Solitary Man (dir. Brian Koppelman & David Levien)

That Michael Douglas, he's so smug.

There are certain kinds of movies I can watch again and again and again, from the people-trapped-in-a-confined-place genre film to the spare, artsy, wow-that's-an-impressive-shot-but-what-did-that-ending-mean? to the crackerjack-script thriller, but one I always forget about is the story of a man who can't stop screwing himself, and everyone he knows, over. Be it Raging Bull or The Wrestler the finer aspects of Iron Man 2, I'll watch hours of a man dig himself a deeper and deeper hole until there's no further to dig.

It's especially satisfying when it happens to Michael Douglas, an actor who has rarely, if ever, done much for me, but is absolutely wonderful here. Playing Ben Kalmen, a car salesman who's managed to squander his business, his marriage, and his personal relationships (and that's just by the beginning of the film), Douglas digs deep into his persona without completely unraveling it - the Michael Douglas character would never leave himself fully exposed. At least, not like that.

He does manage to leave himself physically exposed most nights of the week, chasing whatever woman will have him and more than a few who won't. The film's most uncomfortable moments, the necessary ones that most challenge our willingness to sympathize with Ben, stem from this most urgent of needs. It's to writer Brian Koppelman's credit that actions that may repulse us up front will be turn out to be the cause of our deepest sympathy, and Douglas' credit that he seems as disgusted as we are before long. There's a fine line between a morally corrupt character who revels in his corruption, and one who hates himself for actions he seems unable to prevent. Douglas walks the line with ease and charm, with self-doubt and fear trembling just under the surface.

Koppelman and co-director Levien have been a screenwriting team for over a decade since their debut, Rounders, but it hasn't been until recently, in their collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, that the two have managed to create truly worthwhile characters (through brief-but-indelible sketches in the underrated Ocean's Thirteen and an impressive series of moments in The Girlfriend Experience). Here, though Koppelman received the sole screenwriting credit, they've certainly created their finest, so even when the plot mechanics stretch themselves to kick Ben when he's down, or they give us an ending that undermines and guts so much of what has come before, it's not enough to tear down the entire structure.

They've also assembled an impressive, formidible supporting cast. Though most of them are playing familiar roles, Jenna Fischer brings more urgency to her performances than we've seen in years on The Office, Jesse Eisenberg hilariously nails key lines and has tremendous chemistry with Douglas, and Susan Sarandon, God bless her, is as heartfelt as ever. The big revelation comes in fantastically-named Imogen Poots - she's given liberty to have a lot of fun with her role, and she embraces it whole-heartedly.

It's not a stick-with-you kind of film. It's not going to make my year-end best. In two years, I'll have to be reminded it exists. But boy am I glad I caught it.

Five Great Criterion Blu-Rays

In a date much anticipated by art house fans worldwide, the grand Criterion 50% off sale begins today at BarnesandNoble.com. While it's hard to go too wrong with just about any of their selections, I wanted to spotlight five Blu-Rays that are really worth your time, and more than worth the few shillings they're charging during the sale (I've previously spotlighted ten of their DVDs, so feel free to reference that as well, as I still heartily recommend them). It was the Blu-Ray set of The Godfather trilogy that really converted me to Blu-Ray, but it wasn't until I saw Criterion's work that I really knew what the format was capable of. So if you're like me and you're desperately trying to stay within your budget while still taking advantage of this fantastic deals, here are some suggestions to make that journey even more difficult.


Red Desert - This will be my first and most urgent purchase during the sale, having watched it a few weeks ago and been absolutely awestruck. My brother has this whole thing of giving me books as gifts so that, even if I don't read them right away (if at all), they'll have a presence in my house, and there are some films I feel the same way towards - my cinematic soul will be better for the presence of Red Desert, and I can always take a peek at it when I need to glimpse perfection. And did I mention the special features include two short documentaries by Antonioni, a commentary, and a booklet with an interview with Antonioni by none other than Jean-Luc Godard? Among other things, naturally.

Last Year at Marienbad - Speaking of perfection. This is my second-favorite Criterion Blu-Ray in terms of just the look of the thing (sadly my favorite, The Third Man, is out of print). I first saw Alain Resnais' masterpiece on a shoddy dupe of a Region 2 disc, and while the movie is still good enough that it shook me through all junk holding back its total glory, the layers and depth revealed to me by this disc is astonishing. The special features are worth the price of admission alone - a ton of information on the production of this film (which is endlessly fascinating in a way film production rarely is, unless something goes Apocalypse Now-level wrong), a dissection of various interpretations, a truly wonderful booklet, and best of all, two short documentaries by Resnais that I recommend with the greatest urgency. I'd pay for it all over again if I had to.

