Win Win: So-so

Win Win immediately announces itself as the natural successor to actor-turned-writer/director Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent and The Visitor. McCarthy very deliberately steers his alternately desperate or lonesome characters into each other’s paths, his quiet collisions challenging them to reach out, to make space in their troubled lives for unlikely, difficult, though finally rewarding alliances. But Win Win is where the filmmaker’s tendencies begin to look less like variations on a theme and more like formula—and somebody else’s formula at that. By shifting away from the somber warmth of the first two films into a sort of humanist comedy, McCarthy has, perhaps inadvertently, sacrificed what measure of tonal distinction his directorial approach had previously nurtured. The result is a perfectly likeable if belabored go-for-it movie that may very well get McCarthy his broadest audience yet, though few will likely walk away from it wondering about or even remembering who made it.

Paul Giamatti plays Mike Flaherty, a Jersey lawyer, family man and high school wrestling coach burdened with enough problems (dwindling practice, losing team, clogged toilet, busted copier, falling tree, dying boiler...) that by the time he does something underhanded we’ve already forgiven him. Mike siphons some revenue out of an elderly client in the early stages of dementia played by Burt Young, an endlessly entertaining actor to behold when he gets pissed off. Along comes said client’s grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a teenager with an atrocious dye-job on the run from a bad situation in Ohio. Having just delivered Leo to a nursing home and unwilling to send Kyle back to an empty house (mom’s in rehab), Mike decides to take Kyle in… and soon discovers the kid’s a tiger on the mat!

You can see where this is going. Which, you know, is okay I guess, but it really takes a while to get there. There’s at least one utterly superfluous character here (Station Agent’s Bobby Cannavale, also with bad hair) and a half-dozen scenes that add precious little to the story or stakes, including an annoying paint-by-numbers mid-point montage set to Bon Jovi. The casting of Giamatti’s a no-brainer: save a couple of pep-talky scenes where he strains a little, he’s very enjoyable in another sympathetic shlubby bit. Shaffer’s so natural you almost don’t notice him. Amy Ryan as the take-no-shit wife gives Mike’s home life a little gravity and consequence: she works to fill each of her scenes with some sort of spark. It's clear that McCarthy has a special gift with actors—it’s just that Win Win feels too dependent on these actors to supply all the nuance.

Season of the Witch: some had it coming

After experiencing an unexpected moment of moral clarity while thrusting his blade through the belly of some helpless woman during the smoky Battle of Smyrna, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and his grizzled old infidel-slaying buddy Felson (Ron Perlman) resolve to quit the Crusades and return to a plague-ridden Europe where everybody everywhere speaks English and have gone without shampoo for longer than anyone can remember. Picked up by some eagle-eyed church cops for desertion, Behmen and Felson decide to take an escort gig rather than face execution. Their destination is some remote mountain-top monastery, their cargo a wily teenager (Claire Foy) charged single-handedly causing the Black Death via witchcraft. Thing is, that accusation might just turn out to be entirely accurate, so you could say Season of the Witch starts out as a remake of The Seventh Seal, with Cage modelled after Von Sydow and Perlman after Björnstrand, turns into a Dungeons & Dragons module, pays homage to The Exorcist during its climactic supernatural showdown, while the whole thing could be interpreted as an apologia for the Inquisition, an implication exacerbated by the film’s entirely superfluous, essentially unrelated prelude concerning a conscientious priest who gets iced by an accused witch whose death by hanging he oversaw earlier that same day. But it might be grossly overestimating the ambitions of this project to presume any sort of polemic, even such an inanely misogynist one.

The reunion of Cage and Dominic Sena, who directed the actor in his remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, should have at least offered some super-stupid fun, but there’s an almost puzzling stiltedness to Season of the Witch. Cage seems largely disinterested, even in the bits where he gets to bark or convey spells of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sena meanwhile seems to be lacking decent coverage for virtually every scene, so many of which end with lingering close-ups of hammy reaction shots, that enduring convention of daytime soaps. Scripter Bragi F. Schut—not, from what I can tell, a pseudonym—resorts to medieval melodrama clichés and dialogue so comically leaden as to invoke Monty Python: “Damned fog. Like a veil before my eyes!”

But producers Alex Garter and Charles Roven should share some blame too, given that it looks like far too much of the film’s relatively limited budget was spent on umpteen needless crane shots and abysmally poor CGI, which winds up gauzed over everything from splintering bridges to apparently supernatural wolves to vast History Channel battle scenes. The zombie monks shamble about like puppets—could they not have just used puppets?

