Night at the Museum

(2006, USA. Directed by Shawn Levy.)

Night at the Museum is the most expensive commercial we're likely to see. It's an extravaganza of a movie; a huge, hulking affair better suited for theme parks than cinemas. The product in question is New York's Museum of Natural History, but I'm doubtful anyone leaving a screening will rush to it's ticket booth -- Night at the Museum is devoted purely to itself. Like every thirty-second ad on TV, the product seems an afterthought -- who remembers what the "Where's the Beef?" lady was selling? Or which beer had more taste and less filling? Thankfully, that brand of soullessness has a half-minute cap; the inanity of Night at the Museum, however, stretches nearly two hours. It's like an endless word-from-our-sponsors: there's no actual program.

With a title like a Marx Brothers movie and a cast resembling a contemporary version of Cannonball Run, Night at the Museum is all about quick connections. Everything is delivered shorthand, from the lazy establishing shots of Central Park to the insistently emotive score. We've seen this stuff a million times and everything is supposed to ring a bell. It's like hearing the Who's "Bargain" in a used-car spot: a lazy technique that tries to con us in to paying attention when nothing is going on.

The cast in particular seems to have been assembled with less thought for the characters than the actors' recognizability. Ben Stiller, playing a newly-appointed night watchman at the museum, reverts to the high-strung frustration that worked so well in There's Something about Mary. But without the sexual stimulus -- this is a family picture -- he flails about for no reason. Elsewhere, Ricky Gervais and Steve Coogan, two supremely talented comedians, riff on their personas to no avail; it's a bit startling to see funny people be so profoundly unfunny. And Owen Wilson, repeating his gee-whiz Bottle Rocket act again, is palpably bored. Everyone is at a loss; with a script as lazy and dull as this one, it's no wonder the actors regress: they're working with the tools they've been given.

But no one is interested in supplying words -- Night at the Museum is about what we see. It's a special effects monster. The museum comes alive at night due to some hokum involving an ancient Egyptian curse; dinosaur bones stomp corridors, stuffed lions stalk the African wing, and mannequins of historical figures parade. And though the eye candy does provide a few creepily effective moments when the museum takes its first few breaths, goopy sentimentality awkwardly invades much of the film's second half. Night at the Museum is a rare movie that would have worked better without a plot. It's a hoot to see Stiller awing Attila the Hun with magic tricks while pilgrims, Victorians, and terra-cotta soldiers from the Han dynasty roam the background. Too bad he also has to learn about being a good father.

Commercials, by definition, lack art. They're quickies that work on sleight-of-hand and diversion. The ones we remember are simply zeitgeists, catchphrases that sneak into the lexicon. Successful movies -- those we remember -- are often art despite themselves. However banal they appear, there's talent somewhere beneath the junk. Night at the Museum is all junk; it'll disappear faster than the dude-you're-getting-a-Dell kid. Yo quiero my money back.

The Pursuit of Happyness

(2006, USA. Directed by Gabriele Muccino.)

The latest weapon in the Right's war on all things decent is called The Pursuit of Happyness and it’s the enemy's sleekest rocket yet. Aimed at the heart and minds of a key Democratic constituency – African-Americans – it disguises racism under a sheen of cuddly traditionalism. "Pull yourself up by the bootstraps," it says. "No one's out to keep the black man down." Is this what they meant by compassionate conservatism?

Inspired by a true story, Happyness (not to be mistaken for the Todd Solondz movie) is a love letter to the yuppie in us all. It stars Will Smith as a brilliant but down-on-his-luck San Francisco worker bee; the kind of well-meaning guy with so much initiative he spends his life savings on a stock of futuristic x-ray machines, only to have them dismissed as unnecessary and useless by every hospital in the city. He plummets into poverty, and some of us might see his fall as a quintessential example of the American Dream gone bust.

The movie, however, says, "Just keep trying; this is America after all." One day, after losing yet another sale, Smith strolls by the Dean Witter headquarters and, in a burst of inspiration, his eyes turn to dollar signs. Ogling the sleek businessmen with their perfect hair, he intones in drowsy voiceover, "they look so happy." He wins a salary-free internship at the firm, and the rest of the movie chronicles Smith's attempts to keep he and his oh-so-adorable son afloat long enough to achieve a high-paying position and a six-figure bank account.

