..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Burn After Reading
plus reviews of Righteous Kill, The Women and Bangkok Dangerous
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Vault

Burn After Reading Three and a half stars
U.S.; Joel and Ethan Coen

In Burn After Reading, their first movie after the career high point of No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers take a satiric slash at several subjects that Americans often take very seriously indeed -- including politics, sex, spying and physical fitness.The Coens are in a savagely playful mood here -- and, with their usual visual/verbal finesse and mastery of American movie gothic, they introduce us to a typically Coenesque comic ensemble, a bunch of self-deluded Washington D. C. dummies afflicted with various levels of sublime ineptitude, appalling idiocy and bizarrely dysfunctional fashion sense.

These hapless but oddly egotistical characters are played brilliantly by a cast that includes George Clooney as an ex secret service guy obsessed with penises, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt as knuckleheaded gym employees caught in a morass of self-improvement and blackmail, John Malkovich as a bad tempered alcoholic fired CIA analyst seeking revenge with a tell-all memoir, Tilda Swinton as his obnoxiously arrogant, mean and faithless snob wife, Richard Jenkins as McDormand's love-struck, good-hearted employer and David Rasche and JK Simmons as the flabbergasted (and sometimes clueless) CIA agent and superior who've been monitoring the whole mess.

The movie has been variably and sometimes acidly reviewed, so I think I should both applaud it and express a little disappointment right away. Burn After Reading is beautifully crafted, smart as a whip and funny as hell, but it's not a classic, perfectly articulated comedy in the way No Country is a classic noir thriller/drama. It amused me mightily much of the way, but it suffers occasionally from a kind of wacky elision in the storytelling, weird narrative leaps. The Coens sometimes eliminate key scenes and instead tell us what happened afterwards, as they also did, a little annoyingly, with the unshown climactic gunfight at the end of No Country.

On the other hand, why carp at two of our best moviemakers because they don't make an inarguable masterpiece every time out? Its like the career-long "Topping Citizen Kane" predicament of Orson Welles, who had to surpass or equal the greatest movie ever made with each new film he made, to avoid charges that he was slipping --leading to unjust blasts for everything from Touch of Evil to F for Fake. But Welles wasn't slipping and neither are the Coens -- though their characters here certainly are. Like Blood Simple and Fargo, Burn After Reading is a noir nightmare, featuring an ensemble of liars and goofballs so addled by lust, greed or criminal endeavor that every misstep they take brings on fresh disasters.

The inspirations for Burn After Reading were modern paranoid spy thrillers by Tony Scott (Spy Game, with Pitt) and writer Robert Ludlum (Doug Liman's film of The Bourne Identity), those slick, scary movies in which unusually attractive and confoundingly resourceful characters stumble into a Byzantine machine of betrayal and deceit, and have to scheme, race and fight their way loose. (Clooney's Michael Clayton is another example). In this case, however, the Coens reverse the model: the characters' deadly fixes are brought on by their own stupidity and self-deception, which keeps escalating to mind-boggling levels.

Their nightmare-trap begins when irascible, boozing, egomaniacal analyst Osborne Cox is fired (actually demoted and reassigned) by the CIA, spurring the first of a string of epic Cox tantrums, rivaling Jack Nicholson's Carnal Knowledge and Last Detail blowups in sound and fury. Disgusted at his antics and fall from grace, Cox's icy-patrician wife Katie (Swinton), decides on a divorce -- while simultaneously swiving away with her own illicit bedmate, Clooney's dick-crazy Harry Pfarrer.

Sex-mad Harry -- whose own wife (Elizabeth Marvel) is also cheating him -- in turn starts another affair with the promiscuous and desperate gym employee Linda Litzke (McDormand). Self-critical Linda has her heart set on extensive and expensive plastic surgery as her personal salvation, and she leaps on the coincidental discovery by her gloriously doofus physical trainer pal Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) -- who sports spandex shorts and a blond-stripe pompadour. He has stumbled onto Osborne's tell-all discs at the gym, and hard-driving Linda talks obliging Chad into an insanely ill-advised blackmail scheme, which leads to bloodshed, lots of moronic miscues and final chaos.

