Surrogates: Substituting B-Movie Plots for Story Telling

There seems to be a rash of movies lately about the oh-so-1990’s subject of virtual reality, or what this latest sci-fi film starring Bruce Willis as a future cop on the trail of a virtual reality killer, calls “Surrogates.” You know: plug into a substitute idealized android body that you control remotely with some fancy looking VR goggles and easy chair. The much awaited James Cameron sci-fi thriller, Avatar, also uses this same plot device, as does the recent Gamer (only in the case of Gamer, the androids were real, living convicts). The same idea is as old as the original "Star Trek" (the Harry Mudd episode with the Androids) and was given real attention in TV shows like "Wild Palms" and movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Virtuosity in the mid Nineties.

I’m not quite sure why this old sci-fi trope is suddenly so popular again. As it’s done in Surrogates, it definitely has a William Gibson, 1990’s feel – especially as this film delves into our pension for electronic communication and fascination with artificial reality. Like most of these films, the moral is simple: we're now so plugged in to the “net” that we've lost our ability to enjoy real life. But this time, the VR “chairs” and “goggles” used in this film seem hardly at all re-imagined from their 1990’s counterparts, and the story does little to update a theme that’s been well exploited ever since Jean Baudrillard wrote his treatises on hyperreality and movies like The Matrix turned the net into a well dramatized metaphor for modern electronic isolation.

In Surrogates, we have a kind of cross between I Robot and The Matrix – a vast volunteer matrix of metallic, human-looking artificial life forms that people can control remotely from the lazy comfort of their living rooms as they send younger, handsomer robotic look-alikes to work, play, and generally participate daily life for them. The robots are manufactured by, of course, an all-powerful corporation with vested interests and internal dissention. Life is seemingly sweet in this safe, accident-free virtual world until someone discovers a weapon able to short out a robot with enough power that it can kill its remote operator in his chair (it does so by “melting his brain,” just to make sure you get the point).

Enter Bruce Willis as Tom Greer, the cop with personal issues who’s assigned to track down the mystery of the killer. Now Surrogates borrows from its third major source – Majority Report – as the cop with a dead son gets lured into uncovering the conspiracy behind the killings, while simultaneously having to stop a deadly threat to the billions of surrogate users around the world.

While the set up to the concept is nicely done – there’s a kind of Paul Verhoeven style to the direction that tweaks our modern corporate sensibilities – the back stories about the dead son and the mysterious corporate founder fail to resonate as well as the movies they’re borrowed from. (James Cromwell even stars as the corporate font head, as he did in I Robot.) We get a kind of promising political allegory in the form of a revolutionary named The Prophet, who wants everyone to go back to the “unplugged” pre-surrogate lifestyle – a charismatic rabble-rouser whose moral righteousness in this film is the flip side of the villainous Flesh Fair organizers in Speilberg’s AI. But this interesting wrinkle in the plot is conveniently smoothed over in an effort to get to the movie’s more conventional pat ending. In effect, they seem to have substituted real writers with Hollywood surrogates who merely borrowed plot devices to fill in the steps in their fantasy.

It’s a shame, because a movie with a promising concept ends up delivering less than a TV show with a similar concept ("Caprica", based on "Battlestar Gallactica"), but more atmospheric character and backstory development. Really, the makers of Surrogates could have done better by committing more to one of to extremes – either a bigger budget, with better chase scenes, special effects, and explosions, or keep it to the B-movie budget they seem to have had, but develop more nuanced characters, and explore with a bit more care the themes of disconnection and loss. Instead, we get a movie about a people who live but a shadow of their lives, which is itself but a shadow of a movie.

Michael Moore's Capitalism: More Agit-Prop Than Love Story

But is that really so bad? In an age where corporations and governments have become their own slick propaganda machines, maybe Moore's project - being a carnivalist entertainer for the common man - is what those who study leftist art would call purposeful propaganda, art in service of a populist political message. It strikes me that having a propaganda machine like Moore fighting back for the workers is only...well, to use one of Moore's own overtly latent terms..."fair."

After refining his approach for over two decades: telling sob stories of workers crushed under the wheels of cruel corporations and government, while mugging and embarrassing the lugs who run them, all the while mixing in a Raffenstahllish montage of found footage and Dada-ist deconstruction intending to highlight the contradictions and absurdities of the enemy, Moore has become a master of the style...a style, at this point, ripe for a Saturday Night Live parody. But that's another story.

In Capitalism: A Love Story Moore, in a way, decides to go for broke - instead of simply tackling a particular leftist issue (such as failed intelligence of Fahrenheit 9/11 or the medical system in Sicko), he's decided to set his sights on the whole shebang, basically indicting the entire American "Capitalist" way of life.

What Moore spends most of his time on here is a heart-wrenching deconstruction of the mortgage-cum-banking-cum-bailout crisis of the past year; and when Moore sticks to his subject - such as interviewing a farm family loosing their house, following fired workers as they sit-in for the pay still owed them, or following neighborhood activists as they battle local police from evicting families, he's got his teeth into a subject that surely resonates with the times. His point that maybe this time, Americans who usually vote against their interests will get mad enough to do something about it, starts to feel like a movement in the making. And by tying back the moments in the news with his own personal family story of growing up in Flint, Michigan, Moore succeeds in making himself not just a strident spokesman, but another one of the families who've ended up on the losing side of the Republican revolution: and thus a voice we're more inclined to follow.

But in going for broke, Moore overreaches - throwing in unrelated stories about the corporate practice of taking out life insurance on young workers (known as "dead peasant" insurance); charting the Congressional vote for the bailout without examining the alternatives, and basically letting everyone off the hook for our fiscal mess - including not only those homeowners who bought into the refi-mania of the 'naughts, or who abandoned their homes when the payments got tough, thus fanning the flames of the crisis, but also favorite Democrats like Clinton and Obama - who don't neatly fit into his "us versus them" meme. This time, Moore wants to disparage the entire Capitalist system as, in his words, "evil" - to be replaced by...well, that word Socialism seems to be the alternative on offer, though Moore does little to explain it (and seems to intentionally avoid uttering the word). I grant you, it's not a far leap from our current fiscal mess to concluding that this whole Capitalist project is a dud. Yet Socialism is hardly a rejection of capitalism (Moore seems to buy into the Republican line, here), so what is it that he's really arguing for? Moore clearly cares little about such niceties as making sense - which makes his point here a bit of a mess. Moore, as we know, doesn't want to convince: he wants to break your heart, then hit you over the head with his assertions. But it's not just that the realities are more complicated than Moore would wish them to be, it's that this time, by aiming at an entire economic system, instead of just a particular crisis or two, his buckshot rarely hits the intended targets, and instead of the righteous anger he's going for all we emerge with is a sad shaking of the head, not just at the misery caused by the banking crisis but at the deep, deep misunderstanding of it that even lucid commentators like Michael Moore seem to have.

