American Gangster

Director: Ridley Scott. Screenplay: Steven Zaillian. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Production design: Arthur Max. Music: Marc Streitenfeld.  Producers: Brian Grazer, Ridley Scott. With: Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Josh Brolin, Lymari Nadal, Ruby Dee, Joe Morton, Roger Guenveur Smith, Cuba Gooding Jr., Armand Assante, Kevin Corrigan, Jon Polito, Ted Levine, John Hawkes, RZA, Yul Vazquez, Malcolm Goodwin, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Carla Gugino, Skyler Fortgang, John Ortiz, Kathleen Garrett, Ritchie Coster, Bari K. Willerford, Idris Elba, Common, Warner Miller, Albert Jones, J. Kyle Manzay, Tip Harris, Melissia Hill, Quisha Saunders,  Robert Funaro, Jon DeVries, Gavin Grazer, Norman Reedus, Marjorie Johnson, Jeff Mantel, Jerrod Paige. USA. 157 min. 2007. 

As its title suggests, the ambitions of this expansive cops-and-robbers epic run high, sometimes approaching Godfather proportions in ways that don’t work to this picture’s advantage. Although the story has about a zillion characters, the action swirls around two of them: Frank Lucas, a suave but psychopathic New York City drug lord (Denzel Washington), and Richie Roberts, a klutzy but honest New Jersey detective (Russell Crowe) who’s determined to bring him down. The film’s first portion shows Frank setting up a hugely lucrative trade by importing heroin from Southeast Asia, where the Vietnam war is raging away, and putting it on the New York market at prices that undercut the competition by a mile. Intercut with this is an equally detailed sketch of Richie’s professional life, which has lost momentum since he baffled his fellow officers by refusing to abscond with a million dollars in loot that he stumbled on during a raid. Hardly anyone on the force is willing to trust a guy this weird, so he’s going to law school in hopes of changing his career. 

Washington is so utterly charming in so many important scenes (he is truly the Jimmy Stewart of our time, minus the awful politics) that the violently deranged side of Frank’s personality – which bursts out intermittently, spewing blood and rage to every corner of the screen – seems almost a secondary trait; this doesn’t speak well for the movie’s underlying (a)morality, however triumphantly law and order prevail in the end. Yet in the film’s best sequences, forces of good and evil face up to one another in confrontations of real psychological and ethical complexity, bringing the narrative alive in intellectual as well as emotional ways. Add a good supporting cast and hard-hitting camerawork by the marvelous Harris Savides and you have one of Ridley Scott’s most effective pictures -- far from a new American myth à la the first two Godfather films, but brisk cinematic storytelling on its own ethically challenged terms.

I’m Not There

Director: Todd Haynes. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Production design: Judy Becker. Producers: John Goldwyn, Jeff Rosen, John Sloss, James D. Stern, Christine Vachon. With: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchette, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Julianne Moore, Benz Antoine, Mark Camacho, Joe Cobden, David Cross, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Garth Gilker, Kristen Hager, Fanny La Croix, Kim Roberts, Yolonda Ross, Dennis St John, Craig Thomas, Michelle Williams. USA/Germany. 132 min. 2007. 

Todd Haynes’s hugely ambitious, boldly unconventional biopic, wherein seven people play Bob Dylan at different stages of his protean career, calls for a point-by-point response. 

1. Todd is an enormously gifted artist. His keenly intelligent 1995 drama Safe has my vote for best American film of the '90s; the 2002 melodrama Far from Heaven works sensitive and sensuous variations on themes borrowed from Douglas Sirk; his 1987 short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is a conceptual tour de force; and his 1993 television short Dottie Gets Spanked is the rarity of rarities, a virtually perfect film. He ranks with the very best auteurs of his generation. 

