Did The Wrong Thing. Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer, Reviewed. [Grierson & Leitch]

Spike Lee is such a confident filmmaker that when one of his movies doesn't quite work, you almost wonder if it's your fault for not getting it. Secure in his talent for sweeping emotions and powerful visuals, he sets out to make a masterpiece with each new movie, and the worst thing you can say about him is that he tries too hard. Giving a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down to his work is almost insulting: Good or bad, they're all Spike Lee Joints, and if you're a fan of the man, why wouldn't you want to see the next one?

Red Hook Summer is one of Lee's lesser films, and yet it's full of such bold strengths that you feel guilty for not loving the hell out of it. But if you first have to acknowledge the passion and skill that go into every frame, you also have to admit that Lee sometimes lets his mighty purpose compensate for his lack of clear ideas or thematic subtlety. Red Hook Summer is resonant and inspired when it doesn't resemble a film made by those old fools playing the dozens on the corner in Do the Right Thing.

The movie stars newcomer Jules Brown as Flik, an insular, gadget-obsessed boy who is shipped from his home in Atlanta to live with his grandfather, Bishop Enoch Rouse (Clarke Peters), in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn for the summer. Enoch is a man of God, preaching the Good Word every Sunday at his church and then in the streets and homes of Red Hook the rest of the time. At its heart, Red Hook Summer is a coming-of-age story as Flik learns to put the iPad away and experience life, but as with many of Lee's films, this low-budget effort is quite content to wander around, allowing whomever Flik runs across to become part of the narrative as well.

When the film premiered at Sundance, Lee made it clear he didn't want people to think of it as a sequel to Do the Right Thing, even though they both feature his Mookie character, are set in Brooklyn, and rise to a shocking moment of violence. No filmmaker wants to be accused of repeating himself, so his annoyance is understandable, but the sad truth is that Red Hook Summer shrinks in comparison to Do the Right Thing. (To be fair, a lot of films would.) While they both invest heavily in the vitality of city life—no filmmaker since Robert Altman so facilely populates his world with characters who feel like they've always been there—Red Hook Summer isn't focused around a principle thematic concern (race relations) the way Do the Right Thing was. By comparison, Red Hook Summer wants to take on poverty, gangs, Barack Obama, religion, race, and family, to name but a few. It's a commendable approach, but Lee doesn't tackle his themes in a way that makes them feel sufficiently addressed. Instead, he skips around, touching on provocative ideas that don't receive the care or follow-through they deserve.

The film's range of performances also reflects that erratic tendency. Brown tends to be unappealingly monotone, failing to reveal much of Flik's inner life, while Toni Lysaith is rather one-note as a tomboy-ish neighborhood girl who catches his eye. Lee has done great work with younger or inexperienced actors in Crooklyn and He Got Game, but two of Red Hook Summer's central characters end up being too flat to make their budding friendship add up to much. On the other side of the spectrum, Peters is simply extraordinary as the devoted grandfather, living and breathing his Christian beliefs every waking second. It's hard to know how much of his sermons were scripted, but he gives them an improvised, stream-of-conscious fervor that elevates the entire film, helping to encapsulate the story's rambling narrative into a parable about perseverance in the face of life's hardships.

But Red Hook Summer's digressions and dead-ends aren't in and of themselves problematic—it's that Lee eventually builds to a big (and ungainly) revelation that shakes this community to its roots. On one hand, the surprise is meant to be jarring, which it is, but the lack of careful foreshadowing leaves it feeling baldly manipulative as well. For all its messy inconsistencies, Red Hook Summer is held together by Lee's seriousness of purpose, which is why the ending feels like such a cheat—it's careless and inflammatory without being rooted in the concerns that have pulsated through the rest of the film. In this way, Red Hook Summer is very much not akin to Do the Right Thing, which showed how unimaginable acts can be carried out by people we think we know. And, yet, I can't fully dismiss Red Hook Summer: It's got too much life, too much verve in it. Spike Lee always makes movies you want to wrestle with—I just wish this one had more rewards to make that grappling worthwhile.

