The Bank Job, Across the Universe, South Park, Eastern Promises, Domino - Some movies

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

I seem to have seen a slew of movies recently, more than usual. I just got back from "The Bank Job," which was curiously bloodless. Maybe because it was British, and they can't help it. It felt like an exercise in genre, well done, nice people, derived from a real event. But at the end, I kind of shrug. The denouement was rather anticlimactic, bland. So, that's that.

We also watched "Across the Universe" on dvd, which was a colorful, fun trip through the late '60's in America done through the music of the Beatles. But at the end of the day with this one, not much substance, and kind of a string of stereotypes and stereotyped situations. Like they looked through the papers of the time, and stripped the major headlines and cultural figures: there's Janis Joplin, and Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the radicals turned bombers, the student movement, the soldiers. And that's pretty much it. It was nice though, to see Joe Cocker playing a singing hobo.

Ok, and then there's "South Park the Movie," from years ago, which we never saw. Actually, the TV show is, in general, much funnier than this movie, I think because on basic cable you have to censor yourself. Where here, the boys are swearing up a storm, which kind of takes the edge off. It was funny seeing what you'd always thought, that Saddam Hussaine is Satan's lover...and batshit crazy.

Also, "Eastern Promises," David Croneberg's second film with Viggo Mortensen, a story of the Russian mob in London. It was a more straightforward story than "History of Violence," that horrible mess of a film. This one has the nice, order-affirming twist at the end, and the baby is saved. Yeah! Well executed, but pretty forgettable.

Anything else? Oh, I saw "Domino" on the on-demand cable, and was really impressed. Which was curious, because it got TOTALLY panned in the press when released. I just checked Rottentomatoes and of the credible critics, 9% liked it. But Roger Ebert liked it, which makes sense (here). I almost always agree with Ebert; I wonder if we're the same Ennegram number? I love the way he can love the scraggly dogs that no one else wants to let in the house, or can see the beauty of.

I told Heather that "Domino" is like a Joss Whedon production on methamphetamine, a story of a totally dysfunctional, but loving family of thrown-togethers. If it were shot in a linear, cinemagraphically conventional way, it would be banal. But Tony Scott's crazed Vegas color scheme and ADD editing style gives the film a vibrancy and surreal sweetness. Some films look at their characters as if they were either planets floating in space, or a bunch of billiard balls knocking into each other (The Bank Job was a bit like this). Others, like "Domino," somehow see their characters as both people, representatives, and locations of spirit. Which is weird to say of a film so violent, so on edge, and so darkly comic. But these people really seem, in their brokenness and unpolished and unaware selves, reflect that Leonard Cohen line, "There's a crack in everything/And that's how the light gets in." There's a lot of light here because there are really tremendous cracking in this world. And Tom Waits as the desert prophet in a Cadillac is wonderful.

Plus, the totally audacious scene of a man having his arm shot off at the shoulder by a double barrel shotgun, in front of the ex-stars of Beverly Hills 90210 is, well, jaw droopingly ballsy. Christopher Walken's character, a sleazy reality show producer, just looks and says, "Wow."

So, that's my movie roundup.

Posted by MC at 9:44 PM

A show only a therapist [i.e., your mother] could love

"In Treatment" began airing on HBO last week, and will run for 9 straight weeks, 5 days a week. And what you get is two or three people talking for a half hour each day, mostly in the therapist's office, or in his supervisor's office. That's it. But man, it's like therapist porn! I'm not sure how anyone who's not a therapist--not just in the mental health or healing trades, but a working shrink--could possibly love such a show.

But I find it riveting. The acting is mostly solid and the stories are real enough (though they've definitely selected the more extreme cases), and the therapizing is pretty accurate. Paul Weston, the psychiatrist/analyst played by Gabriel Byrne, is a competent, caring clinician who is falling apart in about the way most therapists I know are. His marriage is imploding, his relationships with his children are thin, and he hates the supervisor who he keeps returning to for support and to punish. In fact, Friday with the supervisor is some of the juiciest interactions in the show, because you have two veterens of the game playing doing very high level sparing with rather low-level emotions. Watching Paul lie to her without even realizing it is thrilling!

