Trailer Trash Writ Glorious.

In the first three minutes of THE FIGHTER, we realize that Christian Bale should not have won that Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in this film. He should have won for Best ACTOR.

Yes, we know the technical definitions of “main,” “major,” and “supporting” characters – but really! Bale’s Herculean immersion into his wild-eyed character drove this film, which, without his involvement, would have been merely another lazy story about an underdog clawing his way to the middle echelons of a testosterone-induced inferiority-complex dick measuring competition; to call boxing a “sport” is to imply it has some intrinsic spiritual worth.

Bale is to THE FIGHTER what Kilmer is to TOMBSTONE, what Brando is to STREETCAR, what Day-Lewis is to GANGS OF NEW YORK.

Bale is Dicky Eklund, a gregarious, trouble-seeking, ex-boxer from “Bahston,” who trains and manages his younger brother “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) with the best intentions, yet with no clout to take Micky into the bigger leagues where he belongs. Mother Alice (Melissa Leo) co-manages with big dreams and bigger hair.

Dicky’s claim to fame is that he once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard. (Leonard plays himself alongside Bale and Wahlberg – still looking twenty years younger than his age.) Since this movie is based on real life characters, we see some old footage of the real Eklund swiping at Leonard and Leonard hitting the canvas; contention to this day whether Leonard slipped.

But Dicky is a junkie. Though he must have once retained a modicum of discipline to grace the ring with Leonard, when we meet him here, he is so way past gone that when HBO interviews him and follows him around with a camera crew for a documentary on crack addiction, he sincerely thinks they are documenting his boxing comeback.

Bale’s performance is magnetic, crafting a character through mind and body; gaunt, emaciated, a junkie for all intents and purposes. Oldman, Seymour Hoffman, De Niro. Bale is an actor willing to go so deep into his role that we truly think he lives there; an actor who makes us forget he was someone else in his previous movies – we do not look at this incoherent, twitchy crackhead and immediately think, “Hey, this guy is John Connor!” – and we really have to woik our imaginations to believe this beanstem could possibly be the Dark Knight! Further, deponent sayeth not; the awards speak for themselves.

Wahlberg diametrically opposes Bale’s extroversion and brings a studied quietude to a role that demands of him an Eastwood-ian intensity coupled with a Schwarzenegger power behind his shoulders. And his underwear modeling days serve him in good stead – his physicality is explosive. If Bale wasn’t here ass-klowning around, then Wahlberg would have been lauded as this movie’s driver. He’s become a very efficient actor – from annoying New Kid On The Block, to weaning off his baby-fat in FEAR, to the reasonable SHOOTER, to his slap-in-the-face performance in DEPARTED, we’ve seen him grow into this starring role. Well done, my son!

The Gay-For-Wahlberg Express is boarding now…

THE FIGHTER follows the tribulations of Wahlberg’s Micky before he went pro in the mid-80s, as he tries to literally and metaphysically fight his way out of the security zone of his trailer trash environs.

He dates barmaid Charlene (Amy Adams looking voluptuously trailer) and butts heads with his family to accept her – a gaggle of sisters who all look like men and speak like education hasn’t been invented yet; he must constantly drag Dicky out of the crack house; he must contend with Dicky’s jealousy when an agent offers him paid training in Vegas (to raise the money to train in Boston instead, Dicky puts his crackhead girlfriend out on the street hooking); he must contend with Dicky getting in trouble with the law (during one street fight, a cop breaks Micky’s hand); he finds himself at the center of two families – his girl and trainer pit themselves against his trailer siblings and mother.

THE FIGHTER boasts a powerhouse rock soundtrack (Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, etc.), an inevitable training montage (as Trey and Matt tell us, Even ROCKY had a montage), and boxing scenes as realistic as having your jaw rattled by a roundhouse. We have grown so inured to the fakery of the ROCKY films (and their imitators), where the fighters box without blocking and the punches resound like thunderclaps, that seeing the realistic boxing style of these guys is refreshing. Wahlberg trained for years for this role, and it shows. Where are YOU looking when he takes his shirt off?

Reliable character actor Jack McGee is Micky’s father; Mickey O’Keefe, a real life policeman and friend of the family who trained Micky, plays himself. Now training Wahlberg, which must have been surreal for him.

