I caught a portion of David Lynch’s The Straight Story on television very late one night recently, and was struck again by not only how naturalistic and charming the late Richard Farnsworth (above left) is in the title role of Alvin Straight, an ailing Midwesterner who sets off on a 500-mile trek on a riding mower to visit his estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton) after the latter has suffered a stroke, but also just how completely devastating is the scene he shares with a fellow World War II veteran.

It’s a time-whiling sequence between two strangers. Sharing the scene with Wiley Harker (above right), Farnsworth’s character opts for a glass of milk instead of a beer, and glancingly relates, in a single line of dialogue, how a pastor, after many years, finally helped lead him away from the bottle. The duo start talking about their war experiences, and Straight tells how he can still read and translate the unique pain from battle in a man’s face, decades on. “That’s one thing I can’t shake loose — all my buddies’ faces are still young,” he says. “And the thing is, the more years I have, the more they’ve lost.”

The  scene culminates in a long monologue about Straight’s training as a sniper and his experiences in Germany, and it’s perhaps the most low-key but emotionally overwhelming passage of personal combat experience I’ve ever seen put to film. You already have sympathy for Straight, a decent and honest guy. But in this span of just a few minutes — which ostensibly has nothing to do with the main narrative of reconciliation with his brother — this story paints a detailed portrait of a man gripped by despair and loss. And it absolutely wrecks you.

This reminds me of my grandfather, a Marine during WW II and a quiet, honorable and unassuming man back home, who speaks of his time overseas reluctantly, and only in the broadest terms. And it makes you realize what in your heart of hearts you already know — that war doesn’t really end with air-quote victory, whether fully realized or courtesy of cooked-book historical re-framing. And that there’s now another generation of scarred young men and women, waiting to take their place — in pained, swallowed silence — on barstools and in easychairs across America.

I caught Paramount’s Disturbia last week, and for all those huffing and puffing about its similarities to Rear Window, you can rest easy: despite some good-ish performances, the movie marginally fails on its own terms, as a thriller.

Shia LaBeouf stars as Kale, a decent but wayward kid who gets sentenced to house arrest for punching out his Spanish teacher. (Why he does that is another story…) Bored out of his mind after his mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) snips the cord on his television and otherwise severs his connections to outside entertainment, Kale takes to scoping out the rituals of his neighbors, including new girl next door Ashley (Sarah Roemer, of The Grudge 2). Soon Kale comes to believe that another neighbor, Robert Turner (David Morse), is responsible for the disappearance of several young women. With Ashley and friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo) as his lifelines to the outside world, Kale investigates, and confirms that Turner has dark secrets worth hiding.

I was a fan of director DJ Caruso’s The Salton Sea and, to a much lesser extent, Taking Lives, and he’s got an undeniably solid visual style. The problem here, though, is a sense of space, and all the technology deployed in surveillance, which is never really clearly laid out. LaBoeuf gives Disturbia its own chatterbox personality, and there’s some interest to be found in the manner in which the movie charts Kale’s path of initial insouciance to a more proactive nature. But the big problem is the script, by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth (Red Eye). There are gaping holes in motivation and behavior — even adjusting for the necessity of personalizing the conflict — and by the second act it becomes apparent that the movie and its makers don’t have anything interesting to say, with the finale tipping over into siege film shenanigans. Disturbia releases wide on April 13. For more information, click here.

I’m hearing good things from a friend in the know about American Gangster, director Ridley Scott’s latest effort — a ’70s-set period piece about a drug lord who smuggles heroin into Harlem by hiding stashes inside the coffins of American soldiers returning from Vietnam, and the cop who attempts to thwart him. It’s a re-pairing of Virtuosity stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe (and you know that’s gotta get a DVD double-dip special edition the week of this flick’s theatrical release), and the positive buzz shouldn’t be all that surprising, given the solid reputation of Steven Zaillian’s script, based on an article, “The Return of Superfly,” by Mark Jacobson, who also provided the source material for Ryan Gosling’s searing 2001 leading man debut, The Believer.

The interesting thing I’m hearing, though, is that Scott’s first cut is two hours and 25 minutes, the same length of less-than-well-received Kingdom of Heaven (nevermind the 194-minute director’s cut of that film, said to be much more cohesive, interesting and historically accurate). Universal brass is said to be keen for Scott to trim the film down a bit more, but producer Brian Grazer and others are planning to fight such requests. To view the movie’s trailer, click here.

UPDATE 9/25: According to a studio source, the film is two hours and 38 minutes, even a bit longer than previously rumored.

I caught the Weinstein Company’s Grindhouse
last night, after battling an ungodly but dispiritingly typical Los Angeles
traffic snarl to make it all the way to Culver City (total distance: roughly 21
miles; total traveling time: one hour, 41 minutes, door to door!), and I’ll
have more discrete thoughts here and there, as well as a full review on Monday,
but it suffices to say that this is a film that will further entrench those
locked in mortal debate about the diminishing return of Quentin Tarantino’s
gifts as a filmmaker.

The movie, of course, is comprised of separate full-length
features from Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The latter’s effort, Planet Terror (above), kicks things off,
and it’s arguably his best work in years. In telling a loose story of the
zombie infection of Austin, Texas, Rodriguez certainly makes the most out of
the whole notion of a grindhouse homage, with a great score — alternately
purposefully tremulous and conveying great, dick-swinging strides — calculated cinematography
and production design, and plenty of affected scratches and grain. It sags a
bit toward the end, but it’s a good bit of fun, and full of characters we care about.