So my complaint about Moore's movie this time isn't that he's gone and done it again - rather, it's that he's missed an opportunity. There is plenty of blame to throw around in this mortgage/bailout mess - Moore bags a politician or two (Chris Dodd comes out looking less than pretty); and he nails the Goldman Sachs/Government conspiracy previously written about by Matt Tiabi. And it's worth being reminded that there are real lives being destroyed by this debacle. But what Moore leaves out is even more telling: little mention that Obama's cabinet is, surprise surprise, more of the same, or that it was Clinton who signed the bank deregulation bill, or - even more complicating - that the anti-AIG anger has now morphed into the anti-Obama, anti-government Tea Party movement, who has concluded just the opposite point: that it's not Capitalists who are evil, but Socialists. Perhaps these oversights are all part of Moore's strategic plan to get labor-leaning pols into higher office (Roosevelt is practically canonized at the end of the film). But the long passage on Reagan's war against the unions in the Eighties really feels like a stretch, and starts to betray Moore's real passion in this film: organized labor, and its ability to fight for worker's interests.

That's a worthy goal, and perhaps one worth fighting for, but really, it's tangential to the mortgage meltdown and the financial bailout. Then again, what Moore wants to do is achieve his dreamed-for worker's revolution, and in his mind, the bailout/meltdown is merely the spark he hopes will get the Peasants to rise. That's perhaps why it's more important for him to show angry AIG protesters and clear-cut enemies like Hank Paulson, than to really reveal the nuances of what just happened.

It's too bad, because I think a political propagandist like Moore, if he really focused in on the financial mess, could have helped do for banking reform and regulation what a movie like "Sicko" has apparently done for the health care reform initiative. This time, Moore takes aim at the entire capitalist edifice, trotting out his most strident and vague Troskyist anthems, and instead of launching a roar that has the potential to create a movement, all he gives us is a cris de cour: the yelp of a dog who's had his tail caught, and plaintive though he may be, seems to have lost his bite.

The Informant! Promises More Than He Delivers

That's the basic premise of Steven Soderbergh's latest film about an unstable, pathologically lying Archer Daniel's Midland executive who turns informant for the FBI, staring a corn-fed Matt Damon as the chunky executive who turns undercover agent on big Agri-business.

Soderbergh seems to be going for a film in the style of the breezy, kooky fun cops and robbers escapade that Speilberg did brilliantly with Leonardo di Caprio in Catch Me If You Can. He gives the film a fun, Seventy's font styling (even though it's mostly set in the mid-Nineties) and creates a similar exasperated cop (Scott Bacula of Enterprise fame) running the exasperating Damon as Mark Whitacre, a kind of introverted scientific genius and executive big-wig who has absolutely zero social intelligence but finds himself the center of international intrigue.

When Mark reports to his boss (Tom Papa doing a great job as ADM favored son Mick Andreas) that a mole in the company is poisoning the promising lysine-generating bugs in their grain silos and extorting ADM for a payout to uncover the mole, Andreas brings in the FBI, much to Mark's dismay (the poisoning story, we later find out, was just a ploy to deflect Mark's own failure with the bugs - but anyone with two sticks of wood to rub together can tell that Mark is one suspicious cookie). Mark quickly enlists the FBI into the intrigue of a greater scheme - international price fixing in the agri-business industry - and offers his services to help them create a series of tapes to make their case. Again, just how much of this is tall tale designed to extricate Mark from an uncomfortable situation is anyone's guess, but he does manage to get the FBI dudes to fall for it, and off we go.

Damon's Whitacre turns out to be a bit of a dunce when it comes to stealthiness, talking about the case with colleagues, showing his taping equipment to neighbors, and generally acting like a two-penny lout. Turns out that Whitacre isn't the shiniest penny in the bank, especially when push comes to shove and it turns out that ADM is wise to his antics.

Though the style of this sort of thing generally tends to be congenial and enjoyable (nine years in the poky is just a lark in movies like this), this effort just doesn't gel for me for a number of reasons: Damon's voice over, where he recites random thoughts in the middle of tense scenes that could make the top 20 of the ADD all-time-hits list, is continually distracting. In fact, Damon and Bakula both seem miscast - too "on-the-nose," as it were (one wonders if reversing the casting might have been more promising). By the end of uncovering the endless pathology that seems to be Mark Whitacre, we're no further along in sympathizing with the guy - and in fact, we kind of wish to get rid of him all together. This is the classic intentional fallacy, where the movie becomes obstreperous and boring when it's only the character that's supposed to be.

That's not to say that the audience didn't enjoy this type of acerbic humor, which I believe some certainly did. But Soderbergh has woefully under imagined this story, trapping it in a dull limbo between Fargo and Catch Me, but without either the menace or the thrill that either of those two movies supplied. Instead, we have a kind of lightweight Ocean's One, and one, as we know, is the loneliest number.

Perhaps the problem is that it's too early for the mid-Nineties to generate the kind of stylish bravado that Soderbergh is able to get out of his re-imagined fifties brat-pack, or Speilberg was able to mine with the mid-Sixties jet set. The main promise in this movie lies in dissecting the bi-polar insanities of farmland niceness and corporate culture: the intersection between paranoid small-town stability and the desire for greatness that leads one to perform great crimes against humanity and oneself. Soderbergh here has all the ingredients for such a film - he just doesn't have the temperament for it. Instead, we get a lightweight, aimless comedy that feels like water-downed Cohen brothers. It's a harmless enough thing to rent on date night. And if a fat Matt Damon is your thing, you might get a thrill. But Soderbergh can do better. This film only delivers a half Whitacre.

Tim Burton’s 9: Dystopian Modern Art With Heart

A few months ago I went up to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, Massachusetts (Mass MOCA as it’s called). I love this museum, which always has some of the most nuanced and interesting contemporary artists exhibiting today, artists deeply influenced by movements such as deconstruction and postmodernism, yet who have often moved beyond those intellectual gestures to also create objects of formal beauty, electronic wonder, genuine feeling and humanity. This last visit, at the “Badlands” exhibit, there was an interesting diorama depicting scenes of desolation, with in the far distance, tiny human figures swallowed up by the destruction. The work was both serene and disturbing, dark shapes brightly lit from behind like a planetarium, yet suggestive of the massive pain and suffering of war.

