Mongol

2007 // Russia - Germany - Kazakhstan // Sergei Bodrov // July 6, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Mongol is far too mediocre a film, given its ambitions. It purports to be "The Untold Story of the Genghis Khan's Rise to Power". Whether this tale of the man who would be Genghis—here still called Temudjin—was truly "untold" until now or just unfamiliar to Western audiences, I can't say. Regardless, it's clear that director Sergei Bodrov wants his film to be a grandiose period epic in the vein of Braveheart or Gladiator, with all the cheesy mythologizing that entails. Yet even in this, Mongol stumbles. The film's luscious look and generally warm, mature treatment of its characters can't conceal the incoherence or tedium of its story. Furthermore, Mongol delivers almost no fresh insight into one of history's Great Men, a nagging flaw in light of how forcefully the film trumpets its "untold" character.

In the opening scenes of Mongol, we are permitted a brief glimpse of an adult Temudjin (Tadanobu Asano) as a haggard prisoner, before we whipsaw back to the Khan's childhood. The young Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren) and his father (Ba Sen) journey to meet with a rival clan, from which the boy is supposed to select his future bride and seal a sorely needed alliance. While under the hospitality of a weaker clan, however, Temudjin jumps the gun and chooses a local girl, Börtee (Bayertsetseg Erdenebat), who incidentally egged the boy into his hasty bit of defiance. This decision echoes throughout the rest of the film, but of more urgent concern is yet another clan's fatal poisoning of Temudjin's father. A kinsmen uses the opportunity to seize power and Temudjin's herds. Mongol tradition apparently forbids the traitor from slaying the boy outright, so he enslaves Temudjin and vows to execute him when he reaches adulthood.

This pretty much sets up the rest of the film, which is one, long, exhausting, disjointed succession of escapes, chases, imprisonments, skirmishes, battles, reunions, reversals, and so forth. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, the whole enterprise is skillfully shot, and certainly entertaining in the moment. The film delivers the minimal requirements for an historical epic: melodrama, action, and period detail. The problem is that Mongol is entirely forgettable—not because it's a bad film, but because it doesn't have much interest in being memorable. Sure, the romantic storyline between Temudjin and the adult Börte (Khulan Chuluun) is bittersweet and touching, and the action sequences are suitably swift and savage. However, I have trouble recalling one genuinely outstanding moment in the film.

This seems at odds with Mongol's apparent aspirations for penetrating historic revelation. The banality of the film's genre furnishings might have been less disappointing if the filmmakers had given the audience something else to work with. I was hoping for some insight into the conqueror that Temudjin would one day become. No such luck. To be sure, Asano glares with unsettling calm, and he effectively portrays the Khan as a wolfish outcast with a clinging whiff of destiny. Indeed, all of Mongol's performers shine, narrowly evading the camp indulgences that usually bedevil the genre. Yet there's a sense of lost opportunity in the film's treatment of Temudjin. Through Mongol's lens, we learn of the man's cool individualism and his ambivalence about others' opinions. We witness his dogged loyalty to his pledged bride, and his often irrational pursuit of an idealized family life even as he gathers loyal horsemen for his horde. There are all sorts of contradictions at work in the portrayal, but Bodrov fumbles them, settling for ambiguity and mistaking it for complexity. Meanwhile, the film is always straining with awkward hindsight to meet up with the notorious Khan of history. The overall impression is: "Huh. That Genghis was one odd badass." It's not exactly Lawrence of Arabia.

I don't want to undersell the satisfaction of seeing a neatly executed Mongol epic. The film engages on its own (paper-thin) terms. Surprisingly, its most affecting sequences are also its quietest. Witnessing Temudjin's friendship with another warlord slowly sour and boil into violence is one of Mongol's chief pleasures, especially because its tragedy seems to rest solely on the incompatibility of the two men's ambitions. In its best moments, the film almost succeeds in painting Temudjin as an alien rebel, whose greatness was less a product of destiny than of his peculiar, unbowed personality. Sadly, the distractions of vaguely sketched motivations and generally confused storytelling scuttle Mongol's potential for greatness. The gorgeous steppe landscapes and somber throat singing on the film's soundtrack emerge as mere Mongolian trimmings on a fairly typical exercise in big-budget epic sameness.

Kung Fu Panda

2008 // USA // Mark Osborne and John Stevenson // June 12, 2008 // IMAX Theatrical Print

B - It's tempting to damn Kung Fu Panda with faint praise. In some respects, it's a fairly middling film in the pantheon of animated children's fare. However, Panda is blissfully uncorrupted by the pervasive sins of recent kiddie cinema. It's a completely linear and uncluttered approach to the genre that even adults—parents and non-parents alike—will likely appreciate. In place of pandering, pop culture references, and potty humor, Panda focuses its energy on sparkling visual design, engaging characters, and, since this is twenty-first century computer animation, eye popping action set pieces. I can forgive its creaky, shallow message, and even its shrink-wrapped Daoist-Buddhist pearls of wisdom, for one simple, delightful reason: It's an utterly pleasurable bit of digital escapism, executed with martial arts precision. Oh, and it's about a panda who knows kung fu. And he wears little shorts. If I have to explain why this is appealing, there's no hope for you.

