Want to understand the recent Riots in England Dear Listener?  Than you must must must start with Joe Cornish’s brilliant sci-fi kitchen-sink action dramedy ATTACK THE BLOCK.

Running time: 29 minutes and 20 seconds – 28.2mb

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That’s not to ignore the genre elements, which take as freely from ALIEN and TWILIGHT ZONE as MISSION TO MARS and RED PLANET, resulting in a plot that never lacks for an adrenaline injection, no matter how cheap. The found footage conceit is merciful: Unlike PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, López-Gallego never wastes our time watching nothing, and unlike THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, APOLLO 18 doesn’t save its horror for one garbled final shot. The SAW camera-flash-strobe lights our way through two exciting EVAs, some mild Cronenbergian body horror starts a ticking clock, and López-Gallego delivers at least one breathtaking composition straight out of Lovecraft. Cynics who wait at the exit instead of getting on the roller coaster find the solution to the mystery dumb and the plot derivative, but of course they are. APOLLO 18 has no anxiety of influence because it has no pretension, openly embracing its close friendship with truthers and moon landing hoaxers. It’s free to soar precisely because it wants to be the sleaziest flick of the year. It believes in the unwashed as much as the masses.

But what the Cliché Chorus miss is just how deftly made it is. Despite its skuzzy feel, the film respects us with its amateur found footage style. The handheld is a bit floaty but never epileptic, and the stationary security cams show nothing only to tell us that all’s well (for now), not to trick us into searching for some grainy ghost. Speaking of old-fashioned filmmaking, APOLLO 18 approaches the transformation of digital into film with modesty, reveling in sparing, convincing lens flares and enough noise to keep George Lucas busy between re-releases but never obscuring or distracting from the visuals; there’s just enough print damage to keep us in the Deepthroat ‘70s. The compositions take advantage of the naturally expressionistic lighting and color palette of the moon, but the primary visual strategy is in security guard montage, floating among the five or six NASA cameras and a magical one that captures some excusably gorgeous wide shots. The film wants us on our toes as it disorients us, while the silence and the shadows and the dread erect the atmosphere of a spooky deserted carnival.

Of course, some of those clichés I defend help to sink the ending, which is uncharacteristically slack even before the typical horror movie twists arrive to partially validate the arguments the rest of the film rabidly rips apart. But one thing the film never relents on is its faith in the people. Our astronauts are American icons, headstrong, creative, and uber-competent, and no matter what happens, APOLLO 18 depicts these political pawns as a society who will risk everything to help each other. It’s a shame that faith becomes a punchline.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Because no shocked and giddy souls on Youtube have documentation of the decades-long abandonment of this segment of western civilization but plenty are shooting the eruption, selection bias utterly obliterates our sympathies. Which is a persuasive argument for the first hour of APES, a nonstop subway ride of boredom as we fly mechanically from Oscar nominee James Franco’s tired cardboard performance art to Best Picture star Freida Pinto’s pretty prettiness to John Lithgow’s best attempts to transcend Hollywood Illnessland. We don’t need any of that, most of which is origin story exposition required to bridge every gap from 2011 Tottenham to whenever Charlton established an NRA chapter in PLANET OF THE APES because we couldn’t possibly leave a little mystery or wonder in there. What we absolutely need—what is vital to this film’s faith in a mass demographic to demand its rights and win—is the systematic oppression of an animal much smarter than its society realizes. Maybe it’s cheap to give our hero fur, consolidating our sympathies with that sad, little creature, but Andy Serkis’ performance is the most nuanced characterization in the film, and what’s really sad—and sly—about Rupert Wyatt’s democratic B-flick is that our compassion isn’t as strong for the abused furless primates among us.

It’s frustrating that even a movie called RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES about apes who, through sheer force of superintelligent will, sprout enough of an alveolar ridge to speak English is struggling somewhat to please its respectable financiers instead of going all-out campy B-movie, but at least we get that gorgeous, fluid final sequence capping a film riddled with plot holes. Wyatt loves giving us (and his gymnastic heroes) aerial views of gorgeous San Francisco, so we have a firm understanding of the geography of the bay area just in time for the finale, and the rest delivers exactly what the trailer promised by way of showing us all of the major beats. You can’t entirely blame the marketing, since the film delivers as much uprising as HARRY POTTER features the Deathly Hallows, but Wyatt’s restraint does his action no favors, and his politics are too simple and idealistic to resonate much beyond a basic grating against suppression. What he does have is a promising visual clarity. That shot where Caesar draws the chalk outline of his attic window on his cell is one of the most moving images of the year, respectful and compassionate, in a film that cheers its apes on to violent revolution as long as it isn’t too violent for the comfortably done-up guardians of the status quo. It could have used more rising, frankly, but then how would they make sequels?

