Four You've Heard Of

1. "Thank You For Smoking". There have been a few attempts at satire in recent months from Hollywood folk who don't seem to grasp that the lowest-common-denominator approach they so often take is completely at odds with what satire needs to succeed ("American dreamz", anyone?). Satire needs to be a virtual attack dog, and at last there is a mainstream American movie that understands this. It's almost unbelievable that "Thank You For Smoking" came out of Hollywood.

Aaron Eckhart stars as Nick Naylor, a dedicated lobbyist for the tobacco industry. If a film producer wants to place cigarettes in films to make them cool again, if a manufacturer wants to figure out new ways to get kids addicted at an even younger age... well, Nick Naylor is proud to be able to help them out. There are forces working to stop him, like a dedicated Vermont Senator (William H. Macy), but they're so weak and ineffectual that they don't stand a chance.

This film never takes the easy out of "American Dreamz" in trying to make Naylor likable or a figure of pathos... this is a guy who is, simply, nasty and unapologetic from first to last. He's the kind of guy who regularly meets for lunch with lobbyist from the gun and alcohol industries and tries to top them with stories of how many more people HIS industry killed than theirs. If you're one of those people who insists on being able to like the protagonist of a film, you're out of luck here. You won't even be able to like the people who you might think are supposed to be "good guys", such as Macy's Senator or the crusading reporter played by Katie Holmes. This is a movie which, in addition to deservedly bashing big tobacco, also wonders in amazement how the general public can be so naive as to continue to consume a product they know is so lethal. Nobody gets off the hook in this movie.

And yet, with all the bite and nasty characters, director/writer Jason Reitman (son of Ivan of "Ghostbusters" fame, working from a novel by Christopher Buckley) never loses track of the fact that the film is a comedy: there are more laughs per minute in this movie than anything I've seen out of Hollywood in several years. An amazingly witty script, a terriffic directorial debut, and flawless performances by the entire cast (well, okay, except for Holmes) add up to the sort of film you rarely see from the big studios... satire done right. You might as well catch this one while you can. Who knows when you'll get a chance to see that sort of thing from Hollywood again?

2. "Friends With Money". Nicole Holofcener is a rare director who can tell stories about ordinary people doing and saying ordinary things and make them fascinating. In "Walking And Talking" and "Lovely And Amazing" she made the stuff or everyday life among friends absorbing. Which is kind of what makes "Friends With Money" a bit of a letdown.

This is the story of a few weeks in the lives of a group of female friends played by a stellar cast of actresses including Holofcener regular Catherine Keener, frances McDorman and Jennifer Aniston. Most of the members of this little clique are indeed "with money"... except for former schoolteacher Aniston, now working as a maid in the homes of those much wealthier than her, and a bit of a kleptomaniac (and pothead). There's obviously a bit of a gap between her and the rest of the bunch... as one of them remarks, they probably wouldn't be all that close if they met for the first time now. This is just the sort of real-life contrast and conflict that Holofcener has mined for emotionally effecting material in the past. But this time, you just wait for the moments of impact that never quite arrive.

One of the central problems of the film is that it seems not quite finished. Important plot points are brought up, as when Keener finds out that Aniston has stolen from one of the homes she's cleaning... we even see her wrestling with the question of what she's going to do with this knowledge... but then it's never brought up again. McDormand's obviously gay husband isclearly being led to the brink of acknowledging his sexuality as he becomes more and more attracted to another man... but the man in question disappears from the story and the whole issue is dropped. And the ending is one of the biggest anti-climaxes in ages... the movie doesn't so much come to a conclusion as it merely stops, right in the middle of a scene, with numerous questions still unanswered, including what in the hell Aniston's boyfriend means by his final line of dialogue.

Even all of this would be at least somewhat forgivable if too many of the characters weren't so hastily sketched. Aniston's character never really comes alive, for one, and McDormand's husband at times comes just a little too close to the usual limp-wristed gay stereotype. There are isolated moments in "Friends With Money" that give you a glimpse of the kind of creativity that was in evidence in "Walking & Talking" and "Lovely & Amazing", but if this were the first Holofcener film you had seen, you probably wouldn't feel very inclined to seek out those two. I don't have any doubt that she will be able to come up with another gem the next time out, so for now we should probably just content ourselves with them and hope for the best next time. Holofcener is a director who's going to be going places, even if this particular film isn't.

3. "Inside Man". Spike Lee has a 20-year history of bringing us some of the boldest and most confrontational films in recent memory on subjects no other film maker would take on: "Do The Right Thing", "Jungle Fever", "Get On The Bus"... the list goes on. Now he has given us a suspenseful semi-action thriller about a masterful policeman who goes up against an equally masterful criminal who's holding a bank full of hostages. Has Lee sold out? Well, don't hold your breath waiting to see Spike Lee's superhero comic book adaptation just yet.

