Jungle Fever

Considering Spike Lee's career-long examination of various American attitudes about race and culture, it's not surprising that at some point he should take a look at the concept of inter-racial relationships. Many of Lee's films have thesis-like ideas at their core, from Bamboozled's satirical dissection of the history of blackface and the issue of race in the entertainment industry, to School Daze's inquiry into divisions within the black community, to the consideration of black/white romance in Jungle Fever. Like so many of Lee's films, Jungle Fever fearlessly looks at race head-on, and like so many of his films, it's messy, provocative, awkward, contradictory, uneven — and unevenly acted — stylistically eclectic, and (over)loaded with ideas. It's never a smooth viewing experience, but then it's clearly not meant to be; its barbs are there to get caught on, to provoke viewers of any race into thinking about ingrained prejudices and the ways in which the history of race in America continues to dominate current-day interactions and relationships between races.

The narrative of Jungle Fever skips all over the place a bit sloppily, but basically it's about the relationship between the black architect Flip (Wesley Snipes) and his white Italian secretary Angie (Anabella Sciorra). Flip is initially antagonistic — he'd wanted his white bosses to hire a black secretary for him — but one night, working late in the moodily lit office, the pair suddenly develop a romantic rapport that leads to a night of passionate sex, even though Flip is in fact married, and seemingly very happily, to Drew (Lonette McKee). There's no explaining attraction or lust, and Flip and Angie simply give in, with predictably problematic results.

Lee places the emphasis on the reactions to this affair more than the affair itself, and at times the film seems to keep forgetting about Flip and Angie for long periods of time. Instead, he detours into scenes with Angie's former boyfriend Paulie (John Turturro) and his crude Italian buddies hanging around a convenience store, expressing racist attitudes while simultaneously lusting after the pretty, educated black woman who visits the store every morning and is friendly with Paulie. Much of the film turns around these kinds of nakedly polemical scenes, shoving character and narrative into the background for scenes like the one where Drew and her friends discuss men and skin color, Lee's camera circling relentlessly around the room while the dialogue, though apparently improvised by the actresses themselves, hamfistedly delivers these ideas.


All of Lee's films have this dichotomy, this tendency to interrupt the narrative for scenes of straightforward political and racial preaching, but Jungle Fever is probably one of his most unbalanced films in that respect: it's not as straightforwardly satirical and polemical as a film like Bamboozled, so its preaching sits uncomfortably with the moments that are more about character or narrative. A prime example is the scene where Flip and Angie visit his parents (Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis), only to have his reverend father deliver a long, to-the-camera address on the history of slavery, miscegenation, and the rape of female slaves by white masters. What could and maybe should be a character scene, about the discomfort of the couple with the reverend's distaste for their relationship, instead becomes just another of Lee's immersion-breaking history lessons, and the central relationship gets shifted more and more to the fringes of the film.

There's still some interesting material here, especially in the way Lee shows the couple receiving prejudice and judgment from all quarters, in both Flip's black Harlem community and Angie's Italian Bensonhurst community. One of Lee's recurring themes is the way that blacks and whites are trapped by race and by the racist history of this country, fated by culture and history to play certain roles, to repeat certain mistakes over and over again. There's some uncertainty here about just how real Angie and Flip's relationship is, regardless of race, but race ensures that they don't stand a chance; it's just too big a barrier to get around. Flip's sudden voicing, late in the film, of prejudiced attitudes about mixed-race children is hard to justify narratively or in terms of his character up to that point, but thematically it makes perfect sense: these ideas, ingrained as they are, are exceptionally difficult to escape, passed down from generation to generation and running through entire cultures, both white and black.

The specter of race makes it impossible to judge this relationship like any other relationship, impossible even to think of Flip's adultery as just adultery rather than a betrayal of his entire race. In that sense, the way the film keeps getting bogged down in polemics and theoretical discussions of race and history is part of the point: these issues are so tangled and complex that this story can't just be a story.

School Daze

Spike Lee's second feature, School Daze, is a fictionalized reflection of the director's experiences at the historically black Morehouse College, here renamed Mission College. It's a loose-limbed musical satire of various attitudes and types within the black community, especially the conflicts between the politically conscious, radicalized students led by Dap (Laurence Fishburne) and the party animal fraternity Gamma Phi Gamma, led by Julian (Giancarlo Esposito, a weak link in a generally good cast). Dap (and presumably Lee as well) is disgusted by the whole Greek system, which he sees as a repudiation of his own radical activism, a way of involving young black students in inconsequential showmanship rather than something that truly matters. This point is driven home early on when Julian's Gamma Dogs interrupt a rally that Dap is giving to convince the university to divest its holdings in South Africa, since ironically Mission has been lagging behind white colleges in sending that anti-apartheid message. The Gamma Dogs, including Dap's cousin Half Pint (Lee), barge onto the scene, distracting from Dap's oratory with their goofy, ridiculous antics and pointless histrionics.

For Dap, and for Lee, the Gamma Dogs represent the subjugation of black male identity, particularly by the military. The Gamma Dog initiation rites, like those of many fraternities, involve the pledges acting in emasculating ways, but there's an especially degrading component to the way Julian has the pledges act like dogs, dragged around on chains by the accepted frat members, barking, eating dog food from dog bowls, and engaging in militaristic rituals. This imagery resonates with the history of slavery, putting black men in chains and teaching them to obey authority, to willfully humiliate themselves in public. Later, during a sex scene between Julian and his girlfriend Jane (Tisha Campbell), she licks his fraternity brand; he's willingly branded himself the way slaves were once branded by their masters. The Gamma Dogs' chain of command and the military discipline they impose on pledges also suggests a connection with the military, as though they're preparing these young black men for a life of obeying orders, submitting to their superiors, and sacrificing their self-respect in order to be accepted into society.

The conflict between Dap and Julian extends to their respective girlfriends, Rachel (Kyme) and Jane. Jane is a member of the Gamma Rays, the organization of the Gamma fraternity's girlfriends, and they're very different from Rachel and her friends. Lee stages a musical number set in a hair salon, dramatizing the conflict between the glammed-up Gamma Rays and the politically conscious, Afrocentric women associated with Dap's activist crew. The Gamma Rays are seen as the women who want to be white, with generally lighter skin, poofed-up hair and even, in at least one case, blue contact lens. They're contrasted against the women who have darker skin and who don't try to hide or change their nappy hair. Lee stages this conflict between different conceptions of racial identity like something out of West Side Story, a break in the reality of the film that recasts this battle of ideas in frenzied choreography.


This is the only musical number in the film that really breaks the diegesis. The rest of the film's music is posed as actual performances as a part of frat rituals, parties and school rallies. Some of the music is wince-inducingly saccharine, which might be intentional, especially as juxtaposed against the soulful gospel number that accompanies the opening credits' black-and-white photos from the history of civil rights. At one point, Lee cuts between Dap and Rachel having sex and a lame song being performed at the Gammas' party, drawing an implicit contrast between this whitewashed music and the passionate relationship of this couple who shun the Gammas' frivolity. Other performances, like the chants incorporated into the Gamma Dog initiations, are grating and annoying by design. The point is, much of the music in the film seems intended more to deliver an idea or underscore a polemical distinction than to simply exist as good music. As interesting as the film is in terms of the ideas it's exploring and the racial hot buttons it's fearlessly pushing, it kind of fails as a musical because the music is so secondary to the politics.

Even if a lot of the musical numbers are unsatisfying — a dance party towards the end of the film seems to drag along forever with little purpose or effect — the film remains an interesting early sign of Lee's preoccupations and the brash style he's crafted to explore the sensitive areas of race and intra-race politics. What's interesting about the film is that, though Lee is unquestionably on Dap's side in this debate between African identity politics and frat bro ignorance, he doesn't entirely let Dap off the hook. Dap's arguments with Rachel push him to think about his approach to women and to question his own judgmental tendencies, like his distrust of lighter-skinned black people, a form of racism as insidious as when the judgment flows in the opposite direction. Even more provocatively, there's a scene where some local men (led by Samuel L. Jackson in an early role) confront Dap and his friends, revealing that they see Dap much as Dap himself sees the Gammas: as wannabes, trying to be something they're not by educating themselves. It's the extreme version of Dap's ideology, as regressive as the Gammas' desire to assimilate and ignore their heritage, and Lee's inclusion of this scene complicates the simple dichotomy that exists in the on-campus scenes.

The film ends with a jarring, fourth-wall-breaking sequence that abruptly all but dispenses with the narrative in favor of a literal "wake up" call, with Dap running around the campus, screaming for everyone to "wake up." This summons is directly addressed to the audience far more than it is to the film's characters, who seem to suddenly and passively accept Dap's wisdom after rejecting him throughout the film. It's not a narratively believable or satisfying ending — Julian's sudden reawakening in the finale is especially unconvincing — but it doesn't seem like it's meant to be: after the Gamma Dogs' antics reach a truly despicable climax that reveals their abysmal attitude towards women, some kind of "wake up" call was obviously needed. Dap's turn to the camera explicitly implicates the audience in the behavior they've just seen, forcing those watching to think about which roles they'd inhabit, which side they'd choose.