The verisimilitude is a bit strained, but that's ok, since it's being adapted for dramatic television. For instance, 30 minutes is pretended to be a 50 minute session, which is a little mind bending as it happens (because you see the total session), but you can handle it. And as I said, the intensity level is higher than in most therapies.

But what you get is an intense presentation of one man and his many relationships, in which little nuances carry great meaning. He says in one of the first episodes, to the cocky fighter pilot, "In our profession we have a saying: 'The customer is always wrong,'" which he later explains as that a chunk of his work is to expose how his patients are lying to themselves and to him. Watching this unfolding and unpacking happen is riviting, and really funny at times, though the show is in no way a comedy. What's funny, to me, is seeing these common human train wrecks happening, and watch the games and machinations of the human psyche laid out so clearly. It's not a phony or supercilious clarity, though, because there are times when people are so clear and obvious.

It would be a much paler show if you didn't get to see Paul interacting with his wife and with his estranged supervisor, which then changes the way you see him interacting with his clients, even though his demeanor is consistently professional and competent. Like the one scene where he's spent most of the episode fighting with his wife after she exposes her having an affair, and then after she is dismissed from the room, he straightens his jacket, wets his hair, and opens the door to greet his next client, who launches into his own self-centered stuff. It's funny because it's so accurate, and is a juxtaposition of tones which is part and parcel of the therapists life. There are unresolved contradictions which are simply held, which is also so much of a therapist's work.

Seeing a portrait of a mature psychotherapist is a treat for such as me, relatively green in the field. Because it's a complex portrait of a complex man, who is both very skilled and personally very flawed. And it gets the therapy situation right--they must have good consultants. It's like seeing a show shot in your home town. You get to point and jump up and down: "Ooh, I've been there!" Good stuff.

Speed the Plow: A review of a play more interesting in the disection than the viewing

Saturday rained like a million Clydesdales pissing, and I, seemingly in some egotistical notion that by virtue of not being prepared for inclement weather, the weather would bend to my will. Instead, in the attempt to find the A.C.T. theater on Ellis, after my consultation group, I couldn't drive my scooter fast enough to get between the rain drops. Drenched from top to bottom, in a punishment of my hubris.

And then I get to the theater, looking for my wife to be standing there, awaiting me with pitying eyes, I see no one familiar. She hasn't left yet, telling me to come home and get dry, and we'll set out again. I'm irked by her absence, but at the thought of sitting through lunch and a two hour play wet, it seems a pretty good idea.

So, to the play. "Speed the Plow," by David Mamet, is a piece of theater that talks a lot, has people move around in small spaces, and says very little. Not that the characters say little; they actually are saying a lot, even when they're saying nothing. It's the work itself that has people expressing meaning in empty patter, and yet, in its gestalt, says nothing particularly revealing about its subject. I found more in it on the walk back to the car with Heather than actually sitting in the theater.

So. "Speed the Plow" is about two old Hollywood survivors who have risen together through the studio ranks, one in the lead and the other ("The Parasite," my term) on his coattails, struggling through a 24 hour period, blown around by the introduction of Kathy the temporary secretary ("The Idealist"). The Mogul and Parasite are set to make an empty but profitable blockbuster with someone I kept hearing as Tom Cruise, a prison buddy movie blah blah. They're going to make a lot of money: the Mogul will continue to rise, and the Parasite will finally get some juice around town, and long coveted wealth, and longer coveted ability to get some payback for having to eat shit the last 20 years.

Enter the foil, a young woman working as a temp, filling in for the Mogul's sick secretary. She acts as the voice of idealism, who, in a bid to get her in bed, the Mogul invites to read a book on the transformative value of radiation in human history and soul. She comes to his house and pitches the book to him, which he buys because she taps into his long dormant need for basic human sustenance: purpose and emotional meaning.

