How to Train Your Dragon

The Wyrm and His Boy

2010 // USA // Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders // April 18, 2010 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies Cine)

B+ - For over a decade now, Dreamworks Animation has been churning out Shreks, Madagascars, and various other talking animal mediocrities (anyone remember Shark Tale?), jousting with Blue Sky Studios for a distant second-place slot behind American animation's reigning champion, Pixar. In 2008, Dreamworks managed its first genuinely good film, Kung-Fu Panda, a charming, marvelously designed bit of fluff in the underdog sports movie mold. Lacking contemporary kiddie animation's characteristic risible pop culture references and cheap scatological humor, Panda hinted at better things to come from the studio in terms of feature animation. And, lo and behold, here we are, two years later, and Dreamworks has delivered the exhilarating, dazzling How to Train Your Dragon, a film that should by all rights be nothing more than disposable entertainment, but attains something much finer. No doubt this is at least partly due to the men at the helm, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who were the minds behind that oddball late Disney Renaissance marvel Lilo & Sitch. However, it's undeniable that Dragon feels like the progeny of a studio that has finally found its stride and resolved to aim high. The story is simple, the design breathtaking, the action rousing, and the humor mostly warm and sweet. While Dragon lacks the grace and thematic sophistication of a Pixar film, it is by any measure a damn splendid animated feature.

Based on the novel by Cressida Cowell and adapted by DeBlois, Sanders, and William Davies, Dragon is a teachable example of how superior children's films flow from simple, vivid stories, as opposed to high concepts or gaggles of wacky characters. At bottom, the film is a winning blend of two familiar fairy tale scenarios: 1) Loser Find His True Purpose, and 2) Two Groups Find Understanding. The setting is Berk, a fantastical Dark Age Nordic village as seen through a sumptuous, sardonic cartoon lens. (Picture Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert's take on Richard Fleischer's The Vikings and you won't be far off the mark.) The village is bedeviled by constant dragon attacks, and as a result life in the community is organized almost entirely around fighting the beasts. Our hero is a milquetoast blacksmith's apprentice named Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), who wants more than anything to slay a dragon and thereby prove himself, particularly to the aloof object of his crush, Astrid (America Ferrera), and to his perpetually disappointed father, Stoic (Gerard Butler), who is, naturally, both a mighty warrior and the village chieftain.

When an opportunity to kill a wounded dragon falls into Hiccup's lap, the young Viking nonetheless finds himself pitying the creature. Over the course of several days he returns to visit the hobbled dragon, which he dubs Toothless, bringing it food and gradually earning its trust. Hiccup's kindler, gentler approach proves to be a boon, as he quickly rises to the top of his dragon-slaying class with the aid of all the practical knowledge he's gleaning from his quality time with Toothless. Eventually, Hiccup fashions a prosthetic tail fin for his dragon pal, as well as a saddle and bridle, and before you can know it the pair are sailing through the wild blue yonder. This is just about the point when his secret comes out to Astrid, the most capable wannbe-dragon-slayer in the village before Hiccup's unlikely rise. Shortly thereafter, Hiccup's enraged father captures Toothless and uses him to discover the lhidden location of the legendary Dragon's Nest, setting the story up for a climactic confrontation.

Dragon treads over well-traveled fairy tale territory, but it's told with an admirable tidiness and emotional sincerity. There are no feeble, prolonged digressions for the sake of comic relief or unearned pathos. The scenes click together, one after the other, succinctly establishing the story's core emotional conflicts while also taking time to revel in the film's rich design. And what design! Boasting the most evocative art direction in a computer animated feature since 2007's Ratatouille, Dragon is bursting with marvelous sights, evincing a phenomenal attention to detail and a spirited affection for its historical-mythic Nordic setting. From the mighty longboats and icy fjords to the tiny runes scrawled in a dusty book, the film is wall-to-wall with visual pleasures. The design just feels positively enthusiastic, and while one might be tempted to dismiss its "Völsung-Cycle-for-Kidz" aesthetic as faintly ridiculous, the overall effect is so lusciously enveloping and so vividly realized that the look of the thing feels like an artistic achievement all on its own. Nowhere is this element more apparent than in the dragons themselves, for DeBlois and Sanders have envisioned them not as a slew of anonymous scaly terrors, but as a collection of distinctive species, each with its own appearance, movements, personality, and lethal breath weapon. Toothless, who from a certain angle resembles nothing so much as a proud, finicky black cat, is a particularly fine example of a memorable animated creature whose persona is derived almost wholly from facial expressions and motion.

