"Rachel Getting Married" Retrospective Review

-Originally posted for the CultureMob Blog on (http://culturemob.com/frustratingly-watchable-movies-jonathan-demmes-rachel-getting-married)

On this first (and potentially only) installment of “Frustratingly Watchable Movies,” I divert your attention to 2008′s Rachel Getting Married. Heralded as director Jonathan Demme’s return to the funky, humanistic fiction films he made in the 1980s, the movie covers the misadventures of Kym, a recovering junkie, as she leaves rehab to spend the weekend at her older sister Rachel’s wedding.

Rarely have I seen genius and inanity mingle as freely as they do in this movie. I remember coming out of the cinema and not knowing if I wanted to declare my love for Rachel Getting Married before God and all Creation or crash my car into a tree out of frustration.

It’s that kind of movie.

Here’s the thing that sets Rachel Getting Married apart. Demme does not hit you with one movie. He smuggles in two.

The first, and the one I keep returning to, is an intimate family drama centering on the antagonistic relationship between Rachel and Kym. At her core, Kym (Anne Hathaway, whose work in the film is revelatory) obsessively craves attention from anyone and everyone. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) has quietly endured her sister’s grandstanding up to this point in their lives, but Kym’s increasingly desperate efforts to become the focus of the wedding ignite years of resentment inside Rachel.

The verbal and emotional warfare between the sisters would be enough to sustain most movies; Demme reportedly let his actors improvise their way through scenes, leading to some moments of bracing emotional candor, like the scene where Rachel announces her pregnancy as a means of wresting the spotlight back from Kym, a tactic that her sister sees through instantly.

Yet Demme and company let the specter of Kym’s addiction loom over the proceedings, giving the film a richness of tragedy it might otherwise lack. Without getting too spoilery, Kym did some atrocious things to her family when she was on drugs, and her presence at the wedding brings those horrors back to the surface. As we watch Kym struggle with her demons, she gains a vulnerability beyond Hathaway’s innate likeability; her boorish behavior is a smokescreen to keep from facing the hurt she causes.

In its own way, this first movie is as good as vintage Eugene O’Neill—it’s that emotionally raw and honest.

The problem is Movie #2. That wedding that’s brought everyone together? Demme insists on showing it in what feels like real time. He gives us long scenes of nothing but nuptials, from the pre-wedding party, to the rehearsal dinner, to the wedding itself, to the celebration afterwards. It all amounts to creating what Demme referred to “The New York Times” HERE as “the most beautiful home movie ever made.”

Objectively, I cannot fault him. Half of the film feels like his stated intention, with authentic toasts and slightly awkward declarations of love and boisterous merrymaking. It’s quite the sight, this full, happy, enthusiastically multicultural wedding, and I wanted to shoot myself whenever the film shifted its attention back to the ceremony.

Here’s the thing: it’s not my family. If Demme is giving me is a wedding video, why should I care about anyone in it that isn’t related to me? If a colleague at work put on his wedding video, I’d watch as little as I had to in order to maintain the illusion of politesse before sneaking off to throw up. There is nothing more boring than watching the family celebrations of a family not yours, except maybe watching a fake wedding put on by some extremely committed individuals. Bravo, Mr. Demme!

And again, I’m not against substantial playback given to the event in theory—if it elaborates on the main action, go for it. Think of The Godfather. The whole movie is set up in that opening wedding ceremony; Francis Ford Coppola is so canny about contrasting what we see there with the violent occurrences later on.

None of that in this movie. These scenes don’t reflect back on the central conflict between Kym and Rachel, either explicitly or obliquely. They don’t even maintain the same emotional tone of the rest of the film. The film lurches suddenly from painful scenes of emotional anguish to upbeat wedding festivities. If the actors weren’t the same in both movies (including non sequitur cameos from Demme cohorts like Don Harrison, Pastor Robert Castle, Robyn Hitchcock, and Roger Corman), you’d assume some random dude spliced their family’s home movies into this edgy, little indie drama.

Is the bifurcated structure in keeping with early Demme? Sure. Something Wild, for example, hums along as an energetic screwball comedy for its first half and then turns into a more violent thriller in its second half. But the stakes were lower in that film; at the end of the day, Something Wild is the screen version of the old advertisement where the 90-lbs weakling finds the strength to take on the bully kicking sand in his face. It’s insubstantial fluff.