Such is the feeling I get from Tim Burton’s recent post-apocalyptic cartoon, 9, directed by relative newcomer Shane Acker (and co-produced by Burton). The look of the film has the same Burtonesque exaggeration as his earlier work – movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Edward Scissorhands. Yet this film is at once more serious and more light – a kind of fairy tale of about human destruction and human spirit. It’s hard not to be both moved by this work and to find it deeply suggestive and artistic.

The movie starts in-medias-res – a technique that I sometimes find jarring, but works quite well here since when 9, a kind of sock puppet imbued with human life, wakes up, thrown into a world of destruction and danger, he has no idea how he’s come to be and what’s come before, and neither do we.

The movie is both an exploration of 9’s origins as well as, of course, a battle with an evil robot holding lord over the apocalyptic ruins, a nasty piece of spidery belching machinery that looks suspiciously similar to the round, indestructible iron baddie in The Incredibles. The artistic panorama here is a bit more finely nuanced than The Incredibles, though – not CGI but carefully arted backgrounds, hued in acid green, faded khaki, shades of black, and fiery red, reminiscent of a cross between the drawings in Coraline and World War I cinematography. The visual work in this film is truly incredible and had it not been a major motion picture, stills from this movie could have hung in Mass MOCA and been right at home.

What’s most enjoyable about the film, though, is the exploration of human character represented by the sock puppets. There are indeed nine of them, each with its own distinct character, and each, presumably, created in a significant order from 1 to 9: each one an incomplete attempt, it seems, to capture the human spirit necessary to defeat evil. Naturally, 9’s destiny is to have the necessary spunk and spirit to compel the others to rally to the task. But the other puppets each have their interesting significant place, as well – including 1, the leader who feels he must protect the others at all costs, 7, the courageous warrior, 6, the compulsive who secretly deduces the answers, and 5, the loyal friend. At a mere 1 hour and 20 minutes, it’s not an involved story or a convoluted plot, yet its very simplicity is what makes this a fine film.

As a somewhat scary bedtime story for kids, then, the film has an uplifting moral about loyalty, courage, and camaraderie that any parent would want their child to understand. There is a repeated gesture throughout the film where one of the sock puppet characters will put their arms around another – a gesture of intimacy, friendship, and humanity. Yet that gesture comes to mean so much more: a longed-for human connection that sustains us in even the darkest of times. For adults, the film may recycle the simplistic tropes of science-fiction cartoons: evil robots and mad scientists, assembling a movie from bits of cloth and string and borrowed movie scenes. But there’s no doubt that this fine movie isn’t also a moving portrait of the human spirit, and yes, a finely crafted work of art.

Extract Delivers Little Juice

Mike Judge, creator of such TV wonders as "Bevis and Butthead" and "King of the Hill," has taken to the big screen once again with the comedy Extract, which stars Jason Bateman as Joel, a successful small business owner, making flavored extracts with his hired assembly line of hicks, losers, immigrants, and complainers.

I wish I could say this movie was better than it is. Bateman is a sincere actor who often brings an air of refreshing reality to his performances. The movie is supported by SNL's Kristin Wiig as Bateman's wife, Ben Affleck as his best bud, and the ever entertaining J.K. Simmons (of Spiderman and "The Closer" fame) as his plant manager and business partner, yet despite the nice casting, it never gets off the ground.

Judge's film centers on the shenanigans of a female drifter and knock-out, Cindy (played by Mila Kunis, the "other girl" in Forgetting Sarah Marshal). We are given a demonstration of how Cindy's way with men allows her to perpetuate all sorts of small-time scams; and then Cindy thinks she's hit the big time when she reads about a testicular accident (don't ask) at Joel's plant, and sets her sights on scamming Joel. Meanwhile, as Joel becomes more infatuated with Cindy, he turns to his bud Brad for advice, who insists that he hire a brainless gigolo, Brad, to sleep with his wife so that he'll feel less guilty about wanting to get it on with Cindy.

It's hard to believe that a successful business owner heading into his forties - let alone one played with the kind of beleaguered sincerity Bateman typically brings to his performances - would engage in the kind of teenage juvenalia of this Cindy/Brad/Ben Affleck triangle dictates. The young and handsome Brad is essentially a good-looking Beavis to counter Joel's grown-up Butthead. But the forty-year-old Beavis and Butthead thing just seems rather charmless to me. I'd tell these characters to grow up if it weren't that Joel was already so serious about everything to begin with.

Meanwhile, Cindy gets her claws into one of Joel's employees and threatens to bring Joel's life crashing down with a frivolous lawsuit. Gene Simmons breaths a bit of life into the story as the greasy lawyer trying to shake down Joel and his partner. But it's just not enough to sustain a script that's filled with routine gags like a nosey neighbor, snooty assembly line workers, and a married sex life deadened by eight-o'clock sweat pants.

The film would like to turn the fear of turning forty, and the fear of success, into a black comedy of errors. It simply isn't black enough or comedic enough. Perhaps it goes wrong in trying to mix the "King of the Hill" culture of hicks and losers with a grown-up successful Butthead who's only issue seems to be that he needs more private time to whack it. The directing feels very TV-like and we're given only modest inconveniences for Joel to contend with. If Joel was really frightened by his life, he'd be looking for a lot more trouble than this silly Cindy and stupid Brad represents. Judge just doesn't seem to be the right person to try to tackle this subject matter. Success, it seems, is really not his forte.

Taking Woodstock Immerses In Metaphor

Ang Lee is a director who likes to immerse his films completely in a time and place. Whether it's suburban Connecticut in the '70's (The Ice Storm), classical China (Crouching Tiger), or the '60's West (Brokeback Mountain), he wishes to capture not only the scenery, but the feeling - the essence, if you will - of being in a specific moment in time, in a specific landscape.

His films are also about sexual awakening - whether the awakening is naive and dangerous (Ice Storm), furtive and repressed (Brokeback Mountain), or symbolically coded Freudianism (The Hulk), he's seemingly fascinated with the roles between parents and children and the fraught sexual tensions of adolescent transformation into adulthood.

It's perhaps inevitable, then, that Lee would eventually gravitate towards filming the biggest cultural moment of sexual and adolescent awakening in our collective memories: Woodstock, that late-Sixties concert on Yasgur's farm that became synonymous with a generation's blossoming into sexual freedom.