Grade: C+

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

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Zach Galifianakis And Will Ferrell Race To The Middle. The Campaign, Reviewed. [Grierson & Leitch]

Aug 9, 2012 6:40 PM  

1. That The Campaign could never come up with a fictional scenario that would rival the absurdity of what actually happens in our daily political discourse is an obvious point, yet one that needs to be made again nevertheless. Is any sort of shtick that Will Ferrell could dream up odder than a reality in which Newt Gingrich becomes friends with Snooki or a hot-button political debate centers on chicken sandwiches? ProPublica has a consistently hilarious tumblr of every batshit weird statement uttered by public officials and candidates this election season that's considerably funnier than The Campaign because, jeez, how could it not be? You've got Bill Clinton posing with porn stars and presidential candidates saying, "I stand by what I said, whatever it was," and Sen. John McCain co-sponsoring legislation with a giant pink pig. Beat that, Galifianakis.

2. That's to say, with politics in the place it is, who needs satire, really? (The best jokes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report usually just involve letting the boobs speak for themselves.) So The Campaign was left with two ways to differentiate itself. It could've gone ultra-dark and acerbic with the satire, Armando Iannucci-style, or it could've eliminated any real-world political context whatsoever and just become The Other Guys, except with politicians instead of cops. That's the route The Campaign chose, which is fine enough, one supposes; it's not like we expect Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis to put out a cutting, vicious parable about our rotten political culture on 3,5000 screens. But it makes you wonder why they bothered making a political movie in the first place; it might have been more fun if they were just cops.

3. It doesn't matter much: The only real political bit the movie uses is the Ferrell! Versus! Galifianakis! idea, which means we should probably just be thankful they made them politicians rather than boxers. (This at least keeps their shirts on.) Ferrell plays Rep. Cam Brady, a so-obvious-they-probably-should-have-tried-something-else riff on his George W. Bush impersonation with a heavy dollop of Clinton-esque skirt-chasing thrown in. Brady, a Democrat, is usually a shoo-in for his House seat, but the evil Motch brothers (a dopey riff on the Koch brothers played by John Lithgow and a deeply depressing Dan Aykroyd) decide, improbably, to finance Marty Huggins, the lisping, socially awkward son of an old rich political operative, so that they can sell American jobs to China, or something. And that's pretty much the whole deal: The two men take turns humiliating each other and themselves, and at the end people vote.

4. The Campaign is directed by Jay Roach, who also directed the (terrific) HBO movies Recount and Game Change, so I guess I sort of expected a little more political savvy than we get here; it's obvious he's playing dumb on purpose, because those movies showed he knows how to create a convincing political atmosphere. Here, he just relies on his leads to carry the whole movie—as improvised as these movies usually are, this one feels particularly ragged—and I have to say that Galifianakis is more successful than Ferrell. He at least tries to ground Marty in a real, sweet place—he works for the tourism center of his town and loves it, and his family, in a sincere way—which gives him a lot more rope to work with when the movie turns more and more absurd. Ferrell is coasting more here, not really invested in the part and, oddly, sort of bored with the whole thing. Ferrell has attempted to stretch more in recent years, with varying success (Stranger Than Fiction worked, Everything Must Go less so), and he's sort of checked out here, doing Ferrell Schtick more than careering into the land of the blissfully surreal as he does when he's on his game. I think part of the problem here is that neither Ferrell nor Galifianakis recedes, allowing one to be the straight man to the other; the result is that you watch each men do their schtick in a vacuum. They're both occupying their own, different movies.

5. There are still laughs to be had here, if just because of the pure volume of gags. But it's still sort of the low-hanging fruit variety. Galifianakis's sweet-looking children and wife, as it turns out, are secret freaks! Campaign videos are often full of lies! These guys are such bad politicians that they punch babies! (There is a good bit with a Korean maid whose boss makes her speak like the cast of The Help, but the movie goes to the well with it once too often.) You keep waiting for the movie to say something, to find that extra level of inspiration we've seen each of these two guys reach. Or at least to justify making a political comedy in the first place. The Campaign is mild Ferrell and mild Galifianakis, and putting them together leads to diminishing returns for both. A movie like this either needs to keep it small and dark, or just go for it, balls-out surreal. The Campaign, alas, occupies that squishy middle. And seriously: Do not look directly at Dan Aykroyd.

Grade: C.

