The stars are lackluster

Interstellar was good in terms of being a technical marvel and an example of what well-composed camera shots can get you, but the film wasn't so stellar as a thought provoking masterpiece that director and co-writer Christopher Nolan likes to attempt making. It has what one could term the "Apocalypse Now" syndrome, where an ambitious director of acknowledged skill and accomplishment attempts to grasp and discuss , in visual narrative form, a series of intellectually daunting notions that, for all the spectacular visuals and endless minutes of characters pondering metaphysics, resist an convincing transition to film.

As much as I have enjoyed "A.N." (I have watched a dozen times easily since its original theater release) , Francis Coppola didn't evoke "the horror" nearly as cogently as Joseph Conrad did in the movie's source material, the short story "Heart of Darkness"; as brilliant as many sections of the movie was , the Viet Nam saga relied on spectacle over interior rumination. Prose fiction has definite advantages over film with respect to seducing the reader into the private cosmology of heroes and villains. But beyond the keen distinctions between what prose and film are able of conveying, it's clear that Nolan is a terrible plotter; he cannot write a third act that provides a satisfying ah-ha!To coin a phrase, the harder he tries for significance beyond the thrills and visceral confirmation of what passes as truth, justice and irony in our popular culture, the more trying his films become to endure. Coppola, to his great credit, had a genius for creating outstandingly comic and absurd scenes even if the all-together philosophy that was to give Apocalypse Now gravitas wasn't achieved, not nearly. It is a watchable, memorable film. Nolan is serious like surgery, humorless, dour, vaguely depressed, mumbling in half-heard abstractions. Not fun."Interstellar" , in turn, concerning a mission to the far reaches of known space to ostensibly find a habitable planet for the population of a dying earth to migrate to, sub themes like love, honor, loyalty and the like are handily mixed in with hazier , not easily rendered subjects, physics and metaphysics alike, which means , of course, that there far too many instances where the otherwise attractive likes of Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are sitting in their technological huts literally talking about the meaning of life. It is a ponderous exposition that makes the pace of Interstellar sluggish . Nolan, is at an instance where he has no other method to make his movies move forward. Nolan has a problem writing coherent third acts, most notably in his third Batman film and inInception". Nolan's fondness for large vistas and other sorts of visual exposition, both in "Inception" and "Interstellar". The tendency is chronic in the new film, with grand and sweeping shots of corn fields at the film's beginning and later, on one of the planets being investigated for possible human habitation , large, high contrast panoramas of frozen ice and mountain ranges.

The problem , as usual with Nolan, isn't execution, but duration. The cameras dwell too long on the shots, lingering sleepily. There is in 'Interstellar", as well, an overbearing music score, soundtrack, composed by Hans Zimmer; often times Matthew M's trademarked gritty whisper turns into hushed garble. Entire swaths of dialogue are lost in the conflicted soundtrack. It swells up at moments when there is an explanatory bit of conversation going on. Even the least interested person in the matter of how effective music background can be in creating dramatic tension has the innate awareness of when it works and when it does not; how anyone can leave this production and not feel manipulated , coaxed and otherwise coerced by the noise level to a level of nervous anticipation is, I believe, impossible. Direction, motivation and coherence diminish even more and one is puzzled why the music is bearing down on you when nothing interesting is happening. It is a mess, a hurried, hasty, careless mess. Nolan does not engage the senses, he bullies them.

The final sequence of the film is quite fantastic , a fanciful illustration of another kind of existence, and this is a sequence I would watch the movie again for, but there is the nagging feeling that the plot twist at the movie's mid point was less a what-the-hell?!-moment than it was a set up for the sort of deliberate virtuosity that was lurking around the corner. There is always a sense in Nolan's recent work that he was bored with the process of perfecting his script and rushed into production without really a clear vision of what he was trying to convey. It should be noted as well that Nolan mistakes length and vaguely outlined ideas as narrative poetry, as a sign of greater depth. I think it is actually a sign of weight, not gravitas, and that weight sinks the enterprise altogether.

"The Equalizer": Equal parts violence and boredom

The Equalizer starring Denzel Washington is a thriller that 's equal parts stylish violence, over- familiar character types in the form of naive victims and idiosyncratic bad guys. And yes, the villains are Russian mobsters, perhaps the last nationality American directors can cast wholesale as evil doers without an excess of complaints from the political sensitive. It is, in essence, the most recent variation of the avenging angel motif that has been a standard part of Hollywood movies since , director Michael Winner's 1974 Charles Bronson effort Death Wish. On that score, we could go as far back as Shane in 1953, George Steven's masterpiece Western about a retired gun fighter who is forced by circumstances he cannot ignore to put his guns back on and ride off to practice his deadly trade once again. It's the kind of often used formula that almost mixes itself once you open the package: gentleman, quiet man, pushed too hard for too long by bad guys, fights back and reveals lethal skills that swift and sure when used. In the end, lots of carnage, gruesome deaths, screaming bad guys and things blowing up and, to be sure, a firm dead pan on the part of the avenging hero serving his curb side justice. 

The Equalizer, based on a fine television program that featured actor Edward Woodward as a black ops spy who , disgusted with his life of gruesome death and deception, quits his espionage employ and puts his special set of skills in the service of those little people who are beset by awful people and circumstances. Odds against you? Call The Equalizer. This a durable premise for a television series.The movie incarnation features Washington as a schleppy worker at a Home Depot like super store who seems, at first , a nice guy , a good friend, a hard worker, but who reveals, when awful things begin to infiltrate his world by the likes of Russian mob bosses and their tattooed goons, sheds the Everyman guise and reveals what he has been all along, a virtuoso of death-dealing, inflicting fair and unambiguous punishment against those who are irredeemably guilty of something. This is all well and good so far as plot particulars, but we are not really engaged by any of this activity. Washington, who can be a superb actor with the presence and gravitas, is in his lazy mode here, seeming not a little bored with the dialogue and the scenes that he happens to be end.