Rachel Getting Married is a more sober beast. It’s bonds of love and hate that join families together, about the possibility for redemption, about being your own worst enemy, except all of that goes into the penalty box every time Demme wants to get his wedding on. It throws the film off-kilter, obscuring the dramatic greatness present.

But, man, that greatness is there, and it’s so potent it can knock the wind out of you.

Pity that wedding’s in the way.

"Rango" Review

-Originally posted for the CultureMob Blog on 3/7/11 (http://culturemob.com/movie-review-rango-is-johnny-depps-weird-wonderful-return-to-form)

The unspoken doctrine of the modern animated kids’ film frowns on any kind of semi-serious character introspection, so it’s already a shock when, not two minutes in Nickelodeon Pictures’ Rango, we stand witness to the eponymous hero engaging with forced desperation to a room of imaginary friends and pausing long enough to ask himself THE question, the Mack Daddy of psychotherapy:

Who am I?

It’s a question Rango struggles with throughout the film and never in the crowd-pleasing sense that Jason Bourne does—it’s not that literal chameleon Rango has forgotten who he is that’s the problem, it’s that he’s almost positive that no one cares who he is, least of all himself. By the time this crisis reaches its apex, and Rango decides to kill himself by slowly walking across an interstate highway, the packed audience of (mostly) under-ten-year olds and their parents I saw the film with began to stir uncomfortably. Can’t blame them, really. You do not give your animated hero an existential crisis (unless you are Pixar), and you certainly don’t have him/her decide that Suicide is Painless in response (which even Pixar wouldn’t dare attempt).

As a kids’ movie, Rango is an abject failure. It’s the only thing the movie is bad at. In terms of sheer creative invention and filmmaking panache, Rango stands well above every major release of 2011. Lest one think that’s faint praise (it has been a very bad movie year), Rango is the only mainstream animated movie to hit the big-screens since Pixar started cranking out feature-length stories that ranks with the best of that venerated studio’s output.

Rango finds success in eschewing convention. It takes to the Wild West for inspiration, which—the recent True Grit’s success notwithstanding—isn’t exactly a lucrative commercial proposition, and then it inspires viewers to be up on their Western Cinema knowledge. On one level, the film is Rango recontexualizing his existence as the lead in a Western epic (the mysterious loner coming to the rescue of a dying prairie town), always aware of the hero’s role and of the conventions guiding his path. On another, it’s a full-length Looney Tunes cartoon, the structure of the film a frame to hang loads of winking references/homages/in-jokes. Some of these nods are overt—a viewer with no prior knowledge of spaghetti westerns and John Wayne movies will probably sense Rango is up to something when these beats hit—though shout-outs to Budd Boetticher, Cat Ballou, Duel in the Sun, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller come faster and with little fanfare.

Some viewers might find the structure a little aimless, but I thought it part of Rango’s charm. This is the rare animated movie that delights more in characters riffing with one another that with frenetic mayhem. Rango’s confrontations with a murderous hawk and a family of redneck moles aside, the heart of this one lies in extended, seemingly-improvised scenes of talking, from Rango embellishing his exploits before a crowd of the inebriated to a campfire scene that gets stranger and funnier the more its participants ramble. It’s a hangout movie, a spiritual successor to The Big Lebowski, in many ways.

Where Rango exceeds that particular modern classic is in visual splendor. The aesthetic imagination can take your breath away; visual consultant and master cinematographer Roger Deakins (True Grit, No Country for Old Men) helps to design a Western landscape more myth than reality, from arid desert plans and red canyons to some of the most stunning Big Sky tableaus put on film. There is always something to marvel at, always something interesting to see.

Credit must also go to director Gore Verbinski, who uses Rango as a palette cleanser after years of toiling for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. If those films were mundane actioners punctuated with surrealist wit, then Rango flips the equation: it feels like Verbinski throwing in every crazy idea he ever had (dream sequences that are equal parts Salvador Dali, Terry Gilliam, and Alejandro Jodorowski; scarecrow-like cactus plants that slither on tentacles to find water; a whole town constructed from common household paraphernalia) and connecting them by the briefest suggestion of plot. Verbinski lets his cast of misfits run wild in all this madness and visually, it’s as if the characters stepped out from a Ralph Steadman drawing. No effort has been made to aesthetically ingratiate anyone with audiences. Pixel for pixel, there is more slime, scales, grit, and texture than “cute”—“cute” cannot thrive in the savagery of the West.