Yet this is not the straight-on Woodstock movie that many might expect, that a director of realism like Ron Howard or of moral drama like Spielberg might make. There is little of the music, none of the performers - nothing, in fact, of the "subject matter" of the concert itself. What Lee wishes to focus on is the experience - the feeling - in fact, the meaning, of Woodstock, not only to the thousands who attended but to an entire generation, more than anything else. Lee goes so far deeply into the meaning of this moment that what he creates is a supremely "laid back" film - a film with a breezy style and subtly of drama that seemingly might have even been made in the Sixties, but with such awareness and fullness of the moment that it could only have been made from our present perspective.

Taking Woodstock centers on a particular man/boy, if you will, played with halting charm by the young comedian Demetri Martin. Martin is Elliot Teichberg, the dutiful, industrious, creative son of two bat-shit crazy Jewish hotel owners in the Catskills who are going broke in their lazy, run-down old town. (Elliot's mother, an Eastern Europe refuge who looks a bit like a drained beet, drives away customers by charging for towels and showers, berates the banker who's about to foreclose on their property, loves shooing the hippies renting their barn back inside whenever they pop out, and is an eternal albatross and embarrassment to Elliot. Meanwhile, Elliot's father is a thoroughly defeated roofer who lets Mom run the boy around.). This is the story of Elliot, how he ends up bringing the concert to his town, and how the concert transforms Elliot - a buttoned up Jewish intellectual with hidden drives and tender obligations - from a divided, unhappy soul into a fully actualized, integrated human being.

That's pretty much the plot of the film, and as with his movie Brokeback Mountain, the pace of Taking Woodstock is slow and easy, the main character is a gay man (only this time, one who finds comfort in discovering who he is), and Lee is more concerned with building metaphor and moments of beauty than creating drama and tension (this film couldn't be more opposite to something like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.) I'm afraid all this may make it a bit unpopular for certain theater goers. (Exiting the film, the people behind me said, and I quote: "What happened? Nothing. It was gay. That's all that happened." Then again, I saw it in New Jersey.)

I too was a bit bored during the movie. Lee uses a split screen (as he did in The Hulk), a technique that was too clever by half in The Hulk and which seemed, at first, discredited here (the reason for it I'll explain in a bit). It bothered me, as did a beefed up Liev Schreiber in wig and dress playing an ex-Marine drag queen, the corny little breaks in character (like a cop with a flower in his helmet) and the sometimes slow scenes of spaced-out dialogue. Yes, like many, I wished Lee had used more of the music of the festival to punctuate the soundtrack (were the rights unavailable, or was this a conscious decision?). I sat through the film not sure what I thought about it. But as I left the movie, and as it sat with me, it grew and grew - seeing it was like taking a pill, and as the memory of the movie flowered inside me, it increasingly left me with a good feeling. Finally, as I fully realized how Lee's symbolism had worked throughout, how well he had touched upon a critical moment of adolescence, I realized that a movie hasn't made me feel this good in ages. Lee had done something much much more than simply shoot a boring movie about a gay boy's peripheral view of Woodstock. It's like taking a little bit of the Sixties with you.

How he does that is actually quite complex, and what a director like Lee is so brilliant at is creating layers of metaphor. He does that here and it's just not apparent how so until the movie is over. But start at the opening scene: a shot of flowers growing in the decaying, ordinary landscape of the Teichberg motel, and the empty pool. This landscape is Elliot's landscape. There are flowers growing (Elliot is a painter) but the life is drab and dull. The pool is empty. Lee has chosen these metaphors - flowers and water - because this is Woodstock, a cultural moment about sexual blossoming, and the age of Aquarius.

As the people of Woodstock come to town, the pool becomes full - first to bathe in, later to drink. Elliot begins to become more of himself as he bathes in their almost extra-terrestrial glow, and he begins to use his entrepreneurial skills to help organize the concert promoters, to convince his parents and to fight the hostile townspeople. The character of Michael - the lead promoter, who once lived on Elliot's street - is handsome, virile, laid-back, chilled, and completely actualized. He's the dream of what Elliot could be (he even comes riding in on horseback at one point): a combination of a creative soul with business smarts and leadership...the perfect Aquarian.

But Elliot is divided - clearly evident in his paintings, which all exhibit dark and light swatches intersected by a single bright color. In fact, much of this movie is divided into Yin and Yang: there are the two townie brothers, one the uptight older fisherman, the other the war-ravaged whacked out wild soul. There's Elliot's mother and father, who have reversed roles, with the mother dominating and the father shy and shut down. And there's the motel itself - which has both a barn, in which live the Earthlight Players, a communal, semi-naked, pansexual chorus of free thought and love, and the main motel, in which live Elliot's uptight, hostile, repressed parents. The parents, like Freud's ego, must keep the naked players inside the id of the barn. But Woodstock is about letting all that free love energy out...by the millions.

This is why the split screen technique ultimately makes sense: like Elliot, the film is split between repression and freedom, and is about breaking down that barrier through the crucible of the concert (it's also apparently a direct tribute to the Woodstock documentary, which used the same technique). The character of Vilma - Liev Schreiber's drag queen - shows up as the hotel bodyguard, as the first embodiment of that mixing: a hard man and soft woman in one person. But the real mixing happens the first day of the concert, when Elliot is sent "to the center of the universe" by Vilma and his father. What he encounters when he gets to the concert isn't the concert itself but a van, where sits a hippie from California and his chick. The two spot Elliot and immediately deduce that "he's thirsty." He is thirsty - for the age of Aquarius - and they offer him wine, and ultimately seduce him into the van, where he's given a tab of acid. What comes next is probably the most delicately created, insightful, and accurate representation of a drug awaking experience ever put onto film. As Elliot lies in the van, seduced by both the man and the woman, the mandala paintings around him begin to move, swirl, and mix. This is the beginning of the journey to dissolve the dualism, to mix the Yin and Yang of the movie's themes.

When Elliot finally emerges from that van, he's a new man: literally dressed now in the relaxed garb of the Sixties, he goes to a hill to look at the concert with his new friends. What he sees becomes an entire ocean of people, a moving, rolling sea, with the center of it the light of the concert, blossoming and exploding like a verdant flower. This: this moment of sexual awakening, this moment of self actualization and integration - this, Lee is saying, is the center of the universe. But this is not just Elliot's story: this is a story of an entire generation that awakened at that concert, and that's why his film is so powerful. This rolling sea, this is the Age of Aquarius. "Perspective," Elliot is told, "is the death of love." To fully love, one must lose one's perspective: one must become part of the rolling sea.

