The Dark Knight & Journey to the Center of the Earth

SF's IMAX theatre has been running 'round-the-clock sold out showings of The Dark Knight. When the 3 A.M. Monday-Tuesday show sells out, you know a movie is a hit. At last look, critics have ranked The Dark Knight at 95% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite all this approval, I say The Dark Knight is a mediocre piece of filmmaking.

It's just too hard to tell what's happening; information is often poorly presented to the viewer. Fast-cutting, ultra low lighting, and an out-of-focus camera make it hard to see anything, this is disorientating. For The Dark Knight, this is a problem because the movie feels like it doesn't make sense and the result is frustration. Ledger is really, really good in this movie, but we hardly ever get a good look at him. When we do, it's almost like a Jazz trumpet solo—brash, unique.

The IMAX version, worth the extra cash, has some neat tricks. Cityscapes are magnificent, and when Batman flies from one tall building to another, my head had to swivel to track him. But never is IMAX's huge frame used to anything close to it's full potential. The level of craftsmanship was better not only in the first two Batman movies (by Tim Burton), but also in Gangbusters, a TV show from the 1950s I've been watching a lot of lately. That's right, 1950s T.V. is better made than The Dark Knight.

It's been commented before that Rambo: First Blood Part II created a fantasy world where the Vietnam war could be won by the right man. Some of this conservative ideology / lone-wolf stuff is at work in The Dark Knight. To wit, multiple references to the Joker as a terrorist. How does Batman foil a Joker plot to bomb the populace? By getting information from everyones' phones. Harvey Dent, the hope of Gotham, is referred to as All-American. (Batman, referring to Dent, “Have you aver seen such an American face?”) Dent is so American that guns made in China can't kill him. According to Wikipedia, Christopher Nolan chose Aaron Eckhart to be Dent in part because of a “kind of chiseled American hero quality.”

But, the new darkness is how open The Dark Knight ends. Incorruptible American Dent is corrupted. Terroristic Joker is at large. I posit that this parallels current American political impasses, which is interesting, I guess, but what's fascinating is that Joker captures sympathy. Joker:

“You see, nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If I told people that a gangbanger was going to get shot, or a busload of soldiers was going to get blown up, nobody would panic. Because it's all part of the plan. But tell people on tiny little mayor is going to die and everyone loses their minds!”

Good point.

Copying down this quote, I can hear Ledger's delivery, word by word. Ledger's Joker is wildfire and Loki. The lack of origin story, bucking genre convention, emphasizes these aspects. Other Batman characters have been darkly virtuoso—Jack Nicholson's Joker, Pfeiffer's Catwoman, DeVito's Penguin. But never do these actors go that extra six feet under to deliver a performance as sinister as Ledger. Furthermore, Nicholson, Pfeiffer, and DeVito had director Tim Burton, whose style aided their performance. Christopher Nolan's filmmaking, however, often hamstrings his actors (what possible justification is there for the sound design on Batman's voice?) by making it hard to see the actor.

Presumably to get The Dark Knight a PG-13 rating, violence on the human body is only described and not shown. The inanimate is ripped apart and exploded with something like affection, but blood takes place off-screen; except, I'm uncertain whether whatever cut Ledger took place on-screen or off-.

Reading what I have written, I notice that Ledger has stolen the focus of this review, much like he did The Dark Knight.

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Big square Brendan Fraser and his big square head are often launched at obstacles physical and emotional, but, appealingly, he always manages to bust through unscathed. Gods and Monsters played on this quality of Fraser the best, but certainly Journey to the Center of the Earth is distinguished by having him in free fall the longest.

At certain theaters Journey to the Center of the Earth is presented in 3D, a gimmick that helps the film along. In response to the rise of T.V. in the 50s, Hollywood screens got bigger and productions grew more elaborate. Perhaps, with the rise of piracy, we are witnessing similar tactics with the upcoming group of films in IMAX or 3D. Of these strategies, IMAX is likely to be the more fruitful because 3D technology can't currently present objects as rounded, instead the image is composed of a sequence of planes at different distances from the viewer (i.e. foreground, middleground, background) reminding me of paper cutouts composing a diorama. On the other hand, only 3D startles with objects appearing immediately next to one's face.

