Whatever you do don't eat the candy

This is a sad state of literature we've descended into. Not only are book shelves obsolete in homes and book stores going out of business, but now the books themselves are being carved up into bastardized versions of anything that passes as pop culture nowadays.

Here, for instance, is Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, a fairy tale turned into an action movie with kung-fu witches and witch hunters who wield automatic guns even though the film seems to be set in the 15th Century. The movie takes its cues from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by using timeless characters to introduce mindless action violence to a story that would otherwise have none. A finger should also be aimed at Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith's mash-up novel that gave the all-clear to a horde of talentless copycats.

This is cheap, stupid moviemaking, lowest common denominator type material. Aristotle Fights a Dragon. Gandhi Versus the Werewolves. Gatsby's Great Troll Hunt. Mark Twain: Beard Lice Executioner. See, anyone can shoehorn a historical or literary character into a dopey action film. I guess this is no different than those porcelain statues of Jesus playing football or ice hockey or stock-car racing. Maybe our society deserves material this thoughtless and trashy.

"Oh, you stick-in-the-mud, just roll with it and have some fun," is what you may be thinking here at this point. I would have had fun if there was any fun to be mined from Hansel & Gretel. Their wasn't. I did have high hopes, though, because I thought the movie was supposed to be a horror-comedy — certainly it would have landed better as a comedy — when all it aspired to be was a flavor of the week, a been-there-done-that failure, a witless story unaware of its own source material. Seriously, was Kate Beckinsale not available for another Underworld movie, is that why this was made?

It stars Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as Hansel and Gretel, the puritan children of a woodsman and a witch. Yeah, you read that part right — a witch. If you didn't remember momma witch in the original fairy tale about children in a witch's candy house, that's because it was just thrown in here to give Hansel and Gretel a gritty backstory that explains how they're left in the woods, immune to dark-magic spells (but not light-magic spells), come to fight witches as a career choice, and … oh geez, I'm already exhausted explaining the film's logic.

Hansel and Gretel are called to a sleepy forest village with a rash of child abductions. There they find lots of witches, a troll and many, many occasions for a gunfight. The brother-sister team use rotating-barrel pistols, belt-fed machine guns, spiked grenades, foldable sniper rifles with cluster-bomb bullets, devastating shotguns and spinning machine-crossbows that might as well be Transformers. This is three movies in a row (after Gangster Squad and The Last Stand) that has glorified guns to an uncomfortable degree. To Hansel & Gretel's credit, this is the first film do it in an age when guns did not exist. (And don't get cute and email me about how the Chinese had guns hundreds of years before this. The Chinese never had guns like this.)

Renner — a recent Academy Award nominee for The Hurt Locker, let me remind you — sleep-reads his way through this dreary plot, only occasionally showing that famous acting spark before smothering it in mundane dialogue that is too frequently of this variety: "Quick, over here," "Watch out," or "There she goes." Arterton is a bit more plucky if only because all the other women are plastic-haired witches with quite possibly the worst makeup effects in a Hollywood movie in recent memory. Now that the movie's over I wonder what Marilyn Manson's makeup team will be up to next.

Let me backtrack just a little: this could have been a hilarious movie. Looking at some of the trailers, the marketing team even accentuated some of the film's more comedic lines. Those moments are wasted in the actual film. I was expecting some laughs at all the modern references — like the weapons, a stun gun with a hand charger, a crude phonograph — juxtaposed against the fairy-tale backdrop. Even Your Highness found some gags that worked along those same lines. Instead the movie has two big laughs: one where we see the missing children's wood-cut images wrapped around old fashioned milk bottles, and another with Hansel seeing the candy house from his fairy tale — "Don't eat the fucking candy," he says grimly.

Everything else is bland fight scenes, photographed so close and with so many cuts it is hard to tell who's kick-punching who. The potential humor, like the original story, is purely fairy tale. 

Arnold's back, just like he promised

If you were wondering what a Chevy commercial would look like with more Second Amendment in it, then by all means check out the zaniness of The Last Stand.

And if those two elements — burnouts and bullets — weren’t enough, then let me just namedrop some guy they call Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s back, and in this pancake of schlock that’s so bad I started to appreciate it for its overt awfulness. You sorta cringe-smile your way through it, because, “Hey, look, Arnold’s back in the movies.”

