Category Archives: Review Re-View
Elizabethtown (2005) [Review Re-View]
Originally released October 14, 2005:
Cameron Crowe is a filmmaker I generally admire. He makes highly enjoyable fables about love conquering all, grand romantic gestures, and finding your voice. His track record speaks for itself: Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous (I forgive him the slipshod remake of Vanilla Sky, though it did have great artistry and a bitchin’ soundtrack). Crowe is a writer that can zero in on character with the precision of a surgeon. He’s a man that can turn simple formula (boy meets girl) and spin mountains of gold. With these possibly unfair expectations, I saw Elizabethtown while visiting my fiancé in New Haven, Connecticut. We made a mad dash to the theater to be there on time, which involved me ordering tickets over my cell phone. I was eager to see what Crowe had in store but was vastly disappointed with what Elizabethtown had to teach me.
Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) opens the film by narrating the difference between a failure and a fiasco. Unfortunately for him, he’s in the corporate cross-hairs for the latter. Drew is responsible for designing a shoe whose recall will cost his company an astounding “billion with a B” dollars (some research of an earlier cut of the film says the shoe whistled while you ran). His boss (Alec Baldwin) takes Drew aside to allow him to comprehend the force of such a loss. Drew returns to his apartment fully prepared to engineer his own suicide machine, which naturally falls apart in a great comedic beat. Interrupting his plans to follow career suicide with personal suicide is a phone call from his sister (Judy Greer). Turns out Drew’s father has died on a trip visiting family in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Drew is sent on a mission from his mother (Susan Sarandon) to retrieve his father and impart the family’s wishes. On the flight to Kentucky, Drew gets his brain picked by Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a cheery flight attendant. While Drew is surrounded by his extended family and their down homsey charm and eccentricities, he seeks out some form of release and calls Claire. They talk for hours upon hours and form a fast friendship and stand on the cusp of maybe something special.
I think the most disappointing aspect of Elizabethtown for me is how it doesn’t have enough depth to it. Crowe definitely wears his heart on his sleeve but has never been clumsy about it. Elizabethtown wants to be folksy and cute and impart great lessons about love, life, and death. You can’t reach that plateau when you have characters walking around stating their inner feelings all the time, like Drew and Claire do. They might as well be wearing T-shirts that explain any intended subtext. Crowe squanders his film’s potential by stuffing too many storylines into one pot, thus leaving very little attachment to any character. Elizabethtown has some entertaining details, chiefly Chuck and Cindy’s drunk-on-love wedding, but the film as a whole feels too loose and disconnected to hit any emotional highs. If you want a better movie about self-reawakening, rent Garden State. If you want a better movie about dealing with loss, rent Moonlight Mile.
This is Bloom’s first test of acting that doesn’t involve a faux British accent and some kind of heavy weaponry. The results are not promising. Bloom is a pin-up come to life like a female version of Weird Science, a living mannequin, possibly an alien with great skin, but he isn’t a real compelling actor. He has about two emotions in his repertoire. His whiny American-ized accent seems to be playing a game of tag. He’s not a bad actor per se; he just gets the job done without leaving any sort of impression. To paraphrase Claire, he’s a “substitute leading man.”
Dunst is chirpy, kooky and cute-as-a-button but is better in small doses. Her accent is much more convincing than Bloom’s. Sarandon deserves pity for being involved in Elizabethtown‘s most improbable, cringe-worthy moment. At her husband’s wake, she turns her time of reflection into a talent show with a stand-up routine and then a horrifying tap dance. Apparently this gesture wins over the extended family who has hated her for decades. Greer (The Village) is utterly wasted in a role that approximates a cameo. Without a doubt, the funniest and most memorable performance is delivered by Baldwin, who perfectly mixes menace and amusement. He takes Drew on a tour of some of the consequences of the loss of a billion dollars, including the inevitable closing of his Wildlife Watchdog group. “We could have saved the planet,” Baldwin says in the most comically dry fashion. Baldwin nails the balance between discomfort and bewilderment.
Elizabethtown wants to be another of Crowe’s smart, feel-good sentimental field trips, but it falls well short. I was dumbfounded to see how little the story progressed. It lays the groundwork for a menagerie of subplots and then, in a rush to finish, caps everyone off with some emotionally unearned payoff. To put it simply, Elizabethtown wants credit and refuses to show its work. The film is packed with characters and ideas before succumbing into an interminable travelogue of America in its closing act, but what cripples Crowe’s film about opening up to emotional growth is that the movie itself doesn’t showcase growth. We see the rough and tumble beginnings of everyone, we see the hugs-all-around end, but we don’t witness that most critical movement that takes the audience from Point A to Point B. The results are beguiling and quite frustrating. Take the subplot about Drew’s cousin, who can?t connect to his father either and wants to be friends to his own son, a shrill little terror, instead of a father. Like most of Elizabethtown‘s storylines, these subplots die of neglect until a half-hearted nod to wrap everything up. Father sees son perform and all is well. Son does little to discipline child but all is well. Elizabethtown is sadly awash in undeveloped storylines and characters and unjustified emotions, and when they’re unjustified we go from sentiment (warm and fuzzy) to schmaltz (eye-rolling and false). I truly thought Crowe would know better than this.
Crowe has always been the defacto master of marrying music to film. Does anyone ever remember people singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” before its virtuoso appearance in 2000’s Almost Famous? Crowe has a nimble ear but his penchant for emotional catharsis set to song gets the better of him with Elizabethtown. There’s just way too many musical montages (10? 15?) covering the emotional ground caused by the script’s massive shortcomings. By the time a montage is followed by another montage, you may start growing an unhealthy ire for acoustic guitar. Because there are so many unproductive musical numbers and montages, especially when we hit the last formless act, Elizabethtown feels like Crowe is shooting the soundtrack instead of a story.
Elizabethtown is an under-cooked, unfocused travelogue set to music. Crowe intends his personal venture to belt one from the heart, but like most personal ventures the significance can rarely translate to a third party. It’s too personal a film to leave any lasting power, like a friend narrating his vacation slide show. Elizabethtown is gestating with plot lines that it can’t devote time to, even time to merely show the progression of relationships. The overload of musical montages makes the movie feels like the longest most somber music video ever. Bloom’s limited acting isn’t doing anyone any favors either. In the end, it all rings too phony and becomes too meandering to be entertaining. Elizabethtown is a journey the film won’t even let you ride along for. This movie isn’t an outright fiasco but given Crowe’s remarkable track record it can’t help but be anything but a failure.
Nate’s Grade: C
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I truly hope some day Cameron Crowe reads this. I owe him an apology.
I’ve always considered Elizabethtown the turning point in Crowe’s career, where things took an errant path that he’s been stuck on ever since, though there were certain warning signs with 2001’s Vanilla Sky. I was disappointed by this movie and the ensuing twenty years have only made me think back less favorably, since this was the juncture where Crowe’s hit-making streak of such tender, personal, and tremendously entertaining studio dramedies came to an end, where the Crowe projects afterwards felt more like Crowe was chasing after the idea of what makes a Cameron Crowe movie and losing his sense of self. I selected Elizabethtown for my 2025 re-watch mostly because I’ve never gone back to it in the proceeding two decades but also because it’s an important switch point in a popular artist’s career. What I wasn’t expecting when I re-watched the movie was to be so taken in by it considering my own personal circumstances.
This is a movie about grief, about putting one foot in front of the other, about coming to terms with mistakes and regrets, and ultimately looking ahead. It’s still a little corny, and it’s still got some flaws, but in 2025, having lost my own father not even a year ago as of this writing, Elizabethtown hit me square in the chest. It made me a mess of emotions and I could plug myself into this bittersweet yet gentle nudge of a film. Even the amiable tone and gentle, searching nature worked for me, as it felt like it was expertly channeling the fog of grief upon experiencing significant loss. Your body is sort of operating on autopilot and you feel outside yourself, like you’re watching a documentary about your life. You feel numb and recognize you’re in pain but you never really want to talk about it yet you crave human connectivity, and even when people awkwardly ask the question, “Are you doing okay?”, while the answer is obvious to all parties, you’re still unexpressively grateful for someone else granting the kindness of reaching out. This movie encapsulates this drifting feeling of loss and shock better than any I can recall. And in Crowe’s universe, which is like a more filled-in and colorful version of our own, strangers will take a moment to recognize your emotional pain and give you a hug. It’s a universe that cares about you, where even a guy getting married in your same hotel wants to invite you to his reception. There are no cynics in a Cameron Crowe universe, or at least if there are, they will be converted by the end like a Charles Dickens tale. It is a universe supremely about feeling and connectivity, and that’s what Drew (Orlando Bloom) has to learn.
Drew is under personal and professional crises. He’s been cast off at his job as an athletic shoe designer because his big design was recalled to the cost of a billion dollars. He says he’s begun cataloging “last looks” by co-workers, when people think this will be the last time they see him again. It’s a nice detail that comes back but also gets us thinking about the later drama with life and death, how every one of us will give our last looks to the people in our lives, we just won’t have the same sense of clarity. Drew is traveling to Kentucky to retrieve his father’s body and return home to his immediate family. This is intended to be a pit stop, a brief sojourn with extended family he doesn’t really see often, a respite before he gets his life back together. These significant loops in life become a natural reflective point, and that’s where Drew is coming from. His life has seemingly bottomed out, and the movie functions as his therapy session to process his grief and his shattered self-image. His sister, an undervalued Judy Greer, keeps asking if he’s had his “big cry” yet, and reminds him that it’s coming. By the end of the movie, it’s not Drew having come full-circle and found his way out of his grief fog. The whole movie is about just setting him up to actually address the loss and feel the completeness of his sadness. Under this perspective, the movie’s many menial supporting characters that dot the plot feel like gentle well-wishers. I complained about them in 2005 but in 2025 it makes the entire world feel like therapy accessories.
Much of the movie is also pinned on the romance between Drew and quirky flight attendant Claire (Kirsten Dunst), and it was her performance that coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG). She can definitely fit that mold but there’s a more subtle sadness to her that you see along the edges, like she’s putting so much effort into maintaining this front in public lest the mask drop and she has to deal properly with her own loneliness and disappointments. I think a more accurate depiction of the MPDG trope as a transparent sop to male fantasy is 2004’s Garden State with Natalie Portman’s spunky character. There is a sense that Claire’s off-screen long-distance bad boyfriend, Ben, is actually made up, an excuse to stop her from getting too close. She uses the term “tourist” to describe herself and Drew, and it’s fitting. The reality of her job makes her feel like she’s constantly in motion without setting down roots, prone to a thousand superficial human interactions that get washed from her memory as the day resets. It’s a transitory life and it can make a person feel outside of themself, questioning which version is their true self. The romantic dance between Claire and Drew really is all about both of them working up the nerve. It’s less a relationship that is fully formed and banging the drum of love; it’s far more an infatuation, where each side is circling over whether to risk the fun for something more. Under that guise, I’m more forgiving of the movie not exactly “showing its work” as I criticized in my original review. It’s not there because they aren’t there. This isn’t a relationship but a flirtation and friendship coalescing. It’s sweet and pleasant, like much of the movie, falling right in line with Crowe’s compassionate, humanist vibes.
It’s hard to exactly quantify but Elizabethtown is more of its moments and the gradual pull that is tugging Drew toward his ultimate destiny, which amounts to self-acceptance and fully processing his grief. I originally castigated Drew’s mother (Susan Sarandon) trying out new hobbies as a means of busying herself in the wake of her husband’s demise, including turning the wake into a standup comedy audition. The jokes themselves can be a little cringey or in poor taste for a funeral, but the overall effort is about this woman trying to define her life now that her partner, the old sturdy definition, has departed. I see something similar with my own mother in the wake of my father’s death. I’m not expecting my mother to start making boner jokes like Sarandon, but I see how this identity crisis can become all-too familiar. I love the absolute chaos of the actual wake that erupts into a literal flaming bird while the family band jams out to Lyndard Skynard’s “Free Bird,” and as that famous guitar solo hits the stratosphere, the movie’s built-up pressure all seems to come to a head, and the continued playing of the song despite all the chaos is its own defiant act of catharsis. It unbounded something inside me as it does for the characters. Then there’s the extended conclusion where Drew drives all over with his father’s ashes and with Claire’s travel guide, notes, and curated soundtrack as companion. It’s a lot, but it’s also the final stretch that gets Drew to finally accept his feelings, to finally feel the totality of loss but also that totality of love, and while his father may be gone, that does not eliminate the lessons and love and memories that live within him. Having this personal deeper dive happen on a father-son road trip actually feels rather fitting and poignant even.
This is the third Cameron Crowe movie I’ve re-examined for my twenty-year re-reviews and it’s also my last. I never formally reviewed any of Crowe’s follow-up movies after 2005. I’ve already talked about how his career has taken a different track in other re-reviews, but I’ve come around on Elizabethtown, and that makes me wonder if maybe I’ll be more charitable to We Bought a Zoo or Aloha in time as well. In 2005, I found Elizabethtown to be a disappointing grab bag of Crowe’s touchy-feely familiarity, and now twenty years later, the movie really gelled for me. Perhaps I needed to go through a similar experience as the protagonist to be more open to its charms and artistic waves, or perhaps I’m getting nostalgic for Crowe’s kind of big-hearted romantic storytelling that hasn’t exactly been proliferating cinemas for some time. Perhaps I’ll watch Elizabethtown again years later and feel completely different, but I kind of doubt it, because now this movie is linked with my own reconciliation of grief after my father’s passing. It’s now been elevated from a disappointment from a revered filmmaker to something personal and passingly profound. It exemplified the foggy feelings and desire for connection for me post-funeral. As Claire says, “We are intrepid. We carry on.” Responding to failures and regrets should continue to resonate, and so Elizabethtown might actually become a personal movie I cherish over the years. It’s not the masterpiece that Almost Famous is, an all-timer, but hardly any other movies will rise to that level. I’ll accept Elizabethtown on its own terms in 2025, and those were the exact terms I needed to feel more whole.
So thank you Cameron Crowe. It took twenty years but I’ve come around. This isn’t a folly, a failure, and certainly no fiasco. It’s actually a sweet and moving tale about trying to find your direction in the face of grief and shame and just finding your way out the other side of the fog. For me, this whole movie was about the universe working through a million cheerful helpers to nudge Drew back onto his feet, including our love interest, which seems less damnable if the entire movie is achieving the same results. For a person looking through tragedy and asking why, it’s just enough encouragement, wisdom, and empathy to feel nourishing without feeling overwhelming, and it doesn’t feel phony at all to me in 2025.
Elizabethtown was what I needed. I love you dad and miss you every day.
