9

2009 // USA // Shane Acker // January 10, 2010 // DVD - Universal (2009)

B - Shane Acker's talent for nimble, evocative world-building is on full display in 9. It's telling that even at a lean 79 minutes, the film still feels a bit padded and sluggish on the story front, given that all the satisfying setting crunchiness is delivered swiftly and efficiently. Acker deftly establishes the essential traits of his post-apocalyptic world and the clan of burlap-skinned homunculi that inhabit it, while leaving plenty to implication and imagination, including the precise mechanics of the setting's steampunk-tinged alchemical magic. Perhaps unexpectedly, the nine little doll-folk are quite distinctive, both visually and as characters, but the real draw here is not the simplistic story--a hero awakens evil and then defeats evil, etc.--but the richness of the blasted landscape, the uncanny menace of the monsters that stalk it, and the thrills of numerous small-scale battles and escapes. Even the vague, unnecessarily drawn-out ending doesn't markedly detract from 9's guiltless visceral appeal, which is that of a novel, densely detailed world sketched with precision and enthusiasm. Acker gratifyingly demonstrates that not only aren't the fantasy, science-fiction, and dystopian genres dead, they're often found in the same film, and a gorgeously animated one at that.

Funny People

2009 // USA // Judd Apatow // January 7, 2010 // DVD - Universal (2009)

B - Funny People represents a distillation of the best qualities from Judd Apatow's previous film, Knocked Up. In this dark, meandering tale of second chances and human fallibility, the director employs both his ruthless pursuit of affecting emotional detail and the self-effacing vibe of star Seth Rogan (in his plush animal mode). Meanwhile, the film jettisons the last Apatow outing's retrograde sexual politics and ridiculously pat conclusion, resulting in a melancholy film that reveals the director not as an intrinsically comedic film-maker, but as someone interested in the absurdity of psychological landscapes. Thus, Funny People, while hardly a barrel of laughs, is nonetheless perceptive, audacious, and weirdly charming. Adam Sandler indicts his own career via a thinly-veiled alter ego, and Leslie Mann's character devastatingly demonstrates how bright, bighearted people can make unbelievably stupid decisions. Apatow's focus on his characters' feelings rather than the narrative is both a strength and a weakness. Absent a conventional structure or a clear antagonist, Funny People spins off the rails a bit in the final half-hour, as the director searches for a way to conclude a story that has no end. Still, the film proves to be an invigorating slap to viewers expecting yet another storybook conclusion.

The Limits of Control

2009 // USA // Jim Jarmusch // December 26, 2009 // DVD - Universal (2009)

B+ - Whether a given viewer will find Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control to be a gorgeous slice of generic deconstruction and existential provocation, or just a frustrating string of opaque, inert set pieces will be a matter of taste. Count me among those who, while conscious of the film's pretensions, found Jarmusch's latest work invigorating. The film follows a sleepless Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé, resplendent in sharkskin suits) as he travels across Spain on a sinister errand, meeting a progression of oddballs with whom he exchanges matchboxes and cryptic messages. Backstory and motives are never elaborated upon, because of course the film's thriller elements aren't the point. (To wit, Jarmusch stages a James Bond infiltration sequence entirely off-screen.) The director is working in Lynch-country here, sans that director's smudging of dream and reality. The Limits of Control is foremost about the evocation of mood: through conversations laden with significance; repeated dialog, objects, and motifs; Christopher Doyle's sun-kissed cinematography; and the soundtrack by experimental metal group Boris. While the absence of emotional footholds necessarily limits the film's potency, Jarmusch nonetheless delivers a daring and inexplicably compelling work about, well, control, and its increasingly illusory nature in the modern world.

Five Minutes of Heaven

2009 // UK // Oliver Hirschbiegel // December 24, 2009 // DVD - IFC (2009)

B - Just as Oliver Hirschbiegel's uncommonly penetrating Nazi epic Downfall pivoted on Bruno Ganz' portrayal of Adolf Hitler, so too does his tale of the Irish Troubles' aftermath rests on the shoulders of an actor. However, Five Minutes of Heaven's most riveting performance isn't delivered by its most familiar face, Liam Neeson, whose repentant Loyalist now works in conflict resolution. Leonine and haunted, Neeson suits the material well, but the film's locus is unequivocally James Nesbitt, as the brother of a Catholic man a seventeen-year-old Neeson gunned down. Goaded into confronting his brother's murderer by a company that engineers reconciliations for television, Nesbitt is wholly mesmerizing as a frayed man who is utterly unapologetic about his hatred and his lust for revenge. Hirschbiegel and writer Guy Hibbert never lose sight of the story's essential theme of the futility of blood-for-blood, but they are unafraid of exploring other avenues, such as the insidious nature of indoctrination, the toxic effects of grief on families, and, most damningly, the manner in which the media exploits human tragedy and treats peacemaking as just another bit of niche programming. It's primarily some third act wheel-spinning and narrative goofiness that prevents the film from feeling like an unqualified success.

The Hangover

2009 // USA // Todd Phillips // December 24, 2009 // DVD - Warner Brothers (2009)

B- - Although hardly the Second Coming of raunchy comedies that the hype suggested, The Hangover establishes that the "lost night" high concept can work when executed with sufficiently nasty enthusiasm and held aloft by a cast willing to fritter around in its weirder crannies. Call it Dude, Where's the Groom? Director Phillips and writers John Lucas and Scott Moore at least understand the appeal of their pseudo-detective story conceit. They maintain the focus on delivering unexpected gags right to the end, at which juncture nearly every plot point clicks into place. (Very, dare I say, Shakespearean, that.) Frequently, the laughs the films coaxes are guffaws of sheer disbelief, whether from a teacher swiping kids' field trip money for the casino tables, or a naked Chinese gangster popping out of a car trunk. The cast keeps things afloat, especially Ed Helms in clueless square mode and Zach Galifianakis' unexpectedly effective space cadet shtick. Too often, however, The Hangover errs on the side of gleefully gratuitous slapstick, when it isn't indulging in sexist twaddle. Helms' ludicrously shrewish wife in particular is an offensive bit of caricature that serves as a convenient straw-woman for the film's stale, contemptuous "Let Boys Be Boys" ethos.

Terminator Salvation

2009 // USA // McG // December 18, 2009 // DirecTV On-Demand

C- - Just as Nick Stahl's skittish, fatalistic John Connor fit Rise of the Machines' ferocious rush towards a bleak future, a zealous yet cynical Christian Bale—plagiarizing his Batman growl—suits Terminator Salvation's gritty realization of that future. This, and the admittedly seamless visual effects, is about the only thing that McG's distressingly rote sequel gets right. This outing's central conceit—SkyNet has spawned an experimental half-human, half-machine abomination (a rugged, essentially charmless Sam Worthington)—isn't remotely meaty enough to sustain a feature film. The story is as limp as a noodle, but even as a mindless science-fiction actioner, Salvation fumbles. At about the halfway point, McG trades genuinely frightening early set pieces for dull sensory incoherence. Blessedly, it's not the nerve-frying visual lunacy of a Michael Bay film, but just the undistinguished smash-bang nonsense that has characterized vast swaths of the past two decades' action films. That such mediocrity has befallen that Terminator saga is all the more frustrating given that the film-makers are clearly besotted with the previous films, loading Salvation with references and homages that range from the blatant to the clever. If only fanboy enthusiasm alone were sufficient to conjure a good film.