The Next Three Days: Breaking out is hard to do

Following a bafflingly superfluous teaser prelude, the first scene proper features two handsome couples of apparent privilege seated round a table in a nice Pittsburgh restaurant, getting into a heated—which is to say overcooked—debate about gender roles in the workplace. So, ostensibly serious theme now slapped down on the table, we already know we’re in a Paul Haggis movie, even if the theme’s not entirely obvious relevance to our story seems a surprisingly loose opener for the Crash (2004) writer/director’s typically hyperactive dramaturgy. What this scene tells us is that Lara Brennan’s a woman worth going the limit for, one both smart and amorous—her public cat fight gets her so aroused she leaps upon her husband as soon as they get to their car. Of course, her husband is Russell Crowe.

The following morning Lara finds blood on her coat. Four seconds later cops burst in and arrest her for a murder we just sort of presume she didn’t commit. Before you know it, Lara’s behind bars and all out of appeals, sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of avoiding a very bad dye job. Now desperately spouseless and stuck with a morose six year old to raise alone, John Brennan’s only recourse is bust Lara out. He teaches literature at a community college, so there’s a scene where he lectures on Don Quixote, in case we didn’t catch on to the fact that he’s about a hatch a plan that’s positively quixotic!

The title of The Next Three Days reads like a fleet thriller, but it actually needs to cover about three years worth of story before those three days arise. That’s a lot to burn through, and the perhaps inevitable result is that each of its central characters, Lara and the little boy most especially, never emerge as anything more than ciphers, mere props in a complicated plot. This isn’t such a bad thing if the focus were to stay firmly on the action, but Haggis, working from a 2008 French movie called Pour elle, has to have it both ways, so we get scenes like the one where we first see John visit Lara in prison. I’m guessing that Haggis wanted to use the scene to strengthen our sense of the couple’s intimacy and John’s fathomless devotion—there’s not much of a movie here without it—yet their every exchange is almost comical in its slavishness to exposition. What we get is somberness without the satisfaction of emotional depth. What we get is a waste of Brian Dennehy in umpteen scenes where he does nothing but gaze portentously. The other thing we get is a thriller that’s 133 minutes long.

There’s a nice cameo from Liam Neeson and some clever twists. Things are most interesting when John’s forced to descend into Pittsburgh’s underworld to collect the necessary illegal items on his conscientious prison-break check list. He has dangerous run-ins with RZA, a deaf pessimist, and some really nasty dudes in a meth lab whose lives we’re to regard as expendable if their termination should facilitate Lara’s liberation. You sometimes wonder if there couldn’t be something in John’s totally insane adventure that might be fun, but that would be in the Tony Scott version, and we already got a new one from him last weekend.

Stone: do you hear what he hears?

When Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) calls upon his pastor for spiritual advice he’s told that god speaks to us in mysterious ways, though the pastor may not have imagined the Lord being channeled through a cornrow-sporting, pornographically minded, trash-talking convicted arsonist when he offered up that old chestnut. Mabry’s a parole officer on the verge of retirement, his last case to close being the aforementioned Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton), who for all his abrasive locker room jive seems to have a good heart and an earnest desire to get out of jail and get his shit together. Stone comes across some New Agey pamphlet in the prison library that promises spiritual awakening to those who listen for the right sound, those ready to become god’s tuning fork. Stone’s awakening comes one day during lunch while staring at a nature scene mural on the mess hall wall.

Stone was written by Angus MacLachlan, who previously wrote the script for Junebug, based on his own play. Directed by Phil Morrison, Junebug was buoyed on a warm embracing of eccentricity and subtle playfulness with form. Stone, directed by John Curran, is far more somber and downplays its characters’ quirks, though it’s very easy to imagine its premise yielding a comedy, particularly once we factor Stone’s wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) into the mix, a talented seductress who's big into the healing power of magnets and aims to boost her husband’s chances of early release by getting cozy with Mabry. As wildly different in tone as Junebug and Stone are, their similarities constitute much of what’s most fascinating in both films: an interest in the line that divides religious practice from spiritual thirst, and in the fundamental role outsiders play in shaping a given community. I settled in for Stone mildly intrigued but expecting little. I was surprised by how deftly that sense of intrigue blossomed and held on right to the end.

Curran’s previous directorial credits include The Painted Veil and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, so it’s no wonder that he seems to take a special interest in flushing out the themes of marital disharmony in MacLachlan’s text. Stone spends much of his first encounter with Mabry boasting about how his wife’s a dime and quite possibly a nymphomaniac, while at the dame time insisting that she’s an alien—that’s the word he uses, “alien,” as in someone from another planet. (Was this picture made before or after The Fourth Kind?) Stone wants to know about Mabry’s marriage, how it works, how sexual interest is sustained over the decades, but Mabry proves to be the real stone in this relationship, refusing to disclose any personal details. The truth is that Mabry’s marriage to Madylyn (Frances Conroy), a tippling Bible thumper, appears deeply unhappy, probably sexless, and has probably been that way from the start, as the film’s disturbing prologue set in the early days of their domestic life clearly implies. This prologue is in fact utterly unnecessary—there’s no reason at all for us to know the specifics of Mabry’s dark side, and this dramatization, awkwardly using younger actors to play De Niro and Conroy, feels like something demanded by outside forces with little faith in an audience’s ability to read between the lines.