2. Dylan is one of the two authentic geniuses – the other is John Lennon – produced by popular music in the 20th century, and if I had to choose between the two, I’d pick Dylan as the greatest of them all. He has no peer as a songwriter; as a performer he’s as dynamic and courageous as anyone I’ve ever seen or heard; and as a public personality his refusal to be pinned down or reductively defined is brave and stirring. I’ve admired him since his very first album in the early '60s, and I’ve watched him play in coffee house and concert hall alike. I’ve sometimes been too busy or preoccupied to keep up with his work for a while, and sometimes I’ve tuned out because of skepticism over his latest direction -- when he turned born-again Christian, for instance. But when I eventually go back to check out what I’ve missed, it’s brilliant! Even the Christian stuff! He is, in short, a unique and inspiring phenomenon. 

3. I am amazed and disappointed at this movie’s overall failure to accomplish what it apparently set out to do, or to accomplish much of anything beyond slicing and dicing its material in a badly managed effort to echo the dizzying diversity of Dylan’s life and times. 

4. It’s always interesting to have a single person played by multiple actors for more than mere character/old-character/young reasons. Todd Solondz used the device effectively in his 2004 comedy-drama Palindromes, for instance. But the acting has to be good, and most of the Dylan-players here don’t make the grade. Christian Bale, one of the best actors on the scene today, is inexplicably weak, slumping over his guitar like a pouty adolescent from central casting. Richard Gere’s shot at Dylan the cowboy is bewilderingly unfocused, one of his worst showings ever. The only portrayal with sizzle and bite comes from Cate Blanchett, who turns in one of the most perceptive trouser-role performances since Linda Hunt’s in The Year of Living Dangerously back in 1982. The supporting actors playing well-known figures (Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, the usual suspects) waver between impersonation and interpretation, succeeding on neither count. Safe star Julianne Moore can’t even bring off Joan Baez persuasively. At the very end of the movie there’s an extreme closeup of the real Bob Dylan wailing away on his harmonica; it’s the most riveting moment in the picture, greater by orders of magnitude than anything that’s preceded it, and additional proof that his brilliance lives exuberantly on. 

5. Cinema buffs will have fun spotting references to Jean-Luc Godard, the low-grade Sam Peckinpah western Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid that Dylan acted in, et cetera, and Dylan aficionados can chortle over fleeting references to his book Tarantula and other esoterica. This is just game-playing. 

6. Todd has done disappointing work before, including the 1998 glam-rock musical Velvet Goldmine, wherein he used structural ideas from Citizen Kane, of all things, to hold a kaleidoscopic story together. It’s surprising that he’s struck out with two music-movies in a row, since his avant-garde Superstar is excellent, and pop-music pictures – especially pop-music biopics, from American Hot Wax to What Does Love Have to Do with It and beyond -- strike gold with remarkable frequency. And hey, Don Pennebaker’s classic Don’t Look Back is one of the all-time-great documentaries and the most powerful Dylan movie to date, aside from some portions of Dylan’s own Renaldo & Clara, especially the transfixing concert material. In this context, the failure of I’m Not There is all the more striking. 

7. Ed Lachman’s cinematography is fine. 

8. The movie comes vibrantly, excitingly alive every time Dylan’s voice – not the many so-so covers – sings out on the soundtrack. 

8. Dylan reinvents himself every few years, and Haynes can certainly do the same. 

9. I still have faith in both of them. 
 

No Country for Old Men

Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Film editing: Roderick Jaynes, a k a Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Music: Carter Burwell. Producers: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Scott Rudin. With: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, Tess Harper, Barry Corbin, Beth Grant, Garret Dillahunt, Kit Gwin. USA. Languages: English, Spanish. 122 min. 2007. 

This excellent drama is a largely faithful adaptation of the eponymous novel by Cormac McCarthy, an author I discovered later than I should have, and whom I’ve come to admire as one of the most brilliant modern American writers. No Country for Old Men, published in 2005, ranks with The Road, parts of Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West, and the first two novels in The Border Trilogy as one of his most resonant works, a moving and intelligent meditation on the proposition that contemporary America, and perhaps contemporary everywhere, is brutalizing and vulgarizing itself toward extinction one self-destructive step at a time. It’s a savage book, and in the best possible way. 

