X-Men 3: The Last Stand Between Ratner and Singer

Contrary to some prior reports, Brett Ratner has left his grubby little paw marks all over X-Men 3. Surprisingly, it’s nearly as much a good thing as it is a bad thing.

But before we get into the ramifications of the Ratner effect, let’s address what he hasn’t changed, namely, the script. The story goes like this: Bryan Singer, the director of the first two X-Men installments, left X-Men 3 because he supposedly didn’t like the screenplay (written by Zak Penn, who co-wrote X2, and Simon Kinberg). When 20th Century Fox roped Ratner, they knew they were getting a competent craftsman who leaves the writing to the writers. Unusual for a director with his kind of track record, and very much unlike Singer, Ratner hasn’t added a writing credit to his résumé since his first flick, a short he made at film school in 1990. For better or for worse, the producers of X-Men got what they wanted: a filmmaker who wouldn’t tinker with the X-Men template.

And what’s the template? Superheroes with cool powers doing battle, of course, but more importantly, a story centered around society’s fear of mutants and the spectrum of responses that elicits in them. In X-Men 3, a biotech company with a lab on Alcatraz has developed a “cure” for mutation by harvesting the genes of a mutant boy named Leech, who can neutralize other mutants’ powers. The U.S. government offers the cure for free to those who want to be “normal,” but Magneto (Ian McKellen, as awesome as ever) figures it’s just a smokescreen for forced vaccination. When he discovers that the army has started putting the cure into anti-mutant guns, he responds the only way he knows how: all-out war on humanity. And this time he has a secret weapon. After awaking from her apparent death, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen, as smoking as ever) has become the most powerful, and unstable, mutant in the world… and has joined forces with the bad guys.

So if Ratner was under apparent orders not to mess with success, what did he do? For starters, he’s amped up the action. Nothing in the first two installments compares with X-Men 3’s climactic battle scene, in which Magneto commandeers the Golden Gate Bridge and moves its terminus from Marin County to Alcatraz, where armies of good and bad mutants do battle, where hundreds of human soldiers are vaporized and where Jean Grey almost destroys the world. It’s no easy feat to effectively stage scenes with virtual casts of thousands–for proof, check out the plodding war scenes in Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones–and Ratner has the knack for it. Singer is the superior filmmaker and a much better director of suspense (think back to the confrontation between Magneto and Professor X on the steps of the Westchester train station in the first X-Men). But Ratner is the better director of action.

But the success of the movie’s climax isn’t simply a matter of scale and spectacle. It’s actually an intelligent, emotionally resonant depiction of the main characters’ throughlines. Take the chase scene where the evil Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) and the virtuous Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) race to find Leech in the bowels of Alcatraz. Their personalities and powers are polar opposites: she’s charming and polite; he’s brutish and blunt. She can walk through walls, he can smash through them. While he destroys everything in his path, she leaves no mark, literally disappearing into her surroundings. It’s an apt metaphor for the differing approaches of the the X-Men and the Brotherhood: where the X-Men want to quietly co-exist with human society, the Brotherhood wants to dominate and destroy it.

This touches upon what makes the X-Men movies so great–the way the mutant motif doubles as social commentary. In the other X-Men movies, mutant prejudice could easily be read as a metaphor for racism, with Magneto as Malcolm X and Professor X as Martin Luther King, Jr. In this installment, the cause of choice appears to be prejudice against homosexuals. The analogy is never announced, but consider these clues: there are numerous references to how the mutants don’t need to be fixed, how there’s nothing wrong with them in the first place; a public meeting of disaffected mutants is led by a pale, frail man who looks like he has AIDS and attended by flamboyantly dressed men and women, many of whom are androgynous; the most important action takes place in San Francisco; and the most obvious–Magneto is played by Ian McKellen, who is very public about his homosexuality and active in the gay rights movement. (The parallels don’t end there. McKellen, much like Magneto in the first X-Men, only revealed the secret part of his self when provoked by the government. He came out of the closet when the Thatcher administration was considering anti-gay legislation in the late ’80s.) Several scenes even suggest that Magneto and Professor X were once lovers.

So that’s the good stuff. What did Ratner do wrong? For starters, he could’ve used his clout to cut some fat out of the screenplay, which has about a dozen too many Ahnuld-esque one-liners. Worse, his depictions of emotional moments are so crammed with cliché–when Jean Grey dies, Wolverine lifts his head to the sky and screams, “NOOOOO!!!!”–that they ring false. Further, I think he made a poor decision in how he depicts Jean Grey’s power to kill people. Because she’s nearly omnipotent, she can rearrange matter in any way she can imagine, which means that she doesn’t have to shoot, crush or gore her enemies; she just sends their molecules on their merry way. While this makes sort-of sense from a pseudo-scientific perspective, it blunts the impact of her victims’ death scenes. When she obliterates Professor X, I should have been saddened, but his disappearance was so unlike any death I’ve ever seen (or heard about) that I was merely shocked. It was narratively audacious but emotionally empty. (Compare it to the assassination of David Palmer in Season Five of 24, where a similarly beloved guru-like character is killed. Many in the audience, including myself, found themselves mourning… and I haven’t watched the show regularly since Season One.)