Re-View Review: B+
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The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) [Review Re-View]
Originally released August 19, 2005:
Yes it’s an uproarious sex farce, that’s a given from the ads, but this movie is also surprisingly sweet and genuinely moving. A lot of credit goes to star/co-writer Steve Carell and co-writer/director Judd Apatow, creator of some of the best, most honestly funny TV series unjustly cancelled. Apatow is a master at mining human comedy for pathos, where you get a great sense of character and really feel for those onscreen, and yet nothing feels cheap or unwarranted, all the while deriving comedy from the situations. We need more men like Apatow in the film industry. Carell can do it all whether it’s deflecting his insecurity, which we feel so bad when he comes up with outrageous things he’s overheard to make himself seem like one of the guys. The supporting cast is top-notch. They’re basically the stock roles in a sex comedy and yet they bring so much more to the table, with a true-to-life boys-will-be-boys camaraderie that you can identify with. The character relationships in The 40-Year-Old Virgin really elevate the story and the jokes and make the film something really special. It’s not merely a barrage of gross-out humor; it’s a nice story with some very tender moments. This is a movie that goes well beyond its gimmick premise, never feeling like a skit blown up into a feature film. It mixes in psychology, heartbreak, awkwardness, but also insights into loneliness and human connection. The best character-based comedy in years.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
It’s always an interesting prospect to revisit beloved comedies decades after their impact. Comedy is, by its nature, a form of entertainment with the shortest shelf life. What one generation and time considers funny may prove antiquated or offensive the next or, just simply, not funny. I challenge readers to watch the old vaudeville routines and really try to laugh, not just snicker or titter but laugh, the kind of laughter where you have to hold your sides and worry about losing bladder control. Shakespeare wrote many comedies but I would argue most would view them today as clever rather than gut-busting. That’s just the nature of funny, which is in constant flux. One day you’re a popular comedian building your brand on copious “I hate my wife” jokes, and the next you’re a has-been who has transparent issues hating women. I experienced this before when I revisited the movies of Kevin Smith, a filmmaker who made a significant formative impact on my burgeoning sense of comedy and indie cinema. I found that the same movies that proved so funny and outrageous in my teenage and young adult years now, in the light of distance and decades, felt painfully dated and grasping, gassed and flailing. Comedy is a cultural time capsule.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a delightful surprise when it was originally released twenty years ago, but it wasn’t only a popular sex comedy, it began a new era of dominant comedy, the Judd Apatow Era. The prolific producer had been responsible for critically acclaimed TV series that always got cancelled too soon, like Freaks and Geeks (created by Paul Feig), Undeclared, and The Ben Stiller Show. He was a well-regarded writer with a sharp eye for talent, but it wasn’t until 2004’s Anchorman that Apatow had a hit under his name, a comedy that crossed over from a small cult audience into the zeitgeist. After The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s reign, the Apatow style of comedy became hip and desirable. It was a winning mixture of broad body humor and character-driven pathos, usually following lonely men suffering from arrested development and finding kinship, agency, and a fuller sense of who they are by the end. There were regular set pieces like traditional comedies but these were more focused on character moments and vibes, which lead to roaming running times and loose-goosey, improv-heavy jam sessions. It was the combination of salty and sweet that proved a winning combination, starring less conventional leading men like Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Jonah Hill, many of whom also wrote or co-wrote their own movies. The Apatow factory created a comedy coaching tree of influential big screen storytellers.
It was the apex of studio comedy and then… it wasn’t. This isn’t so much a tale of the world growing fickle to the Apatow formula, though with time any formula can start to wear out its novelty. Apatow went on a cold streak for me, first with 2009’s misanthropic and misshapen Funny People and then again with 2012’s This is 40, a sequel to Knocked Up that was obnoxiously wallowing in its sense of woe-is-me rich privilege (it definitely wasn’t my life turning 40). After that, he became something of a shepherd for exciting new comic voices, creating starring vehicles for Amy Schumer (2015’s Trainwreck) and Pete Davidson (2020’s The King of Staten Island) and Lena Dunham (HBO’s Girls). Then he made 2022’s The Bubble, a limp COVID-era satire of studio filmmaking that was painfully unfunny. It felt like Apatow had run out of things to say and even things to laugh about. It was pretty depressing for this comedy giant.
However, the downturn in Apatow’s influence also coincided with the downturn in studio comedies. These mid-budget vehicles used to dominate the box-office and then by the end of the 2010s, they seemed to vanish, seemingly folded into larger-budgeted superhero movies and/or ceded to streaming venues. This became even more entrenched in the theatrical environment during and “after” COVID. Even the occasional A-list starring vehicle, like 2023’s No Hard Feelings with a brassy Jennifer Lawrence performance and the selling point of a full-frontal nude fight scene, could only muster so much attention. Take for instance a Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon comedy released just this year directed by Nicholas Stoller (Neighbors). Can anyone even remember the title? I had to look it up myself and I watched it. Have moviegoers grown to expect comedies being lesser or have people lost their sense of humor in the Trump Era where every day can feel like a burdensome weight on your very soul.
I genuinely enjoyed most of the Apatow-related comedies of the 2000s, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin holds up because its central appeal is on the engaging characters, their winning camaraderie, and the relatable vulnerability and awkwardness of sex and dating. While some of the jokes and attitudes have changed in twenty years, there is a timeless quality to the inherent vulnerability of feeling like you cannot connect with others and the steps taken to rectify that, risking shame. Dating is still a minefield for awkward yet relatable observational comedy just as it was and just as it always will be. Apatow and co-writer Carell anchored their movie on a repressed man’s awakening, taking the formula of a sexual awakening we usually see in teen/young adult movies and applying it to an older man. It redefines a sub-genre but also provides a little sadness and sweetness, as we can’t help but hope that Andy (Carell) will luck in on pleasurable experiences denied him. He’s not a creep, and the explanation for how a man could hold onto his virginity for 40 years (the CDC stats say 0.3% of women and 1.2% of men aged 40 to 44 are indeed virgins) is painfully plausible. After a few embarrassing experiences, he just waited with the expectation it would happen eventually, and the longer it took, the more shame built, and the less certain he was to pursue a romantic relationship. He knows once his secret is out that people won’t just look at him differently, they’ll look at him as if he’s a freak and think less of him. That’s why it’s genuinely sweet how involved his co-workers get to help Andy get over this hump, so to speak. While each co-worker has a different perspective of advice, they open up about their own troubles with women and self-confidence. It’s not like this is a searing relationship drama, but the fundamentals that make it worth investing are there, and that begins and ends with the characters and their conflicts and their camaraderie.
Each of Andy’s co-workers is giving him bad advice because each one of them wants him to be someone else. Cal (Rogen) advises Andy to be inscrutable and standoffish, turning everything into a question while revealing nothing personal. It’s reminiscent of those smug 2000s pick-up artists that trained a generation of young men into thinking the way to a woman’s heart was to insult her. He does have a hilariously specific note (“Be like David Caruso in Jade”) that still made me laugh hard. Jay (Romany Malco) advises Andy about it being a numbers game, to embrace a bravado to ensnare women, and to pick them up where they are most impressionable. David (Paul Rudd) is still hung up on his ex and is lovelorn, so his advice is often coated in reflexive bitterness. He’s the friend who advises Andy to explore more about his own desires, leading to a very funny sequence where Andy sets up his home environment for his attempt at masturbation, turning around family pictures to spare their eyes. It’s actually through the character of Marla (Kat Dennings, Thor), the teen daughter of his girlfriend, that Andy finds a level of self-acceptance for being a novice to human sexuality. I think it’s telling that the best advice he receives on the subject is from a teenage girl rather than his horndog pals who consider themselves female experts.
The movie pivots into a more focused romantic comedy by its second half once Andy finally works up the nerve to ask out Trish, played by Catherine Keener (Get Out, Being John Malkovich). This is a natural transition because now Andy has a person to practice all the advice and prove himself. They have a chummy and self-deprecating chemistry together, so the challenge becomes how long he can hide what amounts to his secret shame. Things are going so well he throws out obstacles to delay their physical copulation because he’s afraid that’s when she’ll realize he isn’t worth it. You’re rooting for Andy to get over his hangups and recognize he’s actually a nice guy and that Trish would be really happy to have sex with him, especially after waiting over twenty-plus dates. This is one of Keener’s warmest performances in her storied career. This was Carell’s star-making role. He had been a notable scene-stealer before in Bruce Almighty and Anchorman, but now he was a leading man, further solidifying that same year with the role that would define him, as Michael Scott on the American version of The Office. The both of them are a winning pair and you want their shared adorkable energy to work out for the best.
Much of the comedy still works very well, like the famous chest-waxing scene where Carell really had his chest hair ripped out, but there are some elements that would have been scuttled had The 40-Year-Old Virgin been released today. It’s hard to conceive of a modern studio comedy that would allow two straight guys insulting each other with the many ways they are irrefutably gay. The 2000s was a time rife with gay panic jokes. What has aged the worst is the advice to prey upon “drunk bitches” because they have fewer defenses. Given the term, “prey upon,” you’ll no doubt surmise that this advice is predatory. This dubious thinking is something that would set up a guy as one of the bad men in Promising Young Woman, and it would have proven fitting had one of those women gotten one over on the guys. Frustratingly, Jay has a brief moment of recompense and self-reflection when his long-suffering girlfriend has had enough of his cheating ways, but then she goes right back to him and reveals she’s pregnant. We’re missing a scene that would help solidify how this event changes Jay, but instead he’s basically rewarded for his bad behavior with a baby and a woman forgiving him once again.
You’ve probably heard about the loneliness epidemic of modern men, a media-friendly term exploring how many of today’s available men are having difficulty making connections with women and some of them using this rejection and/or fear of rejection as the excuse to radicalize themselves. There’s been so much written on the subject, but I think most of it really just comes down to empathy. When you care about other people, and allow yourself to think about their needs and desires, it communicates an openness to others and that their time and emotional investment is worth it. It’s hard to fathom a swath of young men, the ones who identify as reactionary incels, deigning to view empathy as a strength rather than character defect. Empathy communicates two important self-realizations: 1) other people matter, and 2) being vulnerable and possibly being hurt is worth the risk. You can’t have one without the other. When young men reach that epiphany and acceptance, they will discover women are, amazingly, much more open to seeing them as a romantic partner worth their time, affection, and their bodies. Nobody owes anyone their bodies or emotional bandwidth. Sharing your life with others should be valued, not entitled.
This is also a perfect spot to talk about one of the minor co-stars, Shelley Malil as co-worker Haziz, who was charged with stabbing his girlfriend 25 times in 2008. He was released from prison in 2018 after serving eight years of a twelve-years-to-life prison sentence, which doesn’t sound very close to “life” for me, but on the flip side, “12 years to all years” seems like too expansive of a window of time to serve.
Twenty years later, The 40-Year–Old Virgin still funny and sweet and entertaining because it nails the tenets of what makes movies worth coming back to again and again, our connection to the characters and their relatable plights. Even two decades later, we can still see elements of ourselves in these characters, though maybe fewer. This was the announcement of the Judd Apatow Era of big screen yuks, and frankly I’d be happy to return to it if we got more movies like this and Knocked Up, a comedy I liked even more upon release. My original review was correct for all the accolades The 40-Year-Old Virgin deserved and still deserves, and so it remains a comedy classic with more on its dirty mind than many adult dramas.
Re-View Grade: A
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Batman Begins (2005) [Review Re-View]
Originally released June 15, 2005:
I have been a Batman fan since I was old enough to wear footy pajamas. I watched the campy Adam West TV show all the time, getting sucked into the lead balloon adventures. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman was the first PG-13 film I ever saw, and I watched it so many times on video that I have practically worn out my copy. Batman Returns was my then most eagerly anticipated movie of my life, and even though it went overboard with the dark vision, I still loved it. Then things got dicey when Warner Brothers decided Batman needed to lighten up. I was only a teenager at the time, but I distinctly remember thinking, “You’re telling the Dark Knight to lighten up?” Director Joel Schumacher’s high-gloss, highly stupid turn with Batman Forever pushed the franchise in a different direction, and then effectively killed it with 1997’s abomination, Batman and Robin. I mean these films were more worried about one-liners and nipples on the Bat suits. Nipples on the Bat suits, people! Is Batman really going, “Man, you know, I’d really like to fight crime today but, whoooo, my nipples are so chaffed. I’m gonna sit this one out”?
For years Batman languished in development hell. Warner Bothers licked their wounds and tried restarting their franchise again and again, only to put it back down. Then around 2003 things got exciting. Writer/director Christopher Nolan was announced to direct. Nolan would also have creative control. Surely, Warner Brothers was looking at what happened when Columbia hired Sam Raimi (most known for low-budget splatterhouse horror) for Spider-Man and got out of his way. After Memento (My #1 movie of 2001) and Insomnia (My #5 movie of 2002), Nolan tackles the Dark Night and creates a Batman film that’s so brilliant that I’ve seen it three times and am itching to go again.
The film opens with a youthful Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in a Tibetan prison. He’s living amongst the criminal element searching for something within himself. Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) offers Bruce the chance to be taught under the guidance of the mysterious Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe), the leader of the equally mysterious warrior clan, The League of Shadows. Under Ducard’s direction, Bruce confronts his feelings of guilt and anger over his parents’ murder and his subsequent flee from his hometown, Gotham City. He masters his training and learns how to confront fear and turn it to his advantage. However, Bruce learns that the League of Shadows has its judicial eyes set on a crime ridden Gotham, with intentions to destroy the city for the betterment of the world. Bruce rebels and escapes the Tibetan camp and returns to Gotham with his own plans of saving his city.
With the help of his trusted butler Alfred (Michael Caine), Bruce sets out to regain his footing with his family’s company, Wayne Enterprises. The company is now under the lead of an ethically shady man (Rutger Hauer) with the intentions of turning the company public. Bruce befriends Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), the company’s gadget guru banished to the lower levels of the basement for raising his voice. Bruce gradually refines his crime fighting efforts and becomes the hero he’s been planning on since arriving home.
Gotham is in bad shape too. Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), a childhood friend to Bruce, is a prosecutor who can’t get anywhere when crime lords like Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) are controlling behind the scenes. Most of the police have been bought off, but Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) is the possibly the city’s last honest cop, and he sees that Batman is a figure trying to help. Dr. Crane (Cillian Murphy) is a clinical psychologist in cahoots with Falcone. Together they’re bringing in drug shipments for a nefarious plot by The Scarecrow, a villain that uses a hallucinogen to paralyze his victims with vivid accounts of their own worst fears. Bruce is the only one who can unravel the pieces of this plot and save the people of Gotham City.
Nolan has done nothing short of resurrecting a franchise. Previous films never treated Batman as an extraordinary character; he was normal in an extraordinary world. Batman Begins places the character in a relatively normal environment. This is a brooding, intelligent approach that all but erases the atrocities of previous Batman incarnations. Nolan presents Bruce Wayne’s story in his typical nonlinear fashion, but really gets to the meat and bone of the character, opening up the hero to new insights and emotions, like his suffocating guilt over his parents murder.
Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer (the Blade trilogy) really strip away the decadence of the character and present him as a troubled being riddled with guilt and anger. Batman Begins is a character piece first and an action movie second. The film is unique amongst comic book flicks for the amount of detail and attention it pays to characterization, even among the whole sprawling cast. Nolan has assembled an incredible cast and his direction is swimming in confidence. He’s a man that definitely knows what he’s doing, and boy oh boy, is he doing it right. Batman Begins is like a franchise colonic.
