The Peanut Gallery

There’s a time and a place for clowns. Not clowns in the balloon-animal sense, but the obtuse, vociferous type that used to fart into Bunsen burner flames during high-school chem. Sure, it’s uproariously funny from across the room, but not so much when you’re right there and the flame ball singes your hoodie embroideries.

That’s part of why I feel lucky to live here, in New York, with more movie theaters than I care to count. If I want to see a serious “film”—tent my hands, scratch my chin, affect intellectual curiosity—with the rest of the pious and the effectively shushed, I can go to BAM. Or I can go to Lincoln Center, or the 42^nd street E-Walk, or the Village 7. Whatever.

And if I want to see something else, I can go to Court Street.

Average American movie theater : Court Street Cinemas of Brooklyn :: Catholic mass : Mets game. You’ll find that on the 2009 SAT.

If you go to Court Street for the right movies, you’ll easily double the value of your ticket. There’s no way “300” last year would have been as enjoyable without the outbursts from the audience. (e.g. “Yo, that’s that Persian money!”) Since the “stay quiet” imperatives just before the previews start receive about as much respect as jaywalking laws in Greenwich Village, the off-screen entertainment consistently rivals the on-screen. It’s the only movie theater I’ve ever been to—aside from one midnight showing of “Donnie Darko” when the first 20 minutes were played upside-down and in reverse—where I felt that the viewing was truly a community event.

Strangely enough, New York Times head film critic A.O Scott also recently wrote a paragraph on Court Street. I guess I’m not the only one who’s noticed it’s different. I highly recommend it. As Mr. Scott says, the energy is contagious. But arrive a little early, because even partially nude Spartans would have trouble with the lines.

Good “Point” (but not great)

I get the sinking feeling that there’s a fundamental problem with my movie-reviewing idea. It used to be that I’d mosey into the cineplex for free with my press pass and see whatever Paul Walker garbage I’d been assigned to eviscerate that week. But now it’s different. Just the thought of saying, “one for College Road Trip?” makes my glutes tighten. That’s $11.50. A.k.a. two weeks’ worth of full-service laundry or 5,441.53 cubic centimeters of Mountain Dew. I just can’t do it.

So, what’s happening here is that I’m seeing movies that I actually want to see, which, most of the time, I end up liking. And a movie that one likes is much harder and much less fun to write about than a movie one despises. No one wants to read a positive review. I guess I’ll need to either get rich, sleep with a cineplex manager, or wax iniquitous and start sneaking into movies I don’t even want to see. Oh, the irony.

Meanwhile, though, meditations on “Vantage Point”.

The preview for this movie, aside from the useless flashing antonyms between the action sequences, is extremely well done, effectively touting “Vantage Point” as a complicated, sleek, high-action thriller. That’s pretty much what it is. There are explosions and suspense and surprises and revelations aplenty. But there’s also a subtle higher purpose and a good bit of structural cleverness.

The film, hinging on its name, shows us a small-scale but high-prominence terrorist attack in a public square in Spain. First, we’re shown as we, the public, would see it— through the perspective of a news team covering a political event. The attack unfolds in about 23 minutes (movie time), at which point we are taken back to the beginning and shown the same attack from the perspective of secret-service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, “In Good Company”). Then, we’re taken back again and shown the attack from the perspective of an American tourist, Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker, “Last King of Scotland”). Then we’re taken back again and shown the President’s perspective, and so on and so on, each time through revealing a little more of what exactly unfolded and how and why.

The “why” is where this movie falters. I haven’t read anything yet, but I assume that major critics pummeled this movie for its political vagueness. I’m sure someone noted that it’s never made quite clear who the terrorists are or what they hope to accomplish; that the purpose of the “summit” in Spain has something to do with the commencement of “peace,” but the details are never ironed out; and that the psychological damage apparent in Barnes is never fully explained other than “he took a bullet for the president not long ago.” It’s all true.