Intellectually, the screenplay is probably smarter and better-structured than the scripts for the first two X-Men installments–for example, witness the way the plots of Jean Grey and Mystique parallel each other. When Jean Grey becomes more powerful, she betrays Professor X and joins Magneto’s rejectionists; when Mystique loses her powers, she betrays Magneto and gives the goods on him to the government. But Ratner fails to turn the story’s thematic depth and balls–three major characters are killed, numerous characters lose their powers forever–into the stunning finale it should be.

X-Men: The Last Stand is still a damn entertaining and interesting movie. How many superhero movies have the smarts to have a coherent social subtext? But I just wish Ratner had cranked down the cartoonishness and taken as much care directing the actors as he did the action.

X Marks the Thoughts

Some thoughts on the first X-Men, which I rewatched tonight, in anticipation of seeing X-Men: The Last Stand some time soon. As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that the X-Men movies are the greatest superhero movies ever–and this comes from someone who watched Batman everyday for two months after getting the video for Hanukkah in 1989. Yes, I’m a geek.

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ONE OF THE THINGS THAT MAKES THE X-MEN MOVIES SO GREAT is the way they avoid the credibility pitfalls of other superhero stories. In other superhero stories, the writers have to come up with reasons for (a) the good guys to be good and (b) the bad guys to hate the good guys. The best of the rest of superhero movies usually come up with serviceable reasons for one of these premises but never for both. Usually the the good guy becomes good because a close family member is killed by a petty criminal (think Batman or Spiderman), which, when you think about it, is not a very convincing reason for a person to become a superhero. In real life, Peter Parker wouldn’t turn to fighting crime if Uncle Ben got shot; he’d turn to Smirnoff and codeine.

The reasons for the bad guys to hate the good guys are typically even more contrived, usually relying on some coincidental misfortune that befalls the villain when the hero happens to be in the vicinity. In Batman, the Joker blames his disfiguring on Batman because Batman was there when he fell in the vat of green goo; in Spiderman, the Green Goblin just happens to be the father of a friend of Peter Parker’s; in Superman, well, crap, I think Lex Luthor was just devious.

But in the X-Men movies, not only does the animosity between the good mutants and the bad mutants make perfect sense, the good mutants don’t even fight crime. Unlike the Spiderman or Batman movies, which each have ridiculous scenes where the heroes stop muggings, the good mutants aren’t particularly concerned with crime in the general sense. The only crime they’re interested in is crime perpetrated by bad mutants. The X-Men’s motivation for doing good is reversed from typical hero/villain dichotomies, where the villain has it out for the hero. In the X-Men movies, the heroes have it out for the villains.

That’s because the only reason the good mutants do “good” is because they protect humanity from the bad mutants’ animosity toward normal humans. If the bad mutants weren’t seeking to destroy humanity, the good mutants wouldn’t fight crime at all. They’re actually quite shy about their powers and seem more interested in living in seclusion.

In the X-Men movies, the villains don’t even hate the heroes. They’re actually on a charm offensive to recruit the good mutants to their cause, and their respective leaders–Professor X and Magneto–are best friends.

Moreover, because the bad mutants’ motivation is so convincing, there is no simple dichotomy between the righteous good guys and the devilish bad guys. While we may be repulsed by the actions of the bad mutants, we also understand where they’re coming from. Who wouldn’t want to get back at a society that protests against your very existence? That seeks to register you for public safety reasons? That seeks to “cure” your gift?

In concocting a world where the heroes and villains embody natural, credible responses to the same social phenomenon, Stan Lee has created a premise with as much potential for thematic complexity and dramatic praxis as a great Shakespearean play.

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HAVE ANY SUPERHERO MOVIES BEEN AS WELL-CAST as the X-Men series? Since whatever age Patrick Stewart went bald, he was destined to play Professor X, who is the embodiment of patient wisdom mixed with a hint of paternalistic condescension (which pretty much sums up Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation).

Magneto, meanwhile, needs to be someone of equal grativas who can also play rage (which I’ve never seen Stewart do convincingly). McKellen perfectly fits the bill. Even as Galdaf in the Lord of the Rings movies, he’s at his most interesting when his temper flares up.

Perhaps what keeps us equally engaged with the heroes and villains in the X-Men movies is the fact that McKellen is actually better at engaging our sympathies; Stewart is so remote and virtuous that we have a hard time relating to him, while McKellen’s anger and occasional displays of vulnerability bear a closer resemblance to our own emotions. It’s a classic dramatic trick: make the villain more human than the hero, and all of a sudden we’re torn between our aspiration to support virtue and our instinct to empathize with suffering.

Hugh Jackman is also perfect as Wolverine, suppressing his Australian accent for a slightly exaggerated masculine American tone, and arching his eyebrows in anger at all the right moments. In the smaller role of Cyclops, James Marsden captures Cyclops’ icy arrogance, while Famke Janssen has always had a knack for playing women who don’t know what they got, which is the essence of the Jean Grey character.