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The Conspiracy To Kill A Great Movie Franchise. The Bourne Legacy, Reviewed. [Grierson & Leitch]

Aug 8, 2012 5:55 PM  

1. The first three Jason Bourne films had an intensity, a vitality to them that made them feel urgent and relevant, grounded in the messy real world of global capitalism and a U.S. government that was alternately confused, corrupt, and terrified. The movies didn't have a specific politics other than paranoia: Everyone's out for himself or herself, everyone's hiding something, everyone's lying to everyone else. The great quiet joke of the films was that Jason Bourne knew nothing about himself. It was sort of the only route to heroism. The sad thing about The Bourne Legacy, the attempt to sustain the franchise in the wake of Matt Damon's departure, is that it's more interested in keeping the series going than in understanding what made it so vibrant in the first place. It takes everything to an excessive, nearly comical next level. In the first three films, everyone was in on the conspiracy. In this one, everyone is in on it, from the principle players to their doctors and their grandmothers and their high school prom dates and possibly even their dog. The film isn't steeped in anything but itself; large swaths feel more like a parody of a Bourne film than an actual one. At this rate, in the next sequel, we're going to learn that the conspiracy goes even higher, and it turns out that George Soros, the Koch brothers, and Charles Nelson Reilly were In On It Together All Along.

2. You can't blame Jeremy Renner for any of this. He gives a smart, muscular performance as another almost unwitting killing machine, one who, like Bourne, is a bit of a guinea pig for Big Pharma (or something). The general idea is that some pharmaceutical company has been working with the U.S. government to create some sort of mind control device in pill form—it's not all that different from what Ludwig was working on with Reggie Jackson in The Naked Gun—and Renner's character is one of the people who test subjects. It also gives them super strength and super intelligence, which come in handy for Renner. In an odd touch, he is established as a guy who, sans pill, actually is borderline mentally disabled. It's basically Flowers for Algernon with face punching. This leads to a couple strange little scenes when Renner's face starts to go blank as he runs out of super smart pills, and he stares dumbly off into the distance. I half expected him to start asking to be told about the rabbits.

3. For a big tentpole action movie, it's a bit surprising how little actual action there is in The Bourne Legacy. On the whole, it's just a bunch of talking. Oh, there is so much talking in this movie! Writer-director Tony Gilroy is particularly skilled at scenes of glowering military-industrial-complex/corporate types gabbing back and forth to each other—used to great effect in his fantastic Michael Clayton—and he goes back to that well over and over and over. The film moves back and forth between scenes of blandly evil CIA drone Edward Norton instructing a room of khaki-wearing subordinates in front of massive tech screens and scenes of Renner and Rachel Weisz (who plays a scientist who somehow got caught up in all this mess) running through various international locations. There could be something compelling about the usual war-room mechanics being used to track down and murder the good guys rather than save them, but the movie doesn't give itself much air to breathe. It turns into a monotonous series of extreme shaky-cam closeups of Norton's nostrils.

4. It's also extremely overplotted, throwing in new characters every 15 minutes or so and not giving us much context to figure out how they fit into this whole business. It also increases the level of difficulty by making sure to intricately tie the events of this movie to the events of the last three, just in case the audience had any doubt that they'd walked into a Bourne movie. So we have climactic scenes of Joan Allen and Albert Finney and David Strathairn from the previous films, even though they connect only tangentially to this film (and are barely in it), and only in the Larger Global Conspiracy sense. This leads to the odd sense that the events of this movie, all the stuff Renner and Weisz are sprinting away from, don't really matter: It makes this film feel like reboot filler.

5. The whole movie feels like that, all told. It's an awfully long 134 minutes, and it doesn't so much as end as run out of running time. (Seriously, when the credits came up, I actively thought, "Wait, that's it? Did they drop a reel or something?") The movie is competently made and intelligently conceived; more than anything, this is a movie that desperately wants to be considered Intelligent Entertainment. But it's all so needlessly complicated, jammed full of exposition you won't care about nearly as much as Gilroy thinks you will. The mess that this film is will ultimately be blamed on Renner, I suspect, considering he's the new guy, but that's a shame: He certainly came to play, and in a perfect universe he could play a Jason Bourne alternative quite effectively. Heck, I'd love to see the two Bournes fight. Though after the endlessly chatty and pointless scenes of The Bourne Legacy, I'd love to see any fight.

