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Down in the Valley makes Taxi Driver a Western again.

The Los Angeles of David Jacobson’s imagination is a dusty, sun-dried place, the countryside almost bleeding through the pavement. In Down in the Valley, the writer/director sees modern-day L.A. as just a few generations removed from the Old West desert. The film’s setting regresses farther and farther into the wilds of the hills until, in the end, it has cloaked itself in the guise of the classic Hollywood Western.

The Western motif is established with the film’s main character, Harlan, played by Edward Norton, who speaks with a country-bumpkin drawl that is a generic mix of every sincere cowpoke in film history. Harlan is a South Dakota transplant to the San Fernando Valley and an experienced horseman and ranch hand struggling to find his way in a modern, complicated world. By chance he meets a young woman, Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood, in a likable version of her character from Thirteen), and he’s instantly bedeviled by her beauty, innocence, and sweetness.

As their relationship grows, Harlan’s true nature is slowly revealed to the audience, and his love for Tobe sours into obsession. The film itself has secret intentions as well: Down in the Valley is a kind of retrofitted Taxi Driver. But what Valley does best with the idea of Taxi Driver is unexpected (and just about the only thing that hasn’t been done to it already): explicitly return it to its Western roots.

Just as Taxi Driver updated the John Wayne classic The Searchers, telling a fundamentally similar story but transplanting the Western locales of Monument Valley to the dark cityscape of New York City in a summer swelter, Valley reverses the twist, making it a Western again.

The choice of Norton for the lead role is inspired. Simply put, he is his generation’s Robert De Niro. In roles as varied as Primal Fear, American History X, and Keeping the Faith, he brilliantly portrays a broken-boy murderer, an iron-hearted angel of death, and a broken-hearted man of the cloth. In Valley, he calls on all three characters, making Harlan into a charming romantic capable of some pretty unloving acts.

Norton’s Harlan is a criminal in the mold of De Niro’s Travis Bickle and a defender of innocence like Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, though his singularity of purpose is arguably more pure (love, not war) and certainly more politically correct than either. Harlan is a Bickle/Edwards variant that you’d just as soon buy a beer as punch in the mouth.

Valley doesn’t have the benefit of being iconic like The Searchers or unprecedented like Taxi Driver, but it works because it has a romantic and dreamlike, outlaw spirit unique to itself.

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Man of Myth

Superman Returns is a product of the same writing and directing team that made the second X-Men movie (X2: X-Men United), perhaps the best superhero movie ever. But what is interesting here is that the same creators — director Bryan Singer and young writing team Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris — have taken an almost opposite strategy this time.

X2 pleased comics fans without being for them. It took fantastical source material and rooted it in the real world, made it seem more human, more lovably and thrillingly mundane. By contrast, Superman Returns is awash in nostalgia and self-awareness. It’s a geek’s reverie, filmed with a burnished glow that makes the movie look something like a memory. That this obsessively reverent approach doesn’t leave casual fans out is a result of something Singer, Dougherty, and Harris seem to understand: Unlike most comic-book creations — and certainly unlike X-Men — Superman is shared cultural mythology. With this story — and the iconography that goes with it — we’re all knowing geeks.

Rather than break from cinematic tradition — a la Batman Begins — Superman Returns takes the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies from a quarter-century ago as canon: It uses the same musical score and same style of opening credits. It uses archival footage from the earlier films of Marlon Brando as Krypton father Jor-El. And, as Superman, relatively unknown TV-actor Brandon Routh doesn’t just look like Reeve but seems to use his performance as a direct homage to how Reeve played the part.

Pretending the less successful third and fourth installments of the earlier Superman series never existed, Singer & Co. treat Superman Returns as an alternate second sequel to the Reeve original. The storyline has Routh’s Superman returning to Earth after a five-year absence in which he went searching for the remains of his lost home planet.

Upon his return, the Man of Steel has to find his place on a planet that’s learned to live without him. Though perpetual romantic interest Lois Lane (a brunette Kate Bosworth) is set to receive her Pulitzer for the editorial “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman,” a television news scroll reveals a world gone awry.

The planet’s problems are made worse by the re-emergence of Superman nemesis Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), whose grand entrance comes when he plops his wedding ring in the denture jar of a dying billionaire as she signs her fortune over to him. This Luthor has retained his real-estate obsession and penchant for skittish, unreliable female companionship.

