It is probably bad form to start a review with a cliche, but here goes nothing. The truth is stranger than fiction. Seriously. This is especially the case in Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Informant!, which dramatizes the story of Mark Whitacre, the highest-level executive to ever turn whistle-blower for the FBI. As the byzantine, darkly hilarious, and utterly astounding plot of the film plays out onscreen, The Informant! earns that exclamation point in the title.

While at the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), Whitacre tipped the government off to an international price fixing scheme between some the largest manufacturers of lysine. Lysine is an amino acid that humans need but cannot produce on their own. Thus it is added to lots of food. And when I mean lots of food, I mean lots of food. Detailing such a conspiracy may not sound so exciting given that this film does not play out like a thriller along the lines of The Insider or All the President’s Men. The ways in which Whitacre helps the FBI and subsequent revelations surrounding the price-fixing scheme surface, however, make this film one of the funniest and most infuriating whistle-blower films to date. It is funny because Soderbergh, working from Scott Z. Burns’ adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald’s book about the case, tells the story with an incredibly droll and wry tone. Some of the funniest humor does not come from overreactions, but from people trying to remain measured while events that merit wild reactions take place around them. It is infuriating because when ADM and their co-conspirators agreed to raise the price of lysine together, nearly every person around the world was hurt in their wallet when they bought food. The Insider told a terrible story of how tobacco companies lied about the effects their products had on consumers, but people by and large can avoid smoking if they choose. People cannot avoid eating.

Matt Damon plays Whitacre with a level of sincerity bordering on naive. While he is actively undermining his company’s illegal activity — activity that he helped create, by the way — he hopes that his actions will actually ingratiate himself to the company’s executives and they will put him in charge once all the corrupt people are out. Whitacre is shown to be a genius who understands both the science and business sides of ADM. His mind races nearly every moment. He can be in the middle of a complex business meeting with someone from Europe, Asia, or South America, and as they discuss intricate calculations and numbers, Whitacre is also telling the audience through humorous voiceovers about what he learned about polar bears that week. Sometimes these voiceovers seem like non-sequiteurs and completely unrelated to the action onscreen, but as the film moves on, we see that their use is intentional and revelatory. Damon’s choice to play Whitacre so straight and on the surface is the absolutely right one. He is the type of person we meet and we believe what we see is what we get. The thing is, even Whitacre believes this about himself, or wants to believe this about himself. He wants to believe that he is essentially a good person doing the right thing despite his involvement in creating the price-fixing scheme in the first place. His assistance of the FBI — he is called one of the best informants in history — does not come about as a way to rectify his guilty conscience. Whitacre truly wants to be a hero. He wants to be recognized as a hero. Whitacre draws inspiration from Tom Cruise’s character in The Firm. I will leave the plot discussion at that since the story is an onion with layers of incredible and hilarious disclosures.

Soderbergh’s detached and wry sense of humor comes through not only in the staging and pacing of the scenes, but in the overall look of the film. Though events in The Informant! take place in the 1990’s the film itself looks like something from the 1970’s. Soderbergh casts everything in a golden glow and the titles of places and dates appear on screen look like they came from a cop show like The Streets of San Francisco or Hawaii Five-0. These visual elements may feel a bit disjointed until we realize that this is how Whitacre sees himself. He wants to be like one of those cops unearthing a terrible underground conspiracy and bringing justice to the world.

Soderbergh is a fantastic director of actors. I don’t think I have seen a bad performance in one of his films — even when he casts amateurs like in Bubble. The same goes here. I have already praised Damon’s work enough. I should also mention Melanie Lynskey as Whitacre’s terrifically supportive wife, Ginger. She is as sincere as Whitacre himself, though Ginger actually has a moral rudder. It is Ginger who threatens to blow the whistle on ADM first. Also of note are Jole McHale and Scott Bakula (you read that right) as the FBI agents assigned to Whitacre to coach and cajole him to give them more evidence. They are proficient and professional and humorously exasperated by Whitacre’s inability to keep his mouth shut.