But he's a duck out of water in those realms, and stumbles into the office the next day, the day of the big meeting with the head of the studio, and tells his old partner that he'd doing the book, not the blockbuster. The Parasite struggles through the next 20 minutes, from cajoling to physical attack, and finally does a brilliant maneuver on the Idealist, a beautiful judo move that throws her to the mat and out of the ring. The partners go off to serve their appropriate function.

Now, I have never like Mamet. I find his people odd cyphers, not devoid of real life, just so filtered as to be relatively useless. His men are a particular narrow, and at the end of the day, particularly uninteresting and unrepresentative variety of humanness. They're like testosterone that has been thinned with water. They have the carapace of power, they move like power, but they're wispy inside.

As a send up of the Hollywood system, it was a bit of a yawner, and besides, what's easier to skewer? But it's not really a satire, because the most likable person, the most honest and worthy of empathy is actually the Parasite. He isn't confused about who he is or what he wants. The Mogul wants redemption, in the same way a dim ember wants to burst into flame, but finds itself on a dark night, totally without wind. The Idealist closets her yearning for power in ideas and phony emotions, in intellectualized pathos for the world, in her desire to reshape the world in her own image, the right image.

The Parasite calls it right and honestly when he says to the Mogul, "You're a whore and I'm a whore." That is true. And there is integrity in the admission and embrace of that. The Idealist is the ugliest character on stage because she doesn't really know herself, is lying to herself throughout the play, learning nothing at the end, baffled by her own failure because she cannot recognize her own machinations. The Mogul's redemption is actually his return to lucidity about his own identity: he is no longer lying to himself.

The Idealist is willing to have the Mogul sacrifice his 20 year relationship with the Parasite, and all that the Parasite has yearned and worked for, without a second thought, without a trace of empathy or understanding of what she is doing. She sells the Mogul on the arrogant totalizing of the Radiation book without realizing she's selling, or that she's manipulating. When she says to the Mogul, after admitting, when pushed by the Parasite, that she wouldn't have slept with the Mogul if he hadn't agreed to making the book, "Come, we have a meeting," you see the ugliness of her unacknowledged manipulations.

When, in the program notes, the play's director, in a single paragraph in a two page article, refers to the Idealist as pure or honest, I was totally surprised. The Idealist is the dishonest one, and more brutal in her way than the business men because she will sacrifice both on the altar of her own righteous ideals. The book won't make a great movie; it's horribly written, and intellectualized in its spirituality. The Mogul will be ruined and not at all redeemed, because he has found only a toxic mimic of spirituality and soul, and will realize this in the hail of scorn over the movie. The Parasite will be thrown away, made the scapegoat of venality for the other two's palsied reach for salvation.

The Parasite and the Mogul actually have a bond, a relationship, and when the Parasite says he loves the Mogul, you believe him. Thus the Idealist's encouragement for the Mogul to toss away the Parasite is not an indictment of the Mogul--he's been exposed to the pheromones of Spirit and is totally un-moored--but of the Idealist, who in the guise of caring and meaning will cut the throat of the unworthy and unconverted. She doesn't know it; it's buried a few layers down and only emerges in a couple comments, but is there in her actions. Given enough power, you could see in her why the far left and right often come out acting the same, even if one is dressed in organic cotton and the other blue blazer.

At the end of the day, it's the aware corruptions who are more sympathetic than the unaware idealism. The system is what it is; you're dealing with huge sums of money and therefore there's huge constraints and dynamics at work. That's the real world, and the Parasite, and then the Mogul, know what world they're living in. They're not exercising a subtle violence against Spirit by insisting that the real world is a corruption of something else. Plus, they have a relationship formed out of real struggle and loyalty, and against the de-centered, other-focused pull of the Idealist, that's something to be admired.

