A review for Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together should be forthcoming sometime soon but I keep coming up with new ways to put it off (if you download Sid Meier's Pirates from Gametap, expect at least five hours of your life to disappear in flash).

Like today, for example. There's no reason I couldn't sit down and organize my thoughts on the book, but instead I'm gonna review a few movies I saw rather than, y'know, being true to the purpose of this blog. I apologize. (On the other hand, it's probably foolhardy to try another comics-related post on the same 24 hour period as Jog's awe-inspiring Jademan essay, so maybe this will work out best for all involved.)

COMEDIAN: Accomplishes the more-or-less impossible task of making me like Jerry Seinfeld again. During the height of publicity for the "may be the Gone With The Wind of talking animal CG movies and I'll never know because I'd rather die than watch it" Bee Movie, I found myself wishing the guy would just...go away. Go far, far away. And that's part of what makes this documentary kinda interesting--despite Seinfeld's name and mug plastered all over nearly every inch of the DVD and case, the man's barely in it.

Oh sure, he's in it--the majority of the film focuses on Seinfeld building a new routine after retiring his old set and talking comedy with fellow comedians (with the remaining third or so of the film covering the counterpoint of young up-n-comer Orny Adams on the cusp of his career moving to the next level)--but it's not the smirking, bemused, low-key Jerry Seinfeld we're used to seeing (and, in my case, pretty damn sick of). No, the Jerry Seinfeld of Comedian is a glassy-eyed, queasy looking junkie, chasing the comedy dragon from nightclub to nightclub, working his material up from six minutes to fifteen to thirty, comparing notes after hours with other comedians who similarly look gassy and uncomfortable. At one point, after a less-than-stellar set, someone tries to reassure Seinfeld by saying, "Well, you looked like you were having fun up there," to which he tersely replies, "Yeah, that's the job." And although Seinfeld flies from gig to gig in private chartered jets, and spends time at his house on the Hamptons, it's clear his material possessions don't mean half as much as the strange, ephemeral high of making people laugh.

Although it doesn't go as far as one would want in showing how spectacularly fucked up and insanely neurotic stand-up comedians can be, Comedian nevertheless shows a world few of us are exposed to, and a flip-side to celebrity, without condescension or bias. It's highly OK, and certainly worth a rental.

DYNAMITE WARRIOR: The action setpieces and Tony Jaa's athleticism in Ong-Bak and Tom Yum Goong (released here as The Protector) impressed the hell out of me, but it was the out-of-control insanity of 2004's Born To Fight that made me vow to check out anything done by Thai production company Baa-Ram-Ewe. That movie--an astonishing mix of propaganda flick and Die Hard featuring athletes and poor villagers kicking the shit out of mercenaries and soldiers--stars Dan Chupong, a guy who makes the charisma-light performances of Tony Jaa seem positively Brandoesque in comparison. (On the other hand, Chupong spends so much time in mid-air you're convinced he lives there.)

Chupong is also the lead of Dynamite Warrior, but whereas Born To Fight is like a Thai John Woo flick (and Ong-Bak and Tom Yum Goong are like Thai Jackie Chan flicks), Dynamite Warrior is a Thai version of that other Hong Kong film staple, the batshit-crazy historical wire-fu flick.

Set at the turn of the 20th Century, Chupong plays a mysterious rocket-riding hero who appears out of nowhere and kicks the shit out of corrupt water buffalo rustlers and herders, looking for the man who killed his parents. He finds him, but of course the man is gifted with immense magical powers, as well as the ability to turn two of his henchmen into monkey and tiger-possessed strongmen. In order to defeat him, Chupong needs the menstrual blood of an evil wizard's virginal daughter (well, sure, who doesn't?) as well as the assistance of an untrustworthy hare-lipped tractor salesman.