No other superhero movie has cast so many important parts so well. Christopher Reeve was born to play Superman, but, as good as Gene Hackman was, there were others alive at the time who could’ve been just as juicy as Lex Luthor (Telly Savalas comes to mind). Yes, nobody will ever be a better match of actor to comic book part than Jack Nicholson to the Joker, but others could have done Batman as well as Michael Keaton–and many could have done it better than Val Kilmer. Toby Maguire was fine as Spiderman, although the simple fact that the producers were ready to replace him with Jake Gyllenhaal in the first sequel shows you that his casting wasn’t inevitable. All the Spiderman villains, meanwhile, are fairly forgettable. (I love Alfred Molina, but any good actor could’ve played Doc Ock.) As for The Hulk? I don’t even want to think what happened to the casting director who came up with the bright idea of casting Josh Lucas as a villain…

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HUGH JACKMAN HAS A GREAT FIRST SCENE as Wolverine. The movie starts with a series of shots of a concentration camp where our view of the scene is obscured by various fences and gates. In that scene, we see a young Magneto try in vain to save his parents from the Nazi gas chambers. Two scenes later, continuing the visual motif of filming mutants through the latticework of fencing, we see Wolverine inside a cage in a roadhouse in northern Alberta. But for a good 20 seconds, we only see his back, and his occasional profile as he takes a swig of hard liquor. We don’t get a full view of him for another 30 seconds or so; all we see is him making swift work of a much larger man, followed by a puff on a cigar. In less than a minute, we know this about Wolverine: he’s dangerous, he has a well-earned persecution complex, he’s a drinker and smoker and he’s a loner. In other words, he’s cool as shit.

I will say this about Wolverine, however: I’m awfully skeptical of the plans to make a whole movie about him. I have a hunch that his sarcasm will wear real thin without the comic foil of Cyclops or the romantic interest of Jean Grey around. We gravitate to the Wolverine character for the same reason we gravitate toward Han Solo in the Star Wars movies; his cynicism is a good counterweight to the sincerity of the other leads. But without Luke Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi around, Han Solo would just seem like a grouch. We like our heroes to have a mix of virtue and skepticism about virtue; without characters like Professor X to push Wolverine towards virtue, Wolverine’s skepticism would simply play as bitterness. Drinking, smoking, homeless, alone–he’d be little different than Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa.

How Dumb the Con of Dan

I was reluctant to write abou the Da Vinci Code since I only read half the book and I have not seen the movie. But at the risk of becoming an easy target for Codeys (or whatever fans of the book are called), I have to point something out: the Da Vinci Code is complete crap.

Not since the movie Independence Day came out ten years ago has such bad art been so well-liked. But at least Independence Day can be enjoyed as camp. Nobody reads a novel for its camp value; cheese factor is too meager a reward for the investment of 15 hours of dedicated reading time. The only literature that can be enjoyed as camp is poetry written by teenagers, or Maya Angelou.

But even worse than Independence Day, which the director and producers knew was nonsense, Dan Brown actually takes writing very seriously. He spends months in near-seclusion crafting his novels so that he can produce memorable exchanges like this one from the end of a chapter in the Da Vinci Code*:

Sophie: How can I repay you, Dr. Langdon?
Dr. Langdon: There is one thing.
Sophie: Yes?
Dr. Langdon: You can call me Robert.

Of course, every chapter in the Da Vinci Code ends like this, with either a cliffhanger or a cliched witticism. The substance of each chapter is little better; most are either implausible action vignettes or lectures, in dialogue form, on Dan Brown’s nutjob theories about the Catholic Church. And the chapters are short, too, the easier to keep late-night readers turning the pages. It’s like 24: The Novel, minus the grit, wit and Elisha Cuthbert.

The amazing thing is that people actually take Brown’s conspiracy claptrap seriously, and treat it like it’s relevatory. Wait, so you’re saying that Jesus isn’t really the son of God and he actually had a kid? Wow. And I thought he actually walked on water and rose from the dead. The mythology behind Christianity, like the mythology behind all religions, is bullshit anyway. Revealing its secrets is like me revealing the secret treaty between Papa Smurf and Gargamel. It may be mildly amusing, but it’s all make-believe in the first place, and so shouldn’t be taken seriously.

“Call me Jesus.”

In a way, though, I guess Dan Brown and the Vatican deserve each other. Both base their fabulous wealth on a wildly popular, poorly written book that purports to reveal the mysteries of the world. At least the writers of the Bible had enough good sense to not have Christ say to Mary Magdalene after he saved her from a life of prostitution, “You can call me Jesus.” That one was a groaner even in Roman times.

*That’s from memory from a book I attempted to read more than a year ago. The exact wording may be off but that’s pretty much how it went.

Last Two Sopranos Episodes

I finally saw the last two episodes of The Sopranos last night, and I was hoping to write about them but I couldn’t. Today I realized why. I’ve become numb to the show’s ridiculousness.

Christopher spontaneously marrying a pregnant girlfriend we’ve never seen before? Sure. Vito telling a Harley-riding firefighter, “I love you, Jonnycakes.” Why not? Christopher back on smack and spending a night hanging out with a stray dog? Whatever.

A lot of people have been hating on this season since it premiered, but I actually loved it—through the first four episodes, at least. The pathetic portrait of Eugene in the first episode, ending with his brutal hanging… Tony getting shot by a demented Junior… Tony’s profound and moving dream sequences in the hospital… the machinations of his crew members when Tony was incapacitated… the nearly incomparably brilliant fourth episode, where Tony awakes from a coma and changes his view of the world. All this stuff was as good, I think, as anything The Sopranos has ever done.

But since then, it’s been one narrative-grinding subplot after another: Artie’s beef with Bennie, Christopher’s escapade to Hollywood, Vito’s outing, the list goes on an on. Some of these plots, like Vito’s outing and the revelation that Paulie’s aunt was really his mother, are interesting, and say something about the characters and the world they live in. But a bunch of them are just minor tangents that seasoned Sopranos-watchers know won’t ever end up in anything.