BioShock and my history of gaming

James and I, in our impromptu walk on Sunday, spent time talking about this game, which I was rhapsodizing about. And in that talk, he brought up "The Game Room," an arcade where his friend used to work at during high school. I haven't thought about it forever, and it's apparently been deceased for a long time. Which, given the current state of video games, doesn't surprise me. The quality of console (xbox 360, Playstation 3, the new Wii) and computer-based games is so good that these shops are totally antiquated. There was a place down the street that tried to do an arcade with desktops, but it failed quickly.

BioShock, a game released this year for the new Xbox 360, is probably the clearest example of why the Game Room's of the world are gone. The 360 gives performance and graphics which are just stunning, not photo-real (yet), but getting close. Which would be neither here nor there if the game was not so sophisticated--beautiful and empty is no unfamiliar phenomenon in this photoshoped and CG'ed world--basing itself on classic dystopian novels, and sending up the Libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand and her wacky crown (a whole different post, believe me...).

The story has your character (it's in the genre of the "first person shooter," with some elements of "adventure games") in a plane crash in the middle of some icy ocean, landing right next to a dark, moonlit tower poking up from the frigid waters. That's the entry to Andrew Ryan's utopian Libertarian experiment, a world where "petty morality" can be transcended by the artists, scientists, industrialists. Of course it goes really, really wrong: the genetic modifications have turned the denizens either into corpses or zombified "splicers" (i.e., genetic splicing into the persons DNA code), who wander around attacking each other and you. (By the way, my favorite line from these splicers--as they do their murderous perambulations, they spout different comments--is "Don't you fucking judge me!") The place is leaking icy water all over the place. There's lots of decay and fires, blood everywhere, but with the artifacts of the functioning city, like the 1950's style perky advertisements and loudspeaker announcements that tell the history of the city's decline into fascism and civil war. You go through the huge city (that's the images in this post), from level to level, accomplishing various tasks towards learning the history of this sick place.

Now, NOTHING like this existed even 10 years ago, in terms of the technical and storytelling sophistication. But in terms of brain modification, it's pretty much the same experience after a point as playing Pacman back at the Game Room.

As fun as these games can be, and as clever and immersive as they are, much of their appeal is that they are diversions, and that they induct the brain into a fugue state. These are not, usually, the choice of the integrationist. And they are usually built to encourage a forward-leaning progress of half-satisfactions, leading onward to the longed-for finale, an addictive process of pulling you out of the present, as you lean into the future, anticipating the Big One.

That's the way they've always been, if they fit into the rubric of "video game." Back to pong, through the arcade games to the early text-based adventure games, then into these modern technical masterpieces (like BioShock).

Which is not to slam them, really. I like my coffee, and try to limit it to one cup in the morning, knowing that if there are more, I'll be an anxious mess the rest of the day. Same with games, you have to know how to use them in moderation, and not do them to excess or for the wrong reasons. Which are all easy to do--as I said, they're built for addiction.

That said, BioShock really is a masterpiece of the genre. And it points up the amazing cultural phenomenon of these games, the intense use of resources (apparently, even before marketing, the modern console games cost $15 million to make, and BioShock I'll bet too more than that), and the incredible profits (2K, which produced BioShock, will net about $1.4 billion next year with the release of the new Grand Theft Auto IV). I've seen a few film sets and it's always awesome and appalling how much it takes to produce even the worst movie.

BioShock's most amazing aspect is its set design, the exquisite art deco environments and flourishes (my favorite is the redwood trees individually encased in glass at the bottom of the sea), and it must have taken a butt-load of money to stable a group of artists that talented. This is the sort of place you can just wander around gape-jawed, regardless of the story or combat.

So, my history with these games continues, more complex and sophisticated than when I was ten and whacking a white dot back and forth on a TV screen, but with the same ambivalence and awe, joyfulness and dread.

I Am Legend - Will Smith is a Mensch

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Heather and I took in the new Will Smith movie, "I am Legend," (trailer) what would be called these days a "re-imagining" of the book that was made into Charles Heston's unforgettable "Omega Man" (1971 trailer). A solid "B" movie, with a plus for what seems to be Smith's basic mensch-iness. There was a little making of video that I watched last night, which at least made him out to be a nice, thoughtful dude.