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

The problem with making an entire movie about the wonder and torment of lens flares is that the human eye is hardwired to detect artifice. You don’t have to be a middle school student with as much passion for filmmaking as you have for french fries to know that midnight scenes with no onscreen light sources don’t produce parallel neon blue lines obscuring the action. The only way that happens is to shoot much wider than you need and crop out the light source causing the flares (which still doesn’t explain the cave scene, where hero Joe Lamb goes spelunking into a Las Vegas rave). Well, that or CGI, a brilliantly simple way to simultaneously remind us we’re watching a film, envelop us in nostalgia, and keep us in the moment, or it would if all that weren’t a mere wave breaking against the bulwark of our graceful BS detector, the human eyeball. Instead it’s just JJ Abrams playing with his toys as the child director in his film just shakes his head and walks away to a better project.

More BS: Kyle Chandler must have spent weeks studying Brad Pitt in TREE OF LIFE to achieve paternal selfishness this titanic, and then at the big, Amblin-mandated sentimental climax, we’re supposed to be all weepy. “I got you,” he says, but all I wrote was, “Who cares?” The arc comprises three scenes: Dad tries to make nerdy Son go to baseball camp, Dad tries to tell Son he can’t hang out with his crush, Dad hugs son at the end of all things. There’s a resonant tension, but it’s chopped into storyboards, lobotomized as Dad and Son perform an all-yelling rendition of OEDIPUS REX while Mom and Son appear in a magically edited Zale’s commercial. No wonder. The Amblin pictures that inspire SUPER 8 are equally tyrannical, fating authority figures to wrongness, the better to inspire independent thought, and death, the better to, uh, threaten us? Extras are cast as comic relief and then redshirts, because even delightful innocents are totally expendable in this universe, and every family tension is cast as Shakespeare without the fun. All of which is a problem when JJ Abrams wants us to believe this is the story of a kid getting over the death of his mother by realizing he’ll be just fine with Dad, or something. I’m not sure what happened between Dad and Son, but whatever it was happened off screen, presumably deleted because they couldn’t figure out how to interrupt it with sudden loud noises, which I believe John Carpenter once called the height of horror.

SUPER 8 is a great little picture. It’s just wrapped in this throwaway monster flick and saddled with a dysfunctional family subplot that only gets to the end because it says so, not because it earns it. It’s becoming a theme of summer: what’s actually developed by a film works, or at least tries; what isn’t, on the other hand, thinks we won’t notice. We deserve better, and we get it in the scenes with the kids. Joel Courtney as our dorky hero and especially his love interest Elle Fanning—all dye job and cherry lips—just got off the bus from 1979, and they feel sublimely like suburban freaks and geeks bonded by unspoken tragedy. See, it’s not just the monster spurring Joe to action or forcing his father to finally see him for who he is—or whatever. It’s also the movie he’s making and his crush on the girl he’s eager to impress that pulls Joe out of his rut. And that’s enough for its own film, or it would have been, apart from all the Amblin histrionics and genre slavery. The kids’ lo-fi zombie murder scene, with the simple elegance of a silent film, is more cinematically compelling than all the swoop-swoosh-swirl JJ Abrams could muster for the monster attack. Too bad the Super 8 movie wasn’t enough for SUPER 8 the movie.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

ERIC WHEELER: Hello! And welcome to the first installment of what we hope will become a long-lasting and beloved niche in the bowels of The Film Talk website: Contributor Crosstalk. The obvious idea here is that we ‘below the line’ talent (to use an industry phrase) clang our heads together and see what movies have been giving us pleasure, pain or ‘other.’ Ever the deadline daredevils, we hatched a plan many weeks ago to do a Quarterly Review of the first three months of this film-going year. Needless to say, we blew it. But perhaps waiting until mid-May* to reflect on the diamonds and detritus of January, February and March 2011 will pay unexpected dividends. We’ll be dividing the films we’ve seen into the Good, the Bad and the Weird**. And since the bulk of the year lies before us like a cruel, shimmering mirage we’ll also tackle our Most Anticipated and Most Dreaded of Two Oceans Eleven (to quote noted movie lover, Doug Benson). So let me throw it over to you, Brandon. What’s been good, bad or weird for you so far?

BRANDON NOWALK: I’m not sure we’re on the same page: There were good films in the first quarter of 2011? I kid—sort of. But the best films of 2011 for me are the 2010 releases I’m finally getting to see here in muggy, surprisingly out-of-the-way Houston (fourth biggest city in America, seventy-second quickest to get new releases). By far the highlight is Abbas Kiarostami’s CERTIFIED COPY, for me the best film of 2010 and the season’s saving grace. It helps that in preparation I spent a fair amount of January catching up with Kiarostami’s work since 1987’s WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOME and spent at least as much time kicking myself for not getting to him sooner as his particular way with postmodernism eerily coincides with my interests. The other great film was by another international auteur I studied up on for the first time this year, Manoel de Oliveira’s ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE-HAIRED GIRL. Because apparently I can’t be satisfied without homework.

