Dreamworks

Let's suppose for a minute that it's OK for a movie to be completely, flat-out, sponge-brained preposterous.

A woman rings up Shia LaBeouf, tells him the FBI will be at his door in 3, 2, 1 -- boom -- enter the FBI. This woman continues to be prescient, wait, not just prescient but able to control every object in Chicago that runs on 'lectricity. She can dial any phone, swing any crane, and reverse any El. She can put messages on the screens at McDonald's, flip the traffic lights to Mr. LaBeouf's favor, and dispense orders from the FBI's fax machine. I bet she could even update your Facebook status without your knowledge. She's just that connected.

Fine. Let's accept that. She rings up Mr. LaBeouf -- Jerry, a regular guy who works at Copy Central -- to tell him that he's "been activated," which is a euphemism for being framed by a disembodied, preternaturally connected female voice. Jerry is to meet up with Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) who's been comparably activated. The voice tells them to drive to such and such and do something, and since they're running from the FBI, having been framed, this trip involves not a leisurely drive but a massive car chase, shown with such fast cutting that I began to feel somewhat activated myself by the end of the first big crash-up.

Here's my problem. In real life, a menace that's everywhere and unescapable would be terrifying. But in movies, it's the locatable killer who generates more suspense. A man with an axe is bound by the laws of physics, so our minds calculate where he might be. Behind the door? In the basement? Out back? The killer who's everywhere -- in your dreams, your brain, your walls and drains and household appliances -- has it too easy.

Eagle Eye isn't a horror film, but the same principle applies. I don't mind that it makes no sense. I mind that it makes no suspense. (Har har.)

Thanks to her impressive reach, the voice is able to coerce Jerry and Rachel into a mission against their will and, I must say, one that could have been accomplished by simpler means. Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson -- two cogs in this Rube Goldberg machine -- are the straight-talking authorities pursuing our coerced pair of everypeople. As they were in The Fugitive, the cats and mice are likable in this film. For his previous movie, Disturbia, director D.J. Caruso borrowed heavily from Hitchcock's Rear Window, and this time he's consciously mining North by Northwest (a man is roped into a scheme he cares nothing about) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (a set piece is built around a musical crescendo). And by the end he even folds Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey into the mix.

Say, where is the menace in 2001? He's everywhere, it seems. The HAL-9000 computer has a red glowing eye in every part of the ship. But the points of tension in Kubrick's film, the iconic conflicts between man and machine, generate suspense by constraining HAL's location: the astronauts step into a docked pod so HAL won't hear them, negotiate with HAL to get back into the ship, and dismantle HAL by entering his physical memory.

Eagle Eye isn't so carefully considered, of course, and it has only one layer of metaphor to 2001's two thousand and one. It's built around a single, reasonably clever analogy that says we're all slaves to something that I shall not reveal in this review. You'll have to see the film. But if answering that question sustains your interest, you're a more activated person than I.

James Bridges / Roadside Attractions

When Tim Robbins isn't twitching or faking an accent, I kind of like him. When his characters clinch their jaws or go all crazy in the head, I can't stop thinking, "Now, what's he supposed to be again?" And by the time I uncock my head, I realize that I've missed some important dialogue.

Point is, he's a normal dude in The Lucky Ones, and it makes all the difference. Three American soldiers are on leave from Iraq -- Rachel McAdams, Michael Peña, and Robbins -- and the plot conspires to keep them in the same car as they drive across the US en route to home and loved ones. It helps, therefore, that all three have enjoyable personalities. They're not in the least bit twitchy.

It's clear from the start, from the way these soldiers begrudgingly embark on a road trip in the face of air traffic hiccups, from the way the hand of the screenwriter keeps appearing like the wires on a flying saucer, that the film is a lightweight, quite a change from Neil Burger's previous film, a heavy confection called The Illusionist. But the light touch fits the story, which favors the simple emotional bonding of three people who don't know each other over the trite wartime lessons of movies like Stop-Loss. One of Burger's almost invisible successes is designing his characters as a balanced contrast of ages, genders, and attitudes linked only (only?) by common experience in Iraq and the scars they have to show for it. And a need to get across the country.