I used to really go in for these "last man on Earth" stories when I was a kid. I suppose I was struggling to find a sense of the heroic in what felt like a pretty bleak existence, so these tales really caught me. "Earth Abides" was one that my father had read as a kid, and turned me on to. Heather read a bit and said it was poorly written, but I remember it as at least giving some warmth.

So "I am Legend" tells the story of an Army colonel who is a virologist, living alone in Manhattan after a genetically altered cancer cure goes very very wrong. As far as he knows, all humans are dead, except for the "dark seekers." Apparently, 4% of the population turned into these methamphetamine accelerated, Peter Garrett (the singer from Midnight Oil) look alikes, who huddle in dark buildings during the day because their skin bubbles when exposed to UV rays, but come out at night to hunt. There were 1% of the population which were immune to the virus, but the 4% ate them. I suppose that's a kind of democracy.

But Smith was not one of them, and he's spending his time looking for a cure, or maybe antidote, to the virus. His only friend is Sam the dog, and some mannequins at his favorite video store. He's pretty lonely. But then a couple survivors arrive and he makes his life meaningful.

OK. The real star of the film is New York. How often has this city starred in films? It probably has a longer filmography than any actor, including Klaus Kinski, who was in over 200 films. Apparently he would work a day or two, and that was it because the directors could not stand to have him around any longer than that.

New York is a favorite city to destroy, but here it's not blown up, but rather it's handed back to nature. Streets have become rivers, Central Park is overgrown, there's grass growing in the streets, and all you hear is birds and the winds. Beautifully quiet.

But, as Roger Ebert said in his review, "The movie works well while it's running, although it raises questions that later only mutate in our minds" (link). You know, parenthetically, Ebert is almost always right in his reviews. If I want a nearly always spot-on take on a potential movie, he's a great guide. Or, well, at least for me. Our sensibilities seem to match up really well.

So, here are some of the mutations that formed in my mind after leaving the theater:

1) There are 1,611,581 people (according to the 2006 census) living in Manhattan, which means that 1,531,002 (rounding up) people died, 16,116 were immune, and 64,463 turned into "dark seekers." Why is there no sign of the 1.5 million dead people? If we say that the typical human weighs 160 pounds, then that's 240,000,000 pounds of flesh and bones. Where is it? If you say that the dark seekers ate it, did they only eat the dead bodies inside of buildings? And even the bones?

2) If the typical human body becomes inedible within, say, a month, and if that's what the dark seekers were using to stay alive, what have they been eating? They are not smart enough any longer to open tin cans, and there's no sign of stores being looted. So?

3) It's implied that the dark seeker's metabolisms are about 6 times as fast as humans (it takes six times the normal sedating dose to tranquilized a captive dark seeker). So, presumably that's at least six times the normal calories required for a human. Where are they getting all those calories?

4) You might say from the wildlife of the island--the first scene of denuded New York is of Smith hunting deer in the city--but if 64,000 cranked up super piranha were sweeping through each night, the already small population of deer (zoos I assume) would be gone in the first month. Manhattan is 13 miles long by 2 miles wide, which given how fast the dark seekers move, would probably take the 64,000 hairless hungers a brisk evening's jog to cover.

5) What does Neville (Smith's character) think he's going to do with a serum? My understanding is that human brains begin to cook past about 106 degrees F. The dark seekers have internal temperatures of about 200. Even if he did "cure" them, wouldn't they be so fried that they couldn't function as normal humans anymore?

6) How did the colony of survivors put up those huge cement walls around its village?

7) Why is the road through rural Vermont totally clear of debris after 3 years of being untended by humans?

8) Why did the government decided to seal off New York, when such a virus couldn't possibly be contained by such crude means?

So, the reason why I bring these points up is not to be snarky, because most sci-fi collapses on the verisimilitude front about as fast as rice paper exposed to water.