But I’ve reviewed those already. What I haven’t mentioned is Kyle Smith’s TURKEY BOWL, an OLD JOY-style reunion between friends drifting apart post-college, pre-marriage that’s currently playing the festival circuit, and is the best film of 2011 proper (so far). It’s only 64 minutes long, and I had no idea how its hooks had stuck in me with its effortless feel and sidestepping of indie cliche until the credits rolled. Beyond that, there’s Mike Leigh’s ANOTHER YEAR, most of RANGO, the last three-quarters of Aaron Katz’s COLD WEATHER, and the final scene of I AM LOVE, but now the well’s dry. Have you seen CERTIFIED COPY yet, Eric? What are your favorites from the first quarter?

ERIC: You raise an interesting ontological question, Brandon. If I see a film for the first time in 2011, does the film belong to the year in which I see it in an American theater or the year in which in was made? There are tremendous films that either sit on the shelf or struggle to find distribution for years – such as the absolutely extraordinary LOVE EXPOSURE, but that’s for another discussion. There are also films that we hear about and read about for months as they play the festival circuit, but only catch up to many months, or possibly years, later. Living in Los Angeles, I’m fortunate enough to catch a number of works at either the height of the hype machine (such as the heinously underrated I’M STILL HERE) or, somewhat bizarrely, months before their proper release, in a tiny independent theater like the Laemmle 5 (such as CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS).

BRANDON: First off, I’m dying to see NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT! Glad to hear you hold it in such esteem. Personally I consider a film’s year to be when it opens to the public anywhere. So neither my 2010 foreign films nor my 2011 festival flick technically qualify, but otherwise my cinematic pleasures of early 2011 were limited to hacked off pieces of films, like the surrealism of RANGO or the pecs of THE EAGLE.

As for The Bad, I’ve got a doozy: I’m convinced BATTLE: LOS ANGELES is the worst film I’ve ever seen, since most of its competitors for that crown have the unfair advantage of nostalgic childhood viewing. Like Jett and Gareth I see why this threadbare quilt of cliches is such a touchstone: America attacked, unified in a time of petty divisions. Unlike them, I don’t see how that absolves its breathtaking boredom and weepy nationalism of sin. I’d rather watch a friend play Call of Duty for several days or workshop my one-man play DOG TAGS AND CAMO: THE STAR-SPANGLED FETISH than revisit that anti-spectacle.

Early 2011 has seen a lot of bad films, most of which (COUNTRY STRONG, THE MECHANIC, and especially THE EAGLE) have something to recommend them, and some of which (ANIMAL KINGDOM) have gotten strong reviews anyway, presumably by virtue of intoxicating accents. It’s a nice reminder that even bad films have some good in them, and some good doesn’t mean a film’s not bad.

ERIC: While I am professionally obligated to take offense at some of your ‘worst’ selections (THE MECHANIC?! How could you???), I can empathize. I was spared COUNTRY STRONG, though it’s interesting to see you slagging off ANIMAL KINGDOM. I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe I shouldn’t bother?

BRANDON: ANIMAL KINGDOM was a cheap shot, but suffice it to say it’s another of these deathly serious crime flicks that pretends to profundity through sheer force of gravitas. I firmly believe self-seriousness is the greatest threat to cinema today; lifeless pretension is killing our B-movies. THE MECHANIC might not have made my list if it were a bit less brooding and a bit more fun.

As for what I’m looking forward to, you can count out all the comic movies except X-MEN, and even that I’ll be watching through my fingers. What I’m really dying for are last year’s Cannes superstar UNCLE BOONMEE, this year’s Cannes superstar THE TREE OF LIFE, and Kelly Reichardt’s MEEK’S CUTOFF. I’m seeing MEEK’S next week, and TREE the week after, but Thor only knows when BOONMEE will get a DVD release.

I don’t know that I’m actively dreading anything because I don’t have to see anything I don’t want to over summer, but I can say I’m decidedly not on the JJ Abrams bandwagon. I’m sure SUPER 8 will be fine, but the Internet is so in the bag my mildness might as well be dread. After all, you either think a film is the greatest thing ever or you hate it. There is no such thing as middle ground.

Now before we go, you’ve got to tell me your pick for The Weird! I’m on tenterhooks over here.

ERIC: Well, I can’t imagine I’ll see a more compellingly weird movie in theaters this year than DRIVE ANGRY SHOT IN 3D. It’s not a great, or even a particularly well-made, film but it’s something I won’t be forgetting anytime soon. Brandon, what freaked you out in the best way possible?

