Tag Archives: movies

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Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

“I represent the church every time I step into the courtroom, because I represent the people and the people are the church.” – Father Thomas Doyle in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Of course when Thomas Doyle utters this line deep into Alex Gibney’s deeply absorbing Mea Maxima Culpa, we know that he is an ordained priest, but one who has been representing victims in the Church abuse scandal, serving as expert witness.  The victims are every bit the members of the community as anybody else in the Church, but the organization – not the religion, but the corporation that appointed itself the keeper therein – failed them, with considerable evidence that “failed” ought not be a present tense term.  The media of course largely sidestepped this reality when covering the conclave naming Pope Francis – either sheepishly describing the scandal as a relic of the past, or just breezily neglecting altogether to focus on the flowing robes.

Father Lawrence Murphy was himself a member of the corporation, running the Saint John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee from 1950-1974.  Surrounding him were kids with a physical handicap obviously, and kids who depended on him profoundly (one considers that in the 1950s and 1960s, parents often did not understand or appreciate communication with special needs kids), and kids who were extremely vulnerable marks, if you turned out to be a predator.  Gibney follows four of these children (now grown of course – voiced by actors you all know, but so unobtrusive that you almost totally forget), and we hear their stories in their words.  Murphy abused the kids yes, but he also had established a system much resembling a fraternity.  Former abused students grow into trusted lieutenants, and often abusers themselves.  We hear one of the men talk about offering up somebody else for abuse on an offsite trip – it’s obviously horrible but better him than me.

These were the choices these students had, because they could not communicate with their parents or with other officials – and certainly with the School for the Deaf as the pillar of the community, who could believe them?  Rarely watching a movie have I ever had the sense of loneliness that I got from these stories.  How could the parents have been so blind to their children’s plights?  Where could these kids turn as their childhoods were being robbed from them?  It goes without much saying that these systems totally failed this most exposed population.  This was the stuff that stayed with me, and the strongest parts of Gibney’s film.  Certainly for others, the meticulous case that the Church knew all about these things etc etc etc is a big deal, but being from the Boston area, I knew all about this (hello, Bernard Law).  Where the film works best is a statement on how this failure felt on a human level.  It is a testament to the power of these stories that the simple stuff carries the movie and allows it to transcend some of Gibney’s overly cinematic touches and “dramatic reenactments”.  This is a tough but hopeful story – and one gets the final reckoning won’t take place anytime soon.

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Hugo

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo might be the single sweetest movie he has ever made.  In a world where various special interest factions – conservatives, hippies, whomever – complain about the filth and chum in Hollywood, too often family entertainment is merely content with being innocuous and uninterested with actually being worth seeing.  Obviously, Pixar has made a great living providing that combination of quality and wholesomeness, thus sticking out like a sore thumb in this entertainment wasteland – while by contrast this has not been Scorsese’s usual beat.  That said, this is the greatest living American filmmaker we are talking about – so that he accomplishes so much when he puts his stamp on a family film and special effects fantasy, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living in Paris of the 1930s, helping fix and run the clocks at the train station that his uncle is in charge of.  His father, seen in flashback and rather incredibly resembling Jude Law (just Jude Law as someone’s dad – come on now), also had the fixing stuff bug, and prior to his death was working on reviving an automaton he had got from a museum.  Since his father’s death, Hugo has evaded being sent to an orphanage – in particular by the dogged Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) – by living in the walls and sneaking about.  Hugo subsists by stealing, and by the movies.

The train station, and Scorsese’s Paris is a masterwork of the imagination.  The film filters and the way it is shot – this is not an animated film and these are actual actors, but somehow the filming has a certain heightened reality more akin to a movie like The Polar Express.  Into this hyperreality, Scorsese peoples his Paris with characters such as the aforementioned Inspector, the shopkeeper Lisette (Emily Mortimer), and the grumpy guy Georges Meiles who runs the toy store (Ben Kingsley).  Meiles in particular makes things difficult for Hugo as he puts Hugo to work fixing stuff at his store.

