Welcome to the late column…

A NICE SLEEPER:  Insomnia continues the run of solid movies hitting theaters this summer, each one hoping to avoid being crushed by the meteoric blockbuster products like Spider-Man and Star Wars.  Hopefully, some of the folks who are expending all of their energies as media proctologists for George Lucas will notice the trend sometime soon.   And I’m talking studio films, not just indie fare.  About A Boy, Unfaithful, Insomnia, The Bourne Identity, Road to Perdition, Full Frontal… that’s looking like a pretty nice summer for a change.

Insomnia is a remake of, well, Insomnia, the Erik Skjoldberg (unavoidably misspelled in English) film from 1997, starring Stellan Skarsgard.  It has none of the expected markings of a remake.  Christopher Nolan is an original voice.  Al Pacino is half the size of Stellan Skarsgard, demanding a very different performance.  The script was re-written by a first-time credited screenwriter, Hillary Seitz.  Robin Williams is getting attention for playing a bad guy, but what is most marked about his performance is that it is completely natural and restrained.  And Hilary Swank plays what may be a career-saving role as a smart, attractive, real character, whose sexuality is non-issue. 

Insomnia is a mirror movie, asking viewers to consider where the line is between good and evil, between heroism and villainy, between nightmare and reality.  Pacino’s turn as a hero cop searching for a killer while carrying baggage that gets heavier and heavier is well worth the price of admission.  It is not one of his great performances.  It is not really Oscar bait.  But it is solid, one-of-the-best-actors-in-the-world kind of work.  You can feel his deterioration.  And even more impressive for a film performance, you can feel his energy shifting throughout the film… when it wanes, when he turns it up, the time he needs to recover from each expenditure of excitement.

There is nothing really tricky about Nolan’s work here.  There are flashes of his Memento style, but like all good filmmakers, he isn’t a one-trick pony.  He likes close-ups and he likes long takes with naturalistic lighting.  And he lets his actors work.  The only time I saw his hand was in a short scene between Martin Donovan – who is always excellent – and Pacino in a restaurant… it was clear that Nolan didn’t get what he wanted in his master shot of the two actors and so he cut to singles too many times… but that’s more than forgivable.  One of my favorite touches… and I’m betting it was his doing and not Hilary Swank’s… is that Ms. Swank’s character doesn’t quite know how to use her make-up in the early scenes.  She’s trying.  But it’s just not quite right.  As the movie progresses and her character grows up, everything about her, including her make-up becomes more confident.

Swank is solid here.  I can’t imagine why anyone would attack Williams for his work here.  He’s like a working character actor more than a movie star.  And the subtext, which is that he is an actor you like, works for the story of the movie quite well.  Donovan, great.  Great to see Paul Dooley, one of America's great character actors, as good as ever, bringing understated authority to his role in a movie of extremes.  Maura Tierney gets to be mysterious and dark, but doesn’t have much of a role in the final cut.  Same with Nicky Katt, who needs to bite the financial bullet and refuse all and any roles where he is the brooding, overlooked guy… eventually it will end his career if he keeps playing the same guy. 

But the real acting finds here are Jonathan Jackson and Katharine Isabelle.  Apparently, neither actor is really unknown.  Jackson was, apparently, a regular on General Hospital for years and is now working on a Disney family comedy made by the guy who did My Dog Skip.  This guy is right up there with DiCaprio and James Franco and all of the teen/twenties charisma actors.  He keeps up with Pacino quite well.  And so does Ms. Isabelle, who co-starred in the acclaimed Canadian film, Ginger Snaps, which was unceremoniously dumped by Artisan and can now be found in video stores AND on Cinemax at 3:45 a.m. EST/PST tonight and next Tuesday night @ 8p EST/PST.  Neither actor has more than five minutes of screen time.  And both left a strong impression.

Anyway, this is a good, solid cop movie with another layer of depth that should leave you thinking.  It’s not quite as ambiguous as the original, but it’s not a sell-out either.  Good movie.