Luthor’s grand plan in Superman Returns is to create a new continent as personal kingdom from purloined Kryptonian technology, sinking North America and killing billions in the process. But despite a truly thrilling early action set piece — Superman has to dislodge a space shuttle from its 747 launching pad and then stop the jet liner as it plummets to earth — the battle of good against evil seems like a secondary concern.

Superman Returns is primarily about obsessing over the idea and imagery of Superman: swooning over the idyllic allure of the Kent family farm; paying homage to Reeve and the original-movie Lois Lane, Margot Kidder, with another lovely night flight; reproducing the iconic image of Superman lifting a car above his head which graced the cover of Action Comics #1.

Superman Returns does have some fun updating Superman mythology. (Jimmy Olsen gets upstaged by a 12-year-old with a cell-phone camera.) But, ultimately, Superman Returns is rooted in reverence. Singer’s latest adaptation might be one of the most satisfying Hollywood films of the summer, but it’s almost as much a meditation as it is a movie.

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Four Eyed Monsters

Four Eyed Monsters could have been yet another independent film fading into obscurity. No big-name stars and no big-studio money often means no future, no matter how well a film does on the festival circuit. But Four Eyed Monsters, which will be screened Tuesday, June 27th, at the Brooks Museum, continues to draw interest, despite the fact that the film has no distributor and has yet to be released.

“We knew there was an audience for the film, and we were frustrated at the film industry’s inability to grasp what we were doing,” says Arin Crumley, who made the film with partner Susan Buice. “Instead of waiting for a distributor, we pushed out on our own, via the Internet.”

Crumley and Buice posted podcasts on their Web site(foureyedmonsters.com) chronicling both the making of Four Eyed Monsters and the filmmakers’ attempts to drum up interest in the film. Since Crumley and Buice released the first episode November 1st, 2005, subscribers have tuned in to see Crumley and Buice’s trials and triumphs: the $54,000 in credit-card debt that forced the filmmakers to move in with their parents, a nervous breakdown that resulted in the film and its first festival being thousands of miles apart, and the exploits of an overzealous acting coach.

Four Eyed Monsters follows the lives, love, and artistic ambitions of a young couple. The podcasts cover similar territory. What keeps this from being a navel-gazing art-school piece is the razor-smart editing and completely open, self-incriminating content of their documentary approach. “We realized that the story of us trying to get the film out was thematically on-point,” says Crumley. Just as they recorded their relationship for the film, the couple turns an unblinking eye on their often bumbling attempts to make headway in the film industry.

The podcasts became an Internet hit, with over a half-million views of the complete series. This was good news professionally for Buice and Crumley, although it did have a strange effect on them personally. “If we meet someone in real life who’d been watching online, they would act very different, just blasting into conversation like they already know us well. While I find it really exhilarating to hear these things from other people, I’m astonished that I’m being let into their lives and shown things when I’m basically a stranger.”

The couple is planning on releasing Four Eyed Monsters for download and DVD this coming September. Until then, they’ll keep pursuing an audience via the Internet.

“We’re making it all happen ourselves, with the help of our fan base,” Crumley says. “We are enthusiastic about the possibility of this new form emerging, where artists can use media to be easily viewed by an unlimited audience.”

Four Eyed Monsters is the second film in the Brooks’ indieWIRE”Undiscovered Gems” Series, which features well-received films that have yet to find a distributor. The screening will be 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 27th. Tickets are $5 for Brooks members, $7 for nonmembers.

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Bollywood turns bitter in attack on religious tradition.

Water is the third in a series of controversial films by Indian writer/director Deepa Mehta, and her skill and experience as a provocateur are on full display. The film centers on the plight of widows in traditional Indian culture. Through an opening intertitle, we learn widows are expected to live out their lives in chaste religious observance, separated from society, under penalty of damnation if their piety is violated. On the cusp of Ghandi’s passive revolution — a time when political and cultural boundaries were in flux — these women live in isolation, holding onto the hope that perhaps, if they are lucky, they might be reborn as a man.

The central character in the film is 12-year-old Chuyia, a girl too young to realize that she has already been married or that she is soon to be widowed. The opening scene introduces the tone of bittersweet tragedy that Mehta achieves so well throughout the picture: Chuyia seated on a cart beside her dying husband, happily sucking on a sugar cane, unaware that she is traveling toward lifelong imprisonment. This is quickly juxtaposed with a painful scene of Chuyia having her head shaved and being abandoned by her parents at a widow’s compound in the city.

