Eagle Eye asks audiences to suspend disbelief to an unfathomable level. It might preface the request with this: “Don’t most thrillers, though?” Yes, but this one deserves some kind of special plaque, a pat on the head or maybe just a footnote in cinema history for plotting impossible developments and then asking us to believe them without chuckling.
But go ahead and chuckle, because on a deeper level Eagle Eye has to know it’s ridiculous. And if it doesn’t, then the fact that it takes itself so seriously could easily be just as funny.
The movie is one of those robots-become-aware science-fiction movies. It’s less sci-fi than say The Matrix or the Terminator movies, but it involves the same concept: a computer given artificial intelligence will start to make decisions it was never intended to make, including the elimination of the human element that created it. The genre, hardly a fresh one, was probably kick-started in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000 refused to open the pod bay doors for poor Dave Bowman. Here, the computer is Eagle Eye and its purpose is to use advanced algorithms to protect the United States from terrorism. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The plot settles on Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), a perpetual loser who works at a copy store in a bad part of town. One day his normally empty bank account is overloaded with funds and his usually bare apartment is overloaded with military hardware, including weapons, all of which are iron-clad proof of terrorist activity when the FBI arrives in door-smashing mode. Of course, Jerry is framed, but the hows and whys elude him until he starts getting phone calls from an icy-cold OnStar voice that tells him when to jump, duck and get on trains.
The voice — which can contact Jerry through hijacked cell phones, electronic billboards and anything slightly less illogical than biplanes writing in smoke in the sky — guides Jerry away from capture and deeper into trouble on a mission that is never clear until he arrives at the Pentagon the evening of the State of the Union. All along the route, he meets other victims of the voice who are given equally perplexing tasks that somehow fit into a larger plot that may involve explosive crystals, a trumpet and a computer named Aria. One of the victims, and Jerry’s travel companion, is Rachel (Michelle Monaghan, Made of Honor), whose son, a young and white version of Morgan Freeman, is threatened with train derailment should she not help Jerry on his thrill-a-minute quest.
Eagle Eye reminds me a great deal of North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic adventure about an innocent man who gets wrapped up in an international espionage scandal. The man (Cary Grant), some desk jockey at an ad agency, is forced to become a spy to prove he’s not a spy, which confirmed Hitchcock’s theory that regular people are far more interesting than action heroes. LaBeouf is no Cary Grant, but he plays the character with an invigorating zeal. He did an equally commendable job last summer when he played a Jimmy Stewart role in Disturbia, which was a loose copy of Hitchcock’s Rear Window — all LaBeouf’s missing now is a horror movie at a hotel (Psycho) and detective-thriller in San Francisco (Vertigo) to complete his neo-Hitchcock canon.
What a likeable guy Shia is. I’ve interviewed him twice and both times he was so wired with energy — naturally or chemically, I don’t know — it was infectious. He seems ambitious and that oozes from his roles. He sometimes seems like a punk, but he’s a punk with depth to his performances, even if they involve talking transforming robots. There’s a moment toward the end of Eagle Eye, with LaBeouf in a police officer’s uniform running around the catacombs of the Library of Congress, when I realized LaBeouf is one of the most consistently entertaining young actors working now, and this role is no exception. Although, I would have appreciated a better ending, one that didn't use the Shoulder Wound Rule.
LaBeouf’s character is chased by some other great actors, including Rosario Dawson as an Air Force investigator and Billy Bob Thornton as a G-man who does a Hollywood first: he has an air-to-ground battle with an unmanned Predator drone in a traffic-jammed tunnel. (On a side note, Live Free or Die Hard featured almost the same idea but spread out over three different sequences.)