Baruchel—who is apparently a movie star now, but who I still remember best as scrawny, dimwitted Danger from Million Dollar Baby—is a fine fit for the wry, self-effacing, slow-on-the-uptake Hiccup. Indeed, most of the voice-acting is suitably spry and broad without being distracting, with Craig Ferguson's garrulous blacksmith being a particular standout. One of the film's odd incongruities is that the adult Vikings speak in booming Scottish brogues, while the adolescents sound like Santa Clara high school students. (When it is dubbed into Danish or Norwegian, will the Vikings still have Scottish accents? The mind boggles.) The film's rare moments of unsuccessful, grating "humor" consistently involve the teenaged Vikings, who, more so than any of Dragon's other characters, seem to have wandered in from hyper-kinetic afternoon cartoon show. They're cranked up to eleven—as teens are wont to be, I suppose—and therefore seem a poor fit for the film's more conventional storybook pacing and tone.

While How To Train Your Dragon fits in seamlessly with a thousand other good-natured children's stories about understanding and cooperation, DeBlois and Sanders reveal, through their handsomely expressed Long Ago milieu, a more sophisticated dimension to their film, one absorbed with the relationship between man and animal. The dragons of this story possess fantastic physical qualities, but they are not genius arch-villains in the mold of Tolkein's Smaug. They are animals, who yearn for food, comfort, and companionship above all else. Dragon thus functions as a kind of Domestication Myth, condensing millennia of side-by-side adaptation between man and beast into a magical moment when the savage wolf changes into the loyal hound, or the stallion into the steed. It might be a far sight from the psychological, emotional, and generic complexity that Pixar has been able to weave into its ostensible children's stories, but this added dimension to Dragon deepens its appeal and adds a humane resonance to its timeworn outlines.

The Red Riding Trilogy

A World Stinking on the Bone and Pecked by Sparrows

2009 // UK // Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker // April 15, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

A- - Yorkshire. Is there a more evocative landscape in all of England? The word conjures visions of Wuthering Heights and its doomed lovers, of green dales and simple, working-class folk. Such visions, nurtured on robust helpings of classist romanticism, are nowhere to be found in the Yorkshire of Red Riding. Turn off the M-1, peer out the rain-spotted windows. What do you see? Sad, ragged flats and shops; cruel buildings of steel, concrete, and linoleum, seemingly designed to engender malaise; the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant, pumping God-knows-what into the air, water, and bowels; vacant lots inflamed with rubble, weeds, and grubby children, who aren't so much playing as they are biding their time. And out there, beyond the drone of Leeds, Sheffield, and Hull and the countless, wretched towns, are the moors. There are no trees, just the pitched and rolling Pennines (what passes for mountains in England), clad in heather and huddled under eternally gray skies. The sense of exposure and remoteness is suffocating. England's sun-kissed Isle of Wight might as well be in Monaco, or Timbuktu. The Red Riding film trilogy spends nine years in this miserable dream of Yorkshire, from 1974 to 1983, as the Left's dreams of a bright British future comes crashing down amid economic stagnation and ruin. The tale crosses paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in British history, but the film is not really about him. It's about the sort of place that could give birth to such a creature.

