Author: Bo List

Though it was directed by longtime indie icon Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, the Memphis-set Mystery Train) and was the recipient of the Grand Prix (i.e., second place) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Broken Flowers might be most notable as a key step in the ongoing evolution of Bill Murray.

Murray might be America’s most beloved comic actor. He got his start as Chevy Chase’s replacement on Saturday Night Live and went on to stardom with wisecracking or otherwise flamboyant turns in classic broad comedies such as Caddyshack and Stripes. But over the past decade, Murray has evolved into an art-film object of contemplation, his now-deadpan visage as expressively inexpressive as Buster Keaton’s once was.

Setting aside Wes Anderson’s listless The Life Aquatic, Broken Flowers completes a trilogy of sorts for Murray as a left-of-cinematic-center protagonist. In Anderson’s Rushmore and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Murray was an avuncular figure. The identification in those films was on the younger leads, Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fisher in Rushmore and Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte in Lost in Translation, both characters essentially stand-ins for the films’ respective directors. In those movies, Murray was idealized as a symbol of experience that ratified the younger characters’ alienation and embodied each film’s cross-generational utopianism.

Broken Flowers isn’t quite as romantic as Rushmore or Lost in Translation. Jarmusch is a generation older than Anderson or Coppola. At 52, he’s only a couple of years younger than Murray, and in his film it’s finally Murray’s character, aging lothario Don Johnston, with whom the camera identifies. Jarmusch (who worked with Murray in one segment of his short-film compilation Coffee & Cigarettes) has found the perfect vehicle in Murray, whose recent style of detached cool rhymes precisely with the director’s own aesthetic.

Broken Flowers is ostensibly a mystery. As the film opens, Murray’s Johnston, who built a fortune in the computer industry, sits in a bored stupor as his latest, much younger, girlfriend (Julie Delpy) walks out on him. But the same day he receives a letter – with a smudged postmark and no signature or return address – from a woman in his past who claims he has a 19-year-old son he never knew about.

Prompted by his mystery-novel-loving neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright in a warm, casual, deeply enjoyable turn), Johnston reluctantly sets out on a trip to locate the five women who could have fathered his child and to look for clues.

Despite the cross-country trajectory, Broken Flowers is as elliptical and minimalist as Jarmusch’s other films. Even so, the common suggestion that Broken Flowers could be the director’s most commercial film may be accurate. (At least it’s as commercial as a film dedicated to obscure French post-new-wave director Jean Eustache is likely to get.) For starters, it’s in color (not at all a given with this director), but more importantly, it’s packed with recognizable stars, including past paramours played by actresses such as Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange. In fact, this may be the first Jarmusch movie that won’t be primarily identified as a Jarmusch movie.

But it’s also a movie that, in its settings and characters, witnesses Jarmusch pushing at the boundaries of his perpetual weakness: a professional hipsterism that sometimes lapses into subcultural sentimentality. Rather than stay in his comfort zone, Broken Flowers is Jarmusch’s travelogue through modern America, with Johnston’s ex-girlfriends embodying a wide range of American life: a racecar driver’s widow in a red-state small town, a suburban realtor, a rural washout, and a limousine-liberal-ish new-age professional.

This type of journey might be liberating for a director usually more at home in urban dives, but Jarmusch seems as uncomfortable as his protagonist on this trip, recoiling from the variety of present-day America like Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka before a group of children, and what he presents is a bleak, sometimes grotesque vision. Jarmusch can’t help but make a mockery of suburbia, where Frances Conroy’s realtor lives in a subdivision called Pleasant Estates and makes her living selling “quality prefab homes.” Jessica Lange’s striving “animal communicator,” serving a string of no-doubt wealthy clients, seems to be living a similarly soulless existence. And Jarmusch (and Johnston) seem simply terrified of Tilda Swinton’s backwoods world. Only Sharon Stone, vivacious as the small-town widow with a sexually precocious teen daughter, challenges Johnston and Jarmusch for control of the movie.

But maybe Jarmusch’s alienation is part of the plan; maybe the character’s journey is as much the director’s. For most of the movie, as Johnston staggers reluctantly from woman to woman, place to place, Jarmusch matches him with a series of long, still takes broken up by fadeouts. But at the end, as Johnston’s torpor is broken, detachment gives way to desperation, physical stillness to action, and Jarmusch’s heretofore stationary camera takes flight as well in a swirling, fluttering motion that might be the most moving moment in the director’s oeuvre. In this instant, the resolution Broken Flowers finds – the act of overcoming detachment – may be more important than the one Johnston seeks.

– Chris Herrington

Four Brothers, based very loosely on the 1965 John Wayne western The Sons of Katie Elder, is set in the modern day, substituting lawless Texas for a mostly lawless Detroit. Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan) is a sweet old lady shopping for a Thanksgiving turkey in a corner market. Two thugs appear suddenly and gun the clerk and Evelyn down. Looks like an open-and-shut case of armed robbery. Or is it?

Evelyn, a tireless foster parent to dozens of children over the years, adopted the four that nobody else would take: ex-hockey-goon leader Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), unrepentant ladies’ man Angel (Tyrese Gibson), wannabe rock star Jack (Garrett Hedlund), and Jeremiah (Outkast’s Andre Benjamin), a business and family man who seems to be the only one of the four who hasn’t retained the rough edges of his upbringing. Two black and two white, these four characters, now adults, are united not by blood but by love for each other and the shared need to find out what really happened to their adoptive mother. The facts just don’t add up.

As the Mercer boys start to investigate Evelyn’s murder, it doesn’t take long for more violence to erupt, and it becomes clear that this brood shoots first and asks questions later, if at all. In this vision of modern Detroit, director John Singleton (who also produced Memphis director Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow) orchestrates extreme violence anywhere and everywhere: a restaurant, a high school basketball game, a city street. There is, as in our current political climate, no negotiating with terrorists. Likewise, there seems to be no trusting cops (one of them played by Hustle & Flow‘s Terrence Howard). Not only is there only a tepid investigation into Evelyn’s death, one of the cops assigned to the case is crooked and on the payroll of local gang lord Victor Sweet (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who may or may not be behind the murder.

