FRESH FROM THE GRAVE: IT SEES "THE AVENGERS"!

I don't think Marvel's new blockbuster The Avengers represents an all-time achievement in summer popcorn filmmaking.  And I can tell you right now that it doesn't stand as a benchmark of action-adventure cinematic storytelling.  But in terms of its sheer logistical achievement, the film dwarfs anything released by a major studio since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings soon-to-be-quadrilogy.  Uniting characters who have been spotlighted in their own films for a four-year span, and the end result of a tease planted after the closing credits of the very first film in this cycle, 2008's Iron Man, The Avengers is the payoff to arguably the longest non-George-Lucas-related case of cinematic blue balls in fanboy history.  It's a loud, colorful, multi-million dollar spectacle on a massive scale, delivering six costumed superheroes for the price of one and reducing even the most normally erudite of online zombie film critics to hyperbole more befitting a 1940s movie poster:  SEE!  The Invincible Iron Man!  THRILL!  To the terrifying Incredible Hulk!  SWOON!  At the rippling pecs and flowing locks of Thor, the God of Thunder!  Marvel Studios, partnering with Disney (they now own the comics behemoth), Paramount (responsible for the popular Iron Man, Thor and Captain America features), and Universal (they released two Hulk films, both to decidedly mixed critical and audience response), have put together a package that was sure to score huge box office...for the first week, at least.  After all, this film seemed primed more than most to fall victim to the two cardinal rules of fanboy cinema: 1)  the fanboys will go, and 2)  the fanboys will bitch.  Deliver a substandard film, and no matter the box office, a second Avengers film could have well been dead in the water (not to mention further solo adventures for the film's heroes).  Therefore, it makes me happy to report, as most of you no doubt already know, that while it's no masterpiece, The Avengers is a fast-paced, exciting spectacle, and the fact that the film is ultimately no more than it has to be doesn't much matter when what it has to be is so supremely entertaining.

As perhaps befits a film aiming so squarely for all four quadrants, the plot of The Avengers is simple and to-the-point.  Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Asgardian god of chaos and brother / nemesis of thunder god Thor (Chris Hemsworth), has arrived on earth to steal the Tesseract, a glowing cube of pure energy last seen in Michael Bay's Transf...uh, I mean, in last summer's Captain America:  The First Avenger.  In that film, the nefarious Red Skull was using it to power super-weapons, and the high-tech, low-profile government agency known as SHIELD has recovered it and is attempting to develop its own deterrent to the potential intergalactic threats it now knows are out there.  But they don't know the cube also holds the key to an interstellar portal with the power to unleash Loki's conquering armies onto an unsuspecting planet.  Losing the cube, SHIELD's director, the hard-nosed, eye-patched Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, with his most screen time yet in the role), realizes that mankind only has one hope:  to kick off the Avengers Initiative, bringing the power of Earth's mightiest heroes together to defeat the alien swarm.  

That is, if they don't kill each other first.  In classic movie super-team tradition, the Avengers initially prove a combustible mix.  Captain America (Chris Evans), the super-soldier who puts duty and country above all else, clashes with Iron Man / Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), who sees the world as a monument to himself and has the towering skyscraper emblazoned with a giant neon "STARK" to prove it.  Thor can't see why they don't just smash Loki to smithereens and be done with it, and Bruce Banner (franchise newcomer Mark Ruffalo, taking over for the "difficult" Edward Norton), brought in against his will to track the Tesseract, just lives in fear of the moment when "the other guy" kicks into snarling green high gear.  Alongside Fury is super-assassin Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), who's got a personal stake in the battle; Loki has hypnotized her fellow agent, master archer Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and has developed a mind-raping, Hannibal Lecterish bond with the tormented government killer.  

It would be a large cast for any filmmaker to wrangle, but one of the strengths director Joss Whedon (who also wrote the screenplay from a story he conceived with Zak Penn) brings to the table is his ease with ensemble casts, his ability to make a team work strongly on screen without sacrificing any character's individuality.  One of the best things about The Avengers is the interplay between the team, how each hero's strengths complement the others...and how Whedon remembers exactly what quality in each hero's personality would most annoy his teammates.  Stark and Banner connect over their mutual scientific expertise, while Thor is an ideal battlemate for the Hulk, marrying the latter's brute strength with control over its devastating effects.  But then, Thor's cocky and brash, just like Stark, whose sarcastic humor doesn't go over well with anyone, and Black Widow's own confidence in her warrior's abilities is shaken when she can't face the sheer titanic assault of the Hulk.  Building on the solid character work done by the franchise's previous directors and writers (aside from Penn, who wrote The Incredible Hulk, only one receives onscreen credit here:  Iron Man's Jon Favreau, as co-executive producer), Whedon stays true to who we already know everyone is while playing them off of each other in interesting and exciting ways.  Of course, we get the scenes where these super-powered beings throw down against each other, but Iron Man blasting Thor into a tree is just as thrilling as Stark smashing away at Steve Rogers with jokes.  (Please tell me I'm not the only critic to ever think he could just as easily be called Tony Snark.)  

As director, Whedon likewise delivers on the action in a big, blockbusting way.  A mid-film assault on SHIELD's floating fortress is impressive enough to serve as the climax of a smaller-scale film, with Iron Man forced to manually fire up a ship's failing rotor while Captain America's life hangs, literally, by a thread.  Black Widow's escape from the Hulk reminded me of another great big man / little man showdown, between Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren in The Expendables (putting a team's biggest fighter up against their smallest always works for me, even if the big man dominates, as the Hulk basically does here).  This scene also brings Hawkeye back into the fold and into the film's REAL climax, an explosive assault on Manhattan by Loki and his army of lizard-soldiers and flying techno-beasts.  Whedon marshals this sequence like a master general.  He does an excellent job of keeping us oriented within the sprawling, all-over-the-place battle, and he deftly gives every character an arena of action commensurate with their powers.  Captain America and Black Widow lead the ground defense, while Iron Man manages the air combat and Hulk...well, Hulk smashes things.  Loudly and brutally, and marvelously.  Every character gets an iconic moment here, whether it's Hawkeye leaping dramatically from a roof while firing his last-ditch arrow, or Iron Man placing a quick phone call to Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, in for a crowd-pleasing cameo) at the moment of direst drama.  It's more or less the climax you wish that every such film would wrap up with, and it's arguably the big screen's best depiction yet of the kind of huge, over-the-top action only comics could previously provide.

It's to Marvel's credit that, even with all the action and spectacle on display, the film would not work without the efforts of the actors, who have done such a strong job sketching in their characters in previous films that they know just what to do here.  By now, four films into playing this character (if you count his brief appearance in The Incredible Hulk), Robert Downey Jr. could probably play Tony Stark in his sleep.  Isn't it nice that he chooses not to?  Downey is lively and engaged here in a way he wasn't in the entertaining-but-not-excellent Iron Man 2, and he has a scene where he confronts Loki that ranks among the best in the film.  (Nice to say, the suit likewise has some new tricks we haven't seen yet.)  Hemsworth's a handsome giant with charisma to burn, and playing a role that could be completely ridiculous in the wrong hands, he invests Thor with gravity, strength and just enough humor.  Evans makes less of an impression here than he did in his own film, but thanks to the conviction of the character and Whedon's smart writing, he stands out more than most people would against the one-two screen-stealing team of Downey and Hemsworth.  Ruffalo has, in many ways, the toughest role, coming into a cast of Marvel vets as a first-timer (playing an already-established character, no less), but he wisely chooses to underplay Bruce Banner less as a man holding in anger than one skittish with fear of what he knows is inside him.  (The big reveal of his "little secret" solidifies Banner as a hero and just makes us like him all the more.)  Johannsson may never grow on me as an actress, but she's more comfortable with the character here than in Iron Man 2, and Renner, who also has a tough job in his first full-fledged appearance as Hawkeye, shares several strong moments with Johansson that make his late-coming seem less of a problem.  Hiddleston chews huge mouthfuls of scenery in the way that only great British actors can, and Jackson, like Ruffalo, underplays to great affect.  

The film is also one of the year's best-produced, with no expense spared and every dollar on the screen.  Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (Atonement) delivers colorful, whirling, Oscar-caliber images, and costume designer Alexandra Byrne dresses everyone in a unique, eye-catching style.  Editors Jeffrey Ford and Lisa Lassek pull off their job as heroically as any Avenger; not since GoodFellas have I found a two-and-a-half-hour film so easy to sit through.  The special effects, of course, are terrific, though I almost never like mentioning that in reviews; with as good and expensive as FX technology is these days, there's really no excuse for any film having subpar visual effects.  But I will mention that I was a little disappointed by Alan Silvestri's score.  Thus far of the Marvel composers, he's the only one to give his hero's film a distinctive theme (I was humming the "Captain America March" for days after I saw the film...that is, when I wasn't humming Alan Menken and David Zippel's "Star Spangled Man"), and I was hoping for the same here.  Instead, I got serviceable action themes, perfectly fine, but not as rousing as I was hoping for.

But honestly, if you stuffed any more rousing elements into any one film, the theater might explode.  The Avengers is a hell of a curtain raiser to a summer movie season that I predict will be one of the stranger in recent memory.  I think there will be plenty of "big" films that fall by the wayside (Battleship and Men In Black III are on deck to try to dethrone Earth's mightiest heroes at the top of the box office, and I don't think either of them will pull it off), as well as a few second-string blockbuster releases that I have a feeling will outperform expectations (call it my gut, but I think G.I. Joe:  Retaliation is going to surprise the hell out of everyone).  But unless something goes horribly awry, or The Dark Knight Rises somehow manages to top its predecessor, look for 2012 to be remembered as the Summer of The Avengers.  And I'd mind that a lot more if the movie wasn't so damn much fun.  

