Lions Gate

Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W.

The early criticism of Oliver Stone's W. has centered around its lack of ideas, and indeed it's a veritable void, another entry in a catalog of fictional films about the Iraq war that haven't benefited from time and reflection.

It is the funniest of those films, and seems the least angry, but it doesn't function as commentary or insight, and more strikingly it doesn't function as a character study, even a fictional one. While the performances -- by Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Richard Dreyfuss, Scott Glenn, Thandie Newton, and others -- are enjoyable to watch, it's hard to imagine this Condoleezza Rice sharing a scene with this George H. W. Bush. She's in a broad comedy, but he stepped out of an earnest TV melodrama about fathers and sons. They don't share a scene, but the glue between them is W himself whose outlines are left hazy so as to coerce the film's disparate modes into coexistence. On the outside, he's a face-feeding, shallow-thinking, attention-deficit-suffering plunger. On the inside, well that's anybody's guess.

Screenwriter Stanley Weiser seems to have assembled the script from notecards containing memorable phrases from recent American history. The greatest hits. "Fool me once ... can't get fooled again." "Slam dunk." "We know where [the WMD's] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." He hasn't put the quotations where they belong in history; he's scattered them into the story like he's playing a parlor game, a cute corpse, not terribly exquisite. In this film, Rumsfeld makes his claims about the location of the WMD's not on TV but in the war room with Bush, Powell, Cheney, Franks, et. al. Instead of waving his hands, he waves a laser pointer.

These aren't factual errors; they're a deliberately ahistorical juggling of familiar iconography, and yet this shuffling presumes little difference between how these people talked to each other and how they talked to the public, which is wrong, dead wrong, maybe even fundamentally disqualifying. Would any general tasked with finding the WMD's sit quietly across the table from someone who told him he knew where they were? It's odd enough that George Stephanopoulos did it, but TV lights do strange things to people.

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Remember that old dude in Jurassic Park who unleashed a bunch of prehistoric beasts by reanimating them from a drop of blood that was caught in the proboscis of a mosquito who'd met her doom in a blob of DNA-preserving amber? Remember when those beasts got loose and tore up the joint, and the old dude likened it to a flea circus he'd built in his youth? And remember when Laura Dern told him that this seemingly intractable problem -- which he created -- was something he couldn't think his way out of, that he'd have to feel his through it, which is maybe the dumbest advice ever given to a mad entrepreneur in the movies? Well, he ate it up. Said, yes, he'd feel his way through it so that next time it wouldn't go so disastrously haywire.

Well, a year before that incident in the jungle, the same ass -- Richard Attenborough -- made a movie about Charlie Chaplin, and he didn't understand Chaplin any better than he did velociraptors. He feigned interest in Chaplin's art and acted like he was going to feel his way through the biography, but even though his heart swelled in the vicinity of the master, he somehow churned out a tabloid biopic of the worst kind. Little did anyone know that Pola Negri or some such starlet was so pivotal in this history. She gets some naked screen time in Chaplin, but Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight and A King in New York -- Chaplin's later films, the first an oddly chilling subversion of his most famous character -- don't exist. Attenborough barely examines the films that he does acknowledge, except to give them a cursory glance and place them into a timeline that seems to mock the entire medium. You'll find no greater fan of Chaplin than me, but it's silly to think that cinema was all about thrown pies until Chaplin alone turned it into an art form. Attenborough's 50 years in the business surely taught him that much, but the token idolatry of his film says otherwise. As far as the plot is concerned, the work is a mere psychological motivator that serves, above all, to bring the artist fame and fortune. I suspect the real Chaplin, who shot 300 hours of footage for an 82-minute film called The Gold Rush, would disagree with that assessment of his priorities.

Attenborough probably could have reanimated Chaplin from blood, mosquito, and amber, but instead he did the next best thing: he hired Robert Downey Jr. for the lead role, and this actor clearly put something more than just heart into the job, something more like elbow grease and I assume significant practice. I'm not sure how exactly he tapped into the contradictions of Chaplin's personality nor how he mimicked the physical performances with such staggering precision, but I remember thinking in 1992 that the movie, bad as it is, might be a net positive if it replaces in the public's mind the gussied up tramp of those IBM commercials with Downey Jr instead. I also get a kick out of seeing the great Geraldine Chaplin play her own grandmother in a small role, but it's Downey Jr. who makes the film more than a regrettable footnote; thanks to his out-of-band contribution, it's a regrettable footnote with an asterisk that reads "outstanding performance."

