Cynical Cinema

The theory is sound.  You take one major event, then show it from several different perspectives, or “vantage points”.  It worked to perfection in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant existentialist visionary examination of the nature of truth, 1950’s Rashomon.  It worked almost as well in Zhang Yimou’s magnificent 2002 Chinese kung-fu epic, Hero.  And it has been done well, in various forms, in dozens of other movies like Run Lola Run.  But in Vantage Point, director Pete Travis shows us exactly how NOT to do a movie in this way.

Vantage Point starts out in a promising way.  Sigourney Weaver is a newswoman manning a trailer outside a plaza in Spain where the American preisdent is scheduled to give an address as part of some kind of summit conference.  Just as he begins his speech, the president is shot by a sniper, and all hell breaks loose.  A bomb goes off in the podium and…we get pulled back to the start of the film, this time from a different vantage point.  Now we are riding along with Dennis Quaid, a secret service bodyguard who recently took a bullet for this same president and became a national hero.

Then we see tourist video shot by Forest Whitaker (although we don’t really see the whole thing through the eyes of his video camera, we see him holding it.  Why not show the video footage?  At least it would be different.)  Also giving their perspectives are the president himself (a wooden William Hurt), a local Spanish cop whose job it is to protect the mayor of this town, the assassin who is sent to do the dirty work, and the terrorists.  And others.

Which means we see the same beginning.  Again and again.  And it gets more and more tedious.  Each perspective we see gives us just a few more clues to the total plot, each time leaving us with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger until we see the next vantage point.  And as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it becomes more and more obvious, glaringly so, that nothing about this movie makes any sense at all.  Not that the scenes don’t fit together - they do.  The story becomes somwhat of a whole picture by the time the movie ends.  But no reasonable person could accept that this is the actual story.

First of all, we would have to believe that it is remarkably easy to assassinate a president.  I’ve gone on a ride-along with the RCMP in their Prime Minister motorcade, one step down from their President of the United States motorcade.  Trust me, it is not easy to shoot a president.  And certainly not in this manner.  Secondly, this extremely well-planned attack relies on the fact that upon the shooting of the president, the secret service will immediately panic to the point where someone can walk up and place a bomb in the president’s rectum.  Which is essentially what they would have us believe.

Then, we are asked to believe that one well-armed Rambo type (or, more accurately, Chow Yun Fat from The Killer type) can take out several hotel floors worth of secret service agents on his own.  Silently.  And that the bad guys, once they had actually succeeded in their massively daring and brutally violent plan, having slaughtered many hundreds of innocent citizens, would risk their getaway just to avoid…well.  I won’t give away the ending here.

But it wouldn’t really matter if I did.  After all, the ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.  Dennis Quaid is obviously that Secret Service guy who is going to step up and save the day at the end of the film - we know this, everyone knows this - we know what has happened to the president long before the movie tells us.  We know who is really responsible before we’re supposed to.  We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the get-go.  And even then, when it finally plays out the way we fully expect it to play out, it’s even more ludicrous than we could have imagined.

And finally, adding insult to injury, thy set up the president to appear like an incarnation of George W. Bush.  the protests that accompany his visit to Spain.  The placard-wavers and the “World’s #1 Terrorist” signs and the vitriol in the streets.  You see, this president is hated.  And there is a big deal made over this at the beginning of the film, having to do with the censorship of the news and so forth.  Then we’re asked to believe, just a few minutes later, that this president actually is the antithesis of Bush.  That he is a smart, moderate and decent man who does NOT want to listen to his advisors, who are telling him to attack Morocco.  Yes, Morocco.  And he gives a speech about “we don’t need to show strength.  We need to have strength.”  Or some crap like that.  So which is he?  Ah, who cares?

The thing that made Rashomon and Hero brilliant was that the same exact actions were presented with different motivations so that we could see them from a different character’s perspective.  Audiences are left to decide for themselves which version of events is the truth, or whether the truth can ever truly be determined in any case.  But each character had a different feeling about the same events, which made the events themselves different.  But Vantage Point doesn’t do this.  So we watch the same events over and over, without any new insight, just new “clues”.  And it makes no difference if we’re watching through William Hurt’s eyes or Forest Whitaker’s.  They’re basically just shooting the same scene, over and over, from different camera angles.  Which is pretty boring.

