THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE

It’s a dick move, but every tenth movie or so I force the bored girl selling tickets to make eye contact—it’s easy, you just hold onto your cash for a beat through the moment you’d normally hand it over. She looks up, you meet her eyes, she smiles and thinks, in spite of herself, this twelve dollars standing before me is full of surprises.

I saw the last one, maybe with the same twenty-five women here tonight. Who collectively gasp twice: when vampire Pattinson proposes to human Kristen Stewart, and when she later kisses werewolf Lautner. The latter’s a puppy-dog, kind but baffled because she can’t be reached. He doesn’t understand: she’s a phantom, half-made of the possessiveness Pattinson lavishes on her virgin form. “How do we learn to covet, Clarice?” Hannibal, you old film critic, we don’t even need to wear the mouth-jail anymore, we’re as frozen stiff as this tall, awkward kid. Every metaphor for static looking—mesmerized, riveted, fixed—to him, and therefore us, obtains.

The face of Stewart, who trained—in Panic Room—at coveted Clarice’s knee. Her eyes set a hair’s breadth to the wide around that slightly-sloping nose. Ingenuously emphasized front teeth peeping out between full lips that never deign to overflow (Madeleine: “The lesbian mouth”). A trace of the hardness, in mouth and chin, she either will or won’t someday avoid. If quick flashes of pleading cross the whole, they’re extinguished so fast it’s just impossible to be sure. The entire Pacific Northwest, tinted mist-gray and fir-tree aquamarine, surrounds her glowing skin. And we sense the very thing we’re asked to imagine: how that unblemished dish of cream is a function of deep tributaries running hot blood.

How fantastically here we are, says that face, while we are all so busy being resigned, the day after tomorrow, to disappear.

THE LAST AIRBENDER (3D)

I’m on a bit of a bender myself. Not to lose myself, anymore—that’s trickier these days—but to keep my nerves in shape. My friend Neil’s story about tripping: a guy they meet asks “Do you want to see me spit fire?” “Are you joking?—Fuck yeah!” I feel a similar luck in taking in the theatrical version of what some cynic clearly developed as content for mobile phones. Director Shyamalan fills his cheeks with the lighter fluid of Failure and breathes out a radiant plume of Waste.

Based on a cartoon called Avatar, with Matrix-paced fighting and Lord of the Rings sets dressed in a free-floating orientalism—all tai chi and persecuted Tibetan monks. The Fire Nation—fossil-fuel types—step to the kid whose head tattoo is an arrow pointing straight down at himself all the time. C’mon, you know what that’s like. Feelings always arise when on the brink of a dangerous adventure the sidekick or potential love interest insists: “I’m going with you.” It’s nice to have company, but it also means bringing along a witness whose presence coerces courage, who might not get how disgrace lets the world end so that it may crucially re-begin. Which in retrospect looks heroic, the same way one must re-project, in one’s mind’s eye, on the car ride home, the entirety of The Sixth Sense.

If 2012 really is the apocalypse, at least we’re in the home stretch. So why all this fuss, this late in the game, to dissolve the dimension-bound screen? Luckily the frame’s built strong, legacy of a doomed but prescient age. They knew: sacrifice is the root of all culture because one thing stands in for another. So to maintain the screen is a final gambit to see its denizens taken, when the taking-time draws nigh, in our place. What would Jesus watch? Exactly: Working Girl and A Few Good Men. On Lifetime and Spike TV.

KNIGHT AND DAY

Jesus, Rajiv, what the hell did we smoke? I put too much vodka in the ghetto blasters, the whole tapering cone-part of two Gatorade bottles apiece. Before the show even starts I wander heedlessly into the ladies’ room—hey, where’d all the urinals go? “The elsewhere is the region of space-time that does not lie in the future or the past light cones of P,” wrote Hawking, way back in ‘88. Where P is the poem. Poetry is not a project, but every poem is a pastiche or commentary, a hustle or con. Bolaño thought poets shaded over into cops and pimps. For Tom Cruise, acting flirts with preaching, where the preacher is the one who has lost—lost mightily—and lived to tell the tale. He lost Goose, and he lost the egg. He lost the Rain Man. But is he himself crazy-gone? He laughs his maniacal laugh at the notion that we’d consult a movie to find out.

