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 Ray Pride

1. “In the Mood for Love,” Wong Kar-Wai, 2000
Repetition, proximity, music, exchange of glances. Looks of desire, clouds, rain. Unconsummated romance = cinema.

2. “Yi Yi,” Edward Yang, 2000
Perfection. It’s taken for granted because it seems so simple, so easy, so natural. Family as lovingly detailed soap opera; at just under three hours, the late Taiwanese master made a multigenerational epic worthy of a novel. And, strangely befitting his background in computer science, he knew precisely where to place the camera for the most dynamic effect.

3. “Before Sunset,” Richard Linklater, 2004
Linklater knows there’s grandeur in the smallest of shared, skittery moments. This couple that never was, with dreamy memories of their one-night stand, are different people now, older, oft-disappointed, yet despite underlying melancholy, still straining for a moment of genuine contact. 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 stockings are still hung by the chimney with care.

Surveying a couple hundred year-end lists by movie reviewers and entertainment writers can be a soul-squishing thing, particularly if you read the reasoning and rationales, the dithers, the doubts, the demurrals, the dishing and dashing to and fro, recurring, recurring. Oh, that’s what “The Dark Knight” was about! (No, it wasn’t, but thanks for watching.) Oh, that’s why “Slumdog Millionaire” is so special! (Um, where’s the fun? Fun? Energy? Bold colors? Remember.) That’s why “Wall-E” is the best movie since, in, well, since, ever! And doesn’t Eve deserve a best actress nomination? (I can’t get animated. Sorry. An hour of the apocalypse followed by this week’s adventure with The Inedibles?)

It was years ago, a bit, I will concede, before the turn of the century, the dawn of the millennium, but I do remember when I was a moviegoer on the street corner, looking up at the marquees of the Cinema or State-Lake, the Oriental or the Granada, the Sandburg. The Sandburg… whose cinephile operators went on to respectively produce “Election” and “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Milk” and “Synecdoche, New York.” I’ll even get teary going past a storefront recognizable as having once been a neighborhood theater. Say, the Wicker Park, now the John Fluevog store on Milwaukee Avenue below North Avenue, or the Parkway, now an optical store just south of the Landmark Century.) Those were the days. Those were the days. Stale smells and bright lights and furtive goings-on in the balcony. Civilian cinephilia: by this time of the season, I would not have had the chance to have seen all the films, or the privilege to have seen some movies several times before they hit Chicago. That was also before the epoch of knowing a movie would usually be available for rental eighty days after its release, dropping neatly through the mail slot the afternoon of its street date if you were one of the subscribers picked out of the Netflix queue.

I’m not sure how the experience a 22-year-old civilian cinephile who’s not visibly, volubly blogging his or her little heart out would simmer in today’s distribution picture. I do know a video-besotted bunch of talented amateurs, but they’re knowing as hell. The average moviegoer, though, may be confused by the return of the “platform release.”

Less a matter of being parsimonious than returning to canny marketing of the past years, distributors large and small have taken their sweet time in releasing movies, whether a matter of them not having come to Chicago at all yet, or perhaps only on a couple of screens for a week, two, three. Universal did its work releasing Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” a few months back, a bigger picture, with a star (Angelina Jolie) in a star performance in the middle of it. It was released in hundreds of theaters. Didn’t do all that well. Now Warner’s got “Gran Torino,” a smaller, darker, profane, sometimes mad Eastwood picture. The powers that be seemed to have watched that disappointment as well as the platforming of movies like “Slumdog Millionaire.” The figures say Eastwood’s purported last acting role is only at eighty-four theaters, but goes to about 2,250 this weekend.

“Slumdog Millionaire,” on over 100 best-of lists, brightens only about 600 screens. (An oddity: Warners, who turned most of the rights to “Slumdog” over to Fox Searchlight later this month releases “Chandi Chowk Goes To China,” a Chinese-Bollywood comedy hybrid in a few dozen theaters.)

Does the anticipation build? Or are audiences, pounded by politics, going “eek!” about the economy mentally changing the channel? In Chicago, for the early weeks of some releases, the committed theatergoer gets to know well the smell and sound of AMC’s River East multiplex.

Another example: Mickey Rourke’s been named best actor for “The Wrester” by critics’ circles in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Florida, Kansas City, Oklahoma, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Utah and D. C. For the same movie, Marisa Tomei’s gotten nods from Detroit, Florida, Las Vegas, Oklahoma, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco. How many theaters across the nation? Eighteen.