THE SPIRIT OF SCALLIONS & CINNAMON:  I guess DreamWorks should be spinning about how brave Disney is to be putting out the 2-D-with-some-3-D Lilo & Stitch as loudly as they are trumpeting their heartfelt foray into drawing pretty horsies.  I guess what writers who bite on that bunk forget is that Spirit was in production as a 2-D animated film for years before Shrek and Monster’s Inc.  And the irony is that the only bad animation in the entire movie is when a 3-D train derails and falls down a hill, looking for all the world like a CG effect in a non-CG film.

Anyway…

I really wish I liked Spirit better.  My 11-year-old niece loved it.  My 12-year-old nephew enjoyed it.  And whenever I try to recall a single lyric or note of a single song in this movie, I keep finding myself humming Bryan Adams song from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Here’s what I found irritating about Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron… it could have been a true one-of-a-kind.  The horses may not talk, but they have been anthropomorphized so that they have human expressions that make every emotion clear.  Fine.  So why do we need the Matt Damon voiceover?  It would have been wonderful had they left it out, because even when it is there, is just tells us what we already know, because the animators know what they are doing.  Trust in the animators, Jeffrey.  

After a while, it becomes obvious that as talented as Bryan Adams is, he was not the first choice as the song guy on this film.  Bruce Springsteen had to be the first choice.  And the movie cries out for the musical ranginess that has become his signature in his later albums.  Springsteen has shown the ability to swing between rock and country in a powerful way and while I can understand that DreamWorks didn’t want to box themselves in with a country soundtrack, there are some times in this movie that just scream out for a non-electric twang on the guitar and some really quiet, soulful singing.  It needed the kind of resignation that you find in Springsteen’s voice in some track on Nebraska and Tunnel of Love.  I like Bryan Adams a lot, but he never goes gravel.  He’s never really sad in his music.

And the human villains and heroes could have been a bit less obvious.  Didn’t anyone thing about the irony of Spirit being freed by an Indian only to be caged by an Indian?  The Indian may eventually learn to respect Spirit as a free soul, but in the meantime, is he really better than the evil cavalry?  And the use of a mare to turn Spirit through her sexual wiles?  I don’t know. 

I would have loved to see the animals slightly anthropomorphized, but still be animals.  Instead of having Spirit do impossible things, like unlocking all the barn doors to let other horses out, I would have liked to see a character who feels for the horses in the cavalry, who knows that, say, Spirit is going to be put down in the morning because he can’t be broken.  Then he meets the Indians, who come to respect Spirit’s spirit.  There is a beautiful story underneath all of that effort to take care of the audience.  And I’ll tell you… they don’t need to be coddled like that.   Have you ever watched kids play with action figures and see how they come to live in their hands?  I always remember watching a 4-year-old who wanted to play good guy/bad guy but only had Batman figures around… so he made one of the Batman figures good and the other one bad and moved forward.  Kids don’t need to be fed.

In any case, Spirit is a decent animated movie.  It’s no overwhelming visually, but it’s not bad either.  A nice movie.  Your daughters will love it.  Your sons will put up with it until they can get another ticket for Spider-Man or Attack of the Clones.

LOOKING FOR MR. JONES:  The lovely and talented Anderson Jones of E! Online let loose that he was working on a funny story about some subliminal imagery in this summer’s most butt-erific poster for an upcoming comedy.  So I ran over to his site to see whether he had written about it yet, so I could link y’all to him… but finding him on that site is like finding a needle in a haystack.  And Andy is no needle.  So, here is his link.  The story still isn’t there, but I’m sure it will be when he updates the column tomorrow. 