Grade: C.

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Hollywood Gets Sex Right, For Once: The Surprisingly Honest Hope Springs [Grierson & Leitch]

For a subject that's so popular, sex is something most people have a hard time discussing. This is especially true in Hollywood movies, where it's usually treated as exciting (9 1/2 Weeks) or dangerous (Basic Instinct) but rarely realistically. Even when sex is taken seriously, like in last year's addiction drama Shame, it exists in a world that's foreign to the common experience. Because the MPAA tends to freak out over the smallest bit of sexual content, carnal relationships are largely kept behind closed doors, robbing sex of a shrugging normalcy that would help demystify it. As a consequence, sex in movies is usually portrayed as a mind-blowing fantasy, which for most long-term couples doesn't square with their ordinary lives of kids, jobs, responsibilities, and familiarity. Audiences go to romantic comedies looking for the happy ending, but once a relationship solidifies, apparently we're on our own—Hollywood doesn't know what to tell ya.

While it's not a great film, Hope Springs is almost revolutionary in its straightforward approach to sex among married couples. For one thing, it upends the traditional narrative that married couples don't have sex at all—or, if they do, that it's executed in an embarrassingly clumsy way (e.g., the blowjob-in-the-car scene from Parenthood) that's meant to be hilarious because the characters are grownups and should stop trying to act like horny kids. For too long, sex in movies has been reserved for the young, the single, and the hot. By comparison, Hope Springs is about Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep trying to get it on. And while there are laughs, it's very rarely at the expense of the characters. You'd almost think the filmmakers were OK with middle-aged people having a healthy sex life.

Jones and Streep play a couple who have been married for 31 years. He's Arnold, a gruff accountant who bores his wife talking about his job and watching the Golf Channel. She's Kay, a sweet woman who can't remember the last time her husband touched her. Hope Springs couldn't start off with a more conventional setup: They sleep in separate beds; he's not very affectionate; they're so staid that they bought themselves a fancy new cable subscription for their anniversary. (If the movie wanted to be any more obvious that This Couple Is Having Problems, they'd be on separate laptops in the same room, not talking to each other—the standard Hollywood semaphore for fading passion.)

But the film gets interesting after Kay hears about Dr. Feld (Steve Carell), a bestselling couples therapist who offers an intensive, week-long session in an idyllic little New England town where sexless pairs meet with him to talk through their problems. Arnold reluctantly agrees to go, and the bulk of the film consists of Arnold and Kay discussing with Dr. Feld their sexual history and hangups. You'd expect punchlines and zany slapstick—and, unfortunately, there is some of that—but what makes Hope Springs remarkable is that this is all taken rather seriously.

If that surprises you, it's understandable. The initial trailer made Hope Springs seem very silly in a safe, pseudo-naughty way. But for a mainstream romantic comedy-drama, Hope Springs is frank in its discussion of sex. At the advance screening I attended, people at first snickered when masturbation or orgasms were discussed during the sessions, but then they realized that these topics weren't meant for laughs. (And can you blame people for assuming that? Masturbation, impotency, and orgasms are normally comic staples. We feel ashamed talking about them, so we make jokes instead.) But it's clear after seeing Hope Springs that Sony is nervous about selling its movie as a thoughtful, dialogue-heavy film about marriage and commitment. It's much easier to make it about Streep putting a banana in her hoo-ha.

This doesn't mean that Hope Springs is some searing drama. It's still a film meant to appeal to adults who want pleasant, comforting entertainment that features montages set to Annie Lennox's "Why" so that they know when to feel sad. But director David Frankel has a habit of making movies that are superficially very glib but are a lot more interesting underneath. Since hitting it big with The Devil Wears Prada, he has directed Marley and Me, an ostensibly adorable family film that was really a tearjerker about embracing adulthood, and The Big Year, that forgettable 2011 bird-watching comedy with Steve Martin and Jack Black that touched on the pointless obsessiveness of male competition.

