The 1975 spy thriller directed by Sydney Pollack is centered around CIA analyst Joe Turner (Robert Redford, just prior to his crusading reporter turn in *All the President’s Men*)—a kind of proto-Jack Ryan. Turner’s employed by the agency to read books, newspapers, and magazine and try to find material: new ideas, hidden codes, etc. Returning from lunch one day, Turner finds his entire office brutally murdered and is forced to go on the run. He kidnaps a woman (Faye Dunaway, not long removed from her performance in [*Chinatown*](http://doombot.com/2008/10/20/review-chinatown/)) and sets about trying to figure out how to evade contract assassin Joubert (Max von Sydow). This might seem like your archetypal conspiracy flick, but what makes it resonate for me is not only the still-curent themes (guess what’s the motivation behind the nefarious plot?) but the fact that Turner is a hero after my own heart: he’s totally unqualified as a spy except for his inquisitive mind and the fact that he *reads so damn much*. What better argument for literacy? The two final showdowns, between Turner and Joubert and then between Turner and Higgins (Cliff Robertson, perhaps best known to current moviegoers as Tobey Maguire’s Uncle Ben), the only CIA director who Turner thinks he can trust, are nerve-wracking and marvelously juxtaposed, leading to the delicious ambiguity of the ending.

(I would be fascinated, incidentally, to see somebody pitch a modern-day sequel with Redford reprising his role, kind of like Gene Hackman in *Enemy of the State* or Paul Newman in *The Color of Money*.)

I suspect I’m not the only one here who wants to say something about this movie, so I’ll qualify my post in the title.

Decent movie, good music, great opening credit sequence (by MK12, creators of the excellent Man of Action). As my brilliant girlfriend points out, it’s such a direct sequel that it probably should’ve been called Casino Royale 2: Bolivia or Bust! It lacked the slow drama and high-society allure that its predecessor offered with the poker tournament (opting instead for a brief, tuxedo-clad shootout during an opera), but it still felt enough like a Bond movie to me thanks to the womanizing and intelligence-gathering and such. And, in a way, it’s nice to see the occasional Bourne Identity-style fight scene that doesn’t end with the protagonist getting all angsty about killing bad guys.

Norman Jewison’s Academy Award-winning classic is a story about racism in the south, set against the backdrop of a murder investigation. Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs (Sydney Poitier) is passing through the small town of Sparta, Mississippi at the time of a murder. Virgil reluctantly agrees to stay and help Chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) solve the crime, despite—or perhaps *because* of—the blatant bigotry he encounters. As much as you’re encouraged to feel sympathy for Virgil, a black man beset in the deep south, he’s no saint: he’s stubborn, arrogant, and frankly, kind of a know-it-all. And Gillespie pegs him when he points out that Virgil can’t leave town, because he wants to show up Gillespie and the rest of his redneck police department. There’s no question that Poitier is a great actor, but Steiger provides him an excellent foil here, as the two characters ultimately grow into a grudging mutual respect.

What struck me most is that the movie was made in 1967—just about forty years ago. Even though the Civil Rights Act and National Voting Rights Act had already passed, racism was still highly entrenched, especially in the deep south. Forty years ago may seem like a long time, but it takes on a different perspective when I think that it was only thirteen years before I was born—and at the time, my dad was the exact age I am *now*. There’s also an unpleasant echo of the bigotry [still so prevalent in this country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_8)—in particular, a scene when one character angrily shouts at Gillespie that he had “no right” to let Virgil stay in the room during an interrogation. To espouse a sentiment of entitlement that involves *depriving somebody else of rights* is not only unwittingly ironic, it’s kind of sickening. It’s a shame that we haven’t learned from our mistakes of the past.

First things first: Oliver Stone’s movie about our *beloved* sitting president is not a political film, so if you go in expecting to see *Fahrenheit 911, Part 2*, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not to say there aren’t political elements in it, but despite the fact that the main thrust of the story centers around Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, this is at its heart a character sketch. And in that, Stone succeeds adroitly. It would have been easy to paint Bush as a caricature of himself, reinforcing the perception held by those who already dislike him. But in showing him as a three-dimensional person, Stone creates a portrait of a fairly charismatic guy—who actually *might* have been smart at one point, if it weren’t for all the drugs and alcohol—who ends up in way over his head, all because he wants to prove himself to his father.

Josh Brolin deserves an Oscar for his portrayal of George—he inhabits the role with the perfect blend of folksy charm and cluelessness, tempered with occasional flashes of frustrated insight that he just *doesn’t know what’s going on*: “Why wasn’t I told?” he yells at his advisors late in the movie, as they argue about who’s in charge of searching for WMDs in Iraq after the invasion. Also worth commending are Richard Dreyfuss’s Dick Cheney, James Cromwell’s George H.W. Bush, and Toby Jones’s Karl Rove, all of whom give excellent performances—though make no mistake, it’s Brolin’s film.

There are a couple of missteps: both Geoffrey Wright, who is a tremendous actor, and Thandie Newton, as Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice respectively, spend a little too much time concerned with *sounding* like the people they’re portraying, which becomes distracting. Newton gets a bit shorted on screen time, but Wright has a couple meaty scenes as the lone man of reason in an administration tilting to go to war (including a particular eerie flashback to Gulf War I, where he and Cheney agree that not going to Baghdad is a good idea). Likewise, Elizabeth Banks’s Laura Bush who doesn’t show up until later on in the movie, and seems to be rather ancillary at best.

