Small Soldiers

In 1998, the movie-going populace could easily be divided with one simple question: Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line? But there was always only one right answer, and that’s Small Soldiers. Joe Dante’s cutting satire shows up the hollow platitudes of its more prestigious war-movie brethren, all while conveying the simple joys of blowing shit up. As always, Dante is such an energetic entertainer that you sometimes forget he’s almost a better media critic than he is filmmaker (and he happens to be a very good filmmaker).

War becomes child’s play when a toy manufacturer unthinkingly installs some high-grade military tech into a new line of don’t-call-it-violence-call-it-action figures. These square-jawed grunts—known as the Commando Elite—are ostensibly heroes bent on hunting down the monstrous Gorgonites, a peaceful group that just wants to return to its homeland. These being little lumps of plastic, none of this should matter, but the military intelligence powering the toys also allows the commandos to learn and adapt. They grow more resourceful and increasingly vicious in their pursuit of the “Gorgonite scum.” When Alan, whose father runs a small toy store, gets his hands on an early shipment, he unwittingly unleashes a war on his own sleepy neighbourhood.

Actually, not just a war—Dante’s weird, wonderful comic imagination also runs amuck over this little suburb, spitting out all manner of wonky delights. Pop-culture references need not be dull, as a film like this proves. Every knowing reference comes wrapped in a layer of sardonic commentary. The score, for instance, cleverly parodies 1980s action movies by reworking the tune of “When Johnny Come Marching Home” with macho guitar-and-synth posturing. One of the film’s most indelible set-pieces is a double-tribute to Bride of Frankenstein and Gulliver’s Travels in which an armada of deranged, deformed dolls are brought to life, spouting cheery quips like “All my makeup is cruelty free” while threatening tied-up teenagers with nail files. Fever dream doesn’t begin to do justice to this stuff—it’s more like what you might dream up after snorting coke off the belly of a Barbie.

For all the goofy pleasures to be found here, there’s also something powerfully unnerving in the way Small Soldiers merges war movies with children’s entertainment. No one here wants to be a fun-killing scold and shield children from anything remotely upsetting—least of all Dante, I’m sure, whose films have always been happy exhibits of cartoon mayhem—but just what does this constant exposure to war iconography do to a child? For that matter, what does it do to the rest of us? Nothing makes the military-industrial complex quite so easy to swallow as a Burger King collectible cup. As we grow up steeped in images of war, the very idea of bloodshed loses something of its fundamental horror. What does the much-vaunted realism of a film like Saving Private Ryan matter in a world where real images of war are always at our fingertips? Only a stylized version of war, such as what Dante offers here, still maintains the power to upset and disturb. When reality ceases to shock, fantasy becomes the only way back into the world.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is pompous, self-indulgent, much too fond of its own flakey bullshit mysticism, not fond enough of coherent thought, and quite possibly the best film to be released this year. Terrence Malick gets full marks for ambition, even if he has to take a few deductions for the windy ending and bloated beginning of his cosmic memoir. But the film’s middle section, a tour de force that recounts the childhood of Jack, the eldest of three brothers, is one of the most lyrical evocations of adolescence yet to make it onto the screen. Just look at the montage of Jack’s earliest years, which turns the years to minutes and exemplifies the potent mix of nostalgia and dread that makes this film so hard to shake. Seen largely from the child’s perspective, images rush by: two sets of hands floating in a mirror, a man collapsing into seizure on the front lawn, light refracted through a mobile forming a dancing ghost on the wall. The whole world seems mysterious, terrifying and deeply wonderful. Malick, as ever, makes one very grateful for the simple pleasures of seeing.

Equally true to form, Malick also makes one much more ambivalent about the act of hearing. While the use of classical music is well suited to the material, the voiceovers remain ponderously poetic, pricking holes in the corner of scenes and slowly sucking the air out. Let the moments breathe, please. They’re so fragile they need all the oxygen they can get. Then, when the film finally screams out for some sort of context, the voiceovers fail us, and we are left drifting through Malick's subconscious doodlings with nary a whispered epigram for guidance. Suddenly, this humble family drama is tied to all history, including the birth of the universe, the creation of life, and two dinosaurs attempting to reenact “The Insult that Made a Man out of Mac” on a riverbed in the Mesozoic.