The guy wraps his movies in bright, shiny packages that look harmless, but even with Hope Springs there's an attempt to get at some deeper emotional truth: the subtle ways that couples can take each other for granted and let their emotional glue (which includes sex) wear off. There's only one sorta-kinda sex scene in the film, but the really "shocking" stuff comes in the conversations between Arnold, Kay, and Dr. Feld, where issues about intimacy and performance and fantasies are all put on the table, so to speak. Carell in particular is great: His character isn't meant to be funny, and he's not one of those movie therapists who has one brilliant breakthrough after another. Mostly, he listens. And so do we—to the type of honest talk about sex and relationships that you just never hear in movies. It's not filthy or dirty or titillating—it's better than that because it's just real.

One of the toughest things about being married is that the culture really hasn't provided any model for how to conduct a romantic life. Young lovers and mysterious strangers in movies get to do all types of kinky things onscreen, but for people in long-term committed relationships, it's nothing but impotency jokes and interruptions from the damn kids. (And when there actually is a compelling film about a married couple's sex-life struggles, like Eyes Wide Shut, it meets with confusion and mixed reviews.) The lesson conveyed is that sex is something exclusively for the non-married, a miserable proposition for the rest of us who'd like to maintain a loving, physical relationship until the time we're as old as Arnold and Kay. In its small way, Hope Springs lifts the shroud away from the subject. That a Hollywood summer comedy starring two 60-year-olds is the year's most daring sex film is astounding. And also kind of sad.

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Nothing We Haven't Seen Before: Total Recall, Reviewed. [Grierson & Leitch]

Aug 3, 2012 4:30 PM  

1. As a skeptic of the original Total Recall, I was ready to give its remake more than a fair shake. My primary issue with the original is how little it does with the film's initial, fantastical Philip K. Dick premise, that the difference between reality and fantasy is not only slim but perhaps irrelevant; that film was too interested in Arnold Schwarzenegger wisecracks and dopey Future Jokes to slow down and develop that central theme. I'm happy to say that the remake does, actually, focus a little bit more on that premise, and stay consistent with it. That's pretty much the only thing I'm happy to say about it, though.

2. OK, the film also has the advantage of casting a legitimately outstanding actor in the lead role, Colin Farrell, who does his best to give his potentially compelling but sketchily conceived character a foundation as the movie skitters messily around him. The premise is the same as the first film: In the future, a lowly construction worker dreams of a less dreary future and has memories that he was once a spy "implanted" in his brain. Next thing you know, something goes wrong and he's involved in a revolution and his beloved wife is trying to kill him. This movie gets rid of the Mars aspect, the leader of the rebellion is less "scary alien baby" and more "Bill Nighy" and this time the Michael Ironside and Sharon Stone characters are combined into one, but other than that, this is the same deal, with updated special effects and less gore, to make sure they hit the PG-13 rating. (The three boobs are still here, though. I wonder if four boobs would have earned that R.)

3. The issue here is that as safe as I might feel Paul Verhoeven played it with the original—for him, anyway—director Len Wiseman (most well-known for the Underworld movies, though I did think his Live Free or Die Hard was cheerfully over-the-top) locks this movie in a room and puts a bag over its head. It's bizarre how humorless the film is, as if this whole notion of a futuristic dystopian society was sacred or even, you know, not the topic and tone of every science fiction movie made in the last 25 years. The movie is dark and ominous and thudding in predictable, deeply boring ways. I'm pretty sure the whole movie contains only one joke, and it might have been one Farrell sneaked in when his director wasn't looking. If you're not going to go all the way this and make it some Aronofsky-ian delve into the depths of a mentally diseased man's search for psychological truth and stability—and, uh, Wiseman isn't going to do that—at least let us have fun with the aliens and the spaceships and the robots. Wiseman directs with a two left, leaden feet.

