Reviews

I recently watched AFTER HOURS for the first time since its initial release hoping for a jolt of 1980s New York nostalgia. But time has not softened my original estimation: I find it insufferable.

Firstly, it seems to aspire to be a black comedy, but even black comedies should be, you know, funny.

The premise is promising but the chain of plot contrivances is ludicrous. Even if you buy into it as some sort of yuppie anxiety fantasy playing to the suburban multiplex crowd, it still sucks.

The casting is uneven, some parts spot-on, others dubious. Dunne is good as the hapless, ultimately contemptible everyman who has surely earned a crueler comeuppance than he gets.

Far and away the best thing about the movie is Michael Balhaus' vivid cinematography.

But the thing that really irks me is the utterly inauthentic depiction of downtown Manhattan. Strange, coming from a director who grew up in lower Manhattan. I spent the '80s living in the East Village and TriBeCa, and worked in SoHo. One could argue this vaguely resembles the TriBeCa of that period, but certainly not SoHo, which was already overrun with galleries, boutiques and bistros by this time. Regardless, it seems a secondhand depiction of the downtown demimonde, possibly informed by mom's subscription to New York Magazine.

Brett Morgen's "Moonage Daydream" is a highly selective, fawning portrait of seminal rock artist David Bowie. Its sheer length, the fact that it is told almost entirely in Bowie's own words, and was authorized by his estate, suggest it should be the last word on the subject. Instead what we get is a cinematic personal essay both windy and frenetic, the Bowie Gospel According to Morgen. While many of Bowie's pronouncements are useful and enlightening, it's also useful to remember that Bowie was always, to use a literary term, an unreliable narrator who changed his positions as often as he changed his wardrobe. The film does not shy entirely away from this, limning Bowie's seesaw craving for both fame and artistic credibility from episode to episode. Well, he achieved both, bless him.

The movie feels obliged to do a lot of heavy lifting, visually, to jazz up now ancient analog imagery through effects and shreddy editing. There are some respites from the assault, like passages of Bowie's solitary wandering through Southeast Asia, looking contemplative and anonymous -- until one reflects that he's being followed around by a bloody film crew. The public Bowie was always striving for effect, or affect, which Morgen totally buys into. Tellingly, there's no non-music video footage of Bowie in his late, turn of the century period when he finally seemed at ease in his own skin.

Though Bowie was clearly brilliant in his own right, he always thrived on collaboration with other musicians and producers. Aside from name-checking Brian Eno, the master's other collaborators are reduced to fleeting images at best. In the climax of the performance of the titular track, rather than cutting to Mick Ronson -- who was as crucial to the Ziggy era as Eno was to the Berlin -- playing his ferocious guitar solo as in the original Pennebaker film, Morgen cuts from Bowie to his rapt fans. The focus is relentless, and after two hours even diehard fans might have enough of gazing into their star(man)'s mismatched pupils.

A surprising amount of time is devoted to Bowie's painting, as if an artist must be visual to be validated. Bowie himself admitted he was a more confident writer than a painter, yet that is only obliquely referenced through the soundtrack. As there is no footage of pre-Ziggy Bowie, it was gratifying to hear music from the brilliant "Hunky Dory" and earlier. It was a happy shock to hear the obscure but epochal (for me anyway) "Cygnet Committee" figure so prominently.

So this is not the definitive word on David Bowie, a figure so complex that no single retrospective would likely do him justice. The film's fatal flaw is that it is too long. While Bowie deserves more, Morgen rates less.

The camera was locked off. The models were filmed as they rotated on a turntable. To achieve the twisting effect the footage was re-photographed on an animation stand though a specially designed mask, a slit shaped window which allowed one narrow horizontal band of footage to be exposed at a time. This window was moved incrementally down the frame, each band corresponding to one of hundreds of lines of resolution the way TV images are composed. But here, each subsequent line was taken from the adjacent frame. In the final film, each frame is composed of hundreds of slices of image from different frames, methodically staggered, to create the illusion of the image twisting.

Today it's possible to write a computer program that would achieve the same effect. But in this film the effect was achieved optically. Part of the charm of many of Zbig's films -- like "Tango" -- is the apparent handmade quality which clues the viewer in to the mindbogglingly meticulous execution involved in its creation.

See Zbig's music video for Accept's "Midnight Mover", which anticipated "The Matrix"' bullet-time effect a decade earlier.

For 110 minutes "Take Shelter" is a gripping, dread inducing portrait of an average Joe going off the rails. At first there is a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether the main character's nightmares are apocalyptic premonitions or manifestations of creeping anxiety. The plain-spoken naturalism of the script, direction and performances -- especially Michael Shannon's believably unraveling lead -- stack up on the side of a mental breakdown. The details of his crack-up are painfully accurate and he even has a family history of schizophrenia.

Then, in the last few minutes, the movie becomes a highfalutin "Twilight Zone" episode, with one of those "gotcha" endings of the "It's a cookbook!" ilk. This would not be so bad if the buildup had not been so tonally different. As it is it's an utter betrayal of everything that preceded it and an insult to audiences' emotional investment in the characters.

"Take Shelter" is the latest and most egregious example of a distressing trend among filmmakers to take manifestly silly premises and invest them with dour gravity. Nolan, Shymalan, and Singer are the avatars of this style. They try to turn comic book and supermarket tabloid subjects into Ibsen, sucking out the fun as they inflate their stature. Rod Serling is surely rolling in his grave.

As James Cameron did with Aliens, Brett Ratner takes the X-Men franchise in a crasser, splashier direction. While Brian Singer is (thankfully) no M. Night Shamaylan he did invest the first two X-Men films with a gravitas that, to those of us not enamored of the comic books, seemed out of scale to such silly subject matter. Ratner has re-tipped the balance of soap opera to action in favor of plain dumb fun. Because what is the allure of this premise but the opportunity to watch people with super powers wreak havoc? He even does us the favor of killing off the dreariest characters. The script is clunky and obvious, and one feels embarrassed for the actors having to mouth such dreck. It seems pitched at the level of an especially dim and truculent nine year old, but that's as it should be with a comic book franchise. It's one of those movies that has so little on its mind that it has to state the obvious just to give the actors something to say. As Wolverine and Storm wander in a literal fog he says "I can't see a thing" (we know this) and she responds, "I can fix that" (we knew that). The movie's impatience with thought is wonderfully illustrated in a scene where Dr. Xavier's lecture on the philosophical implications of super power is interrupted by an outburst of more special effects. Later Beast drops an attempt to articulate a point in order to beat up bad guys. To every First Act action there is a predictably equal and opposite Third Act reaction. The Gay metaphor is strained to the breaking point, embodied by a kid with wings whose only role seems to be to save (forgive) the father who wanted to cure him of his mutantness. This is all to say there's a lot of splashy action which is mostly fun. The race between the giant Juggernaut, smashing through walls behind the little Kitty, slipping through them like a ghost, is a highlight. The beef/cheesecake factor is higher than before: Rebecca Romijn struts around in blue body paint for a few good scenes before she's neutralized, and Hugh Jackman takes his shirt off. It's all unpretentious, disposable fun, and that's as it should be.