She's Gotta Have It

Spike Lee's debut feature, She's Gotta Have It, is a quirky, interesting view of sexuality and the double standards applied to men and women. Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) is sexually liberated, and she makes no secret of the fact that she's not a one-man woman. She's going out with three guys at once: the narcissistic, shallow Greer (John Canada Terrell), the earnest Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), and the brash, funny Mars (Lee). The guys think she's a slut, or a nymphomaniac, that there's something wrong with her, even though of course they're all just as promiscuous; when Nola rejects Mars one night, he immediately dials up another girl and tells her how much he misses her. Nola's simply refusing to live by anyone else's rules, refusing to want or to do what she's supposed to do just because someone tells her to. "I don't believe in regrets," she says, and she seems to mean it. She's her own person, resisting conventional ideals like marriage and monogamy.

The first shot of Nola shows a bed with the covers rustling, as though in the midst of passionate sex, but then Nola sits up, alone, addressing the camera. It's an appropriate introduction for a character who's often defined by others (including Lee as the director, at times) strictly in terms of her polymorphous sexuality, but who just wants to be appreciated on her own terms, not judged just because she enjoys sex and doesn't want to be tied down to any one man. Lee probes this icon of female sexuality with a pseudo-documentary style in which Nola and her three men all talk directly to the camera, as does Nola's estranged friend Clorinda (Lee's sister Joie), who's disgusted by her friend's attitude towards sex, and the lesbian Opal (Raye Dowell), who wants Nola as badly as the men do. As Nola herself explains towards the end of the film, all of these people might understand parts of her, but they don't understand the full woman, and they all try to get her to conform to a role that she's not ready to fill.

The multiple perspectives and direct, casual addresses to the camera give the film a loose, jazzy vibe. Indeed, it's a pretty loose film all around, as one would expect from an early feature. Lee's style is already vibrant and punchy, scattering the film with stray fragments of New York street photography to ground the story in his beloved hometown. But the performances are unfortunately inconsistent, and the direct addresses are often awkward and poorly acted. Even Johns, who is a charming and expressive screen presence, with a radiant smile and an ability to say a lot with her eye movements, is mostly flat in her line readings. Terrell is probably even worse, though at least it seems like his character is supposed to be a stiff killjoy. Lee himself gets an easier time, basically playing his own goofy self, hiding behind tremendous glasses, wearing his grungy, scuffed-up sneakers even during sex. At one point, Mars excitedly raps with Jamie about a Knicks game, channeling the director's well-known love of basketball, ripping on Larry Bird — "the ugliest motherfucker in the NBA!" — and briefly finding some common ground with the otherwise aloof Jamie. Mars' enthusiasm is so infectious, his character so outrageously funny, that it's easy to miss the somewhat hateful things he says about Nola, slipped seamlessly into his patter.


As funny as Lee is, Greer is the richest target of mockery in the film, providing comic relief with moments like his earnest monologue about the "three penis monster." The best scene, though, is the one where Nola seduces him and he responds by slowly, methodically undressing, carefully folding his clothes item by item as he takes them off, smoothing out the wrinkles, taking so long that by the time he's ready to get into bed Nola is bored and frustrated, rolling her eyes. Lee deliberately extends the scene, letting Greer's fastidious stripping play out in plodding real time, the joke getting funnier and funnier the longer he stretches it out. In scenes like this, Lee's goofy humor and stylistic restlessness recalls early Woody Allen, an obvious reference point for this film.

She's Gotta Have It is much less assured in its serious moments. A sex scene between Jamie and Nola late in the film is especially uncomfortable because it pretty much plays out like a rape except that Nola, uncharacteristically, submits to it. It's an ugly scene that seems to undermine Nola's sexual independence and leaves a sour taste in one's mouth during the film's final act, which stutters to a halt rather than really wrapping up the film's many provocative threads.

The film's flaws are indicative of a young filmmaker just finding his voice, but in many other respects Lee is already fully formed here. His love of New York and his love of the cinema shine through in a big way, especially during a playful and unexpected musical interlude, in bright color, when Jamie has some dancers perform an allegorical love story for Nola as a birthday present. It's a bit of a French New Wave meta diversion that briefly hints at the bold colors to come in Lee's later films. But the film's black-and-white cinematography is actually one of its best assets, switching between a functional, low-key style for the "documentary" sequences and gorgeous, stylized noir-esque imagery during the film's lushly erotic sex scenes. In these scenes, naked bodies seem to shine brightly against a black background, with candlelight flickering over bare skin and every intimate contact charged with pleasure. The film's occasional eroticism jars against its goofier tendencies — never more so than when Lee's Mars is involved in the sex — but this sensual aesthetic is actually a perfect way to privilege the perspective of Nola, who genuinely loves and enjoys sex, having fun with her body and her lovers. She's Gotta Have It is an interesting early work from Lee, a bold, provocative, uneven examination of sex and gender that's as funny as it is thought-provoking.

Midnight In Paris

Midnight In Paris is the essence of recent Woody Allen in its purest form. This is a charming love letter to Paris, which opens with a series of crisply photographed, perfectly colored postcard images of Paris as a collection of tourist landmarks and street scenes that are familiar from the countless French movies they've appeared in. It's a glossy depiction of the latest destination on Woody's touristy trip through Europe, and this city in particular, Paris, seems to mean a great deal to him, as perhaps the place that appeals the most nakedly to the hopeless romantic in Woody.

The film hits all the usual Woody notes. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a successful screenwriter who's dissatisfied with his work and wants to be a serious novelist. He's in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams), who he's feeling increasingly disconnected from, while his love of the city, his association of it with art and creativity, reawakens his dormant literary ambitions. This effect is intensified when Gil, sitting on a staircase around midnight, soaking in the atmosphere of Paris, is picked up by an old-fashioned car and transported back in time, to exactly the 1920s Parisian paradise that he'd been dreaming of. He is soon at parties with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and many other luminaries of the multinational Paris cultural scene of the 20s. At a party, Cole Porter sings sadly and beautifully at the piano, flappers dance, and everything seems bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia. And then there's the lovely Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a young woman who's been a lover and muse for many painters of the time, most recently Pablo Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo), and who Gil instantly falls for.


It's a very simple story, with a fantasy hook that delivers the very simple point that we always yearn for an ideal past that we never experienced and that never really existed. Such desires are an escape, an outlet for anxieties about the present, rooted in the inescapable feeling that if only one had been born earlier, or elsewhere, everything would feel so much more right. Woody realizes that this is a somewhat misguided desire but he can't help feeling it anyway, and he lovingly depicts 1920s Paris as a beautiful, perfect, charming place, even while gently nudging Gil towards the realization that the past can't offer solutions for the problems of the present. The film seems torn in two, its aesthetics delivering an unadulterated ode to the beauty and joys of the past while thematically it has to lead Gil to a place where he's happy to exist in the present, to live and create in his own time instead of aching for a past that will always seem sweeter than the familiar present.

Of course, it's no surprise that Woody is much more convincing in selling the past than the present. A big part of the film's pleasure comes from the offhanded sense of awe that Gil feels when he realizes that he's been pulled back in time, and his wide-eyed joy when encountering each new famed cultural figure of the past. Woody obviously has a lot of fun with depicting all these historical icons, who are surely the director's idols as much as they are Gil's. The best and most memorable of these personae is no doubt Stoll's perfectly pitched performance as Hemingway, who speaks exactly like he writes, in a clipped, assertive, no-nonsense tone that leaves little room for debate or uncertainties. He seems like the Hemingway we might imagine from his writing, come to life, speaking a perfectly phrased short story every time he opens his mouth, unleashing a series of terse, blunt phrases connected by chains of "and." Similarly effective, though in a much different mode, is Adrien Brody's Salvador Dalí, who mutters and slurs in multilingual argot and repeatedly announces his famous surname, always with an implied exclamation point and a grand sweep of his arm. He also introduces Gil to his friends Man Ray (Tom Cordier) and Buñuel (Adrien de Van), and Woody, hilariously, has Gil give Buñuel a movie plot idea, describing the surrealist premise of The Exterminating Angel, which puzzles Buñuel as much as it's puzzled and provoked audiences since he made it. It's a bit of a cutesy time travel gag but a charming one anyway.


It's a shame that the modern story is comparatively slighted. Inez is distant and self-absorbed, and she and Gil are so clearly ill-suited for one another that it's hard to imagine how they ever got together. Her parents are used primarily for a few offhanded and easy-target swipes at Tea Party Republicans and Woody's favorite topic, clueless Americans. Woody at least seems to realize that he's being insufferable: right after Gil calls Republicans "lunatics" during a rambling rant about politics, he adds that it's okay, he can still respect those who don't think like him. Gil's present-day romantic resolution at the end of the film is also pretty unsatisfying, but maybe that's just because Cotillard's Adriana is so luminous, so sweet and smoldering, that nothing in the present seems very alluring in comparison, even Léa Seydoux's pretty but vague love interest. Maybe that's what Woody is going for here: a particular time is not tempting, ultimately, because of when it is, but because of who is there, because of the connections that one forms with other people. What Gil really learns, through his immediate and visceral connection with Adriana, is that what was lacking in his present was not necessarily a result of his era but the (lack of) genuine connections in his life.