Set in south Texas near the Mexican border, the story centers on three men. The first character we meet is evil: Anton Chigurh, whose very name sounds evil. (To my eye, it even looks evil on the page.) His murder weapon is a gizmo used for slaughtering animals, and the motive for his crimes is partly money and partly sheer, psychopathic . . . evil. Another character is good: Ed Tom Bell, a sheriff who’s seen enough to have few illusions about the world, the criminality and violence it contains, and the ability of folks like him to effect much of a slowdown in society’s downward trend. And the other key character is in between: Llewelyn Moss, a working man who loves his wife, doesn’t mind his job, and likes to hunt. Scouting for game one ordinary day, he stumbles on a scene where mayhem recently took place, leaving behind several corpses, an enormous stash of packaged narcotics, and a satchel holding a breathtaking amount of cash. Moss is a reasonably upstanding guy, but the money is too tempting to pass up. So he chucks it into his truck, tells his wife he’ll be away for a little while, and heads off to hide the package in some safe place. Before long Chigurh is on Moss’s trail and Ed Tom is on Chigurh’s trail. Awful things are bound to happen, and the only question is how awful they will be. 

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen are a versatile filmmaking team, and a very uneven one. Their best movies (Blood Simple, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There) are strikingly original pairings of offbeat content and innovative style; their worst movies (Intolerable Cruelty, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) are meretricious and showy; their in-between movies (Miller’s Crossing, The Ladykillers) are just that, lukewarm and inconsistent. For a long time Joel took the director credit on their films, Ethan took the producer credit, they both took the writing credit, and Roderick Jaynes, their joint pseudonym, took the editing credit. They’ve always worked together on all phases of their productions, though, and since 2004 they’ve been sharing the director and producer credits. So it’s hard to say exactly who’s responsible for what in No Country for Old Men, but whatever the case may be, they’ve done just about everything right. 

This starts with the casting, almost always a Coen strong suit. Tommy Lee Jones emerged from a lot of mediocre work in the '90s (culminating in Cobb, where he and the picture vie for the atrociousness prize) with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a meticulously observed modern-day western in which he made a top-notch directorial debut as well as giving one of his most nuanced performances ever. He’s kept up the pace with starring roles in two 2007 pictures, In the Valley of Elah and No Country for Old Men, both making strong and sensitive use of his expressively battered face and no-nonsense down-home diction. Ed Tom is the kind of part he was born to play. Javier Bardem has done some fine work (e.g., Live Flesh) but in pictures like Before Night Falls and The Dancer Upstairs he’s seemed kind of cloying, as if those doe-like eyes in that echt Latin face meant we had to love him whether we wanted to or not. All of which left me unprepared for his Anton Chigurh, a chillingly wicked portrayal that had me hooked from the first scene, when he flashes a broad grin overflowing with the insane brutishness the character embodies. It’s a performance that never pulls a single nasty punch. Josh Brolin is less interesting than Jones and Bardem, but this suits the character he’s playing, and Woody Harrelson does a spiffy turn as a minor player in the never-ending intrigue. The women of the story are confined to the margins, but they’re very well played by Kelly Macdonald and Tess Harper, among others. The mostly bleak environment in which they move is eloquently photographed by Roger Deakins, one of the best in Hollywood today. 

After the comedy of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, and the stylized atmospherics of The Man Who Wasn’t There, it was time for Joel and Ethan to make a completely earnest movie that engages their hearts and souls as well as their whirring and clicking minds. No Country for Old Men is exactly that. It’s not a somber masterpiece on the level of the novel that inspired it, but on cinematic terms it comes fairly close. It stands with the Coen brothers’ very best pictures. 
 