I feel kind of like Tony said he did in the most recent episode – “Every day’s a gift. Just why does it have to socks?” Now that the Boss has mellowed, the writers seem bored, too, and, like Tony with his confrontation with the bikers, are looking for ways to get their rocks off. Their solution? For the most part, comical, often repetitive, frequently ridiculous subplots.

The show is starting to feel like long-term therapy. It just keeps rehashing the same traumas, exploring the same character flaws. Yes, Christopher puts the “drug addict” in “recovering drug addict.” Yes, Janice is the second coming of Livia. Yes, Paulie is a hypochondriac. So? Even Dr. Melfi appears bored going over the same issues with Tony over and over again.

If I were a therapist and The Sopranos were my patient, I would suggest shock therapy. Not a lobotomy, but something to shoot an electrical spark through the show. Kill Christopher. Start a coup against Tony. Throw A.J. in jail. Have Paulie leave the crew. Anything to get The Sopranos’ juices flowing again. Just like Tony, this show needs a new doctor.

Seven Most Overrated Movies of 2005

In the continuing spirit of lists of movies of 2005 (and doing them when the average Joe can respond to them intelligently, not on Dec. 24, when a third of the movies haven’t even come out in most people’s hometowns), here is a list of what I consider the seven most overrated movies of 2005.

1. Cache: So French, so acclaimed, so bewildering. I’ve never seen people walking out of a theater looking that perplexed. (Except for maybe when I saw Signs. So water kills the aliens, huh? That’s a good one.) Oh, and for all the reviewers who either suggested or stated explicitly that Americans can’t understand this movie because either a) we expect our stories tidy or b) we don’t know about French-Algerian history, fuck off. If I wanted to be condescended to, I would call up my college screenwriting teacher.
2. Crash: Gimmicky as hell, and as my good friend Brendan Higgins said, “It’s about 10 years too late.” Worst Oscar Best Picture winner since, well, I’m not sure when. Oh and by the way, angry white people calling black bureaucrats “nigger” isn’t a problem in this country; calm white bureaucrats not promoting black people because they can’t picture them in positions of leadership is. Crash runs under the mistaken assumption that the problem of racism in this country is that it’s shouted, not that it’s whispered.
3. A History of Violence: Good, interesting, entertaining, but it’s not at all the sophisticated exploration of American attitudes toward violence that the critics have made it out to be. I do like Maria Bello in a cheerleader outfit, though.
4. Brokeback Mountain: Not as good as it is groundbreaking, and it suffers from film-making flaws. But unlike some people, I still think it’s great in some very important ways.
5. Wedding Crashers: Pretty funny, but continuing proof that the best Hollywood comedies aren’t half as good as an average episode of South Park, The Simpsons or The Office.
6. Capote: A great movie actually, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–anyone who considers Capote a better movie than Kung Fu Hustle doesn’t like to be entertained.
7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: It wasn’t that acclaimed, but the handful of critics who put this Tim Burton flick on their top-10 lists (according to metacritic.com, thanks Brad) are a handful too many. It’s terribly unfunny, boring, gutless and pointless. How the hell did the surrealist myth-maker who made the first two Batmans, Beetlejuice and especially Edward Scissorhands end up making useless remakes like Planet of the Apes and this? And what audience was he trying to appeal to exactly when he decided to show that Veruca Salt, Mike Teavee and all the other bad kids survived their “just desserts”?

The Dave Chappelle (and Friends) Show

I should clear the air on a couple of things: I’m not a huge hip hop fan, I like Dave Chappelle but I’m not in man-love with him (unlike most 20-something white guys I know) and the last concert movie I sat all the way through was, um, This is Spinal Tap? So there’s no good reason I should like Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, or even want to see it.

All that being said, I am a hopeless sucker for good reviews, and I practically spring a boner any time Entertainment Weekly gives a movie an A. (Although I trust Owen Gleiberman more than Lisa Schwarzbaum, and continue to feel sorry for Scott Brown, who is only given the most unappetizing leftovers to pick through – cheap horror movies, cheaper urban comedies and Linsday Lohan flicks.) So I was pretty much obligated to see Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.

So what is it about Dave Chappelle that has a generation of middle-class white people snorting Hefeweizen out of our noses? (Besides our love for anybody who calls us a cracker. We’re a bunch of masochists really.) The guy’s certainly got charisma: when he talks, his eyes bulge in a kind-of crazy way and his head bobbles like it’s tethered to his spine by a string. When he walks, he scrapes his feet and seems on the verge of tripping over himself. When he’s not flapping his bony arms to make a point, they’re so lifeless they seem to sway with the wind. And his natural voice is so cartoonish, you’d swear it’s a put-on. He’s like a crackhead Muppet. And like all Muppets, it’s impossible not to like him.

The similarities are uncanny, aren’t they?

