THE AMERICAN

Dir. Anton Corbijn USA 2010

If The American was anything, it was predictable. It was much more than that; in fact many of the adjectives I would use to describe it would be positive. But the beats of the story are ones you've seen a thousand times. I won't spoil the ending or anything, but it barely matters. If you've ever watched a movie about a hitman before, you've more or less seen The American, whether it's In Bruges or Blast Of Silence or Le Samourai or The Killer. I enjoyed all of those films more than The American, but this film (hell, this genre), is rarely one that you visit for the plot. Above all, The American is a mood piece, as tightly wound, effortlessly professional and quietly hollow as it's protagonist.

George Clooney plays Jack, a meticulously professional assassin who is sent to a small Italian town by his handler to hide out following a violent incident in Sweden. There, Jack befriends an elderly priest and begins a romance with a warm-hearted prostitute named Clara. He also begins building a customized rifle for a new client, a fellow assassin named Mathilde. As Jack attempts to reexamine his old life, his new one is threatened by retaliation for the incident in Sweden as well as new threats from unexpected sources.

See? Familiar, isn't it? Trite, even? Absolutely. However, the worthiness of The American lies not in its plotting or its scripting or even its acting, but the direction. Corbijn shows his European roots (he directed the 2006 Best Foreign Film winner, The Lives Of Others) by crafting a methodical, icy thriller in which the glacial pace is made all the more agonizing by the blink-and-you'll-miss-it bursts of violence that punctuate the film. The film is almost two hours, but I wouldn't be surprised if the script was about 50 pages. The dialogue is direct and to the point and Corbijn isn't afraid to include natural pauses that last for so long, they almost become unnatural. Despite it's realism, the movie becomes almost dream-like by the end, as you get more and more entrenched in Clooney's headspace.

Speaking of which. For a guy who's so handsome and charming, Clooney has a surprising amount of range. You've got suave, smarmy Clooney (the Ocean's movies, Out Of Sight), goofy Clooney (his work with the Coen Brothers) and serious, grim Clooney (Syriana, Michael Clayton). He plays all of these types pretty well, and in The American he takes his serious, grim performance to it's extreme. It's a deceptively tough role to pull off too. The stoic badass seems pretty basic, but Jack is given very little dialogue to work with and is shown to be particularly heinous at the beginning of the film (in a sad, brutal scene that is stunning just by virtue of it's nonchalance). Clooney still manages to create an evolution for the character though, and by the end of the film I was really pulling for him.

The rest of the cast is pretty solid as well. LOST fans will recognize Mathilde (who's name, I think is a reference to The Professional) as the woman Sayid encounters in his flashforward and the woman playing the prostitute also managed to do a lot with a pretty thankless role. I wasn't really sold on the priest character, mostly because he seemed to exist only as an excuse for Jack to cryptically wax philosophical about his job.

All in all, I'd recommend this movie, just don't go into it expecting an action move because...it's totally not. Definitely more of a mood piece. Or if you just like seeing George Clooney looking pensive and sad.

UP NEXT: A way less pretentious review. Mystery Team! Also, Game Of Thrones starts in less than a month! Get psyched!

MOON / MONSTERS

Dir. Duncan Jones USA 2009

Dir. Gareth Edwards UK 2010

I caught both of these films on Instant Watch this week. They're both minimalist, low-budget (one much more so than the other) sci-fi flicks with small casts and high concepts. I wouldn't call either of them new favorites, but they're both well worth your time and warrant a bit of discussion.

Moon is the directorial debut of Duncan Jones, son of David Jones, better know as David Bowie. I'll refrain from any Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust jokes and just say that Jones shares his fathers fascination with the unknown, both physically and psychologically. However, he eschews the psychedelic fantasy of his fathers work for a believable reality to create one of the hardest sci -fi films I've seen in years.

In a one man (sort of) tour de force, Sam Rockwell portrays Sam Bell, an astronaut in the last two weeks of a three year contract to mine helium on the moon. Fueled by a desire to see his wife and new daughter (who was born while he was away), Sam attempts to stave off boredom and loneliness, with only an AI construct (voiced by Kevin Spacey) for company. When an accident caused by a possible hallucination leaves Sam injured and even more unstable, a strange new arrival at on his one-man space station threaten to unravel everything Sam knows about his past, present and future.

