What happens in Drive is not greatly distinguishable from what happens in countless other crime films, perhaps most directly Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978). The Kid (Gosling) is an inexpressive mechanic moonlighting as a movie stunt driver and, more importantly, a getaway driver. When he’s behind the wheel or in a fistfight, we can see exactly who he is: he’s a master, a man with ice in his veins and savagery in his heart. In every other way, he’s inscrutable, almost totally opaque. When he meets next-door neighbor Irene (Cary Mulligan), they fall easily, almost wordlessly in love, and they—along with Irene’s young son Benicio (Kaden Leos)—soon become inseparable. Then Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), returns from prison and, in standard film noir fashion, the Kid finds himself drawn deep into the criminal underworld he’d previously only skirted.

In other words, if you judge by what’s happening you’re bound to be disappointed, because none of the plot is very original. Neither are the characters. Every one is an echo from another crime movie, an old noir, a thriller on cable at 3 a.m. One reviewer, panning Drive, asked: What kind of character wears a gold satin jacket embroidered on the back with a huge scorpion, like the one the Kid wears? The answer, of course, is a stock character, the kind Steve McQueen or Robert Mitchum used to play. And when the Kid, late in the film, asks mob boss Bernie (Albert Brooks, nicely cast against type), if he’s heard the story of the scorpion and the frog, it’s hard not to remember that that was already an old story when Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin brought it up in 1955. (“Let’s drink to character,” indeed.)

To understand the greatness of Drive you have to consider what’s not happening – its absences, the lulls and silences it creates and sustains. It’s the best, most stylish use of genre since Rian Johnson’s Brick (2005).  Within a simple framework, endless variation is possible. But unlike Brick, which retooled noir’s conventions and threw them at us from unexpected directions, Drive’s innovation is in creating silences and spaces that beg to be filled with meaning.

Take, for example, the movie’s violence. To me it felt like a brutal film. In truth, its instances of violence are not only few, but notably brief. Why do they stand out so much? Because every burst of visceral bloodletting has some quiet, almost poetic moment as a counterpoint. Like the scene in the hotel: The Kid has agreed to help Standard rob a pawnshop to get him out of a debt to the mob, but of course it’s gone terribly wrong. Afterward, the Kid and a hapless cohort, Blanche (Christina Hendricks), are attacked very suddenly in a very small hotel room, where they’re holed up with the requisite duffel bag of cash. It’s true – the battle is gruesome, but what gives it weight is the long, long (I didn’t time it, but it had to have been close to a full minute) interlude immediately after the shootout, when a blood-spattered Gosling peers out from the bathroom where he’s just offed the last thug. There is no sound at all; director Nicolas Winding Refn simply holds it. It’s just us and the moment: slow, observant, begging to be filled with some sort of meaning, emotional or otherwise.

These quiet moments in the narrative have their corollary in the way the characters are developed—or, more to the point, aren’t developed. Time and again the script and performers lead us to moments where we expect to learn who they are and why they do what they do. But then everything stops short. Drinking a glass of water in Irene’s kitchen after he first meets her and gives her a lift home, the Kid answers her questions minimally. He doesn’t elaborate about himself and she doesn’t press him for information. It’s not the conversation we expect during the expositional period of a story. There’s a gap. This is a movie that understands how to use negative space, and how negative space creates—or at any rate encourages—meaning.

Drive also works to create space between the story and the viewer. It’s full of distancing artifice. At one point the Kid conceals his identity by wearing the rubber mask he wore stunt-driving in a movie, a facsimile of the face of the fake star of that fake movie within this fake story—layers on layers of pretending until we hardly know what we’re looking at or what we’re supposed to feel.

And there are constant instances of self-commentary. During the opening chase (a masterpiece of restraint, during which almost no actual chasing occurs), a radio plays a sports broadcast so generic we can’t even tell what sport it’s supposed to be—it becomes clear that the play-by-play isn’t about a game at all, but the chase we’re watching. In another scene, the Kid and Benicio sit watching a children’s TV show, and the Kid asks if a shark character is a bad guy. Of course, replies Benicio. He’s a shark. There aren’t any good guy sharks? asks the Kid. No, Benicio replies. Everyone knows sharks are all bad. The Kid isn’t talking about the show, of course. It’s an actor pretending to be a character, saying lines that are questions about that character.

But here, in these spaces, it’s hard not to project meaning. Gosling, as the Kid, is asking: Are all movie characters who are adept at killing other movies characters rotten, evil, irredeemable? Are we so totally defined by what we do that it’s synonymous with who we are? If so, then there’s nothing more to know about the characters than what we see on the screen. There’s no need to know where they came from or how they got the way they are. There’s just the movie, the character, and what he does.

The question for me, I guess, is whether it’s possible, as a viewer, to have a genuine emotional experience amidst all this artifice and emptiness, or whether, more fundamentally, the filmmakers even want us to. I think they do, maybe, and there are moments when feeling comes through. There’s this elevator scene, for example.

It’s the Kid and Irene in an elevator with a goon sent to kill the Kid. There’s a great deal of silence, and the Kid and the goon sneak peeks at each other. It’s tense. Then comes a lull. The Kid reaches back and gently nudges Irene into the corner of the elevator, away from what’s about to happen—not just the violence, but what it will reveal. Then, prolonging the moment, he leans back and kisses her. It’s a long, slow, silent kiss. It seems to last forever. And then the explosion of violence. In 15 seconds the Kid has dispatched the goon, stomping him to death in a mounting frenzy of bloodlust. The elevator reaches the garage and Irene—who knew nothing about why the goon was there—backs out. Her expression says it all: to her, the Kid is a monster. The Kid’s face is flushed and bloated with ebbing rage and fury, his eyes heavy and dull, spittle on his lips and blood sprayed across his jacket. In what’s perhaps a three-second shot with no dialogue, Gosling tells us more about the Kid than we learn in the whole rest of the movie. He conveys fury, shame, regret, compulsion, love, and a kind of helplessness. He looks like an animal caught devouring its prey. He looks captive to his own native traits—and those of every noir anti-hero that came before him—like that scorpion he and Mr. Arkadin like to talk about. He lets us peek behind the nothing to see the something.

At least, that’s what I think I saw while I was busy ignoring what was happening in favor of what wasn’t. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it’s just a movie doing what all movies do, only more honestly. Maybe it’s a savvy filmmaker and a brilliant actor who know that they just make the images; we make the meaning.

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Will I regret doing this? If it goes anything like last year, definitely. Better get started. I get my $6 matinee ticket and head upstairs.

10:00 a.m.

Rise of Planet of the Apes

I always think of science fiction as our most earnest genre, and for me it’s often an uncomfortable union of big ideas and ridiculous execution. Take Star Trek, for instance. How can I seriously consider the weighty philosophical issues so often promoted in science fiction when I have to look at aliens that are nothing but homely character actors wearing plastic foreheads? I can’t, is the answer. Over and above budget consideration, even the most revered science fiction movies are often marred by heavy-handed symbolism that undermines any interesting themes. For me, the gold standard of distractingly earnest, homemade-looking sci-fi has always been the rubber masks and ridiculous tunics of the original Planet of the Apes.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist trying to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s, which has afflicted his father, Charles (John Lithgow, who I realized halfway through was born to play a guy with Alzheimer’s). Lo and behold the drug Will tests on apes improves their intelligence dramatically. A baby chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis) winds up being the lone surviving recipient. He’ll become their liberator.

Naturally there are no rubber monkey masks in sight, the filmmakers opting instead for CGI apes. Like most CGI creatures, they’re beautifully rendered but, once they start to move around, oddly stiff. In theory, moving toward something more visually believable should let the ideas shine through, and often they do. For example, it’s hard not to at least momentarily ponder the definition of humanity when Caesar stares ruefully at the collar Will forces him to wear. But when it comes down to it, the movie might be a little too reliant on horror movie clichés and shallow ideas to ever really take off. Maybe they spent too much time making it look better than the original. Ironically, I found myself fondly recalling those old masks and tunics, because while the actors in that film might be a little hard to take seriously, there are moments—like when Heston’s character finally learns the truth–that this film simply can’t rival.

(As an aside, the movie is set in the Bay area, and I just feel like I have to ask: How many loose primates do they get out there? Because when Caesar gets hauled away by animal control, it’s not to a catch-all stray animal facility, but a site specifically for primates (and run by Brian Cox sporting Rip Torn’s hair), where there are something like 50 chimps, orangutans and gorillas all just awaiting a leader and some of that sweet brain enhancement. A whole site just for stray primates? And when they inevitably break out and start the uprising, the Bay area is revealed to be home to hundreds of apes. Their destination? Marin, just like everyone else. No wonder they’re so cultured in the later movies.)

Trailers: In Time, Contagion, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Killer Elite (in which every cast member seems to play an assassin, except for Clive Owen, whose mustache suggests an assassin who’s also a pedophile)

Intermission 1

So is there much real risk of being caught? I suppose. But I’ve decided that the friend who tried and failed to sneak in an extra movie was just an amateur. If you plan well and take a few basic precautions, you can eliminate most of the risk. The fact is that the system of film exhibition isn’t designed to prevent all-day movie orgies, because really, how many people even want to do try it?