The movie is lustrously visualized, wittily written and gorgeously shot (not by Roger Deakins this time, but by the equally talented Emmanuel Lubezki) and it's also superbly acted by the whole goofball ensemble, even though how hard you laugh may depend on your own tolerance for human stupidity, especially in Washington quarters. (George W. Bush and Dick Cheney become more comprehensible as we watch these nitwits.)

A common complaint against about the Coens is that their humor is misanthropic and anti-human and that their characters are unlikable. But, if you admire their pictures, including the more variably received comedies (and I admire them, strenuously), it's because you're amused by their characters and you like or love the actors playing them -- which is just the kind of reaction inspired by Ealing Studio comic nightmares like Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets or Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (which the Coens remade, to one of their worst critical receptions) or in the darker comedies of Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder. The Coens are modern masters of film noir, or neo-noir -- and conventional likeability isn't necessary for their galleries of entrapped, fate-strangled clowns.

Humanistic cavils aside, there is one genuinely kind and decent person in Burn After Reading, and that's Jenkins' melancholy gym boss Ted, whose stupidity lies purely in his infatuation with Linda. And there's also something sweetly deranged and eccentrically likable about Pitt's Chad, as pricelessly dumb here as was Pitt's other pompadour guy, his fantastic 1991 James Dean/Ricky Nelson imitator Johnny Suede. I felt almost dispirited when Chad made a sudden, violent exit.

But why do we have to keep defending the Coen brothers from charges of misanthropy anyway? Their dark senses of humor may be the reason they've never clicked with the mass audience, despite efforts by Joel Silver and others, and their highly calculated, deliberately artificial, aggressively tongue in cheek style -- dominated by sometimes arch performances and oddities like their signature floor-level tracking shots -- seems to annoy some people. I've also noted that older movie-lovers, who should really like the Coens' stuff, are sometimes put off by their Mametesque fondness for four-letter word-riddled dialogue. A torrent of fucks never bothered me though, as long as they're smartly written and tastefully presented, and I've never felt my time was wasted at any Coen brothers movie. Far from it. Burn After Reading gave me a hell of a good time, even as its cast of nitwits plunged into their own private hells of intrigue, schlongs and physical fitness.

Righteous Kill Three stars
U.S.; Jon Avnet

It's only another melodrama with notable flaws -- an aging-buddy cops serial killer thriller cooked up by writer Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man) -- and Jon Avnet once again seems a better producer than director. But I wasn't too disappointed by Righteous Kill, the second movie summit meeting between those two great, streetwise actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. These two haven't made enough movies together -- Heat was their only other onscreen meeting, though in Godfather II they shared the same movie in different time frames -- but even a less-than superior vehicle is okay, as long as it gives them an opportunity to drive and swing.

Pacino remains a fantastic wild soulful-eyed comic/dramatic genius and De Niro -- who has gotten more dour than manic in his maturity -- is still the best on the street. He can radiate a vulnerability and menace that jump-starts any movie. Neither has lost a step, at least any important ones, and their sometimes ravaged faces or bulkier bodies are still far more photogenic and magnetic than their younger competitors, including John Leguizamo, who's excellent as their fellow cop nemesis here.

In Righteous Kill, De Niro sometimes (perhaps deceptively) seems to be playing an older, smarter version of his Taxi Driver violent outsider Travis Bickel, while Pacino as his mercurial partner, reminds you of his untamed cop in Heat. The two are caught up in a series of murders, marked by poems written and left by the murderer, and by the facts that the victims are all killers or scum who got away with it, and who were also involved with the buddy cops. Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg (also good) are two younger police on the case, and while the final payoff doesn't have the emotional voltage of Heat, it's good enough.

And it's inspiring to see De Niro and Pacino together, striking sparks off each other, going to the edge. The movie could be better written and directed, but, in their cases, it could not be better acted. I just wish they had more reunions.

The Women Two stars
U.S.; Diane English

Makeovers aren't always an improvement. George Cukor's classic 1939 movie of Clare Boothe Luce's all-female comedy The Women is an often delightful Hollywood-Broadway period piece that still can kill you. But the new version -- ultra- glossy, contemporized and more politically correct though it may be -- eventually doesn't really work

The original was one of those all-star MGM glamour machines (starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine and Paulette Goddard), summoning up a world of luscious Depression-era wealth and crazy romance, filled with beautiful or humorous-looking people saying witty or outrageous things. Couldn't we use another like that?

