STEP UP (3D)

At last: cinema. Its only essential genre, whose crux is the tug between shot and montage, the gaze and the blink. Pure decadence to make Luke, the leader of the House of Pirates dance crew, their videographer as well. “You’re a filmmaker,” gushes his anima, when he shows her the rough cut of his labor of love. Yeah, but their abdomens hail from the beginning of time, he python, she anaconda—if Eat Pray Love is a numb glimpse through a sealed airplane window this is a legit jungle fuck. The cast more matter-of-factly gay, brown, and global than anyone else has half-approached, the LEDs attached to their chests for the climax’s Busby Berkeley take the peace-drunk counterpart to The Expendables’ grim laser rifle-sights. The kids are all right.

To step up. When the Argentine breakdancing twins find the Zoltar machine from Big in the Coney Island practice space, they ask him if they will in fact win the World Jam dance-off’s $100,000 purse and thereby rescue their home from a foreclosure instigated by the rival House of Samurai. But Zoltar just spits out gibberish, and they laugh it off—it’s a goof on fate, whose services they don’t require—they’re gonna sweat and krump, pop and lock their way to glory, they’re B.F.A.B. (born from a boombox), nomads as who wouldn’t be always sort of waiting for the other Nike to drop renting that size Williamsburg loft? It boasts sneaker vault, boombox wall, graffiti studio, and communal eating space—is anything more fun than a crew?

That the kid from the last one is now at NYU, and winds up double-majoring in dance and engineering, is telling. Because the moves are spinning legs and moonwalk and robot, even robot zombie, because the LEDs are not just on but of their suits. All is accomplished—the Deleuzian cyborg come, no big deal, to pass. No wonder I weep like a child when the kid and the girl suddenly break into a lyrical little Gene Kelly routine on a Greenwich Village street—the perfect immanence one foolishly fails to see coming. “Oh Luke, that film academy sounds amazing.” Let him in. I’m glad someone out there, tonight, is awake.

EAT PRAY LOVE

It’s about time I did something for me. But why is the answer always, I’ll do something weird for a year. What time frame could be more melancholy: too long for a mood to persist, too brief to really change. She had her sad New Yorker’s project, I have mine, it’s the curse of a place where so much vitality churns that you think you could conjure something major if you could just get the recipe right. Laugh Gulp Yelp. Buy Cry Blog.

Seems The Expendables’ Eric Roberts has a sister. That upper lip God himself wants a gelato spoon tucked under. Why-a you so sad, bella? The—how do you say?—sensual experience, she-a mean so much, but she’s-a isolating, too, she’s-a stuck inside-a the moment, inside-a the body. There is no mystic pizza. This tale indicts us all, it mocks the hubris that lights out to conquer loss. It’s not that Julia takes herself around the world but that like Carrie Bradshaw she displays, to the world to come, what awaits them—the very crater she lugs and into which their contemplation of her tumbles. Act Lie Star. Beg Flay Tan.

Nice Bollywood anthem, solid second-unit work in Bali. Madeleine shows me the EPL collection now on sale at World Market stores: tea, scarves, wicker chairs. I scan the drop-down menus for the men—James Franco, Javier Bardem—I’d like to have the latter delivered to my place, please, so he might heave his surging body on top of mine. I call him Barbarian, he calls me Rome. Melt Crush Bone. The leetle words-a, so small, but it’s like-a they some-a-how control us, capice?

THE EXPENDABLES

Did you hear about the burglars who broke into Dolph Lundgren’s house? They’re just getting down to robbing the place when they see an enormous portrait of Dolph Lundgren on the wall and suddenly they’re like, Shit, this is Dolph Lundgren’s house. And hightail it out of there without taking a thing. He’s amazing in this, playing the heroin-addicted turncoat as slurring Frankenstein’s monster re-animated by old pal/director Sylvester Stallone along with Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, and a handful of pro wrestlers whose name recognition varies widely in a viewer like me. “We used to be on the same team together.” “You guys aren’t gonna start sucking each other’s dicks, are you?” So much for subtext. The other Planet Hollywood CEOs do a quick cameo, Bruce Willis as a CIA spook and Schwarzenegger as a rival leader. The Terminator, of Rambo: “He likes playing in the jungle.” Rocky, of the governor: “He wants to be president.” We once thought there’d be an endless supply of these guys, but it turns out it was just the one moment: Vietnam hangover, high camp culture, peak oil. “We’re both dead inside,” says villain Eric Roberts to Sly, right before the world explodes—or at least most of a pseudonymous banana republic, and then the credits roll over what else, “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