Curran doesn’t have the charm or penchant for aesthetic detours that Morrison displayed, but I wonder if his approach isn’t actually more closely aligned to MacLachlan’s intentions. In any case, I don’t think anything he does here really hurts the story’s integrity, and the device of manifesting Stone’s obsession with listening for that magic sound through an aural landscape of Christian radio broadcasts, insect buzzing, and an immersive piece of glassy ambient music from Jon Brion is accumulatively effective. As well, Curran should perhaps take some credit for bringing out the best in his leads. There’s an engrossing chemistry between De Niro and Norton, and a near palpable heat coming off of Jovovich, who imbues what could have been a one-dimensional supporting role with considerable complexity.

I'm not claiming the film is entirely successful on every front, but I worry that some viewers—most certainly some critics—might be put off by Stone simply because it’s hard to tell what this film’s trying to be. I’ve seen it described as a thriller, which feels way off the mark, and I’ve read Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review, which tries to finger at as failed neo-noir, which seems even more off the rails. Stone doesn’t adhere to genre, not does it defy genre in any flamboyant way. I don’t know what to call it, but I think its ambitions are noble and the results substantial… if you only listen closely enough.

Scentless Apprentice

Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) had been searching for the “Prime Merlinian” for 1270 years and in all that time never caught wind of this invention called shampoo. He did however develop a liking for ultra-long rawhide trench coats and other such comic book Goth super-stylings and at some point wisely chose to base himself in New York City, a place where one can go out wearing such flamboyant vestments without drawing too much unwanted attention.

Balthazar was biding time running a grimy midtown antique shop when he first met Dave (Jay Baruchel) back in 2000, but Dave was just a little kid then and not quite ready to assume his duties as savior of the world. Ten years later Dave’s grown into a nerdy genius physics major at NYU, and when Balthazar’s old nemesis Horvath (Alfred Molina) is resurrected from a pillar of roaches Dave’s belated date with destiny finally arrives. He’s taken under Balthazar’s wing, is ordered to wear pointy shoes, and learns how to make molecules vibrate faster and cough up plasma bolts and fireballs, both of which, it should be said, look pretty awesome. Indeed, the fairly seamless parade of luminous special effects in Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is by far the best thing in the movie, whose story is entirely mechanical, formulaic enough that you can take naps and not miss a thing, and whose performances range from pleasant to annoying.

Director John Turteltaub’s been making movies for all ages for ages, among them Cool Runnings, 3 Ninjas, Disney’s The Kid and both National Treasure movies, which I guess is where he became pals with Cage, who repeatedly flings his locks and trench coat but isn’t let off the leash enough here to be very interesting even as pure camp. Canada’s own Baruchel meanwhile delivers hunchy, squirmy, fidgety affectations that seemed fairly purposeful in The Trotsky but here just get distracting and oblivious to the vibe conjured by his collaborators, especially his token love interest (Teresa Palmer). You have to wonder, did they bother to ask Michael Cera?

In any case Turteltaub’s doesn’t give his actors enough space to fully play the comedy, but he keeps things jumping at least, letting our eyes roam all over as, for example, we watch a Chinese dragon careen through Chinatown or a brassy bull bash up Battery Park. Yet for all the expensive location work there isn’t a single scene in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that actually resembles New York in the slightest. Too bad, since all that hocus-pocus would probably feel more magical if it were unleashed in settings that felt more like real life.

Manic repression: Sentimental Exorcisms

There are forms of oppression so subtle, draconian, and fully incorporated into our shared way of living as to press their hoary bulk upon us only in guises of kindness, invitation, and concern. The stifling embrace of altruism. Trevor Spate offers a curious case study. He’s a market analyst having some sex problems at home, which is to say he’s having a tough time working up the energy to perform the sex act with his wife Gillian. Gillian wants a baby, which, requiring sex, only increases the pressure. Trevor takes to visiting a peeler bar to get him in the mood, but his gallant efforts to defend the dignity of an ungrateful waitress—who not coincidentally resembles Gillian, at least from a certain distance—yield nothing but troubles. He’s forced to take a leave of absence, coerced into going into analysis as part of his legal defense, urged to visit his sister and brother-in-law and their wriggling new child in Tofino, of all places. Next thing you know he’s trapped with a self-described reformed rapist with a ponytail who co-opts Neil Young to justify his own neuroses and plies Trevor with experimental drugs that ostensibly produce only “positive emotions” and the most tender-loving desires. Trevor has fallen victim to the “tyranny of sympathy.”

