My Favorite Films of the Decade

Since taste is so subjective -- and because I'm fully aware of the fact that there are plenty of movies out there from the last decade that I haven't seen -- I'm loathe to call this a "Best Of" list. Rather, let's just say that these are my personal favorites, the ones that compelled me to go back for a repeat viewing.

So here goes.

1. Let the Right One In and The Signal (both 2008)

Directed by Tomas Alfredson (Right One) and David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry (Signal)





2008 reignited my passion for horror movies after a slow, nearly decade-long falling out with the genre, and it was these two films -- wildly different but each brilliant in its own way -- that did it.

I saw The Signal first, and I walked away convinced I wouldn't see a better horror film for at least another decade. Conceived by a collective of independent Atlanta filmmakers working with prosumer equipment, the movie is told in three elegantly interlocking parts, each written and directed by a different person but all forming a cohesive -- if utterly demented -- whole. The story is deceptively simple: a strange electronic signal delivered through TVS, radios and cell phones turns all of the denizens of a fictional American city into homicidal maniacs. I don't want to say anything more about it for fear of spoiling the experience. Just trust me when I say this is the most original and thought-provoking American horror film in years. And it was all done for a budget of about $200,000.

So when I saw Let the Right One In some months later, I was stunned to discover that it was even better. Austere, chilly and deliberate where Signal is heated and frenetic, Right One manages to do what Twilight, True Blood, Thirst, Underworld, and all the other "vampire chic" movies and TV shows in recent years have so far failed to do ... make vampires scary again. The swimming pool scene toward the end is worth the rental price alone.

2. The Business of Fancydancing (2002) and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

Directed by Sherman Alexie (Fancydancing) and Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat)



NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!


I don't really like the term "indigenous film" because it smacks to me of white liberal condescension, but I think it's worth noting that two of the best independent films from the early part of the decade came from Native American (or Canadian) filmmakers using the then new medium of digital video.

Fancydancing was written and directed by novelist/poet/screenwriter Sherman Alexie, and it follows Seymour Polotkin (Evan Adams), a gay Native American poet living in Seattle, as he returns home to the reservation he grew up on to attend a childhood friend's funeral. The film comes off as one part documentary, one part traditional narrative, and one part visual poem. It will creep under your skin without you even knowing it, and the quiet but crushing ending can reduce even the most macho dude to tears (trust me, I've seen it happen).

Atanarjuat is a very different film. Written and acted entirely in Inuktitut, it is the cinematic realization of a centuries old Inuit myth about the title character. Director Zacharias Kunuk provides almost no narrative context for non-Inuit audiences, choosing instead to toss us head-first into the story, and he uses the DV format to lend the film a sense of both immediacy and reality. The result is a movie that feels in some ways like a Maysles brothers documentary. Yet Kunuk still manages to create a stunning visual landscape, wringing images out of his video camera that a studio cinematographer would envy. It's a long movie, and slow going, but well worth it.

3. Michael Clayton (2007)

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy



The directorial debut from screenwriter Tony Gilroy (Dolores Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate, the Bourne trilogy, among others), Michael Clayton was sort of lost in the shuffle during a powerhouse year that offered up such lauded (and I would argue overrated) films as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Critics had nice things to say about it, but audiences didn't really notice and all the available Oscar buzz got sucked up by the Country/Blood showdown.

Granted, a legal thriller about a cynical lawyer (George Clooney) confronting the depths of corporate greed is familiar terrain oft-traversed by the likes of John Grisham and Scott Turrow. But that's selling this movie short. Michael Clayton is oh-so-much better than its legal-thriller genre origins would suggest. Click on that clip I posted above, close your eyes and listen to Tom Wilkinson's opening monologue, and try to tell me that this isn't the work of an A-list screenwriter operating at the absolute top of his game. Michael Clayton is the type of straightforward movie that Hollywood does best, when it can get its shit together.

4. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Directed by Edgar Wright



This is the movie that singlehandedly destroyed my beloved zombie subgenre and forever dashed my aspirations of making a truly scary, super-serious zombie movie like the ones I grew up on. After receiving the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg treatment, I just don't think zombies can ever be taken seriously again.

But that's okay, because this movie is so friggin' awesome I can't be mad at it. Smart, silly, and -- yes -- even scary at times, Shaun of the Dead injected a much-needed shot of comedic tough love into an admittedly (begrudgingly, on my part) tired formula. The film transcended parody and proudly entered the pantheon of great horror comedies, unceremoniously batting Return of the Living Dead aside like a rag doll and knocking An American Werewolf in London off its long-occupied throne. And we all must now bow before it.

5. Memento (2000)

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan



The backwards-unfolding structure of this movie could have been a hopelessly irritating gimmick, but writer/director Christopher Nolan used it to craft a brilliant exploration of the very nature of memory and identity. And he managed to make a pretty awesome neo-noir thriller as well. Memento is now considered an undisputed classic, and it's as stunning to me these days as it was when I first saw it almost ten years ago in the theater. If you haven't seen it in awhile, go back and give it another watch. I promise you'll see things you missed the first time around.

Plus, it has Joey Pants. You can never have enough Joey Pants in your life.

6. Little Children (2006) and House of Sand and Fog (2003)

Directed by Todd Field (Children) and Vadim Perelman (House)





I grouped these two films together because of the presence of the generally amazing Jennifer Connelly, but it says something when you stop and realize that hers isn't the strongest performance in either film.

Little Children, directed by Todd Field (In The Bedroom) and adapted from a novel by Tom Perrotta (Election), was criminally unappreciated upon its release. A seemingly familiar tale of suburban infidelity, it's both funny and tragic, deleriously sexy, and is wonderfully acted from start to finish. It reintroduced us all to Jackie Earle Haley, whose turn as pedophile Ronnie James McGorvey is so alternately creepy and heartbreaking that it will leave you breathless, near tears and desperately wanting a shower. And Kate Winslet's pretty good, too.

House of Sand and Fog is probably the better film (although I'm partial to Children). Connelly and Ben Kingsley soar as two broken people battling each other and their personal demons in a tug-of-war over a repossessed house. There's nothing funny about this one, and the conclusion left me shaking in my seat. This is a movie that cuts to the bone.

7. Zodiac (2007)

Directed by David Fincher



David Fincher fans expecting another violent bruiser like Se7en or Fight Club were largely disappointed by the slow-paced, talky, and necessarily open-ended Zodiac. What they failed to realize was that this is a mature film for grownups, and it's less a serial killer movie than an old-fashioned, 1970s-style newspaper movie. Granted, I was predisposed to like it because of my already established fascination with the Zodiac Killer (which came from reading the book by Robert Graysmith, who's portrayed in the movie by Jake Gyllenhaal), but I still fly in the face of movie-geek wisdom by maintaining that it's Fincher's best. And, besides, it comes with my favorite movie soundtrack since Natural Born Killers.

8. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Directed by Ang Lee



I almost didn't post this trailer, since it -- along with the theme song and the "I wish I knew how to quit you" line -- have been reduced to an unfortunate parodic shorthand in the years since. But watching it just now reminded me how much I love this movie, which for my money is one of the most starkly effective works of cinema I've seen. Masterfully directed by Ang Lee (robbed at the Oscars by that hack Paul Haggis) and adapted from an Annie Proulx short story by veteran writer Larry McMurtry (along with writing partner Diana Ossana and frequent Lee collaborator James Schamus), this is the movie that reminded all of us that Heath Ledger could act. He may now be forever remembered as the Joker, but this is the performance that stole my heart (and I'll thank you to stop your snickering).

9. Grizzly Man (2005) and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Both directed by Werner Herzog





Werner Herzog has proven to be one of the most fascinating documenters of human folly and psychosis that cinema has to offer (this probably comes from all that time he spent hanging out with Klaus Kinski back in the 70s). In his documentary Grizzly Man, he focuses on a real-life crazy person: Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who got it into his head to go to Alaska and hang out with a bunch of hungry grizzly bears all summer without any means to defend himself. He did this for years, proclaiming over and over again that he would die for his beloved bears. And then one of his beloved bears decided to eat him, along with (sadly) his girlfriend, who Treadwell drug along with him on his delusional adventure almost against her will. Herzog mixes Treadwell's footage with interviews and his own acerbic commentary, and he presents a vision of this story that is both funny and tragic, occasionally sympathetic and at times downright cruel. In true Herzogian fashion, we can't help but think the celebrated German filmmaker is reveling a bit in the tawdry details of the story. And who can blame him?