During the end credits, we meet both real life brothers, Micky and Dicky, and we realize just what amazing jobs Wahlberg and Bale did personifying them. Visually, we immediately recognize who is who, and when they speak, it’s over. What the hell! – give a Best Actor award to BOTH those guys!

END

Immovable Force meets Unstoppable Accent.

For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
— John F. Kennedy, address to the nation, June 1963 after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The people were real, the crisis was deadly, the decisions were world-shaking. And the accents were abominable.

THIRTEEN DAYS is the taut story behind the maddening politics of the John F. Kennedy administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the world held its breath as Russia moved nukes into Cuba and America played chicken with them.

From the book by Philip D. Zelikow and Ernest R. May, The Kennedy Tapes – Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, director Roger Donaldson and screenwriter David Self capture every sweat-soaked moment of the Machiavellian politics yet keep it understandable, airtight and kinetic, with the filmstock often reverting to black and white to emulate the iconic period look.

Kevin Costner is presidential advisor Kenny O’Donnell, whose Kennedy-clique accent at first seems over the top, but when everyone is vocalizing at that level of absurdity we’re soon inured to it.

Bruce Greenwood is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, uncanny when the light hits him the right way, but then, I never “knew” Kennedy like older pundits knew him; I’m basing my visual knowledge on those iconic news clips (“ask not what your country can do for you”) and photos (White House portrait, arms crossed; at the podium, inauguration; in the limousine before the assassination…)

In a time when all women wore beehives and men folded their arms across their chests more than they had to for maximum iconic photo effect, the thirteen day standoff finds President Kennedy battling against his own military who want to invade invade invade (the only solution those lunkheads know or understand), and against the Russian diplomats stonewalling him on the reason for the missiles.

The inoperative missiles – when operative – would have the capacity to level American cities in minutes. How dare they?! Don’t the Russians know that only America is allowed to point missiles at other countries?

With the aid of brother Bobby (Steven Culp) and back room deals with the Russians (that were not revealed until nearly three decades after the crisis), John F. reached a non-military resolution, saved face and became an American Hero.

And all with that abominable accent.

END

Resistance is Futile.

When one of the world’s largest international banks is discovered brokering covert arms deals with China and the Middle East… well, who’s really surprised these days?

In THE INTERNATIONAL, it seems everyone is. Louis Salinger (perpetually unshaven Clive Owen) and Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts, sporting the most atrocious American accent since Gerard Depardieu) are international police who must have just arrived from Bizarro World not to realize that corruption at the highest levels is the jugular upon which the honest world suckles. The movie SYRIANA conveyed terrifyingly and succinctly how Corruption makes the world turn: “Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win.”

So in the grand scheme of bringing justice to those who operate above the law, THE INTERNATIONAL is a no-win. Clive Owen is the nominal Good Guy (an obsessive, disheveled, loose cannon working for Interpol) and Ulrich Thomsen is the nominal Bad Guy, a slick, Euro CEO for the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC), whose amorality is tempered by his being a family man.

To eradicate the cancer that is Big Corp would take a lot more than one man taking down one other man.

As flying camera pans languidly caress the modern architecture of Berlin, Italy, France and New York, Salinger and Whitman run around a lot looking for people to blame.

It’s all very covert and one big fat coverup, but there is a major breakthrough when Salinger and Whitman discover the IBBC has a hired hitman on the payroll – whom they call The Consultant – who has just assassinated an Italian dignitary. Again with the incredulity: Imagine that?! A bank using an assassin for their hits! Well, who else would they use – a baker?

And when the four IBBC owners/conspirators meet online and decide, “We must cancel our contract with the Consultant,” we know they’re not talking paper trails.

Upon cornering The Consultant (Brian F. O’Byrne) in the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, there is a great fun shootout in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, with Salinger and the Consultant having to go Marvel Team-Up to escape the IBBC’s hitmen for the hitman.

Armin Mueller-Stahl is one of the four IBBC “conspirators” who tells Salinger he cannot stop the bank within his idealized scheme of justice, he must go outside the law – but if Salinger does that, the very justice he fights for will be moot. “Everyone is involved.” The govts of China, France, Russia, all so interconnected to world trade that the corrupt IBBC is – as they say in 2009 America – “too big to fail.”

The Italian dignitary (Luca Barbareschi) gives the most profound speech in this movie, much like the “corruption” speech from SYRIANA:”It’s about control… the IBBC is a bank, their objective is not to control the conflict, it’s to control the debt that the conflict produces. The real value of a conflict is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. This is the very essence of the banking industry – to make us all… slaves to debt.”