Yes, after a lengthy foray into politics, Arnold is back in the acting business, though I use the phrase “acting” very loosely. The Last Stand is his first full starring role since the third Terminator movie in 2003. The years have been kind on the Governator: he’s a little more wrinkly and squinty, but he still looks like a mountain of muscle. Though he really should mash down that vertical boy-band haircut; it’s scaring the ladies at the senior center.

He plays Ray Owens, sheriff of the sleepy (and fictional) Arizona border town of Somerton Junction. After a cartel kingpin slips through FBI custody, Sheriff Owens only has half a day to prepare his three deputies for what is sure to be an all-out war as the fugitive attempts to cross into Mexico at a narrow ravine outside Somerton. The situation grows more dire after the kingpin creates all sorts of trouble as he drives through the Arizona desert in a tricked-out Corvette, a car that can do 95 mph in reverse and send SUVs toppling down the highway by simply brushing past them. There’s an ongoing trick where the Corvette turns its lights out and drives in the dark, and the police helicopter can’t find it because of an obvious mistake in the script: the helicopter’s flying 10 feet above the highway and it’s spotlight is apparently fixed in one position.

Chevrolet paid for the privilege to be in The Last Stand and it must have paid handsomely because every person in town drives a Chevy, from the mayor right on down to the football boosters. The term “product placement” implies that the products were semi-hidden within the scenery of a movie. This is something more akin to product cluster-bombing. And then, as if one racing Chevy weren’t enough, the last scene is a chase featuring two competing Chevy muscle cars. Neither is faster than the other, which is Chevy’s way of saying you should stop into your nearest dealership to buy both.

For being a comic-action movie, with Arnold’s deadpan delivery of jokes rubbing elbows with his gun-slinging machoness, there sure is a lot of murder in The Last Stand. At the Phoenix screening of the movie, local law enforcement, including Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was in attendance. What an unfortunate movie to invite cops to. In one scene, a dozen cops are gunned down, chunks of meat blasting from their wounds, as the villain races toward Somerton. Two scenes later, Johnny Knoxville, playing the local gun nut, shows up to a gunfight with nunchucks, a handgun longer than his arm and a matching medieval helmet and shield. I can’t imagine real cops enjoying watching movie cops die and then have the film turn into a slapstick comedy, with Knoxville shimmering up a telephone pole in his pajamas. The whole thing just felt uncomfortable.

The acting and dialogue in The Last Stand are agonizingly bad. Performances are terrible, which only compounds the awfulness of the writing. Much of the dialogue is unnecessary exposition from all parties, be it Forest Whitaker, who tells FBI agents who a cartel kingpin is, or Arnold explaining all his small-town problems to people who never asked for his laundry list of senior moments. Even poor Rodrigo Santoro, as the town’s ex-Marine — his “Semper Fi” tattoo is written in the Papyrus font, as if it were printed directly from a Word document — gets involved in all the mindless exposition. His first words in the movie, to an ex-girlfriend, are word diarrhea: “I can’t believe you dumped me because I’m a criminal, even though I’m a Marine and served in Iraq and came home and couldn’t cope with the emptiness.” Who speaks like that, besides bad screenwriters?

This is the way the movie unfolds, with a wistful abandon for logic. Arnold’s acting does not help matters. He’s actually become a worse actor in the last decade. I give him a pass, though, if only because Arnold Schwarzenegger is an institution and it’s terrific to see him back on the big screen as he blasts the evil from his town. His acting may be flat and wooden, but few other actors command such a presence on the screen.

The last third of The Last Stand is basically gun porn, with the sheriff and his deputies arming up against the kingpin’s henchmen, including a coolly wicked Peter Stormare, whose only weapon is a revolver apparently recovered from the Civil War. Then there’s a shotgun guy, two sniper guys, big machine gunners, and a guy with a bazooka. On the good side are Knoxville with the Howitzer assault pistol, a lady sniper, a granny with a concealed pistol, Arnold with a World War II machine gun and Luis Guzmán with a Tommy gun. All these characters are shown cleaning, loading, stroking, firing and posing with their guns in a way that can only be described as a love affair. I didn’t find it as tasteless and glorifying as last week’s Gangster Squad, but it is still way over the top and also oblivious to the ongoing national debate about guns.

I didn’t like all the guns and cars, though they are precisely what will appeal to many viewers of The Last Stand. I mostly enjoyed Arnold and his triumphant return. This is in no way his best movie, or his worst, but he’s back, just like he always said he would be. 

Gangster lives by the gun, dies by the gun

Before Gangster Squad was made, someone involved in its production probably found themselves watching L.A. Confidential and thinking, “This would be great with more guns.” And that’s how movies get made, folks.