That uncompromising character detail spills into the voice work. Verbinski didn’t hire big stars just so he could put them on the poster; he hired good actors (Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Vincent Kartheiser, Ray Winstone, Bill Nighy, Ned Beatty, the incomparable Stephen Root) to contribute their own idiosyncrasies to their roles. The MVP is Johnny Depp as Rango. After ten years of phoning in quirky shtick, Depp gives a complex and supremely odd vocal performance as a chameleon desperate to reinvent himself. It’s the most engaged and inspired he has been since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a welcome return to form for the actor.

With all the riches Rango offers, it does come as a slight disappointment once the more conventional plot elements kick in during the last forty minutes of the film. These are well done (and another gift for movie geeks—the plot comes courtesy of Chinatown, complete with a Big Bad animated and voiced as a near-duplicate of John Huston’s Noah Cross), with moments of absurdity and emotion outclassing anything else released this year; it just isn’t as freewheeling and inventive as the previous hour.

Still, even with Verbinski and Co.’s lone concession to narrative coherence, you never get the sense of studio interference or artistic compromise. It’s a minor miscalculation in an otherwise funny, bizarre, thought provoking, unique, exuberant, and wholly original piece of animated cinema. This is the best film of the year so far.

Analysis on the Tonal Differences between "The Ghost Writer" and "Shutter Island"

-Originally posted for the CultureMob Blog on 4/8/11 (http://culturemob.com/polanski-vs-scorsese-the-curious-case-of-tone-in-the-ghost-writer-and-shutter-island)

How interesting that 2010 saw so many of cinema’s Young Turks offering evidence of greater maturity in their filmmaking (Christopher Nolan in Inception, Darren Aronofsky in Black Swan, David Fincher in The Social Network), and how interesting that two of the medium’s most venerated masters—Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese—decided to go in the opposite direction, turning in glossy larks seemingly engineered for maximum playtime. Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, Scorsese’s Shutter Island; these two films share much of the same DNA. Both are adaptations of popular novels, both elevate their source materials’ beach-read cheesiness to a rococo pulp, and both create dense visual experiences designed to homage the great suspense filmmakers of yore—guys like Sam Fuller, Val Lewton, Fritz Lang, Mario Bava, Michael Powell, and Alfred Hitchcock might turn red with flattery if they’d lived to see either film.

Currently, Metacritic charts a 77% favorability rating for The Ghost Writer and a 63% rating for Shutter Island, and one can attribute that 14% difference to an interesting discrepancy. By and large, critics praised Polanski for his stylistic and genre homages and criticized Scorsese for the same indulgences. Check out The New Yorker’s dueling reviews of The Ghost Writer and Shutter Island for explicit evidence of this condition.

David Denby gives The Ghost Writer an unqualified rave, highlighting Polanski’s nimble cinematic technique as it “offers…the steady pleasures of high intelligence and unmatchable craftsmanship…a stunning over-all design that has been color-coordinated to the point of aesthetic mania.” Denby acknowledges the film’s fluffy genre aspirations, but he finds them appealing, that “there may be nothing formally inventive in this kind of classical technique, but, in the hands of a master, it’s smooth and satisfying, and…it works its old magic.”

Contrast that with Anthony Lane’s more negative Shutter Island report. Lane lauds Scorsese for his mastery of craft, how “the thrill of watching [his protagonists] blunder through a graveyard during a hurricane…or…tiptoe through Ward C, the maximum-security wing, with light and water dripping from on high and misting spookily underfoot, shows a director in such command of his skills that no pathetic fallacy escapes him,” before condemning that same craft as limiting of potential greatness. “No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past,” Lane writes of Shutter Island’s inspirations, “but when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?”

The contrast in opinions stands indicative of the larger critical consensus—Polanski gets away with screwing around. Scorsese doesn’t.

Here’s the thing about critics: despite their support of tricky material, critics like to keep tone simple. It’s fine for a filmmaker to create a way-out tone as long as it stays consistent. Start adding new flavors, and the critics start sharpening their knives.

The Ghost Writer stays consistent tonally. Polanski has created the kind of high-sheen thriller that Hitchcock used to make in his sleep; despite the political and autobiographical allusions, it is all glittering, menacing surfaces. I used to have issues with the actors playing archetypes rather than people or the ludicrous plot contrivances powering the narrative, but I’ve softened on those problems because of how unimportant they are in the tonal scheme of things. The Ghost Writer isn’t about a book so deadly people kill to hide it before they allow its publication or a conspiracy daft enough to be solved with a cursory Google search or a protagonist whose sense of self-preservation is akin to the squirrel that dashes as fast as it can towards a moving car. It’s about desolate, wind-swept beaches that hold fatal secrets. It’s about being alone in a fleabag motel at three in the morning, unsure if the knock on the other side of your door belongs to someone who wants to help you or kill you. It’s about a letter passed from hand to hand by people who will never know how important it is. The Ghost Writer isn’t about people or logic or emotion; it’s about mood, and what a mood it is.

