Movie Maven

Directed by: Gregg Araki
Written by: Dylan Haggerty
Starring: Anna Faris, Danny Masterson, Adam Brody, Roscoe Lee Browne

I'll be seeing "Pineapple Express" this weekend, though mixed reviews fill me with trepidation about relinquishing my precious $10. But I'm too intrigued to see a stoner/action flick to not take the risk.

I am a connoisseur of the stoner flick, ever since I was a freshman in college, spending evenings in my buddy's apartment "chillaxing" in her inflatable chair and watching "Half Baked." After deciding to see "Express" this weekend, I was inspired to watch "Smiley Face," a movie that was completely ignored when it came out, but which I had heard about from several people as the best stoner movie action around.

A homage of true pot cinema, it is the story of Jane F., who gets really baked off of her roommates cupcakes, and then must travel to a hemp festival to convince her dealer not to take her furniture cause she hasn't paid for her drugs, because she spent all her money on this really awesome sleep number bed, which is the one thing she really doesn't want her dealer to take, and she also has to pay the power bill, and buy enough pot to remake the pot cupcakes that her roommate made so he doesn't know she ate them.

So, basically, the story is a story your buddy would tell you if she was high and you were chillaxing on her inflatable chair, Supertramp playing gently in the background.

The film is a glorious meandering through Los Angeles, a place that in itself looks like a bad trip. Faris is wonderful precisely because she doesn't at all seem concerned with seeming either pretty or likeable. Her hair looks like it hasn't been washed in a few days; her eyes are perpetually bloodshot and her movements are slow and deliberate without ever seeming graceful. Her inner monologue is a masterpiece of stoner logic; in one delightful scene she decides that owning a picture of President Garfield to display her love of lasagna would be "totally meta."

When you actually think through what happens in "Smiley Face" you don't come up with much. But that's actually a good thing. Weed is special in that it makes every movement of your body seem like a momentous, arduous task, so it makes sense that taking a bus across town to Venice Beach could be construed as an epic rivaling "The Odyssey."

Faris leads, or rather is followed by, a sparkling supporting cast, including ur-straight man John Krasinski, post-"OC" Adam Brody as a pot dealer with hilarious rasta dreds, and Roscoe Lee Brown as both the narrator and existential muser within Jane's toked-out soul.

The most fascinating part of "Smiley Face" is really the paradox of portraying marijuana in film. It's hardly a social commentary on drug use: pot is demonstrated as a funny, and primarily harmless drug that just makes people stupid for a little while. When Jane asks if not paying back her dealer Steve will get her killed, Steve scoffs. "Oh, come on Jane, I deal weed. I'm not gonna break your kneecaps. At the most I'll, I dunno, take your furniture or something."

But there is something to be said for how pot also can make you extremely unlikeable once you've had too much. No one likes the lazy, self-involved idiot who borrows your money and doesn't pay the power bill cause she spent it all on weed. So we don't mind when Jane gets her comeuppance for her escapades at the end of that sun-drenched day in Los Angeles. Though we do hope that maybe she'll replace her furniture with inflatable chairs.

Written and Directed by: Craig Brewer
Starring: Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson, Justin Timberlake

If I had to describe "Black Snake Moan" in one word, the only one that seems remotely fitting is "writhing." The Southern Gothic fable about a wild girl and the God-fearing bluesman who tries to cure her of her wicked ways is a tale that, for the first half at least, moves forward like the titular snake, slithering and undulating in ways you didn't know could appear in nature.

When we first see Rae (Ricci), she's making love to her boyfriend (Timberlake) for the last time before he joins the army. It's a lovely intimate moment, but the second he drives away, she falls to the ground, clawing and moaning like an alley cat in heat. The cicadas in the background swell in time with her wailing, and oh, she just can't help herself, she needs it, she's gotta have it now. She goes on to a party where she takes all manner of hillbilly meds, fucks a guy on a football field and ends up beaten on the side of the road in just her confederate t-shirt and dirty white panties within the first 20 minutes of the film.

Watching Rae self-destruct is both terrifying and fabulously fun to watch. Ricci and Craig Brewer, who wrote and directed the film, understand the special paradox of melodrama: it's so serious it becomes absurd, and its absurdity becomes an somewhat accurate portrayal of truth. Rae embodies sin and inequity, but in actuality she's a victim, and the message is beautifully buried underneath all the dirt and sweat. What follows is a deliciously surreal turn when Jackson's Lazarus finds Rae, takes her home and chains her to a radiator in order to "heal" her. The most remarkable thing about this turn of events is that Brewer miraculously manages to avoid the obvious icky racial issues surrounding the image of a large black man keeping a white girl chained up in his house. The only shame is that about halfway through the film, the reason for Rae's affliction is neatly "explained." After this, the film begins to take itself too seriously, which is a little disappointing.