Everything about this film is totally ludicrous, and every new “clue” we get about the real identities and motivations of the bad guys makes us care less and less about the final act of the movie.  And when it does, it relies so heavily on coincidence and implausible actions that it’s laughable.  The whole movie would be laughable, if only it didn’t take itself so seriously.  Which is the main problem.  Vantage Point wants so badly to make this movie seem as realistic as possible, when the connection between reality and this plot is like the connection between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my fridge.  Vantage Point is an absolute turd of a movie.

Oh yeah - Matthew Fox.  From Lost.  You know what’s interesting about him?

The first 20 minutes of In Bruges are absolutely hilarious. Minutes 20 through 25 are heartbreaking and suddenly, crazily brutal. And the last 82 minutes are hilarious and brutal. And all 107 minutes of this movie are joyously, darkly, utterly fantastic. In Bruges has got to be an early candidate for best movie of 2008. It’s beginning to end fantastic, it never stops being side-splittingly funny, and at no point does it ever half-ass anything, shy away from offensive subject matter, or compromise itself in any way. And this movie could well be considered offensive. To everyone. Blacks, whites, natives, Irishmen, Americans, Belgians, and especially the Vietnamese. Fat people, pregnant people, Christians, tourists and especially midgets and dwarves. And boy, is it ever funny.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star as Ray and Ken, two Irish hitmen who have just carried out an assignment in London that has gone horribly wrong. Their employer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has sent them to lay low in Belgium, in a tiny town called Bruges. Bruges is actually a real town in Belgium, one of the prominent “World Heritage Sites” of UNESCO. It’s a famous town because most of the buildings and structures from the medieval era remain intact, and because, like Venice, it is one of the few canal-based cities in the world. There are roads and plazas, but for the most part people get around on the canals. Bruges features dozens of museums, concert halls, festivals, theatres, and sightseeing locations. And that makes the town an absolutely wonderful place to set a movie filled with such coarse language, gratuitous drug use and graphic violence.

Brendan Gleeson gives an absolutely mesmerizing performance as Ken, the hit man who is completely enamored with this quaint little antique town. His glee at seeing the sights is as charming as Bruges itself. Farrell, on the other hand, absolutely hates the place. He hates the tourists, he hates the sights, he hates the quaintness and the charm. And he has never been funnier in his life. On top of his hatred of Bruges, he has an obsession with midgets, (and their tendency to commit suicide in disproportionate numbers), abuses many substances, and is himself suicidal. There is real pathos in his character, and through all the jokes and the ridiculous situations and the violence, he manages to convey a real sense of pain, loss, and heartbreak in his character.

There is certainly violence in this film, but it’s all first-rate violence. And by that I mean that it’s violence played for laughs, then violence done to tear-jerking effect, then violence for the sake of violence, and then violence for the sake of emotional effect. And it’s all letter-perfect. In fact, just about everything in this movie is done to perfection. The recurring themes - suicide, dwarves, honour - could have seemed very contrived in lesser hands. But in this case, every theme fits perfectly into the scope and tone of the movie. A tone which is sometimes dry, sometimes ironic, sometimes totally insane, and always, always, totally ballsy. This movie does not hesitate to break any taboos, to push any limits, to test any outrage the audience might feel.

Gleeson and Farrell are amazing together. They have the sort of relationship Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega had in Pulp Fiction. And many parts of this movie - especially the dialogue and the drug use and the violence - are very reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. And these two Irish hitmen are every bit as funny and interesting as Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. And then - Ralph Fiennes shows up! Fiennes, one of the great actors in movies, is playing a psychopathic character that is unlike any other he has played in his career. And yet, he is perfectly cast for the role. While his arrival on the scene seems to forecast a darker, less humourous turn to the movie as it reaches it’s bloody peak. And it certainly does get even darker once Fiennes enters the picture, but amazingly, it actually gets funnier too!

In Bruges is that rarest of movies that manages to be dark, comedic, dramatic, violent, charming, sweet, bad-ass, action-packed and clever all at the same time. It even throws in a little romance. This is the first great movie of 2008, opening in limited theatrical release in February. It made a total of 8 million dollars in North America, 21 million worldwide. The Love Guru, which by all accounts is an absolute pile of crap, made 14 million in it’s first weekend. But then, how many people watch the great films at the box office? In Bruges was the film debut for writer and director Martin McDonagh, who is one of the great talents to watch in movies. Some day, In Bruges will be remembered the same way people remember Reservoir Dogs. As the brilliant first film that launched a brilliant career. And you can pick up this wonderful movie today, July 1st, thanks to Alliance Films.

