Archangel Goes Rogue, Sprays Ice Cream Man with Automatic

The plot to “Legion” is summed up nicely in the trailer: “Last time God lost faith in Man, he sent a flood. This time, he’ll send angels.” So…they’re short on water up there? I know the economy’s not what it used to be, but you’d think there’d be some lightning or lava or pestilence lying around. Sending in the troops seems kind of inefficient with Nature at your disposal, right? God in this movie is in serious need of some Holy Management Seminars.

Be that as it may, this is the situation. God has given Word, and the angels are to systematically exterminate mankind. But prior to the invasion, an electromagnetic Englishman (Paul Bettany, badassified) falls from the sky. He goes by Michael. Yeah, that’s the archangel, for those of you who are familiar. He’s kind of a big deal. And, fortunately for us, he’s on our side. He’s rebelling against God’s commands to protect the humankind he’s been raised to love. If you think about it in a twisted way, it kind of makes Michael the new Lucifer. Which is weird. But kind of a cool concept.

However, the movie fails to capitalize. Shortly after Michael’s arrival, the movie’s logic and story begin to fall apart—and continues to jangle along for the next 70 minutes or so on its way to the scrap yard.

Michael is on Earth to protect an unborn baby—which is really what the angels are after—lodged in a waitress’s belly at Paradise Falls, a diner/gas station outside of Los Angeles. According to Michael, this child is “the only hope for mankind.” However, they never really say why this child is the savior or what makes him special. Nor do they ever explain who the father is. Nor do they explain why there’s no umbilical cord when he comes out. Nor do they explain why the angels waited until a couple days before he was born to attempt to kill the mother. You get the idea. It’s like some bored asthmatic rolled a couple of Comic Con Party Dice, got “Angels” and “Machine Guns,” then took a bong hit and wrote a movie. Not exactly a Miltonic invocation. I’m pretty sure the whole thing is an ad hoc excuse to put seraphim in a gunfight.

One could argue it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek stupid—some kind of farce—but the movie didn’t quite have the recognizable “wink” of, say, a Robert Rodriguez movie (“Desperado,” “Grindhouse,” etc.). In fact, it proved so unfunny and unentertaining that there was someone snoring in the theater to my right for a good 10 minutes during the middle, when the people trapped in the diner while the end of the world is happening riff about their personal lives between the waves of zombie-angel attacks.

Side note: I don’t know what’s going on with Dennis Quaid. First “G.I. Joe” and now this? Is the man strapped for cash? Do we need to start a fund? If he appears in one more toxic yawner, I’m at least going to organize a car wash.

I am of two minds about there being a sequel. On one hand, I really would like all these questions I have answered: Who is this baby? How is it going to save humankind? What happened to everyone who wasn’t in SoCal at the time of the apocalypse? What does the rest of the world look like now? I want to know. But on the other hand, this movie is offensively shitty, and there doesn’t need to be any more of this in the world. Losses need to be cut, because, for a movie about preventing The End, it sure makes you look forward to it.

Ctrl+V: $1,841,000,000

I wanted to hate it. I really did. Those Golden Globes pissed me off. James Cameron up there clutching them in his gangly hands like some regal arachnid. Choice words, I tell you. Choice words. Let James Cameron buy his way onto the awards stage again with “Avatar,” his billion-dollar Ferngully and YOU’RE GETTING A LETTER FROM ME, FOREIGNERS.

But even while grumbling to myself, I knew I really shouldn’t be judging without having seen it. I’d seen only clips—all of which failed to compel me. Hence my surprise at its popularity and my subsequent reluctance to feed into it. Even a month after its debut, here I was at the Union Square cinema, forced to choose between the neck-stretchers or the Mezzanine.

Now I’ve seen it. Everything they say about it is true: it’s repurposed Disney plot: “Pocahontas” or “Ferngully,” take your pick. Maybe with a little “Last Samurai” thrown in there too. (Think about it.) Even the imagery was taken from Ferngully—the big twisting tree, the lily pads that light up when you land on them, the encircling fairy lights. And I’ve seen floating mountains before, too…I forget where.

But, much to my dismay, I didn’t hate it. I didn’t even mind its length.

There’s two ways to refer to recycled material: “unoriginal” and “familiar,” and it’s simply a matter of rhetoric. Sure I’ve heard this story before, but it’s one that I enjoy when it’s told in an interesting way. So I’m going to say it was a “familiar” story.