In terms of plausibility, Eagle Eye starts to go haywire right at the beginning when military special forces deploy a modified paper airplane to track a terrorist. Later, when Eagle Eye goes online it seems to alter everything in the known universe to get Jerry to go where it wants. How can this be when at any given time 97 percent of the world’s computers aren’t communicating properly with the printers they’re hooked up next to? So yes, this is a very smart computer. Too smart, in fact, which is why it can control buses, traffic lights, sprinkler systems, military cargo planes, automated junkyard claws and every cell phone regardless of provider or minutes of use. In terms of functionality, it even tops the intelligent jet in Stealth, which, in an effort to learn, “downloaded the Internet … all of it.”
The actual hardware of Eagle Eye is housed 36 floors beneath the Pentagon in what looks like one of Tesla’s electric current experiments. Inexplicably, it’s stored over a lake of water, which makes me question its intelligence, but nevermind. It freely quotes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, yet somehow still justifies killing people with high-voltage lines and 18-wheelers. Once the film establishes the power and the reach of the all-knowing computer, I found myself longing for a human villain instead of this floating computer orb.
But see, therein lies the dilemma with computer villains: they are flawed, often more so, than human characters. I have one of those GPS navigation systems in my car. It’s ingenious: it can not only tell me how to get somewhere and by what route, but also the arrival time within a couple of minutes. It maps any road in the United States, even some outback goat paths, and it can talk to me in 15 different languages including Suomi, which is the official language of Finland. But as clever as it is, sometimes the damn thing tells me to drive around a city block when I’m 30 yards from my destination. Sometimes, when at red lights, it shows that I’m parked past the intersection or at the next light. No computer system will be perfect, yet Eagle Eye’s is perfection personified, a technological marvel of the ages, which is why it doesn't work — it's too unrealistic.
As dopey-smart as Eagle Eye’s villain is, though, the movie has some killer stunts, a fast-moving pace and relentless action. Some of the chase sequences feature that Bourne Ultimatum hyper-editing style that’s likely to cause a seizure; I hate that style, but I’m in the minority ever since Bourne won an editing Oscar back in March. I’ve really railed on some of the plot elements, but I had a good time and found LaBeouf’s presence amid the mayhem an enjoyable factor. Just don’t go into Eagle Eye expecting to come out any smarter.
There are no naked celebrities on this page so feel free to click away if you reached this blog by mistake. No hard feelings.
Two weeks ago Roger Ebert wrote about the brilliant little SiteMeter he put on his blog — take a look at the bottom of this page if you haven't seen one yet. I had a SiteMeter before his post, so I was stoked to read his comments, which reinforced the little gadget's curious skills. The little green button links to its home base, where it tracks visitors to this page. It catalogs their visit: how long they stayed, where they came from and where they left to. It's completely anonymous except for a little blip that will appear on a world map indicating where the click originated, be it northeast Phoenix or Norway. One list on SiteMeter, called referrals, shows the page the visitor was on when they clicked onto this page. Sometimes the pre-PickupFlix page is a Yahoo or Google search. Incidentally, SiteMeter has a funny little trick to its cataloging: it preserves the original search criteria of the visitor. So not only can I see that they visited my site, but that they clicked into it after searching for "Humphrey Bogart movies" or "great cop flicks." Or maybe the occasional "Marisa Tomei nude."
Yes, there are lots of people looking for porn on the net. Apparently some get sent to my page which is 100 percent porn-free. I first noticed this lost-porn-surfer phenomenon after naming a non-nude photo of Vanessa Hudgens "tween," which sent droves of assistant principals to this page to see Miss Hudgens sans clothes. Creepy indeed. (I've since renamed the photo, by the way.) One variation on the "tween" search was "tweens nude," which my blog was able to keep up with since, three posts before the one with Hudgens, I had used the word "nude" to describe a plot element in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. Yahoo and Google have a hard time analyzing the distance between searched words apparently, so as long as "nude" and "(insert your favorite female celebrity's name here)" appear on the same page it counts them as if they appeared in the same sentence.