Journey is a fabricated film, complete with a hook at the end a sequel can link onto. But, the film was good enough for the 10 year old sitting with her father in the row behind me, and it's good enough for me. Journey is a simple machine designed to be fun, and it is.

Wanted & Brideshead Revisited

In Action Speaks Louder, Eric Lichtenfeld points out that an action film can be about being fully alive. Anything good, Hollywood can ruin. Part self-help book pastiche, part action movie pastiche, Wanted tells the story of a boring man, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), recruited into a secret society of assassins. Unfortunately he remains boring. This society teaches Wesley to be a killer, instructing him in its secret ways. For example, he learns to curve bullets around objects by spinning in place really really fast, pistol arm outstretched, while firing. (No wonder my girlfriends high school physics students have trouble understanding centripetal force.) Whom the society assassinates is determined by a giant loom, The Loom of Fate. This handily avoids the problematic morality of a film like the The Matrix, where a disturbing number of innocent security guards are killed to save Morpheus. (I acknowledge that Fate plays a role, though less prominent, in The Matrix.) In Wanted, guns don't kill people, metaphysics does.

In between energy drink product placements and Matrix references, sleek sex-bot Angelina Jolie is the love interest of scruffy charmer James McAvoy. This seems to me an extraordinarily mismatched paring; imagining them having sex is like imagining a head on collision between a modern aerodynamic motorcycle (Jolie) and a stately elk (McAvoy)—awful messy and no one survives.

The comic book original of Wanted swims deeper into darker waters than the film. Actually, the two have almost nothing to do with each other. In the comic book Wanted, there are no heroes. Villains have taken over the earth. The comic book Wanted consists only of villains plotting villainy against other villains. The character of Wesley Gibson falls down, not up, from ordinary man to serial-killing super-villain. The comic infamously ends with Wesley Gibson addressing his readers, looking out of the page announcing "This is my face while fucking you in the ass." Post-modern self reference reaches a new low. The extremity of the original source is nowhere located in the film version of Wanted. No, Wanted has a different, more rare problem for an action film: it has too much plot. I would prefer a more minimalist version of the avenging angels mythology Wanted is trying to construct. This would bring Wanted more in line with a classic like Gun Crazy. In no way an intellectual film, Gun Crazy is a case where a director's instincts are right. Wanted, by contrast, fails by the criterion it implicitly establishes for itself—Wanted is boring. This is in extreme contrast to director Timur Bekmambetov's previous film, which was made on a far smaller budget, the extremely memorable Nochnoy Dozor (Night Watch). Do the teenaged owners of the identically worn sneakers (expensive? cheap?) propped up on the back of movie chairs everywhere really enjoy Wanted? Will they in ten years?

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Brideshead Revisited is so British it's sure to be reviewed by Anthony Lane. I think he will find a lot to like in this well constructed, quietly revolutionary film. Despite its across the pond mentality, Brideshead closely follows Hollywood stylistic norms, such that it feels of the very studios themselves. Brideshead uses familiar tactics: beauty of image sometimes substituting for beauty of language, a great score that knows when to be quiet, a script that takes much of its emotional depth and moral complexity from great literature as reinterpreted by a talented screenwriter, award deserving editing, and a director who appears to be at his best tying all of these talents together. Comparisons to Atonement and Barry Lyndon are instructive. All three films utilize isomorphic formulas and strategies developed by Hollywood, but only in one is the name of a director writ large in content and visuals—Kubrick in Barry Lyndon comes across as KUBRICK. Brideshead, instead, seems like Atonement. One moment in Brideshead breaks with tradition, two men kiss and the moment passes without comment from either.

