The Worst Ever

The Wonderful World of Disney?

When Roy E. Disney died last week, it got me thinking about The Walt Disney Company and the movies it has produced over the years. Disney is the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world, and its movies probably receive favorable notices as often as those of any other film studio. Certainly its more ambitious projects -- Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin -- and all of its co-ventures with Pixar have received nearly unanimous acclaim, and when the AFI released its list last year of the top ten animated films of all time, nine of them were Disney products.

The older movies on the list -- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi -- are classics of the animation genre, but are they classics of film in general? I think many critics would say so, but I wonder if they wouldn't be voting more with childhood affection than with sensible critical judgment. Of the six major film studios -- the other five are Warner Bros., Paramount, Columbia, Universal, and Fox -- Disney is the only one that, in my view, hasn't ever made a really great movie under its own banner, even though its "art-house" subsidiary Miramax has. (You wouldn't think that Pulp Fiction and Disney belong in the same sentence, but Miramax was acquired by Disney in 1993, the same year Harvey Weinstein bought Tarantino's script.) Walt Disney Pictures itself limits its projects largely to family-friendly fare, which, as any other genre-limitation might, narrows the range of its artistic possibilities.

But I, too, have some fond feelings for Disney. Before a film, I get the same stupid sense of comfort from its logo, whose castle recently was refurbished rather magnificently, as every other person who grew up during the Disney Renaissance. Surely there are some Disney movies that hold up under adult scrutiny. And I've done some research and found a few titles that, though they are not Stagecoach or The Third Man, may remind us why, even after its early revolutions in animation, Disney has achieved such gargantuan success in motion pictures. I particularly enjoyed the following:

Tron (1982)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Cool Runnings (1993)

Toy Story (1995)

The Emperor's New Groove (2000)

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)

Bridge to Terabithia (2007)

WALL-E (2008)

As it happens, Roy E. Disney, whose name always was one of the ones I thought of first when I thought of the company even though I hadn't any idea what his role was, joined Disney's board of directors in 1967, so all of the movies above were made during his tenure. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of them were also made during my own lifetime, as I remain largely unfamiliar with the bulk of Disney's work prior to the '80s and largely indifferent to those bits -- the unavoidable favorites -- with which I am familiar.

The celebrated magic of Disney's fairy-tale cartoons, if it indeed exists, is lost on me, though I think The Emperor's New Groove is a splendid comedy, almost too irrepressibly slapsticky for our millennium. The best of the movies I listed, however, is certainly Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which I did not know till now was produced by Disney. Remarkably, Robert Zemeckis was able to wrangle permission from Warner Bros. and Paramount to use Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Betty Boop. The detective stories of film noir, which Roger Rabbit parodied, usually skulked in the shadow of Hollywood, but none gave as colorful a picture of the Golden Age as Zemeckis did, partly by showcasing these iconic toons. Roger Rabbit may, after all, be a classic -- a greater pleasure for cinephiles and for children, perhaps.

A complete list of the movies produced by Disney is available here.

I've yet to see The Princess and the Frog, of course.

With Friends Like These . . .

I recently came across a high-profile petition addressed to the Swiss courts, asking for the release of Roman Polanski. It was written more than a month ago by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and was signed by Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Mike Nichols, and Paul Auster, among other celebrities. Take a look:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, 26 September, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.

Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute of limitations in Europe.

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious film-maker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honour, require it.

Are artists and intellectuals doomed always to embarrass themselves so thoroughly in matters of this kind? Are smart people really so stupid?

This morally lofty letter can't withstand the smallest bit of moral scrutiny. Forget the idiotic opening line, with its implicit complaint that Polanski was treated commonly and not like the sort of person who is friends with Bernard-Henri Lévy -- and that, by arresting him before an awards ceremony, the police deviated from some gentlemanly code of honor that officers of the law should be obliged to follow when arresting rapists. Forget the trite and simplistic suggestion that the Nazis or the Stalinists caused Polanski to rape that 13-year-old -- or that, in surviving those villains, he accumulated such a stockpile of suffering as to offset any future wrongdoing on his part. Forget even that the subject and the verb disagree in the last sentence. (Seriously?)