The potency of a film often flows from its story or characters. Red Riding possesses both story and characters in abundance, but its bedrock is a mood, one born of slate skies, lonely ridges, and relentlessly grim housing projects. Screenwriter Tony Grisoni adapted three of David Peace's "Red Riding" quartet of novels to create this trilogy, with directing duties split between film-makers Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker. Each has modest achievements to their name, but there is little in their filmographies that hints at the churning, despairing tone that Red Riding reveals. (Tucker has visited Yorkshire before in When Did You Last See Your Father?, but the setting of Riding is so foreign to that film that it could be on another planet.) Peace was raised in West Yorkshire in the years portrayed in the novels and the films, but by the 1990s he had fled to Japan. There is no romanticism in his vision of the cities and moors of his youth, none of the cock-eyed affection for a particular place that graces the works of so many authors. Red Riding reveals a soul wrestling with the loathsome seeds inside him: the smug malevolence of men who savor their petty authority; the casual contempt for foreigners and women; the everday brutality poorly hidden behind paper-thin walls; the cruelty that grows like cancer from idleness and hopelessness. Peace got out, but he can't get away. Grisoni and the directors, all British, have felt the discomfiting vibrations in the novelist's words, and shaped their own visions of his Yorkshire. Traditionally, there were three Ridings in the county: North, East, and West. The Red Riding of the title's trilogy is not a physical place, but a force of darkness, one that seeps through the ground into the greasy puddles left by yesterday's rains, into tacky basement pubs with last decade's decor, and into the hearts of pitiless men who have made the North into their personal feifdom.

The plot concerns a sprawling maze of corruption and murder that encompasses the West Yorkshire Constabulary, a construction magnate, journalists, lawyers, priests, pimps, and hustlers. It brushes up agains the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, a real-life serial killer who slew and mutilated thirteen women and is currently living the remainder of his days at Broadmoor Hospital. However, the mystery that squats at the nexus of the film is not the Ripper murders, but the disappearance of three little girls. One of them has been discovered on a construction site: tortured, raped, and murdered, with white swan wings stitched to her back. Who committed this horrific crime? Like detectives in a police procedural, we might pin photos of all the principals on a board and draw lines of connection, mark them with question marks and pin bits of evidence in tiny plastic bags to them. Perhaps, before the killer is revealed, we could deduce it on our own. It doesn't matter. The film-makers are less concerned with who is murdering these children than in transporting us to a place and time where such an atrocity could occur with such ease, where the man responsible—and, make no mistake, it is always a man—could go unpunished, even protected.

The scope of the plot is overwhelming; it is unnecessary to attempt to summarize it here, or to catalog the enormous cast of characters. Each chapter of the trilogy focuses on one or more protagonists. They are not so much heroes as they are men of abundant grit and a smear of conscience, who find themselves in situations where conscience can be compromising, or even fatal. Red Riding: 1974 follows Yorkshire Post reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), who is digging into the disappearance and murder of the little girls. In 1980, we meet detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine), who the Home Office sends to West Yorkshire to assist the local police in the Ripper investigation, and also probe possible misconduct in the Constabulary. 1983 splits its time between West Yorkshire detective Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), whose long-repressed scruples are beginning to gnaw at him, and John Piggott (Mark Addy), a bargain-basement lawyer reluctantly drawn into the case of a mentally retarded boy scapegoated for the murder of the children. Many of the actors convey everything we need to know about their characters by their mere presence. We hear the name of nefarious Yorkshire millionaire John Dawson drop into conversation, and when he appears with the face of Sean Bean, the chilly menace we feel multiplies threefold. Eddie Marsan portrays a repugnant Post reporter who wheedles Dunford with the nickname "Scoop," lending the man a slathering of nihilism with just his gnomish sneer. Then there's Peter Mullan, whose twinkling eyes should put us at ease; however, his local priest has an oddly close relationship with seemingly every woman in the story. Other actors seem to have been cast for their countenances or voices alone: jowly Warren Clarke as a thunderous senior detective; Sean Harris as a malevolent weasel of a cop; John Henshaw as a portly Post editor; Julia Ford as a cowed widow. The nearly incomprehensible rumblings of the Yorkshire dialect serve as the soundtrack to the film, along with snatches of pop and soul from the era, drifting out of jukeboxes and phonographs.