This is a sweet, warm movie, much brighter and airier than anything Woody's made in a while. It's funny, too, though mostly at the expense of the hapless sorts who Woody sets up as targets for his mockery: the pompous Paul (Michael Sheen), who professes to be an expert on everything, and a private detective who Woody gives a minimal role seemingly just to set up the film's best and funniest throwaway time travel joke. As a bit of a meta joke, Woody even has Carla Bruni, the First Lady of France herself, appear as a tour guide, adding to the sense of this film as Woody's guide to Paris. Midnight In Paris is Woody at his most charming and romantic, quite a change from the darker, more cynical tone that's dominated most of his more recent films, both the successes like Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the more uneven efforts. It's a delicious confection, a magical realist treat that's all but impossible to resist.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is somewhat notorious as a belated and unfortunate entry in Steven Spielberg's long-running adventure series. It lives up, or down, to that reputation in many ways, but it's not entirely the dismal failure it's said to be; it's deeply flawed but also strangely fascinating. The opening of the film establishes this fourth Indiana Jones movie, which is set in the late 50s, as a representation of the destruction of American innocence in the crucible of World War II: the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, as well as the Cold War and the McCarthyite anti-Red fever that developed in the aftermath of WWII. The previous three films were all set before the end of the war, and even if the Nazis were often Indy's enemies, the films still seemed very distant from the grisliest realities of the war. In The Last Crusade, Hitler himself appeared as almost a comic figure, in an absurdly hilarious cameo. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, on the other hand, opens with Soviet spies, disguised as American soldiers, coolly gunning down the military guards at a desert installation.

From there, Indy, after escaping from the Communists, stumbles into a fake town in the middle of the desert, full of plastic people, with Howdy Doody on the TV, all of it ready to be blown away in a nuclear bomb test. Indy survives the bomb in a lead-lined refrigerator — one of many groan-inducing moments in this over-the-top opening sequence — then stumbles out into a wasteland with the distinctive mushroom-shaped cloud of the atomic bomb drifting up from the horizon, the sky turning red as Indy's distinctive silhouette is framed against this apocalyptic backdrop. It's a deliberate subversion of Indy's image, jamming the spirited adventure and pulpy thrills of the Indy serial against the real-world horrors of the atomic age that he's suddenly been thrust into. (This remains true even though the jaw-droppingly stupid refrigerator gag basically turns the whole thing into a cheap joke just moments before that harrowing mushroom cloud image.)

Perhaps that's why the tone of these opening scenes is so all-over-the-place. It's an attempt to integrate the pulp hero into Cold War nuclear age hysteria, but as such attempts go, it's no Kiss Me Deadly. Instead, Spielberg and producer/writer George Lucas vacillate back and forth from cutesy farce, to the near-slapstick kinetic action that the Indy serial is known for, to moments of seriousness like that beautifully apocalyptic image of Indy, with his whip and his fedora, dwarfed by the fiery mushroom cloud and its deadly rain of fallout. Indeed, in another sign of the times, Indy is soon expelled from his university teaching post, a victim of the Red Scare, before he's pulled into his next adventure by the sudden appearance of the young greaser Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), a Fonzie type who joins Indy on a quest to find the mythical crystal skull.


The Indiana Jones films have always revolved around some rather fantastical premises — it's part of the series' over-the-top pulp charm — but this one, with its interdimensional aliens and portals to other dimensions, risks the ridiculous even more than the magical Christian relics and ancient cults of previous films. The climax, in which the secret of a hidden Mayan temple is revealed as a roomful of aliens with crystal skeletons, is so far beyond the usual tone of the Indiana Jones series that it feels imported from another movie, perhaps Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the equally contentious finale of A.I.. More than that, though, the film's script and action are often simply ridiculous. In one scene, Mutt swings through the trees on vines, accompanied by an army of monkeys who wind up causing trouble for the sinister Soviet villainess Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). The goofy monkey CGI recalls the equally silly gophers that run around underfoot during the opening scenes, a cutesy bit of patently fake computer imagery that recalls the worst moments of Lucas' Star Wars prequels more than anything in the previous Indy movies.

Thematically and emotionally, this film is a logical next step for the Indy series, but the execution keeps getting in the way. It makes sense that the film should be about Indy discovering he's a father — Mutt turns out to be Indy's son with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), returning from Raiders — after the father/son dynamics of The Last Crusade. Indy's distance from Mutt repeats Indy's relationship with his father, who had been distant and unapproachable until the pair bonded on that last adventure. The problem is that LaBeouf's Mutt is not an especially compelling action hero, even when he's not playing Tarzan leading those cuddly CGI monkeys to the rescue, and his repartee with Indy is forced and awkward. At least Karen Allen's return as Marion is welcome; she's been somewhat tamed by the years since her last appearance, but she still has the devilish grin that made her such a natural match and foil for Indy in the first film, and made all the women in the subsequent films seem like such pale, unsatisfying substitutes. Even Indy admits as much, telling Marion that the women he's known in the intervening years have been lacking because, "they weren't you."

This all adds up, unfortunately, to a film that's interesting in theory more than it is in practice. Spielberg and Lucas are obviously having their usual fun riffing on the previous films in the series and the pulp tropes they've based the character on, but the film is goofy where previous Indy flicks were witty, bluntly action-packed where previous films had action sequences that were thrilling and frenzied without veering so far into self-parody. The film is tonally inconsistent in the extreme, and Spielberg and Lucas fail to grasp that while the Indy films were never exactly rooted in reality, by any means, neither were they as relentlessly plausibility-defying as this one is. Compared against some of the ludicrous action scenes that Spielberg piles on here — like the jeep-to-jeep swordfight between Irina and Mutt — the aliens at the end begin to seem positively grounded. Even these more-ridiculous-than-usual action set pieces might have been tolerable, though, if the film had recaptured the ephemeral "magic" of the earlier films, but it just doesn't. Despite some interesting subtexts and ideas, this latest Indiana Jones film fails to add much to the franchise's history.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The third film in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones series was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and after the strange, overblown tone of Temple of Doom (which chronologically serves as a prequel to the series), this film continues much more directly from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Once again, Indiana (Harrison Ford) must try to track down a legendary Christian relic — the Holy Grail this time — before it falls into the hands of the Nazis, even though one would think that the Nazis would have learned their lesson after the last time they actually got a hold of what they'd been searching for. The film is more than just a repeat of the formula from Raiders, though, because this time around, Indy's no longer a solitary adventurer, but is instead surrounded by both a literal and figurative family. Of course, the first two Indy films had sidekicks and accomplices who tagged along with the hero, but this time around he's gathered together a more substantial crew.

Foremost among them is Indy's father, Henry Jones (Sean Connery), who's been searching for the Grail for his entire lifetime, and who's been kidnapped by the Nazis as part of their quest to discover the source of eternal youth. Indy must rescue his father and find the Grail, aided by Raiders returnees Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), who in Raiders had been Indy's office-bound acquaintance, sending the adventurer off on his missions but never coming along himself. These men form a loose masculine family for Indy, a rough and ready band of friends and family. The film's last shot shows the four men riding off into the sun and the blood-red sky, an image right out of a Hollywood Western. This is especially appropriate because, more than in the other films, Spielberg is making Indy a cowboy archetype, with his signature hat and his horseback heroics.

The Western references start right with the film's first moments. The clever opening sequence is a referential, and self-referential, tour de force that continually subverts expectations with clever visual gags in which things are seldom what they seem. The first shot evokes the imagery of John Ford's Monument Valley, with a line of mounted riders winding through dirt trails between massive cliffs and red rock mountains. When Spielberg cuts in for the first closeup, though, he reveals that the riders are not Ford's cavalry but a troupe of Boy Scouts, even though they do have the yellow scarves that recall the uniforms of Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Soon after, two of the Boy Scouts, hearing strange noises, wander into a cave and find some men eagerly excavating ancient relics from the rocks. One of the men has the familiar fedora of Indiana Jones, but Spielberg keeps his face hidden, first by shooting him from behind and then from slightly above, so that the brim of his hat shades his eyes, showing only the man's unshaven chin and square jaw. He looks like Indy, but it's not him: when he finally looks up it's a different man, and Spielberg quickly reveals that one of the Boy Scouts observing this scene is a young Indiana (River Phoenix), as an onscreen caption identifies the time and place as "Utah, 1912."

The subsequent chase scene, in which Indy boldly steals a valuable relic from the fortune-hunters, is full of in-jokes for fans of the franchise, suggesting where Indy's famous fear of snakes came from, showing the first time he experimented with using a whip, and tweaking audience expectations of Indy's flawless feats by having the young Indy leap off a rock to land on the back of a horse, only to miss and stumble as the horse simply steps forward. The whole sequence is relentlessly meta, building on the history and iconography of this character from the previous two films.