To date, Attenborough's film is the only feature-length biopic on Chaplin, and while there are several documentaries -- some of them only a tad better than this fictional feature -- the best by far is diametrically opposed to gossip. Unknown Chaplin, a three-part BBC documentary by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, goes into the weeds and tries to divine Chaplin's methods from the footage he cut away. Brownlow and Gill show a nine-minute sequence cut from City Lights in its entirety, without talking over it, the antithesis of the highlight reel that ends Attenborough's film. Theirs is the studied gaze of knowledgeable and still-curious cinephiles who pore over shots like excited archeologists, and their unpacking of Chaplin's early short film The Immigrant is both scholarly and suspenseful, proving that the subject withstands scrutiny and holds an audience even with no mention of starlets and scandals.

Sarah Shatz / Dreamworks

In Ghost Town, Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) sees dead people thanks to a botched medical procedure. Manhattan has a lot of them. Dead people, that is, roaming around with unfinished business, looking very normal to each other, and now to Pincus, but invisible to everyone else. They look so normal that Pincus isn't even aware of his new ability until he joins a group of people crossing the street, steps in front of a moving cab, and startles at the screeching brakes and sudden horn. He didn't realize the other people are ghosts whom the cab driver can't see.

We behave differently in crowds. We're more likely to join a pack crossing the street than dart out alone during a yellow light, because we know the cars are already stopping for other people, because we know that any blame will be spread across all of us. We'll decide to stand or sit, head for the exit or wait in line, by weighing the actions of other people, and for a minute the film seems to have built this common social math into its story: What if one man sees a crowd that others don't?

However, screenwriters David Koepp and John Kamps have a different reason for including the cab scene: it tells the ghosts that Gervais is not one of them. "Hey, the cab stopped for you!" a dead person says. In that slight exchange, the film's trigonometry turns into simple addition, and it continues in that vein to the end. The acute social observation that I thought I saw never again rears its head.

But at least there's Ricky Gervais. He's a dentist, a Scrooge, a lonely curmudgeon. Greg Kinnear is a ghost with unfinished business, Téa Leoni is his widow, and the film's trick -- which practically performs itself -- is to make this triangle line up without using sines or cosines.

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The S&P 500 dropped another seven percent today. Something to keep in mind as you look at your retirement account or whatnot: seven percent of your account isn't as much today, in real dollars, as it would have been if this had happened a week ago.

Vivendi Entertainment

I had to ride six escalators to watch An American Carol yesterday afternoon, so it's entirely possible the altitude killed a few of the jokes. Keep that in mind.

As I sat down and wondered what I was doing, I also wondered how many of the other eight people watching this Monday matinee were people I shared a screening of Expelled with several months ago. Wait, that was in another city, another liberal oasis. Still. A few of these folks approached the film with the steadily declining enthusiasm of true believers, but I have a feeling the rest of us may have been living out a variant of Fight Club. I am Rob's morbid curiosity. I am Rob's counterproductive illusion of fairness.

'Cause most of the commentary I've stumbled across on political blogs about An American Carol begins and ends with the schadenfreude (there's that word again) of people reading its lackluster box office receipts like phrenologists massaging America's scalp. But divining truths from ticket sales is a fool's errand, and reading the zeitgeist by counting beans is easy only if you're wearing blinders. There are just too many variables for a simplistic conclusion. Sure, The Passion of the Christ cleaned up. And in the ranking of grosses for 2004 it falls between Spider-Man 2 and Meet the Fockers. Read them apples. An American Carol tanked, but so did War, Inc. People want comedies that are actually funny, you could say. But the financial reports in Variety often tell us otherwise.

So I had to see it. But I'm not fair. I remember telling my wife this time last year that I could live a happy life if I never had to see, read, or hear another adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol again for as long as I live. Don't like Tiny Tim and the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future nor the ghost of Jacob Marley appearing in Scrooge's brass knocker. Enough. Don't care if Scrooge is Bill Murray or Rich Little or a Michael Moore look-alike. Don't like being told I hate America, or that I'm not from "real America" because I live in a city instead of a suburb and because I don't listen to the right kind of music (which is arena-friendly, radio-ready pop-country). I have a couple of Ralph Stanley albums but, alas, no Trace Adkins. I'll put a boot in your bah humbug, it's the American way. Or a clog. Whatever. (Incidentally, I think this counts as breaking ranks.)