Hero Wanted is a rather painful experience.  I like Ray Liotta, who is a pretty solid, you-get-what-you-expect B-Movie actor.  Unfortunately, with Cuba Gooding Jr. you also get what you expect.  And, from him, I expect absolute crap.  Every movie this guy’s been in since Boyz N The Hood, he’s been just awful.  He seems to be that rare actor that gets worse with every passing year and project.  His finest acting performance may well have been in one of those MacGyver episodes when he was a teenager.  (Ironically, that chick who played Blossom - Mayim Bialik - also did her best work on MacGyver.)  And in Hero Wanted, Gooding is predictably putrid and unconvincing as a man on a quest for vengeance.  This is basically the same role that has been played by some very good actors in recent years -Jodie Foster, Kevin Bacon, and of course Charles Bronson.

 Speaking of Charles Bronson, there was a movie made about eight years ago called Boondock Saints (a far better movie), in which the two main characters, played by Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus, make reference a few times to Charles Bronson.  It’s the way Boondock Saints tipped it’s hat to the Bronson revenge fantasy flicks that preceded it, movies that clearly had an influence on the film.  Now here comes Hero Wanted, and where is the tip of the hat to Bronson?  Or for that matter, to Boondock Saints?  As it turns out, this movie is, throughout it’s hour-and-a-half running time, completely ripping off Boondock Saints.  Here’s how.

The guy starring with Gooding?  Norman Reedus from Boondock Saints.  Maybe the film makers thought that his involvement was in itself a big enough hat-tip.  It isn’t.  Ray Liotta plays an unusually smart and literate cop who makes amazing leaps in logic to close in on the real killer, all the while talking down to his subordinates and sending them out to get him coffee when they say something stupid.  Just like Willem Dafoe does in Boondock Saints.  He begins to feel empathy for, and identify with, the vigilante, just like Dafoe.  Cuba Gooding becomes, through some strange circumstances, a vigilante out for vengeance, just like Reedus and Flannery in Boondock Saints.  The director (first-timer Brian Smrz) loves the camera shot that goes around the characters in a sweeping circle, the kind of shot made popular by…Boondock Saints.  The big finale features a surprise appearance by an ex-marine badass killing machine, and every character has two guns, just like the big finale in Boondock Saints.  The killing scenes are shown piece by piece, where the scene begins, then they cut away, then the cops show up to piece it together, then we see how the scene plays out.  Just like in Boondock Saints.  The list goes on.

The movie starts with Cuba Gooding at a bar, playing an unconvincing drunk.  His drinking problem is easily explained away with the old quick, trite explanation.  Dead wife and unborn child, nothing to live for, and so on and so forth.  Then we see him working as a garbage man with Norman Reedus as a partner, when out of nowhere a car crash happens right in front of them.  Gooding jumps into the car and saves the little girl trapped inside, while the car burns.  He becomes an instant hero.  It’s the only good thing he’s done with his life…and so forth.  But he’s still a messed up weirdo, and he becomes obsessed with a girl who works as a bank teller.  When he approaches her, and the bank is robbed, she gets shot in the head.  He goes a little nuts, and tracks down the robbers one by one, in a quest for vengeance.  The fact that he knows who the robbers are and the police don’t gives away the ending right away, but I’ll leave out the quirky little details in case someone actually wants to see Gooding struggle his way through this painful movie.

Not only is Cuba Gooding Jr. unconvincing as a vigilante, he is also pretty bad at it.  He seems to need to deliver that one, last, tough-guy line before he kills someone, which gives them a chance to avoid death and fight him before he (obviously) eventually comes out on top.  As Eli Wallach said in The Good The Bad And The Ugly, “if you’re going to shoot, shoot!  Don’t talk!”  And the ending is ridiculous and implausible in virtually every way.  The more emotional and heartwrenching the ending tries to be, the more I laughed.  By the time Gooding inexplicably gets the girl, I was in stitches, pausing the movie several times because my sides hurt.  It’s almost worth watching just for that kind of hilarity.  But it isn’t.  Stay far away from this garbage.

“Recount” is an HBO movie that premiered on May 25th on HBO in the states and The Movie Network here in Canada.  Originally, Sydney Pollack was slated to direct the film, but pulled out at the last moment due to an undisclosed illness, which of course was cancer, the same cancer that caught up to him yesterday.  A sad coincidence as this fantastic movie premieres.  This is one of those major TV drama events where a made-for-TV movie actually gets hype and buzz and deserves it.  Well worth checking out.