This is everything one would expect from an Indiana Jones movie, all staged with Spielberg's typical panache for action set pieces. There's a thrilling boat chase, and then later in the picture, Spielberg fakes out the audience by hinting that there's going to be a second one, only to have Indy and his dad jump on a motorcycle instead. There's a brief aerial dogfight, followed by a sequence — nodding to Hitchcock's North By Northwest, an obvious touchstone for this film's dashing, globe-trotting adventures — in which Indy and his dad flee on the ground while fighter planes swoop by overhead, raining down machine gun fire. There's a battle in which Indy, riding a horse, manages to outwit and take down a squad of Nazi soldiers and a tank. There's a trawl through underground catacombs filled with rats and a river of petroleum, which of course soon gets set afire. Indy even comes face to face with Hitler himself, in one of the film's more absurdly funny moments. There's a hilarious scene that wouldn't be out of place in a Marx Brothers spy spoof, where Indy and his dad keep spinning around as a secret panel opens up on a Nazi communications room. The thrills are perfectly paced, and the film barrels along at breakneck speed, with crackling dialogue to break up the action scenes.

Connery's Jones Sr. is especially compelling in that respect, perhaps because his dry wit and unflappable demeanor are linked to Indy's unhappy childhood with a mother who died young and a father who was distant and immersed in work. As the opening scenes show, Indy struggled to get his father's attention as a boy, and when he reunites with his father as a grown man, their relationship is uneasy and marked by dark humor. When Indy breaks into a Nazi castle to rescue his dad, Henry hits him over the head with a vase, at which point the two men immediately begin talking past one another: Henry is upset that he shattered what seems to be a valuable Ming vase, while Indy (incorrectly) reads his father's words as guilt over hurting his son. There's a lot of humor like this in the film, built around this father/son disconnection — even Indy's avoidance of the given name he inherited from his dad is evidence of their fraught relationship — and Indy's boyish desire to please his father. At one point, after father and son have evaded the Nazis during a violent and frenetic chase sequence, Indy lets out a whoop of excitement as they leave the last of their pursuers behind, but his smile fades when he sees his father's unimpressed, stoic expression and total disinterest in his son's love of adventure. Indy is a grown man but he still thirsts for fatherly approval, and because of this obvious subtext the film's bantering dialogue often has real bite.

The father/son dynamics are complicated by the presence of Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), who turns out to be a Nazi but first sleeps with both father and son, which confirms the theme of Indy following in his father's footsteps. Schneider is an interesting character even beyond her importance to the father/son relationship. She's a surprisingly sympathetic Nazi whose allegiances are somewhat ambiguous; it's not at all clear just what she really believes or if her alliance with the Nazis is just a marriage of convenience to get her closer to the Grail, which she desires for her own unstated reasons. Even after she reveals her villainy, her affection for Indy and, to a lesser extent, his father isn't diminished at all. Her best moment, though, is a silent closeup as she watches Indy uncovering clues and preparing to break into a hidden passage through a wall in an underground chamber. She smiles sweetly and affectionately, her eyes shining with warmth: it's a very affecting and mysterious shot, because it suggests a depth of feeling in her that makes the revelation of her true nature somewhat hard to believe. Later, though, when she reveals her betrayal, her smile becomes crazed and sinister, her eyes wild.

The Last Crusade is a worthy successor to Raiders of the Lost Ark, abandoning the darkness and lurid violence of Temple of Doom in favor of the spirited adventure of the first Indy movie. Spielberg successfully channels the tone and the pleasures of that first film without simply duplicating it. It's a fun and exhilarating adventure flick and a worthy addition to the Indy canon.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

With Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg established a new movie icon, a new larger-than-life hero in the tradition of the pulp adventure. The second movie in this new series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, immediately announces itself as a very different kind of movie, a very different take on the pulp hero. The film opens with, of all things, a musical number, staged like a Busby Berkeley set piece, with glamorous showgirls in glittery costumes arranging themselves in colorful, shiny patterns within the frame. The song, of course, is "Anything Goes," an appropriate anthem for a film that deliberately erases the line between good taste and bad, casting Indy (Harrison Ford) in an even more absurd, crazy adventure than his first cinematic outing. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, Indy has battled gangsters while surrounded by balloons in a club ballroom, leaped from a window with club singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in tow, then jumped from a plane with nothing but an inflatable boat to break his fall, before careening off a massive cliff into the river rapids below.

Temple of Doom is also more exaggerated than its predecessor in terms of the supporting characters who accompany Indy on this adventure. While Raiders of the Lost Ark featured cartoonish Nazis as the villains, Indy's allies were the loyal and noble Egyptian guide Sallah and Karen Allen's tough, witty portrayal of Marion Ravenwood. The shrill, helpless Willie Scott is no Marion, though, and Kate Capshaw is no Karen Allen; her character here is basically the butt of jokes about feminine incompetence and greed. When Indy drags her to an Indian palace, investigating the disappearances of many children from a rural village, the first thing she thinks when she sees the wealth and splendor of the palace is to wonder if the maharajah is married. Even worse is the infamous Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), a Chinese orphan boy who accompanies Indy on his adventures, and who basically serves as a source of caricatured comic relief with his heavy accent and squeaky catchphrases. The infamous dinner scene — where Willie and Short Round are horrified as their hosts serve giant bugs, eyeball soup, a snake that spills out smaller living serpents when sliced open, and, most memorably, chilled monkey brains, served out of a monkey head with removable scalp — is another example of the film's wallowing in grotesque orientalism.


At its best, though, the film's melodramatic outrageousness can be strangely compelling. This is true even of the problematic aspects: the seduction scene between Indy and Willie is hilarious, since it consists of two profound egotists posing and sparring, culminating with Willie throwing her head back, closing her eyes and murmuring that she'll be the best he's ever had. Later, Spielberg indulges in a very different form of excess when the three heroes witness an ancient ritual in which a priest pulls the heart from a man's chest before thrusting the (somehow still living) man into a whirlpool of fire. This scene is all about operatic excess, taking the fiery spiritual climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark as a starting point and simply expanding its red-hued lunacy to even greater lengths.

That exaggeration extends as well to the vision of the slave labor mine that lurks within the temple, where dirty, chained-up children hack at rocks with hammers while being whipped by bare-chested overseers. At one point, Spielberg even conflates voodoo with Indian culture, because basically the evil cult depicted in the film doesn't emerge from any one culture or anything real whatsoever. The cult is instead a vision of every foreign culture, as viewed through the xenophobic eyes of the West, all blended together into a soup of strange customs, blood sacrifices, horrible food, and a pagan obsession with death and destruction. It'd be easy to say that Spielberg is parodying that particular lineage within the pulp fiction genres that he's drawing on, but that doesn't really seem to be the case: he's just delivering a potent and especially ugly vision of the stereotypical foreign bad guy, the villain whose very obvious distance from Western culture is the only source of his evil.


The best part of the film comes at the very end, when Spielberg drops all the campy strangeness and simply embraces the spirited action set pieces that made Raiders so boyishly exciting. The mine car chase sequence is punchy and thrilling, crisply edited and visceral, and Spielberg follows it with an equally tense and well-realized sequence with Indy trapped in the center of a rope bridge, sword-wielding villains advancing on him from either end of the bridge. Spielberg, whose action scenes always have a keen sense of place and spatial relationships, inserts long shots in which the bridge runs across the whole frame, showing Indy as a dot in the middle with the slowly approaching enemies, purple blots in their long robes, closing in on him. The action scenes stacked up towards the end of the film have all the tightly wound intensity of the best Spielberg action sequences, and this consistently exciting final act goes some ways towards redeeming the sometimes slack narrative, annoying characters and orientalist oddities of the rest of the film.

Temple of Doom is well-known as the oddball entry in the Indiana Jones series, at least before the fourth film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's a deeply strange and flawed film that, to its credit, doesn't simply repeat the very successful formula of its predecessor but tries to do something different within the pulp lineage. It doesn't always work — an understatement, perhaps — but there's still something hypnotizing about the film's embrace of its own knowing excesses. It's a very inconsistent movie, of course, both in terms of quality and tone: sometimes harrowing and horrific, sometimes barreling forward with no-consequences action, and sometimes goofy and cheery, as when Spielberg nods to the elephant hijinks of Howard Hawks' Hatari!, a film that (as Adam Zanzie first tipped me off to) seems to be very important to his career and his approach to cinema. The film's final shot embraces all these contradictions, as Indy grabs Willie for a kiss (after pulling her to him with his signature whip; kinky!) while Short Round urges an elephant to spray them with water and repeatedly squeals, "very funny!" It's cheesy and ridiculous, especially when Spielberg then pulls back to show a crowd of laughing Indian kids running to embrace the couple. Spielberg's dealing with big, bold images and events here, and the film is packed with clichés and absurdities. That it sometimes overcomes its own ridiculousness to deliver a satisfying action set piece or some other fun bit of business is a tribute to Spielberg's keen instincts showing through.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Raiders of the Lost Ark was the movie that introduced the world to the legend of Indiana Jones, the archeologist/adventurer whose exploits — invading ancient ruins in search of treasure, trying to beat the Nazis to the mythic Ark of the Covenant — are director Steven Spielberg's tribute to pulp fiction serials and boys' adventures. Indy (Harrison Ford) is a romantic daredevil who, in the film's famous opening sequence, enters a South American ruin looking for a gold idol, dodging clever traps of darts, bottomless pits, and a boulder that rolls out of an alcove to pursue the hero through this treacherous cave. The opening sequence is so legendary for a reason, as it economically introduces the hero, his exploits of derring-do, and his ability to escape from even the most seemingly hopeless odds.