For the increasingly rare person who hasn’t seen it, the year is 2154. We’re in space, having fucked up our own planet beyond repair. There’s a world called Pandora, populated by tall blue humanoids and lush greenery. Pandora also has something the humans want—a metal called “unobtainium”—in plenty. (“Unobtainium”? Really?) Unfortunately, the main deposit is buried just below the “home tree” of the tall blue people. So the humans want the blue people to relocate so they can dig it up. To help them negotiate, the humans have come up with a way to remotely (and organically) control tall blue bodies from little Play-Doh-filled tanning beds. (See “Surrogates.”) The humans want to “civilize” them in exchange for their land, and, imagine this, they don’t want to be “civilized.” And thus begins the colonial allegory. Plight of the culturally neutered, displaced indigenous. (See “Pocahontas.”) Then war happens. (See “The Last Samurai.”)

Why they couldn’t just tunnel in and harvest their mineral is beyond me. Drink their damn milkshakes and don’t say a word. I can hear the line now: “I OBTAIN YOUR UNOBTAINIUM!”

You’re hearing a bitterness in my voice, I know. You wouldn’t think, reading this, that I enjoyed watching it. What’s writing here is the part of me that realizes it doesn’t deserve the accolades it’s getting.

It’s easy to see the movie for the dollar signs, but it’s also undeniable that a lot of very gifted people worked very hard in making this. And they’ve made something unprecedented and enjoyable. I liked the characters I was supposed to like. I hated the characters I was supposed to hate. I worried for the blue people when things went wrong. It did its job as a film: It entertained me and let me escape the world for a couple hours. I can harangue it only as a piece of lazy storytelling.

I can cut and paste too, but I can’t make it that pretty.

My Top 5 of 2009

I don’t even know why I’m bothering to do this, having neglected a ton of big and/or well reviewed films this year (Inglorious Basterds, Avatar, Precious, Invictus, The White Ribbon, to name a few). But whatever, everyone else is doing it. People like lists, right? That’s why VH1 still exists.

These were my favorite five from ’09.

1. Broken Embraces
2. Thirst
3. Up in the Air
4. A Single Man
5. (500) Days of Summer

Honorable Mentions:
(Untitled)
District 9
I Love You, Man
Rudo y Cursi
Up

Unsurprising: The top 2 and one of the Honorables are foreign-language films.

Weird: Two movies I’ve listed have parentheses in the title. This means: too many people tryin’ to be cute.

Gucci does Grief

Tom Ford, come to find out, is not the “Searchers” guy. That’s John Ford. Right. Yeah, I think that guy’s dead. But I knew I’d read somewhere that this Tom was famous for something. And research indeed reveals that Tom Ford had been the renowned creative director for Gucci, and now he’s made his impressive directorial debut in film. This background knowledge explains a lot.

It explains, at least, why half of “A Single Man” could be freeze-framed and repurposed as a spread in Vogue: exotic-looking faces, arresting landscapes, bodies reposeful and often naked or nearly. Bad thing? Not necessarily (especially if you’re a lady). But period-piece hounds and Mad Men-crazy moviegoers expecting that same early-60s aesthetic won’t find it. It’s a different kind of pretty.

In fact, I would hesitate to call this a period-piece at all; the Missile Crisis era is little more than a backdrop and a context here. Unfortunately, I haven’t read the Christopher Isherwood novel this movie is based on, so I can’t say what’s been sifted out of the original, but in this movie, the prevailing politics of this time are nothing but the falling axe. The movie is the story of the mess it’s made.

L.A.-based English professor George Falconer (Colin Firth) is faced with swallowing each new day like a horse pill after Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of 16 years, dies in a car accident while visiting his family. “Get through the goddamned day” has become his meridian mantra and his world has gone gray. Due to the early sixties’ prevailing aversion to homosexuality, George has no real outlet to express his grief; no one wants to hear about it. Thus, he feels trapped in his thoughts. To illustrate, Ford frequently cuts to a shot of Mr. Firth flailing around underwater, the point being that he has no way to bail himself out of his own mind, and he’s drowning in it.

The only time George allows himself to viscerally emote in front of anyone is just after Jim’s cousin—the parents refused to notify him—calls to tell him of the death and informs him that he’s not allowed to attend the service. And the sound in that scene, as he falls sobbing into the arms of his old friend Charlotte (Julianne Moore), is rather brilliantly drowned out by the downpour of rain outside.

The movie follows George through one day—a day that, according to his morning narration, will be “different.” And we see how it will be different as he tosses his handgun into his bag, buys bullets, retrieves his insurance papers from his bank vault, gives a lecture to his students about Fear, and refuses sex from an annoyingly handsome young Spaniard whom Mr. Ford obviously plucked from his hefty male-model rolodex. This day will be his last.

Accompanied by well placed cries of weepy string instruments, Mr. Firth’s performance is close to perfection. He does such a job selling his unhappiness and his exhausted, irreconcilable  existence that we actually want him to squeeze the trigger. It’s for his own good. We can’t stand to see him live like this.

