The Ghost Writer

In "The Ghost Writer," Ewan McGregor's character, simply credited as the Ghost, is reassured by someone that he cannot be killed like his predecessor was, because ghostwriters are not cats. This is little comfort to the Ghost, for he is well-aware that he (like many characters in Roman Polanski's films), is someone in conditions that do not favor him, and against characters that are not ones to advance his well-being.

The Ghost is a writer, ignorant of current events but hungry for a good job, who has been hired to be the ghostwriter for Adam Lang, a former British prime minister and one of considerable controversy. Lang, played by Pierce Brosnan, resigned from his office after allegations spread that he illegally handed over British citizens accused of being terrorists to the CIA; the CIA tortured them and thus made Lang guilty of a war crime. The situation is made remarkably worse when the Ghost learns that Lang's former aide and the original ghostwriter was found dead in the waters next to Lang's compound.

Brosnan seems to be deeply concerned, as were some of his predecessors, as being typecast as James Bond. Brosnan was humorous in "The Matador," sang in "Mamma Mia!" and now is a nasty politician in Polanski's film. His performance is the most interesting to watch, though his scenes are few, but McGregor does his usual effective job in the leading role. McGregor's character is a typical one lost in situations beyond his control, as is often the case with Polanski's characters.

Oliver Wendal Holmes famously (and supposedly) said of Franklin Roosevelt that the president had a first-class temperament but a second-class intellect; Lang probably has neither. He is clearly influenced by others, drawing significant parallels to the Blair-Bush relationship. The allegories are not lightly-hinted--the America Secretary of State in the film looks remarkably similar to Condoleeza Rice. Additionally, he is half the talent of the Ghost, and it brings to mind other famous ghostwriters, as varied as Wolfgang Mozart and (speaking of Bond) John Barry, who has claimed he is the original composer of the famous Bond theme and not Monty Norman, who is credited with writing the score. (Incidentally, this is not a major theme of the film, but simply an observation.)

One disappointing aspect of the film is that it relies on the tired use of an ambitious, Lady Macbeth wife pulling too many strings, though the character is very enjoyable to watch Olivia Williams play her. And while this film may be a thriller, it's not always thrilling. The first and third half are fine evidence of thriller-making at its best, and while Polanski should be rewarded for not falling into cliches, he certainly does seem to lose a bit of bearing as it becomes dull and disorganized. Still, in an age of 3-D, CGI hyperbole, and the overuse of intensity, it is nice to see Polanski remind filmmakers how to make a good movie.

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A Fish Called Wanda

Many have noted filmmaker Errol Morris' article in the New York Times on anosognosia. Morris tells the story of David Dunning, a professor of social psychology at Cornell University, reading the newspaper to discover a bizarre story. The article was about a man named McArthur Wheeler who was arrested after attempting to rob two Pittsburgh banks. He attempted to rob the banks in daylight, but what really made the story unique was that Wheeler did not attempt to disguise himself. Wheeler was totally perplexed after he was arrested: "But I wore the juice," he insisted. As Morris writes, "Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to movie cameras."

Wheeler had been told of the phenomenon of smearing lemon juice on one's face to mask it from surveillance cameras. He was at least somewhat cautious, as he conducted a test to verify the results; indeed, the pictures showed no face. Perhaps it was because he had in fact mistakenly turned away from the camera just before it went off.

We have all heard of stupid criminals, but Wheeler takes the cake. Dunning suddenly realized something as he was reading the article. Perhaps Wheeler was not simply too stupid to be a bank robber, but instead was too stupid to realize that he was too stupid to be a bank robber. This is identified by Morris' article as anosognosia, which is when a person suffers from a disability but either is unaware of the condition or is unwilling to admit it exists. In the case of McArthur Wheeler, he was too stupid to realize he was stupid.

Many characters in "A Fish Called Wanda" probably have such a condition.