   

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #65

PULP FICTION (1994)

The Writer

Quentin Tarantino; based on stories by Tarantino and Roger Avary

Why It's Here

In my previous review for this series, I commented that if I was judging the scripts in my countdown solely on their dialogue, then Psycho would not have shown up on my list.  Today's film, on the other hand, is one of the few that could make any such countdown just on the strength of its dialogue.  There's a reason that Pulp Fiction has become one of the most widely quoted films of the last twenty years:  It's one of the most quotable films of that period.  When he is on and firing at all cylinders, Quentin Tarantino writes dialogue that, in his chosen medium, is as good as Shakespeare's lines for the stage.  In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino's gallery of criminals, lowlifes and hangers-on speak in a slangy, hyper-stylized patois influenced by film noir, comic books, late-night talk shows, and any other insane objet culture de pop that the writer can pull from his fevered brain.  The dialogue's field of reference is sprawling, ranging from Kool and the Gang and the TV series Klutch Kargo to the hothouse melodramas of Douglas Sirk.  So much of this is crammed into the dialogue, in fact, that one could easily accuse Tarantino of turning his script into a Meet the Spartans-style pop-culture reference catalog, one in which we're meant to find it funny that a character simply mentions something that we've heard of.  But Tarantino is too smart for that, using these references not as ends in themselves, but as cleverly deployed building blocks of character.  It's one thing to have a character mention Flock of Seagulls, but what does it tell you about a man who uses the band's name as an insult?  

Tarantino tells us a lot about who his people are here through their dialogue.  As a writer, he is frequently accused of writing soundalike characters (in a radio review, British critic Mark Kermode says that every character in Death Proof, regardless of their gender, age or background, just talks like Tarantino), but if the highly original and idiosyncratic dialogue of Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds didn't already disprove this accusation, take another look at the panoply of voices that make up Pulp Fiction's dramatis personae.  Hitman partners Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) couldn't sound less alike, the former's laconic understatement a sharp contrast to the latter's frequently explosive bursts of pseudo-biblical linguistic hyperbole.  Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel), a "cleaner" who helps Jules and Vincent when a car interior becomes accidentally befouled with brains, speaks in exactly the kind of clipped, no-nonsense phrasing one would expect from a man who's made his bones by "getting things done."  Motormouthed British stick-up man Pumpkin (Tim Roth) broadcasts his arrogance and inflated sense of his own intelligence with every utterance, much like robe-wearing heroin dealer Lance (Eric Stoltz), but Lance's more laid-back delivery makes his smugness go down a lot easier.  Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), a gangster's wife with whom Vincent shares a nearly fatal evening out, cuts through her stew of hipsterish lines with an occasional observation surprising for its clear common sense, in utter contrast to the simple-minded, almost childlike dialogue of Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros), girlfriend of small-time fighter Butch (Bruce Willis).  Tarantino is also smart enough to know when his characters should say nothing at all.  The two most tight-lipped characters in the film, Butch and Mia's crime-boss husband Marcellus (Ving Rhames), speak less than any of the other principals, but that's because they (and Tarantino) have the sense to let their imposing physicality do the talking for them.  These characters' voices play off one another and complement the film's scenario and themes like instruments in an orchestra; indeed, if writing dialogue is comparable to orchestration, Tarantino works his "instruments" here like a Debussy, blending his characters' speaking styles into a riot of different tones and impacts.  (It helps, of course, that he is deploying such widely various acting styles, ranging from Rhames' mumble-mouthed cool to Jackson's theatrical intensity.)

Tarantino's dialogue throughout Pulp Fiction is so energetic and muscular that you'll probably be surprised, when looking at the film again, to realize how little action it actually contains.  It's not every filmmaker (Louis Malle notwithstanding) who can make scintillating drama out of characters just sitting and talking, but an unexpectedly large number of Pulp Fiction's scenes consist of characters doing nothing more than that.  Sure, there's a bit of gunplay, some fast driving, and even a footchase.  But when I think about the film, what I usually remember is characters sitting and chewing the fat with one another. They talk at unexpected length in cars, in elevators, in hotel rooms.  There are at least three extended dialogue sequences set in restaurants, in which characters do basically nothing but what we do in restaurants:  sit, eat and talk.  (Not only that, but they do a lot of that talking about nothing more complicated than the food they're eating.)  There are extended riffs about hamburgers, television, foot massages, coffee, the relative merits of pigs versus dogs.  Outre subjects, perhaps, but mundane compared to the matters of discussion in most films.  Still, Tarantino invests these seemingly nonsensical and aimless talks with boundless verve and linguistic brio.  He's got a knack for hitting you with an unexpected turn of phrase (as when Jules' refers to a woman's genitals as "the holiest of holies"), and he has enough skill to ladle heavy helpings of slang into their words without making it ring like a Diablo Cody-esque affectation (as when Jules, denying his potential Judaism after refusing some bacon, declares that "I just don't dig on swine").  Tarantino also wisely peppers these long dialogue scenes with vivid stories and recollections rich in imagery that almost makes you feel as if you've witnessed events that don't even show up on camera.  It's almost surprising to realize that we never see a frame of Fox Force Five, the unaired pilot Mia appeared in back in the day; her recollection of the plot and characters of the episode is evocative in a way that film dialogue seldom even tries to be.  Tarantino is so confident in his dialogue's power to hold us that, like Paddy Chayevsky in Network, he breaks one of the cardinal commandments of screenwriting and features several extended monologues in his script.  Jules gets most of the heavy lifting, most notably in a final speech in which he contrasts his former life as a ruthless killer with his just-minutes-earlier turned-over new leaf (this speech is the reason you can now go into a Hot Topic and buy a wallet with "Bad Mother Fucker" stitched into the leather).  Still, the most obvious example of this gambit comes in the form of Capt. Koons (Christopher Walken), a Vietnam War vet who, in a flashback, delivers young Butch a family-heirloom watch that has been through as many war atrocities as any soldier.  This entire scene is written as a single monologue, which runs nearly two complete pages in the published script, and which, thanks to the unexpected twists Tarantino builds into Koons' story (delivered with brilliantly matter-of-fact strangeness by Walken), never loses our attention even for a moment.

When Pulp Fiction was first released back in 1994, as much attention was paid to Tarantino's dialogue as to the film's revolutionary-seeming non-linear narrative structure, in which the story is told out of chronological order, starting at the near-ending and then killing off a major character halfway through the film, only to have him return in the final hour, which takes place before his murder.  After years of time-bending crime plots and non-linear narratives being utilized in everything from Memento to (500) Days of Summer, it's almost hard to remember how radical Tarantino's structural choices seemed, and admittedly, when viewing the film again, the chronological twists don't seem nearly as fresh as they once did.  This can hardly be held against Tarantino, however; after all, the structure's bloom has only worn off somewhat thanks to the accumulated weight of all the time-tossing films that followed, all of which were merely attempting to replicate, with various levels of success, Tarantino's own achievement.  Hammering the film too hard for not feeling as innovative as it once did would be like knocking Citizen Kane because of all the films that have used flashbacks since its release.  The one respect in which Pulp Fiction's tangled structure can be blamed for a detrimental effect is that the central section of the film, chronicling Butch's thrown fight and his labyrinthine quest to recover his father's prized watch, is easily the film's most lugubrious.  There's little of the sizzling dialogue to be found in the film's other parts, and there is also the issue of De Medeiros' performance, which admittedly didn't annoy me nearly as much during this viewing as it has in the past, but which grated on me something fierce the first time I saw the picture.  Still, the segment works more often than not.  Willis' taciturn charisma holds the frame even without snappy one-liners, and it's hard to deny the weird power of "The Gimp," arguably the film's single most perverse character.  (This segment of the film is largely responsible for Roger Avary's story credit; many of its elements were borrowed from Pandemonium Reigns, an unfilmed short script by Avary.)


Pulp Fiction, to me, will always represent a significant leap forward in the mainstream American moviegoing audience's cinematic literacy.  I was 16 years old when the film was first released, and after seeing it on opening night (I will never forget the burst of applause that greeted Quentin Tarantino's name as it kicked off the closing credits), it was unusual to hear the welter of serious cinematically-oriented conversations it inspired among people who had previous expressed no deep interest in the mechanics of filmmaking or screenwriting. As a budding wannabe filmmaker, I was engaging in conversations like this every day anyway, but it was fascinating to hear it from folks whose previous knowledge of cinema extended no further than the best moment at which to pause the VHS tape for the best view of Phoebe Cates' nipples in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  (Admittedly, after a while, these dilettantes got a little annoying, especially when they tried to tell me something about movies, even though I'd already been watching films seriously for far longer than they had.)  It was once said, allegedly by Brian Eno, that only about a thousand people bought the Velvet Underground's first album, but every single one of them became a musician.  Well, a lot more people than a thousand saw Pulp Fiction (the film grossed over $200 million worldwide), and it's safe to say that this film was likely more responsible than any other release of the '90s for the explosion in film-school attendance following its release.


In the 18 years since the film burst into our consciousness (and it really did; I was stunned, when re-watching the film, to realize how many of its moments and lines have become truly iconic bits of American cinema), debating "the meaning of it all" has become a favorite pastime of fans and scholars.  Pulp Fiction was released in the earliest days of the internet, and epic amounts of bandwidth have since been dedicated to the meaning of the bandage on the back of Marcellus' neck, the significance of the satanic combination number on the MacGuffinesque briefcase, and of course, what's in the damn briefcase to begin with.  I can honestly say that while I find these conversations and theories amusing, I have not given much thought to these subjects myself, and I could really care less what the answers to those questions might be, whether it's Tarantino himself or just a random super-fan providing them.  I remember telling folks during the film's original theatrical run that as far as I was concerned, looking for a deeper meaning in Pulp Fiction is kind of beside the point.  "It's just pure entertainment," I once said.  "Like Star Wars."  Well, if Star Wars has proven nothing else, it's certainly illustrated the power of the enthusiast's drive to imbue message-free popular entertainment with unexpected thickets of meaning, and so the theorizing about the significance of all of Tarantino's whack-job references and tropes will probably continue for as long as people still watch the film...which means they are probably going to continue for as long as there is cinema.  No matter how much some viewers may dislike the film's violence (which is admittedly much tamer than in, say, the average Transformers film) or its fulsome use of profanity (including, by IMDb's count, 265 utterances of the word "fuck" and its useful variations), Pulp Fiction now is as legitimate a part of cinema's canon as any masterwork by Godard or Kurosawa.  I think Tarantino would approve that sentiment, for its references to other filmmakers if for nothing else.