If you doubt that, then look no further than his latest...er...opus, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Ostensibly a remake of Abel Ferrera's...um...classic indie from the early 90s, Bad Lieutenant is nothing BUT tawdry details. I'm not sure I can really defend this choice as one of the best films of the decade, but I will say that I had more fun with it than almost anything else I've seen in the last ten years and it's so gloriously, stupendously demented that I couldn't not mention it here. Nicolas Cage is far from my favorite actor, but what he does in this movie is simply mind-blowing. It really has to be seen to be believed.

10. A History of Violence (2005)

Directed by David Cronenberg



I really tried not to overfill this list with dude-oriented movies about sex and violence, but what can I say? I like what I like. That said, as movies about sex and violence go, David Cronenberg's adaptation of the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke is curiously flat in the depiction of both. That's because Cronenberg has spent a career working his way through weirdo, existential horror movies on an endless quest to explore the frayed edges reality and examine the ways humans find to create their own reality. Violence isn't really about violence at all, but rather about how a man can -- through sheer force of will -- become someone else entirely. Cronenberg and Violence star Viggo Mortensen explored similar thematic territory with their somewhat less effective followup, Eastern Promises. That was a good enough movie, but I think Cronenberg really said all he needed to say on the subject with this one.

11. Infernal Affairs (2002) and The Departed (2006)

Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (Affairs) and Martin Scorsese (Departed)





I can't get away from this list without mentioning Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs and its American, Scorsese-helmed remake The Departed.

It's unfashionable to say one prefers The Departed to Infernal Affairs, and it's true that Departed is sprawling and messy next to the cold elegance of Lau and Mak's original. It's also true that Departed is seriously marred by a "what-the-fuck?" performance by an eternally phoning-it-in Jack Nicholson. But, after living in Boston for a couple years and having subsequently become obsessed with the real-life tale of Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, around which Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan refashioned their story, I have to say I prefer The Departed. The film captures the language, feel, and texture of Boston in a way that no other film I've seen has before it (take THAT, Mystic River), and -- Nicholson aside -- the performances are nearly pitch perfect across the board. Even Vera Farmiga shines in a role that by rights should never have been written.

Is it crazy to think of The Departed as the final part of a trilogy, preceeded by Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995)? I think not.

12. In Bruges (2008)

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh

NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!


I'm not going to say a whole lot about this one. If you watched the clip above you get the idea. In truth, Martin McDonagh is a brilliant playwrite -- nasty, profane, and funny, sure, but with a surprising capacity for spiritual depth and a truly genius touch with character -- and In Bruges is a startlingly solid first step into feature filmmaking (his Oscar-winning short, Six Shooter, is even better). Watch out for him in the future.

13. This Is England (2006)

Written and directed by Shane Meadows



I've mentioned this movie and talked about Meadows before, so I'll try not to dwell. Meadows is one of the most exciting filmmakers working in England today, and his semi-autobiographical film about the rise of the at-first benign skinhead movement and its corruption by the racist National Front is as eye-opening as it is entertaining. Thomas Turgoose is a firecracker as the young lead, Shaun, and Stephen Graham is absolutely chilling as Combo, Shaun's vicious mentor in the ways of English nationalism. This Is England is like a rich, raw wound needing to be bled.

*****

There are a lot more movies I'd like to talk about, but this post is already ridiculously long so I'll just give a quick shoutout, in no particular order, to:
The Last King of Scotland
American Psycho
Dancer in the Dark
Ginger Snaps
High Fidelity
Requiem for a Dream
Traffic
Ghost World
Waking Life
Adaptation
City of God
Spider
Amores Perros
Battle Royale
21 Grams
Cabin Fever
Dogville
Elephant
Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2
Love Actually
The Station Agent
Willard
Swimming Pool
Wonderland
Session 9
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
The Royal Tenenbaums
Sideways
Monster
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Brick
Caché
The Constant Gardener
Dog Soldiers
Inside Deep Throat
Jarhead
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Land of the Dead
Match Point
The Proposition
Six Shooter
War of the Worlds
Wolf Creek
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Before Sunset
Collateral
Dawn of the Dead
Downfall
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Hotel Rwanda
The Lost
United 93
Clerks II
The Prestige
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Volver
Stranger Than Fiction
Blood Diamond
Children of Men
Pan's Labyrinth
Dead Man's Shoes
An Inconvenient Truth
The Science of Sleep
The Lookout
Death Proof
Sunshine
Death Sentence
Eastern Promises
No Country For Old Men
Beowulf
The Mist
Juno
There Will Be Blood
Cloverfield
The Ruins
WALL-E
The Dark Knight
Burn After Reading
Milk
The Wrestler
Donkey Punch
Coraline
Gomorrah
State of Play
District 9
Inglourious Basterds
Zombieland
Brothers
Avatar (sorry, Gene)
No End In Sight
Waltz With Bashir
Narc
Hard Candy

Brothers (2009)

Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal at the Los Alamos ice rink

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

In the interest of full disclosure, I should preface this review by saying that I'm actually in this movie. More specifically, the back of my head makes its major motion picture debut for a grand total of about eight seconds during the big funeral scene toward the beginning.

So I was maybe a little predisposed to like it. Not only am I in it (sort of), the majority of the movie was shot right in my home town. For those of you who grew up somewhere like New York or LA, that's not probably not a big deal. But for us Hilltoppers, it's kind of cool. Even movies about Los Alamos (like Roland Joffe's 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy) aren't usually shot there.

Brothers, directed by Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In The Name Of The Father) and a remake of Susanne Biers 2005 Danish film Brødre, tells the story of Sam and Tommy Cahill. Sam (Tobey Maguire) is the good brother, a star athlete married to his high-school sweetheart Grace (Natalie Portman) and father to two adorable little girls (Bailee Madison and Taylor Grace Geare). He's also a decorated Marine on his way back to Afghanistan. Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the bad brother, recently paroled after doing a three-year prison stint for armed robbery. Grace isn't Tommy's biggest fan. Neither, it seems, is Sam and Tommy's stern alcoholic father (Sam Shephard).

When Sam's helicopter goes down in Afghanistan and he's presumed dead, Tommy tries in his clumsy way to fill the void left by his absence. He does this at first by getting drunk and calling Grace at three in the morning to come pay his bar tab. Oops. After this inauspicious start, he slowly and inevitably steps up to the plate. After enlisting three friends to remodel Grace's kitchen and spending time with his nieces, Grace -- almost reluctantly -- begins to thaw. Brother and sister-in-law grow ever closer. Eventually, Grace and Tommy spend an evening together smoking pot and reminiscing about Sam. One thing leads to another and, in a weak moment, their emotions (unsurprisingly) get the better of them.

Before long Tommy -- a crude but well-meaning facsimile of his lost brother -- has, without quite meaning to, supplanted Sam's memory in his grieving family's hearts.

And then Sam comes home.

There has been a lot of bitching and moaning about how the trailer gives too much away, and before seeing the movie I would have agreed. After seeing it, we'd all be forgiven for thinking we know exactly what this movie's about: bad brother sleeps with dead good brother's wife, good brother (not dead after all) comes home and, after finding out bad brother and wife got their freak on, flips out and goes on a shooting spree.

But, now that I've seen the film, I have to say that trailer was actually a pretty clever bait-and-switch on the studio's part. Obviously they want to sell this as either a sexy melodrama, a taut suspense movie, or, preferably, both. But Brothers isn't really about any of that. It's not about infidelity any more than it is a thriller about a psychotic soldier with a gun. What it's about is family, and the way war can bend and twist a family into something tortured and unrecognizable.

Sheridan cuts back and forth between Grace and Tommy's domestic life stateside and Sam's harrowing experience as a Taliban prisoner. The potential second-act "oh shit" movie moment of finding out Sam's fate is neatly sidestepped. When Grace receives the call that he's alive, Sheridan handles the moment with nothing more than a ringing phone and a look on Portman's face.

Sam returns a changed man. Haunted by what he's seen and done and carrying a yolk of guilt around his neck that not even his Vietnam vet father can understand, he projects all his fury and self-loathing outward at Grace and Tommy. Whether or not his wife and his brother actually slept together is beside the point. Sam, desperately looking for a place to put his rage, convinces himself of such. He coils up amidst his increasingly concerned family like a tightly smiling snake ready to strike. Grace, Tommy, and the girls are soon terrified of this unfamiliar and maybe dangerous stranger who has appeared in their midst.

In movies like In The Name Of The Father and In America, Sheridan has proven himself to be one of the most exacting chroniclers of familial nuance that cinema has to offer. So it's no surprise that the most convincing parts of Brothers involve the family. Each of these characters could have been stock, but Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff's eye for detail saves them, and Sheridan leads his cast to some of the finest and subtly affecting performances of their careers.