The film shifts smoothly between light comedy and light tragedy -- thoughts of suicide are very real one minute but something to chuckle about later -- much more easily than it navigates the hairpin turns of the plot. When you need to plant an RV full of beautiful sex workers at a rest stop, or when you need a tornado to cure a character's impotence, you've lost your purchase as a screenwriter.

But the three road-trippers somehow remain true despite the many elbows in their highway, and even the melancholy ending feels natural and poignant, which half-way through I would have thought to be impossible. The film avoids simple bromides about the war, families, or the soldiers who oscillate between them, yet in a subtle way the conclusion has an attitude toward all three.

Shots and cuts need each other. They are cinema's primal handmaidens. The shots, as moments of luminous accommodation, ripen and expand and are popped like soap bubbles by the cut.
-- Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema

When experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky spoke last year at a screening in San Francisco, he described his mysterious form of filmmaking as a constant effort to prevent his work from "collapsing into meaning."

I love that. Narrative filmmakers work hard to tell stories visually, to make movies that have a literal meaning, even if that meaning is just a sequence of events in an action thriller: one man is stalking another and intends to shoot him. Or: that woman is annoyed by that child.

But half the work of constructing a film's meaning belongs to the viewers. By now, we all know how movies work. We know that two shots in succession fit together somehow. They're side-by-side because they're two views of the same building or two sides of a conversation. Even a bad film may meet the requirements of film grammar, the way a disaster-ridden wedding may still come off OK, if only because every attendee is a veteran of such events. The crowd propels things forward by supplying missing details, by collapsing the gaps into something that makes sense.

Many of Dorsky's non-narrative shorts are shot on the streets of San Francisco, but his goal isn't to create a travelogue or city symphony. San Francisco is just the raw material, so he constantly works against traditional cinematic language and against the viewer's natural tendency to see the object that his camera was pointed at instead of the color and shapes on the celluloid. His films aren't meaningless, but if they succeed it's because, rather than capturing a beautiful world, they undulate with a beauty of their own, one that reflects the world of the filmmaker but doesn't seek to contain it. A film that shows the Golden Gate Bridge may disappear when the bridge becomes the object of interest. Dorsky's films don't disappear; they appear.

Devotional Cinema, which grew out of a talk that Dorsky gave at Princeton in 2001, contains the ideas of someone who's thought about how and why films work, at a poetic-physical level. He considers not just experimental films but popular narrative films, too, and like his visual work, his text is crisp, spare, and gives me new ways to see movies.

The quality of light, as experienced in film, is intermittent. At sound speed there are twenty-four images a second, each about a fiftieth of a second in duration, alternating with an equivalent period of black. So the film we are watching is not actually a solid thing. It only appears to be solid.

On a visceral level, the intermittent quality of film is close to the way we experience the world. We don't experience a solid continuum of existence.

We sleep. We wake. We lose ourselves in thought. The traffic light turns green, popping the dream like a soap bubble. We reawaken to our surroundings. We turn our heads and see not a smooth pan but a series of jump cuts. "Intermittence penetrates to the very core of our being, and film vibrates in a way that is close to this core."

Thanks for following our reports from this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Here's an index of our coverage:

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People used to tell me when to watch TV. They'd print up complicated charts for me to study so that I could always be in the favor of their dictates. Thursday night at 8:00pm. Be there. We're not waiting for you, so finish dinner quickly or eat it on the couch.

I don't travel with that kind any more. For the last year I've been testing a couple of solutions that break the schedule's stranglehold and give me control over what I watch and when I watch it. And they've given me a taste of what I assume will one day be the norm: I think of a movie or TV show I want to watch, I press a button, and a few seconds later I'm watching it on a plasma TV. And I watch it without commercials.

That's the future, but it's closer than you may think. The biggest shortfall at the moment is that not everything I think of is available -- not by a long shot -- but so much of it is that I'm not sure I could ever consume all that's available to me through this pipe. We've passed some kind of threshold.