Meiles is a grumpy guy, but not one without a heart.  He and his wife have taken in their goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), and when Hugo meets Isabelle, she shows him the wonder of the library while he shows her the wonder of movies.  Little does Hugo know of course, that Georges Meiles (both here and the real one) is one of the earliest directors of cinema – you have probably seen is silent short about a trip the moon.  And indeed there are secrets abound which bind these characters together – as the movie evolves from a wondrous fantasy into a celebration of the very building blocks of movies themselves.

I would not dream of spoiling the plot much further aside from pointing out how carefully Scorsese reveals the extent of the Kingsley character’s complexity, and how particular Scorsese and Cohen are with the Inspector.  He is not a villain in any sort of way – just a guy with a particular sense of order. He thinks he is doing the orphans a favor.  What we get at the end of the day is one of Scorsese’s very best films right at the time when we might not have been expecting one.  I was surprised how affected I was by the ending, when some justice and redemption are handed out.  Will kids like this plot, especially as it gets into the cinema part?  I don’t know – I’d think so, but to paraphrase Cohen when he was promoting this film, Scorsese is not one who is focus testing these movies.  He continues to be among the rare directors who is trying to dare greatness every time out.

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The Dark Knight Rises (SPOILERS POSSIBLE)

The Dark Knight Rises, the third and final installment of Christopher Nolan’s remarkable re-imagining of the Batman series, is pretty clearly the least of the three films.  At the same time however, any negative portrayal of this film has to be tempered.  If this is a series nadir, it is a Return of the Jedi or The Last Crusade (wait, there was a fourth movie??!!) – not an atrocity like The Matrix Revoluitons.  Yes, the movie is too long, and the villain is remarkably uninteresting, and Nolan seems to have built his screenplay with a shopping cart full from the Used Movie Parts Emporium.  However, it is a testament to the character of Batman, the strength of the characters and actors that we have so much invested in, that the film works and is effective despite how bloated it is.  In some sense, we can’t be surprised.  The Dark Knight aimed so high, and asked such big questions that the movie – hell, any movie – is fairly ill equipped to satisfactorily tackle them.  What is left is a very well made picture in the genre – and one which is a worthy piece of the canon.

As the trailers have pointed out – when we open the movie, Batman is out of business and Bruce Wayne (Bale) has faded into reclusive hermititude.  Seen only by Alfred (the invaluable Michael Caine), Wayne is moping after the loss of Rachel Dawes, and facing a city that thinks Batman killed Gotham hero Harvey Dent.  To be fair, Dent’s memory has driven a lot of reforms which have made Gotham safer and attacked organized crime while removing many aspects of due process and silly things like rights.  But there is safety and that has been enough for Commissioner Gordon.  However, things are brewing underneath the city – as in the sewers live a bunch of thugs serving Bane, a menace wearing a low-rent Darth Vader mask. He rants against oligopoly and the oppression of those under the mega rich like the Waynes.  An early encounter with Gordon knocks Gordon out and puts him in the hospital.  The city suddenly needs Batman again, and away we go.

As noted in the earlier paragraph, we get a LOT of cliches here.  As in the earlier movies, we get Lucius Fox (Freeman) showing Wayne the newest gadgets to be used, in the classic form of Q in Bond.  We already see the old pro coming back for a last job, but we also get the classic Bond gambit of the beauties who are not quite as they appear, as well as the city under siege, the descent into martial law, and god help me, a prison that “nobody has ever escaped”, and god help me, a Digital Readout (complete with a key speech that feels entirely too long given the time on the clock).  One of my friends who cares deeply about this sort of thing talks about it in terms of lazy plot devices and whatnot – and there is truth there, but the earlier films have been less about startling originality than brilliant execution and a mastery of tone.  That I noticed the cracks a bit now probably is a weakness.  Indeed, the plot spins later on a revelation that felt more or less totally like a cheat, though I’ll let the reader figure out where that takes place.

