LSD Trip for Intelligentsia.

In ALTERED STATES, Eddie (William Hurt) and Arthur (Bob Balaban) are two university scientists experimenting on human regression (mentally reverting to a primitive state) using an isolation tank and sensational drugs, with Blair Brown (the Rene Russo of her day) as Eddie’s supportive yet doubting wife. Back in the day when university professors could drop LSD scored from Peruvian tribes and sleep with their college students without Jesus Christ making a big stink on national TV.

Eddie uses himself as the subject in the iso tank, driving ever deeper into sensory deprivation until director Ken Russell has to invest in extra creamy special effects to emulate the sensory overload a la 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY meets TRON. When a Primal Man eventually pops out of the iso tank, everything – as they say – goes ape.

Loaded with intelligent dialogue (often in well-executed overlapping arguments) and thought-provoking concepts, such as psychosomatic regression, expansion of unused brain lobes, ALTERED STATES almost attains that classic “disturbing” movie state (shots of regression back to cellular states, shots of organs functioning within the body, the Dune Worm state – !), but the Primal Man brought the movie to a screeching fourth-grade halt.

It is, after all, just someone in an ape suit.

Oh well, it’s Ken Russell. Mr. Erratic.

Wacky psychedelia fireworks the movie’s last sequences and we envy Eddie’s LSD – musta be some deluxe shit he scored from those tribespeople for it to short out the electricity in the university with Movie Sparks, crush all the pipes, blow out the windows and turn the isolation tank into a whirlpool…

The greatest gift of this movie is that Balaban and Hurt can take the characters they play here – intelligent, clinical overdork scientists – and insert them unflinchingly into every single movie they make (from Balaban’s 2010: ODYSSEY TWO to Christopher Guest’s comedy oeuvre; from Hurt’s THE BIG CHILL to MR. BROOKS), and never alter their state!

END

Stealing the World with Hanging Chad.

Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.
– Josef Stalin.

RECOUNT is another nail in the “democracy” coffin. Even for those who detest politics, this movie unfolds like a thriller rather than a dusty legal doc.

Surely no one in Amerika believes the lie of “One Man One Vote”? Surely no one believes their vote “counts”? It’s not that everyone’s vote doesn’t count. The lowest-rung incompetents empowered with the fate of the country and, by association, the world, do count the majority of votes, sure. But a bigger percentage than would make anyone feel comfortable simply gets thrown out, lost, disqualified, unregistered, purged, re-directed, or – cue duplicity on toast – RECOUNTED.

Back in 2000, Republican liar and nitwit, George W. Bush, stole the American presidency from Democrat man-bear-pig Al Gore on the strength of confusion generated by a disturbingly imperfect, manual voting system exacerbated by disturbingly imperfect manual morons.

Written by Danny Strong and directed by Jay Roach, RECOUNT tells the backstage story of the infamous Florida Recount, from the hanging chad to the purged felons. Well-researched, well-written, well-directed; myriad events on their own separate tracks or classified at the time, now juxtaposed into a cogent story of deceit, apathy, misfeasance and malfeasance that rivals the most twisted pulp fiction Hollywood can rat-spit.

Kevin Spacey is Ron Klain, Al Gore’s ex-Chief of Staff, who returns to the Democrat fold when, during the last stages of the 2000 presidential election, a computer glitch necessitates a recount of votes in Florida. The winner in Florida would win the presidency.

Denis Leary is excellent as a Gore strategist and Klain’s right-hand; his pivotal scene is explaining the significance of “chad.” The chad was the perforated stub that voters had to punch out on their ballot cards. Chad (plural: chad) were notorious for “hanging” from their perforations if they were not fully punched out, and counting machines sometimes re-sealed these “hanging chad” as the cards were fed through. This meant the person’s vote did not register. To exacerbate problems, the ballot cards were “butterfly ballot” design (see below), that confused people who rarely use their brains – that would be 90% of voters – many votes accidentally cast for Pat Buchanan’s Reform Party (which Buchanan freely admits today).

