Colin Marshall

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, 2007)

In the cutthroat world of competitive classic arcade gaming, hot-wing-sauce entrepreneur Billy Mitchell held the seemingly unbeatable top score at Nintendo's Donkey Kong for years. One day, Seattle-area suburban dad Steve Wiebe, having fallen short in his life's previous efforts, decided to become the new champion. When he beat Mitchell's score on his own machine and submitted the tape to scorekeeping association Twin Galaxies, controversy arose: had the machine been tampered with by another rogue gamer, a Missile Command champion with bad blood for both Mitchell and Twin Galaxies? Only a live showdown can determine the real King of Kong.

* * *

Fans of The King of Kong tend to recommend the film by saying, "Sure, it's about guys who play Donkey Kong, but it's not really about guys who play Donkey Kong." To which I would respond, what's wrong with a documentary about guys who play Donkey Kong? Homo sum: humani a me nihil alienum puto. Few subjects are as reliably fascinating as subcultures — see also Trekkies, or any Guest mocumentary — and boy, is competitive Kong-ing ever a subculture.

Yes, you might say that the movie is about more than playing a 25-year-old arcade game about a barrel-throwing ape. It's about standing up to life's vicissitudes, it's about the greasy pole of celebrity, it's about the primal human drive for recognition. But let's not forget about the game and, more fascinatingly, the sort of man driven to spend days straight in pursuit of a high score.

And it will be a man, certainly white, and almost as certainly doughy and unkempt. Now, I'm not one to comment on the percentage of white guys in a group — surprise at the presence of a lot of Caucasoid males is, to my mind, the equivalent of surprise at the presence of oxygen — but damn. In 2008, there are plenty of female gamers — the ratio fast approaches 50:50 — but not in competitive Donkey Kong. Only three women play roles in the film: an octogenarian Q*Bert hopeful that Mitchell uses as a mule for his own high-score tape, and the wives of the two main contenders. Wiebe's is supportive but lantern-jawed. In a fiction film, Mitchell's would be played by Jennifer Coolidge.

This raises a chicken-or-egg question: does a life spent in competitive classic gaming make you dumpy and socially inept, or are the dumpy and socially inept especially well-suited to a life of competitive classic gaming? And what does it mean that Wiebe and Mitchell, the hardest-gaming of them all, are the least ugly? (Wiebe has the look of a onetime high school heartthrob gone slightly to seed in that Pacific Northwest Dad way, while Mitchell somehow manages to look both meticulously well-maintained and impossibly tacky.)

For me, the question is more than academic, since my interest in video games also centers on the classic. I have attended meetings of the Northwest Classic Gaming Enthusiasts and played, suckily, in their Atari tournaments. In the arcade scenes, I couldn't stop looking at all the machines in the background — Spy Hunter, S.T.U.N. Runner, Robotron 2084 — and daydreaming about how much fun it would be to play them. And that's only one of the things I do where participants are not known for the attention they pay to their appearance: I write and do radio about books, fer chrissakes (and my favorite genre of film is documentary). According to the statistics, I should by all rights be ugly, possibly fugly, but, thanks to the miracle of overcompensation, I have had ladyfriends.

But besides fugliness, The King of Kong also hits on another theme I find resonant: the grueling, unpalatable process of being the best at a single activity. I don't know why anyone attempts to get to the top of an established category. Aspiring to become the world's finest ballet dancer, baseball pitcher, symphony oboist or particle physicist seems like asking for a bad life, one jump ahead of ascetic, self-flagellating monasticism. And for what? To wind up, in the best-case scenario, one in a long line of especially gluttonous gluttons for punishment? None of these dudes are having fun playing Donkey Kong: not Wiebe, not Mitchell, and certainly none of the sad aspirants below them. I'm reminded of a Scott Adams blog post:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Robinson Devor's Zoo
7. Anton Corbijn's Control
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Jason Reitman's Juno
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
12. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
13. Greg Mottola's Superbad
14. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
15. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
16. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
17. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
18. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
19. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
20. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie

Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles, 1975)

In 1971, the ultra-squalid living conditions of Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale and Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, mother and daughter, made breathless headlines. While they weren't the only people living isolated in a decayed mansion filled with garbage and animals, they were easily the only aunt and cousin of Jackie Onassis to do so. About to see her eccentric relatives booted out and their grand shack Grey Gardens razed, Jackie stepped in, ordering trash hauled out and working plumbing installed. Later in the decade, documentarians Albert and David Maysles discovered Big and Little Edie while researching a project about the Bouviers. Thinking there a better movie in the Beales than the Bouviers, the brothers Maysles began showing up regularly to film the pair's odd daily life amidst the house's renewed filth.