There’s a plastic surgery that bloats the face of nations, too. What made us think the war was on screen? Laser sights on the foreheads of Somali pirates speak to precision’s cynicism, while the waterboarding (third movie in a few weeks) of the generalissimo’s rebellious daughter exposes our hysterical dread. Only the Transporter, as a knife-throwing expert, plays alive, in the subplot where he whips a yuppie and his friends for having socked the woman they’ve both courted in the eye. “The Expendables”—but as in those old A-team episodes, no one dies. They’re zombies, the undead shells of a virtue that didn’t add up. What would happen if Rocky went down, if the Terminator called it a day? They’re all big but Stone Cold Steve Austin, it’s like the guy swallowed a whole ‘nother guy. The monster, having been called forth, must be hounded to the very Pole. And that’s the bottom line.

CATS AND DOGS: THE REVENGE OF KITTY GALORE (3D)

Much has been said about Wile E. Coyote, who costars in the short before the film, but not as much about the Roadrunner. Of course he’s enigmatic (and yet why he, and not she?), but this time I felt a clue emerge where I’d somehow never noticed it before: I refer to the sound effect when he stops, the thwang of an arrow sunk in its target, still vibrating from the blow. So the question is, in that caesura of his perpetual blur, what has he penetrated, into what material has he sunk? The slack answer would be, he pins possibility to the agenda of universal law. But I’m tempted to propose, instead, that he punctuates nature’s impossible enthrallment with the machine. In other words, he tempts the coyote to wield technology so that he might circle around or double back to enjoy the spectacle of its limitations—that very quality nature cannot perceive in itself.

Not to refute that maxim of Jakob von Uexküll, the zoologist quoted by Giorgio Agamben: “No animal can enter into relation with an object as such.” The chief of dog headquarters wears little glasses, and the Nick Nolte-voiced hound deploys a jetpack. But it’s not as if the dogs built or even moved these artifacts into place, nor—and here’s the fascinating part—neither have humans done so on their behalf. The dog jetpack is not simply a human jetpack being used by a dog, no, it is impossibly but truly a dog jetpack. Little glasses—that cracks me up.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Cats are the bad guys, one is waterboarded, there’s a gag where one’s done up like Hannibal Lecter, that never gets old. “Radical felinism”—Bette Midler as Kitty Galore, and Wally Shawn as a foul-tempered Persian, Rudy wakes me up at 5:45, lately, I wouldn’t care if when I fed him he would just go back to sleep. But he keeps on crying out. Nothing is clear—cats and dogs team up against a common foe. “I shone, I was shattered, I shouted to the ends of the earth. I shivered, my shivering was a barking.”—Henri Michaux

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Madeleine’s moved to see the title on the marquee, mixed matter-of-factly with the rest. Part two of a double, and while Schmucks is slick, soundstage sets and ordinary actors, this is California spun-gold late afternoons and the most beautiful people in America wearing more leather bracelets than seems anatomically possible. They sure like those out there. But I mean, Julianne Moore, that Vanya, you watch and think, yes, when she leaves at the end, the vacuum in her wake quite literally destroys their lives.

As for Ruffalo, fuck, that hair, that lippy grin, and two or three truly excellent plaid shirts (from his own closet I’d bet). A voice somehow soft and gruff speaks the sentences he lets trail off. It’s partly about how wily this new breed of straight guy is, “groovy and together,” a good listener, earthy and laid-back, he eats a tomato like an apple and owns an organic/local restaurant called WYSIWYG. Indeed. Bening as bitch, again, but wow, that dinner shot. The only film I’ve seen with the word “interloper” in it, the only one in which “Desire is counterintuitive” can be a line. Spoiler alert: adultery. Spoiler alert: the end of James Dickey’s poem “Adultery” reads, “Guilt is magical.” Moral alert: a family is a family is a family—not the worst takeaway, so lower your hackles everyone.