The documentary Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is basically a tribute to Chappelle’s likeability. Its premise is simple: Dave Chappelle is going to take over a burned-out block in Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn, for one September afternoon and throw a kick-ass hip hop concert. To spice things up (or perhaps simply to keep his kook genius director Michel Gondry amused), he returns to his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, to hand out Wonka-esque golden tickets to the show to regular folks. Gondry takes extra care to show off the particularly charming, humble and non-stereotypical folks Chappelle invites; we see a lot of the two older white women who sell him cigarettes (“I know I should have bought a thong,” one says while packing for the trip), an enthusiastic young gay black couple who Chappelle found at the golf course (how’s that for busting every possible stereotype of young black men?) and a Drumline-like marching band from Central State University headed by the squarest black man since Urkel.

Intercutting to New York, we see Chappelle interacting with the people who live and work around the block where he’ll be throwing the concert. We see David mess around with kids at the local school, borrow furniture from the local Salvation Army and laugh hysterically at the two aged hippies who live in a practically decomposing old church called the Blood Street Angel. We also see him a bit with the various superstar performers, but not that much, because Gondry’s smart: too much celebrity schmoozing would turn this into Madonna’s Truth or Dare. The performers we see the most of off-stage are the coolest and most down-to-earth – Jill Scott, Wyclef Jean, Mos Def, ?uestlove from The Roots – and we see almost nothing of the clearly large-headed likes of Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Kanye West, who has elevated arrogance to a higher art. All of this serves two purposes: 1) It makes a star-powered mega-concert seem like just a bunch of cool people hanging out and 2) It makes Dave Chappelle seem like the chillest, most down-to-earth character there is. Not only can he hang with regular folks, celebrities will flock to a sketchy empty lot in Brooklyn to do a concert with him. No mention is made of the stars’ compensation, of course. We wouldn’t want to harsh the vibe.

This all may make it sound like I dislike the movie, which I don’t, or that I’m rather cynical, which I am. The movie was a ton of fun; Chappelle, as usual, turns pretty standard shock humor into comic bling with his ridiculous timing and his embracing smile. The music was absolutely awesome; the highlights for me were Kanye West (I’m a sucker for “Jesus Walks”), Jill Scott, and Big Daddy Kane rapping with the Roots. The guy has to be at least 45 years old, but he still rhymes faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. (Granted, most conversations I’m involved in about modern hip hop peter off after the fifth time I say, “I don’t know it.”) And the lowlights? Lauryn Hill rapping off-beat during a weak Fugees reunion set, Lauryn Hill overemoting every note during a near-solo “Killing Me Softly,” and everyone acting like Lauryn Hill is the second coming of Billie Holiday just because she hasn’t recorded anything in five years. Can anyone explain why celebrities and the entertainment media see not producing art for several years as a surer sign of artistic integrity than regularly working and being prolific?*

All in all, I had, I think, the exact reaction Gondry and Chappelle were going for: laugh your ass off at Chappelle’s offensive antics and bop your head to the literally block-rocking beats. Unlike other concert movies, there’s none of the boring, what’s-the-music-about crap or the self-obsessed moanings of rock stars who are just sick and tired of being so famous. Despite not being a big hip hop fan, it seems like a concert I would have liked to gone to (although I probably wouldn’t have had the balls to take a bus to an unknown location in the ghetto like ticket-holders to the Block Party did, and once there, I would nervously finger my wallet and keys in my pocket, and so would you).

Sure, as a follow-up to Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it’s not much, a trifle really, and not something I’m ever likely to watch again or think about much (as opposed to Eternal Sunshine, which I think about on a near-daily basis). But it’s a fun, well-made twist on the concert movie. Gleiberman (or was it Schwarzbaum?) got a bit ahead of themselves by giving it an A. It’s almost too lightweight to require a grade. It’s more like one of those extra-credit assignments where all you have to do is make a collage, or that pass-fail wine-tasting class you take in college. If forced to give it a grade, I would give it a Satisfactory Plus.

*I can, actually. It’s all tangled up in our fucked up mix of envy, resentment and respect toward wealth and fame. We envy those who have it, resent those with enough who continue to seek more, and respect those who are willing to walk away from it. Of course, the savviest stars take advantage of this response, and build in breaks into their career (see Bruce Springsteen and Daniel Day-Lewis). That way, they maintain a perpetual appearance of authenticity for their audiences, and therefore add to their own fame, acclaim and wealth. Integrity, calculated or not, is the world’s greatest marketing tool.

Top 10 Movies from 2005

While working on my Dave Chappelle’s Block Party review for Friday, I thought I’d dash off my Top 10 from 2005, just to get something up and give you a feel for my tastes:

1. Kung Fu Hustle
2. Walk the Line
3. King Kong
4. Good Night, and Good Luck
5. Hustle and Flow
6. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
7. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
8. Brokeback Mountain
9. Capote
10. Munich

I’d love to see your Top 10s.

Chick (with dick) flick

Or, how Transamerica goes from drag to fab and back again

If the story of Transamerica is meant to be a case study of gender confusion, the movie itself is a case study of narrative confusion. The story relies on a premise we’ve never seen before, yet is terribly ridden with clichés; the movie veers back and forth, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes poignantly, between tragedy and comedy; major plot points require characters to make totally uncharacteristic – or naïve – choices; and the first half of the movie is as painful to watch as a J.V. girls’ basketball game, while the second half is funny, touching and revealing.

