You Won't Be 'Taken' With This Sequel

by Brett Parker

The accomplishment of Taken 2 is to make us strongly realize that this slam-bang action series is the most over-the-top fantasy release for divorced, middle-aged fathers that Hollywood has ever produced.  Lord knows that Liam Neeson busting skulls is an appealing commodity, but maybe the story of a square American who beats the crap out of half of Europe to become a hero in the eyes of his ex-wife and daughter has more personal homegrown resonance that we realize.  What’s telling is how smart grown-ups treasure Taken way more than teenage action junkies ever could.

I happen to fall into the category of those who were wildly thrilled by the first Taken.  Essentially, the sight of a dignified Irish thespian becoming a brutal kick-ass machine more impressive than Jason Bourne was all kinds of awesome.  That’s why it kind of pains me to report that Taken 2, while certainly not boring, fails to deliver the same kind of thrills and tension that were in full force the first time around.  While the script actually produces a promising idea for a sequel, it never builds on its clever ideas but tries for more of the same from last time without bringing the same thrilling effect this time.

Taken 2 continues the story of Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), a retired U.S. government agent who we last saw rescuing his daughter from sex traffickers in Paris, killing countless villains and wreaking havoc in the process.  The film begins with the Albanian relatives of the traffickers Bryan killed holding a funeral for all their murdered loved ones in their homeland.  The family patriarch, Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija), knows that Bryan is responsible for the death of his kin--including his son--and declares to all around him that they will have their revenge.

As Bryan vacations in Istanbul with his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen) and his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), Murad and his clan carry out their vengeful plan.  Bryan and Lenore are kidnapped and taken to a shabby holding house, whereas Kim is able to escape from her hotel room before trouble arrives.  Bryan is tied-up and told that he will have to watch Lenore die for all the lives that he took.  But Bryan is too skilled a survivor to just sit back and let that happen.  Using his highly-skilled government training, along with help from Kim on the outside, Bryan is able to untie himself and fight his way out of his holding area.  Once he’s free, Bryan wastes no time in getting his daughter to safety and trying to rescue Lenore, letting absolutely no one stand in stand in his way.

Things start interestingly enough with the Albanians-seeking-revenge angle, for it’s not only the most logical way to continue the story, but it also put a devilish twist on Mills’ idea about protecting your family at all costs.  Yet things go right out the window once we realize that the Albanians attack Mills with the same ineptitude as their fallen relatives.  If a guy single-handedly shot up half a country, killed half your family, and headed home untouched, wouldn’t you come up with a smarter plan of revenge than just tying him to a pipe and surrounding him with oafish thugs?  As Mills tears through his first batch of henchmen, the air goes out of the movie when we realize that this is all child’s play to him.  The first movie wonderfully conveyed a strong sense of nightmarish danger and impossible stakes that sustained suspense throughout, but this time we feel like Bryan will fight his way out of this situation just fine.

Director Oliver Megaton (Transporter 3, Colombiana) pretty much bungles all of the finer points that made the first movie rather distinctive (not to mention shamelessly steals songs from the Drive soundtrack to amp up this film’s coolness factor).  The sequel’s check-in with Bryan as a divorced family man feels more dopier than the last time around, probably because the screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (who also wrote the first Taken) doesn’t provide the weight and confessions we’d expect from a family who suffered a great crisis and is trying to move on.  Even the delicious exhilaration of watching Neeson pound on bad guys gets diminished here by shaky-cam work and frantic editing that’s among the most fast and furious I’ve seen recently.  Most of the action here feels a lot harder to make out than the last film, with jump cuts distorting a clear view of action.  This is especially frustrating in an alley scene where Mills is pounding on two thugs at the same time.  The camera shakes about so much that you wish it’d lean back and remain still so we can see all of Neeson’s impressive fight work.

One of the most interesting star image evolutions of recent memory has been Liam Neeson’s journey from distinguished, thinking-man’s actor to kick-ass action star.  The success of the first Taken made Hollywood realize that Neeson’s authentic combination of intelligence and toughness could create action gold, allowing him to churn out explosive thrill rides ever since.  If he keeps at it, then he could solidify a tough guy image every bit as memorable and reliable as John Wayne: a tall tower of masculine toughness peppered with no-nonsense gruff and straightforward smarts.

Whatever pleasure there is to be had in Taken 2 naturally flows from Neeson’s weathered gifts.  A Sherlock Holmes-like scene where Mills tries to figure out his surroundings in a van with a hood over his head nicely shows how his brains are just as exciting as his fists.  Yet when it does come time for some hand-to-hand smackdowns, Neeson delivers the goods.  My favorite scene is where Mills faces off with an Albanian who’s (almost) as good a brawler as he is.  It’s one of the few moments where the camera calms down and we can admire Neeson’s skilled yet brutal attack technique.  And while the screenplay tries to turn Mills’ strategic assessments into a kind of schtick, Neeson delivers a poignant speech towards the end about endless cycles of violence that brings the only moment of dramatic electricity within the violence.  

Taken 2 isn’t necessarily a bad product for the action junkie crowd, but it truly does elicit the usual criticisms one heaps upon weak sequels: “it’s not as good as the first one,” “it tries to be like the first one but fails,” and so on.  It’s far from being one of the biggest “sequel-letdowns” I’ve ever seen, but you’d have to be pretty damn delusional to think this flick is as good as the first one.  If anything, this film made me realize that if you or a loved one shoots up half a European country at some point, then perhaps its wise for you and your family to stay the hell out of Europe for the rest of your lives.  

Anderson is a 'Master' at Work

by Brett Parker

The unspoken truth about the very nature of religion is how gurus and disciples need each other in order for religion to even exist in the first place.  A preacher cannot preach if no one is around to believe in his words and a believer can only be a believer if a spiritual cause is arousing enough to inspire self-betterment within themselves.  No film probably understands this delicate connection better than Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a rich and hypnotic masterwork that examines the great unease and sneaky affection that develops between a questionable prophet and the troubled drifter who seeks his help.  The film is a fictionalized account of L. Ron Hubbard’s early days when he notably pioneered Scientology, but it could essentially be about any religion in the way it shows how spiritual practices assimilate with the human condition and how loopholes can pluck away at any foundation of worship.  While the movie gives off an alarming friction as man’s primal urges try to get tamed by enlightened psychobabble, a certain bizarre hope shines through in the end as we realize the backhanded ways we call upon spiritual beliefs to help us get through our lives.

The film opens with a sailor named Freddie Dodd (Joaquin Phoenix) returning home from World War II with deep stares and quirky twitches filled with mysterious pain.  Dodd appears to have a few screws loose but is nonetheless thrown back into society anyways to try and be a normal citizen in post-war America.  He tries to hold down a job as a photographer at a department store, but he drunkenly brawls with a customer and is sent away.  He tries working in a cabbage field, but his hobby of making homemade alcohol out of questionable products leaves one of his fellow workers poisoned, causing him to be chased away furiously from the farm.