Po (Jack Black) is a rotund panda—Are there svelte pandas?—who works in his father's noodle shop in a rural Chinese village. Po's dad, Ping (the great James Hong,) is singularly devoted to his gastronomic trade. Ping is also a goose, which raises a zoological problem that the film acknowledges but never resolves. ("Sometimes I think I'm not your son," Po mumbles.) Po is less than enthusiastic about a future in noodle-peddling. His obsession is kung fu, and in particular the exploits of the Furious Five, a band of fearless warriors who dwell in the Jade Temple high above the village. He even has their action figures! Po is, in short, a fanboy.

The masters of the Jade Temple are a venerable tortoise named Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), and his old student, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), who now trains the Furious Five: Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Mantis (Seth Rogan), Crane (David Cross), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Monkey (Jackie Chan). Oogway informs Shifu that the time has come to choose the Dragon Warrior, a legendary kung fu master who will defend the village and temple. Oogway has had a vision that the evil kung fu warrior Tai Lung (Ian McShane) will escape from prison, and the Dragon Warrior must be granted the power of the temple's Dragon Scroll to defeat him. Tai Lung is, naturally, Shifu's adopted son and former student, and upon hearing the prophecy the alarmed master sends a messenger to request a doubling of the prison guards.

It's fairly obvious where this is going, even if you haven't seen the trailers. During a ceremony, Oogway accidentally selects Po, rather than one of the Furious Five, as the Dragon Warrior. Of course, Oogway keeps reminding Shifu, there are no accidents. Meanwhile, despite Shifu's warning, Tai Lung escapes from prison in one of the film's most breathless, marvelous sequences, and then sets off for the Jade Temple. For better or worse, Po is the village's champion, and Shifu must find a way to forge him into a warrior.

Kung Fu Panda owes as much to sports films as to martial arts films. Certainly, it boasts the trappings of the martial arts action genre: an unlikely hero, the intervention of fate, a focus on the master and student relationship, and plenty of pseudo-profound Eastern platitudes. However, Panda is most essentially a straightforward sports underdog tale, and as such it also hits the familiar features of that archetype. Muttering skeptics? Check. Training montage? Check. Personal crisis followed by revelation? Check. Final showdown where the hero seems outmatched? Check. It might be a tired pattern, but Panda does it very well, and without any pointless subplots or digressions. Where it deviates (refreshingly) from the formula is in the ambiguity or outright reluctance of its protagonist. Po is obsessed with kung fu, and he might fantasize about standing alongside the Furious Five, but he knows that he's no warrior. His main—ahem—ssets are his ample belly and posterior. Destiny might have chosen him, but Po knows it has to be a mistake. Right? (Shades of The Matrix there.)

From an aesthetic perspective, Kung Fu Panda represents a leap forward for Dreamworks Animation. The most memorable aspect of the Shrek films was their acid wit and sly fairy tale send-ups. Excepting Donkey's expressive mug, the characters and settings were mostly unimaginative and the animation lifeless. In contrast, Panda is a beautiful and vibrant film. The mythical China setting is gorgeously realized, down to the steaming dumplings and pink peach tree bottoms. The character designs are distinctive and detailed. Anthropomorphic animals might be a staple of animated children's films, but Panda at least ups the ante. It shows us not just animals that walk and talk, but animals that fight, in full-throttle wuxia glory. Dreamworks asks an intriguing question: How would a tiger, a preying mantis, or (yes) a panda fight if they were martial arts masters? As an answer, they serve up a genuine animation achievement: one thrilling, fantastical inter-species fight sequence after another. (Slow motion CGI has rarely looked so good.)

Panda's performances fulfill that irritating, interminable Hollywood animation requirement of being vaguely recognizable without being colorful. The success of the film's characters lies much more with the artists than the actors. That said, the performances are serviceable and not distracting, and that's about the bare minimum I ask of an animated film. Jack Black in particular tones down his sweaty, manic edge to good effect. Normally, Black has a reckless, goofy comic style that misfires (King Kong) as often as it succeeds (School of Rock). Here, he just delivers Po with the requisite pathos and gentle humor, and without shtick. In a wonderful, traditionally animated introductory sequence, he even has a vehicle to show off the triumphant, adolescent muscles that he flexes in Tenacious D.

The Kung Fu Panda message—"Ya just gotta believe!"—is uncomplicated stuff, earnestly presented but ultimately not much deeper than a kiddie pool. Occasionally, the film strains towards weightier matters, often couched as fortune cookie wisdom from the mouths of Oogway or Shifu. However, the filmmakers misplay their hand a bit; the film's genuinely sharp instincts for humor and thrills make these "deep" moments seem perfunctory. In contrast, the film's subtler thematic elements and mythical nods are also some of its nicest touches. An elderly character vanishes in a cloud of flower petals and sparkling motes, not dying but ascending like a Bodhisattva or Immortal. Shifu's messenger is unintentionally responsible for Tai Lung's prison break, which begs the question: Would the evil warrior have escaped at all if Shifu hadn't been so intent on stopping him? (More Matrix echoes...)

