By Ray Pride

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream even bigger, darling,” a character says in “Inception” (and in its trailers), elevating an enormous weapon into frame and immediately blasting away his adversaries.

A lesson heeded over the course of a decade of writing and production on Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a hall of mirrors of artistic allusions in the form of a heist thriller that takes place in the space of sleep. The intricate carpentry and lacquering of “The Dark Knight” director’s filmmaking shines when you see it a second time: craftsmanship has pleasures, if not limitless mystery. Putting plot synopsis aside—the story’s contours are so neatly delineated and dovetailed, describing them at length defines the word “Spoiler”—Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb assembles a dream team of experts, in the best tradition of heist thrillers, to commit an anti-heist in the dreams of a powerful man: inserting themselves into his subconscious and leaving behind a powerful suggestion.

Like Alain Resnais’ aggressive mind loop, “Last Year at Marienbad,” “Inception” revolves around memories of a past love, which may or may not be “true.” Memory is fallible, dreams are malleable. Charmingly, Nolan has said he’d only ever seen that feat of bold parallel editing after completing this James Bond-scaled movie, but he felt all the other films that had been influenced by “Marienbad” had influenced him. What other influences rest lightly on Nolan’s shoulders? Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Ten years is greater than the blink of an eye. Trying to fashion some sort of great overarching structure for an arbitrary patch of lifetime always leaves me like the kid at the end of “Kids,” who wakes from a ruckus to ask, “What just happened?”

How do you summarize a city’s decade of filmmaking and filmgoing that starts with John Cusack the quavering voice of a generation in “High Fidelity” but finds him as dad-bait in “2012″ in 2010, while once-perennial sidekick Jeremy Piven is an Emmy-winning star-and-a-half? There’s an epic tale right there.

Chicago could be the most cinematic of cities, if you look at Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” slavishly recreating Lincoln Avenue of the Dillinger era with some pricey set dressing, but hardly having to build a thing, or if you fly with “The Dark Knight” into the gleaming sky. There are  two movies that understand  the great city, burned to the ground, its skyline rising from ashes. Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

50. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” Shane Black, 2005

49. “In America,” Jim Sheridan, 2002

48. “The Lives of Others,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006

47. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro, 2006

46. “Best in Show,” Christopher Guest, 2000

45. “Michael Clayton,” Tony Gilroy, 2007

44. “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan, 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The more I think about “Funny People,” the more it seems that Judd Apatow has made precisely the (reported) $75 million home movie he meant to make.

It’s an ungainly gosling, epic with surfaces and, as over its two-and-a-half hour duration, out of its depths with depth. For his third feature, the veteran stand-up-gagman-TV producer-writer-director at times barely channels autobiography. The first three people thanked in the end credits are Garry Shandling, Paul Thomas Anderson and James L. Brooks: three godfathers that offer some notion of the turf he’s hoping to claim. First, there’s the bitterness, passive-aggressiveness, hostility and penis-obsessed humor of Shandling, for whom Apatow wrote on the piercingly harsh classic “Larry Sanders Show.” Shandling’s disappearance from the public eye is often chalked up to questions about mortality like those faced by Apatow’s lead character, George Simmons (Adam Sandler). Secondly, he’s attempting to go beyond the gag-charged confines of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” attempting the tonal range, swooping from comedy to pathos, as in Anderson’s more expansive canvases, as in “Magnolia” or “Boogie Nights.” Third, there are James L. “Spanglish” Brooks’ equally elephantine epics that swoop from pathos to bathos with intermittently brilliant verbal gags. It’s a catalog of well-upholstered influences. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Some movie reviews don’t want “Public Enemies” to be the film that it is.

“Time is luck,” a character says in “Miami Vice,” and that’s become a deep theme in Michael Mann’s carry-case of notions about work, rivalry, crime, law and how masculinity is defined by men in action. Even more so than in earlier films, “Public Enemies,” a portrait of the last short sharp burst of independent criminals like John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) robbing banks in the midst of the Great Depression, Mann works from implication more than explanation. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Anticipation runs high for further blackening of Batman’s soul in “The Dark Knight,” but the Fourth of July weekend belongs to “Hancock,” a handsomely haywire comic-tragic concoction that flies high, sideways, off course and straight up in the air.