Another weakness is the movie’s bigger picture themes, as in this movie oligarchy and economic inequality are explored.  At the same time, themes of anarchism and mob justice are there.  The old themes of vigilante justice are there still certainly, although now it is more about class warfare more than individuals in silly costumes.  However, the movie does not do a lot with them, aside from employing a couple of useful set pieces.  (indeed the court used to try criminals is a triumph of design with a fun surprise as the judge)  We get motivation as to why the stock exchange ends up being the subject of an invasion and why that feline chick is doing what she does, but the film sort of muddles through that.  I am not sure there is a unified statement to be had in any case, but really Nolan and his team have trouble with it, especially in contrast to the very personal nature of the Joker’s exploits.  Sometimes the canvas is too big.  Like the final Matrix movie, the series set up some very big questions, but if novelists and social commentators and political scientists have not satisfactorily cracked the puzzle, why should a summer blockbuster?  Just be assured that Nolan’s work here is not nearly as lame as what the Matrix secret actually was.  This wobbly big picture view infects the villain himself.  Bane is not a particularly inspired villain, and his speaking through the mask actually creates a problem understanding him at times.  He is a badass sure, but the motivations and back story are fairly bland.  It was hard to care about him – certainly not in the way we cared about the Joker, and he lacks the elan of Scarecrow, and of course he suffers by not being Liam Neeson.

What does work though are the set pieces and performances.  When Wayne ends up holed up in a prison in a place that he surely wouldn’t escape if this wasn’t the the final movie of the series, the entire prison and the “you’ll never get out of here” – and the failed attempts therein is pretty neat.  The cliches are here, but they worked on me.  Also, Michael Caine’s performance as Alfred more or less carries the first half hour of the film.  One of Nolan’s great inspirations was to give the role to an important actor and give Alfred real weight in Bruce’s life, when Alfred speaks of his vision for Bruce’s future – it resonates and it surprisingly moving.  Joseph Gordon Leavitt is particularly good as he tries to do the right thing, and as he explains where he knew Bruce Wayne from, and Gary Oldman is terrific as he reveals the struggle between what is right and what is right for Gotham, and the sacrifices he had to make therein.  Anne Hathaway’s Selena is – on the other hand – a little less effective.  The choice of Hathaway and Nolan to make her character something of a good soul whose life has gone off the rails is a bit of a miscalculation – when something a bit more dangerous might have been in order. (it’s cliched to say something that the role is probably better envisioned as something Angelina Jolie could do, but you probably knew that)

Overall, this is a pretty good movie – and deserving to be mentioned with the other two.  Alas, it is not particularly memorable in specific ways – certainly not as sharply seen as the first two films.  But there is some closure, and it brings an end to a series which I had no clue could be this good.  After the Joel Schumacher extrusions of Batman, I never thought I’d care so much about this franchise – but Nolan made it happen.  For that to come from a summer blockbuster is amazing.

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The Dark Knight

(Note: As I giddily anticipate seeing “The Dark Knight Rises” at the Air and Space Museum tomorrow, I suddenly realized that (rather criminally) this corner of the interwebs had said nothing about the first two films of this series.  As we lead to the third film, a look back)

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight takes the foundations of the superb first film, and totally obliterates the gameboard.  Instead of an advancement of the superhero genre, we get a film that descends into tragedy, about wounded people and a wounded city – and asking big questions about the roles of heroes themselves.  It stands as the most realistic superhero movie of all time, taking very seriously the questions raised when some dude decides to put on a bat costume and exacts justice by his own extralegal forms of justice.  While Batman Begins endures as one of my very favorite movies and the favorite of the genre, The Dark Knight is playing with bigger stakes, and is a subtle meditation on the “national security state” and exactly how far will we go in order to keep things under wraps.  Never has a superhero movie ended without anybody being able to claim victory.  It’s answers are bleak and fairly hopeless – I’m not sure the word “enjoy” really applies. I was totally drained after experiencing this film – it is quite an experience.

Of course, as we open – you’d want to think that saving Gotham City might be enough to have earned Batman some brownie points.  Alas, he is largely blamed for the death of cops and civilians (and indeed this is not precisely wrong), and of course a silly costume can only inspire copycats who are making it hard for the grownups to keep order around the city.  It is into this morass that we get the Joker.  Of course we have seen the Joker in several incarnations previous, but Heath Ledger imbues him with real wounds.  The makeup is not as clean as we’ve seen before.  This is not a slick costume, but a broken soul hiding the wounds of a child.  His schemes are truly genius – as he forces Batman, Harvey Dent and Lieutenant Gordon to make Sophie’s Choice decisions, such as when he gets Dent and Rachel Dawes in separate buildings.  In the film’s climax, he forces citizens in two boats to make the most impossible of decisions.