There's a bit of mean-spiritedness in the film's treatment of Po's girth. When Shifu discovers that the secret to training his corpulent student is through his stomach, it's played for laughs (and cleverly so, thanks to the animators). Yet I can't help but wonder whether treating an obese character as a freak who never "legitimately" learns kung fu—and can always safely be mocked, even after his victories—is the best message for younger viewers.

That aside, Kung Fu Panda is the best children's film I've seen this year, and worthy of an adult's time as well. More than a treat for the eyes, it's exciting and endearing without falling into the crass cultural sewers where most kiddie fare wallows. In the age of Alvin and the Chipmunks, that counts for a lot.

The Fall

2006 // USA - India // Tarsem Singh // June 5, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - The Fall is a story about stories, an enchanting visual poem that honors the curious power that fiction can exert over our lives. It is a film where unexpected delights and terrors appear at every turn. Perhaps for these reasons, it is also a baffling and demented work. It is not, in any sense, an easy film. It utilizes a familiar story-within-a-story conceit, but this nested structure is not, in itself, what makes it a challenging work. Rather, The Fall asks that the viewer accept a secondary story that is surreal, volatile, and frequently campy. Meanwhile, it offers a primary story that is unrepentantly sentimental and examines themes that are stunning in their intricacy. The Fall is nothing if not ambitious, perhaps even foolhardy. It waltzes with catastrophe. It snatches dazzling success from fiasco, I think, because the filmmakers trust the viewer implicitly, never stooping to coddle or condescend. This is an unrelentingly sincere film, and unquestionably the most invigorating work of cinema I have seen this year.

The Fall opens in early twentieth century Los Angeles, although the exact year is never specified. (A title indicates that it is "Once Upon a Time," and that right there tells you everything you need to know about the film's sensibility.) A moon-faced Romanian girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) is recuperating from a broken arm in a charity hospital. Alexandria is a curious and unruly child, the sort who never plays with other children and seeks out her own amusements. She always carries a wooden box full of mementos and cast-offs—the treasures of a little girl. Wandering the grounds, she encounters a heartsick silent film stuntman, Roy (Lee Pace), who is laid up with a broken leg. Alexandria and Roy strike up a friendship of sorts. The stuntman tells the girl a short story about her namesake, Alexander the Great, and then persuades her to come back the following day for a true “epic”.

The Fall intertwines the story of Alexandria and Roy in the hospital with the outlandish fantasy that Roy spins for his young listener. This tale concerns the Masked Bandit's quest for vengeance against the vile Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone). In the tradition of all great fantasy stories, the Bandit has a circle of colorful allies: an Indian warrior (Jeetu Verma), a former slave (Marcus Wesley), an Italian explosives expert (Robin Smith), a dreadlocked mystic (Julian Bleach), and, er... Charles Darwin (Leo Bill). Each has been wronged by Odious in some way; each craves revenge. Over the course of their mission, the allies escape from a desert island, liberate a slave caravan, and assault a palace, among other feats of daring. There's magic, romance, and lots of faceless Bad Guys. It's a classic fantasy yarn, in other words.

Sort of. Roy assembles the plot, such as it is, with a hallucinatory logic that has to be witnessed to be believed. The film's fantasy sequences unfold like a whirlwind dream, without much care for whether the viewer keeps up or finds any of it preposterous. Alexandria doesn't seem to mind, of course, and she keeps returning to Roy's bedside to find out what happens next. Roy takes a shine to her spirited nature, but he may also have other motives for weaving his tale. He needs pills to help him sleep, he explains, so that he can be rested enough to finish the story. Specifically, he needs the bottle in the dispensary labeled "Morphine."

Director Tarsem Singh (just "Tarsem" now, apparently) cut his teeth creating visually inventive music videos. However, it would be shamefully dismissive to simply wave away The Fall as a feature length indulgence of the director's MTV pedigree. Tarsem works within a distinctive aesthetic—neither a "video thing" nor a "cinema thing". It is an approach that treats every image like a tableau to be lovingly fussed over. "Phantasmagorical" seems a reasonable adjective to describe his style, but this might overstate the case. In both his first feature, The Cell, and now in The Fall, Tarsem discovered ways to circumscribe his surrealism. In The Cell, the baroque production design was limited to computer-enhanced mindscapes. Here, Tarsem indulges his taste for bizarre spectacle sans sci fi justification, but he still bounds it. The fantasy sequences in The Fall are a peek into Alexandria's mind's eye, her own moving illustrations for Roy's fairy tale.