Redacted

Director: Brian De Palma. Screenplay: Brian De Palma. Cinematography: Jonathon Cliff. Film editing: Bill Pankow. Production design: Phillip Barker. Producers: Mark Cuban, Jason Kliot, Simone Urdl, Joana Vicente, Todd Wagner, Jennifer Weiss. With: Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz, Kel O’Neill, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Ty Jones, Mike Figueroa, Paul O’Brien. USA/Canada. Languages: English, French. 90 min. 2007. 

Brian De Palma has built a large part of his reputation on his knack for purloining smart maneuvers from other filmmakers and giving them his own creative spin. Here he adopts the faux-found-footage minigenre (à la The Anderson Tapes and parts of some earlier De Palma movies), telling a tale via supposedly real cinéma-vérité material; everything in Redacted is purportedly gathered from surveillance cameras, internet broadband, an overproduced French documentary, and a video diary kept by one of the characters. All the material relates to the film’s fictional but horribly true-to-life subject: the rape of a teenage girl and the murder of her family in Baghdad during the Iraq war, perpetrated by American soldiers. 

In addition to being an inventive visual stylist, De Palma is a habitual jokester and chronic sensationalist. Here his jokiness is largely absent, though, and his longtime experience with nerve-jolting violence pays deadly serious dividends. After almost 50 years of filmmaking, some of it brilliant and some too archly clever for its own good, the inveterate movie bandit finally shows he can apply genuine passion to a subject that’s more gravely important and urgently relevant than any he’s tackled before -- and to do so with an unremitting power that ultimately redeems the picture from its multiple shortcomings, which perhaps resulted from haste to finish and distribute it in time to make a difference in the very nonfictional war it so bitingly critiques. Chief among those shortcomings is the acting, which is not bad at best, quite bad at worst. Nor is there a subtle moment in De Palma’s screenplay. 

The film’s most impressive asset is Jonathon Cliff’s long-take cinematography, which allows even the weakest performances to build robust intensity as the camera rolls on and on, wresting unexpected feelings and meanings from the characters and dialogue by virtually staring them down. This is far from smooth-sailing cinema, but that accounts for much its impact. Everyone should see it, and think about it long and hard. 
 

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Director: Sidney Lumet. Screenplay: Kelly Masterson. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Film editing: Tom Swartwout. Production design: Christopher Nowak. Music: Carter Burwell. Producers: Michael Cerenzie, William S. Gilmore, Brian Linse, Paul Parmar. With: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Amy Ryan, Rosemary Harris, Aleksa Palladino, Michael Shannon, Brian F. O’Byrne, Blaine Horton, Arija Bareikis, Leonardo Cimino, Lee Wilkof. USA. 117 min. 2007. 

Needing large infusions of cash for very different reasons, two brothers plan a holdup of a mom-and-pop jewelry store that happens to belong to their own mom and pop, and the scheme goes hopelessly, tragically wrong. The picture starts out as a caper yarn, but resonant human interests quickly take over the drama, lending it great emotional power and narrative appeal. This is enhanced by the structure of the film, which jumps around in time and occasionally repeats a bit of action. Despite its echoes of other films, from Stanley Kubrick’s classic  The Killing to Sidney Lumet’s own Dog Day Afternoon, it plays like a true original, building to its jarring climax with a steady stream of surprises. It’s a New York movie through and through – Lumet’s longtime speciality – enriched by the best efforts of a sensational cast. 

Lumet has been a dynamo of a director since his television and feature-film debuts in 1948 and 1957, respectively. Being in his 80s has hardly slowed him down, as the energetic crime-and-courtroom drama Find Me Guilty showed in 2006 and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead confirms in 2007. His movies don’t always work, but when they do (Network, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 12 Angry Men) they become part of the collective consciousness. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead may not be a picture for the ages, but it’s a spirited testament to the ongoing vitality of a veteran who’s been through all the movie wars and is still downright unstoppable.
 