You do, as one reviewer wrote, come out feeling a bit sorry for Georgie, but such pity doesn’t make Bush any less culpable for his involvement. He’s a man who’s just smart enough to know that he’s *not* smart enough, and that makes him complicit in all the things that his regime does. Worst of all is the fact that the movie deals exclusively with Bush’s first term, which leaves us hanging with the most frustrating question of all: how the hell did he get *re*-elected?

*Chinatown*, Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir starring Jack Nicholson as private detective Jake Gittes and written by veteran script doctor Robert Towne, is one of those classics that film buffs kind of give you the evil eye for never having seen, though not without good reason, as it’s an excellent movie. Taking a page from Raymond Chandler’s play book, the story takes place in L.A. in the ’30s and has a complex multi-layered story dealing with murder, corruption, money, power, family issues, and, above all, *water*. Gittes isn’t quite Philip Marlowe—he’s a little too flashy, too good-looking (a fact that is remedied in part by a particularly famous scene early in the film involving a knife and Jake’s nose), but he’s got the same cockiness and penchant for getting into trouble; Faye Dunaway plays the femme fatale with aplomb; and John Huston (who directed noir classic *The Maltese Falcon*) is in fine form as the charming, controlling villain of the piece. The film’s eponymous location is referenced several times, though not seen until the very end of the film; throughout, there’s a definite implication that Chinatown corrupts everything it touches, leading to the film’s famous closing line: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

I was warned that if I disliked Pitch Black (and I did) that I might not enjoy Chronicles of Riddick, the next in a series of sci-fi movies starring Vin Diesel as a glassy-eyed convict with a heart of gold. Well, surprise surprise: I dug it. Maybe this is just a quirk of my tastes—I did say in my Pitch Black review that I’d put up with crappy filmmaking for a mediocre sci-fi movie, but not a mediocre horror movie—and so perhaps I was more forgiving this time around. I wanted spaceships, laser guns, interstellar travel, and weird pseudo-humanoids, and this delivered. The concept—”half-dead space travelers committing genocide one planet at a time on their quest to Hades-as-parallel-universe”—was much more interesting to me than “stuck on a planet with light-fearing monsters.” And actually, I thought the writing was much tighter here (still cheesy, but more endearingly so), and the visuals often pretty impressive. My only real complaints are that it was too long—about a half hour should’ve ended up on the cutting room floor—and that we’ll probably never get to see the sequel they’d obviously hoped to make.

I probably shouldn’t review Wes Anderson movies. I never saw Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums, one of which is the “only good one,” depending on whom you ask. I saw Bottle Rocket (which was okay I guess), Life Aquatic (which I liked a lot), and now, Darjeeling Limited (which was okay, but my least favorite of these three). I understand that Anderson is all about showing us that there’s something beautiful even in the most quirky and imperfect lives, but I suppose some kinds of quirkiness and imperfection inspire more empathy from me than others. Darjeeling is all about people who are self-absorbed weirdoes largely because they are filthy, stinking rich, and maybe that’s just not a weirdness I’m willing to cut much slack for. (Or maybe I just found it too distracting that Owen Wilson really didn’t resemble his “brothers.”)

The directorial debut of veteran screenwriter Scott Frank (*Minority Report*, *Out of Sight*), *The Lookout* is a neat little thriller that centers around a young man, Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who was left with a moderate brain trauma after a car accident. While outwardly, Chris might look fine, his injury makes it hard for him to do simple things like cook dinner or talk to girls—he has trouble putting things in sequence. After a seemingly chance encounter with charismatic Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode) and a beautiful woman (Isla Fisher), Chris gets embroiled in a risky scheme. There’s a slew of excellent performances here, from Gordon-Levitt, who has become an extremely versatile leading man (if you haven’t seen *Brick*, you’re missing out), and Jeff Daniels, as Lewis, Chris’s blind roommate. This could have been a paint-by-numbers kind of flick, but it ends up being an interesting portrait of a disabled character, without veering into weepy, maudlin territory.

Death Race is stupid fun. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Alien vs. Predator, Resident Evil) and star Jason Statham (The Transporter, Crank, War) were already my go-to people for stupid fun movies so having them do something together is really just an all around time saver.

The premise is explained with a few lines of text that intro the movie: the year is 2012, stuff is bad, people yearn for new blood sports, thus convicts complete for their freedom in the Death Race. Everything after that is cars racing/shooting/exploding. Because the Death Race is the most popular televised sport of the near-future there are many elements of the sport that are simply explained as a tool for boosting ratings, which works as a great excuse for putting crazy stuff in your movie without worrying about whether it makes sense. A great addition for my overall Death Race experience was the inclusion of the trailer for the next Fast and the Furious movie beforehand (4 Fast 4 Furious?) If you are looking for explosions and cars with machine guns this is a fun movie, though it would likely not fare well on Jason’s “Would this be better as video game” test.

Any number of factors might come into play in terms of how we judge a movie: pacing, choreography, acting, narrative resolution, etc. But there’s one simple test I’ve been using privately to judge movies by for quite some time now, and I thought it might be time to share it with you. If your media consumption habits are anything like mine, then time you’re watching a movie, try asking yourself this:

Would I rather be playing this movie as a video game?

If so, then it’s something of a failure of a movie, in my mind, as some other medium better capitalizes on the kind of experience it offers. Let me offer a couple of examples of movies which passed and failed this test.

Read More…