Trevor’s one of several such protagonists inhabiting Sentimental Exorcisms (Coach House Books, $18.95), Toronto author David Derry’s eloquently titled debut, a collection of blackly comic stories in which the Victorian era lives on in the collective unconscious of the white Canadian middleclass male. Stories in which no man is allowed to tend the garden of their own repressed impulses in peace. Stories of men with thorny mom and dad issues, neighbour issues, spouse issues, workplace issues, poo issues. In some cases organized transgression becomes a form of self-medication, but unforgiving society seems unable to appreciate such valiant efforts to take matters into one’s own hands. In Derry’s taut, arrestingly witty opening tale “one of the University of Toronto’s top English undergrads,” employing perfectly sound solipsistic logic, arrives at the conclusion that the only way to fully realize his inherent and sturdy normalcy is to extinguish his compulsion to peep through peeping. “Attainment is annihilation,” he explains. He buys a ladder and a painting suit. He limits his technically criminal therapy to two nights a week. If only he could just manage to see a woman sodomized then surely he would revert to the pristinely well-adjusted individual he and his looming parents know him to be. (In a sly bit of detail, Derry has his protagonist alternately studying The Portrait of Dorian Gray and ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ both being works not only involving sexual repression, but more importantly, looking.)

David Derry, photo by Shannon Bramer

The risk with this sort of material is that the author inevitably condescends to his characters, smugly stacking their often-tormented psyches with so much fodder for gags cheap or otherwise. Derry largely avoids this through writing in the first-person and stressing identification through sheer desperation and what would appear to be a large number of characteristics shared by both the author and his creations. Only a short piece that takes the amusing form of a letter addressed to real-life author Austin Clarke—written by a lawyer convinced that two of Clarke’s stories were based on true events in which the lawyer himself played an instrumental role—seems to stumble through an awkward balance of exposition and the narrator’s somewhat tiring, pedantic tone. Yet the most sympathetic protagonist in Sentimental Exorcisms turns out to inhabit Derry’s only tale written in the third-person. The eponymous hero of ‘The Eventual Eponymization of Tim Pine’ is a Polish-Canadian stamp collector whose washroom experiences epitomize that horror of the log that won’t drown so often described by Slavoj Zizek. I mean it as no small compliment when I say that Derry really knows how to write shit. In the story of Tim Pine Derry transforms an innocent bowel movement into a form of disaster fiction. Here’s a sample:

The aforementioned swirls suggested heavy use, but the water had been clear, and he’s noticed nothing unusual in his advance flush. This time the contents gurgled and started to rise. Back up against the door, he fumbled the lock open, eye on the bowl, and twisted out of the stall with his belt still undone, as the soiled, matted surface paused at the rim before overflowing, just a trickle.

Coach House’s lovely packaging of Sentimental Exorcisms features reproductions of paintings by Greg Denton excerpted from a series entitled Out of Date: 365 Self Portraits. Denton himself joins Austin Clarke by playing an actual role in one of Derry’s stories. In ‘Greg Denton Dons Golden Threads in Anticipation’ a 42-year-old stockbroker unexpectedly becomes one of several subjects—all of them named Greg Denton—to be painted by Denton. The irony that drives the story emerges from the protagonist feeling singled-out and redeemed by an invitation received explicitly for no other reason than his bearing an apparently very common name. Yet, come to think of it, our titular Greg Denton does prove himself a unique individual as the story reaches its conclusion by clothing himself in what reads as one flamboyantly ugly motherfucking suit.

Well, there may be a lot of Greg Dentons in the world, but there was surely only one Raymond Carver. Or was there? Controversy still lingers around the degree of authorship shared between the late Carver and his devoted editor Gordon Lish, crediting with having excised massive chunks of Carver’s most beloved stories and even changing endings, titles and names of characters. My friend Salvador insists that Lish was responsible for what he refers to as “the Carver twist.” (Salvador always places finger and thumb in close proximity and then flips his hand over whenever he says "twist.") I’m not so sure. But it does make you wonder about how many people can claim some part of the person we all know as Raymond Carver. Also, according to Wikipedia there’s also a famous darts player with the same name.

In any case, the Library of America has recently published Raymond Carver: Collected Stories ($50), which offers the whole canon between two covers. These stories remain some of the most influential and enduring in modern American letters, and the nicely packaged collection should make a superb Xmas gift for completists.

Don't worry, this'll only hurt for about 88 minutes

If you’re dying to know what it might be like to see a movie made entirely by robots you could do worse than Surrogates. This new Disney product is top to bottom a sleek, smooth and fully deodorized work, completely devoid of such pesky eccentricities as can occasionally spontaneously pop out of the human imagination. There’s an early scene where a boy FBI robot (a wigged and air-brushed Bruce Willis) and a girl FBI robot (Radha Mitchell, looking rather like Rebecca De Mornay) question a robot while another robot looks on. It’s like an interrogation scene played out between cucumbers, except not so lively. Or funny. Once an actual human or two enters the picture, with Willis receiving his requisite ass kicking quickly enough, things only get slightly more animated.