For 105 of its 138 minutes, Shutter Island places the same emphasis on mood, creating a baroque, The Red-Shoes-by-way-of-Shock-Corridor ambience, and then…

Without delving into spoilers, Scorsese infects his film with emotion. He doesn’t just reveal the big twist. In fact, one can argue that Scorsese telegraphs the twist from the beginning as a Brechtian exercise to direct viewer focus onto the more theatrical filmmaking devices and as a means of recontexualizing the film as a stealth character study rather than a trashy thriller. The twist in Shutter Island…incidental. The psychological elements that forged it…now we’re getting somewhere. They introduce a somber, humanistic tone from what was previously established, and I feel that mingling of tones jarred many critics. For one, it runs at right angles from what Scorsese had given us until the last act of his film. We thought we were getting a glib exercise and BAM! We’re in Cassavettes Territory. Furthermore, once he’s established this depth of feeling, Scorsese doesn’t turn his film into a docudrama. Shutter Island is still a Movie-Movie homage—complete with lush, Cinemascope photography and subjective slow-motion shots—we’re now expected to care about the people involved.

Shutter Island gives audiences a lot to process by its conclusion, and I don’t blame critics for experiencing tonal whiplash. I do fault the urge to call a movie flawed because it strives for many things all at once. That’s the trap Shutter Island sets. It lures you with its surface glow, and it’s only after you’ve luxuriated in the waters for some time that you realize how deep they are. This is challenging, idiosyncratic filmmaking disguised as pap, and further proof (as if we needed any) that Martin Scorsese need never worry about competing with his younger peers.

Analysis of Clint Eastwood in "Unforgiven"

-Originally posted for blogger.com on August 17, 2010 (http://sexboozebull.blogspot.com/2010/08/you-got-to-work-that-clint-orus.html)

Was Will Munny ever saved?

That’s the question at the heart of Unforgiven. I don’t think the film is as perfect as many seem to find it—Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel calls Unforgiven the greatest Western ever made, a hyperbolic statement if I’ve ever heard one, given a) the quality of the best Westerns and b) the deliberately understated tone of Eastwood’s final Oater (it means to elegize the genre, not top it)—and it is that central question about Munny’s true nature that (intentionally?) gives me most pause when assessing my own feelings about the film.

One could argue that Eastwood has elided an important stage from Munny’s development. As it stands, the antihero has two faces: contrite and vengeful.

The former face takes up roughly 110 minutes of the 130-minute film. The operative word here is “reformed”; Munny talks, and talks, and talks about how he isn’t the same man, how his dearly departed wife saved him from a life of drinking and mayhem, how the monster that killed “just about everything that walk[ed] or crawled at one time or another” is no more.

His reformation permeates every atom of his being—being good has made him impotent. Munny can barely shoot, passively suffers a vicious beating at the hands of Gene Hackman’s Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett, and, most literally, refuses a complimentary roll in the hay courtesy of the prostitute whose scarred face sets the plot in motion.

Our first good look at Munny—he’s crawling around in the mud, trying valiantly, and failing, to control the livestock in his beyond-hardscrabble pig farm—could not better depict the degradation that the wages of sin, and of redemption, have cost him.

And then Munny gets word that Daggett has murdered Ned Logan, his only real friend and the closest thing Munny has to a conscience, and Munny transforms into the Angel of Death. Strides into Big Whiskey like a spirit. Kills everyone that needs killing without so much as suffering a scratch. Intimidates those still breathing through sheer force of will. And then, vanishes. Maybe back to his farm, maybe to San Francisco, maybe to whatever plane of existence that loosed The Drifter from High Plains Drifter or Preacher from Pale Rider, who knows. Whatever the case, Munny is gone, his last (?) bloody shootout an affirmation of his true nature, of the sins of the Old West.

It goes without saying that Eastwood is splendid in both facets of the character. That much is certain. Redeemer Will is a pathetic deflation of the Western icon we expect; the Angel of Death inflates that icon to the point of abstraction—his brutal precision is as alien as it is exciting.