Playtime - There are those who say you haven't seen this film until you see it projected on 70mm. That may very well be the case. Until then, this representation of the film on Blu-Ray is beyond satisfactory. I watched it with a small group, and the alternating joy and confusion of laughing at something nobody else noticed and desperately searching the frame to see what someone else was laughing at is one of those odd, wonderful, irreplaceable movie experiences. I haven't plunged into the Special Features, but with tons of interviews with writer/director Jacques Tati and a good chunk of behind-the-scenes info, I have a hard time seeing why it wouldn't be pretty damn cool.

Bigger Than Life - Every cinephile worth their salt has a few canonized directors who just don't do anything for them, and for a long time, Nicholas Ray has been mine. While it's no Party Girl (which I mean and I don't at the same time), Bigger Than Life is the most convincing argument I've been presented with that Nicholas Ray really is one of the greatest directors of all time. A stunning Technicolor transfer (Lord do I love Technicolor) and a ton of scholarly dissections make this a disc worth owning.

Stagecoach - First, if you haven't seen this movie, it's even more awesome than you'd ever expect. Second, be warned that the transfer is an honest representation of what a film looks like, which means it has, oh no, grain and scratches. For those of you who like movies and appreciate such things, it's a wonderful disc all around. Not only do you get one of the best classic westerns (it's between this and Red River for me), you get more special features than you could shake...well, something significantly larger than a stick. Like an entire silent film by John Ford. Or an hour-long interview with the man himself. Or an interview with Peter Bogdanovich about the film, or a visual essay analyzing the film's style, or how about every God damn thing you could ever want. It's extraordinary.

Bottom line, you really can't go wrong with Criterion Blu-Rays. I've seen a good chunk of the ones they've released, and can whole-heartedly recommend all of them. These are merely the ones that stand out. Let me know if you have any others you feel especially strongly towards!

Fun With Miis!

Having recently acquired a Nintendo Wii, my girlfriend and I felt compelled to fill out our Mii selection (Miis are avatars you use to play various games, typically Wii Sports). In addition to populating it with friends and loved ones, we decided to include famous directors, actors, and characters from some of our favorite movies. See if you can guess (with a hint or two), leave your answers below, and be sure to head over to Misfortune Cookie Blog to see the rest!

1) There are rules.

2) Abides

3) British actress who has been aged backward and forward, but narrowly dodged immortality.

4) American director who loves hot rods and spaceships.

5) All you need is a gun and a girl...

6) ...but watch out for the cops!

7) Has high-contrast dreams

8) Young version of an American actor...more along the lines of motorcycles and pianos than motor homes.

9) My window taught me to frame things

10) Some would say he's sold out, but that WAS a really solid decade before that.

11) Bronx-born director often associated with working in London

12) Will someday play Conan O'Brien

Speechless

There are few people in cinematic history who are as immediately arresting as Monica Vitti. It is not simply a matter of being beautiful - there are a lot of beautiful people, particularly in the movies. But a few people, a very few people, seem made for the cinema, and Vitti is at the absolute top of this list. Her every glance or expression will just stop you in your tracks - there are more than a few that don't even last a second but will stick with you forever.

This, and a great many other thoughts, are burning into my brain having witnessed Michelangelo Antonioni's breathtaking masterpiece Red Desert, courtesy of the new Blu-Ray from The Criterion Collection. There are movies you wait to see for years and years and years that somehow manage to live up to the impossible expectations you've set for them. Then there are movies that completely reconfigure your whole idea of "expectations." Or movies, for that matter. That's Red Desert.

Cyrus (dir. Jay & Mark Duplass)

Let's make no mistake - The Puffy Chair, the Duplass brothers' 2005 breakout film of sorts was no grand achievement. It's got its mistakes to be sure. But at the time, I hadn't heard so much as a peep from truly independent cinema, which was being represented by Garden State and its ilk - films that were technically independent but had enough finanical and star firepower behind them that they were ready-made for studio distribution.

The Puffy Chair was certainly not that. I didn't know anything about mumblecore, and I didn't totally love the movie, but it did shake me in some fundamental ways that, whatever your critic hat might say, are impossible to disregard.

