bad decisions, but I don’t think he ever made the same mistakes twice. And what he did get wrong he was willing to admit to at the end of his long, illustrious life. The film neither sides with or against McNamara; it just frames him within his own words and actions, which play out louder and with a ferocity that no history book can deliver.

Robert McNamara died July 6 of this year at the age of 93.

One beer, please ... but make it to go.

At the Tempe screening of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell the real Tucker Max, the main character from the film, made an appearance. Four minutes into his pre-show routine — one in which he treats every fan like a hostile witness or comedy-show heckler — he had painfully shared stories of dead prostitutes, objectified turkey legs and using abortion payments to rack up frequent flyer miles on his credit card.

One fan stood up, grabbed a mic and seemed ready to brag about a sexual assault he perpetrated as a “joke.” Tucker, the screening’s foul-mouthed court jester, cut the fan off before he implicated himself in something that required police intervention. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “at least Tucker has some limits.”

Tucker Max is offensive for offensive’s sake. He claims he’s not a bigot because he hates everyone almost equally. He claims he’s not a misogynist because, after all, he has sex with thousands of women, so by default he must love them, right? Remember when mountaineering pioneer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest and he responded, “Because it’s there.” Why does Tucker say crude things? For no other reason than because they’re there.

The movie would have been better served without its star personality in attendance, mainly because afterward you could plainly see how the film watered down the real Tucker, a mean-spirited and bitter young man who has crafted a franchise from his drunken sexual exploits for the frat-boy branch of future alcoholics of America. The Tucker in the film is not nearly as toxic, which may be its only redeeming quality.

The film follows law student Tucker Max (Matt Czuchry) as he pesters his friend Dan (Geoff Stults) for a rambunctious bachelor party before his wedding to a girl far too sweet for a movie like this. Against his better judgment, Dan relents to a road trip that can only end bad, and has ended bad in a dozen other better films. Tucker and Dan bring along another buddy, Drew (Jesse Bradford, Flags of Our Fathers), who recently broke up with his girlfriend when he found her cheating with a celebrity rapper named Grillionaire, which sounds like a McDonalds prize giveaway.

Beer in Hell pretty much follows a well-worn path through the rowdy bachelor party formula: naked women shimmy from poles, the drinking increases, someone ends up in jail with puke in his hair, the wedding is in jeopardy after the bride’s phone calls go unanswered and Tucker wakes up in bed with a little person, a conquest on par with his bedding of a blind girl and a deaf girl. “Hey, you’re halfway to a Helen Keller,” a friend tells him. Disabled Americans should froth at all this, even if it’s all in “good fun.”

Most of the film is Tucker sharing his twisted theories on life with whoever will listen, be it strippers, drunk bachelorettes or his easily manipulated friends. His core belief system is that women are nothing until a man completes them. That man, of course, is Tucker, who thinks he’s God’s gift to everything.

Parts of the film are funny, though not nearly as funny as similar scenes in its far-more-intelligent 2009 comedy counterpart, The Hangover. Many parts are disgusting beyond description, including an extended sequence involving diarrhea and plastic-wrapped toilets. One of the better subplots is with the Bradford character who is so angry and bitter toward women after his breakup that he can barely stomach the strippers gyrating in front of him. He taunts and ridicules them until one fights back, they retreat back to her place to have a Halo 3 tournament and then he falls in love with her. I wasn’t sure I liked this development until they left the club and began actually talking and you could sense they were real, albeit shallow, people.

Most of the movie, though, is a vain attempt for Tucker Max to mythologize and deify Tucker Max. It’s a monument to himself disguised as a comedy franchise. The stories, or variations of them, are taken from his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a book I’ve read and appreciated for its honest writing and Gonzo style. Seeing it on the screen, though, made me cringe. I would compare it most to Fight Club, another flawed monument to man’s failing masculinity — Roger Ebert called it “macho porn,” a term that works for both movies.

Who cares whether they serve beer in hell or not. My question is this: Is hell big enough for Tucker Max’s over-inflated ego?

Once Upon a Time … When the Music Spoke

This is the fourth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

A great number of films strive for honest portrayals of love. Most of them fail and aim for lust instead — after all, sex requires far less talent and is so much more titillating. Here’s a film that presents us with two people brought together by a love so great there’s no room on the screen for it to manifest in the form of sex, or even an innocent kiss or warm embrace. Like Casablanca long before it, Once is about a man and a woman who, for reasons slightly beyond their control, can’t be together, but that doesn’t stop intimacy so profound that the film seems unprepared for the gravity of it.