This is truly one of the finest casts ever assembled. Bale makes an excellent gloomy hero and really transforms into something almost monstrous when he’s taking out the bad guys. He’s got great presence but also a succinct intensity to nail the quieter moments where Bruce Wayne battles his inner demons. Caine (The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American) is incomparable and a joy to watch, and his scenes with the young Bruce actually had me close to tears. This is by far the first time a comic book movie even had me feeling something so raw and anything close to emotional. Neeson excels in another tough but fair mentor role, which he seems to be playing quite a lot of lately (Kingdom of Heaven, Star Wars Episode One). Freeman steals every scene he’s in as the affable trouble causer at Wayne Enterprises, and he also gets many of the film’s best lines. Oldman (The Fifth Element, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) disappears into his role as Gotham’s last good cop. If ever there was a chameleon (and their name wasn’t Benicio del Toro), it is Oldman. Holmes works to the best of her abilities, which means she’s “okay.”
The cast of villains are uniformly excellent, with Wilkinson’s (In the Bedroom) sardonic Chicagah accented mob boss, to Murphy’s (28 Days Later…) chilling scientific approach to villainy, to Watanabe’s (The Last Samurai) cold silent stares. Even Rutger Hauer (a man experiencing a career renaissance of his own) gives a great performance. Seriously, for a comic book movie this is one of the better acted films of the year. And that’s saying a lot.
Batman Begins is such a serious film that it almost seems a disservice to call it a “comic book movie.” There are no floating sound effects cards and no nipples on the Bat suits. Nolan really goes about answering the tricky question, “What kind of man would become a crime-fightin’ super hero?” Batman Begins answers all kinds of questions about the minutia of the Dark Knight in fascinating ways, yet the film remains grounded in reality. The Schumacher Batmans (and God save us from them) were one large, glitzy, empty-headed Las Vegas entertainment show. No explanation was given to characters or their abilities. Likewise, the Gothic and opulent Burton Batmans had their regrettable leaps of logic as well. It’s hard not to laugh at the end of Batman Returns when Oswald Cobblepot (a.k.a. The Penguin) gets a funeral march from actors in emperor penguin suits. March of the Penguins it ain’t. Nolan’s Batman is the dead-serious affair comic book lovers have been holding their breath for.
The action is secondary to the story, but Batman Begins still has some great action sequences. Most memorable is a chase sequence between Gotham police and the Batmobile which goes from rooftop to rooftop at one point. Nolan even punctuates the sequence with some fun humor from the police (“It’s a black … tank.”). The climactic action sequence between good guy and bad guy is dutifully thrilling and grandiose in scope. Nolan even squeezes in some horror elements into the film. Batman’s first emergence is played like a horror film, with the caped crusader always around another turn. The Scarecrow’s hallucinogen produces some creepy images, like a face covered in maggots or a demonic bat person.
There are only a handful of flaws that make Batman Begins short of being the best comic book movie ever. The action is too overly edited to see what’s happening. Whenever Batman gets into a fight all you can see are quick cuts of limbs flailing. My cousin Jennifer got so frustrated with the oblique action sequences that she just waited until they were over to see who won (“Oh, Batman won again. There you go.”). Nolan’s editing is usually one of his strong suits; much of Memento’s success was built around its airtight edits. He needs to pull the camera back and let the audience see what’s going on when Batman gets physical.
Another issue is how much plot Batman Begins has to establish. This is the first Batman film to focus solely on Batman and not some colorful villain. Batman doesn’t even show up well into an hour into the movie. As a result, Batman Begins perfects the tortured psychology of Bruce Wayne but leaves little time for villains. The film plays a shell game with its multiple villains, which is fun for awhile. The Scarecrow is really an intriguing character and played to gruesome effect by the brilliant Cillian Murphy. It’s a shame Batman Begins doesn’t have much time to develop and then play with such an intriguing bad guy.
Batman Begins is a reboot for the film franchise. Nolan digs deep at the tortured psyche of Bruce Wayne and come up with a treasure trove of fascinating, exciting, and genuinely engrossing characters. Nolan’s film has a handful of flaws, most notably its oblique editing and limited handling of villains, but Batman Begins excels in storytelling and crafts a superbly intelligent, satisfying, riveting comic book movie. The best bit of praise I can give Batman Begins is that I want everyone responsible to return immediately and start making a host of sequels. This is a franchise reborn and I cannot wait for more of it.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Batman Begins could have also been subtitled, Christopher Nolan Begins. The eponymous writer/director, who has defined the twenty-first century in the realm of artful blockbusters perhaps more than anyone, had made three movies prior to this big moment. He began with 1998’s Following, but it was 2001’s Memento that got everyone’s attention. His immediate follow-up, 2002’s Insomnia, is a very good movie, and actually a better version than the Nordic original, but it was really proof for Warner Brothers that this clever indie guy could handle a larger studio project. In the early 2000s, Warner Brothers was desperate to relaunch Batman after the demise of the franchise with 1997’s ultra campy Batman & Robin, and many filmmakers were courted to relaunch the Dark Knight. It was literally a month after rejecting Joss Whedon’s reboot pitch that in January 2003, the studio announced Nolan was attached and writing the screenplay with David S. Goyer, who was hot off the Blade movies and seemed to have cracked the code for making more mature comic book movie adaptations. What followed was a dramatic reworking of Batman, grounding him and his world in realism and opening Bruce Wayne up for a closer psychological examination, giving the man behind the mask an opportunity to be the actual focus for once. The results reinvigorated the dormant franchise, provided a path for superhero reboots in a post-9/11 landscape, and launched Nolan on his ascendant trajectory to being the biggest blockbuster voice of the modern era.
Batman was a popular character in DC comics (note: DC stands for “Detective Comics,” so saying, “DC comics” is like saying, “Detective Comics comics,” much like the way the “Sahara” means “desert”) from his inception in in 1939, but he was always well behind Superman, the golden boy. The campy Adam West TV series was popular, and actually saved the comic from being discontinued, but it wasn’t until 1989 that Batman became the most popular superhero. The darkness and edge of Batman was more appealing for the modern masses, and paired with Tim Burton, it proved the new levels of studio blockbusters after the steep decline from the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. Ever since, we’ve had over ten live-action headlining Batman movies and only four Superman live-action movies, now five thanks to James Gunn’s recent high-flying addition. Much as the Burton 1989 Batman brought the character to an even bigger height of modern stardom, it was Nolan who likewise took the character and made it an even bigger spectacle that also steered the zeitgeist of what superhero movies could be.
While 2008’s The Dark Knight is widely regarded as Nolan’s best movie in his trilogy, I actually consider Batman Begins his best. That is no insult to The Dark Knight, a wildly entertaining movie that is something truly special every second Heath Ledger is onscreen with his magnetic portrayal of the Joker, a modern-day anarchist seeking validation from the costumed crusader who “changed all the rules.” It’s a good movie with some wonky plotting you don’t think of as long as Ledger is lighting it up, but that first movie was a proof of concept that Batman can carry his own movie. It humanizes the character and strips him down before gradually putting him back together, explaining how this character assembles the tools of his trade and the allies that help support his mission. It’s a satisfying series of trial and error that proves entertaining as we watch the myth of Batman take shape. This first movie is about the formation of Batman, whereas the second is about the escalating consequences of introducing a well-armed vigilante into the bloodstream of organized crime. The first film is the most complete movie, and while it has some flights of fancy like a secret ninja conspiracy, it still works on a relatively grounded level. For the first time in perhaps the character’s film history, you will find yourself caring about the character. That is an accomplishment, and you can feel it when Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) merely standing amidst a swarm of bats is played as a turning point of self-actualization. And it works. This is Nolan’s best Batman.
We don’t even get our first glimpse of Batman as we know him until halfway through the movie. That’s a lot of waiting for a movie with “Batman” as the first word of its title. Even twenty years later, I find the build-up satisfying, watching Bruce Wayne put together the pieces that we associate with Batman, from his cowl to his cape to his suit to the Batmobile, which is practically an all-terrain tank. Finding interesting ways to generate these familiar parts, iconography, and allies makes an invigorating drama that is better than the more action-heavy second half of the movie. It’s still fun and enjoyable how Nolan is able to bring together so many elements with payoffs. This is Nolan’s first blockbuster and he proves that he has an innate feel for popcorn entertainment, knowing how to structure and pace the action and intrigue and laying in those setups and payoffs along with winning character beats and themes. He shows how he can make the moments matter to form an even greater whole. That’s the lasting impact of Batman Begins, where every moment helps to build the mystique of the superhero but also the psychology of Wayne and what motivates a man to dress up and punch dudes for a living.
It also helps that this movie is perfectly cast from top to bottom. Bale was as sturdy a center as you could get. He only went on to be nominated for four Oscars, winning once for 2010’s The Fighter (and should have won in 2018 as Dick Cheney in Vice). He’s long been known for transforming himself completely with his roles. Between 2004’s The Machinist and Batman Begins, there’s a 100-pound difference in Bale’s physique. His performances can get too easily overlooked because of the gimmicky body transformations, but Bale has been one of our most consistent and interesting actors for these last twenty years. Getting Michael Caine (Oscar winner), Morgan Freeman (Oscar winner), Gary Oldman (future Oscar winner), Cillian Murphy (future Oscar winner), Tom Wilkinson (future Oscar nominee), Neeson, Wantanabe, and even Rutger Hauer to be in your movie is obviously a setup for greatness. Nolan and company even get the smallest roles right, like hiring Rade Serbedzija (Snatch, Eyes Wide Shut) just as a homeless man Bruce gives his coat to. He’s only in two scenes for maybe thirty seconds but you got this actor for that part. The odd one out is Katie Holmes as Bruce’s childhood friend who becomes a crusading prosecutor. It’s not a knock on Holmes but simply her character’s role in the story. There’s also the knowledge that this role was recast with Maggie Gyllenhaal in the 2008 sequel, so one wonders what Gyllenhaal would have been like here. I like Holmes as an actress but Maggie Gyllenhaal is a definite upgrade.
Allow me to question the mission of the League of Shadows and good ole Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Wantanabe, but really Liam Neeson). They are a secret order of ninjas trained to fight injustice through extreme measures. They’ve been in existence for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, and claim to have contributed to the destruction of such empires as Rome and Constantinople when they became breeding grounds of injustice. Their next target is Gotham and they become our returning antagonists for the climax, Batman having to take down his mentor. This philosophy purports to link criminality with borders, alleging that criminals are only encouraged by the corrupt institutions of the city. If Rome can no longer support a thriving criminal network, the assumption is that crime goes away. You take away the platform and, voila, injustice and criminality are gone. That’s quite an oversimplification. You could make the argument that destroying a corrupt city makes it harder for criminals to find footing, but does it eliminate crime or just force it to migrate elsewhere? This also assumes that only cities are cesspools for criminality and corruption; look into the Sackler-lead network of pill mills dotting rural America. I guess drug and sex trafficking only exist in urban America, right? The League of Shadows have a bad idea forming a bad philosophy that is being applied badly, and I just wanted to point this out.
The legacy of the Nolan Batman trilogy carries on twenty years later. They are considered some of the biggest blockbusters of the twenty-first century, but it’s also the beginning of the meteoric ascent of Nolan. 2006’s The Prestige, likely his most underrated film, is the last of the Before Movies. Ever since, every Nolan movie has been an event, even ones that step back into more personal and cerebral spaces, like 2023’s runaway Oscar juggernaut, the billion-dollar three-hour biopic, Oppenheimer. He’s become one of a very select few filmmakers whose very name is a selling point to the general public regardless of whatever the project might be (joining Spielberg, Tarantino, James Cameron, and maybe Jordan Peele at this point). I agree with my 2005 criticisms that Nolan is not an expert handler of action. He’s tremendous at atmosphere, with judicious editing and eye-popping visuals, but action construction is not his forte, even after several more action movies to his name. I was much more entertained by the horror sequences from the Scarecrow fear toxin than I was by the straight action. I do wish the villains had more time, especially the Scarecrow, but it’s a result of having so much more plot to do, and centering around Bruce Wayne and his personal journey to superhero-dom means everything serves this streamlined goal.
I saw Batman Begins three times in the theater back in 2005. As a longtime Batman fan, a kid whose first VHS tape was the 89 Batman, who obsessed over every detail for the Batman Returns release, who religiously watched the excellent 90s animated series, I felt a sense of elation that this was a movie that got it. Nolan and his team got Batman and did him justice that had been denied for years. We now likely live in a universe where we’ll never be more than four years away from another live-action Batman movie or appearance. I enjoy the Matt Reeves’ Batman era we’re currently living through, another gritty take favoring realism and depth of character to comic book pulp heroics. The Nolan movies walked so that the Reeves films could fly. If you’re a fan of Batman in the real world, then these last twenty years have been resplendent (Ben Affleck was the highlight of Batman vs. Superman – no joke). It’s interesting to see that convergent point in 2005, where Nolan re-imagined the character for today, and also where Christopher Nolan became the signature blockbuster filmmaker we now freely associate him to be. Batman Begins is a comic book movie that feels so well-suited for the times as well as all time. It’s still smashing.
Re-Review Grade: A
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Layer Cake (2005) [Review Re-View]
Originally released June 10, 2005:
Layer Cake may be the least intimidating name ever for a crime movie. It conjures images of bridal showers, cooking shows, and birthday parties. It does not necessarily bring to mind thoughts of gangsters, assassins, drug trafficking, and the seamy underbelly of London’s criminal underground. Unless you’re watching some really awesome cooking show I don’t know about. The “layer cake” in question refers to the hierarchy of criminals. This isn’t unfamiliar territory for Matthew Vaughn, who produced Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. This time it’s Vaughn sitting in the director’s chair and the results are exceptionally entertaining. Layer Cake is a cinematic treat.
Daniel Craig (Road to Perdition) plays our untitled lead, referred to in the end credits as “XXXX.” He’s a cocaine dealer but not a gangster by any means. He wants to make his money, not step on any important toes, and then walk away on top and without any gaping holes in his body. Craig is summoned by his boss Jimmy (Kenneth Cranham) and given two missions, whether he wants to accept them or not. The first is to relocate the missing daughter of a very powerful friend of Jimmy’s. The second, and far more dangerous job, is to secure a package of millions of stolen ecstasy pills and make a profit. Complicating matters is the angry Serbian mob that the pills were stolen from. They’ve dispatched a deadly assassin known as Dragan to track down their stolen drugs and kill anyone involved. Craig is left to juggle the investigation, find a buyer, stay ahead of Serbian hitmen, get some time in with a hot new girl, and all the while keeping his higher-ups content enough not to kill him themselves.
Layer Cake should be the film that makes Craig the star he so rightfully deserves to be. This man is a modern day Steve McQueen with those piercing blue eyes, cheekbones that could cut glass, and the casual swagger of coolness. Craig grabs the audience from his opening narration as he explains the ins and outs of his business. We may never see Craig sweat but he still expresses a remarkable slow burn of fear so effectively through those baby blues. He’s in over his head and the audience feels his frustrations. In an interesting character twist, when Craig does resort to killing, he’s actually tormented and haunted by his actions.