The phenomenon came up again after running a piece on rapper and pop superstar M.I.A., less commonly known as Mathangi Arulpragasam. She played the 2007 Vegoose music festival, where I was photographing her. Shortly after her set (like 2 seconds) I decided she was the hottest thing on the planet. I'm sidetracking, but I write that only to underscore her abilities to charm men out of their socks. Anyway, the piece ran last December, yet every week I get a lovely array of Mathangi Arulpragasam searches. Here's a small cross section of some of the searches: "MIA topless," "MIA nip slip," "MIA sex video," "MIA bra flash," "MIA crotch shot," and all kinds of variations of "MIA nude" and "MIA naked," because apparently there's a difference. Now, let me again clarify something: It would be delightful to see M.I.A. naked, but until M.I.A. actually comes to my door to remove her clothing for a visual inspection by me then I'm going to assume that she does not want me to see her in nothing but her skin. So I just kinda skip the internet treasure hunt for Mathangi Arulpragasam nip slips and sex videos.
That, of course, doesn't stop hundreds of others who cozy up in front of their computers to begin their nightly searches of "Megan Fox lesbian video" or "Zooey Deschanel no panties." Curiously, I've yet to have anyone land on Pick-Up Flix after they've searched for "Laura Dern nip slips," "Kathy Bates hot tub video" or "Christina Aguilera breastfeeding in clown makeup." And, yes, I realize that by including these searchable phrases in this text that I'm increasing the chances of random porn seekers landing on this page instead of their beloved nude sites. It doesn't matter because they stopped reading a long time ago; in fact, they stopped reading as soon as they didn't see any "Jenna Fischer see-through dress" photos, which would be rad but, alas, they don't exist. Yet.
But going back to M.I.A., if I had to talk about a winner this summer it would be her. She didn't release a movie, or even a new album, but her "Paper Planes" in the Pineapple Express trailer was brilliant on a level that I have yet to define in any sort of articulate way. I loved the video and its catchy song so much that I sorta regretted watching the movie when I could have just watched the trailer again.
Remove one element from every Coen Brothers movie — indeed the exact same element from each — and what you’re left with is normal, run-of-the-mill movies of no great importance, mediocre flicks that garner sub-par reviews and moderate box-office takes.
Yes, their direction is exceptionally good, but in each of their movies the writing/directing duo weave one thing throughout their stories, one thing that unites all the characters with all the plot devices, one thing that exaggerates and manipulates the story just enough to make a basic story so utterly profound and diabolically sinister. That element: language. It’s the way the characters talk, the way they syntax their sentences, that twitchy diction, those Southern drawls, those glib jabs and frustrated burps of dialogue. The Coens don’t just direct great talkers, they write great talkers. Their scripts are full of colorful characters, nearly every one of which has an interesting manner in which he or she communicates.
Look at any of their works, even the early ones. Look at Raising Arizona, that madcap comedy that somehow manages to wring laughs out of child abduction of all subjects. Listen to the way Holly Hunter squeals at her no-good husband, the way she blasts through her thoughts in stammering run-ons and then howls those elongated syllables. All Nic Cage can do is grumble and fumble back, pecking out his lines like they were unwanted chores assigned to him. Cage and Hunter are talented performers, but these lines were not written nor directed by them. They may have breathed life into them, but they were spawned by the Coens, magicians of the English language, virtuosic players of the spoken word.
Raising Arizona is the absolute tip of the iceberg. Listen to Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy, confident and jeering in those crisp suits and that inflated ego. Listen to every character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? — those Southern twangers, gulping hillbillies, magnetic simpletons and Holly Hunter, who returns to utter what may be the most convincing non-sensical line in Coen history (“He’s bona fide.”) Listen to one of their more mediocre films, The Ladykillers, where a Tom Hanks pulls a Col. Sander-like baritone bravado with a highfalutin gentleman of the bayou. Listen to No Country for Old Men, in which Tommy Lee Jones uses a back-country form of English so effectively it transcends acting altogether; he speaks his words like he’s lived them. We could go on for several more movies (two more at great length below), but the point is that Joel and Ethan Coen use their characters’ language — tempo, timbre, tone, saliva, pauses, coughs and … everything — to heighten the detail and impact of their stories. Credit also goes the actors who breathe life into the dialogue; indeed, casting is as important to a Coen film as the manner of speech of the characters. But really the origins of the greatness exist long before the films are ever cast. The two examples that best show the style the Coens utilize were released about two years apart and each redefined they way people viewed these two talented writers and directors — The Big Lebowski, released in 1998, and Fargo, released in 1996.