More importantly, don't like watching a comedy that can't deliver the goods. My post-screening tweet went like this:

AN AMERICAN CAROL lands not one joke. Michael Moore is fat! Smells bad! Hates America! NYC ain't real America. (Except ground zero.) Troops!

If Twitter had allowed me another four letters, I'd have finished with "Troops yay!" But I stand by the joke count. I don't remember a single chuckle, which makes this, by a wide margin, the least funny comedy I've seen all year. And remember, I saw War, Inc., and The Love Guru.

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People learning English often say that prepositions are tricky. Using 'at' instead of 'on' can completely undermine your argument or turn your aside into an attack. You have to memorize idioms. There's no way around it.

For instance, today I accidentally typed Burn Without Reading when writing about the Coen movie. A number of writers have joked about the actual title of the movie being applicable to the film itself (guilty), but I think "without" might've invited even more of it.

A few alternate titles:

• Burn despite Reading
• Book-lovers Burn about Reading
• Arsonists in Berkshire: Burn in Reading
• And my favorite: Burn by Reading. Zap!

Lol Crawley / Alluvial Film Company

JimMyron Ross and Tarra Riggs in Ballast (Hammer)

Darren Aronofsky's new film is called The Wrestler, and much of it is shot with a handheld camera that sometimes -- only a few times, really -- stares at the back of its eponymous hero's head as he walks around. It brings to mind Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne whose films -- only a few of them, really -- sometimes make use of this same composition. It's exciting to think that mainstream American filmmakers may be influenced by the Dardennes, but the link to The Wrestler is fairly superficial. That isn't to say it's a bad film, not at all, but Aronofsky's appropriations, if they be, are skin deep. If he'd used a Steadicam for that same shot, we'd all be citing Béla Tarr.

The linkage goes much deeper in Ballast, the tiny, Mississippi-based debut by writer-director Lance Hammer who not only alludes directly to the Dardennes with a shot of a guy on a motorcycle but also seems to have internalized the humanism that drives their style. Rather than use the camera to gawk at an unfamiliar world, Ballast feels like an attempt to live within that world for as long as possible.

The Dardennes are known for using minimal exposition, natural light, only diegetic music -- a quilt of countervailing minima, you could say -- and they've proven that such a spare style lends weight to even minor flourishes. A film's entire attitude may rest on the timing of a cut to black. There's a scene in Ballast that shows the young protagonist sketching the face of a playing card, a king, while his mom discusses his schooling with his uncle. The discussion is happening in the wake of a family tragedy that has left everything in question, including the boy's future. While he and his pen remain in focus, the grownups are a blur in the background, squished by the lens so they look like aliens. Aside from its inherent beauty, the shot seems open to the mind in a way that it might not be if it were just one of many such gestures. But it's unique in the film, and it seems to have leapt from the work of the Dardennes -- who, to my recollection, haven't shot anything that looks quite like this -- toward something that is similarly inspired but also quite new. In this scene, the boy's attention remains fixed on his pen-project while Hammer's remains fixed on his camera-project, which is the boy, the lives of rural Mississippians, the world he seeks to know however an outsider with a camera can. The voices of the adults are soft in the mix.

Hammer's final shot before the Son-like cut to black is a pan inside a moving car that sets the characters on a particular trajectory. This simple, quick camera movement connects the same three people we saw in the sketching scene and elegantly answers a central question, answers it in the affirmative, and answers it silently. There's great pleasure in watching characters solve their problems by standing on them like ballast, and there's great pleasure in discovering a new filmmaker who's more interested in watching the rise than the fall.

Dale Robinette / Warner Independent Pictures

In Alicia Erian's novel Towelhead, Jasira's mother, angrily packing a suitcase, tells her daughter to call her a cab. A suburban 13-year-old doesn't often use taxis, and Erian takes us through the details of Jasira's thought process, which begins in confusion. She tries the yellow pages but isn't sure what to look for. "Cab" takes her to "taxi," "taxi" takes her to a number of choices, one of which leads to a phone call, which raises questions about location and destination.