Portman has never been one of my favorite actresses. She has always seemed so deliberate and hyper-intellectual to me, and her performances have tended to feel like a bundle of ticks and actorly "choices" rather than fully realized characters. Here, in the thankless role of the grieving wife, she manages -- finally -- to eschew her tendency to overthink. She inhabits Grace thoroughly. Grace's pain is almost entirely internal, and Portman lets it bleed out here and there through looks and gestures. When she does cry, the work she and Sheridan have done to keep Grace firmly grounded makes those bigger moments ring true. Later, when she tries to reach out to Sam, the tangled mess of love, torment, guilt, and confusion seems to seep right out through her pores.

Gyllenhaal manages to keep Tommy from drifting into caricature. Tommy is charming, well-meaning, a little flaky, and more than a little devilish. He's also all twisted up with his own Freudian rage and font of self loathing. It would have been easy to go over the top, to hit the dark notes too hard, but Gyllenhaal wisely keeps it simple. The chemistry between him and Portman is thick, but they keep it throbbing at a low hum rather than letting it cycle up to a high whine. When their resolve finally crumbles and they give in to their temptations, the moment is deceptively small but deeply resonant.

The only real false notes for me in Gyllenhaal's performance are the two or three times the script calls on him to play drunk. A wise actor -- okay, Miguel -- once told me that the biggest mistake an actor can make when playing a drunk is to "act drunk" because actual drunks, by and large, try to act sober. Gyllenhaal, unfortunately, goes for the easy choice and you can just see the "acting" all over the screen. Just compare what he does to what Shephard does after the funeral scene, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Shephard, for my money, is the best thing in the movie. His character -- the stern military father constantly comparing his two sons -- is the most fraught with potential for cliche and melodrama. And the script, to be honest, doesn't do him any favors in the early bits (I almost groaned aloud during his rote "why can't you be more like your brother" moment). But Shephard is a pro and he manages to pivot away from our expectations, presenting a flawed man struggling with his own pain who loves both of his sons deeply but just doesn't quite know how to say or do the right thing. After Tommy starts proving himself to both Grace and his dad, Shephard's scenes with Gyllenhaal ("How'd you get so handy?" he admiringly asks as Tommy puts molding on the cabinets) are textbook examples of how less is usually more and what's not said can be more powerful than what is. Later, when he recognizes that Sam is struggling and stumblingly tries to reach out to him, you just want to give the big guy a hug.

The lion's share of the capital-A "ACTING" burden falls, of course, on Maguire, who has to go from loving husband and father to dangerous psycho in just under two hours. This is where Brothers both soars and falters. I had an animated discussion with the folks I saw the movie with afterwards, who felt that they just didn't buy his character from the start. He never seems to really connect with either Portman or his children before he ships out, and so the impact of his loss on the family is not quite felt. My friends were never really rooting for him to come back, they said, which lessened the impact of his return.

I could see their point, but -- whether intentional or not -- the stilted nature of his performance felt true to me. Sam is a professional soldier who, it's suggested, has been away before. It seems not only plausible to me but almost necessary that he would struggle, even in the absence of the trauma later inflicted upon him in Afghanistan, to completely plug back into his civilian life. The same would be true for anyone, military or not, who was away from his family for extended periods of time. I would imagine that most of the men and women currently serving overseas right now would identify with his struggle.

However, the question of whether Maguire -- eternally geeky, awkward, and seemingly light as a feather -- is believable as a Marine at all is debatable. I bought it...just. One of my movie-going compatriots suggested it might have worked better if Maguire and Gyllenhaal had swapped roles. I'm not sure I could buy Maguire as a paroled ex-con any more than I buy him as a soldier., but having seen Jarhead (2005), I can agree that Gyllenhaal would have made the more convincing Marine.

Sheridan's touch with the family dynamic is near perfect, but he stumbles badly when he turns his attention toward Afghanistan. It didn't help that I kept noticing how much "Afghanistan" looked like the outskirts of Albuquerque, but even putting that aside I was just never quite able to buy into the reality the film tries to present. Every Afghanistan scene feels like a different movie, complete with mustache (or beard)-twirling Taliban baddies and tired war-movie dialogue ("Give them nothing, Private!" Sam shouts at a fellow prisoner who's being tortured. "Your life depends on it!"). Sheridan and Benioff seem not altogether interested in really capturing the verisimilitude of war, so they try to shorthand those scenes as much as possible. Unfortunately, that means that when Sam is finally pushed into an irredeemable act of violence the moment is simply not earned.

That makes it even more impressive, then, how much power is in the film's punch after Sam arrives home. What Maguire puts forth in the last forty-five minutes or so of the movie is amongst the most haunting screen acting I've ever seen. Four simple scenes stand out to me. In the first, Sam -- utterly unable to connect with his civilian life and desperate to rid himself of the guilt chewing away at his fevered brain -- tries to talk his commanding officer into sending him back to Afghanistan. "I've just been thinking about my men," he says, smiling and trying to hide the flowering madness that lurks behind his eyes. In the second and third, Sam very quietly confronts both Tommy and Grace about their relationship. "I can forgive you," he tells Tommy...and we almost believe him. Again, Sheridan does more here with looks than with dialogue. The third scene features a birthday party set around a dining room table, and it's one of the scariest scenes you're likely to see in a movie this year.

Sam is a ticking timebomb, as the saying goes, and when he finally blows (again, no spoiler here; it's all in the trailer) the look of utter disconnect in his eyes as he rages is both terrifying and utterly heartbreaking.

Upon leaving the theater, I have to admit that overall I was a bit underwhelmed. I described Brothers as two-thirds of a decent movie and one third of a very good movie. But the damn thing put its claws in me and had me tossing and turning all night. I still think, in a stronger year, Brothers would probably have a hard time getting nominated for an Oscar. This year, however, I wouldn't be surprised to see it at least get a nod. When it's good it's very good, and it has moments where it actually approaches great.

I have no idea what the film's commercial prospects are. The conventional wisdom, after notable failures like In The Valley of Elah and The Kingdom, is that films concerned with either of the current wars (Iraq or Afghanistan) are destined to fail at the box office. Nobody wants to get bummed out when they go to the movies, the thinking goes. But in Brothers Sheridan deftly avoids the temptation toward politics (as much as is possible, at least) and keeps his lens focused squarely on the human drama. You could probably call Brothers an anti-war movie if you really wanted, but it's far from a polemic. In light of President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and the recent tragedy at Fort Drum, I think Brothers is as fitting and sober a tribute to the men and women in the U.S. military and their families as Hollywood is likely to offer.

The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009)

WARNING: SOME MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

I'm sort of enjoying this later-period George Clooney. In both last year's Burn After Reading and the just-released The Men Who Stare At Goats, Clooney seems to be shooting for a subtler, more A-list version of William Shatner, cleverly tweaking his movie-star image and his rugged good lucks for the sake of comic absurdity.

Goats is the sort-of directorial debut of actor/screenwriter/producer Grant Heslov. I say "sort of" because I looked him up on IMDB and saw that he has actually directed a few things before, none of which seem to have gained any real notice. But with Goats (probably because of his Clooney association, with whom he co-wrote Good Night, and Good Luck) he's rocketing out of the gate with a solid pedigree film crammed full of bonafide movie stars (Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor).

The comedy, based on the book of the same name by journalist Jon Ronson, purports to be the mostly true story of a top-secret group of New Age "supersoldiers" -- led by a Dude-ified Bridges as Bill Django-- formed in the 1970s and trained in the art of psychic warfare. The story revolves around a sadsack journalist named Bob Wilton (McGregor) who somehow manages to convince one of these soldiers, Lyn Cassady (Clooney), to let him tag along with him on a covert mission into Iraq in 2003. Throughout the drive into the desert Cassady tells Wilton all about the history of the "New Earth Army", which is revealed though a series of meandering but basically amusing flashbacks. We're introduced to a motley crew of possibly batshit "psychics" including Django, the naive and hippie-dippy General Hopgood (Stephen Lang), the certifiably nutsoid Gus (Stephen Root), and the sublimely oily Larry Hooper (Spacey). We witness the rise of the New Earth Army and its eventual corruption and demise under Hooper's Machiavellian stewardship. Meanwhile, Wilton and Cassady stumble into a few scrapes -- including getting kidnapped, riding along with a bunch of cowboy Blackwater douchebags (led by Robert Patrick, who seems to be channeling the spirit of George W. Bush), and almost dying of thirst in the desert. All the while, Cassady repeatedly attempts to demonstrate his "superpowers" to the skeptical Wilton, with generally anticlimactic effect.

