War film fizzles amid beautiful photography

When Roland Joffé’s name gets mentioned by a film studio it always comes immediately before or after his best film, The Killing Fields.

But there are two sides to Joffé: the director that made The Killing Fields, a marvelous picture about the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the director who made Super Mario Bros. and the more recent torture-porn Captivity.

His new film seems to have introduced yet another Joffé, one that falls right between the others. In There Be Dragons, he maintains the superb visual style of his best work but with the scatterbrained mediocrity of his worst. The film seems to have so much potential, but it never takes off because it languishes in boring backstory, overlapping narration and flashbacks within flashbacks, no doubt an unintended Inception homage.

Dragons begins with a reporter, his ailing father and a trip to Spain, where flashbacks and narration guide us as we meet the father’s long-buried demons — “There be dragons … in my past,” he tells the son. The father is Manolo, a turncoat in the Spanish revolution. He plays both sides against each other — occasionally over a woman — while periodically encountering a childhood friend, Father Josemaría Escrivá, who has since been sainted for his works, which include the creation of Opus Dei, the Catholic institution.

The film flip-flops between the two contrasting characters as it meanders through the Spanish Civil War, a brutal conflict that turned brother against brother, and everyone against Spain’s many faithful priests. Manolo, who is the film’s catalyst and ultimate villain, is also the main character even though his eternal redemption seems to confound everyone including the priest he so begrudgingly hates. Manolo is played by Wes Bentley, the weed dealer from American Beauty, an actor who seems torn between the Manolo’s despicable and contemplative sides. Escrivá is played warmly by Charlie Cox, though in too much of the film he’s got this babe-in-the-woods “awe shucks” gaze. 

Costars include Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko and Rodrigo Santoro, who aren’t given nearly as many bad lines or as much obnoxious brooding as the Manolo character. Dougray Scott has a minor role as the reporter son and he’s given some heavy-handed dialogue that smacks like overwritten trite: “And that is how I went searching for a saint and found my father instead,” or “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” It never quite surpasses the film’s first spoken line, though: “I was a war baby.”

Some of the scenes are quite good, including one where Escrivá is hiding within an apartment’s walls and the soldiers come knocking. In another a man must execute a woman who was framed for espionage. He fires a gun, but not at the person you expect. This all takes place amid some truly wonderful photography. Cinematographer Gabriel Beristain outdoes himself in every scene. 

  

The acting is sub-par and boring, which only makes the long plot so much longer. Occasionally it loses its focus, which I think is Escrivá, though you can’t quite tell when Manolo’s sneering face dominates every shot. Overall, the film is epic in scope, but never in delivery.

Furiously stupid, yet oddly enjoyable

Stupid and preposterous.

Did you expect something else with Fast Five? If so then, then open your glove box and gently slam your hand in it. That pain you’re feeling is your re-entry back to Planet Earth. If that doesn't work, have someone back over your foot.

The movie, the fifth in the Fast and Furious franchise, is also a little fun — guiltily so — but only because it’s so stupid and preposterous. The things that happen in this movie don’t happen in comic-book movies, where the heroes are mutants and the villains are space aliens and the plots take place on planets with less gravity, no physics and a wanton disregard for Newton's Laws. To tolerate the film you must suspend disbelief; to enjoy it you must walk disbelief out to a firing squad and light it a cigarette.

If you've seen the other films, then you've seen this: it's more action, mayhem and crime by way of automobile. Although, this one reunites a bunch of the old actors, basically joining the two sagas of the franchise — they can be categorized as the movies with Vin Diesel and the movies without Vin Diesel — it mostly centers on the two stars. Diesel is the meathead Dominic Toretto, whose love of fast cars keeps getting him busted. Paul Walker plays his foil/buddy, ex-FBI agent Brian O'Conner, who busts him out of jail so they can perform more dangerous car stunts.

Dom and Brian head off to Brazil, where they get entangled with a kingpin who has an empire of crooked cops at his disposal. We know the film is in Rio de Janeiro because every scene is shot in a favela, or Brazilian slum, and director Justin Lin constantly reminds us of that by including the word favela in every sentence. We also know we're in Rio because Lin shows us the Christ the Redeemer statue, which deserves some kind of cameo credit. In this setting — beautiful beaches, the vibrant downtown district and sprawling shantytowns — Brian and Dom lay waste to Brazil, plowing their cars into every national treasure except that statue, which is luckily next to no roadways.