Frisson of someone acting inappropriate on a plane. Super-spy Cruise rolls up on beautiful trannie Cameron Diaz. Her tropical fantasy involves Cape Horn, he keeps repeating the place-name and what do we hear? Say it five times fast. “I should’ve been a fireman.” Her cherry GTO. He’s after a hand-held perpetual energy source—apparently to save the American auto industry it will be necessary to violate the laws of thermodynamics. Diaz memorizes the version of events he gives her, before she’s knocked out, to prepare for the lies—“disinformation protocols”—her captors will be sure to try. I’m like her in that, even though I don’t remember the movie, it’s inside me, it breeds in the shadows with that poem projected throughout my consciousness that for convenience’s sake I’ll call Tom Cruise. Eyes wide shut. I want the truth/You can’t handle the truth! The outpost of ambiguity, even then, was Guantanamo Bay.

Sarsgaard, I love that your wife told Us how Gorilla Coffee once refused to lend you a sleeve of cups. In my drunken notes: “The battery is modernism”—huh? Aging, we get serious. Show me the money. The squibs fire before anyone touches a gun. Windmill high-fives all around. Could one use a person as a time machine? Would one?

GROWN UPS

Are the worst thing that American men, apparently, can be. About as funny as a snuff film, which is to say, pretty funny, in the sense of the question, “Does this clam dip taste funny to you?” In the end, Adam Sandler (“The Hanukkah Song”), as a super-successful agent recalled from L.A. to New England by the death of his old coach, is enjoined by the townie (Colin Quinn) into a rematch of the basketball game he won 30 years before, and Sandler now throws the game because, as he later whispers to his wife (Salma Hayek), “The Baileys of this world could use a win once in a while.” The implication being, “Hollywood” (the town that Capra built, and Quinn’s derisive nickname for Sandler) could have easily created a hilarious summer movie that would ease our minds even as it stoked a mild envy in our hearts, but out of well-deserved pity, and for our own good, they’ve left the world on screen as tedious, dispiriting, and glum, this time, as the one in which we daily wallow.

Cassavetes’s Husbands—aging man-group confronts mortality—but with the glee of possibility, the heady musk of testosterone, and genuine hanky panky replaced by pitch-perfect contemporary anomie, impotence, and desire reduced to porn. Instead of Gazzara’s growl, our emblem’s a family dog whose vocal cords were cut to prevent barking and who, in a running joke, is often wished killed. No one’s a super-spy. Recently laid-off Kevin James is overweight, sneaks food, and suffers urinary dysfunction. Chris Rock: castrated house husband. David Spade: sad, superannuated player. Rob Schneider: “sensitive.” Sandler’s ashamed to be rich. Who will pick up a dinner check, anatomized in grim detail.

But as kids they’d played Chutes and Ladders—gorgeous game of whimsical fate—and run from an arrow they’d shot into the sun. Now they find a single burst of joy at the water park where their sons do a great take—the hottie walks by and they crush their ice cream cones. A whiff of chlorine. Would we rather he put away that final jumper? Muggiest day of the year, the AC on the fritz, I bump into Diana in the theater and after the show she tells me that at one point something small and furry went running across her toes…

TOY STORY 3 (3D)

Thank God it was so dark in there, I choked on a sob towards the end and wouldn’t have wanted all those kids to mark me. I’ve never seen a Toy Story, but then, I’ve lived one. I played with my batch overlong, in love with their haywire scale and serendipitous congruencies, their eloquent language of gesture and pose. Sartre: “Each object possessed, raised up against the background of the world, manifests the entire world…” The Silver Jews: “When something breaks it makes a beautiful sound.”

Woody (determined as Jonah Hex), buddy Buzz Lightyear, Jessie the cowgirl, the halfwit dinosaur, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (Jews), a soon-to-be radicalized Barbie, and all the rest wind up accidentally re-routed from a quiet retirement in now-grown Andy’s attic to a daycare center full of crazy-hyper toddlers. And find themselves at the mercy of an evil transitional object named Lotso, who rules the place with the aid of a swish Ken, an outsized doll called Big Baby, and a panopticon-monitoring monkey with cymbals poised at alarm. Our heroes’ dilemma: return to the boy whose name is etched on their bootsoles, or fulfill their purpose—be played with. Held. Or one other alternative: as Lotso puts it: “You’re a piece of plastic, you’re meant to be thrown away.” Indeed it’s their darkest moment, at the landfill, sliding down shredded-trash scree towards a fiery maw. They join hands and are snatched up by the fist of heaven—those little green fairies again. In the end Andy gives Woody to the little girl (O my Malkie, never leave me!), but only after instinctively, for a moment, grabbing him back. Selfishness is our nature, too, or so teach those Zen masters who occasionally snatch a morsel of food off a companion’s plate.