When Elliot returns home, however, his parents are still there. What he must do then is come back from his journey of self-actualization and fix his life. That isn't always so easy, and Lee punctuates this by giving us a wonderful closing scene of the destruction left at the end of the concert: the muddy fields, the trash, overflowing urinals, the empty stages. After integration, one must still pick up the pieces and carry on.

It might seem to some like nothing much happens in this movie. The concert comes, and the concert goes - we never see Joplin or Hendrix, we never see the guitars and singers. But Elliot knows who he is now, and clearly, that's the most powerful thing that could happen to anyone. It happened to millions of us in that August of 1969, and happens to many more of us every day. It takes a beautiful movie to make us feel that again.

Inglourious Basterds – Kosher Porn for Cinemaphiles

“This may be my masterpiece,” are the final words uttered in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film. Tarantino’s hero, a slow-drawling Tennessee commander (played by the ever scruffier Brad Pitt), who leads a brigade of Jewish Nazi-killing mercenaries, says this as he lovingly carves a swastika into the forehead of another character. It’s no coincidence that these are the last words of the movie, or that Tarantino might wish the audience to take them as his own appraisal of this film. There’s a lot in the movie that’s self-referential, to the point where the movie is much more a cultural pastiche of cinematic techniques than anything else; certainly more so than it resembles anything that might parallel actual World War II history, let alone an Aristotelian story, with beginning, middle, and end.

And presumably, Tarantino wouldn’t have it any other way. Eli Roth, a director whom Tarantino casts as “the bear Jew,” calls the film “Kosher Porn.” What he presumably means by this is that the movie is essentially a Jewish revenge fantasy: a group of Jewish mercenaries so ruthless and deadly that they strike fear into the hearts of Nazis everywhere, bedevil Hitler, and ultimately bring an end to World War II. That may be (though one is left to ask what connection Tarantino feels to such subject matter…as no Jewish director would dare be so disparaging of “real” history). But I think the word “porn” is operative in a different way as well. Like pornography, Tarantino has structured his film as series of character set pieces only loosely connected by a thru-story, with each piece structured as a long, verbal seduction that builds to a sudden release of violence (with the last set being the kind of grandiose all-members orgy of death, the kind of group release the best porn films usually save for last). Porn, indeed.

The plot, such as it is, is essentially borrowed from a series of World War II and spy movies as wide-ranging as Guns of Naverone, The Dirty Dozen, James Bond, and every movie ever made about the French resistance (with, as Jeffery Golderg points out in The Atlantic, a bit of Springtime for Hitler for good measure). The movie opens as Colonel Hanz Landa – a renowned “Jew Hunter” – interrogates a French farmer about a neighboring Jewish family and their whereabouts. Landa is cultured, charming, and something of a connoisseur, at least when it comes to hunting Jews. Next, we get an introduction to Aldo and his band of Jewish mercenaries (including the “Jewish Bear,” who gives Hitler the schvits); Aldo is the opposite of Landa: the rough American with a Southern drawl and a penchant for scalping his victims. After this, some of our characters start to meet in various combinations, and we are introduced some new and interesting actors, including a British movie-critic-turned-spy and a German-actress-turned-traitor.

Each of these pieces really do, I think, exhibit Tarantino working at the top of his form (pun intended, as you’ll see). I’m reminded of the “Big Mac” discussion in Pulp Fiction: the kind of cultural trivia that fascinates as it builds an undercurrent of tension. That scene became a kind of signature discussion piece of film-students everywhere, and each of the scenes in Inglourious Basterds does the Big Mac discussion one better. We get the clever interrogation of the French farmer, who is cornered into a Sophie’s choice of a decision. We get the nerve-wracking interview of a Jewish woman, passing as French, by Joseph Goebbels, who wants to use her theater for a German movie premier. And we get what probably will go down as a classic scene of espionage as two Jews, a British Spy, and a German film actress leading them all on a secret mission to assassinate Hitler during this very premier, play a game of “what celebrity am I” with a group of German soldiers on leave, trying not to give themselves away. There is no doubt something archly fun in the way the game – in which the players put cards on their foreheads to indicate the hidden personage they must guess at – echoes the game of hidden identity the spies are simultaneously playing…not to mention Aldo’s penchant for marking his victim’s identities on their foreheads. Each of these scenes is individually great, even if taken together they don’t add up to anything more than the sum of their parts. (Intentionally, according to Tarantino’s interview with Charlie Rose, where Tarantino essentially explains that he doesn’t believe in morality. Which explains why his films are absent of any moral character arc. They are, in Tarantino’s own words, written as actor vehicles, not really as expressions of story.) There is no doubt that Tarantino is an actor's director, and he gets fine performances out of his entire cast.

But the real point of this film is deceptive – even if we are meant to focus on character over story, acting over arc, Tarantino’s subject here is not so much the characters of the war as it is the characters who wage a war of cultures. The real villain in the film isn’t Hitler, but Goebbels, the German minister of culture who created a “pure” German cinema that glorified the exploits of the Nazis. Goebbels is after a kind of purification of cinema, and the verbal calisthenics of the other Nazis seems to emphasize this obsession with culture. What, after all, is racial cleansing but a kind of ultimate expression of aesthetics? One wonders if Tarantino isn’t after (or fears) something quite similar, in his own fraught relationship with film form; after all, like his obsessed Germans, Jew Hunters, and Nazi killers, all roads in this movie lead to the cinema, where Tarantino seems to be saying that history can be transformed, if not escaped entirely, by virtuosos with enough courage to “break through” classical sentiments about morality.

However, without the morality, it’s rather hard to tell if Tarantino wishes his film to be a tribute to cinema, a rabble-rouser, a personal indulgence, or just another exercise in stylistic borrowing. But what he seems to be doing in the closing scenes of his movie is intentionally copying the German Nazi film style: He creates a celebratory fantasy of violent triumph that is a kind of catharsis; but so similar is Tarantino’s treatment to the Nazi’s film treatment in the film-within-a-film that Hitler’s salivation over the scenes of Germans killing American soldiers is an uncomfortable mockery of our own. To what purpose might this be done, other than mere titillation? And this scene isn’t the only highly stylized borrowing in the movie. The entire film exhibits this homage of styles, one style each for each of the main characters: the style of French cinema to match the Catherine Deneuve-like French heroine; the style of the American Western to match Aldo Raines and his band of Jewish Indians; James Bond for the British spy (“At least let me go out speaking the King’s English”). The characters speak multiple languages and Tarantino slips in and out of multiple film styles, ultimately going out with his Riefenstahl-ish triumph of the pornographic will over history. It’s fascinating, but ultimately, what’s the point? To exhibit Tarantino’s mastery of cinema? Granted, anyone who’s followed Tarantino’s work takes this as a given. To create lasting art, however, I believe one must ultimately offer more than a study of form.