As with Al Pacino at his most unfocused, his voice takes on a mumbling, nasal quality, and comes near to being sing-songy in rhythm. His deadpan stare, so icy and effective in Tony Scott's taut actioner Man on Fire, here suggest that his eyes are glazing over as he struggles to stay awake. Aside from some sweetly nasty death dealing where the former black ops Equalizer treats an assortment fatal conclusions to a swath of thick- necked creeps , the movie drags its feet and scenes lack any feeling of organic development; it's as mechanical a script from a 70s cop show, say Starsky and Hutch or Ironsides. Director Antoine Fuqua cannot energize the material. The most entertaining stretch of the film are those highlighting Martin Csokas as Teddy, an enforcer for the Russian mob boss; tattooed and scarred, this character is sweet extension of the villain who is well spoken, literate, not without charm or a sense of irony, someone who understands beauty and exhibits fine table manners, but someone can without warning and convincingly become a monster, a determined, obsessed , convulsive instrument of malevolence . The screen crackles and scenes get an edge when he enters the room. Csokas' performance is the one I remember. He didn't phone it in; he brought it in person and was in your face, fatally so.

A Walk Among the Tombstones trips over itself

A Walk Among the Tombstones, a thriller based on Lawrence Block's novel , features Liam Neeson as former police detective Matt Scudder, a sober alcoholic now working as an unlicensed investigator of sorts in the dark, wet underbelly of New York City.  The film , steadily directed by  Scott Frank, has a great look to it, dark, neo-noir atmospherics that make the city's architecture express the dual qualities of decay and splendor, and Neeson, displaying a bit more resigned humanity than he has in several films, does a good job  of playing a loose cannon caught between both sides of the law as he tries to locate serial killers who are targeting the wives of drugs dealers. Lots of ethical questions arise, and possible audience complications arise--who deserves a bloody justice that falls outside the law?, who are are we supposed to be in sympathy with?--but there is a sentimentality in the story line that spoils what might have been a first rate, remorseless  crime drama. The introduction of a cute orphan black kid, smart, unctuous, smart mouthed, lovable as a all get out when all is said and concluded, is a conspicuous sympathy play , and it rings false in a film that otherwise has the look of a world where good deeds, gallantry and the best intentions go unnoticed, unremarked  upon and which have no effect in changing the cold heart of things.

That Scudder is an alcoholic who attends AA meetings as a means of keeping his focus, his eyes on the prize, so to speak, is a credible element to the character, but there is a sequence where the  12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are read over a montage as a means of producing an alienating effect of a kind. It's a hokey device, actually, and you're not sure how it's meant to come across, cynical, ironic, hopeful. Who can tell? The 12 Steps , described by AA as being "spiritual in their nature", address the notion that the drunk who wishes to recover needs to rely on a spiritual solution to their malaise , to seek knowledge of God's will and the power to carry it out, and to make amends to those who have been harmed. A sensible and simple plan, encouraging good deeds over bad actions and worst results, but the montage the Steps against are a narrative of violence , pure malice and a need to inflict pain and suffering, followed yet again by violence that is revenge, sloppy, crunching, relentless revenge. The juxtaposition is jarring, which would be fine if something had been made of it, but nothing was, and it's a waste of film time  What this film turns out to be is an efficient piece of film making that has a great look and occasionally an effective tone that suddenly goes soft in the heart and soft in the head, not the thing you want for a hard boiled crime story. 

Changing seats

Save your cash and skip the slow-moving, turgid, and criminally inane Thor: The Dark World. It improves over the first Thor film, but there is lethargy in all the action scenes. Nothing seems crisp or crucial in the physical battles, although there is some good CGI of London smashed to pieces by the invasion of the Dark Elves. Chris Hemsworth as Thor talks like a bad High School drama student who is trying to force his voice into a lower register--he sounds like he's trying to suppress a burp while he speaks--and there is a frown on his face throughout the film that makes him look as though someone gave him a shot of castor oil. Tom Hiddleson as Loki is inexplicable anyway you look at-- he fluctuates between glee, sorrow, and rage raggedly, scene to scene. Plus, he is incapable of not looking like Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Anthony Hopkins as Odin is utterly disengaged from whatever is going on around him and appears rumpled and ready for a nap. At the same time, Natalie Portman, consistently the least charismatic actress I can think of, moves through this movie in a variety of self-loathing postures, as though in pain, realizing everyone she knows will see her in this expensive windup toy of a film.

 A Thor movie could be entertaining if there was the right cast, director, and script, a crew that had a feel of the source material, i.e., the Marvel comic book, not the original Norse legend. This is an efficient, professional bit of filmmaking and does provide a moment or two of entertainment. Still, the cast is so indifferent--either phoning it in or gnawing the scenery--and the plot points so diffuse, distracted, and pitifully predictable, in blockbuster terms, that what we have is an expensive, noisy apparatus utterly without charm. What's missing is the grace, energy, and, yes, essential good humor and humanity of the original Kirby/Lee comic book tales. Jack Kirby had an extraordinary visual imagination, and a capable rendering of his version of Asgard could have been simply magnificent, magical even. I think a Thor movie could be entertaining if there was the right cast, director, script, and crew that had a feel of the source material, i.e., the Marvel comic book, not the original Norse legend. This is an efficient, professional bit of filmmaking and does provide a moment or two of entertainment. Still, the cast is so indifferent--either phoning it in or gnawing the scenery--and the plot points so diffuse, distracted, and pitifully predictable, in blockbuster terms, that what we have is an expensive, noisy apparatus utterly without charm. Barry has a point that what's missing is the grace, energy, and, yes, essential good humor and humanity of the original Kirby/Lee comic book tales. Jack Kirby had an extraordinary visual imagination, and a capable rendering of his version of Asgard could have been simply magnificent, magical even.

What they settled for were computerized variations of Shangra La from Lost Horizon. Worse, the make-believe city resembled a cross between Hearst Castle and an M.C.Escher painting. That, combined with the sluggish momentum this movie is barely capable of, is quite enough to make you calculate how much you worked to make money for the ticket you bought to see something that finally made you feel like a moron for seeing. What they settled for were computerized variations of  Shangri La from Lost Horizon. Worse, the make-believe city resembled a cross between Hearst Castle and an M.C.Escher painting. That, combined with the sluggish momentum this movie is barely capable of, is quite enough to make you calculate how much you worked to make money for the ticket you bought to see something that finally made you feel like a moron for seeing. They've thrown a lot of things in the air for this juggling act, and too many things hit the stage they're playing on.

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Getting around to some old movies, courtesy of the NetFlix miracle, and I decided to catch up on a Ben Affleck/Samuel L.Jackson film from more than a few years ago, Changing Lanes.  It thought it was a decent enough Hollywood "message" film, though it had the dopiest premise imaginable. 

