Christopher East

Insomnia (1997) is a creepy Norwegian police procedural set in a small town above the Arctic Circle.  A pair of Swedish cops, Jonas Engstrom and Erik Vik (Stellan Skarsgard and Sverre Anker Ousdal) travel to the remote town to assist in the murder investigation of a young girl.  In the course of their search for the killer, another death occurs, putting Engstrom — a well regarded cop, who nonetheless has serious personal issues — in a bad position.  The relentless summer sun giving him a horrible case of insomnia, Engstrom has to balance solving the case against battling his personal demons.

Like the majority of the Scandinavian cinema I’ve seen — which is not a broad sample, mind you — Insomnia is a patient film, glacially slow in places, allowing extended shots and silent moments to paint its dark psychological picture.  The relaxed pace, at times an obstacle, nonetheless contributes to the eerie, unsettling mood of the film.  The story gradually peels back the depths of Engstrom’s dark personality, and Skarsgard’s stoic inscrutability slowly melts as the stresses of the assignment build; it’s a subtle but effective transformation.

Overall, it’s a solid psychological puzzler with a distinct visual sense, an effective and well constructed film — it’s easy to see why Christopher Nolan would be interested in remaking it.  (I saw Nolan’s 2002 version, with Al Pacino, years ago, but I don’t remember it well enough to know if it’s a faithful adaptation.)

The Lady Vanishes (1938) is one of nine Alfred Hitchcock films on the list — and based on some its weaker selections, there probably should have been more.  Like most Hitchcock adventures, this one mixes healthy doses of humor in with the suspense, and for the most part it’s an enjoyable romp — structurally messy and tonally curious, perhaps, but overall an engaging entertainment, and an interesting window into the psyche of pre-WWII Britain.

The film opens in an obscure mountain village in a fictional European country, where a number of stranded British tourists are waiting out an avalanche before they can head homeward.   Here we meet, among others, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a young party girl heading home to settle down and get married, and Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a wisecracking musician who gets under her skin at the hotel during a noise complaint.  The tracks finally cleared, Iris makes her way to the train, along the way befriending a kindly old lady named Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who assists her when she takes a bump on the head.  Iris falls asleep with the smiling Miss Froy sitting across from her, but when she wakes up, Miss Froy has disappeared.  Iris begins a search, but it turns out everyone on the train has excuses not to help — some for selfish reasons, others for nefarious ones — and she finds her investigation obstructed at every turn.  Her one ally, of course, turns out to be Gilbert, who helps her unravel the mystery of Miss Froy’s disappearance, which spirals into dangerous intrigue.

The plot is a convoluted sequence of comic encounters and spy switcheroos, and it’s not one of Hitchcock’s tightest films:  the point of attack is late in coming, and it opens at a leisurely pace before finally ramping up to its intrigues.  But it’s a fun concoction, and an early look at many of the techniques and elements Hitchcock would master in later films.  Viewed in the context of its era, the film is also politically interesting, providing some pointed commentary on British attitudes regarding the possibility of a renewed European war — some of the British characters, sucked into the action against their will, are clearly stand-ins for public sentiment during those troubled times.

The Lady Vanishes may ultimately be a better example of a Hitchcock film than of a spy film, but it’s certainly a worthy entry on the list.

This year my M.O. for vacation time has consisted of scheduling it out piecemeal into various four-day “staycation” weekends that give me a chance to get away from the office and recharge my batteries — in the company of my favorite person and my two favorite cats, of course!  Since home is my favorite place to be, I’m perfectly happy to spend my vacations this way — and the fact that it’s both cheaper and lazier is a nice bonus!

This weekend held particular significance, though:  Thursday represented the four-year mark since Jenn and I met at Worldcon in Anaheim.  It’s been an exciting and wonderful four years so far, full of change and adventure for both of us.  We rang in the occasion with a spectacular dinner at our favorite restaurant here in the Valley, Café Carolina.  Jenn’s post describes the meal perfectly, so I won’t try to elaborate, except to show you the dessert:

We filled our Friday and Saturday with food and fun as well.  One highlight was an outing to Dark Delicacies in Burbank, a horror bookshop where Amelia Beamer was signing her new novel.  There we met up with friends and made some new ones, then stopped over at Porto’s for a pile of pastries.