Alice! She goes to college, in the end. How great was that day they dropped you off? A gorgeous film, I say again, all the desire we live for looking so late-afternoon, looking like that white sunlight coming through the interstices of a dark-green hedge, a few simple tables and chairs in a yard of chalky gravel, some food just out of the ground or off the vine that morning beside a glass of long-tended, long-waiting wine. Could that sort of loveliness be a set? And do we want the actors, the language, the wine, to dazzle us further, to take us higher and higher still, into an oblivion of bliss—or do we want them to stop? The Russian winter sneaking up, she leaves the estate, and think of what Vanya and the rest do when they’re bereft: they do the books.

DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS

Part of my first double feature to date, a risk the crazy summer schedule forces me to take. Risk because, having sensitized myself, the double dose may burst me. “Sensitized”—Christ, listen to me. Based on a French film in which a group of corporate savages compete to see who can bring the biggest idiot to a dinner party. Maybe Carley and I will take the two ladies sitting behind us, who share aloud their registration of each basic fact from which the story unfolding onscreen is constructed. But the “idiots” in the movie are really just sad, devoted hobbyists, lost artists, stunted and insistent, not to say holy fools.

The Yiddish is either from “smok” in Polish: dragon or snake—makes sense—or possibly “der Schmuck” in German: jewelry, as in the idiom “family jewels.” The hero keeps pulling, from his pocket, a diamond ring his girlfriend can’t decide whether or not to accept. And he’s Paul Rudd and this is Park Slope, so everyone’s all, What’s she thinking? That clever little guy wouldn’t make it half a block, here, before the mob pulled him apart.

We trade looks when the guy from Flight of the Conchords, as a bombastic artist—Matthew Barney?—dons costume of goat horns, furry legs, and hooves not unlike the flamboyant get-up Carley helped me make one fateful Halloween. You just buy fake horns and spirit gum, eyeliner, a couple yards of fleece. When people saw the end result they predictably lost their minds, it’s just no joke to invoke misrule. Steve Carell is a cuckold who pours himself into taxidermy—glue trap dioramas. “The Last Supper!” says the woman behind us, when thirteen little robed mice at a long table appear. It’s not that you don’t know what you are, idiot or whatever, but that it doesn’t even matter once you’re told. So if the Last Supper was a dinner for schmucks, who brought the Son of God? Do the math—it’s got to be that unseen Holy Ghost.

RAMONA AND BEEZUS

Just back in town, a perfect summer night, I take a detour through the park on my way to the 10:10 screening and watch the crowd watching Sonic Youth distort the breeze. All gorgeous youth and agitation, a crowd like the picture of my soul, even or especially to the extent that I stand outside it. Not cast out—I’m not being maudlin—but apart. And when I say soul I mean, not something mystical, but a kind of ordinary bodily function, a way the body organizes energy, just as when we say “mind” we mean the capability we possess to weave powers together, and when we say “heart” we refer to our capacity to channel feeling with great force. “Soul” means our sense that effervescent energy, which is somehow both ours and not-ours, bubbles up from deep within us—it’s the place where meaning abounds, do with it what you will. You don’t even need to go to the movies, in a way, because the beauty of the movies is that everyone else will go. The movies are what we none of us need to worry about. Then again, let’s go.

To take a beloved book for young people and shoot it like an Old Navy commercial is to practically beg us to lay aside our sentimentality and recognize, as in an Old Navy dressing room, what we brutally are. Oregon, where the DJ from Northern Exposure (Aidan!) is a middle-manager who gave up his artistic dreams for house, Volvo, and kids. He’s downsized and suddenly a stay-at-home. Foreclosure looming—Obama’s America, but they do have a really nice washer/dryer. Troubled middle-child Ramona still loves the big, emasculated lug. Antics. Ginnifer Goodwin pursued all the while by Josh Duhamel (When in Rome)—he pops in the mixtape she made him back in high school and out comes the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.” Oh man, fourteen years old, standing on the streetcorner with Richie Pagano, he told us “That song makes me cry,” and I didn’t know how literally to take it nor understand how that confession made him somehow cooler than ever, and now which way was up? Selena Gomez, to Ramona: “You don’t care what people think.” I’ve always found it’s more that one cares a lot, but how on earth can you ever really know?