The structure of Red Riding is akin to that of Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone: the mystery expands without resolution, collapses around a seemingly unrelated event, and then expands again. After Dunford's haunted search for the truth about the missing girls culminates in violence and further cover-up, the Yorkshire Ripper murders focus our gaze on the essence of the trilogy, the staggering corruption of every civil institution in the county. In the third chapter, another girl goes missing for the first time in nine years, and the film acquires a tint of the The Searchers, as detective Jobson and the lawyer Piggott each grope blindly towards her while the clock goes tick-tock. There is much of the story that is left unresolved, and those who need a complete explanation for all that they observe will be left disappointed. Significant plot points occur off-screen, and much is left to implication, insinuation, and imagination. No matter; there is a visceral quality to the trilogy's vision, one that transcends the specifics of its story to convey a devastating aura of despair which occludes a happy ending, or even a tomorrow that looks any different from today. The directors convey this sensibility with varying degrees of success. Remarkably, Jarrold, veteran of costume dramas such as Great Expectations and Brideshead Revisited, seems to understand Peace's world the most intuitively, and his stylistic choices are a piece with the tone of Red Riding. The grain of the 16 mm film he employs, the scenes that glide in and out of focus, the expressionistic quality to his lingering close-ups: they rhyme with this Yorkshire and its claustrobic flats and eerie parking garages. Tucker's warmer approach is the roughest fit, with its clean digital video and usually unnecessary stylistic flourishes. The third chapter seems intended to lift us, ever so gently, out of the preceding four hours of gloom. Not to a better Yorkshire, but far away to somewhere else, where sun shines once in a while and little girls are loved instead of butchered. Both 1983 and 1980, to a lesser degree, become unfortunately enamored with the more conventional aspects of the story, the love affairs and revelatory confessions and bloody standoffs. Still, Red Riding is a supreme example of the sum being greater than the parts. The experience of these films, taken together, is rich and devastating, a transportive noir epic squirming with the black beetles of a failed society.

Clash of the Titans

Things Fighting Bigger Things

2010 // USA - UK // Louis Leterrier // April 14, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

C - Let's be honest, here. Desmond Davis' 1981 swords-and-sandals-and-stop-motion fantasy epic Clash of the Titans is not a particularly good movie, and the affection that it engenders flows from nostalgia born of endless Saturday-afternoon telecasts on UHF stations in the decade after its release. To be sure, the original Clash introduced Gen-Xers (your truly included) to special effects master Ray Harryhausen's unreal creations, and served as a gateway drug for the discovery of his earlier works, such as Mighty Joe Young, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Today, stop-motion has essentially vanished from big-budget live-action films. (Although not from film altogether, thankfully, as it has recently given us wonderful features such as Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox.) Accordingly, French director Lois Leterrier's remake of Clash can be properly regarded as neither a tribute nor a slap to Harryhausen's creations, although it is rife with winking references to Davis' film. This Clash is strictly a diversionary actioner for the era of computer-generated beasties, one that owes as much to the original Greek myths and post-Lord of the Rings blockbuster norms as it does to the 1981 film. Of course, the force that really sired this update is the almighty dollar, and its target audience is composed of money-flush adolescent boys who can't be bothered to seek out the original Clash. So why bother? Well, because Leterrier, his reputation as a flashy hack notwithstanding, knows how to direct a thrilling action sequence. And because sometimes an old-school fantasy quest is just what the doctor ordered.

Clash presents a slick, simplified take on the myth of Perseus, the illegitimate son of the lightning god Zeus (Liam Neeson) and a mortal woman. Left for dead as an infant, Perseus (Sam Worthington in glower mode) was raised by a fisherman and his family, who have the misfortune of standing in the lethal path of Hades (Ralph Fiennes), god of the underworld. It seems the city of Argos has been behaving in a particularly blasphemous, god-defying manner lately, and the miffed, autocratic Zeus has given his younger brother Hades leave to terrorize the city into submission with his monsters. Things come to a head when Argos' queen injudiciously lauds her daughter Andromeda's (Alexa Davalos) beauty as superior to that of the gods. Hades offers a way for Argos to atone for its sacrilege: present Andromeda as a sacrifice in ten days for his sea monster, the Kraken, or the beast will destroy the city.

