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On a purely cinematic metric, the movie looks like used socks, and the improvised dialogue is as inconsistent as any improvised dialogue (fitting for the movie that kicked off the Apatow-core wave of American comedy). There's also the unshakable feeling that the movie wants to have its cake and eat it, too, regarding its titular protagonist—stressing that it's okay that a 40-year-old man has chosen not to have sex for decades while at the same time leaning into the stereotypical mockery of sexual naivety, e.g. haha Jack's a virgin and he rides a bike to work (though it is an incredible grace note the film grants late in its runtime when, after over an hour of hectoring, Andy is allowed express that he has the hobbies that he does because he likes them, not because he's some lonely loser—this bike-riding reviewer can relate). That said, there's something legitimately fascinating about the thematic ground this movie, uh, plows. For all the movies out there featuring male heterosexuality, there are strikingly few films that are actually about male heterosexuality like this is. For all its glib vulgarity, The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a thoughtful and nuanced depiction of the various ways that heterosexuality and masculinity intersect and how this doesn't always (or have to) line up with the braying, hyper-phallic manifestation mandated by our social norms. In a way, this also accounts for the film's depiction of sexism and homophobia, two key components to the modern hetero-male code: the relentless, even panicked, impulse to define straight masculinity as not those other things—though again, here we get into the movie's simultaneous cake eating and cake having, as this exploration of sexism/homophobia is lamp-shaded but also used for jokes (most unfortunately, the extended "You know how I know you're gay" bit, which is unfunny in addition to homophobic, and I know that's the point, but also, come on, there's no way the movie isn't inviting us to laugh, too). So it's a mixed bag, but one that mixes toward positive for me. It helps that the movie's most inspired stylistic flourish—the (heh) climactic "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" dance sequence—is very inspired and unquestionably the correct note to end the movie on, so I'm sailing out of this movie on good vibes. Grade: B-
I'm not always a huge fan of the "early digital video = gritty realism" strain of American indie filmmaking, even when (as it is here) the digital video is more a budget decision than an aesthetic one. But that this movie involves a women trying to stay sober is such a cogent rationale for the aesthetic—I've never tried to kick a drug habit, but I can't imagine that the world looks any brighter than grainy digital video for someone who is—and I'm willing to swallow my general apathy for a lot of the film's visuals on that philosophical basis alone. Vera Farmiga (in one of her early roles) is excellent throughout, and the story is a stirring blend of Stephen-Crane-brand naturalism and Bruce-Springsteen-brand humanism, all of which I enjoyed quite a bit. Director/co-writer Debra Granik's other two films are far this movie's superiors (more so than either Winter's Bone or Leave No Trace, this feels improvised and documentary-like in a way that feels more aimless than constructive to the narrative), but letting the comparison to those others stick in my craw would be to miss all the wonderful little things about this one. Grade: B
As always, Assayas's film-industry satire feels both too easy and too inside-baseball, and I can't help but wish the movie wore its weirdness a bit more on its sleeve—the comparisons to Mulholland Drive I've seen are not inaccurate, and maybe it's unfair to want a movie to operate at Lynch's tenor (esp. a Lynch movie Irma Vep predates by five years), but still, can you imagine what it would be like if if the strangeness were dialed up just a degree or two here? That said, the ending is the perfect punchline—an arthouse director who, in his attempt to make a mass-appealing movie in the vein of a Van Damme vehicle, ends up making something even more aggressively experimental—while at the same time being a pretty searing indictment of sexual exoticism in film, which, after plowing through so many Disney movies this summer, I appreciate. And speaking of that, Maggie Cheung is beyond great playing the film's bizarro-world version of herself. Much love, Ms. Cheung. Grade: B+
Prior to watching this, I knew exactly one thing about A Few Good Men, and it was the same thing that everyone who hasn't seen A Few Good Men knows. So this whole 138-minute movie turned into this weird sort of jack-in-the-box of an experience, where I was waiting for "Pop! Goes the Weasel" to end and Jack Nicholson to jump out and say, "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!" The movie, running as it is on an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, is a real bastard about it, and it makes you wait until the very end, at which point it's immediately apparent why the moment is so iconic: the scene is by far the best thing in this movie. Outside of that, it's a decent-ish courtroom drama nearly ruined by the fact that Tom Cruise's character doesn't belong in this movie at all and that, by all reasonable standards, Cruise's and Demi Moore's characters should have been combined into one character. For a dramatist, Sorkin really isn't that efficient, and splitting the movie between Cruise and Moore gives both characters only half an arc apiece. Which is fine, I guess, but it never earns the almost ludicrously sincere starry eyes the film has for Cruise's character. Nor does, I'm afraid, the movie say anything very interesting about the military itself; the closest it gets is Nicholson's climactic speech where he uses a bunch of boilerplate propaganda about freedom and protection to justify the abusive behavior of the military toward its own, but Nicholson's character is much too obviously twirling his proverbial mustache for that to amount to anything insightful about the tension between (propagandistic) idealism and abuse in the armed forces. But yeah, "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!" is still pretty great. Grade: B-
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