As you surely know from all the Oscar-time coverage, Transamerica is about a pre-op transsexual a week away from reassignment surgery who finds out she has a son from her days as a man. Felicity Huffman plays the tranny, Stanley Kipchek(sic?)/Sabrina Claire Osbourne, and the movie was executive produced by her husband, William H. Macy, which raises the interesting question: did Macy wake up one morning, see Felicity without makeup on and think, man, she looks like just like a depressed transsexual? (Which raises another question: What happened to William H. Macy? He used to be Hollywood’s go-to guy for sadsack losers, until Paul Giamatti came along. Apparently his days as the prototypical self-loathing loner have passed.)

Huffman does a terrific job as Sabrina, Bree for short. She recreates the mannerisms of a typical male-to-female transsexual – the husky, unnatural voice, the stilted walk, the occasionally mannish gestures – but the marvel of her performance is the way she adds her own affectations that define the character. Unlike the fabulous transvestites we’re accustomed to seeing in Hollywood, Bree is depressed, lonely and insular. She’s shut herself off from nearly all human contact – “living in stealth,” she calls it – because she is repulsed by her body. (When asked about her penis, she says, “It disgusts me.”) Huffman captures this self-loathing by portraying Bree as brittle and tense; she holds her posture absurdly erect, she pulls her shoulders in to make herself smaller and her face is frozen into a permanent frown.

The movie starts on a promising note as we see Bree working on the craft of becoming a woman. We see her apply fake nails, stuff her bra, watch voice-training tapes and tuck her package. She lives a quiet, connectionless life in a tiny bungalow in a low-rent Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles. She works as a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant and also does telemarketing from home. Her only regular contact with the outside world is her therapist, who is also her only friend.

Meanwhile her son Toby (Kevin Zeggers) lives in a similarly disaffected manner in New York City, but his lifestyle, unlike Bree’s, is out of necessity, not choice. He’s a hustler and a drug addict who shares a filthy one-room apartment with two others. Bree only finds out about his existence when the New York City central lockup calls to tell Stanley that his son is in jail. But Bree, who’s fixated on getting her penis inverted in a week, ignores the call. Only when her therapist refuses to sign her surgical consent form because she hasn’t dealt properly with the existence of her son does Bree venture to New York. Once there, she bails him out for $1. If this all sounds clichéd, it is, and it plays no better than it sounds.

The premise raises the kinds of questions that ridiculous movie set-ups always do: If her son is a street hustler, hasn’t he been in jail before, and if he has, wouldn’t Stanley have gotten a call before then? When Bree’s therapist refuses to sign her consent form, what does she expect? Would any therapist expect – or even want – a depressed gender-confused man to form a healthy relationship with her drug-addicted son in a week? Isn’t the therapist aware that reassignment surgery is terribly expensive and difficult to schedule? And what the hell is the idea behind a consent form being signed only a week before the surgery? Wouldn’t any doctor performing the surgery want that kind of approval months – if not a year or more – before? The movie, being a movie, expects us to buy the premise that the only way a transsexual and her street hustling son can patch their relationship is by spending a wacky weeklong roadtrip together.

Once in New York, Bree makes a series of decisions that don’t serve a believable character, but do serve to set up a screwball comedy. She bails her son out of jail, but pretends she’s a Christian missionary and doesn’t reveal their real relationship for the rest of the trip. She decides, spur of the moment, to take Toby with her back to L.A. because he lives in such grime; for some inexplicable reason, she decides to drive, probably because high jinks don’t usually ensue on a six-hour cross-country flight. Then, she’s ready to rent a car for the drive, but a friend of Toby’s convinces her to buy a beat-up yellow station wagon with 236,000 miles on it because, he says, once she gets to California, “You can sell it for a profit.” Bree responds “For a profit?” and the movie cuts to Bree and Toby out on the open road, as if to imply she bought this hustler’s logic (actually I suspect Duncan Tucker, the writer and director, didn’t want to imply anything, but couldn’t figure how else to put the pair into a colorful classic American car).

Once on the road, the out-of-character hits keep coming. Despite having a traumatic relationship with her own family, Bree decides to surreptitiously drop by Toby’s hometown in Kentucky, because she thinks a reunion with his stepfather could be therapeutic. Let’s see: he lives in shit in New York, was just in jail, snorts coke, sells his body for $40 a tumble and was willing to jump in a car on a cross-country trip with a transsexual he’s never met, and she assumes he must have a good relationship with his stepfather? What kind of hormones is she smoking?

Turns out, to no one’s surprise but Bree’s, that the stepfather is a sexually abusive bastard, and the reunion doesn’t go well. Toby, understandably pissed off at Bree, runs away from his hometown a second time, and Bree is told by a family friend that that’s what he did after his mother killed herself. Next scene, Bree picks him up off the side of the road – no chase, no fight, no pleading, no negotiation, no nothing. What? Isn’t this kid basically a professional runaway who was traumatized by his stepfather and has no reason to trust Bree? Why does he just get back in the car? Wouldn’t he run as far as he could? (Later, he expresses shock at "discovering" that Bree is a man, like that fact wouldn't be obvious to a street-wise hustler from New York.)