The movie is pretty amiable, and it has only the barest hint of a narrative to hold it together. Watching it meander toward its conclusion is certainly an amusing and, most of the time, agreeable experience. But there is something slightly discomfiting about the tone. Heslov seems to want to make a biting Three Kings or M.A.S.H.-styled satire, but he doesn't really have the strength of his convictions so he relies largely on slapstick for the comedy. The movie wants so desperately for you to like it that it smiles at you when it should show teeth, caresses when it should cut. The modern-day framing story is set in the early years of the current Iraq War, and the light approach to what should be relatively heavy subject matter (all the psychic nonsense aside) left me feeling a little queasy. A car being blown up by an IED is used for comic effect...and it is funny, until you stop and realize that this shit is still going on right now.

Particularly unpleasant -- in light of the recent massacre at Ft. Hood -- is a scene in which a young New Earth Army recruit, whacked out on LSD, stumbles naked across an Army base and starts shooting. To be fair, Heslov and the studio can't really be blamed for the unfortunate timing, and the scene itself is not meant to be funny. But the relatively quick shift back to farce left a sour taste in my mouth.

Overall, I'd give The Men Who Stared At Goats a mild recommendation. Clooney's performance alone makes it worth the price of admission. He plays Cassady like a slightly crazed and sun-blasted Clark Gable, and manages to hit all the right comic notes without ever quite tipping into caricature. He's able to elicit laughs with a mere twitch of his eyes (I just about peed myself during the "sparkly eyes" moment). The same can't be said for Spacey and Bridges, however. Their performances -- while funny -- are much broader and more conventional.

I really hope Clooney keeps channeling his inner Shatner for many years to come.

BONUS: Dead Man's Shoes & This is England trailers

Judging from the several (okay, four) Facebook messages I received after I posted my last review, it seems I stoked some interest in Shane Meadows. It also seems I misspoke a bit when I referred to him as "...one of the finest and least talked about filmmakers working today." That's not exactly true. In Britain, it appears he's talked about a great deal. Over here, though, he continues to fly under the radar.

Also, before I wrote the Dead Man's Shoes review it didn't occur to me to check and see if This Is England is also on Netflix Instant Viewer. It is. And, in all honesty, it's the superior film. So watch them both. They're awesome-tacular.

It was further suggested that I should mention some of Meadows' other films -- particularly his acclaimed A Room For Romeo Brass (1999), which also stars Considine. I saw that one not long after it first came out, and I remember enjoying it. He also directed Twenty Four Seven (1997), Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), and last year's Somers Town. I haven't seen Midlands or Somers Town yet, but I believe they're all available on DVD.

Anyway, in an effort to keep your interest piqued, here are the trailers to Dead Man's Shoes and This Is England, courtesy of YouTube.

My The Men Who Stare At Goats review will be up shortly.

Dead Man's Shoes (2004)

NETFLIX INSTANT VIEWER HIDDEN GEM #1:

Dead Man's Shoes is a deceptively simple little revenge film. You would be forgiven if, after reading the Netflix plot description, you dismiss it as something you've probably seen before.

In a nutshell: Richard (Paddy Considine), a British soldier and war veteran, returns to his tiny hometown in Northern England where he at first threatens and then brutalizes a group of local thugs who perpetrated a nasty and dangerous prank on his mentally disabled younger brother (Toby Kebbell).

If you've ever seen the Michael Caine classic Get Carter (1971) or the Charles Bronson anticlassic Death Wish (1974) -- or have even a passing knowledge of them -- you can probably guess where this goes.

But the opening credit sequence -- a series of 8mm home movies scored to Smog's mournful "Vessel In Vain" -- should tell you right away that writer/director Shane Meadows is up to something slightly different here. Meadows and Considine take this pulpy genre construct and use it to explore some pretty heady themes of grief, rage, and familial guilt and resentment. What promises to be a fun and nasty thrill ride will end up breaking your heart.

Meadows is one of the finest and least talked about filmmakers working today. Like all true directors, he understands that the root of a great film lies in the performance. In both Dead Man's Shoes and his followup This Is England (2006) -- a harrowing journey through the history of England's skinhead movement and its corruption by the rise of the National Front -- Meadows demonstrates a knack for matching the right actor with the right part (Considine here, the terrifying Stephen Graham in England). These aren't showy performances, but they'll hit you hard.

Meadows' style is not quite verité, but -- like Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) -- he uses verité to create a gritty and fully realized environment, and then blends it masterfully with a more traditional narrative approach. Like Iñárritu, the effect can border on histrionic at times. But, unlike Iñárritu, Meadows knows when to quit. He refuses to pound us over the head with social commentary, instead letting it bleed organically through the characters and the story.

Dead Man's Shoes is a simple movie, but you're unlikely to find a genre film this emotionally rich being produced on this side of the pond. Check it out.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

There are all types of bad movies.

There are so-bad-they're-good movies like Con Air (1997), Road House (1989), and Independence Day (1996) that throw themselves upon you so shamelessly with their brazen ridiculousness that -- like a three-legged weiner dog desperately humping your leg -- you kind of can't help but love them, at least a little bit.

There are so-bad-they're-unwatchable movies like Batman and Robin (1997) and Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (2006) that should really just be shot behind the woodshed or drowned in a river like a bag of kittens.

There are B movies. There are Michael Bay movies. There are Larry the Cable Guy movies.

And then there are movies like The Fourth Kind. These are the worst because -- like an abusive boyfriend -- they knock you around for awhile and then come back with a sly smile, a sparkly little trinket, and a solemn promise to do better. You give them another chance, and they just knock you around some more.

The Fourth Kind begins with Milla Jovovich walking toward us through some foggy Tim-Burtonesque woodscape and flatly intoning into the camera: "I'm actress Mila Jovovich, and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler. This film is a dramatization of events that occurred in October of 2000. Every scene of this movie is supported by archival footage. Some of what you're about to see is extremely disturbing."

Oooh, creepy. This kind of "based on a true story" bullshit is a time-honored tradition in horror movies, starting at least with John Larroquette's equally bullshit (but much more effective) opening narration at the beginning of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): "The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths ... Had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day..."

First-time writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries to freshen up this convention by taking it a step further and having his lead actress break the fourth wall. He keeps it going by introducing each new character with a Chyron giving his/her name and the name of the character ("Elias Koteas [as] Dr. Abel Campos" for example). The movie then cuts repeatedly back and forth between the "dramatization" (featuring recognizable if not exactly A-list movie stars) and supposed "archival footage" (featuring unknown and often faceless actors). It's sort of like The Blair Witch Project meets Unsolved Mysteries on crack.

Osunsanmi tries his damnedest to keep this conceit going, and he never once misses an opportunity to jump cut between the two modes or to go into a really awkward split screen and overlap the dialogue. It's an interesting strategy at first. Then it's just obnoxious.

The movie purports to be a retelling of an "actual series of events" that took place in Nome, Alaska about a decade ago (this is all news to the people of Nome, apparently). A beautiful young psychiatrist (Jovovich) -- still reeling from her husband's unsolved murder -- discovers a pattern in her patients' recurring nightmares about an owl and decides to put one of them under hypnosis. The guy promptly freaks out and kills his family. The town sheriff (Will Patton) -- who seems to harbor some sort of inexplicable grudge against her (I guess he's annoyed that she keeps bugging him to solve that whole my-husband-was-murdered thing) -- forbids her from hypnotizing any more of her patients. She ignores him and hypnotizes another guy who promptly freaks out, levitates, and snaps his own neck.

And then things get weird.

It's no spoiler to say that this movie revolves around alien abductions. As a card-carrying weirdo freak who's into such stories and who spent four years of college in Alamosa, CO, with the specific hope of seeing a UFO, I was impressed by how much they got right in terms of the mythology. I was unimpressed, however, by how much they got wrong in terms of, you know, filmmaking, acting, writing, and basic storytelling.

There are a few effective moments here and there, and -- like the abusive boyfriend's apology -- they kept me hooked and hoping that the rest of the movie would get better. The footage of the psychiatric sessions and the hypnosis is genuinely freaky, as is the audiotape recording of Dr. Tyler's own apparent abduction. In other words, pretty much all the crap they crammed into the trailer. That stuff's easy, though. If you crush a baby's skull in a car door on camera, you're bound to get a reaction from the audience. The film completely misses on all the difficult stuff -- the character motivation, the cinematography, the story structure, etc -- that actually makes a good movie.

And, as awkward and overcooked as it is, I liked Osunsanmi's faux-docudrama approach. With a little (okay, a LOT) more restraint, it could have been effective. I almost expected The Fourth Kind to be some sort of parody of TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Monster Quest. That could have been fun. Alas, I think it's meant to be taken seriously.