12:05 p.m.

Horrible Bosses

People talk about big summer action movies being critic-proof, and they are, but what about frat comedies? As long as you cast a few of the people from the Zack Galifianakis/Steve Carrell/Jason Sudeikis set, throw in a barf/diarrhea/cumshot joke or three, and hit a few characters in the nuts/head for good measure, you’re golden. I swear, they could make them from a template, like Mad Libs for date rapists.

The only really interesting thing in these kinds of movies is the gender politics, and Horrible Bosses’ are pretty strange, though I’m sure unintentionally so, since beneath its veneer of knee-jerk misogyny and fashionable racism, this movie is about as subversive as a church bake sale. Consider: It’s the boss’ aggression that’s causing all the problems—Nick (Jason Bateman) has Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey), a manipulative, power-hungry sadist who could really only be played by Kevin Spacey; Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) has Bobby Pellitt (Colin Ferrell), a coked-up degenerate intent on wrecking his newly deceased father Jack’s (Donald Sutherland) company; and Dale (Charle Day) has Julia (Jennifer Aniston), perhaps the most stereotypically make of them all, a libidinous cougar (sorry, Jen) whose determination to get Dale to sleep with her threatens his impending nuptials. All three characters feel so cornered, so helpless, they decide to murder the bosses.

(By the way, Jennifer Aniston, if you’re reading, let me just say that both your body and your body of work look exactly like they should considering that you spend 90% of your time on the former, and 10% on the latter.)

But wait—is the real problem the aggression of the bosses, or is it our heroes’ lack of aggression? Nick has spent eight years under David’s thumb, groveling and subjugating himself for a promotion that never comes. Eight years. I wouldn’t want to do anything pleasant for eight years. What kind of a milquetoast subjects himself to that kind of suffering for that long? Kurt, meanwhile, loves his job, but his passivity in the face of the unhinged, confrontational Bobby makes it hard to sympathize. As for Dale, it feels like he could escape Julia’s advances pretty easily with a legal consultation.

The attitude of Horrible Bosses is that extreme aggression is the only solution to the problem of male weakness. There’s no room here for adulthood (a central characteristic of this whole genre, really). Your choices as a man are suffering, or murder, the ultimate domination. Take David, for example. He’s haunted by paranoia and insecurity over his wife’s (Julie Bowen) faithfulness, and when he discovers what he considers evidence that his fears are founded, he doesn’t hesitate to murder the presumed lover. Everything about him screams male aggression: his Escalade, his gun, his decisiveness, his swagger. What’s beneath it all? The film doesn’t say. And the only other model is weakness.

Trailers: Footloose, Our Idiot Brother, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Colombiana (“From the writer of Taken,” just in case you can remember Taken, or think writing matters)

Intermission 2

If you want to plan your own all-day movie extravaganza, start by making a schedule, because there’s no surer way to be caught than to wander around aimlessly looking for another movie to see. A movie binge should be well-planned and -timed, like a military invasion. Only with M&Ms. Choose the theater with the largest number of screens, because it will obviously have the most options as you plot your day. Find the earliest movie, and start with that one. Then find the one that starts the latest. Then fill in everything in between. Remember that if there are 3D movies, you’ll need the glasses, so bring your own from home or keep an eye out once you get the theater (don’t sweat it, though, because 3D glasses are about as well-secured as Russian nukes).

2:05 p.m.

Conan the Barbarian

You know what the characters in Horrible Bosses could have used? A little quality time with Conan the Barbarian (Jason Mamoa).

Considering our current appetites for vicarious sadism and homoerotic violence this seems like to the perfect time to adapt Conan again. And since the character has its roots in the pulps of the 1930s and a cinematic heritage that involves Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bar is set pretty low. This version clears it with ease. You got your bare-chested slave girls. You got your swordplay. You got your gory battle sequences (during one of which I swear to God I saw someone punch a horse in the face). The whole thing looks like something airbrushed on the side of a van.

There’s also a pretty thin plot, a warmed over Lord of the Rings thing about a mask made from the bones of dead kings (or something). The mask is supposed to allow the villain, Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), to bring his sorceress wife back from the dead. Once the mask is his, he tells his daughter, Marique (somewhere, Tyler Perry is kicking himself or not thinking of this name; here, it’s Rose McGowan, with the approximate wardrobe, hair, and dramatic heft of the goth girl who makes your Frappuccino), “My wife will make me a god and we will cast all rivals into oceans of blood.” Pretty big talk. But once he gets the mask… not much happens. Some more fighting. A lot of screaming. More blood. Slave girls, of course. But he can’t fly, he doesn’t grow any extra arms, and he stays the same size. Hell, his eyes don’t even glow. Then again, any of those things would have involved special effects, and by that point they’d already blown a lot of budget on HGH, hair extensions and Styrofoam rocks.

Trailers: Warrior, Abduction, The Thing, Immortals, Sherlock Holmes, Ghost Rider (Here’s a line I wrote weeks before embarking on this project: “Some cold, snowy winter day, I’ll recall with regret that I spent 16 hours of summer watching things like __________.“ I knew there’d be something exceptionally stupid to tack onto the end of that sentence. That something is a skeleton demon peeing fire. Thanks, Nic Cage.)

Intermission 3

And then there’s the issue of food. Unless you plan to eating all day at the concession stands (which, first, sounds like a gastronomic apocalypse and, second, gives a whole lot more theater employees a much better chance to catch onto what you’re doing), you should pack a lot. Think protein. I favor hard-boiled eggs (I brought four), but a hardboiled egg smells like nothing so much as a hardboiled egg, so maybe wait until the lights are down to break those out. Oh, and peel them ahead of time. This time around I also brought two turkey sandwiches, some Baby Bells, four apples, and two Clif bars. Remember, you’re trying not to draw attention to yourself, so think about what your food is wrapped in. Cling wrap is almost silent. Just a thought.

4:00 p.m.

Captain America

It’s probably a mistake to read much into this movie. (It’s a mistake, in fact, to see this movie, but such mistakes are what I’ve dedicated my day to.) The only reason this movie exists is because a bunch of Marvel Comics executives are convinced that 1) an Avengers movie can be huge, 2) there can be no Avengers movie without Captain America, and maybe even 3) Captain America is iconic. Number one is plausible; two is probably untrue; and three is unquestionably wrong. Captain America has never crossed over to Spiderman/Superman/Batman cultural relevance. He’s a relic from the super-patriotic climate of the early 1940s, mysteriously surviving from an earlier age, like Tang. The average person on the street, I guarantee you, had very little idea who he was before this movie came out.

Anyway, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a dedicated but physically feeble Army enlistee chosen to receive an experimental drug meant to transform him into a supersoldier. In Rogers’ case, it not only adds about 8 inches of height and 100 pounds of muscle, it also somehow waxes and oils his chest. (The focus on Evans’ torso is so great, in fact, that he isn’t even required to remove his pants for the procedure.)

We’re supposed to root for Rogers because of his determination and courage, and because he wants to join the Army to defeat “bullies.” But the handsome, hulking, blond Evans is more Aryan than the Nazis his character hates so much, and once he becomes endowed with superhuman strength, the action sequences are tedious exercises in predictable physical domination. The take-away isn’t that bullies need to be defeated. It’s that you should make sure your side has the biggest bully.

The problem isn’t helped by the choice of villain. The Red Skull (Hug0 Weaving) is ostensibly a Nazi agent, but early on we learn that he has ambitions for power that would exceed Hitler’s, and from that point forward we hear no more about the Fuhrer. I get that the Red Skull is Captain America’s arch-nemesis, but the choice causes complications. If you want to get audiences riled up about a war that happened before most of them were born, making the villain a guy who killed six million people is a good place to start. By instead making the focus the horribly disfigured, curiously sympathetic Red Skull, the filmmakers have put the story in a vacuum. The battle stands for, and relates to, nothing.

Trailers: No idea—I got in late thanks to Conan’s epic battles.

Intermission 4

This is a good time to remember that by the time you’ve been at the theater for eight hours, the people who saw you come have probably gone home. I keep telling myself this as I skulk about, trying to remember the basic tenets of theater-hopping: keep moving, make small changes to your outfit frequently, act natural. It also doesn’t hurt, depending on your level of self-respect, so hang out in a bathroom stall between shows, where something as simple as adding a hat can turn you into a different person. This is the time of the day that’s easiest, because this is when the crowds start to pick up. They have a lot of people to look at, and they probably don’t expect anyone to be spending 16 hours ripping them off.

6:30 p.m.

Final Destination 5 3D

After waiting for 30 minutes, they cancel the show due to technical problems. But don’t worry, they announce: Everyone will be getting a free pass good at any future show. Seriously? Am I about to get a free pass out this? We line up down the stairs where a girl by the door is handing them out. With about five people in front of me, she runs out. The remaining audience members are instructed to go downstairs to the box office, present a stub, and get a free pass. Of course, I have no stub. And I have business to tend to.

Unfortunately, the delay throws my tightly packed schedule into disarray. I consult Fandango, and quickly come up with: Crazy Stupid Love followed by my originally scheduled The Help. This takes me down from seven movies to only six, and eliminates the almost-surely terrible Cowboys and Aliens. Damn you, 3D projectors. Damn you.