And what illustrations they are! The story of the Masked Bandit takes place in a Near Earth, where the Stone Age abuts the Renaissance next to the Roaring Twenties. Eras and locales ooze and bubble through the film, always gorgeously realized. Tarsem has obsessed over the details of this world so that, frankly, we don't have to. He asks us to refrain from stumbling over the story's unrealities—Charles Darwin?—but to instead submit to the wonder and drama of it all, just as Alexandria does.

Borrowing a page from The Wizard of Oz, Alexandria's fantasies incorporate the people and things around her. The hospital's ice deliveryman is the slave, an orderly is Darwin, a beautiful nurse (Justine Waddell) is a damsel in distress, and the menacing X-ray technicians are Odious' legions, who yip like hyenas. For his part, Roy revises the story at whim. It morphs repeatedly as his objectives in the telling and Alexandria's wishes shift. The Masked Bandit is initially Alexandria's father (Emil Hostina), a gap-toothed farmer, but he later becomes Roy himself. Even misunderstandings are woven into the fantasy. For Roy, who makes silent Westerns for a living, the "Indian" is a Native American. But Alexandria, who has grown up among South Asian laborers in the California fruit groves and has never seen a movie, envisions that the Indian is, of course, from India.

The acting in The Fall's fantasy sequences is lusciously camp, even histrionic at times. Standing alone, the fantasy doesn't add up to much other than an hour or so of stylized excitement. Of course, these sequences don't stand alone—the story is under the control of another story. Tarsem sprinkles the tale of Alexandria and Roy with a flurry of themes. The result is a framing story as thematically rich as the fantasy tale is visually opulent. The director is manifestly fascinated with the phenomenon of storytelling. How much does authorial intent matter? Is it more important that stories fulfill or disrupt our expectations? How does a mere tall tale blossom into superstition, mythology, or even legend? Most movingly, The Fall posits that stories can facilitate connections between strangers, opening us to self-awareness and laying a foundation for love.

Untaru and Pace are the heart of this film, and they both discover portrayals that are curiously magnetic. While the dialogue in the fantasy sequences can be gleefully ludicrous at times, the scenes between Alexandria and Roy boast an unparalleled realism. It's not that they are naturalistic, precisely, but they do perfectly capture a rare thing: a completely convincing interaction between an adult and child who are not related. I cannot do these scenes justice simply by describing them. You have to see them and listen to them: the way that Roy asks Alexandria to repeat her thickly accented mumblings; the way that Alexandria's words reveal the workings of her fidgety, flitting mind; the way that their stance toward each other warms, cools, and bursts with affection from scene to scene. Having just marveled at Simon Iteanu's realistic performance in Flight of the Balloon, it's all the more delightful to witness Untaru one-up him with an even more compelling portrayal of a child. Iteanu's is probably more authentic, but Untaru conveys a searing charm that has no equal in recent films.

The Fall is a curious wonder of a film. It is melodrama, to be sure, but melodrama done artfully and earnestly. The filmmakers have given us a thing that is beautifully crafted, filled with strange sights, and obsessed with the alchemy that fiction can work on our lives. I can guarantee that some viewers will walk away from it bewildered or even embarrassed. The Fall asks that we, like Alexandria, give ourselves to a story without looking back.

Flight of the Red Balloon

2007 // France - Taiwan // Hou Hsiao-Hsien // June 2, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Flight of the Red Balloon is not a mystery, but it is mysterious. It is the sort of film that is difficult to dislike: commandingly acted, studded with bittersweet morsels of authentic human drama, and possessing a quiet self-assurance about its virtues. In offering a brief glimpse into the lives of a Parisian mother and son, Flight eschews Big Ideas for a convincing portrait, and along the way it evokes a powerful aura of tenderness and melancholy. Unfortunately, there is an airiness to its method that is dissatisfying, even distracting at times. Flight is not a film with a message. It seems to have no aim other than to move us, a guiltless bit of voyeurism that will echo our own recollections of childhood (or parenthood). It takes some time to adjust to the film's delicate ambitions; "Where is this going?" I asked myself more than once, and not out of excitement. Flight demands patience, but it rewards the viewer with a wealth of mood and remembrance, delivered in a handsome Gallic wrapping.

The film opens on young Simon (Simon Iteanu) on the bustling streets of Paris, calling out insistently to a red balloon that floats above him. The boy eventually loses interest and ambles on, but the balloon continues to drift through the story, as both a literal presence (often softly bumping outside a window) or as an icon invoked by the characters. Simon's mother, Suzanne—a blond, bedraggled, enticing-as-ever Juliette Binoche—has hired a new nanny, Song (Fang Song). A Chinese film student with a soft demeanor and an even softer voice, Song always seems to have a digital camcorder in hand. She is quiet, bright, wary, warm, and eager-to-please. She seems made for Suzanne and Simon.

