For Your Entertainment

I've got this thing I've been working on for the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle website for two months (yes, I waaaay missed my deadline).

The gist of it is that, in modern society, the role of the "critic" has been marginalized to the point of insignificance. You guys don't come to us to find out about movies; you make up your own minds, then seek out reviews to justify those opinions.

Maybe that's the way it's always been.

Maybe that's been made easier, this empowering the everyman, by virtue of simple access to both information and information dissemination vehicles. You want your own soapbox? Start a movie blog.

I don't think you guys need us. I don't believe that you need me.

You already know if you're going to see a film, and if you already have, what you thought about it. My words are of no relevance to you.

I don't think you're reading my reviews for the reviews. I think you're here for the entertainment, because there's no way you're coming here to borrow my opinion.

Maybe that's naïve of me. Or pessimistic.

Or maybe optimistic. I'd say it isn't pessimistic for me to believe everyone out there in Readerland makes up his or her own mind about what to watch, regardless of what I say about it. I'd like to think people arrive at their own conclusions independently.

It isn't true, but I'd like to believe that. I think most people are too lazy to come up with their own opinions and just borrow one from someone else in their peer group. Or they Google one.

Anyone can throw up a shingle and call himself a movie critic. Hell, it's not that much different than how I got into it. That story is simple, really.

Ten years ago this month, our illustrious editor-in-chief decided to start a movie column so as to procure ad revenue from the regional agencies whose job it is to promote films for the major and minor studios.

At the time, I was the staff writer.

I never envisioned the gig as a strictly "reviewer" kind of thing. I was under the opinion that my experience in seeing a film would be more helpful to readers than any sort of highbrow film theory examination of the films themselves. If people want to read film theory as applied to the schlock of the week, there are other outlets for that.

That and I still had dreams of being Dave Barry or Hunter Thompson, or some combination thereof. It never occurred to me to just write a straight-up review. I, being young and armed with the delusions of youth, assumed my opinion mattered, that I had something to say. I know, I think that's funny, too.

I've reviewed more than 1,200 movies in the past decade, and I probably liked fewer than 10 percent of them. An academic might call that sort of behavior "Sisyphean." (The math: approximately 512 columns at an average of 1,700 words and 2.5 films per column = 1,280 movies, 870,400 words.)

Here's what I know: these are my opinions and experiences with these films, and mine alone. After 10 years, I know what I'm talking about. I also find myself less inclined to care whether or not you agree with me.

Here's to 10 years. Hope I get to do 10 more.

Of course, newsprint might be dead in another 10 years. Maybe you'll be reading us on your Kindle.

Coen Crazy

I sometimes find it hard to believe the Coen brothers have made it as big as they have, that they've become successful and critically acclaimed filmmakers on their own terms.

They make odd movies. I don't know how else to say it. Take Raising Arizona, for instance. It's a bizarre comedy loaded with hilarious scenes and even funnier characters. An ex-con and his cop wife kidnap one of five quintuplets from a rich couple... right.

And then there's the matter of character. Coen brothers' films are peopled with the oddest assortment of screw ups and miscreants in modern cinema. How about the guy in Fargo who got rid of the body with a tree shredder... in the snow. Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink. Or, hell, The Dude.

They also have their serious sides--No Country for Old Men, Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing. Even when they go serious, however, there's that vein of dark humor. No Country had it. It's just a difference in tone.

But no one balances it like the Coen brothers. You know within five minutes you're in one of their films, and thank god for it. Most modern filmmakers aren't skilled enough to have any sort of a signature, instead cranking out almost a stock 90-minute experience.

Again, that the brothers have been as successful as they are is remarkable.

I'm not surprised, really, that they followed up No Country with something like Burn After Reading, which is much more like Raising Arizona than Fargo, and nothing at all like No Country. For one, Burn is almost entirely peopled by idiots, though they're not, ah, stupid.

Right. Have I said it's about character, not plot?

Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) works for the CIA. Or worked, anyway. He's just gotten let go because he has a drinking problem. And also, probably, a bad attitude. He relishes dropping the F-bomb as often as possible.

His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), hates him. Or is tired of him, anyway. She's having an affair with ex-Treasury agent Harry Pfarrar (George Clooney). He's a sex-addict and is cheating on his wife, who writes children's books. He's also paranoid that someone is following him.

Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins) work for a gym. Linda is pathologically unhappy with her body and is determined to have four plastic surgeries to shore up her physical deficiencies. She's also trying the Internet dating thing. Chad is a personal trainer and also a dumbass. Ted runs the place, is an ex-priest and has a thing for Linda.

Throw in a CD full of Oz's CIA memoirs, press blend and you have the character-driven path of destruction wrought by this collection of generally unlikable people. Each has a defining characteristic that practically demands you dislike him or her.

In a way, that's good. It means they are all expendable, something always important in a Coen brothers' flick. Which idiot is going to get it next. Mwahahahaha.

Er, right.

The end result of this cocktail of incompetence is an often hilarious film. I say "often" on purpose, as opposed to say, "always."

First, there's something off about Clooney and Pitt, though the rest of the cast is pitch-perfect.

Clooney plays his sex-addict Treasury agent much the same as he played his characters in Intolerable Cruelty and O Brother, Where Art Thou? He's good, but it's like he's playing too hard for the laugh. Most the time, anyway. There are a handful of scenes where he gets right. But it makes the ones he doesn't stand out that much more. I expect more from the guy after Michael Clayton.

Pitt suffers from some of the same stuff, though he generally comes off funnier than Clooney. I've seen this version of Pitt before in Friends, The Mexican and even Thelma and Louise. That said, he's still funny. Pitt is criminally underrated as a comedic actor and seems to delight in playing morons for laughs. His Chad is damn funny, and by far funnier than Tom Green's.

Burn After Reading is good, but not great, and feels uneven. There were long stretches where I wasn't laughing, followed by moments of hilarity. Then again, it's not necessarily supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be somewhat surreal and absurd, something almost uniquely Coen.

Good stuff. I liked it. But I probably won't be buying it on Blu-ray.

They Might Be Giants

You remember Michael Mann's epic crime drama Heat? While that is one of the quintessential guy flicks, it's notable for starring both Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. It was the first flick the two storied actors starred in together.

It was more exciting back when Heat came out, imagining the thespianic mano y mano between DeNiro and Pacino. And then you sort of got the shaft as they only shared about 30 seconds of screen time.

I assume someone has been scheming up a project for the two ever since. I imagine it's easier now that both actors' careers have canted downward. Easier to afford to put both Pacino and DeNiro in your movie.

I'm not one of those who needed this movie. For one, I'm not really a Pacino fan. I think, as an actor, his time has passed and now someone's just paying him because of his rep. Also, he pretty much just chews the scenery in the same way.

DeNiro, I think anymore he just plays either (A.) tough-guy DeNiro or (B.) funny tough-guy DeNiro. Derivations of a theme, more or less.

This movie would've been more relevant in 2000, two years after Heat, instead of a decade. Now, a movie starring the two of them debuts in third place at the box office and nets a crummy $16 million.

Bah.

So here's the tale. Rooster (Pacino) and Turk (DeNiro) have been partners for a long, long time. They're brothers. But something has happened. You get flashes of DeNiro talking to the camera, confessing his murders. He's killed in cold blood, 14 people. Criminals, sure, but murder is murder.

We flash back prior to his confession, his voice leading him into the events that led to his sitting in the interrogation room confessing.

There's a serial killer on the loose, one who only kills the criminals who need killin'. Some people think it might be a cop.

Righteous Kill wants very much to be The Departed. It isn't, obviously. The source material isn't as good. It's not as smart or as well thought out as The Departed. In short, it's just another cop/crime drama. Nothing special, which is too bad. I wanted it to be good.

I almost wonder if these types of crime dramas, structured as they are, are going the way of the dodo.

Part of my problem is this: I guessed the twist about 10 minutes in. I typically try not to guess the rest of a movie. I try to sit in the dark and let the experience come to me. With this one, the twist came to me instead, and that made the second half of the film, which isn't very long to begin with, not terribly exciting.

The thing about twist endings... they tend to take away from the suspension of disbelief. Even if they're unlikely but plausible, the big "reveal" sort of ruins things. Why rely on a twist? Why not just write a solid narrative with good characters? If the characters are strong enough, then even events audiences have seen before play well.

There's actually little to Pacino and DeNiro's characters, other than plot-furthering dialogue. To be honest, I thought the two old guys were upstaged by John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg.

The final tally is this: Righteous Kill isn't great, but it's all right. It's a matinee or a wait-and-rent. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but it's just not that exciting. There's no tension.

See you next week.