The Democrats sue for a recount – and the Republicans roll out their big gun lawyer: James Baker (an imperious Tom Wilkinson), Reagan’s Chief of Staff and George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State. Ed Begley Jr. is dyslexic Democrat lawyer, David Boies, while Bob Balaban plays snide Republican lobbyist and Baker’s right-hand, Ben Ginsberg.

In Florida law, if the vote difference between candidates is less than 30,000, every county has to run their ballots through the machines a second time – an automatic recount. Bush versus Gore was so close, an auto recount was assured… But 18 of the 67 counties didn’t run their ballots a second time, leaving 1.5 million votes uncounted.

What happens NOW in a “democracy”? Confusion.

Not only were 1.5 mil uncounted; it is well-documented that every time the ballot cards are run through the machines, the total is different – because the chad get pummelled: mangled, resealed, hanging, tearing, swinging, dimpled…

The Purge List is unveiled: people disallowed to vote – felons and names who resembled felons. Since Nixon, the Republicans have always come off as a pigpen of deceitful, underhanded thugs. By the 2000 election, their thuggery and unethical practices were out in the open: Republicans would rather block or confuse the election process (and thereby lose even Republican votes), than have Democrat votes counted, because they play the percentages. They know that if the process were allowed to proceed fairly, they would ALWAYS LOSE, because on sheer numbers, more Democrats than Republicans vote, so in blocking, say, 30% of votes from getting counted, they block a higher percentage of Democrat votes from being counted than Republican votes.

Even as I write this, the Republicans are conspiring to steal the election from Barack Obama in 2008, evidence of their lies and talking-snake politics and smears already apparent.

Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), airheaded Republican Secretary of State of Florida, is called upon to adjudicate the recount. She too is clueless, only concerned with her troweled makeup and regarding herself the incarnation of biblical Queen Esther (who intervened with husband King Xerxes and saved Jews from more oppression). So Sarah Palin isn’t the first underqualified female Republican dumb c**t with delusions of grandeur…

Every time it looks like the Democrats have lost the Recount legal battle, they get reprieve after reprieve, pushing back the deadline date for recounts, gaining numbers, gaining credibility…

At one point, when hand recounts are called for and the Republicans (led by George W. Bush) protest the method, Klain uncovers a statute in Texas that cites hand recounts as the “preferred method” – signed into law by Texas’s then-governor – George W. Bush!

It is amazing to realize what a JUDAS WHORE Joe Lieberman was even way back in 2000, while he was still posing as a Democrat – on the Vice President’s ticket with Gore, no less! Actual footage shows Leiberman on MEET THE PRESS, insisting undated military votes should be counted (swinging the votes in Bush’s favor) – after he was expressly advised by Klain that they shouldn’t be counted because with no post-mark, it could not be determined whether they were submitted after the election date.

If the country was as non-partisan as this movie, there might have been a different outcome – it’s painfully regretful to imagine that one thread of time unravels in that non-W direction, like a sci-fi scenario – but the Republicans overlorded Florida: not only was Harris stultifying recounting, Florida’s governor was George W.’s mildly-Special-Olympics brother, Jeb.

Katherine Harris declares Bush winner before anything had been resolved and (true to Republican form) she lies outright: “Democracy has triumphed once again” (though democratic processes were not used) “the true winner of the election is the rule of law” (though no laws were adhered to); ending with the lies of a Bush win and the lies of “God bless America” (the lie of God, or even if there was God, the arrogance to think It would “bless” a deceitful whore like Amerika).

The Dems escalated the case to the Supreme Court in the now-infamous Bush vs. Gore.

History tells us Bush won, the Supremes decreeing there was just not enough time to recount everything (geez! You’d think each citizen wanted their vote to matter or something!). The actual numbers tell a different story – but we’ll never discover it, all the ballot cards with their accusatory chad relegated to a subterranean vault guarded by a Balrog.