Superimposed on this is the development of Christian Bale’s Batman/Wayne.  It has been a hallmark of this series, almost alone in the genre, of giving the hero full treatment, showing his pain and loneliness.  He is in this to save the city, not so much out of altruism so much as that this is all that he has left to live for.  We are once again returned with the rich supporting cast with Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman that give texture to the story and Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent, in both Dent’s beginning and demise – is always convincing.  (and nothing needs to be said of the change from Katie Holmes to Maggie Gylenhaal)

I think looking at the above paragraphs that I have described a great film.  It deserved the myriad of Oscar nominations that it received for sure.  It elevates the genre and really becomes less a superhero movie than a superior crime drama exploring the nature of violence and whether surveillance and vigilante justice can really get us where we need to be as a people.  There are no heroes, even as the Joker meets his demise.  This is a considerable achievement, and tremendously affecting.  At the same time, the film lacks the rewatchability of the first movie.  It almost has to – the intensity and bleak vision of this movie is very hard to experience.  It is not my favorite of the three, but that it is the best film of the series is definitely arguable and probably accurate.

 

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Batman Begins

(Note: As I giddily anticipate seeing “The Dark Knight Rises” at the Air and Space Museum tomorrow, I suddenly realized that (rather criminally) this corner of the interwebs had said nothing about the first two films of this series.  As we lead to the third film, a look back)

Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins may not be the best modern superhero movie – but it might be the genre’s most important.  With all the taste memories people have of the film’s phenomenally successful successor, combined with the poignancy of Heath Ledger’s final performance, it is easy to forget just what a thrill it was to see THIS film, after the atrocity that Joel Schumacher had made of the franchise.  This film and Spiderman 2 both substantially raised the bar for the genre – from a disposable summer cliche to films with some weight and some basic curiosity about its hero.  Obviously everything that goes on in Gotham is preposterous – but Nolan and his actors take this material seriously – and for a couple of hours it was spellbinding.  The Dark Knight has captured history’s heart I suppose, but the first film still endures as my favorite – sheer filmmaking taking a genre picture and raising the stakes in a way that was unrecognizable until then.

It is not that dark, atmospheric superhero movies had NEVER been done.  Hell, The Crow was a particularly notable entry – and Tim Burton’s attempts at Batman the first time around were ambitious even if the movies were ultimately fairly forgettable.  But too often we had video games or movies that seemed like pure kitsch.  So what a surprise when we see Christopher Nolan taking his time with building the story up, with the League of Shadows stuff.  As is well known, this was new material, but plundering the depths of martial arts movie lore was genius.  We get heft behind Bruce Wayne’s aloneness – his development of powers, and ultimately the forces that would drive Wayne to go home, and put on a mask and cape, plus a drop-in by Ken Watanabe to boot.

Now yes, the villains were not as good as the Joker – but the gangster scheme hatched by the Scarecrow is a pretty slick scheme as far as these things go, and Cillian Murphy delivered menace quite effectively.  And as we know with his recent films highlighting his ability to fight furry woodland creatures, Liam Neeson is one serious opponent.  The villains are effectively villainous here, and the battles – with the brilliant non CGI effects – have humanity in them, the feeling of people hitting each other and performing in a plausible world.

This plausibility extends to the mystery of Batman himself.  Instead of Alfred merely being a butler, Michael Caine gives him weight – he becomes a man who takes the Wayne legacy seriously and cares about both that and Bruce with equal intensity.  He is much more of a father figure here.  Morgan Freeman as Lucious Fox, a sort of Q of this series – imbues his role with his usual dignity, and it allows a throwaway role to have more going for it.  Even Katie Holmes – though replaced by the vastly superior Maggie Gylenhaal – is effective enough.

I guess the first Batman Begins at the end of the day lacks the big questions and serious commentary on heroes and vigilantes and society that The Dark Knight poses.  But it is also a lot more fun, and a superior example of the genre.  It does not lack gravitas and excitement, and really sets the table for the remainder of the trilogy.  It is a great film in its own right, and the easiest one to turn to when you want to get a great thriller on your television.