Written by John Cleese and directed by Charles Crichton, the film opens with three of its main characters: Jamie Lee Curtis as the title character (sort of), Michael Palin (an alumnus of Monty Python with Cleese) as a stuttering animal lover named Ken, and Kevin Kline as a maliciously-witted Otto, not daring to hide any compassion and instead horrifyingly staring at Ken's obvious stutter. "That's quite a stutter you've got there, Ken," he teases, interrupting his sentence with a chuckle. Otto also isn't afraid to mention to Ken that he once had a friend in the CIA who had a stutter which "cost him his life."

Wanda and Otto, with Ken and Wanda's boyfriend George (Tom Georgeson), rob a bank, then double-cross the ring leader while pretending to be brother and sister. They discover though that they too have been betrayed, as the stolen jewels have disappeared. Cleese himself then appears as a lawyer attempting to find some actual satisfaction in his life but instead is taken for granted by his wife and daughter. Cleese, as Archie Leach (Cary Grant's actual name), will be representing George at his trial.

Curtis is perfect at portraying such a seductive and funny character. And while it's reasonable to believe that perhaps Cleese's character would be the smart one of the group, he is the one who dances in the nude (while speaking Russian), only to discover a family walk in on him. Kline in particular is wonderful to watch. He is as animated as Chaplin and as fast as Keaton. Moment after moment, he shines. He is ready to assassinate Ken (regardless of the consequences), he loquaciously speaks Italian as he makes love, and he deeply inhales the leather boot of Wanda in the film's best fetish moment. He likes winning, too, and when he is challenged on the United States losing the Vietnam War, he shouts, "We didn't lose Vietnam! It was a tie!" His jealousy, his hatred of the Brits, his constant need to complicate things are all marvelously done by Kline. But as clumsy as Otto is, there is something deeply troubling him. To tie in the Morris-Dunning-Wheeler aspect, Otto is frequently called stupid, and his voice slows--"Don't ever, ever call me 'stupid,'" he warns. There is complexity here, yet Kline allows hyperbole without losing control, and there is an endless amount of stupidity with his character. For Kline's performance, he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

There is a flaw with a certain scene involving a dog, and I stand with Betty White in the stance that violence against animals is not funny. (May Ms. White forgive me, for I couldn't help but at least smirk at such dark humor.) In a post-Capra era, though, this is one of the finest examples of slapstick humor the movies have seen.

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Inception

Christopher Nolan's "Inception" is a film about characters who perchance to dream. There is something deeply philosophical and fascinating about man's ability to dream, to analyze and reflect on one's own dreams, one's own nightmares, that offers women and men the ability to command such creative power that would make everyone a Dante or Shakespeare, as H.F. Hedge put it, and Nolan capitalizes on this.

There seems to be a genuine dissonance between man's rationality of being awake and the insanity of dreaming, where all absurdity and surrealism is finally available. This is the case with Nolan's film, a film which almost entirely creates a perfect equilibrium between intellectualism and entertainment.

The story is likely inspired by the science and psychology of lucid dreams, that is when a dreamer recognizes and acknowledges that he or she is in a dream. Many characters have such moments in "Inception." The film toys with our own recognition of dreams in that it is difficult to recollect them; we in essence quickly forget what dreams we dreamed. Another aspect is dream incubation, or the placing of a seed in the brain, or inception.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a dream extractor who leads teams to steal secrets from people's dreams. But in this case, for a complicated and quickly-described reason, Cobb and his team are not extracting but creating an idea in someone's mind. Dreams within dreams are created, totems are used to detect whether or not the person is in a dream, and the subjects (those whom the idea is created or stolen from) possess subconscious protections against the extractors. The more dreams-within-dreams that are created, the more risk there is; usually "death" in a dream returns the dreamer to reality, but with heavy sedation (as is the case on the team's special assignment), being killed could result in actual death. To die is truly to sleep for these characters.

Like in Scorsese's "Shutter Island" from earlier this year, DiCaprio's character is a man struggling with deep guilt and alienation. It is as if he exists in a prison when he is awake, and dreaming provides him the perfect escapism. The dreams allow him to take enormous risks, regardless of the potential consequences to him and his team members.

Another wonderful aspect is the fact that Nolan has largely avoided shortchanging his actors. Aside from Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite who both have small roles, this is an ensemble piece, with DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Tom Berenger all having important roles.