The movie, of course, is full of flashbacks, which, to many a critics’ dismay, all manifest themselves as overly wrought set pieces. One takes place, for example, on a breathtaking outcropping of desert rocks. The couple is sunning themselves and talking, but the shot is panned out far enough where you can’t help but take in the background terrain. Initially I wanted to criticize the director for making the flashbacks unrealistically beautiful. Then I realized that Mr. Ford was being Joycean, and that this is exactly how a grieving person would remember time with a loved one. The moment would be colored, magnified, and glossed, any imperfections filled in with cerebral Pulchriputty until it was torture-yourself beautiful. We’ve all been there, I think, staining the wood of our memories.

I’m looking forward to more from Tom Ford. He’s obviously a brilliant designer who knows how to make an awesome picture. That’s half the battle in film making, in my opinion. And he seems to have put a lot of thought into how to reflect the psychology of the characters with his visuals.

However, I’m afraid this film will be pigeon-holed as a “gay” movie when it’s really about grief and loss, eliciting the same emotions as, say, Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Colin Firth’s performance is ridiculously good and should be seen by all…especially when juxtaposed with conjunctionless teleprompter performance of high-cheeked former child star Nicholas Hoult, who I’m not entirely sure isn’t a robot.

Pedro’s not in a rush.

Last time I wrote a review of an Almodovar film, I got into some shit with a hyper-intelligent friend of mine. And now I’m actually hesitant to do it again, after having my intellectual grill so thoroughly dismantled.  What happened was, I didn’t like “Volver” much, but I wasn’t thoughtful or clever or even patient enough to articulate why I didn’t like it. So instead, I fell back on evaluating Penelope Cruz’s cleavage. It’s a good thing to fall back on (literally), but it’s cheap (not literally), and it gets you in trouble when smart people read what you write.

So I am hereby swearing off the hormonal brand of adulation (if only for this round).

“Broken Embraces” (“Los abrazos rotos”) was my fourth Almodovar film and my second-favorite. “Talk to Her” (“Hable con ella”) takes it, of course, as one of my favorite movies of all time. “Volver,” as I mentioned, not so much.  But as hit-or-miss as Spain’s preeminent auteur has been for me, he’s never failed to transport me to his Almodovarland. Watching one of his movies is decidedly different from watching any other. I don’t know where he finds it all, but his films just burst with beauty: Color. Language. Sexuality. Music. Art. I go see his films because he—and forgive the cliché—stops to smell the roses.

For example, in “Talk to Her,” he didn’t need to shoot “Café Mueller,” a dance piece by Pina Bausch for several minutes. Same goes for the “Cucurrucucú Paloma” performance at the party. And “Volver,” too, takes a little break and puts its feet up while Ms. Cruz ‘s character sings for a couple minutes. Indispensible? No. Beautiful? God yes. So why not?

Much of what sets Almodovar apart from other directors—what gives him the license to flash “Un film de Almodovar” in the credits—is his exquisite taste. We don’t mind pausing with him for a little bit, just to admire whatever it is he’s unearthed for his mise en scene. We trust that whatever he puts in front of us is well worth our time. His camera lingers and we exhale and we stare at some piece of radiance. And we’re completely immersed—drowned, transported—before we even realize it.

He does it again here. There’s one scene in “Broken Embraces”—a pair of hands pressed to a television screen playing a grainy video in slow motion—during which I wasn’t even aware of my own body. The guy behind me probably could’ve set me on fire and I wouldn’t have realized it until the take was over.  The movie is worth it just for the few seconds of that image.

That said, the rest of it isn’t too bad either. The narrative is split, about half taking place in the early nineties, when Mateo Blanco was in his movie-making prime. He meets the irresistible Lena (Penelope Cruz), who, to finance her father’s medical care, has married her much older former boss, well known businessman Ernesto Martel. Lena has gotten sick of the housewife existence and has decided to audition for Mateo’s film. She has no real acting experience, but gets the part because she has that whatever-it-is that turns every straight man in her radius into a chunk of warm candle wax. It’s only a matter of time before she begins her affair with Mateo, inciting Ernesto’s ferocious, desperate, deeply painful, and hard-to-watch jealousy. So powerful is it that he decides to produce the film so he can keep a closer eye. Then he has her followed. Then he has her taped. Then things turn a little violent, because, really, how could they not?

All this is flashback from present day, as Mateo, who’s now completely blind and has adopted his writer alias Harry Caine as his actual name, tells the story of his lost love to his convalescent assistant, the likeable young Diego. He confides in the young man as a result of recent events: Ernesto Martel has just died and now his scorned gay son has returned under the alias “Ray X” and suspiciously attempted to contact Mateo (now Harry) about writing a script about a scorned gay son.