Once is one of the more beautiful love stories of the cinema. It stars two people who were, at the time, falling in love themselves. They’re both musicians, which means their hearts are already tuned to love’s frequency. He is Glen Hansard, the singer and guitarist for the Irish band The Frames. She is Markéta Irglová, a Czech singer and frequent Frames collaborator. They essentially play themselves in John Carney’s musical fable set on a lovely Dublin street, where the only people we meet are musicians with unappreciated skills.

He is simply known as Guy in the credits, and she is Girl, although they are never identified as anything in the film. He is a street performer in a bustling plaza. He takes requests in the day, but at night he performs his own material, music that reveals the hurt, betrayed heart withering behind his battered guitar. She is a Czech immigrant selling flowers to tourists and she comes across his music at a vulnerable moment as he bleeds heartache during one particularly hurtful song. I love her entrance: the camera moves in slowly on his face as he sings the final lines of the song and as the camera pulls back there she is, as if materializing from a dream.

They become friends. He repairs her vacuum cleaner. She writes lyrics for a song he had long ago stopped tinkering with. She invites him to her apartment, where he finds out she has a daughter, an absent husband and three Czech neighbors who come over to watch football on her television set, the only one in the building. Abruptly and inexplicably, he decides to travel to London to get his girlfriend back and maybe get some kind of record contract. But before he goes, he wants to lay some tracks down in the studio now that he has a true collaborator and a backup band of other street performers. At times the film stops being a film altogether and nearly becomes a behind-the-scenes feature on a band documentary: there is lots of studio footage, candid music experimentation and playful moments on a beach during a break in recording. Even as the film wanders through these musical montages, though, the camera lingers on the budding romance between Guy and Girl.

Of course he loves her and he doesn’t want to leave. He respects her too much to force himself on her, even though that is a mistake he nearly makes in the film’s early moments. At one point he asks her if she loves her husband, to which she responds with several words in Czech. It’s a Lost in Translation moment and we’re not meant to know what she says, but the coy smile on her face suggests she might have answered, “No, because I love you.” The ending of the film is perfect, delicate and wonderful. A lesser filmmaker would have made it a tragedy, but Carney makes it a story of endlessly uplifting hope.

Once is a fairy tale. It’s also a musical. Music injects itself in every scene, and many of the plot developments are based on the actual recording or writing of the songs on the soundtrack. Consider a wonderful moment for Irglová: she’s in her apartment writing lyrics for Hansard’s song and her CD player runs out of batteries. She throws a jacket over her pajamas and walks down to the market for some double-As. On her return journey, in an unbroken camera shot on Dublin’s dark car-lined streets, she sings the song she just finished writing (“If You Want Me”). It’s a moving song that reveals the depth of her own pain and regret. In another scene, she sits at a piano and weeps as she ponders her own future in a mournful ballad (“The Hill”).

Once is filled with a number of poignant moments, but none quite like the singing of “Falling Slowly,” the song that won Hansard and Irglová an Academy Award. The scene takes place in a music store, where he teaches her how to perform a song he’s been working on. He runs through the verse, chorus and bridge, and she writes piano parts right there on the spot. After only several minutes they begin playing the song in a sequence too magical not to be a fairy tale. I love how the camera never leaves their faces; only once does it cut to a reaction shot of the store owner, who quietly nods his approval of the enchantment taking place behind him. To appreciate the scene more, we must leave the context of the film and visit the Oscar ceremony (see it here). After an emotional performance of the song live, Hansard and Irglová win an Oscar, but due to a misplaced musical cue only Hansard gets to make an acceptance speech. Later, after the commercial break, host Jon Stewart, in a classy move, stops the show and asks Irglová to come out to have her moment. Her belated speech should be considered part of the Once canon: “… Fair play to those who dare to dream and don’t give up. This song was written from a perspective of hope and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are.”

John Carney’s film is an uplifting picture made with considerable talent under what must have been difficult conditions using digital cameras in available light. Apparently it took like 17 days to shoot, which is as speedy as it gets. I object to the treatment of the DVD cover — where the movie poster is Photoshop’d so Hansard and Irglová are closer together and holding hands, and now wearing different clothes — but that’s hardly Carney’s fault. How he managed to get complex performances out of non-actors, musicians no less, is remarkable. And the statement he makes about love and hope is beautiful and pure.

I don't follow celebrity romances too much, but when I heard that Hansard and Irglová had broken up a year or so after their Oscar win, it hurt almost as much as the end of Once. It's our hope that the characters, and the actors playing them, can be happy forever. The film, though, provides the answer to that: love, no matter how fleeting, is an emotion that's always worth having, be it for 20 minutes or 20 years. Yes, Guy and Girl's love was short-lived, but once it's there it never leaves.