It should be noted here that L.A. Confidential is a perfect movie, one that you probably would have heard more about if it didn’t come out three months before Titanic. It was a neo-noir police thriller filled with nuance and mystery; its pace was deliberately tedious and it rewarded careful viewing with dark secrets. Like the police in its plot, it plodded along on tips and hard-boiled hunches, not action sequences, although there are a few of those, too.

Now here is Gangster Squad, a movie that frames all of its drama behind cocked revolvers, racked shotguns and a chorus of ca-clicks as cop and crook alike ready machine guns for the purging of blood. Even when the guns aren’t spewing hot lead they’re used as clubs on heads and battering rams against ribcages. This all leads up to a glorifying slow-mo ballet of bullets shredding through a hotel lobby, tearing ornaments from a Christmas tree and obliterating furniture into explosions of shrapnel and splinters. The people behind Gangster Squad intended this to be beautiful. I found it sad.

Gangster Squad will go down in history as the commemorative trophy given to Americans to mark the beginning of the coming gun debate. Recall that after the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., trailers featuring a similar theater massacre in Gangster Squad were pulled from TV. The scenes were cut and replaced, and the movie was delayed by months. During the delay, Sandy Hook happened. Now it’s difficult to see gun violence in movies without thinking of real victims. This movie rubs your nose in it.

The Ruben Fleischer-directed movie stars James Brolin as Sgt. O’Mara, a no-nonsense cop given a free pass to take down real-life gangster Mickey Cohen, who held a tight grip around Los Angeles in the 1940s. We see Cohen first, as he’s using two cars to tear a snitch in half. He’s played by Sean Penn with a vile snarl and droopy prosthetic features around his eyes. Before he stretches a man's inside out all over the pavement, Cohen is shown clobbering away at a punching bag in slow motion, his veins bulging and his skin rippling from the explosive force of his punches. The audience is the punching bag. 

O’Mara’s first task is to recruit his team that will eventually include a smooth-talking playboy (Ryan Gosling), a radio nerd (Giovanni Ribisi), a Wild West gunslinger (Robert Patrick) and a Mexican rookie (Michael Peña). A knife-throwing vice cop (Anthony Mackie) also joins the team, but don’t expect the movie to comment about his race — the character is black — because, you know, it being the 1940s and all. It’s a curious omission.

With no laws governing the rogue team of cops, they set off to make life very unpleasant for Mickey Cohen and his rackets involving blackmailed judges, gambling dens, the heroin trade, extortion syndicates and sex parlors. Cohen, a very chatty gangster, invokes Manifest Destiny in his explanation of his expansion: “Everything. It’s all mine,” he says with a dame on his arm and a bulldog at his feet.

Gangster Squad has a wonderful look, from the boxy cars and Art Deco architecture to the square suits and palm-lined streets. It looks and feels authentic, even during CGI shots that pan across Hollywood Boulevard to reveal Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and then up to the hills where a sign reads (accurately) “Hollywoodland.” Even Gosling gets in the spirit by giving his character a higher-pitched timbre, the kind of voice you’d hear from characters in Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney movies.

Much of the dialogue even has a period-appropriate edge to it. “The penalty for poaching the king’s deer is a permanent vacation in a pine box,” one character says of Mickey Cohen’s girlfriends. In another scene, a police chief has a great noir-inspired line: “Two things you can’t take back in this job: bullets out of your gun and words out of your mouth.” The Anthony Mackie character has a line that draws laughs from Californians: “I always knew I’d die in Burbank.”

The dialogue is exceptional, but even it is drowned out by one action sequence after another as the gangster squad moves from shootout to shootout. One of the cops even suggests that their game plan is flawed: “We can’t keep doing it this way. Eventually, we’re going to get killed.” I kept thinking the pace would change after that line, but then it descended once again into another mindless shootout. The finale of the movie is all guns, every second of it, as the cops waltz into Cohen’s lair for a crescendo of lead-infused violence.

By accentuating the gunplay, Gangster Squad fails to explore the moral ambiguity of untethered police officers. How easy it would be to for them to hate the laws that define who they are. These men are mere inches away from being crooks themselves, but there they are fighting their own perceptions of right and wrong to protect the public. These are interesting subjects, but Gangster Squad ignores them because of its preoccupation with bullets.