HBO has just put the movie on TV, a dramatized version of the real events that led up to George Bush being fictitiously elected over Al Gore in 2000.  I recently saw Antonin Scalia, one of the American Supreme Court justices directly responsible for the handing of the election to Bush, saying in an interview “it was eight years ago.  Get over it.”  But America can’t get over it.  They still have that falsely-elected president, who is still screwing things up on a daily basis.  And not in a fun, keystone-cops kind of way.  Screwing things up in a malicious, Mr. Burns sort of way.  Scalia, by the way, is also the Supreme Court justice who believes torture is not an act in violation of the Eighth Amendment, the one dealing with “cruel and unusual punishment”.  His reasoning - although torture, such as waterboarding, IS cruel and unusual, it does not qualify as “punishment”.  You see, people who get tortured are not being punished for anything, since they have not been convicted of anything.  They may well be innocent.  And if they are innocent, then they are not being punished.  A prince of a man, Mr. Scalia.  But I digress.

Anyway, although the politics and questionable behaviour of Antonin Scalia are something about which I could rant for aeons, the man does not figure prominently in Recount.  Rather, the movie is about several other people.  Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), Al Gore’s fired-then-rehired campaign advisor.  Warren Christopher (John Hurt), the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who was sent by Gore to supervise the recount.  (Sidebar - Christopher, so far, is the only person portrayed in this film that has objected to his protrayal.  He has not seen it, but he read the transcripts and felt they made him sound way too naive.)  Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), the Florida Republican Secretary of State who exhibited terribly partisan and unethical behaviour during the 2000 election, doing everything she could to hand victory to Bush.  And James Baker (Tom Wilkinson), the Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., who was the chief legal advisor to Bush Jr. in 2000.

Each of those actors gives an examplary performance, especially Spacey, as an idealist who will fight to the end, and Dern as a woman in way over her head with a self-esteem problem and a taste for the spotlight.  Also terrific are Dennis Leary as Michael Whouley, and Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies.  Although we already know the end result of this film, (and for many of us politically interested folk, the entire process), this film still plays like a thriller.  Each moment is more and more tense, as you really get a sense of the machinations behind the scenes.  You get righteously indignant at the Republican troublemakers who tried to delay the re-counting of the votes.  You get furious at the groups who intentionally excluded more than 20,000 voters, most of them African-American, under the false pretext that they had been convicted of a felony.  You pull for the supreme court to render the right decision, and you can get right into it when something goes the right way for a change.  Even though you know for a fact that at the end of the movie the bad guys win and we get eight years of Chaney and Rumsfeld and Rove and Rice and that president guy.

 The only really irritating thing about the movie is the appearance of Bush and Gore themselves.  The two of them appear courtesy of archival footage, which is fine, but then they are shown, always from behind, and played by some stand-in actor.  That gives Recount, if only for those few brief moments, the feel of one of those lame, cheap, re-enactment scenes from a When Animals Attack show, or Unsolved Mysteries.  Aside from that, however, Recount is incredibly brisk, moves along very quickly, and is an absolutely thrilling political true story.  Tour-de-force performances all the way through, and a script that I’m sure just wrote itself.  Catch this one while you can, playing on The Movie Network right now.

One of the great things about older movies is the fact that without the special effects we have today, the movies had to be good. They were carried by acting, scripts, direction and cinematography. Today’s horror movies are special effects crap-fests and bloody gross-out flicks. I used to think that was because we as an audience had become so desensitized to violence and scary scenes that they had to become more and more over the top before they elicited a reaction out of us. I no longer think that’s the case. I now think the reason is more simple. We use special effects because we can, studios know really gross movies are cheap and make their money back, and that way we can just churn out movie after movie without ever writing a real script or creating real tension. This is a blanket statement, and I apologize to such films as 28 Days Later and the first Saw.The best horror movie I’ve seen in a while is The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not the 1978 version, which I have never seen but which seems to be more well known, but the 1956 original, which was truly intelligent. In the old days, every monster movie, zombie movie, alien attack film, was done not only for shock value, but also as a broad social commentary. Body Snatchers is no exception. The social comment, in a way, presages it’s own future in today’s horror movies. The idea is that we as a people are becoming so desensitized that our emotions are becoming almost invisible. There are no big scares in the film, you don’t see anyone die, but the tone and the script are so well executed that you are riveted to your seat the whole time.