As with most British gangster flicks, there are a batch of colorful characters that leave their mark. Dragan (Dragan Micanovic) is a wonderfully enigmatic ghost of an assassin always one step ahead of Craig and the audience. Morty (George Harris) and Gene (Colm Meaney) add heart and bluster as Craig’s trusted right hand men. But the actor who steals the whole film with a malevolent glee is Michael Gambon (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). He plays Eddie Temple, the man behind the men behind the scenes. Gambon delivers the harshest of speeches with a velvety pragmatic calm. We don’t know what runs deeper with Eddie, his tan or his scheming.
Sienna Miller plays the thankless love interest to Craig. She’s pretty, sure, but there isn’t much acting ability on display in Layer Cake beside some smoldering glances. We never really know what Craig sees in her besides being another cute blonde to choose over. Miller isn’t alone in the “underwritten character department.” Layer Cake is crammed with secondary characters that pop in and out when it’s necessary. It’s not too annoying but it does mess around with an audience?s ability to follow along coherently.
Layer Cake is not one of the slick, whack-a-mole ventures Ritchie has given us (pre-Madonna). No sir, this is a brooding, serious and nearly terrifying look at the old adage “crime doesn’t pay.” Very few crime centered films express the day-to-day anxiety of just being a criminal. Jimmy reminds Craig that he’ll never be able to walk away because he’s too good an earner for his higher-ups. In Layer Cake, you can get killed for being too greedy, being too careless, being too good at your job, and even just being in the wrong place. Eddie sums it up best whilst describing Faust: “Man sells his soul to the devil. It all ends in tears. These things always do.”
Vaughn has a polished visual sensibility that doesn’t overwhelm the viewer. He keeps the camera fluid and steady with a minimal amount of cuts. A nifty opening scene involves an imaginary drug store (stocked with pot, cocaine, and the like) melting into a real drug store (one hour photo, impulse items at the register). When the tension does mount Vaughn knows just how to turn the screws. A late sequence involving a chase between the SWAT team and our batch of criminals had me on the edge of my seat. For a first time director, Vaughn also has great patience. He doesn’t rush his storyline and he doesn’t suffocate his movie with visual flourishes. He also has a great deal of faith in his audience’s intelligence. This isn’t as lively as Snatch or Lock, Stock, but that’s because Vaughn’s film is also much more serious and dangerous.
This is an intricate and gripping film but it might be a little too complex for its own good. Twists and double-crosses are expected in this genre, but writer J.J. Connolly has so many characters running around and so many hidden agendas that it’s nearly impossible to keep track. Some of the subplots and back stories add very little like the inexplicable “Crazy Larry” flashbacks. I left the theater still confused about plot points but refreshingly satisfied nonetheless.
Layer Cake is the most thoroughly exhilarating time I’ve had at a theater this year. This pulpy daylight-noir caper is full of memorable hoods, plenty of twists and turns, and a star making performance by the steely-eyed wonder that is Daniel Craig (rumored to be the next 007, though in my heart I’ll always root for Clive Owen). Fans of Ritchie’s frenetic gangster flicks should be entertained. Anyone looking for a clever and exciting potboiler that treats violence and crime seriously should start lining up immediately. If you’re suffering from the cinematic wasteland that 2005 has shaped up to be so far, then have yourself a generous helping of Layer Cake and thank the Brits.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Back in 2005, Layer Cake was really a proof of concept movie for many items. It was proof that someone could take a Guy Ritchie-style crime pot boiler with colorful Cockney criminals and plenty of twists and unexpected violence and play it straight and serious. It was proof of Matthew Vaughn as a director, who had previously served as a producer of those early Ritchie films. It was proof of Sienna Miller as the next It Girl, a proclamation that carried her for years despite mixed results with the movies. Most of all, it was proof of its lead, Daniel Craig, as being so suave he should be considered the next possible 007. James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli has gone on the record saying this movie is what officially put Craig on their radar and got him the gig that has defined his career trajectory. Twenty years later, Layer Cake is still a potent and smooth little thriller that glides right by on its intelligence, sex appeal, and Craig’s charisma
I find myself agreeing with so many of my original points from 2005 so I don’t want this re-examination to be merely a “ditto” without some additional critical analysis. Even though it’s based on a book by J.J. Connolly, who adapted his own novel, the movie feels very much in the company of those early Guy Ritchie movies that Vaughn began producing. Ritchie burst onto the international scene with 1998’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, a brash and stylish crime comedy with outlandish characters, violence that alternated between visceral and slapstick, and twisty plots that often left your head spinning. It was like a mixture of Tarantino and a more lewd Looney Tunes cartoon. While the early Ritchie films, including my favorite, 2001’s Snatch, have their share of characters with grounded stakes, the reality is exaggerated, with the appeal being these grandiose personalities butting against one another. No one would confuse one of these Ritchie movies with a realistic portrayal of London criminals. They’re fun. What Layer Cake does so well is take a Ritchie-esque premise with plenty of low-life screw-ups and hardasses and plays it straight. It takes this middle-level drug distributor and makes his life less a comedy of errors and more a never-ending anxiety attack about how he can become undone from any angle. The movie sure doesn’t make a life of crime look appealing.
Craig’s character, named XXXX, is a smart guy just trying to keep his head down and do his job. The problem for him is that he’s too good at earning money for bad men who like money. In this life, you can get killed for any number of reasons, some of them logical and pragmatic, and others rash and illogical: not being a good enough criminal, being too good of a criminal, thinking he’s too good of a criminal, someone else wanting to make a name for themself and establish cred by going after you, dumb luck, etc. XXXX has his rules and standards to live by to ensure he limits his risk, but when your profession is literally dealing with money and unscrupulous types, there is no absolute zero in that risk. He may be smart and measured but he’s also working with plenty of stupid people who don’t know they’re stupid, and then you mix in vice and avarice with that, and it can be a combustible cocktail of dangerous idiots intruding on whatever peace and distance XXXX has cultivated for himself. In the movie, XXXX is burdened with competing tasks. He’s been offered a stash of stolen ecstasy pills, and his slimy boss wants them sold no matter what, but the assassin hired to retrieve them definitely wants them back too. Either way, our lead character is endangering himself by making someone unhappy. He’s dropped into the sticky morass of power plays and competing interests that will challenge his intended neutrality.
I think the ending for Layer Cake is brilliant and very fitting. For almost two hours, we’ve followed XXXX through hell and back and it looks like he’s found a way out, siding with the right hoodlums and eliminating different risky angles needing to be resolved. He’s kept to his stated retirement of not going out on top and instead going out while comfortable and capable. He’ll leave the business to his associates because he’s tired of looking over his shoulder. And as he walks out with his pretty lady (Sienna Miller) around his arm, that’s when he abruptly gets shot by Sidney (Ben Whishaw – yes, the future James Bond is killed by his future Q). This isn’t some tough or some hotshot; he’s a lanky nephew to another gangster, and he hasn’t exactly shown anything close to a killer instinct. In his brief appearances beforehand, he’s seemed out of place, like a latchkey kid who wandered into a criminal enterprise and everyone has been humoring him for good measure. The only thing he has is… was… the blonde girlfriend (Miller) who’s clearly not interested in him. After playing it so cool and calculated, he’s taken out by this twerpy nobody because he had the audacity to try and steal “his girl.” Even if you are the smartest guy in the room and you’ve made all the right moves, all it takes is one twitchy trigger finger and one grumbling grievance to take you from living to dead. Our hero is denied his happy ending driving off into the sunset with his modest sums of money and his newly acquired pretty woman. Try as he might, XXXX, gunned down mid-sentence as he reveals his real name, becomes just another unfortunate corpse.
Vaughn’s skilled direction immediately made him an attractive target for bigger studio fare. He was originally attached to direct 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand but left weeks before filming for stated “family reasons.” In 2023, Vaughn revealed that he left because of the tight production timeline, going from pre-production to a complete movie in under a year, but it was really the shady behavior of Fox execs that pushed him out the door. Apparently one exec put together a fake script to lure Halle Berry back, including scenes of her character Storm saving vulnerable children in Africa to appease Berry, scenes that were never intended to ever be filmed. It was a ploy to trick her into signing onto the film. After two more geek-friendly adaptations, 2007’s Stardust and 2010’s Kick-Ass, Vaughn was courted yet again back to the X-Men franchise. Once again there was a tight one-year turnaround deadline but Vaughn stayed on board and delivered what I consider to be the best X-Men movie, 2011’s First Class. It revitalized the declining franchise, enough so to lure Bryan Singer back. Singer had departed in 2005 to make his Superman movie, opening the door for Vaughn’s first foray with the world of mutants. Now that Vaughn had reinvigorated the franchise with a new cast of younger actors, Singer was ready to take it back to helm 2014’s Days of Future Past. Vaughn was rumored as one of the potential names to make the first new Star Wars movie in ten years. Instead, he made his own action franchise with 2015’s Kingsman. Granted it was based upon the comic by Mark Millar, the same author behind Kick-Ass and Wanted, but it was Vaughn’s signature all over this new spy franchise. Vaughn had constructed a new Bond for a new age. At this point, I was dubbing Vaughn the best working director to use studio money. Each movie was different but made with style and panache with great structure and payoffs. And then…
I think he got so enraptured with the world of Kingsman that he’s now trapped himself creatively. In the ensuing years, he’s made one Kingsman sequel and one prequel, both of them varying degrees of underwhelming, and another action spy-thriller that might as well be called Kingsman-lite, 2024’s Argyle. For an artist that was dabbling with so many genres beforehand and finding sure footing and a way to make his stamp within each, he now feels stuck, finding diminished returns with each iteration of yet another swanky spy action movie with snark. I’m not even an Argyle hater, a movie that appeared on numerous Worst of the Year roundups but one I consider perfectly fine as a TNT Sunday-afternoon kind of chill entertainment. I loved Kingsman when it was originally released in 2015, but looking back, it appears like this was Vaughn building his own prison brick by brick. Maybe he was too preoccupied with turning it into a franchise with many tendrils stretching all over. I truly wish Vaughn would hop genres once again and leave the realm of spy action to others at this point. Maybe he needs a return to something straight akin to Layer Cake without its tongue already so firmly implanted in-cheek.
But this movie will forever be known as the movie that secured Craig as the next James Bond. He had been working in movies for a while with some high-profile supporting roles like 1998’s Elizabeth and 2001’s Tomb Raider and 2002’s Road to Perdition, but this was a platform that showcased the suave presence of this actor like nothing before. He was so magnetic and a perfect choice for this character, and just listening to him try and talk his way out of jams with so many loose canons was as impressive and entertaining as any high-stakes chase or shootout. These sort of star-making roles are rare and even more rare when they do indeed prove to be star-making. It becomes an artifact to analyze what qualities people with money and influence were won over by. It’s interesting that Craig’s character is so anti-guns and wanting nothing to do with the more unsavory and violent aspects of his profession. When he does hold a gun for the first time, one he compliments as being “really pretty,” he holds it out and strikes a pose, dashing through a hallway like he was James Bond, and it’s just especially funny with hindsight.
The movie is also filled with familiar faces that would become even more familiar over the years, including Tom Hardy, Sally Hawkins, Whishaw, Burn Gorman, and some Vaughn regulars, alums from Snatch and Lock, Stock, Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher. Flemyng became Vaughn’s lucky charm, appearing in his first four movies in some capacity, much like Greg Grumberg does for J.J. Abrams. There you go, an SAT-style relationship sentence I never thought I’d write: Jason Flemyng is to Matthew Vaughn as Greg Grumberg is to J.J. Abrams. My original review in 2005 highlighted Michael Gambon as the biggest honcho, the top tier of this criminal layer cake. I wrote: “He plays Eddie Temple, the man behind the men behind the scenes. Gambon delivers the harshest of speeches with a velvety pragmatic calm. We don’t know what runs deeper with Eddie, his tan or his scheming.” He’s so good at being so malevolent without ever having to raise his voice or anything outwardly hostile.
This movie has a personal factor for me because I was so highly anticipating it that, during a trip through the British Isles with my father in May 2005, I bought it on VHS overseas. I naively thought that while DVDs had different regions to thwart piracy, that VHS tapes would be rather universal considering it’s just tape being read. I got home, popped it into my American machine, and the thing wouldn’t work. This was one of the biggest souvenirs I got for myself during that trip, which my father wanted to embark as something memorable we could share together, and now that he’s recently passed, I do think back on those experiences and part of me wishes my 23-year-old self would have been more actively appreciative. So now with Layer Cake, part of me will always think about that VHS tape, and that trip, and my father, and it will make me miss him more, but I am glad we got to share that experience.
Ever since I’ve been doing this re-review project, now going on five years, it’s a relief to see my twenty-year-younger self having written a smart and articulate review, especially when I mostly agree with it even so many years later. Again, I find myself nodding along to just about everything I had written with my past critique, from singing the praises of Craig and the general examination of day-to-day anxiety, to shaking my head at the underdeveloped Sienna Miller character served as little more than a trophy for our hero to take with him into retirement. It still is a movie overstuffed with characters and storylines and antics that probably could have been trimmed around the edges, but that same burdensome feeling connects with the emotional state of our lead, the anxious feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to achieve it, so in a way, it’s excusable. I don’t know if I think the movie is quite at the same level, calling it “thoroughly exhilarating” seems a bit much, but Layer Cake is still a movie that proves fresh even twenty years later, and one worth a second helping.
Re-View Grade: A-
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Million Dollar Baby (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 15, 2004:
Million Dollar Baby, much like its fledgling female boxing character, has come out of nowhere and made a considerable deal of noise. This little homespun film directed by Clint Eastwood didn’t have the glitz and sheen of other awards friendly movies, but now it seems that Eastwood?s own baby may clean up come Oscar time. Can Million Dollar Baby tackle the enormous hype surrounding it? Yes and no.
]Frankie (Eastwood) is a hardened boxing trainer too concerned for his fighters’ welfare to allow them to fight in championship bouts. He’s the kind of cynical old man that enjoys pestering a priest and causing him to unleash an F-bomb. Frankie and his longtime friend Scrap (Morgan Freeman) run a rundown gym and talk un-sentimentally about their older days as prize fighters. Then along comes Maggie (Hilary Swank), a 32-year old waitress who’s got nothing to believe in except her possibility as a boxer. She wants Frank to train her into the champ she knows she can be. He refuses saying he doesn’t train girls. She’s so determined she won’t take no for an answer. Frank finally agrees, especially after some help from Scrap, and starts to teach Maggie everything she needs to know to be a star pugilist. The two begin to open up to each other emotionally and Maggie seems destined to become a force in the ring.
Million Dollar Baby‘s greasiest attribute is its trio of knockout performances. Swank owns every second of this movie. She’s unremittingly perky, conscientious but also dogged, stubborn, and irresistibly lovable. Swank embodies the role with a startling muscular physique and a million dollar smile. Her performance is equal parts charming and heartbreaking. Maggie’s the heart of Million Dollar Baby and Swank doesn’t let you forget it for a millisecond. Come Oscar time, I’m sure she will be walking onstage to grab her second Best Actress Oscar in five years.