Predictably, the arrival of Chuyia sets the long-ordered universe of the widows tilting toward confrontation, but the women do not present a simple unified front. Mehta digs deeper, showing how their warped, self-righteous survival has created an internal power structure, a microcosm that mirrors the entrenched cruelty of India’s caste system.

The film builds to a boil as Chuyia and Kalyani, a rebellious young widow who befriends the girl, pursue a life outside the compound. A romance blossoms between Kalyani and Narayan, a young nationalist and progressive Ghandite. Mehta allows this love story to blossom to Bollywood proportions, but she never relaxes her tragic intent.

Water

Opening Friday, June 23rd

Ridgeway Four

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The Man Behind the Mask

There’s a scene midway through Nacho Libre that is as exciting to me as anything I’ve seen in a movie in quite some time. In it, men stand around at a party, drinking cerveza and noshing on chips and salsa. To American eyes, though, this isn’t just any old gathering: The men at the party are wearing garish masks and three-piece suits. The scene is compelling not just because it’s so fantastical but because no one in the scene acts like it’s out of the ordinary: Because it’s not.

This is the world of the luchadores, practitioners of Lucha Libre — a form of Mexican wrestling. Successful luchadores are some of the biggest celebrities in Mexican society, so much so that they are, as a nun in the film describes, false idols that the people worship. They wear their wrestling masks all the time — not just in the ring — their identities a secret to all but their inner circle. Nacho Libre is not as good as its topic, however. It merely scratches the surface of its setting, and the best thing that can be said about it is that I now know what I’ll be for Halloween this year.

Nacho Libre is the sophomore effort from co-writer/director Jared Hess, whose debut film, Napoleon Dynamite, achieved cult status with scads of eminently quotable dialogue and an impossibly nerdy — and charming — protagonist. Also notable about Hess’ first film is the seeming ease with which it communicates its filmmaker’s voice.

In this regard, Nacho Libre may be most notable for the revelation that Hess longs to make movies like Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums). At times, Hess mimics Anderson so totally that it’s unnerving, employing Anderson trademarks like the slow-motion depiction of a character’s walk, caption descriptions of on-screen people and items, and the love of boyhood paraphernalia. Unfortunately, Nacho Libre is best when it is at its most Andersonian, and it feels adrift when it loses that focus.

In concept, Jack Black is perfect for the role of Nacho. Black understands that his body looks utterly unathletic, and he plays up this fact with poses that mock the failures of his physique. But his body is actually graceful and the juxtaposition of fat and nimble makes him a perfect candidate for a wrestler.

Black is the whitest actor playing a Mexican since Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, but at least it’s explained in the film, as Nacho’s mom is said to have been a Lutheran missionary from Scandinavia (his dad was a Mexican deacon). Black also sports the worst Mexican accent in recent memory, with phrases like “nitty gritty” churned out like he has a mouthful of guacamole. Black channels Antonio Banderas at his cheesiest, and in a movie this silly, it absolutely works.

He also provides Nacho with a wide-eyed, sometimes even cross-eyed, dumbness that is perfect for the character in the world outside the ring. But one of the main problems with the movie is that Nacho needs to be a more competent wrestler.

Like Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre is about misfits trying to find a place in a misfit society. In Dynamite, the main character is shown to achieve a grace not normally achievable when he performs a choreographed dance. The moment the dance ends, his body sinks back into discomfort, as if gracelessness were a kind of gravity.

In Nacho Libre, a similar scene is needed. Nacho struggles to be accepted in the Catholic mission where he lives and the social world of the luchadores. Nacho is shown early to have some physical skill, but inexplicably, though the story seems to have carefully laid groundwork otherwise, Nacho doesn’t achieve fame in wrestling through his animal talents. In matches where he should be destroying opponents that are more experienced but less gifted, Nacho instead suffers defeat after defeat. Shouldn’t Nacho win some of the time?

All sports fans want to root for athletes who are good at what they do (except maybe Cubs fans). Filmgoers are no different. The audience shouldn’t be rooting for Nacho just because he’s a good guy. He should earn and elevate our admiration through his joint-snapping destruction of opponents. By the time the film does finally warm to the concept, it’s too late.

There’s a compelling story in the detritus of the wasted opportunity that is Nacho Libre. With but a simple rewrite to infuse the movie with a more honest depiction of Lucha Libre, Nacho Libre could have been great. As it stands, however, it’s little more than another Jack Black comedy — plenty entertaining and a reasonable excuse to escape the summer heat, but not something that will be remembered beyond Halloween.