BRANDON: By far my weirdest filmgoing experience of early 2011 was being the only person in a pitch-black theater (no house-lights, no slideshow, nothing) until the trailers started for JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER. When those finally ended, we got a bizarre, inexplicable short film climaxing with the notice (warning?) that our 3-D glasses have now been Bieberized. And then I spent two hours with more provocative material, accidental or not, than any other mainstream flick all year. But maybe that’s just because I never saw DRIVE ANGRY 3-D.

It was never my favorite season for cinephilia, but it was certainly an interesting few months, and all those terrible films taught me a valuable lesson: No amount of rote studio pictures or indulgence indies can kill The Movies. Not as long as genuine visionaries are hard at work on their next exhibition, the strangest films are being harvested from the organs of Little Red Riding Hood and Justin Bieber, and Nicolas Cage is making his fortune back with whatever straight-faced lunacy will have him. Come what may, I believe in Nicolas Cage.

ERIC: I, too, believe in Nicolas Cage.

*Although published in mid-June, this conversation took place (through the miracle of Google-Mail) in the dead heat of May.

** This is of course referencing the recent, Sergio Leone-inspired Korean western-action-comedy, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD.

I guess X-MEN: FIRST CLASS was set in the ‘60s to better reflect Matthew Vaughn’s thoughtless patriarchal identification, because it damn sure wasn’t about civil rights, the Cold War, liberation, or the Holocaust, weighty abstracts whittled into icons, the better for Vaughn to pretend his film has some deep, world-historical meaning instead of actually doing the work of investing his social commentary, or his doomsday scenario, or his gay allegory, or his coming of age with genuine depth. The story thrills—Magneto hunting Nazis, Xavier assembling a team, our heroes saving the world—but the screenplay is a bag of bones, going from civilian to superhero with the whoosh of a montage, racing from scene to scene so we don’t think about it too hard, and pivoting on several sudden betrayals by those sneaky racial minorities, a black wasp hooker and a blue-skinned, naked chameleon (which I think is taking pride a little too far). What’s more, the reversals are prompted by dialogue that couldn’t convince you January Jones has boobs, not that you could possibly miss the twin subjects of this adolescent fantasy, protesting its feminism while objectifying every curve in sight.

Professor X himself could not determine why Matthew Vaughn made a film about the X-Men set in the ‘60s, outside of the all-too-rare bits of reimagining, like casting the Hellfire Club as a Sinatra-style Vegas powerhouse and dropping Moira MacTaggert into the CIA. Sure we get Charles’ groovy come-ons, such frenetic globe-trotting that even Olivier Assayas was like, “Wait, where are we?” and enough cleavage to keep the world from nuclear war for a little while longer, but otherwise, like with everything else, there is no motivation. January Jones is famous for playing dress-up in the ‘60s, but her Emma Frost looks like she’s about to present an MTV Movie Award; how did that bare rack get through the ‘50s without some serious HUAC investigation? The kids are left auditioning for THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER, especially our hopelessly modern rebel without a cause Lucas Till, who has the shoulders of a life-sentence and the macho posturing of a gay bar. Since you brought it up, the gay allegory is everywhere—young Beast wants a cure, don’t ask don’t tell, gay people should out themselves, they fight for a country that hates them, mutants can’t resist a good techno beat—but only because it’s inescapable, X-Men and the 1960s overlapping at this lovely B&B called Civil Rights. Too bad it’s just referenced over and over rather than explicated, because this is the whitest, straightest, malest cast of superheroes since the last Congressional Halloween party. Instead of exploring the allegory, we get a whole lot of well-meaning reminders that we should all be ourselves, which is pretty good for a last-minute cake made with moldy ingredients the film forgot to use. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis is just an excuse for our characters to collide, the backdrop to the real drama, which has nothing to do with faceless hegemons fighting for global domination. The period is more than just pointless. It’s the biggest waste of potential since Havok put on a shirt.

Instead, Vaughn creatively develops this fantastical comicky universe, a brave embrace of the ridiculous that yields deep-roster mutants, colorful costumes, cartoonish photographs, goofy superpower-speak (“I’ll use my sonic scream as SONAR!”), a propulsive score, HARRY POTTER-style effects, BUFFY/TEEN WOLF character designs, a SCOTT PILGRIM villain reject, Kevin Bacon as the world’s foremost expert in mustache-twirling, and a Raimi-by-way-of-Leone shot from the inside of someone’s mouth. You’d think the setting would have demanded some comic-inflected, early Godard color-blocking, but there’s usually enough splashy pulpitude to keep from gagging on the angsty DAWSON’S CREEK interludes. But the airy fantasy only goes so far, and the cheese turns to camp when Vaughn’s going for goosebumps, as in the final shot with a midsentence pause so long I watched THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO trailer on my iPhone and still had some time left. Meanwhile the pseudoscience grounding stumbles into questions it can’t answer, like why the Mohs hardenss scale fails Emma Frost, how mutants can defy the laws of physics above and beyond their superpowers, and why Mystique is almost 30 and dating a teenager. Worst of all, the cheapo effects distract the one time they really need to resonate, a surprise, wannabe heart-rending death sequence that’s just too hokey to land. Like so many grasps at gravitas—mercifully outnumbered by all the whiz-bang fun—Vaughn falls short; even the effects are undeveloped.