It's not that I object to happy endings -- in this case, each of the characters played by Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck realize the exact nature of their wrongs and wind up doing the right thing by the world and themselves: The concentration of the events into one day snaps credulity, and while you're wondering whether this is an alternative universe where there are 76 hours to a day, the film drags way too much in critical areas. Jackson and Affleck are both quite good here. Still, in the crush of the events that are eating our protagonists up, there is too much reflection, self-examination, and fortuitous circumstance for the characters to redeem themselves. The irony is fine, but Affleck's flailing do-gooding at the end is a stretch, theatrical without being dramatic.

 Like the film as a whole.  

Man of Steel: The Best Superman Movie

I have just returned from Man of Steel and find myself pleased with the results. Henry Cavill is now the definitive Superman, and MOS is presently THE definitive Super Hero film. Unlike the dozens of grousing professional film critics who likely had no idea of how they wanted Kal-El to be portrayed, I was impressed with the way director Zack Snyder and writer David Goyer and co-writer/executive producer Christopher Nolan re-imagined the iconic character in a way that helped us understand better how he came about his unwavering diligence to do good and his unflinching resolve to overcome adversity. There was something rather clever and subtly effective in establishing that Kal/Kent/Superman was not just different from earthlings, but also different, quite different from his fellow Kryptonians. The dual fathering of Jor-El and Jonathon Kent made for a credible, believable result in the form of the adult Clark. The action sequences were especially brilliant, with a splendid, inspired use of CGI to convey the scope and magnitude of having a world beset upon by super-powered adversaries; Snyder has a comic sensibility that is a perfect match for the ambitions of this movie. His movies are not everyone's idea of a good time, but for the set that likes fantastic battles and Big Action sequences that concern the eternal issues of Good vs. Evil, with Elizabethan cadences or not, Snyder reveals his customary mastery of the special effects at his fingertips. 

It has the magnificence of the best Futurist manifesto, which claimed that the staid present must be destroyed and that we need to speed the progress of humanity with the speed, efficiency of machines. Ironic, yes, as this was the philosophy of  20th fascists who desired to bully mankind into servitude. Superman, of course, is the free thinker, the free man, the defender of the weak against well-intentioned conquistadors. Michael Shannon as General Zod was a classic villain, sufficiently complex, with a moral compass no less compelling than Superman's, although at odds, fatal odds with those of the Man of Steel. 

The final battle sequence, a long one, is among the most exciting action sequence I've ever seen in a superhero film. Metropolis is gloriously, grandly, royally laid to ruin by the unleashed fury of Kryptonian v Kryptonian, and it is, of course, a near perfect simulation of the reader's imaginative interpretation of a battle scene in the traditional comic book format. Although possessing some gloom and desaturated seriousness from Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, where the watchword has been" realism" from the start, Man of Steel is fantasy all the same; for all the emphasis on Superman's emotional confusion and the junior -college existentialism of his twofold "otherness"--his difference from both his native planet's traditions and the distinctions between him and his adopted planet--this is in a long line of science fiction and fantasy films where grand cities are destroyed, leveled and  turned into rubble in a grand way. 

From the post WW2 nuclear nightmares of the Godzilla movies to the skyscraper decimation in the Transformer franchise, Man of Steel  adds to a  tradition of architectural destruction that I admit is one of my inexplicable guilty pleasures, originating, I think, from my love of the art of Jack Kirby, a comic book artist whose work for DC Comics rival Marvel featured battle scenes among superheroes and super villains that smashed through brick and mortar regularly. The shards, bricks, glass, and wood that scattered through the frames of the panels he drew were captured as if by a high-speed camera; Kirby created the sensation of a great force plowing irresistibly through strong, dense barriers.  Director Snyder comprehends the improbable physics behind what Superman and his foes high-powered hi jinks and proceeds any way to execute them. 

This is the Superman we've been waiting for, muscular, committed, a guardian of the week against the bullies of the universe who will be as strong as he needs to be to make that all of those things we take for granted or pay lip service to truth, justice, an American Way based on fairness and consensus --survive and flourish. For the controversial end of the battle where Superman does something old schoolers insist Superman would never do, I say this: it's about time.  Although he remains the Blue Boy Scout with his big heart and unerring sense of fair play, he is not a doormat, he is not, as we said back in my drinking days, a pussy. He is a hero who is as strong as he needs to be and who will use his moral compass to guide to him action that will truly serve the greater good, the goal of an honestly Good Fight. 

Tarantino Unpacked

"Django Unchained   " is a listless bore. Save a couple of genuinely funny bits, this movie continues Tarantino's delusion that his style of hasty cross-referencing film genres, regardless of the kind of film he is attempting to make, is revitalizing, hip, and slick. This sloppy, pace-less, talky attempt at ironic effect.QT is a one-trick pony. You can not even say that he has a style; what he does seem more like a grab bag of shticks sewn together like Frankenstein's monster. In this case, what is on the table remains a dead heap. It's no good to blame the messenger for QT's latest venture in cinematic tedium. I wanted to like the film very much and kept waiting for some convincing, if stylized, storytelling. The principal fault was pacing, which was pokey and slack. Although his dialogue may appear on the page or the computer screen, Tarantino doesn't seem to have learned that film dialogue, even the conversation we consider "literate" or "bright," requires a ruthless efficiency.

The constant references to the cheesy tics and tacky tropes of old exploitation movies in Tarantino's work passed the point of being homages, tributes displayed in new films that, in themselves, are legitimate extensions of the durable genre. Cringe as he might, Tarantino has created his own kind of formalism, a post-modern template in which the borrowing of elements from other films is no longer a clever, brilliant, and innovative method of transgressing boundaries and revealing but has instead become what seems a knee-jerk response to a challenge to make a certain kind of movie. I agree with the assertion that there is a certain clubhouse knowingness about his films that distance the typical viewer from enjoying his films; the genius of genres is that the true masterpieces in Western movies, war movies, crime dramas, et al., is that they go well beyond the expectations of hardcore fans and appeal to a greater audience that recognizes something more significant than the mere satisfaction of genre expectations. The cliquishness is a buzz-kill and is, I think, more than cynical in attitude. All this mix and matching, bric-a-brac, and pastiche mongering assume, by design, that surprise is no longer possible with film narrative. The effect is like a bored six-year-old smashing once-loved toys to bits with a big, fatal hammer. That is not my idea of a fun date.