The Informant! is the type of film whose plot just keeps getting better and better as it becomes more complex. Different story tellers would buckle under the weight of all the technicalities and details of this plot, but Soderbergh and his team manage to show the audience what happens without making it boring, overly complex, or overly simple. This is a movie for adults, not because there is much in the way of questionable material, but because the humor is so subtle and the story demands people pay attention.

In college, I introduced myself to a fellow student and when he heard my name was Tyler, he pulled me in close and said, “Are you serious? Do you want to join my fight club?”

On October 15, 1999, director David Fincher’s hilarious, subversive, violent, satiric film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club debuted. It is hard to imagine that film is now ten years old.

Fight Club is one of those movies that acts as a watershed for many of my friends and I. I do not doubt that the fact we were in college when we saw it had some affect on why we loved the movie so much. The film questions and offers many critiques about identity, the role of gender in society, consumerism, the work-a-day world, etc. These are precisely many of the questions undergraduates wrestle with on a daily basis. As a bunch of young men living away from home for the first time and away from those male figures in our lives who defined manhood for us, we began asking what exactly does it mean to be a man? What does it mean that so many of my male friends were raised by women because their fathers ditched out on them? Is the narrative that we are to go to college, get a job, and then get married the only one out there? The film tapped into the angst of comfortable, middle class young adults who wonder, “Is this all there is?” much in the same way the grunge music did at the start of that decade.

There was something especially visceral about the film’s violence that fit within our disillusionment. In the midst of a deep-seated frustration with the common trajectory Western society tells us our lives should take and our seeming powerlessness to change that narrative, it seems the only sensible thing is to beat ourselves up. It is an act of deconstruction, a way of going back to square one in order to understand what is real and important rather than merely adopting what was given to us. As Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) says in the film, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”

At one point the narrator (Edward Norton) calls himself a, “Thirty-year old boy.” We realize that though these are adults, they do not know themselves in ways we would consider healthy for adults. They are stunted, in arrested development. Even the name Fight Club and the rules that go along with it sound like the clubhouses and “secret societies” we set up when we were kids. Instead of throwing dirt clods at each other, the members of Fight Club beat each other to a pulp.

To be sure, different films were more significant in terms of their commercial affect and the immediate discussion raised in popular culture in 1999 than Fight Club — The Matrix, The Phantom Menace, The Sixth Sense, and even The Blair Witch Project come to mind. There were even more artistically acclaimed films that year such as Magnolia and American Beauty. (For what it’s worth, 1999 was one of the truly great years of cinema. The Iron Giant, Three Kings, The Insider, Being John Malkovich, Eyes Wide Shut also came out that year.) But Fight Club seemed to hit those of a certain age square in the nose as it explored dissatisfaction and disenfranchisement in Western civilization in the late 20th century. We embraced it because many of us found that it gave voice to our questions.

That and it is one supremely well-made film. Fincher’s direction is spot-on, playing with the audience, knowing when to confront the viewer as someone outside watching an object and knowing when to suck them in as a participant in the story. Edward Norton’s work as the milquetoast corporate serf who finally lets out his frustration is a performance that does not garner enough attention. Brad Pitt’s turn as Tyler Durden convinced me that he was more than a pretty boy, but an actor who can handle serious, intelligent work — because of Fight Club, Pitt became interesting to me. Helena Bonham Carter’s work as Marla Singer is perhaps the one performance that most rewards repeat viewings. The first time one watches it, one usually finds her manipulative, helpless, and the audience wonders if the film is misogynistic. Upon further viewings, she is the most sympathetic character in the film. Even Meat Loaf gives a great performance. The pacing, editing, cinematography, and special effects are all top notch. Let’s not forget the Dust Brothers incredible score.