I was willing to forgive Dynamite Warrior an endless number of sins (Chupong is an utterly binary actor, capable of only expressing determination or befuddlement, making his love scenes pretty hilarious; the plot makes even less sense than my summary conveys; and there's tons of not-particularly-funny broad, vulgar comedy) but for this: the action scenes aren't a tenth of what you'll find in Ong-Bak, Tom Yum Goong, or Born To Fight. There's a lot of the cheats you get from a wire-fu flick, with people flying halfway across a meadow at each other while dynamically pumping their arms, but additionally shots of blows being thrown are cut away at the moment of impact to show someone reeling backward.

I mean, it's not terrible if you like this kind of thing: even if they might be wire-rigged, Chupong does some truly spectacular flips and leaps, and the scenes where things go truly nuts (like when the tiger guy and the monkey guy start chasing a rocket-powered wagon) are enjoyable in a "Hey, you've got to come see this!" kind of way. But by the standard of previous Baa-Ram-Ewe flicks, Dynamite Warrior is pretty Eh--unlikely to be the sort of thing you and your friends will gleefully pass around.

DAN IN REAL LIFE: Oh, god. This is the sort of thing you go see with your wife on "Date Night," and afterward spend almost as long bitching about it as you did watching it. Steve Carell is Dan, a widower advice columnist with three feisty daughters. They go to the annual family reunion where, on his own in the nearby town, Dan meets cute and falls in love with Marie (Juliette Binoche), who he later learns is the new girlfriend of Carell's younger brother (Dane Cook).

The funniest thing about Dan In Real Life is the title, as the filmmakers--apparently test-tube specimens raised in a lab with only nutrient tubes and a copy of Final Draft to sustain them--have no actual experience with real life whatsoever. Dan's interactions with his daughters, the scene where Dan and Marie meet, and particularly every scene with Dan's family lacks any ear for dialogue or eye for verisimilitude one would expect from someone given money by investors to make an indie film romantic comedy. Dan's family, in particular, seem less like recognizable human beings and more like labrador retrievers wearing human skin, jumping up and down whenever anyone suggests an activity and running about the kitchen yelping indiscreetly.

Also, the tone is really, really off in the film, with topics like grief and death and familial betrayal being treated like the perfect jumping-off points for cheap one-liners and awful acoustic songs warbled by some indy folk dude who's clearly spent more of his professional career worrying about hair conditioner than chord progressions. It's as if the filmmakers were told that the film was going to be marketed overseas as Little Miss Sunshine 2 and to film accordingly.

I don't know what other romantic comedies are out there for people to go to on date night, but avoid the Crap that is Dan In Real Life and go see them instead. Honestly, even watching a calf get hit by a heavy mallet for forty-five minutes is a more enjoyable cinematic experience.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN: As a fan of both the Coen Brothers and of Cormac McCarthy, I couldn't be more pleased with this flick which adapts McCarthy's recent novel to the screen (I haven't read it). Not only is it a gorgeous, taut film packed with sharp dialogue, it feels to me like a culmination and canny distillation of many of the Coen Brothers' thematic obsessions--particularly in its portrayal of dead-eyed assassin Anton Chigurh (brilliantly played by Javier Bardem). If you've followed enough of their films, you know they usually include a terse, violent sociopath who enjoys inflicting pain (and they usually have a connotation of being foreigners as well--I'm thinking of The Dane from Miller's Crossing, Peter Stormare's Swede in Fargo, even the German anarchists from The Big Liebowski, as well as Goodman in Barton Fink, Tex Cobb in Raising Arizona, and M. Emmett Walsh in Blood Simple) but Chigurh overwhelms all of them with his awful haircut, his creaky voice, and his air-compressor M.O. Although efficient in everything he does, he's terrifyingly and hilariously incapable of understanding humanity, and humanity is similarly unable to understand him. (Also, he steals the coin-flipping gimmick from Two-Face, so you gotta love the guy.)

Like I said, I haven't read McCarthy's book but I assume Chigurh's horrific larger-than-life attributes come directly from there, as one of McCarthy's ongoing themes are the powerful forces capable of indiscriminately crushing all men, good and bad, strong and weak. Similarly, the very strange turn the movie takes in its final quarter strikes me as straight from McCarthy--not only does he refuse to treat people's mortality with any sort of sentimental escapism, but he's just as likely to end his stories with characters ruminating on visions and dreams that run the terminator between hope and despair.