The real embarrassment is that phrase in the penultimate sentence: "ingenious film-maker." When I began reading the letter, I was truly hoping Lévy could make it to the end without bringing that up. Yes, Polanski is an ingenious filmmaker, but can someone tell me how that is the least bit relevant?

Everyone who values art knows the frustration of hearing philistines try to discredit a great artist by bringing up unpleasant details of his life (he was a racist, a sexist, an anti-Semite). We know that a novel or poem is good or bad irrespective of the private misdeeds or kindnesses of its author. Indeed, I would venture to guess that every person who signed Lévy's letter knows this. But if a bad life cannot make great art less great, then it follows that great art cannot make a bad life less bad. So when we're talking about Roman Polanski's life, it doesn't matter that Chinatown and Tess were terrific films.

This seems pretty elementary to me, and perhaps not even those who signed this letter would argue against it, but by tossing in that ostensibly casual reference to Polanski's brilliance, Lévy tacitly makes an opposing claim: Roman Polanski is a genius, and that must be considered. He exposes the foolish reason why he and his cosigners are really on the criminal's side. Polanski is an artist, and they like his movies. Who would petition for the release of a garbageman who sodomized a 13-year-old? For a defender of Roman Polanski to have credibility, we must be able to believe that said defender would equally support a talentless, unlikable, uneducated rapist, even if the victim were that defender's own daughter. Who can believe that of a writer who, in his letter, invokes the word "film-maker" but leaves out the word "rape"?

Some commentators have pointed out that, if Polanski were not a famous filmmaker, he would not have been hunted down -- that the United States is just flexing its muscles in a high-profile case. This is correct but, ultimately, also irrelevant. If other people get away with rape, it does not follow that we must lament the one who gets caught; we might instead lament that the others get away. If what Polanski did is wrong, then it is wrong no matter how vainglorious his accuser.

The irony of Lévy's protest is that it's more likely to harm Polanski's cause than to help it. In general, people detest the frivolous moral posturing of the intelligentsia, and it probably has aggravated public anger toward Polanski.

Surely there are better reasons to wish for his freedom than the ones insinuated by Lévy. I, too, would prefer to see Polanski freed -- I suspect that he's not a threat to anyone anymore, and I can't say that he deserves to go to jail for what he did, because I have no idea what he or anybody else deserves. I don't think anyone, even a judge, knows what anyone deserves. To me, the only use of a prison is to restrain those whose crimes suggest that they would otherwise be likely to cause harm -- I do not trust it to be an instrument of "justice."

I discovered Lévy's petition in the London Review of Books, which has published a good article by Jenny Diski, in which she discusses Polanski's case in relation to the rape she suffered as a 14-year-old. She suggests that all of us, even Polanski's fans, should face up honestly to what the director did (I agree) and that we "shouldn't worry too much about Polanski's present sleeping arrangements." I don't know about the last part -- as it happens, I don't spend much time worrying about Polanski's sleeping arrangements or anyone else's except my own, but I think I probably should. Maybe this is too easy for me to say, but just as I can't be sure what fate Polanski deserves, I can't really be sure that he deserves less of our concern than others do. I am sure, however, that he does not deserve more of it for having directed excellent movies.

Comedy and the High High Concept

Last month, I watched The Invention of Lying, which has come and gone and was not particularly good. You probably didn't see it, but surely you remember the premise from TV spots: Ricky Gervais lives in a world much like ours, except everyone tells the truth at all times, even to the point of blurting out non sequiturs simply because they are true.

In the movie, Gervais is in love with Jennifer Garner, but she doesn't want "fat, snub-nosed children." She likes him as a friend, however, and says often that he is "nice" and "funny." I suppose these lines seemed natural to Gervais when he wrote the screenplay: the portly heroes of comedies like this one are always nice and funny, which is why we root for them to get the girl.