Despite its very graphic content, which is difficult to watch, I find that for those who do not like the film — and there are many who passionately hate it, such as Roger Ebert — much of the criticism has to do with the shift from when Fight Club stops being just a small, private, secret club where men beat each other in the name of self-destruction. Tyler begins Project Mayhem and the members of Fight Club now work toward undermining those societal conventions that frustrated them so much. What is difficult about this change is that it happens subtly and well within the flow of the movie. The vandalism, small acts of terrorism (excepting for the final act, of course), and threats of violence on civic leaders do not play with a heavy-handed moral voice saying, “Hey, this is wrong.” The narrator eventually reaches that conclusion, but we as the audience, who bought he and Tyler’s critique of society for so long, are left wondering, when did this thing cross the line? Because that moment is not clear and not clearly rebuked, some have seen the film as an ode to fascism, whereas I see it as a clear warning against fascism. In my read of the film, it seems to say as we marginalize a segment of the society and as we numb ourselves with consumerism and an unfulfilling and meaningless narrative, we create the seedbed where charismatic figures like Tyler Durden and the home-grown fascism he espouses can take root.

Upon re-watching the film, it still contains many paradoxes. The majority of Fight Club offers a sharp criticism against corporations and greed and yet the film itself is the product of 20th Century Fox, a studio that belongs to News Corp, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. The filmmakers may have intended to create art, but the corporation that financed the picture was primarily concerned with turning a profit. How are we as an audience supposed to react to this tension? Granted this tension exists with any piece of art funded and supported by a for-profit entity, e.g., the music industry. We are simply more aware of the paradox because of the film’s criticism of big corporations. Also, in one of Tyler’s most important speeches in the movie, he tells those gathered at Fight Club, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” The camera watches Tyler at the same level and distance as the other men in the basement and we as the film’s audience are meant to identify with them. We cannot fully enter the film at that moment, however, because we are aware that we are watching Brad Pitt, a millionaire and movie god, playing Tyler Durden as he gives voice to our disillusionment and anger that despite what has been promised and sold to us, we will never be like Brad Pitt. Are we supposed to take this tension as ironic or as inconsistent? Does the fact that Brad Pitt plays Tyler undercut the power of the film’s message despite the great quality of the performance?

The film wisely does not try to resolve these paradoxes, but lets them sit there, which is one of the reasons I believe Fight Club rewards repeat viewings. This truly is a movie where I see something new each time I watch it. Sometimes it has to do with the plot and hints the filmmakers give the audience as to what the twist in the film will be. Sometimes I see new levels of interpretation or commentary.

Fight Club will remain for me one of those movies that mark my life at a given time. I remember watching it on opening weekend and coming out of the theater saying I appreciated it artistically, but I was not sure I liked it that much. During the following days, I could not get the film out of my head. My roommates at the time fell in love with the movie before I did and I am grateful for their constant evangelism and prodding to get me to see it again. When it came out on DVD, I do not know how many times we watched it, the extras, or with the various filmmaker’s commentaries running. Some stranger things came from the film as well, such as that invitation to a fight club based on my name first alone. I was flattered, but declined, thinking I didn’t need to engage in that kind of violence. Then again, I really haven’t ever been in a fight. Maybe I don’t know that much about myself.

Of the novels I have read from Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is perhaps the most difficult to describe. It is a harrowing epic following a gang of scalp-hunters across the US-Mexican border in the 19th century. Unlike Homeric epics, however, it has little plot, little drive to move the action from one scene to the next. There is plenty of action, but it seems to arise organically and for no human reason like lava from the ground or like water particles gathering overhead into storm clouds. The kid, who is the closest thing to a main character in the story all but vanishes from the narration for a large swath of the book — he is present in the gang, but McCarthy allows him to fade into the group. As in all McCarthy’s fiction, it reads like a prose poem. The book is perhaps the most violent thing I have ever read and it has little direct commentary on the violence. In other words, Blood Meridian is a nightmare. It does not fit in the genre of horror. It is horror.