The film is packed with such iconic moments, the scenes that fascinated me as a kid watching this movie over and over again, and which can still evoke a silly grin of pleasure. There's Indy abruptly cutting short an Arab enemy's elaborate swordplay by simply shooting the guy. There's Indy chasing a Nazi convoy on a horse while the exhilarating and unforgettable John Williams theme plays. There's Indy and his one-time lover Marion (Karen Allen) in a shootout with Nazi troops led by the sinister, perpetually smirking Toht (Ronald Lacey), a cartoon Nazi villain who wants the Ark as a magic weapon to deliver to Hitler himself. Spielberg deliberately makes Indy's adventures over-the-top and outrageous, culminating in the religious fury of the climax, in which the Nazis win, getting to the Ark and opening it before Indy can — for which they're rewarded only with God's fury, an extinguishing fire that erases any trace of the villains from the world. That ending is pretty interesting, because Indy has nothing to do with the bad guys' defeat: he has the opportunity to destroy the Ark, foiling the Nazis' plans, but as Indy's opposite number, the French archeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman) recognizes, Indy can't do it, he can't simply destroy the relic he's been pursuing. He's obsessed, just like Belloq and Toht are, and he wants to see what's inside the Ark as badly as they do. So he and Marion end up tied to a wooden post, watching as the villains open the Ark, which should be the bad guys' moment of victory but instead turns into their death because they hadn't considered what it means to use a relic of such holy significance for evil ends. Indy wins because he lost.


Elsewhere, Spielberg has a lot of fun just playing with the genre conventions of the adventure. A perfect example is the spatial playfulness of the scene where Marion is being kidnapped, carried around in a large woven basket by a pair of turbaned bad guys. As Indy chases after the thugs carrying her, the geometry of the scene has a cartoon absurdity to it, as he winds down one alleyway after another, only to have the men he's pursuing show up behind him or down a distant alley when just moments before they'd turned the same corner that Indy has just rounded. It's Bugs Bunny logic, turning these back alleys into a surreally warped maze where space and time don't behave as they're supposed to. Spielberg frequently mixes the comic with the tragic in this way; the goofy illogic of the chase sequence doesn't diminish the danger that Marion is in, and indeed the sequence ends with her seemingly dead, blown up in the explosion of a truck that Indy tips over, unaware that it's full of explosives. Earlier in the film, Toht, always a locus of darkly comic violence, reaches for an amulet that he needs to locate the Ark, but the metal has been surrounded in flames and burns the Nazi's hand, so he runs screaming outside to stick his hand in the snow. Even at the climax, the open-mouthed screams of Toht and the other Nazis, before their faces begin to melt and decay, are almost funny in their exaggerated expressions of terror. Spielberg, who would later approach Nazis much more seriously, here makes them comic foils, dangerous and despicable but also ridiculous, worthy of derision as much as contempt.

That's a big part of the film's crazy charm, its enduring importance as an action/adventure classic. It's a film that doesn't really take itself seriously, right from the goofy opening moments when one of Indy's South American guides runs screaming in exaggerated horror from a stone statue. When Indy, early on, famously shouts that he hates snakes, you just know that by the end of the film he'll have to get through a tomb full of the slithery reptiles. This kind of movie logic is everywhere in the film, like in the subsequent scenes where Indy returns to his day job as an archeology professor, teaching classes that seem to be populated almost entirely with young girls who adore the dashing, handsome prof. (One of them, memorably, writes "love you" on her eyelids so that the message appears whenever she blinks.)


Another big part of the film's charm is Karen Allen's vivacious performance as Marion, who in a way is even more of a bigger-than-life figure than Indy himself. Indy is legendary primarily because of what happens to him, and because he reacts to everything with the same everyman casualness, betraying maybe a little smile or a flicker of satisfaction at most when he evades death yet again. Marion's a much more intense personality: she's introduced into the film during a drinking game in which she drinks a much bigger man into passing out, while she simply flashes a crooked grin and collects her money. Marion is a more complex and much more real character than the iconic Indy. She's had an active life — she owns a bar in a remote Asian city — and is obviously still nursing some heartache from the older Indy's cavalier treatment of her the last time he saw her. Her introductory drinking game is echoed in the later scene where she seduces Belloq, playing up her own exaggerated drunkenness and lulling him into drunken complacency before pulling a knife on him. She's a great character, a great woman, and if she sometimes falls into the damsel-in-distress role, waiting for Indy to rescue her, just as often she's scheming and fighting for herself, running around in the background of action scenes clobbering thugs in the head with metal pans. She's easily as much a part of this film's appeal as Indy himself.

What's great about Raiders of the Lost Ark is how cleverly Spielberg mines the pulpy adventure tropes that he's drawing on here, making a film that revels in its own artifice, its obviously fictional nature, and is all the more enjoyable because of it. It's a film that deals in legends and icons before the film itself even became legendary or iconic. Indy is a prefabricated icon, and even early on in the film, he's portrayed as just a distinctive silhouette, hat and all, on the wall of Marion's bar, identifiable just from his shadow. He was made to be a cinematic icon, and he fulfills the role admirably.

Bush Mama

Bush Mama is director Haile Gerima's raw, potent depiction of poor black life in 1970s Los Angeles. Shot in grainy black-and-white, the film is a blend of near-documentary street scenes, raw amateur acting, and avant-garde techniques. The loose narrative focuses on Dorothy (Barbarao), a jobless woman who subsists on welfare to raise her daughter after her husband T.C. (Johnny Weathers) is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. With nothing to do and no hope of finding a job — she waits in the unemployment office for hours only to be told there's nothing for her — she simply wanders the neighborhood, reads letters from T.C., and talks with other neighborhood women. She's pregnant with her second child, but because she's on welfare and her husband isn't around, she's under constant pressure from government officials to have an abortion. The letters she gets from T.C. reflect his increasing radicalization and his desire to overthrow a system that seems stacked against blacks in so many ways. She hears some of the same ideas around the neighborhood, particularly from a woman who brings her radical posters from rallies, depicting an African woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in her other hand (the "bush mama" of the film's title) and another poster showing the hole-filled body of a man who'd been shot 25 times by the police.

Dorothy doesn't really understand these radical ideas, though she feels some sympathy for them on a gut level. However, she's often swayed by the brash Molly (Cora Lee Day), who has nothing but mockery and contempt for radical ideas about "togetherness" or African identity. Over the course of the film, in between scenes of ordinary domestic life, Dorothy grapples with this debate over radicalization, vacillating between those who want to do something to fight an oppressive system and those, like Molly, who can't think beyond the day-to-day. By the end of the film, Dorothy, facing the camera in front of the poster of the African mother, has been fully awakened — through a harrowing and horrific series of events — to the necessity of systemic change. She's been radicalized, and to reflect this transition she's finally removed the bushy wig that she wore throughout the film, revealing the sparse, tightly coiled dreadlocks hanging off her scalp underneath. The symbolism is obvious: she's no longer hiding anything, she's embraced her true self, which is why Gerima shoots her in closeup with the "bush mama" poster behind her. He racks the focus, so that first Dorothy's face is in focus, and then the poster is, and then he freezes the shot, while on the soundtrack Dorothy reads a passionate letter she wrote to T.C., telling him that she's finally ready to hear and understand what he's been telling her.

Gerima relates this tale of one woman's gradual awareness of her place within a larger societal struggle with a loose, eclectic style. The film has an elliptical collage structure in which conversations, monologues addressed to the camera, and everyday moments are stitched together with connective scenes of Dorothy walking around the neighborhood or sitting at her window, lost in thought. The soundtrack is also a collage, combining snippets of dialogue and music into an associative portrait of ghetto life: bits of dialogue or radio broadcasts are looped and repeated, and the occasional song with lyrics reflects the events of the narrative. The opening of the film consists of several minutes of slice-of-life footage from around the neighborhood — the police arresting a man, people walking, a purse-snatching kid — accompanied by a dense soundtrack of street sounds, pulsing music and loops of detailed questions excerpted from welfare interviews.


Throughout the film, there are sporadic bursts of violence — men being beaten or shot down right in the streets by the police — that seem as ordinary as anything else that happens in the streets. It's just another part of the backdrop, not exactly accepted but certainly expected. Again, Gerima shows some progress in Dorothy's reactions to these events, so that by the end of the film, the sight of a black man being gunned down in the street outside her home causes her to bury her head and sob, whereas earlier she'd shown little emotional involvement at all in these routine bursts of violence. These scenes are also setting the groundwork for the absolutely devastating final act of the film, in which the violence of the streets and the police directly infiltrates Dorothy's home.