* * *

Grey Gardens is like something out of Tennessee Williams' fever dreams. This isn't crumbling, obilvious aristocracy; it's aristocracy in the dump. After being bilked out of most of their money, the Beales lived on something like $300 a month, selling their jewelry whenever times got tough(er). The octogenarian Big Edie repeatedly insists that she's led a wild, full life — in reality, she seems to have been a frustrated music-hall singer and little more — while the quinquagenarian Little Edie acts for all the world like she'll land a fabulous husband — born, of course, under the proper astrological sign — any day now.

If I was fifteen years younger, this movie would give me nightmares. Grey Gardens looks like a haunted house, but dirtier. Weird artifacts clutter the frame. Little Edie's rambling, impromptu monologues drift in and out of coherence. Big Edie doesn't always cover up. Critics frequently use the term "haunting" to convey the film's look and feel; I won't kid myself that I can do much better.

The theme that jumps right out at me is delusion: as Dictionary.com puts it, "false belief or opinion." While Big Edie, ensconced in her growing-ever-browner bed covered in trinkets and the remains of foodstuffs, could reasonably be accused only of papering over her regrets, Little Edie comes across as almost schizophrenic, enslaved to the false belief that she's basically still her glamorous 20-year-old self, briefly staying with her mother before she can return to glamorous New York City to choose from her bevy of suitors. At times, she shifts gears and near-hysterically berates her mother for pushing away the men who'd come a-callin' during her marriageable days; the older woman just scoffs.

Defeated by their own wrongful belief that they're still on top of the world, the Beales seem to have landed where they are with another, equally wrongheaded idea, one that rendered them helpless: Mr. Right Will Save You^TM. Apparently laboring under such a notion, Big Edie sort of trashed her life when she ran off with her accompanist. By the same token, Little Edie never really began hers. How important our beliefs are: if you're going to choose ones not based in reality, then at least choose ones that help you rather than hinder you. Unencumbered by these arbitrary, human-made restrictions that told them to just stay the course even as their world crumbled around them, Edie and Edie might have been able to avoid having the same nonsensical arguments day in and day out while the Maysles got it all in their mags. Then again, were that the case, we wouldn't have Grey Gardens, and that'd be a damn shame.

Slipstream (Anthony Hopkins, 2007)

On a production filming out in the desert, an actor dies after delivering a bizarre ad-libbed monologue about Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Screenwriter Felix Bonhoeffer is called in to patch the situation up with a quick rewrite. A series of bizarre incidents that intermingle his fictional work with his real life follow — and, it seems, precede — until — or maybe after — he's smashed by a car.

* * *

Summarizing Slipstream isn't easy, and I'm pretty sure I got a lot wrong even in the brief preceding paragraph. That's because there's something up with the chronology: events aren't shown in sequence, and the "real" timeline can be only vaguely pieced together. Some scenes appear to be based in Felix's reality, others look to take place in his imagination, and others still take some third door. Shots repeat in slow (or fast) motion; stock footage of Nixon, Stalin and some lightning is spliced in; distorted voices float in out of nowhere.

My description makes the film sound like a confusing jumble because, well, it is a confusing jumble. It's also the brainchild of writer, director, star and composer (!) Anthony Hopkins, who has had a lot like this to say about it:

I didn‘t set out to write it as a piece with any meaning or message or any sort of significance. In an offhand way I just said, “Okay, I‘m going to write something,” and that‘s how I started. I don‘t want to [use] highfalutin words such as “stream of consciousness,” but I think that‘s what it was. I started with scene one and let it write itself. I tried not to edit my mind as bits came out. I didn‘t spend days intensely working — I‘d write two scenes, maybe, and then I‘d walk away. Then I‘d come in the next day and do something else. I think I wanted to see where it would take itself and how random it would be. After a few months I read what I wrote, and I thought, “Well, this is kind of interesting,” and I let it go at that. Some other people read it, and they said, “This is really, really weird and strange — what does it mean?” I said, “Well I know what it means, but I can‘t actually explain it to people.”