The film runs on a mixture of ethanol and cliché, and it uses every one in the book: the One Last Job trick, the lover's quarrel that ends with the outburst "I'm pregnant," the "I'll give you 24 hours before I hunt you down" clause, the Villain Joins the Hero ploy, and lots of recycled, cheap one-liners. If you've seen just five movies in your lifetime, then you've already seen nearly every trick Fast Five will dish out.

Car chases abound, as do high-octane heists and brutal shoot-outs. These, of course, are all implausible on an obscene level. In one sequence, the stars plunge into a deep gorge with nothing but water to break their fall. No one told the director that water, when entering it at Mach 3, might as well be concrete. In another scene, a bus rolls over after apparently tripping on a dime on the highway. The final sequence involves two cars pulling a massive steel vault the size of a boxcar through the entire city. It would be like a toddler pulling a John Deere tractor from a dead stop, but never mind realism.

Joining all this ludicrous bombast is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who has facial hair more intricately manicured than the gardens of Versailles. He’s so bad it’s comical. The film gives him some hokey dialogue ("We'll catch'em. Not a phone call more and not a bullet less." "Put on your thunderwear.") and he's often shown cleaning his gun, as if we would think he were a pansy if he weren't stroking gun steel, sharpening knives or lumberjacking the entire Northwest. No one really thinks he's the next Schwarzenegger anymore; no one except maybe Johnson himself.

The film builds and builds and builds right up to its ultimate destiny: the two sweaty meatheads — Diesel and Johnson — brawling in an extended fight sequence. The movie could have been called Bald Guys With No Necks Punch Each Other and it would have worked. This sequence, which is actually the false bottom on the film’s finale — oh, there's more — is the male equivalent of women mud wrestling in bikinis. And Fast Five milks every sweaty second of the fight. By the end of the mutual pummeling there's nothing really left for The Rock to do, so he inexplicably joins the team he's trying to apprehend.

Diesel, though, give the guy a hand: He's taken one performance — 2001's The Fast and the Furious — and turned it into a gearhead's magnum opus. He holds court over cars, imparts vehicular wisdom, says grace, swigs a beer, and generally seems to glow in this Zen-like state of perpetual car bliss. His acting is laughable, but his presence on the screen is unforgettable as he soaks up the film's wild cornball energy.

The women of Fast Five don't come out as lucky as the men, though. Jordana Brewster, with her sharp features and waifish shape spends much of the movie as the sympathetic shoulder to cry on for the men. Then she gets pregnant, which means she's out of action so she can shelter Baby Brian in various half-shirts and booty-riding shorts. The other woman, played by Gal Gadot, seems to be a legitimate member of the team, a team that doesn't assign duties to its members based on gender ... oh wait, she uses her ass to secure the kingpin's fingerprints.

Then there's the case of poor Elsa Pataky, who plays an honest policia in Rio. See, she's a widow; her husband, a cop, was gunned down after he refused to take a bribe. After his death, she joined the force to be a crusader to his cause. When she's not being rescued by all the big strong men, the film paints her as this delicate and passionate woman who mourns her husband while trying to undo the corruption in Brazil's wacky system. That doesn't last. I should have known something would have gone awry with this character when The Rock's rock began bulging in his pants when he saw her dossier. "I chose you because of your smile," he says. Then Fast Five asks this crusading cop to shoot at other cops, rob the police station and destroy downtown Rio — where are her principles now? By the end of the film, the widower has been hastily thrown into Dom's arms, where she ditches her modest wardrobe and noble plight so she can be — wait for it — some hoochie-mama on a beach with a bunch of criminals. This movie's understanding of women is better than, say, Sucker Punch — in which all women are rape fantasies and sperm receptacles — but still it's desperately short of understanding women on any level deeper than,"Hot women sell movie tickets."

Fast Five, of course, also fetishizes the car in a soft-core kind of way. People who adore automobiles will be thoroughly titillated as the film frames cars in all kinds of glorious angles. It doesn’t give these cars many interesting things to do, nor does it reinvent the car chase by any means, but it does try so hard. Most of the action is visually comprehensible, though it is edited into a clustery mess. And, for the life of me, I could not figure out which cars were traveling what direction and with which drivers in the last action scene.

One thing that should be unforgivable: Dodge's super-heavy product placement. I kept waiting for Morgan Spurlock to jump out of the backseat as some kind of commentary on the nature of product placement, to which Fast Five sacrifices its soul to the Dodge Charger, a car that is as much a character in this film as Superman is to his. Chargers are in chases, shoot-outs, perilous games of chicken, used as vehicular retribution, cursed at, spit upon, and unnecessarily glorified in an extended sequence where they drag that massive vault through Rio. Curse these obvious product placements.

