Movie Reviews - 2014 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

Watching “Deux jours, une nuit,” the new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (“Le gamin au velo”), I kept flashing back to my days canvassing for Greenpeace. Also Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.”

Part of the problem with “Munich” was the counting game. Five Mossad agents are going after the 11 terrorists who killed Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics, and the first kill takes a while. So does the second. You think, “There are nine more of these?” There aren’t, not that way, but the anticipation of the count, how much more we have to go, weighs on you as you watch.

In “Deux jours,” Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a working girl recently suffering from depression. But she is back “en forme” as she says on the phone to a friend, only to learn that in her absence the boss decided he didn’t need all 17 workers, only 16, and so, apparently unable to fire her outright, offered his employees a Faustian bargain: Sandra could keep her job but they would all lose a €1,000 bonus. Their call. Fourteen of the 16 opt for the dough. But her friend, Juliette (Catherine Salée), claims the foreman unfairly influenced the election, and works to get another vote Monday morning. This gives Sandra the weekend to visit and talk with her coworkers; to get them on her side; to get them to give up €1,000 for her.

That’s the canvassing-for-Greenpeace thing: going door-to-door and asking for money.

It’s also the counting game: She has 14 people to visit—no, 13, she just won somebody on the phone—and you think, a la “Munich,” surely we won’t get each of these.

We do. But you know what’s interesting? It’s interesting.

Canvassing for Greenpeace
It helps that it’s Marion Cotillard doing the asking. The Dardennes try to make her look average, but ... Well, bon effort. I think their efforts backfire, to be honest. I think Cotillard looks better without much makeup, with less covering her face. At one point, Sandra is crying, telling her husband, Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), how she feels invisible, and he’s consoling her with the words husbands usually use, but all I could think was: “Plus you’re one of the most beautiful women in the world. So you’ve got that going for you.”

Cotillard acts the movie slightly hunched, as if Sandra is trying to hide from the world, which she is. She’s a fragile woman, with two kids, fighting for a blue-collar job, but she just wants to go to her room and go to sleep. Maybe forever? Plus she’s just too nice. She almost makes the case against herself during the visits: €1,000, c’mon, everyone needs that. And nothing comes of the first two.

If she doesn’t convince the third, either, it’s only because he’s already decided. His name is Timur (first-time actor Timur Magomedgadzhiev), and he’s on the futbol field, coaching, when she visits late Saturday morning and asks if he’ll vote with her. He stares at her intensely. “Of course I will,” he says. Then he breaks down crying. He remembers how she helped him out in the past. He’s felt so guilty since the day before. “I’m really glad you’re here,” he says. It’s a welcome moment—for her and for us. It’s such a release, I began to laugh. She’s now got four with nine to go.

That’s also why it’s interesting. It’s scorekeeping. It’s less, “God, we’ve still got five more to go,” and more, “Oh no, we’ve only got five more to go!”

Then there’s the variety of responses. Most are like her—seeing both sides—and some fall this way and some that. A few are vehemently for her, while a few think she’s stealing from them. One gets violent.

It’s this aspect, the variety of responses, that really reminded me of canvassing for Greenpeace. You never knew what was behind that door. Most were blasé. A few were totally glad to see you. Then there were the angry people. They made you feel like you didn’t want to go on.

Sandra feels this way most of the time. She’s the exact wrong person to be doing this: an introvert getting over depression. But off she goes. And her pitch improves. A bit. It’s not like she begins as herself, fumbling and hemming and hawing, and winds up like William Jennings Bryan; she just gets a little better.

“Little” is the optimum word here. “Deux jours, une nuit” is all small, straightforward moments. It’s this small window into these small lives. Even the big moment—the attempted suicide—happens so straightforwardly, with so little drama, that when it’s happening you hardly realize it, and when it’s revealed to others it’s not without humor.

Turning up the volume
In the end, Sandra doesn’t win. She gets eight of the 16, and that’s not a majority, so there goes her job. But the boss is impressed that she did as well as she did, so he offers her a Faustian bargain: In a few months, he’ll let go one of the contractors—a man who just voted with her—and she’ll get his job. Sandra turns him down. Because in a way she’s already won. Just the struggle to visit everyone, to do this thing, is a victory for her. “We put up a good fight,” she tells her husband on the phone. “I’m happy.” It’s a nice ending. I’m a fan of win-by-losing movies (ex.: “Casablanca”), and this is that.

Two additional things.

One—and not to be a drag—but every job is a kind of Faustian bargain. It’s competition: you vs. every other applicant for the position. That’s why people like Sandra, the empathetic ones, tend to get ground up. They don’t have the stomach for it.

The second thing is a little embarrassing. Because it’s gushy. About You-Know-Who.

There’s a moment in the movie where I felt like I fell in love all over again. Sandra and her husband are driving to visit another coworker. She’s tired, worn down, and on the radio the French version of “Needles and Pins” comes on, which Manu mutes slightly. Because? She thinks he’s worried too much about her state of mind, that he’s trying to protect her from the sad songs of the world, and she objects. And in defiance she turns up the volume. Then she smiles.

It’s not a pretty smile, necessarily. It’s not a smile to grace the cover of a magazine. But there’s a world in it. It’s self-amused. It says this: My bold defiance is silly, I know, but I’m still glad, maybe even slightly proud, that I did it. There’s such humanity there. You can see it here, in this trailer, at 58 seconds in. Just remember: I saw her first. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Why is it flat? Why doesn’t it quite work?

“Kill the Messenger” was directed by Michael Cuesta (“L.I.E.”), and written by Peter Landesman (the underrated “Parkland”), and it tells the true story of Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), a good investigative reporter for a small newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, who stumbles upon a huge international story: that during the 1980s, in the middle of the “Just Say No” decade, the CIA ...

OK, what was the accusation again? Maybe that’s part of the problem. Even after seeing the movie, it’s still a bit murky.

Let me try. So while the Reagan administration was trading arms for hostages in order to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contras, the CIA ... turned a blind eye toward Latin American drug suppliers who were funding the Contras? Abetted Latin American drug suppliers who were funding the Contras? Funneled cocaine into the U.S. in order to fund the Contras? I was never quite sure the extent of CIA involvement.

But at the least, blind eyes were involved. Vast hypocrisy was involved.

Too true to tell
The movie starts out not bad. Webb is doing a piece on drug forfeiture law—how property can be confiscated by the government without anyone being charged with a crime—when he gets a call from Coral Baca (an impossibly hot Paz Vega), whose boyfriend, Rafael Cornejo, is being prosecuted on drug charges. Her charge? “He sold drugs for the government.” She shows Webb a redacted court transcript and points him to Danilo Blandon (Yul Vazquez), a former drug supplier/Contra supporter, now DEA informant. But when Webb mentions Blandon to federal prosecutor Russell Dodson (Barry Pepper), the charges against Cornejo are quickly dropped—as Baca knew they would be. Webb has been used. But now he senses a bigger story in Blandon.

He follows him to the trial of L.A. crack kingpin Ricky Ross (Michael Kenneth Williams, doomed to play such roles), and convinces Ross’ attorney, Alan Fenster (Tim Blake Nelson), to delve into Blandon’s background during cross-examination. On the stand, Blandon admits that the U.S. government, or at least the CIA, was aware that he smuggled tons of cocaine into the country. This testimony leads Webb to drug kingpin Norwin Meneses (Andy Garcia) in prison in Nicaragua, who points him to Swiss banker Hansjorg Baier (Brett Rice), also in Nicaragua. Then Webb goes to D.C.

There, he gets the usual warnings away from the story from low-level bureaucrats and shadowy agents. The best exchange is probably this:

CIA official: We’d never threaten your children, Mr. Webb.
Webb [stunned pause]: What did you say?

That’s nice: the denial of the threat serving as the threat. But the big line of the movie comes from government official Fred Weil (Michael Sheen), who tells him the story won’t get out, adding, “Some stories are just too true to tell.”

So what happens? Webb returns to California, writes his story anyway, and it goes national. He’s slapped on the back by his contemporaries. Then his life falls apart.

All the Insider’s Men
A quarter of the way through the movie, I thought, “This would be so much better if it had been directed by Michael Mann.” Three quarters of the way through, I thought, “Oh, it was. It was just called ‘The Insider.’”

In “The Insider,” “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), helps draw out a corporate vice-president, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), to go on the record about a Big Tobacco scandal. But then CBS Corporate gets cold feet, Wigand is besmirched, and the news story becomes petty shit about Wigand. Bergman has to betray friends and associates in order to not betray Wigand. The two men win a battle that is everywhere else being lost.

In “Kill the Messenger,” Webb is both Bergman and Wigand, reporter and besmirched. He becomes the story. Because the L.A. Times is jealous it got scooped? Because the Washington Post, the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein, is too close to the CIA? Both accusations are implied here. Webb’s editor gets cold feet. Corporate is called in. Lawyers are called in—to protect the paper, not Webb. He’s shuttled off to a smaller newspaper. Does his wife leave him? Does he leave her? All of this is murky, too.

What isn’t murky enough is our faith in Webb. The Mercury News doublechecks the story after the accusations, and Meneses denies he spoke to Webb while Baier can’t be found. But we saw Webb talking to Meneses, and we see Baier being kidnapped, so we know everyone else is wrong. Maybe if we’d been kept in the dark, too, or a little, it might’ve made the movie more interesting. We would’ve had something to wonder. Instead, Webb comes off as blandly forthright and heroic. He drinks a bit, smokes a little pot, had an affair in the past. But he’s a decent husband, a decent father. To be honest, it’s not a great performance by Jeremy Renner. It’s one of the few times I’ve found him dull.