But what occurred to me during the movie is that Gervais's character, Mark, is not at all funny. Even compared to the male leads in dismal romantic comedies like You've Got Mail and The Ugly Truth, he is not. That's because Mark never actually tries to tell a joke. Comedy does not exist in his world. At the end of the movie's first act, he invents lying; in the second act, he goes one step further and invents religion; he never makes it as far as humor. So it's a silly line for Garner, but the movie is unique: it may be the only comedy where nobody makes a joke.

That's not to say that the film is entirely unfunny -- it has its moments -- but everything that is funny is funny only to us: we laugh because they say things that no one in normal society can say, and like four-year-olds, they say them as though they were perfectly normal things to say. But to the speakers, this is how society works; this is how people act, and Mark, though less cruel than Rob Lowe's character, essentially is no different from anyone else until his groundbreaking discovery. He doesn't really have a personality, humorous or not. Everyone in the film's universe seems slightly lobotomized, actually, and I've wondered if it's merely because the movie is badly written or if this is, to some extent, how we might be in Gervais's scenario: without fiction, we'd lose imagination, and without imagination, we'd lose ourselves. The movie is badly written, but I think there's some truth to the idea it illustrates, too.

But, regardless of whether personalities could exist in The Invention of Lying, I'm certain that humor could not. With truth omnipresent and unbroken, "truth" becomes an irrelevant concept; without its opposite, it has no meaning and so cannot exist. And without truth, comedy disappears. Jokes are funny when they depart from the truth in unexpected ways, push it by exaggeration into ridiculousness, or else uncover it suddenly where falsehood once cloaked it; all jokes depend upon it. What can trigger laughter when everything is in earnest? There can be no shifts in tone, no outlandish perspectives -- except, of course, the fact-driven perspective of everyone in the movie, which is outlandish only to us liars, who eventually get used to it, and then the movie has nothing to offer. We're like children giggling at the unfamiliar ways of foreigners: once they become familiar, we stop giggling.

I'm not familiar with Gervais's other work, but presumably he can tell jokes, so even if The Invention of Lying sounded like a brilliant idea, I think it was actually a very bad one. It straitjacketed him as a comedian. And the reason I'm posting today -- it's not to review a month-old movie that few liked -- is that I began to think of other comedies in the same mode: the sort of comedy for which, instead of concentrating upon inventing funny characters or lines or situations, the screenwriter came up with a really funny central concept, and the premise itself became the movie's main comic attraction. Often these premises are wildly fantastical and sound as those they were devised to make a studio executive laugh in one sentence or less.

There's one that comes to mind easily if you've watched The Invention of Lying, and that's Liar Liar, whose ha-ha premise -- a wheeling-and-dealing lawyer must tell only the truth for one day -- yielded a lot of the same comedy that its younger cousin did. Later on, Jim Carrey did another one of these with Bruce Almighty, in which a normal guy becomes God. Freaky Friday and Down to Earth fit in here, too, but the category doesn't extend to every fantastical comedy: in Back to the Future, for example, the fun is not implied by the synopsis but is in the later twists and in the characters. Likewise, a comedy needn't be fantastical to belong to the aforementioned group: I didn't see I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (two straight men must pretend to be a gay couple), but it jumps into my brain here, and I suspect that it would fit in with these other films. In each, an overbearing premise dictates all the humor to follow; everything is about this funny idea.

I am thinking of some of the comedies that I like best, and they're all more various than the junk I named in the preceding paragraph. With a superior film, you're not laughing at just one conceit. Summarize A Christmas Story or Clerks in single sentence and see if the concept is funny. Of course, I don't mean to say that the concept must not be funny: the Marx brothers and Woody Allen invented extremely wacky (though not so calculatedly "clever") starting points for their early romps, but in Duck Soup and Bananas, they were only starting points. Later on, Woody Allen did try the high-concept comedy with Zelig (about a man who blends into every place and group), which was technically brilliant, sly, and highly enjoyable but, after all, amounted to a series of skillful exercises on the same theme. It hadn't the freedom to be as funny in as many ways as Annie Hall, and it wasn't. The restrictiveness of this subgenre is antithetical to comedy's natural anarchy: I never was Jim Carrey's biggest fan, but did he ever seem more thoroughly tied down than in Bruce Almighty?