The juxtaposition of the grandness of all time with the smallness of our memories, the unity of all life into one great tapestry of pain and forgiveness: well, that’s just got to be more fun than Green Lantern, but does it actually hold together? Not quite, which makes this film as frustrating as it is pleasurable. Malick has set out to do nothing less than make a film capable of holding the entire universe. Unsurprisingly, he comes up a little short (I think he missed Pluto, understandably considering how tiny it is, all tucked away back there). Still, in these dire movie-going months, when so many big-budget beasts are too bloated and lazy to leap even the lowest hurdle to achieve mere mediocrity, there’s something noble in a film that sets the bar so high it can’t help but fail to ever jump over it. May we all fail so splendidly in our endeavours.

The Third Man

Whenever and however I finally pack it in—the smart money’s on decapitation by the side mirror of a passing city bus, by the way—can I have The Third Man played at my funeral in lieu of a eulogy? No, it doesn’t sum up my life in any meaningful way. I never smuggled penicillin in post-war Vienna, wrote dime-store westerns nor, save for several magical weeks one long-lost summer, played female lead in a Germanic powdered-wig farce.

But is there any greater film about the art of saying—or not saying—goodbye? How many tickets out of town do you need before you finally leave? How many times must you bury your best friend before he finally stays dead? Is there really any such thing as a foolproof coffin? Somehow, the dead always find a way to get out and sneak back into our lives. Spiritually, The Third Man is the ancestor of every zombie film ever made.

The dead may rise, but as Orson Welles via Harry Lime says, they were probably happier dead anyway. And looking at the scarred Vienna captured so masterfully by Carol Reed, he might be right. You might not be able to leave once you arrive—as Harry’s friend Holly so comically discovers—but you certainly wouldn’t want to return once you escaped, whether it be by train, plane, or hearse. This city is a broken place, the kind of place where morality is a form of betrayal and even the children are willing to sell you out to the lynch mob. It’s a paranoid place, enlivened only by the occasional black comedy of Graham Greene’s hardboiled dialogue, which is so flinty it strikes sparks (“You were born to be murdered,” one character quips, summing up the general mood quite nicely). Yet somewhere between the canted angles and the zither score—jaunty, romantic and entirely sinister—a strange alchemy takes place. Having your heart crushed by this film again and again is an altogether intoxicating experience.

Just look into those eyes and try to resist. Any pair of eyes will do, for this is a film of faces. There are the famous ones, of course: Holly’s face (Joseph Cotton), weary and stupefied at the discovery of his friend’s crimes; or Anna’s (Valli), buried in her hands, tears rolling down her cheek as she clutches at the ghost in her heart. And when the shadows peel back, Harry’s face, carrying that simple, bemused smile at all of this misery. But there are also the faces of the people of Vienna, wizened and worn by years of war and hunger and terror. Reed returns to these faces repeatedly, punctuating scenes with their accusing eyes—the conscience of the film. Sad faces. Angry faces. Confused, numbed, stricken faces. “Look at yourself,” Anna says to Holly, “They have a name for faces like that.”

Er, is it Harry? At one point, Anna accidentally refers to Holly by his missing friend’s name, excusing her mistake with another insult. “Holly—what a silly name.” Not that Holly fares any better with names, constantly referring to the British officer Halloway as Hallohan (“I’m not Irish,” the man sniffs in reply). Is it a sign of the fundamental dishonesty of the place that no one seems able to master the simple act of direct reference? Or is the fact that no one seems to have bothered to learn any else’s name merely another side effect of the carelessness with which these people treat each other? If I don’t care whether you live or die, do I really care however the hell you pronounce “Winkel”?

That callousness informs the film from Harry’s rationalization of his crimes right down to that immortal final shot where Anna refuses to grant Holly the small comfort of acknowledgement, never mind forgiveness. She just walks down a lane that seemingly stretches into infinity, finally stepping out of sight behind the camera, where a better—if surely less beautiful—world must exist. She says not a word, allowing the headless trees and falling leaves to speak for her. But what use is goodbye? That’s why this film would serve as such a fine eulogy. When the time comes to truly part, irrevocably and eternally separate, the word means nothing. So no goodbyes, please. Give me a good movie and that’ll be enough. Just don’t forget to seal that coffin tight.