I'm being purposefully vague here because there's a first act twist that I don't want to spoil (although if you've heard even a little bit about the film, you probably already know what it is), but I think I can say enough about the movie otherwise without giving anything away. Jones has stated in interviews that he is a fan of the austere sci-fi films of the 60's and 70's (2001, Solaris, etc.), and Moon certainly wears those influences on its sleeve. The mining base, as the sole location in the film, is heavily grounded in real science and combines the sleek, white Macbook look of the new Star Trek film with the grubby, lived-in vibe of the original Star Wars films. Both the spartan, claustrophobic interior of the station and vast emptiness of the lunar surface combine to draw the viewer into the cramped loneliness of Sam's headspace. For a 90 minute film, Jones definitely allows the film to breathe, wallowing in the day-to-day slog that is Sam's life on the moon. It's slow, but never boring.

Really though, this movie rests on the shoulders of Sam Rockwell, who creates a multifaceted, believable character in Sam Bell. Rockwell is probably one of the best character actors working today, with scene-stealing supporting roles in Iron Man 2 and The Assassination of Jesse James. Moon is one of his rare leading roles (apparently it was written with him in mind) and he makes the most of it, blending humor, confusion, fear and despair into an understated, but extremely affecting performance.

I don't know that I'd say that Moon is for everyone, but even if you're not into sci-fi, I'd say it's worth checking out. The plot is twisty and thought-provoking without being overly complex and it's just the right length for such a slowly paced film.

Monsters isn't as well made as Moon, but it's definitely the more impressive of the two films. Made for less than half a million dollars and shot on location in three weeks without permission with a seven man crew (the two lead actors included), Monsters is a film that makes you wonder how studios still manage to invest hundreds of millions of dollars and months of work in films far that are far less interesting.

Set six years after a NASA probe crashes in Mexico, Monsters explores a world where the titular creatures have overrun Central America, forcing the United States to build a massive barrier to keep them out. The film follows a mercenary-minded young photographer named Caulder, who travels the region documenting the destruction caused by the aliens. He is forced by his wealthy employer to escort his daughter, Samantha through the infected zone and back to America after she is trapped by a quarantine order. What follows is a low-key indie romance/road-trip film that occasionally features giant squid aliens.

The 90 minutes that make up this film were assembled from over 100 hours of shot footage and whittled down from an initial 4 hour rough cut. This isn't surprising, given the shaggy, unhurried pace of the narrative. The plot is straightforward and simple and the spaces between the few major story beats play out in short, documentary style montages of travel and observation. This is clearly a film more interested in exploring a world than telling a story and watching it feels like a cross between looking at someone's (well-shot) vacation photos and looking at a photo expose of a war zone. Considering that the plot is, in broad terms, a tried-and-true road-trip/action film plot, the movie has almost no sense of urgency, even during the "action" scenes. If you go into this expecting Cloverfield, you will be disappointed. This is best exemplified by the fact that Edwards devotes the 10 minutes that would be the final climax of an action film to a beautifully shot and rendered interaction between the humans and the monsters that is genuinely moving.

In a lot of ways, this is a very uneven film. The lead actors are a bit bland (for a real life couple, Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able display some lukewarm chemistry in this film) and don't do much to fill out their lightly drawn characters. The film is also a bit on the nose with some of its social and political metaphors. It also features some fractured chronology that ends up being completely unnecessary. As a mood piece, however, the film is a compelling portrait of the chaos and decay lurking at the edges of American society. And the special effects are surprisingly beautiful for something done in the directors home computer.

Neither of these films are going to go down as my favorites and neither packs the sheer originality or pulpy fun of District 9, but they are both encouraging examples of small-scale, personalized science fiction, demonstrating that limited resources and a lot of ingenuity often generates better art a studio-commissioned script and hundreds of millions of dollars.

