25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

Cast: Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Brian Cox, Anna Paquin, Tony Siragusa. Screenplay: David Benioff, based on his novel. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: Barry Alexander Brown. Music: Terence Blanchard. 

Spike Lee's 25th Hour is a "day in the life" movie, and a very good one. The day is the last one of freedom for Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) before he goes to prison for seven years. He spends it with his girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), his friends Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Frank (Barry Pepper), and his father (Brian Cox), and also makes a visit to the Russian mobsters who got him into the business of pushing drugs. It's also one of Lee's best films, less celebrated than Do the Right Thing (1982) or Malcolm X (1992), but worthy of being mentioned in their company. The only reservation I have about the movie is that Lee doesn't let his powerhouse cast bring their solidly written characters to life without indulging in a few distracting cinematic tricks. He and his longtime editor, Barry Alexander Brown, can't seem to resist techniques like freeze frames and moments in which the action is repeated from a different angle. There are showy montages and tour de force episodes, some of which work, like the "fuck you" episode in which the embittered Monty anathematizes almost every racial, social, and economic group in New York City. And the film ends with a beautifully realized sequence in which Monty's father proposes to help him escape and imagines the life he might live. But other episodes don't quite work, like the long take in which Jacob and Frank talk about their friendship with Monty, a scene that must have involved careful preparation on the part of Pepper and Hoffman, But it's staged in front of a window in Frank's apartment, which somewhat improbably overlooks Ground Zero, where crews are clearing away the rubble of the World Trade Center. I couldn't help being distracted by the scene outside the window instead of concentrating on their dialogue. Still, the movie, which was planned before the 9/11 attack and completed and released afterward, beautifully integrates that event into the theme and tone of the film. 

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Norton in Fight Club

The Narrator: Edward Norton
Tyler Durden: Brad Pitt
Marla Singer: Helena Bonham Carter
Bob Paulson: Meat Loaf
Richard Chesler: Zach Grenier
The Mechanic: Holt McCallany
Angel Face: Jared Leto

Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Jim Uhls
Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth
Production design: Alex McDowell
Film editing: James Haygood
Music: Dust Brothers

What if Dr. Jekyll didn't know he was turning into Mr. Hyde? Fight Club is essentially an exploration of that premise, turning Robert Louis Stevenson's sci-fi into psy-fi, a fiction based on a fantastical psychological premise. But Chuck Palahniuk's novel, and the adaptation of it by screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher, is more than that: It's also a satire on corporate commercialism and the grip it has on the soul -- particularly the male soul. The Narrator is a nebbishy corporate everyman, stuck in a job he hates, doing work that morally revolts him -- he calculates whether an auto manufacturer can get away with dangerously defective parts, whether a recall will be more expensive than paying off accident victims. He's insomniac, and finds that he can sleep only when he goes to support groups for people worse off than he is, sufferers from serious illnesses. At one session he meets Marla Singer, beautiful and frazzled, who also goes to these support groups because she wants to feel something that she can't find in her own routine life. Then on a business trip, during which the venality of his job becomes particularly clear to him, he meets a devil-may-care type named Tyler Durden, handsome, clever, and completely amoral. Returning from the trip he arrives to find that his apartment, the only thing he feels some pride in, has been blown up in what seems to be an accidental explosion. He has no place to go, so when he finds Durden's card, he moves in with him in a dreadful rundown old house on the edge of nowhere, and becomes drawn into Durden's life, including the formation of the titular club, in which men of various professions gather to beat one another silly. It's the ultimate catharsis for meaningless corporate drudgery. He also introduces Durden to Marla, and lies in his bed listening to the two of them having raucously noisy sex. Eventually, the sex and violence escalate, and when they reach the pinnacle of rebelliousness against establishment values, the Narrator has a revelation: He's Tyler Durden. Fincher beautifully finesses any literal-minded explanations, relying instead on Edward Norton's ordinariness and Brad Pitt's good looks, as well as some careful staging and cutting, to keep from turning this into a tale about dissociative identity disorder. Instead, it's a fable about the ordinary male's repressed desire to become a Brad Pitt, or as Durden puts it, "All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not." The first viewers of Fight Club were often distracted by the violence and failed to respond to the ideas the film is working with. Since then, it has grown in esteem, perhaps because its violence has become more routine in movies, but also because its apocalyptic ending irrupted into real life on Sept. 11, 2001. The film's power to provoke, to appall, and to stimulate argument makes it some kind of minor classic.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

So, on a repeat viewing, does Birdman hold up as the triumph of style, technique, and performance that won it a best picture Oscar, or is it seriously undermined by pretentiousness and banality? That it is undermined I can't deny, just as I can't deny that the style of Kevin Thompson's production design and Antonio Sanchez's drum score are fresh and powerful, that the technical wizardry of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and the film editing of Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione provide a seamless flow that appears to be one long tracking shot through most of the film, and that Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone give career-landmark performances. But I also have to say that I don't think the movie adds up to enough. As Richard Brody observed in his New Yorker review, Iñárritu even courts comparison to Jean-Luc Godard in the opening titles of his film -- a disastrous comparison to my mind, because whatever his faults, Godard was always going against the grain of conservative politics and social attitudes. Iñárritu is attempting a satire on the power of popular culture and celebrity to foul up even the best-intentioned attempts at doing something different. The problem is that his protagonist, Riggan Thomson (Keaton), is doing little more than trying to change his public image. He's known as a pop-culture hero from his hit Birdman movies, but like every clown who wants to play Hamlet, he's trying to make a Broadway debut in a deadly serious play he has crafted from a Raymond Carver short story. Naturally, he is plagued with insecurity, and nothing that his family, his crew, his fellow actors, or the busily buzzing entertainment media can break him free of it. There is a good human story here, but Iñárritu and his fellow screenwriters, Nicolás Giacabone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo, can't be content to just tell it. Instead, it has to be tarted up with touches of magic realism (the first time we see Riggan he is in his underpants, levitating in his dressing room), and by the unstated fact that Iñárritu has cast as the former Birdman a former Batman. We are in the realm of that tiresome trope, the relationship between illusion and reality, and the screenwriters can't help hammering on the point. Riggan has a sign on his dressing room mirror that says, "A thing is a thing, not what is said about that thing." And Mike insists that he has to drink real gin during the rehearsals because Raymond Carver was a drunk and everything else on the set is fake. He even tells Riggan's daughter (Stone) that the only time he is real is when he's onstage. The satire tends toward banality when the film takes as its target the omnipotent critic for the New York Times, who is determined, even before she sees the play, to destroy it because she resents a movie star like Riggan invading the sacred temple of the theater. So does the technical finesse of the film make up for these flaws? Only if you're willing to shut off some key parts of your intellect, which is something Godard would never ask you to do.