Midnight in Paris

The first night I was in Paris, I got lost.

I suppose I am partly to blame for this. I was one of those naïve tourists who insist on walking everywhere, in the process discovering that when you say you will walk everywhere in Paris, the city takes you at your word and forces you to walk EVERYWHERE. The maddening asymmetrical layout of the city practically demands it. I doubt there is a street in the first eight arrondissements that I did not walk, whether I intended to or not, during my stay there.

But getting lost in Paris really is wonderful, and Woody Allen captures something of that pleasure in his latest, Midnight in Paris. Being lost on a deserted Parisian street at night is lonely and frightening, and highly recommended. What fun it is to walk those empty streets, so busy during the day, now populated only by the glowing orange street lights and whatever ghosts history wishes to conjure up each night. The novelty, I’m sure, must wear rather thin for the natives who just want to walk their dogs before bedtime.

However, tourists like Allen and myself are still easily seduced by these sorts of charms, and Midnight in Paris is a true tourist movie, with all the good and bad that implies. It opens with postcard-perfect shots of all the major sights, carefully avoiding the dreary lineups and crass commercialism that are part of the experience (tourist movies always find a way to avoid everything miserable about being a tourist). President Sarkozy’s wife even shows up in a supporting role, adding to the sneaking suspicion that this is not actually a new Woody Allen movie, but instead a very sophisticated French tourism ad. The camera has an uncanny—some might say ridiculous—tendency to find the Eiffel Tower in the background of seemingly each shot.

Drifting through these postcards is Gil Pender, Allen’s latest doubting hero (superbly played here by Owen Wilson, whose easygoing demeanour has always hinted at the sadness shown here). He’s come to Paris with his fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdam, poorly applied) to vacation with her parents, but also to scrounge for inspiration. As a hack screenwriter, he’s struggling to write his first novel about a man working in a nostalgia shop. So where better to tap into the literary spirit than Paris, once host to literary giants like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who brooded in the cafes of the 1920s?

The playful conceit at the centre of Midnight in Paris is that this era comes to life every night. When the clock strikes midnight, an old car shows up to whisk Gil away to join his lost-generation heroes. Every night, he retreats from the dreary present into this legendary past, enchanted not just by the great artists but also an unknown woman named Adriana, who seems as lost as himself.

Yet it is not the woman who seduces him so much as the city itself. “Can any work of art compete with the beauty of a great city?” Gil asks of her, and he has a point. The voices on the street can become a kind of music, each boulevard a painting of incredible detail and depth with more mysteries than the eyes can behold. Every new street you walk down is another novel. The years have layered story upon story. So how can any mere film compete with that?

More specifically, how can a mere Woody Allen film compete with that? For all the seductive charms of this film—and trust me, there are many—there are just as many clumsy moments and missed opportunities. Most of the supporting characters are little more than a single searing note held for nearly two hours. Inez, her parents, her pedantic friend Paul: all are flat, dull, mean-spirited people, and in the case of Inez’s father, Republican to boot (just in case you mistakenly think you're supposed to like these awful, awful people). The real fantasy of the film is not that Gil journeys back in time to 1920s Paris every night, but rather that he would choose to join himself with this pathetic group in the first place. Time travel, I’ll buy, but that other stuff—really, Woody, come on.

And yet the film still succeeds—due to, not despite, its flaws. After all, can you ever make a truly satisfying film about disappointment? That is what lies at the heart of the film, and gives the film's lighter moments a melancholy undertone. As Gil burrows deeper into his dream version of Paris, he comes up against the false promises of that dream—a disappointment that Allen, an eternally flawed yet relentless filmmaker, knows all too well. Every fantasy world, no matter how well constructed, betrays its flaws in time. All you can do is will yourself not to look for the cracks in the foundation. It’s a feeble happiness, but an honest one, and all that Allen allows.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Early on in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Morgan Spurlock uses the phrase “in perpetuity forever,” only to be chastised for being redundant. But the director just laughs it off. “I’m a redundant guy,” he says.