I liked the look and feel of Gangster Squad, and I even greatly admired much of the writing and acting. Then it loses focus. And the gun violence is unsettling, especially in the way it’s glorified and stylized. We’re in a different world now, and Gangster Squad is still living in the old one.

"For God and Country — Geronimo"

In the years following 9/11, the American intelligence community believed in a theory that now seems like sketch comedy: Osama bin Laden, weak and frail, was avoiding a drone strike to the afterlife by hopping from cave to cave in remote areas of Pakistan, all while pulling a rolling dialysis machine behind him like a little red wagon. His robes were shredded, his beard frazzled, his nerves shot, his resolve faded.

Zero Dark Thirty is the story of another theory, one that turned out to yield a splendid fruit after so many empty harvests. It is told with methodical detail by Kathryn Bigelow, the very talented director of The Hurt Locker, another film about an unpopular subject — American involvement in the Arab world. In both films she proves adept at the language and feel of the military, and how they inhabit a deadly space and time within Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. In Zero Dark Thirty, she tells a story over roughly eight years, as a brilliant CIA analyst works through the bin Laden mystery one clue at a time. It begins in darkness with the sirens, screams and panicked voices of Sept. 11, 2011. 

The agent is Maya and she is played exceptionally focused by Jessica Chastain, a busy actress with unlimited talent. Maya is introduced in the film’s most controversial moments, during an interrogation scene that quickly descends into all-out torture. I found it ironic that she wears a business suit into the dusty cell where a cruel and dirty business takes place. Inside the cell, a man is hung by his wrists from ropes from the ceiling. He's hungry, weeping and he's soiled his clothes. 

I’ve heard of the practice of water boarding, but to see it used, even as a stunt in a movie, is horrific and claustrophobic. You will treasure every breath you take during the sequence. Members of Congress have recently said these torture scenes are unequivocally false, that no torture took place in the hunt for bin Laden. That proclamation, hollow and vacuous, comes from the same Congress that just let the country skin its knees scraping itself back up the fiscal cliff that it created, so you decide who has the facts right. I think torture happened, and I think it probably happened the way the movie shows us: a bunch of bearded CIA guys in jeans dumping water on captured al Qaeda fighters’ faces.

The torture, as brutal as it is, pays off at first. Maya is given a tip on a courier for UBL, the acronym the CIA used for the alternately spelled Usama bin Laden. Maya plucks away at other sources, online chatter, computer databases and her CIA counterparts in other countries to get verification of the courier, which takes years and dozens of American lives. They eventually find the courier — by tracking a wandering and rarely used cell phone — and track him to Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the rest is history.

The final raid serves as the ultimate climax for the movie — and it might be the most authentic real-life climax to any story in American history — but the heart of Zero Dark Thirty is in the buildup to the raid. If you found Lincoln boring because it had “too much talking,” then it’s unlikely you’ll appreciate much of this film’s covert research and data gathering. There are no shootouts or chase scenes, no moments of special effects overload. The few explosions seen, including the devastating Camp Chapman attack, are based on real terrorist reprisals and are thrown into the landscape to punctuate how rattled Maya and other CIA analysts were making terrorist operatives.

Bigelow films all this in dusty locations that serve as Afghanistan and Pakistan. I admired all the little details, like how Maya’s office is a cluttered and dusty cubicle in a grimy building somewhere in Pakistan, not some underground bunker with walls of flat-screens like the lair of some Bond villain. Another detail I liked: her theories were based on research, not espionage. Maya rappelling into a terrorist camp wearing a rubbery jumpsuit to plant high-tech homing devices on RPG launchers might have been more interesting for the Michael Bay crowd, but Bigelow sticks to the facts. Instead Maya catches her breaks because she does her homework, which includes watching interrogation interviews, reading reports and understanding the complex tribal regions of the Middle East — you know, actual intelligence gathering.

This is an intelligent thriller, one prodded along with a tremendous cast led by Chastain, who let her Maya be ruthless and pig-headed. There’s a recurring scene where she daiily writes out the number of days since the discovery of the Abbottabad compound with no action. She writes the numbers, eventually a three-digit one, on her boss’ window as a way to intimidate him into a plan. Jason Clarke, who we last saw with Chastain in moonshine drama Lawless, plays the most prominent male lead, a man who questions his actions and whether or not he’ll ever be normal again because of them. Kyle Chandler and Jennifer Ehle also give noteworthy performances as competing CIA analysts. James Gandolfini plays then CIA Director Leon Panetta in a handful of sequences, including one with a line by Chastain that might be the film’s most memorable: "I'm the mother-fucker who found this place," Maya tells Paneta.