The kids are perfunctory, the gay allegory directionless, the danger neutered by history, but X-MEN: FIRST CLASS isn’t about the first class, though I admire how believably scared and useless they are in their first fight scene, and it’s not about all the topical red herrings trotted out by a script that’s at once on the nose and empty (“Darwin’s dead, Charles!”). Brimming with winky continuity references that would be fun—the first 5,000, anyway—if they didn’t condemn this reboot to the dead-end of “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch,” X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is about being a prequel. If I were turned into a blue, furry beast, I would unleash some unprintables on the woman who tells me that’s who I am inside, but because he was destined for that anyway, Nicholas Hoult’s Beast doesn’t need much convincing. Betrayals are inevitable in this film because certain villains have to end up on the other side in order to show up on cue for Bryan Singer’s films.

For all the film’s jiggling parts, the crux lies in the struggle between Charles’ good, MLK Samaritanism and Erik’s Malcolm X mutant supremacy, which for all the actors’ charisma—and I’m speaking as much of the perennially overshadowed James McAvoy as I am of everyone’s favorite actor Michael Fassbender—is just slightly more developed than the rest. The give-and-take consists of the heroes repeating their philosophies, not arguing for them, so we nonviolent resistance types see nothing more than a stacked deck in Magneto’s favor: first he gets this extended mercenary plot that for all the bloodshed treats him like he’s just some charming bad boy, then the film goes out of its way to validate Magneto by entering conspiracyland and altering history, and when we finally get an action beat that tests the Charles/Erik dynamic, the best my hero can do is put up the loaded Good German defense. This is what the fifty-year franchise is all about, being the better man at the end of all things, forgiving your oppressors, compassion proving your worth, and Professor X can but shrug? Of course. Because one way or another, Magneto has to end up on the other side. X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is not an ULTIMATE-style reboot with the freedom to discover the characters for themselves. It’s an origin story nobody asked for, Rube Goldberg fatalism delivering each of its pieces into place as they yammer on about how liberated they are.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

It might be imperial to claim Abbas Kiarostami’s best film is his first outside Iran, not in Farsi, and starring an international star—in other words, the one that’s most European—but I have no guilt, because in my universe it’s true: CERTIFIED COPY is the most intellectually and emotionally stirring film I’ve seen since INLAND EMPIRE, waking long dormant oxygen tanks and then exploding them like Apollo 13 before successfully landing this bird somewhere, somehow, in some plane of existence. It’s a distillation of his decades-long projects—investigating the camera as a medium of truth and society as a medium of men—and a sly expansion of them, bridging the gap between Koker and Marienbad without so much as a wink. I can’t imagine you’re waiting for my endorsement, but I had a powerful experience going into the film blind and I’d hate to steal that from you, so I won’t so much as tiptoe past the trailhead—with William Shimell as James Miller as Kiarostami surrogate and Juliette Binoche as the world’s worst audience member—but I have to examine some of the film’s profound meanings, and that demands some discussion.

For all its mystery—and the film pointedly acknowledges the great unknowable beyond by keeping at least one secret, when a waitress whispers something to Binoche at the literally central moment and then says audibly, for you and me to hear, “But mum’s the word. They don’t need to know,” and I have a theory about that, by the way—CERTIFIED COPY tells the basic story: two people together. But that’s a phoneme to the film’s ineffable sound, structuralism to its post-. It’s not about the discrete people so much as their universes colliding, their individual rhythms, values, and languages coming together in ways that don’t always overlap (but sometimes surprisingly do), producing a wake of coincident realities fighting for supremacy and building to the beautiful melancholy of Kiarostami via Binoche: “If we were a bit more tolerant of each other’s weaknesses, we’d be less alone.”

Kiarostami’s trick is efficiency. Every line interrogates one of the film’s intertwined theses—reproduction doesn’t necessarily leave authenticity behind, value is born of perception, can’t we all just get along?—and every moment has at least two things demanding your attention, lending this discreet, complete objet d’art an immortality appropriate to the multiscreen age. Often what you’re watching is not what you’re hearing. Other times you’re watching one thing through a window and another reflected off it, as in the hypnotic tracking shot of the drive through Tuscany. Still further you’re negotiating the distance between a character’s words and her expression. Poring over every moment may prompt a higher understanding of the film’s meanings—or, more likely, nirvana—but going along for the ride is hardly worthless itself: these are ideas we already know. It’s child philosophy. After all, the certified copy isn’t linked to biological reproduction just in James Miller’s opening lecture. I’m splitting hairs, but the film makes a joke out of translation being a copy, and the title in its original form, COPIE CONFORME, is spoken only once—when Binoche calls her son “la copie conforme de son pere,” the spitting image of his father—and it refers to that child-philosopher who states the obvious.

