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THE GOOD SHEPHERD

An epic bore. So slow nothing happens but talk for 3 hours.

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is privileged and destined for a luminous future. A Yale student, he is inducted into the secret society of the Skull and Bones brotherhood. His has allies in important places. Edward’s stoic idealism is soon noticed and he is recruited by Army General Bill Sullivan (Robert De Niro) to join the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA) during WWII. As the Cold War looms, Edward’s ice-cold approach to his job helps engineer and structure the future agency’s covert activities.

Quickie sex in the bushes with just-met sister of a fellow Bonesman gives Edward an unwanted wife and son. Clover (Angelina Jolie) goes from feisty wild girl to unhappy, neglected wife as Edward leaves for a six year stint overseas. In London, Edward learns the art of counter-intelligence.

When Edward returns, he reunites with his true love, a deaf girl (Tammy Blanchard) clearly outside his social orbit. He has trouble adjusting to life with Clover and his just-met six-year old son Edward Jr. since letter writing and international phone calls were unknown back then.

Yes, THE GOOD SHEPHERD is about espionage but this is the weary trudge through the paperwork of the CIA’s involvement in the Bay of Pigs and The Cold War. There’s just no excitement here.

Director Robert De Niro chose screenwriter Eric Roth who wrote the under-performing, boring MUNICH. Roth knows how to slough through the drudgery of political history. He does not know how to translate those facts into an exciting cinematic story.

Edward’s responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and those Russian double-agents, causes strains in his frail marriage. Clover didn’t have a clue what she was marrying into!

Edward has something more important to worry about than a neglected wife. There is a mole in the now re-formed CIA. Everyone is suspect among Edward’s colleagues, including CIA director Philip Allen (William Hurt), his valet-assistant Ray Brocco (John Turturro), and smug British spy Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup).

The only snowflake is Edward’s son, Edward Jr. (Eddie Redmayne),who suddenly grows up and wants to become a CIA operative. Finally, the story begins to fire up.

Damon, who hunches over and carries himself like a junior accountant, is dull. His Edward has no spark. De Niro knows how to create and deliver a strong performance, he cannot direct one.

You’d think being America’s Machiavelli would merit some joy. There is just no fun in toppling rogue governments and catching double agents in your espionage snares. THE GOOD SHEPHERD chronicles 25 years of Edward’s career, but he doesn’t age. Edward stays 25 years old. At least Ang Lee gave Jake Gyllenhaal a mature man’s gut and a bad mustache.

Jolie comports herself well. With a project as “stellar” as this, she wisely dropped the sexy pout. Jolie is beautiful without trying, but let’s admit it, she is better when she’s playing an angry woman. Jolie gives a slight nod to Clover aging, but still keeps her stunning figure. The only one who ages is Edward Jr.

De Niro might have liked the idea of THE GOOD SHEPHERD, but he must have lost interest in it along the way. With his kind of career, he should have figured out how to instill a point-of-view. It lacks thrill, it lacks sexiness, it lacks danger.

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CASINO ROYALE

They re-invented the 007 wheel with Daniel Craig. He telegraphs girth.

I’m not wedded to the original Sean Connery 007 model. After Connery, I hated all the rest until Pierce Brosnan. However, I did recognize that even Brosnan’s Bond movies were taking the cartoon path to silliness. An invisible car? A face-changing villain? A hysterical villainess with thighs of steel?

The 007 handlers have thrown out all the elderly set pieces that were ruining the franchise. Gone for good, I hope, are the asinine-named courtesan-assistants, the female scientists in hot pants, the cat-stoking madmen, the “Oh, James” lusting females, the crazy hitmen, and the gadgets.

Give the man a gun and let him do his job.

Daniel Craig was the right choice. He telegraphs “girth.” It is probably what got him the job. He has none of Brosnan’s 007 feline grace. Brosnan’s Bond was losing his masculine presence – he was getting skinny. Craig’s plays Bond as a young man chosen exactly because he lacks a moral foundation. Who hires a hit man who asks questions? Craig, who hasn’t given a bad performance yet (THE MOTHER, LAYER CAKE, SYLVIA, ENDURING LOVE, MUNICH, and INFAMOUS – I’ve seen them all) is pure masculine aggression, and the franchise needed a jolt of testosterone.

Why would a registered killer care if his drink was “shaken, not stirred?” Let’s admit this is too prissy to have any impact today. Craig’s Bond could care less how the damn drink was prepared.

I was worried that a new Bond would be ineffective with a former 007 director, Martin Campbell (GOLDENEYE), back in service. Thank goodness the producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, hired Paul Haggis to infuse some grit in Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade’s (THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH and DIE ANOTHER DAY) script.