AWARDS WON:   Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay; BAFTA Award, Best Original Screenplay; Boston Society of Film Critics Award, Best Screenplay; Chicago Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay; Golden Globe, Best Screenplay; Independent Spirit Award, Best Screenplay; London Film Critics Circle Award, Screenwriter of the Year; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay; National Society of Film Critics Award, Best Screenplay; New York Film Critics Circle Award, Best Screenplay; Stockholm Film Festival Award, Best Screenplay    

  

IT'S THE SECOND ANNUAL ZOMBOSCARS!

On Sunday, February 26th, the 6000-plus members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will convene to present their annual awards for the best cinema of the previous year. It's an event that always provokes outrage over the Academy's choices and equally ardent defenses of same. But here at the Movie Zombie, there's only one ballot, only one voter and no arguments. Listed below, you will find what the Academy Award nominations would look like if I was the only person voting. My selections for the winners in each category are in boldface; notes on the particular quirks of my nominating process can be found in my introduction to last year's Zomboscars list.

A few additional notes about this year's choices:

* You will notice that my ten selections for Best Picture (and yes, I chose ten; unlike the Academy, I can make a nomination-quantity decision and stick to it) differ slightly from the top-ten-of-2011 list I posted several weeks ago. This is because after I posted this list, I caught up with a highly acclaimed late-2011 release; I decided to finally check it out after a glowing review on the highly recommended F This Movie! podcast. Needless to say, Patrick, JB and the crew were spot-on in their assessment of one of the most purely entertaining films of the year, and even though I had already selected my choices for the year's best, I couldn't post the Zomboscar nominees without including this one in several categories.

* This year, I am pleased to announce the presentation of my first-ever Special Achievement Zomboscar, honoring an outstanding cinematic contribution outside the scope of what is covered by the standard categories. This year, the Special Achievement Zomboscar recognizes OSWALDO MONTENEGRO, writer and director of the highly entertaining Brazilian film Leo & Bia. This film, chronicling the trials and triumphs of a rebellious theatrical troupe in 1970s fascist Brazil, did not receive theatrical distribution in the States (I saw it at the Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival in April), but its mix of passionate politics, artistic energy and youthful enthusiasm was utterly infectious. In addition to writing and directing this Portuguese Godspell, Montenegro also composed the original score and songs, a highly eclectic mix of subjects and styles that stayed with me for days after I saw the film. So, Montenegro receives this year's special Zomboscar for his work on the soundtrack for Leo & Bia (a soundtrack I wish I could hear again; maybe Amoeba Records can come through for me...).

And so, without further ado, I present this year's best in cinema...your 2011 Zomboscar nominees!

BEST PICTURE

Anonymous

Captain America: The First Avenger

Drive

Margin Call

Midnight In Paris

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Moneyball

Shame

Source Code

The Trip

BEST ACTOR

Steve Coogan, The Trip

Michael Fassbender, Shame

Ralph Fiennes, Coriolanus

Woody Harrelson, Rampart

Brad Pitt, Moneyball

BEST ACTRESS

Berenice Bejo, The Artist

Vera Farmiga, Higher Ground

Jodie Foster, Carnage

Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method

Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Paul Bettany, Margin Call

Albert Brooks, Drive

Tommy Lee Jones, Captain America: The First Avenger

Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Christoph Waltz, Carnage

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Kathy Bates, Midnight in Paris

Marion Cotillard, Midnight in Paris

Helen Mirren, The Debt

Carey Mulligan, Shame

Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus

BEST DIRECTOR

Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

Brad Bird, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Steve McQueen, Shame

Duncan Jones, Source Code

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

John Orloff, Anonymous

J.C. Chandor, Margin Call

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

John Logan, Rango (story by Logan, Gore Verbinski and James Ward Byrkit)

Ben Ripley, Source Code

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Christopher Markus and Steven McFeely, Captain America: The First Avenger

Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski, Carnage

John Logan, Coriolanus

Jonathan Hensleigh and Jeremy Walters, Kill the Irishman

Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball (story by Stan Chervin)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

John Williams, The Adventures of Tintin

Alan Silvestri, Captain America: The First Avenger

Cliff Martinez, Drive

Michael Giacchino, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Chris Bacon, Source Code

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“Star Spangled Man”, Captain America: The First Avenger

“The Greatest Song I Ever Heard”, POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

“Rango Theme Song”, Rango

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Anna Foerster, Anonymous

Shelly Johnson, Captain America: The First Avenger

Yu Cao, City of Life and Death

Newton Thomas Sigel, Drive

Robert Elswit, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

BEST FILM EDITING

Captain America: The First Avenger

Drive

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Shame

Source Code

BEST ART DIRECTION

Anonymous

Captain America: The First Avenger

City of Life and Death

Midnight in Paris

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Albert Nobbs

Anonymous

The Artist

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

The Three Musketeers

BEST SOUND MIXING

The Adventures of Tintin

Battle: Los Angeles

Fast Five

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

BEST SOUND EDITING

The Adventures of Tintin

Battle: Los Angeles

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Trollhunter

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Fast Five

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

BEST MAKEUP

Anonymous

Captain America: The First Avenger

Conan the Barbarian

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Chasing Madoff

Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

The Steve Project

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

City of Life and Death

Leo & Bia

Of Gods and Men

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

The Adventures of Tintin

Rango

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #66

PSYCHO (1960)

The Writer

Joseph Stefano; based on the novel by Robert Bloch

Why It's Here

In this day and age, with the proliferation of "spoilers" throughout cyberspace, and with fifty-plus years of parodies, homages and tributes underscoring the original work, it's hard to imagine someone coming to Psycho without prior knowledge of its game-changing narrative twists. In fact, for better or worse, Alfred Hitchcock's low-budget black-and-white thriller wrote the book on the modern twist ending. When Kevin Spacey's limp dissolves before our eyes in The Usual Suspects, when the wedding ring rolls from Olivia Williams's hand in The Sixth Sense, even when Darth Vader drops his bombshell revelation on Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, we are witnessing the rug-pulling stepchildren of the climactic moment in Psycho when Norman Bates bursts through the door of his fruit cellar, clad in wig and matronly frock, squealing with his butcher knife raised high. Virtually every filmmaker who hits us with a bet-you-didn't-see-that coming shocker finale is, in subconscious (or sometimes quite blatantly conscious) ways, trying to beat the master of suspense at a game at which he was and largely remains unbeatable.

But Hitchcock in no way invented the concept of the narrative twist. Films as diverse as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Citizen Kane, even Casablanca had wowed audiences with unexpected narrative reversals prior to Psycho's release. What Psycho, which Hitchcock directed from a screenplay by Joseph Stefano (adapted from a novel by Robert Bloch), did like no other film before was explode the notion that audiences could count on a film to play by the established rules of cinematic storytelling. When an audience goes to a mainstream major-studio motion picture, they can generally count on a fairly straightforward example of classically structured three-act storytelling. The first act sets up the protagonist and antagonist of the film and establishes a conflict between them, a struggle that plays out, with periodic escalation of stakes, over the course of the film's second act before reaching a resolution (usually a victory for the heroic protagonist) by the end of the third act. So it had been for the decades prior to Psycho's release, and so it has still largely been, with admittedly more frequent exceptions, in the half-century since.

With Psycho, Hitchcock and Stefano chose to literally stab these rules through the heart. The screenplay's great innovation, one so singular it almost by itself earns the picture a spot on my countdown, is a narrative trope that has come to be known as the "false first act". Psycho's first forty-five minutes lead us into thinking we're watching a downbeat, rather mundane tale of petty crime, a story about a woman on the run and the peculiar encounters she experiences along the way. But when the woman turns off the beaten path and finds herself at a run-down old motel, the real protagonist of Psycho enters the story...and he's bringing the antagonist along with him, in the same fractured brain and tortured heart.

The false first act was Stefano and Hitchcock's invention. Bloch's novel begins with a chapter set at the Bates Motel, introducing Norman Bates and his castrating bitch goddess of a mother. This foregrounds Norman in the narrative from the start and thus makes him no surprise to us later in the story, when Marion Crane arrives at the Bates Motel. We've already met him, and therefore have reason to suspect, even though he drops out of the story for a considerable number of pages after this opening scene, that he'll return later, indeed that he might even be its real protagonist. But in the film, aside from the opening-credits clue of Anthony Perkins's top billing, there is not even a whisper of Norman Bates for nearly the first half-hour. Instead, we are introduced to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her work here), a discontented real-estate officer worker from Phoenix. She's mired in a passionate but going-nowhere relationship with divorced-and-in-debt hardware store owner Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Tellingly, the first time we see them, they're finishing up an afternoon quickie in a seedy by-the-hour motel; Marion likely little suspects that it's exactly this sort of place in which she will meet her sordid end the very next day. As Sam and Marion discuss their financial problems, Stefano establishes a mood of run-of-the-mill working-class unhappiness. Their dialogue is blandly functional, sometimes even nakedly expository, as Sam discusses the debts he's still paying off for his dead father and the alimony he's stuck with as well; Stefano spent much of his career in television, and it sometimes is reflected in these sometimes pedestrian, advancing-the-plot exchanges. Indeed, if all we had to go on was dialogue, Psycho would not be on this list; there are few memorable lines in the screenplay, and most of the ones that do stand out have as much to do with the playing as with the lines themselves. But in a way, this works to the film's thematic advantage. Marion and Sam are not remarkable. They're average joes with average dreams. Really, they're nobodies. Which makes the horror to come all the more terrifying, because if it can happen to a nobody, then it can happen to anybody...including the viewer.

