Review: "Nocturnal Animals"

Director: Tom Ford
Runtime: 116 minutes

It's perhaps not the greatest sign that the scene that has stuck with me the longest from Nocturnal Animals is the one that absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the plot. A mesmerizing series of grotesques set to Abel Korzeniowski's lush score kicks things off in a way that would make David Lynch proud. What follows, sadly, has the basic blueprints for a mesmerizing Russian Nesting Doll of a story, yet struggles to get beneath the artifice to something worth savoring. Fashion designer Tom Ford, in his second feature, continues to showcase his hidden gifts as a director (following the achingly beautiful A Single Man 7 years ago). And he's assembled a cast of talented actors to make it all sound convincing. But what gets in the way of Ford's Nocturnal Animals is Ford himself...or at least, his screenplay.

Adapted from Austin Wright's novel "Tony and Susan," Nocturnal Animals is either three stories in one or one story fragmented into three volumes. In the first, we meet Susan (Amy Adams), an art gallery owner trapped in an increasingly hollow marriage to a philandering Ken Doll of a husband (Armie Hammer). Susan is jolted from her sterile LA lifestyle when she receives a manuscript for a novel from her ex-husband Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal). As she reads through the draft (also titled "Nocturnal Animals"), she traces the connections between it and her relationship with Tony, which ended under less than pleasant circumstances. 

What transpires is, on paper, a compelling slice of modern noir punctuated with heavy doses of a grimy Texas-set revenge thriller. Working with many of the same technical collaborators from A Single Man, Ford has crafted another luxurious cinematic experience, ranging from the aforementioned music to the chameleonic photography (and of course, the clothes). It looks the part, sounds the part, and even adds a few new tricks to Ford's directorial skill set. The dramatization of Tony's novel (in which Susan imagines Tony in the lead role) kicks off with a terrifically staged car chase on an empty West Texas road, and builds to a chilling climax. 

But what's missing from Nocturnal Animals is the psychological acuity that gave such weight to A Single Man. There's a lot of external activity on screen, but precious little of it gets beyond the surface of the beautiful faces on screen. What transpires often enthralls in the moment, but dissipates soon after. You'll likely find yourself wanting to be investing in these people, but Nocturnal Animals too often refuses to even meet you halfway.

Credit then, belongs to the actors for filling out these roles as best they can. Adams, coming off Arrival, turns in another quiet, introspective performance. But while Arrival allowed the actress room to take her character on a journey, Nocturnal Animals too often relegates her to the same position as the audience: a watcher. She is pushed to the margins, and spends more time staring out of windows and taking off her (admittedly killer) reading glasses than she does contributing to the story. 

Gyllenhaal, though occasionally pushed to go over the top, is also effective in both of his grief stricken forms, while Michael Shannon nearly steals the show as a sickly sheriff in Tony's novel. Taylor-Johnson is suitably menacing, though eventually his backwoods terrorizer schtick becomes repetitive. Actors like Hammer, Andrea Riseborough, and Michael Sheen do what they can with limited time, while Laura Linney makes the most of her 1 scene cameo as Susan's imperious mother.

Just about everything in Nocturnal Animals is at least watchable, and for large stretches it's perfectly engaging. But while the narrative's structural divisions are admirable, their proportions are all off. So much time is spent bringing Tony's novel to life that Susan's current existence and her past life with Tony feel like add-ons struggling to justify themselves. And yet, if you were to cut them out, Tony's novel on its own wouldn't be enough to justify a full film. Ford spends so much time figuring out how to cobble the story together that he seems to have neglected to make even the faintest point out of everything. For all of its beauty, it's the ugly imperfections that linger longest. Nocturnal Animals pretends to get its hands dirty, but upon closer inspection, there's never a speck of dust under its immaculately manicured fingernails. 

Grade: B-

Review: "Southpaw"

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Runtime: 125 minutes

Coming just one week after Trainwreck, Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw serves as a grim reminder of what happens a formulaic plot meets formulaic execution. Whereas the Apatow-Schumer collaboration created a typical rom-com executed with with humor and heart, Fuqua's work with Sons of Anarchy creator/writer Kurt Sutter is emotionally stunted. You've seen this story of an athlete seeking redemption, and you've seen it done so much better that this latest iteration isn't worth your time.