I did like his reaction after the story was first printed. He didn’t act triumphant; he almost acted guilty. Because his family had been threatened if he ran with the story, and he ran with it anyway? As if his family didn’t matter? Not sure. But it added a touch of mystery to what was generally obvious.

Or familiar. I kept getting flashes of not only “The Insider” but “All the President’s Men.” Maybe this was inevitable. Or maybe the filmmakers were too enamored of these movies to properly make their own. But the courtroom scene with the CIA revelation from Blandon, with Webb the only reporter present? That’s like the courtroom scene with the CIA revelation from McCord, with Woodward the only reporter present. Or when Webb feels like he’s being followed into the parking garage? Compare with Woodward’s paranoia after the parking garage, or the nighttime golf-range scene in “The Insider.” Here it’s: “We got a call from corporate this morning.” There it’s: “Corporate has some questions.”

Who wins?
Too bad. Its subjects are worth contemplating: the War on Drugs; the national-security state; the back-biting, sensationalistic nature of the national media, which seems to hinder more than it helps. Early in the movie, Webb is asked for the secret to his reporting, and he responds, “I don’t know ... Don’t let the assholes win?” Here, they win. And they haven’t really stopped winning.

At least “Kill the Messenger,” set almost 20 years ago, about crimes almost 30 years old, opened my eyes to a contemporary danger: the NSA spy program. All along, I’ve basically given the scandal a post-9/11 shrug: “You’re one in 300 million. There’s safety in numbers. They won’t focus on you unless you need to be focused on.” Or—the movie made me realize—unless you’re Joe Wilson. Or Jeffrey Wigand. Or Woodward and Bernstein. Or Gary Webb. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

At first I thought: “Oh, they’re doing ‘Groundhog Day.” Then I thought: “Oh, it’s like a video game.” At the end I realized: “It’s like a movie. But not because it is a movie.”

More on that later.

First, why it’s like “Groundhog Dog” but not as good as “Groundhog Day.”

“Groundhog Day,” co-written and directed by Harold Ramis, took a shallow weatherman, Phil (Bill Murray), and forced him to live the same lousy day over and over until he became a decent person. It’s about the growth of the soul. It’s funny and inventive.

“Edge of Tomorrow,” directed by Doug Liman, takes a shallow PR exec, Cage (Tom Cruise), and forces him to live the same lousy day over and over—the day he dies, actually—until he becomes such an expert soldier that he saves not only himself but all of humanity from an alien attack. It’s often funny and inventive. But it’s less about the growth of the soul than about getting good enough at soldiering (leaping and dodging and shooting) to make it to the next level.

Which is why it’s like a video game. You play until you die and then you start over again.

For some people—gamers, hipsters, folks trying to monetize the popularity of video games into the movie business—this is a plus. Not me. I got bored. Tom Cruise is the avatar, Liman and company are making him jump and dodge and shoot, and I’m just sitting there. Hey, watch out for the ...! Right. GAME OVER. Reboot.

Sci-fi Normandy
As the movie starts, we get news reports of a meteor landing in Germany. It turns out to be an alien attack. These aliens are like sand worms mixed with the Tasmanian Devil, and they spread out from Germany, even as the United Defense Force, under the command of Gen. Brigham (Brendan Gleeson), readies a counterattack from Britain called “Operation Downfall.” So it’s basically a sci-fi version of World War II. It’s sci-fi Normandy. Because that’s cool? Because that’s the only way we can comprehend it? Because the filmmakers are lazy?

We first see Maj. Cage on cable news, promoting the “Angel of Verdun,” Rita (Emily Blunt), a super-soldier who stopped the alien attack in northern France. “We fight,” he tells the camera with authority. “That’s what we do.”

Well, he doesn’t. Gen. Brigham wants Cage to film “Operation Downfall” but Cage wants no part of it. “I’m not a soldier, really,” he says. “I can’t stand the sight of blood.” Brigham doesn’t take no for an answer. So Cage tries to blackmail him. For that he’s arrested, tased, and wakes up on some duffel bags at Heathrow airport. “On your feet, Maggot!” a sergeant yells at him. This will be the reboot point for the rest of the movie. The START OVER point. 

It’s a nightmare point for Cage. He’s been busted to private and assigned to combat in J Squad, none of whom like him particularly. Why should they? Suddenly they’re fighting next to a guy who can’t fight. Why would the general even do that? Doesn’t he like J Squad? And why doesn’t anyone recognize him from TV?

In an inspired bit of casting, the Master Sergeant for J Squad is Bill Paxton, the original “Game Over” dude, who gets off some good lines. Asked if he’s American, he replies, “No, sir, I’m from Kentucky.” Before the mission, he tells Cage, in words that echo, “Tomorrow, you will be baptized. Born again!”

The invasion, of course, is a trap, the soldiers are slaughtered, Cage dies. Ah, but because in his panic he kills an “Alpha,” an alien that can reset time, and its blood mixes with his, he develops this ability. For a while he doesn’t know it. For a while, he’s merely experiencing a massive sense of déjà vu. But eventually, in the third or fourth incarnation, the Angel of Verdun herself tells him what’s going on. She had that ability for a while. Thus Verdun. “An enemy that knows the future can’t lose,” she says. Now Cage has that ability. So what will he do with it?

(BTW: For a race that can know the future, they do an awful job of keeping this ability out of the hands—or the blood—of the enemy, don’t they? And isn’t that a fairly easy security breach? “We’ll be fine in this war as long as no one bleeds on anyone.”)

Here’s what Cage does with the ability to reset time. He trains and trains and trains. He goes from PR flak to supersoldier. Then he has to make it off the beach and into the countryside. Then he and Rita have to leave this farmhouse and attack this mountain. Then ...

Right. Different levels.

The end game is the Omega, the aliens’ “hive mind.” But the Omega isn’t in the equivalent of Berchtesgaden, as originally thought; that was a ruse. It’s under the Louvre, man. So that becomes the fight. Except in one iteration, Cage isn’t killed but merely wounded. And he’s given a blood transfusion. And there goes his power to reset time.

A quick aside. Years ago, I tested video games for Microsoft PCs and Xbox; and one night we were testing, I believe, “Midtown Madness,” a car racing game, and we went late, 2 or 3 a.m., after which I drove home. And it was odd. I had to remind myself, “Oh, this is real.” I’d been crashing and dying and rebooting without consequence for so long that I had to consciously remind myself that life had consequences.

It would’ve been nice if Cage, after losing his reboot abilities, had had a similar epiphany.

Instead, he and Rita and J Squad simply team up to attack the Omega, and they all die in the process. Including Cage. But then—because he killed the hive mind?—he’s reborn earlier than at his reboot point, before his encounter with Gen. Brigham, who informs him that the aliens have died off on their own. He did it, Cage did it, but no one knows. Except him. And us. Hoorah.

We've seen this hero before
So here’s why this movie is like a movie. And why it’s disappointing in that regard.

In the beginning, Cruise’s character, Cage, is somewhat shallow and cowardly. He doesn’t have special abilities. He’s like us entering the darkened theater with our tub of popcorn. Then as the movie progresses he becomes the wish-fulfillment fantasy, just as we, munching our popcorn in the dark, transfer ourselves into this heroic character on screen.

The process that Cage goes through in the movie is the process we all go through watching movies.

And that’s why I was ultimately disappointed. The shallow, fearful Cruise at the beginning? He was refreshing. The hero he became? We’ve seen that guy a thousand times. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Sadly, I figured out the plot twist before I even saw it. The week it premiered, I came across a headline, “Is ‘Gone Girl’ Misogynistic?” and that’s pretty much all it took. I knew the movie was about a pretty blonde, Amy (Rosamund Pike), whose husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), becomes the chief suspect, and a cable news cad, after her disappearance. So our big question going in is: Does he or doesn’t he? But if the movie can be accused of misogyny, not only does it clear Nick but it implicates Amy. Maybe she just leaves? Maybe she manufactures the whole thing to get attention—or to turn the world against her husband? Which, yes, turns out to be the case.

So be more careful with your headlines, everybody.

I don’t even agree with the implication in the headline. At some point the one doesn’t represent the whole. Amy isn’t all women any more than Norman Bates is all men. Nor Nick, for that matter. Nick is lazy, adulterous, dull, cowardly. Most of the men in this movie are playthings for the women. That moment when Amy and Det. Rhonda Boney (an excellent Kim Dickens) get into a subtle staredown after Amy’s reappearance, with a scrum of concerned FBI agents between them, I flashed on Margaret Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye,” and thought things were about to get good. But that was it. They had Det. Boney peel off from the story. Too bad. It was a nice scene anyway. With the dopey FBI men acting solicitous toward Amy (who was a murderer), and stern toward Det. Boney (who was simply doing her job), I began to laugh out loud.

That’s something I didn’t see coming. “Gone Girl,” based on the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn, is a David Fincher crime story so in the tradition of gritty, gruesome stuff like “Se7en” and “Zodiac” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The last thing you expect are laughs. Yet they keep coming. The movie is an absurdist take on marriage and privilege and fame and infamy. It’s high camp. It’s the funniest movie David Fincher has made.

Sociopaths
When did I begin laughing? I think when the parents arrived in Missouri.