Near as I can tell, the picture is an unusual combination of Hollywood satire — a fun one to see so soon after Barton Fink, as John Turturro is now the loudmouthed mogul — and meditation on time. Hopkins paints the process of studio film production as irrational and incomprehensible, and he doesn't give time a much fairer shake. According to his movie, we can't hope to grasp either, but they keep doing their thing more or less inexorably.

You know when you wake up in the morning, and then, for whatever reason — you accidentally got up too early, you realize it's a weekend, you've called in sick — you try to go back to bed, and then you get those truly strange dreams during which you oscillate between sleep and wakefulness, and things keep rewinding and replaying themselves in different ways, reflecting what's been going in your mind lately to varying degrees? That's how the narrative is structured.

Do I like Slipstream? Hard to say. Do I admire Slipstream? Oh, very much. (It's the same way I feel about Top Gun.) For all its eccentricities, there can be no doubt that this is a project pulled off with utter commitment, a quality more important to me than any other. Hopkins said (presumably), "You know what? I'm going to make exactly the movie I want to make." When studios complained, he said (presumably), "Oh, you don't think it's marketable enough? See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya." Anybody with complaints about the final product would (presumably) be told to talk straight to the hand. That's an attitude film could use more of.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Robinson Devor's Zoo
7. Anton Corbijn's Control
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Jason Reitman's Juno
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
12. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
13. Greg Mottola's Superbad
14. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
15. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
16. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
17. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
18. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
19. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie

Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Jonesing to finally experience intercourse in the twilight of high school, awkward best buds Seth and Evan plan to leverage their even more awkward friend Fogell's fake ID to purchase booze, which will make them the Guys Who Brought the Booze at a graduation party hosted by their ladies of choice. Alas, the liquor store is robbed as the Fogell makes the buy, and he winds up riding along with the pair of incompetent cops who take his statement. Falsely believing Fogell busted and desperate for alcohol, Seth and Evan wind up at one of those house parties full of creepy 30-year-olds, and not until much chaos has ensued do the three paths reunite and reach the shindig.

* * *

High school guys can be lumped into three categories:

• Pure playaz
• Steady-girlfriend-havers
• Seth, Evan and Fogell

Here's how I remember it from my high school years: though damned to later destroy their livers in frat houses, those in the top group had nothing to worry about. Those in the second group — my own, represent — were slightly more skittish because all their eggs were in a single basket. Almost wholly deprived of female attention, the poor wretches in the third are the sort of guys willing to go to ridiculous lengths for it. Superbad documents those lengths.

What the movie nails, as it were, is how sex is to high school as food was to cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers: there's not much around, so you've got to seize it when times are good, lest the winter be harsh and unforgiving. Those early humans weren't waiting around for coq au vin, either; if raggedy roots and bark were available, they'd chow down on raggedy roots and bark. And like it. I'm considering if I've taken this analogy too far, but no, it's perfect.

I won't say the film made me nostalgic for high school, but it didn't make me not nostalgic for high school either. There's something to be said for a time when the mere possibility of some lovin' was so valuable that you'd drop all other goals in the crazed pursuit of it. You'd manufacture fake govermnent papers, you'd run afoul of the law, you'd get into fist fights at house parties. You'd feel alive.

That house party, by the by, is something else the movie gets right. Who hasn't at some point wound up in a wood-paneled dump brimming with eerily aged yet youthfully dressed ne'er-do-wells? But Superbad weakens when it departs from realism. The "B" plot, where Fogell and the ID that identifies him only as "McLovin'" — which is an admittedly inspired bit of absurdism — are carted around by the increasingly soused officers, could be excised whole without adding to or subtracting from the picture's overall quality. Sure, I'll bet cops occasionally hit the siren to get through intersections, but by the end of their thread, these guys are spinning donuts in a parking lot. (It doesn't help that one of the cops is Seth Rogen.)

Also, I feel obligated to mention that I own McLovin's shirt. Or at least I owned it; I may have gotten rid of it because those damned cuffs are at least twice the length of regular cuffs. I thought I could fold them in half, but they kept coming unfolded.