However, I doubt that the writers of “Vantage Point,” like the writers of last year’s “The Kingdom,” set out to make an “intelligent commentary” on the War on Terror. They would have handled it differently. Terrorism here, as audacious as it sounds, is nothing but a backdrop. Aside from one news anchor’s banter and one line about how “this war will never end,” the film effectively steers clear of politics focuses on entertainment.

The real crux and point of differentiation for the movie is its unique structural device. Not everyone has the patience to be told the same story five times. I know from the groans emitted by my fellow audience members. But at the same time, this is one of the best methods I’ve seen used to portray the impossible complexity of a crisis situation. It reminds its audience that there is much more going on—in any situation, really—than what we can see as individuals. If the film were to have told its story from an individual’s perspective, it would’ve been unable to make that point and would’ve been limited to a smaller cast of characters and a simpler plot. In reality, it’s rarely one bodyguard versus one bad guy. Hollywood just does it because it’s simple (or they want to glorify Sinbad), but they veered away from simplicity here, and made complexity the point.

Mr. Ocean Never Used a Jackhammer

Having been born into the Italian Job/Ocean’s Integers generation, I was confused at first as to how this small, coarse-whiskered troop of amateur Anglo-bandits expected to pull this job off without an electromagnetic pulse generator, or a fleet of Mini Coopers, or even one guy who could break dance through lasers.

Tunneling? Really? So impractical. Well, I guess it worked in Shawshank. (And Caddyshack.)

Jason Statham (“The Transporter”) plays Terry Leather, local chop-shop chief with debt and young children—a combination of forces that might drive a man on to bigger things, for better or for worse—who takes an proposal from his ridiculously tall and elegant old flame Martine (Saffron Burrows: yeah, that’s Hector’s wife from “Troy”) to rob a local bank’s safety deposit vault. But as he assembles his lumpy, tuft-headed cohorts who will assist him in tunneling under the bank, he has no awareness of Martine’s ulterior motives. In one of the deposit boxes are some compromising pictures of some very prominent citizenry, which she has vowed to help retrieve on behalf of the semi-corrupt government. So, as one would assume, Mr. Leather ends up with (cliché time!) “more than he bargained for.”

“The Bank Job” would be very easy to discount as “unrealistic” if it hadn’t been based in truth. The inspiration behind this movie is the real-life Baker Street bank robbery which took place in 1971 in London, a robbery about which not much is known due to a gag that was set upon the British media to protect, presumably, members of the Royal Family. The writers have done a thorough job filling in the blanks with their plotting, having even gone as far as to use dialogue from the actual ham-radio conversation that took place in 1971. They’ve added levels upon levels of corruption, some illicit romance, some civil-rights history, fatherly concerns, a torture scene, a morally complicated hero, whips ‘n’ chains, and, of course, lots of T&A. (Have no doubt: this is a product of a testosterone-soggy brain.)

The problem the movie faces is a bit of identity crisis. It seems lost somewhere between the fun & games of the Ocean movies and the grime & sweat of old-school heist films. Daniel Mays (“Atonement”) and newcomer Stephen Campbell Moore play Dave and Kev, a couple of Terry Leather’s charming gang of human potatoes, while the waifish lookout (Michael Jibson, “Flyboys”) bumbles about with the walkie-talkie outside. The obtuseness and somewhat ridiculous physical appearance of these characters causes them to wax comical, which doesn’t fit with much of the rest of the film’s gritty texture.

I’d personally like to hear Statham’s take, this being his second heist film with “Job” in the title, on how he feels the two movies differed. With him at the helm, portraying the occasionally fractious but utterly likeable hero instead of one-dimensional Handsome Rob, the ride was much more authentic. Or maybe authenticity is just something I associate with large amounts of dirt.

Blog explanation

So I used to review movies for my college newspaper, and I can’t seem to purge it from my system. So I’m going to restart now, reviewing some semi-current movies until I either get bored or can’t afford it anymore.