This is an intense and emotionally draining film that's all about the toll that systemic racial oppression and poverty take on those who live within this system. Some of the most poignant, poetic moments come from T.C.'s letters to Dorothy, which he reads aloud while facing the camera, speaking to the audience as though addressing Dorothy. In one of these letters, he laments the way that prison is sapping the vital, lively parts of his personality that he once treasured: "every time I crack a joke, to test if that part of me is still alive, I never can make it." Even humor is destroyed by the injustice that families like T.C. and Dorothy's must endure. It's especially cruel that T.C. is arrested, early in the film, right before a promising job interview that they'd hoped would finally change things for their family. One moment, T.C. and Dorothy are enthusiastically talking about finally having some money, maybe being able to move somewhere nicer, and then Gerima cuts to T.C. being led through the prison by a guard. The circumstances of his arrest, which are predictably unfair, aren't explained until the very end of the film, which only enhances the sense of how arbitrary it all is.

Gerima's greatest accomplishment with Bush Mama is making a deeply political, angry, even polemical film that rarely feels like merely a collection of slogans. The film's politics are rooted in the circumstances of everyday life, in the injustices that occur daily in poor black neighborhoods. The film has a real political/social message to send, contained in its dialogues and monologues about black togetherness and radicalization, but it delivers this message primarily by focusing on the tangible emotional and physical effects of racial prejudice, police violence, and systemic poverty.

Paris, je t'aime

Paris je t'aime is an ambitious anthology film that compiles 18 short films by a multinational group of directors, each of them focused on Paris from many different angles. As is the nature with films like this, it's an uneven affair, packed with some bright spots, some total failures and a heaping portion of mediocre fare that passes by without leaving much of an impression one way or another. Perhaps even more than most other portmanteau films, this one suffers from the schizophrenic leaps from one short to the next, because there are just so damn many of them and as a result no director gets more than a few minutes to tell a simple story. Many of the best segments here work within those limitations, realizing that the best way to make something satisfying in such a short time is simply to craft a well-acted, cleverly written dialogue scene that stands alone, suggesting a larger untold story between the lines. A few directors attempt something more ambitious and a few take more experimental approaches, but most of the best work found here presents a self-contained, intimate single scene.

A good example is Frédéric Auburtin and Gérard Depardieu's Quartier Latin, which consists entirely of a conversation between a divorcing couple played by Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara. The segment gets by entirely on the charm of the actors, the casual way they trade gently barbed insults, smiling all the while, an affectionate older married couple who might even stay together if they weren't already so thoroughly on the path towards separate lives. The dialogue has a fizz and crackle that's especially well-suited to Rowlands' brassy bravado and razor-tongued wit, while fellow John Cassavetes veteran Gazzara radiates gravel-voiced aging machismo. It's a great piece that pays tribute to the two actors' careers and histories, providing an affectionate ode to the cinema of Cassavetes by casting two of his finest actors in roles that draw on their full, well-lived lives, on-screen and off. A similar tone inflects Richard LaGravenese's Pigalle, another showcase for and love letter to aging stars, in which Fanny Ardant and Bob Hoskins play an old showbiz couple who enjoy playing roles, acting out, talking through their troubled marriage in grand gestures, theatrical slaps and sexual gamesmanship. As in the Rowlands/Gazzara scene, this segment is at least in part about the stars themselves, their personae and their screen histories, and like Quartier Latin it's a charming, subtly funny piece with wit to spare.

That seems to be a key in this film, and the pieces that showcase witty writing and well-timed dialogue exchanges definitely stand out. Wes Craven, of all people, turns in a charming, low-key piece about an engaged couple whose relationship is salvaged by the intervention of the shade of Oscar Wilde (Alexander Payne). It's a slight little trifle, but it's redeemed by the pattering dialogue and the chemistry between the always delightful Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell. So many of the other segments aren't even this entertaining or memorable; where Craven offers a simple premise and a few smile-worthy lines, many other vignettes here are forgettable and bland. Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas' Loin du 16e is a stripped-down and nearly dialogue-free observation of a Hispanic maid dropping off her baby at daycare before going off to take care of a French woman's child. The irony is obvious, as is the parallel between the maid singing a sad lullaby first for her own child and then for the one she's taking care of, but it all just seems so slight and pat. A scene like this could be effective as part of a longer feature, a series of moments eventually accumulating emotional heft and context, but here it just feels like a disconnected sequence that abruptly cuts off.


The same could be said for Gus Van Sant's short Le Marais, in which a man chatters in French to a quiet young man who, it turns out, doesn't understand French. Again, there's just not much to it. Van Sant's camera gracefully follows the nervously energetic tics and pulsations of the talkative guy coming on to the non-responsive guy he's just met, so it's visually elegant but doesn't lead anywhere. Van Sant's films, generally, accumulate weight through a succession of unshowy, casual scenes like this, but in isolation there's just not enough to it. Van Sant's meandering pacing and off-the-cuff aesthetics are poorly suited to this short of a time frame; he needs some canvas to stretch out on and here the scene just feels like a teaser for a fuller story that never comes.

Other shorts suffer, like the Salles/Thomas piece, for presenting some painfully unsubtle sociopolitical content. Gurinder Chadha's Quais de Seine is little more than a pat message about tolerance in which a young boy breaks away from his friends — who are shouting crude come-ons to passing women — to help a young Muslim girl who's stumbled in the street. Everyone else just laughs, and his friends later make nasty and stereotypical remarks about Muslims, but he is kind to her and earns the beautiful girl's friendship. A very touching lesson, for sure, but the seams are so obvious it might as well be an after-school special. Meanwhile, Christopher Doyle's baffling Porte de Choisy seems to have a similar policy of ethnic tolerance at its core — this time suggesting that Asians should avoid Westernizing their appearances and embrace their own cultural ideals of beauty — but it's hard to tell because the film is just so daft and wacky. The colorful, lively style that cinematographer Doyle has always brought to the films of Wong Kar Wai is apparent here, but the bargain-basement surrealism is far removed from Wong's much more assured aesthetics. Doyle engages directly with Western stereotypes about Asia by splattering the screen with kung-fu moves, eerily grinning beauty pageant contestants, Buddhist monks, busty girls in military uniforms, and Hawaiian hula dancers. It's hard to know what to make of this garish, confounding stew of clichés and avant-garde disjunctions, but it certainly stands out from the rest of the film, for good or ill.

Indeed, several of these pieces stand out by digressing from reality, usually not to the most inspiring effect. Vincenzo Natali's Quartier de la Madeleine is a wince-inducing silent vampire story filmed in a grayscale monochrome with bright red "blood" that's obviously just paint. Olga Kurylenko plays a vampiress who falls in love with wide-eyed Elijah Wood, and turns him into a vampire so they can gleefully feed on each other's necks, at which point the short ends with a heart-shaped iris-in. It's a bland piece made worse by its aesthetically tone-deaf blending of silent film homage with a slick, glossy visual style that makes the leads look like they're made of plastic. Also distractingly bad is Sylvain Chomet's short about a mime who is snubbed everywhere until he meets a female mime to share his antics with. The attempts at charm and whimsy seem forced, especially in the framing device in which the mime couple's chatty son introduces the story of how his parents met.

Other segments are diverting, with minor pleasures but nothing more substantial. The Coen brothers' decision to base their Tuileries around the face of Steve Buscemi is a brilliant comic choice, as the actor broadly mimes his reactions to a passionate French couple who include him in their tumultuous, violent way of teasing each other. Buscemi's bug-eyed mugging is always a pleasure to watch, and the Coens structure the sequence around his silent incomprehension of French, keeping the American actor silent while the French couple yells and chatters at him. The broad comedy of it works, and the aesthetics suggest that Buscemi's character is a silent movie hero in a sound world, telegraphing his confusion and frustration entirely through the expressions on his malleable face. Alfonso Cuarón offers up an even more rarefied pleasure: the gritty joy of hearing Nick Nolte speak. The actor's raspy drone is the real star of Cuarón's basic little short, which consists almost entirely of a tracking shot along a street as Nolte's character has a conversation with a younger woman (Ludivine Sagnier). Cuarón keeps the camera at such a distance, tracking along on the opposite side of the street from the actors, that the aural component has to drive the short, and Nolte's distinctive voice would make it obvious that it was him even if he wasn't onscreen at all. The short's conceit is too cutesy by far, keeping the relationship between the two people ambiguous through vague dialogue, and the lame little "twist" at the end is eye-roll-inducing, but Nolte and Sagnier's largely verbal and enjoyable performances prevent it from being a total loss.


One of the better shorts, unsurprisingly, comes from Olivier Assayas, whose Quartier des Enfants Rouges plays out like an excerpt from one of his features, a deleted scene, but somehow avoids feeling as incomplete or insubstantial as the similarly truncated Van Sant sequence. Assayas focuses on an American actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Paris to shoot a costume drama, buying drugs and feeling a brief flicker of romantic feeling for her dealer. It's a simple piece that, typical of Assayas, is all about mood, and it gets across a wealth of feeling in its economical few minutes. So many of the usual Assayas tropes are there — the cluttered and drug-hazed parties, the hesitant connections and uneasy communication, the movie business milieu that makes this seem like a lost Irma Vep outtake — and it's a beautiful, affecting little short. Assayas' love of actresses carries over to his affectionate, sympathetic filming of Gyllenhaal, who turns in a subtle, quiet performance largely without dialogue, portraying a woman trying hard to have fun in a foreign land, but feeling lonely and craving some connection that she can't quite express.

