This weekend at the movies, it's the death of American screenwriting! Neither of the two major July 4th releases, "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" and "The Last Airbender," have what you might call an actual screenplay. In both movies, characters blurt exposition at each other in endless, unwieldy chunks of monologue, Bella and Edward and Jacob disgorging unedited emotions of teen-diaryspeak, and the anonymous brats of "Airbender" laying down the history and rules of the craptaculous fantasy world in which they move as though they were compiling a user manual.
Children, it's called subtext, and in the craft of screenwriting, you hide what the characters want to say to each other beneath what they actually do say. Or, failing that, you give them something interesting to discuss that isn't baldly about getting from point A to point B in the storyline. "Eclipse" is actually an improvement on the narcoleptic "New Moon" -- I still say Catherine Hardwicke's intelligently swoony direction made the first "Twilight" the best so far -- but it hasn't been written so much as mediated. With "Airbender," the lousy non-script is just one more rancid tomato in the stew. Please, if you have to see this movie, save your money and buy tickets for the 2D version -- otherwise Hollywood will get the message that we're sheep who deserve hideous post-production 3D conversions.
Maybe "I Am Love" ain't so hot on the screenplay front, either --but only because the characters are too busy sublimating and then giving into their most carnal culinary and sexual urges. (If "Eclipse" is all text, this one's all subtext.) It's another showcase for Tilda Swinton (in photo above), here playing a cosseted Milanese wife who falls rapturously in love with a young chef, but the chief pleasure of the movie is the sybaritic delight taken in clothing and architecture and, above all, food, all of which are somehow all about sex and lead there forthwith. Watch this on a very big screen, please, and, as Wesley says, you probably don't want to see it hungry or horny.
"Restrepo" is the latest embedded documentary from Afghanistan, courtesy of co-directors Tim Hetherington and "Perfect Storm" writer Sebastian Junger. I have yet to catch it, but it made a splash at Sundance and has glowing notices at Metacritic. It's at the Kendall Square, as is Michael Winterbottom's "The Killer Inside Me," a well-made and purposeless adaptation of the notorious Jim Thompson pulp novel. (Consumer warning: the violence toward the film's female characters is extra-extra brutal.) At the MFA is a heartbreaking work of Iranian magical realism called "Women Without Men." And the Dennis Hopper retrospective continues at the Brattle with two genuine oddities from opposite ends of the actor's career: 1961's "Night Tide" (Hopper's first lead and a romance between a guy and a woman who may or may not be a mermaid -- hey, it's "Ondine" forty years early!) and 1994's "Witch Hunt" (HBO movie set in an alterna-noir Los Angeles where everyone can do magic; Hopper plays grizzled detective H. P. Lovecraft, "Phil" to his friends, of which he has none).
Here's the trailer for "Night Tide" -- come to think of it, this could be viewed as a proto-"Twilight" with the genders reversed and even worse screenwriting, if that's possible. Man, I miss the old, weird Hollywood.