The working title for the new film Shattered was Butterfly On a Wheel. That would have been a better title, because it would have made no sense. The inclusion of the phrase in the movie also makes no sense. The full quote is “who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel”, and it comes from a poem by Alexander Pope called “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”, which is a true classic in the world of poetry. In it’s context in the poem, it refers to an enemy of Pope’s. His doctor (Dr. Arbothnot, it would seem) had warned him about the dangers of composing poems that attacked his peers in society, and so Pope responded by sending him a series of poems that attacked these people. The line, used in it’s proper context, refers to a wheel, the medieval torture device, which seems excessive when used to destroy a butterfly, and exists as a testament to the cruelty and excessive nature of one who would do such a thing. As my friend Kent used to say “it’s like swatting a fly with a Buick”.

In it’s context in the movie, the line is meant to be taken differently. Gerard Butler and Maria Bello play a married couple with a charming young daughter, who is captured by a sociopathic Pierce Brosnan, who holds her for ransom. Before long, it becomes clear that Brosnan is not in this for money, but rather for some kind of personal vendetta against this family. He will kill their daughter, you see, unless Bello and Butler jump through all kinds of hoops. It sets up a Sophie’s Choice-style dilemma…what would you do to save your child? Would you kill an innocent person? And other such light-hearted fare. The quote from Pope comes up again and again, but it is fairly misused. The idea behind it in the film is that this couple are the butterfly, and are so insignificant to Brosnan that he can toy with them, as he would a butterfly upon a wheel. And he is so cruel crazy and evil that he is willing to toruture them in this excessive way. This seems to be the correct interpretation of the quote. However, the twist at the end changes things, and the quote all of a sudden becomes terribly misused.

Ah, yes. The TWIST at the END. I can’t review this movie very well without giving away the ending, and I am tempted to do so because this is one of those irritating by-the-numbers twist-ending movies. I will not, because I’m sure some people will watch and enjoy this. But there have been so many movies made in this style, especially since the success of The Usual Suspects. And there have been many that were better than Shattered. Derailed was better than this movie. Here’s the problem with this twist ending. The director paid a lot of attention to the mechanics of the twist. He went into the movie knowing the ending, and made sure that if you watch the movie again, the right things happen at the right time. It all makes sense mechanically. Yes, that guy could have said that thing to that lady while the other guy was over here. Fine. But the emotional reactions of the people involved are not so closely monitored. Knowing what we know (at the end, and maybe quite a bit earlier), the reactions of the key people in key situations are not what they should be. And the contrivances of the plot, which seems (at the end) to have been so meticulously planned out, seem so forced. If one of the characters involved did anything, at certain points, other than what they actually did in that situation, the whole plan could not have proceeded as it did.

I know, this all sounds so vague. If that guy and this guy had talked to this guy instead of that guy…this is because I think people might actually watch the film and enjoy it. And there are some good things to work with here. Maria Bello is terrific in her role as the terrorized mom, and Gerard Bulter has moments of great acting as well. But overall, this is simply an obvious, pain-by-numbers BIG TWIST movie, where the twist at the end becomes the only reason any of the movie was ever made. And that is obnoxious. Imagine…Eric Clapton going through the motions on Layla just so he could get to that piano part.

In a boxing ring, Lewis. Singing Won’t Get Fooled Again? Daltrey. Acting in Johnny Was? Neither, really. Lennox Lewis plays a rastafarian DJ, running a pirate radio station in a slum apartment in London, right above Vinnie Jones’ flat. Eriq LaSalle (from ER) is a violent heroin dealer, also a Rastafarian, living downstairs from Vinnie Jones’ flat. And Roger Daltrey plays the ringleader of a former IRA bombing organization. You see, Vinnie Jones used to be in the IRA. And he was a chemist…of some kind. He and his partner Flynn made bombs. Now Jones has been laying low in London for several years, hiding out and leading a quasi-normal life. Then Flynn breaks out of prison, and comes to hide out at his flat, which causes problems with the drug dealer living downstairs. Some stuff happens, a lot of it is violent, and then there is a conclusion to the movie, as there is in most movies.