Essentially a shaggy-God story, the riotously primal “Hancock” makes for a swell thrill ride with its terse take on a comically disheveled superhero. “Wanted” is a splendid bauble of heartless Eastern cruelty, but what’s on show in “Hancock” is something shockingly heartfelt, with a level of investment and inflection that teems with glorious incaution.

Among the levels that jostle is a satire of shallow self-realization philosophizing, with the idea of destiny versus choice considered as if O magazine were a trade journal dispatched from atop Olympus. Stewart Brand, who spearheaded the Whole Earth Catalog, the Internet avant le lettre in a bound foolscap tablet, liked to say, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” That’s what the hung-over Hancock (Will Smith) wakes to each day: expectations and responsibilities he cannot remember the source of. Squinty-eyed under a scraggly cap on a bus bench, reaching for his quart of Gentleman Jim’s Bourbon.

And he makes a mess of Los Angeles: he’s the superhero who couldn’t land straight. Liabilities and warrants ensue. “Hancock” opens with a cross-cut action scene that’s in media res embodied: what’s the need for an origin myth in your opening scene if you can show all the contradictions of the character in mid-air? Later, Hancock saves the life of Ray Embrey, an idealistic public relations guy, played by the ineffable Jason Bateman. (We’ve just seen his good works shot down in a Big Pharma boardroom peopled by co-producers Akiva Goldsman and Michael Mann as jaded corporados; a Biograph theater reference later on, alluding to Mann’s forthcoming “Public Enemies” is one of many throwaway details in the vivid frames.) Hancock gets Ray home after the literal trainwreck of his life, and Ray’s convinced that he can turn his skills toward making people understand Hancock can be a good guy. He’s not to be taken for granted, sneered at. Over dinner, Hancock meets Ray’s son, and his wife, Mary, the “angel” who changed his life at its lowest point.

The easy equipoise of Bateman’s on-screen characters, if you put aside the wonderful speed-freak run-a-rant he had in “Smokin’ Aces,” run to the looks of slight and hunt when certain things sour in this story: indicated but not underlined, bolded, capped. A picture is a flicker in itself. There’s a duplicitous charge in a number of scenes where characters withhold knowledge, don’t correct misperceptions, don’t disclose. (You’ll know what I mean when you see it; I don’t even want to hint.)

Berg, emerging as one of the most ambitious and jumpy directors who dares hopscotch across genres (“Very Bad Things,” “The Rundown,” “Friday Night Lights,” The Kingdom,” TV’s 2000 “Wonderland”), racks the same notions visually: a dance of eyelines of matched looks that suggest one thing, are in fact are another and eventually return to the first impression, are electric. (Tobias Schliessler’s cinematography, meshed with John Dykstra’s special effects, lay on grain or gloss depending on the needs of the scene; tonal insolence that’s not heedless is always fine to witness.)

Even at his most jocular, Berg understands the elemental mythos that these sorts of stories are supposed to be good for. “Hancock” bursts at the seams with the silly and the serious, the inspired and the grandiloquent, but in ways that ought not be even hinted at, but discovered, managing to honor the essential iconic elements that comics of long-standing strive to capture in their big-screen adaptations. And amid the baroque jokes and stunts, Berg still knows how to wreak line readings from the smallest of lines, such as “I’m telling!” and “You didn’t!”—the summer’s two most delicious terse-words to date. They’re out of nowhere and say everything.

With a style more febrile and antsy than the Mannerisms of his mentor and co-producer Michael Mann, Berg is generous and dexterous and “Hancock” goes places you wouldn’t expect, including singular romcom-plications of epic complexity. In the end, intelligent action-film tweakery produces results with the brutality and clarity of Greek myth. Destiny? Choice. Can Hancock find peace? Walk among men with his head held high? That would be a happy ending. “Hancock” is now playing.

By Ray Pride

Only Timur Bekmambetov could have made “Wanted.” And that’s a grand thing.

Opening with the familiar Universal logo that has sparkling space dust girdling the globe, we’re quickly thrown into a comic-book adaptation written by Scots by a Kazakh director who made his name in Russia, set in a lustrously shot Chicago, with a Scottish male lead and an American female. We’re quickly propelled into a loonily labyrinthine, gratifyingly Byzantine weave of immaculately produced visual filmmaking. “Wanted” is not breathless in the sense of Michael Bay’s accelerated cutting (although the cinematographer, Mitchell Amundsen, shot “Transformers” and knows from gleam).