Here’s the stinger for you democracy-lovers and Amerikans-in-denial: Florida legislature planned to award the 25 Florida electoral votes to Bush ANYWAY. No matter the outcome of the recount.

Ergo: your vote, counted or not, doesn’t count.

Movie outro shows the real players in this thriller/drama/execution of sanity, while Tom Petty’s Won’t Back Down plays us out.

Movie ends on a nauseous note – Bush’s acceptance speech. The last scene shows Bush and Gore in split screen, acceptance and concession speeches, both ending on the same words, “God bless America.”

Only one of them meant it.

END

The movie about the book about the murders.

CAPOTE, first of all, is not a biopic. It covers a short period in writer Truman Capote’s life when he immersed himself in his classic True Crime novel In Cold Blood, the first “non-fiction novel” of its kind. Published in 1965, this revolutionary book would make Capote the most famous writer in America. And it would suck his soul bone dry, as he never completed another novel before his death in 1984.

Directed by Bennett Miller, CAPOTE follows Truman Capote (a trimmer Philip Seymour Hoffman, putting on that outrageous accent and playing fruitier than even his drag queen in FLAWLESS) as he interviews the two killers of the Clutter family in Holcomb Texas in 1959, Richard Hickok (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). He lightbulbed on the idea of a book which would reveal their psyches, as well as the reactions of the townsfolk and the detectives who eventually caught the two killers, led by Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), but didn’t bargain on the research being a heart-sickening exercise that would take nearly six years of his life, test his skill as an author and his very humanity.

This movie is not taken from Capote’s book In Cold Blood, but rather from a section of the book by Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography, written for the screen by Dan Futterman.

Viewing CAPOTE or reading In Cold Blood reminds us of that scientific precept that states you cannot observe a system without becoming a PART OF that system and thereby affecting the outcome of your observations. (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.)

Upon inserting himself into the story, by becoming so close to the killers that he actually hired powerful lawyers to appeal their cases to the Supreme Court, Capote affected the outcome of his novel; a tale that would keep stretching into the future with no end in sight, because he envisioned the hanging of the killers as closure.

Capote (author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958) was completely stymied on how to psychologically deal with this new form of fiction he was pioneering; he found himself split into two mental halves – one half empathizing somberly with the quadruple-murderers, while the mercenary side of him surreptitiously picked their brains for book material. Though he admitted a kinship with Perry Smith (“It was like we were raised in the same house, and one day he got up and walked out the back door, and I walked out the front”) he would continually lie to him about the book’s details.

After four years of stays of execution, it was Capote who was having nervous breakdowns because the killers were not being executed. Ergo, his book was in limbo, remaining unfinished. When Perry pleads with him to acquire another lawyer, Capote writes back tersely that he cannot find one. It’s a morbid conundrum, as Capote finally wants them dead and so must remove himself from the equation.

Catherine Keener plays Capote’s childhood friend and confidante, Nelle Harper Lee, whose own book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is published during this period. Only she can tell him truths about himself with impunity.

One of the best features of this movie is that, while Capote was openly gay, he is never turned into a punchline – not by the high society depicted in the movie or by the makers of the movie. He lived with his lover (Bruce Greenwood) with no ostracism from the entertainment world. Though he was renowned as the life of any party, we only see snippets of his gregarious night life in CAPOTE.

Movie is slow-moving but not boring, rather, introspective and disturbing. When Perry is eventually hanged, Capote’s tears are not so much for the loss of the man whom he had grown close to, but for the fact that Capote himself could have stayed that man’s execution indefinitely if he had chosen to invest in more lawyers; his tears are rage against his own selfish agenda in wanting to complete his book.

Capote expressed no joy at the publication of In Cold Blood, feeling like his soul was sold for its research.

We feel just as soul-spent by the end of this dark, somber film.

END

Part real. Part fable. All Night.