Amy goes missing on the afternoon of her fifth wedding anniversary. Nick comes home, she’s not there, the glass coffee table is upended and broken. So he calls the cops. He’s kind of dazed. Wooden. We find out later he’s been schtupping a writing student with the All-American name Andie Hardy (model Emily Ratajkowski, the “Blurred Lines” girl), and that morning he was ready to ask his wife for a divorce. So part of him is relieved by her disappearance. But he can’t show that. The casting of Ben Affleck—long accused of wooden acting—is itself a kind of joke. Later in the movie, for example, Nick is prepped by his top-flight attorney, Tanner Bolt (a surprisingly smooth Tyler Perry), before he goes on one of those awful Barbara Walters-like shows to confess his infidelity, and every time Nick acts wooden Bolt pelts him with a gummy bear. Directors from Michael Bay to Kevin Smith are probably going, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

So on that first day, her parents, rich, privileged New Yorkers, Rand and Marybeth Elliott (a perfectly cast David Clennon and Lisa Banes), arrive in Missouri; and in the press conference in which Nick does everything wrong—acts wooden, mumbles a few words, smiles awkwardly next to his wife’s missing photo—they do everything right. They look grim and determined. They give out the 1-888 number they’ve already set up and the URL to the website they’ve already set up. They’re whirlwinds. It shouldn’t be funny—a woman is missing, after all—but it is. And it gets funnier as Nick drives around town and sees billboards displaying his missing wife’s face. How quickly his story becomes their story becomes everybody’s story. How quickly he becomes inconsequential.

Would it be less funny if we actually liked Nick and Amy? We get flashbacks to when they first meet, trading bon mots at a New York cocktail party, and it feels less “meet cute” than “meet awful.” They’re vaguely intellectual, fairly privileged, mostly shallow. He writes for a men’s health magazine, she writes ... where again? I forget. She’s more famous for being the inspiration for a series of children’s books, “Amazing Amy,” that her mother wrote. Plus she’s played by Rosamund Pike, who often projects a decided chill onto the screen.

“The hallmark of a sociopath is a lack of empathy,” says cable-news harpy Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle), implicating Nick in the disappearance of his wife, even if, ultimately, the description fits Amy more than Nick. And Ellen Abbott as much as Amy? She makes her living, and a good one, ruining lives with innuendo. Amy just accuses men of rape. Or “disappears” to get back at her dull husband and his infidelities. Or accuses them of rape, then murders them. That’s what she does with her longtime unrequited lover Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), who protects her after her escape plans go awry. But he’s got the lack-of-empathy gene, too, doesn’t he? He loves her, he says, but when she comes to him in need, still in her dowdy, thickening camouflage, he immediately wants to turn her back into the golden girl she once was. It’s funny stuff. She’s still talking about Nick, whom she watches heartfeltly professing his (fake) love for her on national TV, while Desi, also professing his (real?) love, keeps implying she needs to work out more, eat less, dye her hair back to blonde. So many cross-currents of shallow agendas on display here. So little empathy behind so many professions of love.

Who does have empathy in this movie? How wide a brush should we use? And even when characters seem to have empathy—Amy’s parents, the dingbat neighbor Noelle (SNL alum Casey Wilson)—aren’t they just looking out for themselves? Or is this simply our ungenerous view of them? Or is the film being ungenerous?

The key line of the movie is the sociopath line above, the lack-of-empathy-gene, but it leads to this question: How do you lose empathy? Well, it helps if you demonize or reduce others, and the cable-news industry, in the movie and in real life, certainly does that. It demonizes Nick (into a callow murderer) even as it reduces Amy (into a pretty victim). But doesn’t the movie do the same thing? It gives us reductive characters like the dingbat neighbor and the shallow unrequited lover. I suppose that’s why it’s campy. That’s why it’s funny. It brings us laughs at the expense of lessons. But it also answers our question about how wide the sociopathic brush is. It’s so wide, “Gone Girl” paints itself with it. Giggling.

Silly chilly
It’s also why I got bored. I lacked empathy for these reductive characters. I cared a bit about Nick, particularly when he was getting railroaded, and a little about his sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), who seemed like a real person. I liked Tanner Bolt and Det. Boney, both of whom seemed smart. But anyone else?

The ending is particularly disappointing and unbelievable. The more interesting characters go away—Bolt, Boney—while Nick winds up back in his marriage, trapped there by public opinion, but now with a woman he knows is capable of murder. The outward projection is of love and perfection, the inner version is hell. It should be chilling but it’s too silly for that. What’s missing is anything human-sized.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The obvious comparison, and it’s a doozy, is with “On the Waterfront”—and not just because Tom Hardy has taken over the Marlon Brando mantle. OK, a little because of that.

Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, just another bum from the neighborhood. He tends bar at Cousin Marv’s in Brooklyn, buys drinks for the boys toasting a dead friend, lets the old woman on the corner stool run up a tab, and deals with the irascibility of Marv (the late, great James Gandolfini), who used to own the bar before Chechen gangsters took it over about 10 years earlier. He romances—kinda—Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a troubled neighbor girl, but mostly he minds his own business.

Both “Waterfront” and “Drop” have dark moods, a weight of the world, a sense of being trapped. The cops are no help and the church just reminds you of all the bad you’ve done. Even the actors are similar. Hardy’s hair, and his jacket, match Terry Malloy’s, and of course he exudes that Brando-ness (sans, here, raw sexuality). Rapace, the original ass-kicking Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, doesn’t seem an immediate fit with the virginal Eva Marie Saint, but they actually have a similar high-cheekboned look. And if you’re going to update Rod Steiger, who better than Gandolfini?

More to the point, the key relationship for both Bob and Terry is the older relative—brother Charlie, cousin Marv—and each relationship has a dirty history. Years earlier, favors were asked. Lives, maybe, were ruined. Maybe the asker doesn’t know it yet. Maybe he doesn’t want to know.

These are some of the similarities.

Here’s a key difference: We understand Terry sooner. He’s a bit of a bully—I think of Brando’s great sneer in the back of the church as Father Barry tries to organize the workers—but he’s redeemed by love and courage and by his conscience. But Bob? For much of the movie we can’t figure him out. He seems kinda nice, kinda dumb. But just how nice, and how dumb? Because he really seems dumb. He doesn’t know how to care for a dog? Does he even know how to read? Is he a pushover? Is there something in him? We get flashes of it, don’t we? When Detective Torres (John Ortiz) asks why he never takes communion at St. Rocco’s Church, which they both attend regularly, he responds, “That’s my business,” and something hard comes down over his eyes. At key points throughout the movie we get that: something hard coming down over the innocence and the dumb in his eyes.

Above all, he’s calm. Even when crazy Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts of “Rust and Bone”) enters Bob’s home, and stands there, smirking, dangerous, and demands his dog back—the dog Deeds had beaten and left in a garbage can, which Bob nursed back to health—there’s a calm in Bob’s manner and in his eyes.

And the question we ask ourselves, the question that propels us through the movie, is this: Is he calm because he doesn’t know any better .... or because he does?

Contenders, somebodies
The calm is welcome, by the way. This is one tense movie.

Cousin Marv’s is a drop bar for the Chechen gang, one of many, and one night two punks rob the place. “Do you know what you’re doing?” Marv says. “Do you know who’s money you’re jacking?” Soon after, the Chechens show up with a van and a guy in the back with his foot nail-gunned to the floor. “You know this guy?” they ask. Bob and Marv shake their heads, nervous. Blood drips onto the street like an oil leak. Later, based on a tip Bob was dumb enough (or smart enough?) to tell the cops about the stopped watch on one of the robbers, a plastic bag is hung on the fence in the back alley: it contains the stolen $5,000 and the watch ... still attached to the forearm. Now Marv looks even more worried. He should. He planned the robbery. Not for the $5,000—that was a test-run—but for the biggest haul of the year on Super Bowl Sunday. That’s the day we build towards.

Why is Marv doing it? We get a conversation with his sister in which he worries over expenses for his sick, bedridden father, but I don’t think that’s it. He resents his lost status in the world. Near the end of the movie, in his Archie Bunker chair and in that Tony Soprano whine, he tells Bob about the good ol’ days. “When I walked into a place, people stood up straight! They noticed. I was respected. I was feared.” He talks about the corner stool that used to be his. “That meant something!” he cries. Bob responds, as calm as ever, but a little more insistent, a little more cutting: “But it didn’t. Ever. It was just a stool.” It’s a great scene.

This is another difference with “On the Waterfront”: Terry Malloy’s resentment about where he wound up isn’t in Bob; it’s in Marv. Terry tells Charlie,  “I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody,” while it’s Marv who tells Bob, “I was a contender, I was somebody.” Which is why he does what he does.

Bob? “I just tend the bar.” What about the Chechen gang? “I’m not this. And I’m not them.”

But he doesn’t just tend bar.

The original sin in “On the Waterfront” isn’t a murder, although we see enough of those; it’s the brotherly betrayal: Charlie telling his brother to take a dive against Wilson. It’s Cain going for the price against Abel. Terry’s life was never the same after that.

The original sin in “The Drop” also took place years earlier. But to discuss that properly, we have to go back to crazy Eric Deeds.

Not clean
First, Schoenaerts is amazing here. Is there best supporting actor talk? For him or for Galdolfini? Or Hardy for best actor? There should be. For all three. There should at least be talk.