 

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There Will Be Blood

Oh I remember seeing There Will Be Blood in the theater back in 2007 with a couple of my friends back in ye olde bachelor days.  In the theater, the movie has a pretty staggering impact, as the story of Daniel Plainville is told against a backdrop of large big screen sized canvases – beautiful poetic images that are almost dialogue free at times, and superb cinematography.  What was interesting seeing it in the convenience of my living room was how little there was underneath the film.  Folks remember the Daniel Day Lewis performance and Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction no doubt – but the movie seen today exists more as a series of set pieces without any real insights into its hero.

Yes, Lewis’ performance is extraordinary.  From the time we see him arrive from God knows where, Plainview is captivating.  Speaking with a quirky, perhaps Eastern sort of accent, he is a shark, an oil acquiring machine.  He learns of the Sunday ranch in California, and then convinces Old Man Sunday to sell him the drilling rights at a cheap price (as opposed to selling it to Standard for instance).  Alas, one of Old Man Sunday’s kids Eli is a burgeoning preacher and wants to build a church.  This creates a lifelong tension as Eli and Plainview are trying to gain control of which way the community is headed.

We remember the moments here.  There is a lovely scene where there is an accident that renders Plainview’s son deaf.  The burning derricks and the view of the community trying to put the fire out is breathtaking cinematography, all playing in silence.  Later, when the need to confess and be reborn in Church (for completely Machiavellian images) appears for Plainview, his confession about his sins against his son is another staggering scene.  We also remember the final scene with the famous milkshake quote,  What is interesting is how beautifully this is all shot, and the intensity of Lewis’ performance, but what is Thomas’ goal?  The movie lacks introspection about Plainview’s own attitude about things.  He doesn’t have regrets – or for that matter any real dimension, though the movie successfully fools us into thinking he does.  Indeed, there is little sense when Plainview is lying there in the bowling alley that he actually learned anything – or that we learned anything.

Seeing the movie 5 years later a second time, it does not hold up as well.  Without any moral thrust behind it, and without anything really to say about Plainview or the situation, Anderson leaves this as largely an exercise in style and an excuse for Lewis to go nuts.  As a technical and acting exercise, it is actually very well done, but it holds us at arm’s length.  It’s just a character study, but the character shows no real complexity – just some evidence that he MIGHT be complex.  There Will Be Blood was a striking film in 2007, but now it tends to disappear into thin air.

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Game Change

Game Change, the Jay Roach film based on the much ballyhooed book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, is basically a love song for hacks.  The film, as one might surmise, is politics in its very soul – but politics in a very DC sort of sense.  This is after all, the Washington DC that saw Bill Clinton’s adultery as a far greater sin than Ronald Reagan funding the rape and murder of Catholic missionaries in El Salvador, that continued to pass of Hermain Cain as a conservative wunderkind not until he proved his lack of basic knowledge on Libya, but when it turned out he like to boink.  There is a claim that DC cares more about politics than other towns – which is partially true, but it is more knee deep in the tactics on the Hill than any sort of curiosity about what they are fighting for.  I know living here, I have seen motorcades passing by – but who knew the world the tinted windows covered was no more sophisticated than 8th grade?  Judging by the information contained in Game Change, a film which benefits greatly from competent direction and acting that is better than the material, Halperin and Heilemann had the best seat in the house for the 2008 campaign but could only deliver with spreading nasty rumors about the girls they saw.  This is not to say that the film is not well made.  It absolutely lives up to HBO’s standards for production and acting and whatnot – and this has to be vastly superior to the book considering how much Moore and Harrelson bring to their characters, and how little curiosity the writers seem to show for anything that would actually be interesting or insightful.

Woody Harrelson plays Steve Schmidt – who has remade himself as MSNBC’s Republican Primary version of Hubie Brown – a campaign strategist left over from the Bush days who gets called by John McCain (Ed Harris) to try to help the campaign.  In this moment, we hear Schmidt talk about how Obama lacked experience while McCain was an American hero and he wants to help the team and so-forth.  And that basically is the extent of the politics in the film – and things shift into the very interior world of running a campaign.  Apparently, McCain is struggling along with Obama getting the large convention bump and so on and so on – and so there has to be something to counterract it.  Steve Schmidt of course has the brilliant idea – bring in the governor of Alaska.  Here, the movie is skillful in displaying the calculation.  The team is looking at numbers and the news cycle, and trying to win the everyday campaign.  There is an absence of a larger context – perhaps since for these people there IS no larger context.  Indeed, the authors of the book bring no such insight to the table.  In some ways, the movie would have benefited from eliminating the McCain character entirely.  Ed Harris brings little to the role here, and the filmmakers and the book’s authors have no interest in portraying him as anything other than the heroic news clippings that make Chris Matthews drool.