The means by which Perseus gets drawn into this crisis is a little sketchy, but before the first act is over, his divine heritage has been revealed and the city has shanghaied him into questing for a way to defeat Hades' leviathan before the deadline. The god-son is only in it to confront Hades and avenge his slain adopted family, but the king of Argos suspects that Perseus' blood gives them an edge against the Kraken. The city sends the newly forged hero off with a squad of Argos soldiers and a couple of eccentric monster-slayers, and the film settles into the "fantasy adventure" part. Like the original Clash, Leterrier's film hews closer to the classical Hero's Journey than recent fantastical epics, which tend to favor sweeping warfare over small-scale escapades. There are no epic battle sequences featuring tens of thousands of warriors here; just a band of heroes running from one CGI-monster-studded set piece to another as they race against time. It's often flimsy, but also enjoyable in its way, if only because few fantasy films pursue a pure Guys-on-a-Quest outline anymore.

For the most part, Clash doesn't have pretensions to be anything other than a tacky action flick featuring weird monsters and copious ass-kicking. (There's some egregiously anachronistic critiquing of royal privilege, but the film is palpably apathetic at the prospect of pursuing this line of thought.) Leterrier's film lacks the pornographic dazzle and gore-addled gratification of Zack Snyder's 300, but also that film's strident political gesticulations. Clash is just aiming for heroic thrills, and in that respect it's a modest success, although the awfulness of select elements routinely distracts. The performances range from the serviceable to the terrible, with Worthington's jaw-clenching turn front-and-center in the latter category. The script presents Perseus as a straightforward, clearly motivated warrior-hero, the type of lug whose lack of experience and general hotheadedness lead him to attempt daring (read: foolish) acts of courage. It's not a complex role, but the actor should at least have fun with it, and given that the film's villainy is spread around—both the gods and the humans are pompous assholes—the hero needs to be that much more appealing. Worthington, however, scowls and sneers his way through the role with all the enthusiasm of a Gucci model, and his buzzcut, baby blues, and chiseled profile seem more suited to a Space Marine than a mythic hero. Neeson and Fiennes are slumming; the former looks actively embarrassed in bafflingly medieval armor apparently lifted from Liberace's closet, while the latter phones in the menace with goggling glares and a wheezy rasp. Even the second string—normally compelling presences such as Mads Mikkelsen, Liam Cunningham, and Pete Postlewaite—feels wasted. The dialog is often ludicrous, but mostly it's just forgettable, lacking even the rare bite exhibited by the original Clash's Olympian scenes.

What Leterrier get right, as usual, is the action, which shares with that of his Transporter films and underrated The Incredible Hulk a clarity, urgency, and unambiguous connection to story that few directors achieve. While Clash doesn't realize Hulk's wonderfully tight link between action and drama, it at least moves in a straight line from one monster battle to the next, with the consequences of failure always looming. From a broad vantage point, the battle sequences aren't especially tense, as there's no doubt that Perseus will emerge victorious. (Of course, was there any doubt that Luke Skywalker or Willow Ufgood would win the day?) What Leterrier does admirably well is create a sense of chaos in his action, using terrain and space to fine effect, unafraid to let battles between man and monster veer this way and that. Other directors achieve this through needlessly frenetic editing, but Leterrier keeps things a touch more grounded. He wants us to actually see his effects wizards' creations—dodgy though they might be in some shots—and savor the capricious, uncontrolled character of battle. Perseus might dwell within the Protagonist Bubble of Protection, but his companions often perish quite suddenly and brutally, underlining the lethal nature of their foes, even if the film never lends these deaths much emotional heft.