Surrogates is based on a comic book and adapted for the screen by Michael Ferris and John Brancato, both of whom worked on the last couple of Terminator flicks, which surprisingly weren’t enough to dissuade anyone to keep these guys away from more robot movies. Artificial intelligence is a subject that in theory lends itself to any number of provocative, thoughtful stories, yet it so rarely yields anything above a dim-witted extrapolation of Frankenstein or Blade Runner. In imagining a near future where everyone stays home and has their robot surrogate—usually a younger, blander version of themselves—go out and do everything for them, Ferris and Brancato, in league with T3 director Jonathan Mostow, convey a truly astonishing lack of interest in their scenario’s consequences. And if we can agree that science fiction requires a modicum of plausibility to counterbalance the fantastical, these boys are barely showing up to work. The opening flurry of boilerplate newscast exposition informs us that 98% of the global population is using surrogates. That’s right, Tibetan monks, Bangladeshi disaster victims, underpaid Peruvian coffee growers, homeless guys living under bridges, nomadic Kazakh goat herders subsisting without electricity or running water—all of them are plugged in, kicking back and having their robot doubles plow the fields, get laid, breakdance, and take out the trash. This is when ignorance becomes offensive. I don’t think 98% of the world’s population even owns a fucking radio.

Man, I wish I were in La Jetée, or at least 12 Monkeys.

Maybe a tanning bed.

The story as such concerns an investigation into a murder enacted with a secret zap gun that fries a surrogate’s insides so fast that I guess it somehow gives the same jolt to its human counterpart. Or something. Anyway the victim’s the son of the original surrogate inventor (James Cromwell), who now holes up in his mansion and is clearly up to no good. Bruce decides to rough it and try first-hand experience again after his surrogate is blown to bits following a chopper crash into the inner-city fortress of a band of anti-surrogate insurgents, all of whom, for some reason, are unpleasant, overweight, unshaven, and dress like pissed-off hillbillies. They’re led by Ving Rhames, dolled-up like a Rastafarian mystic, but there’s something fishy about him, too. So we sit patiently and wait for all the drearily predictable plot twists to play out, building to a climax that offers the one genuinely nifty sequence in the whole movie, with dozens upon dozes of life-size Kens and Barbies collapsing in the streets like they’re reenacting that Radiohead video where they guy can’t get up. Think how much better the movie could have been had it started there.

The Informant!: Matt Damon spills the beans, then the rice, and just keeps going

The exclamation point decorating the title of The Informer! gives us a helpful nudge from the get-go that where we’re going is going to be plenty goofy. It’s not a musical, but it is in one sense a hell of a song and dance. As imagined by obscenely productive director Steven Soderbergh and Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, this filmic realization of investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 nonfiction book of the same name—sans flamboyant punctuation—is less a corporate thriller than it is a punchy comic meditation on greed, compulsion, and manipulation. Mark Whitacre, the agri-business executive who secretly collaborated with the FBI in a campaign against his employers on charges of price fixing back in the mid-1990s, would have made a perfectly fascinating subject for a more conventional sort of white-collar crime movie. But Soderbergh and Burns have gone way out on a limb in terms of tone and narrative focus to render him a figure that’s at once enigmatic and strangely intelligible. They’ve taken some pretty crazy risks, and the risks pay off as terrifically audacious entertainment with a toothy social slant.

A large part of the credit for why this all works so well should go to Matt Damon, who in films like The Departed, The Good Shepherd and the Bourne franchise has nurtured a niche for himself via his remarkable talent for twisting his own boyish charisma into perverse shapes. His Whitacre is a golf-loving, Wal-Mart-clad, mustachioed Midwesterner, an imminently cheerful husband and father of three with a big, ugly suburban house and eight—count ’em—eight cars. Even his tics, such as his habit of constantly adjusting his glasses, feel so utterly normal and trustworthy. He approaches the feds as a guy who just wants to do the right thing, so naïve that he thinks he’ll actually become the company’s new CEO once all the fuss blows over and his current bosses are behind bars. But his innocence is always undercut by his evident intelligence. As he keeps reminding everyone, he is the only guy who knows the science and the business side of things at Archers Daniels Midland. He’s someone capable of big things.