That they look, before they’re saved, so convincingly about to melt. And the gorgeously-noticed aspect of modern floor tile, outdoor light fixtures, dynamic black skin of a Hefty bag. Afterwards, in the park, one doubts the grass tousled by the hot, storm-sick wind. The sign—movie or toy—trumps the real thing every time, and even should we outgrow it promises to outlive us. Not “Lotso,” whose name bespeaks a plenitude that doesn’t wash, but To infinity, and beyond!—the ideal formulation, and still the only recipe for the sublime.

JONAH HEX

Today the marquee announced six new titles: made-up movies, on closer inspection, ready to play in the world of some other movie now shooting a scene for which our theater serves as set. What should one feel? I was neither jealous nor thrilled nor betrayed. I felt that same small but exquisite displacement that occurred the first time I saw a rock song I knew from the radio parsed and printed on a piece of sheet music. And thought, oh God, it can see me, as plainly as I can see it. I’d thought the gasket airtight, but here was recognition rushing back at me like chill air from those AC vents in my car, which I always arrange to blow directly in my face.

Not one but two people have expressed dismay, to me, how handsome actor Josh Brolin could be made to play disfigured super-cowboy Jonah Hex. But of course: an Aquarius: “likes change for its own sake,” “dislikes being pinned down,” “can be perverse and unpredictable.” The cursed Confederate vet with the cow-catcher mouth wanders the frontier wreaking objectless vengeance until it turns out his nemesis is still alive and planning to use an ironclad ship to launch a terrorist attack—using Eli Whitney-designed warheads—on half-built centennial Washington D.C. In dreams Hex stalks a red-earth stage. Rescued from near-death by the Crow tribe, he wields a tomahawk and can interrogate the dead by touching their corpses—they spring to life and snitch. When Odysseus finds the shade of Achilles, the greatest of heroes says that for all the good his glory does him he’d change places in an instant with any slave. To be alive, to feel one’s stomach-lining ache after a long sleep. I wonder: Do we believe him?

The supporters: Megan Fox, and the uncredited guy who mists her bosom with a spray bottle between takes. Malkovich the villain. The man’s played Valmont, Ripley, Charlus—a gallery of seductive dissemblers. He must be what they call a good listener. Aidan Quinn as Ulysses Grant. Whoever has my copy of Blood Meridian, I need it back. Science question: how come the man in the moon is always right side up? Metaphysical question: how the fuck is there a man in the moon?

THE A-TEAM

Uncanny twin of The Losers, since both concern a covert military unit, begin with a Latin American misadventure, weave a motif of booths and coffins and containers, turn on a betrayal by a snarky CIA suit (Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson) and, most strikingly of all, climax in a showdown at the Port of Los Angeles (Hi, Jane!). So what’s up? Studio feud? Disgruntled screenwriter? I don’t mind, since these echoes crystallize questions I might not have otherwise understood as fundamental, i.e., Are the members of a team friends? And are friends a team? Ishmael and Queequeg cuddle in bed, of course, but neither has more than a working relationship with Starbuck. I have a Co-op shift in the morning.

The MacGuffin is treasury plates—absurd, with the dollar what it is, but it’s 80s flavor, pure and uncut, despite the Baghdad-and-Blackwater plot. The tangled caper is beside the point, the point being meta all the way, as witness the two or three elaborate action sequences intercut with scenes of the team, beforehand, hashing out the plan (using little toys) whose recital we now watch unfold. So Hannibal’s the director, Face the star, B.A. the stuntman, and Murdock cinematographer. I love it when a plan, etc. Then there’s the part where they bust Murdock out of an asylum by mailing him a tape of a 3-D movie, he coaxes his fellow inmates to watch it (they don the old-fashioned red-and-blue specs), they see a truck speeding towards them on screen and as it reaches the horizon of the room wham, the real getaway truck comes crashing through wall and screen and into their midst. A complicated reference to the onscreen train that is said to have scared shitless the audience at an 1896 screening of the Lumière brothers’ L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. And of course B.A. is an homage to Maya Deren, who is supposed to have once lifted a refrigerator over her head when someone crossed her at a party.