THE BROOD / TRIANGLE / THE LITTLE GIANT

So I've kind of fallen behind (again), but rather than let myself get bogged down, I'm just going to give some brief thoughts on the last three movies I watched and do my best to get back on track. They have almost nothing in common, other than the first two being horror films, but don't let that bother you.

THE BROOD

Dir. David Cronenberg CANADA 1979

I've been on a sporadic David Cronenberg kick for the last year or so. After seeing and loving Eastern Promises, I dove into his (significantly stranger) back-catalogue and haven't looked back. The Fly, Videodrome, eXistenZ and Rabid were all horrifying and thought-provoking to varying degrees, but something about The Brood missed that disturbing mark.

The plot concerns Frank Corveth, a man forced to raise his young daughter Candice by himself after her mother, Nola is committed to an experimental psychiatric institute run by Dr. Hal Raglan, who utilizes a technique called psychoplasmics to channel their mental anguish into treatable, physical manifestations (I know, right). While Nola's obsession with returning to Candice begins to intensify, Frank's life is systematically dismantled by a rash of violence and murder that seems to be focusing on him and his daughter.

Although this is the last Cronenberg film (of those I've seen) that I would recommend, I don't want to give away the ending, because it's still pretty wild. The film is extremely subdued when compared to the other films I mentioned, both in terms of body horror and violence, but the finale boasts one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen committed to film and is worth the wait if you're inclined to watch it. The 80 minutes preceding it however, are pretty spotty.

The Brood is probably most similar to Rabid, of all the Cronenberg stuff I've seen. Videodrome seems to be where he cemented his voice and style, and his early films, while still extremely interesting, come off as a the work of a talented amateur. Both Rabid and The Brood concern a young woman undergoing horrifying experiences at experimental medical facilities and both unwittingly unleash said horror on the outside world (specifically the men in their lives). But where Rabid follows the more exciting template of the zombie/vampire film, The Brood is more of a paranoid murder mystery, with a slow-burn plot and a more subtle tone of dread as opposed to outright horror. It's an interesting turn, but even at 90 minutes, the movies starts to drag a bit. Combined with the low-budget, late 70's set decoration, most of the film ends up feeling like a made-for-TV psychodrama. The acting is also pretty weak across the board, with the exception of Oliver Reed, who plays Dr. Raglan like a sinister, subdued William Shatner. Not a bad flick overall, but I'd only recommend it for Cronenberg completists.

TRIANGLE

Dir. Christopher Smith UK/AUSTRALIA 2009

Of the three films that I review here, this is the one I'd recommend the most, although it's going to be a short review. It's almost impossible to discuss the plot of this film at all without giving away some major curve balls, of which the film throws many. It's a horror film. Sort of. About a group of friends who go for a sailboat ride. Melissa George plays the lead. That's honestly all I feel comfortable saying. I will however, try to convince you to see it.

So I only heard of this film (it was never given a theatrical release in the US) thanks to the guys over at the Slashfilmcast, who spent about ten minutes of one episode raving about it but not actually saying what it was about. Naturally this piqued my interest. I convinced my roommates to watch it, even though they knew nothing about it other than it was a horror movie and we all enjoyed the hell out of it.

Triangle operates on a pretty familiar, yet unique wavelength. It features numerous tropes common to all horror movies, but manages to effectively turn them against the audience and create a film that will probably take two viewings to completely understand (assuming it can be fully understood) and will probably possess Memento-level rewatch value for those who enjoy narratively twisted horror films. The protagonist/antagonist relationship, the attrition of the cast and the straight-forward, goal-oriented plotting of single location horror films are all features present in Triangle, but all of them take on bizarre new dimensions, thanks to a story-telling technique that, while not wholly original in itself, is applied here in a scenario where it is quite unexpected.

This is the ultimate success of Triangle, I think. It presents itself as a film that shouldn't require much thought, but abruptly and deftly begins to make you crank your brain into overdrive at the end of the first act and doesn't let up until the final frames. It would be easy and not completely incorrect to call this film pretentious and ultimately incoherent (I'm sure you could tear the plot to pieces if you were so inclined), but ten years into the 21st century, it manages to be a gripping and effective horror movie without being disgustingly violent, overly self-referential/meta or broad and pandering. And that, my friends, is refreshing.