No one does grizzled better than Eastwood, and maybe no other actor has made as much of an acting mark by squinting a lot. Million Dollar Baby is probably his best performance to date, though for a good while it sounds like Frank has something lodged in his throat (pride?). Frank has the greatest transformation, and Eastwood brilliantly understates each stop on the journey until landing in a vulnerable, emotionally needy place.
Freeman once again serves as a film’s gentle narrator. There isn’t a movie that can’t be made better by a Morgan Freeman performance. His give-and-take with Frank feels natural and casual to the point that it seems improvised on the spot. Freeman unloads some great monologues like he’s relishing every syllable, chief among them about how he lost his eye. It’s wonderful to watch such a great actor sink his teeth into ripe material and deliver a performance that may net him a long-awaited Oscar (I think he’s due, and likely so will the Academy).
For whatever reason, Eastwood is hitting a directing groove in his twilight years. First came Mystic River, an ordinary police whodunnit made exceptional by incredible acting. Now Eastwood follows up with Baby, an ordinary sports film made extraordinary by incredible acting. Hmmm, a pattern is forming. The cinematography is crisp and makes great use of light and shadow to convey emotion. Eastwood’s score is also appropriately delicate and somber. The boxing sequences are brief but efficient.
Million Dollar Baby is a very traditional story that is at times surprisingly ordinary. Maggie’s the scrappy underdog that just needs a chance, Frank’s the old timer that needs to find personal redemption, and Scrap’s the wise old black man. Once again, an old curmudgeon takes on a rookie and in the process has their tough facade melt away as the inevitable victories pile up. Million Dollar Baby is a very familiar story but then again most boxing tales are fairly the same in scope.
What eventually separates Million Dollar Baby from the pack is its third act twist. You think you know where Eastwood’s film is headed, especially given the well-worn terrain, but you have no clue where this story will wind up. The plot turn deepens the characters and their relationships to each other in very surprising ways. You may be flat-out shocked how much you’ve found yourself caring for the people onscreen. It almost seems like Eastwood and company have used the familiar rags-to-riches underdog drama to sucker punch an audience into Million Dollar Baby‘s final 30 minutes. We’re transported into an uncomfortable and challenging position, and Eastwood won’t let an audience turn away.
Million Dollar Baby is not the colossal masterpiece that critics have been drooling over. For one thing, the group of antagonists is not nearly as textured as our trio of leads. They’re actually more stock roles that further enforce the ordinary story of Million Dollar Baby. Maggie’s trailer trash family is lazy unsupportive batch of stereotypes. The evil female boxing champ just happens to be a German who doesn’t mind playing dirty. One of the boxers at Frank’s gym is an arrogant showboat just waiting to be nasty while the teacher’s back is turned. Million Dollar Baby excels at showing depth and humanity with its lead trio, yet it seems if you aren’t in that circle you’re doomed to wade in the shallow end.
Eastwood shows that great acting and great characters you love can elevate a common framework. The package may be similar to a lot of films before about scrappy underdogs, but Million Dollar Baby lacks comparison in its genre when it comes to its enthralling acting and characters. The father-daughter bond between Frank and Maggie is heartwarming. The final reveal of what her Gaelic boxing name means may just bring tears to your eyes. The results are a very fulfilling movie going experience, albeit one that regrettably may not live up to such hype.
Million Dollar Baby has been showered with heapings of praise and become a formidable Oscar contender. The story treads familiar waters but its outstanding acting and deep and humane characters elevate the material. The film can’t match the hyperbole of critics but Million Dollar Baby is an ordinary but greatly satisfying ride led by compelling acting. The film hums with professionalism and seems to just glide when everything comes together magnificently, particularly in that last 30 minutes. Eastwood is hitting an artistic stride and it’s actually exciting to see what Clint will do next. Million Dollar Baby may not be a first round knockout but it definitely wins by decision.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Million Dollar Baby was its own underdog story that showed its strength when it mattered most, taking the 2004 Best Picture Oscar, as well as Best Actress for Hilary Swank and Best Supporting Actor for Morgan Freeman. It wasn’t even on many award prognosticators’ radar until the final month of the year. The odds-on favorite for most of 2004 had been Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, a lavish recreation of Old Hollywood with the power of Harvey Weinstein behind it. After 2002’s Gangs of New York went 0-10 with its Oscar nominations, Weinstein vowed this would not happen again and that he would get Scorsese that first directing Academy Award, so no expense was spared with a $110 million-dollar budget, exceeding the previous highest Miramax budget from 2003’s Cold Mountain. The narrative was set, the power of Weinstein was behind it, and the context of Hollywood celebrating its own history has long been an appealing formula for an easy Oscar victory. Then came Clint Eastwood’s scrappy little boxing movie and it sucker-punched the established awards narrative, taking the top prize (Sorry Harvey, but if it was any consolation, The Aviator improved upon Gangs’ ratio, winning 5 of 11 noms).
Twenty years later it’s impossible to discuss the legacy of Million Dollar Baby without talking about the legacy of Eastwood as a director. He’s been directing movies ever since 1971’s Play Misty For Me. He initially stuck to what he knew, thrillers and Westerns, with the occasional passion project like 1988’s Charlie Parker biopic, Bird. It all changed for Eastwood with 1992’s Unforgiven, a searing deconstruction of the Western and masculinity and conveniently digested American myth-making that won Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. From there, the flinty-eyed, gravelly-voiced filmmaker was seen as an Oscar favorite, though he was only nominated for Best Director three other times out of the twenty-five films he directed after. Eastwood’s been regarded as some higher-minded adult director, but looking over his long list of directorial efforts, the man has always kept to his preferred milieu of thrillers and Westerns with the occasional somber biopic. The more assumed Academy-friendly projects typically gained minimal traction, usually acting nominations like with Richard Jewell, Invictus, and The Bridges of Madison County. Sometimes they’ve just been complete artistic whiffs, like J. Edgar, Jersey Boys, or Hereafter.
The movies that got the most acclaim from Eastwood as director were the elevated genre movies, be they crime thriller (Mystic River), Western (Unforgiven), or sports underdog drama (Million Dollar Baby). The man has an inherent interest in genre movies. He may make a WWII drama from the point of view of the Japanese, completely in Japanese, but then next he’ll make a movie about being a “Get off my lawn” grumpy grandfather taking on street gangs. He made a movie about sending geezers into space, a juror realizing he may actually be guilty of the crime he’s intended to judge, and a corrupt president covering up his crimes (that guy wasn’t even a convicted felon upon inauguration -ha). The man is at his best when he sticks to what he knows, and when he can collaborate with writers who can get the best out of his instincts, the results can be exceptional. He’s a man interested in telling genre stories, and I can respect that. He’s notoriously spartan in his directorial approach with actors, typically only allowing two or so takes before moving on, a.k.a. the anti-Kubrick. The photography is so stark is might be confused for being black and white. There is a stripped-down-to-its-studs quality to the best of Eastwood’s movies, which is why deconstructionist examinations over genres can be especially rewarding. It allows for a larger space for characters to expand and grow and challenge our expectations, which is where Million Dollar Baby still works so well twenty years after it unexpectedly KO’d the awards circuit.
This is a Cinderella sports story balanced by an invigorating surrogate father-daughter relationship. Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) is so eager to prove herself as a boxer, and we’re so happy to see her gain success and dignity, helping to give her trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) a new sense of purpose. Everything is going right for this pair and it feels like the Hollywood movie we would all know and love, and then it all gets violently torn away when Maggie is injured in the ring and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. From there, Million Dollar Baby transforms from its sports movie formula and becomes something so much more meaningful and interesting and emotionally affecting. We’re constantly playing a mental contrast from before and after the accident. She’s so optimistic and bouncy and full of life. To see the joyous Maggie using her body to give her confidence and identity and overcoming adversity and intimidating more professional opponents through force of will, and then to see her bedridden, wheezing through a ventilator, and so deeply lost in her slack eyes, it’s something awful. She survived the injury but her spirit has been obliterated. Now, this isn’t a commentary on how disabled people cannot live fulfilling lives and might as well be euthanized. Maggie is the one who makes the choice to be euthanized and she will not be swayed, and this decision puts it to her coach, a lifelong Catholic, to demonstrate his love for his pupil through assisted suicide. To me, all that is WAY more dramatically interesting than if she had simply won the big title fight and proven all her many doubters wrong.
Swank rightfully won her second Oscar for Best Actress with a performance of such vitality and despair. At the end, when she’s stuck in that hospital bed, and she’s trying to chew off her own tongue so she can bleed to death, it’s such a devastating change from the chipper, optimistic scrappy underdog. Eastwood is gruff and growly and nearly unintelligible at points, but his reactions and his generosity as an actor help Swank achieve even higher acting greatness. Strangely enough, while Freeman is perfectly good in his Oscar-winning role, you could have cut him completely from the movie and affected very little, besides needing a new outlet for Eastwood to unintelligibly grumble towards.
It can feel like Million Dollar Baby is two different movies smashed together, one without an ending and one without a beginning. If you felt like you were plugged into that rousing sports underdog movie, I can understand feeling cheated by the rug pull. I feel like the version of this movie, by its end, is the one it wanted to be all along, and it’s using your emotional investment in these characters to make the decisions all the more grueling and tragic. Twenty years later, I think I enjoyed the moments before the accident a little less and the moments after the accident much more, and considering the ending seems like the whole point for Million Dollar Baby, that seems like an endorsement for its staying power two decades hence. It still has enough power today from the performances and where it pushes those characters. Million Dollar Baby is still a winner because it fit so well as a vehicle that Eastwood could elevate. He’s 94 years old and not likely directing too many more movies, but if anyone can keep making movies into their triple digits, it’s this man.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Primer (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released October 8, 2004:
I was intrigued about Primer because I had been told it was classy, smart sci-fi that’s so often missing in today’s entertainment line-up (see: Sci-Fi channel’s Mansquito). It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and the critical reviews had been generally very positive. So my expectations were high for a well wrought, high brow film analyzing time travel. What I got was one long, pretentious, incomprehensible, poorly paced and shot techno lecture. Oh it got bad. Oh did it get bad.
Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) run a team of inventors out of their garage. Their newest invention seems promising but they’re still confused about what it does. Aaron and Abe’s more commercially minded partners want to patent it and sell it. Aaron and Abe inspect their invention further and discover it has the ability to distort time. They invent larger versions and time travel themselves and thus create all kinds of paradoxes and loops and confusion for themselves and a viewing audience.
Watching Primer is like reading an instruction manual. The movie is practically crushed to death by techno terminology and all kinds of geek speak. The only people that will be able to follow along are those well-versed in quantum physics and engineering. Indeed, Primer has been called an attempt to make a “realistic time-travel movie,” which means no cars that can go 88 miles per hour. That’s fine and dandy but it makes for one awfully boring movie.
Primer would rather confound an audience than entertain them. There is a distinct difference between being complicated and being hard to follow. You’d need a couple volumes of Cliff Notes just to follow along Primer‘s talky and convoluted plot. I was so monumentally bored by Primer that I had to eject the DVD after 30 minutes. I have never in my life started a film at home and then turned it off, especially one I paid good money to rent, but after so many minutes of watching people talk above my head in a different language (techno jargon) I had reached my breaking point. Primer will frustrate most viewers because most will not be able to follow what is going on, and a normal human being can reasonably only sit for so long in the dark.
I did restart Primer and watched it to its completion, a scant 75 minutes long. The last 20 minutes is easier to grasp because it does finally deal with time travel and re-staging events. It’s a very long time to get to anything comprehensible. I probably should watch Primer again in all fairness but I have the suspicion that if I did my body would completely shut down on me in defense. Some people will love this and call it visionary, but those will be a very select group. It’s not just that Primer is incomprehensible but the film is also horrifically paced. When you don’t know what’s being said and what’s going on then scenes tend to drag because there is no connection. This movie is soooooo slow and it’s made all the worse by characters that are merely figureheads, dialogue that’s confusing and wooden, and a story that would rather spew ideas than a plot.
Writer/director/star Shane Carruth seems to have high ambitions but he has no empathy for an audience. Films can be dense and thought-provoking but they need to be accessible. Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko is a sci-fi mind bender but it’s also an accessible, relatable, enjoyable movie that’s become a cult favorite. Carruth also seems to think that shooting half the movie out of focus is a good idea.
I’m not against a smart movie, nor am I against science fiction that attempts to explore profound concepts and ideals. What I am against, however, is wasting my time with a tech lecture disguised as quality entertainment. Primer is obtuse, slow, convoluted, frustrating and pretentiously impenetrable. After finally finishing Primer, I scanned the DVD spine and noticed it said, “Thriller.” I laughed so hard I almost fell over. The only way Primer could be a thriller is because you’ll be racing the clock for it to finish.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I tried, dear reader. I had every intention of giving 2004’s Primer another chance, wanting to allow the distance of time to perhaps make the movie more palatable for my present-day self than it was when I was in my early twenties and irritated by this low-budget, high-concept Sundance DIY time travel indie. I thought with two decades of hindsight, I’d be able to find the brilliance that people cited back in 2004 where instead I only found maddening frustration. I consider myself a relatively intelligent individual, so I felt like I would be able to unpack what has been dubbed the most complex and realistic time travel movie ever created, let alone on a shoestring budget of only $7000, where the showcase was writer/director/star/editor/composer Shane Caruth’s intricate plotting. The whole intention with my re-watches is to give movies another chance and to honestly reflect upon why my feelings might have changed over time, for better or worse. That’s my intent, and while this day may have always been a matter of time for arriving, but I tried valiantly to watch Primer again and I quit. Yes, my apologies, but I tapped out.
I gave the movie twenty minutes before I came to the conclusion that I just wanted to do anything else with my time. I even tried watching a YouTube explanation video to give me a better summation, and even five minutes into that I came to the same conclusion that I wanted to do anything else with my fleeting sense of time. I think this is a case of accessibility and engagement.
Ultimately, this is the tale of two would-be inventors who keep reliving the same day to make money and win over a girl at a party. Reliving this day several times, with several iterations, and literally requiring a flowchart to keep it all together, is a lot of work for something that seemingly offers so little entertainment value beyond the academic pat on the back for being able to keep up with the inscrutable plotting. Look, I love time travel movies. I love the possibilities, the playfulness, the emphasis on ideas and casualty and imagination. I love the questions they raise and the dangers and, above all, the sheer fun. A time travel movie shouldn’t feel like you’re reading a book on arcane tax law. It needs to be, at the very least, interesting. Watching these two guys live out their lives, while on the peripheral more exciting things are happening with doubles, and we’re stuck with watching them migrate to this same party, or this same storage lockers and garages. It’s all so resoundingly low-stakes, even though betrayal and murder appear. I found this drama so powerfully uninteresting, and then structured and skewered and stacked to be an inscrutable, unknowable puzzle that makes you want to give up rather than engage. For me, there isn’t enough investment or intrigue to try and unpack this movie’s homework.