7:40 p.m.

Crazy Stupid Love

By the end of the 1980s, Hollywood was so much in love with the big-budget blockbuster that independent movies didn’t get that much mainstream play. Then along came the Coen brothers, and Tarantino, and Miramax and others, and we had a resurgence of the quirky, intimate, not-necessarily-commercial films that had been the bread-and-butter of the maverick 1970s. And then they figured out how to sell indies to mainstream audiences. And then indie movies started to get a little safer. And then we started getting movies like Crazy Stupid Love. All in all, when Hollywood makes or backs an indie, it tends to look a lot like a blockbuster writ small.

Cal (Steve Carell) is a frumpy middle-aged father married to Emily (Julianne Moore). One night over dinner, Emily suddenly reveals that after 20-plus years of marriage she’s had an affair and wants a divorce. Cal is shocked enough to throw himself from a moving car on the way home (possibly the movie’s best moment). This all occurs within the first five minutes. The real plot catalyst is the introduction of Jacob (Ryan Gosling), an arrogant ladykiller who does his work at the bar Cal begins to frequent after moving out of the house.

Crazy Stupid Love has most of the characteristics we’re taught to associate with indie dramedies: attention to character detail, a small scale, strict verisimilitude, and a cast with considerable indie credibility. But watching it feels a little like buying Stop & Shop’s organic raisin brand: Yeah, maybe it’s organic enough that they can use the word, but is the word much more than a marketing idea at this point?

Crazy Stupid Love wants to have grit, but the only thing it ever punishes anyone for is being dull, and it doesn’t really want to hold any of its characters accountable for their real sins. Jacob, for instance, is a condescending, manipulative cad, and the movie wants to have the guts to make him suffer. In the end, though, his penance amounts to nothing more than a few lines of dialogue about his being “horribly lonely,” and then he’s off to a fairly effortless romance with the substantive, sees-right-through-him Hannah (Jim Carrey’s favorite, Emma Stone). Same with Emily, who’s allowed to chalk up her infidelity to a “mid-life crisis,” and her paramour, David (Kevin Bacon), who gets to be a pretty nice, earnest guy despite breaking up a family. Often, the only thing sustaining any tension is the handful of manufactured conflicts.

All in all, I’d rather watch an honest blockbuster.

Trailer: New Year’s Eve, I Don’t Know How She Does It, What’s Your Number, Machine Gun Preacher, Contagion (they cast this movie by dragging an Oscar statuette behind a Bentley through Beverly Hills)

Intermission 4

By this time of night, after this many hours of movies and this number of hardboiled eggs, it’s hard to care about getting caught. And it’s hard to imagine that anyone working at the theater gives any more of a shit than you do. Myself, I’ve had a piercing headache in my right temple for about six hours. I’m struggling to recall the logic behind saving a bloated drama for last, but here I am. No turning back now. (I wish it was Cowboys and Aliens.)

10:20 p.m.

The Help

Hey, have you heard? Racism is terrible. Same with segregation. In case you’ve somehow missed that point, though, there’s The Help, a movie that answers the question: What’s more tedious than yet another Holocaust movie?

Racial tensions aren’t exactly topping the news in the U.S. these days, but it’s no mystery why The Help was made. The book of the same name has sold something like 40 zillion copies, so there’s a ready audience. But it has more than than that going for it: it’s the Oprah-est story you could ever ask for, comforting us with such messages as: good wins, mean people are punished, courage is rewarded, and so on. Along the way, we also get some cathartic racist comeuppance, but until Gene Hackman comes out of retirement, it’ll be tough to top the satisfying barbershop scene in Mississippi Burning.

Set in the early 1960s, The Help tells the story of Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan (Emma Stone, again), a recent Ole Miss graduate who returns to her hometown of Jackson, MS to confront the horrors of segregation, gender bias and the Junior League. Skeeter isn’t like other Jackson folks. She’s progressive. She isn’t just pleasant to the many black maids, drivers, and groundkeepers that people the film, she actually regards them as human beings. She’s somehow untouched by the racial, class and cultural biases that have engulfed everyone around her. Ultimately spurred by her parents’ dismissal of Constantine (Cicely Tyson), the black maid who raised her, Skeeter, an aspiring writer, starts working on a book about the experiences of the help. Expect to hear the exclamation “Scandalous!” repeatedly.

If you’re thinking that this all sounds like a breeding ground for some good, old-fashioned Magical Negroism, you’re right. To date, our most condescending films have settled for one or two Magical Negroes, but this one is just plain full of them. Segregation and southern culture during the Civil Rights movement are complex things, but you’d never know it from this movie. Here we get bigots whose bigotry is cartoonish but conveniently nonviolent, and saints whose enlightenment is anomalous and unexplained, but the only thing we get in between is Skeeter, a spunky (I like her, Jim Carry, I swear to God I do) but standard-issue surrogate for our liberal outrage.

The Help is a handsome, well-made film. The photography is golden and blandly attractive, like an ad for a sexual dysfunction drug, and the sets and costumes are note-perfect to the era. The performances are all sincere. The script is… I don’t know, let’s call it ‘workmanlike,’ because I’m running out of adjectives for ‘mediocre.’ And in case you were thinking it wasn’t about anything important, consider how long it is: over 6 hours, according to my internal clock. (What? Fandango says it’s only two hours and 17 minutes? That can’t be right.)

Trailers: The Odd Life of Timothy Green, Tower Heist, Ides of March, The Warrior, How Does She Do It, Warhorse (The main emotion I get from this trailer is wanting to punch it in the face. That’s an emotion, right?)

12: 35 a.m.

Walking through the almost-deserted theater lobby on my way out and seeing the skeleton crew left to wipe down the counters and restock the Nips feels like running into an old girlfriend a year after your break-up: everything seems a little silly now. Did we really fight about that? The tension has been drained away. I give one of them a smile. He pauses, then turns and goes back to work. He may want to be here even less than I do.

I should feel worse physically. Last year as I left the theater, there was some numbness in the extremities, dizziness, and mental incoherence. This year, just a headache (which will persist for about 24 hours). Am I getting used to this? The thought is both encouraging and a little unnerving.

Today’s totals: $6 for six movies totaling 11 hours of movies—well short of my goal. Same time next year, Boston Common 19? Same time next year.

[Editor's note: For more thoughts on The Help, see Roxane Gay's essay, "The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help."]

***

Rumpus Original art by Jason Novak.

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Like most great filmmakers, Malick’s movies are all about the same things, and in this case they’re big things. He’s interested in death, God, the meaning of life, the origins and purpose of evil, and the human struggle to live well in a violent world. But in Tree of Life, he’s through screwing around. You want a movie about God? This time, Malick’s not giving you Guadalcanal, or Pocahontas, or the Nebraska Badlands, or the Texas Panhandle. To quote Dennis Hopper: fuck that shit. This time around Malick goes “where God lives,” as Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) puts it: he gives us the cosmos, the spinning galaxies, the dawn of time, the earth’s shifting plates and spewing volcanoes and primordial, striving ocean life.  He gives us all of creation ordering and reordering itself, breaking down and building up and breaking down again in the endless cycle. He doesn’t just give us dinosaurs, for God’s sake, he gives us the death of dinosaurs, too. You want the meaning of life? Malick will show you where it began.

We also get a story—as much of a story, anyway, as Malick ever gives us, which is to say not much of a story, but at least something to hold together all the philosophical cud-chewing. We get Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt, aging well), the disciplinarian dad (or “father” as he angrily insists on being called) with a fistful of stifled ambitions and a chip on his shoulder, determined to make his sons into what he feels he never was or will be. We get Mrs. O’Brien, the mom, who offers endless and mostly mute love and understanding to the three O’Brien boys, principally Jack (Hunter McCracken). Jack is a scowling, loving, trouble-making, gentle pre-adolescent whose emotions are beginning to churn like the roiling surf and bursting magma we see so much of. He breaks windows and shoots his trusting brother with a bee-bee gun and sneaks into an unlocked neighbor’s house where he paws through a lingerie drawer in confused, nameless longing. We get this family moving through their dreamy days in dreamy, late-1940s Waco, Texas, and in bits and pieces, we also get adult Jack (Sean Penn, not aging quite as well), moving through the washed-out colors of his adult life.

And of course we get whispered voiceover. Malick is the all-time league leader in whispered voiceover.

Is this movie any good? It depends on whom you ask. In his rave review, Roger Ebert compares the movie’s ambition to that of 2001, which is where you have to reach to find a movie that tried to do this much. Ebert notes that Kubrick lacked Malick’s feeling. Most people do. But it’s a useful comparison. Kubrick is among the least feeling filmmakers, I would argue, a great artist whose genius is intellectual and visual, but—unless you count terror and violence as emotions—never emotional (which for me has always explained his weakness: directing actors; most of his movies are marred by one or more simply terrible performances, and he was especially susceptible to committed hams like Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson; he had absolutely no eye for performance). Malick shares Kubrick’s interest in ideas (Malick reportedly came close to earning a doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University before dropping out), but at the end of the day he’s more interested in the emotions; for Malick, the ideas are just a way to make sense of our emotional lives, which are what really matter.