Lewis, as a Rastafarian DJ, is less than convincing. I guess all you need to be a Rasta is the vocabulary. He says all the right things. “Jah”, “I and I”, and “Haile Selassie”. Apparently these are the only things he is able to say, because Rastas never have more than an eleven word vocabulary. His Jamaican accent is halfway decent, but his character is amazingly unconvincing (especially at the end of the film, when he shows up in a location he couldn’t possibly have known about, and does something that seems totally inexplicable). Daltrey is in the movie a bit less, and all HE has to do is look mean and talk tough. Which he does fairly well - at least he doesn’t have to fake a British accent - but again, his character is fairly implausible, and does a few completely inexplicable things as well. The least Johnny Was could have done would have been to put some Who songs on the soundtrack!

Johnny Was is so standard, so cookie-cutter, that they seemed to think they could just cram anyone they ran across into some of the bigger roles. Perhaps they were fans of boxing and the Who, and just wanted to work with these people. Also occupying a major role is Samantha Mumba, a hottie who is one of the biggest singers in Ireland. Also, not an actor. She plays a former nurse who is now a junkie, and she also is never convincing, and she also does some things that are inexplicable. The only actor in the movie who is convincing is Vinnie Jones himself, and even HE does some inexplicable things. Which is not to say the movie doesn’t make sense. It plods along, going from plot point to plot point, and you always know what’s going on. It isn’t confusing. It is merely the actions of the characters themselves that make no sense. No human being in the situations they are in would do the same things these characters do. Example: Roger Daltry tells Flynn he will transport him to a safe house. So he arranges to meet him at a deserted warehouse. But really, he wants to kill Flynn. And in order to do so, he has installed a sniper in that warehouse before Flynn got there. And then, instead of just having that sniper kill Flynn, which is why he’s there, Daltrey walks in with a massive machine gun, and announces that he is there with the intent to murder. Not only does that make the sniper totally useless, but one would question Flynn’s judgement for attending one of those deserted-warehouse-meetings to begin with.

Johnny Was is not a painful watching experience, just a profoundly dissatisfying one. Not only is it powerfully unoriginal, just about no one in the film is an actual actor, and you can see it right away. As for Daltrey-Lewis, I will give the acting title to Daltrey, simply because he is adequate. Lennox Lewis is not adequate. He is bad. For the best Roger Daltrey movie, check out “The Kids Are Alright” or “Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who”. At least he is good at playing himself. For the best Lennox Lewis movie, check out “ESPN Sports Century”. Don’t check out “Johnny Was”.

Going into Rendition, I was a little worried. I have read many many reviews suggesting that this film was not a good one. On rottentomatoes.com, James Berardinelli writes: “We are ambushed by a simplistic storyline that’s more interested in sermonizing and demonizing than existing in the real world where things aren’t as clear-cut as the movie would like us to believe.” Richard Roeper says: “I don’t fault Rendition for its liberal politics. I fault it for hammering home those politics in such pounding, slanted fashion.” And Todd McCarthy says: “Even [Reese] Witherspoon, normally the most spirited of performers who can inject even limited characters and blah scripts with her own spark, can do little but mope around and search for different ways to look worried.” Well, they are wrong. All wrong. Yes, Rendition tends to be a little melodramatic. And yes, it has left-leaning politics, but who can be upset by that? Other than Jerry Falwell? Those politics are indeed heavy-handed, and they are indeed pounded home in a slanted fashion, but then the movie ends, and…are they really?

The critics appear to be divided along the same lines that divide people over Meher Arar. The people who believe he was indeed unjustly imprisoned, and those who think “oh, the government’s just doing their job”. Rendition is basically a story about a guy much like Arar, who is detained by the American government after a terrorist attack and then extradited to another country to be tortured into giving up information. But does he really know this information? Or is he an innocent man held without trial without any recourse and with no access to a lawyer or a phone to call his wife to say he is OK? And frankly, if this is what happened to Arar, the 10.5 million dollars he got from the government is not even close to enough. People complain, like he won the lottery just for being tortured, but those people are basing their opinions on media reports which are of course conflicting. Very few people would know the real story there. Like, Arar and three government officials. Everything else is conjecture, and having an opinion one way or the other is more than likely based on the opinion of someone who really doesn’t know the whole story.