Now it's 2010 and the brothers Duplass have written and directed a new film produced by no less than Ridley and Tony Scott and featuring stars both studio comic (John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill) and quasi-independent (Catherine Keener and Marisa Tomei), enhancing none of their aesthetic shortcomings and abandoning everything that made The Puffy Chair feel fresh and vital. Here, Reilly plays a John, a man at the end of his rope - he hasn't come close to recovering from his divorce seven years ago when his ex-wife (Keener) invites him to a house party. There he meets Molly (Tomei), and everything is going great until he finds out that she has a son, Cyrus (Hill), who's still living at home at twenty-one and has certain...attachment issues. It quickly becomes clear that Cyrus doesn't want his mom dating anyone, and will do whatever it takes to get John out of the picture. It's a situation ripe for comedy or drama, and the Duplass' try to have it both ways and end up with nothing.

Cyrus, like The Puffy Chair and most other films that would come to be classified mumblecore, was shot digitally and handheld, and was mostly improvised, theoretically to enhance the "you-are-there"ness of it all, but it doesn't quite take here. The constant zooms call too much attention to the medium to ever put you in the midst of it, never mind the absurd, totally unmotivated montages.

The montages are undoubtedly the middle section's most troublesome aspect. Most of this area plays quite well - it's frequently funny, tense in some nice ways, and moderately compelling in a sort of "okay...well, let's see where this goes" sort of way. There are especially some nice moments revealing John's desperation in the dating field, and once he and Cyrus really start to go at it, every scene they have together is gold. But little things sneak in that are so far afield from the kind of film this is trying to be. The montages, in which conversations play out over images of the people in question hanging out, reveal the dark side of an improvised film - what happens when your actors don't have an interesting conversation? I'm just guessing here, but the montages feel very pieced together, taking bits of improvised dialogue and forming a scene like a puzzle made of ill-fitting pieces - it kind of works when you really jam it in there and stand back far enough, but the seams are showing. And when so much of the method is eager to make everything very natural-/realistic, these are very jarring.

I'll skip the bit about how Tomei and Keener don't have fleshed-out characters to play (except to say that Molly is either as damaged as Cyrus, or very, very dumb), because honestly, at this point it's not really worth making a big stink over anymore. It's just the lay of the land. Reilly and Hill are doing to best they can here (and between this and Get Him to the Greek, Hill seems more capable than we'd previously thought), but their characters each make very sudden, very poorly conceived decisions late in the film and are left scrambling to try and justify them. Everything after John's stupid decision is just a mess, and pretty much unravels any good will the film had garnered before.

I was really looking forward to Cyrus - I was excited to see John C. Reilly doing dramatic work again, and very curious about Jonah Hill, never mind getting a new film from the Duplass' that was perhaps a little bit more up their alley than Baghead (which, all its faults admitted, is still worth watching). Cyrus, alas, is the Duplass' first real stumble since they became a cinematic presence - a film unsure of its tone, characters, themes, or ideas.

Knight and Day (dir. James Mangold)

I've been struggling all week with how to discuss Knight and Day. Because you don't want to oversell it. I mean, it's not exactly reinventing the wheel, and there's a point where the screenwriters (and there were plenty) make a pretty horrible decision that stops the movie dead for a solid twenty minutes. And there is the matter of that title...

But on the other hand, I desperately want to tell everyone that this is just...so awesome. I can't IMAGINE what this movie would be like for someone who didn't have high hopes for it, because I was actually excited to see this and it still swept me off my feet. It's the kind of storytelling Hollywood used to be known for - beat your script into the ground until it works, dammit! - but now utilizes all too rarely. Thankfully, the film isn't simply an imitation. It isn't trying to emulate old classics (Charade, North by Northwest, or the early James Bond films) as much as it has fully digested them and given us those same delights in a modern package.

Tom Cruise (one of the few movie stars willing to give everything he has, no matter what the film) plays Roy Miller, a superspy of the Ethan Hunt variety who has recently either suffered a complete mental collapse or discovered a plot within the FBI that he is seeking to expose. We really can't tell, and more importantly, neither can June (Cameron Diaz). June is, improbably enough, the manager of an auto shop, who is traveling on business when she meets, and is to some extent kidnapped, by Roy - he believes the FBI will kill her simply for having been exposed to Roy (it's a bit more complicated than that, but that'd be telling). From there they'll find themselves in Boston, Brooklyn, a private island, a train in the Alps, and a grand finish in Spain.

The film largely coasts, as these sorts of films do, on the chemistry between Cruise and Diaz, who are absolutely fantastic together. They have a big, getting-to-know-you kind of scene that goes on way longer than most scenes are allowed to these days, especially in an action film, but it locks these two together for us. Yes, the film is selling an unconvincing romance between them, but honestly, who gives a damn? More informed viewers will recall that Charade had a great pair of actors - Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn - who simply never should have been presented in a romantic context. Thing is, both movies are a blast, so nobody gives it much concern.