And yet, again, what's great about No Country For Old Men is that it's very much a Coen Brothers movie, with the ending not unlike that of Fargo, where Frances McDormand's character, like Tommy Lee Jones', can do little more than ponder imcomprehensible evil while taking comfort in the ability to love and be loved by others.

Whether or not the end of the movie succeeds in opening the frame up on its genre conventions and pointing to their larger implications on life and civilization (it didn't entirely work for me), the first three quarters of No Country For Old Men is a remarkable crime-thriller, a violent game of hide-and-seek taking place across small towns and great plains, and absolutely unmissable. I still haven't seen Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which a lot of people have recommended to me, but No Country For Old Men is Excellent stuff, and currently my pick for movie of the year.

Labels: Jeff, movies

Click Here to Read More...

Howdy. Here's what I've been reading and watching lately. God help me, I'm still so trained to write reviews in old school SavCrit style, you get it all in one big glop. I'd like to do something similar about the comics I've been reading, but can't quite tell yet if my week is going to open up enough to let me do so. Anyway, for now, here's what's what.

CEMETERY MAN: Cinematically, I've been in search of some satisfying lowbrow thrills and it really seemed like this cult favorite was gonna do the trick: after all, it's an Italian horror comedy based on a graphic novel by the creator Dylan Dog about a morose gravedigger who must not only bury the dead but kill them when they inevitably return to life. After all, it's got zombies. And boobies. And Rupert Everett at his deadpan best. And yet? Still not very good. It's designed to be a horror film for the Smiths set, with Everett being a proto-emo moper trying to separate fear of death from fear of life, and confusing, as the youth do, love and death, and passion and pain. But not only is Everett about five to ten years too old for the role to make any sense, the filmmakers run out of script about two-thirds of the way through and begin throwing anything at the screen to see if it'll stick, with Everett encountering different incarnations of the woman he loves and being led to greater and greater acts of violence and passion. And then they throw in an ambiguous ending to make the whole thing seem like a mysterious riddle, rather than a cobbled together waste of time. In some ways, it reminded me a lot of Donnie Darko, except I liked Donnie Darko and thought it accomplished a lot of what it wanted to, while this flick was sub-EH. But there are still people who act like this movie was a greater invention than ice cream, so what do I know?

COMIC FOUNDRY #1: There's a lot to like in this first issue and a ton to nitpick, although I'm not sure it'd really be worth your time or mine to sort everything this issue has into those two piles. I think it's highly OK, although the mag should seriously get a good ad rep so there are ads for somebody other than Previews and Rocketship in there (if nothing else, a higher page count would make that price tag sting a little less). And this is probably really dickish for me to do since I can just email the guy and tell him directly, but I thought Ian Brill's fiction piece brilliantly parodied (although I think maybe inadvertently so) chick lit's over-reliance on brand names (Think The Devil Wears Prada, but with comic nerds) and cannily used the protagonist's superhero creation, The Reality Surfer, as a metaphor for youthful indecision. It wasn't the most brilliant piece of short fiction I'd read in some time, but it was effective. More than any other piece in the magazine--and, like I said, there's a lot of stuff to like in here--it makes the case that Tim Leong's ballsiness might really bring something new to the comics magazine marketplace.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN: Continuing in my search for cheap lowbrow thrills, I picked up the inexpensive Grindhouse Experience boxed set which has 20 films jammed onto five DVDs for a low price. Astoundingly, I found a good movie on my first try (although the transfer was, as you'd expect, terrible): Confessions of a Police Captain, an Italian cop procedural from '74 with Martin Balsam and Franco Nero that plays like a variation on Touch of Evil. Balsam plays the jaded police captain who starts the movie off by setting a killer off on a bloodbath, and Nero plays the idealistic district attorney investigating Balsam to determine just how corrupt Balsam actually is. (The great thing about the movie is that it's set in Italy, so corruption is never a question, it's just the degree of corruption). Despite the occasional shootout or stabbing, it's not really an exploitation flick, although it is the sort of film that sounds salacious enough to have played a grindhouse in the '70s. It is, however, a chance to see Martin Balsam play the shit out of a leading role, and to watch a film with insight into the urban Italian mindset of the day. While not exactly a diamond in the rough, it's a highly OK little flick and I'm glad I saw it.