And while Rendition is certainly a condemnation of the American practice of detaining people without trial and throwing due process out the window. But it makes sure that by the end of the movie, there is a certain ambiguity, where the people watching the film can make their own decision about what took place, a decision that more than likely will be based on their existing prejudices. I don’t want to reveal the ending here, but it is far more ambiguous than you would assume. Rendition is not terribly complicated, but it treads along much the same ground as the very-complicated Syriana. Think of Rendition as the poor man’s Syriana. Whereas George Clooney’s movie was intricate and almost inexplicable, (and was, in fact, better than this one) Rendition is far more straight-forward, far easier to understand. But Rendition is thought-provoking in a similar way to Syriana. Even if a man is guilty, is it worth torturing him to find out? If the torture of that one man will create ten more who become enemies of your country?

I agree with Dennis Schwartz, who says that this movie deserves to be commended just for being made. It does. And Reese Witherspoon, who is one of my least favourite actresses, is terrific. As the pregnant wife of the imprisoned man, she hits all the right notes. Yes, she spends a lot of the movie just looking concerned. She’s pregnant. It becomes clear throughout the film that she has only so much energy. She works endlessly, but most of the time she is doing this by fighting through intense fatigue, which leaves her with no option but to sit and look despondent. And during the melodramatic scenes, she is believable in that she can all of a sudden get a burst of energy to confront her husband’s captors, and her emotions carry her away and she dissolves into a shrieking blubbery mess. But you know, I still believe that. After all, she’s pregnant. Jake Gyllenhall could have been better in his role as the American assigned to the interrogation, and I wish Meryl Streep had more screen time as the icy woman in charge of the rendition. And yes, the final scene between Gyllenhall and the torture victim is a little far-fetched and melodramatic.

But these are small quibbles with an otherwise excellent film. I would guess that hard line right-wingers will hate this film, because they will see it as the terrorists winning, or they will see it as questioning something that ought to be beyond reproach. But thoughtful, regular people will just enjoy it for what it is - a thought-provoking, interesting, very good film. I definitely recommend watching Rendition. It comes out from Alliance Films on Tuesday, February 19th.

I have noticed many movie reviewers, when talking about Michael Clayton (and many other movies, of course), like to compare it to other movies. This can make it fairly easy to write a review. So I will attempt it now. Of course, this movie is magnificent. George Clooney is sensational as Michael Clayton, a “janitor” for a major law firm, a man who cleans things up before they get out of hand, whenever they may be screwed up. When a lawyer at that firm loses his mind, Clayton is sent in to clean up the mess. Sidney Pollack shows up in the film, as an actor this time, playing the head of that law firm, and he is good. Tilda Swinton is the litigator in charge of that firm’s biggest client, a company called uNorth. She is absolutely perfect as a detail-obsessed corporate functionary, as a suit-wearing battleaxe who is, deep down, insecure and in WAY over her head. And Tom Wilkinson gives a wonderful performance as the lawyer who has a breakdown in court and removes all his clothes in the middle of a deposition. Oh wait. I’m supposed to compare Michael Clayton with other movies. So, now that I’ve outlined the basic plot, here are some comparisons:

Michael Clayton is a lot like Erin Brokovich in that it involves a class-action lawsuit made by hundreds of “little people” against a major firm that poisoned their land. It is lacking two major things, however, things that made Erin Brokovich such a success. Those would be, namely, boob left and boob right on Julia Roberts’ wonderful chest. Erin Brokovich was a good movie, and Michael Clayton has no boobs. And yet, Michael Clayton is much, much better than Erin Brokovich.

Michael Clayton is a lot like Network, in that a man finally understands the world, and his place in it, and that knowledge drives him over the edge. He goes crazy, has a very public breakdown with hilarious results, and ends up fighting the good fight. In Network, that character was played by Peter Finch, who was terrific. And in Michael Clayton, that character is played by Tom Wilkinson, who is also amazing. Both characters meet a fairly similar end, for fairly similar reasons. Network, however, was about television news, and Michael Clayton is about massive corporate law firms. And Michael Clayton is better than Network.

Michael Clayton is a lot like The Firm, in that it involves a massive law firm, evil corrupt business types, and a plot to get one particular lawyer who can bring down that firm. And both movies involved Sidney Pollack in some way. He directed The Firm. And he stars as the director of the firm in Michael Clayton! However, The Firm had two things Michael Clayton does not. Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. I would take Gene Hackman in any movie. But I would choose George Clooney over Tom Cruise any day. And Michael Clayton is much, much better than The Firm.

Michael Clayton is a lot like The Verdict, in that the central character is a lawyer who must confront his personal demons in order to fight the good fight and defeat the odds. In The Verdict, that lawyer was played by Paul Newman. It was perhaps the finest performance (outside Cool Hand Luke) of Newman’s career. I would take Paul Newman over George Clooney. But Michael Clayton is still better than The Verdict.