First, let us consider Fargo, a movie of surprising detail and scope considering its setting is a white-empty canvas and it takes place in remote, lifeless locations. Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is a police chief and she’s very pregnant. She speaks in an accent I’ve since learned is called Minnesota Nice; it’s almost too comical to be real, but I’ve since found out it is a very real dialect. Roger Ebert, who was forgivably critical of the language in Raising Arizona in his 1987 review, wrote it best in one of his Great Movies essays: “Marge Gunderson is one of a handful of characters whose names remain in our memories, like Travis Bickle, Tony Manero, HAL 9000, Fred C. Dobbs. They are completely, defiantly themselves in movies that depend on precisely who they are. Marge is the chief in Brainerd, Minn., still has bouts of morning sickness, eats all the junk food she can get her hands on, speaks in a ‘you betcha’ Minnesota accent where ‘yeah,’ pronounced ya, is volleyed like a refrain.” Roger goes on, praising the acting, directing and especially the method of the dialogue.
Marge has this way about her: very soft-spoken and friendly, prone to strange bouts of regional slang (“There in a jif.”) and her language colors her with so much more detail. The way she communicates with people is so effective that Jerry Lundegaard, the man who orchestrates the bulk of the plot, finds it uncomfortable and invading, especially since he’s guilty of a lot more than he’s admitting to. Marge appears late in the movie, and before we get to hear her wonderful “I think I’m gonna barf” line we are able to communicate openly with many other characters, including Carl (Steve Buscemi), a man so obsessed with communicating with his near-mute partner that it becomes test of wills. At one point he tries to respond about a car in an intelligent way, gets frustrated, trips over his words and simply says, “Ah fuck it, let’s take a look at the Sierra” — in a sense, his limits to communication have been breached and he throws his hands up in defeat. This is one of many interesting examinations of the movie’s language. Consider later when Carl’s shot in the mouth, a clear assault on his verbal communication skills. And all the while his partner is silent, and those associated with him, like Shep Proudfoot, can only respond in monosyllables. Every character in this movie is given a device in their language. Jerry, who was hurt by his father-in-law’s words (“Gene and Scotty will never have to worry,” he says implying his money is no good for Jerry), communicates in lies, in “bold-face lies” making his language an integral part of his manipulations. Later, when he’s setting up another lie, the Coens allow him to practice his language before making that fateful and deceptive phone call to his father-in-law. Jerry and several other characters are given other forms of communication, too: they beat on iced windows, bang on snowy TV sets and slam the contents of a desk — clearly their mouths can’t express what boils over inside them.