Perfectly encapsulating the W. administration and how they sold the United States to China. China controls America’s debt. Ergo, China controls America.

(I found it amusing that the DVD cover shows a big bloody gash across Owen’s face, with the rest of it airbrushed. I mean, why not leave his face as rugged as it usually is; it would lend more cred to the gash, rather than looking like a cheap stain on a Teen Model With No Pores.)

Directed by Tom Twyker, written by Eric Singer (Hey! Isn’t he the drummer with KISS?), THE INTERNATIONAL has no resolution. It is unsatisfying because the criminal in this case – the IBBC and its CEOs – are too arterially networked into the world markets to be affected. When one of the conspirators is killed, the IBBC simply grows another Hydra head and goes on to post record profits…

In the real world, we know that nothing like this story ever happens… it’s much worse.

END

”A toast… to getting caught quickly and stupidly.”

Counting to Dumb.

In this vacuous drama supposedly based on a true story, Old Hand (Kevin Spacey) teaches Teen Models (Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts) to count cards and take on Vegas. Happens that Old Hand is college professor Micky Rosa, and his Teen Models are his students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. I don’t doubt this may be a true story. That the characters displayed such stupidity, I do doubt.

From a book by Ben Mezrich, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, 21 follows talented young M.I.T. student, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), struggling to pay fees for classes he can’t afford. He is invited to join the covert team of Teen Model Card Sharks (who make us cringe with their Too-Kewl-For-Skool ‘tudes) aiming to break Vegas.

When the Teen Team recruit Ben, they speak like they’re old hands at the Vegas scam, wowing him on how his lifestyle will change, yet when they gather in Vegas, Professor Micky lays down instructions like they’ve never been there before. I call this the Movie-Astronaut Rule: Always save the most crucial information on space travel for the actual journey; never mind that lives are at stake. Do it for the audience… for the love… for The Boys.

The Poff of Clubs

Two glaring loopholes in logic ruined this film: first, the sharks have no fence. These are just college kids. When they rake in large bank, how do they propose to launder it? Ben hides it in his dorm roof, but when he starts paying for that college he couldn’t afford, the IRS is gonna rain down on him like a Vegas jackpot.

Also, their attempts at discretion are ludicrous: they all arrive in Vegas at the same time, sometimes in asinine disguises, check into the same hotel together, go drinking together at strip clubs, constantly acknowledge each other and spend big in loud montages. Smart – but no Common Sense. Their fantastic “secret signal” (on whether a table is hot to hustle) is to fold their arms behind the chair. Nice for some podunk operation in Ohio – but this is Vegas!

Sure enough, a sinister casino cop, Williams (a beefed-up Laurence Fishburne) notices the scam signals on these new inventions called Security Cameras, and uses the Bush Administration Interrogation Policy of “America Doesn’t Torture” to torture some answers outa the dweebs. Williams, on Professor Micky’s tail for years, now sees his opportunity to get Micky through his Teen Model stooges.

In most scam movies, we marvel at the ingenuity of the criminals. In 21, we cringe every time these jokers are onscreen. Spacey and Fishburne carry the movie on their shoulders alone, as every time we turn to the Teen Models, Sturgess is too busy looking like Tobey Macguire and Kate Bosworth is too busy pretending she’s hot, and the movie falls flat.

The attitude casinos have towards “counting cards” bugs the babyjesus out of me! In Blackjack or 21, everyone maintains counting cards is not illegal. So why do casinos allow any jackass to play the game except those who are exceptional at it, who can count the cards? Casinos will fleece anyone, but anyone who fleeces them – legally – is taken to a room with no windows to get the intelligence beaten out of them…

Ben loses his mind over plain Bosworth and starts losing and drinking, and then defects from the Teen Team to scam solo. To stop Ben’s stupidity leading up the chain to Micky himself, Micky grasses up Ben to the authorities – sadist Fishburne. He had every right to do this, as Ben was “gambling not counting” with Micky’s outlay-money, so Micky cut him loose. It’s a dog eat Teen Model world out there.

However, Ben has one last con up his sleeve. He gives Speech Number 32 in the Generic Screenwriter Inspirational Speech Catalogue (the “Let’s Do This One Last Time… For the Honor, For the Game… For The Boys” speech) – and grasses up Micky to the Ethical Non-Torturing Fishburne, who proceeds to torture Micky.