Singleton’s direction is sure and strong, and he handles intimate, brotherly scenes as deftly as the action sequences (particularly one nail-biting icy-road car chase in a blistering snow). But sometimes the exposition fails us, and we don’t quite know where in the story we are or how we got there.

The performances are uniformly solid, particularly the less experienced Benjamin and Hedlund, who provide the few Mercer morals, and Flanagan, whose one scene and few flashbacks break our hearts for her loss. But I can’t help but think she would be mortified by the blood shed on her behalf or by how her sons turned out.

I don’t mind excessive violence as long as it is purposeful. In Singleton’s superior Boyz N the Hood, it makes a social point. In Pulp Fiction, violence is parodied. In Sin City, it is aestheticized. But here the violence only seems to prove Fiddler on the Roof‘s point that if everyone went by “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” there would be a bunch of blind, toothless people around.

Four Brothers, unlike previous Singleton efforts, is all bite and no sight. n

– Bo List

< So far this decade there have been at least nine Hollywood comedies to star at least two of the following five actors: Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, and Vince Vaughn. The media have lately dubbed this gaggle of actors the "Frat Pack," a moniker probably inspired by the Vaughn-Ferrell-Luke Wilson frat farce Old School, but one that makes them sound dumber and less engaging than they actually are.

At their best, these actors make broad, high-concept comedies that are brighter, funnier, and sunnier than the bleak Rob Schneider vehicles and Saturday Night Live spin-offs they get lumped in with. (Ferrell is an SNL graduate, but his star so exceeds other SNLers of his generation that lumping him into that comic category seems too limiting.) Still, these films function better as a collection of moments than as full-fledged movies and work best when they stay true to the comic ethos made famous by Seinfeld: “No hugging. No learning.”

Wedding Crashers, which stars Vaughn and Owen Wilson as a pair of divorce mediators who spend “wedding season” every year infiltrating ceremonies to romance horny bridesmaids, boasts the funniest trailers of the year. But if you’ve seen enough of these kinds of movies, you still fear that Wedding Crashers will scrap its surefire premise to make room for a drearily conventional plot. You worry that the good times can’t last with hugging and learning on the horizon.

In Wedding Crashers, this fear is only halfway fulfilled. The film does indeed dispatch its comically fertile premise early on, in 20 minutes of giddy, satisfying montage that ends with Wilson’s and Vaughn’s respective prey being twirled from the dance floor to the bedroom. Wilson’s and Vaughn’s characters prepare for “wedding season” the way some guys prepare for fantasy baseball – brushing up on the peculiar rules and customs of their chosen hobby, scouting wedding announcements for choice nuptials to attend, preparing pseudonyms and back stories to deploy, handicapping the quality of the food and liquor.

And though the chance to woo romantically primed women for one night of dishonest sex (using such tactics as dancing with the flower girls, making balloon animals for kids, and forcing fake tears at the “I do” moments to charm prospective targets) is the ostensible goal, you also get the sense that their excitement over wedding season runs deeper: It’s not just the women they crave but the weddings themselves, which really are the best and happiest parties. As Vaughn says to one of his soon-to-be-divorced clients, it doesn’t matter if the band’s any good, because music is in the air, and everyone is happy.

Wedding Crashers takes knowing shots at wedding culture (Wilson and Vaughn take side bets on which Bible verse a bridesmaid is about to read), but it also revels in the rituals. These guys seem as drunk on booze and finger food, ethnic customs and dancing (always, at the end, to “Shout!”) and loopy fellowship, as much as on the promise of bedding a bridesmaid.

Wedding Crashers could have spent the whole movie following Wilson and Vaughn to one wedding after another without thought to character development and left me happy, but instead it does exactly what you fear, exchanging its undeniable premise for a sketchy, familiar plot: Wilson falls for a bridesmaid at one wedding, where another bridesmaid (they’re sisters, natch) falls for Vaughn. Somehow they make it work. Mostly.

Credit is due to the Wedding Crashers‘ women, who are equal matches for the male stars in a way women rarely are in these movies. Rachel McAdams is suitably winning as Wilson’s straight-(wo)man love interest, charming him – and us – when she stifles giggles at her big sis’ wedding as the “sailing enthusiast” groom exchanges self-written vows with his “first mate.” But Isla Fisher, as the enthusiastic paramour Vaughn tries to rid himself of until, of course, he falls hard for her, is the real treat, bum-rushing the boys club with a movie-stealing performance of unabashed sexiness, uninhibited goofiness, and crazy-eyed zeal. She needs to become a “Frat Pack” regular, stat.

Of course, Wilson and Vaughn, direct partners on screen for the first time, help things along with their own chemistry, matching easygoing with tightly wound, Wilson’s beach-bum sunniness with Vaughn’s maniacal true-believer seriousness in the face of even the most outrageous situations.

There may not be individual moments in Wedding Crashers quite as guffaw-inducing as the best moments from such “Frat Pack” standouts as Old School and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, but outside of The Royal Tenenbaums (an obvious ringer) or maybe Meet the Parents, it’s the best overall film of the bunch.

In the end, the two sides of Wedding Crashers‘ personality – the irredeemable premise and the redemption-based plot – can’t quite connect: Good-girl McAdams melting for Wilson moments after he admits to cruising funerals for easy play rings false. But a few other missteps aside (including an unfortunate subplot with McAdams’ and Fisher’s surly gay brother), getting there is a winning ride, making Wedding Crashers probably the best mainstream comedy of the year.

– Chris Herrington

Imagine, if you will, that you live a tightly controlled life: You have a diet that is monitored with each bathroom release and you work a meaningless job you neither understand nor enjoy. Everybody seems to be wearing the same outfit, sexual contact is forbidden, and your only source of introspection is your regular visit to the company shrink. That said, I imagine there are some readers out there for whom this happens to be true. Truer still is that there are those whose daily aspirations revolve around the prospects of winning the lottery. For the rest of you, agreeable escapist entertainment can be found with The Island.