"Inside Man" might not be quite on the level of "Dog Day Afternoon" (which it blatantly references in dialogue in one scene), but it's not far off, either. And in spite of the fact that Lee himself did not actually write the screenplay, you still get plenty of sharply observed insights into racism and the abuse of authority (particularly in a scene where a hostage who has just been released is revealed to be wearing a Turban). And remember those trademark Lee scenes in which a character remains stock still, totally unmoving, but somehow continues to advance past the people and buildings surrounding him? Well, Denzel Washington has one such scene late in this film. It's enough to make you wonder if Lee had a hand in an uncredited rewrite.

It helps, as well, that the film has such an accomplished cast, all of whom are working at the height of their powers here. Washington is striking as the detective assigned to the case, Clive Owen is strong and extremely cool as the eloquent and surprising mastermind of the bank heist, Jodie Foster is enigmatic and fascinating as a mysterious figure with unspecified ties to local government figures who has her own personal agenda in the case, and in the relatively minor role of a cop who assists Washington in his job, Willem Dafoe makes his presence strongly felt. Then there's also Christopher Plummer as the bank president... I could go on for a long time like this, the cast is that good. And they're all playing characters with plenty of sharp incisivie dialogue and multiple dimensions to their characters. "Inside Man" is one of the better written, acted, and (it pretty much goes without saying) directed movies in commercial theatres of late.

So even if it is of a slightly more commercial nature than his usual style, "Inside Man" shows Spike Lee to still be a director who is interested in character more than spectacle, and very strong characters at that... one who has no interest in making a movie that doesn't give you something to think about, and doesn't contain dialogue and performances that you'll carry around with you long after you've seen the film. If this time out he's done all of that in a movie that fits comfortably into a commercial genre, well, just think of the "radical" film he'll be able to make next time out with the profits from this one. And while you're at it, you might also want to remember how REALLY cheap & commercial this film COULD HAVE been if it had been directed by someone like, say, Michael Bay or Brett Ratner. On second thought, maybe you might not want to.

4. "United 93". Okay, I certainly don't need to describe the plotline of this movie. You all know what it's about and what happened on September 11, 2001. The real question is whether the film is exploitative, whether it dishonors the memory of the passengers who died in that flight, whether it buys into any of the more outlandish conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11... those sorts of things. Well, anyone who has seen the previous movies of director Paul Greengrass knows that he is not a "tabloid" director and approaches his real-life stories such as his earlier film "Bloody Sunday" with a sense of wanting to tell the story as it happened with documentary-like realism. Whether that makes, in the this case, for a strong film that really needed to be made is still ANOTHER question, and one that I'm not completely certain can be answered in the positive.

Greengrass gives us plenty of footage dealing with the air traffic controllers and news people and government officials of the U.S. as they react to both the World Trade Center attacks & the one on the Pentagon, as well as the news about United 93... but we get absolutely nothing about the Arab community and their reaction to the news. The only Arab presence in this movie are the hijackers, portrayed as the typical flaming Anti-American fanatics. Now I'm not saying it wasn't possible that they were exactly that way, but how much effort could it have taken to present a small fraction as much of the Arab response to the day that we get of the American response?

Then there's the amount of time the movie devotes to people in front of screens (either the air traffic controllers, people watching news coverage of the events, or both), every minute of which takes time away from scenes giving us insight into WHO these people are, other than heroes (I mean, even heroes are individuals). There must be at least a half hour to 40 minutes about the attacks on the World Trade Center... okay, obviously you can't ignore that. But you never actually see any of the people involved in those events... it's all more people watching screens. And this is supposed to be a movie about United 93, after all. You wind up with a movie that doesn't really tell you anything about the people who died in the World Trade Center, and not very much about the passengers of United 93.

I could also, of course, bring up the whole question of the Bush government and their reaction (or non-reaction) to these events, and their lack of action that might have prevented them... which is more than this movie does. In the end, what you have in "United 93" is a film that definitely respects the courage and sacrifice of the passengers on that plane, and sincerely intends to honor the memories of everyone who died in whatever situation or circumstance on 9/11. This is not a cheap, expoitative film. But it's also not quite the film those people deserved, and it raises the whole question of whether it really is still too soon, less than five years after that day, to be making a film about it, to which I can't really give a definitive answer (though I suspect it may be). There will probably be a really memorable movie made some day about the events of 9/11... possibly even Oliver Stone's upcoming "World Trade Center" might be the one... and a movie that accomplishes all this one clearly intended to do is one that does need to be made. However, "United 93" did not.