consumed of late: Half-Nelson, the movie about a social studies teacher who is also a crack addict. His weirdly charismatic, stoic student Dre learns of, and eventually helps to facilitate, his habit. I think Half-Nelson and Freedom Writers should team up and go on a cross-country tour of various PTA meetings to make clear how uninteresting and dispassionate most teachers are compared to these two teachers-who-live-in-screenplays. Dan Dunne, brought to you courtesy of Ryan Gosling, is burnt out in, oh let me count ways: he does a lot of drugs and hates himself after having done them, thereby granting him reason to do more drugs to quell self-hatred; his departure from curricular standards begins w/ good intentions and ends up drowning in narcissism and "question-the-system" platitudes (I don't knock these platitudes but freshen em up a bit, eh?); he's older than he ever really wanted to be; etc. the thing i liked most about this movie was the way it was shot, the music, the glimpses into Dunne's interior self Gosling offers us - which in general I thought Gosling does a stellar job in a role defined by confined spaces - his facial expression when he nods and says, "yes it's for me" in that one scene i want go into detail about is affecting enough to make you want to talk to the screen: "no don't do that, bad teacher role model character Dunne - ask her to leave don't purchase illegal narcotics from her." But I think the movie on the whole left me with a sense that Mr. Dunne is a man with personal demons that tend to influence his behavior in unappealing, assholish ways (see: forcing himself on love interest until she has to punch him; dancing in inappropriate way with Dre before escaping to back stairs exit to do a line; failing to pick up on the one redemptive moment when a former student's father approaches him to let him know the student is a freshman at Georgetown and majoring in history - the father walks off when he realizes Dunne is dead-to-the-world drunk). That said, you still kind of root for him throughout the movie, even when he gets a nosebleed in class 'cause of too much coke and lies down like a petulant teenager rather than return to the petulant teenagers he's charged with helping to educate, empower, etc.
The Departed: how many head shots, with the Kennedyesque splatter of brain gunk that follw in their wake, does a movie need to make a point? it depends on the point. Scorcese's enraptured with the autonomy of violence, its tendency to circle back on those who wield it and even up the balance books in ritualistic ways. The Nicholson-Damon-DiCaprio triumvirate, with strong roles from Mark Wahlberg (again, I must say: what?) and Alec "That's not a pelt on my chest" Baldwin, attend to the pathways that violence establishes and rarely stray from their well-manicured boundaries. I would like to see Infernal Affairs, the original screenplay on which this is based. I'm guessing that the rather limpid exploration of doubleness and multiple identities in the Departed is made more of in the original - that would be a good thing. Anyway. Off we go.