SALT

Alex must’ve given us a quality joint, since the name of the candy we bought is making me smile. “Spree”—we’re on one. And Carley keeps telling me how much sodium chloride she’s sprinkled on the popcorn, though of course she’s using its common name, and finally I’m like, “Are you fucking with me?” And she: “What are you talking about.” And me: “Salt! Salt! Salt!” We’ve been following the Angelina Jolie cover stories, and a guy on the ticket line chats me up: “I said to my son in law, when he said ‘Who else is in it?’ I said to him, ‘Does it matter?’” Grandpa’s hot for America’s anti-sweetheart. But son-in-law, check out bit player Zoe Lister-Jones’s work in Stuck Between Stations, it’s great.

Cold war nostalgia feels so good, with a Wargames-style climax and Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination restaged. The young mole grows up watching The Brady Bunch to learn American ideology, graduates Princeton, and winds up working at an oil company that’s a CIA front. North Korea, Mecca, Tehran, a waterboarding scene—hey, why are leftist intellectuals so fond of saying their work “interrogates” some position or institution or text? The word choice interests me. Do they secretly long to wield the taser or rubber hose? Why not swing wide the gate of meaning’s prison, and let it go?

So spying is acting—you’re not yourself. She’s exposed on the blind side of a one-way mirror, and later fires off a submachine clip trying to break through a bulletproof screen on whose far side Live Schreiber tells her, “You’re about to become famous.” And at another point covers a security camera with her panties, and dyes her hair a witchy black. How one woman’s abandonment issues swallowed the whole wide world. Salt: the spice of life, but also a way to kill a fertile field. She always threatens to quit the biz. She doesn’t need to do anything but be geopolitics. God, she scares the shit out of me…I guess I love her, too.

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

Remember the original? Not Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (1797) but the Fantasia segment in which Mickey Mouse tries to speed up his chores (you can’t) and then the brooms go wild—he chops them up with an axe and the splinters regenerate, multiply—and the water rises with his panic, a child’s sick dread when trouble comes. His master’s name is Yensid—spell it backwards and it’s the old sorcerer himself, the dapper cipher with all our imaginations held firm in his ink-stained hands. But why imprint expansive American generations with the gnarly German forest? This remake is Arthurian legend—Cage is Merlin’s apprentice, and in turn the master to Jay Baruchel in what Chris Kraus would call a classic case of the Cowboy (Cage’s leather duster) and the Kike. So did Walt, who looked around to find himself the most influential goy in studio-era Hollywood, somehow provide, consciously or not, the modern antidote to all those dwarves and witches and dragons by way of his humble alter ego? People, is Mickey Mouse a Jew?

Add to that the intertextuality with Spielberg, Disney’s spiritual heir, as when Baruchel weighs the magic Russian-doll before stealing it back with precisely the same gesture made by Indiana Jones when he palms the golden idol. And then to cast Alfred Molina: “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip.” A perfect economy, and far simpler than the vexed moment when Indy swaps the bag of sand onto the altar and all hell breaks loose. Because he miscalculates the weight, or because the temple senses, somehow, its own desecration? The great thing about Indy is how tired and beat-to-shit he is all the time. But when he finds an artifact, his eyes light up.

Reconciling magic and science, a geek gets a blonde. They’re NYU students, juniors, which if this is present-day means they would’ve taken Writing the Essay back in 2008. But they didn’t have me, or who remembers? When Molina’s asked to provide a Faculty ID he uses the jedi mind trick, but that won’t work, I need to get mine renewed this week. “I’m not your mentor, I’m your master.” Will we ever be done with school?