I'd never heard of Christopher Smith before seeing this film, although I'd been aware of his latest film The Black Death, with Sean Bean, and am now all the more interested in seeing it. He makes some interesting visual choices, given the genre he's working with (I don't think I've seen so much effective use of soft focus in a modern horror movie), and some of his shots are simply striking. And Melissa George, who was serviceable if not particularly inspiring in 30 Days Of Night (that's a good way to describe that whole movie actually), is extremely capable of playing the wide range of emotions and scenes required of her in this film. Her character, Jess, is given a surprising amount of depth for the blonde protagonist of a horror movie and George perfectly strikes the balance of beautiful vulnerability and raw brutality that is at the core of every female character in a horror film.

If you've got any interest in this film, I'd recommend that you read nothing else about it and check it out as soon as possible. I don't think it will disappoint.

THE LITTLE GIANT

Dir. Roy Del Ruth USA 1933

The Little Giant is one of at least 4 films Edward G. Robinson made that spoof the gangster persona that launched in to stardom in Little Caesar. A Slight Case Of Murder is the best of the ones I've seen so far, although Brother Orchid is solid as well (I have yet to check out Larceny, Inc.). Little Giant has a bit of workhorse quality to it (Roy Del Ruth directed James Cagney in Lady Killer, which I reviewed a few months ago, another enjoyable, if unremarkable gangster comedy), but it's more than worth the 75 minutes it takes to watch it, and does take a slightly different perspective on the very narrow "Edward G. Robinson playing a retired gangster trying to fit in with high society" genre. Seriously, he made at least 4 movies about that.

So Eddie G. plays Bugs Ahearn, a wealthy bootlegger who gets out of the business when Prohibition is repealed. Eager to put his ill-gotten gains to good use, he and his crotchety right hand man move to a fancy resort town in California and attempt to rub elbows with classy high society types. There he acquires a snarky Girl Friday secretary in the form of Mary Astor and falls in love with a callow socialite who is only trying to land him because her family is broke. Zaniness ensues.

As I said, despite being a highly specific formula, the film is formulaic nonetheless. However, it's still massively entertaining for a number of reasons, chief among them being Robinson himself. Perhaps the reason Robinson made these fish out of water comedies so often was due to the way he felt about his real life career. A highly educated European immigrant, Robinson ironically became famous for portraying uncouth toughs with delusions of grandeur. His real life passion for and knowledge of art lends an extra layer of amusement to a scene in which Bugs shows off a Cubist painting he spent many thousands of dollars on, claiming it's got "loads of perspective" and claiming, "I'm just crawlin' with education. I been reading all them Greeks. They do plenty besides shining shoes and running lunchrooms." in a bit of hilariously obscure racism. Robinson sells all of this with his usual pitch-perfect theatrical hand gestures and machine gun delivery. I could watch a whole movie of him just ranting about things.

The film also shines as an example of what you could get away with in the Pre-Code era (basically the years between 1929 and 1934, when films had sound but no organized system of regulating content, until the Hayes Code was instituted). The scene I quoted above also contains a joke about cocaine use (actually using the word cocaine), which is never even mentioned, let alone joked about in old films. Some one also gets called a faggot, which I didn't even know was an slur back in the '30s. Not that racism and bigotry are funny (only sometimes), but it's pretty wild to see what you could get away with back during that tiny window of time, and it gives the films a looser, more natural feel, rather than the stuffy, uptight tone that people now associated with older films.

Finally, although she has a pretty small part, the film is a nice showcase for Mary Astor, who always left me a little cold in The Maltese Falcon. Granted, her character in that film is a remorseless, manipulative bitch, but the fact that she played it so well always kind of made me dislike her. Unfair, I know. Here, she plays a clever, sympathetic wise-ass and displays some pretty great comedic timing as the straight (wo)man to Robinson's motor-mouth gangster. The film as a whole makes an interesting choice to breeze through the crime elements and focus most of its time on the absurdities of the upper class and anyone who would try to fit in that crowd, an unsurprising, but understandable viewpoint for a film made during the height of the Great Depression. After all, who doesn't like to laugh at their betters?