It’s probably worth noting, sort of in the movie’s defense, that Transamerica suffers from the same problem that plagues most roadtrip movies, namely: how do you have conflict between central characters but somehow keep them in the same vehicle for the whole movie? Most roadtrip movies are unapologetically dumb comedies – Road Trip, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the first two Vacation movies, Tommy Boy – and therefore rely on a lower threshold of credibility (and interestingly, almost always require the destruction or theft of the original form of transportation). It’s the rare roadtrip movie that injects drama into the mix, and those that work – think Midnight Run and Y Tu Mamá También – do so because there is a powerful reason for the protagonists to stick together. (Although those that fail, such as the excrutiatingly awful – and hence hilarious – 1992 movie Breaking the Rules, starring C. Thomas Howell, Jonathan Silverman and Jason Bateman as a happy-go-lucky terminal cancer patient, can do so for reasons totally unrelated to their lack of believability.)

Jonathan Silverman+C. Thomas Howell+Jason Bateman = Movie magic. 

But Transamerica doesn’t have a powerful reason for Bree and Toby to stay together, like Y Tu Mama Tambien (an older hot chick) or even a good reason for one character not to leave the side of other, like Midnight Run. Sure, Toby has no place to go, but he’s also a hustler and a runaway; surviving under dire circumstances is the only life he knows. And Bree, well sure, she would like to fix her relationship with her son so that she can get cleared for surgery, but we’re back to the old problem: who would expect a tranny and her teenage son to build a healthy, supportive relationship in a week’s time?

Another problem with the first half of the movie is that the two main characters don’t really have a relationship. They’re both such self-protective, emotionally insular characters that neither forces the other to change, so we’re subject to an endless stream of fights, rejections, and cold peaces. By simply sharing the ride, they’ve already got what they need from each other, hence there’s no motive for change. For the first half of this trek, the movie is stuck in neutral.

Only when, in typical roadtrip movie fashion, their car is stolen does the movie come alive. Their encounters with a series of other characters – a hitchhiking hippie, a gentle Native American truck driver, Bree’s dysfunctional parents and sister – force the narrative to wake up from its state of suspended animation and force Toby and Bree to open up their hermetically sealed personalities.

The truck driver is played by Graham Greene, who’s got the market cornered on old, wise Native American men as well as Morgan Freeman’s got the market cornered on old, wise African-American men. After spending a night at Greene’s house in Santa Fe and catching a ride with him, Toby maintains his protective shell, but Bree opens up. All of a sudden, Bree’s frown has turned into a smile and we start seeing her inner femininity and even her charm as she responds to Greene’s flirtations. It’s in these scenes that the curious casting of a woman playing a man being a woman pays off: when Bree cocks her head and coquettishly waves at Greene, we’re finally convinced that Bree’s not just confused, but possessed by a truly feminine spirit. No longer do we see her as a man trying to be a woman; now she’s a woman just trying to be human.

Toby’s and Bree’s encounter with Bree’s family in Phoenix is a bit more screwball, but serves as the engine for Bree’s and Toby’s most important choices. Bree comes from a credible family dynamic – a disapproving, dictatorial Christian mother, a foul-mouthed pushover of a Jewish dad and a recovering addict for a younger sister, who, apparently in her 30s, still lives with her parents. The movie is at its funniest when we watch this quintet of oddballs bounce off each other in hilarious, and sometimes touching, ways.

There’s also a payoff for the seemingly absurd decision to make Bree hide the truth about her relationship from Toby. Once at Bree’s parents’ house, Toby enters Bree’s room, takes off his robe and kisses her. She kisses back, if only for a second. (What woman wouldn’t? Kevin Zegers is like a better-looking Skeet Ulrich.) Toby has fallen in love with Bree – “I think you’re sexy,” he says. When Bree rejects him for as-yet-unexplained reasons, his voice goes monotone and he says, “I’ll marry you if you want.” It’s at this moment that Toby’s character becomes painfully clear: since he’s only known sex as a weapon (his dad) or a means of exchange (everyone else), the only way he can plead his case is by offering something concrete to his object of desire. Love, passion, tenderness, even lust – none of these emotions have ever been useful (and have probably been dangerous) for him before, so he can’t access them when pleading for a woman’s love.

A moment later, Bree reveals the awful truth and Toby, understandably, runs off in horror (but not before giving Bree a black eye). It’s believable and heart-breaking, but it also means that Toby is cheated out of a meaningful character change. Bree returns to L.A. for her physical transformation (which, for some inexplicable reason, her therapist has given her consent for) but is also emotionally transformed. No longer does she separate her life as a man from her life as a woman, and she’s ready to break free from her “life of stealth.”

Toby, on the other hand, has broken into the movie business, or rather, the gay porn business, and seems unchanged. He’s still selling his body for sex, he’s still angry, he’s still suspicious, and Bree’s horrible withholding of information has given him every right to be. The movie is forced, then, to end on an artificially happy note, as Toby stops by Bree’s house, says “This doesn’t mean I forgive you” and then sit downs for a beer with his post-op mom/dad. That bit of dialogue is intended to make the scene more credible for Tucker surely knows how ridiculous tacked-on scenes of forgiveness come off. But when he puts his feet on the table, Bree tells him firmly that he will not put his feet on furniture in his house and he obeys – which says much more powerfully than any line of dialogue that yes, he does forgive her.

While it makes no sense from the perspective of character or credibility, the ending is still interesting. By showing only a glimpse of Toby’s and Bree’s interaction, and showing what is clearly the start of a long conversation, Tucker is telling us that this is a beginning, not an ending. It’s a beginning to their relationship on fully honest terms, where neither one is dependent on the other. It's a beginning to a relationship, that if it develops, will grow out of choice, not necessity.