This is a lesson for me, as I have a newborn baby in my house, and sleep deprivation and fatigue are more a presence in my life, that I’m going to be more selective with what I choose to spend those moments of free time. Do I want to invest my time watching a movie I am not engaging with, that gives me so little to hold onto? When my friend Liz Dollard had her first child, she talked about not watching downer movies like 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, only having the emotional space for stories that wouldn’t be draining to her mental well-being. This meant low-stakes, uplifting, generally happy or familiar tales. I remember at the time thinking that she was willfully shuttling so many potential movies from her viewership, great films that could be challenging or depressing and deserving of being seen. Now, I completely get it, because after you’ve woken up several times during that night to feed a small child who has no means of communicating with you other than volcanic screaming, watching a long movie about human suffering can feel like a tall order. While Primer isn’t overwhelming as some kind of miserable dirge, it is too hard for me to access and gives me too little to hold onto.
As a film critic for over twenty-five years of my life, I try my best to thoughtfully analyze every movie I sit down to write about, and I try to think about potential audiences and the artistic intentions for them, and whether choices help or hinder those intentions. Not every movie is going to be for me just like any other work of media; there are countless musical artists that I will never willfully listen to but have their respective fan bases. I know there are people that love Primer, as hard as it is for me to fathom. I know there are people out there that leap to the challenge of keeping the nine iterations and timelines together as time confusingly folds upon itself. I know there are sci-fi enthusiasts that respect and appreciate the stripped-down, more “realistic” application of time travel. I know there are people who celebrate this movie, but I am not one of them. Primer is simply not for me, and that’s okay. Not every work of art will be for every person. I doubt I’ll ever come back to Primer again for the rest of my life, but there’s so many more movies to watch every day, so why spend precious time on a movie you’re just not clicking with?
Adios, Primer. To someone else, you’re a wonderful movie. To me, you’re, as I wrote in 2004, a “techno lecture” disguised as an impenetrable film exercise.
Re-View Grade: Undetermined
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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released September 17, 2004:
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow started as a six-minute home movie by Kerry Conran. He used computer software and blue screens to recreate New York City and depict a zeppelin docking at the top of the Empire State building. The six-minute short, which Conran spent several years completing, caught the attention of producer John Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes). He commissioned Conran to flesh out a feature film, where computers would fill in everything except the actors (he even used the original short in the feature film). The dazzling, imaginative results are Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Polly (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a reporter in 1930s New York. She?s investigating the mysterious disappearance of World War scientists when the city is invaded by a fleet of robots. The city calls out for the aid of Sky Captain, a.k.a. Joe (Jude Law), a dashing flying ace that happens to also be Polly?s ex. Joe and Polly form an uneasy alliance. He wants to stop Totenkopf (archived footage of Laurence Olivier) from sending robots around the globe and rescue his kidnapped mechanic, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi). She wants to get the story of a lifetime, a madman spanning the world to abduct scientists, parts, and the required elements to start a doomsday device. Along the way, Captain Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie) lends her help with her flying amphibious brigade. Together they might stop Totenkopf on his island of mystery.
Sky Captain is a visual marvel. It isn’t necessary a landmark, as actors have performed long hours behind green screen before (just look at the Star Wars prequels). Sky Captain is the first film where everything, excluding props the actors handle, is digitally brought to life inside those wonderful computers. The results are breath-taking, like when Polly enters Radio City Music Hall or during an underwater dogfight with Franky’s amphibious squadron. Sky Captain is brimming with visual excitement. The film is such an idiosyncratic vision that there’s no way it could have been made within the studio system.
Sky Captain has definite problems. For one, the characters are little more than stock characters going through the motions. The story also takes a backseat to the visuals. The dialogue is wooden and full of clunkers like, “You won’t need high heels where we’re going.” Generally the dialogue consists of one actor yelling the name of another character (examples include: “Dex!” “Joe!” “Polly!” and “Totenkopf!”). My father remarked that watching Sky Captain was akin to watching What Dreams May Come, because you’re captivated by the painterly visuals enough to stop paying attention to the less-than-there story and characters. The characters running onscreen also appears awkward, like they’re running on treadmills we can’t see, reminiscent of early 1990s video games.
Let’s talk then about those characters then. Paltrow’s character is generally unlikable. She’ll scheme her way toward whatever gains she wishes, but not in a chirpy Lois Lane style, more like a tabloid reporter. She whines, she yells, she complains, she berates, and she doesn’t so much banter as she does argue. Sky Captain is more enigmatic as a character. He seems forever vexed. Jolie’s Captain Franky Cook gives her another opportunity for her to use her faux-British accent. Jolie’s character is the strong-willed, sexy, helpful heroine that should be the center of the film, not Paltrow’s pesky reporter.
It’s also a bit undignified to assemble Laurence Olivier as the villain. It’s very unnecessary, but at least he wasn’t dancing with a vacuum cleaner.
Now, having acknowledged the flaws of Sky Captain, I must now say this: I do not care at all. This is the first time I’ve totally sidestepped a film’s flaws because of overall enjoyment. I have never felt as giddy as I did while watching Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. When the giant robots first showed up I was hopping in my seat. When I saw the mixture of 1930s sci-fi, adventure serials, and Max Fleischer cartoons, I was transported to being a little kid again. No movie has done this so effectively for me since perhaps the first Back to the Future. I loved that we saw map lines when we traveled from country to country. I love the fact that the radio signal hailing Sky Captain is reminiscent of the RKO Pictures opening.This is a whirling, lovelorn homage that will make generations of classic movie geeks will smile from ear to ear. I don’t pretend to brush over the flaws, with which story and characters might be number one, but Sky Captain left me on such a cotton-candy high that my eyes were glazing over.
One could actually make a legitimate argument that the stock characters, stiff dialogue, and anemic story are in themselves a clever homage to the sci-fi serials of old, where the good guys were brave, the women plucky, and the bad guys always bent on world domination. I won?t make this argument, but it could lend credence more toward the general flaws of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Sky Captain is an exciting ode to influences of old. It’s periodically breath-taking in its visuals and periodically head scratching with its story, but the film might awaken childhood glee within the viewer. I won’t pretend the film isn’t flawed, and I know the primary audience that will love Sky Captain are Boomers with a love and appreciation for classic cinema. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow will be a blast for a select audience, but outside of that group the film’s flaws may be too overwhelming.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
When I first watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in 2004, I was dazzled by its gee-whiz retro-futuristic homages and cutting-edge special effects. I wrote it felt like an appeal to your “Dad’s cinephile dad,” tapping into adventure serials and quaint sci-fi of Old Hollywood like Metropolis and Flash Gordon and German Expressionism and Max Fleischer cartoons. It was a giant nostalgic bombardment to a cinephile’s pleasure center. Now twenty years later, re-watching Sky Captain leaves me with a very different feeling. I found the majority of the movie in 2024 to be rather boring, and the special effects, while immersive and something special twenty years prior, are now dated and flawed. The whole thing propping up this underwritten homage enterprise are these murky visuals, making the ensuing 100 minutes feel much longer and more strained. It was transporting for me back in 2004, but now it just feels like empty homage run amok and lifted by special effects marked with an asterisk of history.
Sky Captain reminds me of 2001’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a momentary breakthrough at the time of its release in special effects technology that was inevitably to be passed, thus serving as little more than a footnote in visual effects history. It’s now less compelling to revisit. At the time, entire movies weren’t constructed on giant green screen stages and completely in the powerhouse computers processing new worlds of imagination. Now, it feels like most studio blockbusters above a certain budget are completely shot on large, empty green screen warehouses. Now we have entire movies constructed in a three-dimensional play space inside a computer, like 2016’s The Jungle Book and 2019’s The Lion King. It wasn’t even that much longer before another artist would replicate writer/director Kerry Conran’s everything-green-screen-for-maximum-style approach. Just a few months later, in April 2005, Robert Rodriguez released the highly stylized Sin City movie, bringing to vivid life the striking monochromatic artwork of Frank Miller’s celebration of film noir, pulp comics, and busty dames. In that case, the visuals nearly pop off the screen, fashioning something that cannot be served through live-action alone. Re-watching Sky Captain, I found a lot of the visual effects to be dark and blurry, like the filmmakers added a grimy filter. Maybe it was an ode to making the effects less polished to better replicate its older influences, or maybe it was simply a matter of hiding its budget, but the effect is still the same, making the onscreen visuals that much harder to fully observe and appreciate. If the appeal is going to be the then-cutting-edge special effects, then don’t make choices that will mitigate that appeal.
The story is so episodic and flimsy, held together only by the references it bestows. I understand that Conran was trying to recreate the screwball banter of Old Hollywood, but I found the relationship between Sky Captain (Jude Law) and his ex Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) to be excruciating. The bickering is heightened, as the overall tone of the movie is generally heightened, but that makes all human interaction feel wrongly calibrated. Polly comes across as obnoxious, worthy of being booted at many points throughout the globe-trotting adventure. She gets into trouble repeatedly while whining about her big journalistic scoop, or rehashing who was at fault for the detonation of their relationship. I think Law has better chemistry with Angelina Jolie, who appears late as a flying navy commander, and even Giovanni Ribisi as Sky Captain’s trusty ace mechanic. These people feel like they understood the assignment, playing into the heightened pulpy nature. Paltrow is hitting the wrong notes from the start, so her character comes across as annoying and in constant need of rescue. There’s a reason that Conran keeps the plot busy and skipping from one set piece to another, because the more time spent with our two main characters the more you realize they would be better served as transitory archetypes in a short film.
In many ways, it feels like Conran was worried that he might never direct another movie again, and so Sky Captain includes just about every nod possible to his influences. It can become its own Easter egg guessing game, making all the connections to stories film properties of old, like King Kong, War of the Worlds, The Wizard of Oz, to lesser known titles like Captain Midnight and King of the Rocket Men. There’s hidden worlds with dinosaurs, spaceship arks for a fresh start, and Laurence Olivier reappearing as manipulated archival footage as our mysterious deceased mad doctor. It’s somewhat fun to watch Conran be so transparent about his passions and influences. However, all these reverent homages and special effects closed loops are attached to a thin story with grating characters. Again, for a very select audience, dissecting all the reference points will be its own entertainment. For most viewers, Sky Captain will be a tin-eared bore that keeps throwing more reference points into its ongoing stew. Any ten minutes chosen at random will have the same value and impact as any other ten minutes throughout the movie.
Perhaps Conran was prescient because he has no other feature film credits in the ensuing twenty years. There was a point where he was attached for the big screen John Carter of Mars adaptation (as was Robert Rodriguez at one point) but he eventually left for unknown creative reasons. Considering how much buzz Sky Captain had as a project from an unknown outside the system, you might think it would serve as a proof of concept to at least get Conran to helm some other mid-level studio project.
The lasting legacy of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow will be its look, now replicated by many studio blockbusters, though Conran and his team did so without the same studio coffers. The thing I’ll remember most about Sky Captain isn’t my own enjoyment but my father;s a man who grew up reading pulp sci-fi magazines, watching saucer men movies, and instilling in me a love of older movies. I remember the delight this movie seemed to unleash inside him, returning him to a euphoric sense of his childhood. That’s the association I’ll have with this movie, even if my own entertainment level and appreciation has noticeably dipped in twenty years. I know there are other fans out there who may feel that same childlike wonder and glee from the movie. I hope you do, dear reader. For me, for now, it’s like seeing behind the magic trick and wishing you could still feel the same current of exhilaration. Alas.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Village (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released July 30, 2004:
When saying director names you can play a fun little game of word association. Someone says, “George Lucas,” and things like big-budget effects, empty storytelling, and wooden dialogue come to mind. Someone says, “David Lynch,” and weird, abstract, therapy sessions dance in your head. The behemoth of word association is M. Night Shyamalan. He burst onto the scene with 1999’s blockbuster, The Sixth Sense, a crafty, moody, intelligent thriller with a knock-out final twist. Now, though, it seems more and more evident that while The Sixth Sense was the making of M. Night Shyamalan, it also appears to be his undoing. His follow-up films, Unbreakable and Signs, have suffered by comparison, but what seems to be hampering Shyamalan’s growth as a writer is the tightening noose of audience expectation that he kowtows to.
With this in mind, we have Shyamalan’s newest cinematic offering, The Village. Set in 1897, we follow the simple, agrarian lives of the people that inhabit a small secluded hamlet. The town is isolated because of a surrounding dense forest. Mythical creatures referred to as Those We Dont Speak Of populate the woods. An uneasy truce has been agreed upon between the creatures and the villagers, as long as neither camp ventures over into the others territory. When someone does enter the woods, foreboding signs arise. Animals are found skinned, red marks are found on doors, and people worry that the truce may be over. Within this setting, we follow the ordinary lives of the townsfolk. Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the daughter of the towns self-appointed mayor (William Hurt), and doesn’t let a little thing like being blind get in the way of her happiness. She is smitten with Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix), a soft-spoken loner. Noah (Adrien Brody), a mentally challenged man, also has feelings for Ivy, which cause greater conflict.
Arguably, the best thing about The Village is the discovery of Howard. She proves herself to be an acting revelation that will have future success long after The Village is forgotten. Her winsome presence, wide radiant smile, and uncanny ability to quickly endear the character of Ivy to the audience. She is the only one onscreen with genuine personality and charisma, and when shes flirting and being cute about it you cannot help but fall in love with her. And when she is being torn up inside, the audience feels the same emotional turmoil. I am convinced that this is more so from Howard’s acting than from the writing of Shyamalan. She reminds me of a young Cate Blanchett, both in features and talent.
It seems to me that Shyamalan’s directing is getting better with every movie while his writing is getting proportionately worse. He has a masterful sense of pacing and mood, creating long takes that give the viewer a sense of unease. The first arrival of the creatures is an expertly handled scene that delivers plenty of suspense, and a slow-motion capper, with music swelling, that caused me to pump my fist. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is beautifully elegant. Even the violin-heavy score by James Newton Howard is a great asset to the film’s disposition.
So where does the film go wrong and the entertainment get sucked out?
What kills is its incongruous ending. Beforehand, Shyamalan has built a somewhat unsettling tale, but when he finally lays out all his cards, the whole is most certainly not more than the sum of its parts. In fact, the ending is so illogical, and raises infinitely more questions than feeble answers, that it undermines the rest of the film. Unlike The Sixth Sense, the twist of The Village does not get better with increased thought.
Shyamalan’s sense of timing with his story revelations is maddening. He drops one twist with 30 minutes left in the film, but what’s even more frustrating is he situates a character into supposed danger that the audience knows doesn’t exist anymore with this new knowledge. The audience has already been told the truth, and it deflates nearly all the tension. It’s as if Shyamalan reveals a twist and then tells the audience to immediately forget about it.
Shyamalan also exhibits a problem fully rendering his characters. They are so understated that they don’t ever really jump from the screen. The dialogue is very stilted and flat, as Shyamalan tries to stubbornly fit his message to ye olde English vernacular (which brings about a whole other question when the film’s final shoe is dropped). Shyamalan also seems to strand his characters into soap opera-ish subplots involving forbidden or unrequited love. For a good hour or so, minus one sequence, The Village is really a Jane Austin story with the occasional monster.
The rest of the villagers don’t come away looking as good as Howard. Phoenix’s taciturn delivery seems to suit the brooding Lucius, but at other times he can give the impression of dead space. Hurt is a sturdy actor but can’t find a good balance between his solemn village leader and caring if sneaky father. Sigourney Weaver just seems adrift like she’s looking for butter to churn. Brody is given the worst to work with. His mentally-challenged character is a terrible one-note plot device. He seems to inexplicably become clever when needed.