In his book, On Directing Film, David Mamet says of movies, “it’s all make-believe. The question is, how good is the make-believe going to be?” M. Night Shyamalan‘s LADY IN THE WATER is truly what it sells itself as – a bedtime story; make-believe of the highest order, taken with a generous pinch of sandman salt and a mountainous suspension of disbelief.

Artfully woven, beautifully shot and accidentally involving, this movie solidifies writer-director-actor Shyamalan as a tale-telling talent akin to Stephen King, a director rivaling the eye of Spielberg – and an actor only slightly better than Keanu Reeves.

Yet, redemption. Regarding his thespianic dabblings, I’ve got two words for Night’s naysayers: Darth Vader. Though he is far from usurping the thrones of Oldman or Ford, Night need only display two emotions onscreen to put him miles above the Christensens and Cruises – and he pulls off his emotionally-draining role in LADY quite commendably.

Up against Paul Giamatti, he has to. As Night is the new breed of fantasist, turning Hollywood’s formulaic swill in on itself, so too is Giamatti – like Jack Black, through sheer talent – redefining the new breed of leading man. In LADY, Giamatti mines that put-upon Everyman character we know so well, yet taps into acting territory reserved for the De Niros, Hoffmans and Day-Lewises. Playing a lonely, stuttering caretaker – and making it look as painful as it must really be (a stutterer and a caretaker) – he turns in a gutsy performance that makes all his awards for SIDEWAYS and CINDERELLA MAN sit that much more securely on his shelf.

Giamatti is Cleveland Heep, caretaker of an apartment complex called The Cove, which has raised the condition of Nothing Ever Happening to an art form. Into this lusterless community, up through the swimming pool, comes Story (Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of director Ron), one of an ancient race of Sea People, called a narf (which translates as “great legs, but a face like Richie Cunningham”), whom Cleveland keeps finding naked in his shower, quickly buying her tale of being sent to mystically jog the inspiration of surface people (the nakedness can only help the inspiration).

The narf legends are intermittently revealed through one of the Cove residents: apparently, Story must gather together a group of prophesied icons such as The Guild, The Healer, The Wordsmith – but lands a coterie of Batman villains instead, in the form of The Whiner (Giamatti), The Puzzler (Jeffrey Wright) and The Stoners (a bunch of surfer dudes).

Even as a patch of Big Bad Astroturf stalks her – all the better to scrunt you with, my dear! – Story, with Cleveland’s unintentionally-comedic help, discovers The Writer (who is actually – wink wink – The Director) whom her presence inspires to complete a magnum opus which will “change the world.” (We presume The Writer’s inspiration has something to do with seeing Cleveland’s shirt sensually draped over Story’s milk-pale shoulders.) By casting himself as The Writer, Night brings down the wrath from all walks of entertainment wannabes (critics, directors and writers alike), who begrudge Night this indulgence of Ego and frankly, I’m getting sick of the hypocrisy – who gets anything done without Ego?! It’s all ABOUT Ego. As Gene Simmons so astutely sneers, “You wish you were me.” And because they can’t or were never given the opportunity to write, direct, produce and act, all they have is vitriol for someone who can and does. Try looking on the bright side of Night’s humble, Homeric character – it may be the only time we’ll ever hear him say he is “nothing special.”

As with his two previous movies (SIGNS and THE VILLAGE), Night once again creates an insular world where nothing outside its boundaries matters in the least. This is the movie’s great sleight-of-hand and simultaneously its great failing.

The tale works effectively as long as we believe that Cleveland believes wholeheartedly in Story’s veracity – but convincing one lonely, balding man you’re a magical sprite can’t be that hard with legs like those; we are distracted minimally when everyone buys into the fairy tale as readily as Cleveland. The Night sleight-of-hand is employed just when we feel secure with the story’s predictability – what we thought was a plan coming together was merely misdirection. We recall Night’s notoriously subtle foreshadowing – how he merely pencils in, rather than hammers home – and realize that he has once again concealed his mystery in full sight.