* * *

8. Comedic material is funny to the extent that it's plausible. This isn't always and everywhere the case, but it's important for comedy to, at the very least, spring from plausibility. Douglas Adams' jokes about bureaucracy on an otherwise unrecognizable world at the far reaches of space work because the procedures and personalities in question are recognizable. Foul-mouthed grannies and goofy names — with the possible exception of those in Dr. Strangelove — don't because they aren't really found in nature.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Robinson Devor's Zoo
7. Anton Corbijn's Control
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Jason Reitman's Juno
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
12. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
13. Greg Mottola's Superbad
14. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
15. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
16. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
17. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
18. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie

Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007)

In the 1970s, young Ian Curtis of Macclesfield, England wrote poetry alone in his room, rocked out in front of his mirror, worked at an unemployment office, married his best friend's girl and, at a Sex Pistols show, joined up with band that would become Joy Division. As the group found success, Curtis found himself plagued by depression, epileptic seizures, a baby and a Belgian paramour, finally giving up and hanging himself on a clothesline in 1980.

* * *

Control is the work of rock photographer Anton Corbijn — also the cover designer of one of my favorite books — and I'm surprised he hadn't made a feature film before. The whole thing resembles a living version of his black-and-white shots which, though I admit to not having been there, recreates the era in a nicely expressionistic way. In fact, it's one of the best-looking films I've seen in years; why don't more filmmakers work in black-and-white?

Looking good is only one of the things that the film gets right, and that's especially impressive when you consider its genre, the often deplorable rock biopic. That's the sort of movie that has a good day when it can simply get the facts straight, let alone pull off the aesthetics. It's also no hagiography — much to the consternation, I'm sure, of fans who consider Curtis some sort of martyr — nor is it two hours of pure depravity. The film puts a life in front of you and says, hey, here it is. There's no stance, no real argument. It doesn't judge Curtis' choices, if indeed he possessed the kind of agency to make choices, nor does it judge his wife's provincial impulses, his manager's seat-of-the-pants tactics, or his girlfriend's being his girlfriend. I very much approve.

I shouldn't neglect to credit Control with eliciting two excellent lines from my favorite film critics as well:

• Ebert: "[Curtis'] bandmates sometimes look at him with that inward expression people get when they wonder if they have enough gas to get to the next gas station."
• Lane: "Because Morton is so convincing [as Curtis' wife], and because the film refuses to scoff at her homely virtues, you feel torn by Curtis’s betrayal. Step back a second, however, and you think, This guy slept with just one groupie? Shouldn’t he get a medal for restraint?"

* * *

By the time he was my age, Ian Curtis was married, a father, a post-punk celebrity and dead. Not that I'd trade places with him, but that's impressive. Such a life is fascinating enough in film form that one need not even be a fan of Joy Division's music — need not even be a fan of rock itself — to find its lead singer's story compelling. Hell, I actually prefer the music of New Order, the band Joy Division became after Curtis checked himself out. Picking up the synths constituted, to my mind, an immeasurable improvement to the sound. Check out their track "True Faith" if you don't believe me. Great stuff.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Robinson Devor's Zoo
7. Anton Corbijn's Control
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Jason Reitman's Juno
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
12. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
13. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
14. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
15. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
16. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
17. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988)

An explosion in Tokyo triggers World War III. During a routine gang battle thirty years on in the rebuilt "Neo Tokyo", Shotaro Kaneda and his coterie of vocational-school bikers encounter a pale little kid with septuagenarian features. The odd tot is one of three "espers", all of whom possess powerful psychokinesis, and all of whom were previously in government lockdown. In the conflagration, Kaneda's inferiority-complex-having buddy Tetsuo develops highly destructive psionic powers of his own. When Tetsuo knows what he's got, he goes on a rampage, the espers predict the awakening of an even more volatile force, an aggressive colonel declares martial law, and it's left to Kaneda to both shut down Tetsuo and win over this one girl he saw in prison.

* * *

Akira is an awesome spectacle, and I don't mean the word "awesome" in the debased sense — roughly equivalent to "pretty damn good" — that I usually use it. I mean that the film's craft inspires awe, especially when you consider that it's 20 years old. Way transcending the standards of the era, everything moves smoothly, backgrounds consist of multiple parallax layers and characters' mouths actually match the dialogue. Plus, there are all kinds of visual flourishes that impress even today, such as taillight trails left in the motorcycles' wake or the way Tetsuo balloons into a gigantic metal-and-organ monstrosity. They got the micro right, and they got the macro right.

The film adapts a 2,000 page comic, and even though the producers wisely didn't try to cram the whole thing in, the story still suffers somewhat from the compression. That's a problem I notice in much of the anime I watch — which, admittedly, ain't a lot, but still — even if not adapted from epic source material: it kicks into ultra-high-stakes mode way too quickly. (Blue Seed, a favorite anime series of mine, suffers similarly, though to a lesser degree because it's spread out over a bunch of episodes.) The movie's first event is a city-leveling blast, and by act two the threat of another already looms. There's not much of a build, let alone the sort of slow burn I savor most.