The dialogue is, by and large, never less than atrocious. It's all either overheated melodrama or clumsy and amateurishly delivered chunks of (generally useless) exposition. The acting is a notch better than the script deserved, but that's the best you can say for it. Jovovich proves once again why I just can't really take her seriously as an actress. Even a solid veteran like Patton sinks under the weight of this thing. Weirdly, the unknown actors in the archival segments are even worse, which destroys all but the thinnest thread of verisimilitude the movie might have otherwise had. The only person who emerges mostly unscathed is Koteas, who could probably infuse a reading of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the slithery charm of an Internet pederast.

The story ceases even trying to make sense after the first act, instead contenting itself to hopscotch from spooky scene to spooky scene with very little to offer in between. Osunsanmi tries to manufacture some sense of drama during the down time by having his actors either stare portentiously into the camera or scream at each other. It would be laughable if it wasn't so headache inducing.

There's not much more to say about this one. Just leave it alone. You deserve better.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

In the interest of full disclosure, before I start this review I have to admit that I was never really all that in love with Maurice Sendak's seminal 1963 children's book Where the Wild Things Are.

In retrospect, this seems a little strange. A story about a weirdo little kid with an overactive imagination, disenchanted with his day-to-day existence and yearning to sail off and romp around an island with a bunch of monsters should feel like autobiography. But for whatever reason the book never really grabbed hold of my imagination the way it did some kids. I remember liking the basic idea and thinking the pictures were pretty cool, but that was about it.

Right before the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film adaptation came out a couple weeks ago, I went to a Borders and thumbed through a copy of Sendak's original to see if the adult-me could figure out why the book fell with such a thud on the kid-me so many years ago. It surprised me how clearly I remembered the pictures, but it didn't surprise me how narratively slight the actual book is. For a budding writer like myself (I was putting together my own little text-heavy picture books when I was six), the cool pictures and those ten lines of prose just didn't cut it.

The book essentially goes like this: little Max gets in trouble, little Max gets sent to bed without dinner, little Max runs off to the land of the Wild Things, little Max and the Wild Things swing from some trees, little Max gets bored, little Max goes home. The most interesting stuff was completely left out. What exactly happens when Max and the Wild Things start running through the woods? Do they kill and eat things? Do the Wild Things ever threaten to turn on him? What?

The Neverending Story (1984) was (and is) one of my favorite movies. Thematically, it's almost exactly the same as Where the Wild Things Are. I wore out my VHS copy with repeated viewings over the years, but I don't remember cracking open my Wild Things book more than once or twice. The difference was, of course, that in Wild Things nothing really happens. In The Neverending Story a whole mess of shit happens. I couldn't have put it this way at the time, but there are stakes.

When I went to see the movie, I was vaguely curious and not really expecting to have a strong opinion either way. I didn't figure I'd love it or hate it. I just wanted to see what they came up with. And, to be honest, my first impression was that I was underwhelmed. Needless to say the film looked amazing, and it's clear from the first five minutes that little Max Records is a real find. But the story still felt pretty thin to me.

Then I went to sleep that night and dreamed about it. And when I went to sleep the next night I dreamed about it again. Somehow the movie stuck with me in a way the book never did.

I don't have a lot critically to say about this film, because my reaction was largely impressionistic. Yeah, Jonze and Eggers provided a genuine narrative framework, not only to Max's real world (he's the youngest child of a divorced single mom, and he desperately wants his sullen teenage sister's approval) but to the imaginary world he escapes to. The conflicts (completely absent from the book) that erupt between Max and the Wild Things deftly mirror the conflicts going on back home. Overly clever and on the nose, sure, but to harp on that seems to me to miss the point.

What makes the movie work is the way in which Eggers and Jonze slyly nudge the audience back into a child's-eye-view of reality. The Wild Things themselves -- surly Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), distant KW (Lauren Ambrose), morose Ira (Forrest Whitaker) and his irate girlfriend Judith (Catherine O'Hara), Carol's best friend Douglas (Chris Cooper) and perpetually picked-on Alexander (Paul Dano) -- all think and behave with the logic of children. They're neurotic, affectionate, imaginative, jealous, and occasionally temperamental.

Max, of course, fits right in. He bonds immediately with Carol (I have to admit that hearing Tony Soprano coming out of the creature's mouth was pretty distracting at first) and KW, the two of whom are eye-rollingly obvious reflections of Max and his distant sister. Carol is jealous because KW keeps wandering off to hang out with a couple mysterious friends on the other side of the island (this leads to one of the movie's funnier and more bizarre reveals). By trying to be friends with both, Max inadvertently exacerbates the problem. Meanwhile Judith and Ira are jealous because Max -- their newly elected king -- seems to favor Carol and Douglas over them. His solution, of course, is to propose a dirt-clod fight. "Good Guys" vs. "Bad Guys." You can guess where that leads.

I can't quite articulate what it is Jonze and Eggers -- along with their actors -- do to make this feel like a genuine reflection of childhood rather than an adult's feeble attempt to mimic childhood. It's a pretty diaphanous thing they pull off, hard to wrap one's head around in any sort of intellectual way. Somehow they manage to tap that well and slop the memories out. Whatever it is they do and however they do it, it works.

At the end of the day, I wouldn't call this a brilliant movie or any sort of masterpiece. I still think it's pretty slight. The themes, beautifully and lovingly presented as they are, are pretty small and terribly obvious. To my mind the film still lacks the richness, emotional resonance, and fullness of imagination that The Neverending Story had in spades.

Of course, that might only be because I saw that movie when I was an actual child, rather than a guy in his 30s trying to remember what childhood was like. If I had seen this movie as a kid, I don't know if I would have felt any more strongly about it than I did the book. Maybe. Maybe not. Who's to say?

But as an adult who feels more and more disconnected from that hyperimaginative child I used to be with every inch that my gut expands and my hairline recedes, Where the Wild Things Are touched a soft spot on my heart I didn't expect.

Donkey Punch (2008)

NOTE: SOME MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

I love all types of horror movies. Monster movies (anything from Tremors to In the Mouth of Madness to Night of the Living Dead), ghost movies, alien movies (The Thing, They Live), evil-kid movies (Joshua), demonic possession movies, freaky drugged-out mind-fuck movies (Jacob's Ladder), plus all combinations thereof (Event Horizon). I can even appreciate a good slasher film, if done right (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is still the gold standard, as far as I am concerned).

What unites all these films -- indeed, what unites almost the entire genre -- is the basic activity of watching a person or a group of people being forced to confront some seemingly unstoppable and inexplicable outside force. It's all about the fear of "the other," whatever that other may be. H.P. Lovecraft took this notion to its furthest extreme with his tales or cosmic horror, where the human characters find themselves so completely overwhelmed by their encounters with impossibly powerful and completely unfathomable Godlike entities like Cthulhu, Dagon, The Goat With The Thousand Young, etc., that they are rendered completely useless and are -- almost to the man (Lovecraft didn't write a lot about women) -- driven to madness.

Literary and film critics have tried time and time again to quantify this "other" in psychological terms, to make the monsters, ghosts, demons and serial killers stand for something recognizably human and -- too often -- mundane. Sometimes the conclusions are obvious. Frankenstein's monster represents our fear of scientific progress. The slasher killers of the 80s are stand-ins for AIDS. Sometimes the connotations are ugly and uncomfortable. Vampires become our rape fantasies. King Kong is about the White Europeans fear of the Black African (and, after seeing Peter Jackson's portrayal of the ochre-painted natives in his massive-budget remake, I have to say I can see the point). Sometimes they seem more than a little ludicrous. I remember reading an article that drew a line from old tentacle-faced Cthulhu Him(?)self to Lovecraft's supposed pathological terror of his mother's vagina.

There may be something to all this, even if the arguments can become a bit reductive. What ultimately matters -- I think -- is that there is some part of our unevolved, reptilian brains that is still afraid of the dark...and whatever might be lurking within it. This "whatever" can take on any form it likes. It can be Hannibal Lecter, the creepy-voiced Pazuzu from The Exorcist, fire-breathing Godzilla, the weird ghost hand pressing against the door in The Haunting. All we know for sure is that IT IS NOT US.

There's a reason why Stephen King named his novel about the shape-shifting clown It.

This kind of horror -- which I'd ballpark guess makes up 90 percent or more of the genre -- is ultimately comforting. By making the evil something that exists completely separate from ourselves, these stories reaffirm our humanity. And by turning our rape fantasies into Dracula or our Freudian vaginal disgust into Cthulhu, we're given enough distance to tell ourselves that it's only a story, and we don't have to take it seriously if we don't want to.

This is not an original observation, by any means. But I think it's basically a true one.

