doubt is an actor’s vehicle, a film of great performances, but without any real drive to its narrative. where philip seymour hoffman, meryl streep, and amy adams put in exceptional performances, they seem to be almost freestyling through a listless and contrived story-line. perhaps this artificiality has something to do with the fact the doubt was originally a play. all too often in fact, we are reminded of this fact by certain theatrical qualities in the film. things like details that are too over the head, or dialog that feels unnaturally narrativic. the worse of these offenses however, comes in the film’s conclusion, when the otherwise solid meryl streep breaks down and confesses “i have doubts…” in this overplayed moment, theatricality is on full display. unfortunately streep seems to forget that the camera is more intimate that the theatre, and we don’t need the overblown sell.

amy adams is the best thing in this movie. playin sister james, an 8th grade history teacher at the parochial school run by her convent, adams manages to mine the space of confusion, hybridity, and complexity between the two extremes played by hoffman and streep. on one side, hoffman’s father flynn speaks constantly of love and the need for compassion. his nemesis is streep’s oppressive-nun character, who runs the school “like a jail” from her position of power as the school’s principal. it is sister james, torn between the guilt of streep and the innocence of flynn that represents the moral focus of the film, the same focus experienced by the viewer and born out visually by adams. her struggle is ours, and she masterfully trips over her desire to exonerate father flynn even as she fears his guiltiness. her big blue eyes must be the most compelling thing in doubt, and like elijah wood’s portrayal of frodo baggins in the lord of the rings, it seems that all of her acting happens there.

doubt is a fair movie. what it lacks in an engaging story-line, it recuperates with its acting. for streep (the most academy-award nominated woman in history), adams, and hoffman, it will surely represent another opportunity to be lauded, nominated, and perhaps awarded for stand-out work. i must confess however, that given the real mediocrity of this movie, it seems slightly unfair that compelling roles in bad movies should or could be privileged over lesser acting in better movies. from where i stand, it seems to be like giving the mvp award to a team that went .500 when there were surely other players from winning and championship programs who really stepped up. then again, perhaps it is the actors who bring their films up that are more valuable than the one’s who simply fit into a complex machine of excellence.

the curious case of benjamin button is philosophy produced from a photograph found in the attic of american literature. it is gimmick made beautiful, which makes it a truly american film, caught between the circus and the opera as it were, and in the tradition of ‘fable americana’ films like forrest gump, and big fish. like those movies, benjamin button is a myth of the american life, making all that is wonderful about americana visible through an individual who is outside of it, but simultaneously produced by it. that benjamin button is a man who ages backwards escapes being gimmick, in that it produces pain and introspection where a less skilled director may have mined cheap, clever gags, and aspirations to the supernatural.

not that it is cursed to the fates of movies like forrest gump, big fish, and being there, which generally veer toward the fantastic and the allegorical. benjmain button in fact works in the opposite direction, as the fantastic appeals towards the ordinary, finding the extraordinary within the mundane and revealing it. brad pitt’s portrayal of benjamin button, a man who was born the day the first world war ended and ages backward, is brilliant, managing to feel like a lived reality, not simply plausible narrative. button is quiet, pensive, and wise, characteristics produced by his otherworldly adolescence. by chance of fortune, he “grows up” in a home for the elderly, and becomes acclimated to death before he really understands life, the suggestion being that only in facing and understanding death can life really be understood.

three major narrativic sites exist within the film. the first is the foundational reality of a woman dying of old age in a hospital in lousiana, hours before the landfall of hurricane katrina. as she slips off into the world from which benjamin button and the film is born, she motions to a journal, begging her daughter to read. but before the daughter takes up the text, the woman introduces a second setting for our narrative, revealing or inventing a space of legend where a blind clockmaker creates a clock that works backward, to not simply remember the victims of world war one, but in fact to mechanistically recall them. with this second narrativic site introduced, the daughter begins reading the journal positioning us finally in the film’s primary story space, a domain of the cinematic mythological, which is to say the reality that we are meant to regard as the most movie-like, and simultaneously the most fictive but instructive.