Oh, these Almo plots are so fun to summarize…

The biggest story surrounding this movie was that it was to be Penelope Cruz’s toughest role yet, playing an aspiring actress who isn’t all that great of an actress but is possessed of a magnetism that could coax small planets out of orbit. Without question, she’s lived up to her task. I could tell because I completely forgot about it. She will rake in some awards for this; I guarantee it. But she isn’t a lone rose. The movie is full of strong performances. Another that was especially good was Ruben Ochandiano as Martel’s awkward gay son who later becomes the dubious Ray X.

Still, the reason to see this movie is its writer/director. We’ve seen jealousy plots before, and stories of loss and of doomed, desperate loves. Shakespeare was all over that before I was even born! But this story is told with such meticulousness and grace that the audience can forget that they’ve seen it before and simply enjoy it. I’ll always jump in the carriage as long as Pedro’s driving.

It Is a World of Hateful Philistines, Mr. Jacobs

I don’t even want to think about what kind of problems “(Untitled)” is going to cause for film archivists, search engines, video store employees, librarians, etc. Believe me; I’ve been there. Titles like this would make my blood boil. But if the title weren’t such an obnoxious pain in the ass, it wouldn’t have been so apt.

It’s not that the movie itself was obnoxious. The movie, actually, is really good. It’s the cast of characters that’s exceptionally grating. In fact, the first thing I scribbled on my little piece of paper in the darkness of the movie theater was, “dickhead artists.”

We open with a painting by one Josh Jacobs. A crowd is gathered around it. It’s an abstract—a few dots and some colors fading into one another. Suddenly, we hear a ding, and the crowd disperses. We realize then that they weren’t looking at the painting. They were waiting for the elevator alongside which the painting had been hung. They get on, which leaves Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg), Josh’s brother, staring at it by himself.

Josh is doing fairly well with his painting. They’re being sold en masse to hotels, banks, and corporations as lobby décor. Adrian, a sound artist, is not doing so well. Josh lectures him with a comical pretension, a smarmy concern for his brother’s well being. He tells Adrian that if he would just sacrifice a little bit of his vanity to get a larger audience, he could do well. Like him. Adrian, however, has no concern for others’ thoughts on his art. What matters is what people will say after he’s dead. His philosophies make themselves very evident later, when he performs his concert of atonal music, scaring off even his own parents.

One person he doesn’t scare off Is Josh’s date for the night, the pale, thin, bespectacled Madeline (Marley Shelton), who has a pension for clothing that is loud in the literal sense (squeaky leather, beaded skirts, a jacket that crinkles like a Frito bag). She’s intrigued by the quiet, brooding Adrian and asks him to perform at her Chelsea gallery (an honor Josh has never received). The event—Adrian’s documents looking more like architectural diagrams than sheet music—doesn’t go well, but afterward, Madeline asks him to her loft for a few drinks—and thus proceeds one of the funnier sex scenes I’ve seen. Mind you: Madeline wears extremely complex clothing.

So that’s the set-up. The rest of the movie spends its time trying to sort out the endless pushing and pulling between the belligerent forces of artistic ambition, money, and integrity. Everyone shows his ugly side. Adrian becomes hypocritical, Madeline becomes greedy, Josh becomes desperate, and then they all take turns backhanding each other like it’s some absurdist episode of Gossip Girl.

It would’ve been easy to make this film a straight modern-art-is-bullshit comedy. The elements are there. The funniest characters are Madeline’s other artists. Ray Barko does unorthodox taxidermy. His work includes: an angry chimp sucking on the hose of a vacuum cleaner, a distraught mini goat on a tricycle, a Ramboesque bobcat armed with a stapler gun, and three chickens which appear to have been thrown headfirst through a dartboard. Monroe, a nervous, soft-spoken man prone to weeping, does….well, not much. He’s a minimalist. One of his pieces is called “Post-It Stuck to Wall (2007)” and another is “A Light Bulb Turning On and Off (2008).” Yes. That’s what they are. Grant, the assistant curator, points out their “superficial banality—that’s both sexual and imposing” and you want to roundhouse kick him, but you’re laughing too hard.

So there’s that. There’s definitely a few jabs at (air quotes) high art and those involved in it. However, “(Untitled)” manages to distance itself from pure parody with an underlying respect of its subject matter. A few of these crazies pushing the boundaries might just have something. There’s just a lot lost in hypocrisy and inevitable subjectivity. And in fear.