The trouble with sincerity is that it has less of a place in the world than it used to. There’s always some wag or cynic ready to knock it down, and no shortage of means by which to do so. Whether you’ll find Tree of Life profound or tedious depends to a large extent on how open you are to a sincere filmmaker doing his sincere best. If you simply can’t approach any of the silence and symbolic, nonlinear digressions and ominously unanswered questions with a straight face, well, then this may not be for you, because while Malick is as interested in ideas as Kubrick ever was, he doesn’t explore them with the same depth or sophistication. In Malick’s vision, the world is a nasty place, and you can follow your natural instincts, trying to dominate and build and occasionally destroy (like Mr. O’Brien), or you can choose to live your life with grace (Mrs. O’Brien). Grace, in this context, is another word for love, for kindness, for tenderness and understanding of one another. It’s a simple and beautiful idea, but some people may find it merely simple.

I’ll go this far, though: If you like movies, you should see Tree of Life. Like all of Malick’s films, it’s beautifully shot and edited. Watching it all unfurl, I was thinking less of 2001 than Baraka, another quiet, observant movie that took its time with the rhythms and chaos and beauty of nature, and tried to locate man within them. There’s little dialog in Tree of Life, and almost none that you could consider truly necessary. Whether he’s showing you a gauzy, billowing curtain or the boys wrestling on the front lawn or planets being formed from the void of space, Malick is advancing his ideas and, somehow, advancing our emotional experience with it all, and he’s doing it visually.

But the best reason to see Tree of Life is because there aren’t any other movies like it. Its scope, ambition, methods, and risk-taking are all unique, and so is Malick. That may sound like faint praise, but when you sift through the Fast and Furiouses, the Pirates of the Caribbeans and the latest slapped-together, 3D superhero nonsense, you see that’s a significant thing. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without mindless entertainment, but neither would I want to do without the occasional Terrance Malick who, if nothing else, really means it.

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Jack is more than just a gruff introvert with a gun who uses violence and threats to solve problems (though he is that, only the latest in the long tradition of such De Niro characters). As we learn in an effective if somewhat stilted opening scene, Jack is a lost man—no, not as unnervingly lost as Travis Bickle, and not as pitiably, palpably lost as Jake LaMotta, but lost nonetheless, dogged by an aimlessness and pain and an inability to live in the world, groping for a meaning and purpose he’s been waiting all his adult life to find. He listens to Christian talk radio, reads the Bible, and attends church every Sunday with his long- and for the most part quietly suffering wife, Madlyn (Frances Conroy, so good at being simultaneously cowed and furious), but he remains adrift, and feels it deeply. When he corners his pastor (David A. Hendricks) for help, all the church leader can offer is vague bromides  (“There’s an old Bible passage,” the pastor tells Jack; are there a lot of new Bible passages? “It says, ‘Be still, and know that I am the light.’ It means that God has a plan for you.”). Jack, waiting in years of pained, bitter silence for God’s plan to become apparent, is forced to make due with bourbon and hitting golf balls into the cornfields near his rural home.

Then Lucetta appears, all bedroom-eyed and slithery. At Stone’s urging, she begins to contact Jack, flattering him and charming him in an effort to secure Jack’s recommendation to the board (the movie never explains what the actual plan is, whether to seduce and blackmail Jack, or to use sexual favors as a bribe, and Stone seems at times to be going in more than one direction and motivated by more than one thing—sometimes in the same scene; this seems less like a designed contradiction than a flaw in the writing, and it gives the marketers plenty of fodder for their bait-and-switch). Lucetta being played by Milla Jovovich, the plan works and Jack falls into an affair with her. It would likely have worked for anyone at that point. Jack is weeks away from retirement and wondering what it’s all been about, this endless cycle of imprisoning and releasing people, chasing a redemption that never seems to be entirely real or achievable. Feeling the profound lack of spiritual truths, he opts for a physical one (“If the body feels good, the mind just follows,” Lucetta tells Jack when they first meet. A bird pendant dangles from her neck, a counterpoint to the trapped bee motif that recurs for Madlyn.).

Stone, too, is more than a sleazy criminal with a hot wife and a plan, and Norton is doing more than a mash-up of Aaron Stampler from Primal Fear and Derek Vinyard from American History X. As much as Jack, but less mindfully, Stone is lost, too, and he happens upon true revelation one day in the prison library in the form of a pamphlet about a quack religion which, nevertheless, holds meaning for him. In a matter of days, he finds the beatified truth that has eluded Jack for a lifetime. It’s pat, but Norton makes Stone thoughtful and watchful even as he edges up to insanity, and it works.

More notable, even, than the revelation that this movie is trying something interesting is the revelation that in his performance as Jack, De Niro is, well, trying. If you want to know the state of De Niro’s career, how about this: A movie about him being generically tough is considered more saleable than one in which he does something to justify his reputation as the Greatest Actor of His Generation. Watching De Niro in these scenes inspires a complex reaction, part invigoration, part nostalgia, part frustration. The performance is intricate and thrilling. In a scene with Lucetta, Jack mentions his granddaughter, and when Lucetta asks him how much he sees the girl, De Niro manages—in his tone and pauses, in his face and his body language, but mostly in that wordless something that’s at the heart of his best work—to instantly convey that Jack can never see the granddaughter because his relationship with his daughter, the girl’s mother, is hopelessly broken. Indeed, we understand in a crushing flash just how it’s broken, just what an inarticulate mess this man must have been as a father, how inaccessible he must have been, how unable to reconcile his needs to hers. But even more than that, De Niro makes it impossible in that small moment not to feel the pain all this causes Jack. He knows he’s failed, and he may even know how and why, but he’s a powerless bystander to it all. “They live upstate,” Jack’s dialogue goes. “We don’t see them much.” But De Niro makes it mean so much more than the words.

The performance left me wondering something I’ve wondered countless times before: Why has De Niro’s late career work been so disappointing? Like most people, I suppose I’ve chalked it up to indifference, creative burnout, or both. With Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Godfather II, and all the rest under his belt, he reached middle age a rich, revered legend. Like Stevie Wonder or John Updike, his post-prime work has often felt like a matter of habit more than necessity, and his well-known selectivity and discernment seem to have vanished.

But I couldn’t help wonder, as I watched him bring Jack so vividly and painfully to life, if his latter-day work isn’t better than everyone usually thinks. Maybe the problem is as much us as him. Looking over his filmography, I was surprised to find a lot more variety in the last 15 years than I’d given him credit for: Yes, there are the City by the Seas, the Righteous Kills, the Ronins, the Heats (an awful film, I don’t care what anyone says), but he also played the Archbishop of Lima in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Captain Shakespeare in Stardust, the impulsive, semi-comic dullard Louis Gara in Jackie Brown, and Arthur Lustig in Great Expectations. This isn’t to say he necessarily played these roles brilliantly, or brought anything unique or unexpected to them (and he isn’t helped by the fact that none of these movies are much better than mediocre, which may be half his problem), but is it possible that in our decades-long anticipation of and craving for another Johnny Boy or Michael Vronsky, we’ve all give him too little credit for creating other characters in lesser films that still have something to offer? At a minimum, his credits suggest a greater spirit of adventure than I generally give him credit for. Maybe just working competently on projects that please him is enough—for him and us.

Ultimately, Stone succeeds at exploring the search for meaning and redemption, though there are some mechanical problems. For instance, because the motivations and intentions of the would-be thriller subplot are never understandable, especially for Stone himself, the tensions are confused. Are we supposed to be worried that Stone will resent Jack’s relationship with Lucetta? That Madlyn will find out about the affair? That Jack will get fired? We don’t know; it’s a moving target, and the stakes for the characters are unclear. But the plot devices the marketers put to such misleading use never feel like anything the movie is committed to, and the film is at its best when we’re seeing Stone and Jack grope their ways to something better. In the final scene, with Jack crouched beside the packed boxes in his office, he thinks he hears something, maybe the faint beginnings of ultimate redemption, and he looks up. Maybe De Niro hears it, too.

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• All Thumbs: Roger Ebert and the Decline of Film Criticism

At one end of the spectrum, there are critics who approach movies as art — works to be studied, analyzed, debated and (most importantly) enjoyed, but ultimately to be judged the only way they can be: subjectively, with meanings and values unique to each individual viewer. These kinds of critics are easy to identify because they’re so few: Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic, apparently the entire staff of Sight and Sound, and a debatable handful of others.

Ebert is, at heart, the other kind of critic, the kind that sees movies as products, like cell phones or refrigerators or spatulas. These critics consider it their responsibility not to inspire debate or thought, not to use their cinematic expertise to give the reader insight. Rather, they want to judge a film’s fitness for purchase, recommend that a moviegoer either should or should not spend his or her money on the product. These critics are easy to spot. Every newspaper has at least one. They use a lot of puns when they dislike a film. They usually employ a grading system — a letter grade if they want to seem really nuanced, a ten-star scale if they want to make only a passing nod to intelligence, four stars if they’re especially simple-minded. They’re the Rex Reeds, the Leonard Maltins, the (why, God, why?) Gene Shalits. But this end of the critical spectrum is owned by the man who more or less created it: Roger Ebert.