Then I realized that an epic this big needed a tried-and-true director who commands a film production like a general. Wilson and Broccoli couldn’t risk giving the task to Quentin Tarantano. But I would have gambled.

In choosing CASINO ROYALE the producers are saying ‘forget the past’. Here is the beginning of a new franchise. Yes, it has been invigorated. And by casting Daniel Craig, the producers have given Bond a tougher edge. He’s not pretty.

Instead of those opening fake skiing exploits, CASINO ROYALE begins with a foot chase. It is a perfect way to introduce the athletic Bond. That’s Craig running, not a stunt double. What a runner!

The CASINO ROYALE villain is a serious, humorless man. In Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), code-named “the Cipher,” Bond is up against a villain who is a sophisticated arms dealer who shorts airline stocks knowing where and when the terrorists will strike.

Of course this is ridiculous. Only Osama bin Laden and 20 terrorists knew what would happen on September 11th.

Bond is sent by M (Judi Dench) to join Le Chiffre in a high stakes Texas Hold ’Em tournament at the Casino Royale in Montenegro. Needing the $10 million entrance fee, Bond’s backers send Treasury agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) to watch Bond and their investment. Le Chiffre has a pleasurable sadistic streak that made me question whether his interest in Bond was more sexual than ruthless. Or at least that is the way Campbell directed their “pas de deux.”

In a clever move that surprised me, the iconic 007 theme and the definitive phrase, “The name’s Bond. James Bond” are saved for the end, when Bond earns it.

What have been retained are the exotic locations. Bond works in the international playground and we get to glimpse Lake Como, the Bahamas, Prague, as well as Africa.

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THE FOUNTAIN

I’ve taken the same entheogens many times. But I never cried.

A friend’s father died in a car accident as he went to pick up a newspaper while his family waited for him to return to celebrate his 80th birthday. The candles were lit. As far as I am concerned, how auspicious! To die on your birthday is to complete a perfect circle! I’m sure this guarantees a much higher reincarnation. Someone should start a website called Same Day Birth-Death Registry.

THE FOUNTAIN celebrates the regenerative power of death.

Who said Brad Pitt was an idiot? He backed out of THR FOUNTAIN (over major creative differences, but it must have been the constant crying required of the role) that forced writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s fiancé, Rachel Weisz, to save his shut-down project and replace female lead escapee Cate Blanchett. Originally with a $75 million budget, Aronofsky streamlined the expenditures to $35 million and cast Hugh Jackman in the lead.

I loved Aronofsky’s previously acclaimed films, PI and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.

THE FOUNTAIN is gorgeous to look at, evocative in its imagery, and Jackman is at his sexiest. But Jackman is required to spend the entire movie weeping. As a valentine, Weisz is an angelic presence not at all disturbed about dying. It’s a blessing!

Brilliant, cutting-edge but highly distraught research scientist Tommy (Jackman) Creo’s wife Izzy (Weisz) is dying of a brain tumor. Tommy is doing experimental brain research on chimpanzees using a compound he extracted from a tree in the rain forest. Tommy is looking for a “Fountain of Youth.” He wants to save Izzy’s life.

Since 2000 I have been going to the Peruvian rain forest to work with ayahuasca curanderos. There is indeed terror and awe in taking certain psychotropic compounds, but never tears. Apparently Aronofsky and I are working on opposing personal issues.

The story of Tommy and Izzy is linked through reincarnation to the Spanish conquistador Tomas (Jackman) who is also looking for the rumored treasure of immortality. Tomas has a much greater task than Tommy: He must help Queen Isabella (Weisz) save Spain. The Queen quotes Genesis, noting that there were two trees in Paradise: The “Tree of Life” and the “Tree of Knowledge.”

Except it was really “the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2:9) It makes a big difference. Neither tree has anything to do with everlasting love.

Tommy’s emotional hysteria is having a debilitating effect on him – he’s hallucinating. The concept of time and place is blurred. Izzy, like all dying cancer patients, has gone totally mystical. She is at peace. She believes death – like a nebula wrapped around a dying star – brings life.

Izzy’s death liberates Tommy to come to his final incarnation as a pure spiritual being.

Tommy’s unhinged psychic life moves him through three states of being: Queen Isabella’s conquistador-killer, a lovesick mortal, and finally, a 26th century Samadhi Bubble Boy. As Tom, he has been transformed, in the tradition of The Trinity, into a bald, lotus-seated mystic bathed in the golden light of Nirvana.

If Aronofsky had just kept the focus on Tomas’ religious quest and The Spanish Inquisition’s damnation tribunals, perhaps his message of life and death redemption would have been more linear – and provocative.

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