The Informant!’s most winning distinction lies in what we’re able to gather of Whitacre’s private thoughts and obsessions. The use of voice-over is inspired. Rather than function in the past-tense as a way of conveying exposition or foreshadowing, Whitacre’s disembodied voice comes to us as present-tense reportage direct from his easily distracted brain, a series of frequently hilarious digressions into deceitful butterflies, polar bear camouflage, German words, and time-saving techniques, into ideas for TV shows about doubles and story of a man who drops dead upon realizing that the man across from him is wearing a tie with the same pattern—but in reverse. These interruptions are brilliantly timed and only seem like non-sequiturs until you gradually detect a pattern evolve that speaks, however obliquely, to Whitacre’s peculiar pathology, his desire to lead a double life. He’s a strange man, one who needs to talk, and listening to him let loose as the contradictions in his claims accumulate to preposterous degrees is an awful lot of fun.

Two movies about old guys: O'Horten, Is Anybody There?

Every one of us is charged with finding our own private balance between staying on track and surrendering to the call of diversion. When we look back, which of these things will have ruled us? Which granted us that thing that we ultimately lived for? The thing about Odd Horten (Bård Owe), the thing that makes him such a wonderful character for a charming little film like the one named after him, is that he actually took as his vocation a commitment to traversing the same route over and over, taking pride in sliding back and forth with maximum efficiency and minimum discomfort. He was a railway engineer, cultivating the Oslo-Bergen line for 40 years. When we meet him he’s retiring at the age of 67. They give him a party and a little commemorative train as a parting gift. A bachelor, he seems to have nothing to do now save the maintenance of his simple pleasures, his pipe and his beer. But without explicitly indicating some inner urge toward adventure—our hero is a man of few words—he’ll use his retirement to quietly cede his destiny to the dictates of chance.

O’Horten is the third feature from Norwegian writer/director Bent Hamer. Like his period piece Kitchen Stories, in which social scientists examined the habits of bachelors, and Factotum, the melancholy comedy of dreary day jobs and career drinking based on Charles Bukowski’s novel of the same name, O’Horten moves to its own quirky and subtle sense of comic propulsion. I enjoyed the film very much. Still, after watching it I caught myself and wondered if it maybe wasn’t all a bit too slight—but that’s a self-conscious film critic talking. Hamer’s style is unassuming. His story seems threaded so loosely as to tear with the slightest force. Yet upon scrutinizing my memories of O’Horten some weeks later, I found that so many individual moments were still with me and giving me pleasure, moments that remain vivid, curious, warm, rich in detail, and finally adding up to a lot more than it might first seem. A quieter variation on About Schmidt, it’s a portrait of life a little frayed and gray but still chugging ahead, still being explored however one can still manage. And it conveys an optimism that’s pretty rare in movies this personal or this artful.

Shot by John Christian Rosenlund, who also shot Factotum as well as The Bothersome Man, another, even more peculiar Norwegian comedy, O’Horten is filled with wintry cold nights that feel strangely warm, especially in sequences like that where Odd exits a favoured watering hole to find people sliding home down newly iced-over streets. The nearly silent nights imbue Odd’s wanderings—into a strange child’s bedroom where he’s forced to spend the night, into the home of an eccentric old tippler, into a car with a blindfolded driver—with a pointed sense of possibility. Things do get precariously absurd, yet Owe, with his soft, handsome blue eyes and that mouth that burrows into moustached, rumpled cheeks whenever he smiles, makes it all seems more or less reasonable. Maybe this is how you get after four decades of train travel and dutiful service, perfectly calm and composed, and ready to go completely off the rails.

***

Are all only children this endearingly morbid? The kid lives with his folks in their run-down family-run old folks home somewhere in rural England, circa 1987. Surrounded by so many souls ambling around death’s threshold, he gets the idea to set up a tape recorder to try and capture the nocturnal rattle and hum of ghosts who haven’t quite found the way out. So 10-year-old Edward (Bill Milner) sets out one morning with his headphones on, hoping to hear transmissions from the land of the dead. He nearly gets his wish when the Amazing Clarence (Michael Caine) narrowly avoids running him over with his magic van.

The encounter constitutes a cross-generational meet-cute between a precocious oddball fixated on spiritualism and this ornery widower, an aging philanderer and retired stage magician driven to suicide by guilt and loneliness. It doesn’t take a psychic to see that this pair will become ostensibly unlikely pals over the course of Is Anybody There? Edward’s bored and desperate for some paranormal action—who ya gonna call? Clarence needs someone to help redeem his tainted memories and confirm his talents, and nothing fits the bill like a young innocent easily impressed by card tricks or a phony séance. (Clarence also needs someone to give him a reason for grooming. Unshaven and under-slept, Caine looks like a werewolf suffering from hair loss.) It’s obvious these two were made for each other.

Edward’s parents however are another story. His mum (Anne-Marie Duff) works her fingers to the bone to keep their place in running order, while dad (David Morrissey) becomes increasingly negligent thanks to early onset of midlife crisis. He comes home one day with a designer mullet to help perfect his I’m-the-next-drummer-for-Maiden look. He’s aching to win the affection of their teenage employee but mostly just manages to embarrass himself and everyone else.