Suzanne works in traditional puppet theater, the sort of career (and passion) that seems perfectly ordinary in the beating heart of Paris. There are glimpses of her at rehearsal, where she supplies the voice acting for the production. She squeals and bellows her way through a Chinese fairy tale with gusto, while Simon looks on, his eyes full of delight and hunger as they dart between the puppets and his mother. Simon is a sensitive, strong child with a talent for math and pinball. He never has a cross word for anyone. Song quickly sees what Suzanne knows: that Simon is a good soul, and that to treat him with affection is as natural as breathing.

Strictly speaking, Flight of the Red Balloon has only the thinnest plot. Mostly, ordinary things happen. The story elements are related in a way that mimics the nebulous quality of real life, where burdens and pleasures rub shoulders. Song films Simon with her camcorder, mentioning her interest in Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short film, The Red Balloon. Simon has a piano lesson in the apartment downstairs. Suzanne, who owns the building with her ex-husband, is incensed with the neighbors. They haven't paid any rent in a year, and she talks to a lawyer about how to evict them. Song gradually becomes an essential part of the household. She helps Suzanne transfer her family's 8mm tapes to video, and translates when Suzanne hosts an esteemed Chinese puppet master. There are meals and harried phone conversations. Outside, the red balloon floats on.

Flight of the Red Balloon drifts along at is own pace. It hovers over its scenes, absorbing everything that is said and unsaid. The film then flies ahead, time passing in skips and leaps. Flight is mostly chronological, with the occasional flashback sighting of Simon's older sister Louise, now away at school in Brussels. Director Hou Hsiao-Hsien captures many scenes in long, unbroken shots, the frame edging back and forth to follow movement and conversation. There is an appealing understatement to these ambitious scenes. The challenge inherent in them only becomes apparent later, a sort of quiet complement to Children of Men's hold-your-breath set pieces. (Is it coincidence that a poster for Alfonso Cuarón's science fiction thriller has a cameo here?) In Flight, these long takes lend the film a naturalism that sharpens its emotional power.

Suzanne, like the film, is always in motion, even if it is only to pace anxiously, her straw-colored hair perpetually tousled. She bounces from one responsibility to the next. "Why are you always so busy, Mama?," asks Simon. "Because I have many things to do," is the reply, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. Flight is no melodrama about parental neglect or broken homes. Simon does not seem unhappy (for now) despite the long gulfs of inattention, and Suzanne's love for her boy is never in doubt. Song senses the strength in their relationship, and seems content to stand outside of it, feeling its warmth as a friend to both mother and son.

What is Hou doing here, exactly? Flight seems to be striving singularly for a naturalistic depiction of a family. There is drama, certainly, in Suzanne's emerging struggle with the tenants, a conflict connected to the absent husband and daughter. However, Hou isn't especially committed to these aspects of the story. The events that unfold in Flight primarily serve to highlight, to varying degrees, the essence of the relationship between mother and son. It's an appealing approach to the material, and one that is executed with grace. Still, there is a puffy remoteness in the film's stance towards its own story. It is so self-consciously not about the deadbeat tenants or the puppet show or the piano movers that it keeps the viewer at a distance. Flight also suffers from Hou's occasional flirtations with bloated, arty indulgence. (Hey, another sixty second tracking shot of a red balloon floating through Paris!)

It's a testament to the marvelous performances from Binoche and Iteanu, then, that Flight still strikes deeply resonant chords of human sentiment. Binoche is riveting, recalling how she shaped and then dominated the best scenes in Caché. She has the rare sort of screen presence that allows her to convey seemingly contradictory qualities: sexy and haggard, waspish and vulnerable, adoring and aloof. Iteanu is equally amazing, delivering the most convincing child performance of the year. He speaks, walks, and fidgets as a child his age would naturally, and conveys the exact way that young boys brood and gawk. Not to be overlooked is Fang, who is crisply aware of her character's position as both a friend and The Help. Watch her carefully while Suzanne confers with a lawyer or bickers on the telephone; Fang is passive, yet clearly always listening, sometimes with carefully concealed anxiety.

Almost all the scenes in Flight of the Red Balloon include Simon in some way. Although he is not always at the center of the action, he is usually present, even if only as a quiet observer. For me, the film's curious style snaps into sharper focus if it is approached as a scrapbook of Simon's memories, vignettes remembered from this specific time when his mother wrestled with a crisis and a new friend entered their lives. Hou hints as much, particularly in the select moments where Simon is absent. In one moving scene, Suzanne reminisces about a cherished Chinese postcard, and how it always summons memories of her college days. And yet she gives the postcard as a token of gratitude to the old puppet master. Later, she shows Simon one of the restored, silent 8 mm movies featuring footage of her grandfather, also a puppeteer. What are they saying, asks Simon? Suzanne doesn't know, so she makes up her own words. The words don't really matter. The feeling of that relationship—the beauty of it, the pain of its loss, the value of remembering it—doesn't need to be fabricated.