The Coens use these devices in almost literary ways, and they are backed up by the images on the screen. Notice the bleak high-angle parking lot shot as Jerry walks to his car to bang on his window. It isn’t just a wonderful shot designed to amuse our eyes; it shows us how isolated and alone Jerry has become. Notice the tracks in the snow run opposite those Jerry’s car; it’s as if he were traveling against the film’s flow, grating past his moral limits and interrupting the lives of those around him. Language is important to Fargo not just because it transports us to Fargo and Brainerd, the home of Paul Bunyan, but because it transports us into the cop’s quaint lifestyle, the car salesman’s bitter plight, the kidnapper’s lonely assignment, and the murderer’s nihilistic rage. There has been some dissenting opinion on this with regards to Fargo. For instance, consider the writing of reporter James Lileks, who is actually from Fargo and found the accent of the characters as annoying and superficial as the film’s violence. He writes: “People in Minneesohta do talk that way, ya know. Yes, it’s funny to hear people plot, you know, that murder-type deal there in an accent better suited for swapping hot-dish recipes. I don’t think the accent is inherently funny, but that’s because it’s familiar … The real problem was the audience. I saw Fargo in Minneapolis, a supper-hour showing at the Mall of America. Behind us was a couple in their sixties who apparently had chosen this movie based on the title. Perhaps they expected a western. When characters started cussing, I could hear legs being crossed and uncrossed. When the policeman was brainer’d, there was a slight sigh of disappointment. Half an hour into the film, I heard the woman whisper: ‘Well, this is different.’ … In Fargo-speak, that means this is a raw horror blown straight from Satan’s colon, and any decent person would disapprove. I was embarrassed for them. And for me as well. It was a replay of those trying moments when you rent a videotape to watch with your parents, and suddenly the characters are naked and having sex.”
But to counter his response, he doesn’t have the luxury of being not from Fargo like most of the viewers of the movie, most of whom will find the dialogue to be expressive and a defining factor of the film. Language — not just what is said but how it is said — allows us inside the turbulent world of characters that can’t be unfolded just by looking at them. The Coens have mastered it with every picture.
The other film, The Big Lebowski, follows a similar approach. The movie, an inside-out deviation of the film noir — it asks the question: What if Sam Spade were a loser bowler? — not only created a believable world for its eccentric characters to flourish, but it nourished and enriched a growing cult following that now call The Dude an unlikely saint (St. Duder, maybe). The Coens took what could have been any one of James M. Cain’s pulpy detective stories and flipped it on its head and then blew bong hits in its face. And it did this using language. Deadbeats have been in film noir before: Detour, for instance, had a famous deadbeat, as did The Killers. But never has a deadbeat been given so much meaningless dialogue before in a film noir. Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski is a cursing, existential nobody. He has a rug that “really ties the room together,” calls the bowling alley a home away from home, has spliffs that tumble from his pockets when he leaves change for coffee, consumes glass after glass of White Russians, and oh I can’t forget, his Creedence collection in his heap of a car. But more than anything, he has his mouth, a ranting hole of mindless philosophy, deliberate stupidity and simple brilliance.
The Coens have since said The Dude really exists, but I doubt he was this philosophical or crude with his tongue. In Fargo everyone speaks in turns; in Lebowski the dialogue overlaps three and four times creating tapestries of voices and ideas. While Dude rants Walter rants louder and Donny, who wears bowling shirts with every name but his own (proving his ghost-like status in the film), chimes in with question. Donny’s chatter always produces the same response from Walter: “Shut the fuck up, Donny.” It’s language as a weapon, which happens throughout the film with Walter, who intimidates and hurts with his words. Other performances: the nihilists with their cruddy English and thick German clicks, Big Lebowski’s assistant who uses his swollen Harvard language to promote himself and his employer, Maude and her faux British elitism, and finally Maude’s friend (David Thewlis) who uses giggles to stab at Dude’s eardrums. The dialogue is even self-referential: “Do you speak English,” Big Lebowski says to The Dude; later we’re explained words, that sex is coitus and coitus is sex; not long after we’re told men fear the word “vagina”; and when the stranger (Sam Elliott) makes one of his quick appearances he asks if the dude has to swear so much. Speaking of the stranger, he translates stuff into his own vernacular — “I ain’t never been to France, and I ain’t never seen the queen in her damned undies either …” The Coens are manipulating language for our benefit, otherwise what they would have given us would have been a basic, even boring, mystery.
The way the Coens write dialogue is important and by looking at how things are said, in what manner, in what speed and in what tone, we can analyze and come to our own conclusions about what they’re trying to tell us. Whether it be Marge Gunderson or The Dude, language can diagnose their agenda, rip through the plot to reveal the methods and tactics of their players, and the language cuts through the genre to reveal truly intelligent and important filmmaking, the kind we talk about — and quote — for years to come.