It need hardly be said that the film is gorgeous, set in historic, rural Italy, obsessed with European art, and starring the luminous Binoche. The performances are necessarily disorienting, Binoche an exposed nerve incapable of disguise and Shimell aloof until he isn’t, cold and unfeeling and then pissy and uncaring, but not for no reason. The sound design involves us in the world—another distraction from what’s going on—and feeds the film’s polymathic appetites, as in one moment where some guy is shouting at his wife until they turn and we realize he was shouting into a phone, an obvious if extraneous example of the power of perception. It’s cerebral but not alienating, and there are a couple of emotional surprises that’ll blow your house down and rebuild with debris.

As the only detractor I’ve heard of is Peter Becker—and only allegedly—there isn’t much pushback to push back against, but I do find the VOYAGE IN ITALY comparisons disheartening, and not just because HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is a closer match not only in subject but in style. Marriage is the specific door poked and prodded by CERTIFIED COPY, but it’s applicable to any great meeting of minds, and doubly for groups of minds. It is a film about international culture clash, after all. Marriage is just the medium.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Jett here:  I’m excited to introduce a new contributor to the site – Tim Hayes.  Tim’s a freelance writer based in the UK, who earns his living writing about business, science, art, and other topics in a land where, according to legend, the work of the journalist is respected and rewarded.

He writes about films too.  You can find him at www.timhayes.eu, Linkedin and on Twitter at twitter.com/pistolerosa.

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The trick to being a good troublemaker is to lob your brick and then vanish, so it’s entirely fitting that Richard Stanley had made his two recognized feature films by 1993 and has found other fish to fry ever since. Stuck as we are in a drought of troublemaking directors, that’s a shame. But it does leave his authentic piece of brilliance to stand in splendid isolation.

HARDWARE isn’t it. That movie has its admirers, and the filmmakers work wonders to create dystopia in sets that look about as big as a closet, but the very British late-1980s flavor of civilized anarchy has curdled a bit and drags like an anchor. Kudos to William Hootkins for delving so deep into sleazebaggery as a voyeuristic pervert that his sweat runs off the screen and pools on your carpet, but he and the other supporting cast wouldn’t be out of place in BBC’s The Young Ones. The tone of the UK comic 2000 AD is pretty clear too, even before the lawyers got into an argument over the story’s origins.

What does work, and well enough to signpost Stanley’s great gift, is the not-very-sub-text. Stuck in a land of sterilization and birth control, restless artist Jill, played by Stacey Travis as a ballsy flame-haired Final Girl, builds a surrogate child out of black market junk and gets an uncontrollable killobot for her troubles. The sequence where she builds the machine is a great piece of montage, with the beast watching the endless violence on television while Jill gifts him a body and paints it with the Stars And Stripes. Weaned on war crimes and punk rock, the kid duly goes after his mom with a phallic drill bit very close to the one last seen heading for a tender area of Julie Christie in DEMON SEED. Close, but no cigar.

But DUST DEVIL is the real deal. The best kind of horror film, in that it’s a sprawling, political, metaphysical fable cooked up by a production team clearly half out of their minds, it throws any hint of self-parody out of the window and delves deep into psycho-geography instead. Technically it’s about a shape-shifting hitch-hiking serial killer, played by Robert Burke in an outfit owing a debt to both Sergio Leone and Stanley’s old comrades in Fields of the Nephilim, who murders young women and then does very unpleasant things to them afterward. But the film is really about its setting, the Namibia/South Africa border in the early 1990s, where some strange and powerful magic is stirring. Sorcery envelops everyone, but especially the rootless and significantly-named Wendy, played by a convincingly frazzled Chelsea Field. As unsettled and paranoid as any white South African of the time, Wendy falls into the arms of her particularly lost boy in a suicidal swoon, the two of them dancing to Hank Williams’ Ramblin’ Man while the earth shifts under them.

The second-best thing about DUST DEVIL is this whole social dimension that Stanley frets away at patiently while the serial killer has his fun. Only Clive Barker, another fine troublemaker, has this knack in this genre to the same extent. (And Barker’s last film as director before he too tired of the struggle, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, post-dates DUST DEVIL by only a few years and shares a producer and a composer. They make a fine double bill.) DUST DEVIL’s feeling for the land of its birth, for desert and ruin and isolation, is right up there with WITCHFINDER GENERAL‘s empathy for English evergreens. It shows a whole country swimming up through the last throes of a nightmare and apparently calling up a demon in the process, with everyone caught at the moment that the fever breaks.