Of course, with this choice comes the entrance into the arena of Ms. Palin (Julianne Moore) herself.  Palin I believe, is none too pleased about her portrayal here.  Actually I think Roach is far more sympathetic to Palin than Halperin and Heilemann are.  As a matter of fact, considering their gleeful disparaging of Elizabeth Edwards, one can surmise that there is a bit of a misogynistic streak in how they regard women working in the arena in general.  The Palin story of course needs no rehashing here, and Juliane Moore – seasoned pro that she is – does not attempt to strike a perfect impersonation.  Tina Fey has that covered.  Instead Moore suggests the Palin personality, and in the limited things the screenplay allows her to show, you get a sense of a woman who got the call from the big leagues, and slowly started to recognize and exploit what a big deal she was.  She did not ask for this, but the McCain campaign was trying to have it both ways – have her be the running mate for their base, PR flunky reasons, but limit her power to actually act like somebody important.  Needless to say, Palin – like anybody in that position – resisted.  Moore’s performance is heroic here, in fewer quiet moments, suggesting some depth and feeling without the screenplay offering her much help.  Halperin and Heilemann want us to think that she is the cartoon character depicted in the media – but Moore resists.

Indeed, Palin becomes more difficult to handle, and by the end, we are asked to sympathize with Schmidt’s regret for his decision.  However, I just got the sense he was upset that they lost – and for those who lived in that time, it’s not like Palin was causal – preventing a perfectly heroic angel from winning what was entitled to him.  That, like much of DC politics is also invented claptrap.  But of course, this is a Beltway insider book, so what did we expect?  I was glad I saw the movie, if nothing else to sate my curiosity.  However, the screenplay David Mamet wrote for the fictional Wag the Dog contains far more insight about politics, and the PR folks who shine their shoes and the court stenographers.  It is amazing yet totally unsurprising that the book Heilemann and Halperin wrote made such a splash – full of sound and fury and rumor signifying nothing.

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The Announcement

I wonder how many people who watch him on TV even remember.  We see him yukking it up with Jon Barry on Awkward Laughing Weekly NBA Countdown on ESPN, reminiscing about days gone by with rival and close friend Larry Bird, but a mere 20 years ago, I thought he’d have been gone by now.  Look at me, saying a “mere” 20 years.  20 years is obviously barely a fart in cosmic terms, but it’s long enough for a child to have been born, develop an adolescent fixation on cigarettes, and be legally able to feed the addiction without having to resort to a fake ID.  But how it all rushes back when I saw Nelson George’s understated The Announcement, which chronicles the day that Magic Johnson revealed to the rest of us that he was HIV positive.  The movie lives up to the quality that ESPN Films has shown in its 30 for 30 series, but George aims a little deeper than most, and we don’t just get a retrospective on the announcement, but an interesting reflection on Magic Johnson’s poignant triumph, which in some ways might not have been a triumph for the battle against the disease.

I remember the day Magic said he had HIV vividly.  Really, it was hard to separate it from “Magic has AIDS”.  Yeah, I was a Celtics fan, but who could really hate Magic?  The smile, the gregariousness.  Even if it was a media image, he seemed like the friendliest guy on earth.  And for a night, we were pretty sure he only had very limited time here.  The footage of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather reporting it – the local media guy sitting waiting for Magic’s presser with his eyes watering, Larry Bird talking about not wanting to play that night – the gravity of the announcement came rushing back.  The entire thing now still is pretty amazing in retrospect.

However, what we knew less was what it did to Magic himself.  Well obviously he had HIV and that had to be spooky.  However, what about Magic having his Magicness pulled out from underneath him?  Magic himself in the film never really expresses it so starkly – George leaves those lines for us to fill – but as he recounts his actions and we see him speak, it all sort of came together.  Of course, Magic said he would be a spokesman, and then joined George Bush Sr’s panel.  What else could he do?  He was the world’s most famous HIV patient.  But that was not Magic’s gig – and so he drifted.  Being an activist/political flunky was not going to fill the hole.  When he went back and played the All Star Game though, THAT started to get there.  Of course from there, there was the talk show, and the failed comeback, and then the successful one – and only now has Magic seemed to settle into the life and profile that made the most sense for him.  He has raised money, but has been a hero to the cause of fighting HIV by simply rediscovering himself, and being Magic the entire time.