Set in the good old days of the early '80s, Happyness's corporate-friendly vibe is a bit of a shocker in the post-Enron era. Big business is portrayed as a cheery playground of toothy old white guys; James Karen, the diabolical real-estate developer who only moved the headstones in Poltergeist, plays a sagely Dean Witter higher-up – a Capitalist Yoda. When the city seizes $600 from Smith's bank account for unpaid parking tickets, our eyes are supposedly opened to the nefarious tricks of too much government. Smith ends up a tax-law advisor whose motto is, "We don't want anyone's hands in our pockets but our own." Too bad nobody told him about welfare earlier on.

Happyness's San Francisco setting is hardly a Manhattan-esque tribute; hippies are a thieving scourge of the streets and a day-care is run by lazy Asians whose curriculum includes screenings of "The Love Boat" and "Bonanza" – "For history," explains the pudgy teacher. (Apparently, Asians are too stupid to speak English: the movie gets its title from the name of the day-care – "There's no 'y' in 'happiness,'" educates Smith.)

But throughout, the film possesses an easily digestible visual vernacular. Beyond the regrettable shorthand of using a Rubik's Cube to demonstrate Smith's genius, Happyness's 1981 looks a lot like 1981 down to the ashtrays in the corporation's conference room. The hair, costumes, and props are shot in a muted, grainy palate that simulates the era nicely; it even looks like it was made in the Reagan-era. And, in a way, it's fun to watch – but not since The Cell has the disconnect between the merits of a movie's form and its content been so prominent.

This is the third week in a row that I'm calling out a movie for its underhanded Right-wing motives. I have just enough self-awareness to realize I might be coming off as a paranoid pinko, but Hilary Clinton may have been on to something. And the strangest part? Now they have Will Smith on their side. When a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in Charles Bronson's neighborhood, he opened them up with a Magnum. Now-a-days, you move from Philadelphia to Bel Air, quit rapping, and make conservative fantasies about how the man isn't really trying to keep you down. Times have changed.

Apocalypto

(USA, 2006. Directed by Mel Gibson.)

Apocalypto is a strange movie. It has the sweep of an epic and the swagger of exploitation. It's both beautiful and ugly, captivating and repulsive. It's bipolar throughout, and if we didn't know who its director was, we might think him a bit nuts.

But Mel Gibson's name is stamped all over this behemoth – the complete title reads Mel Gibson's Apocalypto – and his unmistakable influence courses through its veins. Gibson wrote the movie, directed it, and acted as producer. It's his baby and he's not handing over the wheel; just be sure to buckle up: Apocalypto is a crazy ride.

But who's willing to take it? With a cast of non-professionals, subtitled dialogue, and a plot kept tightly under wraps, Apocalypto is a hard sell. Its one draw is Gibson. And though The Passion of the Christ was a mammoth hit, does anybody really want to see its follow-up? Did anyone enjoy that movie?

Apocalypto isn't for anybody – it's Gibson's party and no one else is invited. Working outside the studio system and playing with his own money, Gibson here establishes himself as our most rogue director. And like the work of Samuel Fuller or Russ Meyer, Gibson's film is distinctly his own. Beholden to no one – bosses or fans – he's allowed to get as crazy as he wants and indulge his weirdest obsessions. But Fuller's and Meyer's movies radiated a perverse joy – they teemed with the excitement of filmmaking and the (mostly sexual) fixations thrilled them, and in turn, us. Gibson however isn't having any fun, and if there's any reason he's making movies, it's to simulate pain – his obsession with the flesh is unmistakably Sadistic.

Much of Apocalypto, set in the waning days of the Maya civilization, is about bodies in motion; and Gibson gleefully rises to the occasion. The film's second half is a mad sprint through the leafy jungle of the Yucatan, and it achieves a frantic crazy energy that's both thrilling and scary. Gibson's twitchy persona informs much of the action – he photographs movement with rapid, jumpy grace. And his nightmare paranoia vitalizes a wonderfully creepy dream sequence. (With so little use for dialogue, it’s no wonder the actors speak a clipped foreign language.)