McCarthy does not offer horror as Hollywood gives it to us. This is not voyeurism, nor does the book try to make us jump with twists and turns and monsters who show up outside our window. People like to go to horror movies to feel momentarily frightened, but then realize that they are really safe. McCarthy does not let the audience feel safe afterward.

There are monsters in this novel and they are the people inhabiting the wild West. McCarthy removes any last hint of romanticism from the 19th century frontier. No one gets off clean: not the rampaging Glanton gang in search of scalps, not the Mexican towns that hire them for protection only to regret that decision later, not the marauding Apache tribes whose attacks lead the Mexicans to hire the Glanton gang. All are seen as blood-thirsty. They either want revenge, their land, or simply violence. In powerfully descriptive scenes, McCarthy introduces new tools — Colt pistols — that only increase the efficiency with which the Glanton gang can inflict death. The Mexican town initially pays the Glanton gang for each Apache scalp, but when the gang realizes that one scalp looks like another, no matter who’s head it comes from, they begin raiding towns and villages and ambushing peaceful Indian tribes. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this novel is that it is loosely based on history — the Glanton gang actually existed.

McCarthy gives us some of his most iconic characters from the aforementioned kid, who was born under the Leonid meteor shower and seems to have violence in his DNA, to Toadvine whose earless and tattooed face carries the scars of violence, to Tobin the ex-priest who now finds enlightenment in violence instead of in God, to Glanton himself, a calculating and amoral figure, to finally Judge Holden, a hairless, white giant. If you are familiar with McCarthy’s work, Judge Holden comes across as the great-great grandfather of Anton Chigurh, the unstoppable hired gun with a frightening philosophy in No Country for Old Men. While Holden was an historical figure who apparently did participate in the massacres and was known to kill children, McCarthy turns him into a demonic incarnation. He seems otherworldly beyond his ghostly appearance. The kid first sees the judge during a tent revival when Holden stands up and impugns the preacher’s character with fabricated crimes. Tobin informs the kid that every man in the Glanton gang has a story of encountering the judge before they joined the ravaging troop. His appearance is like an evil apparition calling men to give their souls to violence and greed. We read of the time when the judge met the gang and saved them from Apache pursuers by creating a batch of gunpowder using sulfur and urine on the side of a dormant volcano. While the gang belongs to Glanton, the judge is its spiritual leader. He is not acting out of some uncontrollable drive. We never see him licking his chops like a monster in a Hollywood horror film. Judge Holden believes he is acting in the only sensible way because, as he says,

“[W]ar is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them and is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” (249)

McCarthy’s prose and philosophical discussions have always kept his novels from becoming gratuitous. The bleak worldviews do not make the violence in the his writing palatable, but we see that there is a reason behind the terrors we read. In fact these worldviews make the violence that much more frightening. Reading McCarthy is for the most part, not a life-affirming experience — The Road is so far the only exception I have encountered. McCarthy seems to say that life is violence. What we read about in Blood Meridian is not so much an historical anomaly. McCarthy seems to say that such violence is in our bones and still among and within us today.

Blood Meridian is often hailed as McCarthy’s masterpiece, and I can see why. For my money, however, I would give that title to The Road. Regardless, this challenging, frightening, and strangely beautiful book is worth the read. Be forewarned, however, it is difficult and graphic in its depiction of the relentless violence contained within.

Over at NPR.org, Linda Holmes, while praising Pixar’s latest film Up, asks Pixar to create a film with a female lead who is not a princess. It’s an interesting read.