lush film tones and good pacing do the rest. though the film is nearly three hours, we are compelled further into its fiction. particularly by it’s warm, human colors, and the sense that the film, like benjamin button, is slow to life, but increasingly vital. as benjamin button becomes more brad pitt, we are encouraged to celebrate his life, which is the overwhelming goal of the film, to engage with questions about how we appreciate and perceive life. the interconnectedness of life and death, embodied by benjamin button’s birth “of unusual circumstances,” is the film’s thematic focus, which occurs even in the film’s most superficial layer, where the dying woman is reminded of her life. cate blanchett, who plays benjamin button’s red-headed love interest that eventually becomes this dying old woman, has told vanity fair that film is a muse on death. she also said that the film is “a repository for your grief, about whatever you grieve about.”

go see this movie. go see it before it is popularly hailed and taken up as the moralists’ must-see-film-of-the-year. my greatest fear, personally, is that it’s honest, brilliantly open narrative will be consumed by book club types and christian groups, who will champion is joie de vie as a dr. phil admonishment to enjoy life. which is not an unfair conclusion for the film, but it will threaten the quiet genius of pitt’s protagonist, who doesn;t need to stand up on a soap box to have an amazing meaningful life, and neither do we need to make the next forrest gump.

although it is, and better than.

the big news today is that a hospital in cleveland (cleveland?) has completed the most advanced face transplant in history, the first such operation in the united states, and just the fourth worldwide.

while no one’s talking about it, i think it’s clear that the most important implication of this surgery is that john woo’s legendary face/off film (with travolta and nicholas cage) is now plausible.

it’s always funny seeing which sci fi films become sci fact a couple years later. frankly my money was on star gate, rather than the silliness of face switching. then again, who knows? i might be right, and there may be a ancient egyptian stone portal operating in some colorado military base as-we-speak.

the american action movie is founded on the idea of catharsis through violence. which is why critics and intellectuals generally object to it. because it espouses a sort of primitivism in the name of healing, and engages in profound acts of brutality in the pursuit of some sort of harmony.

the american action movie confronts an unresolved paradox: violence at the service of peace, killing in the cause of saving, destroying as a way of building. the ironies are not lost on the american people, whose politics ceaselessly engage this same paradox. and is this way, the american action movie, is the narrative pursuit of the american social psyche.

and is this way, the newest james bond installment ‘quantum of solace,’ reflects american societal contradictions in a way that is singularly genius and pluristically unexpected. this is not the film america thought it would see, and that’s both the problem and the potential.

take this as a spoiler alert: you don’t need to meet the villains of this film to know them. you already know them. ‘quantum of solace’ is in short, a transnational corporation, who know no financial limits, national boundaries or organizations they cannot gain access to. they are everyone, because everyone is a part of them. let me be more specific: ‘quantum of solace’ is globalization, in all of the fears benedict anderson and fredric jameson imagined. they do not answer to any one government, so they make governments. they are capitalism render as jameson might say ‘late capitalistic’ in that they have mutated far past capitalism proper into an organization who preys on the capitalistic, able to overcome the local and the provincial from the total (global) perspective.

quantum of solace are so huge, they manage the earth’s resources. where capitalism managed commodities and negotiated a ideal profitable balance between supply and demand, the post-capitalistic q of s deal in resources, simply what the earth has and humans need. this is oil, as capitalism would commodify, but water, the substance which divides human life and death. so their plot, to control the world’s water and then artificially create drought conditions in which they are the only brokers of life, is so simple as to be offensive. that this plausible in today’s world only further problematizes the viewer’s experience of the film. this is not us and them, there is no division here. this is the american capitalistic system played beyond itself, and in that elevated to the point where the american state can no longer contend with the american psychology. it is capitalism over all. the politics of bound (russians, communists, nations) and the criminal elements (terrorists like dr. no) are lost to the winds of time. in this bondian moment it is globalization that is the enemy, and how can it be fought?

let me re-ask the question: how do you fight (the global) everyone?

the answer is that you must become someone. you must constitute a discrete identity. and that identity cannot be a state (easily fit into the global) or an army (embedded within the state/political) or a force (defined by other forces). no, this someone must be a ‘one,’ an individual.