Ewan McGregor is Lincoln Six Echo, a clone (shhh … don’t tell him he’s a clone. He doesn’t know.) living in a large beachside facility he believes is one of the last refuges from a great contamination that has destroyed all life on Earth. His life is a simple one, consisting of regulated food, mindless work, and impeccable exercise. And yet, this is not enough for Lincoln. He questions. He wonders. He’s curious. One day he finds a bug in a boiler room and is fascinated. Bugs are supposed to be extinct. What gives? Surely the government isn’t lying to him.

Scarlett Johansson is sexy lady clone Jordan Two Delta, friend to Lincoln and latest winner of the lottery. This lottery owes more to Shirley Jackson’s sinister short story than to Powerball, and in a key and suspenseful early scene, Lincoln discovers the nefarious truth behind the winnings and manages to escape the facility with Jordan in tow. The escape is reminiscent of the old joke about the Polish Navy having a submarine with a screen door in that this facility that is so regulated and secure has an easily accessible boiler room with a conspicuous exit into the real world. But never you mind that.

The real world, as it turns out, is 2019 United States. Fast rocket motorcycles, electromagnetic monorails, and the latest Microsoft all abound, and Lincoln and Jordan quickly learn (via help from the adorably scummy Steve Buscemi) that they must find the people from whom they were cloned in order to figure out their destinies and escape their pursuers. But the malevolent Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), who is responsible for their cloning and the poor ethics behind it, has employed expert bounty hunter Albert Laurent (imposing Djimon Hounsou) to track them down at all costs.

Director Michael Bay, responsible for some of modern moviegoing’s most reprehensible entertainment (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor), actually acquits himself (somewhat) of years of tasteless exploitation by imbuing his trademark car chases and sun-drenched, almost pornographic cinematography on an intelligent premise and clever execution. Little distinguishes this from other, better science fiction, but with the classy cast (including Michael Clarke Duncan as Starkweather), you have at least a clone of a good time.

–

For anyone born before say, 1980, the following words are enough to strike fear and giggles into the hearts of lads and lasses everywhere: “There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going. There’s no knowing where we’re rowing. Or which way the river’s flowing. Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a blowing?” This is the chant that a deranged-looking Gene Wilder uttered as his magic gondola sailed down the chocolate river in 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It is a film that has delighted and spooked children for more than 30 years.

Hop into my gondola, Memphians, and I’ll tell you a little about a guy named Wonka.

He owns a big candy factory, and nobody’s been in it for 15 years. And yet, it’s been producing candy all this while. But how, if nobody comes in or out, does the candy get made? Little Charlie Bucket (Finding Neverland‘s wonderful Freddie Highmore) would like to know. He’s a poor boy living on the outskirts of the Wonka factory in a strange, dilapidated house where his four ancient grandparents sleep in one large bed (two at the foot and two at the head). One day, after years of silence, Wonka announces to the world that he is putting five “golden tickets” into his delicious Wonka Bars, and the children who get them will be treated to a tour of the Wonka factory and vie for a chance to win a special prize at the end of the visit.

Needless to say, Charlie gets one of the tickets, as do a quartet of prepubescent horrors: fat and gluttonous Augustus Gloop, spoiled rich kid Veruca Salt, competitive gum-smacker Violet Beauregarde, and the video-game-obsessed brat Mike Teavee. Wonka (played by Johnny Depp) doesn’t like these kids. He has unique ways of expressing disdain for each. And, in fact, each of the kids leaves the tour early, picked off by their own excesses. (Augustus falls into the chocolate river, Violet becomes a giant blueberry, etc.) We know throughout the movie that Charlie will make it all the way based on his kindness and manners. But what is the special prize?

Thirty-four years after the original film, director Tim Burton has reinvented the Wonka legend (originating in the 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl) with several more flights of fancy through dark territory. Not that the original film wasn’t dark; in fact, one of its chiefest pleasures was its creepiness. But unlike the storybook whimsy of the first film, the new Factory (named after the book and not the earlier film) is more comfortable with the funny and with the not-so-funny. It’s more human. And yet, its centerpiece – Wonka himself – isn’t quite human at all.

While Charlie is more fleshed out and real than the moppet of the first film, Wonka himself is a bizarre amalgam of Michael Jackson and Oscar Wilde – only more androgynous than Michael and dandier than Oscar (imagine that!). Whereas Wilder’s Wonka was mischievously wise, Depp’s is neurotic. He has family issues – he can’t bring himself to say “parent” – from a troubled childhood with an overbearing dentist father (played by Burton idol Christopher Lee). Wonka is not merely whimsical here. He is weird.

Some may consider Depp’s creation a miscalculation. But what kind of person could create a factory of such imagination and craziness and not be somehow crazy and imaginary in the process? The factory is a marvel – very much like the one of the earlier film at first but more expansive and magical as it goes along. There are special effects now that were undreamt in 1971, and they are put to enchanting use. (There is a violent squirrel attack that looks as real as any squirrel attack I have endured.)

What exactly Dahl’s book and this film promotes in terms of childhood virtues is elusive. Is it moderate appreciation of candy? Respect for imagination? This is unclear. Crystal clear however is this: Quibble as you may, this is the most imaginative and delightful film so far this summer. It is a feast for the eyes and ears. (The Oompa Loompas, Wonka’s trusty and diminutive servants, all played by Deep Roy, engage in dazzling production numbers, each themed around the exit of a bratty child. The horn section really soars.) And the chemistry between the strange Wonka and the responsible Charlie is touching and, at times, heartbreaking. This is Burton’s most complete and rewarding film in years, and certainly in a year full of Fantastic Fours and Bewitcheds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory succeeds as the most reverential and enjoyable remake.

See it. – Bo List

In 1961, Marvel rejuvenated itself with a revolutionary comic that, not to allude to the contemporary religious semi-cult, “focused on the family.” A dysfunctional one at that. Scientist Reed Richards was the father figure, with Sue Storm as the matriarch. Sue’s younger brother Johnny was the child (though in his 20s), and Ben Grimm was like a rough but lovable uncle. When papa Reed took them all up into space, they became irradiated by mysterious cosmic energy, and they crashed to Earth – with super powers. Reed (aka Mr. Fantastic) could stretch his body to seemingly any length or shape. Sue (the Invisible Girl) could become invisible. (When this power became too limited and tiresome, she gained the power to create force fields.) Johnny (the Human Torch) could catch and shoot fire. Ben (the Thing) grew into a massive, rocky hulk. They became: the Fantastic Four.

