REELING

More violence? Less Depp? Wondering what movies will provide in 2008

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Now 2007 is kaput, yet we reserve nagging little questions about that surprisingly strong movie year, and what they could mean for 2008 and beyond.

The Hollywood writers strike is entangling film production, so predicting what will be made and released this year is a fool's racket. But fools rush in ...

On the Austin front, according to murmurs and Internet intelligentsia (an oxymoron?), Richard Linklater will wrap his sports documentary "Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach," described as a "profile of University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido, the winningest coach in NCAA history" — a seismic departure from his last feature, the wiggy, wonderful "A Scanner Darkly" in 2006.

Terrence Malick — Texas' own Stanley Kubrick: an artistic visionary living in a turtle shell — is readying production for "Tree of Life" in Smithville, which will shoot this spring with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. With the secretive Malick, that's absolutely all we know for now.

Man-boy Robert Rodriguez, who can juggle five projects without sweat or fumble, remains restless. Word is "Sin City 2," "Sin City 3" and "Machete," which is based on the show-stealing faux-trailer from "Grindhouse," rustle with activity, but it's likely only "Machete" will see a 2008 birthday. A "Barbarella" remake is said to be shelved indefinitely.

That's the main local buzz.

Topics in the larger movie picture, compelling trends — the return of film noir, the evolution of artists such as Johnny Depp and Syndey Lumet — that tickled the mind in 2007, have me wondering how they will play out this year and after.

Will there be (more) blood?

In mid-2006, I wrote about a resurgence of film noir, arguing that noir was back, bleak and bloody as ever, faithfully pessimistic, glibly projecting harsh views of human nature, about which it doesn't trust as far as it can spit a gnawed toothpick.

I'm an iffy prognosticator, but I know and love my noir, so this stubborn trend hijacked my senses and made me watch. Especially because it didn't abate in 2007. Indeed, it thrived.

Between 2005-06, a rash of crime noirs honored the savage codes and shadowy flourishes of the form: "Sin City," "Miami Vice," "Derailed," "Brick," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "The Ice Harvest" and "The Departed," not to mention scads of Asian noirs, such as Hong Kong's nifty "Election."

Liking what it saw, 2007 bulged with the violently noirish — "American Gangster," "Gone Baby Gone," "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "No Country for Old Men," "Eastern Promises," "We Own the Night" and the reconstituted "Blade Runner: The Final Cut" — as well as the simply darkly violent, such as "3:10 to Yuma" and "Sweeney Todd." (This is no country for gore-nography like "Hostel 2" and "Halloween" — mindless, amoral kid's stuff.)

But why noir, why now?

Hollywood tied a tourniquet on bloody downer films following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, heralding a new sobriety at once respectful and, dare we say, craven. The national mood and all. But with these newer movies, Sept. 11 anxiety has demonstrably eased.

Eased, not vanished. And that's the rub. We are still encumbered by moral confusion, convulsed by a faraway war gone sour, social and economic instability at home, fear-mongering about attacks on our soil, a pilloried presidential administration soon to be pushed into history by a giant, generational X factor.

We, as a nation, are nervous.

Such were the climes when film noir made its unofficial bow in '40s and '50s Hollywood, with a pained parade of often low-budget meditations on moral depredation, cruelty, lawlessness and social nihilism: "The Big Sleep," "Out of the Past," "Double Indemnity" "Kiss of Death," "Detour," "Kiss Me Deadly," to name some of the best known.

These unusually grim pictures were a response to America's post-World War II temperament. The Depression had lifted, yet a new malaise smudged the national view-finder. Dark films were born from dark times. Momentarily gone were the screwball romps and spangled musicals of the '30s.

Parallels exist today. The events in New York and Washington, D.C., are enshrined in recent history, but we still feel queasy. And cinematic art reflects it, not here and there, but in the clot of films depicting murder, misanthropy and endings far from tidy, happy.

Bad brothers rob their parents' jewelry store and their world collapses in a destructive heap in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." After a healthy body count, an undercover cop is seduced irrevocably into the gangster badlands he was assigned to dismantle in "Eastern Promises." No one wins after the solving of a kidnapping reveals that few are good, not even the law, and the hero is left to agonize over a fatal decision in "Gone Baby Gone." Fueled by a classic noir set-up and characters — a decent everyman pulled to ruin; a psychotic killer; a good but impotent cop — "No Country for Old Men" ends in a moral haze so thick it chokes.