Perhaps so -- it's just occurred to me that he not long ago did what appeared to be another one of these with Yes Man, which, apparently, was about a man who had to say yes to every question he was asked for a year. Does Carrey seek out these "funny concepts" because he himself is not very funny? Maybe he's wise for it, but if Ricky Gervais is funnier than Jim Carrey, he probably should find a movie that does not limit itself to one joke and its protagonist to none.

But, then, I'm probably silly to try to impose my own limits upon comedy. Here I was about to propose a rule -- this sort of thing works, and that sort of thing doesn't -- and then I thought of two terrific exceptions, each of which begins with an amusing what-if that then directs the entire course of the movie. Neither film is as much a story as it is a single notion toyed with again and again. One is truly is a one-joke performance, and it still seems hilarious and profound. Both, in fact, are hilarious and profound. These movies shouldn't work, but here they are: Groundhog Day and Being There.

So, since exceptions don't prove rules (they only prove that most rules are stupid), I give up. Movies can succeed in any fashion and fail in any fashion; they can do anything and do it poorly or well. That's what's fun about them, really. But I'm still not going to see Yes Man.

'2012' Without Frills

I meant to share this when I saw it a couple weeks ago on I Watch Stuff, and for some reason I thought of it today.

This is the trailer for 2012, the upcoming disaster epic by Roland Emmerich (Independence Day), except all the shots featuring special effects have been removed. As the creator of the video notes, the CGI was "really distracting in the other trailers; this one really focuses on the performances."

It reveals what an embarrassing experience this must have been for John Cusack, for whom I suppose this movie involved just sitting around and screaming and making terrified faces. It's like a series of those shots they take of you midway through roller coaster rides. Inexplicably, it ends with a cat playing the keyboard, which I think may actually be a special effect.

Recently Viewed (9/25/09)

Extract (2009) - Mike Judge really likes making fun of stupid people. In 2006, he spent the entirety of Idiocracy doing just that, and though Extract replaces its rather hysterical social commentary with the low-key mode of human observation that Judge employed in Office Space, it's still meaner toward working-class people than any other movie I've seen. None of the employees at Jason Bateman's extract plant is smarter than an infant, and all are more unpleasant. The jokes are a little too easy most of the time, and the epiphanies don't always feel as though they've been earned, but it's funny enough, and it's nice to see a movie so concerned about an ordinary, intelligent, slightly boring, slightly unhappy guy who is not suicidal or homicidal. For all its smug cruelty, a pleasingly modest movie.

Lovers on the Bridge (1991) - Unwatchable. A ridiculous combination of sluggish reticence and outlandish, extravagant spectacle more flamboyant and absurd than the dumbest musical. One of the most idiotic French romance films ever made and one of the longest. If you liked L'Atalante, you'll hate this, and if you hated L'Atalante, you'll really hate this.

Taking Woodstock (2009) - An appealingly mild-mannered protagonist and a nice cast all around but a little too slow for a slender comedy that gets by mostly on airy charm. The LSD scene in particular takes way too long to get going, though it leads to visuals much cooler than the ones in Easy Rider's acid trip. Ang Lee's movies rarely have much urgency about them, but Taking Woodstock still is less dull than it probably would have been if it had been directed by an ex-hippie who actually attended the concert; Lee's film focuses on the people of White Lake, not the stage or those clustered around it. Too gentle to be really funny, yet Local Hero managed to do this sort of thing extraordinarily well; I don't really know how.

Wuthering Heights (1939) - I'd never seen this classic all the way through. Based on Emily Brontë's great novel, it excises chunks of the original story so large that, even if you haven't read the book in years, you'll notice that a great deal -- the whole second half, you might say -- is missing. Wyler tries harder to make Heathcliff "sympathetic" than Brontë did, and he's somewhat less awesome as a result, but Olivier is very impressive; in Merle Oberon's hands, Catherine becomes downright insipid. Slightly stilted but not quite camp, the movie retains some of the power of the book thanks in large part to Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography on the Yorkshire moors (actually Ventura County, California, standing in not so unconvincingly, at least for viewers who have never been to Yorkshire), which he shot two years before Citizen Kane. Gets the author's name wrong (she's Brontë, not Bronté) in the opening credits, astoundingly.