One night, Freddie decides to stowaway on a random yacht he finds on his travels, which happens to be under the command of Lancaster Dodd, a writer and spiritual philosopher in the early stages of starting a new religion known as “The Cause.”  Dodd discovers Freddie hiding out on the boat, but decides not to throw him off, for he loves the taste of his hooch and senses an unexplainable connection between them.  Pretty soon, Dodd subjects Freddie to his own invented form of psychotherapy known as “processing” and is able to sense troubled depths within the broken sailor.  It is then that the Guru decides to make this damaged wanderer his ultimate test case and recruits him to help out with his newfound movement.

Pretty soon, Freddie becomes a loyal disciple of The Cause, helping Dodd and his steely wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), as they try to spread their beliefs throughout random parts of the United States.  Dodd returns the loyalty by subjecting Freddie to increasingly unorthodox practices meant to help him ease past trauma.  Yet as skeptics and obvious questions threaten the logical foundation of the Cause’s ideas while Freddie’s drunkenly erratic and shockingly violent behavior explodes in reoccurring bursts, Freddie begins to question the belief system he’s thrown himself into and wonders if aligning with Dodd is truly the best thing for himself.

As the film allows us a peak at early, midcentury America, the camera slyly recalls the cinematic look and feel of melodramatic Hollywood classics from that era while knocking things slightly off-kilter.  The gem-like cinematography by Mihai Malaimare, JR. and the reliably-acute production design by David Crank and Jack Fisk greatly summons the fragile beauty hinted at in the movies of that time which painted lush images of post-WWII America, yet the hostile and confusing behavior of the characters urgently suggests the troubling cracks in such a seemingly clean-cut landscape.  Jonny Greenwood once again treats director Paul Thomas Anderson to a transcendent score, (after his towering work on There Will Be Blood) that evokes classical arrangements from the traditional film scores of classical melodramas as if they were filtered through a nightmare to produce sounds of demented unsettlement.  

The script’s obvious allusions to L. Ron Hubbard’s early career have led early headlines to believe that the film would be a raw expose of the super-secretive Scientology religion.  While the film is not the low-blow whistle blower some obtuse moviegoers expected it to be, one can’t help but notice how it shrewdly conveys the impending mystery of such an organization.  Scientology is one of the most widely-debated religious phenomenas of our time.  To read up on the subject is to witness a brutal ping-pong match between its detractors and defenders.  Those who devote their lives to the cause swear that it’s the most enlightening, eye-opening life-changer thats ever happened to them while others claim it’s one of the most brutal, heartbreaking scams of modern times.  The film wisely doesn’t condemn or condone such a religious group, but instead veers between both ends of the spectrum throughout the film.  Strangely enough, the film’s in-between-ness on the subject perfectly encapsulates the religion’s aura from a basic, present day view.  

In one spellbinding sequence, Dodd subjects Freddie to his intense, half-hypnotic form of questioning known as “processing” that plunges the depths of Freddie’s frantic psyche and causes him to confront painful memories constantly gnawing at him.  At the end of the process, Freddie feels a certain sense of release and calm for the first time in the film, and we wonder if maybe Dodd isn’t onto something that could be quite beneficial to damaged human beings.  Yet in other scenes, Dodd grows erratic and furious when theories of his Cause are cross-examined with ideological scrutiny, giving off the obvious vibe of a man who is deeply unsure of himself.  One curious, prolonged sequence shows Dodd hiding out in an office moments before his latest spiritual manual, The Split Saber, is to be unveiled to his fellow Cause members for the first time and his face conveys looks of fear and uncertainty.  The film is never explicit as to whether Dodd is a complete charltan or just nervously trying to work out ideological kinks within the early stages of his bold creation.  Scenes of Freddie benefitting from the Cause’s methods in contrast with scenes of Dodd freaking out over naysayers keep us off-balance as to whether the Cause is beneficial or a complete crock.  

The Master once again has Paul Thomas Anderson creating a perplexing and hostile environment where vulnerable outsiders encounter calculating hustlers as they both desperately ponder the uncertainty of the world through their fragile alliances.  Their push-pull dances seem to satisfy inner needs of power and weakness until you catch on that they’re ultimately seeking validation in a remarkably unpredictable universe.  Like the freak climactic storm of Magnolia or the violent oil accidents in There Will Be Blood, fate can deal out random misfortune in the most unforgiving manner, and this has Anderson’s characters clinging to their personal connections to find a significance they can believe in.  

The Master is Anderson’s best play on this reoccurring connection yet, not just because the religious angle causes one to ponder this theme to the largest of extents, but also because the meeting between outsider and hustler here is at once the most complex and most tender its ever been in Anderson’s canon.  Freddie and Dodd have a burning need for each other that’s stronger than any connection between any Anderson relationship before, for if they’re dance of spiritual enlightenment proves to be a successful one, then they could justify each other’s existence in ways that no other entity on the planet could come close to doing.  The guru will have healed a disciple with his beliefs and the disciple would have found guidance of actual worth and so forth.  Yet this alliance between the two men turns out to be anything but solid as both Freddie and Dodd represent the duality of man as both an animal and a spiritual being, respectively.  Anderson brilliantly suggests the great difficulty and friskiness that arises when both ends of this spectrum try to meet in the middle in spite of their gentle willingness.  Freddie’s primal id may be too deep-rooted and elusive to tame while Dodd may be too cocky and narrow-minded to provide a foolproof base of religious guidance.  

Phoenix and Hoffman both turn in astoundingly compelling performances that sets off Anderson’s primary forces like firecrackers.  Phoenix especially swings for the fences and turns in a fearless display for the history books.  It’s one of those rare depictions of cracked madness where the performer goes to such scary heights to get their result that it’s both exciting and disturbing at the same time.  There’s something to be said for Phoenix’s strangely unique gifts in how he makes Freddie’s ferocious confusion sympathetic.  As the super-charismatic and curiously testy spiritual leader, Hoffman skillfully delivers an Orson Welles-like grandeur to the role that carefully veers between charming and volcanic.  The vibrant and affectionate connection between these opposite extreme performances sustains the movie throughout and damn near ignites the screen in a jailhouse scene where both characters release unhinged fury on each other (as Phoenix holds us in his visceral grip by thrashing his body around his jail cell).  It all eventually boils down to a sneakily heart-wrenching scene where Freddie and Dodd confront each other and ponder if they could truly satisfy their needs through each other’s souls.  The surprisingly touching part as how much they achingly wish that could happen.  

Like Officer Kurring in Magnolia and Barry in Punch-Drunk Love, Freddie is able to discover his own justified closure amidst the increasingly-chaotic world around him.  For all the trouble and confusion that the Cause wrought, Freddie is able to confront his own-problems with a hint of level-headedness.  The last scene shows Freddie half-jokingly trying out “processing” on a random bar pickup, and we don’t feel his silliness is meant to be spiteful but has given him a slight new way to be comfortable around people.  And perhaps that’s what The Master has been getting at all along: that in order to get through this messy ordeal known as life, sampling outside beliefs and filtering it through your own terms may just be the way to go.  For when Dodd tells Freddie, “if you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world,” what he may or may not realize is that striving to live without a master may be the most helpful method of all.  

'Looper': Killer Sci-Fi Tale

by Brett Parker

Looper is the first sci-fi film I’ve seen in many a moon in which the story trumps any special effects shots, actions scenes, or otherworldly art direction such a genre tale has to offer.  I consider this a great blessing, seeing as how Len Wiseman’s atrocious Total Recall remake put a serious dent on my faith in the genre.  Director Rian Johnson once again takes a dangerous movie environment and turns it on its ear, this time delivering his most assured and significant work yet.  He brings his sense of playfulness to a time travel plot that never gets confusing nor diminishes the dramatic impact of the story.  Inspired by The Terminator, Looper knows how to make mood and poignant emotions more important than the metaphysics.  

Looper imagines a future in which time travel has been invented, but its illegal due to the fate-tampering damage it could cause.  Yet in the year 2074, criminal organizations secretly use time travel to dispose of people they want eliminated.  Since bodies are harder to dispose of in the future, mobsters send their targets back 30 years into the past where a team of specialized assassins known as loopers are assigned to shoot these targets and leave no trace behind.  We follow a looper in 2044 named Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he blasts away his futuristic quarries who appear out of thin air and gets overly-compensated for his efforts.  The mobs of the future always send back plenty of silver with their targets, and these rewards allow Joe to indulge in clubs, drugs, and hookers when he’s not murdering hooded undesirables.

One day, as Joe prepares to kill his latest victim, he discovers that his latest time traveler victim is a future version of himself.  This Older Joe (Bruce Willis) knows exactly what he’s up against, so he uses his intelligence and ferocious fighting skills to escape Young Joe’s gun.  Loopers are supposed to kill their targets even if they are, in fact, their future selves, and the fact that Old Joe is on the run causes Young Joe to be wanted by the very organization that employs him.  Young Joe simply wants to get rid of his older self so he can stay alive and get back to his normal life, but Old Joe catches up with him and informs him that a dangerous criminal known as the Rainmaker will bring great harm into their life, and he believes he can track down the adolescent Rainmaker in Young Joe’s present and kill him.  A battle of wits ensue between both Joes as they try to satisfy their own desperate needs, with Young Joe finding shelter from a country girl named Sara (Emily Blunt) and her young son Cid (Pierce Gagnon) while Old Joe tries to hunt down youngsters who fit the description of a young Rainmaker.

Rian Johnson is a filmmaker who likes to bring unexpected flourishes to film noir tales.  His Brick brought a hard-boiled detective story to a high school setting while The Brothers Bloom saw him bringing quirky whimsy and yearning romance to a con artist game.  With Looper, he lets snappy time travel complications run amok in a future dystopia.  While most noir tales tend to focus on hoods, degenerates, and amoral everymen totally engrained in the darkness, Johnson focuses on broken people detached from and despairing of their sad worlds.  What his protagonists have in common is a yearning to leave their harsh environments far behind and discover happiness on their own terms.  While destinies in these cynical landscapes can be as pre-determined as a Greek tragedy,perhaps the motivation for Johnson’s characters was best exemplified in The Brothers Bloom when that film’s melancholy hero stated his need for “an unwritten life.”  While most directors are fascinated by the kinkiness and shamelessness of noir environments, Johnson seems most compelled by the crippling sadness underneath them and the emotional damage it inflicts on seemingly ordinary people.

When it comes to the future world of Looper, Johnson once again shows off his knack for lived-in noir atmospheres without making a big deal about it.  The future here isn’t decked out with super-advanced cityscapes and grotesque robotic claustrophobia, but shabby tent cities filled with countless vagabonds and festering urban decay.  This is not a future in which technology is thriving but desperation is festering, with homeless Americans hurting each other like wolves to protect their well-being.  As present day America is currently wrestling with political unrest and deep economic uncertainty, the scary thing about Looper’s future world is that its pessimism doesn’t feel terribly off from what could plausibly happen to this country under extreme circumstances (especially with the sick-joke-of-a-plot-point that China is the only place to be in the future).  The logical depravity of this scary American future tied with the self-reliant cynicism within most of the characters is a scarier cautionary warning than any recent political documentary trying to predict America’s uneasy future.  

Time travel plots can inherently bring about endless paradoxes, logical contradictions, and scientific confusion.  Looper deals with these issues by simply having the characters reluctant to get into specifics.  As Old Joe points out, talking out all the details means “we could be here all day.”  Besides, Johnson is clearly interested in such a plot to ponder what it would be like if a person came face-to-face with their future selves.  The inspired idea here is that both the younger and the older man probably wouldn’t be terribly fond of one another.  It’s typical of human nature that when we look into a mirror, we instinctively check for flaws.  Therefore, staring at an older version of ourselves would probably make us highlight all the bad things.  Ironically, both Joes are appalled by the same flaw under different circumstances: their need to carry out awful acts in order to protect their own lifestyles.  The centerpiece scene shows both Joes meeting face-to-face in a diner they frequent.  As both Joes lay out their underlying personal motivations, they grown angrier with each other by the minute, erupting into a brawl.  Johnson also plays up their tension using their obvious metaphysical connections, for Young Joe can communicate with Old Joe by scarring messages on his body, while Old Joe can see what Young Joe sees through the logic of memory.

Aside from the appealing time-travel spectrum here, Johnson even slyly introduces a “what if Hitler was raised differently” angle into the plot with the treatment of young Cid, who may or may not grow up to be an ultra-violent supervillian.  This subplot actually offers a rare hope in the film by shrewdly commenting on the future of today’s youth.  Cid figuratively suggests that if the confusion and anxiety of today’s youth is mixed with a chaotic and bitter society, then the violent egotism and moral ambiguity of our country could reach cataclysmic proportions.  The answer to this problem is suggested with the presence of Sara (obviously of the Sarah Conner mold), whose combination of no-nonsense feminism and maternal nurturing offers the perfect antidote to impending evil.  Cid is a symbolic visualization that if we put the well-being of the future before our own selfish needs, then perhaps we can solve the problems currently festering without our present society.  A key character comes to this same realization in the film’s shattering yet logical climax. 

One of the main draws of the film’s performances is seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt drawing out how a young Bruce Willis would act.  Thanks to the prosthetic makeup artistry of Jamie Kelman and Kazuhiro Tsuji, Gordon-Levitt is given latex assistance to look uncannily like a young Willis, but it’s Levitt’s acute attention to Willis’ trademark mannerisms that really drives the clone job home.  Even so, Levitt is astounding at hinting at his character’s internalized uncertainties about the world and embittered core that yearns to do good in spite of spiritual confusion.  Willis rounds out the character’s effect by bringing his own sense of loss and bottled-up rage to the elderly side of the character.  Yet together as a team, they help build a whole spectrum of a man whose exhausted by a deadly world and trying desperately to salvage whats left of his heart.  As for the other performances, Jeff Daniels provides an interesting embodiment of a loosened, messy future as Young Joe’s boss, Emily Blunt delivers much-yearned-for feminine ideals in a world of overly-hostile testosterone, and Pierce Gagnon is simply astounding as Cid, eerily conveying a precious child with alarming shadows surrounding his soul.

Filled to the brim with surprisingly-intricate writing that keeps on giving, Looper will once again remind starving audiences about the pleasures of smart sci-fi.  Johnson is a filmmaker whose not afraid to mix seemingly incongruent genres together, and mixing a time travel tale with a bleak crime noir have energized each other with a surprising jolt you won’t soon forget.  With sci-fi cleverness and relevant ideological musings to spare, Looper shows that brains and excitement should always be tied together in an endless loop.

The 'Trouble' with a Clint Eastwood Baseball Flick

by Brett Parker

Trouble with the Curve is a meeting between the time-honored traditions of both a Clint Eastwood movie and a baseball movie, but the film’s great failing is that is has nothing fresh or significant to say about either ideal.  We catch on pretty quickly that Eastwood is just going through the motions of still trying to deal with his old coot ways in a modern era--an act we all assumed Eastwood put to literal death in Gran Tarino--and that the game of baseball is merely nothing more than a plot device to allow Eastwood a platform to continue his meditative grumblings.  If watching Eastwood do his befuddled growling is entertaining to you--no matter how tired it is this time out--or if you get easily lit up by the graceful charms of Justin Timberlake and Amy Adams, then this film will hold small pleasures for you.  Yet if you’re looking for the next Moneyball or Million Dollar Baby, you’ll be pretty disappointed.

Eastwood stars as Gus Lobel, an aging scout for the Atlanta Braves.  Gus is secretly having trouble with his eye sight and can no longer asses the skills and mechanics of prospective athletes like he used to.  His boss and friend, Pete (John Goodman), senses that Gus’s expert eye is fading, and feels the pressure from his organization to let him go.  Making matters worse is a flashy young stats expert (Matthew Lillard) who’s trying to make Gus’s methods as extinct as a dinosaur.  While Gus refuses to retire from the only world he’s ever know, it also becomes clear that his latest scouting trip may be the last chance he has to pick a winning player for his team.  Realizing this, Pete reaches out to Gus’s estranged daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams), and talks her into accompanying Gus on the road and making sure he’s still able to stay on point with his work and talent.

Mickey isn’t exactly thrilled about this idea, for Gus has always been a negligible and elusive father growing up, and he hasn’t appeared to have changed much in his crusty old ways.  So of course old family wounds and paternal conflicts arise between the two as they travel to check out Bo Gentry (Joe Massingill), a magnificently arrogant and surprisingly gifted ballplayer who can crank out home runs with the chunky grandeur of Babe Ruth.  Occasionally helping out the father and daughter with their conflicts is Johnny (Justin Timberlake), a former player turned scout who was once discovered by Gus.  Johnny mainly turns up to show his support for Gus and assess the situation between Mickey and him, all while giving Mickey an affectionate eye, of course.  Suspense hinges on whether or not Gus will be able to pick a golden draft prospect for the Braves’ upcoming season and if he and Mickey will end up reconciling or pushing each other further away.

There was a time when a “Clint Eastwood movie” was classified as Clint with a big gun blowing away bad guys while ideological musings lurk about the bloodshed.  Nowadays, it seems to represent flicks where an aging Clint finds his rigid conservative ways of yesteryear under attack from more loose and liberal ideas in a backwards modern era.  Usually on standby is family members worried he’ll succumb to his close-minded views to the point of reclusiveness, a female character of some sort who complains about how emotionally unavailable or negligible he is, and youthful, yellow-bellied twerps who Clint is quick to point out doesn’t have the stones to do it like he does it.  Trouble with the Curve doesn’t miss a single beat of Clint’s formula, only it feels more like a generic exercise than a work with anything of real consequence to say.  Even if Clint still does an effective job of being Old Clint onscreen, we feel he’s just doing a shtick as opposed to expressing something deep within himself.  

Since Clint Eastwood and baseball are two of the most mythically celebrated of Americana creations, you’d think putting them together in the same movie would intricately energize each other towards homegrown lyrical poetry.  Yet the film’s view of America’s favorite past time is a rather murky one, ping-ponging between idealism and cynicism without any true feeling.  On the one hand, baseball is looked at as an organization of plunging morals, from the stat-crunchers who damn near calculate the soul out of the game (an obvious jab at the Moneyball mentality) to the unhealthy-looking prima donna players who buy their own hype (embodied by the effectively nasty Massingill).  One especially bizarre development shows a flashback to one of Mickey’s repressed memories that paints the world of baseball as a Hades for degenerate men thats no place for innocent souls.  This baffling subplot is filled with such deranged nastiness that to say its unconvincing is an understatement.  Yet on the other hand, baseball is finally revealed to be the ode to the American dream we like it to be once a grandly-contrived yet sweetly-satisfying final scene shows an immigrant baseball prodigy (Jay Galloway) getting a chance to try out for the majors, while affirming Gus’s strict code of old school baseball values.  It’d be nice to think that the film’s love-hate struggle with baseball mirrors Eastwood’s love-hate relationship with modern America, but this isn’t fleshed out strongly enough and there’s too many stretches in the film where any real feelings for the game are put on the back-burner.  

The best reason to see the film is the scene-stealing performance from Amy Adams, who brings a surprising weight and liveliness to the “woman who despairs of Old Clint” role.  Adams may be too beautiful to have played off of Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby, but she certainly has the spunk and toughness to go toe-to-toe with him, using her own kind of rigorous stubbornness to challenge his myth.  As the boyish and playful modern-day counterpoint to Gus’s old school ways, Justin Timberlake shows up as his usual charming self, and watching his puckishness bounce nicely off of Eastwood’s grouchiness is a thing of slight, incongruent beauty.  There’s even time for a nice romance to develop between Adams and Timberlake, since they’re both young, attractive, and care about Gus.  This side romance is handled with such warmth and delicacy that you very much wish Eastwood and all the baseball would go away so the film could just be about these two.

You would think Eastwood was in the director’s chair for this one, but that duty has been passed along to Robert Lorenz, an associate of Eastwood’s who served as an assistant director on many of his films.  This seems to be a pointless move, for the obvious themes here will easily have future moviegoers mistaking this flick as one of Eastwood’s generic directorial efforts, so he might as well have just bucked it up and directed himself per usual.  For seeing this movie as simply Clint still trying to deal with being Clint is the only real validation for its existence.  It’s not a bad movie at all, but it’s certainly not necessary at all.  It’s also the second most recent baseball movie after Moneyball that holds a fatal lack of humor.  What most cinephiles never realize is that Bull Durham’s sense of silliness and mischief says miles more about the greatness of baseball than serious dramas like Trouble with the Curve ever could.  