The first sign of life blows through the movie with the arrival of Cassidy (Frank Albertson), a loudmouthed oil magnate who's buying a $40,000 house from Marion's boss...and paying in cash. He has some of the snappiest dialogue in the picture (when Marion's office mate, played by Hitchcock's daughter Pat, sees the money and exclaims, "I declare!", Cassidy replies, "I don't. That's how I get to keep it!"), and his blatant, drinking-during-the-day amorality and undeniable joy of living rubs off on Marion. She decides to roll a dangerous dice and skips down with Cassidy's money. It's worth mentioning that though she is surprisingly ordinary for a motion-picture heroine, Marion is also, subtly, somewhat unlikable. She is irresponsible at her job, taking extra-long lunches to have sex with her lover in a sleazy motel, and when she sees her first chance at (unearned) happiness, she grabs it...never mind that she's going for it by stealing from a man who was nothing but nice to her, and robbing a girl she's never met of a wedding present in the process.

Marion is not without a conscience, however, and as she makes her escape and heads for Fairvale, California to meet Sam, Stefano envelops Marion in an atmosphere of paranoia and encroaching dread. She's accosted by a poker-faced, mirror-shades-wearing cop (Mort Mills) who follows her long after she's given him a direct reason to be suspicious, and she's tormented by mental voices: her boss fretting about his missing employee, Cassidy threatening legal action against Marion and her employer. We, like Marion, are starting to feel uneasy about what she's done, and by the time she escapes the rain by stopping at the Bates Motel, we're fully questioning her actions and what she should do next.

From the moment he first appears onscreen, Norman Bates is a memorable creation, but it's only on re-watching the film (or watching it with prior knowledge of its secrets) that one can see both how carefully Stefano constructs the character and how he leaves clues to Norman's true nature hidden in plain sight. Smartly, he has already primed us to see the world through Marion's paranoid, on-the-run distorted vision, so though Norman is doubtlessly peculiar and inexplicably tense at times, he seems at first no more bizarre, and in fact markedly less threatening, than the cop who harasses Marion on the roadside. Also, Marion finds in Norman a reflection of her own situation taken to the nth degree; his livelihood decimated when the highway took his customers away (Norman repeats, like the world's most pathetic ad line, that his hotel boasts "twelve cabins, twelve vacancies"), Norman is equally trapped by economic circumstances. But that's not all that's got him trapped. He's cowed by a domineering mother (Marion hears her browbeating her son so brutally that her voice cuts crystal-clear through a rainstorm) and by his own overgrown-adolescent's personality. He refers to himself as a "boy", even though he's clearly in his late twenties at least, and he cannot bring himself to use the word "bathroom" when showing Marion her cabin. Norman, clearly, is an odd duck...and he only gets odder when he starts watching Marion undress through a peephole cut into the wall of his parlor. But still...that cop was weird, too. And we've been watching Marion for nearly forty-five minutes now. We've been following her story. We've fretted with her, sweated with her, feared for her. Surely we're going all the way with her, right?

We sure are. All the way to her grave. When Mrs. Bates pulled back the shower curtain and slashed Marion Crane to death, audiences worldwide suddenly realized that they could never completely trust the movies again. They'd been watching a movie about a sad little woman stealing money to try to "buy off unhappiness". Now she was dead. And the only one they had left to invest their interest in was a creepy hotel keeper with self-stuffed birds on his walls. As if the viewers needed a clearer indication that this wasn't going to be Marion's story after all, Norman never even finds out about the stolen $40,000; it's hidden in a rolled-up newspaper that he off-handedly tosses in the trunk of Marion's car, along with her body, as he cleans up after his mother's crime. Then, to cement Norman's hold over the audience's emotional investment, Stefano and Hitchcock turn the spectator into unwitting accomplices in Norman's crime; when Marion's car, sinking into a swamp behind the motel with her in the boot, stops mid-submersion, we're just as nervous as Norman that the car won't go all the way, that his ruse will be exposed. Norman's all we've got left to hold on to, and much to our horror, we're going to be with him for the whole ride.

That's not to say Psycho doesn't bring other characters into the mix, as Sam joins forces with Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) and with Arbogast (Martin Balsam), a private dick hired by Marion's boss, to find the missing woman. But oddly, even though we already know Sam and are quite aware that Norman (or at least his mother) are guilty as hell, the encounters between Norman and the investigators nevertheless play with Norman as protagonist. We sweat along with him as Arbogast's avuncular nature barely masks his insistent bulldog tenacity (his simple, direct questions are enough to get Norman stuttering; watch how he fumbles over the word "invalid" when he describes his mother), and later, we're just as angry as he is at Sam when the latter clumsily tries to press him into confessing that he has the stolen money. And all of this after we've watched Norman not only hide Marion's body, but apparently do the same with Arbogast, who's stabbed by Mrs. Bates right at the foot of their own stairs (we don't see the clean-up this time, merely Norman staring intently at the swamp that has apparently claimed another victim). Many films brag about making the audience "root for the bad guy", but few have ever done it with quite the intensity and success of Psycho.

That is, if you even consider Norman Bates to be the villain of this story. In truth, he's really the innocent victim at the mercy of the real monster of the story, a woman so domineering and emasculating that she has managed to assert control over her son even in death. Stefano's second act ends with Sam and Lila (and us) learning the true extent of the strange horror afoot at the Bates Motel; the woman we've been watching brutalize people with a butcher knife has apparently been dead for ten years. By this point in our viewing experience, as we see it, all bets are off. Is this a different woman entirely? Are we witnessing the homicidal rage of a ghost? A zombie? What's Hitchcock driving at here? But as is the case with most of cinema's most brilliant twist endings, the truth is right in front of us the whole time; Norman, who murdered his own mother rather than be replaced by her lover (who he also killed), has kept his mother alive as a split personality who has continued their sick master-and-victim travesty of a mother-child bond. And when "Mrs. Bates" rushes into that fruit cellar, ready to slash up Lila just like she did Marion and any other woman who threatened to take her son away from her, the brilliance of Stefano's screenplay is revealed in full. So powerful is the impact of this narrative revelation that even a lengthy coda in which the specifics of Norman's condition are laid out in classic '50s-Hollywood dollar-book Freudian lingo by a court psychiatrist (played thanklessly well by Simon Oakland) can't blunt its edge. Of course, it helps that the film doesn't end there, but instead with a peerlessly creepy moment in which a dead-silent Norman, wrapped in a shroudlike blanket, carries on an inner monologue. The only voice now is "Mrs. Bates", who talks about how she "wouldn't hurt a fly" even as she laments fingering her own son for her crimes. The bitch goddess betrays her maternal duty yet again. The villain is victorious. Another Hollywood cliche sliced to bloody bits.

Psycho is the template for any film looking to turn Hollywood storytelling convention on its ear. Movies had surprised and confounded the expectations of their audiences for years, but few had done it so definitively, with such blatant disregard for keeping the audience comfortable and at ease. It is to Stefano and Hitchcock's eternal credit that this blatant narrative gamesmanship did not leave their audiences feeling had, a risk a filmmaker always runs when attempting such a storytelling bait-and-switch. Rather, the director and his screenwriter play eminently fair with their audience; sure, they pull the rug out from under the viewer forty-five minutes in by killing off Marion, but the clues about Norman are all there if you know where to look...and given the bleakness and troubled state of Marion's life prior to her arrival at the Bates Motel, it's not as if we should have expected a much more cheerful fate for her. Or for Norman. Psycho is often called the greatest of Hollywood horror movies. But in my mind, given its grand-Guignol Oedipal narrative, it is really American cinema's definitive Greek tragedy. Hitchcock and Stefano, with matchless intelligence and daring, created the story of a boy who murders a mother so evil that she manages, from beyond the grave, to "murder" him right back.

AWARD NOMINATIONS (BOLDFACE INDICATES A WIN): Edgar Allan Poe Award, Best Motion Picture (award shared with novel author Robert Bloch); Writers Guild of America Award, Best Written American Drama

IT RISES!!! THE MOVIE ZOMBIE'S TOP 10 FILMS OF 2011

Hide your children, send the old folks to the root cellar, and lock up your antique copies of Cahiers du Cinema, because the Movie Zombie is once again prowling the multiplexes, art-houses and second-run dumps of America in search of movies with heart, movies with soul, movies with guts, and movies with BRAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNSSSSSS! And he's happy to report that in 2011, he saw quite a few pictures that possessed all of those attributes and then some. The Zombie had a busy year. He signed a contract with Michael Wiese Productions to complete the manuscript for a how-to book on screenwriting that he co-authored with the late great writer / director Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Total Recall); the revision is due in a few weeks' time, and with luck, the book will be on bookstore shelves nationwide before the year is out. He also wrote an essay for a forthcoming book on the films of Martin Scorsese, to be published by Arizona State University Press (publication date pending). His own screenplays have been busily making the rounds to various production companies great and small-in-size-only throughout the film industry. And, of course, he met a beautiful Zombette and set up tomb-keeping with her. But somehow, in the midst of all that, he managed to take in a by-no- means comprehensive, but still healthy helping of what Hollywood and the cinematic world at large had to offer in the last year, and below, for your enjoyment, is his (or should I say my) list of the ten best films of 2011.

An always necessary caveat about this list. As I am not a full-time film critic and my viewing habits are therefore restricted to what I can afford to take in at the theaters (and what I manage to see at the industry screenings, festivals and Q & As I do manage to make it to), there are always a number of fairly major releases that I do not get a chance to check out during the course of any given year. If you don't see a critically acclaimed major film on this list, there is every chance that I just haven't yet caught up with the picture (Hugo and The Artist are two well-reviewed films that I have not yet received the opportunity to see). And of course, there's also the chance that I saw the film in question and just wasn't as bowled over by it as everyone else seemed to be; the major example of that this year is probably the Cold War spy thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was admittedly well-acted and atmospheric, and which I might have liked quite well...had I been able to figure out anything that was happening on the screen. Even with these oversights, I've compiled what I feel is a nice lineup of what was best at the theaters this year.

But what's that old saying about the wheat and the chaff? Well, luckily, the chaff, for this viewer at least, wasn't nearly as thick on the ground as it was last year, when I was able to provide a complete Bottom Five list of the worst the movies had to offer. This year, I only feel the need to warn you away from one truly disastrous picture...and it pains me, because it's a film from the mind of some folks whose previous works I have, for the most part, greatly admired.