The Village is a disappointment when the weight of the talent involved is accounted for. Shyamalan crafts an interesting premise, a portent sense of dread, and about two thirds of a decent-to-good movie, but as Brian Cox said in Adaptation, ”The last act makes the film. Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws and problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.” It’s not that the final twists and revelations are bad; it’s that they paint everything that came before them in a worse light. An audience going into The Village wanting to be scared will likely not be pleased, and only Shyamalan’s core followers will walk away fully appreciating the movie. In the end, it may take a village to get Shyamalan to break his writing rut.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Usually in the M. Night Shyamalan narratives, 2004’s The Village is where the cracks first started to show in the filmmaker’s game. While 2000’s Unbreakable didn’t exactly reach the box-office successes of The Sixth Sense and Signs, it still earned $250 million worldwide and was definitely ahead of the cultural curve, introducing a grounded superhero story before the oncoming wave of superhero cinema. No, it was The Village that started the questioning over whether Shyamalan’s need for big twist endings was hampering his creativity. While still earning almost the exact same box-office as Unbreakable, The Village was seen with more hesitation, a cautionary tale about a filmmaker, as Matt Singer recently put it, flying a little too close to the sun. From here, Shyamalan entered his down period, from 2006’s Lady in the Water, to 2008’s The Happening, and the big-budget sci-fi misfits of 2010’s Last Airbender and 2013’s After Earth. This was the beginning of the general public becoming wise to Shyamalan’s tricks.
The real kicker is that, twenty years later, it’s clear to me that The Village is two-thirds of a good-to-great movie, ultimately undone by the unyielding desire to juice up the proceedings with an outlandish twist ending. For that first hour, Shyamalan has done a fine job of dropping us into this outdated community, learning their rules and restrictions, and gradually feeling the dread that the old ways might not protect them from the monsters just along the boundaries. There’s an efficiency and confidence to that first hour, with carefully planned shots that establish key points of information, like little girls panicking at the sight of a red flower and burying it in the ground before going back to their chores. The cinematography is elegant and moody, and the violin-soaring score by James Newton Hoard is a consistent emotive strength. The first encounter with the monsters roaming around the town is fraught with tension, especially as our one character holds out her hand waiting for her friend/love interest to return. The cloaked monsters are also just a cool design, with their long claws and porcupine-like frills extending from their hides.
The greatest strength is Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World) as our surprise protagonist, Ivy, daughter of the community founder, Edward Walker (William Hurt). Howard had made small cameo roles in her father’s films, but she was cast by Shyamalan after he watched her perform on stage. She is spellbinding as Ivy, a woman of great vulnerability and strength, of integrity and charisma. The scene where she sits down on the porch beside Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and dance around the edges of flirting is sensational, and when she talks about seeing people’s colors, or auras, and then smirkingly whispers, “No, I will not tell you your color, stop asking,” in the same breath, I defy anyone not to fall in love with her like poor Lucius. This simple love story actually works well. Lucius is an introverted man given to great emotions he doesn’t know how to fully express, which pairs nicely with the chatty and ebullient Ivy. The protagonist shift works wonderfully as well. For the first hour we believe we’re following Lucius as our main character, especially since at this point Phoenix’s star power was rising and Howard had none. Then, with the sudden sticking of a knife, Lucius is taken down and the movie becomes Ivy’s story and her quest to save her beloved. Her cry of not being able to see Lucius’ color is a well-coordinated punch to the gut. This is an example of a rug pull that really works, elevating the stakes and presenting the real star, the girl so many have overlooked for one reason or another, who will be our hero when we need her most.
But then it all falls apart for me once Shyamalan reveals two twists: 1) the monsters are not real, merely costumes the adults wear to enforce their rules through fear, 2) the setting of this village is not 1897 but modern-day, with the villagers living in a secluded nature preserve. Apparently, Edward was able to gather enough violent crime victim relatives to begin this experiment in “returning to our roots.” He served as an American History professor, so who better than to create a thriving community? You know how to establish safe drinking water there, my guy? How about cabin-building? I assume one of the elders must have had some wealth as it’s revealed later, via Shyamalan’s onscreen cameo role, that the government got paid off to stop having airplanes fly over the nature preserve. I actually kind of hate this twist. It feels the most superfluous of all Shyamalan’s fabled twist endings. I was genuinely enjoying the movie and how it was spinning up until this point, but Shyamalan cannot leave well enough alone. I get that Shyamalan is crafting an allegory for the War on Terror and the constant anxiety of post-9/11 America, replete with color codes meant to serve as warning signs. I get that we’re meant to find the town elders as villains, keeping their community repressed through the fear of convenient monsters. The lessons are there to dissect, but I’m disappointed because I was enjoying the allegory on its literal level more than its intended themes. It’s also because I feel like the twists overburden the movie’s charms.
Another reason the twist really falters is that it creates all sorts of nagging questions that sabotage whatever internal logic had been earlier accepted. Adults deciding to break free from modern society so they can start their own secluded LARP community can work as a premise, but it requires a lot more examination that cannot happen when it’s slotted as a concluding twist. Imagine the kind of determination it would take to retreat from modern society and rekindle an agrarian life from hundreds of years ago. That means abandoning all your family, friends, the comforts of modern-day, and the sacrifices could have been explored, but again, it’s just a twist. There are present-day communities, most famously the Amish, that shun the technological advances of modern society to retain an outdated sense of homespun culture and religious community, but often the members have grown up in this culture already. Regardless, retreating into the woods to start your own 18th century cosplay is a commitment, but when you know all the adults are in on this secret, why are they staying in character at all times? When it’s just two adults talking to one another, why are they keeping to their “characters” and talking in that antiquated jargon and syntax? Is it collective Method acting? Is it a sign they’ve ref-ramed what they consider normal? Have they gone so deep that their muscle memory is to say “thee” and “thou” vernacular in the mirror? They went through this elaborate facade because they lost people in the “real world,” but human impulses, violence, and accidents can occur in any community, no matter if you got cell phones or pitchforks. It starts to gnaw away at the tenuous reality of the scenario, a reality I was accepting until the late rug pull.
It also eliminates some of the stakes of Act Three when Ivy travels beyond the boundaries and may face the wrath of the monsters. It’s maddening that Shyamalan reveals the monsters are not real, mere tools to scare the children into obedience, and then has a supposed suspense sequence where Ivy stumbles upon a thicket of red flowers, the dreaded color the monsters hate. But wait, you might recall, there are no monsters, so then why does it matter? When you realize that her dad could just have taken a hike and driven to a drug store to gather medical supplies, without the supernatural threat keeping them confined, it kind of seems silly. Here you were, worried about the fate of this blind girl, when there’s no reason she had to even venture into this danger because one of the adults could have performed the same task without risking their big secret. I know they think Ivy’s blindness might uphold their secret, but why even risk her possible danger from falling down a hill she couldn’t see or a rock that twists her ankle? Her dad would rather have his blind daughter venture into the woods than do this trek “to the next town” himself. At the same time, her personal journey outside the community is robbed of the supernatural danger and it also re-frames the father as someone burdening his blind daughter with a task he could have achieved. He says she has the power of love and that will guide here, but you know a compass could also help. You could make the argument that maybe his guilt was eating away at upholding such a big secret, maybe he wanted to get caught, but I don’t buy it. Edward argues with his fellow elders that it is the next generation that will keep hold to their traditions and ways of life, and they must ensure this survival. That doesn’t sound like the perspective of a man wishing to break apart the close-knit community he helped build.
What to make of Adrien Brody’s mentally challenged character, Noah? He’s living in a time that doesn’t know how to handle his condition, but he’s also set up as a quasi-villain. He’s the one who stabs Lucius out of jealousy that Ivy favors him. He’s the one who breaks free, steals a monster get-up, and antagonizes Ivy in the woods. He also falls into a pit and dies alone. I don’t really know how to feel about this character because I don’t think Shyamalan exactly knows what to do with him.
Having recently re-read my original 2004 review, I’m amazed that I am sharing almost the exact same response as I did with my younger self. Even some of the critical points have similar wording. My concluding summation still rings true for me: “It’s not that the final twists and revelations are bad; it’s that they paint everything that came before them in a worse light.” You can rightly tell an allegorical story about people rejecting modern society and living a secluded and hidden life. You can rightly tell a story about adults posing as monsters to keep their children in line and obedient. However, if you’re going to be telling me that story, don’t supply an hour’s worth of setup that will be damaged from these revelations. After The Village, it was a steady decline for the filmmaker once dubbed “the next Spielberg” until 2017’s stripped down thriller Split, anchored by a tour de force performance from James McAvoy. It’s frustrating to watch The Village because it has so much good to offer but ultimately feels constrained by the man’s need to follow a formula that had defined him as a mass market storyteller. This was a turning point for Shyamaln’s fortunes, but the quality of The Village has me pleading that he could have shook off the need for ruinous twists and just accepted the potency of what was already working so well.
Re-View Grade: B-
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Garden State (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released July 28, 2004:
Zack Braff is best known to most as the lead doc on NBC’s hilarious Scrubs. He has razor-sharp comic timing, a goofy charisma, and a deft gift for physical comedy. So who knew that behind those bushy eyebrows and bushier hair was an aspiring writer/director? Furthermore, who would have known that there was such a talented writer/director? Garden State, Braff’s ode to his home, boasts a big name cast, deafening buzz, and perhaps, the first great steps outward for a new Hollywood voice.
Andrew Large Largeman (Braff) is an out-of-work actor living in an anti-depressant haze in LA. He heads back to his old stomping grounds in New Jersey when he learns that his mother has recently died. Andrew has to reface his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm), the source of his guilt and prescribed numbness. He has forgotten his lithium for his trip, and the consequences allow Andrew to begin to awaken as a human being once more. He meets old friends, including Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), who now digs graves for a living and robs them when he can. He parties at the mansion of a friend made rich by the invention of silent Velcro. Things really get moving when Andrew meets Sam (Natalie Portman), a free spirit who has trouble telling the truth and staying still. Their budding relationship coalesces with Andrews re-connection to friends, family, and the joys life can offer.
Braff has a natural director’s eye for visuals and how to properly use them to convey his characters’ feelings. A scene where Andrew wears a shirt and blends into the wall is a perfect visual note on the character’s sleep-walk through life. Braff’s writing is also familiar but satisfyingly unusual, like a repackaging of old stories told with a confident voice. His characters are interesting and memorable, but don’t feel uselessly quirky, unlike the creations of other first-time indie writers. The melancholy coming-out of Andrew from disconnected schlub to post-pharmaceutical hero really grabs the audience and gives them a rooting point. At times, though, it seems as though Braff may be caught up trying to craft a movie that speaks to a generation, and some will see Garden State as a generation’s voice of a yearning to feel connected.
Braff deserves a medal for finally coaxing out the actress in Portman. She herself has looked like an overly medicated, numb being in several of her recent films (Star Wars prequels, I’m looking in your direction), but with her plucky, whimsical role in Garden State, Portman proves that her careers acting apex wasn’t in 1994’s The Professional when she was 12. Her winsome performance gives Garden State its spark, and the sincere romance between Sam and Andrew gives it its heart.
Sarsgaard is fast becoming one of the best young character actors out there. After solid efforts in Boys Don’t Cry and Shattered Glass, he shines as a coarse but affectionate grave robber that serves as Andrew’s motivational elbow-in-the-ribs. Only the great Holm seems to disappoint with a rare stilted and vacant performance. This can be mostly blamed on Braff’s underdevelopment of the father role. Even Method Man pops up in a very amusing cameo.
The humor in Garden State truly blossoms. There are several outrageous moments and wonderfully peculiar characters, but their interaction and friction are what provide the biggest laughs. So while Braff may shoehorn in a frisky seeing-eye canine, a knight of the breakfast table, and a keeper of an ark, the audience gets its real chuckles from the characters and not the bizarre scenarios. Garden State has several wonderfully hilarious moments, and its sharp sense of humor directly attributes to its high entertainment value. The film also has some insightful looks at family life, guilt, romance, human connection, and acceptance. Garden State can cut close like a surgeon but it’s the surprisingly elegant tenderness that will resonate most with a crowd.
Braff’s film has a careful selection of low-key, highly emotional tunes by artists like The Shins, Coldplay, Zero 7, and Paul Simon. The closing song, the airy Let Go by Frou Frou, has been a staple on my playlist after I heard it used in the commercials.
Garden State is not a flawless first entry for Braff. It really is more a string of amusing anecdotes than an actual plot. The film’s aloof charm seems to be intended to cover over the cracks in its narrative. Braff’s film never ceases to be amusing, and it does have a warm likeability to it; nevertheless, it also loses some of its visual and emotional insights by the second half. Braff spends too much time on less essential moments, like the all-day trip by Mark that ends in a heavy-handed metaphor with an abyss. The emotional confrontation between father and son feels more like a baby step than a climax. Braff’s characters also talk in a manner that less resembles reality and more resembles snappy, glib movie dialogue. It’s still fun and often funny, but the characters speak more like they’ve been saving up witty one-liners just for the occasion.
Garden State is a movie thats richly comic, sweetly post-adolescent, and defiantly different. Braff reveals himself to be a talent both behind the camera and in front of it, and possesses an every-man quality of humility, observation, and warmth that could soon shoot him to Hollywood’s A-list. His film will speak to many, and its message about experiencing lifes pleasures and pains, as long as you are experiencing life, is uplifting enough that you may leave the theater floating on air. Garden State is a breezy, heartwarming look at New York’s armpit and the spirited inhabitants that call it home. Braff delivers a blast of fresh air during the summer blahs.
Nate’s Grade: B
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
In the summer of 2024, there were two indie movies that defined the next years of your existence. If you were under 18, it was Napoleon Dynamite. If you were between 18 and 30, it was Garden State. Zack Braff’s debut as writer/director became a Millennial staple on DVD shelves, and I think at one time it might have been the law that everyone had to own the popular Grammy-winning soundtrack. It wasn’t just an indie hit, earning $35 million on a minimal budget of $2.5 million; it was a Real Big Deal, with big-hearted young people finding solace in its tale of self-discovery and shaking loose from jaded emotional malaise. If you had to determine a list of the most vital Millennial films, not necessarily on quality but on popularity and connection to the zeitgeist, then Garden State must be included. Twenty years later, it’s another artifact of its time, hard to fully square outside of that influential period. It’s a coming-of-age tale wrapped up in about every quirky indie trope of its era, including a chief example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, even though that term was first coined from the AV Club review of 2005’s Elizabethtown. Twenty years later, Garden State still has some warm fuzzies but loses its feels.