Fear governs the life of one of the movie’s most interesting characters, Porter Canby—a young, naïve, and very wealthy man, deathly afraid of being bland. His philosophy is that if he doesn’t understand something, it must be worthwhile. And thus he’s taken advantage of—bullied, duped, and robbed—again and again, until his home is filled willy-nilly with all the bizarre, creepy shit he’s been told to buy. You can’t help but feel sorry for him, watching him struggle to fit into a world he’d be better off without.

But the movie in no way implies that the world would be better off without “that world.” As much of an asshole and a hypocrite as Adrian is, you want him to succeed—he cares so deeply about his work. There’s something to be said for that, something magnetic about it. Progress must be made somehow, and it’s usually a rough ride. Some suffer. Some sell out. Some even die. But not us. We can laugh at these idiots from our comfy theater seats. And kind of wish we were one of them.

Through a “Floor,” Schizophrenically

If I want to hold true to my personal pledge to evaluate movies on this blog “for what they are,” then I can’t really write what I want to write here—mostly because “Burn the Floor” isn’t a movie; it’s a Broadway show. But that’s a problem which is easily overcome, simply by saying, “To hell with my subtitle and the four people who read this.”

The other half of the problem is a little thornier: as always, I don’t want to evaluate anything unfairly. I see it done all the time. When a reviewer bashes something by evaluating it as a piece of Art when it’s pretty obvious that the producer was not interested in being artistic, it pisses me off. In movies, for example, evaluating “The Hangover” based on anything other than how funny it was would make as much sense as evaluating an apple pie as a cheesecake. I don’t support it.

However, I am of two minds when it comes to “Burn the Floor.”  I sort of expected it to be artistic, so I really want to chide it for its ostentation and Xerxean excess and for generally being a whore of a production, but I can’t, because I initially forgot to factor into my expectations that it’s a Broadway show, and Broadway’s very signature (excepting a few) is whoredom and Xerxean excess. What can I say—glitz is a great way to entertain.

The only way around this, then, is to write a dual, schizoid review—one reviewing it as Performance Art, and one as a Broadway Show.

“BURN THE FLOOR” AS A PIECE OF PERFORMANCE ART

It’s too bad. There was some real talent up there.

But in Broadway Production for Money-Hungry Invertebrates, it is clearly stated on page 86 that “talent is never enough; there must be dry ice and partial nudity.” And so it was written. And so it was overproduced.

Aesthetically modeled after the seasonal kitsch-a-thon of Dancing with the Stars, “Burn the Floor” is the relatively new Broadway production featuring twenty or so talented dancers from around the world performing wide-ranging ballroom(ish) numbers in several different styles.

Don’t get me wrong: the dances themselves are great. But they are eclipsed in a gale of cheese and sequins. To render it palatable to the average NYC Broadway-goer, the people behind this show apparently felt the need to “sex it up,” and thus we are left with slinky dresses, white fur boas, half-open shirts, hairless male busts, ubiquitous ground fog, and every other dance-related cliché you might be able to call to mind.

The cheesiness hits its peak with a number that centers around a blond woman in a silver-sequined dress in a foggy night-scene who’s joined on stage by two shirtless men. They waltz around for a while and are joined by another shirtless man. Then another. Then another. Then another. Until there are six men on stage dancing with one woman, spinning her between them, lifting her, dipping her, and spiraling around her like so many spray-tanned moons. Then they blindfold her and dance with her some more. Is this a harlequin romance novel? I was half expecting another shirtless guy to emerge on a horse, maybe with a broadsword and hair extensions. Maybe we’ll be so lucky in “Burn the Floor 2.”

“BURN THE FLOOR” AS A BROADWAY SHOW

I haven’t looked forward to anything in a long time as much as I looked forward to “Burn the Floor.” There’s nothing sexier than a good, edgy ballroom routine. All the marketing was covered with the word “Sizzle!” I’m a fan of “sizzle.” I don’t know who isn’t.

For those who seek premium dancing and captivating special effects, the show does not disappoint. It starts and ends at a breakneck pace, slowing down only a few times for a Waltz or two (which make the old people happy). Dances vary from Rumba to Jive, running the  style spectrum and sometimes bleeding into each other. I wouldn’t say it was enough to live up to its slogan, “Ballroom. Reinvented.” but the blending certainly produced some exciting fusions.

 Swing may have been the favorite of the night, as evidenced by the collective gasp every time we were sure one of the females was going to end up paralyzed from being dropped on her head, only to see her stop an inch from the floor.

I occasionally had trouble focusing on the dancers, though, as excellent as they were, having fallen hopelessly in love with Rebecca Tapia, the lead female vocalist, who strutted around in a magnetic sort of way, wearing sparkly things. She and male vocalist Ricky Rojas sang extremely well and effectively added the dimension of live music to the show (which is a dimension you don’t often get at dance performances, for obvious economic reasons).

