Brief words on some stuff I sawed.
Hopefully they’ll be briefer in the future…
MEGAMIND (2010, Tom McGrath)
We might say that Pixar’s emotional signature baroquely examines how maturity is often shaped by losses we never overcome; the resonance of Dreamworks’s storytelling, then, frequently rests in the manner that innocent expectations often fail to achieve fruition (most indelibly managed in the father/son relationships of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and How to Train Your Dragon). Megamind, however, is the first film from that studio aside from Shrek 2 & etc that I felt coasted on this truism in a generic fashion rather than endowing it with mercilessly specific heft. The titular blue brain-meanie (Will Ferrell) takes his mythic villianry for granted until he accidentally does in his Michaelangelo-sculpted arch-nemesis Metro Man (Brad Pitt); the ambiguous existential space he’s then forced to inhabit demands that he embody both ends of the comic book dualism binary. Since it’s a kids’ movie, the writing occasionally feels timid towards the Camus-like knottiness of the protagonist’s resulting transformation, and over-compensates with flat jokes (David Cross, as Megamind’s talking fish sidekick, doesn’t do much aside from act as a sounding board for his boss’s puerilely naughty thoughts). But McGrath makes up in plot what he can’t muster in dialog; that Tina Fey’s cropped hair careerist begins dating a dybbuk’d nebbish under false pretenses provides enough of a (mega)mindfuck to earn the obligatory “gotcha!”s of the ending. Between this and Greenberg I think we can safely assume that Hollywood doesn’t view Ben Stiller as a sentient being.
FOUR LIONS (2010, Christopher Morris)
I’ve always felt that, despite the formidable guffaws it provides, the bumbling comedy of The Thick of It/In the Loop represents a new kind of political apathy–”Got Bureaucracy?”, this trans-Atlantic franchise seems to ask, cynically convinced that no matter how determined the brainy bleeding hearts of the west intermittently become, they’re no match for the stentorian dunces at the top of the legislative heap. Don’t get me wrong: We should laugh at our leaders’ shortcomings from time to time, especially since learning of the egregious errors that both provoked and then failed to protect us from 9-11. What else can we do? Four Lions, written and directed by Thick of It collaborators, examines incompetence on the other side, following a group of militant British-Muslim sleeper cells through a mishap-laden training in Pakistan and subsequent suicide bombing attempts in England. It’s not precisely satire; the surreality of life isn’t exposed but speculated upon and made grotesque. Terrorists aren’t politicians–when they succumb to stupidity, they don’t get re-elected, they simply die, leaving their missions unaccomplished.
In this way Four Lions means to reverse the ontological joke of The Thick of It, implying that the movie is a giddy riff on extremism’s inanity rather than a colorfully closer-to-reality-than-you’d-care-to-admit farce; but the sheer fancy of it emasculates the spoofing. (Why couldn’t it have been the story of a band of dolts toiling under a genuinely ruthless Jihadist? I mean, aside from the incredibly incendiary potential of such a premise?) It’s also simply not that funny, aside from the plump whitey (Nigel Lindsay) who wants to blow up a mosque to mobilize the fundies. There are too many “This is mah Jihad, bro”s, too many physical flubs–so when the filmmakers decide to remind us of the fact that these jokers are toying with life and death, the intrusion of violence has no bubble of comic safety to pop. There are effectively schizoid sequences–”You’re going to paradise, brother crow!”–but what starts out as a general observation of the way that terrorism’s larger-than-life threats loom surreptitiously about us sours with the urge to give these largely interchangeable characters souls to be redeemed or lost. That the best material (one of the “lions” raps the word “died” as “da-heed”) is squandered over the end credits, after the comedy has been made complicated, encapsulates my hesitancy towards the movie’s tone. We’re only invited to laugh at the supreme buffoonery of violent fundamentalism in theory; as soon as evil thoughts turn to (attempted) evil deeds we must be reminded that these are “real people” to be “pitied”.
THE NARROW MARGIN (1952, Richard Fleischer).
Despite their anecdotal typecasting as phallic euphemisms, trains are more fittingly the psycho-scape of choice for heat oppressed brains–men under fire, bulleting towards a distant goal, barely maintaining a desperate grip on the sangfroid they require to finish the job. The train illustrates the devil’s bargain implied by any tense task: The faster one moves towards completion, the blurrier the context of duty becomes. The inverse of Howard Hawks’s manic-depressive theatrical comedy 20th Century, Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin is the train noir par excellence–it’s as tight as a coach seat, bearing all the rickety necessity of a meal car. Appropriately, the plot is merely palatable: A detective with a smallish frog in his throat (Charles McGraw) is sent to Chicago to retrieve a gangster’s widow (Marie Windsor) who plans to name names while testifying in California.
The detective’s pudgy partner (Don Beddoe) is snuffed out before they even get out of the widow’s apartment (her pearl necklace pops off at the top of the stairs, and the camera jaggedly follows the beads’ descent to a dark corridor where a gunman silently waits); the mob boss’s entourage then spend the remainder of the transcontinental trip attempting to buy off the detective’s protectoracy by appealing to his guilt (he’s offered “a lot of money” that could take care of his partner’s wife). The dialog is clipped to the quick, and rife with enough arbitrary one-upmanship to make Preston Sturges crack a smile–(between the detective and the gun moll) ”You make me sick to my stomach!” ”Well use your own sink!”–while the story curves with blunt tortuousness around the detective’s conscience and a blonde honey-cum-single-mother (Jacqueline White) that arouses an awareness of his loneliness. But unlike in 20th Century, the camera comes along for the ride. It squeezes past corpulent co-passengers as it dollies through hallways (narrow margins, indeed), leads us on with squinting suspicions and then fails to follow through with eye-line matches, and, in one memorable scene, gets kicked and thrown aside in a scuffle. The parsimonious shadow (odd for a B noir) and contemplatively tilted angles don’t simply impose a sense of dime store claustrophobia, either: The spatial mercurialness of the train is the detective’s steel-tipped head cracked open and flung across the western states.
No intro from yours truly aside from this: I look forward to what American film in 2011 has that can possibly stand confidently alongside the domestic releases of Film Socialisme, Certified Copy, and a host of others. I glimpse 