Andrew Largeman (Braff) is a struggling actor in L.A. who returns to his hometown in New Jersey to attend the funeral of his mother. Right there we have the prodigal son formula mixed with the return-to-your-roots formula, wherein the cynical figure needs to learn about the important things they’ve forgotten from the good people they left behind for supposed bigger and better things in the big city. There’s a lot of familiarity with Garden State, both intentionally and unintentionally. It’s meant to evoke the loose, rougher-edged romantic comedies of Hal Ashby and older Woody Allen. It certainly feels more like a series of scenes than a united whole, and that can work in Braff’s favor. His character has gone off his meds for the first time since he was a child, and he’s experiencing a personal reawakening. He’s opening himself up more to the people and possibility of the world, so the movie works more on a thematic level to unify itself rather than strictly from a foundational plot with key turns. If you can connect on that relatable level, then you will likely be able to experience the same whimsy and enchantment that so many felt back in 2004. However, with twenty years of distance, I now see more seams than when I was but a wide-eyed 22-year-old romantic. Andrew is more a reactive symbol, more personified by his hardships or inability to chart a path for himself than by a personality. He’s easily eclipsed by the quirky characters dancing all around him, with Braff smiling ever so wryly at the sweet mysteries of life. This stop-and-smell-the-roses approach was also explored in 2014’s Wish I Was Here, Braff’s directing follow-up that placed him as a family man questioning himself amidst marital malaise. This movie was far less celebrated, I think, because of the thematic redundancy but also because Braff was playing an older character that needed to, kind of, grow up. It was more tolerable when Braff was playing a mid-20s melancholic experiencing his first brush with romantic love. Less so ten years later.
Natalie Portman had been an actress that I was more cool over until 2004 with the double-whammy of Garden State and her Oscar-nominated turn in Closer. She’s since become one of the most exciting actors who goes for broke in her performances whether they might work or not. In 2004, I thought her performance in Garden State was an awakening for her, and in 2024 it now feels so starkly pastiche. Bless her heart, but Portman is just calibrated for the wrong kind of movie. Her energy level is two to three times that of the rest of the movie, and while you can say she’s the spark plug of the film, the jolt meant to shake Andrew awake, her character comes across more as an overwritten cry for help. Sam is even more prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) than Kirsten Dunst’s bouncy character in Elizabethtown. Her entire existence is meant to provoke change upon our male character. This in itself is not an unreasonable fault; many characters in numerous stories are meant to represent a character’s emotional state. It’s just that there isn’t much to Sam besides a grab-bag of quirky characteristics: she’s a compulsive liar, though nothing is ever really done with this being a challenge to building lasting bonds; she’s incapable of keeping pets alive, and Andrew could be just another pet; she’s consumed with being unique to the point of having to stand up and blurt out nonsense words to convince herself that nobody in human history has duplicated her recent combination of sounds and body gestures, but she’s all archetype. She exists to push Andrew along on his reawakening, including introducing him and us to The Shins (“This song will change your life”). She’s entertaining, and Portman is charming, but it’s an example of trying so hard. I thought her cheeks must have hurt from holding a smile so long. I’m sure Braff would compare Sam to Annie Hall, as Diane Keaton was perhaps the mold for the MPDG, except she more than stood on her own and didn’t need a nebbish man to complete her.
There are some enjoyable moments. It’s funny to watch a young Jim Parsons in a suit of armor eating breakfast cereal and expounding the romance language of Klingon. It’s funny to have a meet-cute in a doctor’s office while Andrew is repeatedly humped by a dog with personal boundary issues. It’s fun to go on a madcap journey around town with your former high school friend-turned-gravedigger that ends up in a sinkhole in a quarry, where characters can literally scream into the void. It’s darkly funny to run into a former classmate who became a cop who is still a screw-up except now he has authority. It’s poignant to listen to Andrew’s story about accidentally paralyzing his mother when he was an angry young child who, in a fit of rage, pushed her, and she hit her head on a faulty dishwasher latch. Given all these elements an overview, it feels like Garden State was Braff’s very loose collection of ideas and stories, jokes and bits collected over the years. It’s entertaining and quirky and silly and occasionally poignant, but it’s never more than the sum of its parts. Garden State wants to be about a man changing his life and perspective, but it’s really more a Wizard of Oz-style journey through the quirky indie backlot of kooky Jersey characters. The scenes with Andrew’s distant father (Ian Holm) feel too removed to have the catharsis desired. He feels like an absent character from the movie, so why should we overly value this father-son reconciliation?
Admittedly, that soundtrack is still a banger. It soars when it needs to, like Imogen Heep’s “Let Go” over the race-back-to-the-girl finale, and it’s deftly somber when it needs to, like Iron and Wine’s cover of “Such Great Heights” and “The Only Living Boy in New York” paired with our big movie kiss. It’s such a cohesive, thematic whole that lathers over the exposed seams of the movie’s scenic hodgepodge. Braff tried to find similar magic with his musical choices for 2006’s The Last Kiss, a movie he starred in but did not direct (he also provided un-credited rewrites to Paul Haggis’ adapted screenplay). That soundtrack is likewise packed with eclectic artists (he even snags Aimee Mann) but failed to resonate like Garden State. It’s probably because nobody saw the movie and Braff’s character was, as I described in my 2006 review, an overgrown man-child afraid his life lacks “surprises” now that he was going to be a father. Sheesh.
Garden State is a movie that is winsome and amusing but also emblematic of its early 2000s era, of young people yearning to feel something in an era where we were afraid of feeling too much because of how painful the real world stood to be as an adult. Rejecting pain is rejecting the full human experience, which we even learned in Inside Out. There could have been a richer examination on parental desire to protect children from experiencing pain but creating more harm than good (kind of the theme of 2018’s God of War reboot). It’s just not there. My original review was far more smitten with the movie, doubled over by Portman’s performance and the effectiveness of Braff as a writer and a director. My criticisms at the end of my 2004 review are all shared with my present-day self, especially the dialogue: “Characters also talk in a manner that less resembles reality and more resembles snappy, glib movie dialogue. It’s still fun and often funny, but the characters speak more like they’ve been saving up witty one-liners just for the occasion.” I’d downgrade the movie ever so slightly, though there is still enough charm and whimsy to separate it from its twee indie brethren. In 2004, Garden State felt like a seminal movie for a breakthrough filmmaker. Now it feels like a fitfully amusing rom-com with slipshod plotting and a supporting character that needed re-calibration.
Re-View Grade: C+
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Napoleon Dynamite (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released June 11, 2004:
Napoleon Dynamite was an audience smash at the 2004 Sundance film festival. Fox Searchlight jumped at the chance to distribute a film written and directed by Mormons, starring a Mormon, and set in film-friendly Idaho. MTV Films, the people behind alternating good movies (Better Luck Tomorrow, Election) and atrocious movies (Crossroads, Joe’’s Apartment, an upcoming film actually based on Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi” song), came aboard and basically said, “Look, we really like the movie, and we want to help bring it to a wider, MTV-influenced audience.” And thus, Napoleon Dynamite seems to have become the summer biggest must-see film for sk8r bois and sk8r grrrls nationwide.
Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder) is an Idaho teen that marches to the beat of his own drum. He lives with his Dune Buggy riding grandmother and 31-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who surfs the Web talking to women. When their grandma gets injured, Uncle Rico (John Gries), stuck in the 80s in fashion and mind, takes up shop in the Dynamite home and coerces Kip to hustle money from neighbors. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends Deb (Tina Majorino), an otherwise normal girl with a sideways ponytail, and Pedro (Efren Ramirez, who was actually in Kazaam!), the new kid at school. Together, they try and get Pedro elected to class president, but standing in their way is the mighty shadow of Summer (Haylie Duff), the most popular girl in school. Oh yeah, there’’s also a llama.
First time director, Jared Hess, and first time cinematographer, Munn Powell, orchestrate shots very statically, with little, simple camera movements and many centered angles. The style is reminiscent of the films of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse), or, more precisely, Wes Anderson. This shooting technique makes the characters stand out even more, almost popping out at you behind flat backgrounds like some Magic Eye picture. Hess easily communicates the tedium of Idaho with his direction. Can anyone name any other film that takes place entirely in Idaho? (Please note that My Own Private Idaho takes place in Portland and Seattle, mostly).
The star of the show is, of course, Heder. His wickedly funny deadpan delivery helps to create a truly memorable character. He achieves a geek Zen and, judging from the incredible amount of kids under-14 that appeared both times I saw this film, is most likely the greatest film realization of a dork. It’s grand dork cinema, a genre long ignored after the collapse of the mighty Revenge of the Nerds franchise. So while Napoleon isn’’t exactly relatable (llamas, Dune Buggy grannies and all), the right audience will see reflections of themselves. You’’ll be quoting from Napoleon all summer.
Napoleon Dynamite is going to be an acquired taste. It’s filled to the brim with stone-faced absurdities and doesn’’t let up. If you’’re not pulled in with the bizarre antics of bizarre characters in the first 10 minutes, then you may as well leave because otherwise it will feel like the film is wearing you down with its “indie weirdness.” Napoleon Dynamite seems to skirt the sublimely skewed world of Wes Anderson, but Napoleon lacks the deep humanity of Anderson’s films. What the audience is left with is a sugary, sticky icing but little substance beneath, and, depending on your sweet tooth, it’’ll either be overpowering and a colossal disappointment or it’’ll taste just right for the occasion. Alright, I’’m done with baking analogies for the year.
Some will find a certain condescension against the characters. Napoleon Dynamite doesn’’t outright look down upon its characters, but it does give them enough room to paint themselves fools. Uncle Rico is really the film’s antagonist, yet he’s too buffoonish to be threatening. It’’s a fine line for a film to have condescension toward its characters, but Napoleon Dynamite ultimately leaves with a bemused appreciation for its characters. The film presents the “good” characters as unusual but lovable and ready for growth (Kip, Pedro, and of course Napoleon), but the “bad” characters (Summer, Uncle Rico) aren’’t demonized. In essence, Napoleon Dynamite is the best example of a film that makes an audience laugh at and with its characters simultaneously.
Napoleon Dynamite is assuredly an odd duck. Some will cheer; others will want to head out the door after a few minutes. It’’s hard to say which reaction an individual will have. If you have a geek-enriched history populated with unicorns, Dungeons and Dragons, and/or social ostracism, then you may be more inclined to admire Napoleon Dynamite. I laughed out loud throughout the film and found it to be an enjoyable diversion, and I went the whole review without one Jimmy Walker reference.
Nate’s Grade: B
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I feel like trying to explain the unexpected pop-culture success of Napoleon Dynamite is a fool’s errand, ultimately leaving one sputtering out and ending with the disappointing culmination, “Well, you just had to be there, I guess.” It was 2004, before the rise of YouTube and dominant social media outlets, and for whatever reason, if you were under 30, you probably fell in love with this Idaho nerd, or at least fell in love sounding like this Idaho nerd. I couldn’t travel more than a few blocks without overhearing some loitering Millennial uttering, “Gawsh” in mock exasperation, or mentioning llamas, tater tots, ligers, or catching a significant other a “delicious bass.” If you can recall how annoying and omnipresent the Borat impressions were after that 2006 movie’s mainstream splash, well the silver lining to every person, usually a smirking male member of the species, saying, “My wiiiiiiife,” was that it finally pushed aside everyone else endlessly imitating Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder). This movie was everywhere in 2004. It was meme-ified before meme culture became prevalent. Re-watching this movie twenty years later is like excavating a novelty from a different time and trying to better analyze why this silly and stupid little movie about weirdos living their weird lives became a zeitgeist breakout.
If I had to explain the appeal of Napoleon Dynamite, I think it serves as the next step in the evolution of comedy for younger adults. The Muppets are a deservedly celebrated comedy troupe for over 50 years, and beyond the iconic characters and their mirthful camaraderie, I think their ongoing appeal is that it’s an introduction to the forms of irony for younger children. It’s teaching that there can be more behind the silly, and Napoleon Dynamite takes that PG-comedy baton and pushes it forward, as its entire being is one of ironic comedy. The entire movie is built upon the viewer finding the behavior and banter of these characters hilarious for being so straight. There aren’t really jokes in the traditional sense of setups and payoffs; every line has the potential to be a joke because it’s a character saying something ridiculous without the awareness of being ridiculous. As I said back in 2004, “If you’’re not pulled in with the bizarre antics of bizarre characters in the first 10 minutes, then you may as well leave because otherwise it will feel like the film is wearing you down with its “indie weirdness.” Perhaps this style of comedy, a feature fully dedicated to ironic detachment, served as an awakening for others in my age-range, who championed the absurdity of the everyday and lionized the liger-loving man. This movie doesn’t achieve the larger artistic ambitions in a heightened tone of a Wes Anderson or a Yorgos Lanthimos, two masters of droll deadpans. It’s not deep. It’s not complicated. It’s always obvious, but that made the comedy all the more accessible to so many, especially for younger teens and kids.
As a movie, Napoleon Dynamite can be overwhelming. Seeing any clip of this movie serves the same comedy function as watching the entire 96-minute experience. It helps to structure the movie around a nerd’s quest to win over the girl and help his fellow outcasts. It has a recognizable us-versus-them formula where we can root for the weirdos to, if not prove their naysayers wrong, at least prove to one another that they have found acceptance from the ones who matter. It works on that familiar territory. Napoleon’s big dance at the talent show is his triumph, showcasing to the rest of the school his skills, though he runs away before the adulation can be felt, robbing his character of the perceived victory but giving it to the audience instead.
For most of the people involved in this movie, they had a brief burst of wider success before gradually coming back down to Earth. Heder was the obvious breakout and was given bigger supporting roles in studio comedies like Just Like Heaven, School for Scoundrels, Blades of Glory, and Surf’s Up, the other animated penguin movie from 2006. Heder has worked almost exclusively in the realm of voice acting in the last decade, including 2024’s Thelma the Unicorn, directed by Jared Hess and co-written by Jared and his wife Jerusha, the same creative team that gave us Napoleon Dynamite. I never really vibed with any other Hess comedy. I didn’t get the love for 2006’s Nacho Libre, and from there the movies just got worse to unwatchable, like Gentlemen Broncos and Don Verdean, each trying to chase that same combination of detached irony and quirk that proved so successful for them in 2004. I think the inability to follow-up Napoleon Dynamite with another breakout comedy of its ilk speaks to the unpredictable nature of assembling the right mixture of actors, tone, and material, as well as good timing. Would Napoleon Dynamite have been as big a success in 2009 as opposed to 2004? Maybe not. There was a six-episode animated TV series version in 2012, and the fact that I never remembered this probably answers the question over whether the filmmakers got lucky in 2004.
Napoleon Dynamite is the exact same movie it was back in 2004 as it now resides in 2024, and forever more. It’s flat, detached, silly, light-hearted and the same joke on repeat, and if you feel yourself gravitating toward that comedy wavelength, then hop on and enjoy. Re-watching it for me was like revisiting a fad from the past that was hard to put into context. What was it that made so many buy “Vote for Pedro” T-shirts and talk about throwing footballs over mountains? Comedies more than any other movie lend themselves to audience dissemination, to take the jokes and moments and characters and run with them. Nearly every successful comedy has experienced some form of this, so why should Napoleon Dynamite be any different? It’s perfectly understandable to watch this movie unfazed, unamused, and questioning what exactly people found so amusing about this guy and his extended family and friends back in 2004. It’s also understandable to smile and chuckle at the absurdities played so matter-of-factly. Gawsh.
Re-View Grade: B-
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