4. Not even the third-act introduction—and it's essentially an introduction; his character is only seen on video screens for the first 90 minutes—of Bryan Cranston as the evil president Cohaagen livens up the proceedings much. He does try, though; Cranston clearly is giddy about the opportunities he has in a post-Walter White and invests a sense of legitimate menace in Cohaagen that the movie doesn't have much interest in following. Instead, it would rather keep following around Kate Beckinsale, in the Ironside/Stone role. Her character is essentially absurd, showing up in every scene (whether she could have possibly known what was going on or not), and exists mostly so Wiseman, Beckinsale's husband, can direct his wife jumping across rooms and scowling like he did in the Underworld films. While she's convincing as a fighter—I sure as hell didn't buy Jessica Biel holding her own in a fight with her for more than 10 seconds—her character makes no sense and mostly inspires laughter every random scene she shows up in. You don't for a second believe Farrell's character would believe her as a traditional wife in the first place; at best, he'd hire her for security.

5. Then again, the chance exists that this whole movie exists in the protagonist's head in the first place, so of course he, unhappy with his life and marriage, might see his wife as a destroyer in his dreams anyway. That central idea is so flush with opportunity that it's frustrated that now two movies have wasted it. Farrell is easier to buy as an Everyman than Schwarzenegger—I think Tom Waits is more believable as an Everyman than Schwarzenegger—and there are times he makes Quaid/Hauser's confusion and fear palpable. The movie is better at keeping this possibility enticingly on the surface than the original was, and the wink at the end feels more genuine, more potentially haunting. It doesn't follow through on it, though. This could be a whole reinvention, the original twisted on its head. But this new Total Recall doesn't have the gumption; it would rather be a blockbuster than a mind-bender. It turns out to be neither.

Grade: C.

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A Very Obsessive Guide To Sight & Sound's Greatest Films Poll [Grierson & Leitch]

Yesterday was heaven for film lovers and list fanatics as Sight & Sound unveiled its once-a-decade poll of the greatest films of all time. There are actually two separate lists—one for critics, one for directors—and the big news was that, after topping the poll since 1962, Citizen Kane had been replaced by a new No. 1 in the critics' list, Vertigo. (The directors' list, which has only been going since 1992, also had a new No. 1: Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story.) What else has changed in the past 10 years?

1. The polls were less exclusive this time around.

In 2002, 145 critics voted, and 108 directors participated. This time around, 846 critics contributed, including me, and 358 directors voted. This is important to point out from the beginning because it suggests that a bunch of new voices entered the conversation that hadn't been part of the poll before. Also, more voters means fewer ties than in past years.

2. Orson Welles took it on the chin.

If Sight & Sound was a presidential debate, with CNN and FOX News discussing all the "winners" and "losers," all the commentators would pick Orson Welles as one of the poll's losers. It wasn't simply that Citizen Kane fell from No. 1. (It's at No. 2.) But in the critics' Top 50, what's striking is how poorly Welles' other films did in comparison to 2002. Back then, Touch of Evil was tied for No. 15, and The Magnificent Ambersons was tied for No. 35. Neither of them made the Top 50 this time. Even movies that simply starred Welles suffered: The Third Man (previously tied for No. 35) was nowhere in the Top 50.

3. Restored/re-released films polled well.

There are always going to be complaints by some that Sight & Sound is too "stodgy," that the poll only honors "old" films. But while it's true that the critics' Top 50 favors films from before 1980 (more on that in a second), some older films got a boost thanks to being rediscovered. Two examples that immediately spring to mind are Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which was brought back in a new print (and a new Criterion release) a few years ago, and Late Spring, which hit Criterion in 2006. Neither film was in the Top 50 (which, because of ties, was actually the Top 60) in 2002; this time around, they were No. 35 and No. 15 respectively. The same rediscovery process could have helped Touch of Evil 10 years ago: Welles' noir was re-released in 1998 in a re-edited form. For all the whining that "new" movies aren't being shown enough love in the poll, older films are being embraced and reevaluated when they return in new prints or DVDs.

4. The last 30 years of cinema aren't having much of an impact—or are they?

In the Top 50, there are only six films released since 1980: Shoah, Close-Up (I guessed the wrong Abbas Kiarostami when I put together my '90s predictions), Sátántangó, Histoire(s) du cinéma, In the Mood for Love and Mulholland Dr. If you take a look back at the 2002 poll, there were nine films from 1970-2000 that made the Top 60. That would suggest that critics aren't as interested in newer films for the new poll. But in 2002, a movie needed all of five votes to crack the Top 60. In 2012, to hit the Top 50 (or 52, thanks to ties) required 29 votes. In other words, it takes a lot more agreement to make an impact in the poll, so the presence of six post-'80 films doesn't seem too stodgy.