On balance, though, it beats the crap out of most other high-tech post-apocalyptic films from the 80s, animated or otherwise.

* * *

I originally took up anime around age ten, and gave it up five or six years later. What in 1994 was a really cool artistic universe just for me became, by the turn of the millennium, a heap of inane nonsense everyone else — but especially the social dented-cans I really, really did not want to resemble — was into. My arch-nemesis also loved her some anime, which didn't help. It was around that time I started pronouncing it "ANN-eyem" just to irritate anime people. I think I was chiefly afraid of turning into this guy.

Though I haven't returned to the fold, the pendulum has swung back a bit. I can now appreciate a good work of anime without fearing my own metamorphosis into a doughy, costumed fanboy. That's not to say that I'm willing or able to slog through 220 episodes of any old show, but I certainly won't turn down the opportunity to watch something a hunch says might be fascinating.

Hiroyuki Okiura's Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is one of my all-time favorite films, and it actually has a lot in common with Akira. They're both set in alternate postwar Japans, though the wars are different. They both take sprawling comic books as their source material. They both employ, at least by anime standards, realistic character designs. That last one deserves some consideration. Most of the anime I like features characters not stylized in the manner someone casually acquainted with anime might expect — big eyes, secondary-color hair, etc. — but passable representations of real people, or even of real Japanese people. Maybe I just got sick of anime conventions somewhere along the line. (And by "conventions" I mean "tropes," not "enormous gatherings of nerds.")

Glaring exception to this pronouncement: Bubblegum Crisis. But more on that later.

Sleuth (Kenneth Branagh, 2007)

A wealthy novelist invites his estranged wife's (relatively) young actor lover over. Ostensibly, the novelist intends to stage a phony break-in which will leave the lover with the wife's jewels and himself with insurance money. In reality, he runs the lover through a humiliating gauntlet, at the end of which he "shoots" him with a blank. On a later evening, the actor returns disguised as a policeman, bent on giving the novelist a good scare in return.

* * *

I have just described the plot of three works named Sleuth: a 1970 stage play by Anthony Shaffer, a 1972 film by with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and the 2007 Branagh remake under discussion here. Think of each one as a partially overlapping circle in a Venn diagram, and the action I've described above as the common area. The two films don't even share much dialogue, and their stories veer apart in the third act, about which more later.

Having loved the 1972 Sleuth, I've seen it many times given a good deal of thought to how it might be improved. It's far from a perfect film — the rough edges probably stood out at the time of release, and time hasn't dulled them — though perhaps that's part of its goofy, arch appeal. A remake three decades on provided the chance for the proceedings to, guided by Branagh's steady hand, sophisticate-up a little bit.

The original movie took place in the large, junk-filled old mansion of Andrew Wyke, that jealous novelist, played by Laurence Olivier. The place was filled with all manner of grandly tacky — or tackily grand? — stuff, including countless creepy mechanical toys. Now that Olivier's gone, Michael Caine, who originally portrayed young lover Milo Tindle, has the older man's role. Though the structure itself is 18th-century, the Caine character's house has been converted into a stark modernist cave teeming with security cameras, monitors and modern sculptures — creepy toys of another kind. I very much enjoy it when a film limits itself to a single location — witness Conspiracy or, more canonically, My Dinner with Andre — and this is a cool one.  Really cool, in fact. I can't help but admire the mind that thought of having the audience see every third or fourth shot through some sort of display device. Unfortunately, the tech angle loses steam after the halfway mark.

Harold Pinter (!) handled the revised screenplay, though it's more accurately called a brand new one. Allegedly, the man never saw the play or the Olivier/Caine film, and thus was free to do whatever the hell he wanted. I admit to having somewhat low hopes on this count, since I just can't get with the supercilious moralizing to which Pinter has been inclined, and Sleuth is rich ground for his class v. class tendencies. What a pleasant surprise that he chose not to indulge either bad habit; even the Wyke line about how Tindle "doesn't know his place" is surprisingly absent.