This is a show that hits hard and often, with a lot of glitter and skin and occasional endearing Broadway cheesiness. I’m always glad to see Dance being popularized in such a way—expanded from weekday television. Any attention the dance community can get is a good thing. I will make this suggestion: if you see this show, have somewhere to go afterward, because you won’t be able to sit still for at least two hours.

New York, I’m with you mostly for your money

The word “exploitative” comes to mind.

Anyone remember that song, “Mambo #5”? Remember how bad it was, but how everyone you knew named Monica or Erica or Tina or Rita or Sandra or Mary or Jessica kind of had a thing for that song? And remember how it got to #3 on the charts?

It makes me suspicious when people give shout-outs in their art. Are they doing it because they really do love the object of their bullhorning, or are they including boisterous apostrophes toward popular names/places/things to make dough off those who also love them/are them? And what is “New York, I Love You” if not one giant shout-out to one giant city? Is this a proclamation of love for NYC, or is this an exploitation of the same?

At one point, as Gus (Bradley Cooper, forever the guy who played the asshole boyfriend in “Wedding Crashers”) stands outside The Slaughtered Lamb waiting for his new lover, I nudged my friend and said “Oh, I’ve been there quite a bit.” And then I knew I had totally fallen for it. Damn. Well, it’s human nature.

Comprising around a dozen narratives produced by different writers and directors, “New York, I Love You” gets its fragile coherence from three salient themes: New York City, Love, and Cigarettes. (Just kidding about that last one, but damn, I now feel like I have to start smoking to meet a nice girl around here. Or at least carry a lighter.) It’s difficult, therefore, to evaluate the movie as a whole. I did have my favorites, though.

The most enjoyable was the simple narrative of Mitzie and Abe on their 63rd wedding anniversary. Unlike most of the others, this Joshua Marston-directed vignette doesn’t take place in Manhattan, but on the way to Coney Island, where, after a relentless barrage of hilarious bickering and nagging (“Pick yah feet up!”), Mitzie and Abe watch the waves crash from the boardwalk in silence, content in their obvious and enduring love. That is, until some skateboarders nearly scare the old couple into voiding their bowels. The fact that Marston’s vignette unfolds in the less touristy area of New York makes it feel more authentic, at least to me. It didn’t feel like he was trying to capitalize on something.

But beautiful people in Manhattan isn’t necessarily unrealistic. It can happen.

Ethan Hawke, who’s been blessed with some of the finest filmic lovers in existence (Jolie, Delpy, Paltrow, Thurman, Tomei…), is denied an additional one in his slice of the film. His wildly audacious, logorrheic, and downright impressive courting of a beautiful woman outside a bar is classic, and is Hawke at his best. However, he’s at a loss for words when the woman informs him that she’s a prostitute, hands him a card, and tells him that, if he’s interested, weekdays are best.

Natalie Portman’s contribution, which she wrote and directed (but did not appear in), is a story of a mocha-skinned man played by dancer Carlos Acosta and a cute little girl having a day of fun in Central Park. Down by the fountain, two women tell him that he is “so good with her” and how hard it is to find a good Manny these days. After they explain that a “Manny” is a “male nanny,” the man nods and smiles. Shortly thereafter, he drops Maggie off with her mother and tells her that Maggie misses her. It then cuts to a scene is of this “Manny” performing a dance solo on stage in front of a large audience, the few seconds of which are just incredible–to the point where you will Youtube this dude. In the audience is Maggie, who we hear scream “Yay Daddy!” and then there’s that “ahh” moment where we’re supposed to realize we’re all racist.

Portman’s portion, surprisingly, was the only one that took on racial issues directly. There was another about forbidden cross-cultural love (which Portman starred in), but that one had to do more with religion than race. Given the diversity and tensions of New York, one would think that there would’ve been fertile ground for racial issues to be at least tangentially explored. Or, in short, WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE? Compared to real-life New York, this movie was a bit of a whitewash. It also left out homosexual love, I realized, having attended this film with a heartbroken lesbian.

But then again, if the movie had included that stuff, I might’ve trashed it for being too PC.

The remaining vignettes ranged greatly in story and quality, covering everything from a “successful” prom night to a phone-only courtship to a role-playing married couple to a painter obsessed with a girl he sees in Chinatown to a weird story of a wealthy aging former singer and a slightly deformed bellhop (Mr. Shia LeBeouf, who actually wasn’t that bad) who may or may not have been a figment of her imagination. Some, like the prom story, are fun but shallow. Others try too hard for the label of “poetic” and miss the boat with overwrought dialogue. Even with the good parts, I couldn’t help but check my watch and wonder what the playing time was.

