8 Mile

 

Eminem is a screen natural who has a ways to go before he can claim a body of big-screen work. But in 8 Mile, he does himself proud with a director who's accumulating one.

Coming off the glossily corrosive L.A. Confidential and the whimsical Wonder Boys, Curtis Hanson has fashioned a dynamic Detroit-based saga about showbiz upward mobility — though, to the credit of both movie and filmmaker, not that upward.

As if it weren't tough enough being an aspiring white rapper, Jimmy (Eminem) finds himself living back in a trailer with his mom after having just lost his girlfriend. But because his mom is played by Kim Basinger, she's not just a mom; her new live-in boyfriend (Michael Shannon) is about Jimmy's age. Basinger manages to convince us this woman could pull off the feat, even though she looks as if life long ago wore her out.

Jimmy stamps metal by day and eyeballs a modeling hopeful (Brittany Murphy) who pops into the factory and flips him an affectionate finger. But by night, he competes in rapping contests staged in earthy venues that appear to be one or two steps down from the joint where Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man fought his wrestling match.

In his first contest, Jimmy freezes and the stigma lingers, despite backing from black buddy Future (Mekhi Phifer). White rappers and black rappers aren't exactly predestined to be pals, and it's refreshing to see not just cross-racial friendships, but also animosities based on nothing more than the fact that individuals simply don't like each other.

The rap sequences are shot and edited with the excitement of a crisply broadcast sporting event, which in a way they are. Eminem may be a success in real life, but you don't get the sense that anyone here will break out and bankroll mansions or hot cars (though in Detroit, you could probably get a deal). The victories here will be small on the world stage but immense in self-esteem terms.

Eminem steals the picture from a cast with snap down to the smallest parts. An argument could be made for Basinger, however, who looms so poignantly with not-quite-faded beauty but totally faded prospects. Hanson not doubt will rank near the top of her Christmas card list; he guided her to a Confidential Oscar and could steer her to another nomination here.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Brutally beautiful, darkly comic sci-fi, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is guaranteed to destroy the feeble competition and conquer the world this summer. Visceral to the point of overkill (and beyond), a berserk blizzard of kinetic images, it doesn't even give you time to be scared.

And even though "T2" stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's not just another chrome-plated casual carnage flick. "T2" has a humane message; in fact, it's even Politically Correct, in a perverse way. Here's a techno-movie that is virulently anti-technology; that deploys mega-violence to make a statement about the value of human life; that is macho in the extreme, but has a female sensibility at heart.

And it has Arnold. Just try and stop it.

As we survey the scorched metal graveyard that is Los Angeles circa 2029, a solemn voice-over brings us up to date since the first "Terminator": Intelligent computers began the nuclear war that wiped out 3 billion lives on Aug. 29, 1997. Those few unlucky humans who survived were left to face a far fiercer enemy than men -- the malevolent machines we created.

But it doesn't have to end that way: The human resistance is led by John Connor, who reprogrammed the original Terminator -- a titanic Teutonic cyborg with a metal robot skeleton beneath its flesh-and-blood exterior -- and sent it back in time to protect himself as a young boy.

And John's mother Sarah (wiry hellcat Linda Hamilton, who outdoes Sigourney "Aliens" Weaver in Ultimate Overprotective Mom mode), is determined to change the future by "terminating" a scientist who bases his ultra-advanced weapons technology on a microchip left behind during the first "Terminator's" earthly visit, thus unwittingly designing the doom of mankind.

So this time, when Schwarzenegger materializes in a parking lot in a blaze of blue lightning, he's a good guy, sort of, sent to protect young John Connor, a 12-year-old mall rat. After John (chipper, androgynous Edward Furlong) learns this frightening father-figure has to obey his orders ("Cool! My own Terminator!"), he gradually humanizes the implacable Terminator, teaching him about mores and emotions ("I will not kill anybody," he promises John after one such lesson -- instead, he just maims them for life). He also gives the Terminator a crash course in teen slang, which provides Schwarzenegger with the raft of drop-dead deadpan one-liners kids will be repeating all summer.

But the robots have also sent a Terminator back in time -- the T-1000, more advanced, more deadly even than Arnold (he's just a T-800) -- on a mission to terminate kid Connor. Blond, bland, all-American-looking Robert Patrick plays the T-1000, who moves about in an L.A. cop's uniform. Relentless and almost invincible, the T-1000 is made of "liquid metal," so he's self-healing and capable of quicksilver metamorphoses into anything he's made contact with.

The collision of these two dueling near-indestructible man-machines at large in Los Angeles leads to fight scenes like you've never seen.

Director and co-screenwriter James Cameron has the framing eye of a great comic-book artist, and a bracingly sick sense of humor -- he wittily borrows from the surrealistic hallucinations of "Nightmare on Elm Street," the paranoia of "Silence of the Lambs" -- and even indulges in a clever reversal of the melting Wicked Witch scene from "The Wizard of Oz."

Budgeted in excess of $90 million ("T1" cost a mere $6 million), "T2" is the most expensive movie ever made, and Cameron puts it all on screen -- the makeup, special effects and especially the harrowing chase scenes (a 14-wheeler truck chases a dirt bike through the L.A. flood-control channels; a helicopter buzzes a SWAT van on the L.A. freeway) redefine "spectacular." And, of course, there are dozens of satisfying explosions, including a horrifyingly vivid envisioning of a nuclear holocaust.

The Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King

At last the full arc is visible, and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy comes into final focus. I admire it more as a whole than in its parts. The second film was inconclusive, and lost its way in the midst of spectacle. But "Return of the King" dispatches its characters to their destinies with a grand and eloquent confidence. This is the best of the three, redeems the earlier meandering, and certifies the "Ring" trilogy as a work of bold ambition at a time of cinematic timidity.

That it falls a little shy of greatness is perhaps inevitable. The story is just a little too silly to carry the emotional weight of a masterpiece. It is a melancholy fact that while the visionaries of a generation ago, like Coppola with "Apocalypse Now," tried frankly to make films of great consequence, an equally ambitious director like Peter Jackson is aiming more for popular success. The epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns, and audiences are much more interested in Middle Earth than in the world they inhabit.

Still, Jackson's achievement cannot be denied. "Return of the King" is such a crowning achievement, such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films. Yes, they will be adrift during the early passages of the film's 200 minutes, but to be adrift occasionally during this nine-hour saga comes with the territory; Tolkien's story is so sweeping and Jackson includes so much of it that only devoted students of the Ring can be sure they understand every character, relationship and plot point.

The third film gathers all of the plot strands and guides them toward the great battle at Minas Tirith; it is "before these walls, that the doom of our time will be decided." The city is a spectacular achievement by the special- effects artisans, who show it as part fortress, part Emerald City, topping a mountain, with a buttress reaching out over the plain below where the battle will be joined. In a scene where Gandalf rides his horse across the drawbridge and up the ramped streets of the city, it's remarkable how seamlessly Jackson is able to integrate computer-generated shots with actual full-scale shots, so they all seem of a piece

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

To call "The Empire Strikes Back" a good junk movie is no insult: There is enough bad junk around. And surely we're getting over the snobbery of pretending that it is undemocratic to recognize any hierarchy of culture, as if both low and high can't be appreciated, often be the same people.
But when light entertainment is done well, someone is bound to make extravagant and unsupportable claims for its being great art. You will hear that this sequel to "Star Wars" is part of a vast new mythology, as if it were the Oresteia. Its originator, George Lucas, has revealed that the two pictures are actually parts four and five of a nine-part sage, as if audiences will some day receive the total the way devotees now go to Seattle for a week of immersion in Wagner's complete Ring Cycle.
Nonsense. This is no monumental artistic work, but a science-fiction movie done more snappily than most, including its own predecessor. A chocolate bar is a marvelous sweet that does not need to pretend to be a chocolate soufflé; musical comedies are wonderful entertainment without trying to compete with opera; blue jeans are a perfect garment that shouldn't be compared with haute couture. There are times when you would much rather have a really good hot dog than any steak, but you can still recognize that one is junk food and the other isn't.
"The Empire Strikes Back" has no plot structure, no character studies let alone character development, no emotional or philosophical point to make. It has no original vision of the future, which is depicted as a pastiche of other junk-culture formulae, such as the western, the costume epic and the Would War II movie. Its specialty is "special effects" or visual tricks, some of which are playful, imaginative and impressive, but others of which have become space-movie clichés.
But the total effect is fast and attractive and occasionally amusing. Like a good hot dog, that's something of an achievement in a field where unpalatable junk is the rule.
In this film, as in "Star Wars," a trio of nice, average-looking young people (Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford as Han Solo and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia) is pursued by a sinister figure in black mask and cloak, Darth Vader. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Skywalker is dull-witted -- for various reasons, he is hanging upside down during most of this film and is always having to be rescued by the others -- but brave young heroes traditionally are.
There are new bad robots, as well as the good robots, C-3PO and R2-D2, whose humanistic fussiness charmed audiences in the earlier film. A new puppet, representing a great guru but looking like an elderly, Eastern rodent, is a success; an invented beast of burden that looks like the rear half of a cheap camel costume is not. The monkish character played by Alec Guinness is back with sparkling lights on his shoulders and a transparent body to indicate that he was killed off in "Star Wars."
The Future is no longer quite pictured as belonging to white males plus one pedestal princess in a white gown. The princess has put on more sensible clothes for wartime, and there is exactly one other woman in the universe, who can be glimpsed working at the home base. There is one black, Billy Dee Williams as a man who seems to have been set up with his own planet by the Small Business Administration and keeps complaining that he has "no choice" about betraying everyone.
At the beginning and end of the new film, the bad Empire and the good Rebellion are still at odds. The fact is that there is no beginning or end, just several middle-of-the-story chases -- one on ice, several using spacecraft in airplane dog-fight style, and some classic duels, except that the swords are laser beams and use of the mystical "Force" means that one can will one's weapon back in hand after it is knocked away.
As for the idea of the Force, it is a mishmash of current cultic fashions without any base in ideas. It doesn't seem to be connected with ethics or a code of decent behavior, either. Shywalker is never called to account for having behaved unpleasantly to his guru before knowing who he is -- even to the extent of knocking food out of the hungry guru's hand. How many religions of any kind would tolerate a disciples having refused to share his food with his disguised spiritual leader?
But then, you don't go to junk movies for your philosophy or religion, do you?