Standard Operating Procedure

2008 // USA // Errol Morris // May 29, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Most Americans who follow current events have seen the pictures. We think we know what they represent. We think we have a handle on the story that they tell. During 2003, prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were sexually humiliated and molested, terrorized with dogs, brutalized, tortured, and murdered. By Americans. The abusers were military police, military intelligence, private contractors, and CIA interrogators. Errol Morris' new film, Standard Operating Procedure, opens the photo album on Abu Ghraib and initiates an inquiry both indebted to and a world apart from the fleeting sensationalism of the mainstream media's coverage. The film's taste for the dramatic might provoke accusations that Morris is aiming for cheap agitprop. Nothing could be further from the truth. SOP is a spellbinding film about a grave and inflammatory topic, a vital rumination that upends one stone after another and then holds up a microphone to the emerging grubs. Morris' refusal to utilize the Abu Ghraib scandal as a political cudgel might be noble or disgraceful, depending on your outlook, but with SOP, he has unquestionably crafted a haunting work that digs deep and cuts deeper.

More so than any of Morris' previous films, SOP assumes a familiarity with its subject matter. The filmmaker is speaking to an audience already branded with the images that inhabit his film: hoods, dog leashes, wires, orange jumpsuits, naked men in piles, cadavers in ice-filed bags, and all those surreal, grotesque American grins and thumbs. To assume this common frame of reference (and the accompanying wondering outrage) is a bit of a detour for Morris. The filmmaker's previous documentaries possess a tone that is expansive and yet reserved. SOP signals in its opening moments—accompanied by a searing, histrionic score from Danny Elfman—that it is a more passionate creature. The film that emerges is urgent, probing, and stark. It leaps into the abyssal inscrutability of Abu Ghraib (and our reactions to it) feet first, and on its way down delivers the best documentary experience of the year to date.

Morris employs a methodology that is now familiar: furiously edited interviews, with no narration and only minimal intrusion from the director's off-camera voice. The appeal of Morris as a credible documentarian is his (naïve? disingenuous?) resolve that his subjects should be allowed to construct the film's narrative, insomuch as his films could be said to have narratives at all. SOP focuses on the perpetrators (and scapegoats) of the Abu Ghraib scandal, permitting them to relate events, explain their thinking, air their grievances, and ruminate out loud on their regrets. Many of the familiar faces among the interviewees seem to be female: Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, Specialist Sabrina Harman, and Private First Class Lynndie England, she who is damned to forever be the face of the scandal. The most visible male offenders are still in prison (or, depending on your view of the real perpetrators, still calling the shots at the Pentagon and collecting lucrative speaking fees).

The talking heads are intercut with lavish special effects that deconstruct the more notorious photographs and breathe life into the words (some crude, some poetic) of Harman's letters home. Morris also makes liberal use of stylized, ultra-slow-motion recreations. These have a music video aesthetic that highlights the uncharacteristic gothic mood that he seems to be aiming for, and they don't always work. Still, these sequences serve to break up the visual monotony of the interviews, and Morris often employs them in cunning ways, tapping into those aforementioned shared memories to conjure dread just shy of a horror movie. When we begin to wonder whether the interviewees will discuss the use of dogs at the prison, a dark shape lurches past the foreground, out of focus, eventually resolving into a close-up of a German shepherd that invites genuine chills.

Unlike most documentarians, Morris has little interest in merely spinning a yarn or proffering a polemic. SOP, like much of his work, suggests that he trusts his material to uncover its own profundity, relying on only a rudimentary story to hold everything together. Few documentary filmmakers are content unless the audience walks away either entertained, inspired, or convinced. Morris asks that we think, truly think, about what we are shown. SOP doesn't have a thesis, but it has themes. Chief among these are the mystery of photographs: their evocative power, our reflexive need to take and pose for them, and the perils of the partitioning and excluding frame. "If it wasn't photographed, it didn't happen," notes one of the film's interviewees. One of SOP's unexpected marvels is an investigator's discussion of the forensic challenge in reconstructing the prison abuses from three separate digital cameras. Thousands of photos glide across the screen, lining up along common scenes of shame, rearranging themselves into timelines of brutality. Through the interviewees' words and his visual flourishes, Morris expands the scope of his inquest beyond what it shown in the photographic frame to include what is beyond it and behind it.