At first, we assume Deeds is part of the Chechen gang, tagging after Bob, making his life miserable. But he’s just an awful person. He likes fucking with people. There’s a palpable menace to him, and the fact that Bob doesn’t buckle under it is the first time we sense Bob’s strength—or his stupidity. But Deeds is too stupid, or too crazy, to realize that Bob didn’t buckle. He keeps at him. He wants the dog and the girl back. Yeah. He used to go out with Nadia but she broke free from him. He probably put the dog in her trash can as a final fuck you; instead it brought together Bob and Nadia.

A lot of the tension in the movie revolves around this pit bull puppy. He’s cute and helpless and we think something bad is going to happen to him, because bad things tend to happen to the helpless in gangster movies. The rumor is that Deeds killed a guy 10 years ago—“Glory Days,” whom the guys at the bar were toasting at the beginning of the movie—and if he can do that, what won’t he do? So Bob is trying to deal with all of this at the same time he’s trying to deal with Marv. Then his problems merge. The Chechens kill the stopped-watch guy, Marv kills the other (running him over brutally), so he needs someone else for the heist. He chooses Deeds. That’s who winds up at the bar on Super Bowl Sunday.

And here, beautifully, the movie shifts slightly on its axis and everything falls into place. Background information from the first act suddenly has meaning in the third.

The old woman on the corner stool? The mother of “Glory Days,” who was killed, not by Deeds (although he took the street credit), but by Bob. For Marv. That’s the original sin. That’s why Bob goes to St. Rocco’s every day and why he can’t take communion, and why he buys drinks for the boys and lets the old woman run up a tab. And that’s why he’s calm in the face of Deeds’ antics. He knows his rep is just that.

Here’s one of the things I love about this movie: The resolution to Bob’s troubles is as we’d want it—a lone man using violence to achieve justice—but it’s not clean. In that moment of confrontation in the bar, something crazy is revealed in Bob’s eyes and in his manner, and he actually frightens Nadia away. He saves her only to lose her.  Most movies give us this moment as cleanly as possible. Most Hollywood movies anyway. Does it help that “The Drop” not only isn’t Hollywood but it isn’t really American? Sure, Galdofini, and sure, the screenwriter is Denis Lehane, who wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone.” But Hardy’s British, Rapace Swedish, and Schoenaerts and director Michaël R. Roskam are Belgian. They’ve made a thoroughly American movie in the most American of locales with a European sensibility. It’s one of the best movies of the year.

Nah
At the end we get this great monologue from Bob. It’s his “contender” speech, but less self-pitying, more hopeless:

There are some sins that you can’t come back from, you know? No matter how hard you try. You just can’t, you know. It’s like the Devil is waiting for your body to give up because he knows … he knows that he already owns your soul. Then, I think maybe, you know, there is no Devil. You die, and God, he says, “Nah … Nah, you can’t come in. You have to leave now. You have to leave and go away, and you have to be alone. You have to be alone forever.”

The way Tom Hardy says “Nah” in this scene. I go to the movies for moments like that.

Did Lehane and Roskam ruin it at the end? The redemption they give Bob? His reprieve and reconciliation? I might not have done it, but it doesn’t ruin it. “The Drop” is too good to ruin.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Here’s what I want to know: Which investigative reporter finally got to tell Ford Brody’s story? Seymour Hersh? George Packer? Because it’s kind of insane.

“So wait, your mom was killed by the male MUTO, or Mothra, back in ’99. Then your dad, who was obsessed with the disaster, was killed 15 years later when the thing came out of its pupae stage ... and you were there to witness it? Then you were on the train in Honolulu that it attacked, and on the train delivering the nuke to San Francisco that the female attacked? Then you skydived into Chinatown with the team that stole the nuke from the female, and you were the one who torched her eggs to save us from dozens, maybe hundreds, of these things, then faced off against her again on the boat with the nuke? And you were the one who sent the boat out to sea? Thus saving San Francisco from nuclear disaster?

“Um, I think I’m going to need some corroborating witnesses.”

Suggested title: “The Greatest American Hero.” Or “Mothra Magnet.”

Patricia and I saw “Godzilla” in Europe this summer, and I immediately dismissed it. Didn’t even plan on writing about it. But when I got back I kept hearing murmurs of praise from critics I respected. Was I wrong? Had I missed something? So I decided to watch it again.

I wasn’t wrong.

Mothra fukra
The trailer for “Godzilla” was good for a reason. Trailers are all about teasing the audience and “Godzilla” turns out to be one big long tease. It’s all delayed gratification. Maybe that’s why other critics like the movie. It recalls “Jaws”: not showing us, for a long time, the reason we came. We don’t see Godzilla until an hour in, when he finally squares off against Mothra (M) in Hawaii; and even then the movie cuts away and we only get a few grainy TV shots of a pitched battle. When Mothra (F) shows up in Vegas, same deal. Director Gareth Edwards keeps doing this. He keeps giving us stunning after-effects of monstrosity. Look how big the thing that WAS here ... is. Probably. And when he finally does give us the big battle between Godzilla and the Mothras, it’s filmed so dark you can hardly make out what’s going on.

I do love the opening credits: taking us from cave paintings of Godzilla, to medieval folio drawings of Godzilla, to early filmed footage of Godzilla’s scaled back submerging beneath the water. The credits keep getting redacted as if by the U.S. military, and all of this is followed by an atomic-bomb blast—an early attempt to kill the creature, we find out later—that turns the screen white. After which we get fallout dust, ghostly music from Alexandre Desplat, and the title: GODZILLA. Cool! It all goes by too fast, to be honest. Unlike the movie.

What’s the most annoying thing about this “Godzilla”? That Ken Watanabe is reduced to gazing, dazed, into the middle distance? That he carries around a stopped pocketwatch and tells Admiral Stenz (David Strathairn) that it was his father’s, and that it stopped at 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, and Stenz, after a long, long pause, nods and says “Hiroshima,” as if we wouldn’t know? Is it when we first meet Stenz on his ship and he’s giving some kind of Knute Rockne peptalk to almost no one? Or that he’s filmed from behind until the very end when we get the Big Reveal? Hey, it’s Edward R. Murrow! John Sayles’ friend! You know. The rich perv in “L.A. Confidential.”

Gareth Edwards is big on the Big Reveal. He keeps doing it with his monsters. See? No, you don’t. See? Psych!

During the Knute Rockne speech, Stenz informs his people, and us, that the creature about to attack Honolulu is called MUTO: Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, adding, almost apologetically, “It is, however, no longer terrestrial; it is airborne.” That made me laugh out loud. Maybe he should’ve added, “And no longer unidentified, either.” So ... MIAO then.

How about when Ford (Aaron-Taylor Johnson), our hero, is riding the nuke train and his superior radios ahead: “Snake Eyes, this is Bravo to November. Is the bridge clear?” He gets static and sounds of shouts, screams, general panic. “Snake Eyes, I need to know if the bridge is secure or not. Over.” Again, shouts and screams. He tries a third time: the same question in the same tone. Another laugh-out-loud moment.

And what makes the San Francisco police stop all the cars and school buses on the Golden Gate bridge as both Godzilla and Mothra approach? Sure, the Army needs to set up shop. But doesn’t it leave all of those schoolkids, including, of course, Ford’s son, rather, um, vulnerable?

A contender for most annoying moment has to be our military strategy to fight the monsters. Even though we know they literally feed off radiation, the plan is to lure them to Alcatraz ... and nuke them. Which is a little like weakening Stone Cold Steve Austin by feeding him power bars. 

All of those are stupid, but the most unforgivable moment, at least to me, is when they kill Bryan Cranston 40 minutes in. What a waste. He only could’ve helped.

Savoir of Our City?
Ken Watanabe, who at least gives us a great rendition of “Gozira!” has a different plan than the military men. Being a man of science, he thinks, without evidence, that Godzilla is a force for good, or at least balance, and so Godzilla can solve our Mothra problem for us.

He’s right, of course. Godzilla spends the movie pursuing the Mothras as if he’s Javert. Oddly, despite being stomped to the ground by both Mothras, Godzilla waits until the 11th hour to deploy his signature move: fire breath. Even more oddly, it’s blue. Then he collapses, dead. No wait, he lives! And he fights and kills the second Mothra before collapsing dead again. No wait! He lives! And out he goes to sea, ready for the sequel.

This leads to the movie’s final, stupid moment. As Godzilla wades into San Francisco Bay, cable news trains its cameras on him, and we see the graphic: “King of the Monsters: Savoir of Our City?” Wow. That soon? No one’s still freaked by a giant lizard from the sea who breathes fire? We’re ready to embrace him already? Godzilla may be big, but I guess human beings are bigger than I thought. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

In his last movie, “Red State,” writer-director Kevin Smith (“Clerks”) imagined three teenagers in a small Southern town searching for sex; instead they’re drugged and taken prisoner by a charismatic preacher (Michael Parks), and unspeakable things happen to them.

In his new movie, “Tusk,” Smith imagines a sensationalistic podcaster, Wallace Bryton (Justin Long sporting a Geraldo moustache), searching for a story in the backwoods of Manitoba; instead he’s drugged and taken prisoner by a charismatic storyteller (Parks again), and unspeakable things happen to him.

Failure of imagination? Yes and no. Because the things that happen to Wallace are much, much worse.

“Tusk,” based on one of Smith’s garrulous, comic podcasts, is in fact the most disgusting and pointless movie I’ve seen. Emphasis on pointless. I spent half the movie sick to my stomach.