The film is stupid and bad, but it's also precisely up to par for a summer starter. Call me a Fast/Furious apologist. Most people turned their movie brains off in December. Before quality can be appreciated again, they need a jolt to the system. And Fast Five will probably do the trick. I knew the movie was stupid, but somehow I admired it for being every kind of stupid in just the right mixture.

Ferrell plays Ferrell in Ferrell comedy

Will Ferrell has grown very tiresome on me. It’s not that he’s run out of material, but rather that he’s never had any material to begin with. He plays his characters like different hues of the same color — and the color is Stupid.

He must begin each movie with Mad Libs: “In this film I am Will Ferrell as a ________ working as a ________.” The blanks are always personality traits and occupation. Anchorman was masculine jerk and news anchor. Blades of Glory was sex addict and figure skater. Talladega Nights was obnoxious redneck and Nascar driver.

Here in The Other Guys the blanks are computer geek and police officer. The performance is funny, like all his performances, but it all feels vaguely familiar, like Ferrell is doing the same character just in different costumes. He’s partnered with Mark Wahlberg, who wears comedy like it’s made of burlap and fire ants. Remember that SNL gag about Wahlberg talking to farm animals? That was not far from the truth in Other Guys, where Marky Mark seems unfit for even the simplest bits, which is strange considering the movie was probably titled from a line Wahlberg delivers in another cop movie, The Departed — “I’m the guy who does his job, you must be the other guy.”

Ferrell is Detective Gamble and Wahlberg is Detective Hoitz on the NYPD. They work in robbery-homicide, although they appear to be doing clerical work for the city inspector — Gamble has a pending investigation involving scaffolding violations. Hoitz is given desk work because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter once in a dark Yankee Stadium tunnel, and now all the other cops call him the Yankee Clipper. (Another cop tells him, “You shoulda shot A-Rod.” So true.)

Hoitz and Gamble share an office with Danson & Highsmith (ampersand intended), hero cops who live in a perpetual Michael Bay movie. In the opening scenes, they eject a hotrod out of a double decker bus into Trump Plaza — Michael Bay, take notes. They’re played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson as if they thought the movie was starring them. In the end you’ll wish it had.

Anyway, the hero cops eventually meet an unfortunate end (here's a hint: their end involves lots and lots of bagpipes) and the department needs some new cops to take the lead on hot cases, which is where Gamble and Hoitz come in. Of course, though, they’re dimwits. Early in the film, Gamble, in his Prius, accidentally plows through a crime scene, over a bodybagged corpse and into a table full of cocaine evidence. The Prius spends the rest of the film dusted in the fine narcotic powder; at one point a bad guy swipes some off the hood and rubs it on his gums.

There’s another gag where Gamble is tricked into doing a Desk Pop, which is shooting your gun at your desk, something cops do every couple of months to blow off steam. He’s such a doofus that he actually does it and his captain (played by Michael Keaton) takes his gun away and gives him a wooden prop. When the bad guys take the guns later, they return the wooden one to the department but with a nice stain on it. “You should really send them a thank you note,” the captain says. The captain ha some other clever lines, including one where he mixes up the morning briefing (involving serial rapists and murderers) with the morning briefing at his other job at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Some of the gags are funny, but the movie wasn’t put together very well. It transitions from scene to scene the way television commercials transition together, which is not at all. I kept wondering, “How did the characters get here?” And the action has that shaky Bourne-style editing that involves a million different shots pieced together in semi-chronological order. Also, watch some of the awkward reaction shots at the dinner table sequence; makes you wonder if director of photography was sick that day because the angles are strange and meaningless.

Mostly, though, I just didn’t care for Ferrell and Wahlberg together. The chemistry is there, but the film seems to fluctuate in and out of the sweet spot on their dial. At one point I wondered if the film was ever rehearsed in front of the actual writers. If so, then they would have seen that a three-minute monologue about a lion swimming in the ocean wasn’t really on the money. Neither was Wahlberg doing ballet moves. Nor was an extended sub-plot with Gamble as a pimp with a stable of women who refer to him as Gator.

Some bits are only funny in Ferrell’s head. The Other Guys has more of those jokes than most Ferrell comedies.

What dreams, dreams, dreams may come

With a growing collection of fine work to his credit, director Christopher Nolan — rightfully becoming heir to cinema’s highest orders — has found yet another way to thrill us, this time in our dreams.