Pixar makes films that capture one of the primary reasons I love going to a theater, sitting in the dark, and staring at a screen for a couple of hours. I love all sorts of films, including those gritty and realistic stories that speak directly about our daily lives. Pixar’s films, on the other hand, are wonderful escapism and enjoyment. Like all good art, no matter how fantastical the subject matter may be, the Pixar movies do show us something about ourselves, they help us see the world differently. I go into a Pixar movie expecting great things and to this point, I have not been disappointed. Some films soar higher than others, but even at their “lower” moments, the movies Pixar produces are better than most other films released. With their ability to craft wonderful stories and worlds inhabited by memorable characters while pushing the technological envelope, I can say that with each Pixar movie, I have always seen something I had never seen before.

The streak continues with Up, which is not one of Pixar’s lower moments. The film is Pete Doctor’s second directorial project for Pixar. (His first was Monsters Inc., which somehow gets overshadowed by the other Pixar films.) It is hard to write a review about this film because I want to give nothing away. It is best experienced with as little knowledge as possible so that the viewer can ensure maximum surprise. Briefly sketched, the film follows Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner), a seventy-something curmudgeon who sees the wonderful life he had lived for several years taken from him in a series of setbacks. Doctor and his screenwriting partner and co-director Bob Peterson set up the movie with deftness and aching beauty in just five minutes. The opening sequence of Up is one of the most moving film beginnings I have ever seen. It is not hard to get me to cry at a film, but I cannot remember the last time I cried within five minutes of a movie starting.

The life Carl created and dreamed of has slowly eroded underneath him. Change that he never wanted has come to him and the last vestige of that life he loved — his house — is threatened by urban expansion. Enter Russell (Jordan Nagai), a Wilderness Explorer who has every merit badge but one, who shows up on Carl’s doorstep in order to assist an elderly person and earn that final badge. Carl rebuffs Russell’s attempts to help with a tried and true scouting trick for which Russell easily falls, which makes us wonder about the depth of Russell’s experience. Carl decides to escape the encroaching restrictions on his freedom by tying thousands of helium-filled balloons to his house and fly the building to Paradise Falls in Venezuela. (I figure this information is in the trailer, so it is not that much of a spoiler.) Russell unintentionally finds himself on the floating house and joins Carl to South America. I will leave the discussion of the plot points alone there. If the idea of a 78-year-old man and an 8-year-old boy taking a floating house on an adventure to the jungles of South America does not sound interesting to you, further elaboration on the story’s events will not help.

Up is a film that handles life’s hardships authentically and gracefully. Carl’s and Russel’s disappointments in life are real to their situations and shape who they are without the movie ever becoming about those disappointments. Rather, their losses frame their actions and growth. Doctor does not fall into the lie that we have to protect children — or adults, for that matter — from danger and trouble in stories. The great stories for any age always have an element of danger, whether physical or psychological. Up knows that even for a movie where much of the action takes place on a floating house, we must connect with the characters if we are to ever lose ourselves in the story. If its audience must deal with the realities of death and divorce, why should the movie avoid those topics? Up offers escapism through imaginative settings and adventure, not through acting as if the pains of our world do not exist.

A final couple of notes on the film. Kudos to Pixar for not only making Russell an Asian-American kid, but also casting an Asian-American kid to supply the voice. Carey and I saw Up in the traditional 2-D projection. I’d love to see it in 3-D.

And I’m not impressed. Did they read the book? Thankfully, an article in Esquire says that the trailer does not reflect the film that well — the film is much closer to the novel in its pacing and dialogue. According to the article, the film, like Cormac McCarthy’s novel, offers no explanation for the post-apocalyptic setting. The trailer makes it look like another post-apocalyptic action story like, I Am Legend, rather than a beautiful story of the love between a father and his son in the midst of a harrowing future. I hope that the trailer truly does not give us a good picture of the film and that The Road merely goes down as another example of a bad trailer for a good movie. My hall of shame includes trailers for The Truman Show and Cast Away, which gave away significant plot points that the films try to keep hidden for, you know, dramatic purposes. The trailer for Master and Commander made a cerebral epic look like Gladiator at sea. Then there is the all-time king of a bad trailer for a good movie: The Princess Bride. “It’s as real as the feelings you feel”? A saxophone? Really?