This Is England

Director: Shane Meadows. Screenplay: Shane Meadows. Cinematography: Gonzalo Fernández Berridi. Film editing: Chris Wyatt. Production design: Mark Leese. Music: Ludovico Einaudi. Producer: Mark Herbert. With: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Joe Gilgun, Rosamund Hanson, Jo Hartley, Vicky McClure, Andrew Shim, Andrew Ellis, Perry Benson, Michael Socha, Hannah Walters, George Newton, Frank Harper, Jack O’Connell, Kriss Dosanjh, Kieran Hardcastle, Chanel Cresswell, Sophie Ellerby, Dave Laws. UK. 101 min. 2006. 

When we met over lunch at the Toronto film festival in 1997, Shane Meadows looked a bit like the ruffians who populate the movie he was showing there: TwentyFourSeven, a rough-and-ready look at English working-class youth. He clearly knew that territory well, perhaps uncomfortably so, and This Is England bears this out. 

Set in 1983, This Is England tells the semiautobiographical story of Shaun, a 12-year-old boy (modeled on Meadows himself: Shaun = Shane) who becomes the mascot of some likable semi-skinheads a few years older but not much wiser. Vandalism, smoking, and boozing are fun for a while, and he even gets a girlfriend when an older girl named Smell (!) takes a shine to him. But the group’s camaraderie is threatened when a mate named Combo gets out of jail and tries to indoctrinate his old pals with the white-supremacist nationalism he picked up in the pen. 

If you can accept the story’s main conceit – that a group of swaggering kids would initiate a preteen kid into their rituals and routines without a moment’s hesitation, which evidently happened to Meadows himself – the picture has the compelling kitchen-sink realism that filmmakers like Ken Loach and Tony Richardson cultivated in earlier British cinema. The acting is amazingly good, very much including young Thomas Turgoose, who makes giggly Shaun a convincing, fully rounded character in every way. 

What gives the movie real sociopolitical value is less its verisimilitude than its strong connection with defining facts of English life in 1983, such as working-class hatred of Margaret Thatcher and the psychological toll taken by her Falklands war, which killed Shaun’s father and lurks in the background of his family life. (One of the film’s signature images shows a small, deserted building with “Church of Christ” over the door and “Maggie is a twat” spray-painted on the wall.) The movie doesn’t build the kind of all-encompassing dramatic momentum that distinguishes major works of art like Gary Oldman’s searing Nil by Mouth and Mike Leigh’s scalding Naked, but it provides solid evidence that Meadows has become a highly capable filmmaker endowed with skill, sensitivity, and savvy. 
 

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium

Director: Zach Helm. Screenplay: Zach Helm. Cinematography: Roman Osin. Film editing: Sabrina Plisco. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Music: Alexandre Desplat, Aaron Zigman. Producers: James Garavente, Richard N. Gladstein. With: Natalie Portman, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Bateman, Ted Ludzik, Kiele Sanchez, David Collins, Michael Costa Parke, Madalena Brancatella, Paula Boudreau, Mike Realba, Liam Powley-Webster, Marcia Bennett, Oliver Masuda, Samantha Harvey, Jesse Bostick, Isaac Durnford, Daniel Gordon, Rebecca Northan, Dash Grundy, Dylan Authors, Aidan Koper, Lin Lin Feng, He Wen, Gan Zhen, Quancetia Hamilton, Matt Baram, Jonathan Potts, Matthew Peart, David Rendall, Milo Gladstein, Zach Mills, Steve Whitmire. USA. 93 min. 2007. 

The heroine of this likable family film is a talented young musician who works at a very special toy store while figuring out how to finish the concerto she’s trying to compose. The toy store is special because it’s magical, thanks to proprietor Magorium, who’s more than two centuries old and full of supernatural surprises. Now his long life is about to end, and the future of his emporium is in doubt, since his protégé doesn’t think she can run it without him, and the only other candidates are a boy who’s too young and an accountant who’s too square. 