I am speaking of David Gordon Green's virtually laugh-free medieval fantasy-stoner comedy Your Highness. The usually reliably hilarious Danny McBride (who also co-wrote the "screenplay" with longtime collaborator Ben Best) and the often-impressive James Franco (who can at least write this off as his latest performance-art goof) headline a stultifying production in which the mere fact that men in chain mail are using the word "fuck" is meant to be inherently hilarious. And if you don't think it is, I'm sorry to say that none of the "jokes" in this film are going to make you laugh. Natalie Portman appears in one of the worst career moves ever for a just-Oscar-anointed actress, and the ever-more-popular Zooey Deschanel contributes some attractive cleavage and basically nothing else. Green's transformation from a creator of potent low-budget kitchen-sink dramas into a slacker-comedy helmsman is one of the more unusual career-evolution stories of recent years, but this attractively filmed but pointless waste of time can only count as a de-evolution. Maybe it's time for Green and his North Carolina Arts pals to put down the hash pipe and pick up a better screenplay than this.

Aaah...now that that unpleasantness is out of our system, let's get to the good stuff. Here are the Movie Zombie's top ten films of 2011...

10. THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

The final film I saw theatrically in 2011 was also one of the year's best. For my money, Steven Spielberg's full-throttle adaptation of the legendary European adventure graphic novel series by Herge was the director's most purely entertaining picture since Jurassic Park. Spielberg, in partnership with producer Peter Jackson, took two of the most maligned technical gimmicks of recent big-budget blockbuster cinema, motion-capture performance technology and 3D, and through sheer force of skill, served up the best usage yet of both technologies that I've seen. Rather can exploiting 3D's hackier qualities by just constantly throwing stuff at his camera, Spielberg instead uses a restlessly moving image to marvelous effect, milking 3D's capacity to create illusions of depth for all its worth. The motion-capture is handled with equal shrewdness. Spielberg's mo-cap avatars are not aiming for creepily human-but-not realism, but instead to give Herge's fanciful original character designs flesh and weight, and the results, as with the almost-identical detectives Thompson and Thomson, are delightful to behold. (The work of the actors in bringing these characters to life is uniformly strong, with the stand-out, not surprisingly, being motion capture's main man, Andy Serkis, as the drunkenly heroic Captain Haddock.) Of course, it doesn't hurt that this is a classic old-school adventure flick in the Indiana Jones vein. Some critics have accused this picture of being merely a framework for a near-relentless series of kinetic set pieces. But they seem to have forgotten that Spielberg is better at kinetic set pieces than maybe any filmmaker who's ever lived, and here he serves up some doozies, from an exhilarating downhill chase in a flooding North African village to a climactic swordfight with towering construction cranes in place of cutlasses. The result was an exhilarating return to form for Spielberg the blockbuster maestro, and a reminder of why I fell in love with the movies in the first place.

9. SHAME

Steve McQueen's near-impressionistic depiction of a few harrowing days in the life of a New York City sex addict was the year's most provocative film, and not just for sexual content that earned it an honestly justified NC-17 (in the strictest sense of the rating's definition, this film is in no way meant for children). But it's not the libido the film arouses. It's the mind. This is a picture that stirs thought and deep conversation, even argument; the Zombette and I are still in disagreement about the strange nature of the central character's relationship with his troubled, reckless younger sister. But we both agree that this film is piercing in its insights into the compulsive mind, as we watch a man on a classic addict's path, pursuing pleasure with an intensity that naturally results in nothing for him but pain. McQueen's brooding long takes, with numerous scenes running five minutes and beyond without a single edit, draw out the film's tension to almost unbearable levels, replicating the feeling of a life lived as a series of barely endurable interludes between orgasms. (Kudos to cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and production designer Judy Becker, who create an ice-cold, Zen-minimalist New York that mirrors the bone-deep emotional deadness of the protagonist.) Carey Mulligan nails the bruised little girl within the would-be bohemian seductress, but this film would die without the right actor in the lead, and Michael Fassbender gives an Oscar-worthy performance. This is a man whose soul and mind have become unwitting slaves to his erotic compulsions, and Fassbender makes us feel his anguish with every weighted stare, every clipped word, and yes, every orgasm. No director asked more of his leading man this year than McQueen did of Fassbender. And no leading man delivered more, more brilliantly.

8. MARGIN CALL

Many films did great things in 2011, but only J.C. Chandor's debut feature as writer and director managed the impossible. Somehow, this film, chronicling a beleaguered Big Apple investment firm's murder-suicide pact with the unwitting American economy, actually gave a sympathetic human face to the monstrous media boogeymen we've come to know as "the 1%". Chandor structures his film like a thriller, as a rocket scientist turned investment guru (Zachary Quinto, who also co-produced) uncovers a financial discrepancy that threatens to bring down their entire firm...unless they're willing to peddle their soon-to-be-worthless stock to people likely to be ruined by the purchases. As the boardroom machinations that set this Machiavellian plan into motion unfold, you'll be amazed how much tension Chandor manages to wring out of men in suits and ties speaking to each other in measured tones in sterile, coolly lit boardrooms. Chandor's fiercely intelligent, scalpel-sharp screenplay avoids weighing the viewer down with facts and figures, instead telling you just enough about the calculations involved to allow you to understand the firm's gambit...and why it's corrupt. I learned a lot about how high finance works, absorbed some interesting details about the world in which these fatcats operate (because of the heavy number-crunching involved, many investment big shots apparently come from engineering backgrounds), and saw these people, who I'm used to seeing only in news footage as they're escorted from deposition rooms by lawyers, as individuals with hopes, fears and about-to-be-dashed dreams. Among an across-the-board solid cast including Penn Badgley, Demi Moore, and Stanley Tucci, the standouts are Jeremy Irons as a CEO who almost seems to believe what he's shoveling; Kevin Spacey as an office manager who knows what he's shoveling, too, and is becoming sickened by the decades of stench; and especially Paul Bettany as the office hotshot, a living, breathing embodiment of high-finance hustle...with all the buried insecurity and fear that implies.

7. MONEYBALL

Like Margin Call, this is also a movie basically about statistics, but instead of making them silent assassins, Bennett Miller's adaptation of Michael Lewis's best-selling 2003 book transforms them into redeemers of men. Brad Pitt, in an incandescent performance that makes the most of his megastar qualities, plays Billy Beane, a failed former baseball protege and general manager of the cellar-dwelling Oakland A's, who rattles the cage of the game's establishment when he throws out the decades-old rules of scouting and recruiting players, basing his new draft choices and signings on statistical calculations provided by an egghead economics whiz (Jonah Hill, in an easygoing, enjoyable performance). The A's are about to become the laughingstocks of baseball for reasons entirely besides their playing...and then, somehow, Billy's system begins to generate wins. This is mainstream Hollywood filmmaking at its best: smart, savvy about its milieu, full of genuine, good-spirited humor (Billy's meetings with his scouts, played by a group of old troupers so authentic I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most of them are real-life scouts), and at its best, heartwarming in unexpected ways. Billy Beane's story, as specific as it is to its time and world, is one that many of us can relate to, and the film is a beautifully observed portrait of a once-promising overachiever, hard past his sell-by date, looking, for just one time in his life, to be the long shot that actually wins big.

6. DRIVE

My feelings about Nicolas Winding Refn's ultra-stylish, diamond-hard crime thriller are more mixed than they are for any other film on this list. At moments, Refn's artsy directorial pretensions threaten to swamp the picture entirely, and my jury is still out on Ryan Gosling, who could be a chameleonic genius of an actor, or just a half-smiling handsome face, a puzzle without a solution. But when this film is on, its propulsive energy and brutal power thrill like nothing else I saw on the big screen this year. The result is arguably the finest film noir since L.A. Confidential. The plot here is nothing remarkable; the usual sort of deal about men on the criminal fringe, the women they love, and the money they cheat and kill each other for. What makes the film special is Refn's eye for detail, his feel for place and mood, and his one-of-a-kind handling of the standard-issue set pieces of the American crime picture. Newton Thomas Sigel's cinematography glimmers with sensuality and menace, the shadowy locations in and around downtown L.A. recall classic noir atmosphere at its darkest, and it's all set to a moody, throbbing electronic score by the always-underrated Cliff Martinez. Refn's showpiece sequences, from an exhilarating opening getaway drive (shot entirely from inside the car) to a shocking head-stomping in a garage elevator, always come at the action from angles and attitudes that you'll never expect. Some viewers were entirely put off by the intensity of this film's surprisingly brutal violence (one friend of mine told me, "I have no idea how anyone can consider that art"), but if you can get on board with this film's wavelength, there's scarcely a wilder ride to be found. Among the cast, special mention must go to Albert Brooks, who, brilliantly cast against type as an underworld boss who's a deft hand with a razor, gives the year's best performance by a supporting actor.

5. ANONYMOUS

You know who probably wrote William Shakespeare's plays? William Shakespeare. You know who made me not mind having that assumption debunked for two hours? Director Roland Emmerich, screenwriter John Orloff, and the marvelously talented cast and technical artisans behind the year's most unexpected, and unexpectedly absorbing, big-studio release. Orloff's witty and literate screenplay, a dramatization of a widely circulated theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare (the largely self-educated son of an illiterate glovemaker), may be ultimately untrustworthy as history, but that doesn't stop the film from drawing you in with its tantalizing combination of costume drama and conspiracy thriller. Rhys Ifans leads a exceptional cast as De Vere, a man whose patrician demeanor and high breeding mask the turbulent artistic soul within; it's Ifans's performance that ultimately lend the film surprising pathos, as he anatomizes a man trapped by the circumstances of his birth into granting the stewardship of his heart and mind's most glorious flights to another man. (I could fault the film's portrayal of Shakespeare as a libidinous near-alcoholic, but you can't knock Rafe Spall's bawdy embodiment of the role.) Emmerich's direction is the best he's done yet, and he's ably abetted by a top-notch technical team. You would hear no complaints from this Zombie if the film garnered Academy Awards for costume designer Lisy Christl, the talented art direction team led by production designer Sebastian T. Krawinkel, and especially director of photography Anna Foerster, whose burnished-yet-sumptuous images deserve to make her the first woman ever to win a Best Cinematography Oscar.