Sometimes I don’t want to be in my own shoes, but I’m glad my post-collegiate years as a filmgoer are tied up in my edifice complex, remembering without trying not just where I saw a movie for the first time, but often the seat where I sat.

A young film lover can buy and rent and download enormous chunks of the medium’s history, but the present tense is my concern. When does movie-watching become merely curatorial, a decadent arraying of lovely narratives and unmatchable images that can no longer be produced because of all manner of economic factors not worthy listing here.

Take “Watchmen.” Tied up in a very serious legal action caused by some bad lawyering: but the politics-charged Japanese trailer was released online Tuesday. Nixon and Kissinger in a Stanley Kubrick-Ken Adam war room? Lovers in the desert kissing in front of the rising orange bloom of nuclear irradiation? One more corner to loiter on. How soon is now?

By Ray Pride

Nobody knows anything.

Veteran screenwriter and rackety curmudgeon William Goldman wrote “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men,” among many other movies, but he wound up being most remembered for reducing his life’s experience in the screen trade down to that single epigram: “Nobody knows anything.” “The Dark Knight” has become the second highest-grossing film of all time in North America, passing the half-billion-dollar mark, and equally compelling arguments have been made that Christopher Nolan’s ambivalent work is in fact liberal, is in fact conservative, is in fact fascist. Who knew?

Over the weekend, while the media was distracted by Hurricane Gustav and the rich tapestry of character unfolding behind the nomination of the Republican vice-presidential candidate, local and federal authorities have been rounding up potential protesters in Minneapolis-St. Paul with mass arrests for obstruction, unlawful assembly, conspiracy to riot and rioting, numbering about 300 as of this writing. Why are there images of this? Partly through half-palm-size Flip video cameras and Qik technology, which live-streams cell-phone images. The pictures aren’t pretty. It’s not a liberal or conservative concern: if authoritarian behavior isn’t covered by mass media, who knows?

Looking back and forward, as the British Film Institute turns 75, they asked seventy-five figures to comment on “Visions for the Future.” There’s a rangy bunch of notions floating through the videos where a largely male assemblage answers two questions: What one film would you wish to share with future generations? And “What excites you about the future of the moving image?” Untethered from the necessities of finance and distribution, optimism reigns in the 150 brief videos, with contributors ranging from musician Nitin Sawnhey’s words on “Pather Panchali”; Ken Russell on “Metropolis”; Gurinder Chadha on Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”; Patrick Marber (“Closer”) on “The Red Shoes”; and Sir Roger Moore (Bond, James Bond) on “Lawrence of Arabia.” Robert Altman liked to say that he was never inspired by a good movie, only the bad ones that showed him what never to do in his own work, yet the litany of titles is like having the 400-plus titles of the Criterion Collection fall on your head: with all the crises crashing around the world in the world of film today, isn’t it amazing that this many remarkable movies have been made despite the complacency and corruption often visited upon the form? (Or, as a Romanian director once said to me, “We are just a little planet with little insects, but what beautiful insects we are.”)

Artist Pierre Bismuth, Oscar winner for co-writing “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” asserts that “with digital technology we have entered into a transitional period in the history of the moving image.” Digital technology, Bismuth argues, “has made us exit the domain of photography. Cinema’s no longer a matter of recording reality but of the pure creation of a synthetic image. In a way, we are returning to painting, but today we’re making animated paintings, and I think that what excites people today is imaginative possibilities opened up by technology.” It’s not for him, he says, “since I don’t have a lot of imagination and am always surprised by what reality produces, but I believe that the future of cinema will be the synthetic moving image.”

Composer Michael Nyman goes for Carlos Reygadas’ amazing “Silent Light,” without U.S. distribution, for being “an extraordinary, transcendent meditation on love and religion.” A frame from its opening shot, a glorious six-minute sunrise that encompasses the stars, the sky, animals and man, is pictured above. A work of obstinacy and vision, it holds rare beauty. Here’s a condensation of Nyman’s comments: “What excites me is that filmmaking is accessible to anybody and everybody. There’s obviously the same danger that there is with very accessible music technology—synthesizers and computer programs—that you can equally come up with crap as you can come up with a masterpiece. That’s the danger. Whether it breaks down the studio system or it breaks down the hegemony of studios and big producers, conditioning the way we see images, and the way that narratives are put together and the way that specific subjects are dealt with, I think—I hope—Hollywood is in a terminal stage. Maybe this almost free cinema will be the future. Visual education on the Internet, even with YouTube, I think will increase and make these Hollywood dinosaurs into what they are, relics of nineteenth-century theater.”