The best thing about DUST DEVIL is two of those people, the shaman Joe played by John Matshikiza and the cop Ben played by Zakes Mokae; two actors not demeaned in the slightest by the film’s wild mix of social witchcraft, playing two characters long since battered into shreds. The social document of these two South African performers playing out this story, both of them as freighted with past experiences as the characters they portray and both now gone, is not short of power. Mokae’s voice sounds like creaking shelves of history books. DUST DEVIL’s delirium finally crests when poor tormented Ben gets an inkling that he just might be a character in someone else’s film. Hypnotized by a vision of his wife as the Black Madonna, he lurches sideways out of his own movie in a flurry of sprocket holes. Free at last.

Tough to top that. And barring the disastrous miseries of Stanley’s attempt to film THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU, he hasn’t tried. Instead he turned that same eye for montage and illusion to documentaries, and if ever there was a convincing argument that the best documentarians are anthropologists, Richard Stanley is it. All his documentaries are worth the effort, but inevitably the humdinger is SECRET GLORY, a wild old girl of a doc taking in Nazism, mountains of crystal in the Tyrolean Alps, and the Holy Grail being carved out of a meteorite. Made in 2000 it fits neatly into the millennial vibe of the moment, while also looking askance at Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and backwards towards Illuminatus!. Watched today, it also looks as if Stanley preempted the folks now thought to be reinvigorating the documentary form by a decade or so.

And he’s still out there somewhere, although for now it looks like the man’s puckish glee in getting behind the camera has displaced his analytical eye. Maybe Dr Moreau has to take the blame for that. But go and find SEA OF PERDITION anyway, to see what a self-aware director can do when at play in a nine minute short, and how a Martian temple and some shape-shifting SOLARIS-style manifestations can be created down one end of a beach in Iceland if a filmmaker has the nerve for it. Watch it for its female astronaut (niftily named Sly Delta Honey, a sign for any Lucius Shepard readers that this particular wanderer probably isn’t exactly in the land of the living either), stumbling around to John Barry’s music from MOONRAKER. Take the opportunity to see a fish-man space traveller saunter off to the strains of Paul Williams singing We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be from BUGSY MALONE. More troublemaking like this, please.

When will people learn? Mystery is greater than resolution. Curiosity lured us from hulking mouth-breathers into torture rationalizers—but torture-rationalizers who went to the Moon! Answers just remind us that George Nolfi’s THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU is a work of poorly planned screenwriting about half-forgotten ideas it picked up from that fascinating pamphlet on the philosophy of THE MATRIX.

The promise is irrevocably shriveled after the promising failures fail. I can hardly remember what I liked so much for most of the running time of the film—temporarily sequestering, of course, the conceptual holes that could turn out to be subversive irony until we find out that, no, they were just the unforeseen ripples of dropping the leaden answers into the mix. The opening scene, for instance, is a spirited montage of Matt Damon’s Senate campaign, and his meets-cute—there are a few, but I’ll save you the guesswork: this is not an ETERNAL SUNSHINE situation—with Emily Blunt, equally charismatic, though, I can assure you I would have had far less patience with her aggressive flirtations than Damon does, actually delight. In fact our protagonists make a winning pair that gets us through two whole acts without feeling the disappointment the drab mis-en-scene suggests. It’s not even that the style is remarkably unimaginative; it’s not, as that magnificent hotel bathroom and a couple of the chase shots prove. It’s just that this is a film with magical doorways and it looks and feels like an insurance commercial. Christopher Nolan really is rubbing off.

But these are ignorable problems, moles that don’t tarnish the complexion so much as hint at unseen dangers. The Answers, however, spring Borgesian implications that drown the film.  Free will is well-trod territory, and it takes a good five minutes of thinking to realize that the illusion of free will—all that is knowable, anyway—is all that matters, which is to say if you’re gonna tackle the subject, the least you could do is have something new to say. But THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU isn’t about absolute free will so much as humanity’s specific guidance at the hands of The Adjustment Bureau, a hierarchical team of magical extrapolators influenced as much by Kafka as Kors who are so good at calculating the general course of humanity and nudging it in a beneficial direction, not that we ever know who exactly their work benefits (Us? Them? Their bosses? Philosophy majors?), that only Matt Damon’s hormones could stymie the system. And even if we buy that Matt Damon is the one person in the history of our species to pursue his love at first sight doggedly enough to surprise his overseers—and come on: Shakespeare is the king of love at first sight—that doesn’t come close to the trap THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU blithely walks into, proudly if tacitly endorsing authoritarian patriarchy and the violent conquest that defines human history. That’s what happens when you get into subjects that are over your head, not that we couldn’t have done some extrapolating of our own in regards to this homosocial army of fedoras. No wonder they gave up on us just as women achieved suffrage.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Most of the time, I’m quite content with my indie and foreign film diet. But every now again, I crave the high-calorie, high-fat content of an EVENT film. These are the films for which you soak up the production diaries; buy tickets for in advance; stay up late for the midnight premiere; pack yourself into the crowded theater; and let the collective laughter, screams, oohs and ahs wash over you like a leaf on a wave. As such, I don’t expect a great deal from the film itself. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, thought-provoking, well-acted, or well-written. All the film really needs to do is to be fun, entertaining and not overly-long.