But there is no in-between. Whatever bridge one might normally expect, Eastwood perversely denies us. One minute, Munny is decrying killing to the battle-shocked Schofield Kid, and the next, he’s coolly savaging six people. We don’t see the progression, the return of one man from another. We see one man. Then we see the other.

The more I process this, the more I respect it. Clint has oft trafficked in ambiguity, and this might be the most complex iteration of it in his oeuvre. Was Munny redeemed? Is he trying to force it—his constant proclamations of his lack of wickedness ring the “Me think he doth protest” bell loud and hard. If he reverts back to his old self at the end, does he stay that way, or does he start a new, happier life with his children in San Francisco? Is that final, pre-credits epigraph more than a rose-colored conjecture? Is Munny even “bad” in the final shootout—he is spurred on by the death of the most morally sound character in the film, after all.

It’s a slippery resolution for a slippery character. Everyone else in the film is at a certain peace with his or her contradictions, from Little Bill through Strawberry Alice. Will Munny seems to exist outside his ambiguities, and his distance from himself obfuscates matters irrevocably.

With Eastwood’s film, we get a view of violence and death unlike any I have ever seen. I don’t know if it is as narratively and emotionally satisfying as a (slightly) more concrete take on Munny might be—seeing Will evolve into the man he was would have a savage inevitability. As it is, the film lacks the weight of tragedy. Nothing is inevitable. It just is.

There’s something much more disturbing about that, I reckon.

"You Don't Mess With The Zohan" Review

-Originally posted on 6/6/08 for Richmond.com (http://www.richmond.com/movies/24481)

One of my goals as a reviewer is to clearly and efficiently state my opinion on a movie. As such, let me sum up "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" in two sentences.

1. This "comedy" is the worst flick of the year so far.

2. It's lowest common denominator filmmaking, and I would rather watch late-night public access TV with my eyelids stapled shut while being water-boarded than sit through this movie again.

The plot, if you can call it that, focuses on the Zohan (Adam Sandler), Mossad's top agent, who fakes his death and defects to New York City in order to become a hair-stylist under the alias "Scrappy Coco." If that last bit made you chuckle, then this is the movie for you, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I don't like to get this hostile over cinema. With regard to movie preferences, "to each their own," I've always thought. But this flick is so bad I have to seriously question the livelihood of those who can enjoy it. This isn't one of those movies you have to shut your brain off to enjoy. I can deal with those. This is a "You Must Be This Brain-Damaged to Ride" kind of flick. And those are rare.

But you know what? So is Ebola, and no one goes around recommending that either.

"You Don't Mess With The Zohan" would be offensive if it weren't so stupid. You've got the entire Israeli/Palestinian conflict played solely for lowbrow laughs; those two ethnic groups speak in indecipherable accents and prance around like third-rate Borats.

Male hairdressers are automatically assumed to be gay, and if they're not, the other characters mock their sexuality incessantly. If there was any real humor or craft to this stuff, it could be funny, but here it's all delivered with the crassness of an exceptionally dirty-minded eleven-year old.

The one saving grace of the flick is that, in the real world, people might find this stuff offensive, and no element of Sandler's flick occupies the real world as we know it.

I'm used to a certain degree of surreal non-sequitors when dealing with an Adam Sandler movie (heck, Chris Farley making out with the imaginary penguin in "Billy Madison" is still one of the funniest things I've ever seen), but this time he just goes overboard. Terrorists with their own fast food chains? An Israel stuck in Miami Beach culture, circa 1984? International Hacky-Sack Tournaments?

Take that, and couple it with the same four jokes repeated ad nauseum. Here's what I imagine the script looked like for this one: Stupid setup. Hummus joke. Bizarre character. Reference to Sandler's genitals. "Wacky" pratfalls. Gay joke. Shot of Sandler pleasuring an old woman. Occasionally toss in random cameo star (Michael Buffer and Dave Matthews, I'm looking at you two). Repeat over the course of a soul-deadening 113 minutes.

Ho ho. That's comedy gold, I tell you.

Really? Is the comedy world this starved for ideas? No character in this movie comes close to displaying authentic human behavior. And if you can't connect with any of the characters or their situations, then…well…lots of luck to you.

I was done with this one about five minutes in, after the third shot of Sandler catching a foreign object in his butt cheeks. Unfortunately, that would not be the last time that joke appeared in the movie.

More than anything, the biggest crime of "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" is that it just isn't funny. I laughed at one joke. Gently chuckled at another. Smiled at a third. That's three jokes in two hours. It's the filmic equivalent of waking up in the hospital to hear the doctor tell you that you survived the car crash, but they had to take your legs.