Requiem For a Nightmare

This is the third in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Addiction is a monster with an insatiable appetite, which is appropriate that Requiem For a Dream is more a horror film than anything else. This is not Trainspotting or Blow; there is no irony or humor in the destruction that drugs cause. Requiem bypasses all the winking drug culture acknowledgment and taps into the repulsion and the terror of addiction. It does it on the ground level with four people who have otherwise good souls with real hopes and dreams, real aspirations that float on the edge of the screen. And then addiction guts them from the inside out.

Requiem For a Dream is a horrifying film. Its dread can be almost unbearable. The first time I saw it the audience seemed relieved that it was over, as if its depictions were some form of emotional torture. Truly, though, it can be intense: the drilling music, the character’s pathetic conclusions, the unrelenting editing. It pounces on you and doesn’t let go. The effect is haunting and disturbing, yet provocative and strangely cathartic. It’s also deeply, deeply heartbreaking.

The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, who wrote the screenplay from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel of the same name, a novel that perversely exempts itself from basic grammar and punctuation. At the time of the film’s production, Aronofsky was a rogue independent filmmaker. He had done Pi on the fly without permits in New York City. After Requiem, in 2000, he would go on to do his long-delayed, nearly abstract science fiction film The Fountain and then his exploration of a deeply wounded has-been in The Wrestler, where his credibility to the masses was cemented in his careful direction of has-been Mickey Rourke. But Requiem For a Dream was his watershed moment in cinema. It defined his commitment to his material, specifically his characters, who he wasn’t afraid to bleed out within his plots.

Requiem’s four stars cover the gamut of addiction. First there’s Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). The three of them, wander around Coney Island and Brighton Beach with no purpose. In time-lapsed montages we see them doing drugs: the fidgety boredom of marijuana, the wired energy of cocaine, and then heroine, their drug of choice, which makes them quiet and reflective as they stare at the ceiling and dream. They use the drugs to inspire them: Marion imagines owning a fashion boutique with her designs on the racks, and Tyrone and Harry want to buy some pure heroin so they can “off it” and settle into an early retirement.

The fourth character is Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), Harry’s mother, who has to buy back her television set on a weekly basis after Harry sells it near the boardwalk for drug money. “When you gonna put an end to this and tell the police on Harry, Mrs. Goldfarb?” the profiteering recipient of the TV asks. She couldn’t turn in her only son, she says and then hauls her set back up to her apartment. Sara’s drug is her past, which she dwells on but can never gain back. Later, after a telemarketing hack convinces her she’s going to be on television, Sara starts taking diet pills so she can fit into a beloved red dress that signifies the happiness that was once so distinct in her now-indistinct life. Eventually, after only several days, the diet pills stop working and Sara begins popping them handfuls at a time. At this point in Requiem For a Dream, everyone is hooked on something and the downward spiral turns into a nosedive down into the void.

What happens next can only be described as a brutal, all-out assault on the senses, relentless and unflinching. Sara grows more paranoid as her uppers stopping sending her up, and her downers stop sending her down. Her sanity drifts in and out, and eventually she’s wandering the streets a drooling mess. Harry, now completely dependent on heroin, starts itching at an infection at his injection site on his arm. The wound screams at him for more drugs, yet each needle plunge assures his demise. Marion, unable to cop her fix on the street with money she doesn’t have, sells her body to Big Tim (Keith David), an upscale drug dealer who trades his product for sex or demeaning sexual performances. Tyrone gets off the luckiest with just jail time on a minor drug charge, although cleaning up in jail is no treat. The finale is meant to shock and offend — Sara getting electric shock therapy, Marion engaging a huge dildo at a sex party — because the effects of addiction are shocking and, yes, offensive.

I’ve given away some of the third act’s secrets, but the film can’t be described in text — it must be experienced. People talk about great editing in movies, like the famous baptism sequence in The Godfather, and those discussions should always include the entire last third of Requiem For a Dream, a virtuosic collection of sequences. By the time the third act begins, the film turns into a bleak, offensive opera of degradation: The jarring music, by electronic artist Clint Mansell and strings by the Kronos Quartet, becomes the wave the film rides on. The editing cuts relentlessly between our four characters. And the pace feels like an expression of panic or hyperventilation. Watch, too, how the three acts use color: summer uses warm golden hues, fall begins to incorporate more cold blues, and winter abandons all hope inside claustrophobic fluorescents.

The colors aren’t the only camera trick, either. Requiem utilizes a bunch of in-camera tricks, some of which were invented here and are now overused gimmicks in the industry. Aronofsky and his cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Iron Man) use time-lapse photography to show Sara cleaning her house, hanging and spinning cameras to show the falling dreams of Marion and Harry, and the famous “body-cam,” which is a camera attached to an actor’s body giving the impression of a purely subjective point of view. In one scene, the camera is attached to a vibrating motor that oscillates depending on the volume of the performance. In another scene, Sara’s grapefruit breakfast is eaten in still-life elegance with no hands in the frame. To illustrate the drug use, which is never shown in any broad detail, Aronofsky filmed dozens of close-ups: lighter sparks, heroin spoons, cotton swabs, needle pokes, veins loosening and pupils dilating. These quick shots — all added up to only a second or two of film — are strung together with appropriate sound effects to show the repetition and compulsiveness of drug use. Doing it this way, without drug paraphernalia laying in every shot, it allows us to watch the behavior of the characters and not the mechanics of the drugs.