The failing of the movie is in its less-than-compelling climax, for even when the plan does come together, we ask ourselves what exactly came together; it seems too pat for Story to find every icon that she needs amongst The Cove’s residents, and except for The Guardian and The Healer, no one else seemed to be integral to protecting Story and The Writer; that is, anyone could have picked up a rake to fend off a twiggy wolf, you didn’t need to be “seven sisters” or “a man with no secrets.”

Yet again – redemption: the stirring and stunning music of James Newton Howard dynamically spirits us into this world of twigs shaped like wolves and mermaids shaped like Twiggy, salving the wounds of weak plot; Giamatti provides a surprising amount of humor amongst the suspense, at times, overlapping the sublime and ridiculous, as when he pretends to be an infant to glean more of the narf legend; Night’s film-making itself is a wonder to behold, with his penchant for making every frame count, his creative camera placements and artful use of out-of-focus shots; and beautifully simple aspects like lighting a night scene as if it is night! – i.e. no backlit trees and shards of light aimed at actors when they hit their marks, but an overall, enshrouding darkness.

LADY even gives us a self-referential movie critic (Bob Balaban, whom some critics take as seriously as he satires them), who didactically elucidates “movie formula,” specifically so that Night can show us how LADY ingeniously subverts that formula…

LADY IN THE WATER is a suspense tale, not easily forced into a horror mold – nor should it be. Yet marketers, reviewers and audiences alike insist on calling it “horror,” then complaining that “it ain’t that scary.” As much as he is lauded by film aficionados and fans alike, an unsophisticated coterie obsessively maintains that unless an M. Night Shyamalan film contains a “twist” exactly like that in THE SIXTH SENSE, it is worthless. Who made up that rule? Writing, acting, music, sound design, ingenious plot arcs matter not to these bent-parochial netherworlders. Either they need to get over their stone-stupid provincialism, or they need to get laid.

LADY is proof that Shyamalan still gives his audience more credit than they deserve, as the “dumb” contingent, complying with the saw of empty vessels making the most noise, are the most vocal in their deprecation.

Yet the same people who denounce this master storyteller for some of the stranger aspects of this fiction (the boy reading portents in cereal boxes, the wolf hewn from garden greenery, the aquatic lady not having gills) are the same people who believe in humans with wings in a cloudy habitat called heaven; who believe in extraterrestrial anal-probing; who believe that a man can absolve them of their vilest crimes by being flayed by Romans for two days straight two-thousand years ago; who believe planets influence their lives more than the dangerous stupidity which would lead them to believe that in the first place – and whilst vilifying Night for fiction which brings only entertainment to those intelligent enough to glean it, these people would readily bring suffering to those who do not regard their idiotic fictions as reality.

Maybe one of the most poignant messages of LADY IN THE WATER is that even the insignificant among us may have a significant role to play on some grander canvas. Unfortunately, only the “significant” will glean that message. And those who pule for twists and horror and moronically await SIXTH SENSE PART II: THE SEVENTH SENSE, or SIXTH SENSE III: OCEANS’ FIFTEEN should take my advice and get themselves a massage.

And – like this movie – include a happy ending.

END

A Midget in the Footsteps of Giants.

No one said it would be easy. Following in the mythic footsteps of Stanley Kubrick and equally legendary Arthur C. Clarke. Maybe it was this inimitable pedigree that gave lowly Peter Hyams the impetus to craft such a reasonably watchable sequel to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A tension-filled space trek where we laugh at John Lithgow, gasp at the skyscape and weep for a computer, 2010: ODYSSEY TWO is a one-step-forward, one-step-sideways kind of movie.

Considering Mr. Hyams is the writer-director behind two films that boast “scientific” backdrops, yet lay claim to the most scientifically-bereft storylines of the technological age (CAPRICORN ONE and OUTLAND), 2010 surprisingly retains much hard science in its telling and is consequently a more enjoyable experience for it. Due in full, we must presume, solely to the dogging of author Arthur C. Clarke, who was in constant communication with Hyams through the production process. (Clarke’s book of the same name was more or less plundered for initial momentum, rather than adhered to devoutly.)