It wouldn’t be a four-day weekend without TV, movies, and games, of course.  I’m catching up on season five of Rescue Me (about halfway through so far); I always seem to forget how good this show is when I’m not watching it.  I find elements of it problematic, but there’s something refreshing about how unapologetic and gutsy it is, and the ensemble cast is consistently amazing.  (I think Steven Pasquale in particular is a brilliant comic actor, and his story arc this year has been filled with entertaining surprises.)  We also instant-streamed the weird Belgian animated film A Town Called Panic, a wonderfully strange, frantic movie I found a little too stream of conscious for a full review — suffice it to say, it’s the best weird Belgian stop-motion animation you’ve ever seen.  And on Saturday night we enjoyed some World of Warcraft instancing with friends, where I got to heal my first heroics with my neglected resto druid.  (If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it…)

The weekend wrapped up with Jenn’s birthday, and I made my first solo batch of chocolate chip cookies — a personal baking milestone.  Not only that, but they look and taste like cookies.  Holy shit!

It was nice to shut down and relax for a while, but it’s Monday again and time to resume some responsibility.  Back to work, to editing, to blogging and bill-paying…and soon, to writing, as I’ve decided September will ring in draft two of Subnetworks (or, more likely, draft 1.5, the last pre-critique version).

For now I’ll leave you with our anniversary photo — I do believe we are as happy as we look in this picture, so it’s a great way to remember a great weekend!

A mountain-climbing film dressed up in spy clothes, The Eiger Sanction (1975) is one of those oddball selections the list seems to include now and then just to stir up conversation.  How this one ever crept so far up the list is beyond me, though; it’s not a very good film.

Clint Eastwood stars as a retired assassin named Jonathan Hemlock (ugh), whose pedigree also includes a past in mountain-climbing and a current gig as an art professor.  Hemlock is lured back to the intelligence world by his former boss in the top secret agency “C2,” a man named Dragon (Thayer David), who blackmails him out of retirement for one last job, taking out a pair of enemy agents who stole a microfilm detailing a germ warfare formula.  Hemlock performs one hit, but the second one looks to be more of a challenge; the target, as yet unidentified, is suspected of being a member of an international mountain-climbing expedition to scale the notorious north face of the Eiger in Switzerland.  Hemlock’s mission:  join the team, identify the agent, and take him out.

Is there a spy movie plot tying together the sequences of The Eiger Sanction?  Sure, and it’s even got some classic elements:  the retired agent pulled off the shelf for one last job…the nefarious intelligence organization with murky motives…heroes just as morally questionable as the villains…dastardly misdirections…sexy femme fatales…a cynical (if not nihilistic) message about the costs of the intelligence world on its agents.  It sounds reasonable on paper.

But is it a spy film?  Not really.  It feels more like a macho ego-stroke for Eastwood Circa 1975, with his iconic monotone, square jaw, and bad-ass behavior.  The plot is serviceable, but fails to engage because it’s consistently trumped by its function as an action vehicle, an excuse to watch Eastwood scale mountains, thump thugs and bed babes.  The performances are wooden, and the script is full of lazy cliches — not to mention casual racism, sexism, and homophobia, a sad timestamp of the more politically incorrect characteristics of its film-making era.

Eastwood also directs, and not without some skill.  The film makes good use of its western U.S. and Swiss mountain landscapes, and some of the mountain-climbing shots are impressively hairy.  Eastwood obviously did much of his own climbing, which contributes greatly to the authenticity of those sequences.  On the other hand, he overuses the wide helicopter tracking shots of nature, and the film’s pace is all over the map.  Interestingly, a massive section of the film focuses on his rigorous training for the big climb.  I appreciate that — most action heroes wouldn’t bother practicing, they’d just automatically be awesome — but it has a brutal effect on the film’s pace.

Meh.  Most of the films on the list at least make a case to warrant their inclusion:  even Modesty Blaise, in its bizarre way.  But to me The Eiger Sanction is rated way too high at #67, and probably wouldn’t even get an honorable mention on my list.  Fans of Old School Clint might get a kick out of its testosterone-heavy exploits, but most spy buffs will probably be repelled.  Or is that rappelled?

As with Inception, I’m tempted to open this review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) with a spoiler alert — or maybe just an “expectation prevention warning.”  I entered the theater with no foreknowledge, except that it was based on a comic book and starred Michael Cera.  The film surprised me in all sorts of spectacular ways, and it’s probably my favorite movie of the year so far; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it worms its way onto my all-time favorites list.

Set in Toronto, the film stars Cera as the eponymous Scott Pilgrim, a twenty-something slacker bassist in need of a few valuable life lessons.  On the rebound after a bad relationship, Scott’s fake relationship with a high school girl is thrown for a loop by the arrival of the (literal) girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).  Ramona comes into his life with a lot of baggage, though — in order to secure Ramona’s love, Scott needs to deal with his insecurities and defeat her seven evil exes, all while his band is working its way through a Battle of the Bands competition.