It's a real shame, considering the talent behind the movie. Along with Sandler, Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel co-wrote the script. Apatow's a god, and Smigel comes pretty close (he's the creator of Triumph the Insult Dog and has written some classic SNL skits like "Canteen Boy"). Even the great John Turturro plays the villain.

I love Adam Sandler, too, and not just the pretentious artsy fellow from "Reign Over Me" and "Punch-Drunk Love." "Billy Madison," "Happy Gilmore," "The Waterboy," "Mr. Deeds," I can watch these over and over again, and I laugh my butt off every time. I am an Adam Sandler fan.

And he, like everyone else associated with the flick, is terrible. Just dreadful.

If we get a movie this bad this early in the year, I shudder at what the coming months will bring. This is a truly wretched film. I can't be more blunt than that.

As a comedy about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the best I can say about it is that it's about as funny as "Munich."

No, "Munich" was a little funnier.

"No Country for Old Men" Review

-Originally posted on 11/21/07 for Richmond.com (http://www.richmond.com/movies/23026)

Here's the thing: perfection's hard to come by. Calling a movie "perfect," to me, reeks of massive overstatement — no person is perfect, so how can a movie, which is made by people, possibly be?

I bring this up because I'm very tempted to call "No Country for Old Men" perfect. Howard Hawks once defined a great movie as having "three good scenes, no bad ones." "No Country" doubles that formula. There's not a false note in the whole flick, a violent, spare neo-noir/Western about Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Texas hunter who, after stumbling upon a lot of dead bodies and even more money, is pursued by both a world-weary lawman (Tommy Lee Jones) and an assassin named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who might just as well be called the Angel of Death.

The ways in which these three men collide with one another make for the most exciting, profound, and deeply disturbing film experience I've had all year. But I'm still loath to use "perfect." So, here are some superlatives I feel more confident in dropping.

An adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, "No Country for Old Men," the film is that rare bird: a literary adaptation that actually improves on terrific source material. I'm slightly biased here — I think McCarthy is the greatest living American writer, and "No Country for Old Men" is the book that got me hooked on his work.

But in translating it to film, writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen have done something rather wonderful. They've nailed the feel of the novel, for one. There are sequences in the flick, Moss' discovery of the money, or Chigurh's introduction, for example, that play out exactly how I imagined they would.

But they've also managed to streamline the novel, highlighting and elucidating themes that McCarthy's lean, tough prose made deliberately elusive. The result is a narratively richer and supremely confident piece of filmmaking, with the Coen brothers expertly modulating every beat.

In many ways, this doesn't feel like a traditional caper from the brothers. Most of their staples — kinetic camerawork, heavily stylized dialogue and supporting characters strange enough to be second-stringers for the cast of "Freaks" — are missing.

We get little reminders here and there: in the intensity of the violence, in some of the exchanges between Moss and his deputy (a very funny Garrett Dillahunt, from "Deadwood" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") or in the memorably odd appearances by a mariachi band and a border-patrol cop at the most incongruous of moments, but overall, the Coens are markedly restrained.

Guided by Roger Deakins' career-best cinematography (who's worked with the Coens since 1991's "Barton Fink" and also shot "In the Valley of Elah" and "The Assassination of Jesse James …" this year), they let scenes unfold in real time, often with very little dialogue and no music whatsoever — maybe 10 words are spoken on-screen in the flick's spellbinding first 25 minutes.

This doesn't feel like a copout. Rather, their restraint is proof-positive of the confidence they have in McCarthy's novel, and it allows them to dazzle with peerless cinematic craft. This flick is a masterpiece of formal construction, hearkening back to the minimalist thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville.

The Coen brothers have made some of the most enduring flicks of recent years: "Blood Simple," "Raising Arizona," "Miller's Crossing," "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski." Here, they've outdone themselves — "No Country for Old Men" is their masterpiece, the best film they've ever made.

And three actors doing some of the best work of their careers headline it. That's not to knock the rest of the cast — everybody in the supporting cast does good work, particularly Woody Harrelson as a wise-ass bounty hunter and Kelly McDonald as Moss' sweet wife (McDonald has maybe the most affecting scene in the flick. You'll know it when you see it). But without Bardem, Brolin and Jones, the flick wouldn't work as well.