It's that there's such attention placed on the reality of a post-human urban environment, with details lavishly thought out and presented, that it makes the unbelievability of the actual happenings rather strange.

Anyway, a fun and sad movie with problems, but well executed as a set piece, and with some genuinely touching and scary scenes. Natch.

Margot at the Wedding: And if you thought your family was bad...

(Click here for the trailer.)

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

David and I took in "Margot at the Wedding" after a pretty good, but kinda-expensive-for-this-town Thai meal at Oshas. It was playing at the Embarcadero theater, which I'm guessing either is financed by a cinema sugar daddy/momma, or runs guns out of the back entrance, because with the wacky and oddball films they run, how do they possibly afford the rent at their location? But it's a nice theater, with good coffee and a nice, mature staff that never seemed to have had to read an employees manual--i.e., are not nice by design. (Going to the AMC 1000 on Van Ness is like being in my suburban mall haunts as a kid, with angst personified giving me my popcorn and coke.)

"Margot" reminds me a bit of the other film I saw in the theaters recently, "No Country for Old Men." Both are like slightly different hell realms. Both are visions of a life without Spirit, though "Country" is much more totalisistic in its vision. "Margot" doesn't say there isn't Spirit anywhere, it just focuses its lens in a way that excludes Spirit from the frame. Or even just a representative of sane human relationships.

"Margot" tells the story of two sisters coming back together after several years of estrangement, for the event of one of the sister's wedding. The details are not very important, nor the plot. It's the portrait of scathing dysfunction that's the real raison d'être, scathing not because it is writ so large or luridly, but because it is so unconscious and common.

Margot, the titular character played by Nicole Kidman, can't reflect on herself with any effectiveness; her sister says, "She can be a monster when she's angry." But it seems that she's angry all the time, and for her, that means attacking wherever it will hurt the other. She is brutal energy channeled through sophisticated means. She has gathered language and culture to her as a way to defend a fragile, scarred interior. Her way of creating a sense of safety and control in her life is to destabilize others. At the beginning of the film, she criticizes her son for not wearing his new glasses, and then at the end, when he puts them on to prepare for his solo bus ride away from his mother, she says, "They make your face look fat." Her persona is that of an aware, observing woman, but what she does and says is disjointed and fragmented, because her m.o. is not truth but defense. She says to her sister, "I'm a speaker of truth," while delivering a cruel verbal blow.

The other characters are not much more developed than her, though their personas are of relative sophisticates. Jack Black's character, the groom to be, is perhaps a bit more honest in his being "cognitively disheveled" (one of my favorite phrases from Ken Wilber), but really, they all are lost in the idea that their beliefs and thoughts are true and coherent. These are very lost people who are "very" lost because even their attempts at self-reflection can find nothing substantial to rest their gaze on.

They are not empty people here, just internally fractured, with "self-knowledge" which is created as works of fiction, not the result of self-inquiry. Margot doesn't know herself: she either holds concepts about herself ("I'm a speaker of truth") or touches on her own pain and pathology, but looks away so quickly, distorting her vision with self-disgust, that she can't learn from her seeing.

These are people who don't learn because they essentially cannot tolerate their own pain long enough to have it tell them about who they are. Jack Black's character says at the end of the film, as he's unraveling, "I ate the cake and I don't know why." There's a surface cohesion to these psyches which is belayed by their disjointed actions and words. Often communications will drop from each mouth to plunk in the mud at the others feet, without being picked up and understood. "I masturbated last night," says the son out of the blue, before getting on the bus to leave his mother. "You don't have to tell me things like that," says Margot, not stopping to understand or reflect on her son's confession, or maybe sharing.

These are damaged people in sophisticated personas, which makes them more toxic to each other than the merely ignorant. This is what mind-fucking is about, and it's often coming from people whose selves are broken and the fragments are being defended even more fiercely for the brokenness. Margot is a legion of lawyers charged with protecting a pile of shattered glass.