It may not be fair to blame Ebert completely for the dumbing down of American film criticism, but there’s really no better choice. Ebert gained national fame, of course, as one half of the iconic “Siskel and Ebert” tandem. His show with Gene Siskel (and a rotating lineup of critics following Siskel’s 1999 death from complications from surgery to treat a brain tumor) was first called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, then Sneak Previews, then At the Movies, and over the years by various other names. It also station- and network-hopped, beginning on Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW and later becoming nationally syndicated, but always keeping its guiding light burning: the simplified, binary system of judgment that told the viewer, in plain terms, whether a given film was good or bad. Each film they reviewed was briefly discussed, its merits and faults tallied up along the lines of verisimilitude, emotional impact, and production values, and a final judgment was rendered: thumbs up or thumbs down. If you’re really interested in film analysis, the Siskel and Ebert approach, adopted by most mainstream critics, is about as interesting as a Consumer Reports dot chart.

The first incarnation of the show premiered in 1975, and it shares its birth year with another watershed event in American film history: the release of Jaws. Fairly or not, Jaws is often cited as the film that launched the age of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Most of this has to do with the way in which the film was released and promoted, but its significance was greater than that: it marked the beginning of the end of New Hollywood, that golden, bizarre, wondrous period in Hollywood history when the artists actually ran the place and American film produced some its richest and most challenging works. Because no matter how much Jaws owes to its promotional innovations, it would never have succeeded to such a degree if it had been, say, Raging Bull or The Conversation. (From BoxOfficeMojo.com: lifetime gross of Raging Bull: about $23M; lifetime gross of Jaws: around $470M.) In other words, Jaws was a smash hit largely because eschewed the core principles of New Hollywood: challenging subject matter, a personal approach, a willingness to embrace the unhappy ending, the unlikable protagonist, the ambiguous meaning. New Hollywood films were still made after Jaws, of course; Raging Bull itself came along a full five years later, in 1980. But Raging Bull pretty much marked the end of the maverick period. By 1982, Heaven’s Gate had destroyed both Michael Cimino and United Artists, Francis Ford Coppola had destroyed himself with One From the Heart, Dennis Hopper was nearing the bottom of his seemingly bottomless personal and professional plunge, and E. T. the Extra Terrestrial topped the box office with $359.2M on its initial run. As it happens, 1982 was the same year that Siskel and Ebert walked away from their increasingly popular and now-syndicated show over a contract dispute with WTTW, leaving the backwater of the Chicago station and relaunching the show with mainstream media titan Tribune Entertainment. When it came to movies, commercialism and mass consumption were the business, and business was good.

***

I couldn’t help but think of Ebert and his ilk recently when watching Paul Verhoeven’s generally despised 2000 sci-fi thriller Hollow Man. In the likely case you’ve forgotten about, or never even noticed the film, it’s another take on H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. In this version, Dr. Sebastion Caine (Kevin Bacon) is the brilliant scientist, leading a military-funded team in their research to discover the means to make people invisible. He succeeds on a gorilla, and it isn’t long, of course, before he makes himself the first human test subject, goes mad with power, and tries to kill everyone who wants to stop him, including Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue), his assistant and former girlfriend, Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin), another team member and McKay’s current lover, and damn near every other character.

Let’s be clear: Hollow Man is not a good film. Ebert and Richard Roeper, reviewing it on At the Movies, gave it the dreaded two thumbs down. They both complained that it wasted its intriguing premise and excellent visual effects by reverting to slasher film predictability, and Ebert mocked it for being, I kid you not, unrealistic. Roeper, meanwhile, condescendingly called it a “B-movie.”

“It’s just a B-movie.” This is a put-down commonly used by pop movie critics, and it reveals most of what you need to know about them. After all, the same could be said not only of every movie Verhoeven has ever made, but of some of the greatest films in Hollywood history. Gun Crazy was a B-movie. Scarlet Street was a B-movie. Johnny Guitar, Psycho, Touch of Evil – all B-movies. The other thing those movies all have in common is that they’re brilliant, complex and thrillingly unique. The term B-movie relates more to a film’s budget and cast than anything else, and by criticizing a film because it’s a B-movie there’s a nonsensical implication that big budgets and all-star casts somehow guarantee quality. We can all think of several hundred contradictions to this idea without breaking a sweat. B-movies are often interesting and even great because the stakes are so low. Free from the scrutiny and micromagement that often comes with large budgets, the makers of B-movies sometimes create great things, because their movies can afford to be daring.

Back to Hollow Man: I have to agree with all Ebert’s and Roeper’s criticisms of the movie, and of course I’m not suggesting that critics ought not to have opinions; reviews would be pretty dull without a point of view. But what we lose with critics like Ebert is the opportunity to appreciate bad art, or found art, or more importantly, art that actually tries something, but simply fails. To put it another way, by beginning with the basic assumption that there’s a universal standard of quality in films, we lose the opportunity to discover surprising, rewarding, unique and even life-changing films — films that may not pass the thumb test, but hold small pleasures and significant moments of clarity, meaning and insight. We lose, for example, the dark undercurrents in Hollow Man, the question of whether people behave well because they’re moral creatures or simply because they don’t want to face the consequences of indulging their ids (“it’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror,” Caine says at one point). We lose its beguiling examination of the male gaze, its idea that what cannot be seen has no meaning. None of these ideas are brought to any conclusion, which is why I would call the film a failure. But there’s value and pleasure to be found in what the film tries to do.

There will always be critics like Ebert, of course, because there will always be moviegoers for whom movies really are like cell phones or refrigerators or spatulas. These moviegoers just want to know, should they choose to see a certain movie, if they’ll be entertained. My mother-in-law is such a person. Assigned to watch Taxi Driver for a movie group she belongs to, she seemed flabbergasted that the movie even exists. What purpose could there be in making such a thing? she seemed wonder. Fair enough. If you don’t like to be uncomfortable at the movies, there are some movies you simply shouldn’t see.

It could be, too, that I overestimate what I think of as the Golden Age of American film criticism, the early-1960s-to-late-1970s — it’s no coincidence that this coincides roughly with the New Hollywood era — when people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris led what I (probably romantically) imagine as a sort of national conversation about film. Their work was as challenging as the films themselves, rich and informed and intellectually alive. Ebert has outlasted them all, and seems like one of those figures who gains respect not because he’s the most talented or accomplished, but by virtue of having stuck around the longest, like LL Cool J or Lou Piniella. There’s a lot to be said for longevity. And lest you think Ebert might use his position to elevate the collective critical approach, you should know that he recently announced his intentions to relaunch his movie reviewing show early next year on WTTW, now to be called Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies and hosted by Christy Lemire and the increasingly Ebertian Elvis Mitchell. What will the show be like? Ebert, who’s co-producing it with his wife, will of course retain the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down format (which his blog says is copyright; of course it’s copyrighted), which all but ensures that it won’t be able to tell you much about the movies it reviews, besides whether they’re good or bad. Which, all in all, seems like about the least important thing to know.

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Cheever is rightly (though myopically) criticized for never having really solved the novel, and most of the five he wrote, including both Bullet Park and even the one generally considered his best, Falconer, show his struggle plainly: He was a peerless short story writer, and when he takes on the novel it’s a bit like a baseball player who never really learned how to swing a golf club. He may score well, but watching him, there’s always something off. If you care most about a beautiful golf swing, stay away from Cheever generally, and Bullet Park especially.

Bullet Park is divided into three parts. It begins with the third-person account of Eliot Nailles, a typical Cheever suburbanite who commutes to the city from the titular Westchester (we presume) village, where he works as a chemist for a mouthwash called (in my all-time favorite example of Cheever’s ear for the absurd) Spang. Nailles is a good man, but incomplete, to say the least. He loves his wife, Nellie, immoderately, though she’s as useless and empty as an ornamental vase. And he loves his only child, Tony, even when Tony announces one morning that he would prefer not to leave his bed, not because he’s ill in any specific way, just because he feels “sad.” For Eliot, a simple-minded optimist who keeps his eyes to the sky no matter what befalls him, the idea that you would choose anything but action, that you would look anywhere but up, that you could ever let a little thing like your emotions slow you down, clashes so totally with his view of the world that he’s simply stumped by Tony’s plight. Nailles, after all, can’t even fathom why he himself needs a powerful tranquilizer just to get on the train to work every morning. The plight of Tony, who stays in bed for months, consumes a large part of Nailles’s section.

If it feels like there’s something missing from the Nailles character, that’s because there is: namely, the character from the book’s first-person second section, Paul Hammer. Hammer is everything Nailles isn’t. The bastard son of a batty, vagabond mother and an absent father whose defining characteristic was a physique that made him a sculptor’s model for shirtless statues all over the world, Hammer represents instability, rootlessness, irregularity, and chaos of the mind, spirit and emotions—in short, everything the suburbs promise to solve. Where Nailles is utterly simple and unable to comprehend the intricacies of the world, Hammer is unfathomably complex and unable to comprehend himself. He wanders the globe, drinking continuously and pursued by a “cafard,” a crushing depression that seems able to follow him anywhere except, he finds, into a room with yellow walls. This is Hammer’s only refuge. Ultimately Hammer decides, in one of the book’s many unsignalled and unexplained left-hand turns, that his only choice is to move to Bullet Park and murder someone as a sacrifice for the sinful conformity represented by the suburbs. Or something like that. The clash of the two characters, brief after the book-long build-up, comprises the book’s third and final act.