Obviously if Smith weren’t talented, I wouldn’t feel this way. More’s the pity. He has talent and uses it for this.

Karma for the Kill Bill Kid?
It opens with laughter. It’s the laughter of Wallace’s podcast partner Teddy (Haley Joel Osment), who is cracking up over Wallace’s on-air riffing about the latest cultural flotsam: “Kill Bill Kid,” a hapless viral video sensation (a la “Star Wars Kid”), who lops off his leg with a samurai sword. And the video is still uploaded? And watched? And laughed about? Whatever.

Wallace, a jerk without a trace of empathy, plans on interviewing the Kid in Manitoba. Bad luck: he dies before the interview happens. Now what? Hey, in a men’s room Wallace finds a notice from a man promising great seafaring adventure stories! It’s only two hours away! And off he goes.

The mansion has all the trappings of a 1950s horror movie: wrought iron gate, tchotchkes, and an old man, Howard Howe (Parks), in a wheelchair. His stories are good: how he met Hemingway before Normandy; how he almost met his maker in the North Atlantic, but how he was saved by a walrus, an animal he considers “far more evolved than any man I've ever known.” Wallace listens, rapt, then with heavy eyelids; then he collapses, drugged, on the floor.

When he awakes? He’s in a wheelchair, and his left leg below the knee has been amputated. Karma for the Kill Bill Kid? No. Because that’s just the beginning of the decapitations and humiliations and mutilations.

Both Teddy and Wallace’s girlfriend Ally (Genesis Rodriguez), who are having an affair, search for him, but their efforts lead to a comic-relief Quebec detective, Guy Lapointe (Johnny Depp), who is neither comic nor relief. By this point, in fact, there is no relief. We’ve already witnessed things so horrific ... 

I’ll just say it. By the time Teddy and Ally even get to Canada, Howe, who isn’t wheelchair-bound at all, has amputated Wallace’s other leg, cut out his tongue, knocked out his teeth, and stitched his arms to his sides. He’s taken Wallace’s tibia bones and fashioned tusks out of them, and inserted them through Wallace’s cheeks. Then he’s stitched him inside a pale walrus skin and chained him next to a dank basement pool. Wallace can only waddle and bark. He’s forced to subsist on raw fish. Howe pulls him into the water to force him to learn to swim. He calls him, gently, “Mr. Tusk.”

Are we supposed to laugh at the absurdity of it all? At the critics screening last month, other critics did laugh—at scenes that turned my stomach. They were like Wallace at the beginning of the movie laughing at Kill Bill Kid. But eventually the laughter stopped. Is this what Smith wanted? Stifling the laughter? What if you didn’t laugh at the beginning? What if you had a trace of empathy then?

The introduction of Guy Lapointe, with his bulbous nose, cross eyes, and long, pointless stories, is even more infuriating. It’s as if instead of Jodie Foster tracking Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs,” you had a bumbling, unfunny Inspector Clouseau. It’s as if, in the middle of an Ed Gein movie, Gallagher interrupts to do stand up.

Goo goo ga joob
The ending is the stupidest part of all. Teddy, Ally and Lapointe arrive at the mansion just in time to see Wallace kill Howe with his tusks. Then Wallace barks at them. To kill him? Probably. And Lapointe levels his rifle.

But then it’s a year later, and Ally and Teddy are visiting some sort of animal sanctuary in Manitoba. They’re somberly bringing something wrapped in newspaper. It’s a fish, of course. For Wallace, of course. Who continues to live as a walrus next to a pool, of course. Because? Because Kevin Smith couldn’t come up with a better ending? Because it mirrors stupid ‘70s endings that he’s always laughed about? Is that the point of all of this? Giggles for Smith and his thousands of fans?

After the disaster of “Red State,” Smith said he’s reached the “I don’t give a fuck” portion of his career. It shows.

-- A shorter version of this review originally appeared in The Seattle Times.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The beginning of “Dolphin Tale 2” startled me. The soporific style of the first movie was gone, replaced by a pulse-pounding, hand-held-camera jerkiness, and a torrent of marine biology lingo, as our team from Clearwater Marine Aquarium (CMA) rescue another beached dolphin, quickly dubbed “Mandy,” off the coast of Florida.

“It’s almost like a documentary,” I thought.

It is, in fact, exactly like a documentary, because it’s part of a lecture that Sawyer Nelson (Nathan Gamble), the lead of the first film, and now staff at CMA, is giving to the new volunteers, including a pretty girl who has eyes for him. Meanwhile, Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff), his friend from the first film, stands off to the side giving worried looks. Isn’t he supposed to like her?

“Right,” I thought. “This.”

The original “Dolphin Tale” was so anodyne it felt like a 1950s TV series: episodic problems resolved in an ultra-safe atmosphere, often by parental, generally fatherly, advice. This is more of the same. Will Hazel’s dad (Harry Connick, Jr.) let Hazel take charge at the aquarium more often? Why is Rufus, the comic-relief pelican, obsessed with an injured tortoise? Will Sawyer go on the three-month-long Sea Semester or is he too worried about Winter, the real-life, tailless dolphin, with whom he has a bond?

That’s the main conflict. Winter’s companion dies in the first act, so she’s lonely. She refuses to wear her prosthetic tail, meaning she swims side-to-side rather than up and down, which is causing scoliosis. Plus she’s lashing out—even at Sawyer. Can they find a companion for her before the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture take her away?

Fans of the first film probably won’t mind the facile resolutions to these problems. The rest of us should swim elsewhere.

-- This review originally appeared in the Seattle Times.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The ending doesn’t quite work, does it? Too bad, because everything else does.

Craig Johnson’s “The Skeleton Twins” is a serious-sweet movie, a movie in which, as Jon Stewart said on “The Daily Show,” the humor is organic to the situation. It stars two SNL alums, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, but they’re not doing bits. They’re playing complex characters. Particularly him. Hader’s a revelation here. He’s the real deal.

Hader and Wiig have such good rapport here, and their characters, Milo and Maggie, estranged twins reunited in middle age, know each other so well, that you begin to wonder why they became estranged in the first place. The movie wonders it, too. “How did we go 10 years without talking?” Maggie says at one point. Milo mumbles a reply, and she, oh right, remembers, and they fumble their way back to a kind of rapport until the thing emerges again.But it’s not just the thing: it’s them. They get along because they know each other so well but that’s also what splits them up. They know where to cut.

Jesus, Maggie
Suicide permeates the film. Long ago, their father, seen only in flashback in Halloween mask, killed himself, while the movie opens with a double suicide attempt: Milo slits his wrists in a bathtub while Maggie stares at a handful of pills at the bathroom sink. That’s where she gets word of Milo’s attempt. So she flies to L.A., visits him at his bedside. He calls himself a gay cliché and asks her to leave. She asks him to come back to New York. Upstate somewhere. She lives in a nice house with a nice man, Lance (Luke Wilson), and they’re trying to have nice kids. In his new room, he picks up a photo of her and Lance hunting. Under his breath: “Jesus, Maggie.”

Everything is in that two-word exclamation. Who is this person that I used to know so well and haven’t seen in 10 years? Who is she trying to be now? Who does she think she is?

At dinner, Lance, a sweet, forthright, unimaginative man with the patience of Job, says that he and Maggie are trying to have kids, and Milo’s response to Maggie, spoken with his fist resting on his cheek, is, “I thought you never wanted to have kids.” Maggie’s confused for a moment. No doubt she said this at one point, but she’s an adult now. Except Milo’s right. She doesn’t want kids. She’s actually taking birth-control pills to make sure she doesn’t get pregnant. She’s also sleeping around and hating herself for it. Later in the film, after she confesses all this to Milo, and tells him—and herself—that Lance is a good man and their relationship is good, this is Milo’s quiet, sympathetic response: “Maybe you don’t like good.”

If Maggie’s problem is too much sex and too little need, Milo’s is the opposite: too little sex and too much need. He slits his wrists because of a bad breakup in L.A., and in New York takes up again with Rich (Ty Burrell), his old English teacher, closeted, who seduced him when he was 15. That, it turns out, was the reason for Milo’s estrangement with Maggie: She saw it as wrong and ratted. He didn’t and resented.

Question: Is he trying to do the same to her here? Did he arrive in New York to break up Maggie and Lance? I didn’t think so watching, and I don’t think so now, but the point can be raised. Maggie raises it herself near the end, during her last big argument with Milo. He’s insinuated the information about the birth-control pills to Lance—Lance is worried he’s firing blanks, and Milo wants to ease his troubled mind—and when Lance confronts Maggie, she tells him, “I’m a sick person.” But she goes off on Milo. And we get this exchange:

Milo: Maybe I should try fucking all my problems away!
Maggie: Well, maybe next time you should cut deeper.

Families.

Someone to laugh at the squares with
What makes the movie work is their rapport, and the humor in their rapport, and even its claustrophobia. When they go out for Halloween, they don’t mingle. “Don’t they know anyone else?” I thought. Gore Vidal called Tennessee Williams, “Someone to laugh at the squares with,” and I guess that’s their relationship. Although they laugh less at the squares than at the absurdity of life and family and upbringing. “Well, at least she’s sending in the light,” he says after their new-age mom returns with a vengeance.

I also liked this aspect of the film: One of the two characters is gay, tragedies abound, but none is really tied to homophobia. Even closeted Rich seems an anachronism. Everyone’s pretty cool with it. It’s a non-issue. We’re onto other issues now.