SOP is mostly free of political and moral tongue-clucking. There is little contextual discussion of the Iraq War raging outside the prison, and only few lofty statements about American morality or empire. The elements in SOP's photographic collage are both broader and more timeless: bullying, mob mentality, chain-of-command, revenge, guilt, responsibility, judgment, power. In this, Morris avoid caricaturing his interviewees as Ugly Americans, and instead finds a tantalizing, contradictory tone in his treatment. On the one hand, he permits them to be woefully, specifically human, allowing justifications and explanations to pour forth without comment. On the other, his blood- and shadow-flecked styling invests them with the dread agency of legendary creatures in a fable about human fallibility. Granted, the film paints some of the central actors in an unashamedly menacing light—and justifiably so, given the personality traits and crimes revealed. And yet, SOP cannot in any sense be characterized as a righteous indictment of the actors at Abu Ghraib. When Morris intrudes on the film in a distant, off-camera voice, he seems more curious and flabbergasted than angry. The interviewees themselves rarely seem defensive. The most common reactions are disbelief, bitterness, and a longing to forget it ever happened. Of course, it cannot be forgotten, by the perpetrators, the victims, or the world. There are photos.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008 // USA // Steven Spielberg // May 26, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Let's get the Bad News out of the way first: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the weakest chapter to date in the now-grizzled archeologist's adventures. To put that statement into context, consider that I have stubborn admiration and affection for the series' previous low point, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Given the mark the original trilogy left on my young mind, and given that it's been so long since Harrison Ford last took up the fedora and bullwhip, I'm finding it somewhat difficult to put the new film into the proper perspective. What I can't deny is that there's a sense of melancholic disappointment to Kingdom, a sharp slap of reality that fades to a lingering sting. It's like running into a an old schoolmate after nearly twenty years apart, and finding that the former star athlete and class president is now a termite inspector living in a trailer with five kids. Kingdom is a fine adventure film, and it superbly accomplishes its tricky task of updating the series for a new age. Yet there's something a little shocking and unwelcome about unearthing a new Indy film at long last, only to discover that, in many ways, it's just another action-film-as-amusement-park-ride in a bloated summer season.

It's 1957 in Indy's world, and the long winter of the Cold War has arrived. The Soviets have supplanted the Nazis as the villains du jour, but Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. is still alive and kicking. Since we last saw him, the professor of archeology has grayed and plumped some, settling more comfortably into his daylight role as a befuddled academic. When the film opens, however, our first glimpse of Indy is that dusty and beaten fedora that serves as a talisman for his less savory, more thrilling pursuits. Indy and fellow relic hunter Mac (Ray Winstone) are hauled from the trunk of a car and held at gunpoint at an Air Force hanger (Number 51, naturally). Their captors are Soviet spies, commanded by porcelain-skinned femme fatale Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who demands that Indy locate a particular crate inside the hanger. No, not that crate, although it does make a cameo appearance. Treating the Ark of the Covenant as a throwaway gag might be uncomfortably glib, but it serves to underline the shift in the series' tone. The tyrants of the Cold War are not enticed by anything as provincial as an occult artifact. They crave nothing less than the secrets of the stars. Indy reluctantly helps the Russians retrieve their mysterious prize, but of course he eventually slips from their grasp, in a gloriously ridiculous sequence capped with one of the film's truly unforgettable visuals.

Indy returns to his college, where his cooperation with the Russians—under duress, but no matter—prompts some to question his loyalties. Eventually, a motorcycle-riding delinquent named Mutt (Shia LaBeouf, decked out in leather and pomade) tracks Indy down and pleads for his aid. The Russians have kidnapped the greaser youth's mother, as well as archeologist Harold Oxley (John Hurt), a father figure to Mutt and an old colleague of Indy. Oxley knows the location of a legendary crystal skull, an allegedly pre-Columbian artifact with mysterious powers, and the dread Agent Spalko is, naturally, seeking it with supervillain fanaticism. It's fairly pointless to get into the plot details, given that Indy explicates the academic mumbo-jumbo and connects the dots for us, as usual. At any rate, the plot is just an excuse for a bunch of action set pieces, right? In Kingdom, we get a motorcycle escape through a New England college campus; a brawl in an Air Force weapons research facility; a crawl through a Peruvian mummy tomb; a car, truck and boat chase in the Amazon rainforest; and the opening of the gates of fabled El Dorado.

Are these action sequences any good? Yes, in that they're always entertaining and often quite thrilling. Are they on the same level as Last Crusade's tank chase, Temple of Doom's bridge standoff, or anything at all in Raiders? Nope. The computer-generated mayhem of Kingdom lacks the sense of genuine danger that Steven Spielberg achieved in the previous films using old school stunt work, pyrotechnics, and camera trickery. Granted, the original trilogy contains the occasional matte or puppetry effect that looks downright embarrassing nowadays. Yet Kingdom is so littered with digital effects—literally from the very first shot—that the film seems to suffer for it. Part of this may be that its effects are, well, substandard. When you've seen The Lord of the Rings and Transformers recently achieve miracles of digital visualization, LaBeouf's vine-swinging in Kingdom comes off as distractingly bogus. I'm trying not to be hypocritical here. Gleefully fake action can suffice in fluffy, post-Indy fare like The Mummy, or as a deliberate stylistic choice in pseudo-auteur popcorn endeavors like Speed Racer. But this is Indiana Jones, for crying out loud. He deserves better, and I know damn well it's possible when Spielberg's own War of the Worlds set a higher bar three years ago.