The FF’s chief nemesis: Dr. Doom, ruler of the mysterious European country Latveria. (Think Romania meets Bavaria meets pre-WWII Germany.) Once a friend and college roommate of Reed, he suffered a scar on his face from an experiment gone awry and, being vain, decided to become a masked villain and rule the world. This was during the Cold War, before it was fashionable to try and take over the world through diplomacy or commerce, don’t ya know.

A fantastic 44 years later, 20th Century Fox has cooked up an hour and 46 minutes of constant nonsense unworthy of its simplistic source material which, incidentally, was a childhood favorite of mine. Alas, a series of miscalculations has made this endeavor a terrible failure. Foremost, unproven director Tim Story is at the wheel. Story is known primarily for the flaccid action comedy Taxi and the endearing situational comedy Barbershop. Whatever the producers saw in his previous work that led them to select Story is baffling.

Likewise, what’s up with this cast of TV people? Ioan Gruffudd (Mr. Fantastic), known chiefly as A&E’s Horatio Hornblower and Lancelot in the recent King Arthur, is a fine actor but with no marquee value. That would be left to Michael Chiklis (the Thing), if by marquee value you mean “star of F/X’s The Shield,” and Jessica Alba, whose talents seem more apropos a Maxim magazine cover than as legitimate scientist Sue Storm. Torch-y Chris Evans at least had a film success with the recent Cellular, but does anyone even know who he is? Dr. Doom is played by Julian McMahon of F/X’s Nip/Tuck. Darth Vader, he ain’t. I guess I am not criticizing the film and the acting (though that is to come) as much as I am chastising the marketing and the producing end. It would have benefited the endeavor to have a George Clooney attached (and he was, at one time, interested in Mr. Fantastic) or, hell, Meg Ryan as the Invisible Girl. She could use a career rev-up.

But what name star would have said yes to this tripe? The plot, which approximates the original, relies on the nefarious villainy of Dr. Doom, but there is no motive for his attempted destructions of the team. In one scene, he sits in a diner trying to trick the self-pitying Thing (looking like a clumpy mound of melted cheddar cheese) into changing back into Ben Grimm and getting even with Reed for his disfigurement. But why? To what end? He has no aim beyond the “Bwah-ha-ha”-ing of revenge. This is no “super” villain. At least Lex Luthor has an exit plan.

If there are joys to be found here, they are gratuitous. Alba (24, but looking 12) creates force fields by sticking her chest way out, and she can only be invisible at first while naked. (Hoot! Holler!) Evans has about nine minutes on screen wearing nothing but a pink ski jacket around his shame (drop the jacket!), and we are to believe he was a NASA hotshot. Gruffudd and Chiklis acquit themselves best with some real acting, though the Thing would have been better served by CGI effects than the latex Halloween costume they have him in. McMahon acts really, really hard (as evidenced by many painfully earnest close-ups) but, like Dr. Doom, to no apparent end.

Though the film sets itself up for a sequel, I wouldn’t expect one. While it raked in an astonishing $56 million in its opening weekend, I predict that word-of-mouth will sour its subsequent weeks.

Looking for some “fantastic” entertainment about a superhero family? I suggest something incredible: The Incredibles. n

More Four

Eleven years ago, another Fantastic Four was made.

In 1994, shlockmeister Roger Corman produced a film version of Fantastic Four. As legend has it, the production company had long ago purchased the rights to make an FF film and would lose said rights if they didn’t make a film by 1995. Unable to cough up the dough for a big-budget blockbuster, they hired Corman to make a cheap Fantastic Four, so that they could hold onto the rights for a later, real movie, never intending to release the cheap-o version … unbeknownst to the entire production team! The budget? A measly $2 million, which sounds like a lot to me and you but in Hollywood terms is nothing.

Eleven years later, 20th Century Fox has a Fantastic Four – this one budgeted at $100 million. No better than the first, one wonders how the $98 million difference could have been better spent. Regardless, the 1994 film is a cult classic, with bootleg copies available on eBay and other Internet sin dens that proffer illegal, copyrighted material. (Shame on you, eBay, but thanks for the copy!) The plot approximates the comic book and the 2005 film, though the accident that gives the team its superpowers is caused by the nebbish “Jeweler,” who replaces the power gem in Reed Richards’ spaceship with … Folgers Crystals. (Just kidding … I don’t remember what it was.)

The biggest name in this FF was Jay Underwood, who was not bad in 1986’s The Boy Who Could Fly but is terrible here as the Human Torch – all yelling and whooping. His trademark battle cry “Flame on!” seems better suited for a Gay Pride march than a comic book. The cheese of his smile could crack glass. Better acting is provided by soap actress Rebecca Staab, whose wholesomeness is so over-the-top she looks like a porn actress cleaned up for serious “acting.” The Thing’s outfit doesn’t look much worse than Michael Chiklis’ suit, though an inferior actor is inside it. (I bet it wasn’t air-conditioned like Chiklis’ duds.) Speaking of duds, the best moment in the film is when Ben’s blind girlfriend Alicia is chloroformed. We see a point-of-view shot of her world going hazy until she blacks out. But she’s blind! Blind, I tell you!

Terrible but fun, this FF makes Daredevil look like Citizen Kane, but it’s oh so good to watch and mock. n – BL

In War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise’s Ray Ferrier emerges from the first alien attack with a white, ash-covered face. After escaping harm, he returns home, shaken and in shock. His children, unaware of any trouble, ask what has happened, but he doesn’t have any words for it. The attack was too horrifying, too terrible. All he can do is gather them and move them out of the house. But where? Where can they run when the terror is seemingly everywhere? They get in a car and drive, but the carnage is all around. When Ray’s daughter asks, “Is it the terrorists?” what we are seeing is an update of a classic story that cannot possibly be told without acknowledging the deep trauma of 9/11 and its ramifications.