Not even Jake Gyllenhaal, coming off of a winning streak that peaked with Nightcrawler, can do much to elevate the material. From a physical standpoint, the role is every bit as transformative as the one the actor played in Dan Gilroy's thriller, albeit on the opposite end of the spectrum. Gyllenhaal gain between 20 and 30 pounds of muscle to play boxer Billy Hope. Yet the external transformation is the most impressive aspect of Gyllenhaal's work. Of all of his recent projects, Southpaw gives Gyllenhaal the most traditionally Leading Man role, and the actor sells every minute.

But underneath the muscles and the screaming and cursing, Southpaw's protagonist rings hollow. The blame shouldn't be laid at Gyllenhaal's feet, but rather at Sutter and Fuqua, who have hardly fleshed out the character beyond the most obvious and blunt surface details. With such a textbook protagonist, it's even more difficult to care about the mechanical storytelling. A man is on top of his respective profession, then tragedy sends him into free fall. What is he to do in his hour of woe? Why, revisit his roots, get help from an elderly black mentor (Forest Whitaker), and work his way toward a boxing match that could serve as his redemption. Southpaw is Raging Bull filtered through the aesthetic of 8 Mile, but without the raw intensity of either.

Fuqua has never been a particularly nuanced director, and Mr. Sutter doesn't do much to help. As the architect behind one of TV's most suffocatingly MACHO prestige dramas, Mr. Sutter is an ideal fit on paper. But vapid bluntness multiplied by faux-gritty vapid bluntness only leads to...well, you get the idea. It's not enough to offer audiences a Damaged Male Protagonist and expect a connection, and it hasn't been that way for a while (and as for the way the film uses its female characters...yikes). 

All of this reinforces the notion that Southpaw is, from a pop culture standpoint, a bit of an unintentional relic. Even from a technical standpoint, it's a surprisingly flat piece of work. Fuqua's images are a mix of the glossy and the grimy, and both sides are equally artless. The fight scenes effectively communicate the brute force of taking a punch to the face, but they never heighten the story's drama. Every story beat is so obvious that's no room to be engaged in the moment. A story of blood, sweat, and tears shouldn't feel so rote, yet here we are.  

Grade: C-

Review: "Nightcrawler"

Director: Dan Gilroy
Runtime: 117 minutes

Likable protagonists are overrated. At least, they are in the world of Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler, a psychological thriller set in the world of freelance journalism. Yes, it's much more engaging than it sounds. Featuring Jake Gyllenhaal (or what's left of him after all of that weight loss) in a truly inspired lead performance, Nightcrawler is unsettling proof that we don't need the good guys front and center. We just need the interesting ones, warts and all. 

Set in modern Los Angeles, we first meet Louis Bloom (Gyllenhaal) as he's stealing metal to sell for a few quick bucks. Louis is a bit of a chameleon. He tries anything, and it's instantly his next obsession. Speaking to a grungy looking shopkeeper, he exalts the man's high status, trying to stroke his target's ego all while selling himself as a potential employee. The man is unresponsive, but if Bloom is upset, there's no way of knowing it. Lou Bloom is relentless, yet the quality of his voice casts him as the sort of fellow who soaks up self help seminars as though they've been handed down from heaven.

Fittingly, it doesn't take long until Louis is able to find a potential career field that he can really latch on to. After witness a freelance news crew capture footage of a fiery car crash, Bloom starts to grab some money selling video to one of Los Angeles' local news stations for their 6AM broadcast. His first submission is rough, but when the station's news manager Nina (Rene Russo) gives him some kind words of advice, there's no turning back. With this miniscule token of encouragement, Lou puts out an ad for an assistant. His only response is Rick (Riz Ahmed), but Lou still conducts the interview as though he's hiring for a Fortune 500 company. 

Given that Nightcrawler is set in the world of journalism and TV news (albeit its squishy underbelly), the first film that comes to mind is Network. There's some truth to that comparison, with Russo's Nina functioning as older, washed up version of Faye Dunaway's character, along with the film's biting assessments of how easily local news stations can manipulate simple truths into wide reaching hysteria. 

But Nightcrawler is much more of a one man show, with a single Machiavellian force at its core. The more apt comparison, especially when looking at the lead characters, would be Gus Van Sant's To Die For, which starred Nicole Kidman as an aspiring anchorwoman with a vicious streak and an uncomfortably forceful desire to appear "professional."