The main difference is the third round of the conversational "game". As ever, Wyke wins the first round with his faint-inducing fake shooting. Tindle wins the second round with his sloppy cop routine. The third, new round, dear readers, is the gay round. At this point, you don't what's true, what's false or what's the intention behind anything said, but Wyke invites Tindle to live with him. Oh, the places they could go. Oh, the celebs they could meet. And the younger man is receptive; why, he could be better than any woman, especially the one over which they've been fighting, and could he possibly see the bed again? Or is one of them just playing along? Or are both of them? Since Pinter adheres to the original ending which puts Tindle in the path of a second, real bullet, I suppose we'll never know.

* * *

You'll notice I've revealed a number of plot points, especially the one about Tindle in disguise that sounds like the big twist. That's because I have a little rule: any narrative work that's truly "spoiled" by the early revelation of its details is, by definition, lame. If over, say, five percent of the enjoyment of a story comes from being blindsided by a certain development, it's what we call "poorly crafted." Now, the secret of Sleuth, such as it is, has had 35 years in the open and is likely common knowledge. Despite that, the new Sleuth is still enjoyable, or at least it is to me. But was I just waiting to be surprised by how it would differ from the original? That's a more tangled question than I have time for right now.

7. Knowledge of a narrative's plot points should not significantly reduce the audience's enjoyment of that narrative. Reliance on surprise is, essentially, reliance on a cheap trick and the red flag of shoddy work. M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and The Village, for instance, don't have much to offer beyond the revelations that Bruce Willis is a ghost and that the village is one big historical re-enactment. The very best stories are the ones from which you can still extract enjoyment even while already knowing every detail.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Robinson Devor's Zoo
7. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
8. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
9. Jason Reitman's Juno
10. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
11. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
12. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
13. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
14. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
15. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
16. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie

Zoo (Robinson Devor, 2007)

In 2005, Boeing engineer Kenneth "Mr. Hands" Pinyan died of internal bleeding as a result of engaging in... relations with an organism of a more... equine persuasion. Subsequent attention from the news media revealed Pinyan's circle of self-described zoophiles — "zoos" — who would clandestinely gather at a farm house in Enumclaw, Washington to discuss their favorite pastime (and, apparently, how the moon landing was faked).

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You know those movies that have a certain shot that sticks with you for a good, long time? In Zoo, a documentary heavy enough on re-enactment to allow Devor to go for a look, just about every other shot is that shot. Meticulously composed shadow and light, slow tracking and saturated color render Seattle and the more rural areas of Washington state that lie outside it eerie and otherworldly: Mr. Hands staring blankly at the skyline from his high-rise, the moon hanging over Mt. Rainier through the window of a farmhouse, the zoos marching through a corridor of trees bristling with purple flowers. From a visual standpoint alone, it's probably the most beautiful documentary of the last twenty years, and the soundtrack — a mixture of off-kilter "film score"-type stuff plus a good deal of tension-building electronic material — fits right in.

The subject matter may have dictated an approach which, in Devor's own words, "aestheticized the sleaze right out of it." Unsurprisingly, Pinyan's compatriots were disinclined to admit anything but their voices into the film — startlingly, one actually does appear — so actors stand in for most of the zoo crew and the cops who later descend on it. This pushes the film into the realm of "non-fiction" rather than straight "documentary", but Errol Morris did the same with The Thin Blue Line, and that turned out okay.

This, as you may have guessed, is not a work of condemnation. Nor is it a cri de coeur for the acceptance of interspecies love. Since most of the words in the film are spoken by zoos themselves, the standard justification comes out several times in different forms: we just love our animals a little bit more than everyone else, and hey, it's consensual. Which makes an odd sort of sense, because, really, could this happen if the horse didn't consent?

Still, I can't say I've been made sympathetic to the plight of the zoo. Then again, neither am I sympathetic to the plights of the furry, the foot fetishist or the polyamorist, but I'm not going to tell them what they can and can't do behind closed doors. The film doesn't appear to have much of an agenda to push, either. Despite the involvement of The Stranger's resident Marxist — yes, really — its wackiness quotient remains low. There's this snippet toward the beginning where Mr. Hands listens to Democracy Now! in his car — could anxiety over The War have driven him to get killed by a randy horse? You decide! — but that's about it.

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The preceding paragraphs didn't fully express how much I enjoyed the movie. Maybe this will:

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Robinson Devor's Zoo
7. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
8. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
9. Jason Reitman's Juno
10. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
11. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
12. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
13. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
14. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
15. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)

Into the fourth day of a headache, a drunken widower aged well beyond his 62 years calls an ambulance. Hassles social, bureaucratic and merely circumstantial force the long-suffering paramedic and her driver to a series of hospitals, each of which shunts the trio to another. Diagnosed with a hematoma, Lazarescu is finally admitted to neurosurgery, which will only briefly forestall his demise from unrelated liver cancer.