People will go see this movie, though. Because people love New York. And people love Love. It’s a formula. We can’t know what the motivations were for making this movie, but we do know that it was an unofficial follow-up to “Paris, Je T’aime” and will be unofficially followed-up by “Shanghai, I Love You” in 2011. Weird how these filmmakers have so much love for so many different citie$. (Oh whoops, a typo!)

“A Serious Man” – Zagat rated

As a Biblically uninformed non-practicing Catholic, I feel unqualified to review this movie. There’s all kinds of Hebrew. There’s a Yiddish parable. There’s a Mitzvah. There’s a Dybbuk. Even after a year with two Jewish roommates and another year in Crown Heights, I still suspect that half this movie flew over my head.

Therefore, to be fair to the indomitable Coens, I’m going to try something unprecedented, as far as I know, and string together a Zagat-style movie review.

Here we go:

When going to see a Coen brothers movie, it’s almost foolish not to expect a “metaphysical pie in the face,” which is exactly what they deliver with their “pitilessly bleak” new comedy, “A Serious Man.” Whether it will “floor you or drive you batty,” with its “grim narrative soil” is a matter of perspective. (Just ask the Junior Rabbi.) Like the Book of Job—its “source material”—this is a “distilled, hyperbolic account of the human condition,” but where “every cosmic joke is a black one.” True, this film, at times, “makes you feel anxious and miserable,” but it’s “impossible not to respect” a film that can manipulate your physicality like that.

Well, that was easy. Probably really illegal too. Sorry, Legitimate Media!

But really, after reading all those reviews (or at least the first paragraphs of them), I think the most apt sentence came from Todd McCarthy at Variety, who said “‘A Serious Man’ is the kind of picture you get to make after you’ve won an Oscar.” As “bleak” as it was—and that was the preeminent adjective—it also felt unabashedly celebratory.

I know: that sounds crazy and contradictory. But listen, I got a sense that the directors had always wanted to make this. There’s no discernible attempt at “broad appeal” here. One gets the sense, watching it, that there must be some autobiographical inside joking going on here to which we were not privvy–or invited. It’s set in Minnesota in 1967 and is about a Jewish family. The brothers were born in ‘54 and ‘57 in Minnesota. If you do the math and reduce the fractions, it looks like a movie that sprouted from a conversation that began with, “Hey Ethan, remember our adolescence?” And he totally did. Because no one forgets his adolescence.

And now, after they’ve won their golden folded-armed man, and after they’ve managed to stuff people like me so completely in their back pocket that they’ll just automatically shell out the money to see whatever they produce, they can make the movie they wanted to make this whole time without fear of it going unwatched. They can ask “big questions” and not answer them. They can include as much “Jew stuff” as they want. They can be cynical. They can be coy. They can be wink-winky and nudge-nudgey. They can make us cringe and cover our eyes and heave sigh after sigh and not even worry about it. They’re talented, and they deserve it.

That is not to say that this movie is bad. It’s very funny in a few scenes, and the acting  and costuming is superb. It’s just that it’s hard to watch a man trying to do right by God and family and getting screwed over so royally and consistently and relentlessly. But such is life, I guess. And from what I understand, such has been history for a certain People.

Funniest thing is, the news anchors look exactly the same.

I first encountered “Surrogates” when one of the curvy blondes hired to melt the intergalactic young brains at New York Comic Con handed me a black postcard featuring an evenly tanned, non-bald Bruce Willis. Bruce also appeared to have a metal neck. Hm. I turned it over, read the marketing copy, and immediately decided that this movie was about Facebook. Yeah, that  Facebook.

Then the preview began to show, and the posters of pulchritudinous people with titanium endoskeletons started to pop up in subway stations. And I would point to them and turn to whomever I was with and casually say, “Oh that’s that movie about Facebook.” Most of them assumed I was joking or were just plain confused. By all appearances, this was an action movie, not a montage of Jesus-fish wall graffiti and What Lawn Ornament Are You? results. (Flamingo, if you were curious.)

Having now seen it, I hold my ground: this movie is about Facebook. (OK, and Twitter and Second Life and WoW, etc.)

The concept itself, however, I’d come across in The Time Before Facebook, in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, which I had been reading just as Facebook was trickling its way to the Midwest. The book housed about 10 pages devoted to the hypothetical rise and fall of the hypothetical video-phone. There’s a great little synopsis at conversationalreading.com, which I’ll copy here:

Basically it works like this: First consumers flock to the technology. However, they soon notice the drawback — now the person you are talking to on the phone can see you…[C]onsumers develop horrible complexes about appearing ugly on their video phones. Soon new technology enables users to “upgrade” their appearance, and this idea runs away until eventually there is an entire industry built around providing fake appearances to hardwire into video-phones. At this point people realize that for all intents and purposes they’re right back where they started, voice-only phone communication, and the bottom drops out of the video-phone market.