One of Milo’s issues is his status in the world. He talks about a bully named Justin who used to pick on him in high school. Back then Milo was basically told, prefiguring Dan Savage, “It gets better.” It will get better for him and worse for Justin, because these are Justin’s best days. The universe will eventually make sense. Except Milo went to L.A. and nothing happened. His acting career didn’t take off, his writing career didn’t take off. Plus he’s alone. And one day he looked up Justin online. Justin had a pretty wife and two kids and a steady job. “It turns out I’m the one who peaked in high school,” he tells Maggie. To her credit, Maggie doesn’t try to buck him up. She basically says, “Welcome to the party, pal.” She says the line that should be imprinted on every mirror in every bathroom in the world. A few people are happy, sure, but:

The rest of us are just walking around, trying not to be disappointed with the way our lives turned out.

I was ready to say a hallelujah at this point. But then we got the ending.

After the birth-control revelations, and the “cut deeper” remark, Lance and Maggie break up, Milo leaves town, and Maggie goes to the scuba-diving center where she’s been sleeping with the instructor and hating herself for it. He’s not there. She’s alone. And attaches weights to the equipment. Suicide, as I said, permeates “The Skeleton Twins”: it begins with a suicide attempt and it ends with a suicide attempt. After she sinks to the bottom, she begins to struggle. She wants to live. But she’s done her job too well and can’t get free. And then suddenly Milo is there, freeing her, and they both ascend to the surface. For a moment I thought it was a dream. But it’s not. It’s the type of serendipitous rescue I didn’t expect in a serious movie. Call it a straight cliché. The man to the rescue. “Really?” I thought. “Really?” What would Milo make of this ending? He would have a cutting remark for it.

I’m glad he returned, though, I just wish it had been in less-dramatic fashion. There’s a line in Syd Straw’s song, “CBGBs”: “Abandonment like that was easier then.” When you’re young, friends are easy to be had—every school year, you’re tossed in with a new group—and that’s why abandonment is easy. But then you age, and opportunities narrow, and people drift. So you need to hold onto the people you have. Because we all still need someone to laugh at the squares with.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Watching “The Equalizer,” in which Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) helps stock characters (child prostitute, Latina restaurateur and son) with their various problems (beating back the pimps and gangsters and corrupt cops of the world), I began to think of this old Bob Dylan lyric:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Were riding down the line
Fixing everybody’s troubles
Everybody’s except mine
Someone musta told ’em I was doing fine

And I began to wonder if this wasn’t how our nation went wrong; how we changed from isolationists to what we are today: wannabe nation builders and whoopsiedaisy nation destroyers. Maybe it was good ol’ liberal Hollywood that set us on this path. Maybe the George W.’s of the world think that nation-building is as easy as riding into town, beating back the bad guys, and riding out again. Done and done. Maybe we all long to hear the phrase, “Who was that masked man?”

Something similar is said in “The Equalizer,” the modern, stylized adaptation of the 1980s TV series, but it’s generally said by the bad guys as they’re lying on the ground with fountains of blood leaking from their necks. Shock in their eyes, they manage to gurgle, “Who are you?”

Do we ever find out? Not really. Our heroes don’t need masks anymore to be masked men.

Hemingway and Cervantes
The beginning of the movie isn’t awful. Writer Richard Wenk (“The Mechanic”; “The Expendables 2”) and director Antoine Fuqua (“Olympus Has Fallen”; “Training Day”) build the tension slowly. McCall is a man who dresses proper and helps everyone out at work, which is in a kind of fairy-tale Home Depotish warehouse where no manager is an asshole and the main source of entertainment is guessing what Robert did before this gig. (Cf. “Saving Private Ryan.”) At one point he gives a joke answer. “A pimp?” they say, laughing. “A Pip,” he corrects. Then he does the backing moves for Gladys Knight. Later, before the final battle, we get to hear a bit of “Midnight Train to Georgia” blaring over the loudspeaker. That’s a nice touch. It was nice to hear that.

But despite the smile and the charm, Robert is a haunted man who can’t sleep. So at 2 a.m. he takes his latest book—he’s reading the “100 books everyone should read before they die”—over to the local 24/7 diner, which is a shockingly clean, quiet place despite the fact that it’s open 24/7 and is a hangout for prostitutes. “Go make your living,” the counter-guy/owner tells the child prostitute solicitously when the limo with the fat man pulls up outside. Way of the world, right?

Her name is Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), and she and Robert develop a kind of rapport. She’s always interested in what he’s reading, and what he’s reading usually reflects on what’s about to happen. “The Old Man and the Sea”? The fish allowed the old man to test himself, to see if he could do what he’d always done. “Don Quixote”? It’s about a man who thinks he’s a knight in shining armor during a time when there are no more knights in shining armor. Etc.

This stuff ain’t bad, and Denzel’s usually fun to watch. He’s sort of the action-hero Bill Cosby here, forever giving advice to the younger, sloppier generation: pull up your pants, quit eating potato chips and processed sugars. “Doubt kills,” he tells Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis), the fat Hispanic dude who wants to be security guard. “You gotta be who you are in this world, no matter what,” he tells Teri.

Teri’s the reason for the slow build-up. Shit keeps happening to her at the local diner at 2 a.m. Another call from her pimp. (Cut to Denzel, brooding.) That car pulls up outside with the fat man in it. (Cut to Denzel, brooding.) The next night she has a bruise on her face, and Robert is walking her home when the bad guys, led by Slavi (David Meunier), a Russian pimp, cut them off and take her away. They give Robert their card: RUSSIAN DOLLS. Not that he needed it to find them. He finds everybody.

After that, she doesn’t show up. She’s in the hospital, beaten to within an inch of her life. Cut to Denzel, brooding no more.

How many white girls has Denzel saved over the last 15 years? When did this become his cinematic lot in life?

Anyway, that’s what starts it. He’s ex-CIA, or some such, and his skills are immense, and he cuts a swath through Slavi and his boys in that “Sherlock Holmes” style: seeing everything relevant in both quick and superslow-mo, then acting. Boom-boom-boom. Dead dead dead. He always offers them an out but they never take it. He does the same with some corrupt cops who are leaning on Ralphie’s mom. He solves everybody’s troubles ’cept mine.

Does this help him sleep? That would be a nice touch. That once he begins to kill again, and be who he is in this world, he can sleep; that it wasn’t past killings that kept him up but lack of killings. Like he’s a vampire who needs blood. But that would make “The Equalizer” a more complex movie than it is. Instead, it’s a sugar rush, a handful of potato chips. It’s a Big Mac. Before you eat it, you think, “Yeah, that sounds good”; afterwards you realize you really should’ve eaten something else. But we keep stuffing our faces with these things. If only Robert had warned us.

Pushkin
The movie quickly becomes ridiculous. Turns out Slavi wasn’t just a cackling, tattooed pimp; he was the Northeastern arm of a Russian oligarch/gangster named Pushkin (Vladimir Kulich), who acts with impunity since he’s got corrupt Boston cops on his side (David Harbour, the poor man’s Peter Krause). So Pushkin sends his man, Teddy (Marton Csokas, the poor man’s Kevin Spacey), to assess and clean up.

Robert gets shot a bit here and there, but nothing that some home-remedy boiled honey or battlefield cauterizing won’t cure. Mostly, grim-faced, he mows guys down, leading to the inevitable showdown at the Home Depotish warehouse. My hope during? That Teddy, the main bad guy, rather than his various henchmen, would get it first. Wouldn’t that be fun? Just for a change? But “The Equalizer” plays it all without imagination. The further we go, the more stylized the violence becomes, until our eyes are as dead as Denzel’s.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Frank Costello, the Irish mob boss with FBI ties played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s Academy-Award-winning film “The Departed,” was based, in part, on James J. “Whitey” Bulger, who ran the Winter Hill gang in South Boston from the 1970s until his disappearance, just before indictment, in 1994. He was finally captured in southern California in 2011 and put on trial in 2013. The 33 charges against him included 19 murders.

Here’s something I began to ask myself as I watched Joe Berlinger’s documentary “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger”: Is this a better movie than Scorsese’s Academy-Award-winning film? An argument can be made.

For one, there are more twists in the real-life version. Sure, “The Departed” was about a cop who infiltrates a gang and a gang member who infiltrates the cops, and how they meet and fight. But this?

This is nuts.

Was he or wasn’t he?
The doc opens with Stephen Rakes, a tough-looking, 50ish guy recounting his encounter with Whitey Bulger 30 years ago. Back then, Rakes opened a liquor store in south Boston and it was going good. Then two guys showed up at his doorstep, Bulger and Kevin Weeks; they said they were there to kill him. But he could save himself—in front of his young daughters, who were milling about, unaware of the situation—if they gave them a partnership in his liquor store. He refused. They got mad. Rakes could see the killer in Bulger’s eyes. “We’re taking the fucking liquor store!” Bulger told him. It unmanned Rakes, this encounter. It changed his view of the world and his place in it.

We meet more victims, and the families of victims. Tommy Donahue, whose father Michael was allegedly killed by Bulger, greets the press on the first day of Bulger’s trial: “I’ll see yas when I get out.” Steve Davis, friends with Rakes, talks to Berlinger about the death of his sister, Debra. “They took her teeth out,” he says quietly. “Her hands.”