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The Death of Mr. Lazarescu doesn't — indeed, can't — fit into any genre. Though fictional, it's filmed with a handheld camera and mostly in real time, too documentary-like to be a straight drama. The number of funny moments also disqualify it from that label, though it's not a comedy; even the appellation "black comedy", with which it's often tagged, feels inappropriate. (This poster especially fails to capture the spirit of the movie, though it could just be an expression of that part of the world's absurdist sense of humor.)

Is it a polemic against Romania's crappy health care? Maybe, but I've heard that things are worse over there than even this film shows. But boy, if and when I die, I sure as hell won't do it in Bucharest. Lazarescu and his neighbors have to make multiple calls before the ambulance shows. A bus crash — a bus crash — books almost three hospitals solid. Embittered by eastern Europe's still-rampant alcoholism, doctors and nurses berate poor Lazarescu as one more bum who swills booze and then demands to be fixed up for free. Oh, and good luck booking time on the CT scanner. "At least he is not asked for his insurance company," Ebert wrote, "and he has a theoretical right to free medical care." Yeah, awesome.

The film is meant to open Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest, Puiu's Romanian answer to Éric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Each will take on a different theme; Mr. Lazarescu's is love, the sort one has for one's fellow man. It's not, however, a picture that needs to make some big thematic statement to succeed. Puiu has expertly created — I'm not sure how to put this non-pretentiously, but bear with me — a film with the texture of reality. Conversations slide into entertaining mundanity, everything's a bit grimy — in the case of Lazarescu's flat, more than a bit — and nothing clicks together perfectly. Abbas Kiarostami is the rightfully acknowledged master of this type of act, but Puiu's almost thirty years his junior. By the time we're at that sixth tale, and we'll really see something.

Conspiracy (Frank Pierson, 2001)

In the winter of 1942, chief of Reich Security Reinhard Heydrich gathered a bunch of other Nazi officers at a repossessed mansion in Wannsee. On the agenda was a delectable catered lunch; on Heydrich's agenda was extracting the agreement of the other senior officials present that the Final Solution of the Jewish Question was not deportation or sterilization, but large-scale mechanized killing.

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I saw this at an on-campus screening followed by a discussion between the affable, octogenarian Pierson and several history professors. The big issue was the meaning of Hannah Arendt's line about "the banality of evil" and its applicability to the film, with its cast of petty, chortling bureaucrats discussing how best to remove The Jew from the gene pool. When the audience mics were put up, people voiced opinions on same. One fellow in a beret rambled at length about how the Nazis should have been depicted as more expressionistically evil — with forked tails, maybe? — because what if neo-Nazis see the movie and decide that Eichmann is cool? (I hereby christen him "The Berambler".) One professor/survivor took the mic and argued that "the banality of evil" is a worthless phrase, since there's no way the Holocaust could be considered banal. Everyone was talking past each other.

Speaking out of school though I may be, it's important for historical films dealing with the Holocaust not to depict Nazis as otherworldly creatures of sulfur and brimstone. That's not because I think they deserve some sort of fair shake, but because I'm with Phillip Lopate when he writes about the danger of mythologizing the Holocaust. To isolate it and its perpetrators so starkly from the continuum of history and humanity is, in a way, to make it seem less real, when the most important thing for us all to remember is that it was real, was enacted not by robots bent on death and destruction but by human beings, people under the impression that they were the good guys. (See pattern two.) Evil people aren't a race apart, even if they themselves insist they are.

Another string-around-the-finger for historical films of any kind is to cut down on the dopey expository narration. The events of the Wannsee conference "would change history... forever"? O RLY? Remember creative writing class: show, don't tell. One of the best qualities of the historical film is that the viewer comes in knowing the context — and, in many cases, the aftermath — which obviates a lot of the gruntwork involved in telling a fictional story. And don't even get me started on those stills-and-text where-are-they-now endings. This ain't American Graffiti, after all.

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6. Historical narratives can, and thus should, hit the ground running. A major pitfall of bringing the audience into a fictional world is losing them with clunky and/or contrived exposition. Stories that replicate or are based on historical fact do not, by their very nature, require that kind of hand-holding.