Bardem is getting the most attention, and Lord knows, he deserves it; his Chigurh is both an indelible Coen creation (right up there with The Dude from "The Big Lebowski" and Officer Marge from "Fargo") and the most memorable screen psycho since Hannibal Lecter. The Best Supporting Actor Award is going to this man next year, mark my words.

Far less showy, but just as impressive, are Brolin and Jones. This is the year of Josh Brolin, and Llewellyn Moss is the third, and best, "great" performance the ex-Goonie has turned in (just behind his Detective Trupo in "American Gangster" and Doctor Block in "Planet Terror"). Brolin is effortlessly charismatic and likeable in what could be a fairly standard variation on "The Fugitive" archetype — we're rooting for him every step of the way, even as his actions directly and indirectly result in horrible bloodshed and carnage.

As Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, Jones is wonderful, prickly and funny and deeply sad and far more interesting here than in the over-wrought "In the Valley of Elah" (also featuring Brolin). It's his best work since the original "Men in Black." As a character … well, that's a bit more tricky. Bell is both the most and least important character in the flick. That sounds odd, I know, but if you think of it as a Greek tragedy where the protagonist is a member of the chorus, you're on the right track.

It's Jones' character that ultimately gives the flick its greatness. For about an hour and 45 minutes, "No Country for Old Men" is just a crime thriller. It's a ridiculously well made and intense example of the genre (and the closest the Coen brothers have ever come to making a full-bore action movie), but there's not a whole lot separating it from a potboiler by someone like James M. Cain or Elmore Leonard.

And then, something … changes. I wouldn't dream of spoiling it, but it's that change that elevates the flick above and beyond its genre trappings. Let's just say that the flick works on two levels: it's both highly realistic and visceral and highly allegorical and contemplative.

McCarthy, and by extension the Coen brothers, have far more on their minds than a robust genre exercise; they're deeply unsettled by the casual atrocities of the world today, and the last 15 minutes of the flick bring that unease to light, without being preachy or didactic in the slightest. The tone becomes meditative, elegiac. And before our eyes, this little crime thriller has morphed into something far rarer and impressive: a brutal and poetic ode to nihilism, all reflected through the troubled and compassionate eyes of Sheriff Bell.

As a movie fan, I wish every film could be as good as "No Country for Old Men." It's immaculately crafted in every department, thought provoking, and genuinely exciting. I'm still not sure if I can call it "perfect," but I can, with all certainty, say this: it's the best American film I've seen all year.

"The Darjeeling Limited" Review

-Originally posted 10/26/07 for Richmond.com (http://www.richmond.com/movies/22916)

For those of you who go see Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited," the good news is you'll get to see his brilliant short film, "Hotel Chevalier," projected before the main feature. After some controversy, Fox Searchlight has agreed to attach it to all prints of the film, and it's maybe the best thing Anderson's ever made.

This spare, evocative piece about the final coupling between Jack Whitman (Jason Schwartzman) and his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) works in ways you don't expect; it's dry and passionate, funny and somber. Plus, Portman looks like Jean Seberg from "Breathless," and she has one of the best lines I've heard in a movie all year. It's not fit for print here, but you'll know it when you hear it.

I loved all 11 minutes of "Hotel Chevalier" — it shows Anderson at the top of his game and suggests a new maturity and depth of feeling that we haven't really seen from him.

The bad news is that you can see "Hotel Chevalier" for free online without having to suffer through the feature length film that follows.

"The Darjeeling Limited" is, for me, the biggest disappointment of the year. I love Wes Anderson something fierce. "Bottle Rocket" is one of the great debut flicks of all time, and both "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" are, in my opinion, two perfect films.

His last film, 2004's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," didn't live up to the heights of the previous three, but the stripped-down and whimsical "Darjeeling" seemed, on paper, to be a step in the right direction — the feuding Whitman siblings, Francis, Peter, and Jack (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Schwartzman again) take a picaresque trip to India to reconnect with each other and find spiritual grace after the death of their father, even if attempting to do so pulls them further apart. Good stuff, right?

Wrong. This is Anderson's worst flick, a visually stunning yet emotionally muddled yarn that isn't half as profound or funny as it thinks it is. I'm even having a hard time believing this is Anderson's work; it feels like a subpar imitation by an ardent and untalented admirer.

Other than the beautiful Indian locales and some choice musical cuts (but nothing as good as Anderson's use of "Ooh-La-La" in "Rushmore" or "These Days" in "The Royal Tenenbaums"), there's nothing noteworthy about this flick, save for the fact that:

1. It made me appreciate "The Life Aquatic" so much more. That flick may not have the emotional resonance of Anderson's other work, but it's creative and aggressively quirky and odd enough to at least be consistently interesting (and it loves David Bowie obsessively, just like I do. So, there's that too).