Nacho Libre

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Less Than Human

Film critic David Thomson once wrote of director Howard Hawks that it is “the principle of [Hawks’ films] that men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world.”

Similarly, it is the principle of the first and, especially, second films in the X-Men franchise that a mutant is more expressive cooling a Coca-Cola than doing battle.

With a new director — Rush Hour‘s Brett Ratner replacing Bryan Singer — at the helm, X-Men: The Last Stand, the third and presumably final installment in the series, loses its grip on that quality. Instead, Ratner has taken the dreamiest, most soulful, and (despite the subject matter) most human of all Hollywood action/sci-fi/fantasy franchises and turned it into something still worthwhile but far more conventional.

It doesn’t seem that way at first: The Last Stand opens with a tremendous, tone-setting, pre-credit diptych, a pair of flashbacks that mirrors the best of the earlier films. In the first, set 20 years in the past, then-friends (now rivals) Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Eric Lensherr (Ian McKellen) visit a young Jean Grey to recruit her to Xavier’s school for mutants, finding a bored, unimpressed pre-teen with revolutionary powers.

Even better is the second, set 10 years in the past, where a young boy has locked himself in the bathroom, his father pounding on the other side of the door. The boy is desperately trying to saw off wings that have begun to grow from his back. The mix of blood and feathers on the floor perfectly encapsulates the marriage of absurdity and non-blinking/non-winking commitment that makes these movies such ace comic adaptations. And the child’s palpable mix of terror and shame at the prospect of being found out by his dad marks the scene as the more pained companion of X2‘s more sardonic “coming out” showcase. (Where a mother says to her “special” son: “Bobby, have you tried not being a mutant?”)

But Ratner fails to live up to that early promise. And despite the boy’s torment or the later moment when, now grown, the same character spreads his mighty white wings and flies — bare-chested and triumphant — across San Francisco Bay, one of the biggest problems with The Last Stand is that it isn’t gay enough. McKellen’s marvelously bitchy, queeny performance as “bad guy” Magneto is toned down here and with it much of the series’ personality. There are no moments that equal his haughty prison break or gossipy, catty sparring with good-girl Rogue (Anna Paquin) in the second film.

The X-Men saga is an endlessly mutable bundle of narrative and critical possibility, one that can stand in (and apparently has) for any story about minority rights and the persecution of difference. Rooted literally in the Holocaust (McKellen’s Magneto is a tattooed concentration-camp survivor), the story also functions perfectly as a civil rights movement allegory, with X-Men leader Xavier a MLK-esque integrationist and Magneto a by-any-means-necessary separatist in the mold of Malcolm X. The current set of films has taken this dynamic and infused it with subtext about more contemporary concerns, most prominently gay rights and the post-9/11 balance of freedom and security.

As we pick up this third installment, Xavier protégé Grey (Famke Janssen) is presumed dead and her beau Scott “Cyclops” Summers (James Marsden) is in mourning, which has transformed him from a good-guy eagle-scout type to a surly, unshaven bad boy. Summers’ decline has opened the door for Storm (Halle Berry) to take over as X-Men commander, in which role she and Logan (Hugh Jackman), aka Wolverine, are training a younger generation of X-Men, including returnees Bobby “Iceman” Drake (Shawn Ashmore) and Peter “Colossus” Rasputin (Daniel Cudmore) and newbie Kitty Pryde, who can walk through solid objects (walls, people, whatever) and is played by instant star Ellen Page, the same young actress who tormented a pedophile stalker in this year’s indie provocation Hard Candy. Kitty and Bobby (what is this, Father Knows Best?) seem to be getting along a little too well to suit Rogue, Bobby’s girlfriend, whose mutation doesn’t allow her skin-to-skin contact with other mutants.

Another new character introduced in The Last Stand is Dr. Hank McCoy (Kelsey Grammer), aka “Beast,” an erudite but furry early student of Xavier’s who now sits on the presidential cabinet as the first secretary of mutant affairs.

On the other side of the mutant divide, Magneto is on the run, with new right-hand-man Pyro (Aaron Stanford) helping recruit other mutants to his Brotherhood. Prior lieutenant Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) is in federal custody. As the secretary of homeland security says when asked how the shape-shifting Mystique can be contained, “We’ve got some new prisons now.”

Narratively, The Last Stand is driven by two primary story arcs. One is the rebirth of Grey as Phoenix, a character with greater powers but a darker outlook. The other is the emergence of a mutant anti-gene — a “cure” — and, as McCoy puts it, “the impact this will have on the mutant community.”