The film opens as a stylish, hip coming-of-age comedy peppered with unique and creative comedic flourishes, and it pretty much maintains that tone and mission throughout, but along the way it morphs into something else, too — a fantastical, celebratory fusion of geek culture filled with superhero comic action, gleeful video gamery, and thundering indie music.  The dialogue is witty, the pace is snappy, the characters are memorable (almost all of them are, which is amazing), and the action scenes are both brilliantly choreographed and emotionally charged.  Cera’s shtick is familiar, but he’s in pitch-perfect form, and the ensemble surrounding him is superbly cast.

I could rain more superlatives on the film, but I can’t really do it justice — it’s hard to describe the unique awesome that is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  It’s just one of those movies you just want to write GO SEE THIS!!! about — highly recommended!

And now, a belated review of Salt (2010), which I saw last weekend at the Arclight.  Salt is an all-too-plausible cautionary tale about the dangers of…no, wait, it’s a preposterous action vehicle for Angelina Jolie.  But it’s not without its silly charms.

Salt is a rather odd film:  a campy 1960s spy-fi premise wrapped up in ultraviolent, modern thriller trappings.  Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, an agent for a clandestine outstation of the CIA, and it’s just another day at the office until she and her boss Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) are informed they have a “walk-in” — a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) has shown up on their doorstep, bearing gift-wrapped intelligence.  According to Orlov, there is going to be an assassination in New York City later that day.  The name of the assassin?  Evelyn Salt.  “Outed” as a Russian spy, Salt goes on the run — but is she really an enemy of the state, or is something more complicated afoot?  Winter isn’t sure, but counterintelligence officer Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) isn’t taking any chances, and the pursuit is on.

Salt opens as a fairly conventional spy story, but descends quickly into non-stop, often irrational-seeming action.  Filled with video-game-like stunt setpieces, wild firefights, and insane switchback plotting, the film aims for and mostly delivers big budget spectacle and frequent (if often silly) surprises.  Its complicated twists and turns are pretty out there, but if you surrender to the camp early enough, the ridiculousness of it all actually works in the movie’s favor; the story keeps going places it just shouldn’t, and doesn’t care, which is kind of liberating in a way.  It somehow manages to engage and insult your intelligence simultaneously.

Curious to note that Salt was originally written for a male lead, and was retooled as a vehicle for Jolie.  In fact, this film is next-to-nothing without her.  Jolie is becoming one of those screen figures whose celebrity persona is constantly threatening to consume her every role, but I’ve got to hand it to her:  she can totally carry a film, and it’s hard to imagine Salt working at all without her.  Schreiber and Ejiofor provide solid support in a cast that is otherwise undistinguished.

I’d be hard pressed to recommend Salt over the scads of other, higher quality spy films I’ve seen recently, but despite my snobbishness I still kind of got a kick out of it.

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a curious film, an Aaron Sorkin script largely populated by non-Sorkin-ish actors (with apologies to Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman), and dealing with a subject not exactly tailor made for Sorkin’s highly stylized dialogue and sense of humor:  the covert U.S. war to support Afghanistan in their war effort against the Soviets in the 1980s.  As an unlikely blend of subject matter and approach it’s not entirely unsuccessful, but it’s certainly an odd bird.

Texas senator Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a smarmy, sexist liberal hawk, whip-smart under his hedonist lifestyle.  On a whim, he doubles the CIA intelligence budget against the Russians in recently invaded Afghanistan — which doesn’t help them much, but does put him onto the radar of a wealthy, right-wing activist named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts).  A militant anti-communist, Herring maneuvers Wilson into meeting with the president of Pakistan about the severity of the situation on their border, and Wilson — along with his erstwhile aide Bonnie (Adams) — is so moved by the plight of the Afghanis that he undertakes to clandestinely support their war effort with every means at his disposal.  To that end, he liaises with curmudgeonly CIA officer Gust Avrakatos (Hoffman), and they work together to secretly get the needed weapons to the resistance fighters, meanwhile escalating Soviet defense spending to unsustainable levels, which contributes to the collapse of the USSR.

Sorkin and director Mike Nichols bring an oddly cheerful, rah-rah aesthetic to this period piece biopic, which has all the earmarks of a bitter, grim spy tale but doesn’t play any of them up.  Unlike Sorkin’s The West Wing (which it resembles in tone), it’s hard to determine which political end of the spectrum the film is playing to; if this covert war is depicted as something of a Pyrrhic victory, it’s also shown as a heroic effort to down an evil regime, and the bizarre tone makes the message seem a little muddled.  (I’m not well schooled enough in the history here to know how accurate the depiction of events is, which makes it even harder to render judgement.)