Perhaps what’s most aggravating about this movie though is that while Inglourious Basterds wants to erase history in its wake, and be blissfully free of morality, it’s also trafficking in the morally-weighted subject of the Holocaust. Why this subject matter? It’s weirdly insulting – at first – or possibly insanely brilliant, in the way that sometimes the autistic or the socially inept student can hit upon some brilliant insight in their obsessed recitation of arcane detail. But if it is brilliant, one is still left to wonder why a movie like this is even needed, and why now. Americans certainly aren’t lacking for propaganda, nor does either an homage to Germanic cultural exceptionalism nor an education in an orgy of pornographic cinematic violence seem necessary in our present moment (anyone who saw the G.I. Joe movie this summer must certainly agree). Nor does it seem like the story of the Holocaust need credulous deconstruction…unless you’re a Holocaust-denying anti-semite, which Tarantino (one assumes) is not. So the motivation for the movie is a bit of a puzzle. One imagines Tarantino at the end of the film looking it over and saying to himself either, “I’m a genius, and this is my masterpiece” or “Boy, if anyone actually buys this crap they are such suckers.” One can possibly imagine him saying both simultaneously.

I know, this could be said to be a criticism of the whole Tarantino/Rodriguez nihilistic oeuvre, with its fascination of form over morality and its love of carnage. There is indeed much to be admired here in Tarantino’s facility with writing and directing, and Inglourious Basterds seems to have elevated this sort of thing to a true art, as much as that word can be applied to a formalistic exercise. Yet I fear that Tarantino may have created a masterpiece that has no moral value, other than to exhibit the filmmaker’s fluency with film. In this sense, then, Eli Roth is right: this is a kind of Kosher Porn, though it’s not quite clear who’s supposed to be getting screwed.

Distric 9 - Classic Sci Fi

Way back in the day, sci-fi used to be about something: specifically, it was a coded way of providing a social critique. HG Wells and other writers who invented the form placed their stories in the future, or created metaphors of strange monsters and aliens, as a way to help their readers escape their present social or economic class, in order to see a present-day issue like poverty or class resentment in a new light.

Such is the spirit of District 9, set in Johannesburg and written as a clear metaphor for apartheid.

The movie has sparked some controversy – some who believe its portrayal is racist, others who think it’s merely trivial . Most of these reactions are due to the way the aliens are portrayed: as “digusting” insects who ravage through garbage and seem both disoriented and violent. Then there’s also the portrayal of the society that reacts to them with a mix of fear, revulsion and exploitation.

I think it’s a brilliant film intentionally challenging racial assumptions as well as our reception of news, international events, and our own places in society. It certainly is a challenging movie, extremely violent as well as trafficking in stereotypes both cinematical and racial.

The movie opens in mockumenatary style, interviewing the factotum of a U.N.-like semi-military aid agency (“NMU”), Mathias, charged with relocating the aliens, vernacularly referred to as “prawns,” from their make-shift camps near Johannesburg to a tent-city well away from civilization. The interviews are conducted with members of the press, academia, and general public; we also get the back story of how the aliens came to Earth, the mystery as to who they are and why they are stranded here, and the somewhat threatening and odd behavior of the aliens in their raggedy camps.

That all this has a direct parallel to apartheid is obvious, and the movie doesn’t really get going until Mathias is accidently spayed with some alien gunk. The gunk begins a genetic transformation in Mathias that allows him to operate the advanced alien weaponry (which has been coded only to respond to alien DNA).

The DNA transformation from human to alien is a stock sci-fi trope (Star Trek: Next Generation did a nifty episode on this theme), but what elevates this movie are precisely the controversial chances it takes with its racial/alien metaphor. Much like Bruno, District 9 wishes to explode safe assumptions – in this case, racial assumptions - even as it traffics in the same stereotypes it’s examining.

The “prawns” are not pleasant – they rummage through trash for their meals, respond to the violence of the MNU with equal violence, and are seemingly addicted to cat food (the alien equivalent of heroin?), for which they trade technology, weapons, and stolen goods on the black market supported by an evil Nigerian gang that rivals MNU for their violence and ferocity. They are also trapped here – unable to restart their spaceship to return home. In this sense they also serve as a metaphor for any displaced people, from Palestinians to Afghani’s, who find themselves dispossessed. The mockumentary treatment helps to reinforce our view of this tragedy as something apart from us, the way world news is something we simply watch on our TV. The movie seems to be saying that in our media saturated environment, even the presence of aliens from another world would soon become just another nightly news story, hardly worthy of disturbing our daily routines. The aliens and their situation have become something we can hardly understand, let alone sympathize with.

But when Mathias starts to become a prawn himself, he quickly discovers personally what it’s like to be on the other side of the MNU stick – as well as befriends one of the key prawns, and his son, who equally have to wrestle with their suddenly found allegiance with their former persecutor.

At the core of this movie is the alien / human bond, which develops richly over the course of the bloody action, giving the film a strong emotional underpinning which I think is the key to the appeal it’s finding with its fans. I complain often in my reviews about movies that lack a character arc; it’s hard to find a more pronounced arc than the one Mathias must travel, changing in the course of two hours not only his social station and his politics, but his species as well. Mathias’s change is met with an equal growth on the part of his prawn ally, who is able to discover a bond of friendship that goes beyond worlds. It’s a classic story of war and oppression, only the alien DNA and weaponry give it a unique kick, and the documentary style ads the right measure of curious distance and subtle, sarcastic humor.

There certainly is some truth to the criticisms about the movie. The Nigerian bad-guys are right out of central casting, and couldn’t be a more offensive stereotype. As are the white military commanders and the bloodthirsty CEO’s. There’s no subtlety lost on this film.

But for a sci-fi that’s mean to entertain, District 9 does so in the best fashion. Like the great episodes of Battlestar Galactica or the sci-fi classics of an earlier generation, it asks us to re-look at our present sociology with the strange orientation offered by an alien culture. It does so originally and with spirited gusto, and for those who love a classic sci-fi yarn told well, it doesn't disappoint.