The Phoenix plotline is one of the most famous and well-loved story arcs from the comics. But though it supplies the ostensible emotional climax of The Last Stand, here the Phoenix story feels like more of a distraction from the more interesting questions about community/identity politics inherent in the “cure” plotline. But even when focusing on this part of the film, Ratner exchanges potentially greater emotional and intellectual possibilities for more conventional action-film payoffs.

Two characters struggle with the arrival of the “cure” more than others in the film — one “cured” against her will early on, another tempted to voluntarily take the vaccine. If the spirit of the prior films drove The Last Stand, these characters would be at the center of the film. Those movies would be more interested in what it means to lose part of yourself (or to give it away) and live in the aftermath than about the next big battle. Alas, Ratner’s version is not, and these promising storylines are shunted to the side in favor of setting up a big confrontation between the X-Men and the Brotherhood.

X-Men: The Last Stand is meant to be a big finale but is instead a noisy misstep. There’s enough built-up interest in these characters, their problems, and the world they inhabit to make the film more satisfying than most big-budget action flicks, but the spirit that made the earlier films so special is largely dormant. In The Last Stand, three major characters perish, but none of these deaths is as memorable or as moving as the demise of Deathstrike (I looked it up) in X2, a minor character who cries metallic tears when Wolverine takes her life.

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Good Girl Gone Bad

Aside from a vivid, pulpy prologue in a surprisingly well-lit smut shop, The Notorious Bettie Page is fairly unsuccessful as a biopic but more successful as a meditation on female role-playing and male fantasy. In many ways, it’s an extension of the ideas developed by director Mary Harron, whose adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho was fascinating as both entertainment and argument. Harron’s wit and grasp of period details reinforced Ellis’ conviction that males remain quivering, depraved invertebrates in search of protective shells even when they are awarded power, money, and sexual satisfaction. Characters slid and squirmed in a slick onscreen mucus composed of hair gel, four-star restaurant grease, and cocaine sweat.

In Bettie Page, these furtive, pale, and perspiring types reappear as the wealthy clientele for tasteful bondage photos, but they are not the focus of the film. And although the period detail is decent, its black-and-white photography is less effective at capturing an era, which is unfortunate because cinematographer W. Mott Hupfel’s color sequences capture the Easter-egg colors of 1950s films. But Harron’s argument this time — that women who assume roles that satisfy and comfort such men can lead pretty decent, healthy lives — is still noteworthy and perhaps more radical than before, even if the end of her film is far too conservative.

Harron’s argument is convincing because of Gretchen Mol as Bettie and the film’s recreation of photo shoots. Aside from looking like Page, Mol doesn’t do much; she offers a pleasing counterweight to the narrow standards of American screen beauty but little else. Yet this isn’t a serious flaw. The film offers few psychological clues about why Page entered the pinup business, and aside from one shocking, oleaginous turn by Dallas Roberts, the people and events of Page’s early life and hardships pass by quickly. Even Lili Taylor’s snappy, Thelma Ritter-esque role as a smut-film den mother and David Strathairn’s stiff performance as a political crusader during the inevitable government investigation matter less than the process of image-making and the politics of representation.

Page’s many photo sessions are meticulous and businesslike instead of erotically charged. She talks openly and freely to her cameraman and her fellow bondage gals — more, in fact, than she talks to any of her boyfriends or relatives. The film is near its best during these sequences, where Page’s desire to “make people happy” competes with the problems that come with wearing huge stiletto boots. Harron also captures an offhand revelation when one of Page’s early photographers asks her to look “horny” and Mol crinkles up her nose in playful disgust as if she were a first-grader asked about which boy in her class is the cutest. Somehow the expression works, and the closest thing to a secret about Page’s best pinups is revealed.

Eventually, Page gives up her life to preach the word of God, and Harron’s serious, respectful treatment of Page’s reconversion to Christianity is the best part of the film. Page achieves the transcendence she mimicked but never claimed for herself in front of the camera. Unfortunately, the film ends on a phony note unrelated to issues of faith.

While Page is quoting Scripture, a passerby recognizes her and tells her about the filthy porn that is making the rounds these days. But wait a minute. Isn’t blaming the problems of contemporary society on the corruption of the past as suspicious and reactionary as venerating the past as a time worth reviving? Nobody needs a preachy movie about how and why it’s okay to show your keister.