Using all these tricks, Aronofsky has made addiction into a modern-day horror story, and he’s done it with the decade’s most underrated performances. Burstyn, in a fat suit for the first half of the picture, was nominated for an Oscar for her role (and famously lost to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), but the film didn’t get a single other Oscar nomination. No Leto, no Wayans and no Jennifer Connelly, who deserved a nomination and a win more than she did for her winning performance the next year in the completely forgettable A Beautiful Mind. These brave actors become these characters on such deep levels that their demise is painful, their hurt hurts us. By the time they curl up on their beds in those famous last images, the film has wounded us on a spiritual level — “What a waste,” we tell ourselves.

This is a frantic, ferocious movie and it cuts like a razor across the face of all that we hold dear, our dreams and our aspirations. Addiction is the very real monster that lurks out there waiting for us, and Requiem For a Dream is the monster’s exposé.

When burlap sacks save the world

When our world ends — like really ends — let’s pray that little burlap dolls aren’t left to fix our mistakes. Although, at that point it's unlikely anyone will be around to do any praying. Hell, at that point dolls or even rusty carburetors could be tasked with the cleanup and either way mankind wouldn't peep a single complaint.

I watched 9 keenly, absorbed by its post-apocalyptic detail and its well-choreographed action, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why six-inch-tall ragdolls were given the job of saving the world. Or why a scientist, who could inject his soul into anything, would choose forms so tiny and so incapable of preserving man’s dual legacy of hope and destruction. I question this part of the plot, but let that be my only complaint on this strikingly different animated film.

In 9, it’s the not-too-distant future and scientists have created artificial intelligence, which will be invented to be villains in movies like this or the Terminator franchise. Notice the “peacekeeping” machines that first roll off the assembly line: they all have chaingun turrets to, you know, keep the peace. Of course, the AI responds to man’s control with hostile force and eventually every city on the planet is a smoking crater of poison gas and brimming with the stench of death.

Living in the smoldering remnants of man are the nine little stitched dolls, each named in the order that they were made. 9 is the last one created and he awakes in confusion: what is his purpose, he wonders, as he claws through the detritus of splintered wood, powdered brick and decaying bodies. This movie is not shy with its treatment of death, and it rightfully earns its PG-13 rating; think twice before bringing little ones.

Eventually 9 (Elijah Wood) meets up with the other eight sack people, including fear-mongering leader 1 (Christopher Plummer), gadget guru 5 (John C. Reilly), sexy fighter 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and loony tune 6 (Crispin Glover). Their purpose in this apocalyptic landscape, they reason, is to hide from the last of the nomadic machines as it scours the cracks for things to kill.

Surely life has more purpose, free-spirited rebel 2 (Martin Landau) says. He’s proven right after 9 finds a thimble-like artifact that accidentally turns the machines of war back on after their battery life expired long ago. Before they could hide in fear, but with fresh smoke billowing from the factories of death, the nine now have to fight or be crushed in a second apocalypse. The movie never establishes the nine’s importance well enough that we can accept their role in ending this world-obliterating calamity, but the nine believe it and that counts for something.

I love the style and feel of this film. The sack people, with their zippered fronts and hand-stitched joints — apparently this is called “stitch punk” — are terrific, albeit outlandish, subjects. They have these can-like eyes with snapping little apertures for eyelids that allow for full, expressive emotions. The villains they fight, assembled from the rubble of the wasteland, are equally impressive as harpoon-tailed pterodactyls, wormy snakes that can cocoon victims in scarlet thread, and a robotic cat with a real cat skull for its head. The bombed-out landscape provides many opportunities for these two sides to battle, and battle they do on the crashed wing of a bomber, on the plains of the war-ravaged countryside, and on the mechanical arms of a brain machine.

Mostly I liked this film because it was completely original. When was the last time an animated film used the post-apocalypse as a setting? Or featured death in such a challenging way? Or had non-human characters that weren’t talking animals? You can answer all three questions with “never” or “almost never.”

Like Coraline before it from earlier this year, 9 presents a frightening story and tells it in an inventive, unforgiving way. Children need not be coddled so diligently in this day and age. If they can handle it, let them be a little scared with 9 and its unique burlap heroes.

And just because I love the 9 artwork, here's more: