10,000 BC (2007)

The only good thing to come out of this movie was us. Early.

Chopper (2000)

On the heels of loving the Jesse James movie, I wanted to see "Chopper" all the more, since Andrew Dominik directed them both. I also have a strong affection for Eric Bana, for some reason, so I had been pushing for us to see "Chopper" for a while. Nick finally agreed after some resistance, since he hadn't liked it very much the last time he saw it.

Although I had no reason to think this, I had this impression that there was a motorcycle in this movie, and since I knew the film was Australian and about prison, I pictured sort of a Mad Max scenario: a convict riding around liberating people from prisons in the outback, shooting people. Lots of blood, I thought. I was right about the last part, but not the motorcycle. No motorcycle was involved.

Bana, who seems both taller and fleshier than he was in "Munich" and "Troy" (please, no laughing), is indeed a convict, who earns the name "Chopper" when he gets another convict to cut off the outside edges of his ears so that he will get sent into the prison hospital. Inside and outside of prison, Chopper leverages his charisma and his willingness to be more violent than everybody else, emerging embattled but yet untouchable (in this way, he's like Jesse James, and we kept noticing similarities between the two movies - yet another piece in the "Australian outback = American West" equation). Eventually, he becomes some sort of a media phenom, with DVDs and books produced about his story (apparently this happened in real life too).

There's a scene where Chopper's ally turns on him and shivs him repeatedly in the chest, while Chopper continues to stand up and look at the friend with reproachful eyes, finally stripping off his shirt so that everyone can see the blood pulsing out of all of his stab wounds. He's like a tree whose bark is being ripped off piece by piece. Or Christ. That's what I'll probably remember from the movie, along with the scene when Chopper pulls his flaccid penis out of his pants in order to impress a lady in a bar who's looking his way. Laughing maniacally, he watches as she tries to suppress her obvious interest, attracted as much by his madness as by the dangling member. Probably not Bana's actual banana. But hey.

Gone Baby Gone (2007)

The Casey Affleck-fest continues! This movie was directed by bro Affleck, the other one, what's-his-name, the Garner one. Casey is Patrick Kenzie, a private eye in Dorchester, MA who's called in to investigate a case of a missing four-year-old girl. Twists and turns ensue as Kenzie, his girlfriend/partner Angie, and three cops navigate Dorchester looking for Amanda.

I thought I would not be able to extract the character of Robert Ford out of Casey Affleck, and that I might find him repulsive and a bit frightening forevermore. And while occasionally, when Kenzie is at a loss for words, I expected Bob Ford's stock phrase "I'm sorry you feel that way" come out of his mouth, I mostly was able to accept the transition. The callowness of Ford, the youth and cockiness that made all of the people in "Assassination of Jesse James" want to beat him down on sight, continues in Kenzie, who pisses everyone in one bar off so much that he has to pull a gun on them to get away. But there's a much more likable moral depth there, as well.

The main problem I had with this movie was with the casting of Michelle Monaghan as Affleck's ever-present but silent girlfriend/"partner," Angie, who never does anything but just sit with him while he asks the questions. She is so much prettier than everyone else in this movie that it ruins everything every time the camera lands on her. One character, after realizing that they went to the same high school, asks Angie "Still a bit conceited, I see?" This line is trying to make the willowy, OC-esque girl actually belong to this world in some way, but since she has no back story, no accent, no feeling, no words, it's really hard to see her as a part of it. Affleck is too attractive, as well, but in his Adidas jackets and with his incipient forehead lines, you can kind of see him as a fresh-faced Irish Bostonian about to go to seed. You could, that is, if Michelle's character weren't right next to him the whole time. Together, the two look like they've been cut out of another, prettier, teen-ier movie and inserted into this one.

Apparently some people from Boston were mad that Affleck made them look so ugly. And I'm a little mad that the Afflecks, from Cambridge, claim to speak for Dorchester (am I splitting hairs?) But it's funny that this article, from Slate, which defends Dorchester from Affleck's sometimes ugly portrait, is written by Patrick Keeffe, who I happen to know grew up in Dorchester but then went to my fancy-pants high school alma mater, Milton Academy. How close does somebody have to be to a place in order to defend it or portray it properly? That's one of those koans that will never be answered, but I like what Patrick Keeffe says here: "It's Dorchester by way of Diane Arbus." Yes: there's the same sense of dirty fascination with the goings-on inside those row houses as one gets when looking at Arbus photos. The comparison is particularly apt when the film gets to the point when Affleck enters the boarded-up house where a child molester has kept a seven-year-old boy hostage. Must the child molester have a rounded head with overly slitty eyes, like he's bordering on mongoloidism? Pedophiles aren't a different phenotype, so far as I know.

But anyway. I think the film is saved from charges of exploitation by the ending. Don't read this if you don't want it spoiled. Okay. Kenzie faces a choice: take the child, Amanda, back from the kindly police captain who has kidnapped her with the help of her uncle, and give her back to her slatternly mother; or leave her to grow up a nice, middle-class life. He chooses the former, which enraged me as much as it does Angie, who leaves him for it.

But the way I read it, Kenzie has to choose to give the child back to the mother, because if he chooses the other way, he's basically saying that Helene, the mother, and tangentially, Dorchester itself are inherently toxic and dangerous. He's demonstrating faith in human nature and faith in his community. Although the film leaves you questioning whether Kenzie made the right choice, there's still a sense that in some way, the director is demonstrating his faith in Dorchester as a real, non-sensationalized place, where children don't have to be "lost" permanently.

Michael Clayton (2007)

Directed by Tony Gilroy, this movie got Tilda Swinton an Oscar and I kind of feel like it should have gotten more people involved with it more Oscars. I couldn't understand, before seeing it, how there could be such a thing as a legal thriller that was "quiet," but after viewing, I completely get it. Although the film is "Insider"-esque in its intense portrayal of the power inherent in corporations with lots of money, there's also the compelling moral journey of this Michael Clayton character.

Clayton/Clooney is an outsider in a monied world, sort of a hired legal thug who "fixes" problems that arise for his big-fancy-pants law firm (problems like undocumented nannies, drunken car accidents, etc). When he's asked to "fix" a problem involving his friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), a senior lawyer at the firm who's gone off his medication and begun to blather about how the firm is wrong to be defending U-North, a giant pesticide company, against a multi-plaintiff lawsuit, Clayton begins to have second thoughts about his life. The best parts are the ones where he goes to family reunions at shabby suburban houses in upstate NY, or interacts with his cop brother, or has man-to-man talks with his little son (I told Nick that one particular conversation of theirs was one of the only on-screen parent-child sentimentalities I've ever felt moved by).

One problem only—the movie has a weirdly inverted structure—there's an intro, and then a "four days earlier" screen, a la "Alias"—which feels unnecessarily "Memento" and unneeded.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This move got totally shafted by only getting one Oscar. We both thought it was incredibly beautiful to look at—it won the statute for cinematography—but it was also a sort of brain-bending, quiet, sad human story.

Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, joins Jesse James' band of outlaws right at the tail end of their exploits. He's a handsome young man who nobody likes or wants to be around, because he is so insecure that he seems dangerous, like a stretch of quicksand or a bridge held together by string. Affleck's eyes shift around constantly as he tries to ingratiate himself into the gang. Despite his good looks, he's completely unappealing.

Watching Affleck's Ford reminded me of the phenomenon childhood studies scholars talk about in questioning people's reactions to being around young children. They point at the horror that adults feel upon realizing that a particular child seems to be faking cuteness in order to be loved. That moment lays bare all of the assumptions that the adult has had about adult-child relationships and their naturalness and goodness, by exposing the power dynamic that's always present. Like the cute-faking child, Affleck's Robert Ford tries to play the part of the handsome young gunslinger, but the responses of everyone around him show that he is failing. And like that child might, Ford lashes back by becoming more and more angry and confused. He loses his initial hero worship of James, and as he begins to think that James is going to kill him and his brother (played by the awesome Sam Rockwell), he forms the resolve necessary to kill James first.

Meanwhile, Brad Pitt's James is mercurial, likeable at one point, unlikeable at the next, and always in control of every situation. By playing off of Ford's hero worship and insecurity, James creates a situation in which he practically aims Ford's gun at his own head and pulls the trigger.

The barren, muddy old-West landscapes (the movie was actually filmed in Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg) and and the cold, unvarnished frontier interiors make every scene look paradoxically clean and perfectly arranged.

Right At Your Door (2006)

Dir. Chris Gorak. There's a bunch of bombs that go off in LA! They have dirty-ness in them, some undefined disease! (I thought dirty bombs were supposed to have radium in them, or something, but maybe I was wrong?) There's a couple, and the husband stays at home because he's an unemployed musician, and the wife, a real ball-breaker, goes to work in her convertible, and ends up stuck in the middle of the melee. When she comes back to the house, the husband has already sealed it up with plastic and lots of duct tape, like Tom Ridge told him to do, and he refuses to let her in. I thought that a lot of the movie was supposed to involve them debating their relationship and its flaws, but there's really only a second or two when they actually do that. Mostly they're crying and trying to figure out what to do.

The movie's major flaw is that it doesn't have enough budget to show the destruction of LA in proper apocalyptic style. Instead of real visions of destruction, we get exposition about the whole scene from media outlets or from the wife ("I went to the hospital! They weren't letting anyone in and people were jumping into the windows from parking lots nearby!" Nick said, "That would be really cool, if you showed it!") The "destruction" that's on this poster never actually shows up. Instead there are a couple of shots from the couple's house toward the street of what looks like smoke from a smoke bomb set off by a production assistant a couple streets over.

This wouldn't matter as much if there weren't major holes in the plot, like when you find out at the end that the husband is the one who's actually screwed because he sealed himself into the house with a particularly deadly strain of the virus—yet, he hasn't been at all sick, while the wife, who's been outside the whole time, has been coughing to beat the band.

I still teared up when she talked on the phone to her brother, though, but mostly because I have been playing phone tag with my own brother for two months and I miss him.

Klute (1971)

Directed by Alan J. Pakula, this movie has a young Donald Sutherland as a detective from Palookaville, PA (actually, Tuscarora), who investigates a missing-persons case in the Big City. Jane Fonda is a jaded prostitute/model/actress with a connection to the missing man. Sutherland and Fonda slowly form a working relationship, as she takes him into the Underworld to follow various leads. He's a total straight man - literally jug-eared, and wearing dorky jackets, he is out of place in the wild partying seventies underground dives she brings him into, but has a masculine, old-school sense of purpose that somehow forces her to yield and help him with his investigatins, and eventually to sleep with him. For fun! Not for money!

There are a couple good what-is-the-sex-industry-all-about moments in here, like when Fonda meets with her psychiatrist and talks to her about her inability to get out of the trade (she likes the sense of control that she has over events, which the film opposes quite well to the moments when she gets passed over at modeling calls and auditions). But overall, it chafes that she's the ultimate woman-on-her-own who figures out that she can't really hack it without a man for protection. "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," from 1977, seems to be sort of a more violent spiritual sequel to this movie.