We could. But Diane English's contemporary remake -- which tries to copy the magic and graft onto it the manners, styles and mores (and, in some cases, social-political clichés) of today --misses the mark, despite a pretty nifty all-star cast of its own: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen, joined by scads of others. The new ensemble has beauty, grace, style and humor and I liked watching them -- but something doesn't click.

Is it because the famously conservative Boothe Luce and the more liberal English (creator-producer of Bergen's Murphy Brown) are basically an ill-fitting match? Probably. Boothe Luce was one of the leading Republicans of her day and The Women is basically a conservative text, whatever the politics of Cukor's writers. (His MGM adaptors included Anita Loos, Jane Murfin and, uncredited, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Donald Ogden Stewart.) English's Murphy Brown, by contrast, was the major feminist TV show if the 90s.

Superficially, there's a rapprochement. English keeps the basic story line of The Women -- in which society wife Mary Haines (played in 1939 by MGM queen Shearer, now by Ryan), finds that her husband Stephen is cheating with gold-digging department store perfume seller l Crystal Allen (then Crawford, now Mendes). Mary, unwisely gives in to temper and divorce but ultimately, with a little help from her friends, including Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard, Mary Boland, Marjorie Main and the flip-flopping Rosalind Russell (whose role as super-catty Sylvie Fowler is taken by Bening), turns the tables.

And English has kept Boothe Luce's central gimmick: the fact that we never see a man onscreen. Instead we spy on the world of the women as Boothe Luce saw it then: a plush domain of society homes, department stores, dressing rooms, powder rooms and all femme Reno divorce hotels. But English has changed it, in more ways than a chronological transplant.

It may be a case of too much of the old story, too many of the new mores. English seems to me way too nice to all her ladies -- at last for the good of comedy and satire --lightening up even on the ones the original writer trashed. Boothe Luce, who married Henry Luce and kept him, enjoyed dishing it out to her fellow dames. And when Crystal says, "There's a name for you ladies, one more used in kennels," she has Booth Luce's approval, even though she's the villainess. Sweet Mary, the ideal society wife who grows claws, still has not much life beyond her marriage -- which is why we're supposed to cheer when she gets her hubby back. But English turns the old movie's fashion show, an Adrian gimmick in 1939, into Mary's triumphant debut as independent designer.

English wants Mary to have it all. But incredibly she wants that also for devious Sylvia who (as played by Russell in her star-making role) was the most two-faced character in a play full of two-faced women. Bening's Sylvia is a true friend who's manipulated by hardcase gossip columnist Carrie Fisher (Cukor had Hedda Hopper) into betraying Mar publicly and feels terrible about it. Imagine Rosalind Russell feeling terrible about anything she does -- except maybe a missed manicure appointment -- and you can gauge the difference. Bening is fine, but she doesn't steal the show like Russell.

There aren't enough kennel candidates, and the movie needs a few. Poor Eva Mendes has to handle most of the villainess chores Crawford nailed, but since she's been encouraged to play her part mostly for laughs, there's not enough pizzazz and conflict.

The ideas behind Boothe Luce's The Women -- that rich society women should hold onto their men with wit and guile and that lower class other woman are floozies who should lose in the end -- wouldn't play today to a modern post-feminist audience. For English, her women have to pass other tests: making it and staying loyal to each other. But there are plenty of modern Sylvias and I would have liked to see, and laugh, at a few. I also missed that gloriously dippy "Ah, l'amour! L'amour! Toujours l'amour!" of Mary Boland, whose role has been taken over by a very savvy Bette Midler.

Meg Ryan seems an odd choice to fill Shearer's shoes -- Irving Thalberg's widow and the pre-Greer Garson grande dame of the MGM lot. But it turns out to be a good part for her, a return to her old style and persona: sweetheart Meg, with the honeybunch smile. Debra Messing sometimes delightfully expands on Phyllis Povah's baby-making Edith, a one-joke samba in the original and Jada Pinkett Smith's hip black lesbian writer Alex seems spun out of the brief part of the mannish old maid of 1939. Cloris Leachman is the film's most consistent laugh-getter as cynical housekeeper Maggie (Mary Cecil in 1939), who keeps zapping of zingers. There's no counterpart I could see to Fontaine's good young wife Mrs. Day.