4. THE TRIP

I have described the year's funniest comedy to friends as "northern English Sideways", and though it doesn't quite match that film's near-peerless combination of laughter and pathos, Michael Winterbottom's richly witty autumnal picaresque (edited to feature-film length from a six-hour BBC miniseries) is nevertheless a memorable creation in its own right. Steve Coogan, playing a self-absorbed-yet-arrogant British actor named "Steve Coogan", takes an eating tour of England's hilly, chilly north country, which he'll review for a popular magazine. Along for the ride is his friend "Rob Brydon", a charming-but-sometimes-insufferable comedian-impressionist played by comedian-impressionist Rob Brydon. As the men drive, drink and eat their way through the byways of upper Britannia, the film sneaks in plenty of sly commentary about the insecurity of the middle-aged male, the ever-fickle celebrity self-image, and the evolution of Michael Caine's voice through years of films, cigars and whiskey. These latter scenes, with Coogan and Brydon impersonating fellow actors from Schwarzenegger to Woody Allen, have made the rounds as popular out-of-context YouTube clips, but the film really deserves to be savored as a whole (and I'd like to check out the entire BBC series some time as well). Winterbottom's smooth, unobtrusive direction skillfully serves the performances of the actors, who, largely improvising, make the year's most outstanding onscreen duo. Brydon's impressions and non-sequiters garner huge laughs, and Coogan, in his inimitable way, wrings self-stinging sympathy from even the archest dialogue.

3. CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

I have a reputation amongst my friends, particularly those with fanboy inclinations, for being someone who hates "fun movies", as if the fact that I occasionally pay to see foreign films and documentaries on the big screen means I'm allergic to popcorn flicks. Honestly, the problem is that, at the end of the day, most blockbuster Hollywood product just doesn't do it for me. And then there was Captain America, a film I spent the second half of the year almost gratefully deploying whenever my friends hit me with their baseless "he hates fun" complaints. Because I defy you to find a more fun filmgoing experience from 2011 than Joe Johnston's rousing, colorful big-screen rendering of Marvel Comics' star-spangled super-soldier. Beautifully visualized and excitingly scored by Alan Silvestri (who also co-wrote the hilarious, USO-show-spoofing musical number "Star-Spangled Man" with Stephen Schwartz), this film brings the origin and adventures of the man with the high-flying shield to life with wit, speed, exhilarating action sequences, and a surprisingly sympathetic and likable lead in Chris Evans, who garnered much-deserved praise for making his hero all-American earnest without pushing the character's gumption into self-parody. The film is beautifully cast all around, with strong work from Tommy Lee Jones (as a gruff general whose every utterance had me laughing), Stanley Tucci (as the scientist whose special formula gives life to a superhero), and especially Hugo Weaving, who, buried under heavy prosthetics as the villainous Red Skull, gave us the year's most memorably hissable bad guy. Johnston, who won an Academy Award for his visual-effects work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a classic popcorn filmmaker in the Spielberg tradition (he was the man behind 2010's sorely underrated update of The Wolfman), and he delivers a film that looks great, moves like a rocket, and effortlessly, endlessly entertains. The Avengers, coming out this year, has its work cut out for it as far as I'm concerned, because from where I'm sitting, there's not likely to be any Avenger quite like The First Avenger.

2. SOURCE CODE

Duncan Jones's time-and-mind-bending sci-fi thriller was far and away the year's best genre film. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a career military man who finds himself roped, against his will, into a bizarre experiment. A bomb has blown up a commuter train outside Chicago, and government scientists have managed to isolate the "source code", the eight-minute pattern of final memories stored in the brain of one of the train's dead passengers. Now, Gyllenhaal's psyche is being zapped back into the last eight minutes of a dead man's life, where he must use this all-too-brief timespan to track down and stop a terrorist, all while falling in love with the late passenger's sweetheart (played charmingly by Michelle Monaghan)...who just may be among the dead herself. Ben Ripley's strikingly complex and elegantly rendered script uses the mission's eight-minutes-only duration to whipsaw us between past and present, all the while stirring up provocative meditations on the nature of time, identity, and the limits of duty above and beyond the call. Jones's direction brilliantly teases out the story's raft of revelations and twists, keeping us always guessing and staying skillfully always just a step or two ahead of us. This is really Jones and Ripley's show, but the film nevertheless boasts a well-judged and likable lead performance by Gyllenhaal and nice supporting turns by Monaghan, the always-strong Vera Farmiga (as Gyllenhaal's mission commander) and Jeffrey Wright, suitably officious and subtly menacing as the scientist behind the source-code experiment. High praise as well to composer Chris Bacon's thunderous score and the dazzling editing work of Paul Hirsch. Normally I hate it when films blatantly set up a sequel. But when Ripley and Jones left the door open for one here, I was ready to walk right through it to find out where (and into who) Gyllenhaal was going next.

1. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

In my 101 Favorite Screenplays review of the 1973 comedy classic Sleeper, I crowned Woody Allen as my favorite screenwriter. At the end of the day, and looking over the entire span of his career, he's probably my favorite filmmaker, period. Thus, not surprisingly, the last few years have been tough ones for me, as I've seen Allen put forth films problematic (Hollywood Ending), forgettable (Cassandra's Dream), and just plain old at-the-end-of-the-day not that good (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). And so, it gives me great pleasure to declare Allen's utterly charming comic fantasy, in which a sad-sack screenwriter (Owen Wilson) takes a magical journey back to the Lost Generation's City of Lights, the best film of 2011. Allen combines the love-letter-to-a-city romanticism of his 1979 masterpiece Manhattan with the reality-bending fantasy-fulfillment plot of 1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo to create a shimmering love story tinged with humor, yearning, and honest, lived-in regret. Allen has marshaled a typically sensational cast to bring this delicate enchantment to life. Wilson invests his lovestruck struggling artist with pathos and wit while never once resorting to simply aping his director's mannerisms as so many other Allen leading men have done. Marion Cotillard, as Wilson's out-of-the-past love interest, is enigmatic and heartwarming in about equal measure; the fact that she's one of the world's most beautiful women is just icing on the cake. They're ably supported by Corey Stoll as a hilariously blustery Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Bates as a subtly commanding Gertrude Stein, and Adrien Brody, who, if they gave out Best Supporting Actor Oscars for just one scene, would win it in a walk for his showstopping cameo as Salvador Dali. Darius Khondji's cinematography and Anne Seibel's art direction make Paris look better than it ever has onscreen, and the soundtrack is Allen's customary melange of elegant classical and period jazz, with the soprano sax of the great Sidney Bechet raising and lowering the curtain in inimitable fashion. This being Woody Allen, the ending this film serves up is bittersweet, never forgetting that we, after all, live in the real world. But it was bliss visiting Allen's fantasy Paris. And when it was all over, I just couldn't stop smiling.

THE DVD ZOMBIE: IT SEES "SHALLOW HAL"!

As I discussed in my 101 Favorite Screenplays review of The Matrix, every few years, a particular film will come along and will temporarily change the nature of its genre by providing a general stylistic or visual template to which the majority of other films in its genre aspire. In 1998, following the surprise success of their hysterically hilarious doofuses-on-the-road comedy Dumb & Dumber (and the well-reviewed but less lucrative bowling comedy Kingpin), writer-directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly scored their biggest success with There's Something About Mary, a film that opened to decent but unexceptional box-office returns in July of that year and, through word of mouth and strong repeat business, pulled off the rare task of rising, after several weeks of increasing admissions, to the number-one spot at the box office by Labor Day. The film's blend of gross, broadly sexual and flat-out politically incorrect humor (including extensive jokes at the expense of mentally challenged kids and a man with polio), combined with a surprisingly sincere, sometimes even sentimental romantic plot, proved a potent mix, and for the next six years or so, the vast majority of American studio comedies went for a similar combination of heart tugging and crotch bashing. Thus were we treated to such memorable-though-we've-tried-to-forget sights as Chris Klein with his arm wedged up a cow's anus (in Say It Isn't So) and the venerable David Odgen Stiers inadvertently dining on another man's amputated testicle (in Tomcats). None of these films managed to score with the public the way that Mary had, and in 2005, Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which married romance and crude sex comedy in a different, more improvisational and effortlessly sincere fashion, came along to change the face of American film comedy yet again.

Smack in the midst of Mary's reign as the paradigmatic big-budget studio comedy, the Farrelly brothers released Shallow Hal (2001), a film that is not as aggressively crude as the Farrellys' previous works, but that likewise attempts to marry its un-P.C. comedy with a sweet, even overtly sentimental story. I was not the huge Mary fan that many people are, perhaps because I came kind of late to the party, after the word of mouth had already built for the film a reputation as a not-to-be-believed taboo-smasher. In some ways, there was almost no way for the film to live up to the hype by the time I saw it, and with the exception of a few especially unexpected jokes, I found it to be a bit of a disappointment. So it didn't come as a surprise to me that I liked Shallow Hal more than Mary. Its ambitions with regard to its comic moments are far more modest, but it's therefore a more relaxed and easily likable picture...that is, if you're a person who can tolerate Jack Black in full-on, wiggly-eyebrowed Tasmanian Devil flower.