That Brideshead seems to come out of Hollywood, sui generis, doesn't detract from its merit. Anthony Lane, perhaps recalling the accidental greatness of Casablanca, has mentioned that Hollywood most needs skilled crafts people, not self igniting geniuses. As a work of craft, at least, Brideshead is like Casablanca. Both also face a similar menace, a shrinking and alteration of color and light to conform to television. Instead, see them on the biggest screen possible.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull & Made of Honor

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has a high gloss, high lighting ratio look similar to many modern comic books—pulp, updated. Crystal Skull is built to be fast, too fast to be weighed down by encumbrances like a sensical plot or the laws of physics. Everything is subservient to speed, which is part of why this movie is so disarmingly weird: as far as I can tell, both good guys and bad guys want to accomplish the same goal, returning the title's crystal skull to its home, but must pointlessly squabble en route. Why? Because that's how these kind of films work, it is their formula. At least the camera doesn't shake so much as to make me nauseous, like the last two installments of the also formulaic Bourne Identity series. (Side track: how eerie is it that Joan Allen replaced Chris Cooper as the spying face of the U.S. government, and they look like male and female versions of exactly the same person?)

Another part of the Indiana Jones formula is a component of the mystical. Any mythology can be raided for this purpose, from the Old Testament refry of Raiders of the Lost Ark to the Sir Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi refry of Crystal Skull. Is belief in everything that different from belief in nothing? Maybe, as this is a film where the Ark of the Covenant is relegated to a cameo. Unfortunately we still can't seem to believe our way to a role of any import for a non-white actor and are instead stuck with the usual killer “native” tribes nonsense. Those falsely accused of Communist sympathies, perhaps in some kind of belated comment about the Hollywood Black List, are treated with plenty of sympathy, but persons of color are again a racial Other.

There will always be room for the entertainments Spielberg has shown himself a virtuoso of, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Cinema, with its taste for engaging image after engaging image, loves speed. But Crystal Skull is never as entertaining as Spielberg at his best. The primary fault, I believe, lies in an unwillingness to develop any situation whatsoever, instead relying on bigger explosions, bigger waterfalls, etc., to the point where the explosions (nuclear) and the waterfalls (Iguazu) are literally the biggest in the world. Spielberg might consider the advice Cate Blanchett gives while sword-fighting Shia LaBeouf, each on a speeding jeep. She tells him, “You fight like a young man, eager to start, quick to finish.” Then she punches him in the stomach. Classic.

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What Made of Honor (tagline: an unbridled comedy) really needs is more puns. Hipster super-crush Harmony Faith Lane of Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang) must choose between an annoying Manhattan playboy (Patrick Dempsey) and an annoying Scottish royal (Kevin McKidd). I would have been happier if she chose neither, but genre conventions force the expected coupling.

Like a pink tee-shirt with “it takes a real man to wear pink” printed on it, Made is obsessed with being a “real” man while assuming stereotypes of the feminine. At times this comes across as unintentional parody, like the odd moment where Patrick Dempsey competes in a caber toss while wearing a too short kilt. Or, when Patrick Dempsey's buddies come over to help him make bridal shower baskets one of his buddies can't handle it and leaves, saying, “See you ladies ... I'm going to a strip-club to drink a beer and eat a steak.” Who talks like this? Four credited writers and not one axed this line? Apparently, maintaining Dempsey's masculinity was enough of an issue to the makers of Made that they included a character, Tiny Shorts Guy, to point to as different—not a “real” man, a sissy. The audience is supposed to laugh at Tiny Shorts Guy and to deride him, excluding him just like he is excluded from full participation in the group of “real” men. This schtick is old and offensive, and anyone who thinks otherwise should read Vito Russo.

There's another connection between Made and Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang), cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts, who brings great visual depth to Made. All of Made is well shot, but Pierce-Roberts' camera really excels in the diffuse outdoor light of Scotland, and my favorite parts of Made are the shots of sheep hanging out in the glens. Comedic lighting is generally flat and bright, the one surprise about Made is how hard it strives for a beautiful image. Too bad these carefully constructed images are un-Made by the content.

Adventure

Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna) & 700IS

The Mexican film Under the Same Moon tells the story of Carlitos, a nine year-old boy who smuggles himself across the Mexico-United States border to find his mother Rosario, who is working as a housecleaner in the U.S. Moon is corny, nevertheless, it efficiently uses current Hollywood style to quickly establish characters and make political points. Often, in Moon, plot is subservient to exposition of issues, as it is when Carlitos enthusiastically asks to work picking a tomato crop, and that day, of all days, INS raids that particular tomato farm (one almost writes plantation). However, Moon never loses a warm humanity, and hence never becomes trite, or a film only about political problems. Much of this is because every actor (main to supporting) is well picked for their role. Kate del Castillo, as Rosario, is perfect, and her complicated, unresolved romantic entanglement with Eugenio Derbez, as Enrique, has the screen presence of famous couples from Hollywood's big studio era.