The twisted message 21 sends is that even though the Teens betrayed their mentor and he tried to protect himself, the Teens won by being even more unethical, amoral and underhanded. And they’re justified because… well, because they’re Teen Models fer cryin out loud.

END

A Muddle-Headed Miracle.

WARNING TO DIABETICS: The syrup content of MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET is so high that the surgeon general advises not to watch it, for danger of inducing diabetic neuropathy and gastroparesis.

Les Mayfield (ENCINO MAN) directs this remake of the 1947 “classic,” about a Coles store Santa who claims to be “Kris Kringle” (Richard Attenborough), and is taken to court charged with assault (the “Santa” impersonator whom Kris replaced at Coles provoked Kris into assaulting him), whereby the assault charge is forgotten and the case instead turns to “whether Santa Claus is real.” And we wonder why there are so many innocent people in jail…

Elf Poffy, child slave to Klaus Kringlehoffen.

Dorey Walker (Elizabeth Perkins) is responsible for hiring Kris at Coles, with a cynic daughter, Susan (Mara Wilson), who ironically doesn’t believe in Santa. Not until all her outlandish wishes are granted, at least. Bryan Bedford (Dylan McDermott) is the hunk next door who helps Kris win in court and helps himself to finding Dorey.

Like a straightjacketed epileptic, this film bashes itself against hundreds of paradoxes, in frothing attempts at taking one step forward (in its high-end production value and A-list acting) and then three or four steps backwards into the mouth of Hell (with its thigh-numbing sentiments of goodness and niceness and the utility of believing in figments as reality). MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET is one of those well-intentioned, “dangerous” movies – the type over-popularized in the last two decades by brain-damaging fare like the HOME ALONE’s and the CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN’s, which purport to wholesome family entertainment, whilst insidiously intimating that intelligence and reason are only for fools.

The greatest paradox faced by any Santa-Is-Real film is that in the film’s world, it is always taken for granted that Santa DOES exist and that parents do not believe in him. But if he actually exists, it is not a question of “belief” – it is a case of “evidence.” All it takes is one christmas morning and a cluster of unidentified presents under the christian-killed tree and – question of veracity solved! Therefore, in these movies, if the parents are, in fact, buying all the presents, there are two possibilities: either Santa does exist and is not visiting anyone, or Santa doesn’t exist, which is why you parents had to buy all the crap under the tree. Occam’s Razor tells us to go with the simpler of the two possibilities.

Yet through the course of this film, all the humbugs and doubting parents in Kris’s jolly wake gradually get overtaken by some kind of delusion (sometimes called “the christmas spirit” in pagan texts), and are cajoled into “believing” in Santa, for the sake of, we are told, “a lie that draws a smile, rather than a truth that draws a tear.” Yes, turn away from Truth. Truth is bad. Better to delude yourself that Mercury in retrograde is the cause of your lost wealth, rather than betting it all on a card game. Better to believe in astrology, rather than facing the truth that you are a DIMWITTED MORON STEERING YOUR SPECIES INTO EVOLUTIONARY OBLIVION.

Sir Attenborough makes for a perfect visual representation of the mythical, peeping-tom, child-watcher Klaus (render as much Nazi inflection as you see fit), ably supported by intentionally-retarded performances by Perkins, McDermott, James Remar as an attorney, Robert Prosky as a judge and young Mara Wilson, playing her usual seven-going-on-forty, precocious, mouthy brat. (Why “intentionally-retarded”? Well, the longest anyone would ever have to wait to establish whether Santa existed or not is 364 days. In MIRACLE, the wait is only a few days, yet the filmmakers conveniently avoid the issue by neglecting to tell viewers whether any presents mysteriously appeared under trees.)

The fact that this movie astoundingly retains as its central theme the conundrum that any semi-intelligent dolphin could decipher as unutterably imbecilic, illustrates perfectly the reason why mercy killings exist. This movie almost cries out for humanity to beat it over the head to put it out of its misery.