Eagle Eye asks audiences to suspend disbelief to an unfathomable level. It might preface the request with this: “Don’t most thrillers, though?” Yes, but this one deserves some kind of special plaque, a pat on the head or maybe just a footnote in cinema history for plotting impossible developments and then asking us to believe them without chuckling. 
The plot settles on Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), a perpetual loser who works at a copy store in a bad part of town. One day his normally empty bank account is overloaded with funds and his usually bare apartment is overloaded with military hardware, including weapons, all of which are iron-clad proof of terrorist activity when the FBI arrives in door-smashing mode. Of course, Jerry is framed, but the hows and whys elude him until he starts getting phone calls from an icy-cold OnStar voice that tells him when to jump, duck and get on trains. 
The voice — which can contact Jerry through hijacked cell phones, electronic billboards and anything slightly less illogical than biplanes writing in smoke in the sky — guides Jerry away from capture and deeper into trouble on a mission that is never clear until he arrives at the Pentagon the evening of the State of the Union. All along the route, he meets other victims of the voice who are given equally perplexing tasks that somehow fit into a larger plot that may involve explosive crystals, a trumpet and a computer named Aria. One of the victims, and Jerry’s travel companion, is Rachel (Michelle Monaghan, Made of Honor), whose son, a young and white version of Morgan Freeman, is threatened with train derailment should she not help Jerry on his thrill-a-minute quest. 
What a likeable guy Shia is. I’ve interviewed him twice and both times he was so wired with energy — naturally or chemically, I don’t know — it was infectious. He seems ambitious and that oozes from his roles. He sometimes seems like a punk, but he’s a punk with depth to his performances, even if they involve talking transforming robots. There’s a moment toward the end of Eagle Eye, with LaBeouf in a police officer’s uniform running around the catacombs of the Library of Congress, when I realized LaBeouf is one of the most consistently entertaining young actors working now, and this role is no exception. Although, I would have appreciated a better ending, one that didn't use the Shoulder Wound Rule.
In terms of plausibility, Eagle Eye starts to go haywire right at the beginning when military special forces deploy a modified paper airplane to track a terrorist. Later, when Eagle Eye goes online it seems to alter everything in the known universe to get Jerry to go where it wants. How can this be when at any given time 97 percent of the world’s computers aren’t communicating properly with the printers they’re hooked up next to? So yes, this is a very smart computer. Too smart, in fact, which is why it can control buses, traffic lights, sprinkler systems, military cargo planes, automated junkyard claws and every cell phone regardless of provider or minutes of use. In terms of functionality, it even tops the intelligent jet in Stealth, which, in an effort to learn, “downloaded the Internet … all of it.” 
The actual hardware of Eagle Eye is housed 36 floors beneath the Pentagon in what looks like one of Tesla’s electric current experiments. Inexplicably, it’s stored over a lake of water, which makes me question its intelligence, but nevermind. It freely quotes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, yet somehow still justifies killing people with high-voltage lines and 18-wheelers. Once the film establishes the power and the reach of the all-knowing computer, I found myself longing for a human villain instead of this floating computer orb. 
But see, therein lies the dilemma with computer villains: they are flawed, often more so, than human characters. I have one of those GPS navigation systems in my car. It’s ingenious: it can not only tell me how to get somewhere and by what route, but also the arrival time within a couple of minutes. It maps any road in the United States, even some outback goat paths, and it can talk to me in 15 different languages including Suomi, which is the official language of Finland. But as clever as it is, sometimes the damn thing tells me to drive around a city block when I’m 30 yards from my destination. Sometimes, when at red lights, it shows that I’m parked past the intersection or at the next light. No computer system will be perfect, yet Eagle Eye’s is perfection personified, a technological marvel of the ages, which is why it doesn't work — it's too unrealistic. 