'Words' to Ignore

by Brett Parker

You know you just saw a bad movie when hours after leaving the theater, you damn near forgot that you even saw a movie in the first place.  Our ultimate hope for when we walk out of a theater is that we’ve just witnessed a film that either stirred our imaginations, challenged our emotions, or reaffirmed our confidence in life.  Even watching a bad movie can have unlikely merits.  Trash, as Quentin Tarantino wonderfully proves, can excite us and alert us to loony insights into the human condition.  Even awful movies can appall us enough to make us seek out great art with a stronger hunger.  Yet for a film to be so dull and lifeless that it instantly evaporates from our memories with little fuss may be the greatest cinematic sin of all.

Cinematic frivolity as dull non-entity is the ideal that comes to mind when regarding The Words, a drama about the literary world that isn’t terribly dramatic at all.  The central premise invites interest--a struggling writer steals a great work from another man and claims it as his own--but almost no effort is put into unearthing the deep emotions and moral complications inherently built into such a situation.  The filmmakers work quickly to tidy things up for a happy ending while neglecting grand dramatic potential that could’ve made this enterprise a lot more juicier.  The irony here is how a movie about literary greatness turns out to be such a worthless guide to the literary world.

As the film opens, we see a distinguished author named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) as he begins to read his latest novel, The Words, for an eager audience, which includes a pretty admirer (Olivia Wilde).  We then see Hammond’s story visualized before us as we follow Rory (Bradley Cooper) an aspiring writer who’s struggling to come up with a novel that’ll catapult him into the big time.  With mounting debt and a lovely wife name Dora (Zoe Saldana) to support, Rory feels like his literary aspirations will die out if the muses don’t talk to him sooner than later.  On a trip to Paris, Rory finds an old leather briefcase in a thrift store and buys it.  He later discovers that a lost manuscript is hidden within the case.  The manuscript turns out to be a remarkable story about love, death, and loss in a post-World War II world.  The story is so magnificent that it gives Rory an idea: he’ll claim the manuscript as his own work and try to get it published under his name.

Not too long after, Rory gets the book published and it becomes an overnight sensation.  It receives endless critical acclaim from the New York literary scene and it tops the best-seller chart for weeks.  Rory seems to be enjoying his newfound fame until the fateful afternoon where he runs into an Old Man (Jeremy Irons) who claims that he is the true author of the manuscript.  He patiently explains how the story of the novel is based on his real life, and after telling a heartbreaking story from his past, the Old Man convinces Rory that all his claims are true.  Will this Old Man expose Rory for stealing his manuscript?  Will Rory’s guilt lead him to do the right thing, even if it tarnishes his career?

One of the main problems with the film is that the so-called “great novel” at the center of the plot isn’t much of a story to begin with.  It’s pretty much a tired Hemingway-knockoff that tells the kind of age-old “better to have loved than lost” tale that anyone reading this review can write in their sleep.  Much is made of this novel’s vivid imagery and grand prose, but the filmmakers never allow us to hear even a sentence from the book presumably because, like Rory, they can’t comprehend transcendent writing themselves.

Another major problem is the film’s framing device, in which the entire central story turns out to be a fictional story told by a third-person author.  This conceptual knockoff of The Hours proves to be pretty flimsy stuff and if you thought Rory’s dilemma was on shaky ground, then you’ll find Hammond’s situation downright laughable.  This narrative device is so blatantly pointless that any idiot can see that it’s simply a desperate ploy for creative profundity within a lightweight script.  Perhaps even first-time directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternhal realized this halfway through, for whatever tension Hammond’s plot evokes is never resolved as it simply hangs there blowing in the wind.  What’s probably most offensive about all this is how it once again places Dennis Quaid in a sanitized and bloodless role.  Considering the smirking rascals and wily rogues he played in the beginning of his career, it’s hard to believe that this patron saint of bland everyman roles once felt cut from the same irreverent cloth as Jack Nicholson.  I’d give anything for Quaid to play a kinky villain or a boozing womanizer to get back to his puckish ways.

It’s rather jarring how the filmmakers blow past every strong dramatic opportunity like The Flash blowing through Disneyland.  Once the premise’s central dilemma is presented to us, dozens of questions pop into our heads that never get answered: how deep does Rory’s guilt run?  Could he truly stomach his deception for the rest of his career?  Does the old man harbor any deep desire to seek revenge on Rory?  Could he take legal action against him?  What kind of anguish does he feel over the theft of his own story?  How does Dora feel about living with an imposter?  Just how punishing would the repercussions be for Rory if his secret were publicly exposed?  These answers can only be nibbled at while making it impossible to sink our teeth into them any deeper.  The big idea the movie eventually gets at is how obsessing over great writing can distract one from truly experiencing life and love firsthand.  We have trouble buying this considering A) it’s a hell of a stretch, seeing as how most writers have proved that great writing and great living can compliment each other wonderfully, and B) the female characters aren’t fleshed out strongly enough to support the “life and love” side of that argument.  Zoe Saldana and Olivia Wilde are pretty and enjoyable actresses, but its an insult to their intelligence that they’re simply window dressing here when they could’ve been strong feminine figures to counterbalance the wounded egos of the male characters.

Whatever dignity this film has, it can be found in Jeremy Irons performance as the Old Man.  He takes this underwritten role and wrings every ounce of heartache and wistfulness he possibly can while attempting to bring some real feeling to a transparent film.  I don’t want to insult the thespian by saying he sleepwalks through the role, but rather point out that simple, lay-up acting can seem more alluring than it deserves to be when it comes from such a skilled pro like Irons.  And God bless Bradley Cooper, for everyone knows he’s too pretty to play the accepted idea of a struggling writer, but the surprising sincerity he carefully dishes out here sure does prove otherwise.  Perhaps I have sympathy for his character because I’ve met many such lunks in my life who wanted Hemingway’s glory but couldn’t begin to understand the pain and passion that went into it.

Perhaps The Words is such a bewildering failure because it’s rare to see a movie so dumb that celebrates something so intelligent.  Like Rory, its as if the filmmakers also worship great writing and are endlessly frustrated that they can’t concoct it themselves.  Perhaps if they focused more intently on what great writing truly means to them, and what it can say about our egos and our worldviews, they could’ve better developed this paper-thin story.  But all we can do now is just pick up a book by Hemingway or Fitzgerald and realize for ourselves what Klugman and Sternthal were trying to get at all along.

Exclusive Interview: Jon Russell Cring and Anna Shields Discuss Indie Film Projects

by Brett Parker

Anna Shields was a last minute replacement for the lead role in Jon Russell Cring’s R.I.D., the first installment in his skin-crawling anthology of delirious terror, Creeping Crawling.  Cring really lucked out with this acting discovery, for Shields proves to be the sexually vibrant cherry atop Cring’s sundae of demented and unsettling horror treats.  Instead of relying on gotcha scares and generic familiarities, Cring pushes to build a feverish nightmare fueled by slow-burn disturbances.  Within every step of this crazed fun house, Shields rides each creepy wave with an alarming colorfulness.  With her classical blonde looks, Shields elevates the material with a bubbly alertness and animated resourcefulness thats like watching Jean Harlow trapped on Shutter Island.

What this beautiful star and her horror-flick helmer probably didn’t anticipate was that this collaboration would not only produce a fruitful actor-director relationship, but also a filmmaking team that reflects each other’s passionate drive and creativity.  For as Cring was working to complete the rest of his Creeping Crawling trilogy (with Grubbery and Bugger making up the second and third installments, respectively), Shields presented him with a script for Little Bi Peep, a heartfelt and modern peek at a young woman who lives her life as a bisexual.  Cring not only loved the script, but encouraged Shields to produce and co-direct her very own starring vehicle by any means necessary.  Cring cheerfully showed her the ropes of mounting one’s very first film production all while trying to get his own horror anthology across the finish line.

Linked by the hardships of making a low budget feature and the creative zest in bringing cinematic visions to life, I decided to sit down with Cring and Shields on a recent summer afternoon to discuss both of their film projects.  By focusing on their thematically-different yet equally-inspired productions, the duo was able to highlight the stresses of pre-production, the process of fundraising, and the reasons why any average joe with passion can make their very own movie:

You two worked together on the first installment in the Creeping Crawling trilogy, R.I.D.  How did the actor-director relationship work out between you two?  What did you learn from that specific process?

JON: I found Anna basically because she was recommended to me by my friend James Pentaudi.  I was looking for somebody because someone else had fallen through on the role due to medical reasons.  I needed someone and I didn’t want to cancel my shoot.  I had only two days to go and James said “you have to come meet this girl, Anna Shields.”  When I met her, I knew she had something about her.  She’s kind of has an old Hollywood thing, because she’s beautiful, funny, sexy, yet not afraid to be super self-deprecating and it was a great combination.  When people meet Anna, they tend to surface her.  They think “this is all she is,” but she has a lot of layers underneath her.  I felt like the character in R.I.D. was exactly the same way, for Dori Dixon was a woman who put up a normal front to be like everyone else, yet underneath her there was all this darkness that was bubbling up from the bottom, so I felt Anna was a great choice for that.

ANNA: Meeting Jon, I just felt there was this cool, calm understanding between us, like, from day one.  There was some sort of connection.  I remember right off the bat, right after we read the script together, I compared it to some movie and you agreed and there was this basis off of that and I think it was just a big comfortability factor....

JON: We’re best friends, basically!  Anna and I didn’t know we were best friends until we actually met each other!

ANNA: [laughs] Exactly!  Yeah, so there was this initial connection and it worked great on set, and I think we made something great out of it!

JON: Anna is doing a Hollywood film right now, she has another movie coming up...I mean, some people just have “it!”  They have star quality, they are the kind of people that, if the stars align, you’ll see them on the cover of magazines.  

What do you look for in an actor as a director?

JON: I look for a combination of a seriousness about the material and a levity about themselves.

Anna, what do you look for in a director?

ANNA: Someone who has everything planned out for a movie and is just able to get that across to an actor who also probably has the same ideas but doesn’t really come to that idea right off the bat.

JON: It’s all about being easy to work with.  I always ask Anna about past film experiences, “did your director actually direct?”  And most of the time she says....

ANNA: No! [laughs] 

JON: It’s like the idea of the director has been lost.  What exactly does a director do?  Really all I’m concerned about is performance, performance, performance, and trying to get the actor to surprise me.

ANNA: And an actor just wants someone who can translate clearly to the actor what they need to be doing.   

R.I.D. was completed last year and screened at a premiere in Albany, NY.  What did you guys think of the finished product and how people reacted to it?

ANNA: My first time seeing it on the big screen was the first time I saw it, actually.  I was completely blown away, in a positive way.  In the short interval that we shot it, I was amazed by how good it looked and everything.  It looked exactly how I thought it should look after the first time I read the script.

JON: I was shocked by how tiny Anna’s underwear was!

ANNA: [laughs] I was shocked too!

After R.I.D. was complete, you guys went off to follow your own independent film projects to bring your own unique visions to life.  Jon, I understand that the entire Creeping Crawling trilogy is now officially in the can.  Were there any new challenges you faced while filming the other two that you didn’t experience the first time around?  Are there any mistakes you made on the first film that you went to great lengths to prevent from happening with the other two?

JON: One of the big issues I had on the first film was that it was underpopulated.  Because of a freak snow storm we had on October 26th, we had to change scenes in which we would’ve had a lot of our extras.  Thats one thing about independent film, it can’t look like a porn!  You can’t just shoot it against, like, a black wall and say “that’s a movie!”  Movies are populated, they have a lot of people in them.  That was a big issue on R.I.D. and we wanted to fix that.  So we made sure we went to some great locations on Grubbery and Bugger and we made sure that the films were a lot more populated.  

I’m extremely excited about getting Raine Brown, a horror movie icon who’s all over Fangoria.  She was incredible, she came with a lot of ideas and opinions about how she wanted her character to be and it was really fun working with her.  So Bugger became a very funny story then Grubbery turned out to be a very dark story.  You never really know how something is going to turn out to be until you finish shooting it.  In October, we’ll be doing a run of the films and introducing the world to them!  They will see things in Creeping Crawling that I guarantee they have never seen on film before!  So that’s always exciting for me, to push the limits, surprise people, maybe gross them out, and reveal the human experience.

Will we be seeing more girls in their underwear?

JON: I won’t really get into that, just to say that maybe you’ll be seeing more girls OUT of their underwear!

Anna, right now you are working on your first writing-directing endeavor on film with Little Bi Peep, which is the story of a young woman and her lifestyle as a bisexual.  You are currently funding this project through Indiegogo.  What is the funding process like for a project with a decidedly sexual subject matter?

ANNA: I’ve never done anything on the business side of films before and there’s so many tricks to marketing things a certain way and so we had to find a hook that maybe I hadn’t initially thought of when I wrote it, so we’ve sort of been trying to adapt the movie to that.  But yeah, we’ve been funding through Indiegogo, which has gone pretty well, and we’ve just been trying to get the word out there.  Like any kind of connection you have, you just kind of push this project like “hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while, but here’s this project I’ve been working on...” [laughs] So you try to see what connections your connections have and it turns into this tree of marketing.  We’ve also been talking to a couple of people who could possibly help produce, so its just been this giant web of inter-marketing!