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There are few places better than SF to see experimental film, and Artists' Television Access, at Valencia and 21st, often manages to showcase what I would otherwise never know existed, like the recent showing of short work from the 2007 700IS Icelandic experimental film festival as part of the Global Undergrounds program. (ATA has an international partnership with 700IS. Should SF and Reindeerland be sister cities?) Many of the films I saw deserve praise. I'll single out:

• Fokus by Löffel. Consists entirely of slow-motion close-ups of women before, during, and after they fire a gun. The women range in response from enjoyment to reluctance, from fear to satisfaction. Like good portraiture.
• HOT AIR: Keep Yourself Alive by Ellsworth. A women without ovaries or breasts plays air guitar. She's “a one-woman all boy band!” announces HOT AIR. Pushes gender ID and proclaims performance. Moving in a way I would never have expected.
• Honey by Deinema. Honey drips out of a mouth onto a glass table. Erotic.
• Untitled by Boermans. A lineup of female nudes, echoing the nude in sculpture while reinterpreting/reclaiming the female form. Each women stays in front of the camera until she feels like leaving. Most don't stay very long; shortly there are only two remaining. Both, without shame, return the gaze of the camera, self-possessed, until one chooses to leave, and then the other.

The calendar of events at ATA is available at www.atasite.org.

The Counterfeiters & The Band's Visit

The face of The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is Karl Markovics, and he controls the film with expression ranging from sullen and dangerous, to sullen and passionate, to sullen and kind. Markovics plays Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch, a Jewish counterfeiter interned in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen and forced to participate in Operation Bernhard, a Nazi effort to counterfeit first the British pound, then the U.S. dollar. Based on a true story, Counterfeiters has the neatness of a piece of moral fiction. Virtuously, Counterfeiters never sermonizes. Instead, moral questions are developed through juxtaposition of Sally with other characters—Sally and an innocent, Sally and a hero, Sally and a villain. I use labels like “hero” and “villain”, but nobody in Counterfeiters is exactly good or exactly evil. To say this another way, each characters actions can be questioned yet each character can also be viewed with sympathy. This is not to say that the Nazis' actions are forgivable, but like Peter Lorre's pedophile in M, here the villain becomes human. The images of Counterfeiters support this point—few color films more make the world look composed of shades of gray.

I've made Counterfeiters seem cold and intellectual, but it is an engaging, even entertaining, movie. Counterfeiters shares this quality with American Psycho, which I saw at a midnight showing directly after. Counterfeiters is so noble in intent, and American Psycho loses itself so easily in blood-slick play, I panicked when I realized how much greater a work than Counterfeiters I consider American Psycho. How can this be?

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The musical soundtrack to The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) is unusually sparse, especially for a film featuring musicians, so that when music is played it seems like a miracle. The Band's Visit is about finding such miracles in sparseness, though the plot concerns an Egyptian police band (really something more like a chamber orchestra) lost in Israel—a mistake in pronunciation leads to the stranding of the band in a remote Israeli town for one night. A great hearted film, humanistic in politics and loving of its characters, the unusual and foreign setup becomes relatable to us in far away San Francisco. In the magnificent finale, when the band's conductor raises his hand, I believed. I've never heard classical Arab musical compositions before, those in this film are beautiful.

Sleepwalking

So there were some good things and some bad things about Sleepwalking. On the good things list is the camera, which regularly perfectly frames a face. Is it fate that I read the following in David Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood before seeing Sleepwalking? “... the chemistry that exists between photography and the face maintains a depth or mystery that is without rival.” (Pg. 86.) For Thomson, the image of the face, or images of the face as it moves through time, lie at the heart of an understanding of cinema. Sleepwalking adheres to this theory, to its benefit. Also interesting: Charlize Theron again makes herself – not exactly unpretty – but not the glamorous image she is well capable of being. Red eyes, tragedy makeup, and the right kind of light; if it works on her it will work on anyone.