However, and this is the most interesting point in the film – was simply being famous enough for him to have done the HIV cause proud?  Chris Rock once posited that Bill Cosby did more for black comics by just being Bill Cosby than a more active dude like Dick Gregory.  Did that apply with Magic?  His journey and the advances in medicine have left him nearly HIV-free.  Does that mean, as Andrew Sullivan naively noted, that we are really safe from AIDS now?  Sure, HIV at this point is like many forms of cancer now – get it early, attack is sufficiently, you should be able to live a pretty normal life, but that ain’t “cured”.  Magic seems to get it – and laments that in his own journey he might have contributed to the false sense of security that folks like Andrew Sullivan can make such a weirdo claim.  It does not take much to veer into wacky African politician territory from there.  I was expecting a good story about a seminal event of my lifetime, but George has gone one better and provided a meditation on triumphing over HIV, both in a macro and micro way.

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The Adventures of Tintin

It is interesting how loaded a term Steven Spielberg’s name is at this point.  Doubtlessly one of the very greatest filmmakers alive, Spielberg’s canon is so well known that it is a waste of disk space on WordPress’s servers for me to rattle them off.  He has been able to touch a cultural nexus, the intersection of mass culture and actual legitimate art, in a way that only folks like The Beatles, Kanye West, Picasso have been able to do.  His thrillers and science fiction movies of the 70s and 80s are part of the tapestry of our youth (well “our” if you are my age).  What is striking about The Adventures of Tintin is not that it is his first animated piece, or that it is his skillful adaptation of a children’s literary classic – but that it is a “Spielberg movie”, and one realizes with a start just how long it has been since he has actually MADE one of these things.  Minority Report and Munich are superb movies, but throwback entertainments they are not.  Instead, we have Sean Connery stepping into Bond in 1980, or Michael Jordan scoring 55 points wearing Chuck Person’s number at Madison Square Garden.  Okay, okay, it’s not quite THAT good – but it tickles the Indiana Jones receptors just the same.

Tintin is a journalist of some repute in France presumably in some time that is not precisely modern  He procures a model ship at a local market after sitting for a portrait (a wink to Herge fans no doubt) and coming home.  Meanwhile a pickpocket seems to be working his magic in the crowded square, and of course Tintin’s loyal companion Snowy, is barking to try (unsuccessfully) to get his master’s attention.  In any case, while trying to see what his dog wants, Tintin is approached by a couple of shadowy figures who seem very interested in the ship.  Despite the sorts of ominous warnings that movie characters immemoriam have neglected, Tintin brings it home, and suddenly narrowly avoids some bullet fire.  The model boat breaks and something rolls behind the desk – Snowy seems to have an idea.

Snowy is one of the real delights of the film, and Spielberg takes so much care in producing him.  We’ve heard dogs bark in movies like Snowy does, but how often do we hear the animated dog slobber, or that tinny sound that sounds like microphone feedback dogs make as they are entering or departing a whimper?  Spielberg doesn’t have to do this – it’s a barely noticeable detail but you appreciate that it’s there.  Snowy often times seems like the smartest organism in the movie – and the issues a dog has communicating its brilliance to us luddite humans is felt acutely here.  In any case, the model ship and the attempt to take it leads Tintin to investigate and takes him to the Haddock Mansion where he spots another model ship.  Could the two be related?  Could the need to find the ships result in an adventure where Tintin is trying to outwit the bad guys?  Well, that’s entertainment for you.