His latest, Inception, is an elaborate heist movie that takes place within the fragile scaffolding of a victim’s sleep. The items stolen are not jewels and gems, but powerful ideas. Don’t call it just a heist movie, though; it is so much more, and also so much less. It manages to do something very few Hollywood action extravaganzas do: It provides high-octane thrills with shootouts, car chases and special effects, but also dissects one man’s own very personal story using science so technical and precise that it plays out like an MIT term paper.

Nolan’s fierce one-two punch — big action and personal character studies — is what gave him an edge in Dark Knight, but here it’s fine-tuned even further inside the recesses of man’s unconscious state, to a level that even Freud would find compelling. That Nolan juggles all of his elements— a large cast of A-list actors, a riveting sci-fi plot, hundreds of special-effect shots, a huge nine-figure budget, and a script he’s managed to keep secret for a decade — so precisely is further testament to his powers as a great director.

Inception’s thief is Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). Using a machine that fits into a suitcase — which at one point fits into another suitcase, a paradoxical visual — Cobb can boot himself into another person’s dreams, where he accesses their private thoughts to extract secrets. What he steals hardly matters; it could be the formula for Coca-Cola, Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices, or top secret company documents. It's simply Hitchcock’s MacGuffin: everyone wants it, but it is inconsequential to the actual plot. Inception's MacGuffin is the sell-off of an inherited company. What the company does, or what its wholesaling will accomplish, is not important.

Once in a dream, an extractor like Cobb can manipulate the physics of the dream to a certain extent including one scene where Paris seems to fold in half like a piece of paper, and then the fruit stands explode in a parade of colorful shrapnel. And should he die in a dream he’ll simply wake up, or he can always throw himself off a tall building — after all, that dream of falling always ends before we hit the ground.

Early in the film, Cobb is hired to do an difficult, thought-impossible inception job. We learn that inception is implanting an idea into a sleeping brain, as opposed to stealing one. It's no cakewalk since a dreaming mind is not easily tricked, so Cobb and his team have devised layers of dreams that will hide the true nature of their task. By the end of the film, we’ll see four layers — a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream — with the possibility of even more layers that remain unseen. There’s also this business where five minutes of sleep time translates into hours of dream time, and on the deepest levels, a dreamer can experience decades of dreams inside a single night’s sleep. Meanwhile his real body is booted into the suitcase machine while dream versions of himself are booted into dream machines on descending levels that fall down into the rabbit hole. So climbing back out of the dreams means his subconscious must be woken up on each dream level, sometimes they require a "kick" that adds to Cobb's labyrinthine masterplan.

These are heady ideas, but the film handles them without compromising the dense science of Inception’s world. As confusing as it sounds, Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay) seems to enjoy the complexity of the challenges associated with the plot as it descends into maddening new layers of dreams and collective unconscious. His Memento was apparently light calisthenics to prepare for this. Like time-travel caper Primer before it, or even Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Inception will reward sharp or repeat viewers with further science. After I saw it, I immediately wanted to see it again, mostly because it was such a remarkable experience, but also because the plot warrants further examination.

Besides DiCaprio, who proves his talent with each new role, the film is full of wonderful actors perfectly cast in solid, impenetrable roles. There’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer) as a dapper assistant who has different roles within different layers of dreams. In one dream layer, he has a zero-G brawl in a hotel corridor that apparently took weeks to shoot. Then there’s Ellen Page (Juno), who plays a dream architect able to design the basic structure of a dream. Cobb has her audition for the role: “Draw me a maze in two minutes that takes one minute to get out of.” Tom Hardy, who will be the new Mad Max in 2012, plays a forger who can assume the identity of others, one of them being a character played by Tom Berenger (welcome back, Tom).

These characters, as good as they are at their respective jobs, must rely much on team leader Cobb, whose dreams are easily penetrated by the subconscious taunting of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose name has an ominous meaning in Spanish. In one scene, she interrupts the con by sending a freight train tearing through a place that definitely was not meant for a freight train. Although separate from the dream infiltration sequences, this plot element with the wife really allows Inception to expand on the idea of dreams: that dreams are the unrepressed images of our unconscious fighting to express themselves to our conscious self. Eventually, the film becomes more about what reality ultimately is and isn’t, which leads us into Matrix territory. But what the Matrix movies couldn’t do in three movies, Inception does in just one.

Few films can invent their own worlds, let alone their own brand of science. And few films can juggle so many elements so smoothly. The bigger, more innovative, more ambitious movies become the more they expose themselves to risk. Yet here’s Inception, as bold and ambitions as sci-fi movies can get, and Christopher Nolan makes it look so simple with his latest, easily the best film of the summer, and probably the entire year.

Don’t bother pinching me; I’m not dreaming.

(I like the photos so I'm posting all of them!)