On the bad things list is the plot. A melodrama about family relationships, Sleepwalking manhandles our emotions as characters lose their jobs, their homes, their children, etc. I felt manipulated, especially by a scene near the end. I caution you, what follows discusses a major plot development. In the final act, a man murders his own father. Such is the power of narrative that a fucked up situation like patricide become satisfying, completing, wholesome. As the son bangs away at the father yelling “its all your fault” we believe it and the violence is cleansing. No blood, which might engender sympathy, is shown. This could have been played out differently, it would have been sufficient for the son to stand up to the father some other way. One thing I liked about In the Valley of Elah was that violence done by anyone served only to worsen, never to resolve. In Sleepwalking violence begets violence, and violence solves the problem, with the force of a happy ending and narrative resolution shoving this “solution” down our throats. The violence in either American Psycho or Kill Bill could never be this disturbing, even if it is more prevalent and graphic, because stylization always put the killing in quotes. Sleepwalking never allows for a question mark.

The Other Boylen Girl & Acadamy Award Nominated Shorts: Animation

Creators of The Other Boleyn Girl: you spent so much money on beautiful costumes, on castles, on banners ... why do you insist on obscuring everything behind grates or shoulders or moving the camera every freakin' moment? Polanski, for one, did stuff like this, but he know when to do long takes as well. He had rhythm. TOBG loosely tells the story of the sisters Boleyn, who in the 16th century both bedded Henry the XIII. Anne Boleyn became Queen of England and mother to the throne's eventual successor, Queen Elizabeth. The plot has all the loose ends and inaccuracies of condensed history, but it also has the emotional density of good melodrama. Besides the camera thing, TOBG has some merit as a work of craft, and I found it surprisingly likeable. Eric Bana as Henry pulls off the difficult combination of being alternately lupine and oafish, and Scarlett Johansson conveys as much depth as Natalie Portman, the two appear as petty pretty girls, strong women, predators, and victims. Some trick of how TOBG is shot makes many of its images look golden, which conveys a moral point: if everything is gilded then what is the value of anything?

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Animation is close to the heart of film. Each frame is individually crafted, twenty-four frames per second. All the Academy Award nominated shorts in the animation category are now showing at the Embarcadero. In the wonderful stop-motion Madame Tutli-Putli, the Madame experiences an increasingly sinister train ride that ends somewhere a lot like Heaven. The eyes of the Madame are beautifully expressive, for portrait painter Jason Walker invented a method, used in the film, to superimpose images of real human eyes onto the eyes of puppets. The high artistry and style of Moya Lyubov (My Love), from Russia, will be familiar to viewers of the series Masters of Russian Animation, and the mostly playful stop-motion rendition of Prokofiev's Peter & The Wolf, the award winner, was enjoyable. Two other films also show, I Met the Walrus, an animated version of an interview of John Lennon by 14-year-old Jerry Levitan, and Meme Les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven), so there's a lot of value for your money.

There Will Be Blood

Someone told me they signed up for a film class after seeing There Will Be Blood. It's that kind of film. In it, everything has so much character, down to things environmental – sere landscape, searing light, and insidious oil – I was reminded of everything cinema can be. Especially the light. Look for the cross in the church of Eli Sunday, and ask yourself Has salvation ever looked so burning? Today so many movies look like video games or a series of monochrome color swatches (this is a warm scene, this is a cool scene), Blood always looks like film.

Blood traces the rise and fall of Daniel Plainview; a man whom greed drives, then devours. There's room enough in the complex structure of Blood for three main plots, each based on Daniel's relationship with another character: H.W. Plainview, Daniel's adopted son via a sort of anti-Immaculate Conception; Eli Sunday, a preacher and showman weirdly reminiscent of modern televangelists; and Henry Brands, a con man. The heart of Blood, an opposition of similar men, is between Daniel and Eli, whose games of power escalate to some of the title's promised gore. Director Paul Thomas Anderson found the perfect actors for these roles, Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview and Paul Dano as Eli Sunday, and the best scenes are when both actors are onscreen, each playing off the other. To these two men, Capitalism is a form of bullying, and maybe murder (hardly surprising considering the film is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!), and Christianity is only another form of capitalism.