So at this point we think the story is about whether justice will be done. But that’s not the story. Bulger isn’t even contesting some of the charges at the trial. In fact, the main thing he and his defense team are fighting isn’t even a charge, really. It’s background information: the fact that for years Bulger was an informant for the FBI.

Bulger says he was never an informant for the FBI.

So what, right? He has nothing left but his reputation so he’s trying to salvage that. Basically he’s doing the opposite of James Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan in “Angels with Dirty Faces.” Rocky pretended to be yellow so kids would stop looking up to him. He besmirched his rep for the greater good. Bulger is besmirching others for his greater good. Right? Because there’s a 700-page FBI file on him with all the info he gave to agent John Connolly. Facts are facts.

Until they’re not. Most of the info in his file you could have gathered 100 other ways, his defense team says; it’s not specific to Bulger’s insider knowledge. Plus an expert implies that 700 pages over 20 years is nothing; she expected it to be 60,000 pages or 100,000 pages.

Could Connolly be lying? He’s in jail now, convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice. Could Bulger’s partners have been the finks and Bulger’s name got mixed in because it made the FBI look good—that they landed this top guy? Could Bulger be lying?

So many fingers get pointed at so many different people it’s like a John Woo gun finale without the guns. Ultimately, one gets the sense that, yeah, there was a mutually beneficial relationship between the FBI and Bulger that didn’t produce much except smoke. One wonders what the FBI was hoping. That Bulger would help them bring down the Mafia? How much protection did they give him? How often did they look the other way? How many people would be alive today if they hadn’t?

One agent who tried to brush away the smoke, Bob Fitzpatrick, wound up getting canned in the early 1980s—and then besmirched by the prosecution in the 2013 trial. It’s implied that he was just looking to get ahead when the evidence suggests the opposite. The others were doing this. To quote “The Departed,” he was the guy doing his job.

Question marks
There are a lot of loose ends in “Whitey,” but none more bizarre than the fate of Stephen Rakes, who waited 30 years to confront Bulger in a courtroom but was dismissed as a prosecution witness before being called. A few days later he went missing. A few days after that, he was found dead in the woods: poisoned. Bulger? His friends? The Feds? The fuck?

For all the question marks we’re left with, though, Boston Globe columnist (and talking head) Kevin Cullen feels we’re not left with enough. He feels that Berlinger, and the doc, buy too readily Bulger’s protestations that he wasn’t an informant:

The film ignores much of the overwhelming evidence in the public record, and the resulting impression is so guileless and sympathetic to Whitey as to be disingenuous.

Sympathy? I think that’s overstating it. Your revulsion for Bulger never leaves you. In the case of United States of America v. James J. Bulger, there’s no doubt that the latter is guilty. What the doc reveals is that the former isn’t exactly innocent. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The biggest problem for Dom Hemingway is Dom Hemingway—not the man but the name. Well, the man, too, but you have to start with the name. How can you not have a tendency toward grandiloquence and megalomania if you’re named Dom Hemingway?

Throughout the movie, Dom (Jude Law), an East End petty gangster and safe-cracker, keeps going through the same cycle. He’s so full of himself that he acts foolish, then he beats himself up for the foolish things he’s said and done while he was so full of himself. Rinse, repeat.

Put it this way: the movie opens with Dom singing a paean to his cock as he’s being blown in prison. He compares his anatomy to a work of art—a Picasso, a Renoir, something that should hang in the Louvre. He says it should be studied by science, win a Nobel Peace Prize. He goes on and on. It’s a kind of masterwork, this soliloquy. It’s Hamlet as ass. More on this thought later.

A poor player
Shortly afterwards, Dom is let out of prison after 12 years. First thing he does? Finds a mechanic named Sandy Butterfield and, as he says, “makes Bolognese” out of his face. Was Sandy the dude that finked on him? No. He simply dated Dom’s ex before she died. He even paid for her tombstone. He’s an upstanding guy. But what do you expect from a guy who sings an extravagant paean to his cock?

The second place he goes is a pub, for a pint with his friend Dickie (Richard E. Grant), who also works for the gangster, Ivan Fontaine (Demian Bichir), that Dom didn’t give up in prison. He lost 12 years because of Fontaine. It still rankles. How much? Even after being presented with two beautiful prostitutes and cocaine and going on a three-day binge with all three, and taking the TGV with Dickie to the south of France for a meeting, Dom resents it. So much so that he belittles Fontaine. To his face. Calls him Ivana. And worse. He gets James Taylor on his ass:

You don’t scare me. You don’t fucking scare me, Anal-toli. I’ve seen death. I’ve seen evil. I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. I’ve seen lonely days I thought would never end. ... I eye-fuck you. I throat-fuck you!

For a moment I was vaguely intrigued. “Well, this can’t end well,” I thought. But it kind of does. If Fontaine is who everyone says he is, he’s not going to allow this—even after 12 years of loyalty. Particularly when Dom demands Ivan’s girlfriend, Paolina (model Madalina Diana Ghenea, who is so hot she’s nuclear), as partial payment. Instead, amid a few vague threats, Ivan forgives, then gives Dom three quarters of a million pounds for his 12 years, then is stupid enough to get into a car driven by a drunk/high Dom down a narrow winding road. In the aftermath, Dom has cost a life (Fontaine), has saved a life (Melody, Kerry Condon of HBO’s “Rome”), and has had his three-quarters of a million pounds stolen (by Paolina). So of course, despondent, he returns to London to try to win back his daughter (Emilia Clarke, Khaleesi from HBO’s “Game of Thrones”) and get work from the son of the gangster he was fighting all of these years. The cycle continues. It gets old.

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
What doesn’t get old? The language. There’s a majesty to it, even if there isn’t to Dom. Before it all goes awry, Dom is in the pool with Melody. She tells him he has a noble chin and he says she has noble tits. She mentions her sister is an actress and he says he did a bit of acting, playing the apothecary in “Romeo and Juliet” at reform school. What I like is that by this point we realize Dom is a Shakespearean character. He even talks like one. “Misfortune befell me,” he says at one point. Look at the poster: He’s Macbeth with bad taste. He’s a low-end character with a high-end vocabulary.

That’s purposeful. Here’s writer-director Richard Shepard:

I do think there's something Shakespearean about Dom. He's a larger-than-life character, who by his very nature just shoots himself in the foot. He destroys himself at every turn. If the movie is about anything, it's about, “Dom, just don't destroy yourself any more.”

But we know he will. The movie ends, as it began, on an up-note, another soliloquy:

After much heartbreak and ruin, the pendulum of luck has finally swung back to Dom Hemingway. And I intend to enjoy each moment of its fickle pleasure—whether it lasts for a minute, a day or a lifetime.

I’m betting a minute. Dom’s life is a merry-go-round. Our step off seems arbitrary. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Near the end of “Love Is Strange,” the slice-of-life indie directed by Ira Sachs, George (Alfred Molina), the longtime companion and new husband of Ben (John Lithgow), critiques a student’s classical music performance thus: “When a piece is that romantic, there’s no need to embellish it.”

He could be describing the movie.

Ben and George, a painter and a music instructor, have been living together for decades. As the movie opens (on a stockinged foot at the end of the bed), they are getting ready for another day. Ben slumps into the shower, they dress (necktie for George, bowtie for Ben), Ben can’t find his glasses. They talk to the housekeepers (Two of them? Are they preparing for a party?), then try to flag a cab on the streets of Manhattan. “We’ll have better luck on 6th,” George says. And off they go. To? A wedding. Theirs. It’s both another day and their wedding day. It’s a moment of triumph and celebration. Short-lived, it turns out.

George, you see, is a music instructor at Saint Grace Academy, where most folks, including Father Raymond (John Cullum), know he’s gay, know he lives with Ben, don’t care. But gay marriage? That’s toxic. Or political. And somehow (New York Times wedding page, maybe?) the Bishop finds out and George is fired. As a result, he and Ben can no longer afford to live where they live. As a result, they are forced to live apart.

The dramatist’s dilemma isn’t how to bring the lovers together but how to keep them apart for 90 minutes. Sachs’ approach here is novel. He keeps the lovers apart by marrying them.

No place
Question: Once it becomes apparent that the sale of their apartment won’t net them the income they need, why not just take the Poughkeepsie option? That’s where Ben’s niece, the brassy Mindy (Christina Kirk), lives, and she has room for both of them. But it’s not Manhattan. And the folks we saw at the wedding—friends and family—decide Ben and George need to live in Manhattan. So they divvy them up: George goes with the gay cops downstairs, Ben with his nephew Elliot (Darren E. Burrows of “Northern Exposure”), and his family—novelist wife Kate (Marisa Tomei), teenage son Joey (Charlie Tahan)—across town. Ben gets the bottom bunk in Joey’s room. Tensions quickly fester.

Joey no longer has space, Kate no longer has space. (Tomei is excellent at being just this side of awful.) At first Ben is oblivious—going on and on in the living room as Kate tries to work on her second novel—and then painfully aware. He walks on metaphoric tiptoes. He paints on the roof of the apartment building, using Joey’s friend, Vlad (Eric Tabach), as a model, but this only makes Joey angry. When he comes home at night, Elliot and Kate are talking quietly (privately) in the living room, so he ducks into the bedroom—where Joey, hanging with Vlad, yells at him for not knocking. He has no place.

Neither does George. He’s with the hunky cops who are always partying, and he’s not a partier. One night he turns up rain-soaked at Elliot and Kate’s. For a moment, everyone’s surprised. Then he falls into Ben’s arms and sobs. It’s a powerful beautiful scene, and, per the above quote, unembellished. It just happens. It reveals, retroactively, all the tension and loneliness he’s feeling.