JON: We call it a LGBT, but when she wrote it, that wasn’t what it was initially about.  Anna wrote it as a character piece about her experiences and the experiences of other people that she knows and the LGBT market just seemed obvious for this particular story.  So thats kind of the direction where we’re taking it, but we also want to do something almost like Juno or Ghost World with that kind of look and feel.

CHASING AMY springs to my mind, for that’s a well-known film that dealt with bisexuality.

JON: Yeah, well you know Chasing Amy is very much a straight man writing a story about being gay.  That’s cool, but its a completely different mindset than someone who’s actually in the light.

ANNA: And that’s exactly what I was trying to write about!  It wasn’t just about an LGBT stance, but also a young person’s stance in general.  You know, sexual encounters within the current times of a younger generation.  So it was about me nailing that down, as opposed to someone in their 60s trying to nail it down! 

JON: And its like what you said in the campaign that I found very interesting: “in relationships, you start with sex.”

ANNA: Right, so then what are relationships after sex?

JON: Cause nowadays, its not unusual for someone to have slept with someone by the third date!

Both of you guys have gone through the process of funding a film and trying to put complicated pre-production plans together.  Do you feel these are tasks that any artistic person with passion can pull off, or do you need to be a lawyer or accountant to get this all together?

JON: Any artistic person can!  You have to have the experience of making all the lists, writing down all the names, and doing all the organization.  You have to have that experience to know that it can be done.  Everything has to be demystified!  It has to stop being about inspiration after a certain point and it has to start being about “okay, this is what we need to do to get this done!”

ANNA: Right!  Because so many filmmakers today write their own scripts, buy their own camera, they just do it.  They’re not sitting around trying to rely on big-time producers to get things done.

Anna, what’s it like starting out as a first-time filmmaker?  Are there more frustrations than pleasures?  What kind of things would you warn other aspiring filmmakers about?

ANNA: It can be frustrating, but I think its all going to pay off.  I think I would tell people to never lose any connection they ever made because you’re probably going to need to count on it again!  I think its all about getting out there and talking and just knocking out that self-deprecating way you look at yourself and assume that everyone wants to hear what you’re talking about.  That’s a giant thing that I’m trying to learn.  

JON: Anna is an asshole in training, while I am a professional asshole! [laughs]  I would say Anna is a minor league asshole and I’m trying to get her into the majors!

ANNA: [laughs] Right!  Just trying to vocalize inner-sarcastic thoughts right now!

That brings up an important question: do you have to be an asshole to get a film project done?

JON: Well I think one definition of an asshole is someone who knows what they want to do and believes that they can do it.  I don’t think “niceness” has anything to do with it.  I’m the nicest person in the world, but I also am somebody who believes that they have a voice and believes that other people have a voice that should be heard.

ANNA: And I think either way wins you points, because if you are an asshole, you can go and voice your thoughts to the greatest extent you can or if you’re nice about it, people can be into that, too.

JON: Yeah, absolutely.  I am never mean to anybody, I don’t believe its necessary or important.  But I also don’t let myself be stomped out like a fire.  I am going to burn!  If you’re a pile of embers and you’re mad at me because I’m a fire, thats your problem!  But I’m not gonna bring my fire down just to make you feel better about yourself!  

So when all is said and done, what are your ultimate hopes for the future of your projects?  In a year from now, where would you like to see yourselves artistically and professionally?

JON: After Creeping Crawling, I have a short film that I’m working on called Carnival.  As far as whats happening with Creeping Crawling, I’m definitely going to seek distribution on that.  And, I’m just trying to make bigger and better films.  I want to get more people involved and have more energy behind projects.  I love what Roger Corman did, you know?  There’s a whole generation of filmmakers who wouldn’t be making movies if it weren’t for Roger Corman and his process of encouraging people.  You know, Anna sent me this script and had written something that wasn’t her.  Its like she was trying to make a commercial movie.  And I said to her, “this is SHIT!”

ANNA: [laughs] I think you compared it to Abduction with Taylor Lautner!

JON: Exactly!  It was a terrible script!  It had a plot, but it was terrible!  So I said to you, “write yourself, write what you know.”  And literally, two days later she sent me this incredible script!  She knew exactly what she wanted to write about!  There’s a whole generation of people who need that opportunity for someone to say “look, if you write something awesome, I want to totally get behind that!”

ANNA: I want to see my project in the festivals.  I think this is a big festival piece and that’s kind of what we’re aiming it for.  I also want people from the LGBT community to see it, cause there’s not too many LGBT movies around, so it’d be a reassurance if everyone comes and find that its a good one!

JON: I think Little Bi Peep is going to appeal to everyone because its a movie about sex.  I like sexy movies, I like movies that aren’t afraid to play with that idea of how intimacy and sex relate to each other.

ANNA: But its also about relationships, and the way people misjudge relationships whether they’re just about sex, which a lot of them are, or whether there is something more to them, including the lies people tell each other within them.

JON: Hopefully, someday we won’t even have to say that “this is an LGBT film.”  It will feel like its just another movie.  I mean, no one ever goes, “hey, this is just a firefighter movie!  It’s for firefighters, so we’re marketing it just for firefighters!”  It’s sound just as stupid to say such a thing about a LGBT film, but thats where were at right now in this country, and hopefully we can get past that “firefighter” phase.

You think we’re still in such a “firefighter” phase?  You don’t think people have become more accepting of such subject matter?

ANNA: I think a little more, but I think we’re still in it as well.  Just look at The L Word, its literally named after “lesbian!”  You know?  Its marketed specifically for that.  I think we’re getting more and more into an age where thats more acceptable, but to just throw it into a movie as a minor thing isn’t exactly marketable.

For more information on Little Bi Peep, check out http://www.indiegogo.com/littlebipeepmovie and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2262078/

For more information on Creeping Crawling, check out http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234035/

To read Jon Russell Cring's previous interview with The Cinephile New York, check out http://thecinephilenewyork.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-interview-filmmaker-jon.html

Not the 'Lincoln' You Remember From History Class

by Brett Parker

I’ve heard all the snickers, groans, and bickering over the prospect of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, for the general consensus over the past few weeks appears to be that the film simultaneously represents creative bankruptcy in Hollywood, an abomination of our national history, and cinematic cheese jumping the shark.  To be honest, I’m more irked by the people who complain about the film’s premise than the actual film’s existence itself.  Where’s our sense of humor?  Anyone bringing an ounce of seriousness to this enterprise is forgetting that most Hollywood thrill-rides are built on magnificent ridiculousness, and they should at least admire the cheerful way this historical mash-up is reveling in its own insanity.  As far as the Steampunk genre goes, the film finds a very entertaining vibe from its historical resources.  If Sherlock Holmes can dish out Kung-Fu and Edgar Allen Poe can get his Silence of the Lambs on, then I’m all for our Honest Abe chopping off vampire heads with an axe.  