INCEPTION

“Fuck Icarus” —Leonardo DiCaprio

BP’s capped the oil spill, theater five has new seats, Friday night’s hopping, as Jenny said when she saw the preview, “That’s exactly the movie I want to see.” But Amy has managed to take in none of its extensive marketing, she’s been photographing nudes lately and I suppose she’s after the advantage of seeing this movie undressed, too. Stoned, we go straight for Twizzlers, and I eat mine slow as a winch pulling up, turn-by-turn, a rope thrown down to the cliffs below.

Where are we? Washed up on the beach, in medias res. Seeking the ideas embedded in dreams, our heroes are psychoanalysts for whom, however—because they operate from within—the manifest content is equal to the latent content. They need not interpret, but do need to jump levels and hold together, detail by detail, a reality that longs to explode. A top that spins forever, those beautiful roofs of Baron Haussman’s Paris bearing down from the sky. All meta-talk and story meetings—“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.” Is this an intellectual-property fable, a cautionary tale about whose idea is whose? On one level, yes, even as on another it longs to unleash the avalanche that Kafka knew one needed to blast one’s frozen insides apart.

The movie argues two things: First, it would take an entire team of crack experts, working round the clock, to convince you that your father is proud of you. And second, if you want to get with that cute Architecture grad student you’re going to need to let go the memory of your crazy, dissociated wife (Cotillard). “Who would want to be stuck in a dream for ten years?”—and it goes by in an hour, to boot. If Juno plays Ariadne, the labyrinth specialist, does that make Leo Theseus, the lover who leaves, the hero who visited the underworld, like Odysseus, to meet the dead? “You’re just a shade.” We think we know better, and call those departed friends and lovers who visit us in the dark “projections.” As in Shutter Island, guilt is the tenor; as in Nightmare on Elm Street, the question is, Are we awake or asleep? Great question, to which one should reply, well, what’s at stake? Are jump-cuts flashes of consequence, or is each a psychotic break? And what is the nature of a sun that would smite Icarus’s joy upon the hour he flies free of fear’s maze?

DESPICABLE ME (3D)

No one hassles me, no one asks what I’m doing in the dark, one thinks of all the films noir in which, to escape their pursuers, the heroes duck into a theater to find themselves agreeably obscured by another reality already unfolding. As the movietickets.com ad I’ve seen sixty times has it, the movie is a train one runs to catch at the station—and may miss. As if the comparison was necessary, as if movies weren’t the ultimate modern conveyance. This is why it is not merely pretentious to say “film,” but simply not as richly accurate as that silly word “movie”—a childish stammering toward the overwhelming essence of this becoming-machine chugging unstoppable across the pitch-dark continent of our astonishment.

When we first meet Gru, the barrel-chested, hook-nosed supervillain, he’s up to inspired banality, comforting a kid who’s lost his ice-cream cone by making him a balloon animal—which Gru proceeds to pop with a pin. He parallel parks like my neighbors—bashing bumpers—and forces his way to the front of a coffee shop line by freeze-raying the other patrons. I stood behind Chris Noth at the Astor Place Starbucks the other day and felt sorry I’d compared him to Shrek.

Devastating ambition, coupled with a sense that time is running out—the younger villains coming up behind. It’s sad when he tries to hype up his C.V. for his minions, and later when the loan officer cuts him off. “Become the man who stole the moon,” says the fatherly (=demonic) inventor, but on the brink of his dreamt triumph Gru falters, he’s fallen for the three orphan girls, he’s become a real dad. What’s the most fraught ambition, the culture’s trickiest sell? Not revolution, nor art, but orthodoxy. It means spreading oneself thin, knowing full well that sick obsession is the far better lever for moving the heavens.

The minions are a masterstroke—cute, amoral bits and blobs of id. The joke is that they’re individualized, he calls them by name. What are they? The proletariat? Pills? Boogers? Gru’s sperm? During the closing credits they test the 3D, crawling so far out along the z-axis that the plane breaks and the film itself “burns” (as in Gremlins 2). All that remains are their shadows in the light of the projector, as if they were among us—we’re them.