Does it even have to be said? Of course not, which is exactly why he says it anyway. After all, this is the man best known for Super Size Me, the movie that taught the world that eating at McDonald’s every day for a month makes you fat. Now he’s returned to tell us that advertising is everywhere, and gosh, isn’t that annoying? God save the truth tellers.

This might come as a shock to you, but—brace yourself—advertising has pervaded the very core of our society. Why, it might even be in your very own home. Right under your nose. And you don’t even know it. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only more horrible because it’s real and doesn’t star Donald Sutherland. But at least Spurlock is here to alert us to the threat by courting advertisers (excuse me, “brand partners”) to sponsor his documentary about putting ads in movies. And then the scourge of advertising is defeated, and our hero moves to the country, and all is well, in perpetuity forever. That’s basically the ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, right?

But before that point, we can count on Spurlock to at least find some humour in the material, whether it be the weirdness of pitching for Mane 'n Tail Shampoo or the wink-wink naughtiness of slipping product placement into interviews (he even gets Ralph Nader to help shill for a pair of shoes). The director is a genial host, which is both his best asset and greatest liability. Unlike someone like Michael Moore, Spurlock defers to his subjects, preferring to make himself the butt of the joke most of the time. But his aw-shucks narration quickly grows tiresome. Imagine an entire documentary narrated by Kenneth the Page and you have some idea of how obnoxious this faux-innocence can be.

The film’s breezy, jocose tone ensures you’re rarely bored, but also rarely engaged. Spurlock, ever skilled at turning the obvious into the trivial, passes by every occasion to dig deeper into his subject matter. He only briefly delves into the unnerving practice of neuromarketing, in which MRI scans are used to shape movie trailers. He runs himself through the process, cracks a few jokes, and then zips off to the next setup. A discussion with a class of high school students suggests that the kids have thought more about the effect of advertising on their lives than Spurlock has. Making us aware of these things is not without value, but that’s a pretty weak peg to hang an entire film on.

Look, I won’t deny that the man’s intentions are honourable here. Much like in Super Size Me, he takes on the role of guinea pig for the social good, subjecting himself to an unnatural process so that we don’t have to (as if we ever would). He also wrestles with issues of art and commerce in the process, but that only results in the embarrassing sight of a middling artist contemplating his own integrity. It’s a bit like a gold fish discovering the little tree is plastic yet never realizing that he’s in a bowl. Spurlock’s world is already so limited—does it really matter if it also turns out to be fake?

But perhaps that’s unfair. Even lousy art has its own integrity. The problem is that Spurlock’s approach to the material is so relentlessly banal that there isn’t really anything to compromise. The film amounts to little more than a few abbreviated talking-head interviews, a couple of modestly amusing sketches, and the occasional generic montages (plus commercial breaks!). What’s he saying that might be jeopardized by the interference of commerce? Far too toothless to be a polemic, the film amounts to little more than, “Advertising is everywhere, it sucks, whattaya gonna do about it?” Spurlock settles for a nice walk in the woods. Well, bully for him.

The Beaver

I’ll grant The Beaver this much: it’s not the train wreck I imagined. It’s still something of a wreck, mind you, but it’s also intriguing enough to avoid being a complete disaster. Mel Gibson stars as Walter, the clinically depressed CEO of a toy company, in one of the film’s many neat, obvious ironies. One botched slapstick suicide later, and a beaver puppet that speaks in a Michael Caine accent while spouting carpe-diem platitudes takes control of Walter’s hand. Supposedly, the puppet is a form of therapy, allowing Walter the necessary distance so that he can once again appreciate his life. It easily serves the same purpose for the audience, allowing us the necessary distance from this disgraced A-lister to at least tolerate his presence, if not appreciate his talents. (Say what you will, but just look at that mug shot and tell me you’re not mesmerized. Even in still photos, Gibson has an electric presence.)