Julie and Julia: Should Have Halved The Recipe

I can imagine the conversation that must have gone on when Nora Ephram went to the studios to pitch a movie about Julia Child. "Julia Child?" some twenty-two year old executive must have said. "How will movie-goers related to a deceased French cook?" (or perhaps worse, "who's that?"). The solution: license two books, one about Julia Child, and the other the book based on the blog by the young woman who spent a year cooking all of Julia Child's recipes ("The Julie/Julia Project"). It's about Julia, see, but younger audiences will relate to the young chick.

Then mix thoroughly and voila: audiences will flock. Unfortunately, rich as the ingredients are, the final confection falls flat, and probably due to all that mixing.

The Julia story – played by the always wonderful Meryl Streep and supported by an equally wonderful Stanly Tucci – tells a warm and tender story about how an American diplomat’s wife, stranded in Paris, learns to cook in order to pass the time, and eventually finds her métier in besting the stuffy French and translating French cooking for the “servantless” American audience. Julia and her husband are very much in love, and the story is really about how women in the Fifties, servants to their husbands, were still able to occasionally find acclaim and satisfaction by discovering their hidden talents (if they were lucky enough to have husbands with the right careers, and the right politics).

Then there’s the Julie story – about a modern, twenty-something Brooklynite who discovers Julie Child’s cookbook and decides to cook every recipe over the course of a year. This tale is rather the opposite. Dour and unrelenting, this Julie has been turned into a stock Nora Ephram heroine: winey, self-absorbed almost to the point of weird obsession, more than a bit neurotic and the last person any man would want to spend any time with (the voice exhibited in the Julie/Julia Project blog is much more accessible than the character played by Amy Adams, and one feels sympathy with this author for what Ephram has done to the character.)

Ephram chops up the Julia story and sprinkles in the Julie story, shifting the mood between uplift and whiney, to the point that by the time the movie finishes, with Julie reminiscing in the Smithsonian over Julia’s kitchen, we feel cheated of both stories – the Julia story seems to be just getting going, and the Julie story should have ended long before, after an interminable sojourn in Julia’s footsteps with no new insight.

I don’t think the problem is necessarily Amy Adams (who’s serviceable enough) so much as it is Ephram’s cloyingly morose view of her heroine (and the fact that her story line must compete against the incomparable Streep, who elevates everything she touches). Adam’s Julie is a beleaguered assistant at the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation, hating her job and hating her new spacious brownstone loft, with its expansive deck and room for elaborate dinner parties, over a pizzeria in Queens. Yeah, that’s tough. Ephram shoots Julie’s trudge to work through the New York subway system through the “drab” filter, washing out colors and packing the frame with mundane details of office cubicle desk life. In part, this is meant to be a contrast to the romantic view of Julia’s 1950’s Paris, but it struck me as ungrateful: ninety percent of Manhattan’s middle-class intelligentsia lives this life, and enjoy it rather much – thank you. And I know the people working at the Redevelopment offices, and they are quite happy to be doing what they see as important, meaningful work.

Not so our Julie, who is pained by every workplace phone call and finds having a marvelously sexy and supportive husband who actually has a job he likes a real drag. My feeling is that this is all rather changed from the original blog project, which was written for quite different reasons (mainly to occupy time while unemployed, and establish a career). That Ephram changes the motivations of the heroine does significant damage to the story, I believe. I’d find it much more interesting to learn the strategic process of a happy blogger – or to just get the straight story of Julia Child’s life – than to sit through the sad lamentations of a female Woody Allen who draws inspiration from an imagined cooking Yenta. Yes, Woddy populates his New York portraits with nebbishes too; the difference is, he’s funny.

All of which makes it more painful to report just how wonderful Steep is in the backstory role. Julia Child is a character of easy parody, but Streep creates a person that is far deeper than, yet still recognizable as, the character we think we know. As Child, she brings the same kind of kooky intensity to discovering Paris and ingratiating herself into Parisian society that she later does to cooking and writing. Stanley Tucci lives up to his role as Mr. Child, loving his wife and lending his sympathetic ear as she finds her passion, and the straight story line of how Julia became Julia is the most moving and interesting thing in the film.

All the more reason to be disappointed by that ending in the Smithsonian, which stops us short of finding out the really interesting parts of Julia’s life, and refocuses back on the sad symbolism of our nebbishy heroine. I was fascinated by Julia Child’s kitchen – and curious to learn more of how she mixed her home life with her career. But by this time, I was thoroughly fed up, as it were, with the elaborately layered soft terrine of audience appeal Ephram was trying to make instead. Julia herself would have stripped out all that gooey gunk and served it to us straight, and perhaps raw.

The Hangover: ReDefining "Night on the Town"

This nice little misogynistic movie, The Hangover, actually is rather entertaining, if you're willing to overlook it's anti-female attitude and buy into its improbable premise.

That is, four friends (each of a certain type, which we'll delineate momentarily) decide to head to Vegas for a wild night for one of the friends - Doug's- bachelor party (the wedding in this film is entirely ancillary). The wild night becomes a bit more wild than they anticipated when someone slips the group of "Micky." Three of the friends wake up the next morning with a tiger, a chicken, a baby, and a naked lady in their hotel room, entirely unable to remember the night before. Oh, and Doug is missing.

The log line makes a nice joke, but the real test in a movie like this is where they go from there. The movie is essentially a treasure hunt, as the free friends must use the clues they discover to re-trace their steps from the night before.

What makes the comedy here work, mostly, is that the friends are four distinct personality types: Doug is the cuddly, good-natured groom, who ends up getting the worst of it. Phil is the pretty-boy womanizer, who also happens to be the only married member of the bunch. Stu (played nicely by Ed Helms) is the neurotic dentist, who in his micky-induced stupor somehow pulls out one of his own teeth and marries a hot stripper; and Alan is the not-all-there, tag-along, brother-of-the-bride, in the nominal "John Belushi" role.

Naturally, the movie lavishes oodles of time nicely characterizing our four fellows, while reducing all the women in the film to caricatures (the bride, the whore, the police dyke).

Despite that, it has some good moments, and the comedy is more self deprecatory than mean (the film is a spiritual inheritor of the Meatballs and Caddyshack school). Some jokes work better than others (I found the gangster bits a bit lame, and the tiger more growl than bite, but I loved the naked Asian in the trunk of the car and some amusing bits involving a grade-school taser demonstration).

In other words, it's a light-hearted romp with a number of the standard "Daily Show"/"Saturday Night Live" graduates making appearances; on the whole probably more entertaining than egregious. It won't end up in any comedy hall of fame: However, the final sixty seconds of the movie - when the four friends find a camera and are finally able to see the shots of what happened that night in sequence - are laugh-out-loud hilarious, and worth sitting through the film to see.