But like "Country," it's a particular hell, and it's a big mistake to view it as any coherent vision of life. "Margot" is what life looks like for a child stuck within their toxic family. There's no way out, there's no sane "other," there's no sanctuary of escape. Such a child does the best they can to survive and protect their Self from the literate and sophisticated desperation of their parents, trying to experience love despite its union with pain.

"Margot" has a claustrophobic pain which describes a particular type of family, not families as entities, or life as an experience. "Margot" has no one who sees it clearly; even Baumbaugh, the director, seems to be grasping for sanity simply by articulating the insane. But there's no sense of seeing these people, this hell realm, in perspective, in relationship to what is sane, grounded, and self-aware. There's no mature touchstone anywhere in the film, which is what makes it a partial vision, the depiction of a family made hellish because there's no "outside."

Not to say I didn't like it. I did like the film, quite a bit. And I felt empathy for the people. I just wouldn't want them anywhere near me.

3:10 to Yuma - 3:10 to Horse Shit

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

On Monday, midday, I thought I'd treat myself to what in my family was termed a "funkie." That would be the movie you'd turn on on weekend afternoons, in the midst of the heat, that would usually be a gun opera or involve oversized lizards.

So my choice what a neuvo Western called "3:10 to Yuma," starring Russel Crowe and Christian Bale as the antagonist and protagonist, the charming sociopath and the frumpy one and one-half legged ex-Massachusetts militia man turned Arizona cow farmer. And then there's Ben Foster, the young actor who keeps getting case as quasi-psychotic weirdos or psychopaths, a la the boyfriend in Six Feet Under, or the creepy criminal in Bruce Willis' hostage movie, who burns himself to death at the denouement. And some miscellaneous bad guys, my favorite of which being the silent sharpshooter Mexican.

The thing I really didn't like about the film was not the improbabilities--why was the stage coach robbery so badly planned. I mean, they're running behind a coach loaded up with a backward-facing Gatling gun. Well, and for that matter, why doesn't that early machine gun hit more of them? It isn't that Ben Wade (Crowe) stays inexplicably in town after "taking" the comely frontier town bar wench (could they really have been that attractive and worked in a bar for long). It was the faux psychology. The last time I'd seen such a psychologically shallow film parading itself as something deep was Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven." That one won some award. Apparently there's a prize for most self-deluded.

I mean, how hard is it to make a Western? The template is already there, either in Eastwood's early films of the great operas of Sergio Leonne ("Once Upon a Time in the West" is about as good as it gets). You take archetypally exaggerated characters, pit them against each other in archetypally charged situations, and bring them to an archetypally loaded climax and conclusion. You don't need to fuss around with real motivation, with complexity of psychology and relationship. Unless you do, and then you have GOT to get it right.

If you're going to tell a story of human psyches, for God's sake, know what you're talking about. Don't get your information from other shallow movies that are pretending to be deep. Or maybe being as deep as they can, because they've never looked inside for their source material.

3:10 to Yuma was, I guess, as story of fathers and sons and redemption. In Wilberian terms, it's the story of the "red," self centered, ego-centric level of development maturing into an "blue," family/village-centric level of development, the story of the transition from the social form of the strong man to that of the strong law. Ok, fair enough. Deadwood, David Milch and HBO's fantastic ballad of civilization, did it for three years. It's a great subject, rich and deep.

Except for in this film. Just as in "The Unforgiven," human motivation is presented with the form of depth--yes, fathers and sons have complex relationships, and sons have to choose their idealized figures and then come to grips with their real world men; darkness must be struggled with and brought to the light, socially, interpersonally, and intrapsychically--but it doesn't actually have the substance. It's like someone quoting Shakespeare, and at first it seems they are taking those pieces that are meaningful, yet pretty soon you realize they are spouting those parts that they believe are deep, because of what they've heard or read. But not what they have felt.

That's this film: callow, un-heart felt, bleak in its confused morality, shallow in its understanding of human nature and minds. Blah.