2. It gave me a film experience I've never had before. About a third of the way through, during the brothers' excursion into a bazaar in India, when the movie was just "boring" and not "bad," I began to sense that that it would grow more horrible as it went on, and I wanted out of the theater. Not because I was offended at what I'd seen, but because I was worried I would be offended at what was to come. I have such respect for Anderson that I wanted to leave the theater with what few good memories I had of the flick to that point. I stayed. I shouldn't have.

If I wasn't clear enough, Anderson's really off his game here. The whole movie is unfocused and dull — it's only 91 minutes, but feels three times as long because nothing of interest happens to characters we don't care about. You'd think a flick with rampant drug abuse, poisonous snakes, amorous bathroom interludes, religious epiphanies, and a man-eating Bengal tiger would be exciting, and you'd be right, normally, but Anderson works his hardest to make it not so in this flick. I suppose that's not solely his fault; the three lead performances are so unlikable and irritating that you begin to actively seek ill will to befall them.

I like Wilson, Brody, and Schwartzman a lot, but they play such unredeemable jerks here that you almost can't care about them. You can make a movie about a jackass and have it work. Anderson did it with Gene Hackman as Royal in "The Royal Tenenbaums." That's Hackman's best performance: a selfish, bitter, terrible father and husband who's also wonderfully funny and charismatic. He's magnetic in the part, and so we're with him even as he nonchalantly destroys the lives of those around him.

Maybe it's the writing, maybe the acting, probably it's both, but the Whitman siblings don't have that essential charm to undercut their meanness. They're just petty and cruel and when they do have a change of heart, it comes out from nowhere, and nothing we've seen up to that point suggests they're capable of having one.

Acting-wise, Brody's bland and uninspired, Schwartzman's just terrible, mannered and posturing his way through the role, and though Wilson fares best, I can't help but feel it's because his character's troubles uncomfortably mirror his real-life problems.

But wait! There's more! The dry, arch humor that Anderson's known for is present, except the material's a) not funny here and b) it's far too arch and dry, like it's being delivered in a vacuum where no humor can thrive.

I've never seen so many laugh lines go so flat. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the only places where the humor does work. Still, that's small potatoes compared to Anderson's insistence on instilling profundity in the flick, which is flat-out offensive. He needs his flick to matter, and so he throws in a completely random and unearned tragedy at the halfway point to give his flick significance. It's insulting in its contrivance, it ends up wasting the talents of the great Indian actor Irfan Kahn (so good in "The Namesake" and "A Mighty Heart"), and what's worse, it leeches out the humor from this already-unfunny flick.

I wonder if the irony of making a meaningless flick about three characters searching for meaning was lost on Anderson. Hmm … something to ponder. Throw in an ending that feels longer than the 37 ones in "Return of the King," and the reducing of Anderson vets Bill Murray and Angelica Huston to symbolic cameos, and I was ready to Ambien myself out of the screening, had I the resources.

Furthermore, if ever you needed concrete proof that breaking with Owen Wilson as a writing partner has hurt Anderson's films, look no further. Not only is the script here the weakest Anderson's written (co-penned by Schwartzman and Roman Coppola), but after "The Royal Tenenbaums (the last flick he wrote with Wilson)," Anderson's work has evidenced a growing and unpleasant elitism.

His first three films favored the underdog — Dignan in "Bottle Rocket," Max in "Rushmore," and Royal in "The Royal Tenenbaums" – all self-made men (of varying successes) striving for high-class acceptance before realizing that it's best (and more emotionally fulfilling) to accept to accept the worlds they've come from, even at the expense of wealth, love, and privilege.

Now, the Whitman brothers are the upper-crust elite, and they want the underdog (as represented by India) to accept them. I call B.S., and I suspect it's the result of Anderson's personal identification with the "high-life" untempered by Wilson's more populist approach.

This review hurt to write. I wanted … no, I needed … to love this flick, and in the end, I couldn't even like it. It's unfunny, meandering and shallow; I can imagine it becoming the nadir of Anderson's body of work.

I still think Anderson's a brilliant filmmaker, but he needs to reinvent himself at once because, well, because I'd hate to picture a world where I began dreading his upcoming flicks. It just hurts to hate a filmmaker you once loved. I cannot abide another Woody Allen.