Most of the memorable monsters from the 1981 film return here: giant scorpions, a coven of witches, Medusa the gorgon, Pegasus the winged horse, and the Kraken itself. Even the diabolical Calibos appears, although Leterrier's film recasts him as the hideous, exiled king who once consigned the newborn Perseus to the sea. (To my young eyes, the brooding, slightly erotic menace of Calibos was always the most frightening element of Davis' original.) Naysayers will likely decry the "sterility" of the new film's computer beasts compared to Harryhausen's creations, but this new Clash's threats are both stunningly designed and consistently frightening. Medusa retains a ghost of feminine beauty beneath her scales, which vanishes into serpentine grotesquery when her petrifying gaze flares to life. The Kraken owes as much to Japanese kaiju monsters (and by extension, Cloverfield) as it does to myth. Rising out of the Argos harbor with tentacles flailing and toothy maw clacking, it's so colossal that we never truly glimpse its entire form. Needless to say, the whole film is production designed within an inch of its life, and for the most part it presents a vivid fantasy world. (The tawdry, soft-filter, silver-and-alabaster Olympus is a prominent misfire, as is the stiffly unconvincing Stygian ferryman, Charon.) Consistent with most lavish fantasy films, it's the little details that stick, such as the smoke and orange embers that swirl in the air when Hades appears, or even the peeling skin on his pale forehead.

Clash might be a vulgar, hack-and-slash adventure, but it manages to avoid one of the perennial traps that bedevil the genre. Blessedly, there's no attempt to establish a romantic connection between Perseus and Andromeda. They only meet on two occasions over the course of the film, and her role is to permit Perseus' personal redemption for failing to save his family. The romantic sparks that do flare are between Perseus and Io (Gemma Arterton), a cursed, ageless woman who has been shadowing the god-son for years and volunteers to join his quest. (We'll just disregard the creep factor inherent in pining for your 600-year-old stalker...) The passion between the couple is a background element, and resolutely chaste, but it makes for a welcome change from the usual Hero and Princess template. Unfortunately, Leterrier tacks on a cheap romantic resolution in the film's final moments, rendering the wise, battle-hardened Io as little more than a prize. This is a shame, as it diminishes the film's modest flexing against blockbuster conventions. What's left is merely a glossy, silly escape-hatch to a time when heroes and monsters still rumbled.

Carlito's Way

1993 // USA // Brian De Palma // April 9, 2010 // Laserdisc - MCA / Universal

While Carlito's Way bears that telltale De Palma touch of the Grand Guignol, it's positively staid compared to the excesses of the director's earlier Latino crime epic, Scarface. And therein lies the root of the former film's most conspicuous faults, for in tossing out the operatic lunacy while clinging to the shameless melodrama, De Palma neuters Carlito, rendering it essentially indistinguishable from any other gangster flick. That said, there's plenty to admire here. Presenting only the final chapter of an underworld titan's fall is an admittedly novel approach, and it's fairly remarkable how De Palma sketches in so much back-story with so little exposition. While the film's violence often seems dispiritingly obligatory, it's also presented as a nasty, messy business. Tellingly, Carlito often bests his enemies through bravado and trickery rather than brute force, and the film privileges the competing criminal virtues of preparation and adaptability. Pacino, with a laughably protean Puerto Rican accent, is fully in his post-Sea of Love self-parody phase here, but Sean Penn, behind child-molester glasses and beneath a Larry Fine 'fro, is deliciously loathsome as criminal defense attorney David Kleinfeld. Unfortunately, Carlito feels like a middling gangster drama from an aging stylist who is capable of much more. (see: Ridley Scott.) Most exasperating is De Palma's affinity for torpedoing the film's most appealing moments. This unfortunate tendency is epitomized in a scene where Carlito's ex-flame Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) enticingly suggests that he could break down her chained apartment door if he really wanted to ravage her. What song does De Palma use to cap this searingly erotic sequence? Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful." Yeesh.

It's a Strange World: The Alphabet (1968)

David Lynch's first "true" short film, The Alphabet, preceded the premiere of PBS' Sesame Street by a year, but by 1968 ground-breaking research in education and psychology had already provided the foundation for the newly-created Children's Television Workshop. One suspects that Lynch, who typically has a casual disregard for contemporary social movements and pop cultural phenomena, took no notice of the seismic shift occurring in television, which was about to take upon itself the task of educating American preschoolers with unprecedented earnestness and rigor. In fact, the genesis for The Alphabet lies, according to Lynch, in a distressing episode reported by his then-wife Peggy Reavey, whose niece had suffered a nightmare that prompted her to repeat the alphabet over and over in her sleep. Nonetheless, with the benefit of hindsight, it's appealing to regard Lynch's film as a dark presaging of Sesame Street's spry, scientific instruction in early language skills. With a richly symbolic, viscerally disturbing four-minute pseudo-narrative, Lynch presents an adult's vision of a child's striking, abstract fears. Education, in the form of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, becomes a psychic violation. The fact that Lynch employs animation and sing-alongs only adds to the uncanny aura for post-Sesame Street viewers, transforming The Alphabet into one of the director's most effective efforts at straightforward horror.