Michael Clayton is a lot like No Country For Old Men. Both are films that are critically acclaimed, and both were released to theatres in 2007. They were both released to DVD in 2008, and both are nominated in the Best Picture and Best Director categories at this year’s Oscars. No Country For Old Men has a best supporting nomination, for Javier Bardem. And Michael Clayton has one for Tilda Swinton. And Clooney is nominated for best actor. Both films deserve all these awards. They are both unbelievable achievements. But Michael Clayton will not win best picture or best director. Because No Country For Old Men is better than Michael Clayton.

OK, Michael Clayton is not better than Network. I just threw that in because it fit with my comparison scheme. But Michael Clayton is a genius movie. There are two scenes in particular that are especially effective. One is in an alley where Clooney happens upon Wilkinson, the old friend he has been trying to reign in for the whole movie. The scene makes their relationship completely clear in a few short words, and also shines a light on Wilkinson’s “madness”. Perhaps he has not lost control of all his faculties, after all. And the second is a scene where Tilda Swinton is primping herself in front of a mirror, adjusting her buisness suit so it is just right. She does a fantastic job conveying both her obsessive nature and the fact that she really is completely lost in this world. She is in over her head, and you can read that in her face as she prepares herself to come off as confidant when she must address the board of uNorth. Both scenes are unbelievable moments in a staggeringly good movie. Michael Clayton would have been the best movie of the year in seven of the last ten years. However, this year, it just happened to be going up against the greatest movie of the millenium, No Country For Old Men. I suggest watching both.

The basic premise of Awake is a good one. A man is going in for open heart surgery, and the anaesthesia does not work 100% properly. You see, he is awake during the entire surgical procedure. He can’t move a muscle, he can’t speak, but he is aware of his surroundings and he can smell and feel and hear everything that is going on. Which leads to a very intense scene when he first realizes that he can hear everything that’s happening in the operating room, and he can feel the incisions. The scene is fairly graphic, in a surgery-channel sort of way, and my girlfriend couldn’t watch. Which means she missed the best seven minutes of the movie. The rest of the movie is maudlin, phony, and fairly irritating. And I blame two people in particular. The Star Wars Guy and the Bikini-Chick. Those two people are the stiff-as-a-board Hayden Christensen, and the sweet-as-pie-with-giant-eyes Jessica Alba.

The DVD cover for Awake has a quote from Frank Scheck, movie reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter. He says “Awake does for surgery what Jaws did for the beach”. If he means it will make people afraid to go under the knife, he is wrong. If he means it will send people screaming in droves from it, perhaps he is right. In fact, based on that logic, Awake does for Hayden Christensen movies what Jaws did for the beach. Maybe, just maybe, people won’t go back into the theatre for these things for a long time. Hayden Christensen is just painful. At best, he is a third-rate Christian Bale, which works fine for the acting-is-not-required Star Wars roles, but rarely is effective elsewhere in the movies. And Jessica Alba has the appearance, the charizma and the acting talent of a ridiculously attractive cabbage patch doll. Which makes these two the least believable screen couple this side of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. Oh, they do the standard movie scene where he pulls her into the tub with her clothes on - get it? They are in love, and that’s what people in love do…

At any rate, while he is aware of his surroundings but unable to respond, Christensen hears a plot to kill him! An evil scheme that involves his murder while he is having a heart transplant! But how is he to stop it? Well, it turns out, he isn’t. He must hope that his loved ones piece things together before he comes out of his coma. And in the meantime, we watch him wander around the hospital in a completely ineffective out-of-body experience. Meanwhile, characters become their own narrators so that we know exactly what is happening. Dialogue like “OK, now you do exactly what we discussed. Take this syringe that I have prepared for you, put it into the heart he is about to receive, press down on the plunger, and then when the heart is placed in his chest, he will die, and we will collect the money. And remember, the reason we did this is…” If I was planning to kill someone for any reason at all, and I was conspiring with someone else, I don’t think I would have to explain the entire plan to that person more than once. But, it sure helps us (and Christensen) know what is going on!

Awake has seven minutes which are intense, exciting, and terrific. They occur when Hayden Christensen is in a coma and can’t act, and Jessica Alba is fretting in another room and isn’t a part of the scene. The other 77 minutes of this movie are either poor or awful. I suggest avoiding all the minutes in this film.