Does TRON: LEGACY pass these three simple criteria? Read on to find out.

Disney’s TRON: LEGACY is a direct sequel to the 1982 cult film TRON. In the original, a hacker named Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges in both films) gets trapped in a video game and must fight to survive. In LEGACY, Flynn has been missing for 20 years, and his son (the heir to his father’s billion-dollar company) twiddles his thumbs while the board of directors run the company with proprietary greed. The company heavies guffaw about such evil concepts as free software, open source, and creative commons. This is especially ironic considering Disney’s long history of copyright-extension lobbying, aggressive intellectual property lawsuits, and vice-like grip on media. I can’t wait for the inevitable mashups followed by Disney cease-and-desist letters followed by more mashups.

As you can probably guess, Flynn’s son also gets sucked into the game world. There, he finds his long-lost father and a perfect likeness of the young Flynn in master controller program Clu. You have to give the writers a little credit for the imaginative idea of a young Jeff Bridges. But the effect is achieved by computer animation, and sadly, it’s just unrealistic enough to be distracting.

Son of Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is thrown into the thick of it via obligatory disc-throwing and light-motorcycle games. He is rescued by the beautiful-and-mysterious Quorra (Olivia Wilde) who takes him to his father. We learn that each person’s disc is their personal-stats, code, soul, everything and that elder Flynn’s disc is highly desired by Clu. Why? I can’t remember. But trust me, something bad will happen. (Cough, MacGuffin, cough.)

So, is it fun, entertaining, and not overly-long? I am sad to report: sort-of, mildly, and no. The film IS fun and entertaining in parts; but it’s also drab, boring, self-important, impenetrable, and WAY too long. Near the end, my expectations coalesced into the single hope that it would end soon so I could go home and sleep.

TRON: LEGACY is loyal to the original in many ways. For instance, the original TRON suffered from a headache-inducing color-palate-squashing that was hard to watch for long periods of time. Not to be outdone, TRON: LEGACY pays headache-inducing homage by way of an unnecessary 3D process that was hard to watch for long periods of time. A money grubbing exec was asked in the film what was different in version 11 and 12 of their flagship software. “We put a 12 on it,” was his reply. What’s the difference between the 2D and 3D version of TRON: LEGACY? They put a 3D on it (and also reduced the brightness and sharpness and tacked on a $6 surcharge). If you can see the 2D version, by all means do.

Aside from the length, my main beef with TRON: LEGACY is the utter unoriginality of the story. Yes, the “young Jeff Bridges” was an original idea that failed in execution; but that’s the only original idea in the whole movie. I get the sense that the writers read too much Joseph Campbell and promptly stole every sci-fi trope in the book, using the justification of the generic nature of the mono-myth. To me, it’s just sloppy writing full of fist-shaking villains, predictable double-crossings, sacred item searchings, and more cliched lines than you can throw a disc at.

The writers also mined for pop-culture material outside the world of Tron, most notably by exploiting Jeff Bridges’ “The Dude” drug persona. Flynn is very much a “Space-Dude,” and I wonder if Jeff Bridges kept a laminated copy of his check close at hand every time he was forced to spout some corny hippie catchphrase. Each of these self-referential pieces of wit took me completely out of the story.

The real highlight for me was the stunning Olivia Wilde, perhaps the most beautiful person I have ever laid eyes on. I had a hard time telling if her stiff delivery was part of her character’s persona or her acting limitations. She hasn’t been given much of a chance to shine in this or her other major film, YEAR ONE — yet still, she was the most engaging part of either film. Time will tell if she has what it takes to be one of the greats. I’m certainly gunning for her.

If you’re a die-hard fan of the original, you’ll probably enjoy LEGACY enough to see it in the theater. Otherwise, I recommend you wait for home video and role-play the master-controller by using the all-powerful fast forward button.

Tony Youngblood is the current Foursquare Mayor of the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, TN, a film and music snob, and producer of the experimental improv music blog and podcast Theatre Intangible. His favorite films include Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Abbass Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician, Lee Chang Dong’s Oasis, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.