To Die For is the story of a small town falling prey to a manipulator, which Nightcrawler's setting is far more ambitious. Gilroy and cinematographer Robert Elswitt include a number of beautiful LA sunrises and sunsets, capturing all of the city's sprawling, unrefined beauty. The film opens with a series of post-card ready images, before giving us our violent introduction to Lou. But Gilroy isn't out to subvert LA's image. Instead, he presents Lou's story in tandem with his portrait of the city and the freelance journalism scene. People like Lou Bloom aren't infecting the City of Angels. They're merely working both sides of the city's dual natures.

For Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler is the crown jewel in a string of recent impressive performances. Like Scarlett Johansson (also on fire right now), Gyllenhaal was someone Hollywood tried to make into a traditional "star," and the results were pretty rocky. Moving away from expected leading man roles is the best thing to happen to the actor's career since his performance in Brokeback Mountain. Following Prisoners and Enemy, Nightcrawler is the actor's next (and long overdue) great performance. The actor lost a considerable amount of weight for the role, but his gaunt appearance is an afterthought considering the effort put into the actual performance. Gyllenhaal's nonstop commitment to Lou's persona - even when he shifts from career advice platitudes to thinly veiled threats - is totally gripping to behold. He never has a scene that allows him to coast, which keeps the performance, the film, and the audience, subtly on edge the whole way through. 

Gyllenhaal's creepy and darkly funny performance is certainly Nightcrawler's big draw, but Gilroy's work as writer and director ensure that the film is more than just an acting showcase. Gilroy carefully dials up the intensity with each story that Lou and Rick chase. The film's big finale, a nighttime car chase, is exceptionally well done, building off of the cumulative intensity to end Nightcrawler with a bang. And when it comes to the scenes that don't involving dashing around LA, Gilroy switches hands and grabs the viewer in a different, yet equally compelling chokehold. There are no shades of grey in Nightcrawler, only shades of black with barely perceptible differences. 

Grade: B+

Review: "Enemy"

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Runtime: 90 minutes

"Chaos is order undeciphered," reads the apt opening title card of Denis Villeneuve's Enemy, a film which either has quite a bit of order to decipher, or simply a small amount of order that's been reconfigured beyond recognition. The second, and artier, of the director's collaborations with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, Enemy escalates slowly, before finishing with a nightmarish bang. With strains of Kubrick, Lynch, and Hitchcock in its DNA, Villeneuve's latest finds the director focusing on atmosphere over narrative details, to positive and negative effect.

After an unsettling prologue, Enemy turns its focus to the humdrum life of college professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal). A neurotic shut in, Adam's life changes when he notices an extra in a movie he's watching who looks just like him. Rather than shrug off the incident, Adam lets his neuroses get the best of him, and he sets off to investigate. The other man is Anthony Saint Claire (Gyllenhaal as well), a haughty actor and motorcycle enthusiast. Adam lives in bland, cluttered apartment and has a girlfriend (Melanie Laurent), while Anthony is married to Helen (Sarah Gadon), who is six months pregnant. 

As the title suggests, the eventual meeting of the Gyllenhaals doesn't exactly bond the pair. Adam freaks out, and wishes he'd never pursued Anthony to begin with. Anthony, meanwhile, is tempted to toy with Adam's life. Their similar, yet oh so different, paths in life start to cross, and then they fold onto each other, before merging in thoroughly unsettling ways.

Rather than constantly play Gyllenhaal off of himself, Javier Gullon's adaptation of Jose Saramago's "The Double" is more interested in how the two men act as individuals. The cocky Anthony is keen to use Adam's life as another role to play, while Adam struggles to cope with the idea once he's actually confronted with it. Adam's mother (Isabella Rosselini) tells him that he's her only son, which takes out the only logical reason for Anthony's existence. There's also the matter of Adam's dreams, which may or may not be a sign of a deeper connection between man and doppelgänger (and vice versa). 

Yet compared to other media involving similar concepts, Enemy focuses less on the mystery of how than the ramifications of the collision of two lives that are only separated by a few threads. Twists aren't the driving force of Enemy's limited narrative. Instead, it's the gradual (at times too gradual) release of details that glues the story together. Rather than build to a big revelation, Enemy ends in a way that dares the viewer to go and figure it all out on their own (though I suspect certain details have meanings that will remain elusive).