Then there's the dialogue, which just isn't very good. I didn't expect anything close to Lawrence Kasdan's amazing screenplay for Raiders, but I was hoping for something on par with Temple or Last Crusade. Alas, Kingdom just isn't as touching, brisk, or witty as its predecessors. That last item is a particular problem. Many of the film's "jokes" fall flat, partly because they're simply not funny, partly because Winstone, LaBeouf, and Ford (regrettably) don't put much of a shine on them. Tellingly, I had a hard time discerning whether it was Ford or Indy that's become a tired, humorless fart. (The latter might be excused as a distressing but valid evolution of the character, while the former is just bad craft. I tend to favor the more charitable explanation) The dialogue doesn't fare much better when it gets sentimental, and the alternately hazy and hackneyed secondary characters just make matters worse.

As you probably know by now, Karen Allen is back as—surely we can all agree?—Indy's greatest female foil, Marion Ravenwood. Thanks to the clunky screenplay, Marion's return isn't addressed with the grace or pathos it deserves, but at least Allen finds an appropriate tone. Marion's credible swagger and low tolerance for bullshit are still intact, but Allen dilutes the character's youthful venom and finds a fitting middle-aged softness and longing.

Given all these problems, what's good about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Well, for starters, it's a new Indiana freaking Jones movie. I like to think that I'm discerning enough to reject a turd in a box from Spielberg with the words "Indiana Jones" on it. And my initial impression is that Kingdom isn't even in the upper half of Spielberg's filmography. Yet Kingdom is no exception to the rule that Spielberg is a natural talent when it comes to the language of film. Even on his off days, his composition and his flair for storytelling are something to behold, and at its best Kingdom is another brick in Spielberg's artistic reputation. It's certainly not a self-contained legacy the way Raiders was, but I think that time will generally be kind to its striking beauty and sharp pacing, in the same way that Temple and Crusade have aged well.

Furthermore, I can safely say that Kingdom is further confirmation that George Lucas is an Idea Man, whose strength will always be the creation of worlds rather than films. In contrast to Star Wars, here the creaky dialogue can't be laid at his feet, nor can the lackluster performances. But the Indy stories are his and Kingdom's is an unexpected coup. I was skeptical about the film's aim to update the Indiana Jones franchise for the 1950s. To launch Indy into a new era after such a long absence is, in a word, brave. The shift in tone takes some getting used to, but the story feels compelling and fresh, a diversion into the territory of Cold War thrillers and science fiction rather than 1930s pulp. It's a gamble, but for me the atomic terror, psychic spies, and alien technology came together. In a way, Kingdom feels like an intriguing slice of Indiana Jones fan fiction, save that it comes courtesy of the original creators and stars. The only downside is that our long absence from Indy's world covers so much time that one can't help but feel a bit cheated by all the interesting stuff that's happened off-screen. ("Wait, Indy worked for military intelligence during World War II? Can we see that?")

Blessedly, the tweaking of Indiana Jones' genre trappings doesn't feel forced or frivolous, like some kind of "Sherlock Holmes in the 28th Century" speculation. If there is a bit of awkwardness to Kingdom's alignment with the realities of a new setting, there's also a clear recognition that cultural icons are creatures of a specific time and place. Some discomfort is to be expected. This is what makes me more inclined to forgive the harder, more petulant edge to Indy in this outing. The Indy of the 1950s is less a man of bravado than a scarred and foul-tempered bulldog. This is the most conspicuous change in the character: he just isn't as charming as he used to be. It's saddening, but also somewhat understandable. Two decades of frantic globetrotting, a Second World War, and the chill of the Red Scare would wear down any man.

More crucially, Kingdom also boasts a satisfying awareness of its place in Indy's character arc. Unlike the man he portrayed in the original trilogy, here Ford plays Indy as a veteran hero with little need for newly minted wisdom. He is weary and cantankerous, but he also feels complete, excepting perhaps a family to share his later years with. The older Harrison Ford fumbles Kingdom's ill-conceived attempts at humor, but so what? To his credit, Ford knows exactly where his character is in 1957. We get a strong sense of a resilient old man with the foolishness and narcissism distilled out of him. Indy gets to show off his breathtaking anthropological knowledge like never before, and he's presented with opportunities to provide direction and wisdom to others. Kingdom offers what seems like heresy for the series, but upon reflection only makes sense: a vision of a man changed by the harrowing events that have come before. This is first Indy film that is occupied not with the hero's struggles with desire (that ever-tantalizing "fortune and glory"), but with his awakening to his true needs. In a telling and wonderfully insightful twist, Kingdom's story hinges not on the plundering of a relic, but its return to its rightful place, an oblique indictment of the previous films' colonial undercurrent.

My expectations for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were, in a way, the complement to the film that I got. I anticipated an exhilarating Spielberg epic whose break with the Indy films of old would be its downfall. Instead, I discovered a thoroughly B-grade summer action flick whose most enthralling feature is its audacious updating of an allegedly sacred American pop mythos. As with all the Indy films, I think that Kingdom will grow on me. However, I also suspect that the fourth film's place in the Indy Canon will always be shaky. The mediocre effects, dialogue, and acting lend it a sad staleness. Its redemption lies in its persuasive determination to blaze new paths with its hero, Spielberg's eye for transfixing imagery, and the fact that in the final analysis, it's still a fun action film.