Bekmambetov’s “Nightwatch” (2004) and “Daywatch” (2006) were reportedly Russia’s biggest hits ever, but didn’t cross over here. Of “Daywatch,” I noted that his “full-tilt willingness to be incomprehensible is his keenest talent,” and of “Nightwatch,” its “convoluted, grimy, gruesome, Gothic, Slavic, giddy humbug.” Ah, but now. “Wanted” is a tonally aggressive, wildly expressionistic, deeply satisfying film, a sleekly machined action powerhouse, words I hardly expected to type this summer.

Wesley Gibson (James McEvoy, sporting a fine American accent) is a lowly office worker who takes anti-anxiety medication and knows that his beautiful-but-shrill girlfriend is having sex with one of his coworkers on their Ikea kitchen table. A voice-over by this cubicle-bound sweet-faced nerd is profane and echoes with hapless exasperation the self-realization gab of “Fight Club.” (A character named Darden may just echo “Tyler Durden.”) But that’s only a component of the many layers offered up by Bekmambetov and screenwriters Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan (from the comic-book series by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones). Bekmambetov, like George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson before him, owns his own effects house, and there are generous swirls and dabs of technique throughout this story of a young man who’s enlisted by a secret society of assassins who’ve persisted for a thousand years, led by Morgan Freeman, and whose mostly silent teacher of the arts hardcore is embodied by Angelina Jolie. (She has fun.)

Bekmambetov’s going for baroque at each available instant. Yet on recognizable streets in the Loop and near North, atop El trains always curving or going under low underpasses, he elevates and heightens the city in rare fashion, much like Michael Mann or Andy Davis (“The Fugitive,” “Code of Silence”). Lake and Wabash; Wacker and Wabash; lower Wacker: all stylishly rendered. The multiple uses of and references to the El are integral to the tale, not visual or sonic scene-setting. (An opening shootout that takes place partly atop the Carbide and Carbon Building, home of the Hard Rock Hotel, is immaculately cut and composed for maximum narrative and visceral effect.)

These filmmakers get Chicago. Bekmambetov uses everything at his disposal, adapting more than lifting styles, techniques and gags that have been in movies by David Fincher and the Wachowskis, for instance. But this florid, perfervid visual style delivers. No romcom-style reverse-angle tick-tocks of conversation. Yet the rush of imagery doesn’t suggest videogames as much as a romping pulp infraction.

Credit, too, must go to Chicago names in the credits likely to have something to do with the look, such as location manager Mark Mamalakis, as well as prop work that includes the characteristic Loop newspaper kiosks with headlines about a violent act, all done in the correct style of the newspapers on display. A character back at tough-love assassin HQ drinks from a Bears glass. A restorative bath involving some kind of chemical-wax compound comes to resemble shards of broken ice eddying around Wesley’s face (Alexander Nevsky much, Timur?) The costume design, Varvara Avdyushko, is also typical of the attention to detail: everyone’s garb is slightly heightened; Wesley’s costumes are plain and tend to beige and brown, yet are immaculately refined.

Even the stripped-down, quintessential cod-philosophical twaddle satisfies. “Why are you here?” “I don’t know who I am!” “That’s good enough for now.” And when you can pull off Morgan Freeman intoning, “We call this the loom of fate,” causing you to grin rather than laugh out loud, something’s very right. You come to accept characters slinging armory like a chef with an omelet pan or a tennis player at the top of their game. The El itself becomes one more weapon in their expressive arsenal.

With such impressive filmmaking in every technical respect, and decent respect for the comic-book flummery while acknowledging its essential silliness, you want something to tie it together, a deeper undercurrent other than the obligatory Zennish bromides. Perhaps an undercurrent about terrorist cells? Mmm… No. [AN ALLUSION TO THE ENDING FOLLOWS.] The man who made his name in Russia pulls it off with gleeful aplomb. In the last scene, which is one of a corkscrew-laden movie’s most elaborate twist-and-turn sequences, when the last one standing shows how it’s done and confronts the audience head-on with a profane provocation? It’s the grace note: the winner who takes all, head spinning throughout from Kremlin-style hall of mirrors reversals, now resembles one triumphant figure on the world stage: Vladimir Putin. Za vas, Timur! Za vas! “Wanted” opens Friday.