War of the Worlds has fascinated us for more than 100 years. Set initially in Victorian England, H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel chronicles the landing of Martians and their swift takeover of the world in giant “tripods.” Some credit this book as the beginning of science fiction. Forty years later, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre performed an unusual and updated Halloween interpretation, retooled as a radio news broadcast. Even though there were numerous disclaimers within the program, there were pockets of hysteria across the country. (My grandmother fondly recalled hearing this as a girl. She wasn’t fooled.) In 1953, Hollywood offered another update, this time with the atom bomb as the preferred weapon against the enemy.

There’s an interesting pattern to this history. Each update of the story emerges from the specter of social disaster. In 1938, it was the threat of World War II. In 1953, it was a response to nuclear paranoia and the Cold War. Now it is terrorism.

Anyhoo … Ray is a bad single dad. His stately ex-wife drops the kids off at his messy New Jersey home for the weekend, and Ray is reminded, yet again, of how disconnected he is from their lives. Son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) is a rebellious teen, and daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is precocious and well-spoken, if phobic. But family divisions are easily forgotten (temporarily) when aliens are attacking, and it’s not long before the arrival of intergalactic evildoers interrupts domestic squabbles everywhere. Instead, though, of arriving from another planet, they’re already here – deposited millions of years ago for an eventual uprising. They are horrible: giant three-legged metal monsters that zap with death rays and suck blood out of people. Ray and family essentially spend the film running until the final showdown, which, if you have read the book or seen the ’53 film, you know does not involve humans.

In the wake of 9/11, director Steven Spielberg has broken his pledge to never direct a film with bad aliens in them. The truth is that things that are alien to us are just as likely to be as bad as we are ourselves. Our panic and our response to terror must be examined. And so it is in this slick and satisfying remake. The destruction of the world looks quite real, and the aliens and their vessels look quite alien – retro, almost, which is fitting in a film that is the third remake of a science-fiction story (fourth, if you include the late-1980s TV series which was bad but awesome). By taking an almost exclusive Cruise-centric point of view, the film becomes very personal, and we can see our own responses and choices within his. And it’s not all running from aliens. The scene where Ray realizes he doesn’t know any of his daughter’s favorite lullabies is more devastating than the several human-vaporizations that preceded it. Likewise, when we first see the aliens, they are meticulously poring through a family photo collection. Creeeeeepy! And yet strangely real. They’re so careful with the photos. Weird. Alien.

Neither as grand in scope as it could be (what? no appearance by the president?) nor as suspenseful as it wants to be (Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws had the good sense to wait a full hour before showing us the shark), War of the Worlds still succeeds as the kind of social catharsis that can only be achieved by watching the world end. As with 1994’s Jurassic Park, you can tell that Spielberg sped this through production, but he shows here that he’s better at speeding than he was then. His touches are everywhere, and his sentimentality is used as sparingly as John Williams’ restrained and alarming score (whose sounds are sometimes indistinguishable from alien noises). Cruise, likewise, succeeds with the less-is-more approach. Seems like his apocalyptic personal life could take a few notes from the notion of subtlety and restraint. n – Bo List

By now, it should come as no surprise that a thin TV series like Bewitched would be made into a feature film with a handful of Academy Award winners and bankable box-office stars. Hollywood has mined all kinds of sources, including (but not limited to) Car 54, Where Are You?, Sergeant Bilko, Starsky and Hutch, and maybe 11 bad Saturday Night Live skits. There’s an I Dream of Jeannie coming up, not to mention The Dukes of Hazzard and Miami Vice. I can’t imagine that it will be long before The Facts of Life, Manimal, and Diff’rent Strokes get silver-screen treatment. It’s easy to understand that, in 1996, Steve Martin was slumming when he made Bilko or why Lorne Michaels would desperately seek a minor hit out of an SNL franchise. We all need money. We all want a hit. But what on earth would motivate two superstars at the height of their game (Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell) or two classy legends (Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine) to an overlong sitcom mess like Bewitched? Is there no art?

The premise of the TV show was that an ordinary, handsome advertising agent meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman, and once they’re married, she reveals that she’s a witch. To make the marriage work, she tries to keep her sorcery to a minimum, but this is the source of wacky marital conflicts between Darrin and Samantha ‹ not to mention Samantha’s wacky relatives: colorful mother Endora, flamboyant Uncle Arthur, etc. Samantha was played by the stately beauty Elizabeth Montgomery, and over the show’s eight-year run, two actors played Darrin (Dick York and Dick Sargent). Endora was stage and screen grand dame Agnes Moorehead and Uncle Arthur was the incomparably “festive” Paul Lynde.

In the film, Kidman plays Isabel, a naive witch deciding arbitrarily that she wants to be normal. Michael Caine is her scamp of a father, Nigel, who insists that her conversion will be temporary, since she’s not very good at mundane and frustrating tasks. Across town (Hollywood, that is), has-been actor Jack Wyatt (Ferrell) is offered the historically thankless role of Darrin in a TV Bewitched remake. To preserve his celebrity, he insists on an unknown to play Samantha. When he stumbles upon Isabel at a bookstore, he can’t help but be wowed. She looks like Elizabeth Montgomery, and most importantly, she’s got Montgomery’s trademark magical nose-twitch.

Brief summary of subsequent plodding (I mean plotting):

Jack is a jerk, but Isabel falls for him anyway. She turns out to be a pretty good Samantha, even as Jack tanks with test audiences. A colorful stage actress, Iris Smythson (MacLaine) is cast as Endora (MacLaine as Endora ‹ inspired or obvious? I dunno, but it’s perfect). Nigel falls for her and suspects she might be a witch too. Jack and Isabel clash over her talent and his manners, etc., while Isabel’s real magic causes all kinds of zany hijinks. I think there’s some influence from hot screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) in that his films specialize in inverted introspection and clever reexaminations of reality vs. fantasy. Alas, there is no wit here. This Nora and Delia Ephron-penned effort is like a Paul Rudnick (In and Out, The Stepford Wives) rough draft ‹ all cheap one-liners, no sustained comic momentum. When Jack announces early on (sans magical influence) that he wants three trailers, a leopard, and a two-story cake every Wednesday (aka “Cake Day”), we know that only silliness will abound. When the best thing about the movie is the scant-seen Nigel/Iris romance, we know that not a lot of thought went into the writing of the script, no matter how clever the idea. At least the premise was interesting. Instead of doing a flat remake of the sitcom, it’s a movie about remaking the sitcom.