 The characters here, especially those played by Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio, chatted up considerable dust storms of hyperpolarization that would be the dialogue equivalent of a jazz soloist improvising for too long. This is at the sacrifice of momentum, a quality that isn't achieved in "Django Unchained"- try as I might suspend my disbelief, I was never convinced that the inevitable reckoning would result in the catharsis that even a hipster variation of a Jacobean revenge tragedy requires as a matter of form. Humanity and all its layered awfulness--lust, greed, avarice, revenge, slavery, racism, all those rotten instincts that create tension within individual characters who try to abide by codes of honor, decency, and respect which then are transformed into something much uglier and wrathful--are summarily smothered by Tarantino's heavy hand and instead used as premise-giving props as the writer/director hits all the generic marks. In doing so, QT seems like a less than agile man learning how to dance, following the shoe prints laid out on the floor, "...one, two THREE, one, two THREE..."

Tree of Life with Shallow Roots

There's much one can say about a movie's beautiful , lush photography when it works with a structure--a good script, a graspable plot and ideas an audience can take interest in, credible, complex characters--but pretty pictures by themselves cannot save a film like Terrence Mallick's "Tree of Life" from coming across as a bloated, pretentious attempt to evoke a sense of human existence and beyond what the director seemingly considers the petty concerns of individual characters.

It is a mess, with a whispering, hushed narration that cannot seem to rise above a mumbling buzz, and sequencing of story lines between a family tragedy set in a 1950's American suburb, the pensive rumination of a soul sick business man in current day Dallas, and images of dinosaurs hunkering, squirming, swimming, wandering through their various versions of flora and fauna in search of food and , we could assume, significance beyond their appetites and survival instincts.

This would all be interesting in the right proportions, but this film is not the tone poem Mallick wanted it to be; it is is not mesmerizing, poetic or suggestive of the sort of secret-of-life conceit the film hints at. What is infuriating , beyond the rhythm-less, shambling length of the film ( two hours and 44 minutes) is that for all the wonderful images Mallick and his crew manage to bring us, very little of it is effectively mounted or framed; we are not allowed to become engaged with any seen nor permitted any sense of continuity . It seems to have been edited with a lawn mower on a foggy day.he constant riff of showing us various trees, in various stages, topographically believable for conceptually baffling, with light coming through the branches was irritating, as was the constant visual cues of running water from rivers, lakes, streams and shorelines. These are meant to function as a leitmotif, no doubt, but repetition does not equal effective emphasis. This results in symbolism without an actual "thing", an idea, under the metaphorical disguise. It does seduce into thinking about one thing only to discover that something else was being arrived at just under our perceptual radar.

There is, I'm sure, a metaphysical aspect that I've missed through this ,but closer to the truth, I think, is that I merely noticed what's missing from the film. I don't know quite what those elements were as to what was intended, but it seems clear enough that no one thought to bring them to this project.

The Man Who Was Not There

As usual with Coen Brothers films, The Man Who Wasn't There is visually stunning, and has it's share of odd touches and sublime moments that set the film makers from the rest of the herd, but I thought it was the least interesting of their films.

The varying elements of a James Cain flavored noir thriller filtered through Camus-toned existentialism and the zany insertion of UFOs makes me think of bright guys brain storming against deadline; much of the meaning of Coen Brothers movies is open ended and deferred, but this film just couldn't merge the oddities. Billy Bob Thorton, though, needs special credit for maintaining his granite faced deadpan in a film full of eagerly demonstrative actors. He portrays his emotionally somnolent barber with less expression than a pair of pliers left at the bottom of a over-stuffed drawer in a typically crowded work bench; like the pliers, this is a man who is forgotten, anonymous , virtually invisible despite being part of the everyday scenery.His flat effect is so consistent and untouched by a hint of actorish  style that you can well imagine the character relishing the burn in the throat and the coughing and hacking that result in  the excess because it is one of the things that might penetrate his otherwise impenetrable numbness.

He he clips hair, sweeps up the clippings, and chain smokes his way through the film, Thorton's already sunken cheeks and general skull-hugging features take on the grisly isolation of a long abandoned building under the movies effectively baroque use of high contrast black and white. Still, this has the feeling of an exercise, a project to keep their hands in the game while the brothers Coen finesse their next major project. Visually gratifying, but the movie bombs over all because there is nothing inspiring in the plot to make the movie seem like another more than an empty stage.

Ape shit

I just took an extended gander at "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and this reaffirms that 2011 has been the tamest and lamest of Summers for action, science fiction and fantasy films. It's not that there was anything wrong with this newest version of the Apes franchise--a prequel that goes to lengths to furnish background drama on how those Damn Dirty Apes got so smart and how they could speak in stilted, theatrical English-- but just how bloodless this enterprise is. I would assign the blame to length, as this film tends to linger on the admittedly wonderful special effects to make the ur-Simian, Caesar, into a convincingly expressive animation.

 All told, though, there is not much room for the non-disguised actors to do here, given the kind of Exit Stage Left dialogue that is sounds like hurried rewrites of various signifying cliches.The cast never really  commit themselves to the eviscerated exchanges provided them , a shame, since there have been a number of action films  with  rickety chit chat that still managed to give a number of quality thrills, accomplished , I think, with a one two punch of a cast going for the gold as they mine whatever worthwhile emotion they can from the silliness of their set speeches, and direction, where a good director with an instinct for set ups, surprises, pacing and editing can create a verve the script doesn't  originally contain.

Pacing goes a long way, and this film drags fatally in the middle ; it makes you long for the days of leaner action movies, like Die Hard  or Alien.  An action movie cannot decide to take a rest in the center of it's unfolding. The actors, as a result, appear to have nothing else to do except trudge from one scene the next. The shoes and their boots  appear uncommonly heavy.James Franco in the lead has fewer expressions than headless mannikin; worry, concern, inner turmoil, anxiety, dread, dread, dread, the man appears to be nursing an ulcer rather than overseeing a scientific breakthrough.

Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino, like Brian De Palma, likes to dress up in the old clothes of directors he admires; unlike De Palma, this cut and paste style has for Tarantino, resulted in occasional brilliance and one legitimate masterpiece, Pulp Fiction. The energy and playfulness, however, has become wearisome as this fellow repeats and reiterates his moves, stylistically and intellectually. "Death Proof", his contribution to the "Grind House" collaboration with Richard Rodriguez, was something of a "Pulp Fiction" knock off, overly stylized dialogue about not much in particular slowing down the narrative momentum like a big thumb on an old turntable, and "Inglorious Basterds" was this film maker at his most hollowed-out, glib, verbose, lazily constructed, scenes drawn out and shocks and surprises twists slipped in along the way as a means to distract us from the fact that Tarantino's bag of tricks was a small one to begin with. The irony about the matter of Tarantino is that while he maintains the loves, admires and discusses eloquently the elegant leanness and clean procedural logic of genre films, he cannot make films near their perfection because of his verbosity; as Duncan Shepherd wrote, he likes to hear himself write. It's not that action genre films cannot have compelling or compelling dialogue; the problem lies in Tarantino's reluctance to have a tighter grasp on where his plots and subplots wind up. What he thinks are layers of ironic misdirection,where absolute monsters or amoral reprobates are given reams of well -honed speeches to recite between spasms of bad-doings are, in fact, padding and time wasting. Even  dialogue virtuoso Elmore Leonard, knows to trim his exchanges to advance the action and the surprises. Leonard  has sage advice to those younger writers who desire to have readers finish the books they write or the movies they author:"Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

De Palma

Brian De Palma is a filmmaker who obviously covets the genius of other filmmakers, so much so that he reflexively duplicates their trademark signature gestures as his own. This occasionally results in exciting film work, such as the staircase scene from "Battleship Potemkin" artfully crafted into De Palma's "Untouchables." More often, though, the unending of one homage after another homage, tributes, plagiarisms is not unlike a three-year-old's version of peanut butter and jelly sandwich; they are virtually unwatchable, dripping with references, abrupt and illogical in their construction. De Palma, in fact, seems far too often to contrive a story just to insert his neurotic virtuoso camera tricks.

He desperately wants to be taken seriously and considered an artist, .and yet the best he can do is occasionally approximate the contours of another filmmaker's inspiration. No one can really watch "Blow Out" and not think of the two superior films that inspired it, "Blow-Up" and Francis Coppola's ingenious Americanization of the film, "The Conversation"; both those filmmakers had an idea of what they trying to do. The Untouchables and Casualties of War succeed as film narratives because De Palma had good scripts he hadn't the chance to alter, "improve" on, nor had the liberty to ignore. He is a director whose body of work would be more impressive if he could reign in his desire to short-cut his way to genius.

 De Palma seems to select what scenes he would like to plagiarize and then fashion a movie around them; that would be an exciting technique if it had better results, but it doesn't. Saying that De Palma's style is "post-modern pastiche" is an excellent way of saying that this director hasn't an interesting idea of his own. The tradition has been, and stubbornly remains, that younger artists are influenced and inspired by older artists; the younger artists, those few who will rise as being notable on their own terms, will imitate and then mold their influences with their own experience and sensibility. It's a compelling dialectic. De Palma's work is an excellent example of what is fatally wrong with the post-modern method: take various scenes from other filmmakers and then do a puppet show.

 Carrie, Casualties of War, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way, a few are indeed fine movies, but one can say that they are the least "De Palma-like" in the body of work. He does a good job when he sticks pieces in service to a good script; he had the potential of being a perfect "Hollywood hack," an underappreciated designation to those directors who take assignments and produce influential movies that resist fashion and politics. Perhaps he should have aspired to be Robert Aldrich rather than Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma revealed technical virtuosity, yes, but unlike those he admires, he could translate his personal quirks and issues into compelling art. Scarface is a classic merely because it is glutted burrito of excess; faithful to a post-modern nature, one cannot decide if it is intended as parody or critique. I doubt De Palma knew either, as the increasing extremes of debauched sex, violence, and vulgarity achieves not catharsis but rather the opposite, apathy. The last few minutes, the climactic shoot out with Sonny's invitation to "say hello to his little friend," is terrific, but it is the only thing in the film worth talking about these decades later. It is a simple lousy movie made memorable solely because it was so expensive and garnished.

Eyes Glued Shut

This caption is dedicated to my friends Barry and Janet.

Eyes Wide Shut, the final film by director Stanley Kubrick, came to us with a hype that suggestively alluded to matters of infidelity, necrophilia, an orgy,  intense , bad-faith sex between an eventually naked pairing of Tom Cruise and his then wife Nichole Kidman. The highlight of the film, it seems, was that we did view Kidman nude, a sleek figure one encounters in drawings by fashion designers, but the movie itself, intended to be ominous, exhibits all of Kubrick's faults and very few of his strengths. The movie is an uneven enterprise, impressive technical competence here , pretentious art gestures there; I have the suspicion that Kubrick actually died before he completed the film and that what we have was finished by c...ommittee. I am not a fan of Kubrick, but I do think that even his most portentous efforts had, at least, a "finished" quality, a well tailored fit. Kubrick could finesse his films to the degree that it was easy to overlook the vacuum that seems to habitually occupy the center of his themes. "Eyes Wide Shut" attempts to approximate the interiority of Schnitzler's novel and exhibits a topic drift; what ought to seem like incidents that, while insignificant in themselves, build to a culminating crash of tones, instead seems like the tale told by someone who cannot finish a sentence, let alone deliver a punchline.

Tron Legacy

Tron Legacy was better than I thought it might be; the film makers follow up the original film with a plot that is as just as  sketchy as the  first film's, and offer up an atmosphere and special effects that are, to be sure,  better than before, but also in a tolerable scale. One is relieved that no one decided to pause, linger or dwell on a multitude of thyroidal spectacle and one appreciates the smartness to have the action move on,  without a hitch or a distraction. The shallow characterizations are not to be sniffed at--this is a fantasy  and pretensions of Siddartha would have sank this project, just as it did the last two films in the  Matrix  trilogy, both of which sounded like nothing so much as the most jargon-choked undergraduate papers from a class in post modern theory as enacted by kitchen appliances.