DR. SLUMP, VOLS. 4 AND 5: Out of all of my guilty manga pleasures, this is probably the guiltiest since I miss being in the target group's age range by about thirty years or so. And make no mistake, Dr. Slump revels in its childishness, with cheap jokes built around the size of Tarzan's "dingy" or aliens trapped on Earth mistaking a toilet for a new spaceship, and stories sporting titles like "Yay Yay Wildland." But not only is all this nonsense executed with an infectious sense of joy, but Akira Toryama's cartooning chops are formidable--I'm shocked at how everything he draws is so appealing and visually consistent, be it robots, a parody of Golgo 13, the back of a TV set, or a valley at sunrise: it's all clearly part of the same kooky universe. I've been meaning to donate these volumes to the library forever now, but I find myself picking them up and flipping through them whenever I come across them. They're deeply goofy comics for little kids (and maybe not the sort of stuff you want to pass along unless you're comfortable explaining why Dr. Slump wants to see Ms. Yamabuki's panties so badly) but they're really quite GOOD.

DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL. 7: Probably the first volume where things lag a little bit. Of course, in the world of Kazuo Umezu's horror/disaster manga, a lag means only that after the flash flood is through ripping people to shreds, strange mushrooms begin to grow on all the food and tough decisions have to be made about whether or not the strange fungi should be eaten: it leads to a 30 page section where motivations get even thinner than usual and cruelty exists less for thematic purposes than to keep the chain of events clanking along. After that, however, we get deformed monster-children, a hasty religion devoted to the hero's mother, the new opiate of the masses, and a one-eyed Lovecraftian menace that threatens to devour everyone and everything. Vol. 7 suffers by comparison to the other books in the series as the pace flags just enough to suspect that Umezu is either vamping or winging it entirely. Still, quite GOOD and apeshit enough to make for a fun read.

FLOWER & SNAKE '74: Strange little impulse purchase, which I made in part because they mentioned Riichiro Manabe did the score, and his music for Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster is probably my favorite Godzilla score ever, and in part because I have such fond memories of the ultra-insane Sex & Fury which this seemed to resemble. Turns out it's not nearly as inspired (or inspiring) as the Lady Snowblood-styled Sex & Fury, and instead comes off a bit like Belle de jour if you stripped that film of all of Bunuel's lovely surreal touches and put an obsession with enemas in its place. Flower & Snake '74 is about Makoto, an kink-loving impotent clerk living with his pornography making mother, who is hired by his boss to break the boss' wife. The 70+ minutes of bondage and enema inducing are made watchable (unless, you know, that's your thing) by the novelistic approach to Makoto's character (he's been rendered impotent ever since childhood where he caught--and killed--a black G.I. making love to his mother) and, similarly, a cast that has the (very) slightest bit of depth to the personalities. (And it's pretty easy to make the case for Makoto, traumatized by the conquering of his mother by an American, representing good ol' fucked-up post-war Japan in the filmmaker's eyes). There's also a few shots-- such as when the bloody spirit of the murdered G.I. appears against a blood-red sunset--that are technically impressive. But, generally, unless you've got an annual subscription to Comic A-G, it's the kind of exploitation trash you're not missing much by skipping. Highly EH.

GOLGO 13 VOL. 7: As is the way with these volumes, Takao Saito makes us pay for the awesome (Sweet Jesus! Golgo 13 snipes a nuclear power plant!) with pages of technical research and blathering secondary characters. In the second story, G-13 ends up in a compact piece of gangster noir set in a small Nevada town, with the tale's highlight being a one-page knife-versus-gun fight that's an engaging and spiffy bit of page design. Finally, Takao Saito is interviewed by the charmingly insane Kunio Suzuki who gets bonus points for writing craziness like "Golgo 13 was the textbook of my life." If you've been digging Duke Togo 'til now, you'll probably think it OK.

JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE VOLS. 1-3: The Overlooked Manga Festival at Shaenon K. Garrity's Livejournal has become an invaluable resource for me, and as soon as I read her overview of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, I knew I had to get my hands on it. The pleasing mix of epic scope (several generations of family and friends travel the world to fight a vampire who's taken possession of the patriarch's body and his superpowers; everyone has a psychic power based on a motif from the major arcana of the Tarot deck), astounding dopiness (many characters have names that are lame puns on '70s and '80s rock and pop performers; the art looks like the project was originally intended to be Street Fighter II slash fanfic) and over-the-top gorey horror tropes (how else to describe the fight scene that's largely a man being cut apart by a straight-razor wielding voodoo doll?) make it an entertaining, deeply dopey read. JoJo's Bizarre Adventures isn't without its significant weaknesses--at three volumes in, the story is deeply formulaic (like levels in a fighting game) and there are times when the author, Hirohiko Araki, gets bored or runs out of ideas and whisks his characters off to the next location and the next enemy--but it also takes frequent turns into the inspired, such as the section where the heroes have to fight a porn-reading orangutan on an abandoned oil freighter. So far, the book reminds me of what the early days of Image Comics were supposed to be: product so juvenile and energetic it's irresistible (as opposed to what the early days of Image Comics actually were, which was product so undisciplined and yet fiscally calculated it was simultaneously annoying and dull). I should really call this stuff highly OK, but considering how eagerly I gobbled down the first three volumes (and how much I'm looking forward to the next three) I guess I'll reservedly call it GOOD. It won't appeal to everyone, certainly.

LUCKY V2. #1: I loved how this issue uses the autobio up front to heighten the punch of the extended dream narrative in the back. It's not done in the way that you might think with recurring visual motifs or what-have-you, but through some brilliant tricks of pacing. By breaking the autobio stories into brief one or two page segments, and by continually excerpting her performance of the dream story in the back in a hyper-compacted fashion, the dream story, My Affliction, feels much, much longer and recreates the feeling of being trapped in an seemingly endless dream. It's really fucking brilliant, and makes the issue well worth the $3.95 cover tag. A VERY GOOD issue, and one that moved me from being a casual fan of Bell's work to avidly interested in what she'll do next. (By the way, is it wrong that Gabrielle Bell's style reminds me of J. Backderf's? I feel like I should be seeing more of a David B. influence, but that cover and the use of blacks really makes me think of Derf. Not that it's a bad thing, but I can't think of a tone more opposed to Bell's than Derf's.)

MONSTER VOL. 10: The most satisfying of this week's Viz Signature releases, and not just because it's about 30 pages longer than Golgo 13 and a dozen pages longer than Drifting Classroom. Although you'd think Naoki Urasawa's introduction of yet another kindly drifter (Grimmer, a former spy turned freelance journalist) would undercut the story's narrative tension, Monster succeeds by setting up any number of potential victims to be preyed upon by Johan's evil scheme, the mystery of Kinderheim 511, and all those crooked cops and violent gangsters lurking around every turn. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for long narratives jammed with characters and odd details (the strangely understated and creepy street sign for the Three Frogs Bar in Prague made the whole volume for me)--I thought it was a VERY GOOD chapter, in any event.

MY DEAD GIRLFRIEND VOL. 1: Eric Wight's first book from Tokyopop made me curse the heavens, not just because I'd spent money on the thing, but because the book could've been so much better if Tokyopop had treated the material as more than a simple IP grab: Graeme in his review gripes about the pacing of this book and what he suspected was an imposed three act structure on the story. And certainly, there's some really awful pacing choices in this book that seem designed to drag the story out for another two volumes. But even more frustrating than that are choices that suggest Wight really didn't consider his structure too much in the first place. In the opening few pages for example, the protagonist recounts the family curse that results in all of his ancestors dying a highly absurd death. As the hero finishes up, we see that he's been delivering a school report... and that all his classmates are monsters. It's not done in a way that maximizes the reveal, by the way: it's just done as a standard transition by someone telling a story without much thought for the best way to get the maximum impact from it. Similarly, once the supernatural setting is fleshed out, you can't figure out why the protagonist is so upset about the idea of dying, or even dying absurdly: all of his ancestors, including his ghostly parents, are still around, playing cards and telling stories. In this Addams Family lite setting, death is only one more moment on an unending continuum, making the protagonist's anxiety about it come across as deeply prissy.