But Ferrell is allowed free comic range (not good with the unsubtle comic), and Kidman doesn’t seem to know whether she’s in an homage or a spoof or a drama or what. The film’s climax is the inevitable appearance of Uncle Arthur, badly caricatured by Steve Carell. Pish.

Both Kidman and Ferrell seem determined to squander the interest of film audiences everywhere by too many movies and too few of them good. (Combined, they’ve six films so far this year.) Bewitched could have been a good step for both, but instead it leaves the audience merely bothered and bewildered. ‹ Bo List

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David LaChapelle’s new film, Rize, is a documentary that tries to be more than just an exposé on the newest outlet for the frustrations of the poor. The subject of the film is krumping, a dance form that began as humble hip-hop entertainment and has slowly transcended its origins. To capture the art, LaChapelle takes us through the evolution of krumping, including the life stories that feed this dance and straying into questionable musings on the nature of the African-American experience.

Krumping began as clowning. The film follows a Los Angeles performer named Tommy Johnson who performs as Tommy the Hip-Hop Clown. Tommy used dancing as a part of his routine while entertaining at birthday parties in poor L.A. neighborhoods. Slowly, as his business expanded, Tommy began to hire kids to perform with him. They took Tommy’s dancing, a mixture of various hip-hop forms, and expanded it.

But some of Tommy’s older dancers grew tired of using dance just to entertain. They made it clear in the film what they think of Tommy. He may have given them the idea, but Tommy only invented clowning; they created krumping. Krumping is far more serious and aggressive than clowning, accentuating the wild, almost ecstatic quality of the movements.

For the dancers, krumping has many functions. Krumping, according to the film, is one of the few positive outlets available to these kids. It provides them with a chance to safely release their anger; it creates a community of dancers who become family; and it helps young people avoid getting involved in gangs. In the neighborhoods where they grew up, the dancers explain, you’re either a gangster or a clown.

Rize is at its most moving when LaChapelle intertwines the story of krumping with the realities of the dancers’ lives. They struggle with broken families, drugs, and gang violence, finding expression for these struggles in their dance. It’s the age-old story of African-American art, from the blues to hip-hop.

LaChapelle goes even deeper when he intersplices scenes from L.A. riots, tribal dances in Africa, and spiritual ecstasies in black Baptist churches with the footage of krumping. But the association is hard to swallow. The dancers wear face makeup because they started as clowns, not tribesman.

As a filmmaker, LaChapelle, a well-known fashion photographer and music-video director, still has a few things to learn. The film cannot find a comfortable way to end, and the mixture of hand-held low-quality footage with glossy MTV-style shoots is awkward. The strength of the movie is its source material, the undeniable appeal of seeing people who have next to nothing create works of power and originality. �

‹ Ben Popper

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p>In 1989, Tim Burton astonished and excited a new generation of comic-book fans (and the moviegoing public in general) with his stylish and striking reinvention of the character of Batman. His was a dark and intense hero, played with equal parts restraint and aplomb by typically comedic Michael Keaton. Batman Returns elaborated on Burton’s dark visions with more fun and more thrills. Those were good Bat-days. But then Joel Schumacher came along to malign the next two films, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, and by 1997, the franchise looked dead in the water.

Enter the 21st century. Accordingly, we need a hero for the times, which, if you haven’t been reading the paper, are dark and uncertain. Our government has not been this untrustworthy since Nixon, and there are “evildoers” hiding behind every foreign corner.

As Batman Begins er, begins, we are introduced to young Bruce Wayne, son and heir to Gotham City’s humanitarian billionaire Thomas Wayne. We see Bruce endure two childhood traumas: first, a fall into a well that becomes a harrowing bat attack, and then the murder of his parents at the hands of a mugger (just the kind of impoverished soul that the good Thomas Wayne was devoting his money toward helping).

Fast forward a few years. Bruce has grown up to be played by steely Christian Bale and is a prisoner in an unnamed Asian country’s torture camp. He is there by choice, to learn the limits of human fear and the extent to which darkness will rule a man’s heart. While there, he is mentored by a league of mercenaries, led by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), and is taught the ways of combat and discipline. When he refuses to kill an enemy of the league, they turn on him. He escapes — but not without the warning that his compassion will one day undo him.

When Bruce returns to Gotham, he assumes his rightful place as the unofficial prince of the city — a playboy billionaire with the world as his oyster. By day, that is. By night, he studies the slimy workings of the corrupt city and devises a means by which he can continue his father’s work to better its people. He must be more than a man; he must be a symbol. A symbol of fear — his fear. A bat.

That’s the film’s thrilling first half. What follows is a slightly muted, slightly anticlimactic, slightly lessened second half. Wayne becomes Batman and works to stop the city-conquering plans of mob boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) and the evil psychiatrist-turned-villain, the Scarecrow (erotically dire Cillian Murphy). We are introduced, along with the villains, to the elements by which we recognize and appreciate Batman and his legend: the cape, the cowl, the gadgets, the Bat Signal, the Batmobile. Each element is familiar and, when tweaked, made more real than in previous incarnations. This is not your older brother’s Batman. This is new.

Once the introductions are made, the film devolves a bit. The thrilling hand-to-hand combats of Bruce’s prison training water down when transferred to the streets of Gotham. The Scarecrow is fascinating when brought into the story yet somehow fades away without resolution. Likewise Falcone. Likewise the nefarious plot (to turn all of Gotham mad). Likewise Ducard’s revenge and comeuppance. The latter takes place on a speeding monorail, and like all of the previously mentioned details, made me long for that character’s earlier moments. There was an attention to detail in that first half that seems taken for granted in the second.

Did I mention that there’s no sex? I hear there’s an R-rated version (this one is PG-13) out there with some Christian Bale/Katie Holmes (she plays assistant D.A. and childhood pal Rachel Dawes) sex in it, but it was not released so that the younger market would be tapped. Alas. And alas, Katie Holmes looks 12 when trying to posture as a high-powered city attorney. At least Michael Caine (as butler Alfred) and Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) are on hand to lend some class and weight.