As a moviegoer and crime genre fan, I'm perfectly at ease with these harrowing depictions of humankind and the climate in which it seeks, skulks and hides. But will the trend continue this year and after?

Check back after Jan. 18. That's when the punishingly misanthropic "There Will be Blood" opens in Austin. The title says it all.

Will Johnny Depp play it straight?

When was the last time Johnny Depp, a fascinating actor who's struck gold in flashy burlesque, portrayed a regular, identifiable human being?

Friends I've asked reply, with searching facial contortions, "Donnie Brasco," in which Depp played a straight-arrow undercover cop who infiltrates the mafia. That was 1997.

It's also not quite right. Depp was a relatively subdued Irish gypsy in 2001's vanilla romance "Chocolat" and quietly urbane author J.M. Barrie in the 2004 biopic "Finding Neverland." There were smaller unaffected roles in between, but Depp, who wears eyeliner off-screen, has become the go-to guy for the fantastical and cartoonish, figures who luxuriate in their decadence-kissed flamboyance.

Note: the titular "Edward Scissorhands"; a mincing crossdresser in "Ed Wood"; the "actual" Don Juan in "Don Juan DeMarco"; a hallucinating drug freak in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"; the now legendary Jack Sparrow, bounding with swishbuckling overacting, in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogy; a slyly funny rogue agent in the hyperactive "Once Upon a Time in Mexico"; Willy Wonka (enough said); and, currently, the utterly theatrical creation of Sweeney Todd, a sanguinary monster whose fright-wig appearance and creepy twitches are all whooshing gestures. Depp has fast evolved into the leading man as chameleonic character actor, Lon Chaney with better lips and cheek bones.

I'm looking forward to a Depp without extravagance and glued-on ornament. He can do it, certainly, because he's done it, and nicely. ("Brasco" is a good example.) I worry, though, that he's having too much fun in the grand masked ball of make-believe baroque, and that when he does try something more ordinary, stripped of screaming artifice, he will look plain and unexciting. He will have to work that much harder creating a realistic character to convince an audience weaned on his exhibitions of winky exuberance.

The Internet Movie Database — the film journalist's 411 line — lists five new projects for Depp through 2009. One is playing real-life gangster John Dillinger in Michael Mann's "Public Enemies," which sounds adult enough. But he's also rumored as down for Robert Rodriguez's graphic-novel noirs "Sin City" parts two and three. Like all of Rodriguez's work, the "Sin City" franchise feeds on fakery and comic-book hyperbole. It's terrific fun. Yet it's surely a place in which Depp will get lost in the transformative magic of make believe. The actor vanishes. The character is born, noisily.

Will octogenarian Sydney Lumet sustain his momentum?

Last year, at age 83, director Sydney Lumet reclaimed his men-in-trouble cred with the bristling "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," still showing in Austin. Everything great about his gritty classics "12 Angry Men," "The Pawnbroker," "Fail-Safe," "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Network" and "The Verdict" he applied to the new crime thriller, with aces.

But this triumph follows a long erratic stretch pitted with the forgettable: "Running on Empty," "The Morning After," "Critical Care," "Gloria" and others. Still, it's such a muscular return that it restores some confidence. Lumet has always been a favorite, one of my Hollywood deities, jostling with Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese.

Last year also saw the belated DVD release of Lumet's stunning 1965 military prison drama "The Hill," a film so tough and powerful, it instantly leaped onto my imaginary best films of all time tally. Lumet does crime, cops and prisons peerlessly, which bodes well for his next movie, "Getting Out," a prison-break thriller slated for a 2009 release.

Fingers are crossed.

What I'm watching on DVD(a new feature for my biweekly column): "Hard Candy" (2006), "Barbershop" (2002), "Everybody Hates Chris" (2007), "A Place in the Sun" (1951), "Simon Schama's Power of Art" (2007), "Crossing the Line" (2007), "The Clock" (1945), "Penny Serenade" (1941).