With Nolan, there is a special attention to detail, and when there are elaborate and expensive CGI images, one gets the sense that Nolan, unlike so many other directions, has not forgotten that the onus is on him to make the audience believe that these images are real. Cities fold onto themselves and characters fly like acrobats in a gravity-less corridor. There are nightmares--Cotillard's near-perfect moments as practically a ghost tormenting Cobb's guilt--filled with sudden horrifying glances, a look that could kill. And then a firm grip with a broken glass, and a powerful charge. And there is the wonder of subtext with regards to psychology and even architecture, all culminating in a film inspired by obvious previous science fiction films.

But this is a film with flaws. While there certainly is a sense of wonder here, that wonder unfortunately often does not go far enough. At times it feels as if there is nothing really new here, unlike other films that have dealt with similar subjects, as varied as Wilcox's "Forbidden Planet" to Hitchcock's "Spellbound," to Kurosawa's "Dreams." This film has been called a Kubrickian masterpiece; it is not. Part of the reason is that Nolan already is one of the best directors around, so the bar is just so high every time, but that does not mean one should not see "Inception." If you can tolerate the intensity, confusion, rapid speed at which the plot is explained, the lack of details to the plot, the real-or-not jargon about our dreams, the non-stop gun fights, etc., then it is a film worth seeing. There are many reasons to see this movie: its thrills, its acting, its cinematography, its ideas and especially its visuals.

You probably have heard about the ending. I won't mention much, other than it will probably make you smile (or groan if you are less patient or intellectually curious), and it would be best not to dwell too much time on it.

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Empire of the Sun

Steven Spielberg has created a legacy as the ultimate magician of the cinema. His movies have, for the most part, been bright, magical pictures, as is the case here in his 1987 film "Empire of the Sun." With this film, a coming-of-age World War II story, Spielberg indulges in familiar formulas: a lost boy without his parents, a yearning towards reconciliation, a feeling of miraculousness.

Almost always, Spielberg's combination works. Here it does at times, but there is no concrete epicenter, and instead it oversimplifies things and overly-complicates others. "Empire of the Sun" is a movie that often has that Spielberg quality of excellence but more often feels too long, too boring, and even too Spielberg.

A young Christian Bale plays Jamie Graham, the son of wealthy parents living in Shanghai in the 1930s as war breaks out between China and Japan (and the world, of course, for that matter). Jamie is as imaginative and charismatic as he is spoiled and selfish, but he is also quite interested in planes. In fact, it is his toy plane he tries to retrieve which separates him from his family during the chaotic and frightening invasion. Lost, scared, and confused, he returns home where food will run out. Often exactly in the right place, he joins an American sailor named Basie (John Malkovich), and the two develop a friendship, despite Basie constantly betraying him. The two are eventually captured and moved to an internment camp and wait for the war to end.

As mentioned, "Empire of the Sun" is either too complicated or too simple. It is too complicated as it involves an enormous amount of characters which were probably given their proper explanations in the autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard which the film is based on. There is a doctor, a young Japanese man Jamie befriends, a brutal Japanese captain, an impatient British couple, and parts of Basie's gang which are all practically ignored. It is often too simple, as well. Towards the end of the film, Jamie, now called Jim, witnesses a bright and sudden light approach and push against his body. Instead of allowing reasonably intelligent viewers to ascertain that this is most likely one of the atomic bombings on Japan, Spielberg inserts a radio broadcast to provide exact details of the event. If that still could not suffice, Jamie offers out loud his realization of what has occurred and how he mistook it.

Most of the film is wonderful to look at. It involves dreamlike visuals and another majestic score from John Williams. But at times it feels like another attempt at "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," though it is worth noting that in 1987, Spielberg, along with his 1985 period piece "The Color Purple," was emphasizing his directorial range, shedding the perception that he could only direct children fantasy stories. (Then came "Hook" in 1991, and he would have to wait another two years with "Schindler's List" to finally secure the reputation he deserved and strived for.) Again, at times the quasi-fantastical nature of "Empire of the Sun" feels justified, and at other times it feels gratuitous. It is also noteworthy, though, that Spielberg discussed in interviews about this story being the anti-Peter Pan story in that this is about a boy who has grown up too quickly. And so far, no praise has been given by the reviewer to the performer playing that boy, Christian Bale (the future American Psycho and Batman). It is a very commendable performance, as are the other performers throughout this film (including Ben Stiller, who has said that he first gained the idea for his 2008 film "Tropic Thunder" while making "Empire of the Sun.")