The movie gets a lot of mileage from its colorful visual effects, and it deserves extra credit for raising the subject of death in a G-rated context, mild though the treatment is. Dustin Hoffman has a lot of fun with the title role, and Natalie Portman is just right as his right-hand woman. Ditto for Jason Bateman as the numbers man, essentially the same role he handled so well in The Ex a few months earlier. The whole affair is kid stuff, but grownups won’t groan too much if they happen to see it. 
 

Hitman

Director: Xavier Gens. Screenplay: Skip Woods. Cinematography: Laurent Barès. Film editing: Carlo Rizzo, Antoine Vareille. Production design: Jacques Bufnoir. Music: Geoff Zanelli. Producers: Luc Besson, Adrian Askarieh, Chuck Gordon, Pierre-Ange Le Pogam. With: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen, Henry Ian Cusick, Michael Offei. France/USA. 100 min. 2007. 

Timothy Olyphant tramps through Eastern Europe hunting bad guys, killing henchpersons galore, and doing a very weak James Bond imitation. 

The picture looks like a video game, bleeps and booms like a video game, and thinks like a video game, which is to say not at all. For all intents and purposes it is a video game, except that to stop it you have to actually leave the room instead of lurching for the off switch. 

This said, there are two excellent reasons to stick it out to the finish: (1) To find out if anyone will notice the enormous barcode tattooed on the back of Timothy Olyphant’s head, which practically screams “I have been raised from birth to be a ruthless assassin at the command of hugely powerful unseen forces,” yet seems to attract not a single glance from anyone who interacts with him or just passes him on the street, even though his cranium is shaved! and (2) to see the picture’s crowning touch, in retrospect as inevitable as the rising of the sun, in the otherwise commonplace closing credits: “Executive Producer . . . Vin Diesel.” 
 

Love in the Time of Cholera

Director: Mike Newell. Screenplay: Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Cinematography: Affonso Beato. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Production design: Wolf Kroeger. Music: Antonio Pinto. Producer: Scott Steindorff. With: Benjamin Bratt, Javier Bardem, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Liev Schreiber, John Leguizamo, Hector Elizondo, Laura Harring, Indhira Serrano, Gina Bernard Forbes, Alicia Borrachero, Fernanda Montenegro, Marcela Mar, Juan Ángel, Catalina Botero, Luis Fernando Hoyos, Unax Ugalde, María Eugenia Arboleda, Jhon Alexander Toro, Rodolfo Enrique Mercado Parra, Rubria Negrao, Angie Cepeda, Alejandra Borrero, Alfonso Wong Ma, Ana Claudia Talancón, Horacio Tavera, Adriana Cantor, Andrés Parra. USA. 140 min. 2007. 

Like the extremely popular 1985 novel by Gabriel García Márquez, this expensively produced movie tells a picaresque tale spanning half a century and involving many characters, including a lovestruck man (Javier Bardem) who never gets over his passion for a tantalizing woman (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) after she accepts his advances for a while, then rejects him and weds a physician (Benjamin Bratt) whose personal and professional prominence proves a mixed blessing for their marriage. 

Does this sound like a project you’d hand over to director Mike Newell, of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco fame? Darn right you wouldn’t, and congratulations for saving a huge production budget from going down the proverbial drain. There’s no reason why a good picture couldn’t be made from García Márquez’s novel, which is a bit more manageable – i.e., less teeming with events and superheated with ideas -- than One Hundred Years of Solitude, his other greatest hit. The trouble with Newell’s approach, abetted by Ronald Harwood’s by-the-numbers screenplay, is that it skims across the surface of the story without bothering about the mysterious depths beneath. García Márquez himself has a weakness along these lines, and teaming him with Newell and Harwood brings out the worst in all of them. 

Despite all this, I found the picture worth watching in a semiattentive sort of way, letting it trudge along under its own steam while I slid in and out as the narrative’s interest waxed and waned. Don’t expect more than this, though. Multiple storylines and a boatload of movie stars don’t make a gratifying movie by themselves. 
 