The movie is full of this kind of humanity. Another scene I loved: Joey and Ben talking at night in the bunkbeds. Joey, a kid without many friends, is still slightly angry at Ben, and possibly feeling guilty, too. Before going to bed, trying better to understand him maybe, Ben asks Joey if he’s ever been in love. Joey talks of seeing this girl on vacation one summer. He never spoke with her, he just saw her. She saw him, too. That seems key for him: being seen. He knows she lives in the city, too. “You should say hello,” Ben says matter-of-factly. That’s it. No resolution, no obvious epiphany. Just an ordinary scene that feels like everything.

Every place
Sachs, who co-wrote the movie with Mauricio Zacharias (“Madame Satã”), has a nice habit of transitioning weeks or months ahead without explanation. We figure it out by and by. Oh, they’re going to their wedding. Oh, Ben is living with them. The ending is this way, too.

After George finds them a nice, rent-controlled apartment, he and Ben celebrate at a local bar. They talk, comfortably. They walk down the street, comfortably, until they’re out of sight. You think that might be the end, but no. They talk before Ben takes the subway home. Apparently they haven’t moved in yet. Then we fade to black. Is that the end?

No. We see Joey waiting outside their new apartment, and George takes him upstairs. Joey admires the place, then apologizes for not being at the service. Service? Yes. Ben’s. Joey brings out a painting, Ben’s last, the one with Vlad on the rooftop, and he helps George hang it. Then he leaves. On the stairs down, he breaks down. Is he thinking about how he wasn’t that nice to his Uncle Ben at the end? How he called Vlad “gay” for posing for him? Or maybe he’s just feeling all that he’s lost? After 30 seconds or so, an eternity of screentime, he starts walking again, and one assumes that’s the end. No. The final scenes are Joey riding his skateboard around the more picturesque, treelined streets of Manhattan with a girl. The girl? The vacation girl? Did he finally say hello? Who knows? But at least he’s finally said hello to someone. And maybe he wouldn’t have without Ben’s bunkbed conversation. The things we leave behind.

“Love Is Strange,” despite the title, contains no Mickey and Sylvia on the soundtrack. Chopin piano pieces instead. Played without embellishment.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Winning is fun but relentless winning is hardly dramatic. There’s nothing to overcome. There’s no story there.

Neil Hayes’ book, “When the Game Stands Tall,” about the record-shattering 151-game win streak by De La Salle, a private Catholic high school football team in Concord, Cal., is mostly about its 2002 season; but Hayes includes an epilogue about the 2004 team that finally lost a game. (To Bellevue, by the way, at Qwest Field. Represent.)

So that’s what this movie focuses on: losing, and how you recover from it.

There are some natural contradictions to mine here. Winning, for Coach Bob Ladouceur (Jim Caviezel), is a byproduct of playing the game right (humility, teamwork, etc.); but glory, humility’s opposite, is a byproduct of winning all the time.So how do you keep egos in check when you never lose? When does the byproduct of playing the game right cause you to play the game wrong?

Sadly, the movie dramatizes all of this with reductive situations and stock characters: the me-first, team-last dude who is cured like that by a trip to a VA hospital; the glory-seeking father in the stands (Clancy Brown, the prison guard in “The Shawshank Redemption,” doomed to play such roles). Neither rabid fans nor the probing media help. And aren’t we, the movie audience, part of the problem, too? We want them to win as much as anyone.

First-half subplots—Ladouceur’s heart attack, a senseless murder—are more-or-less forgotten in the second. Caviezel’s Ladouceur is sourly inscrutable, his talks with his wife (Laura Dern) are dull business, and the grace moment at the end is hardly graceful.

The movie raises religious and philosophical questions (via Luke 6:38 and Matthew 23:12) about whether what we put out in the world is returned to us, but it sticks with the ultimate American answer: There is no problem so great that winning a football game won’t solve it.

-- This review originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Seattle Times.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“This rotten town soils everybody,” Nancy (Jessica Alba) says at the end of “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.”

This rotten movie, too.

Is anyone still jazzed by this stuff? Does anyone think writer/co-director/creator Frank Miller isn’t a sad, sad man? Someone channeling Mickey Spillane through the Tobe Hooper grinder? A creepy, morally bankrupt, reactionary idiot?

His male characters still speak in sentence-fragment voiceovers:

Dwight: She’s playing it for all its worth. And it’s worth plenty.

His female characters are still argued about in the most infantile fashion:

Roark: She was a whore and not a very good one.
Johnny: She was an angel.

To recap: Sin City is a corrupt town where, if you’re a good man, you drink hard liquor every night, watch Nancy do her non-strip striptease, then go out and bust heads. Preferably the heads of bad guys. You know: frat boys who light winos on fire or the hired bodyguards of the powerful and corrupt. You get to do what you want with these people because they’re bad. You get to torture people and feel moral about it. It’s like America after 9/11.

If you’re a good woman you’re most likely a prostitute. You wear lingerie and maybe a mask. Maybe it’s a Zorro mask. You tote a machine gun or a crossbow or a samurai blade, and you slice up the bad guys, often with the good guys by your side. And that’s about it for you.

Bad women are the ones who betray good men. Bad men are the ones with money and power. Innocent women are the ones who are killed by the bad men so we get another round of bloodletting by the good men.

Etc.

Worse than the first
The first “Sin City” (2005) was morally reprehensible but at least it kinda held together. At least the motivations and actions of its cartoonish figures kinda matched.

Here? Oy.

So Johnny (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is a lucky, coin-flipping son of a gun who decides to play poker with the most powerful man in the state, Senator Roark (Powers Boothe). Everyone warns him off. Everyone tells him you don’t beat Roark at poker and get away with it. But he does it anyway. Why? Because he’s one of Roark’s bastard children. Does he think this matters to Roark? It doesn’t. So he doesn’t get away with it. He’s beaten, shot, and his lucky hand is mangled, and his lucky charm, an innocent waitress named Marcie (Julia Garner), is killed. So he plots revenge. What is this revenge? He plays more poker with Roark, loses several hands (on purpose?), then wins big at the end. Then he tells Roark he’s a loser, and he’ll always know in his head that he’s a loser, because he, Johnny, beat him twice. Then Roark shoots Johnny in the head. That’s the end of that. Apparently revenge is a dish best smooshed into your own face.

In our second story, private dick Dwight (previously Clive Owen, now Josh Brolin) is revisited by the Love of his Life, Ava (Eva Green), the dame of the title. She’s watched over by a giant of a chauffeur, Manute (Dennis Haysbert), who is apparently the watchdog of her new, rich husband, Damien Lord (Marton Csokas). Is her husband holding her captive? Does he beat her? She implies as much. So after trying to rescue her and getting pummeled by Manute, Dwight returns with Sin City perennial Marv (Mickey Rourke), who relieves Manute of one of his eyes while Dwight relieves Damien Lord of his life. Except, ha ha, Ava is a femme fatale who is playing Dwight for a sap. She’s now a rich, powerful woman, and she sics the cops on Dwight, who holes up in Old Town with the lingerie-clad, sword-wielding prostitutes. Dwight spends this standoff getting plastic surgery, Ava spends it seducing the cop on the case (Christopher Meloni), who becomes so distraught he kills his friend (Jeremy Piven) and then himself. The point of this subplot? Who knows? Eventually Ava hires a Texas killer who turns out to be Dwight, post-plastic surgery, but everyone recognizes him. Then there’s a final big battle, with the lingerie-clad prostitutes vs. the hired bodyguards, and Ava is finally relieved of her life. And that’s the end of that.

Satisfied? Of course not. And it gets worse.

Worst for last
That’s the thing about “Sin City: A Dame to Die For.” Sex + violence isn’t supposed to equal boring but it does here. The violence is cartoonish, the sex puerile and voyeuristic. The dweebs it’s aimed at will probably find it boring. And Miller and co-director Robert Rodriguez save the worst for last.

So Nancy is the girl who was abducted by Roark’s pedophilic son in the first movie, only to be saved by Det. Hartigan (Bruce Willis), only to grow up to be the best stripper at the best dive bar in Sin City; and she, like Johnny, plots her revenge against Roark. At one point, dancing her cowgirl dance, she has Roark in her sights, but she can’t pull the trigger. Alas. So she has to drink, and emote, and dance some more raw, angry, sexually absurd dances, before she cuts up her own face and tells Marv that it was Roark who did it, which leads she and Marv to attack Roark’s fortress the way Dwight and Marv attacked the Lord fortress, and there’s another final showdown, this time between Nancy and Roark, the stripper and the Senator. But does she have the guts to finally go through with it? Moot point. He shoots first, her gun is inches away, and he’s about to take the final deadly shot when, in the mirror, he sees the ghost of Hartigan, who’s been following after Nancy for most of the movie, giving her bad advice she can’t hear; but his appearance here, in the mirror, gives her the time to grab her gun and blam blam blow away the baddest of the bad guys. After that, she visits Hartigan’s grave and says the last line and the lights come up and we all shuffle out of the theater feeling as soiled as Sin City.

Ick.

I’d want revenge on Frank Miller if I didn’t feel so sorry for the man. We get to leave Sin City after 100 minutes, but he invented it. He cared enough about it to put it on paper and then film. It will soil itself in his head forever.