One aspect of The Women which you wouldn't think would translate well is the total absence of men (though not, in this case, of males). But English actually takes us right out onto the city streets and shows us crowded maleless sidewalks, stores, and big lawn parties. It's pretty artificial of course, but you're amused by the ingenuity it takes to keep the gimmick afloat until the last turn of the screw. I remember nearly everything about Cukor's The Women, which he inherited from Ernst Lubitsch after getting booted from Gone With the Wind. What I'll probably remember longest about the new one are Leachman's zingers and those femme-blanketed streets.


Bangkok Dangerous Two stars
U.S.; Danny and Oxide Pang

The Pang brothers' Hollywood remake of their 2001 Thai hit man hit thriller -- also called Bangkok Dangerous -- is a gaudy, grim, ultra-violent neo-noir that's pretty hard to watch or enjoy, despite the presence of Nic Cage as American assassin Joe. In the movie, Joe is a taciturn, hardcase killer, given to fits of morose narration, who comes to Bangkok to fulfill four contracts for a pudgy local crime boss (Nirattisai Kaljarjek), but shows his soft spots by falling in love with a sweet, deaf pharmacist named Fon (Charlie Young) while starting to act as a mentor to his hip Thai assistant Kong (Shahkrit Yarmnarm, who's very good). That's a real switch: Kong is a patsy who would normally be scheduled for a rubout when the job is over.

The original Bangkok Dangerous had a real feeling of danger, mixed with its schmaltzy romance, but the remake feels mostly dour and dispirited; it misses the mark with schmaltz and carnage alike. It's a remarkably uncoupling, gloomy-looking show. Cage has been ridiculed for his messy hairdo here in some reviews, but the problem isn't hairdressing, but the scenario (by the Pangs, with Jason Richman of Swing Vote).

There's little sense to much of what Joe does here, after he falls for both Fon and Kong, and scant explanation of why he's become so emotionally vulnerable and rash. Why would a killer as hitherto cautious as Joe get himself into gun chases in the canal before hundreds of witnesses, unless he was determined to outdo Popeye Doyle in The French Connection? Why would he do almost anything we see here, unless he was determined to turn his life into an action movie and a Hong Kong bloodbath? Technically, the Pangs are slicksters, but they've wasted Cage, and they need much better scripts.

Talking about better scripts, Bangkok Dangerous, in a negative way, reminded me of my favorite hit man novel, and the book that lies behind this movie and many another existential hit man thriller, from Blast of Silence to Le Samourai and The Killer: Graham Greene's great This Gun for Hire.

Source of the 1942 Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake-Frank Tuttle movie, and a book that for many decades has been crying out for a remake itself, This Gun for Hire is the annihilating story of Raven, the killer with the twisted lip ( a perfect Tim Roth role), who falls in love with the Yard man's girl and goes after his ex-employers when they double-deal him. The '42 version, which did boast Laird Cregar in his best part, is otherwise way over-rated. This Gun for Hire (a better title than Greene's English A Gun for Sale) has never been filmed properly -- though James Cagney, as director, took a whack at it in 1957 as Short Cut to Hell -- and it's obviously a masterpiece waiting to happen. (Possibly too many movie people, told of the property, screen the '42 movie instead of reading Greene, which is a big mistake.)

Any smart ambitious producers out there? Read this book, get the rights if they're available, hire a top screenwriter and director (this next is important) who love the material, cast Roth as Raven and maybe Kate Beckinsale as the girl, back them up with actors, known or not, of the Ben Kingsley-Michael Caine-Bob Hoskins caliber, and you'll have a classic. I promise.

Maybe then, when filmmakers like the Pangs knock this kind of material off, they'll at least be copying better sources.

 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASES

The Fall Three and a half stars
U.S.; Tarsem Singh (Sony)

Fantastic and voluptuous, a fountain of wonders in the vein of a modern Arabian Nights, this second feature by the Indian-born commercial/video expert Tarsem (Tarsem Singh) -- his first was the grisly shocker The Cell -- borrows its brilliant remise from a Bulgarian film, Ho Ho Ho (Zako Heskija, 1881), making marvelous use of it. At an L. A. hospital, an injured stunt man named Roy (Lee Pace) beguiles a small Romanian girl, Alexandria (the fascinatingly low-key Catinca Untaru) with a tall tale in which a Bandit King and his comrades traverse gorgeous landscapes all around the world while hunting down the tyrant Odious for vengeance and a stolen princess.