The reason all this bugs me so deeply is that if there's one section of the American comics marketplace that should understand the importance of an editor helping a creator shape the material and maximize its impact, it would be one of the top three North American manga companies. I mean, Wight's panel to panel storytelling is good, his character design is appealing, and his art has a Bruce Timm-ish quality to it I really like--it wouldn't take much for someone read the material he has, criticize it constructively, and help him find the best way to present the material, and I get the impression that most manga companies in Japan wouldn't let it get out the door without that. But Tokyopop, like most of the other big comic companies here in the U.S., is more than willing to keep the overhead low, push the material into the marketplace, and reap the dividends, should there be any.

On the other hand, what do I know? Graeme gave it a Very Good, and the book's front, back and inside covers are practically leprous with blurbs from industry professionals praising the book. So maybe I'm wrong and I read this book on the wrong day or something. But it must've been a worse day than I realized, because I thought this was a frustratingly EH piece of work.

SAMURAI COMMANDO VOL. 1: You ever see that Sonny Chiba movie G.I. Samurai (also known in some places as Time Slip)? I stumbled across it on video a few years ago, and it's one of my favorite b-movies for both the elegance of its plot hook and its execution: a troop of Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers on maneuvers end up back in feudal Japan and decide, basically, to conquer the country. Despite being armed with firearms, a tank, a helicopter and other modern weaponry, the soldiers aren't prepared for the combination of their own internecine conflicts and the power of their enemies. As I said, it's one of my favorite action flicks, so I got pretty hopped up to come across this manga by Harutoshi Rukui and art group Ark Performance reprinted by CMX: it's essentially the same premise, except that the Colonel of the Forces instead makes allies with the warlords of the past and together they declare war on the present. (Both the movie and the manga work from the same material, the novel, Sengoku Jieitai by Ryo Hanmura.)

However, while the Chiba movie balanced out the blabbity-blab with ninjas attacking helicopters, Samurai Commando (which appears to be only two volumes long) spends so much time setting up the premise, introducing the characters, and hinting at their backstories, and so by the time you've got gunfire and decapitations by samurai swords, it's too little, too late. It's a shame too, because the art by Ark Performance is dynamic and strangely airless in a way that I think fans of Jim Lee would like: this could have been, like Death Note, a nice little transitional manga for comics readers of the Big Two looking to branch out a bit. But instead, it's a very EH little manga, and given the choice between recommending it and suggesting you visit Amazon and pick up an out-of-print copy of G.I. Samurai for less than five bucks, I have but little choice but to exhort you to do the latter. Pity.

TRAIN_MAN VOL. 1: It's easy to see why this tale of a reclusive Internet introvert struggling to find romance with the help of his online community is wildly popular: it's nearly impossible to read this and not have your heart strings plucked, to the point where I found myself a little resentful of the brazen emotional manipulation. Each chapter gives the Train_Man a minor challenge that seems insurmountable to his sheepish soul, and each chapter shows him succeeding, with page after page of laudatory exclamations from members of his online community. And yet, to bitch about the first volume of Viz Media's Train_Man being sweet to the point of near implausibility is like chastising a teddy bear for being cuddly: that's what it's supposed to do, it's clearly marketed as such, and it's very effective at what it does (I'd be lying if I told you I *didn't* read the volume all in one breathless sitting). It's Good material, provided you've got a weakness for the cutesy, but I can't guarantee you won't hate yourself just a little for enjoying it.

Labels: Jeff, manga, movies

Click Here to Read More...