Shallow Hal was Black's first mainstream leading role, and it's a part that plays strongly to his natural gifts for ostentatious sleaziness and aggressive insincerity. Black portrays Hal Larson, who in a flashback that opens the film, is told as a boy by his dying father the secret to a happy life: "hot young tail". Encouraged by his old man to never settle for an average-looking woman, and indeed instructed that looks are the only factor in determining a potential mate, Hal has spent his entire adult life pursuing young hotties with all the gentle romanticism of a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon. It doesn't seem to bother him that most of these women are spectacularly out of his doughy league, and it doesn't help that his wingman is the equally average-looking, even-more-shallow Mauricio (Jason Alexander), who dismisses perfectly attractive women for the most trivial of "crimes" (one woman he dumps because the second toe on her feet is longer than her big toe). Hal seems destined for a life of tilting at a bevy of big-breasted windmills, until one day at the office, he gets stuck in an elevator with positive-thinking guru Tony Robbins (playing himself), who, hearing Hal's reductive view of women, confers on him an unusual blessing. From now on, he tells Hal, you'll only see the inner beauty of the women you see. Shortly after this, Hal meets and falls hard for Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow), the shy, humanitarian daughter of his Irish businessman boss (Joe Viterelli, affecting a thick Lucky Charms accent). Hal can scarcely believe his luck. After all, what sort of thin, beautiful woman ever has a personality like Rosemary's? Unless she's not thin and beautiful. Unless she's a 300-pound whopper who Hal can only see, thanks to Tony Robbins, as the goddess she is on the inside.

This is admittedly a charming concept for a comedy, and while the Farrellys, along with their co-writer Sean Moynihan, don't push the conceit to its manic comic limits, they nevertheless draw some decent laughs from the material. It's nice that the film is not simply a relentless parade of fat jokes at Rosemary's expense. She has a few chairs collapse under her, and she does nearly drain the water from a public swimming pool with her diving-board cannonball, but the joke here is really the opportunity to see the slim, attractive Paltrow presented as if she's a clumsy oaf (for much of the film, we see Rosemary as Hal sees her, as thin and radiant, a perception reinforced by cinematographer Russell Carpenter frequently shooting Paltrow with sunlight streaming through her blonde hair). Paltrow had never had a chance to do much comedy before this, and certainly not slapstick, but she rises to the occasion with some of her most enjoyable work in any film. Smartly, she soft-pedals Rosemary's clumsiness, choosing instead to emphasize her embarrassment at the fact that, oh dear, she's broken another chair. She also nails the self-deprecating manner of a person who's spent her whole life believing she's unattractive; her halting style of speech, soft, tentative voice, and reluctance to make eye contact all help to reinforce the illusion that what we're seeing here is really a woman whom society has branded as ugly and fat...an illusion later solidified, sort of, by Tony Gardner's makeup effects, which are decent enough for a film of this type but don't hold a candle to Rick Baker's work turning Eddie Murphy into the 400-pound title character of The Nutty Professor.

Jack Black is admittedly an acquired comic taste that I can't unreservedly say I've fully acquired. I've enjoyed him in certain pictures (even King Kong, a film for which he received some undue criticism), but I've never seen him completely disappear into a role or a story. I understand that such chameleonic abilities are not the reason one casts Jack Black in a comedy, but it would be nice if he'd stop winking at his own arch cleverness more often, because when he commits to a character or a moment, he can be very enjoyable. Black is at his best here in the quiet moments, when he's wooing the insecure Rosemary with compliments and attention, and when he stands up to Rosemary's father, defending her after he accuses Hal of only dating her to further his own career, his anger and hurt feel genuine and earned. Black has also made something of a side career of onscreen romances with unlikely counterparts; his pairing with Kate Winslet in The Holiday has many loyal followers, and likewise here, his chemistry with Paltrow is unexpectedly effective. It's not a masterful piece of comic acting, to be sure, but one can see here why Black has been able to sustain a career as a comic leading man.

Jason Alexander has some terrific moments as the chauvinistic Mauricio, a would-be Lothario with lacquered-on hair whose confidence with women is only matched by his obliviousness to how repulsive he is to them (he has a great early moment when he shushes a disgusted woman in a nightclub and assures her, "You had me at 'get lost'"), and who carries a shameful secret that provides the Farrellys with their most characteristically disgusting visual joke. Also surprisingly good, believe it or not, is Tony Robbins, who plays himself with a warmth and natural ease that makes one believe that, despite his unusual stature and voice, he could have been a strong and unconventional actor himself, had he chosen to do so.

All of these qualities make one both root for Shallow Hal and wish the final product were better than it is. Still, for all its virtues, Hal is not the Farrellys' best work. Though I appreciate that the screenplay does not attempt to explain how Robbins works his magic on Hal, the writers also neglect to address some of the particulars of Hal's condition that might be worth contemplating. Why, when Hal hugs Rosemary, does he not feel that he's hugging a 300-pound woman? What happens when they have sex? And how come his inner-beauty vision seems selective? Some women, like Rosemary and a trio of grotesques he dances with at a nightclub, blossom into their true, soulfully beautiful selves in his sight, while others, like his on-again-off-again crush neighbor Jill (Susan Ward), remain unchanged. Are we to believe that Jill is the same inside as out? A bigger problem from a comic standpoint is the Farrellys' insistence on stacking the deck too strongly in Rosemary's favor. It's apparently not enough that Rosemary is funny, charming and realistic about her self and her goals. She also has to volunteer at a pediatric burn unit playing with scarred children, and be a former Peace Corps volunteer who makes third-act plans to go help suffering earthquake victims in the South Pacific. You know, I'm perfectly capable of liking and rooting for someone just because they're nice; they don't have to be set up as the type of person you'd be a jerk not to like.

This portrayal of Rosemary as a too-good-to-be-true uber-altruist reflects a tendency in some of the later Farrelly films, one that seems to attempt to counteract potential accusations of political incorrectness that dogged them in the wake of Dumb & Dumber and Mary. One senses this tendency as well in their frequent casting of mentally and physically disabled actors in key roles. In the Siamese-twin comedy Stuck on You, Ray "Rocket" Valliere, born with Down's Syndrome, plays a buddy of the main characters, and here, Hal and Mauricio find an unlikely romantic rival in Walt (Rene Kirby), a dot-com millionaire who doesn't let his severe spina bifida (he walks on his hands) get in the way of his love of life and beautiful women. I have no problem with individuals with such conditions being cast in any film, but it the Farrellys' intention had been to show these folks as "just like us", it might have been more beneficial to allow them some wrinkles, some idiosyncracies, to be jerks and sexists and flat-out assholes like Mauricio. Instead, Walt, like Rosemary, is near-saintly, beloved by everyone he meets, and even volunteers his own time at the hospital. Granted, the Farrellys did come in for a lot of flack for their jokes about "cripples" and "retards" in There's Something About Mary, but comedy is nearly inherently predicated on stereotype and political incorrectness. And in that respect, what's funnier? A man with spina bifida who, hey gang, is just swell!, or Matt Dillon (in Mary) spiking a football on a special-needs kid's back with a brusque "Hah! Exceptional, my ass"? I think the answer to that question is brutally obvious, and the Farrellys would have done well to remember it when writing Shallow Hal.

Still, despite these issues, Shallow Hal remains one of the Farrelly brothers' better films. It can't hold a candle to Dumb & Dumber, but coming in second to the funniest film I've ever seen in a theater is scarcely something to be ashamed of. I watched this one with my girlfriend, who laughed at all the right spots and even cried a little at one or two points. For my part, I didn't shed any tears, but I can appreciate her reactions, and since I laughed a lot myself, I think we can call this one a successful date-night choice. If you give it a shot, you and your significant other might agree...no matter what you both happen to weigh.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #67

THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1996)

The Writers

David Sheffield, Barry W. Blaustein, Tom Shadyac and Steve Oedekerk; based on the motion picture written by Jerry Lewis and Bill Richmond

Why It's Here

I have never been one of those moviegoers who believes that remakes of classic films are an inherently bad thing. If it's okay for the BBC to favor audiences with a new presentation of a well-worn Austen or Dickens text every few years, what's so fundamentally awful about refashioning a great cinematic work with contemporary actors and updated special-effects technology? And let's be frank here. It's not like some of these films that are being remade couldn't stand a little improvement (I'm looking at you, Friday the 13th...). I do believe, however, that most people's knee-jerk objection to the present-day glut of "re-imaginings" is not a fundamental belief in the invalidity of such a concept, but rather that said re-imaginings are seldom re-imagined at all. Many contemporary remakes, rather than taking their source material's fundamental concepts and reworking them to suit the vision of a particular director, screenwriter or even actor, seem content simply to re-create memorable moments, lines or shots from the original film without adding anything new to the equation. Thus, we get stuck with contrivances like the final scene of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes re-do, which recycles the monkeyfied-national-monument finale of the original Apes picture with no regard to its lack of logic within the framework of the remake's plot. Some people say this notion reached its dubious apotheosis with Gus Van Sant's 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, but one has to at least give Van Sant credit for attempting a bold, if perhaps ill-advised, cinematic examination of the true nature of filmmaking genius (and kudos as well to Universal Studios for having the guts to let him spend $25 million of their money on such an experiment). Still, I feel that the best cinematic remakes are those which have truly re-imagined their source material, channeling the original film's narrative through a strong and distinctive filmmaking sensibility. David Cronenberg re-invented the hokey '50s science-fiction chestnut The Fly as both a gruesome essay on the wages of disease and a surprisingly potent love story, while John Carpenter's The Thing used modern special-effects technology to transform the original film's plant-man hybrid into a shape-shifting beast of terrifying versatility.

Even with all these possibilities, however, the notion of remaking a comedy seems dubious at best. After all, a comic story setup can only earn laughs of surprise once, and recycling jokes seems to be as clear a case of the law of diminishing returns as one could find. But it's not impossible to cleverly re-imagine a comedy, as David Sheffield, Barry W. Blaustein, Tom Shadyac and Steve Oedekerk prove with their 1996 re-invention of Jerry Lewis's most revered film, the 1963 Jekyll-and-Hyde riff The Nutty Professor. The 1996 version, which co-writer Shadyac also directed with supreme energy and a lightning-fast pace, takes the original film's source concept, in which a nerdy, lovesick college professor uses a chemical potion to transform himself into a "cool" but obnoxious alter ego, and takes it in directions intriguingly different from the Lewis film (which the comic also directed and co-wrote with Bill Richmond). The result is a film, I think, both narratively stronger and funnier than the original. The Nutty Professor, in fact, ranks high on my list of the laugh-out-loud funniest comedies produced in Hollywood in the last twenty years.