But, oh, this cast. Samuel L. Jackson is fabulous as Lazarus. Jackson does his own singing and guitar-picking, and his voice is a striking mix of longing, hate and sheer sexual virility. I have a theory that if you simply put Samuel L. Jackson into the frame, the mise en scene immediately becomes 45 percent more bad-ass, and this film goes a long way to prove it.

I think Justin Timberlake is a little overrated as an actor (people seem to fall over themselves when they realize he can actually deliver a line) but there is a delicacy to his performance here as Rae's cuckolded boyfriend Ronnie which I wasn't expecting. He surrounds his character with the thinnest veneer of machismo, which, when stripped away, reveals a hot ball of pain and insecurity. It could have been a throwaway character, but Timberlake manages to hold his own nicely with Ricci and Jackson.

The last good part of "Black Snake Moan," is set in a honky-tonk, with Jackson singing a raging version of Stack-o-Lee and Ricci whirling in a trance-like (and entirely sober) state. Yes, Jackson's singing her pain, he's singing the wickedness out of her, and in that moment you can practically wipe the Louisiana humidity off your foreheads and smell the warm spilled beer cooking on the bar. Jackson's role may be to lead Rae back to God, but Brewer never lets us forget that this is a movie about humanity.

Photo courtesy of Collider.

Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer

My God, it's such a mess. The plot is packed to the gills. There are nameless characters that flow in and out, spouting pertinent dialogue, and then dissolving away with no explanation. It has the look of a film that was obviously carved up from a much longer movie like a Thanksgiving turkey. It jerks in fits and starts, allows the audience no way to stop and catch their breath. There are plot and continuity holes that you could drive a truck through. And the themes (Duality! Moral ambiguity! Patriot Act! Patriot Act!) are dropped sometimes with an audible thud.


And it went to his head. He lost control, created a monster. He became drunk with power, and every little idea that popped into his head was given to him (i.e.: 'Hey, I know! Let's do illegal wiretapping! With sonar!'). He was a mad scientist, not remembering from his "Memento" days that sparing is usually better, that if you want a film to brood on the moral ambivalence of human kind, it needs to whisper sometimes, not bellow.


Primarily though, the film is salvaged, and even wrestled into something vaguely coherent, by its spectacular cast. Christian Bale is an even better Batman than his last go-round, and a thousand times better as Bruce Wayne. In the first film he had a tendency to stiffen his dialogue, thinking that a haunted nature could be expressed by simply excising one's personality. He learned his lesson, and in "Knight" Bale says forty different things simply with a turn of his head, or the merest clench of his (admittedly yummy) jaw. Katie Holmes has been forbidden from spreading her crazy within 500 yards of a Batman set, and as such has been replaced by the luminous Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes. Gyllenhaal manages to imbue her damsel in distress a brain and a soul. Nolan never quite gives her her due in this blue-toned boys club, but at least she manages to hold her own.

But why do I prattle on about Bale and Gyllenhaal. We know who you really want to talk about.

It would have given me that surge of malicious glee only critics can feel to say that Heath Ledger's performance was over-hyped. There's something about the populist love of a person that makes the elitist in me want to run over that love like road kill. And it's impossible to ignore the fact that perhaps his performance would not be considered as Oscar-worthy had he not died an awful, pointless death.

But the stunning, improbable truth is that I didn't remember Ledger the man at all as I was watching him on screen. Such was the power, the absolute engrossment of his performance. His Joker is like something out of a Coen brothers film: there's a move involving a pencil that is both horrifying and outrageously funny in much the same way as Steve Buscemi's wood chipper scene in "Fargo." His movements are lurching and twitchy; he hunches his shoulders and leans slightly to one side, his tongue slithers out of his head, and yet it never feels overdone. His characterization is so wonderful you want him on the screen every moment; when he leaves you can't wait for him to appear again. And though the plot might be convoluted and even absurd, you couldn't care less as long as he's there in his frosting makeup and carved grin. You don't even remember it's Ledger until the movie's over, and you realize that this particular Joker is no more. There will be no sequels for Heath Ledger's Joker. And I don't envy the man who might replace him.

There is lots of tongue-wagging about "The Dark Knight," and the records it will break, the cinematic value it will have in the future, the filmic culture it will inspire. I'm not sure it'll ever beat "Gone with the Wind" or "Titanic" either in terms of box office numbers or place within the film canon. But, flawed as it is, it has filled me with hope. The mainstream film industry has been lagging, putting out an absurd amount of schlocky films every week and filtering them in and out of theaters like water. Cheap Wal-Mart pieces that you forget about five minutes after seeing it. The idea of movie-going as a true communal experience, something that you share again and again has really been lost within the last few years. Perhaps "Dark Knight" won't make as much money as "Titanic." But if it's allowed people to regain just a little bit of the wonder we used to feel going to the movies, then it has truly accomplished something great.

Photo found on Lee Side Story