Tom Tykwer arguably takes the most ambitious approach out of any of the featured directors. His Faubourg Saint-Denis is about a blind young man (Melchior Beslon) who receives a phone call from his girlfriend (Natalie Portman) in which she seems to be breaking up with him. As a result, he flashes back through a sped-up summary of the entire history of their relationship, starting with their first meeting and then gradually speeding up to touch on significant moments in the rush of routine. A breathless voiceover recounts the ways in which their relationship gradually settles into familiar patterns, and the writing of this narration cleverly uses repetition and the gradually increasing frequency of certain words to suggest the shifts in their relationship. By the end, words that had appeared only occasionally in the voiceover come to dominate it, suggesting just how much this relationship has changed, mostly for the worse, over its course. From intimacy and excitement the mood changes to alienation and fragmentation, simply by altering the balance of how often certain events recur and the context in which they occur. The girl's screams chart the course of the relationship. They meet because she's screaming, rehearsing a part in a play, and early in the relationship he's charmed by her screams, by her playful habit of yelling on a subway or a shouted orgasm. Later, screaming signifies arguing, slamming doors, angry words, shifts into negativity. Tykwer defies his short allotted time by cramming the whole length of a relationship into this scant length, condensing this romance into key words and key events, providing a formalist breakdown of a possibly evaporating love. It's an affecting and aesthetically bracing piece, and Tykwer is one of the few directors here to really do something interesting with the short form beyond staging a quick little scene and getting out.


Alexander Payne's 14e arrondissement is also quite interesting, and very typical of Payne's unflinching observation of lonely or emotionally troubled people. It's the story of a middle-aged American postwoman (Margo Martindale) abroad in Paris for a vacation by herself. The short is narrated in this woman's awkwardly accented, faltering French, and it's a rather heartbreaking portrait of someone who's alone in the world but doesn't give in to despair, instead finding pleasure in exploring a foreign place by herself. There are signs of that condescension and nastiness that sometimes creep into Payne's treatment of middle American characters like this, as in the cheap shot where Payne cuts to an image of a greasy fast food burger in response to the narrator's disappointment that French food isn't as good as she'd expected. Surprisingly, that's one of the only moments where Payne takes that kind of mocking oh-those-silly-Americans tone. For the most part, Payne's perspective on this character is empathetic and warm, and the short (which is wisely sequenced last in Paris je t'aime) ends with a sweet moment in which the woman looks from children playing to lovers kissing to an elderly couple talking, as though seeing the entirety of a human life spread out across the lawn of a Parisian park.

Many of the other pieces here are just trite and forgettable. Nobuhiro Suwa wastes the excellent Juliette Binoche in a lame attempt to tug at heartstrings with a story of a mother grieving for her dead son. She runs into the street and encounters a cowboy — Willem Dafoe, channeling the infamous cowboy of David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. — who briefly reunites her with her son. It's pointless surrealism and pointless maudlin tripe, especially since it ends with the woman rapturously telling her husband that God has given her strength. Huh? God's a cowboy? I guess? Bruno Podalydès' Montmartre is just inoffensive and boring in comparison, a meet-cute in which a lonely man romances a woman who faints by his car. Oliver Schmitz's segment similarly suffers from its bland premise, in which a female paramedic cares for a man who's been stabbed, while flashbacks show that the events that led to this moment include the man's romantic obsession with the paramedic, who he'd pursued ever since randomly running into her in a parking garage some time before. It's an O. Henry-esque bit of irony that hardly seems earned by these inconsequential, ill-defined characters. In Bastille, Isabel Coixet uses voiceover narration to tell the compressed story of a man who is about to leave his wife until he learns that she is dying, at which point he devotes himself to her anew and falls in love all over again. The voiceover essentially provides a summary of what might have been an interesting movie if it had actually played out with some detail, some real scenes and real characters. As is, it's like a pitch for a movie rather than an actual story in itself.

As a whole, Paris je t'aime is unfortunately weighted down by more chaff than wheat. With so many shorts at just a few minutes each, more than a few of these segments feel like they required more room to stretch out and really develop something. (On the other hand, a few others are so slight they could barely sustain thirty seconds.) There are some real gems here and some other shorts that have their moments, but these sparks of vitality and interest are all too often overwhelmed by the many shorts that are barely remembered three segments later, let alone after the movie ends. All anthology films are flawed almost by necessity, and Paris je t'aime proves that the more fractured a portmanteau film is, the more different visions it attempts to cram into one container, the less satisfying it is in the end.

Munich

Munich is a film of exceptional moral ambiguity and inquiry from a director often known for his tendency to tie his films' morals up in neat little bows at the end. Steven Spielberg resists, for the most part, that temptation here, and the result is one of his best films and certainly one of the best of his more self-consciously "serious" films. The film concerns the aftermath of the 1972 terrorist attacks on Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. Spielberg's film is based on a book by George Jonas, about the Israeli government's secret response to this act of terrorism. A group of operatives are gathered and sent off with the names of 11 Arab men who had planned and been involved with the Black September terrorism in various ways. Led by a young and inexperienced low-level Mossad operative named Avner (Eric Bana), this secret group moves around Europe targeting and killing these terrorists.

It is a film about revenge and the cyclic nature of violence, but it is also a compelling, taut, and tightly constructed thriller, a visceral espionage movie in which each kill is meticulously tracked from the planning stage through to the often troubled and frenzied execution of the plan. Spielberg is a master director of action, and part of the reason that Munich is so successful is that there isn't a schizophrenic disconnect between Spielberg the Hollywood crowd-pleaser and Spielberg the "serious" moralist, as there is in so many of Spielberg's other late films. Instead, the action is the content here, and Spielberg uses the crisply executed action scenes to build the moral foundation of the film. It's a seamless and organic process that makes Munich work on multiple levels, as a straightforward historical thriller and as a moral consideration of guilt, revenge, and political assassination.

One of the best scenes in this respect is the sequence where Avner and his team plot to kill one of their targets using a bomb in a telephone. They plant the bomb, then wait outside the man's apartment one morning, watching his wife and child leave, then call from a pay phone, waiting for the target to pick up so they can set off the explosive. The plan goes wrong because a moving truck pulls in front of the bombers' car, blocking their view of the apartment, so that they don't see when the car carrying the target's daughter pulls up again so she can go back inside to fetch something she forgot. The Israelis go forward with their plan, calling the apartment, one of them poised with the detonator, but when it's the little girl that picks up, not the father they intend to kill, they realize their mistake. Spielberg deliberately draws out the tension here, cutting back and forth from inside the apartment, where the girl strolls around trying to find what she'd left behind, to outside where the commandos prepare to carry out their kill. It's harrowing: each number dialed on the pay phone outside gets its own shot, interspersed with images of the girl, and after she picks up, as two of the commandos scramble to warn off the man with the detonator, it's not at all obvious whether they'll be in time or not. It's an especially potent use of Spielberg's instincts for Hollywood-style suspense: the moving truck that blocks the commandos' view is certainly a Hollywood contrivance, and the emphasis on the cute little girl who may soon be blown up is also deliberate heartstring-tugging, as is the earlier moment where one of the commandos, in the apartment posing as a journalist, sees her play the piano and smile at him.

Spielberg's use of such devices isn't just empty manipulation, though. Scenes like this one — and the later scene where a honeymooning couple are injured in the overly powerful blast that kills another target — drive home just how delicate such missions of vengeance are, just how easily the ethos of eye-for-an-eye can lead one astray. It's not only the possibility of unintended collateral damage: this mission of murder begins to weigh on most of the commandos, with the possible exception of Steve (Daniel Craig), who says that "only Jewish blood matters" and as a result doesn't feel any remorse at extinguishing the lives of those who threaten his people. Steve's Zionism and nationalism give him an unshakable faith in the rightness of this mission that makes him eerily parallel those on the other side who are also so convinced in the essential rightness of their cause, who also believe that murder is justifiable in pursuit of their objectives. Not incidentally, many of the Arab terrorists depicted in the film also see their mission as one of revenge for Jewish attacks on their people.


Indeed, Spielberg's parallels between the Arab terrorists and the Israeli commandos hunting and killing them excited much outrage from Jewish and Israeli groups, upset by the film's conflation of terrorism with counter-terrorism. But that's missing the point. Spielberg's film is about not forgetting the value of a human life, and most importantly it's about not falling for the delusion that violence can beget peace. Several times in the film, the characters count up the record of Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli reprisals, as though keeping a tally on some morbid scorecard. The more men they kill, the more they question their actions, as they see that even while they're in Europe killing terrorists, others immediately take the place of those they kill, and high-profile attacks are still carried out, killing Israelis and other Westerners all over the world. Seeing no tangible result of their actions, no benefit, they begin to wonder if all the bloodshed is worth it, or if they're simply sacrificing the moral high ground, the goodness and decency that allows them to live with themselves.