One of the major changes the Nutty Professor writers enacted can be gathered simply from looking at the film's poster. Realizing that it would be awfully been-there-done-that to simply have their lead actor, Eddie Murphy (in a career-best performance that won him a National Society of Film Critics best actor award), play yet another bespectacled nebbish, the writers decided to play up both the difference between the two personalities and the film's comic potential by making their nutty professor, Sherman Klump, a 400-pound behemoth of a man. Sherman is not nearly as garden-variety nerdy in his personality particulars as the original's Julius Kelp; he lacks Kelp's ridiculous bowl haircut, buck teeth and slightly crossed eyes, and his voice, unlike Kelp's nasal whine, has a pleasantly dignified, slightly Southern-inflected tone. But you whip 250 extra pounds on this professor, and the comic catastrophes virtually take care of themselves. The film opens with a chaotic carnival of destruction as hundreds of research hamsters escape from their lab cages and cavort through the campus of the college where Sherman teaches. We later discover, of course, that Sherman caused the rodent exodus when his prodigious rear end accidentally tripped the lever holding their cages closed. And so it goes throughout the film's first act, as we are invited to laugh as Sherman struggles to wedge himself into a chair in the dean's office, knocks over a jar of candy on his desk with his belly (he claims that he did this on purpose, as it "makes the table more festive, and the children, of course, they enjoy it"), and sings a Teddy Pendergrass bedroom anthem to a TV dinner revolving in his microwave.

In these early scenes, the film admittedly seems to be scoring some easy chuckles off of a fat man's troubles with a normal-sized world, but Sherman soon wins our sympathies through several smartly conceived moments and characters. First of all, the writers show how disrespectfully people treat Sherman just because of his weight; his students can't help but laugh when his trailing gut wipes away a long equation he's writing on the blackboard, and his own boss, the odious Dean Richmond (Larry Miller), calls him a "fat tub of goo" to his face. We also see the mixed dietary messages Sherman has gotten on the home front during a side-splitting scene in which Sherman joins his equally plus-sized parents, grandmother, brother Ernie and nephew Ernie Jr. for dinner. The entire family, with the exception of little Ernie Jr. (played by Jamal Mixon in a wordless but very funny performance), is played by Murphy in various Oscar-winning makeup disguises, and he joins forces with the writers to create a hilarious gallery of wholly distinctive comic characters. Papa Klump is a fat-and-proud sort who assures Sherman that "you could sew up your stomach and your asshole, and you're always gonna be fat", while Ernie Sr. tells Sherman he just needs to work out like him, that his own considerable bulk is "all muscle". Grandma, meanwhile, is slightly dotty but still with-it enough to recount her family with tales of talk show host Mike Douglas making her "moist" and about giving her dates "hot lovely relations" as a youngster. And this is all before the farting starts (and it's a testament to this film's comic command that the farts, which rarely work for me as a comic device, set me laughing every time I see this film). The one island of what passes for sanity in Sherman's family is Mama Klump, who dotes on her sons as a good mother should, gives as good as she gets against the vulgar Papa Klump and his constant "breaking gas", and assures Sherman that if he believes in himself, he can do anything. Sherman's ass may take after his dad's, but he gets all his sweet-souled spirit from Mama, and their post-dinner conversation is surprisingly touching.

So, too, is the following scene, where Sherman goes to the apartment of Carla Purdy (Jada Pinkett), a pretty young chemistry instructor with whom he has become smitten. He has been afraid to ask her out for fear of being laughed at, and when she confronts him about his wishes to request a date from her, his downcast eyes and almost ashamed mumblings have us pulling hard for him. This scene is not played for laughs. We share in his exhilaration when Carla accepts his proposition...and the scene is set for one of the most effective scenes in the film, one in which Sherman is treated with a cruelty to which the original film's Professor Kelp, for all the indignities he suffers, is never subjected. Sherman takes Carla to a popular nightclub called the Scream, where she is starting to be won over by Sherman's expertise and sweet simplicity, when onto the stage bounds Reggie Warrington (a memorably grating Dave Chappelle), a pitch-perfect send-up of hack stand-up comedians who alternates stupefyingly unimaginative scripted material ("Women be shoppin', baby!") with easy insults about his audience's appearance. Naturally, he has a field day with Sherman's girth, riddling him with yo-mama jokes, and we get an uneasy chuckle out of a few of those...but then Reggie spots Carla, and the laughs quickly dry up as Reggie lays into her for being on a date with Sherman ("Who is suckin' whose titties over here?"). The writers have set up our sympathies enough for Sherman that the scene, without spilling over into sappiness, has a surprising emotional charge (when we first saw this film in its original theatrical release, this moment actually moved my then-girlfriend to tears).

Therefore, we completely understand Sherman's motives when he downs a heretofore-experimental serum that shrinks his waistline, pumps up his testosterone levels, and transforms him into Buddy Love (the only role Murphy plays looking more or less like himself), who is every nightmarish alpha-male cliche brought to preening, egotistical life. At first, we share in Buddy's ecstasy as he purchases an all-spandex wardrobe and downs piles of hamburgers, all the while gushing about how great it is to "feel thin". Even when he meets Carla for the first time, he tempers his somewhat too-aggressive come-ons and sly jabs at his alter ego (telling her about Sherman's reaction to the Scream fiasco, he says it "tore his chunky ass up"), there's something appealing about him. The writers may not have intended this, but Buddy Love is a sly commentary on the ways in which society is ever predisposed to judge people on their appearance; we want so much to like Buddy because...well, look at how handsome he is, and what good shape he's in! A guy that looks that great has to be great! Right?

Wrong. It's upon the return visit to the Scream, at which Buddy exacts revenge on Reggie Warrington with a long string of insults, mostly about the comic's horselike teeth and ridiculous "shit-locks" hairdo, that Buddy's macho posturing crosses the line from amusing into obnoxious. It's there in his embarrassingly forced begging for Carla's clemency when he shows up late for their date, in his caustic cautionary note to a valet ("Every scratch in my car is a scratch in your ass"), and in his forced laughter at Reggie's really-not-that-funny act. When the confrontation finally comes to blows, it seems an inevitable outgrowth of Buddy's testosterone-drenched personality. Here the film reaches its major narrative hiccup (one which the writers admittedly inherited from Lewis and Richmond's original script). Why doesn't Carla simply run in the other direction when faced with the full gale-force awfulness of Buddy Love? The film pays some lip service to the notion that Carla can sense the true, decent Sherman buried inside the hideous Buddy, but it mostly serves to diminish our opinion of Carla, who seems willing to overlook an awful lot for the sake of being with a handsome, athletic guy. Of course, one could say that about a lot of men and women in the actual world, too, so in the process of harming the audience's opinion of their female lead, The Nutty Professor's writers nevertheless manage to strengthen their film's satirical underpinnings.

Of course, to Carla's credit, the bloom soon wears off the Buddy Love rose for her, too, as the writers unveil their film's other major deviation from the plot of the original Professor film. In Lewis's version, neither Kelp nor Buddy professed much awareness of the other's activities, and even when they did, they never attempted to actively interfere with the plans of the other. Not so with Sherman Klump, who finds in Buddy Love something the original film was sorely missing: an honest-to-God antagonist. Buddy, whose testosterone levels keep dangerously increasing the longer he stays in control of Sherman's body, soon grows weary of sharing a being with a chubby, sweet-souled sad sack, and he begins scheming (with the scientific expertise his other personality has bequeathed to him) of a way to eliminate Sherman for good. He attempts to destroy him professionally by taking complete credit for Sherman's "miracle" formula at a meeting with Dean Richmond and Harlan Hartley (James Coburn), a wealthy alumnus who plans to donate heftily to the college's science program; the meeting goes so well that the dean fires Sherman on the spot and gives his job to...Buddy Love. Buddy also sabotages Sherman's romantic ambitions by forsaking Carla for three bimbos he picks up at a hotel and then throwing a raucous party (at Sherman's apartment, natch) so that, when Carla comes by the next morning to apologize to Sherman about Buddy's undercutting him with Hartley, she finds the three bimbos in his bed and assumes that Sherman and Buddy are "sharing girls now". Finally, Buddy recalculates the formula into a super-formula that will allow him, if he drinks enough, to take over Sherman's body for good. He plans to dose himself with the formula at the school's alumni dinner, proving his mettle to the deep-pocketed Hartley and killing off his nutty professor-ness forever. I have commented in other reviews on this site about the way in which the lack of a strong antagonist frequently hurts the narrative drive of comedies. The Nutty Professor has no such problems. It's a rarity, a big-budget Hollywood comedy with genuine stakes for the characters, and with, in Buddy Love, a comic antagonist to rank with the greatest in cinema history. It all culminates in a brawling, effects-laden showdown at the alumni dinner, with Sherman's body morphing back and forth between his own self and Buddy's as they battle it out for control. Usually, heavy special-effects sequences kill the laughs in a comedy, but by the time The Nutty Professor reaches this boisterous climax, we've invested so much in Sherman Klump's welfare that the laughs stay big and the tension remains high.

The Nutty Professor admittedly wraps up its proceedings with the expected speech about believing in yourself and staying true to what you are, but somehow the message doesn't seem as hackneyed here as it does in other comedies...perhaps because the writers, through Buddy Love, have so memorably laid bare the horrors of the alternative. Indeed, in less skilled hands, the remake of The Nutty Professor could have ended up just like Buddy Love: a slicker and better-looking version of the original model, but crasser, louder and not nearly as lovable. Crass and loud it is, for sure, but thanks to the skilled screenwriting work of Sheffield, Blaustein, Shadyac and Oedekerk (not to mention Eddie Murphy's memorable panoply of comic characters), the film is funnier, faster and more emotionally engaging than its predecessor. It's a Professor that could teach a lot to any filmmaker attempting to tackle a remake of a well-loved original. Its lesson: Do it different and do it better, or don't do it at all.