24 Hour Party People (2002) - I wasn't the least bit interested in the Manchester music scene of the '70s and '80s, but this movie is pretty brilliant. As the ridiculous but endearing Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) vividly narrates the rise and fall of Factory Records, director Winterbottom's perpetual digressions veer into Wilson's personal life, his day job as a TV reporter, and his fantasies, putting in and leaving out details and events seemingly at random. Winterbottom provides actual footage from the era, into which clever editing allows him to insert his own actors, and he includes cameos by the real people whom his performers are portraying. His characters constantly break the fourth wall, disputing the accuracy of the film and commenting upon its omissions. It sounds like a big, sprawling mess, and it is, but it's infectiously enthusiastic and fun to watch. All the madness makes it feel like a personal history, more authentic somehow than the official story. Even the grimy digital video works here -- the fanzine aesthetic seems right. Coogan is great, very funny. Probably the only good movie about rock music that I've ever seen.

Black and White (1999) - Completely retarded look at the fascinating sociological phenomenon of white kids imitating black kids. A palpable aura of self-satisfaction stemming from (as director Toback would have it) its in-your-face attitude, cutting-edge reportage, and daring analytical brio. Toback is consumed by his subject in a frenzied, delirious way that is utterly antithetical to actual thought; the result is a series of pointless vignettes in which he hasn't a single thing to say, but he says it loudly. Mike Tyson's performance is the best part; fellow athlete Allan Houston doesn't fare nearly as well.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) - By far Tarantino's best work since Pulp Fiction. That's not saying much, and this doesn't approach his 1994 masterpiece, but it's a surprisingly gripping movie. An extremely silly story based on a totally inane and perhaps even offensive idea (Tarantino was tired of Jews always being the "victims" in Nazi movies and wanted to give them a chance to kick some ass too), it is nevertheless very impressive as a series of discrete set pieces; nearly every scene could play as its own short film and entertain. Inglourious Basterds showcases the same ostentatious mastery of dialogue that characterized Tarantino's early work, but it does so without the filmmaker's customary verbosity; here, the marvelously tense pauses are showier than the cleverest lines. The film moves perhaps even more slowly than Jackie Brown did, yet every shot feels ebullient. Scenes achieve just the right balance of wit, suspense, and violence. Christopher Waltz's performance is chilling and funny and altogether remarkable. A great B-movie; still a B-movie.

Fortune Favors the Bold

I do not think I have ever successfully sat through an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series or of any of its television progeny. Until last night, I'd never seen any of the movies spawned by the TV franchise, either.

Fortunately, J.J. Abrams's reinvented Star Trek doesn't require any prior familiarity with Gene Roddenberry's creation. It starts from the beginning, with the birth of our protagonist, James T. Kirk, whose mother goes into labor just as the evil Nero attacks the USS Kelvin, where Kirk's father, the spaceship's new captain, dies moments after his son takes his first breath. The opening struck me as too frenetic, too eager to grab our attention with lasers and explosions and the screams of childbirth.

Star Trek doesn't slow down much during its 127-minute running time, but I soon became accustomed to its headlong pace. It's actually a rather wonderful action movie, directed with a childlike enthusiasm for pilots hurtling through faraway galaxies; for giant, bloodthirsty monsters; for time travel; for interplanetary warfare; and for good triumphing over evil. It is unburdened by maudlin romantic subplots (Kirk never falls in love), heavy moralizing, and excessive background information about the futuristic universe that Star Trek inhabits: We're thrust directly into the story, which has Kirk joining the Starfleet Academy in San Francisco; meeting a half-human, half-Vulcan named Spock; slipping onto the USS Enterprise; and eventually coming face-to-face with his father's killer.