Man from Plains

Director: Jonathan Demme. Writer: Jonathan Demme. Cinematography: Declan Quinn. Film editing: Kate Amend. Music: Alejandro Escovedo. Producers: Jonathan Demme, Neda Armian. With: Jimmy Carter, Rosalynne Carter. USA. 124 min. 2007. 

A new trend: political documentaries in disguise. An Inconvenient Truth claims to be a movie but is really a slide show, and Man from Plains claims to be a movie but is really a book tour. 

Their credentials as actual movies aside, these films apparently have happy side effects for their stars. Al Gore’s opus won an Oscar and helped him garner a Nobel Prize, and Jimmy Carter’s doc shows the old nuclear-physicist-cum-peanut farmer-cum-less-than-successful-president still going strong at 83 years old. Carter does interesting work as a former White House occupant, and while it’s not all that interesting to dog his trail while he promotes his 2006 book about Israeli-Palestinian relations, I was interested to hear his spirited defense of putting “apartheid” in the volume’s title, a move that caused lots of controversy and probably upped the sales figures. 

Jonathan Demme has made a few excellent features, but like Spike Lee, who has made more than a few excellent features, Demme can’t sustain his talent when he visits the nonfiction field; although he chooses promising subjects, his documentaries are artistically and polemically flat. Say what you will about Michael Moore, he knows how to command attention and pitch his points of view with (usually) eloquent and energizing power. Man from Plains would seem too long at 90 minutes, and at more than two hours it overstays its welcome by way too much. So does the present White House occupant, who makes Carter seem like a cross between Mohandas K. Gandhi and Mother Teresa in retrospect. That’s reason enough to think nice thoughts about the man from Plains, even if you decide not to sit through Demme’s overlong travelogue. 
 

30 Days of Night

Director: David Slade. Screenplay: Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie, Brian Nelson, based on the comic by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith. Cinematography: Jo Willems. Film editing: Art Jones. Production design: Paul Denham Austerberry. Music: Brian Reitzell. Producers: Sam Raimi, Robert G. Tapert. With: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster, Mark Boone Junior, Mark Rendall, Amber Sainsbury, Manu Bennett, Megan Franich, Joel Tobeck, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Nathaniel Lees, Craig Hall, Chic Littlewood, Peter Feeney, Min Windle, Camille Keenan, Jack Walley, Elizabeth McRae, Joe Dekkers-Reihana, Scott Taylor, Grant Tilly, Pua Magasiva, Jared Turner, Kelson Henderson, John Wraight, Dayna Porter, Kate S. Butler, Patrick Kake, Thomas Newman, Rachel Maitland-Smith, Abbey-May Wakefield, John Rawls, Andrew Stehlin, Tim McLachlan, Ben Fransham, Kate Elliott, Allan Smith, Jarrod Martin, Sam La Hood, Jacob Tomuri, Kate O’Rourke, Melissa Billington, Aaron Cortesi, Matt Gillanders. New Zealand/USA. 112 min. 2007. 

Some horror movies pay off in violence, others pay off in atmosphere. Or try to, anyway. This one pays off on both counts, thanks to its effective premise: After preying on people in places like Transylvania for who knows how long, it belatedly occurs to a small band of vampires that since they can’t stroll about in the sunshine, they could have a wild old time in a place where there isn’t much of same. Hence their arrival in an Alaskan town on the Arctic Circle just as the winter period of long, long night is kicking in. And hence their ability to wreak uncommon amounts of mayhem without setting the alarm and scurrying back to their coffins every morning. 

Although they’re well choreographed and enhanced with convincing visual effects, the picture’s bursts of violence get monotonous after a while; and although I was impressed by one of the climactic scenes, wherein a human character manages to take on vampire powers, my son Craig says this is a common trick in horror nowadays (a trend I’ve apparently overlooked) and that he saw it coming miles away. Craig walked out early and missed the finale, but I think the movie’s ending would have overcome his skepticism. Harsh, sad, and uncompromisingly grim, it’s better than anything I can remember in the oeuvre of producer Sam Raimi, whose Evil Dead antics paved the way for this sort of fare a quarter of a century earlier. Raimi has moved on to bigger things, but for better and for worse, his influence on horror film still lingers.  
 