It’s said that Cheever was once wounded by a student who told him she loved his work because it’s “funny.” But he needn’t have been. The student may have put it badly, but it’s impossible to separate the humor from the blackness in any of Cheever’s work, especially Bullet Park. This novel is funny the way Van Gogh’s paintings are pretty, the way the Rolling Stones’ “Midnight Rambler” is catchy, or the way Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is gripping. That is to say that calling Bullet Park funny is accurate but doesn’t begin to capture the horror of its vision, the violence of its emotions, or the weirdness and unpredictability of the narrative.

The first thing readers generally notice—and are bothered by—about Bullet Park is the names he’s chosen for the characters. The first time I read it, I was crestfallen. Cheever was my hero, and I thought, “Really? Hammer and Nailles? That’s the best you could do?” It seems lazy, immature, obvious and worse. It seems like the blunt, primitive humor of the creatively insufficient. But that name pairing is the first indication of the reckless, fuck-all attitude Cheever brings to this glorious, troubling tangle of a story. It’s easy to assume, given the realistically described settings, the (at a glance) conventional approach to the characters, and the familiarity of the milieu (which Cheever more or less invented and then went on to deconstruct in much of his later work) that this is a realist novel. And, having made this assumption, you instantly begin to judge it according to the success of its verisimilitude.

But as the names of the two main characters indicate, this is Cheever at his most boldly archetypal, and Bullet Park is less a physical place than a state of mind. Namely, Cheever’s state of mind. The book was written as Cheever began to engage in his final, life-altering descent into alcoholism. It was published in 1969, and by 1975 Cheever was separated from his wife, creatively eviscerated, ensconced in his delusions and narcissism, drinking continuously from the first light of morning until the darkness closed in around him, and staggering through a farce of a visiting professorship at Boston University. He was, in short, committing a slow suicide, and Bullet Park is his snapshot from the edge of the precipice, before the rapid descent began. From that vantage point, he had a prime view of the chasm below, and what a sight it was.

If you read the jacket of Bullet Park, it will tell you it’s about “the death of the American dream,” but after reading the book itself, this blurb can only seem like a piece of empty marketing tripe composed by some publishing house minion who probably hadn’t even cracked the book. It’s at once too limited and too grandiose a description of what goes on within its pages. It also gives the book, in a way, too much credit. It suggests that Cheever was essentially in command of his powers, crafting a piece of art that reflected some considered vision. But Bullet Park is not one of those perfect, tour-de-force novels that leave you in awe of the possibilities of the form, like Lolita or Babbitt. It is, to be fair, something of a mess. The ending is rushed (though, for me, devastating), the parts don’t necessarily hang together into a whole, and it’s full of incomplete thoughts and unexplained details. In Bullet Park, it feels as if Cheever is at best fitfully in charge. The book is not a novel, it’s a vision of hell. It’s Cheevers anguished cry from the edge of oblivion.

Cheever biographer Blake Bailey was asked, during a talk in Boston last year, why Cheever’s reputation is so in decline, how he could be so revered by writers and those readers who find their way to him, but so dogged by poor book sales, so increasingly excluded from anthologies, so forgotten after a career of such renown. Bailey suggested there were several reasons for this, the most telling being that it’s hard to categorize Cheever. Bullet Park makes the problem clear. Readers expecting a realist novel, something decisive and clear in its intentions, something noted yoyo-dieting middlebrow tastemaker Oprah Winfrey might endorse, are bound to be disappointed. Bullet Park is a joy to read, a powerful example of how incapable Cheever was of composing, no matter the disarray of his life, anything less than a sonorous sentence. But it is not an easy book, and it is not a book that leaves you with a great many answers to the problems it raises. It is not neat. But then again, when it comes to literature, movies, or art of any kind, I personally believe perfection can be the enemy of greatness: If an artist has spent too much time tying up all the loose ends, tightening up the structure, crafting the nuance of the characters, and teasing out the themes, he or she may have left something out. That something, for me, is often the mysterious part, the part of art that we can sense without necessarily understanding, the part that moves us and has meaning for us even when we can’t point to its origin or exact character. In other words, perfect art, for me, often lacks the thing that makes it art. What’s left is an admirable but hollow exercise in craft that leaves us entertained, maybe, but untouched. Give me a daring failure any day. Give me Bullet Park.

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How much bad Hollywood filmmaking can one man take in a day? With my wife and kids out of town for a week, I decided to find out. Charting a day of theater-hopping at my local megaplex, I figured I could see six movies over 14 hours—an assertion of my right to quantity in lieu of quality. I thought this was a great idea. Most people disagreed.

“This sounds like a horrible idea,” my brother emailed me, “but a fun one to read about.” Would my head separate from my shoulders? My mind from my brain? My soul from my body? Here’s my experience gorging myself on Hollywood’s summer fare.

7/10/10, 9:55 a.m.

I’m standing in the downstairs lobby of the Boston Common 19, situated downtown. It overlooks the Common and the campus of my alma mater, Emerson College (go Lions). In my bag I have 12 Fig Newtons, an apple, two hard-boiled eggs, a small bag of potato chips, two chocolate bars, two Trader Joe’s strawberry bars, and a Nalgene bottle of water—everything I could scrounge from my almost-bare, post-vacation cupboards. In my pocket I have an AMC gift certificate I found in a drawer, good for one admission.

It won’t be my only admission, of course, but it will be the only one I “pay” for. I get my ticket.

I consult my notebook and see that my first three movies will be The Last Airbender, Despicable Me, and The A-Team. With a few minutes to spare, I scout their locations, plan my transitions from one auditorium to the next, note the location and position of the security cameras, take a rough headcount of the staff, and head in to see the movie. The auditorium has four other people in it.

10:10 a.m

The Last Airbender

I planned this one first not because I needed to be at my most mentally acute, of course, but because I’m fascinated by the career of M. Night Shyamalan. The trajectory of his critical reception (see left, below) inspires awe. But more interesting than the decline of his critical reputation is what I see as the inevitable transformation of how he sees himself: from important auteur to scrambling journeyman. The fact that he took this gig suggests to me that the transformation may be under way. With this movie—the first he’s made that didn’t come from one of his own original stories, though he did write the script—would he leave his personal themes and style behind, and embrace the principles and spirit of big-budget commercial filmmaking, à la other such auteur aspirants as Steven Soderbergh with the Ocean’s movies, or Francis Ford Coppola with Jack?

Neither of these comparisons is apt, of course, because Soderbergh and Coppola had significantly more auteur credibility before turning to the dark side, so to speak. And this is one of the things that makes Shyamalan unique: His reputation seems to be based more on his own ego than his accomplishments. How long can you think well of yourself after producing Lady in the Water, The Village, and The Happening? It seems like more than anyone’s self-esteem could take.

Anyway. The Last Airbender had (as of July 10th) an 8% rating on RottenTomatoes.com for a reason. One more person detailing the community-theater feel of the acting, the mystifying casting choices (why is that chipmunk-faced white kid dressed like a monk, and why do all these remote villages in this primitive world have a mix of what appear to be white, Asian, Polynesian and Indian people?), or the writing (one of the villains, Prince Zuko, played with a pained expression by Dev Patel, at one point threatens to burn down a village that’s made of ice) is like picking on the fat kid when he takes a fly ball off the forehead. Suffice it to say that Shyamalan, flushed out from the cover of artistic pretension, has proven to be as technically inept as he is intellectually bankrupt.

As for his hypothetical transformation into a big-budget hack—you’d be hard-pressed, I think, to spot this as a Shyamalan movie if you didn’t already know (unless, of course, you were sharp-eyed enough to spot his brief cameos). It will be interesting to see if he returns for the much-threatened sequel to this one.

Food consumed: Five Fig Newtons, the apple

Trailers: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Nanny McPhee Returns, Rango, Megamind, and Legend of the Guardians (why are those owls wearing armor, why are they all speaking with Australian accents, and is this a joke?)

Noon

This will be my longest layoff between movies—45 minutes. The theater is starting to fill up now, which is good for me. I can’t decide how paranoid I should be about getting caught. Most theater employees seem to lack the alertness, investment and sobriety to pay much attention, but still: I’m excited for this project and don’t want to get kicked out. I settle on: Slightly Paranoid. I go into a bathroom and take off my glasses, hat and sweater. Worked for Superman.

12:45 p.m.

Despicable Me

Is it crazy to think that Pixar so dominates CGI kids’ movies that they’ve given all other such productions a debilitating complex? If movie-goers were a girl, and movie theaters were a bar, Pixar would be the super smooth guy who makes everybody laugh effortlessly, never drinks too much, plays great darts and leaves with the prettiest girl in the room—not for a tawdry one-night stand but to settle down to a rich, fulfilling life together. All competitors would be the guy in the bad shirt wearing too much cologne who winds up puking in the bushes on his way home, alone, to masturbate to a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Despicable Me is not a bad movie. But that’s the thing: All these non-Pixar CGI movies are judged—by everyone, I’m convinced, unconsciously—through the Pixar lens. Despicable Me deserves better than just “not bad—considering it’s not Pixar.” It isn’t overly noisy and shrill (the surest sign of Pixar Paranoia), it doesn’t come across as desperate, and it doesn’t base all its humor on farts and getting hit in the nuts. All of which is sincere but backhanded praise, since I’m complimenting the movie for mistakes it doesn’t make. Such is the state of non-Pixar affairs.