<I>You can see the opening scene of “Silent Light” at http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=gHTkxYz2cMQ; on a proper screen, you see neither the past nor the future but an eternal present.

“Tropic Thunder” might well have been named “The Grudge.”

In an April interview with Los Angeles Daily News journalist Glenn Whipp, Ben Stiller brightly confessed the source of his latest itchy comedy: a twenty-year-old grudge against the director of “Platoon.” “I got there, and Oliver Stone looked at me and, said, ‘You’re cute.’ ‘You’re cute,’ that was it. I never got to audition.” It’s hard to imagine those words in Anne Meara’s mouth, let alone Oliver Stone’s.

“Tropic Thunder,” the result of that long-nurtured chip on the shoulder, directed, co-produced, co-written and starring Stiller, finds him playing Tugg Speedman, a desperately needy, deeply shallow actor in an immensely over-budgeted Vietnam war movie to end all war movies. His cohort of pampered performers-turned-grunts includes Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a fat actor from a movie series called “The Fatties” who farts a lot, and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.). Among other characters, Nick Nolte as the author of the project’s source novel, is cruelly wasted; Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a young black actor, makes almost no impression whatsoever; and a pyrotechnics guy played by Danny McBride (“Pineapple Express”) is almost the only breath of oxygen in the rank result.

Did you hear the joke about Robert Downey, Jr.? He’s in blackface. He’s an Australian actor who wants shiny metal trinkets so badly he does the opposite of Michael Jackson’s self-mutilation: he has his skin darkened. Hey! Stop it. Don’t laugh yet. Stop. Where the tragic case of Jackson’s self-mutilation carries layers upon layers of historical and psychological implication, what does this movie do? Lazarus can’t stop speaking street! Until he slips and he’s speaking Aussie! Downey’s eyes, ordinarily one of his most expressive features, are seldom in play. Downey’s debut as a child actor was in a film by his father, whose most accomplished, rudest comedy was “Putney Swope,” in which a black man is elevated to the heights of the advertising industry in 1969. Memorable line: “Putney is confusing originality with obscenity.”

Speaking of obscenity, Tom Cruise plays a grotesquely fat, hairy, bald middle-aged studio executive whose dance moves are as repulsive as his “Risky Business” ones were frisky. But it turns to pissy business when you discover that his character—Les Grossman, is that an Albanian name?—is like a child actor trying, badly, to improvise Mametian swears. “Fuck shit cocksucker shit!” isn’t quite as funny as, say, this genius bit from “American Buffalo”: “Only, and I’m not, I don’t think, casting anything on anyone: from the mouth of a Southern bulldyke asshole ingrate of a vicious nowhere cunt can this trash come. And I take nothing back, and I know you’re close with them.” Stiller and co-writer Justin Theroux come within at least a galaxy’s distance of that outburst with Jack White sweating strung-out inanities about a “hobo’s dick cheese” and vivid descriptions of the gay sex he’ll perform on the other characters if they just untie him and feed him blow. Grossman’s hands and wrists are made up with the most skin-cracking, angry pink-white-flaking eczema. And the character might as well take a shit in the middle of the floor in scenes where he compulsively gyrates his woman-hipped bottom in the audience’s face.

“Tropic Thunder” is the kind of heavy meta that might work in sketches, such as the short-lived “Ben Stiller Show,” shot on a budget of a dollar and a dime. But as a want-to-be-painfully-hip comedy about soul-killing horseshit, it manages handily to be more the thing itself than its reflection. The reasons some writers claim to resent movies like “Fight Club” and “The Dark Knight”—that somehow it’s insincere for an artist to make a decamillion-dollar movie that satirizes consumer culture or that suggests the entire political culture has gone over to the “dark side” of brutal, fearful, vigilantism, is one I seldom feel attracted toward. “Tropic Thunder”? Twenty years of overcontemplation of old ideas in hundred-million-dollar full flower.