Why should cinema call attention to itself, here, so strongly? Is it just that The A-Team has always lived in awe of it own narrative power, as evidenced by the original series’ famous ban on killing—they knew they must protect us from even the picture of our true, lethal nature. Which explains why the two tweens behind us, overwhelmed, chatter away in vain hope of comforting themselves until Jenny turns around: “Either be quiet, or move.” Fuckin’ A, we’re trying to watch this movie! Or, more precisely, watch for it, the screen the scarred, shining back of the white whale glimpsed before it dives and a minute later shivers our vessel and leaves us floating on the sidewalk, dazed and with an unspeakable tale to tell.

THE KARATE KID

I thought the deal was, remakes are as hysterical as nostalgia feels. But this one’s even more somber and reserved—no easy feat—than its original. One took the emblem of Macchio quivering in that crane stance too literally—I signed up for karate class instead of readying this bullied soul for one last point. To think he was moving to 1984 California—decadence, the pax americana—whereas Jaden Smith is uprooted to galvanic Beijing. His mom, giving it to him straight: “There is nothing left for us in Detroit. This is what we got. This is home.” Everybody ready?

Calasso: “But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation.” Jackie Chan: “Everything is kung fu.” Yes: to learn something is to learn, impossibly, the whole, including why your teacher is anonymous, half-invisible, prone to getting fucked up alone and smashing in his car with a baseball bat. The beauty of wax-on/wax-off is that it elicits the student’s perennial bad question: Why do I have to do this? And opens the door to the teacher’s necessary reply: Shut up and keep going. Not one but two really good training montages, in which stillness and empathy are the values only time can win. The sole shortcut: be like the hero of Ninja Assassin and have your heart on the other side of your chest, and upside-down.

Will and Jada Pinkett co-produced. The only step of which I disapprove: the 12-year-old Chinese girlfriend’s stripper moves during the dance sequence at the arcade (puh-puh-puh-poker face puh-puh-poker face). I know, parents just don’t understand. What’s sweet is the way the kids kiss behind the screen at the shadow theater, and everyone sees. One suddenly recognizes the true order: projector, puppet, screen, audience. So are we, seated in the theater between projector and screen, actually the puppets? And if so, who is it watching us from the far side of the screen, up there? And who pulls the strings? Well, that much at least we know.

KILLERS

The 88-year-old monkey man splatters clorox, straight from the bottle, over sidewalk weeds outside. Quote, “I’m crazy. I’m really crazy.” Heigl plays a recently-dumped internet-security software developer swept off her feet in Nice by boyishly buff Kelso, a CIA assassin whose violent side translates, in their courtship, into suavity and the spontaneity she lacks. He longs for exurbia and normativity, she obliges, they marry, he nicknames her breasts Wit and Charm (really), and they move to a development where he starts a contracting business—during the bubble, one hopes—to push their homestead’s border ever-further into the scrub-green rind of the unsaid.

Unsettling. Fetus as MacGuffin. And is that the new iPhoto on the Mac they hack into? Why is it so nice? I hear it recognizes faces, a paranoid’s wet dream, you sync up the backgrounds and find out who really lurks there. But if you could let your pursuers reach and destroy you, you’d set them free. Just kidding, they’d still be cursing you, saying you’ve gotten more passive-aggressive than ever.

Couples of America, do your secrets have secrets? When the rival spies finally come for Kelso, Heigl’s mad and all the dirty laundry comes out: insufficiently frequent sex, and porn. But don’t forget, David Foster Wallace says the pornophile seeks not empty degradation but rather to scrutinize performed pleasure for those moments of accidental joy that in spite of everything breech its obsidian surface, thereby dangling a paradoxical intimacy or at least a glimpse of it. Granted, it depends on your level of investment in an outside/inside trope of subjectivity. The reversal being, after it turns out everyone they know—his pal and coworkers, her best friend, a couple down the street, her dad—is a killer, the only one who’s not is the next-door neighbor with whom they dispute the property line. And it’s her whom Heigl punches climactically in the face.