Was I the only one who was overwhelmed with the feeling of someone who'd been sitting in the same room for hours suffering the unceasing prate of  a handful of dull and dulling monologists who haven't a worthy anecdote for all their volumes of talk who had to resort to some sort of violent act in order to feel something again?  Boredom is a major cause of revolutions and and riots; ennui is the ultimate social injustice, and mindless , jacked-up , effects-glutted spasms in other wise very talky, snail-paced , portentous narratives is a bad way to make a series of action thrillers.The old joke that Kenau Reeves was safely in his expressive range as his cast members, who were robots.

If nothing else, the viewer  of  TL gets to relish Jeff Bridges reprising his persona as Dude from Big Lebowski   as he allows his computer program embedded hippie to emerge in the high contrast, glow in the dark worked that his Tron Legacy's terrain: "you're messing with my Zen thing, man."One appreciates as well the elegance that comes through what is an engaging if ultimately forgettable entertainment. It is refreshing when a competent entertainment is willing to let itself be forgotten
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The NetFlix Report: "Changing Lanes".

Getting around to some old movies , courtesy of the NetFlix miracle, and I decided to catch up on a Ben Affleck/Samuel L.Jackson film form more than a few years ago, Changing Lanes.  It thought it was a decent enough Hollywood "message" film, though it had the dopiest premise imaginable. It's not that I object to happy endings -- in this case, each of the characters played by Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck realize the exact nature of their wrongs and wind up doing the right thing by the world and themselves -- it's that I want the fictional solutions to seem fictionally plausible. The concentration of the events into one day snaps credulity, and while you're wondering whether this is an alternative universe where there are 76 hours to a day, the film drags way too much in key areas. 


Jackson and Affleck are both quite good here, but in the crush of the events that are eating our protagonists up, there is too much reflection, too much self examination, too much fortuitous circumstance for the characters to redeem themselves. Irony is fine, but Affleck's pragmatic do-gooding at the end is too much of stretch, theatrical without being dramatic. Like the film as a whole.  


It's a cinch that Affleck, who is having a comeback lately with a growing reputation as a director--the buzz is that he ought to hang acting altogether and stay behind the camera, calling the shots--has spent sometime pouring over this flawed drama and thinking what might have been better. He, and we, are benefiting from his mistakes. 

Simmering Bigelow

Profiling  Hurt Locker  director Kathryn Bigelow hot after her historic  double Oscar for Best Film and Best Director,  Vancouver Sun writer Jamie Portman made note of  the film maker's "simmering anger" and her seeming fascination with violence.  It's been asked, reasonably, that if  Bigelow had been a man, would the reporter had written the article the way it  was.. Kathryn Bigelow directed a fine motion picture that won both best director and best picture Oscars, which establishes her as a director of high skill who takes a back seat to no one. She also joins a community of artists who's personality quirks become almost as well known as their work. One can imagine the equivocating  variations that will be spontaneously created when those thinking they have issues with Bigelow's cinematic vision. She might become part of a name-dropping choruses that give quick inventories of the pluses and minuses of being a famous artist:

Mailer is a great writer, sure , but isn't he a blustering egomaniac? Bukowski is a brilliant poet, yeah, but isn't he an incorrigible drunk? Picasso reshaped what can be  done with paint and canvas, but  wasn't he misogynistic monster? Brando redefined film acting for a generations to come,but wasn't an self-destructive egocentric? 

Maybe the director will one of those who are referred to by their last name, "Bigelow", with readership knowing exactly who you're referring to. The advantage of that depends, though, on whether one's body of work or the history of their public moodiness is the first thing people think of when one's name is mentioned.

The pattern is discernible, where one begins by acknowledging a subject's talents , gifts and accomplishments, and then qualifies the exceptions with what are more often references to gossip talking points than a writer's subtle observations. Still, it becomes fair game , as many celebrities discover. The fact that they are celebrities means that they are news, period, and discussion of them is not limited to the quality of the work they do. Bigelow's temperament has been no secret in the film industry for years, and now that she's made history by being the first woman to win the best director award, her past work and her short-fuse become topics for conversation.

So yes, if Bigelow had been a man with the same history of anger, I think the reporter would have recent much the same thing. And it is, in fact, unusual for a woman director to be as fascinated with violence as a male director is; that's what makes her a ground breaker, that's what makes her newsworthy beyond her two Oscars, and it's something fit for public discussion.

Schadenfreude is bliss

There's been a bit of grousing about whether the Coen brothers have set themselves on cruise control since multi-Oscar wins  for No Country for Old Men,the current evidence being the new comedy, Burn After Reading. It's familiar character terrain for Coen fans, this time focused on a gaggle of Washington DC nitwits and imbeciles who try to get the upper hand when a canned CIA analyst's memoirs , on CD, is found by an attendant on the locker room of a local gym. What follows when the CD gets into the hands of two inordinately self-seeking body trainers, wonderfully kinked performed by Francis McDormand and Brad Pitt , is the sort of comedy the Coens excel in, a detached though acute view of a many characters operating agendas from myopic cocoons who are frantically pursuing their ends regardless of consequences. Theirs is a comedy of situations where nothing is thought-through by the characters, everyone is looking for the shortcut, and all the assumptions crash, burn and sometimes are fatal when the gravity of collected self-regard takes hold and takes over.Their genius is to make you laugh at all this no matter how unsympathetic the characters might be; the unsympathetic nature of the figures in Burn After Reading is the charge leveled against the brothers this time out, as well as some complaints that they're borrowing from their other movies, particularly Fargo and Oh Brother , but to the first challenge mostly I'd counter that being able to "relate" shouldn't be the sole basis to enter a film's narrative. What matters is how well matters are brought out, made compelling; Burn is compelling, if nothing else, but more so, it is a film by masters. They are  practioners of Hitchcock's techniques of voyeur-noir --their camera notices everything, notes each gesture, figure of speech, constructs different scenarios as to where the plot might go, and then allows a particularly fragile house of cards to collapse.Shallow as they be in life's purpose, their quirks, their world views are fully delineated and detailed. This has the sort of aesthetic remove that made Nabokov an effectively satiric novelist; wouldn't a Coen Brothers' version of Laughter in the Dark be an ideal match up of sensibilities? Nabokov, always in love with people's schemes , their rationalizations, and the erotic inflection when lust and avarice influence the chatter and buzz phrases, would like the Brother's merciless technique and distance; he'd appreciate the way their movies can get in close without embarrassment to expose a massive vacancy where something like a soul should be.