While there is much sautéed in the behind-the-scenes pandemonium of “Hearts of Darkness,” Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr’s documentary about the making of “Apocalypse Now,” not a single instant strikes as cleanly in human, humorous, behavioral or poetic grace as the outtake of Marlon Brando working his wind through an arch peroration, pausing, gacking and saying, much as he asks, “Milk Dud?” in “The Formula,” in character and in beautiful cadence, “I swallowed a bug.”

John Toll, who less than three years ago was cinematographer on Terence Malick’s luminous “The New World,” is called upon to make images that look like they were shot in the Philippines in the 1970s and developed there in a ditch. But as images go, the ones of Ben Stiller I’ll always treasure? The look on his face in “Your Friends And Neighbors” when Catherine Keener shouts during coitus, “Is there any chance you’re gonna shut the fuck up? Let’s just do it. I don’t need the narration, okay?” And stabbing a neck vein with a hypodermic in “Permanent Midnight” with an aggrieved grimace of “Hey, dad! Looking at me yet?”

By Ray Pride

On Tuesday, the L.A. Times started the tom-toms going, gauging if “The Dark Knight” is on the mark to become the highest-grossing movie in the U.S. of all time, rising beneath “Titanic”’s substantial and seemingly unstoppable total that surpasses $600 million. Then again, Christopher Nolan’s dark, conflicted tale has gone above $314 million in a mere ten days, and most of the devoted moviegoers I know who have been dying to see it have faced nothing but sell-outs. (They’re still adamant, and most of them about the IMAX version.)

There are critiques as riotously conflicted as the movie’s politics—which presents, but does not necessarily endorse, the “dark knight”’s apparent turn to the “dark side” in the choices he makes throughout the movie. This is a good thing, I think: ambivalence and ambiguity just shy of notional incoherence make for the kind of movies that make it possible just to watch the zeitgeist burn. (See under: Robert Zemeckis in mid-career movies like “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump.”) If the world’s all hopped-up over the relative virtues or failings of “The Dark Knight,” they cannot help but engage with its suggestive political text, can they?

I’m most surprised by the fistful of reviews I’ve read where the portrayal of the city—the City—Gotham—Chicago—never enters into the appreciation. Even without knowing the corners being turned, the buildings just-glimpsed then cut away from, “The Dark Knight” is a city symphony of the hardly planned architectural heap that encircles Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for this patch of prairie, this City Beautiful.

The best movie you can readily see this week traffics in the same approach to drama, in a calmer, steadier fashion, and the likenesses were even more apparent last week when I watched Christian Petzold’s glassy dream-thriller “Yella” for the third time. Petzold’s earlier pictures, like “The State I’m In” (2000) and “Something to Remind Me” (2001), have had little play here, confined to a couple of screenings at Siskel. Yet this 47-year-old German director shares the amplitude of ideas about image and sound being as important as text with the Englishman who turned 38 on Wednesday. (Happy Birthday! Here’s $10 million!)

“Yella,” like most movies, unfolds like truth, like a moment, but it is also a dream, or perhaps less a dream than a portrait of a dreamer who cannot wake. Like his earlier movies, the ninth feature from Petzold haunts for what is shown but also for what is merely implied. Petzold works in apparent realism, concrete in his depiction of space and color, yet things remain disquietingly abstract—haunted. (“Ghosts,” the name of his 2005 feature, could title any of his work.)

“Yella” keeps the viewer off-kilter with strange happenings, beginning as Yella (Nina Hoss), a woman in East Germany, is stalked by a man who turns out to be her ex-husband. An accident happens. No one could survive. They both do. (Petzold admits reworking Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” for this story.) She improbably boards a train, drying her blood-colored blouse—Little Red Yuppie Hood?—and heads to the urban west, proves to be proficient in business, the equal of the venture capitalist who employs her. While her ex continues to stalk her, the dance of attraction between Yella and her boss resembles her earlier romance, as if her boss were a hale, hearty version of the earlier man, as if memory could only become moored by repetition. Hoss has the intense features of an older Mena Suvari, with a dash of Greta Scacchi’s coolness, along with an unnervingly steady gaze. Yella is central to nearly every scene, in almost every shot. She wears a blooded-red blouse that suggests vigor within, a burst of liveliness in the VC realm. Petzold’s images are hushed, interiors and compositions in painterly geometry that holds beauty that gratifies the eyes but becomes disturbingly clinical in accumulation. The real becomes spectral before these backdrops and in these spaces.