5. Coppola's "greatest film" is up for debate.

In 2002, Sight & Sound allowed multiple films to count together as one film, which is why The Godfather and The Godfather Part II collectively came in at No. 4. This time, though, the publication asked that every film be counted separately, and The Godfather tied for No. 21 and The Godfather Part II tied for No. 31. Consequently, neither of those is Francis Ford Coppola's most popular film among polled critics: Apocalypse Now (which wasn't in the Top 60 in 2002) landed at No. 14. Did the release of Apocalypse Now Redux in 2001 sway voters to its greatness? (That definitely seemed to be the case for Roger Ebert, who put the film on his ballot after its re-release.) As Matt Singer points out, if the two Godfather films had remained together, they would have ended up at No. 7. The bottom line is that among major directors, Coppola is the one guy whose "best film" is in dispute. Everybody else—Hitchcock, Welles, Kubrick, Fellini, Ford—has always polled strongest with one particular film. Which leads me to...

6. Having only one masterpiece helps your Sight & Sound chances.

Four directors have more than two movies in the Top 50: Coppola (3); Andrei Tarkovsky (3);  Carl Dreyer (3); and Jean-Luc Godard (4). With the exception of Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc), none of them has a film in the Top 10. Every director with a movie in the Top 10 is well-respected, beloved, a titan, etc., but also benefits from having one singular film that critics point to as the film. A consensus around a particular masterpiece allows voters to pick both a film and a director they admire in one fell swoop.

7. Comedy is in short supply.

Every once in a while, someone will write a piece arguing that the Academy Awards overwhelmingly prefer dramas to comedies and that a Best Comedy prize should be awarded. (Everyone reads that piece, shrugs, and then moves on with their life.) But it's true in the critics' poll as well that dramas perform much, much better than lighter fare. By my count there are only five films outright comedies: Singin' in the Rain, The General, Some Like It Hot, Play Time, and City Lights, which tied for No. 50. Singin' was No. 10 in 2002; now it's at No. 20, the highest comedy on the list.

8. The list is mostly inclusive...with a few exceptions.

It would be a mistake for Sight & Sound voters to feel that they "have" to include films from directors of all races, genders, creeds, nationalities, and sexual preferences on their ballot. (Great movies should be great movies, period.) But only one female director, Chantal Akerman, made the Top 50. There are no African-American directors in the Top 50. Other than that, you do have a healthy mix of Asian, European, and American filmmakers.

9. Certain "beloved favorites" didn't make the cut.

Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, and It's a Wonderful Life are the sort of film-library staples that everybody owns and everybody loves. But they don't make the critics' Top 50, opening the door to criticism that the voters willfully turn their nose up at popular favorites. Be that as it may, none of these movies cracked the Top 60 in 2002, either—with the exception of Lawrence of Arabia, which tied with a bunch of other films with five votes at the bottom of the Top 60.

10. The directors' list is pretty fun.

The directors' poll is enjoyably unpredictable from decade to decade. This is only the third time Sight & Sound has conducted a directors' poll, and their new No. 1, Tokyo Story, was nowhere to be found in the Top 10 in 2002 or 1992. (Ten years ago, it was tied at No. 16.) There's simply no rhyme or reason from one decade to the next, which makes this list constantly surprising. (Unlike the critics, the directors have decided to change which film from a certain beloved director is his masterpiece: substituting Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for Dr. Strangelove, and now preferring Scorsese's Taxi Driver to Raging Bull.) It's entirely possible several of their Top 10 slots will change again in 2022. For those who wish the critics' list wasn't so similar each 10 years, the directors list will be more your speed.

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Total Recall Is a Lot Dumber Than You Remember [Grierson & Leitch]

Jul 27, 2012 4:48 PM  

The remake of Total Recall — which features Colin Farrell as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kate Beckinsale as Sharon Stone, Jessica Biel as Rachel Ticotin and Bryan Cranston as "Cohaagen give these people some air!" — opens a week from today. The original Total Recall came out in 1990, right on the edge of the end of the cheesy, fun, low-budget '80s action movie era and the beginning of the big-budget, special-effects laden '90s Terminator 2/Jurassic Park era.