Breaking free of the moving-yet-static constraints of his multi-media installation, Six Figures Getting Sick, Lynch embraces the possibilities of the filmic medium with live-action footage, stills, and animation. In the dreams of a sleeping Girl, the alphabet become a relentless, creeping, fungus-like force that excretes capsules, filaments, and pseudopodia forming the twenty-six runes of the English language. In contrast to the traditionally constructive view of education, Lynch conceptualizes the seemingly benign process of learning the alphabet as a repulsive phenomenon, one that entails distressing transformations. The biological elements that were relatively ambiguous in Six Figures are put to a starkly metaphorical purpose here. The Alphabet is replete with phallic and vaginal shapes, white and crimson oozing substances, and alphabetic "spores" as virulent as any anthrax strain. The capital letter A gives birth to wailing little a's, one of which replaces the dream-Girl's head. (This pattern will recur in more gruesome form in Eraserhead, when Henry's head is supplanted by that of his own mutant infant.) The "shooting" of letters into the girl's brain-box results in a violent disintegration, as, with a gasp, her head melts into bloody goo. At the film's conclusion, this image is echoed as the Girl, waking (or not?) from her nightmare, writhes amid her sheets and vomits blood. The alphabet has, in the words of Blue Velvet's Dorothy, "put its disease in her."

The sound design, as crude as it is, deserves particular attention in The Alphabet. The conspicuous, whistling winds that will blow through much of Lynch's works, often with sinister connotations, are the dominant sonic feature here. Howling wind is, of course, the aural sign of an otherwise invisible force, air moving in response to pressure differentials. One is reminded of Twin Peaks' wind-swept Douglas-firs and the demonic BOB who, like the letters that assault the cranium of the Girl, pushes his way into the minds of the weak. Singing figures prominently in the film's soundscape as well, whether in the form of a man's oddly flourished execution of a bit of doggerel or the Girl's fearful, almost-whispered rendition of the familiar Alphabet Song. Most arresting, however, is the chanting of a group of children, who repeat, with mounting vigor, "A, B, C! A, B, C!" Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" is still a decade away, and while Roger Waters would eventually capitalize on the eerie authority of indignant children's voices for an anti-establishment message, Lynch is blazing a far more unconventional path here. He is firmly in the nightmare landscape of a sleeping child, and in that space the chanting of the Girl's peers is not a stirring anthem but an underlining of the anxieties of conformity. The letters become a schoolyard taunt, an admonishment to keep up with the rest of the class, delivered with a hardened edge of cruelty. Many other alarming sounds intrude insistently into the film, including a sobbing infant and a ceaseless, droning tone. As with Six Figures, the sound design suggests a state of distress, which is at odds with the traditionally positive associations with learning one's alphabet.

The ominously expressive character of the The Alphabet, unmoored from a conventional narrative, grants it a frank sociological coloring that is unique in Lynch's work. Contrary to his reputation as an obscurantist, Lynch's filmography is characterized by decisive critiques of sexism, commercialism, stoicism, hedonism, and old-fashioned human depravity. Yet these views are often tightly wedded to flamboyantly conveyed characters and settings. The short format and surreal character of The Alphabet permit Lynch to engage in a much more forthright and uncluttered examination of the process of education, sans a genre-indebted storyline. Within The Alphabet's sinister, poetic confines, education takes on the air of a breach or infection. The child's mind, which exists in a pre-language state of openness, is restrained and subjected, Ludovico-style, to a repeating sequence of runic symbols, which authorities insist must form the basis for her future thoughts. The individual who was once receptive of non-verbal inspiration becomes rigidly bound to a discrete set of formulae. The process of internalizing the alphabetic figures thus becomes a kind of mental foot-binding, a deformation of the child's natural state in order to fulfill the cultural requirements of adults.