Food: The other seven Fig Newtons, one egg

Trailers: Cats and Dogs, Megamind, Ramona & Beezus, Tangled, Smurfs, Nanny McPhee Returns, and Alpha and Omega (which is a movie about trying to get wolves to fuck. But for kids.)

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Here’s a little news worth sharing: Christopher Nolan does not shit solid gold. Like most people, he shits shit. Inception, for example.

Let me explain:

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his trusty sidekick, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his trusty sidekick, a can of Layrite) specialize in a unique kind of espionage: espionage of the mind! (I believe the exclamation point is legally required.) Entering the dream of the victim by means wisely left vague, they and the rest of their team trick the dreamer into revealing whatever secrets the client is paying to retrieve — plans for the big corporate merger, what have you. The act of inception is the more challenging process of planting an idea in the dreamer’s mind that will make him awake thinking the idea was his own, causing him to take a different path than he’d intended — breaking up his dead father’s giant energy company, say. But it can’t be done! Or can it!

All in all, I liked it better when they made this movie with Dennis Quaid.

Inception is the kind of movie that never stops throwing things at you, presumably in the hope that you won’t notice it’s really something very familiar: a heist movie. There’s nothing wrong with heist movies, of course, and as with any other genre, the quality is all in the execution. Just an example here, to give you an idea of how original the bones of this film are: Nolan wrote, then reviewed, considered, and retained the following line: “I just need this one last job.” You might have thought this line would be banned from heist films forever, but no. Only the taste and originality of the filmmaker stand between you and hearing that line over and over again. Instead of needing that one last job to set himself up on a desert island, or to get out of this crazy business once and for all, or to open an adorable bakery in Noe Valley, Cobb needs that one last score in order that he can clear his name of murder charges and return to the US and the two children he was forced to abandon (he murdered their mother — or did he!).

Is this more original or interesting than the desert island or the bakery? No, it’s just Nolan’s way of washing all the goings-on in a thicker-than-usual layer of sentimentality (while also allowing the game DiCaprio to basically replay his role from Shutter Island). Without the specter of lost children, Inception would have to rely on the development of its characters, earned emotion or, I don’t know, actual ideas, all of which are in short supply despite its 148-minute running time.

There are no bad movies, of course, only badly-executed movies. Inception is so loaded with potentially rich subject matter — the subconscious, regret, our need to delude ourselves, the yearning for lost love —that it’s easy to imagine this having been a good or even great movie. But between creating visual spectacle, teasing along the cheap emotion, and having his cast awkwardly explain what could have been confusing plot points, there’s very little time to make things cohere.

The problem is Nolan and his usual lack of subtlety. Is there a moment of actual levity in any of his films? I struggle to think of one. Inception has barely a single sustained minute when the ponderous, bass-heavy score relents and allows some tone other than doom and pretension; when any member of the cast unfurrows his or her brow long enough to convey something besides complete seriousness; when the pace of the film is anything but deliberate and plodding. Even when his story is little more than 10th-grade psychology wrapped around 8th-grade science, Nolan treats it as if it’s Einstein giving a college lecture on Jung. This approach served him well enough in his forays into comic book adaptations (the workmanlike Batman Begins and the painfully, infuriatingly, ludicrously overrated Dark Knight, the reputation of which is mostly driven by hysterical reverence for Heath Ledger, the hysterical reverence for whom is driven by his talent, but just as much by his early death), because we expect a certain juvenile self-seriousness from comic book adaptations. But seeing a Nolan movie is generally like eating at a mid-priced steak restaurant that serves nothing at all but steak. Steak is fine, even when it’s overseasoned and undertenderized, but Nolan seems to have no awareness at all that a salad is a nice tonal contrast.

But about that visual spectacle: it’s jaw-dropping. This is something you can’t take away from the man. To call Nolan a great architect of visually inventive action and grand imagination is an understatement. Inception creates dream worlds that are how we wish our dreams could really be, but still feel familiar, with their own logic and recognizable rules, all rendered with a unique visual flair that uses CGI not just to show off, but in service to the underlying idea. (To some extent, Inception’s dream scenes recall the mind-erasing sequences of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with the main differences being scope and audacity). Every set piece outdoes the last (at least until the final, climactic one, when even Nolan seems tired and confused about which characters are supposed to matter); and it’s only in the film’s second half that the pleasures of living in that world collapse under the accumulated weight of emotional incredulity.

When it comes to Nolan’s films, I find myself increasingly at odds with most of the rest of the world. I’m aware of this. Like Brie or helium balloons, the enthusiasm for his movies leaves me waiting for the moment when everyone cracks up and says, “Nah, just kidding. That shit sucks.” If anyone has a guess how much longer I’ll be waiting, please let me know.

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Something horrible is coming to 17 Cherry Tree Lane

Something horrible is coming to 17 Cherry Tree Lane, the home of the Banks family. Anyone can see it: clouds are mounting on the horizon, the winds have shifted, the barometer is falling. Their neighbor Admiral Broom (Reginald Owen) warns Mr. Banks (David Tomlinson) that he’s “steering into a nasty piece of weather,” just as Broom had cautioned neighborhood chimneysweep Bert (Dick Van Dyke) that “storm signals are up at number 17.”

But this is no ordinary storm. Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) is coming.

If the last time you saw Mary Poppins you were under the age of 10, prepare to be startled upon a fresh viewing. I recently watched it with my kids, and like so many things revisited in adulthood, Mary Poppins proved altogether different from my memory.

The first thing you notice is that, despite her reputation as a paragon of patience, understanding, and love, Mary Poppins simply isn’t very pleasant. It’s not clear that we’re even meant to like her. For one thing, she’s highly and relentlessly critical of the children, Michael (Matthew Garber) and Jane (Karen Dotrice) — you slouch, she tells them, you’re slobs, your manners are deplorable, and when you let your mouths hang open you look like fish. She’s also largely humorless, never satisfied with anyone but herself, and terribly vain (she describes herself, quite sincerely, as “practically perfect in every way”). Furthermore, she’s a bully: When a line of nannies congregate outside the Banks’s front door to apply for the job, she conjures a violent windstorm to sweep them away.

Mary Poppins isn’t just rude and egostistical, she’s also faintly sinister. It isn’t simply that director Robert Stevenson (a Disney lifer whose final film, The Shaggy DA, is also surprisingly creepy), and screenwriters Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi (adapting from the P.L. Travers book series) choose a violent, foreboding storm to announce her arrival, although that certainly sets the stage. There is, in Andrews’ performance, something steely, unsympathetic and cold that makes even the magical things she does — sending toys leaping back onto shelves with a snap of her fingers, say, or jumping into a chalk sidewalk drawing — feel a little threatening. It’s not for nothing that this recut trailer works so well.

If we have a pervasive, collective sense of Mary Poppins as the most dreamily agreeable babysitter of all time, it’s presumably because she can perform magic (I suppose looking and sounding like Julie Andrews doesn’t hurt, either). But really, it’s remarkable how much is obscured by the magic and the singing. The children have fun with Mary Poppins, but she allows it only grudgingly. Bert is the real instigator—she only takes the children into the sidewalk drawing after he fails in his attempt to do so (“Why do you always complicate things that are really quite simple?” she scolds Bert), and when they find old Uncle Albert (Ed Wynn) floating helplessly at the ceiling thanks to a fit of giggles, she’s furious at Bert and the children for encouraging him, as if fun and laughter are somehow hazardous. This could be the key scene in the film, in fact. The lightness and giddiness are all things we associate with Mary Poppins. The first time we see her, she’s sitting in a cloud, presumably awaiting her next assignment, and between that and her magic umbrella, she’s strongly identified with the heavens. But on close inspection, none of that feeling really comes from Mary herself, and the fact is that her sensibilities are firmly earthbound. The frivolousness, fun and whimsy of childhood are everywhere in the movie, but only in spite of Mary Poppins who, it seems clear, would just as soon see the children dressed properly in their best Sunday suits, obediently awaiting her next command.

There’s very little on the screen to suggest that Mary Poppins is, or is meant to be, a real character, with feelings, dreams, a past or a future. She doesn’t suffer aspirations or disappointments, only annoyances (and many of those) and smug affirmations of her good sense and rightness, and she doesn’t want anything because she has everything she wants already. The “practically perfect” line is meant as a joke, I suppose, but it’s true: She’s perfectly in charge of the children, perfectly vain, and perfectly self-assured. “I never explain anything,” she haughtily tells Mr. Banks when he demands to know, quite reasonably, why he’s come home to find a small army of chimney sweeps performing a choreographed dance number in his living room. Mary Poppins is a closed circuit, perfectly self-sustaining, a machine without the capacity or need for love, either chaste or romantic (you could spend the entire film watching nothing but the sexual undercurrents between Bert and Mary, although they almost entirely flow from him towards her).