Clint Eastwood needs a hug. He makes some of the most sure-footed films in American cinema, with memorable characters facing real problems. But if we trace his latter career work from Unforgiven to Mystic River to Million Dollar Baby to the two Iwo Jima films and Changeling, we find films of spectacular beauty and chasms of despair. His films seem to continually make the point that we are alone in the world, fighting a battle we cannot win against death. I am surprised he has not adapted any of Cormac McCarthy’s work since their outlooks seem to match each other so well. Eastwood comes across so sweet and cheerful in interviews that I am nearly always shocked by the violence and darkness of his films.

Eastwood’s recent work Changeling tells the true story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother in 1920’s Los Angeles. One day she returns from work and finds that her son Walter is missing. She begins to work with the Los Angeles police department and months later they say that they have found Walter. When Christine sees the boy, both she and the audience knows immediately that the boy standing before her is not her son, Walter. As she challenges the LAPD during one of their most corrupt eras, she fights against an organization that will do nearly anything to keep their image in the press in a positive light. The Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) befriends Christine and publicizes her plight. The LAPD retaliates by having Christine institutionalized for psychiatric reasons without any due process. As Christine continues her fight, the LAPD discovers a horrific series of crimes that take place in Wineville (near Riverside). These crimes are of such an evil and infamous nature, that the town of Wineville changes its name to Mira Loma. Christine’s story and the Wineville crimes may or may not be related.

The story behind Changeling is a guaranteed home run. It has pathos, tragedy, engaging characters, and elements of true crime. All the filmmaker needs to do is organize these components in a coherent manner. Eastwood succeeds for the first two-thirds of the film, but the last act unravels a bit. Granted, this may be the case of telling a true story where real life does not fall into a nice dramatic arc, but Eastwood had the same problem with ending Flags of Our Fathers. It seems that he was so in love with the material in both films that he had difficulty making choices in the cutting room.

As with any Eastwood film, the acting here is first-rate, especially Jolie. Her portrayal of Christine gives us a soft-spoken, but determined heroine. We feel her anger, we shudder at the injustice she suffers, and we sympathize with her plight. In Eastwood’s universe, one may not be able to defeat death, but resolution seems to come from the commitment to fight.

I saw Slumdog Millionaire back in November and now that it just won several Golden Globes, I suppose I should write my review.

No one is ever going to fault director Danny Boyle for making boring films. His movies brim with energy while never flinching from the harshness of life. Boyle makes movies in the same vivacious stream as Baz Luhrmann and Martin Scorcese. All three directors make highly charged films shot with fervency, edited so that the pace never slows from a sprint, and that use music as another plot-driving device. Boyle’s latest film, Slumdog Millionaire is a Dickensian story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an orphan who grows up in the slums of Bombay (later Mumbai). The story follows Jamal, his brother Salim, and their fellow orphan Latika through three periods of their young lives. We meet Jamal as a contestant on the Indian version of the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As Jamal progresses through the questions, the show’s producers suspect that he is somehow cheating since they believe an uneducated slumdog could have no way of knowing the answers to all these questions. His interrogation by the local police inspector (Irrfan Khan, who gives another excellent performance after The Darjeeling Limited and A Mighty Heart) allows Jamal to tell the details of his hard life from his early youth to the time on the show, when he is eighteen and working as a tea-gofer at a telecommunications firm.