A great deal of the plot seems silly to me (most sci-fi plots do, but I really don't see why Kirk had to be exiled to Hoth midway through the picture), but it doesn't matter so much because the characters are thoroughly comprehensible. Kirk is a brash, youthful genius, whose jocular insouciance masks an insurrectionary spirit. Spock, sedate and judicious, though conflicted about his mixed heritage, subdues his human passions in favor of logic. Their relationship, transpiring alongside the individual advancements and crises of each, forms the modest emotional crux of the film, with irritation and enmity transforming into respect and partnership. As a portrait of friendship among young servicemen, it's no Gallipoli (with aliens threatening Earth, Kirk and Spock don't have much time to get to know each other), but it helps that the two leads are fresh, amiable performers, each previously unknown to me. Chris Pine is not quite so suave as to render Kirk unbearable, and Zachary Quinto looks just right as Spock. Even without the makeup or the haircut, he probably could be mistaken for a Vulcan.

Abrams also intersperses cameos by more familiar faces. I was pleasantly surprised to spot Winona Ryder, Simon Pegg, and John Cho (the latter two add a few unobtrusive moments of comic relief), and I even enjoyed Tyler Perry for his sheer incongruity. Meanwhile, Eric Bana, whom I took a little while to recognize as the Romulan villain, finally appears to be having a good time on screen. Since everyone has already seen the film, I don't mind revealing all this. In any case, every reviewer has mentioned the appearance of Leonard Nimoy, whose substantial, deep-voiced presence lends the the movie an inoffensive dose of gravitas.

The special effects here are, of course, first-rate, though none of the astral battles carry the same thrill as those in the original Star Wars did. What really makes this movie work is the high-spirited approach that J.J. Abrams and his writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, have taken to the material. Another director might have approached Star Trek with a rigid, geeky reverence; yet another might have decided that only a spoof of its predecessor, like 2004's Starsky & Hutch, could satisfy modern sensibilities. Abrams's Star Trek is neither camp nor parody. Its ebullience never gives way to carelessness, nor its respect to imitation. It avoids the staid earnestness that, in my perhaps mistaken recollection, characterized the show; it has fun without making fun. Its only really unfortunate dip into hipness involves the overuse of lens flares, which appear with an almost comical frequency. At the same time, it freely borrows the hoariest cliches of space opera, but we're moving too fast to care. It's pure adventure, and in this way it resembles 2007's Transformers and, yes, the first Star Wars.

'Sherlock Holmes' Trailer

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, obviously has very little in common with Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. It does, however, look like a good time:

The question is whether the relatively commonplace pleasure of a funny and exciting action picture can satisfy amid reminders of the more exquisite pleasure of the original Sherlock Holmes. I'll definitely see this, but I wonder if Ritchie wouldn't have been better off calling his movie something else.

We'll find out this Christmas.

'The Road' Trailer

John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's not-bad, Pulitzer-winning book The Road, which I guess was actually a novelization of The Day After Tomorrow, has yielded its first trailer:

I didn't like the book quite enough to care that this is going to suck, but yeah, this is going to suck.

The Last King of Journalism

State of Play, a middling thriller about a newspaper's investigation of a political scandal, has an atypically star-studded pedigree, with three Oscar winners in its cast in addition to an Oscar-winning director. Russell Crowe plays Cal McCaffrey, a shaggy, old-school reporter for the Washington Globe and a former roommate of Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), a congressman who breaks down in tears on television when he hears of the death (suicide? murder?) of a female coworker, which leads to suspicions of an affair. Rachel McAdams is Della Fry, the young blogger who becomes McCaffrey's sidekick as he investigates the Collins story. Helen Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, Jason Bateman, Jeff Daniels, and Viola Davis all make appearances as well.

The movie has, from newspaper critics, also received atypically admiring reviews for a middling thriller. We must, I suppose, attribute these to the mournful material about the death of newspapers that director Kevin Macdonald has woven into the picture. State of Play's theme is the importance of those journalists who ferret out the truth from matters clouded by gossip and sensationalism. They ask the questions that need to be asked and care about the issues that matter. I'm talking, of course, about print journalists, whose ostensible nobility would not interest Hollywood much if their work did not involve murders and other glamorous crimes. As it is, however, State of Play offers an encomium for the profession that has provided us with so many dressed-up, kinda boring versions of P.I. movies.