By the time we’re sitting in a hangar with stealth helicopters and SEAL Team Six — “with your dip, your beards, your vests” — the film has earned that payoff because we know that CIA intuition and research is what brought us to this point. The raid itself, representing the last quarter of the movie, is thrilling and gut-wrenching, but still far removed from an action movie. I was surprised how slow it all happened. Doors were breached, rooms were cleared and silenced weapons were fired, but it all moved at a gentle pace. The raid sequence was shot in that green-tinted night vision style, and it provides some haunting visuals, including of soldiers moving silently through the bin Laden compound, their shadows clinging to walls and doorways. And nothing will shake your American spirit like hearing a soldier say, “For God and country — Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” the code word for the death of Osama bin Laden. (Interestingly, the title Zero Dark Thirty is a military reference to 12:30 a.m., when the raid kicked off.)

This is one of the finest films of 2012 (it had a limited opening in December), and also one of the most victorious in its delivery, performances and ending. And speaking of its ending, Maya is asked, “Where would you like to go?” She doesn’t answer. With bin Laden dead, and 9/11 stretching further into our past, where we go from here is not up to her, but to us.

Damon scams from The Promised Land

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, is a method to withdraw natural gas from rock layers beneath us by polluting the soil, poisoning the water, destroying the local economy and driving the population away. The natural gas isn’t sucked out as much as it’s frightened out by a campaign of shock and awe.

This is a personal opinion, one that I think director Gus Van Sant shares with me in his devastating new film Promised Land. Whether you think fracking is an energy savior or world destroyer hardly matters, because the film is more interested in how far an energy company would go to secure its profits. In my opinion, pretty far. If a new energy source were discovered inside baby penguins, Exxon Mobil would have half the world’s penguin population liquefied on a tanker within about a month’s time.

In Promised Land the company is called Global, a multi-national conglomerate energy group that is very good at investing in energy, be it oil or natural gas. Global sends in Steve Butler, a “town closer,” to begin leasing land from rural town folk in America’s heartland. Steve (Matt Damon) came from a small town just like this, he tells people, and he even wears his grandpappy’s work boots, too. Oh, and let him tell you about the time he painted the family barn. His down-home patter is a well-oiled machine. He goes first to the large farms, where he tells them Global will pay a cut of anything they make on their land. The farmers stand to make thousands while Global makes millions. What Steve doesn’t tell them is that their water will be a milky white and on some days they’ll be able to light it on fire right out of the kitchen sink.

Some people sign up, and others refuse. The town’s high school science teacher (Hal Holbrook) speaks some sense about fracking and its many dangers, but for some the lure of untold money is too great. The town’s mayor accepts a bribe and jumps right on board. When anyone does mention fracking’s risks, Steve admits that there are some bad companies out there, “but not Global.” He refuses to believe that his company would not tell him explicitly if fracking were dangerous; his naïve attitude about his employer is his one fault.

Promised Land plops forward at an easy pace until eco-warrior Dustin (John Krasinski) shows up to disrupt Steve’s sales pitch. Dustin and Steve are equals on opposite poles of an idea: they’re both likable, they’re both reassuring in their reasoning, they both exude confidence, and they both fall for a local teacher (Rosemarie DeWitt), who they use as a sounding board for their various ideas. She can see through both of them. By the end, after the town has heard both sides of the fracking debate, the film sprung a twist on me so great, so devious, so utterly convincing that I’m surprised I didn’t see it coming a mile down the road.

Van Sant and Damon haven’t worked together since 1997 — it’s been too long for their reunion. Damon is given a lengthy monologue so powerful and heartbreaking that it reminded me of Robin Williams’ “Sistine Chapel” speech from Good Will Hunting, Damon and Van Sant’s last collaboration together. The film is written by Damon and Krasinski, and based on a story by writer David Eggers. The writing is sharp and clean, and it sparkles with nuance and detail. There’s a scene where Steve closes a lease deal with a poor family in a trailer. The father breaks out the expensive alcohol for a toast. Later, to Steve’s horror, the father shows up in a new Corvette because, you know, “we’ll be rich soon,” he says. The movie is filled with little scenes like this, and they’re all exceptional.

Ultimately, what happens is that Steve must decide where his loyalties lie — with his principles or with Global. That’s not a spoiler. You could see it coming in the first scenes. What’s astonishing is not his choice, but how he comes to make it.