Slumdog Millionaire neither sensationalizes nor downplays the realities of the slums — the lack of potable water or adequate sewage treatment, the tight proximity of people living together, the exploitation of the poor. But this film is a fairy tale and what keeps it from being an expose about slum life is the unlikely story of someone escaping poverty via a television game show. What keeps it from being schmaltzy, however, are the characters and how they survive their harsh realities. Jamal is a scrapper and survivor. We see this is true from his earliest days, when as a five-year-old, he goes through horrible travails to secure the autograph of a popular actor who visits their slum. (This early scene establishes the relationship between Jamal and his brother Salim.) When Latika, a little orphan girl joins them, they form a triumvirate of survival. Jamal never loses his romanticism whereas Salim opts for a more cynical route, falling in with gangsters and violence as the only means to escape the radical poverty. Salim does not want to escape the slums, but to rule them. Latika ends up somewhere between the two brothers.

I called the film Dickensian and anyone familiar with how Charles Dickens treated class issues in his time will be able to sniff his influence on this story within the first five minutes. On the surface, the story follows the pattern of humanizing the poor found in Dickens’ work. We know the set up in squalor, the struggles to survive, the romanticism of the heroes, and the sacrifices to rise above the pain. What keeps this film from entering the sentimentalism of Dickens’ predictable conclusions are the specifics of Indian life Boyle draws out. He filmed in real slums in Mumbai. Jamal suffers an emotional beating from the host of the game show and the reasons for it go beyond than merely Jamal being from the slums. Jamal is a Muslim in a predominantly Hindu culture with a caste system that locks people into a socio-economic class and there is little if any hope for moving out of that class. When Jamal needs a lifeline for the second question of the show — naming the official slogan of the nation of India — he is mocked for not knowing something a five-year-old would know. We see that while Jamal is a citizen of India, he is not a part of India. His caste, his economic realities push him to the margins of society. Why would he care about India when India does not care about him? The film does not preach at us, but it neither avoids the reality of religious hatred.

While Slumdog Millionaire comes across as a testament to the power of life and love, to the power of belief and destiny in the midst of suffocating oppression, the movie’s hope for redemption lies in money. True, Jamal’s and Latika’s spirits are never broken and we see hope in their willingness to never give up on each other, but their greatest hope comes in Jamal winning so much money that he will never have to enter the slums again. As Jamal progresses on the game show, we see scenes of his slum-dwelling neighbors cheering him on, as one of them. In the end, he succeeds in leaving the slums and his neighbors behind. It is a strange ending in which only Jamal’s and Latika’s lives are transformed. Then the film ends as any Bollywood fairy tale should: with a dance number.

Director Tom Hooper screenwriter Kirk Ellis teamed with HBO to create a mini-series adaptation of David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. The gigantic scope of McCullough’s book suits itself well for a multi-part telling rather than a two or three-hour film, which would have felt like a greatest hits version of the biography. The book and the mini-series follow one of the most important thinkers and shapers of the United States of America beginning at the Boston Massacre and ending with his death. The miniseries’ scope is large, following Adams from his farm in Massachusetts, to the Continental Congresses in Philadelphia, to his work in Europe as one of the new nation’s primary diplomats, to his work as Vice President and President of the union, and finally to his retirement, again, back at his family farm in Massachusetts.

Overall John Adams makes good on its high aims of recounting history and exploring the characters who shaped this nation during some of its most tenuous moments. Ellis’ scripts appear faithful to the time while remaining accessible for modern ears. The characters express their thoughts and emotions believably without resorting to annoying soliloquies or civics lectures. Ellis must have had the most fun with the second installment, “Independence,” which shows Adams defending the product of Thomas Jefferson’s work, the Declaration of Independence. In the biography McCullough writes that no transcript or record of Adams’ speech before the Congress was made — since these meetings were supposedly fairly secretive — but that it was likely the finest speech he had made in his career. Because no record exists, Ellis had free reign to craft Adams’ words.