Rendition

Director: Gavin Hood. Screenplay: Kelley Sane. Cinematography: Dion Beebe. Film editing: Megan Gill. Production design: Barry Robison. Music: Paul Hepker, Mark Kilian. Producers: Steve Golin, David Kanter, Keith Redmon, Michael Sugar, Marcus Viscidi. With: Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard, Alan Arkin, Aramis Knight, Rosie Malek-Yonan, Mohammed Khouas, Zineb Oukach, Yigal Naor, Laila Mrabti, David Fabrizio, Mounir Margoum, Driss Roukhe, J.K. Simmons, Bob Gunton, Nava Ziv, Reymond Amsellem, Simon Abkarian, Wendy Phillips, Hassam Ghancy, Najib Oudghiri, Omar Salim, Anne Betancourt, Lasfar Abdelghani, David Randolph, Hadar Ratzon. USA/South Africa. 120 min. 2007. 

This politically charged drama focuses on people affected by the despicable Bush administration practice of “extraordinary rendition,” whereby persons suspected of terrorist activity are kidnapped by government agents, spirited away to countries with a history of torture for defense or law-enforcement purposes, and subjected to physical and psychological torments meant to extract information and confession, all in the absence of legal charges or the possibility of mounting a defense.  

The main storyline concerns an Egyptian man whose disappearance during a trip from Africa to Washington leads his American wife to renew acquaintance with a CIA analyst she knows and ply government officials in an effort to find out what’s really going on. This part of the narrative is strongly acted and grippingly told. Another storyline, about a Middle East terrorist in the making, is more predictable and less effective. Gavin Hood is a filmmaker with a social conscience, and we need as many of them as we can get. This picture is much more effective than his Tsotsi of 2005 – Hood hails from South Africa and has a special interest in that country’s problems – so he’s evidently improving as a screen artist and a social critic. If he stays on this track he could become a real force for good in the largely cynical movie world. 
 

Lars and the Real Girl

Director: Craig Gillespie. Screenplay: Nancy Oliver. Cinematography: Adam Kimmel. Film editing: Tatiana S. Riegel. Production design: Arvinder Grewal. Music: David Torn. Producers: Sarah Aubrey, John Cameron, Sidney Kimmel. With: Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Paul Schneider, R.D. Reid, Kelli Garner, Nancy Beattie, Doug Lennox, Joe Bostick, Liz Gordon, Nicky Guadagni, Karen Robinson, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Billy Parrott, Sally Cahill, Angela Vint, Liisa Repo-Martell, Darren Hynes, Victor Gómez, Tommy Chang, Arnold Pinnock, Joshua Peace, Aurora Browne, Alec McClure, Tannis Burnett, Lauren Ash, Lindsey Connell. USA. 106 min. 2007. 

Lars is a mentally backward young man who buys a sex doll on the internet, tells his family and friends that he’s got a girlfriend at last, and treats the object exactly the way he’d treat, well, a real girl. Being a decent and decorous guy, he doesn’t try to have sex with the sex doll, just a warm relationship. And hey, he gets to do the talking for both of them. After a period of bewilderment followed by bemusement, the residents of Lars’s small town decide the whole thing is sweet, and pitch in to facilitate – maybe even share -- his fantasy. But all things must pass, and eventually even Lars knows it’s time to pull the proverbial plug and move on to other things. 

The movie’s first portion is a one-joke weird-comedy sketch, made worse by creeping sentimentality attacks. It gets better as it goes along, thanks largely to good acting by Ryan Gosling as Lars and Patricia Clarkson as a physician called in on the case. But in the end this feel-good psycho-drama-comedy is as forgettable as a fling with a sex doll you bought on the internet.