There’s a lot going on in Is Anybody There? though rest assured everything fits all too neatly into the thematic thrust of Peter Harness’ script, which tries to balance the macabre with saccharine whimsy, though the latter wins out by a long shot. It’s cheerier territory for Boy A director John Crowley, but his approach simply feels more generic. The saving grace is the cast, and Caine’s elderly Alfie does have his moments, such as the lovely little scene where the old atheist whispers his dead wife’s name in the mirror with the sad flicker of a hope that she might answer. Milner’s not excessively ingratiating, yet he’s saddled with a character whose journey isn’t as compelling as his starting point, which is simply to say he was more interesting when he was just a troubled tyke and not the prop of an over-eager screenwriter. (And really, what kind of a name for a little kid is Bill Milner?) Both Duff and Morrissey shine in their surprisingly well-drawn supporting characters, yet here too, their happy ending feels annoyingly pushy. Only the quirky collection of aged residents is overwhelmingly tough to bear, though even here I blame the material over the actors. The sort of dottiness and sentimentality on display in their scenes careens between flabby farce and the sort of sap you’d expect from religious programming.

Bruising my religion: Year One shows daring, lacks bite

It’s left ambiguous as to whether the forbidden fruit consumed by portly Paleolithic hunter Zed (Jack Black) near the start of Year One actually bestow its eaters with divine knowledge. But it’s worth noting that after gobbling these honey-dipped orbs, which resemble Christmas tree ornaments and seem to possess hallucinogenic properties, Zed will question his people’s most deeply rooted beliefs, invent applause, and resolve a riot that threatens to topple Sodom. (He’ll also, apparently, travel through time.) Zed’s exile from his brethren may not lead him to found his promised “Muscle Tribe of Danger and Excellence,” but with the aid of his slight young sidekick Oh (Michael Cera), he will be present for a numerous quasi-historical events such as Cain’s slaying of Abel, the ideation of circumcision, and Abraham’s near-slaying of Isaac, the sacrifice prevented not by God’s intervention but Zed’s. It’s no wonder Oh, encouraged by Zed’s precocious doubts, begins questioning the existence of God altogether.

If Year One focused more on Zed and Oh’s pursuit of skepticism and heresy it may have been more satisfying as a narrative while maintaining it’s good natured, amusingly picaresque tone. (Maybe we could have had a smarter, more entertaining and less condescending version of Religulous.) But writer/director Harold Ramis and co-scripters Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg have opted to shuffle almost aimlessly from gag to gag, and few of these gags would work at all were it not for the fun duo of Black and Cera, whose pairing invokes a sort of reverse Quixote and Panza, though neither of them seem to break a sweat here. (Maybe they should have let Black sing something. He's got metal hair and everything.) Whether eating shit, nearly getting sodomized by Sodomites, or getting car sick from riding in a donkey-drawn cart that goes slower than pedestrians, there’s a lot that’s almost funny.

Comedy, especially of the dopier variety, is dependent on timing, and I think if Year One fails to generate the desired number of laughs—the audience I watched it with certainly seemed more sedate than one would expect for such fare—it may also simply come down to basic directorial and editorial choices. Judging from the number of scenes that cut out just as something spectacular is ostensibly about to happen—such as Oh getting rescued by Zed from becoming lunch for snakes or cougars—its possible Ramis, rather than being willfully elliptical, simply lacked coverage. Yet it’s just as likely that the coverage he did get just didn’t serve the scenes. There are numerous dialogue sequences comprised of far too many close-ups, and as Ramis keeps cutting from one to another it seemed to me that something in the comedy was getting lost, or at least severely dissipated in the lack of interplay. But its equally true that the brand of comedy that distinguishes Year One may just be too stale for 2009, a sensibility, replete with casual homophobia, so outdated they actually resorted to putting a blooper reel over the credits, a technique that even Jackie Chan has surely abandoned.

A troubled, nearly transcendent duet: The Soloist

The based-on-true-story premise reads as pretty pedestrian. LA Times staffer crashes his bike, bashes his head, runs into a homeless head case and secretly virtuosic cellist, and hits upon a knockout idea for his column. Good copy leads to friendship, which leads to second chances, increased public awareness of homelessness, and so on. But The Soloist plumbs deeper into interdependence and responsibility than such cynical synopsizing lets on. It does indeed deliver the (feel-)goods, but what it lets us feel good about is failure, fleeting victories, and unnerving ambiguities.