But the nuttiness has a dark side, and the movie becomes a freakshow devoted to Gibson's crazy fetishes. In the opening scene, a character is forced to consume boar testicles. Body organs have far too much screen time. Gibson lingers on wounds, bulging eyes, and rotting flesh. He slows the film speed whenever a knife pierces skin, letting the blood ooze. There's a bizarre monkey fight; a pregnant woman's stomach mutates like something in The Fly; and in an especially crazy moment, a baby is born underwater while its mother tries to keep from drowning. The entire cast is pierced, tattooed, and scarred. And only Mel Gibson would see a stepped pyramid as an opportunity to roll a decapitated head down a giant flight of stairs.

Apocalypto’s subject – Mayan human sacrifice – seems an odd choice for Gibson following The Passion’s success with the Christian community; why stray from what worked so well? But if the movie isn’t overtly religious, it isn’t because the director intended it as secular – Apocalypto is an unmistakable metaphor of the Second Coming. Instead, Gibson is making the kind of leaps that unhealthy artists can make when working at their least stable. In transporting his profoundly Biblical tale to Central America, Gibson leaves his audience behind, skipping steps and connecting ideas in his head; only he understands what much of the movie means. When we finally catch up in the film’s final moments, it’s a scary peek into Gibson’s mind – Apocalypto’s Second Coming is in fact the arrival of the Conquistadors. As the invaders row ashore guided by priests and crucifixes, the movie presents them as heroic cleansers: vengeful gods in silver armor primed to judge. Our hero gazes at them and tells his wife that it’s time for a “new beginning.” Aside from being wildly inaccurate, the whole thing feels vaguely fascistic (which is unfortunate for Gibson given his recent anti-Semitic meltdown).

The word “apocalypto” means “I reveal” in Greek, and other than sounding vaguely Spanish, there’s no clear reason why it serves as the film’s title. Really, Gibson reveals too little and too much at the same time. And if Apocalypto fails as far Right-wing religious revisionism, it works as a portrait of creativity out of control, soaked in fake blood.

Turistas

(2006, USA. Directed by John Stockwell.)

Turista's tagline reads: "Go home." You might just want to stay home. It's a half-hearted retread of Hostel that mangles that film's insidious subtext - Turistas is everything Hostel was making fun of.

After a (confusing) bus accident leaves a rag-tag group of spring-breakers stranded in the leafy hills of the Brazilian countryside, sinister locals concoct an elaborate scheme that leaves our heroes without their passports or their intestines. But a lot of time passes between the loss of their possessions and the loss of their guts: the film rambles endlessly as the personality-free (but silicon-filled) Americans first party away in a sequence that looks like MTV's The Grind: The Movie and then roam the jungle as vultures caw overhead. Turistas is two-thirds complete when the blood starts to flow.

If Turistas had been made fifty years ago, it would have been set in outer space and been called "science fiction:" a group of astronauts lands on an exotic planet, roams the dusty craters, and gets kidnapped by nefarious aliens intent on discovering the intricacies of Earthling anatomy. But by relocating the action to Brazil, a real place where real people happily exist, Turistas inadvertently announces itself as something political. When the mad-doctor villain is introduced, he intones his ugly intentions to an unwilling patient: "The whole history of our country is you taking from us: land, gold, sugar. We've had enough. So maybe, I thought, there's something I could do to even the scale just a little. I'm going to remove your liver and kidneys and take them to the People's Hospital," he says, seething through his teeth in a thick South American accent. His toadies, meanwhile, stand back either smoking crack or having sex. It's a wonder the filmmakers didn't go all out and set the movie in Venezuela with an evil Hugo Chavez removing the innards of helpless white American tourists. It's a bit hard not to be on the bad guys' side.

Horror films should be fun: something like a roller-coaster - we hang on for dear life as the movie tosses us this way and that, all the while holding up its end of the bargain: we won't be harmed. Somewhere along the way, horror films started to assault their audiences - sex and violence were conflated, we were told to keep our clothes on, and getting high could result in our deaths. But being scolded is a downer, and I'm not going to turn to Wes Craven for lessons on life. Hostel deftly turned the tables on this school of scares: it dressed our hero in the villain's garb, forced him to act as torturer, and asked, "Is this fun?" It sure wasn't. That the movie managed to remain a blast is a testament to its filmmaker's skill.

Turistas follows much of Hostel's plot, but like Michael Bay's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, it completely misses its source's point. It's an unwieldy mess of a horror movie with precious few scares and even less (or fewer) brains. Seriously: stay home.