The movie rushes headlong into the adventures as Tintin, Snowy and a key figure go from land to sea to a quaint notion of a Moroccan port.  There are chases, fights and an opera singer with a key power for a key time.  All of this is handled with such easy precision that it’s invisible.  Spielberg is just such an easy craftsman in putting this stuff together.  The animation, of the motion capture sort that was used in The Polar Express is handled here in a way where you just sort of take it for granted.  The movie is shot in that crappy 3-D technology, but Spielberg does not linger on it – it makes the chase scenes more visceral, but it is surprisingly unobtrusive and the colors still pop.  Spielberg has such command of the medium and storytelling that you end up focused on the latter.  The resolution is totally enjoyable in that way that ties up the loose ends and leaves room for umpteen sequels – I almost laughed at how it set the deal up.

If there is a weakness in the movie it might have been the choice to go 3-D motion capture.  The movie works and Spielberg is too good to make it a distraction, but the clear line technique of Herge is such a raison d’etre for the book series that abandoning it is a curious decision.  Can it be Tintin if you don’t use the drawing style?  I don’t know – so Spielberg is not gunning for authenticity on that front.  That said, he has created a fun entertainment that is hard not to enjoy and feel like your money and time were not wasted.  It’s not his best movie since Catch Me if You Can, but it is his most Spielbergian.

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Forgetting Sarah Marshall

From the beginning in his naked, pathetic, sorrowful breakup with the woman in the film’s title, Peter Bretter, as played by Jason Segel is one of the biggest sad sacks in movie comedy history.  When Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) walks out of his life, he is crestfallen – and many other synonyms.  Sure, he tries to go on dates – he meets other girls, but somehow it ends up with Peter crying pathetic tears – as Dan Patrick might put it, drooling the drool of regret into the pillow of remorse.  So Peter tries to go to Hawaii to forget about things – perhaps to be able to get out of this rut.  But alas, when he arrives, somehow Sarah and her rock star fiance are in the same hotel.

Of course this is all the setup for a formula movie, and in its way, as written by Segel and directed by Nicholas Stoller, Forgetting Sarah Marshall IS a formula comedy.  It is also the funniest of the movies to roll out of the Judd Apatow hit factory, and perhaps the best.  While the film lacks the sweetness and higher emotional stakes of The 40-Year Old Virgin, it amply compensates with one accomplished comic character and performance after another.  The credit has to be shared between Segel’s screenplay, which gives this gallery of players such good dialogue and material to work with, and the actors themselves who bring exactly the right note time after time.  Actors over and over again seem to indicate that comedy is at least as hard an art form as performing drama, and this film provides evidence through and through.

As we pick up where we left Peter, yes, Sarah is in the same hotel with her new fiance, the rock star Aldius Snow (Russell Brand).  Snow is your archetypal clueless rock star with his tics insecurities and ego – he is like a creature from another planet.  Russell Brand of course took this character and made another movie based on him (Get Him to the Greek), and he is very very funny.  Obviously the song he sings in the movie is ridiculous – but if it wasn’t for the lyrics, it would be a totally plausible rock song.  Indeed, Aldius Snow is a totally plausible rock star – and of course that is why he is so hilarious.

This development does nothing to help Peter to move on from the Sarah relationship.  However, the resort is much more than just them.  There is the lovely woman behind the desk Rachel (Mila Kunis), and the weirdly chatty bartender, and the spaced out surf instructor (Paul Rudd, of course walking through), and a waiter who when a great star like Aldius Snow is in his presence, does what one suspects many waiters do.  All of these characters are given quirks and depth – they all have chances to be funny and quirky.  The resort becomes its own microcivilization – Peter soon becomes not just a guest but a friend of these people.  All of the actors in these roles bring the exact tone, whether it be luminousness with Kunis, Jonah Hill’s awkward creepiness or even Kristen Bell in the thankless position as the pill (Segel’s screenplay is wise with her and gives her more humanity than just being an evil harridan).  Even skype conversations between Peter and his brother (Bill Hader) are written perfectly.

At the head of the class is Segel himself as Peter Bretter.  Bretter, as the first paragraph of this tome would indicate, really needs a break.  His sad sack act, especially as a counterpoint to all the happier folks around him in Hawaii, is crucial – and Segel is walking a tightrope here.  He has to take this character, drive him as far down towards pathetic as possible without compromising the likability for us as an audience to root for him.  His Eeyore act is what gives the movie its essence – a place for all these forces of nature to work.  He is a terrific straight man here, and as the movie works through its inevitable steps, it never stops being funny and effective, right down to the realization of Peter’s career dreams.