It's all a marvelous showcase for Gyllenhaal and Villeneuve, even as Gullon's adaptation leaves them to compensate for the script's emptiness. Gyllenhaal creates clear distinctions between Adam and Anthony, most noticeably in posture. Though the film's decision to keep the two men apart pays off, a few more interactions between the pair would have likely only deepened the sense of danger that the aesthetics work so hard to create. Of the rest of the cast, only Sarah Gadon makes an impression as Anthony's vaguely paranoid wife. Meanwhile, Villeneuve and cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc shoot the Toronto settings with a sickly, yellowish haze that lends even the most mundane skyscrapers a foreboding presence. Meanwhile, composing duo Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans turn up the atmosphere with their eerie, off-kilter score.

The big factor holding Enemy back from fully hitting its mark as a nightmarish psycho-drama is that it doesn't go far enough with its central mystery. There's quite a bit hinted at that could have been explored without 'solving' the case. Despite the 90 minute run time, the first act's glacial pacing is also partly to blame. It's long on atmosphere and short on character ground work. Despite some nice visual characterization and elegant editing, Enemy's initial foundation isn't as solid as the film thinks.

Shortcomings noted, though, it's refreshing to see a psychological drama/thriller that isn't afraid to leave most of the hard work to the audience. Villeneuve and his cast's commitment to the brazenly head-scratching material is admirable, and ensures that Enemy never sinks under the weight of its own weirdness. Spiders play a significant (albeit puzzling) role in Enemy's puzzle, which couldn't be more appropriate. Enemy lures you in with hints of danger, but only shows you enough to draw you deeper and deeper into its web. By the time you think you have an idea of where it's going, you're hit with the blood-chilling realization that it's already too late. 

Grade: B/B+

Review: "Prisoners"

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Runtime: 153 minutes

You'll have to look awfully hard to find anything new in a film like Prisoners, the English language debut of Quebec-born filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. As written by Aaron Guzikowski, the film's tale of two missing girls and the search to find them covers its share of well-worn tropes, many of which can be found on one of the many police procedurals currently on TV. Yet thanks to superlative craftsmanship, effective plotting, and top flight performances, Prisoners rises above the average procedural, even though it never quite transcends the genre to achieve true greatness.

As the film opens, we see hear Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) reciting the Lord's Prayer as he and his son lie in wait for a deer to shoot. This immediate juxtaposition of faith and violence (on an innocent subject, no less) will echo throughout the film's tale of desperation, loss, and vigilante justice. On an overcast Thanksgiving Day, the youngest children of the Dovers (Jackman and Maria Bello) and the Birches (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) go missing. Though twitchy Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) quickly finds  potential suspect Alex Jones (Paul Dano), the hunt for the girls has just begun. Frustrated with the police department's inability to find strong evidence, Keller takes matters into his own hands.

All of this takes up no more than the film's first 40 minutes, leaving roughly 110 more. Yet rather than cram the remaining runtime with twists and red herrings, Prisoners finds a smart, and even surprising, balance between the mystery driving the narrative forward, and the character drama that holds it all together. While this makes the narrative less immediately compelling, it allows Prisoners to explore its characters and the repercussions of their actions without having to rush. Rather than try to pull off something we've never seen before, the film simply takes familiar ingredients and executes them with a very sure hand. 

There's also the matter of the effort that's been put into the film's look, which does its best to distance itself from the small screen as possible. With its gloomy visual aesthetic and haunting flares of music, Prisoners owes as much to the crime thrillers of David Fincher as it does to TV dramas like Broadchurch and The Killing. Where the film receives a considerable boost is in the lensing from master cinematographer Roger Deakins. With its rainy, wintery suburban settings, there appears to be little room for a movie like Prisoners to have any visual flair. Yet Deakins, with all cylinders firing from start to finish, finds ways of capturing the dreary and plain settings with a level of artistry that feels wholly cinematic, yet never pretentious or distracting.

The cast certainly aren't shirking their duties either. Stacked with talent in every major role, the entire ensemble gives it their all. Even Bello and Davis, whose characters are somewhat underutilized, have moments that they knock out of the park. Dano is effective as well as the mumbly Alex, while Melissa Leo underplays her ambiguous role as the boy's doddering aunt. Of the supporting roster, however, it's Howard who makes the strongest impression. Some of that is due to how the script uses the character, but the actor finds ways of communicating grief and confusion without ever being redundant. As one of the cast members who spends the most time playing off of Jackman, Howard makes his straightforward character a nicely conflicted foil. 