You remember that humorless Brian dePalma turned Tom Wolf's dyspeptic novel Bonfire of the Vanities into a fat, trudging monster that turned the author's flinty wit and lacerating details of New York greed and class where the wounds inflicted were secondary to everyone being manic and mirthless for all the tortured reasoning their obsessions required. There wasn't a laugh to be had, and you merely experienced unpleasant folks at the expense of the time you might have spent doing something more interesting. Had Joel and Ethan Coen helmed the screen adaptation, one would be singing their praises further for maintaining a balance between the audience's voyeur like interest in what is none of their affair and the nearly clinical portrayal Bad Faith as a quality no sympathetic spin. As is, however, Wolf's book suffered the fate of being another of dePalma inflated galleries of borrowed camera styles and Joel and Ethan have fared well enough without him. Duncan Shepard, film critic for the San Diego reader and one of the better essayists on film matters Coen has a punchy, succinct and on-target review of Burn After Reading here. It's significant, as Shepard is America's fussiest film critic; fair, and hard to please. Mostly, far beyond the aspect whether I find sympathy with a film character, is whether the project is fun. Art of any sort has to be fun , which isn't to say fun on the level of the playground, but more with whether I regret the time I spent engaged or not."Art" is massive set of aesthetic activities that accommodates plenty of agendas in its generalized practice, the practice of "having fun" not the least of them. "Fun" is that sense of something that engages and provokes in someway a facet of one's personalty that makes up the personalized and skewed way that one understands how the world works in fact. Whether Cage piano recitals, James Carter solos, Fassbinder film festivals, or whatever gamier, tackier sounds cleave to ones' pleasured ganglia, the quality of fun, that fleeting, momentary state that defines an activity, is why we're attracted to some kinds of music , and not others. It's a legitimate definition for an aesthetic response, but the problem comes in the description of the response, the articulate delineation of what made a set of sounds "fun".The point, of course, being that everything that is entertaining or distracting from the morbid sameness of daily life cannot be said to be exclusively in the domain of the willfully dumb, conceived in a massive expression of bad faith: what is entertaining, from whatever niche in the culture you're inspecting, is that activity that holds you attention and engages you the degree that you respond to it fully.

"Fun", in fewer words.

"Shutter Island": CLOSED FOR REPAIRS

It's heartening to think that there is a large audience that desires a major motion picture of substance, grace and  elegantly restrained craft , the sort of movie that director Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island" longs to be, but that's slim consolation for those who sat through the movie's two hours and eighteen minutes. One of things I like Martin Scorsese for is that he's an extreme movie fan--at his best he's what Quentin Tarantino wants to be, blessed with an observable genius--and one appreciates that he wanted to make something in the style of Val Lewton. Lewton's productions were distinct and elegant, but they were also taut, tight narrative lines leading to increasingly nerve racking results. As with Brian dePalma, who never learned that lesson for all his stylistic obsession with Hitchcock, Scorsese doesn't glean that from any of the suspense masters he 's viewed.

Lewton, though, didn't poke around his set ups nor erupt with gratuitous verve as Scorsese often does; his thrillers "I Walked With a Zombie", "Cat People" and "Body Snatcher" , though rife with a psychological nuance, were stylish and efficient engines of excitement. Ninety minutes, more or less, was what it took for the problematic results of a protagonist's plight to slam you up against the wall. Irony , effectively deployed , was essential to Lewton's artistry, a wrinkle, a turn, an unexpected result that could alter the entire tone of the film; Scorsese, too often arty and not at all artful, hasn't the slightest grasp of the ironic touch. The twist in "Shutter Island"--the man investigating a disappearance in an insane asylum is himself insane--startles no one; the audience is basically tipped off by the escalation of weird events. Believability has nothing to do with it; rather it's more plausibility, the extent to which you're willing to suspend disbelief to allow the genre to work it's distractions on you. 

The delusional nature of Leonardo DiCaprio's character was as unexpected as a phone bill. Another issue hampering the film's effectiveness is DiCaprio's youthful appearance; seasoned law enforcement officers don't look like they just got back from a shoot for Tiger Beat. He compensates , or tries to, by scrunching up his face in sustained series of prune faced close ups, but the effect is of a watching a man suffer through a bad headache, an unintended irony for the viewer waiting for the movie's quality to improve. Relief came, of course, in the form of the end credits.

Terry Gilliam Gets it Right

I liked the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, although Terry Gilliam is far from my favorite director; for all his general flash and opulent imagery, he cannot tell a story, really, and he likes to crowd the frame. His movies tend be like a shut-in's apartment, cluttered with piles of undifferentiated stuff.Many appreciate his willingness to toss in everybit of historical aracana into his heaping constructions of detail, but this the very thing that stops me, nearly every moment , from appreciating the absurdity he purports to advance. Sticking through the impressive messes that are Brazil or Baron Van Munchhausen aren't without their rewards, but Gilliam's desire to fill each inch of his frames with his patisches is ,to use the former analogy, like making a nervous path through so much precariously balanced deitritus in order to get to the kitchen, or the bathroom. Simply stated, you get impatient for the payoff, if not the point. Heath Ledger's death, though, had an upside side, since it seemed to force Gilliam to stream line his storyline and create a structure justifying the additions of Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Collin Farrell to replace the sadly departed Ledger. Without giving too much away, it works more often than not. And, as usual, there is plenty of cool imagery to wrap your senses in.

I equate clutter with flash, and it's the case that Gilliam really does not allow us much time in his films to allow his designs to register or resonate. It's the kind of flash one means when they discuss carnival game decoration--lots of cheap prizes dressing up a joint (I am an ex-carnie, after all) meant to attract attention, not intelligence. I... See More often wished there was less ebullience and more discretion in his designs; his best visual ideas goto waste. In "Imaginarium", they do not, as the tragedy with Ledger forced Gilliam to limit his range and so lend his story a logic that made sense in the terms of the fantasy he was operating within; he paid attention to his idea and didn't overshoot it.

Artificial, yes. Intelligent, no.

Salon has started a rather fine film section in it's redesign, and it was a surprise to see Chicago Reader movie critic Jonathan Rosenbaum highlighted in a brief piece defending Steven Spielberg's maligned sci-fi meditation on the human soul, A.I.Artificial Intelligence. His defense of the feature , brave as it is, has the benefit of being a pithy:


Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense -- an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what's human and what isn't, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.