Fact is, though Cruise and Diaz have both given fine performances in the past (Cruise especially seems destined to never get his proper due), this is the most fun they have been in a very long time. Cruise is given instant license to cut loose, and as incredible a performance as it is, he actually remains fairly restrained, making consistently brilliant choices to navigate some tricky territory. He successfully plays to the character, the audience's preconceptions of Cruise himself, and the is-he-or-isn't-he-crazy question that dominates much of the narrative. That he can do this and still be so magnetic (in a way similar to, but very distinct from, Jerry Maguire) is the kind of thing that very few actors ever have the license to do, and even fewer can pull off.

Diaz, meanwhile, has to play the Cameron Diaz type who is suddenly thrust into a world of violence and mayhem, and while the script has a couple of really unfortunate, ditzy-girl moments (as in the one shown in the trailer, where she is surrounded by gunfire and rather than, say, move out of the way, she simply spins around in a circle and screams), she mostly just reacts to these situations as a person. And most people wouldn't know what to do in a high-speed chase, have never handled a firearm before (much less an automatic weapon), and try to avoid violence in their everyday lives. Diaz plays fear, shock, and resistance very well here, skirting the edge of genuine concern while maintaining the film's entertainment-first goals. When the film finally does give her license to have as much fun as Cruise has been having, her gusto is a genuinely wonderful thing to watch.

Director James Mangold has shown a special knack in the past for bringing out the best in formulaic films - the heart of the biopic romance in Walk the Line, the excitement of a Western shootout in 3:10 to Yuma - but he's really knocked it out of the park here. Pace and timing is everything, as the film has to move fast enough to keep us hooked, slow down enough to develop Roy and June's relationship (and even if the romance doesn't work, they do develop a convincing bond over the course of the film), and land the many laughs the film puts out there. Breathless, light fun is one of the hardest things to pull off in all of cinema (which is probably why nobody makes fun live-action movies anymore), so I'm even willing to forgive the twenty-or-so-minute stumble at the end of the second act because everything else is just so...perfect.

The way Mangold sets up and pays off the fun bits of tension is extraordinary. None of the suspense stems from dread, so Mangold sets it up more like a slight tickle, a tease. The action is clean, coherent, very well paced. Set pieces should play like music or dance, and while others are wrestling to craft grand symphonies, Mangold here has mastered the concerto. Cuts are there for a reason, not simply to be economical in his coverage - if he can accomplish something in a one shot (and there's one in particular that is maybe the most inspired shot I've seen all year), he'll just go for it.

He creates a really interesting, very cinematic tone to the film, the sort of otherworldly vibe that radiates from classic Hollywood films where an artificial environment is very purposefully created and maintained - he never once tries to pretend this isn't a movie. Because of this, the fact that the seams show on CGI is not a detriment as many have declared, but in fact to the film's advantage. The distancing created when we can feel the presence of an artificial environment is something alternately battled (as in the fourth Indiana Jones) and embraced (most recently and successfully in Shutter Island), but it used to be commonplace in classic Hollywood cinema in rear-projection and more artificial sets, which were such pervasive parts of the pictures that one comes to accept and love them, as one does a stage at the theater. That something looks "fake" doesn't automatically means it looks "bad." It just has to look "right," and Knight and Day looks exactly as it should, all the time.

What else is there to say? Knight and Day is a wonderful film. Smart, genuinely fun - the joy comes as often from the wordplay and the characters as it does from the car chases (sometimes all at once!) - it calls to mind the globe-trotting adventures of yesteryear without referencing or imitating. I'm not going to lie and say it's perfect, because no, of course it's not. What is? But its tone is so delightful, the performances turned all the way to "fun," and so frequently inspired that I just adore it through and through.

Eighty Thirty Next Saturday...

Per Glenn Kenny's open suggestion, I finally got around to watching Joseph Losey's These Are The Damned. It was introduced to me as a fine bit of sci-fi/horror, and I will simply leave it at that in terms of content description. It's an absolutely stunning film, with one of the more...ahhh I shouldn't say. Let's just say I was not expecting it to be so...haunting. It's also incredibly brave in its structure, particularly by today's standards - the game isn't given up until fifteen or twenty minutes before the end, and without any sort of "twist" to necessitate its positioning, and we don't even have a hint of what the game is until...halfway through the film? Even better, it's the rare revelation of a very compelling mystery that absolutely pays off.

It's available on DVD in a box set of Hammer Films, and you can get it through Netflix (it's paired up with Never Take Candy From a Stranger, which I regretably didn't have time to get to).