But if Mary isn’t meant to be a person, what is she? If she’s meant to represent something, then what? It’s not warmth or kindness — she makes it quite clear during her initial interview with Mr. Banks that her wages are a matter of great concern to her, and she holds the children at arm’s length. It’s not love, either: at the end of the film, as Mary begins to pack her bag (including her prized possession, a mirror), the children tearfully beg her not to leave, profess their love and ask, “Don’t you love us?” Mary replies, “And what would happen to me, may I ask, if I loved all the children I said goodbye to?” Andrews and the treacly music behind the dialogue do their best to inject a mood of sorrow into the scene, but there’s simply nothing else in the story or Andrews’s performance to support the idea that Mary Poppins cares about them in the least, to suggest that this hasn’t been, in fact, just another job.

By the end of the film, we’re meant to feel that Mary Poppins has taught the children — or more to the point, their parents — a valuable lesson, but it’s hard to say just what it is. Standing on the front step, ready to depart, Mary watches the kids run off to the park with their parents without so much as a goodbye, and her bird-shaped umbrella handle says, “Look at them! You know, they think more of their father than they do of you!” (By this point, it seems perfectly consistent that Mary Poppins has an easier and more natural relationship with an inanimate object than she does with actual people.) “That’s as it should be,” Mary replies, and again, Andrews gives her line readings a Disney touch of sentimentality. But again, because she’s been such a relentlessly unsentimental character, it rings hollow. So have they somehow learned, thanks to Mary’s eye-rolling and grumbling assent to various ill-advised adventures, to love their father, or he to love them? It’s a stretch.

Still, I can’t help but feel that there is some message in the film, even it isn’t the one that everyone seems to hear (in fairness, the steeliness of Mary Poppins hasn’t entirely escaped notice). Maybe I’m giving it too much credit. After all, the early 1960s were a strange, transitional time in American film. The studio system was moribund, and the new Hollywood of independent cinema, maverick directors and raw subject matter were rumbling below the surface, but still a few years from changing movies (John Cassavetes’ Shadows appeared in 1959, but Easy Rider didn’t come along until 1969). With few exceptions, major studio films were bloated and unfocused, designed by committee to make money, not statements.

Nevertheless, you could say that even a high-profile spectacle like Mary Poppins might have a message. After all, Mary represents discipline and, specifically, the idea of giving children less love, or at least what too many parents think of as love—namely, indulgence. What if Mary Poppins, a supernatural being if ever there was one in cinema, is the higher, less familiar idea of boundaries, consistency, and authority? Their parents, and specifically their father, have a strong sense of propriety, but that’s not really the same thing. As I said, Mary doesn’t try very hard to make us or anyone else like her, and maybe that’s the point: Maybe Mary Poppins is meant to suggest that love and indulgence are different things, and that sometimes love looks cold, efficient and decidedly unsentimental. Can a movie made in the 1960s and set in Edwardian England have something to teach 21^st century parents? I think it can.

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If the sight of a 10-year-old girl acrobatically and graphically hacking up a roomful of muscle-bound drug dealers makes you squirm, then Kick-Ass is not your kind of film. Also, we probably can’t be friends.

Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, a semi-parody of all things crime-fighting and Spandex-clad (adapted from the comic by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.) takes pains to accentuate the differences between Dave (Aaron Johnson) and more conventional superheroes. For instance, Dave has no powers, just a couple of billy clubs, a discount wet suit, and a vague idea that people should help each other out. He also has no special training or ability, no technological advantage, and no particular motivation for fighting crime (the one tragedy in his life was his mother’s death, which came not at the hands of some master criminal or street thug, but at the kitchen table, thanks to a singularly undramatic aneurysm). The early, expository scenes of Kick-Ass strongly recall the early scenes of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman (2002), and while they’re amusing enough, they really only illustrate director and co-writer Vaughn’s laziness. What in Kick-Ass is more or less perfunctory is rendered, in Raimi’s film, with a sense of fun and discovery that makes it seem fresh. Vaughn, who made his name with the overrated action-crime drama Layer Cake (2004), seems eager to get to the action scenes. It could be that these early scenes in Kick-Ass were meant to parody Spiderman, but it’s hard to satirize a film that had as well-developed a sense of its own occasional silliness as Raimi’s film.

The movie picks up as Dave’s crime-fighting career as Kick-Ass begins to draw public attention, thanks to a YouTube video and a MySpace page, but it isn’t just the good people of New York who are noticing — it’s also the bad ones, specifically crime boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) and his minions. A price is put on Kick-Ass’ head, and he would soon have been delivered to D’Amico were it not for the city’s other superheroes: Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), who’s nursing a murderous vendetta against D’Amico; Hit-Girl (the astonishing Chloe Moretz), Big Daddy’s daughter, who’s been trained to kill, well, every criminal in the city; and Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), D’Amico’s son, who has an agenda of his own. (One of the things that contributes heavily to the overall DIY feel of the film’s world is the overwhelming lameness of the names the heroes choose). As the movie becomes crowded with competing plotlines — Big Daddy’s pursuit of D’Amico, D’Amico’s pursuit of Kick-Ass, Red Mist’s shifting loyalties — it begins to find its rhythm. But a problem arises: Most of the other characters are more interesting than the bored, horny high school student in a wet suit. The Kick-Ass storyline is never exactly dull, mostly because Johnson handles the numerous demands of the role so well. He’s just masculine enough to plausibly talk tough and get the girl; just vulnerable enough to curl up into the fetal position and cry when he realizes that being a superhero is hard; just dorky enough to be humiliated by his school’s popular kids and bullies. But it’s hard not to be impatient for the movie to get back to the other characters and storylines.

The main attraction here is Moretz, who earns every bit of the buzz around her, her performance, and the character she plays. Hit-Girl is equal parts lethal and cuddly, daddy’s girl and lone wolf, gee-gosh innocence and gleeful sadism. It’s not quite fair to say she steals the film, but when you leave the theater, don’t be surprised if most of the scenes and moments that stick out the most feature her. Few movie moments this year are greater than the one when Hit-Girl, having just dispatched a roomful of thugs, spots the lone survivor and sees that he wields a butterfly knife. “Hey!” she exclaims. “I have one of those!” Her face registers unfiltered joy, and her voice has the tone most little girls reserve for talking about their favorite sparkle ponies. She produces her knife and puts on a prodigious display of blade-flipping butterfly knife dexterity. The moment captures everything that’s great about the character and Moretz’s performance, but it also manages to capture the spirit of the film itself, a giddy blend of graphic ultraviolence and slapstick playfulness that, at its best, is as much fun as a movie can be. The fact that we know exactly how the scene will end — with the knife planted in the bad guy’s chest — doesn’t distract from it in the least.

Naturally enough, Hit-Girl has proven controversial, and those who consider it their duty to worry about such things have called the character irresponsible, exploitative, or worse, and blasted everyone from Vaughn to Millar and Romita, Jr. for putting her on the screen. There will always be people who are uncomfortable with any pairing of childhood and violence (not to mention the pairing of childhood and words like “cunt” and “motherfucker,” which Moretz delivers frequently and with relish), and the impulse to protect children is a noble one. But this is a comedy, and comedy is often about juxtaposition. If the sight of a 10-year-old girl acrobatically and graphically hacking up a roomful of muscle-bound drug dealers makes you squirm, then Kick-Ass is not your kind of film. (And also, we probably can’t be friends.) As for the welfare of Moretz, I leave it to her parents.

Interestingly, the hysteria over Hit-Girl’s violence and profanity obscures a subtler, perhaps more troubling (and certainly more interesting) issue common to comics and comic-based films: the question of how females generally, and the female body specifically, are represented. It’s temping to give Kick-Ass credit for creating such a strong and independent female character, until you remember that, in fact, comics are full of such female heroes. What’s different here is that, unlike She-Hulk or Red Sonja, Hit-Girl is not built like a gym-rat Barbie or dressed like a streetwalker (fair or not, the reputation of mainstream comic readers and creators as under-sexed and under-socialized is seldom contradicted by female superheroes, which remain predictably absurd projections of the most-adolescent male fantasies). Hit-Girl is, of course, a child, ostensibly pre-sexual but dressed, nevertheless, in a pleated, schoolgirl skirt. Is it fair to suggest that any character dressed in such a costume is meant to be seen sexually? In the case of comics, probably. It’s possible that the skirt was meant to be a commentary on the issue, but there’s little in the film to suggest it has that much on its mind. At one point, a high school-aged character, having just watched Hit-Girl work over yet another gang of criminals, announces his love for her. When his friend points out that she looks like she’s about 10 years old, the smitten teen vows to save himself for her. It’s a funny line, but the anticipation feels all too plausible.

Where Kick-Ass is concerned, maybe it’s pointless to bother pondering such things. As weakly as the movie starts, it ends strongly, with a gunfight finale that plays to Vaughn’s strengths as an action director with a good eye and ear for deadpan comedy. Bad guys die, good guys overcome, stuff explodes, and it’s all executed with the perfect silliness and humor. And Hit Girl? The character is about 10, but Moretz herself is 13, so by the time the sequel rolls around she’ll be close enough to legal for fanboys everywhere to drop any pretense of restraint.

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