The Countdown continues: The second best Sopranos tangent episode

2) Trip to Colby (Season 1)

In this episode, Tony takes Meadow on a trip to check out Colby College in Maine. While he’s there, he takes care of some old business: he tracks down and kills a rat living an anonymous life as the owner of an autoshop. (Come to think of it, Big Pussy was in the same business. Was this a bit of foreshadowing?)

Like the episode where Christopher befriends and brutalizes Tim Daly, this episode brilliantly demonstrates the division between these guys’ personal and criminal lives: drop kid off at campus tour in the morning, track down and strangle a guy in the woods in the afternoon. It’s even more effective than that ep because of the contrast between the peaceful, verdant beauty of God-given nature and the ugly brutality of man-made violence. Seeing an informant chocked to death with piano wire in Hoboken seems ho-hum, an expected consequence of urban anomie; but seeing the same thing happen in unspoiled nature is shocking.

For whatever reason, the writers of The Sopranos are often at their best when their characters are out of their element, out in the elements: think of the episode where Chris and Paulie spend a night in the Pine Barrens, the episode where the crew kills Big Pussy on the yacht, the episode when Tony and Christopher visit Tony’s uncle farm, the episode when Tony comforts his sick horse on a rainy night.

This episode is also a wonderful little study of a man – the rat – who has escaped the life and is trying to live like a citizen. Sometimes he’s a regular Joe; other times, he’s paying local meth-heads to kill Tony Soprano. But this guy has been a civilian for so long he’s lost his ruthlessness. When he spots Tony outside his motel, he hesitates from shooting him because Meadow is there. Unlike Tony, he can’t completely separate his criminality from his humanity.

The episode ends with Tony and Meadow driving back to Jersey. Meadow asks Tony if he’s in the mob, and Tony gives her a scrap of truth: he says he’s involved in some illegal activities, but that it’s nothing like you see in the movies, no murder or anything like that. This bit of sophistry is worse than a lie because it’s so believable. But it’s also the start of the slow deterioration of the walls between Tony’s life of crime and his family life; eventually, by Season 6, A.J. has so internalized the rumors about who his father is that he fashions himself a young gangster.

There’s another interesting parallel between this classic episode from Season 1 and the most recent episode. In the most recent episode, after Tony bails A.J. out of jail for attempting to kill Junior, A.J. calls his father a hypocrite. His rationale? When they watch The Godfather, Tony always says that the scene where Michael kills McClusker and Sollozzo in the restaurant is “his favorite scene of all time.” Tony’s response? “That’s just a movie. You have to grow up, A.J.”

In both episodes Tony uses the seeming unreality of “the movies” – specifically a movie that he and his buddies actually model their lives after – as a way to obfuscate his own crimes. In a way, he’s right: his life is nothing like The Godfather. In The Godfather, the mob killings always seemed honorable, and the life seemed glamorous; in The Sopranos, the killings are always horrible and the life is grotesque.

Last night’s Sopranos episode (April 25, 2006)

From guest blogger Jeremy Sachs.

“Sometimes we lie to ourselves for so long it becomes impossible to know the truth”

-(paraphrased) Vito to his firefightin-johnny cake makin hunk of manmeat

“You the man!”

-Hanger-on to AJ

These two lines of dialogue aptly represent the character arcs of both Tony and AJ and a return to form after last week’s mostly useless episode. Tony’s hypocrisy is on full display, as he first uses his supposedly transformative post-shooting experience as both a pick up line and as a justification for an extramarital romp. He also decides to sell the building housing the chicken store, despite his earlier protests that to do so would rob the neighborhood of its history and character. In these two decision, the contradictions inherent in Tony’s life have never been more clearly on display. Family is paramount, except when particular family members get in the way (see the dearly departed Adriana). Tradition is sacred, as long as the repositories of said tradition are not vying for control of the business (see the shunting aside of pre-Alzheimer’s Junior).

While these themes have been a constant throughout the series, where this episode stands out is that Tony is finally realizing the tensions between his words (to Dr. Melfi- “How can I cheat on the wife who’s taken such care of me since the shooting?”) and his deeds (his psuedo-encounter with the real estate agent). As the agent unbuttons the shirt his wife lovingly buttoned just minutes before, Tony suddenly puts a halt to the proceedings. When Tony returns home, he starts a fight with Carmela over nothing, perhaps in an effort to lessen the guilt he is feeling. Is this the beginning of a new Tony, a Tony who is capable of remorse before or during a questionable act (rather than the usual post- act regret expressed via his panic attacks), a Tony who acknowledges the lies he had told himself?

Surprisinly, the other major arc involves AJ. It’s surprising because over the course of the series, AJ has changed all the way from a fat dumb spoiled child to a thin dumb spoiled slightly older child. But after a succession of events that include-

1. his mom having to wake up him so he wont miss his planned assassination of Junior

2. his poorly thought out attempt to kill Junior fails miserably

3. his father being more upset with him for crying than for an attempted murder-

AJ agrees to intercede in a landlord dispute for a friend in the club, and the friend replies that “You the man!”. As AJ looks in the mirror shortly afterward, he realizes that he is anything but a man. He’s failed out of school, living at home, working in a dead-end job, and totally reliant on his father’s name, connections, and money to survive. The only appropriate response to such a realization- a panic attack. A hint, perhaps, that father and son are more similar than either would care to admit.