Did I mention that the first half was great? That the second half does not match or improve upon the first does not diminish this film as an accomplishment: a resurrection of a fallen film franchise and an anti-hero for the 21st century. At this film’s end, another Batman nemesis is alluded to, and I imagine that by the time the Bale Batman encounters his Joker, this series will have ironed any wrinkles from the cape.

REVIEW by Bo list

I’ve spent too much time in line at the grocery store lately and have not been able to escape the latest alleged celebrity romances. They run from the wholesome (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner) to the bizarre (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes) to the hotly intriguing (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie). Ben and Jen seem to have something real going on, whereas there has been much publicity surrounding the latter couples regarding their legitimacy. Are Tom and Katie posing as lovebirds just to promote their upcoming movies (War of the Worlds and Batman Returns, respectively)? Has the media created the “Brangelina” romance out of nothing? Consider the two couples’ contrasting methods of dealing with the attention: Cruise jumps up and down on Oprah’s couch while proclaiming his schoolboy passions, while Pitt steers clear of the fracas. When all is said and done, I expect that Brad and Angelina will turn out to be quite real, while Tom and Katie will conveniently break up once their movies open and Katie’s celebrity is properly expanded. But the real question is: What does this do to their movies? Mr. and Mrs. Smith opened very well at the box office. As for the other films, time will tell.

What is certain after a viewing of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that, off-sceen or on, Brad and Angelina have considerable chemistry. In fact, if there are two people on earth who should be having sex, shouldn’t it be Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie? They are almost mythologically beautiful; their love would transcend time and space all the way to Olympus, where it would burn forever. It would … well, never mind. I digress. Anyway, my point is that real or no, concocted or conceived, “Brangelina” works.

Our tale begins in a marriage counselor’s office. The eponymous couple are having some marital difficulties. The spark is gone. Five (or six) years after they married, John and Jane Smith just don’t have it anymore. Maybe it’s the sex. Maybe it’s communication. And maybe it’s their secret double lives. They are both assassins without the other knowing it. Five or six years of lies and “weekend business trips” and hidden weapons and such have eroded their interest in each other. They’re in a rut.

Begin end of rut: Both Mr. and Mrs. Smith are instructed by their respective agencies to take out the same target. When they foil each other’s hit and figure out who ruined their mark, they figure out (incorrectly) that their marriage must have been a scam to the other. Begin fireworks. Or, rather, gunshots. Both accomplished mercenaries, they are adept at a number of fighting techniques and spare none on each other, from driving each other off the road to gunplay to crashing through glass to good, old-fashioned drop kicks. It’s a shame their counselor couldn’t be on hand with those foamy wiffle bats for them to use instead, but then where’s the fun in that? Anyway, it’s not long before the weapons are down because, you know, with all those bullets and knives and explosives, it’s hard not getting turned on. Their house destroyed and their covers blown, there’s nothing left to do but “it.” The sparks are back, baby! But not so fast. Neither of the Smiths’ agencies is pleased that their star agents are married to competing vigilantes, and eventually these expert assassins become targets of their opposing employers. Can love last with a bounty on your head? Will the Smiths live to love another day?

Some critics are dismissing this film as flimsy, popcorn pap. And maybe it would be with lesser players or a less apt director. Doug Liman harnesses his stars’ energy like Edison with electricity. The sexual tension is matched only by the wit and specificity of the beautifully choreographed domestic violence (which would be horrifying in a battered-wife Lifetime movie, but is hilarious here). Pitt is able to burnish his trademark casual, sexy wit while Jolie smolders with her sexxxxxxy knowing smiles – each mannerism and glance and touch a hot complement to the other. And all of this takes place as if the car chases and explosions and skyscraper falls weren’t even taking place around them.

Flimsy, maybe. But you’ll never notice how thin the material is because it’s such enormous fun. In fact, it might even put a little fire back in your marriage. Now, if only Tom and Katie would start beating the crap out of each other. – Bo List

Dreams are at the center of Robert Rodriguez’s new film, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl. The protagonist, a shy young boy named Max (Cayden Boyd), keeps a journal of his dreams, which star Shark Boy (Taylor Lautner) and Lava Girl (Taylor Dooley). But Max has trouble keeping his fantasies separate from reality and becomes a target for bullies at school. There’s trouble at home as well. Max’s father is a bit of a dreamer himself, and Max’s mother wants her son to shape up. Max is ready to give up dreaming when the two superkids, Shark Boy and Lava Girl, appear and take him to Planet Drool.

In true Freudian form, the problems from Max’s real life have taken on a life of their own in his dream world. The bully from his class becomes the archvillain Minus, spreading darkness across Planet Drool. Max’s teacher, Mr. Electricidad, becomes the vile henchman Mr. Electric, and Max’s crush becomes the Ice Princess, who helps him save the day. Max’s adventures eventually explode into the real world, and his dreams teach everyone to follow their own.

The film – its characters were created by Rodriguez’s 7-year-old son Racer – is an adamant defense of dreams against all odds. The film is a bit didactic in this regard, and it suffers the pros and cons of its dreamlike state and child author. Watching the film is like listening to someone else talk about their dreams, disjointed and much more vivid to the teller than to the audience. On the other hand, the use of such a simple script and dream logic might make the serious childhood issues like bullying, divorce, and loneliness all the more potent for the kids watching.

Where the film suffers is in its use of 3-D technology. In Spy Kids, a trilogy of kids’ action films Rodriguez directed, he handled the 3-D scenes well. In this film, they seem forced and gimmicky at best. Not only is the technology unimpressive, large portions of the film force the viewer to use their 3-D glasses even when nothing of extra-dimensional interest is occurring.

Kids may enjoy the plot, but The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl will become grating pretty quickly to any adult. Rodriguez would be better served writing his own films and encouraging his son to follow his dreams off-screen for a little while longer. n – Ben Popper

A s Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith brings George Lucas’ critic-proof prequel trilogy to his beloved original Star Wars series to a (can I say merciful?) close, one fact has become clear: Lucas doesn’t seem to understand what’s best about his own work. His constant refrain in the press interviews that have accompanied this current trilogy has been that he had to wait 20 years to make these films because he needed technology to catch up to the movies in his head. He says that film is morphing from a photographic medium to a painterly one and offers up these movies, essentially digital animation with a few human actors, as an introduction to a brave new world.