and that individual, as if framed by our question, is james bond- the ultimate someone. the role which is prepetually passed on and reintrepreted, but always inhabited. he is the man in the circle. the discrete individual. bond. james bond.

utterance as identity.

not that daniel craig’s james bond needs it. his bond is a identity enacted, but rarely named. in the opening half hour, craig races through the Italian Alps, Siena, Port Au Prince, and Austria. he is driven, and the cinematography is likewise propelled, almost unwatchably so, at a pace that can be difficult to follow. which is our protagonist’s own malady. if we cannot follow the plot at first, it is because our young, driven hero cannot either. he simply fights, drives, runs, wins, kills.

judi dench, cast as ‘m,’ asks him why he killed a man who he tracks through a busy siena without thinking to wound him and bring him in. bond doesn’t know. and neither do we. it seems somehow like the thing to do at the end of the chase, and as natural as it feels to us, it feels even more obvious to bond. so like him, we are confronted by the obvious rationality of m’s rebuke and wonder back at the overwhelming emotionality trying to read reason back into the adredinale that had the viewer and bond unequivocally wanting our rival dead.

it is back to that first rule of the action film, catharsis through violence. absolution through dissolution. and then, there’s m to tell us to knock it off.

judi dench is the intellectual embedded in the film. when she ask’s bond to gain control of his recklessness (the central theme of the film) it’s really a critique of the bond film rather than this bond in particular. her admonition is a critic’s voice patched through to bond directly; don’t just kill people, fuck women, and wreck cars, make it mean something.

so he does.

in fear of watching two hours of non-stop, hard-hitting, non-narrative violence, craig’s bond takes a breath just when we need it. the pacing’s been too much. we need a break. so bond goes by boat to a friend from ‘casino royale’ and we re-engage with what bond might be thinking, not just doing. his friend takes him in, helps him out, moves him along in our story. it is a reflection in motion, but still a reflection. it is an acknowledgement of the fundamental flaw of the action movie: no time to think, just never-ending violence. and this bond needs to reflect, because even though we are never invited into bond, it’s clear that there’s a lot at work. lots going on. what after all, must be healed by the catharsis of his unattached violence?

bond goes awol. he is cut off by mi6. which is inevitable. because for all their alteriority, their as much a part of the globalization that bond is fighting in quantum of solace. they cut off his money, take his passport, all semblages of his global citizenship, objects which are hostage to his enemies and which he must do without. which is why he must appeal to a friend. because in the face of everyone you need to be someone, and bond’s someone needs someone else.

daniel craig is the anti-bond, and it’s beautiful to watch. where connery and moore seduce major supporting figures of their films (socialities, scientists, mistresses of their enemies) craig fucks a secretary sent to turn back around to london. he does it without seeming to give a damn. because he doesn’t. there is no seduction, and she’s not anyone special. she’s just another someone. she’s not beautiful. she’s available. this not conquest. it’s sex. which is the way you’re never supposed to think of james bond sex- it always has to be conquest and seduction. it always has to be strategic. it can never just be doing the secretary because she was available.

no, daniel craig does not need to be the rabid male potency that connery was. in fact, he must be more inhuman than superhuman. and there’s no way that he can beat the quantum of solace, only disrupt it, unveil it, cause it to take shape, and that confront the shape that it presents. not accidentally, bond ends up in bolivia, framed by the bolivian campesinos as the ultimate anti-globalist population (hyper local in their suffering over the lack of water in their single canister), and in the end can only succeed by forcing the tentacles of globalization of ‘greene planet’ out of the country. in this bond defeats the idea of a ‘planet’ as a total homogenized reality, to preserve the individuality of the bolivians. his somebodyness allows them too, to avoid becoming everyones, and remain someones.

which is why the american movie goer will leave quickly when the film ends. unsure. unsure if he liked it. disappointed that it was not more… something.

because the villain seemed to much like an executive from aig. because even with the stacks of bodies, and the secretary made into an ebony object, even with the bolivian secret service agent telling us about her mother’s rape, the last act of violence doesn’t seem to release any anger in the viewer.

they don’t realize that bond’s shooting at globalism. and if they do, they might be shooting back.