Apparently, Mr. Wallace saw it when he wrote this way back in 1994–that technology was allowing people to carefully manipulate and craft their outward appearances. He saw how easy it was for the Marketing Gods to pray on our vanities.

These days, Facebook is the ultimate tool for persona-honing. We can choose our most flattering picture. We can fake our interest in soccer. We can de-tag that one photo where our arms make us look kinda gay. We can elicit desired reactions from peers with carefully vague status updates. Moreover, we can present ourselves how we want to be seen, and almost believe that it’s true. And that’s what “Surrogates” is all about, underneath the action.

I should probably talk about the movie now.

It is not the future; it is an alternate history, and it’s now. Technology has evolved that lets us sit in a chair all day and control our better-lookin’ mechanical selves, remotely enjoying all the senses (except maybe taste?) that we’d enjoy if we were using our actual bodies. Your “surry” can look however you’d like it to look. Most people have chosen to look like Mario Lopez. I guess flawless and vacant is in. Murder rates have plummeted to almost non-existent. War has essentially become a game of multiplayer Halo. And they didn’t mention it, but I’m assuming STDs are also on the decline?

There’s also a small Ving-Rhames-helmed percentage of the population that has resisted. They live in a roped-off section of town called “The Human Quarter” or something nauseatingly cornball like that. They’re hairy and poor and they’re ugly and they don’t get invited to shit these days. But they insist that surrogacy is evil and they wave sticks around and promise Revolution. Psshh. Yeah right, Humans. What match are you for human-controlled robots?

Well, now something strange is going on. The humans might have a weapon of some kind. A very dangerous one. For the first time in many years, the police have a 187 on their hands. Somehow, some rogue human zapped a surrogate with some Star Trekish contraption, overloading its circuits and killing its controller. (In Facebook terms, this would be like someone spamming your wall until you die, bleeding from the eyes.) And that person who died just happens to be the son of the inventor of surrogate technology, Mark Zuckerberg Emilio Canter. (They didn’t actually give him a first name on IMDB, so I’m just going to call him “Emilio.”)

So Bruce Willis gets put on the case: Where did this weapon come from? And how do the “Meat Bags” have it, when it’s way too advanced for them? I mean, they’re just silly humans!

Just as he’s digging in, though, Bruce becomes involved in a dangerous chase. In the process, his surrogate is destroyed by the population of the Human Quarter and he’s nearly killed by the zapper thing. Hospitalized, he’s forced to drop the case. But c’mon. It’s fucking Bruce Willis. He’s not giving up that easy. I mean, haven’t they seen the Die Hards?

In the course of all this, though, he is becoming increasingly conflicted about his own surry. He hasn’t seen his beloved wife in forever. Just her goddamn robot. His son died years ago in a car accident, and this is how his wife is dealing with it. She hides behind her veneer. He thinks that she shouldn’t though. You can read it in his eyes when he wanders into his son’s old room and caresses his little baseball glove. Then he just goes all Zach Morris on her later, as they argue in her workplace: “Baby, I want you. This isn’t you. Come back to me.” But she’s all like “This is better.” and just “unplugs” mid-conversation. (Which makes for intriguing possibilities in connubial exit behavior. Because, really, what do you do? Continue to talk to this powered-down hot robot?)

You can probably see where this is all headed. Leather jacket comes out. Bruce Willis goes vigilante. Zuckerberg goes batshit. There’s a Revolution. There’s a Conspiracy. A Personal Epiphany. A Ticking Clock. A Decision. A Dramatic Climax, and then—what’s that I hear? Laughter? From everyone in the theater? Whoops, I don’t…uh…I don’t think that was supposed to be funny.

But it kinda was.

“Surrogates” takes itself way too seriously. It wants to be an allegory with guns like “The Matrix” was an allegory with guns. There are even what could be construed as nods to “The Matrix”—the style of running in the chase scenes, the leather jacket on the “free” character vs. the suits on the surrogates, the bolt-belching ray gun, the angle of recline in the sim chairs—but the coherence of the film’s world couldn’t approach the level of “The Matrix.” There were too many questions, too many improbabilities, and thus the alternate universe appeared thrown together. When that happens, “dramatic” becomes “ridiculous.”

The movie’s ambitions are laudable. It’s helping to get across an important message about remembering who we are (not Mario Lopez) and the necessity for real human connection, but it could’ve maybe done without the tired end-of-the-world framework. Perhaps a more even-handed, cerebral approach should be employed when implying that we’d be better off without our online communities. But then probably no one would’ve seen it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go post this review and wait for people to tell me they care.