Tarantino’s Death
Proof, on the other hand, might most charitably be described as a mess. If
it has an idea, it’s certainly not a codifying one. There’s a lot of rangy
material for Kurt Russell, but he drops out of the movie for a goodly portion
in the middle, and too many scenes drag on for far too long, stung by Tarantino’s
unchecked self-satisfaction.

Watching the film as a whole — and coming as it does on the
heels of the very divisive 300
— I was struck by just how alienating along generational and cultural lines Grindhouse will likely be. I was
actually reminded, in tangential fashion, of an Eminem lyric from “Who Knew,” from The Marshall Mathers LP: “I don’t do black music, I don’t do white
music/I make fight music, for high school kids/I put lives at risk when I drive
like this,” then, “Get aware, wake up, get a sense of humor/Quit tryin’ to
censor music/This is for your kids’ amusement.”

Grindhouse is, of
course, a film full of sputtering excess, and in fact largely predicated on it.
As such, its vulgarities and careening nature are bound to upset the
sensibilities of older film critics, as well as general audiences who don’t
necessarily embrace referentiality for referentiality’s sake. (In particular I’m thinking
of two shots from Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving,
one of the trailers for fake movies that serve as bumpers between the features:
one presents a quick shot of a masked killer screwing a “turkey,” another emphasizes
a cheerleader stripping on a trampoline, and then the insinuation that she does
a naked split down on a knife.) Not typically the sort of thing one imagines the Richard
Schickels and Kenneth Turans of the world being predisposed to appreciate.

The Los Angeles Times has a profile piece in today’s paper on The Office‘s Jenna Fischer, who also has a role in this week’s Blades of Glory, and it doesn’t exactly come as a shock that she took secretarial work after graduating from college with a degree in theater, and that she worked in Los Angeles in the same capacity and didn’t give it up even when her husband, Slither writer-director James Gunn, hit it big as a screenwriter.

It’s a nice, gentle-cycle bio piece that mentions Fischer’s casting in Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard, opposite John C. Reilly, and The Office executive producer Greg Daniels nails it when he says of her, “She’s very subtle and very smart and makes very interesting comic
choices. She has the brain
of a great British comedy actor in a beautiful woman’s body.”

Still, despite having a really brilliant smile and an innate relatability, it’s the melancholic qualities that Fischer most nails on The Office, as beleaguered secretary Pam, and there’s little in any of her other performances to suggest that she can necessarily cross over into leading lady comedienne territory with any sort of mass critical following, and certainly not commercially. (If it didn’t happen in lasting fashion for someone as brassy as Téa Leoni,
it ain’t happening for Fischer.) So can she go sexpot? Or even rom-com vibrant, something for which Hollywood is totally (and rightly) desperate? That’ll be tough, though the latter will require a pinch of the former, if only for differential shading.

All of this isn’t a dis so much as an observation. Obviously Fischer remains totally crush-worthy, and will continue to get comedy work, given her crack timing and instincts. How much any of those hiatus roles allow for any measurable distance between her and her Office character, however, remains to be seen. For the L.A. Times piece, click here. For a review of Fischer’s low-fi, Troma-bred directorial debut, the canted mockumentary Lollilove, click here. For a nice picture from Blades of Glory, meanwhile, of Fischer in lingerie, click here, and enjoy.

I caught New Line’s Fracture last night — from director Gregory Hoblit (NYPD Blue, Primal Fear, Fallen), who certainly knows his way around the criminal justice system.

The story of a man (Anthony Hopkins) who kills his cheating wife and then locks horns with a hotshot assistant district attorney (Ryan Gosling) while representing himself, the movie is a first-rate chess match with legal thriller trappings. Co-writer Daniel Pyne puts some snap in the dialogue, and Gosling gives a great, engrossing performance as a blithe egotist under fire.

It is what it is, but it’s a very well made genre picture, which Hollywood has a lot of trouble with these days. There’s an especially crackling interrogation scene (above), which elicits strong evocations of The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling’s first encounter. There’s friction everywhere, too — all the main characters are keeping one another at arms’ length, forever measuring their relationships, personal and professional.

Fracture releases wide on April 20. For more information, click here.

It’s a special art of evasiveness that not all Hollywood stars have, supporting a movie that they know to be a turd. Some are good at it through the sheer forcefulness of their exuberant personalities (John Travolta, for instance, who certainly should have enough practice). Others — in roundtable interviews, say — are able to speak in coded vagaries about how much “fun” they had making the movie. When tangential anecdotes dominate the conversation, a smart interviewer knows it’s by design, not accident.

The TV circuit is another matter, because it’s so much more manageable. Still, Sandra Bullock is not at all convincing in her stumping for Premonition (nor should she be — it’s retarded). On The Daily Show recently she slipped into a bizarre slipstream with host Jon Stewart about their (individual, not shared) experiences with re-shoots, and each joked about smoking pot. Then, last night on The Tonight Show Bullock was lobbed a characteristic softball by Jay Leno — who really still is an awful interviewer, after all these years — about the production of the movie, and she had this to offer: “We shot it in kind of a way where the audience is feeling everything she is too… it’s trippy, [watching it] you feel like you’re going crazy as well.” Now there’s a ringing endorsement!