The first moment in The Bourne Ultimatum I truly loved comes about fifteen or so minutes into the film, when Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is about to meet with reporter Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) about articles Ross has been publishing about Bourne and his mysterious past. Seeing what's about to go down, CIA uber-clench Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) places a call to have both men eliminated. The call reaches a man (Edgar Ramirez) sitting on a bed in a nondescript room, his bag on a chair nearby, and when he gets the call, he takes the bag and exits without hesitation.

This shot of Paz, the man in the room, is indicative of the rest of the film: it happens very quickly; it relies on your knowledge of the previous films to convey meaning (Paz, like Bourne, is a hired killer for the CIA but unlike Bourne he still does whatever he's told without hesitation); and it seems so straightforward as to lack any deeper subtext.

If there is subtext to The Bourne Ultimatum, it stems from precisely that scene and others in the film like them. The Bourne Ultimatum is, from what I could tell, a fetishized love letter to the assassin, to lonely men in empty rooms and the things of which they're capable. Bourne himself is one of these men; a trained killer who, after losing his memory, finds himself locked in near-constant battle with the CIA as he struggles to find out who he is (first film), take revenge on what was done to him (second film), and find out how he was created (third film). As Bourne becomes more and more unstoppable, the films cannot help but create a greater appreciation for this man without a history, without a place, who lives forever on the run and five steps ahead of anyone else. His only real threats are other men like him--similarly streamlined men with backpacks and furtive steps, capable of entering anywhere, killing anyone with anything. The Bourne films take the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald--the nobody with the gun believed to have done the work of mysterious men--and turns him into a superhero, and I find that both alarming and oddly comforting.

The alarm, I would think, is easily understood: no one would like to see a upswing in the number of blank-faced young men breaking into apartments and killing people with magazines, textbooks and Hummel figurines. But I hope the comfort is too: cities are filled with lonely men in empty rooms the world over, and the Bourne movies are made for them, flatter and woo those lonely men with no lives as if they were prettiest girls on their blocks. The Bourne Ultimatum, in fact, makes the connection between lonely men and cities manifest, as the camera frequently zooms in and out on the facades of one international city after another--London, Madrid, New York--similar to the way it does on Bourne's guarded face. And, of course, no matter what city, Bourne and his kin can dash about in ultimate confidence, able to maneuver through it with a speed and ease native policemen cannot. Even more than they celebrate the magic and mystique that surrounds the assassin, the Bourne films romanticize the global, post-industrial urban worker: rootless and without community, appearing in any city to do any job asked of them, these men appear to own nothing but their own specialized skills and yet can do anything better than anyone else. In The Bourne Ultimatum, the non-Bournes are men of color, played by Edgar Ramirez and Joey Ansah, and they are presented as Bourne's equals in every way. When battling Bourne to the death, their fights aren't charged with the fear of the Other, but by a strangely liberating feeling of equality: in the world of this film, all of God's childrens got the skills to kill with a bathmat, a candlestick and a Peugeot.

Now, like its predecessors, The Bourne Ultimatum is so well-made and so satisfying I'd hesitate to link the movie's success to this subtext. Director Paul Greenglass and screenwriters Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi create a movie shorn of any unnecessary detail, and allow viciously unrelenting momentum to take the place of character, theme or meaning. At times, the viewer is one split-second behind what's happening onscreen and then, without warning, there'll be a pause and the viewer will have a second to appreciate what's coming next, and then things accelerate again. It's completely exhilarating, although also a little depressing if you think about it a little bit afterward: part of why you're able to follow what's happening is that so little of it is new. The films play like classical variations on each other and, as well, the man on the run genre. But they're made with so much intelligence and clarity of vision you leave the films feeling both smarter and more clear-eyed after seeing them.

It'd be lovely if this intelligence and clarity was joined to something morally or spiritually edifying, which is probably where my temptation to bemoan/praise/pick at the film's possible subtexts comes in. Still, the Bourne trilogy (almost certain to be a quadrilogy, considering Bourne's monstrous opening weekend) has proven to be a surprisingly sharp series of action films, the kind that Hollywood burns to make more of but by and large lacks the skills to do so. If you haven't already, check them out.

Labels: Jeff, movies

Click Here to Read More...