There is another kind of horror story, however, one that is at once simpler, bleaker, more nihilistic, and -- I believe -- much scarier. These are stories that take us into those weird little places that lurk just a hair's breadth beyond the reach of civilization, where the comforting veneer of modernity that we depend on to get us through our day is suddenly torn away and we're confronted with the fact that -- at the end of it all -- we're basically still animals. In these stories, our own capacity for violence is limited only by our imagination.

Call it the Lord of the Flies school of horror. The movies don't seem to take us there too often, or at least not directly. If a film treads into those waters, it's more likely to be couched within some sort of crime-based revenge fantasy (like Deathwish or its Kevin-Bacon-starring offspring Death Sentence), an Apocalyptic future (A Boy and His Dog), or a distant war scenario (Apocalypse Now). Occasionally someone will take a crack at a really serious drama (Straw Dogs) or even a black, black comedy (Very Bad Things, or just about anything by the Coen Brothers).

Horror movies themselves don't seem go there too often (although you do see much more of it in horror fiction...anyone who's ever read a Jack Ketchum novel knows what I'm talking about). There are a few exceptions, like some of Wes Craven's early work (Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes), but those tend to be pretty few and far between. I think this is probably because -- at least in our country -- studios are simply afraid to go there. It's much easier to sell an unapologetically scary movie if you at least provide the dubious comfort of some external source of all the carnage. Even most of the newish wave of "torture porn" films tend to give us a clear and distinctly separate antagonist (I don't know about you guys, but I've never met anyone who resembles Jigsaw from the Saw films). It's simply harder to get a studio to sign onto something that just goes ahead and rips the scab off the wound and says, in effect, that we're the problem.

I'm guessing most of you know what a "donkey punch" is, but I'm gonna go ahead and describe it anyway so that there's no confusion. If you're squeamish about such things, skip the rest of this paragraph (and for God's sake, don't see this movie). A donkey punch is a gross, irredeemably misogynistic, mostly apocryphal don't-try-this-at-home sex act wherein a man, whilst performing anal sex on a (likely female) partner, delivers a vicious punch to the back of the head right at the point of orgasm, thereby causing an involuntary contraction of the partner's sphincter muscles and, in theory, increasing exponentially the level of pleasure during climax (for the puncher, of course, not for the punchee).

Donkey Punch -- the movie, not the sex act -- is the first film from English music-video director Oliver Blackburn (who co-wrote the script with David Bloom). Set in coastal Spain, it opens with three vacationing lasses from Leeds (Sian Breckin, Jaime Winstone, and Nichola Burley), who encounter four caddish but charming enough Londoners (Tom Burke, Julian Morris, Robert Boulter, and Jay Taylor). The boys crew a luxury yacht, and they invite the girls onto the boat to party. The girls go (of course), and before long are all stripping down to their bikinis. The alcohol and ecstasy are supplemented by crack, and the conversation turns -- as it so often does in these situations -- to sex. There are brief discussions of the "dirty sanchez," the "rusty trombone," and -- of course -- the donkey punch.

Finally (and inevitably) two of the girls go down below with two of the boys. A third boy accompanies them, video camera in tow. The two "nice" kids stay up top and talk about, you know, feelings and relationships and stuff, while the others rip off each others' clothes and engage in the type of spontaneous on-camera orgy that you see popping up in online porn every so often (and, no, don't ask me how I know that). The boys egg each other on. Finally, one of them tries a donkey punch. And a girl ends up dead.

So there's your setup. The best one-sentence description I've read so far comes from Scott Tobias of the Onion A.V. Club, who wrote: "...the film is what Dead Calm or Knife In The Water would look like if they featured late-period cast members from The Real World." If you think it all sounds tawdry, you're right. I'm generally a pretty unflappable movie-goer, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I watched the orgy scene in particular with my mouth agape and consumed by the itchy feeling that I needed a shower.

What sets Donkey Punch apart from its hardcore horror contemporaries and elevates it somewhat beyond the limits of the Howard-Stern worthy premise is Blackburn and Bloom's eye for moral ambiguity. The characters are fairly generic on the page. The girls fall into two types: Tammi (Burley) is the shy and reluctant one, while the other two are apparently up for just about anything. The boys are equally archetypal. You have Sean (Boulter), who -- on the surface, at least -- comes off as responsible and sensitive. On the other end of the spectrum is the thuggish and amoral Bluey (Burke), who provides the drugs, steers the conversation to rough sex, and eventually engineers the on-camera orgy. In between the two extremes are Marcus (Taylor), the ship's arrogant skipper; and Josh (Morris), Sean's boyish and unfortunately suggestible younger brother.

These are not complicated characters, but Blackburn is a smart director and he and his actors have an impressively clear eye for nuance. They avoid packing in a lot of backstory and instead look for the little moments -- a lilt in one's voice, a twitch in the eye, a particularly revealing turn of phrase -- to establish the characters. They infuse the performances with an easy naturalism that makes these kids relateable, if not entirely likeable.

This is key, because when the shit goes down and eveyone inevitably turns on everyone else, the situation remains horrifyingly plausible.

The film could have very easily been another us vs. them horror movie, with the boys being the obvious villains. But Blackburn's not interested in that. No one in this film is a monster...or, at least, no one is any more monstrous than anyone else. At first the boys -- fearing for their jobs and their freedom -- make the executive decision to dump the body and concoct a believable cover story. They repeatedly try to convince, cajole, and eventually bully the surviving girls into going along. The girls resist. And I think you can guess where that's going to lead.

Most of the characters (except for the dead girl) commit at least one truly nasty act of violence, and they are each given a plausible motivation for his or her behavior. The violence -- when it comes -- is more the result of fear, frustration, and a few remarkably bad choices than any inherent psychopathy on anyone's part. Bluey would seem to be the obvious choice to fill the villain role, but Blackburn and Bloom sidestep this pitfall nicely by never making him directly responsible for any of the violence. He's a thug, sure, but he's mostly shit-talk and bluster.

Blackburn and Bloom craft a superbly realized thriller by relying on this crazy-kilter seesawing of the audience's sympathies. As soon as you think you've pinned down the villain, someone else does something worse.

There are some serious missteps, however. Blackburn and Bloom stage a conversation over a loaf of bread just after the body has been dumped that is filled with tension and a nauseating sense of dread, but they end up pushing it way too far in a desperate attempt to bridge a narrative gap and nearly blow all the credibility they had earned over the previous hour or so.

In retrospect, that beat was portentious because the movie -- so carefully constructed in its first two acts -- descends into familiar stalker/slasher territory during the last twenty minutes. Blackburn and Bloom toss aside the meticulous interior logic they had spent so much time lovingly creating for the sake of simple narrative expediency. Characters start behaving in ways that people only do in movies...which would be sort of forgivable if the filmmakers hadn't done such a solid job of defying the genre conventions in the movie's early stages.

But in a world overstuffed with crap like the upcoming Saw VI and the unforgivable remake of The Stepfather, I'll take a hard-hitting and thematically ambitious movie like Donkey Punch any day. It manages to be a pretty taut, engaging, and genuinely thought-provoking psychological thriller, and even if it ultimately falls short of the high bar it sets for itself I have to give everyone involved credit for going for it.

Apologies

So I started this blog with the best intentions of, you know, actually writing it. But then I moved, and didn't really have ready Internet access, and, well...

So the entire summer went by, and I managed to NOT review almost anything, including "Inglourious Basterds" (although I assume no one was waiting with baited breath for my thoughts on "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen").

Anyway, now I've got Internet again, so hopefully this will be a bit more regular than it has been for the past few months. No promises.

Later tonight or tomorrow I'll be posting my review of Donkey Punch. Hope you enjoy!

Orphan and A Perfect Getaway (2009) SPOILERS

I decided to wait a couple of weeks before talking about Orphan (directed by Jaume Collet-Serra) and A Perfect Getaway (written and directed by David Twohy). Reviews about movies like this are no fun unless you can get into the spoilers, so I figured I'd give people some time to see the films first.

If you haven't seen one or both of them yet and still might have some interest in doing so, I'd suggest coming back later or just waiting until I get a chance to write about District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. Because I'm gonna be spoiling like crazy here. Consider yourselves notified.



Before I get into what I thought of these movies, I wanted to post this quote from the Washington Post's review of Orphan.

"...the only people who should escape unscathed from 'Orphan' are the three young actors who play [Vera] Farmiga and [Peter] Sarsgaard's children, adopted and biological. The sadistic violence, symbolic incest and flirtation with pedophilia in the film -- not to mention its shameless perpetuation of toxic stereotypes surrounding the adoption of older children -- leads one to think their work on this film wasn't employment so much as child abuse. Finally, let's hear it for those fearless executives at Warner Bros., currently bloated like engorged ticks with billions made from Batman and Harry Potter, for using all the time, talent and treasure at their disposal to put out bilge like this. Their lust for money, apparently, is exceeded only by their contempt for the suckers who keep on forking it over. Shame on them all, every single one." -- Ann Hornaday

Wow. I'm sorry, but any movie that gets a review like that is a must-see for someone like me. What on earth could have raised the bile so viciously into Ms. Hornaday's throat? I have to know.