We first witness the young Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) as a man haunted by the death of his mother, Nancy (Robin McLeavy).  Years earlier as a child, Lincoln witnessed an evil vampire named Jack Barts (Marton Csokas) sucking her blood dry to repay a debt owed by his father, Thomas (Joseph Mawie).  As an adult, Lincoln wants to seek revenge, but has no idea what he’s up against.  By chance, he meets a mysterious gentleman named Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper) who is quite the expert on hunting and killing vampires.  He agrees to train Lincoln in the art of vampire combat if he vows to destroy more vampires beyond the one that killed his mother.  Lincoln agrees, and after bouts of training, he becomes an axe-twirling warrior who expertly disposes of an alarming number of evil bloodsuckers.  

All of this hunting leads Lincoln to discover than an ancient vampire named Adam (Rufus Sewell) is plotting to take over America through his forces in the southern U.S.  Vampires favor slavery, for it provides them with countless warm bodies to feed on without anyone really noticing, and they hope to expand that enterprise all over the country.  Lincoln realizes he must take his anti-vampire stance to a whole new level.  He rises up through the ranks of government to become President of the United States, taking a firm anti-slavery stance to fend off his ghoulish foes.  Realizing their opposing strength, he oversees the Civil War to make sure the south is defeated and slavery is abolished.  With the assistance of his childhood friend and right-hand-man, Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie), Lincoln carries out his epic war against the vampire nation, all while keeping it a secret from his beloved wife, Mary (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).

Producer Tim Burton had the right idea when he compared this flick to the blaxploitation mashup Blacula, for the basic idea is to marry together two incongruent but very entertaining genres of cinema and see what bizarro fun can be generated from the result.  As a fusion of historical epics and action horror, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter isn’t half-bad.  It doesn’t feel like the easiest marriage of opposite ideals, but its never boring and it presents the logic of its atmosphere with a surprisingly clarity.  Part of me wonders if this film would’ve been better had it been built on broad humor in the style of Mel Brooks or The Naked Gun films.  It takes itself pretty seriously in a hyperbolic action-thriller way, and perhaps we missed out on a great deal of laughs in the process.  Yet the more I think about it, a silly comedy version probably wouldn’t have been all too funny, and the hard-boiled tough guy treats we’re actually given does a good job at making this deranged cartoon premise exciting.  

Perhaps its an advantage that foreigner Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) is in the director’s chair here.  An American director probably would’ve been slightly more timid about tinkering with his own heritage, putting a leash on action indulgences and being more meticulous about historical accuracy syncing up with supernatural ideas.  Yet the Kazakhstan-born Bekmambetov clearly has no qualms about pushing one of our greatest national heroes into feverish lunacy, and he cheerfully places our 16th president in his comfort zone of grandiose action overkill.  Bekmambetov’s Wanted was one of the most over-the-top action movies I’ve ever seen: a sleek, kinetic ballet of slam-bang scenes that could never, ever occur in a realistic universe (hell, it strained plausibility in a movie universe, if you know what I mean).  Oddly, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is also founded on such impossible action.  While the sequences here are clunkier than Wanted, they’re still a hell of a sight to see in a historical fantasy.  A vampire chase across a stampede of horses and Lincoln dishing out beheadings in a southern mansion pumps up our adrenaline until the film’s climax sneaks over into Lethal Weapon territory with a flame-inducing brawl on a fateful train ride.  

With this film and Wanted, Bekmambetov is clearly in love with the idea of a sincere young simpleton finding liberation and purpose after morphing into a gritty tough guy.  Since that represents the basic fantasy of male moviegoers who turn up religiously to action pictures, having it literalized on the screen can add excitement to any frivolous thrill ride.  What’s surprising here is not only how it fits and enhances the crazy concept so well, but how it also deepens our appreciation of Lincoln’s legacy, as opposed to the opposite effect.  Credit for that must largely be given to the superb Benjamin Walker, who pulls off the main schizophrenic balancing act with a heroically straight-face.  It’s a testament to his skill that we can see him playing either a true-blue sincere version of Lincoln (especially if Daniel Day-Lewis had to back out of Spielberg’s upcoming biopic about the president) or a sketch-comedy concoction of the man.  That he can reconcile both of those aspects into a a package of open-faced alertness and remarkable leading man poise is nothing to sneeze at.  Ironically, this isn’t even the first time he’s played a deliriously-skewered portrayal of an American President, for he starred in the Broadway hit, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.  Bringing level-headed magnetism to demented pop manifestations is the mark of a good actor, and I’m excited to see what Walker brings to us in the future.

I like to think that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter isn’t complete nonsense, but actually has thoughts to spare about our current business of American myth-making.  Whats telling about our current times is that people seem to care more about superhero mythologies than they do about American history.  Most schoolchildren probably couldn’t name all the U.S. Presidents, but they could recite the names of The Avengers--along with their secret identities--almost as a reflex action.  It makes sense, then, that this modern-day movie about Abraham Lincoln is essentially a superhero film, in which a damaged soul turns to a life of righteous ass-kicking to squash evil and protect all that is good in this world.  The tipoff comes when we realize that the scene first showing Lincoln with his iconic dark suit, beard, and stovetop hat holds the same cinematic allure of seeing Batman in his costume for the first time.  Re-imagining Lincoln’s legacy in the mold of a superhero tale shrewdly allows lesser minds to reflect on his heroic deeds and his importance as a man in American history.  

Another effect this strange premise achieves is that it plays out good old-fashioned American conspiracy theorizing to its absolute breaking point.  Entire books and television specials have been devoted to secret conspiracies hidden throughout history that make The Da Vinci Code look like a John Hughes movie.  Most people find it ridiculous to imagine Lincoln as a vampire slayer, yet an alarming number of right-wingers have no trouble buying that President Obama is a secret Communist overlord plotting to destroy democracy.  By taking the ultimate absurd conspiracy theory and mapping it out with halfway-seriousness, we are able to hint at the mountains of implausibility and murkiness that arises when an actual conspiracy is visualized.  I’m not saying all conspiracies are mirthless, but I imagine most paranoid grumblings would look as silly as the vampire plot expanded out here.

To the people that think this film will skewer Lincoln’s legacy and make people more stupid about history, I must clarify that this movie fueled a curiosity in me to do extensive research about the real-life Lincoln and seek out the actual facts about one of our finest leaders.  So don’t let anyone ever tell you that trash serves no purpose.  Either way, you have to realize that this is all in good summer movie fun.  As Inglorious Basterds cheerfully pointed out, if we go to the movies for a history lesson, we’re usually getting a skewered version of actual events.  Hell, I bet even Spielberg’s upcoming “serious” biopic about Lincoln will probably sentimentalize the actual truth.  As with most Hollywood pop, the important thing is to understand the whole-hearted difference between real life and make-believe, and here its wise to know what this great man actually achieved as this flick wickedly suggests otherwise.  Once you’ve done that, feel free to put your brain on autopilot and enjoy some sweet vampire beheadings!