In one key scene, the Israeli commandos are unexpectedly surprised at a safehouse by a team of PLO soldiers, because the double-dealing French spy Louis (Mathieu Amalric), who set up the location, had, accidentally or on purpose, double-booked it. The subsequent standoff and fragile peace between the two groups (with the Israelis pretending to belong to various European terrorist cells) is another of those Hollywood contrivances that Spielberg turns into a productive opportunity for moral inquiry. (Though the scene where Steve and a PLO operative stage a symbolic battle between East and West on a radio dial is a rare goofy, heavy-handed misstep.) Avner has a late-night conversation with his opposite number, Ali (Omar Metwally), in which Ali expresses his sincere belief that soon Israel will fall, and that the whole world will have to go along with the creation of a Palestinian state. Avner looks at him uncomprehendingly, unable to grasp that this man actually believes that this will happen, actually thinks that terrorist attacks and bombings will somehow convince the world of the rightness of the Palestinian cause. Ali thinks that violence will wake people up, will make them see what's going on, but Avner is starting to understand something very different: that violence only causes more violence and entrenches people even deeper into their established ideologies, making them less, not more, open to compromise or change. What this conversation also yields is a reminder that the Palestinians really do want a home, that whatever else this fight might be about, the primary stakes are the right to a feeling of rootedness and belonging. Avner can't deny Ali the right to want that feeling, for himself and his descendents, and the conversation ends, typically, with nothing resolved, with the two sides remaining separated from one another by a seemingly irreconcilable conflict in ideas and desires.


At times, Spielberg is almost aggressively even-handed. Early on, when the news mistakenly reports at first that all the Munich terrorists were killed but all the Israeli hostages survived, Spielberg shows relieved Jewish families and sobbing Arab families. When the news changes and the reporters have to correct themselves and announce that the hostages have also been killed, then everyone on both sides is crying, mourning their dead. The effect is not, I don't think, to equate terrorists and their victims, but to suggest that there are families and human connections on both sides, even for those who perpetrate terrorist acts. This is a recurring theme in the film, the importance of family and home, because the justification for all the violence and war and terrorism and reprisal on both sides is always that everyone involved is fighting for their families, for the right to a homeland. Avner's wife and daughter appear at several key points in the film, as reminders of his humanity and his home, but terrorists like Ali are also fighting for what they believe they need to do for their families. It's telling, too, that at the end of the film Avner's Mossad contact refuses to "break bread" with him; governments and their political agendas are largely disconnected from such domestic concerns, though they also perpetrate their acts in the names of their citizens and their families. That's why the family-focused Louis and his father (Michael Lonsdale), who run a global espionage, information-dealing network, refuse to deal with governments, with their abstract motivations and distance from the passions that drive individual fighters.

What's great about Munich is that, atypically for Spielberg, all of these moral questions and entanglements are dealt with but there's no definitive resolution for the contradictions and doubts that dog the Israeli commandos during their mission. The film simply confronts, head on, the cycle of violence that marks the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In one scene, which epitomizes the film, Avner comes face to face with one of his targets, having a pleasant chat on adjoining balconies at a hotel, while in the background a passionate couple kiss and grope one another on a third balcony. Avner is just waiting for this man to go to bed so he can give the signal to blow him up, and he knows that the man is a terrorist responsible for many horrendous acts, but for a few moments he's confronted with both the humanity of his target and the potential innocents who could get caught up in this attempt at retribution. Spielberg even layers Avner together with the target and the innocent couple within a single shot, so that the link between Avner's signal and the murderous consequences will be absolutely clear. Vengeance, the film suggests, is never a simple thing, but rather part of a network of causes and effects that tie together family, politics, religion, history, and more, making questions of right and wrong far more complicated than mere binary values. Never before has Spielberg seemed so acutely aware of such complexities, and never before has he so powerfully portrayed them onscreen.

Rango

The neat trick of Gore Verbinski's Rango is the way it wraps some rather adult themes (and adult references) around a pretty basic kids' movie structure. The film follows the titular chameleon, voiced by Johnny Depp, as he falls out of a moving car and stumbles into the desert, where he encounters an adventure right out of a spaghetti western. The film is packed with hip references, like an early blink-and-you'll-miss-it Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas visual gag, and more notably the obvious influence of the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood "Man with No Name" trilogy. Those films loom large here, as Rango arrives in a dusty frontier town populated with various grizzled species of anthropomorphic animals. Rango, who inhabited a lively fantasy world to stave off loneliness in his small tank, now presents himself as a wandering mercenary hero, ready to help the townspeople, who are suffering from a drought that threatens to eliminate their water supplies. The plot combines the Leone films with, improbably, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and its schemes over water rights.

The plot, however, is not the film's strong point by any means. Despite the sophisticated reference points, the film's narrative is a bit of a jumble, and Verbinski leans too heavily on cliché when he's not nodding to his more venerable influences. When one mid-film action sequence devolves into a noisy, silly war film parody complete with "Ride of the Valkyries" — probably the most tired musical choice it's possible to make in a movie these days — it underscores how rapidly the film veers between clever pastiche and rote regurgitation.


It's easy to forgive and forget the more unimaginative stretches, however, when Verbinski packs the fringes of the film with such a wealth of visual wit and interesting ideas. When Rango first arrives in the desert, he encounters an armadillo (Alfred Molina) who has been run over on the highway but is somehow still alive and talking as though nothing has happened. This is especially disconcerting because there's a giant truck-tire-sized cutout in the animal's midsection, but the armadillo simply wants Rango to push the two halves of his body back together again. It's a disconcerting image, particularly for a movie supposedly made for kids, and an image that suggests the twin poles of surrealism and mortality that will serve as important motifs throughout the film.

Indeed, Rango is curiously obsessed with death. A trio of musical birds provide the vibrant, Morricone-esque soundtrack for the film, while also appearing onscreen as a Greek chorus narrating Rango's adventures. From the beginning, the birds suggest that this is going to be the story of the life and death of a hero, and they begin to seem strangely disappointed when the hero continually faces death and fails to die. At one point, the birds even deliver their grim predictions while hanging from nooses. The film's biggest threat, the tremendous, vicious Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), claims to come from Hell, and his fiery eyes and seeming willingness to kill suggests that there's some truth to the claim. The grislier aspects of the film sit uncomfortably against its sillier moments and its concensions to kids' movie conventions, like the plucky love interest (Isla Fisher) and the unbearably cutesy kid (Abigail Breslin) who does pretty much nothing and serves no purpose, throughout the movie, besides saying cute things in a cute voice and batting her huge eyes.

There's tension here, because the film sometimes seem to want to offer little more than this kind of predictable, jokey entertainment, but sometimes it seems to want to tell a much more serious story. It's a story about loneliness (on the personal level for the misfit Rango, a lifetime loner who creates his own entertainment with imaginary friends because he's never had real ones) and about the costs of modernization and the impotence of common people faced with powerful political and economic interests. The latter story, the big picture social story that's derived from the example of Chinatown, crops up periodically, most powerfully perhaps when Rango discovers the body of the town's bank manager, killed and cast aside in the rush for progress. Like all the best Westerns, this is a film about the West facing its end, about the push to tame the frontier. But the theme is never fleshed out very much, so that even at the end of the film, the exact nature of the plot cooked up by the film's obvious-from-the-start villain, the turtle mayor (Ned Beatty), is somewhat unclear, and he's left to spit out rote expositional dialogue to emphasize his villainy.


If the film's plot is sometimes less than coherent, broken up by embarassing digressions like the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene, Verbinski compensates with other pleasures. Rango's first night in the desert is visualized by a charmingly surrealist dream sequence populated by a talking windup goldfish and a disembodied Barbie torso, his only "friends" from his solitary existence. Later, in the film's best and most memorable scene, Rango actually meets the Man with No Name himself, a cartoonized Clint Eastwood (actually voiced by Timothy Olyphant) dressed in the distinctive poncho he wore in his Leone films. It's a wonderful meta moment, an explicit acknowledgment of Rango's affectionate tribute to the Leone/Eastwood collaborations. Eastwood's appearance provides a good example of the film's animation quality, too, since the caricature is instantly recognizable as the iconic actor, his face deeply lined and worn like a grizzled, aging Western hero, squinting and sneering as he dispenses advice to the tiny lizard he's inspired.

The animation is generally gorgeous in general. Not all of the character designs are as expressive and satisfying as the depictions of the Man With No Name and Rango himself, but the animation is unceasingly lovely, and all of the characters are textured and detailed so that they never seem like molded plastic (as, for example, the highly praised Pixar's human figures often do). There are plenty of visually sumptuous moments along the way, brief sequences where the action pauses to simply admire the scenery. A posse ride through the desert is particularly jaw-dropping, as the sunset desert scenery looks simultaneously realistic and colorfully stylized. The iconography of the Western is lovingly referenced in the visuals, from a shadowy figure appearing out of the shimmering heat haze of the desert to a group of riders galloping against the huge orange half-circle of the setting sun.

Rango is in many respects an interesting, if somewhat schizophrenic, work with the ambition to marry some big ideas to a rather conventional underlying structure. At its best, the film is visually dazzling, witty and a tribute worthy of the spaghetti Western influences it wears on its sleeve. At it's worst, it's cloying, overbearing kiddie fare, and those two sides of its personality are never quite resolved. Still, the film has enough ambition, smarts and style to make it a mostly enjoyable entertainment that occasionally reaches for something more.