Orphan and A Perfect Getaway are both "twist" thrillers, which seems to be the only type of thriller Hollywood knows how to make in this post-Shyamalan world. I'm not complaining, exactly, because I dig twist thrillers. They get knocked all the time for being gimmicky and artificial. I totally agree. That's part of what I love about them. To my mind, dismissing a twist movie as cheesy and artificial completely misses the point of what a twist thriller is. It's like telling Motley Crue they should try to sound a little more like Beethoven. To mix metaphors here, not everything can be filet mignon. Sometimes you just want candy. It may rot your teeth and make you want to puke later, but when you're eating it it tastes so good.

With that out of the way, I have to say that I liked both but didn't love either of these movies. They're both fun and pretty well executed for what they are, which are B movies. Orphan is The Bad Seed all dolled up to resemble a taut, arthouse thriller. It seems to want to be more than it is, and for that I found it kind of adorable. Getaway, for its part, is much more aware of its limitations.

Each film has a genre setup that can, if you're inclined to be forgiving, be described as "conventional." Orphan gives us John and Kate (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga), two loving parents who -- after a tragic miscarriage -- decide to adopt a precocious (and weird) little Russian girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from one of those antiquated, down-country Catholic orphanages that I'm inclined to believe exist only in movies. Apparently it doesn't occur to either of them that it might be a good idea to introduce Esther to their two biological children, Danny and Max (Jimmy Bennett and Aryana Engineer), before tossing her headfirst into the family. But if they had there wouldn't be a movie, so whatever.

Esther at first seems to be a model child. She's hyper-articulate, preturnaturally talented, obnoxiously devoted to John and endlessly respectful towards Kate. So far so good. But she's also a weirdo. She refuses to wear anything but little baby-doll dresses that seem to have floated right up out of a Tim Burton daydream, and she freaks out if anyone tries to remove the cloth ribbons she uses to cover her wrists and neck...

Hmmm...

I think we all sort of know where this is going (twist notwithstanding). What makes Orphan work moderately better than it should have is a flawed but basically well-constructed script by Alex Mace and David Johnson, assured (if uninventive) direction by Collet-Serra, and strong acting almost across the board.

Collet-Serra directed Paris Hilton in House of Wax. I recently happened to catch that one on FX while laid up with a bad back a few weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was only bad, not awful. In Orphan -- with somewhat better material and actual actors to work with -- Collet-Serra settles into a style that remains (until the end) refreshingly understated without ever quite being turgid. He clearly understands the value of taking his time, and he knows when to get out of the way of the actors. There's nothing he does here that will blow anyone away (he does resort to a couple unfortunate cat-in-the-closet scares early on) but he surpasses "competent" (which is the best you can say for his work in House of Wax) and progresses all the way to "okay."

It's the performances that really make the movie hum. Farmiga is impressive if only for managing to play essentially the same role she did in Joshua (2007) without completely feeling like she's repeating herself. Farmiga is one of those instantly believable actresses who has found a niche turning rote characters into something memorable. She stood out in Joshua, and owned her few scenes as a Russian hooker in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering (2006). She even managed to take one of the most extraneous characters ever conceived -- the pyschiatrist/girlfriend in The Departed -- and nearly steal the show from Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

In Orphan, she has the thankless task of portraying a grieving mom with a drinking problem who slowly starts to realize that her adopted replacement child is a psychopathic killer. In a lesser actress's hands, this would have tipped over into melodrama right quick. Farmiga manages to keep Kate grounded, and lets the back story seep through the performance in an organic way rather than force it through histrionics. She never plays either the grief or the addiction; they're just there, infused in every glance, gesture, and movement.

Sarsgaard is okay, but he never manages to bring his equally thankless character to life. Roger Ebert had the best line, so I'm going to go ahead and steal it: "John is the kind of understanding husband who doesn’t understand a damned thing except that he is understanding." The script does a nice job of motivating his relentless obtuseness (he's understandably dubious about Kate's suspicions because of her history with the booze). But Sarsgaard never manages to get the audience on his side. By the end of the movie, I found myself hoping that Kate would just give up on trying to convince him and just crack his skull open with a bottle or something.

The real revelations here are the kids (Bennett, Engineer, and Fuhrman). All three are very, very good. Danny is another stock character -- the spoiled brat who is immediately jealous his new sister -- but Bennett manages to hit all the right notes. In his hands, Danny comes off like a real kid with understandible (if primitive) motivations.

Little Max is more interesting. She's hearing-impaired, cute as a button, and takes an immediate shine to her new big sister. But as Esther starts to show her true nature -- first smashing a pigeon with a brick, then pushing another girl off a jungle gym, and finally inviting Max to play Russian roullette with a loaded pistol before enlisting her help in disposing of the body of a nun she just murdered -- Engineer has to strike a very delicate balance. Her feelings towards Esther move from adoration to concern to outright terror, and she must portray Max's childish moral quandary -- to tattle or not to tattle -- without the crutch of dialogue to guide her. That's a feat that would be difficult for an actress twenty years her senior. Engineer nails it.

It's Fuhrman, however, who really steals the show. Her Esther is genuinely chilling. When she puts a pistol to little Max's head and asks "want to play?" or sneaks into Danny's room and threatens to cut his balls off with a box cutter, she does so with all the cold malice and devillish poise that De Niro brought to Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas and Alan Arkin brought to Harry Roat in Wait Until Dark. It's a remarkably disciplined and self-assure performance. Forget Dakota Fanning or whoever else is being groomed to take her place. This evil little girl is the real deal.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the movie -- and what seems to have made Ms. Hornaday so livid -- is the kid's-eye-view perspective. Esther remains perfectly behaved around the parents but shows her true face to Danny and Max early on. Their growing terror and eventual resolve to stop her rests at the heart of the film. It's a heavy burden for any child actor to carry, and here we have three who handle it beautifully.

A Perfect Getaway is, in many ways, the weaker of the two movies. It's goofier, and the plot contrivances are eye-rolling from the start. Yet, in a strange way, I found that awkwardness somehow endearing. The movie reminded me of a big German Shepherd puppy not quite used to its gangly big-dog legs. The way it slides and stumbles all over the screen in its panting, eager-to-please way only adds to the charm.

Steve Zahn and Mila Jovovich play Cliff and Cydney, a newlywed couple honeymooning in Hawaii. They are city-folk all the way: a budding screenwriter and a rich girl who wants nothing more than to be a stay-at-home mom. On their way to a renowned but hard-to-get-to beach they stop and pick up a couple creepy hitchhikers named Cleo and Kale (Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth). They quickly make their escape, and just as they start their hike they overhear some vacationing girls (so outlandishly caricatured as to engender a number of surprised laughs from the audience) talking about another honeymooning couple who were recently butchered in Honolulu. Now the police think the killers -- a couple -- have jumped to another island.

Trying to stay ahead of the obvious Kale and Cleo, Cliff and Cydney encounter Nick (Timothy Olyphant), a friendly but slightly peculiar Army vet with a love of knives and a plate in his skull. Nick leads them to a waterfall, where his naked Southern girlfriend Gina (Kiele Sanchez) suns herself on a raft.

Cliff's fevered, screenwriter's imagination starts to churn away. Could Nick and Gina be the killers? Or is it Cleo and Kale? Meanwhile, the Honolulu newspaper has posted a grainy photo of the suspected murderers online, conveniently captured by a well-placed surveillance camera. Now if only Cliff's cell phone would get better service...

Hmmmm.....

Writer/director David Twohy is best known for his Vin Diesel sci-fi/horror twofer Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004). Genre fans will also know him from the low-budget submarine horror film Below (2002) and as a writer on such films as Critters 2 and Warlock. He's no auteur, but he's got a solid enough grasp of genre storytelling, he's pretty good with character, and he adds a refreshingly off-kilter tone that keeps A Perfect Getaway from ever feeling entirely like a retread. There's not a whole lot more to say about him, other than that he knows what he's doing, within a limited scope.

The performances are decent, if not exceptional. I've always liked Zahn, almost in spite of myself. He does a solid job here giving us the many faces of Steve Zahn, and I enjoyed him. Sanchez is alternately sultry and sweetly likeable, punctuated with little stabs of menace here and there. Jovovich (not one of my favorite actresses) manages not to be too irritating, even if the demands of the role are clearly way outside her pay grade. Only Olyphant really delivers. He brings a goofball sense of humor and almost lovable agreeableness to his ostensibly villainous Nick.