Well acted, well shot, good script, interesting themes ... Blood slots neatly into film criticism and history as a masterpiece. David Denby has already proclaimed it as “... work that bears comparison to the greatest achievements of Griffith and Ford.” It's such a nice (both pretty and precise) film that it seems mean to bring up that a film about white men and their big, gushing oil towers (shooting oil, the film's anti-semen: black instead of white, destructive instead of creative), may not be the direction American cinema should head. And yet, might there be a queer reading of Daniel Plainview? Certainly, there is a complete absence of women in his life, and all his relationships are with men. When Daniel suggests a trip to get some girls, it is his male companion who gets drunk and chases women. Daniel stays sober and alone. Perhaps Daniel is not attracted to women? We're given no solid evidence either way. We do see that what Daniel comes to truly love is the domination of others, to the point of losing his humanity. What makes this process of loss so interesting is that Daniel seems to have genuine warmth, even joy, in him at the beginning of the film. At the end I wondered whether this initial impression was only an illusion.

Juno & Sweeney Todd

Neither Juno nor Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street are much good. Both films are so high concept I can hear the pitches ...

• Juno: “an 'indie' comedy where a teenage girl with a strong mind and a dry wit gets pregnant—laughter and touching moments ensue."
• Sweeney Todd: “Johnny Depp has killer hair (hah!), again," or perhaps "a hair raising (hah!) tragi-comic musical."

Not much is made of what must have seemed amazing scripts. At least both films feel like they're trying to be something interesting, partial credit for effort. However, both films are still Hollywood product trying not to be. Juno is as independent as post-Nike acquisition Converse, and Sweeney Todd is as goth as Hot Topic. The fact that I know exactly what brands to assign to these films clues us into how purely they are each aimed at a specific style. It's all there in the clothes.

Neither film, for being so dependent on music, really works with its music. Sweeney Todd just has too much of Johnny Depp singing—I like my musicals musical. Juno lacks an ear in a different way. For example, there is a sound montage near the beginning of Juno that uses about five different songs in less than three minutes—it's confusing and manipulative. The soundtrack to Juno uses some excellent artists, but they crutch up the plot too much and none of their edge is present in Juno, especially my beloved Sonic Youth.

The acting in both Juno and Sweeney Todd is competent, but never good. Michael Cera was way, way better in Arrested Development, and I'm pretty sure Ellen Page has more in her than this. As for Sweeney Todd, what's going on with Johnny Depp anyway? I can tell he's hungry for something great, something immortal. I think he just needs the right director. After Edward Scissor Hands, it seemed like that director might have been Tim Burton, but that's not turning out to be the case. (In Sweeney Todd, after all, characterization is mostly left to an actors hair—ineffective, however befitting the subject matter.) Johnny Depp needs someone to do for him what Wes Anderson did for Bill Murray. I would advise Helena Bonham Carter similarly, as in Sweeney Todd she retreats from the grandeur she displayed in Fight Club and Big Fish or her flirtatious elegance in Conversations with Other Women into mere likeability.

Merry (Belated) Xmas

Enchanted & National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Harvey Keitel wears the coolest tie in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. It has little skulls on it, and I imagine it's a subtle message to all of us about the quality of Book of Secrets. I only wish I could have seen the international symbol for POISON before entering the cinema. At some point I realized the plot of Book of Secrets makes no sense—why do “smart” movie characters miss all the obvious plot twists? Although, there was one marvelous moment, a welcome breath of self consciousness, where Justin Bartha's character says (approximately), “Of course someone else is looking for the treasure. It's an axiom of treasure hunting.” I saw the film with my wonderful parents. My mom said, “It's kinda like it should be on T.V., but then I guess they couldn't afford the explosions.” My dad said, “I liked it. Every minute had either a chase scene or a puzzle.” A pleasant new Goofy short shows before the feature.

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Enchanted is better the straighter it's played. Movies where “movie land” invades “real life” do offer some nice possibilities: Who Framed Roger Rabbit explored the visual and The Purple Rose of Cairo had the most to say about cinema and it's relationship to our lives, but Enchanted is best at allowing actors to act like cartoons, and then to lose the naivety of their animated fairyland. By the end of Enchanted, cinema conventions, though tweaked, still win. Amy Adams is as good as everyone says, here and in Charlie Wilson's War.