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FYI, I've posted a few comments about some of the festival's American and otherwise English-language films over at Paste.

Jean-Claude Lother / Why Not Productions / IFC Films

Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale

Every festival goer makes his own festival and finds her own themes. Half way through this year's Toronto International Film Festival -- which wrapped up on Saturday -- it was clear that I'd accidentally scheduled movies about families.

Then in the second half, film after film continued to round out this theme, whether it's because I was looking for it or because a coin flipped seven times will sometimes produce seven heads. (It was probably a little of both.) I'd have grown tired of the family reunions and blow-ups if the films hadn't been so honest and true, many of them not only exploring interesting subject matter -- deeply and personally -- but also exercising film as an art form. Denis's musical minimalism and Desplechin's cinematic vortex, each in its own way, found new ideas in a century-old toolbox. All of my favorites were fresh takes on the familiar, so every time a black sheep would darken the family's door or a shoebox of photos would appear from beneath the bed, I'd smile instead of roll my eyes at the repetition.

In that box of photos, Darren Aronofsky's wrestler finds a photo of his daughter and turns it over to find a list of phone numbers, all but the last one struck-through. The daughter in Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum finds an old letter that concerns her. The house in Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale has pictures of the black sheep's first wife, the mysteriously-named Madeline, now dead. Instead of a shoebox full of photos, Olivier Assayas's film, Summer Hours, has an entire house full of keepsakes, and Assayas considers his characters by measuring their affection for these objects: the stuff of museums and dollars on one end, mementos of sentimental value in the middle, and things that will remain in daily use forever, the past repurposed for youth.

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Anne Hathaway as Kym in Rachel Getting Married (Demme)

With three more days left in the festival, my sense of the films I've seen -- as a whole -- is starting to take shape. I'm posting very quick reactions at Twitter (140 characters or fewer), and I'll be posting about the best English-language features shortly at Paste; I'll put a link here at Daily Plastic.

But looking at the whole lot, if I list them in order, they'd probably break out as shown below.

Some films take more time and consideration than a festival allows, and many of these could grow or shrink in my regard as I noodle on them. I've only been able to see one of these films a second time (35 Shots of Rum), for instance. Also, I've broken the list into sections, and within these broad swaths there's no sense in fine-tuning. I mean, is Rachel Getting Married better than Wendy and Lucy? Or is The Burning Plain worse than Burn After Reading? Could be, could be, burn 'em both, burn 'em both. But there's no time for such nit-picking today.

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I'll be posting quick film reactions to Twitter. Because why not? I haven't used Twitter extensively, but it's like the status feature of Facebook. Nothing more. It might work well for this sort of trickle -- don't want to hammer my Facebook friends with these.

Consider it an experiment on my part. Vials around me are bubbling, and you're welcome to sip from them with the link above. I'll also be posting here alongside J. Robert and over at Paste.

My schedule got a bit horked today for various reasons, so I've ducked into some movies I probably wouldn't have otherwise (like Cold Lunch), but I'm getting back on track.

I began the festival proper with a screening of Claire Denis' new film, 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums). This wasn't by design, but if I could choose a way to kick off a festival, this would be it. Now if there were a way to end the festival the same way -- short of skipping three dozen movies -- my trip would be complete.

Like all of her films, this one confounds me in a good way. I have to learn how to watch each one, which is why a second viewing is so important. The music, much of it by the Tindersticks, is a hypnotic force, both in the theater and in the lives of the characters, and Denis continues her knack for finding gems at a rummage sale of discarded pop LPs. As ever in her films, dances say more than words.

But what put a surprised smile on my face was discovering that 35 Rhums is a strong homage, almost even a remake, of one of my favorite films of all time. There's an allusion to that director's movies fairly early in the film, highlighted (and, in some ways, counterposed) by a tracking shot in a doorway, but that just lays the groundwork for the plot that follows. (The list of favorite films, by the way, is due for an update, and Denis's Beau Travail will surely go onto the list, not because I hadn't seen it in 2004, but because her films grow and grow. That's how they do.)

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