And now, on to the twists.

Last chance to turn back...




Okay, you've been warned.

Both twists are unexpected and jaw dropping ... not because they are so cleverly set up (a la The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects) but rather because they are so brazenly outlandish that I couldn't help but respect the balls it took to throw them out there.

In Orphan, we learn that Esther is not a nine-year-old girl at all. She's actually a 32-year-old Russian woman with a rare genetic form of "primordial dwarfism" (whatever that is) and a really massive daddy complex. She has spent her life in and out of Russian mental institutions between bouts of posing as a little girl so that she can be adopted by unsuspecting families, where she tries to seduce the father and -- after being predictably rebuffed -- murders the entire family. She's sort of the reverse of Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather (1987).

We learn all this via one of those frantic "get your family out of the house" phone conversations that takes place near the end of the movie. Kate, after some too-easy sleuthing, manages to track down the administrator (Karel Roden) of the last institution where Esther was committed. Roden delivers an ungainly but mercifully brief chunk of exposition, and then it's off to the races as Kate -- at the hospital with an injured Danny -- rushes home to get John and Max away from Esther.

In A Perfect Getaway, we discover that Cliff and Cydney are the killers, not Nick and Gina or Kale and Cleo. It's a red herring on top of red herring (awkwardly telegraphed in an early conversation about movies between Cliff and Nick that should have been left on the cutting-room floor). Cliff's nervousness throughout the hike was not about being in danger, we learn, but about being discovered. Nick and Gina figure out -- too late, of course -- that they are his next targets.

Trust me, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Not only is it not set up earlier in the film, it flagrantly contradicts everything we've seen. Twohy tries to stitch a pig's ear onto a cow by reaching to the very bottom of the desperate filmmaker's tool box and resorting to the time-honored tradition of stopping the story altogether and giving us a really long black-and-white flashback, where we're supposed to reevaluate all the previous scenes, dialogue, etc. It doesn't help.

At least in Orphan, the twist is within earshot of believability. Luckily, Collet-Serra and screenwriters Mace and Johnson have a couple tricks up their sleeve. Rather than do the hard work necessary to patch the logic holes, they try to distract us with an eye-poppingly tasteless scene where Esther puts on makeup and a slinky black dress, then goes to a drunk and weepy John and tries to give him a handie.

Yeah, you read that right. Esther, played by 10-year-old Fuhrman, tries to give John, played by 38-year-old Peter Sarsgaard, a hand job.

And no, this movie isn't French.

It's no wonder that critics like Hornaday are up in arms. I, for one, kind of loved it. It's so wantonly over-the-top, so wickedly debauched, as to be truly awe-inspiring. (For the record, I don't think anything about this was likely to have traumatized Fuhrman. The action itself is merely suggested, and if you blink you'll miss it.)

The rest of the movie is pretty by-the-numbers, and Collet-Serra wisely gives us almost no time to think about what we just witnessed and gets us out of there as quickly as he can. John rejects Esther, Esther kills John, Esther chases Max around the house with a gun, Kate shows up, Kate kills Esther. I was still reeling as the end credits started to roll, and Fuhrman is the reason why. She sold it. As stupid as it is, narratively, I never doubted Esther's transformation into an adult. She moves like an adult, talks like an adult, even seduces like an adult. When the shit hits the fan and she starts shooting at Max and Kate, it's an adult firing the gun.

It's a little hard to defend this, both on moral and analytical grounds. So I won't even try. If you think it's wrong to have a 10-year-old actress act out a seduction scene, I'm not going to be able to say anything to convince you otherwise. In the end, what I dug about it is that the filmmakers were shooting for something. They didn't come anywhere the bullseye, but at least they stayed on the dartboard. That's something, at least.

What Twohy does in A Perfect Getaway is not nearly as debauched, but what it lacks in teeth it more than makes up for in pure idiot shamelessness. To employ a perfectly gross metaphor, I'd say that Getaway is like a guy/girl trying to convince a prospective suitor that he/she is still a virgin immediately after showing said prospective suitor a sex-tape of him/her on the receiving end of a high-school gangbang.

From what I was able to gather, Cliff (whose actual name is Rocky) is supposed to be some sort of pathological liar and psychopath who likes to kill people and then live out their lives for as long as he can before moving on to his next victim. Cydney is his somewhat reluctant girlfriend. The last twenty minutes or so turn into an extended three-way chase scene, and the narrative violation is so deep and so complete that I was happy enough to just shut my brain off and watch all the pretty Hawaiin scenery drift across the screen.

That said, however, I kind of liked it. Like Orphan, the twist is so brazen, artless, and unapologetic that I just couldn't help but enjoy it for what was.

For some reason, I always find it really cute when little kids try to lie. They're just so bad at it. They understand the concept of deceit in a blunt way, but they don't understand how to perpetrate it. But they don't give up. I remember once watching my nephew -- maybe six or seven at the time -- throw a ball in the house and break something. When I asked him why he did it, he just looked at me right in the eye and denied throwing the ball at all. The lie was so blatant that I just couldn't be angry at him. In fact, some dark part of me kind of wanted to encourage him to keep it up (this is why I should probably not have kids, by the way).

That's what Twoy and -- to a slightly lesser degree -- Collet-Serra do here. Neither of them come anywhere near pulling off the lie, but I have to give them credit for even going for it in the first place.

Thirst (2009)

I'm not going to spend a lot of time here talking about the return of the vampire to the international zeitgeist, or whatever. Critics have been going on and on about that for months. Suffice it to say, from True Blood to Twilight to Let The Right One In, vampires are kind of "the thing" again.

Thirst, from Korean director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy), is the latest vampire movie to hit the screens. Twilight it's not. The movie is gory, violent, and has two or three really graphic sex scenes that kind of made me blush.

The story follows Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a Catholic priest who somewhat inexplicably volunteers to participate in an African study to find a cure for the Emmanuel Virus, an ebola-like malady that causes painful blisters and ends with those afflicted vomiting up very cinematic quantities of blood. Predictably, Sang-hyun is infected and, at deaths door, undergoes a blood transfusion. He survives (the only one in the study to do so) and goes back to Korea, where he suddenly finds himself craving blood, as well as yearning for "sins of the flesh." He's hailed by the faithful as a miracle worker. A desperate mother begs for him to pray at the bedside of her loutish son, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), who is stricken with cancer. Sang-hyun drifts into the bizarre family's orbit and soon falls for Kang-woo's beautiful but disturbed wife, Tae-Ju (Kim Ok-bin). Eventually Sang-hyun defies his priestly vows and has a lot of noisy, acrobatic sex with Tae-Ju, and -- as his vampire nature begins to assert itself -- falls under her manipulative, femme fatale spell.

Park Chan-wook is one of those culty genre directors (like Guy Ritchie and Takashi Miike before him) that critics like to frame as an heir to Quentin Tarantino. And, to be honest, Park's films do seem to owe a lot to Tarantino. He likes to take pretty straight-forward genre concepts and throw them into a blender with a lot of other stuff. Thirst is no different. It's a violent, occasionally scary, often funny vampire movie with allusions to classic noir and family melodrama, along with a couple fart jokes for good measure. There's more than a little Double Indemnity at work here, side-by-side with some Three Stooges slapstick and a pinch of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The effect of all this is sporadically interesting, sometimes effective, very often frustrating.

The problem -- and it's not a new problem for Park -- is that, once you get past all the razzle-dazzle, it quickly becomes clear that the dude can't tell a story to save his fucking life. Park knows what to do with the camera, and he crafts more than a few dazzling scenes (nothing quite as cool as the infamous fight sequence in Old Boy, but dazzling nonetheless). These scenes, in isolation, feel lifted from a much better movie. There are some really bravura moments, such as the scene where Sang-hyun shows off his new vampire skills to Tae-ju by taking her into his arms and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. And the conclusion by the ocean is spectacular. But, once it's all strung together, the movie itself becomes an incomprehensible mess. It's not that it's confusing as much as, after awhile, really boring. After about an hour I had no idea where the story was going, and not in a good way. There's no emotional logic connecting one sequence to another, and the characters are pretty much insipid and unlikable across-the-board. Half-a-dozen visually breathtaking scenes don't mean anything if, in the end, you don't give a shit.

That's not to say there's not a lot to like here. The cumulative effect of all these cool sequences is deceptive; if you're not paying attention, you may mistake this for a good movie. I just wish Park had put more of his efforts into joining it all together with more than the movie equivalent of cheap twine and old duct tape.