Working with his usual cinematographer, Hans Fromm, Petzold places his characters in patterns of urban isolation; the effect is studied, but never becomes forbiddingly icy. It’s tempting to explore comparisons to other filmmakers, such as Antonioni, or to the use of space in theatrical work, in which Petzold spent much of the 1980s. Like the late Italian master or Godard in their moment, European directors continue the struggle to capture the modern world as it enfolds us. His cool complexity suggests a familiar world with ease as simple as breath. Like Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”) or Joachim Trier (“Reprise”), Petzold is an anatomist of the unsettling, the unbearable, the heartbeat that remains beneath the money-counting tick-tock of contemporary commerce.

But I’d still belabor the comparison of Nolan and Petzold: among other things, they’re landscape artists, photographers of precision. (The surfaces submerged by the plotting that only seem to be the primary cinematic element.) Big doings are conveyed in simple gestures and images (with elusive yet evocative potential means that surpass mere framings and focal lengths). In “Yella,” sound matters, too: alarms drill, clocks tick, birds call, bells ring. A sonic boom? Seismic. A crow’s caw, the wind in the trees, the thrumming of a small river: a woman always living, mentally, at water’s edge. 

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Now here’s a city I could imagine living in: Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City, a justbarelynot Chicago. “The Dark Knight” captures Gotham City as a nightscape that surpasses the gleam and hazard of Hong Kong, a setting that makes literal the divide between wealth and poverty, of comfort and peril. It starts with the elevation of Bruce Wayne’s abode to a penthouse overlooking the Chicago River on Wacker Drive and continues through the film’s many swooping, gliding perspectives of the city by sky by dark, contrasting with the sustained chase scenes that descend to the welter of warrens of Lower Wacker Drive. Pick a metaphor, make an analogy. More allegory than simply gory, Nolan, writing with his younger brother Jonathan and with Wally Pfister again shooting, makes “The Dark Night” a story comprised less of arcs than dovetailing dualities, oppositions that hardly rise to dialectic but suggest primal symptoms: good and evil, light and dark, the moral-settled mind versus the disordered, insane one, to suggest only a few. The look is central, and Pfister’s skills echo those of Gordon Willis (“The Godfather,” most of Alan J. Pakula’s paranoiac gems) and Mark Lee Ping-Bin (“In the Mood For Love,” “The Vertical Ray Of the Sun”): Chicago stories high, insanely crisp, almost painful indelibility. You can fall from the sky, you can fall from grace, and the light is always creeping toward gloom. And, too, Bruce Wayne is an oligarch, a plutocrat, a beneficent billionaire: Gotham City is very post-Soviet. But in later complications (which I’ll only hint at), this reportedly $180 million production becomes more than brooding, kinetic brutalism, but a blunt political allegory for many choices the U.S. has made since 9/11, involving moral responsibility and thinking oneself absolved when others make choices: “In their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.” What does the Joker say? “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” There is a major subplot involving surveillance that is a direct echo of the Fourth Amendment-violating actions by telecommunications companies, which were retroactively pardoned the day after “The Dark Knight”‘s first Chicago screening. Gateman? Alluded. The temptation to act unilaterally, as a vigilante, in times of hazard? Check. “That’s too much power for one person!” Spoken aloud. The placement of the line “No one wants to get their hands dirty” is eminently suggestive of the timing of the Vice-President’s cry that it was our turn to explore “the dark side.” Heath Ledger’s Joker? Man, oh man. No backstory. No explanation. The embodiment of terror: what do you want? Fear. Ledger mingles old-fashioned Cagney-style intonations with a lovingly observed Bridgeport-type Chicago inflection. A good listener, he was. Still, the look is the second most seductive element, with Nolan’s insistence on the “practical,” that is, locations, settings and stunts that are done physically rather than through digital smearing. Gary Oldman, as Commissioner Gordon, is keenly quiet. Morgan Freeman’s skepticism is matched by Michael Caine’s doubt. Aaron Eckhart, hair much like his director’s, demonstrates the fine line between zealotry and payback. (Maggie Gyllenhaal? Present.) Brutal, yet piercing, “The Dark Knight” is a necessary fable. “You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time.” Yes. Yes, we did. 152m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen or widescreen/IMAX blended. (Ray Pride)

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.