I remember Total Recall somewhat fondly, as one of the transitional Schwarzenegger films, taking him from the Commando world into a more mainstream one that would ultimately end up with him in Junior. So I rewatched the movie this week, and I was a bit taken aback by just how poorly it holds up. The years have been far kinder to older movies like Predator and The Running Man.

You'll remember the basic plot, one that the remake seems to be mostly repeating. An "ordinary" man of the future—and this movie suffers from the same problem as a lot of more "mainstream" Schwarzenegger movies, asking us to believe the massively bulked-up, eye-bulging, head-popping Schwarzenegger as a regular workaday fella—visits a dream-implanting travel agency but ends up on the run from real bad guys who think, rightly or wrongly, that he's a secret agent turned revolutionary.

The concept itself is Hitchockian at its core: Average Joe suddenly accused and hunted for a crime he didn't commit ... or maybe he did. But needless to say, Schwarzenegger is no James Stewart or Cary Grant. You can see Ah-nold doing his best to be a relatable human being in Total Recall, but he's not quite there yet, so when he's working as a construction guy dreaming of a better future on Mars, you never buy it: You just keep waiting for him to rip somebody's arms off.

My memory recollected Total Recall as a spooky, smart mind-bender about identity and cool aliens, but, upon watching it again, the main point of the movie seems to be "the future is totally different, you guys." The first two-thirds of the movie are one groaning "whoa, future!" gimmick after another. Total Recall is honestly just a couple step removed from Tomorrowland. The future will bring us full-body X-ray machines! Light pens that change your nail color! Telephones with cameras! Taxi cabs driven by robots! Newspapers called "Mars Today!"

These are "jokes" not even thought through halfway as much as Back to the Future's. It was also depressing to learn that Total Recall found it important to point out that ESPN would still exist in the future, though, to be fair, ESPN was a lot more likable in 1990 than it is now.

Perhaps what stands out most about Total Recall is how chintzy it is: This is a schlocky low-budget film impersonating a big-budget one, poorly. The sets are boxy and artificial, the alien effects are famously underdone—honestly, what a strange way to personify "gasping for air"—and I'm pretty sure only one of those three boobs look real.

The movie is also oddly serious and heavy-footed; there's a scene in which a little-person prostitute shoots up a brothel and the movie doesn't even pause to find it even slightly amusing. Director Paul Verhoeven had created a wild, satirical landscape of madness in RoboCop three years earlier—and would top it seven years later with Starship Troopers—but he feels neutered here; there's precious little of that Verhoeven ludicrousness. There's no way the Verhoeven of Starship Troopers would have played that idiotic love story straight. This was the only time Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven worked together, and you can see why. Schwarzenegger's total lack of irony and Verhoeven's crazy-person perversity were never going to be a match.

The movie has its moments, or it wouldn't have lasted. I love the freaky alien-baby rebel leader, who, now that I look at him, has a striking resemblance to Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Happiness. It's pretty tough not to smile when Cohaagen—played by ultimate '80s villain Ronny Cox—fires off his "I'll blow this place up and be home in time for corn flakes" line. (I've spent 22 years trying to figure out what time, precisely, one needs to be home in order to have one's corn flakes.) No movie with Michael Ironsides in it can ever be entirely bad.

And the best performance in the film is from Sharon Stone, as Arnold's evil, nurturing, ass-kicking wife. This was two years before Basic Instinct, and you can see why Stone was about to become a huge star: You know she wants to kill you, but you want to have sex with her anyway, despite that, maybe because of it.

But the movie itself drags in spots and bungles its central premise, that messing with one's memory could erase the notion of who someone is, what "identity" even means. That's the premise of the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" that the movie was supposedly based on, but Total Recall loses interest in that in a matter of minutes, instead turning into yet another series of scenes of people shooting machine guns at each other. There's a terrific concept at the core of Total Recall, and maybe the remake will cut closer to it. But good feelings for Total Recall are nostalgia, with perhaps fond remembrances of better Schwarzenegger movies seeping in. See The Running Man or Predator or Commando again instead. Or, even better, just go rent Starship Troopers again. Service guarantees citizenship.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

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