Needless to say, Lynch is not some education theory radical advocating the discarding of the alphabet, nor is he suggesting that education is a purely malevolent rite of passage. Rather, he is asking us to look at a mundane social process with new eyes, specifically the fearful eyes of child. He underlines his point with bizarre, seemingly arbitrary inserts, such as an upside-down human jaw--complete with prosthetic nose on the chin--that intones, "Please remember, you are dealing with a human form." This moment serves both as an empathic caution (the Girl's agency should be respected) and a sly statement of Lynch's favored theme: the deceptive, concealing nature of physical realities. Other elements in the film are less comprehensible: a groaning, red-tongued mouth; an animated white orb that ricochets through a narrow corridor; a dark field of stars or dots (a repeating image in Lynch's oeuvre). These fragments lend the work the feeling of a free-fall nightmare, for while their meaning is uncertain, they seem fitting within the context of a dreamscape. Lynch's skill at integrating the surreal into his films will develop substantially over years. The roughly grafted strangeness-for-strangeness' sake in The Alphabet will later evolve into the evocative pageant of uncanniness that characterizes Twin Peak's dream sequences, and a better part of the Lost Highway / Mulholland Drive / INLAND EMPIRE cycle.

It's not The Alphabet's surreal flourishes that provide its fearful potency, but Lynch's developing talent for employing every aspect of the film's design to convey the Girl's terror. The aforementioned soundtrack is crucial, but so is the minimalist design of the bedroom, which appears to be nothing but a white-sheeted bed floating in a black void. The girl's makeup suggests the countenance of a kabuki actor or the frozen scream of an Iroquois false face. The animated sequences, which seem to be alternately whimsical and coldly detached, evoke Francis Bacon's unsettling images as the Girl's dream-self is restrained and assaulted with letter-ejaculate. Again, we find that subsequent cinematic history has only enhanced the film's force. The nightgown-clad Girl's bed-born thrashings and vomiting are echoed in William Friedkin's 1973 horror masterpiece, The Exorcist, which also centered on a girl invaded by an outside force. In Lynch's film, however, no priests arrive to save the child from her torment. The drama of The Alphabet is that of an internal struggle, and the protagonist's solitary conflict is the essence of the film. In this, The Alphabet has more in common with Lynch's late works than, say, The Elephant Man or Dune. Even Henry's search for release and fulfillment in the bizzare world of Eraserhead is more classical and storybook-like than the Girl's nightmare. Like Highway's Fred, Drive's Diane, and EMPIRE's Nikki, the Girl is in a place of torment, but unlike those adult protagonists, she hasn't done anything to deserve such (psychic) pain. In this, The Exorcist's Regan MacNeil and the Girl are kin: they are innocents violated by powerful forces for reasons they cannot comprehend.

Green Zone

2010 // USA //Paul Greengrass // April 3, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

C+ - In Green Zone, Paul Greengrass employs his relentless, You-Are-There approach to action film-making to establish a liberal, skeptical cinematic counter-myth to the corrupted, calcifying historical Iraq War narrative. This loose adaptation of Imperial Life in the Emerald City is justly cynical about the 2003 invasion. However, Greengrass' fictionalized take on the subject diminishes the real lies and crimes behind the war. While journalists from Thomas Ricks to Greg Palast are still searching for the truth, Greengrass seems content with a pat conclusion that casts his film as a kind of anti-war First Blood. At least Greengrass is a sufficient talent to render the enterprise stirring, and Green Zone throbs with the same searing momentum as the director's Bourne installments. One barely gets a moment to breathe as the film's (all-too-believable) conspiracy unravels. Greengrass' imagery of fiery, war-shattered Iraq is both jarring and gnawingly familiar, and Damon is working at the peak of his tough-guy powers. However, artful thrills can't mask the formulaic outline to the proceedings—Will Greg Kinnear's slimy Pentagon bureaucrat get his comeuppance?—or the sense that this subject deserves better. Seven years on, the definitive film about the Iraq War is still In the Loop.