Certain writers apparently believe that, even though people care so little about newspapers that they'll allow them to die, they nevertheless care enough about the death of newspapers to read articles and watch movies about it. If we judge by State of Play's box office take, this looks like an erroneous assumption. The filmmakers here, however, are concerned about the decline of journalism. So Cal McCaffrey, the seasoned professional, must teach Della Fry, the rookie who -- let me remind you -- writes a blog (and probably has a Twitter account for God's sake), the difference between chitchat and news, hearsay and truth, scandalmongering and making a difference. Eventually, she learns that some stories are too weighty merely to post online. To hammer the point home, McCaffrey types on a computer so ancient that it can run only MS-DOS, and the film ends with a celebratory (or elegiac?) montage where we see the morning's papers printed and shipped. Actually, that last part is sort of fun; I'd never seen a printing press before.

State of Play is based on the BBC miniseries of the same name, but it will remind more American viewers of All the President's Men -- although the politician, the reporters, and the newspaper are fictional this time. All the President's Men was less steeped in triteness than State of Play -- the latter with its pissed-off, demanding editor and its scenes of reporters having doors slammed in their faces, stumbling out of bed in the middle of the night to pursue a lead, bending the rules, struggling to clarify the thin line between public service and exploitation, and subsisting on Cheetos and coffee -- but even as the apotheosis of its genre, All the President's Men feels merely workmanlike, and State of Play (whose mystery, unlike that of its forebear, never really seems crucial) is the same way. The plot thickens and then unfolds roughly as it should, with killings and personal revelations and outbursts and only a few twists that are a bit too silly, and then things wrap up quite neatly, and by the next day you can hardly remember what it was all about. The tone is sober (Macdonald made sure to shoot our nation's capital mostly on rainy days), however, and so State of Play is described as a "mature" film, but really it's about gunfire and chases and shady doings and guessing what will happen next, and even though it's a little talkier than the average thriller, there's very little happening on the human side. When Jason Bateman's character -- a fast-talking, stressed-out, helplessly repellent P.R. man -- shows up in the third act, we realize how dull our protagonists are, simply because Bateman's character is allowed a few personal characteristics that don't exist solely to serve the plot. He's more colorful than he needs to be; it's a great relief.

Crowe is less powerful here than he was in 3:10 to Yuma, where I last saw him, and Mirren, as the editor, is similarly unable to enliven the cliches with which the script has supplied her. Wright Penn, as Stephen Collins's wronged wife, is a bit too subdued; I preferred Affleck and Daniels, the congressmen, though both are underused.

Afterward, I wondered what the point is of this sort of movie -- intricate and fairly intelligent and clearly designed for adults yet devoid of all the stuff that makes movies satisfying to adults. It's comparable in some ways to Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, but Michael Clayton was morally and psychologically richer. Tony Gilroy also co-wrote State of Play, which is smart enough but is not really thoughtful; it's serious without being serious.

In any case, I hope the filmmakers don't mind that I'm blogging about it.

'Whatever Works' Trailer

The trailer for Woody Allen's latest, a comedy called Whatever Works, premiered last week, and I've just seen it:

I'm not sure what the point was of casting Larry David as the lead: Usually, when Woody gets someone else to play Woody, it's because the role requires a young man, like Jason Biggs or John Cusack or Kenneth Branagh. Larry David is a little more than a decade younger than Allen, but he isn't a particularly youthful 61-year-old.

With that said, I'm looking forward to this. I've never seen Curb Your Enthusiasm, but if Larry David is responsible for as much of Seinfeld as many claim, then I'm sure he's a funny guy, and the trailer has a couple laughs. Besides, it's Woody; no matter how many Vicky Cristina Barcelonas he gives us, I'll never stop looking forward to his movies.