Roy, who draws his inspirations for all of his epic's characters from people in the hospital, or from his own nemesis outside, has a dark motive. He wants his rapt audience of one to steal him enough morphine pills to commit suicide. Tarsem's visuals spectacularly enhance this dreamlike story of the world within and without, and of the secret motives of storytelling and moviemaking. If you let The Fall grab you, you'll be spellbound.

Beaufort Three and a half stars
Israel; Joseph Cedar, 2007 (Kino)

A great Israeli war film. Based on the novel "Im Yesh Gan Eden" by co-scenarist Ron Leshem, and set in the 12th century mountaintop Beaufort military fortress in South Lebanon during the Israel army's withdrawal in 2000, it was directed and co-written by Joseph Cedar, a major figure in Israeli cinema who has already won two Israeli Best Picture Oscars, for 2000's Time of Favor and 2004's Campfire. This is his best work to date: a powerful, intelligent war film, balancing gritty authenticity with artistry and sensitivity, while generating a strong anti-war message.

In the maze of tunnels and bunkers inside the fortress, the moviemakers achieve a near-symbolic and allegorical presentation of the harshness of the soldier's lot (something that Cedar, a veteran who served at Beaufort, knows well).The acting is intense, from co-star Oshri Cohen as the idealistic commander Liraz and Ohad Knoller as Ziv, the brooding bomb defusion expert, down to the smallest roles. The visuals are strong. Austere, shadowy, perfectly framed, and bristling with claustrophobia, the shadowy interior scenes often suggest the space ship corridor scenes in those visionary science fiction movies, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.

Cedar instills a feeling of horrific menace by never showing the enemy directly, and the ending of Beaufort is especially moving: a celebration of both wartime camaraderie and the eternal yearning for peace. (In Israeli, with English subtitles.) Extras: featurette, deleted scenes, trailers.

CLASSIC RELEASES

The Big Lebowski 10th Anniversary Limited Edition Four stars
U.S.; The Coen Brothers, 1998 (Universal)

Jeff Bridges' greatest incarnation, and the main man in the Coen Brothers' funniest film is Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, ex radical activist, bowler, connoisseur of second hand rugs and the most remarkable and hilarious of all Philip Marlowe-inspired L. A. detectives (No, I'm not forgetting Elliott Gould) in the greatest Raymond Chandler-inspired neo-noir comedy we'll probably ever see.

The Dude wanders through a perfectly recorded L.A. where he keeps, like Marlowe, uncovering the rich's guilty secrets and getting bashed: centerpiece of a wonderful comic ensemble that includes John Goodman and Steve Buscemi as his bowling buddies -- motormouth Vietnam Vet Walter and silent, squelched Donnie, David Huddleston as the other, big Lebowski, Julianne Moore and Tara Reid as Lebowski women, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a smiling right-hand man, Sam Elliott as the western narrator and John Turturro as a perverted bowler named Jesus.

Most everything in this movie works, and if it doesn't work, it's funny anyway. The Big Lebowski is called a cult movie but it deserves the biggest cult possible. Right on, Dude. Extras: Featurettes.
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BOX SET

Criterion Essential Art House, Volume One Four stars
Various countries; various directors, 1938-1963 (Criterion Collection)

A budget anthology of six great Criterion Classics releases, shorn of their extras. They all are essential, but you might want the earlier versions, with Criterion's excellent extras, anyway.

Included: Grand Illusion (France; Jean Renoir, 1938) Four stars. Beauty and the Beast (France; Jean Cocteau, 1946) Four stars. Rashomon (Japan; Akira Kurosawa, 1950) Four stars. Wild Strawberries (Sweden; Ingmar Bergman, 1957) Four stars. Knife in the Water (Poland; Roman Polanski, 1962) Four stars. Lord of the Flies (U.K.; Peter Brook, 1963). No extras.

- Michael Wilmington
September 11, 2008

 

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