Where the acting really shines, however, is in the leading duo of Jackman and Gyllenhaal. The roles are radically different, yet the way they reflect the dual strands of Prisoners' narrative creates a compelling blend of material driven by pure emotion and by pure clinical determination. Jackman, coming off of a career high with Les Miserables, has the emotional side of the story to carry, and the ferocity he brings to the role is never less than gripping. For all of the hysterical yelling involved, the actor never sounds shrill or false. It may not be subtle work, but Jackman invests each growl and yell with a fury that would make even Wolverine cower. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Gyllenhaal, who makes the less emotive role work in his favor. He puts a nervous bit of blinking, though initially distracting, to smart use as a means of communicating the character's internal processing of events.

Behind the scenes, Villeneuve deserves immense credit for his intelligent balance between the emotional and the procedural elements of the story. His previous film, 2010's Oscar-nominated Incendies, marked him as a talent to watch. Though more harrowing than Prisoners, that film also suffered from a messiness that built to a pair of twists that bordered on laughable. Prisoners runs nearly 15 minutes longer than Incendies, but it feels remarkably more focused, despite the room it allows for slow-building drama. Procedural mysteries live or die by how well they pull you in. Even the best of the genre, such as The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, have their implausibilities upon reflection. Yet what makes a great procedural work is its ability to cast a strong enough spell to allow you to suspend your sense of disbelief. Following in the footsteps of those aforementioned films, Prisoners certainly succeeds on that level, albeit with less flash (you'll find no lip-smacking cannibals). 

The lone disappointment of Prisoners, however, stems from the very aspect of its script that also makes it a success. By aiming for character-based drama over thrills, the film starts to feel more generic as a whole, despite the first rate filmmaking. There's a tantalizing taste of the more ambitious, possibly pulpier, movie that could have been made in the form of a mysterious maze symbol. You can practically feel Guzikowski contemplating whether or not to take said symbol and use it to turn Prisoners into a denser and more twisted story. Instead, the resolution of the maze, and the main plot, comes across as rather expected, even though it's as well-crafted as everything that precedes it. 

In straddling the line between thoughtful character drama and attention-grabbing thriller, Prisoners somewhat robs itself of a sharper identity. In trying to focus more on emotional developments, the film forgets to give itself a memorable stamp. Not content to end with a whimper, however, Prisoners ends (and the sound team deserves kudos here) its somewhat mundane narrative with a brilliant piece of ambiguity. Just when it seems in danger of fading out forgettably, it throws in one last nasty little kick that ensures that it'll stay with you just a little bit longer (Law and Order looks cheerful in comparison). It may not be the next Zodiac, but Prisoners is still an compelling and satisfying mystery with a refreshingly adult look at unsettling subject matter. 

Grade: B+

What I watched this week: Nov 22-28

As we bring November to a close, I have two more viewings before we move into the last month of 2010. Well, technically one, since the first was seen in theaters and is from the current year. I just didn't feel like having a post titled "what I watched this week" with only one entry, hence my cheating.

Love and Other Drugs (2010) dir. Ed Zwick:

The name Ed Zwick usually calls to mind accessible action flicks with at least one key, often nominated, supporting actor. Notable examples include Glory (Oscar for Denzel Washington), The Last Samurai (nomination for Ken Watanabe), and Blood Diamond (nomination for Djimon Honsou). Which is what makes Zwick's latest effort such a strange departure: an R-rated romantic comedy. Based on Jamie Reidy's novel "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman," Drugs tells the story of up-and-coming pharmaceutical salesman Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal). While trying to push one brand of anti-depressant to a doctor (Hank Azaria), Jamie meets patient Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), who has Parkinson's. After a first meeting that ends with Maggie attacking Jamie with her purse, the two begin having a relationship-free relationship, centered only on guilt-free, no-strings-attached sex.

As the film progresses of course, a real relationship begins to take place, and (a few) complications ensue. Yet for much of the film, the story remains as breezy as Jamie and Maggie's early relationship. Despite running roughly 1 hr 50 min, Love and Other Drugs flies by, and the large amount of skin-baring scenes manage to not be repetitive. The sex scenes actually manage to push the relationship, and even the plot forward (if at times just barely), and keeps the film from feeling indulgent or tacky. Gyllenhaal and Hathaway fulfill the promise showed in the much more somber Brokeback Mountain, and radiate chemistry with this significantly lighter fare. Hathaway in particular makes the most out of her character, though this is in part due to it being much meatier. Gyllenhaal is charming, though the scenes that could have yielded stronger, richer work are often simplified, watered down even. And along with the supporting cast, namely Josh Gad as Jamie's brother, the pair get a good number of well-earned laughs.