I am glad someone thought this was a good movie. I had the good fortune to take a couple film courses with Jonathan Rosenbaum in the seventies when he was a visiting film lecturer in UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department. The topic of one class, Paranoia in Films, was an especially engaging, if diffusely defined course, and it was of particular interest that the required text for the course was Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, from which Mr. Rosenbaum would bestow cryptic quotes from the book like "God is the original conspiracy theory" while showing acutely observed studies in monomania such as Nick Ray's Bigger than Life. That film in particular was apt for a course in paranoia on film, as it dealt with a meek school teacher's growing dependence of a mood altering medicine (cortisone) that converted into an arrogant, edgy, lunatic who needed eventually to be placed in a straight jacket. The print Rosenbaum received for the class wasn't the theatrical print he expected, but rather the cropped version, intended for television screens, where much of the image was cut away and the focus was on the talking heads. Viewing a tightly contained James Mason screaming larger than life on a large auditorium screen made you feel like you were watching someone trying to escape from a shrinking glass box. Paranoid indeed.

It's with this back story that I understand his appreciation of A.I.:Artificial Intelligence, but where he sees a brave vision from Steven Spielberg in the way he attempts to sort through the ways technology threatens to blur and eventually erase the distinctions between human and android programming--the eventual point was that both these creations are subject to a hard wiring that needs to bond with others as a defense against the lurking solitude--but it remains for me a vague, grandstanding mess. The buzz was that this was intended as the last film Stanley Kubrick was to make but never got to, and that Spielberg had gained access to the notes and developed his own ideas about how to flesh out, so to speak, the bare premise. Kubrick , is not the best person to pick if you're in the market for a useful idea for a film; more than a few of us have felt that the late director's reputation was inflated beyond sane justification, a man who could indeed shoot an engrossing sequence but was ill at ease to explain what thinking lay behind his imagery. It was a matter of monumental style in Kubrick's films, and he's lucky enough to make a hand ful of movies that haven't had their reputations collapse after their initial release and the wave of awestruck reviews.

His final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, was as pompous and preposterous a botched project as anything Ed Wood had made; you suspect that he had actually died before he had a chance to repair the raw feed in post production. Even the director's skill for making capable actors appear like sleepwalkers wasn't enough to calm the antsy Tom Cruise; he remains within his emotional range as an over-eyed wind-up toy. AI,in kind, was a half a bad idea from Kubrick's mind, was was reason enough for Spielberg to pour on the effects, flash the lights, go crazy with the colors, with abrupt and unconsidered cuts between broad humor, family hour sweetness and uncorked violence and villainy. The last set of clauses sound like a Coen Brothers movie, sure, but the Coens have a tone that runs through through their vexing genre variations and character studies; there are links, there are connections, there are matters in the frames that can be discussed, debated, but which are very tangibly present in the movie. Spielberg is muscle, flash, loud noises; his idea of subtext is a Cliffs Notes of discussion points--what morality play that can be discerned operates only on the surface, and it is when this happens--as it does all though this messy, ill-lit narrative--that you realize what button-pushing schlock meister the director really is. The whole A.I. enterprise comes off like that horribly cropped scene of James Mason yelling on an auditorium screen. Nothing at all fits the slim premise.

The Auteur Theory: Filmmakers Beware

There was an interesting piece at Slate in 2006 about the auteur theory in film criticism with regard as to whether film directors and screenwriters can both be given credit for being the central creators of an especially great movie. Read that piece here and be prepared for a cogent lesson in the history of movie reviewing. I think the theory is useful, but that it ought to be considered sparingly: it's useful as a particular aspect of film criticism and review, but it is a notion that we are better off retiring altogether. The problem with the idea is that a generation of film critics spent their time generating convolutions about directors and their reputations, using the auteur-ism as the main filter, rather than actually assessing the films that were being made. What we wound up with was little about individual films and much about puffed-up reputations. The theory, I suspect, has helped ruin a few film maker's products, as in the case of Martin Scorsese. 

Scorsese might as well be screaming through a bullhorn about his auteur status. On the other hand, Clint Eastwood has an easy claim on the term, although he wears his ascendancy to Great Directorhood like it were a loose suit. It shows in the movies he makes, I think. Fascinating as his films are, they are marred by an arty( as opposed to artful)virtuosity that steps out of the frame and instructs the viewer that genius and vision are unveiled in front of them. There is great talent here instead of self-declared genius, which is to say that Eastwood uses his filmmaker skills to serve a story, not pad his resume. I've thought for years that the auteur theory was useful mostly to fanboys who wanted a means to turn their film hero obsessions into matters of serious study, thereby providing them with a reason to discourse as a matter of professional dispatch about their teenage enthusiasm. The same has happened to rock criticism and continues as popular arts chatter mimics the tonier rhetoric of literary and theater criticism. Everyone, given a theory to match their preferred diversion, gets to be a know-it. 

It beats learning a trade, I suppose. A pesky item in the concept is the advance of reputation over the quality of specific work. Dozens of second, third, and fourth-rate directors whose films exhibit the tendencies a nominal auteur must have, such as a readily identifiable camera style that accents and enhances a director's personalized view of the world. Jack Webb, creator and star of Dragnet, wrote and directed films that transported the cue-card realism of the television show to the wider screen, "30", "The DA," "Pete Kelly's Blues" among them. The style is very distinct; the writing stands out from anything else in the field, the world view, basically post-Hemingway misery about loners abiding by a code without which the planet descends into slow chaos, bespeaks the traits the auteur critics consider as graces. Yet there's a reason Webb's films only see an infrequent screening on AMC or one of the Turner stations while Howard Hawks or John Ford are shown repeatedly; Webb's films are fascinating for their stiff professionalism but are in plain fact dull and dulling. Just imagine Dragnet's basic flat line style transposed to newspaper offices, a Marine base, or a jazz band, with the storyline stretched to feature film length, and you can imagine something so trudging and cement shod that you might mistake it for Brecht. Hawks and Ford, or others one can name, easily break out of the specialized auteur ghetto and aren't afraid to entertain the senses. Auteurism's particular limit is the failure of the proponents that not all filmmakers are worth the same amount of enthusiastic ink.