Jodie Foster directs and plays Walter’s long-suffering wife, and both director and performer release every stray smile through gritted teeth and a pained expression. Does it hurt that much, Jodie? Ah, but this is no laughing matter, and that is where our troubles begin. How can you avoid humor in a film that features a montage of Gibson, Foster and hand puppet engaging in vigorous makeup sex? (Don’t worry, it’s not that freaky—the puppet mostly just likes to watch.) Yet Foster is clearly uncomfortable with the thought that this film will be treated as a joke, and recoils from the inherent absurdity of her premise. This only makes things worse, as she overcompensates, turning every second scene into another emotional peak. The whole film becomes one dramatic high after another until it is as numbing as Walter’s depression; everything is drowned in a somberness typified by the sort of soundtrack that features Radiohead songs and a piano player who only seems to have one finger.

Foster certainly deserves credit for not ignoring the darkness inherent to the situation—the third act takes a grisly turn that is shockingly audacious, in fact—but the film never resolves this tension between inspirational family drama and edgy psychodrama. It can’t decide if it wants to be as cute and cuddly as a talking stuffed puppet, or as dark and dangerous as, er, a talking stuffed puppet.

In Cold Blood

There’s something strangely romantic in the idea of a couple of criminals on the lam—two against the world, outside of the shackles of social propriety and legal responsibility, free to do what they want, be what they want. Sounds better than waking up at six in the morning to go to work on Monday, at least.

But there’s little romantic in the lives of Perry Smith (Robert Blake) and Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson). The two men murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, and for what? Less than fifty dollars, a radio and a pair of binoculars. Within a few days of the killings, their wallets were once again filled with as much dust as the Nevada desert, and the pair resorted to cashing bad cheques or picking bottles while plotting their next move. This is less a crime spree than a long series of wrong turns down any number of dead-end dirt roads.

Richard Brooks wrote and directed this 1967 adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, aided greatly by the rich cinematography of Conrad Hall and two excellent full-blooded performances from Blake and Wilson. The film is not without a few dubious wrong turns of its own—Perry’s fantasies and hallucinatory visions are particularly at odds with the hardscrabble realism Brooks otherwise seems to be aiming towards—but it’s also an incredible portrait of American violence. Brooks acknowledges the monstrosity of these acts without subtracting the humanity of the perpetrators. Which, when you think about it, makes everything vastly more upsetting.

Not that everything about the film is so dire and dark. In fact, the score (by Quincy Jones!) is rather bright and bold, picking up the usual movie-music tropes and running them through what appears to be some sort of hot jazz machine. But it’s a Technicolor score for a black and white movie. Early scenes of the cheerful, unbelievably perfect Clutter family are married to sprightly, we’re-happy-smiling-people-about-to-die music that borders on poor taste. Just because dramatic irony is impossible to avoid in your story doesn’t mean you should run up and greet it.

No surprise then that the best scenes are often stripped of music. The murder of the Clutter family is played out largely in shadows, a single flashlight used to highlight the cringing faces of the victims. In place of strings and horns are echoing footsteps on a wooden staircase and the hollow, hungry wind. We’re deep in the murk now, as disoriented morally as we are physically.

The hangings might be the most remarkable scenes, however. Strikingly blunt for a Hollywood film of the day—indeed, it’s hard to imagine a mainstream film of any era portraying violence in such stark and unappealing terms—the deaths of Perry and Dick are as chilling as the murders. And yet they must contend with one of the film’s major missteps: a reporter sort-of representing Capote (sans personality, and maybe 30 years older) who supplies intrusive narration about the men’s death-row days, finally capping off his useless presence by making belaboured points against capital punishment while chatting with another vagabond cipher.

But none of this can detract from the final shot itself. Capote notoriously ended the book with a fabricated scene in which chief investigator Alvin Dewey met one of Nancy Clutter’s friends at the town graveyard. This misplaced burst of overwrought sentiment was an astounding miscalculation for such a finely modulated book—he might as well have ended with Nancy waving goodbye from a passing cloud.

Brooks wisely cuts the scene right out. His version may not be the equal of the book, but for all its flaws, the film surpasses the source material here. There’s nothing to buffer us from the sting of seeing such a pathetic end to such pathetic lives. No mercy in a merciless world. There’s just the sharp snap of the trapdoor, the sudden jerk of the rope—and then a body swaying like a pendulum, while a heart beats in our ears, slower and slower and slower.