Hanks performs adequately in the lead role, although he’s definitely not a natural fit for a “bastard with a heart of gold” role — as a persona, he might be just a little too nice-guy for this.  He’s also not a natural with Sorkin dialogue, nor is Roberts or most of the cast; there’s a certain rhythm to Sorkin’s writing that only Adams and Hoffman seem adept at rendering.  (The great Hoffman, by the way, is easily worth the price of admission.)

In the end, I enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War without loving it.  If nothing else, its oddly upbeat tone makes it a refreshing change of pace to the genre’s characteristic cynicism.

There’s nothing earth-shattering about Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), but I liked it, a low-key, low-budget comedy about a young man named Zia (Patrick Fugit) who commits suicide in despair over a break-up with his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb).  Turns out, though, that killing yourself only puts you into a purgatorial half-life where everything’s just like actual life, but worse.  Nobody smiles, nobody laughs, and nothing happens.  Nonetheless, Zia is stirred by the news that Desiree, too, has committed suicide, and with his Russian pal Eugene (Shea Whigham) at the wheel, he sets out to find her.  On the way, an attractive female hitchhiker named Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) — claiming her arrival in this particular afterlife was a mistake, as her death wasn’t a suicide but an accident — joins them on their road trip, with her own mission.

Wristcutters is quirky, laid back, dark indie fun, its premise perfect for its miniscule finances – the suicides’ afterlife is a grimy, run-down place full of dilapidated buildings, clunky cars, and litter-strewn desert, which probably made location-casting easier on such a shoestring budget.  Despite the offbeat trappings, the plot is rather formulaic, what with the hero pursuing the wrong girl while the right one is right under his nose; but plot is less important than tone, which is extremely dry and just a little weird.  Fugit makes for a likeable slacker protagonist, and Sossamon an attractive love interest.  And Tom Waits makes an appearance, which improves just about any movie.  It’s not a great film by any means, but it’s an honest and likeable one.

I either didn’t read Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox or simply don’t remember it, so I had no idea what to expect going into Wes Anderson’s animated film version.  Well, except that it would probably be Wes Anderson-like.  My guess is that if you like the quirky, low key sense of humor of Anderson’s other films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, etc.), you’ll probably like Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).  I certainly got a kick out of it.

Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a former chicken thief gone straight, now working a humdrum life as a newspaper writer to support his family.  But he can’t resist the lure of his wild animal youth, and behind the back of Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), he masterminds daring heists against callous local farmers Boggus, Bunce, and Bean, which escalates into an all-out war between the humans and the animals.

Like most of Anderson’s films, the pacing is subdued and the humor is offbeat, although here the uniquely stylized stop-motion animation (which is occasionally creepy, but kind of inherently funny) lends a different kind of energy to the proceedings.  Intriguing visuals aside, it’s dialogue that drives the funny here, highlighted by the rivalry between Mr. Fox’s son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) with visiting, too-good-to-be-true cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson).  I’m generally not that big on anthropomorphized animal humor, but the take here is pretty clever.  It’s light, enjoyable fare, unique and fun.

A well made film examining the intelligence war on terror, Body of Lies (2008) nonetheless feels slightly humdrum, perhaps because many of its themes and ideas have been dealt with more memorably by other films.

Roger Ferris (Leonard DiCaprio) is one of the CIA’s top men in the Middle East, and as the film opens his work in Iraq turns up a lead that may put them onto a major terrorist leader whose cell has been setting off bombs all across Europe.  Ferris is reassigned by his manipulative Washington control Hoffman (Russell Crowe) to Amman, Jordan, where he makes headway in the manhunt by initiating a tense alliance with the head of Jordanian intelligence, Hani (Mark Strong).  Between the hard-nosed Hani and the deceptive Hoffman, Ferris has his hands full accomplishing his mission, and things only get more complicated when his involvement with an Iranian nurse, Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), finds its way into the intrigue.

The plot is stocked with clever gambits, its intricate machinations playing out neatly, and director Ridley Scott brings plenty of energy to the exciting action sequences.  DiCaprio — who keeps turning up in this blog lately! — carries the film with aplomb, and it’s generally well acted; Strong makes for a particularly formidable foil.  But there’s something a little bit expected about it all.  The film’s major mission seems to be contrasting the harrowing experience of the man on the ground (DiCaprio) with that of the distant, calculating higher-ups pulling the strings (Crowe), and there’s something a little heavy-handed about how that comes off.   Hardly in poor form, Crowe may nonetheless be a little too obvious a D.C. schemer for the film’s own good.  Similarly, Ferris’ ill-considered romance with Aisha seems a bit out of character, pro forma plot maneuvering.  A few on-the-nose turns of phrase in the dialogue also contribute to the sense of familiar thematic ground.

An earnest, well produced, and structurally satisfying film, then, but in the end Body of Lies doesn’t quite stand out from the crowd.