To state the obvious, the story picks up 9 years after Kubrick and Clarke’s pioneering and inimitable 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A joint Soviet-American mission, headed by American scientist Heywood Floyd (now Roy Scheider, was William Sylvester in 2001) and Soviet Commander Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), is sent to Jupiter to retrieve the abandoned hulk, USS Discovery (found silently spinning in orbit about Io, one of Jupiter’s moons), to gather data on the “failure” of the HAL 9000 computer and to maybe make sense of Dave Bowman’s last intriguing transmission regarding the Monolith, “My God! It’s full of stars!”

As economically unsound as this venture may seem, plausible reasons are given for the mission, but – like they say – you’d have to be a rocket scientist…

Amid growing political tensions on Earth, the Soviet ship Leonov arrives at Jupiter with its Russian and American crew, Hyams performing a controlled set of vignettes to bring about tension between the crews (initially distrustful of each other), then building the tension around the giant Monolith orbiting Jupiter, which unites the crews for their lives’ sake.

Though it retains none of the breathtaking poetry and grandiose vision of 2001, Hyams’s lesser vision is aided by spectacular views of Jupiter and Io, thanks to Voyager 1‘s groundbreaking flybys of the planet in 1979. Mattes of these images are put to excellent use during a suspenseful spacewalk by astronauts Max and Curnow (Elya Baskin and John Lithgow), as they approach the dead Discovery.

Though science is bowed to more often than in his previous efforts, Hyams doesn’t quite shake off his trademarks of outrageous conceptual anomalies and immutable physics laws treated like arbitrary physics suggestions. (With the Earth and its Moon in the same screen shot, Hyams makes the same sophomoric mistake that most non-credible space movies make when depicting these two celestial bodies which are on average 240,000 miles apart – if they were as close as depicted onscreen, not only would tides be generating tsumanis daily, both celestial bodies would have torn themselves apart eons ago or smashed together due to gravitational attraction.)

After the Monolith mysteriously goes about its business of doing nothing on a monolithic scale, puny humans pondering its purpose, and after HAL is revived and jovially goes about his business of being unnervingly menacing, Dave Bowman (model mannequin Keir Dullea) appears to Floyd, in the form of a constantly-morphing old man/astronaut/elder, and tells him “something wonderful” is going to happen.

Only Arthur C. Clarke would have the temerity to blow up Jupiter. Crumbling under the confluence of millions of Mini-Monoliths, Jupiter goes nova and becomes a sun, whilst the Leonov makes a narrow escape. HAL, through the intercession of Dr. Chandra (an ascetic Bob Balaban, perfectly congruent with his typecasting from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and ALTERED STATES, who is somehow able to bring that same character to his future comedic roles with Christopher Guest), becomes sympathetic enough to weep for, when he is destroyed along with Discovery.

The last scenes of Earth and its twin suns illustrate Hyams’s kindergarten comprehension of planetary orbits: we are shown a constant two-sun sky everywhere on the Earth, yet in becoming our newest star, Jupiter (which is renamed Lucifer) has not changed its orbit, nor will it ever. Its orbit will appear exactly as it did when Jupiter was merely a planet – that is, it will continually “cross the sky” at a different rate than the actual Sun, thereby causing two suns to be in the sky at ever-changing positions, or sometimes merely one Sun in the sky, sometimes only Lucifer, sometimes no suns. (And I am surprised the great Arthur C. Clarke allowed this anomalous visual to be committed to film!)

After this silly sequence, we immediately jump-cut across the solar system – in an uncharacteristic grandiose sequence – to Europa, the moon of Jupiter that the Monolith forbad any landings on, in its final message to Earth:

“All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.”

And lo, the last frame sets up sequelae ad infinitum, as The Monolith makes a cameo on Europa, and the harbinger-like strains of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra crouches and then leaps at us – banging its head on Hyams’s lowered ceiling.

After all, for midgets, the ceiling can afford to be that low.

END