But on that day, without direction or supervision, meek and naive Jasira successfully schedules a cab for her mother, and her pride at having run this gauntlet is tamped down by parents who don't even know the gauntlet exists.

Most of the trials in Erian's novel aren't about calling for cabs. They're sexual in nature, and they involve various predators who swarm around Jasira, and while Alan Ball includes many of these trials in his awkward new film based on the book, he's omitted the one about the cab. More importantly, he's omitted -- or failed to convey -- the all-important sense of wonder and trepidation that a young person can feel solely because her view of the world is limited by lack of experience. The episode with the cab mirrors a dozen others that would -- and do, in the film -- lean toward the lurid and titillating when stripped of the child's logic.

Ball has recorded the motions but none of the understanding, and his heavy-handed direction punches up each character's cartoonish traits while eliminating any nuance. So Jasira's father is a racist, and the woman next door is a nosy bitch. I get the feeling that even Ball didn't intend those simplistic characterizations, but that's what clumsy direction will do to a story full of minefields.

I don't have the census in front of me, so I don't know the exact number of presidential campaign managers who currently reside in the U.S., but given the television coverage of the election it must be millions, which explains why so many news programs are aimed at people who want to know what "works," what statements "connected" with Merkins, how a particular candidate can move her numbers, what sorts of attacks a candidate is likely to make in the coming week, and how his actions will be seen by potential voters.

Millions of campaign managers. Or perhaps just a handful who have such deep pockets and voracious TV-viewing habits that news programs can't afford to ignore them. Advertisers are known to covet this handful, hence the many ads for shit shovels.

Millions of campaign managers. Or a deep-pocketed few. Either way, I feel left out since I'm merely a voter. I realize I'm not in their target market, but I had trouble finding a weekend yak show that could help me evaluate the candidates and their stated plans.

Focus Features

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Brad Pitt shooting Burn After Reading

If there's a trait I hate to see in a film critic it's the willingness to dismiss with little thought a film that doesn't immediately reveal itself. So when I sense that tendency in myself, I feel a little guilty.

Take the Coen brothers. I was a fan in college but eventually decided that I'd seen all their tricks and lost interest. College seems like the right age to appreciate their stuff, and while I always wished they'd attempt something a little more ambitious with their obvious gifts, that mythical film has never materialized. I kept watching their movies up through Intolerable Cruelty, the one with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the one with the asthma inhaler gag, the one with the rapid fire conversations that -- I remember noting -- I'd like to watch again one day, separate from the rest of the film, if possible.

But it was the last straw. The Coens were no longer an auto-see. I skipped The Ladykillers.

Even No Country for Old Men, which I watched in the ritzy digs of Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival, felt to me like an exercise of their technical abilities -- their way with storytelling mechanics more than anything else -- and an exercise that sustained a good hour before it drifted into pretensions I didn't believe.

But after a quick dismissal and the subsequent guilt, I gave it more effort. Everyone else was. It seemed only fair. Revisiting No Country for Old Men didn't turn me around, but it reminded me that their exceptionally well-crafted films do offer certain pleasures, like the pleasure of releasing a shoelace from its knot. But when the knot seems to exist for its own sake, when it seems to have been created only for me to unravel -- gee, thanks -- I'm inclined to use the scissors and get it over with.

Burn After Reading isn't generating the same critical dialogue that No Country for Old Men did, for whatever reason. As our sample of quotes in the grid attest (which are not, of course, representative of the universe of criticism; they're just our faves), this one is disappointing to many people who see it as the return to a lesser form. Me, I'm not sure they ever strayed very far.

But when Michael Sicinski, Mike D'Angelo, Victor Morton, and Karina Longworth actually sort of agree that Burn After Reading has merits and find plenty to roll around in (a couple of them placing it among their favorite films of the year!), maybe it's worth a little more time, even while steeling myself against the the aroma that's always steaming from the Coens stew: that we the viewers -- and especially we the critics -- are one of the joke's many butts. To bark in all caps at the idiocy of other reviewers, to complain that some of the film's detractors in Toronto* were "people who like to spend a lot of time bitching," is reminiscent of its own noisiest characters.

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