The story, despite its ending, also manages to avoid a great deal of the tedious mush that so many romantic comedies fall into. Yes, there's the inevitable brief parting-of-ways, but here it isn't contrived. It's a bit too brief and comes too late, but it's not annoying just because it delays the inevitable. Where the film runs into problems, though, is that in its quest to satisfy the obvious need to see Jake and Anne naked, the greater issues are pushed to the side. One of the film's most interesting conflicts, Maggie suffers from a disease that requires her to take a number of medications while Jamie's job is to further turn medicine into a money machine, is barely touched upon, though it is hinted at on the surface. Meanwhile, Oliver Platt is stuck in a wholly thankless role as Jamie's roadside partner; by the film's end, Platt is rendered little more than a plot device. His final scene, in which he makes a revelation to Jamie in a bar, feels weightless as a result, despite the script's attempt to make it indicative of the character's conflict about his job and his family life. Hank Azaria, who has much more screen time, fares worse. The character never changes, and is so static and blank, and this is made worse by the film's attempt to use his role to show the dark side of certain kinds of doctors.

By the time Love breezes through to its conclusion, it feels as though the film's last act should have given the material some more weight. It's satisfying, but just barely so. Hathaway and Gyllenhaal make for an extremely appealing and watchable coupling, but even their considerable charms (and bone structure) can't completely mask the weaknesses in the screenplay.

Grade: B-

Apocalypse Now (1979) dir. Francis Ford Coppola:

When you take a step back, there have actually been quite a few good or great war movies. And yet in reviews, writers always talk about these films as though they're first of their kind. This is one of those genres of storytelling where the devil really is in the details. Plenty of war films are appropriately gritty. Plenty of them pull no punches when showing us the horror and madness of war, free of action movie tropes. And plenty of them feature strong performances. Where they really make a mark for themselves has to be somewhere else, and for Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," that comes in the final 30 minutes.

At a sprawling length of 2 hours and 40 minutes (the Redux clocks in at 3 hours), the original cut is a very strong war movie, filled with great production values, strong acting, and brutally honest depictions of violence. But, coming from the perspective of one who only saw the film for the first time a few days ago, these traits feel routine. They feel expected. And that's what makes the last half hour so dizzyingly brilliant. I had no problems with following Capt. Ben Willard (Martin Sheen) and his team as they navigated up a river to find the renegade Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando). I was never bored, and the pacing (from a team of four editors) always kept my interest. Coppola's execution of the majority of the film is also great, especially the helicopter attack set to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," made all the more chilling by the fact that the music is being played by on-screen characters. It's brutal but not exploitative, and it captures so much about the shades of grey that war brings out in us. The sight of a surfboard strapped to the side of a helicopter next to missiles and machine guns is hard to shake, even when its shot so matter-of-fact.

But when Willard and his team finally reach Kurtz, and the native village he has essentially become god of, the film reaches new heights. This is where Apocalypse Now puts its own stamp on the war story. Not that the outsider-becomes-worshipped-by-natives angle hasn't been used before, but here it comes loaded with so much complexity. Issues of what it means to be barbaric, in terms of different cultures and even time periods, along with man's transformation in war, all come to the surface without clashing or boiling over. And when Capt. Willard emerges from the water and mud and opens his eyes, his face covered in mud and paint, and marches toward Col. Kurtz, the film reaches mythic heights of cinematic expression. It's a towering work of construction and execution, and one that manages to distinguish itself without betraying its subject matter, which is no easy task, and just one more reason why Apocalypse Now still deserves to be regarded as a masterpiece.

Grade: A

Trailer for Duncan Jones' (Moon) "Source Code"

Duncan Jones' Moon may have been criminally overlooked at both the box office and during awards season last year, but apparently someone took notice of the exceptional debut. I remember hearing this title being thrown around as Jones' next effort, but never investigated it much (I didn't even know Gyllenhaal was the star until now). While the trailer certainly has a more commercial feel to it than the art house-y Moon, I wouldn't be surprised if the film is more than a high concept thriller. Then again, maybe it's yet another "countdown" thriller in the vein of films like the recent Unstoppable. Still, Jones was able to accomplish a lot on a tiny budget with Moon, which is impressive considering the lunar setting, so I'm interested to see what he cooks up with an obviously larger budget. There's always the risk that having a studio behind him will force the film to be watered down from whatever Jones' original vision was, but if it does well, Jones could begin to gain the clout necessary to make more films like Moon, and that's certainly not a bad thing.