Overall, "Empire of the Sun" has the feel of a inspirational picture that does not exactly inspire the feeling of being inspired. Instead the film drags on; there is a beginning, middle and end, but the middle seems of epic proportion and unjustly too long. It seems that as matter-of-fact as the story could be, it instead chooses to lack a definitive sequence of events. At times it's "Oliver," at other times it's "Stalag 17," and at other times it at least looks like "The Color Purple" but feels like it possesses the youthful optimism of "Hook." It is an interesting hybrid, and another example of his interest in World War II. World War II, a war Spielberg's father fought in, has often been the setting for Spielberg's stories. His first Hollywood attempt at the subject was "1941," then this film in 1987 (ignore the Indiana Jones films for now), and he finally secured a masterpiece with "Saving Private Ryan" (or "Schindler's List" if you prefer to consider that film the "third time's a charm" entity).

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The Dead Zone

As the film opens, Christopher Walken, the patron saint of eccentricity in the movies, is reading out loud Poe's "The Raven" to a classroom of students. It is immediately clear that his will be an enjoyable film. David Cronenberg's "The Dead Zone," from a screenplay by Jeffrey Boam based on Stephen King's novel, is an epic picture, despite its relatively short length of about 103 minutes, and immensely enjoyable to watch.

Walken's character, in that opening classroom, presents himself as a content man with an exaggerated smile; there's no real reason to doubt that most of his students probably like him, and as the audience discovers throughout the film, his character is passionate about education (King was also an English teacher himself before he became a full-time writer). Incidentally, Walken the teacher instructs his students to read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and if Christopher Walken could see the future as his character did in "The Dead Zone," he would know that about fifteen years later he would play that very headless demon he refers to.

Walken plays Johnny Smith (a name almost changed by Cronenberg due to its hard-to-believe simplicity). In love with his fellow teacher (Brooke Adams), Smith drives home in a storm and suffers from an accident. He finally awakens in a clinic. It is explained to him by his doctor (Herbert Loam) with dark-brimmed glasses and Polish accent (elaborated on later in the film) that he has been in a coma for five years. His girlfriend has left him, married, and now has a child. He obviously does not have his job anymore and requires physical rehabilitation.

These challenges would be difficult enough for any man, but Johnny discovers that he now has been blessed (or cursed) with the ability to see the future. One day in his hospital bed, he touches the hand of the nurse and suddenly can see that her daughter is in great danger. He shouts to the nurse that there is enough time; the daughter is saved. Johnny's life is completed altered.

Other characters appear in the story to utilize or be affected by Johnny's ability. Tom Skerrit is the local sheriff who has run out of options to find the Castle Rock Killer involving the rape and murder of young women. To the sound of the operatic score of Michael Kamen (one of the rare occasions in which Cronenberg did not use his frequent composer Howard Shore), Johnny helps the police track down the killer. Then there is a politician named Greg Stillson played by Martin Sheen in some of the film's best scenes. Stillson is a character that is the complete antithesis to some of his other characters like the loyal chief of staff in "The American President" and a practical, idealistic president in "The West Wing." He proclaims in a Pentecostal manner that he has a vision that he will one day be president (he played the title role in the miniseries "Kennedy" the same year), and Johnny becomes alarmed at the dangers of such a man and whether his power gives him the responsibility to act against the possible future.

Cronenberg's films are not usually scary so much as highly stylized, as is the case here (the exception is "The Fly," which manages to succeed in both aspects). Walken is effective from the beginning; his performance shows a man shifting from states of fright, command and anger, and he does so at complete ease. Not as accoladed as his performance in "The Deer Hunter" or as oft-quoted as his role in "Pulp Fiction," Walken's role in "The Dead Zone" is terrific and certainly one of his best performances.

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