ONE LAST THING:  Lost in all the Clone attacking is any reportage on Natalie Portman’s skin tight white jumpsuit and other outfits that remind us that being small-breasted can be sexy as hell.  Likewise, the poster for Blue Crush tells us the same… Debra Messing in Hollywood Ending… Bridget Moynahan in The Sum of All Fears…

READER OF THE DAY:  His Whiteness writes:  To say that the best (two sequence combo in a film ) in the past five years (was) the pod race and the Darth Maul fight is a head-scratcher. For swordplay, I thought that Crouching Tiger has scenes just as exciting and popularly accessible as either the Darth Maul sequence, and at other times it rivaled Matrix's best moments. Or what about Fellowship's climactic brouhaha? The Jeep/cliff sequence in Lost World is more suspense than action, but I think if the terms of the fight are direction and edge-of-your-seatness, it's a winner. And while we're talking Spielberg, the last firefight in Saving Private Ryan is superior action. I even dug on almost all the tomfoolery in M:I2.

DP RESPONDS:  Fair enough.  Point taken.  Lost World is more than five years ago.  Crouching Tiger and Rings are excellent comparisons from two movies that were better than Phantom Menace and Clones, in my opinion.  MI:2 and Ryan… not so sure.  But with 150 summer movies in the last five years and maybe 100 major action movies, that still puts Menace’s tandem in the top ten percent.  Or is that not good enough (he asked rhetorically)?

And 2M writes:  “Hell. Yes.

You seem to be the only member of the film press not currently engaged in what is swiftly becoming a yellow press war of truly ludicrious proportions. Never, in all my (shortish) adult life, have I witnessed so many grown men and women descend into bewildering displays of rancor and outright hate. That Star Wars (the film series that convinced Coppola of Lucas' future as religious visionary) should be this film is a surprise and a disappointment.

A surprise, because I expect better from supposedly intelligent and emotionally mature adults than the slander fest we've been exposed to.  Critics as diverse as Wells, Ebert, Schwartzbaum and the NY Times critic whose name is currently completely escaping me (and who likened Star Wars fans to Muscovite peasants waiting hours in line to beg for unsatisfying slop) have all taken up arms against the apparent all consuming evil of George Lucas. Their rampant and blatant condescension, dismissal of, and summary judgment upon AOTC was less warranted criticism and more critical witch-hunt. However, the critics aren't really piling on Lucas. The infuriating thing, and the thing that has compelled me to write editorials to yourself, Wells, Ebert and the Times, is that they're piling on us.

Whether they be professional critics with respected reputations, or overly (and negatively) opinionated people off the street, if you liked AOTC, you're not right in the head. It's SOO bad, SOOOO unbelievably awful in so many ways, that to have enjoyed it is to admit that you lack taste. That you don't appreciate the "original trilogy", that you are a poor, unfortunate peasant waiting in line for your gruel that will inevitably disappoint. Fuck them. Some of them gave better reviews to Scary Movie than they did to AOTC.  As far as I'm concerned, that's where the authority ends.

I loved AOTC. I got no deep and spiritual inner meaning from the film, nor did I receive any insights as to how I, as a person, am better for having seen it. But I enjoyed it. A lot. And that's my right. For my money, people who have given laughably high marks to low class, effects driven fare (as Ebert did on "Spawn") do not have a particularly valid point when they complain about the effects in Clones. People who use their review as one part review/one part snide castigation of Lucas/the franchise (as Schwatrzbaum did in EW) should be singled out for the agenda driven individuals they are (see also: Salon.com)

Wells is the worst, because he's ridiculous in his agenda. Not just annoying, or frustrating, but actively ridiculous. The tone of the pieces is just barely above "George Lucas raped my childhood!"; the common and execrable comment found on AICN.

NO movie (short of, just perhaps, Freddie Got Fingered) deserves this sort of attention/derision/slander. It's a film, not a political event. Last night, I met some friends out for drinks and one of them informed his brother that I had enjoyed the film. He sneered at me and said, "Is that right? Big fan of shitty dialogue and terrible acting, huh?"

I had no idea how to respond. It felt as if I was being provoked. I shook my head and said, "I just like Star Wars. I..." but already, people had lost interest. It's sad, really. And it's not just this film. Our culture is becoming one that picks things apart before we can put them together.”

E ME:  How are you going to spend your weekend?  Not sleeping, riding, single parenting, web-slinging, cloning or …?