Before his arrest, Kris – in his naïve goodheartedness – was advising Coles patrons of better bargains at other stores. Immediately, Coles management jumps on the marketing ploy: “If we don’t have it, we’ll find it for you.” Now, as altruistic as this may sound, the corporate heads realize the reverse-psychology is garnering more business! With the public embracing Coles as helpful, their rival department store seethes with lost-business fury! Conveniently located across the street, the rival store is managed by a game Joss Ackland (playing the same evil overlord he perfected in LETHAL WEAPON 2 and BILL AND TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY), who goes after the person responsible for the campaign to discredit him. No, not someone in the Coles marketing department, nosiree; in his tactical wisdom, he goes after the bottom rung employee, the Coles Santa Claus.

Idiocy soars.

As evidenced when Perkins, recanting on her brain, poses the question to the Coles board of directors when they are considering ceasing Kris’s “ploy” of recommending other stores, “What do we care about? Profit?” Well – YES, you jackass! Why are you working here? Charity? And the only reason she convinces them to retain Kris is because of the PROFITS they are seeing!

Kris tells Dorey, “If you can’t accept anything on faith, then you’re doomed for a life dominated by doubt.” Yes, but Kris, if you use the scientific method of observation, skepticism, theory, experiment, amassing evidence, replacing outmoded knowledge with updated facts, a cohesive picture of what you doubted will come into focus. And we wonder why America, in the 2000s bows down to a megalomaniac who cannot separate church from state (at a base level, this means he cannot separate fact from fiction – exactly this movie’s problem!); we wonder why science is taking a backseat to pseudoscience; we wonder why it is so easy to sell people an ab-roller that “takes pounds off” their fugly gunts without any effort expended on their part, yet who cannot be convinced that proteins, carbohydrates, fats and sugars in correct amounts can winnow away that same fat.

The miracle is that, for all its vaunted intelligence, the human race has degenerated to this credulous, gullible, mongoloid state.

Treat others with respect. Be humane. Be courteous. Love. Sex (as in verb). Let live. These are universal truths, built into our genetic framework, in order to perpetuate procreation of our species. There are those who maintain the movie’s aspirations to goodheartedness and the “spirit of christmas” should not be belittled. They are right – the SENTIMENTS should be upheld. But why couch these truths in the filth of mysticism and hypocrisy, in the framework of paradoxical fictions that insult the truly inspiring, knowledge-seeking mind?

Claus affirms, “I’m a symbol to suppress the hateful tendencies that rule a major part of our lives.” Firstly, if “hateful tendencies,” as you so pessimistically put it, Klaus, “ruled our lives,” homo sapiens would have been excised from the pathway of evolution eons ago. Our adherence to social structure and reciprocal altruism is what has kept us alive. That being said, if modern day humans are so braindead that they require an effigy to represent faux-spirituality and faux-goodness (whether it be Santa, Jesus, Thor, Buddha, or Tom Cruise), we’ve put ourselves on the pathway out of evolutionary selection. Give it fifty-thousand years. The roaches would thank us – if we were not already below their contempt.

The grandest malarkey of all is that the case for or against Kris Kringle – a phantasm to begin with – is decided on the grounds of another phantasm. Bryan, Kris’s attorney, highlights the fact that American money is inscribed with the words, “In God We Trust.” On the strength of this vague indeterminacy, the judge rationalizes that one fiction is as good as another and rules that Santa Claus does, in fact, exist.

Piling insult upon insult on the viewer, Klaus then tells the prosecuting attorney (J.T. Walsh), “I hope you removed that antenna because I tore my pants on it last year.” This must mean that Klaus left anonymous presents at the attorney’s house. Evidence! So the only reason Walsh refutes Santa’s existence must be either short term memory loss or retardation. Choose one, movie.

As we gag in disbelief at the level of insanity attained in the movie’s last ten minutes, we remember Sarah’s Christmas wish – “a house, a brother, a dad” – anything else, like 40 acres and a mule, you little snot? And just to make our heads explode: Bryan and Dorey suddenly wed at movie’s end, both advised of work bonuses (which accounts for Dorey’s chunky wedding ring), and then take possession of a mansion mysteriously bequeathed to them. And if the movie is to comply to all the wishes of the whining spoiled bitch at its heart, I suppose Dorey has a bun up the duff as well.

This makes Susan very happy, because that’s what happiness is all about – having lots of money and a house that is fully paid for, living in a family with great-looking people with great hair, because those are the most loving and sincere of all humans. And if you believe in a fiction hard enough, you will win your court case.

I wish for some insulin.

END