G.I. Joe Deserves Dishonorable Discharge

I guess I could have more fun making up snarky review titles about this film than I did seeing the movie. Let me start by saying that I found the trailer intriguing, and was actually looking forward to a solid summer action pic. The super-suits seemed cool, and I loved the effect of flying through the light-rail train and leaping over cars.

It turns out that scene is the high-point of the film. Everything else is a sour mashup of Team America and Star Wars. Maybe that's not quite fair: the team America puppets had more life than the actors in this film. (Though we do get a couple of gratuitous male beefcake shots. Who's the audience for this again?)

The film opens with a flashback to fifteenth century France, where a Scottish arms merchant is tortured for selling arms to both sides. The merchant turns out to be the distant ancestor of our movie villain, modern-day arms merchant McCullen (I don't think I'm giving too much away here - it's not like his villainous role isn't obvious from the start). Since when did Scotts get a reputation as super villains? I've always thought of them more as bumbling well-intentioned tinkerers, like Simon Pegg and other incarnations of Scotty on Star Trek. Well, if nothing else, maybe this movie will do something to toughen the Scottish reputation.

McCullen sends a group of U.N. troops to escort some nasty nanobites in a silver briefcase across an ambush; two troops who survive the ambush get recruited by the G.I. Joes (run by Dennis Quaid as General Hawk); the shadowy COBRA, behind the ambush, finally get their hands on the nanobites, and the Joes have to get them back. That's about as basic a "get the briefcase" movie plot as you can get.

Which is fine, and Hasbro turned another children's toy, Transformers, into a simple action pic earlier this summer. But Transformers had Michael Bay. This movie just has only...extreme violence, and juvenile back stories, which seem to be built on the level of five-year-old sibling rivalry, and targeted directly at a kiddie audience who need to see everything at least five times in order to place a connection (the movie isn't taking any chances on subtly). It's also assembled from an uninspired assortment of stolen action movie scenes. I know, I was asked to see Julie and Julia, but to my regret, insisted on this macho confection instead. Anyway, let's see if I can re-create the recipe for this film:

Day the Earth Stood Still: three measures of nanobite special effects

Men In Black: teaspoon of testing procedure

Team America: sprinkle with lair banter, and loaf of Paris destruction

Kung Fu Panda: lightly toasted back story resentment

Star Wars: two cups of Darth Vader, and a dash of Sith fight in reactor room

Pound heavily with metal music, chop finely, then flame broil on high violence.

What results is not really digestible, if you ask me. It's more like an extended ad for G.I. Joe action figures, and I already got enough ads before the trailers (seeing the trailer for Tim Burton's "9" was actually the best moment in the theater). But what bothers me most about this film is that it's clearly targeting children, and yet I haven't seen a more violent movie in years. The movie kills probably two or three hundred innocent civilians, but with no more a care than a video-game. I'm not usually sensitive about these things, but I feel it my civic duty to warn any parent who cares at all about their children's mental health to keep anyone under twelve out of this movie, which since it has no real character development, has no real moral message to speak of, and does nothing except desensitize the viewer to killing.

As for the rest of us, why bother? The movie is almost five minutes from the ending when it suddenly realizes it needs to set itself up for a sequel. Hence, "The Rise of Cobra." It's obvious this G.I. Joe is the first in a planned line of seasonal movie merchandise. Put me on the 'do not call' list for the rest.

In The Loop: Great Political Satire, Lousy Title

If there were a movie store somewhere where I could go order a custom movie, filled with all the humor, insight, cleverness, biting political satire and wit that I'd ever want to see from a film, then the new British comedy, In The Loop - loosely about the British and American political culture that led to the Iraq invasion - would be that movie.

It's hard to imagine a cultural product that has been more spot on in satirizing the Bush/Blair culture of the early decade that led to the stove piping of made-up intelligence justifying the march to war. Though the movie never once mentions the words Iraq, Bush, or Blair - and introduces characters who in the first thirty minutes could really be any politicians in any modern times - you soon get enough background to surmise the real targets of this laugh-a-minute lampoon.

John Stewart would be hard-pressed to come up with a five minute routine this good, but director Amando Iannuci and writers Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell (behind some popular British TV comedies) have an intimate knowledge of their subject and the political animal rarely scene on screen, and they keep the keen entertainment going for a solid hour and a half. Someone on that team must have spent time as either a Washington intern or British communications officer, as the characterizations are just filled with such subtle insight it's hard to imagine any writer coming up with these characters out of whole cloth.

The movie opens with British political communications chief Malcum Tucker chewing out the somewhat inept minor cabinet official Simon Foster for inadvertently suggesting on a radio programme about some interior health blah blah that the eventuality of war in the Middle East was "unforeseeable." The inscrutable "unforeseeable" comment naturally opens a whole can of worms for Simon (as well as Malcum), as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karen Clarke comes to London, seeking support for her political machinations against the power-hungry Linton Barwick (a Donald Rumsfeld stand-in) and his secret war planning committee (which goes by the intentionally boring name of the "Future Planning Committee").

The ensuing shenanigans ensnare a riotous assemblage of political consultants, planning secretaries, diplomats, army generals, assistants, and seventeen-year-old cabinet appointees on both sides of the pond. The sacred cows that get skewered are too numerous to name, but do include Oxford-educated Debussy-listening diplomats, U.N. protocols, Rumsfeldian declarations about altering the text of meeting transcriptions to make them, as John Stewart would say, "truthier," office politics between twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings -- and probably the most humorous bit of the film, in which the army general and the secretary of state plan out the number of troops needed for war on a three-year-old's speak-and-spell adding machine (the bit is pure genius).

There are also some truly inspired running gags that are done with just the right level of subtlety: "communications" officers who can do nothing but cuss; seventeen-year-old planning secretaries who get chewed out for ordering "I Heart Huckabees" for viewing by the troops. A rickety garden wall that's a bit like Checkov's loaded gun, just waiting to go off at a critical moment in the plot.

There's much much more: the movie is just chock-a-block with gags and two viewings minimum I think is necessary to catch them all. But don't worry: even getting half the humor of this film would be tens times more than any movie I've seen in the last decade. Yes, this is not just the best movie of the summer - it's the best in years. It's not a perfect movie by any means: though the script is witty, it does have a bit of a TV feel: more craft could have gone into the locations and cinematography, we get a bit lost navigating the various scenes around the U.N., and Gandolfini is mis-cast as the General. And that title does nothing to sell the film. But if there's been anything of late with the insight and wit to cheer me out of the Bush years, this movie is it.