Nathaniel Ayers wears some crazy duds, including a jacket with a patch on it that reads VISITOR. This seems apt as Nathaniel’s P-Funk-hits-the-skids outfits and erratic, verbose behaviour can render him otherworldly to amused passersby. Yet VISITOR can also be construed as ironic, given that Nathaniel’s one of 90,000 homeless people in Greater Los Angeles, a population that may not have an address but is hardly just passing through. Jamie Foxx’s performance as Nathaniel is immersive and specific. He grants Nathaniel his rightful charisma without being needlessly ingratiating. We come to care about Nathaniel terribly, but, despite the misguided efforts of director Joe Wright—more on that in a moment—we're never fooled into thinking we can fully comprehend his wildly fraught interior world. And anyway, it’s not his story.

Steve Lopez is the journalist, a workaholic in an imploding industry, and our protagonist. As their association thickens, Steve seems to believe he can save Nathaniel from drowning in marginality and madness, and this is where The Soloist, scripted by Susannah Grant from Lopez’s memoir, bucks against formula. Robert Downey Jr. invests Steve with layers of guilt and uncertainty that no amount of energy, column inches or phone calls can ease. With nuances that play out with wonderful clarity across his wearied face, Downey’s is a grounding presence. His desperation never makes a spectacle of itself, but rather burrows into his engaging surface cocksureness and flurry of conflicting desires.

Making a spectacle however seems to be Wright’s overriding raison d’être. I appreciate Wright’s willingness to infuse unabashed emotionalism into his camerawork, but there are scenes in The Soloist that, recalling Wright’s cripplingly show-offy work and penchant for bathos in Atonement, suffer from a lack of trust in the material. Wright tries too hard to externalize Nathaniel’s subjective confusion and bliss, which at its worst apes the third-act psychedelic freak-out of 2001. At times Wright verges on rendering homelessness as tastefully aestheticized and numbingly maudlin. On the other hand, the film’s rhythms are immaculate. The Soloist is partly about the transcendence of music, and, in harmony with this, Paul Tothill’s taut, melodic editing feels utterly inspired.

"Please. Help. Jean-Claude Van Damme is robbing a post office!"

What is surely the world’s first major meta-martial arts movie opens with a bravura tracking shot that forces Jean-Claude Van Damme, portrayed by Jean-Claude Van Damme, to kick, punch and jab his way through dozens of anonymous opponents to the sounds of some vintage Curtis Mayfield soul. The sequence just goes on and on, rather hilariously, until Van Damme begins to run out of steam, he misses a mark, and the whole thing literally collapses. “I’m 47!” he protests with affecting vulnerability to the frustrated crew. “Just because he brought John Woo to Hollywood doesn’t mean he can rub my dick with sandpaper,” the rather unforgiving punk of a director mumbles to his AD. A sort of companion piece to The Wrestler, but way goofier, JCVD gives us a fading action star waxing reflective on his own anxieties over struggling to keep up with the action.

Reeling from divorce and child custody suits, amassing vast debt, tiring, both physically and spiritually, of headlining an endless string of actioners that are virtual remakes of the same thing over and over, the muscle from Brussels returns home to lick his wounds and settle some business. But life will soon imitate art, and weirdly. It starts, aptly enough, in a sleepy video club that will soon be crammed with cops, some of whom wear only their underpants. They’re responding to one of the most memorable radioed-in cries for help in recent memory: “Please. Hurry. Jean-Claude Van Damme is robbing a post office!”

It appears Van Damme’s gone postal, though the truth is more complicated, involving hostages, many layers of theatre, meditations on the social duties of celebrities, a really bad and quite annoying bad guy with John Cazale’s haircut from Dog Day Afternoon, and a humiliating courtroom scene where a prosecuting attorney slaps down DVDs and rattles off the countless ways Van Damme has meted out death upon fictive victims for the last two decades. As helmed by Mabrouk El Mechri, JCVD is pitched somewhere between Jean-Luc Godard, Charlie Kaufman, a midnight movie and a cartoon. He bathes the whole thing in this bizarre, ugly, sort of bronzing ethereal haze that’s perhaps meant to resemble what the world looks like after 18 consecutive hours in a tanning bed. Like the enjoyably throwback score, the Dutch angles, or the long takes which frequently fix solely on Van Damme’s face even during a conversation, it’s one of many choices that render JCVD stylishly stoned and indiscriminate. But it’s never less than watchable and utterly diverting.

What grounds all this at all is obviously Van Damme himself, who seems to be genuinely laying his heart bare, slumped in chairs complaining about shit scripts, signing autographs and posing for pics, doing a few high kicks, and flipping out when he can’t make a simply bank transaction. The movie’s key scene has Van Damme drift out of the action altogether for a few minutes, floating up to the ceiling like the hero of Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist, delivering this rambling, semi-coherent, Brando-esque monologue about fame, drugs, women and whatever else haunts the tired mind of a Belgian kickboxing movie star. In some parallel universe it just won him the Oscar.