But if the movies really are becoming a painterly medium, then Lucas himself is more Thomas Kinkade than Van Gogh, and the newfound freedom to convert the ersatz pulp-sci-fi visuals that cloud his brain onto the screen relatively unencumbered has been a detriment to his art. He doesn’t seem to realize that the digitized video-game images in this recent trilogy pale in interest to the more low-tech but also more tactile and more creative images of the earlier trilogy. The giant lizard creature that Obi-Wan Kenobi rides in Revenge of the Sith just looks like another CGI monster, less compelling than similar visual achievements not only in the Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings films but even in dragon-slayer “B” movie Reign of Fire.

By contrast, the lumbering, elephantine tanks from The Empire Strikes Back are far more memorable. And though the clacking, coughing proto-Vader General Grievous from Sith is a relative witty CGI creation, he’s still less interesting than the guys-in-costumes that populated the earlier trilogy: dopey dog-man Chewbacca or the alien menagerie that peopled the first film’s great cantina scene.

On the other hand, one consequence of Lucas’ near-total immersion in digital effects is that the most personable characters in Sith tend to be nonhuman, with beloved robot R2-D2 and diminutive Jedi master Yoda flashing more personality than actors such as Samuel Jackson and Jimmy Smits. Among the leads, Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker broods and grimaces and Ian McDiarmid’s evil Chancellor Palpatine slithers around, both like performers in the Saturday matinee serials Lucas has paid homage to throughout the series. (Though perhaps Christensen’s woodenness works if you take into account that he’s playing the father of Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker.) Only Natalie Portman, striving to make something out of nothing as love interest Padme, and Ewan McGregor, bringing game gravitas to Obi-Wan Kenobi, evoke any of the humanity of the original series.

On the plus side, Revenge of the Sith is by far the most satisfying of the prequel trilogy, both for devotees and those who approach this overburdened space opera with more casual interest. There’s real narrative pleasure in witnessing Anakin Skywalker’s final descent into “the Dark Side” and his rebirth as Darth Vader, the climactic scene a lovably cheesy homage to the “It’s alive!” moment from Frankenstein. It may well be that the lasting impact of this trilogy isn’t what the films do on their own terms but how the back-story alters repeat viewings of the original trilogy.

Another notable — and unavoidable — aspect of Revenge of the Sith is its clear connection to present-day politics, which seems to be a first for Lucas. Palpatine wresting power from the Galactic Senate and turning the Republic into an Empire is compared, in not so subtle ways, to the present power grab by the Bush administration. Palpatine’s martial speech to the Senate rhymes with Bush’s first address to Congress after 9/11. Padme’s reaction: “So this is how liberty dies. To thunderous applause.” This aspect of Revenge of the Sith has been ridiculed in some quarters, and with good reason, perhaps. Control-freak Lucas is not the most natural defender of messy democracy, and it’s odd for a series of films predicated on a clear-cut, old-fashioned clash of Good and Evil to be chastising the president for thinking in absolute terms. On the other hand, considering that Lucas’ audience probably includes an awful lot of pro-Bush Republicans (and, of course, the apolitical), it’s an interesting gamble for the toy-movie mogul to take.

As Lucas closes the book on Star Wars, another thing has become clear: At this late stage, the most creative and spirited people involved with the Star Wars phenomenon are probably the films’ fans, who bring more verve to the art-fan nexus the series’ popularity has fostered than Lucas and his techie minions.

Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a meticulous reconstruction and evaluation of what was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history, is something of an unintentional companion piece to one of last year’s best films, the documentary The Corporation.

The Corporation made the case that the modern corporation, which has been given the same legal rights as individuals, has the traits of a sociopath. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, adapted from a book by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, acts as something of a case study to test this hypothesis.

During its late-’90s boom, the Texas-based energy trading company was dubbed “America’s most innovative company” by Forbes magazine. But Enron — led by its trio of corporate villains, Andrew Fastow, Jeffrey Skilling, and founder Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay — was most innovative in its ability to mask losses, drive up its stock price, and line the pockets of its top-tier executives. Aided by energy deregulation and lax accounting rules, Fastow, Skilling, and Lay were essentially corporate con men.

The film cites the use of “mark-to-market accounting” as the device that fueled Enron’s fraud. The practice gave the company the ability to project future profits off of new ideas or ventures and to put those profits on the books immediately, even though, in many cases, those profits never materialized. The result was an appearance of huge profits that didn’t actually exist.

In the film, Gibney unearths an in-house video where Skilling spoofs this practice, cackling to a couple of other executives that the next step would be to replace mark-to-market accounting with something Skilling dubs HFV — hypothetical future value — in order to bank even more outrageous sums of nonexistent profit. This accounting practice enabled “pump and dump,” where the executives pushed the company’s stock price up only to dump their own shares for huge sums.

The foot soldiers in this enterprise were Skilling’s energy traders, mostly young men who accumulated profit with amoral zeal. In the film, Gibney introduces audio tapes of Enron traders gleefully manipulating the California energy markets as blackouts roll across the state. “There’s plenty of power available for the right fuckin’ price,” one trader hisses.

Essentially, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a corporate disaster film, packed with Titanic references, and the victims are obvious: While Enron’s top executives were escaping with multi-million-dollar golden parachutes, the company’s bankruptcy led to 20,000 jobs lost and $2 billion in pensions and retirement accounts vanished.

Gibney interviews a Portland electrical lineman whose company was bought out by Enron. At one point, the lineman had $348,000 in his retirement account. When Enron was finished with him, his savings were only $1,200. Gibney also shows company video of Enron executives suggesting that employees invest all of their 401(k) money in Enron stock at the exact moment that the executives themselves were unloading their shares.

But Enron’s top executives weren’t the only culprits in this story. Gibney spreads the blame, citing the government, banks, consultants, analysts, and journalists as enablers. Author and former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls the cozy connection between Enron and the Bush family (the company was the single biggest financial supporter of Bush’s 2000 campaign) “the most important major relationship between a presidential family and single corporation in American history.”