The vast majority of the praise for the miniseries belongs to the actors, especially the leads Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as his wife Abigail. Reading McCullough’s book, the brilliance and wisdom of the Adamses becomes evident and the production had the task of casting actors who could convey intelligence effortlessly. Giamatti and Linney do so in spades. Some have criticized McCullough for glossing over some of the more caustic aspects of Adams’ character in favor of presenting the second president in a more favorable light. Giamatti’s performance balances the two — he gives an empathic performance, communicating Adams’ sharp mind and devotion to his family (especially to Abigail) and at the same time shows his pride and generally irascible temperament. Linney’s Abigail is able to contrast and smooth over Adams’ lack of people skills with her good humor. Linney’s performance accurately captures the fact that Abigail was every bit Adams’ peer in thought and devotion. She is perhaps at her strongest in part 3, “Don’t Tread On Me.” The supporting cast is also excellent, as seen in Tom Wilkinson (when is he bad?) as Benjamin Franklin, David Morse as George Washington, Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson, and Sarah Polley as Nabby Adams. The one exception belongs to Kevin Trainor whose Charles Adams comes across as whiny and whose voice reminded me of Prince Herbert in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“What, the curtains?”)

The production design and costumes of the miniseries adds strong weight to recreating early America. The directing is solid and I cannot imagine trying to tell fifty some years of geopolitical movements along with a family changing. Hooper manages to keep things in order and understandable, although it is probably helpful to brush up on your Revolutionary War history prior to watching the miniseries as they do not take a lot of time to explain everything. Hooper makes some strange camera choices and I occasionally found the cinematography distracting. He opts for askew angles and obstructed views when it is unclear why the scene would demand it. These choices are at times off-putting and took me out of the miniseries, reminding me that I was watching a movie. But that is only a minor quibble for a work that does justice to an important period of our nation, to a great family of thinkers, and to an excellent biography.

It seems whenever the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen release a full-fledged work of film noir, they often return with a screwball comedy. After Blood Simple they came out with Raising Arizona. Then, after Fargo came The Big Lebowski. They followed The Man Who Wasn’t There with Intolerable Cruelty. And now, after their Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, they bring us Burn After Reading. While the humor moves to the front in their comedies, they are often just as philosophically bleak as their more serious films. Likewise, their dramas always contain a certain amount of humor. The people of the Coen brothers’ films are selfish, often stupid, and get themselves into situations beyond their capacity. Life in their films is random yet intertwined, violent, and ironic.

Their comedies also serve as farces of different film genres. For example, The Big Lebowski sends up the Los Angeles private eye story. Now Burn After Reading skewers the spy thriller, beginning with a satellite view of the Washington, D.C. area as the credits come across the screen in electronic type. It is a character-driven comedy, so it takes time for the humor to build. Initially, there are not many laughs, but by the film’s end, the theater laughed at almost every other line. Burn After Reading stars John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox, a Balkans expert in the CIA who has been “reassigned” (read, fired) because of his temper and drinking problems. He tells his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) that he quit his career and he wants to begin writing his memoirs. Katie secretly begins divorce proceedings against Osbourne while having an affair with the serial and married philanderer Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Seemingly unrelated, we meet Linda Litzke (Francis McDormand) who is in search of love via internet dating and personal improvement via several costly plastic surgeries. When her co-worker at the Hardbodies gym Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) finds a compact disc containing special information that belongs to Osbourne, Linda sees an opportunity to extort him for the money she needs for her surgeries. If that doesn’t work out, she’ll resort to committing treason to get the cash. Linda’s dating service eventually hooks her up with Harry and thus the relationships in the film become more complex. Because this is a Coen brothers film, no one is bright enough or capable enough to carry out their plans. Everyone is equally earnest and that commitment to fulfilling bad ideas leads to everyone getting in over their head. Burn After Reading is a Coen brothers comedy, so be prepared for lots of profanity and some very shocking violence. The plot is difficult to explain, but not to watch, unless you’re one of the CIA operatives charged with keeping tabs on the story’s events. The point of the film is not to examine causes and effects. Rather, the viewer should allow the Coens to work their magic, resting assured that everything and everyone will cross paths, or more accurately, everything will crash into everything else. And meaninglessness will win over meaning.