I Totally Recall Having More Fun The First Time

This should tell you everything you need to know about director Len Wiseman's lugubrious new remake of Total Recall, the brutally funny 1990 Paul Verhoeven/Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic: Kate Beckinsale, not an actress I often depend on to keep life seeming worthwhile, is the only performer in sight who shows even a glimmer of liveliness or wit. She's playing the part that put the pre-Basic Instinct Sharon Stone on the map—Lori, the loving wife who turns into a kick-ass villainess and slugging opponent once the hero catches on that his "real" life is a sham—and believe me, her maddened Posh Spice glares and curled lip when she revs into action are sights as welcomely incongruous amid the gloom that surrounds her as an icy martini wafting toward you in a mine shaft. It's a mystery how her old-fashioned notion that performances in movies like this one should be amusingly over-the-top ever managed to escape her director's (also her husband's) eagle eye for glumness.

As if to cater to our Great Recession doldrums, the plot has been reworked to drab, literally earthbound (no trip to Mars) effect. But the basic gimmick is in place. Taking over Ah-nold's old role, Colin Farrell plays Doug Quaid, an assembly-line worker living in "The Colony"—that is, the former Australia, now packed with mostly Asian refugees after too much chemical warfare has turned it into one of the only two habitable places on the planet. The other and richer one is the "United Federation of Britain," to which drone bees like Doug commute via a sort of supersized Acela named "The Fall"—not after the band, presumably—which zaps them through the earth's core in seventeen minutes flat.
The UFB's top cat is Bryan Cranston as the usual sinister dork with a totalitarian gleam in his eye, named Cohaagen-Dazs or something. (OK, so it's just "Cohaagen," but finding laughs in this movie is a DIY project.) He's got plans to invade the Colony with a robot army of heavily armed "synthetic police" to root out the resistance movement there. If all of this sounds like pretty stale stuff as dystopias go, you're getting the drift. The way the Colony is visualized mostly just tells you how badly Wiseman would rather be remaking Blade Runner.
Troubled by recurring dreams in which he's some sort of secret agent, Doug drops into Rekall—purveyors of implanted fake memories—and asks for their spy package. (The original's set-up was less clumsy: Schwarzenegger wanted to visit a virtual Mars simply because he couldn't afford to go to the real one.) And, well, you know what's coming: It turns out his spy fantasy was the reality, and his former employers up top wiped his brain clean of remembering it. Now he's a turncoat on the run, helped out by a resistance fighter named Melina (Jessica Biel). She needs to take him to her/their leader, Matthias—played by a mightily bored Bill Nighy, who seems to be fighting an impulse to yank out an iPhone between yawns and ask Siri to find him a new agent—to help foil Cohaagen-Dazs's looming invasion.
Understand, in principle, there's no particular reason to lament the idea of remaking Total Recall (which was itself based on Philip K. Dick's story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"). The original is 22 years old, pretty much the Pleistocene era to today's public, and not what you'd call sacred. But as tiresome as it is to say, just about every choice made by the filmmakers ends up reminding you of how much more brash and inventive Verhoeven's original was. Even the reprise of one of the 1990 version's best-remembered gotchas—a mutant prostitute exhibiting her three breasts—is embarrassing, because she's just plunked into a scene at random and nothing else in the movie justifies including her. For Verhoeven, three-breasted hookers were an organic (so to speak) part of the gleeful, salaciously pranksterish tone he brought to the material.
Compared to Verhoeven's relish for tweaking us with perverse gags and bold images—not least, the big post-marital martial-arts brawl between Schwarzenegger and Stone, a cliché now but a genuinely twisted novelty in those pre-Buffy the Vampire Slayer days—the way the new movie crawls by feels like sitting through a state funeral for a bunch of gigantic kitchen appliances. The variety and flair of the original's action showpieces have been replaced by scene after scene of people monotonously punching each other in cramped, dim surroundings, and even the one sequence that might have generated some thrill-ride momentum—a chase involving futuristic cars scooting around above ground—is a cluttered mess. The same goes for the CGI renditions of the world everybody lives in; they're so crammed with post-apocalyptic busywork that you can't glean any basic information about each environment, like where anything is in relation to anything else or the intended result of what anybody is trying to do.
The real puzzler, though, is that the whole thing is so joyless. How badly do you have to blow redoing Total Recall to end up with a movie that's no fun at all? Practically the only joke in the whole two hours is whose face is on the future's currency—and it goes by in an unexplained eyeblink, too. Beckinsale aside, nobody in the cast has any spark. Farrell seems to have been directed to play the hero by imagining what Robert Downey, Jr., might be like after a lobotomy. (Answer: awfully down in the dumps.) Cranston—who's so brilliant in Breaking Bad—seems almost painfully out of place; it's like watching Hal Holbrook play Hitler as he tries to stick in little touches of folksiness to humanize him.
Then again, Wiseman may not have blown it at all so far as the big audience is concerned. Joylessness—or humorlessness, anyhow—is what proves a comic-book movie's importance these days. Even admiring The Dark Knight Rises as I mostly do, I can still wish Christopher Nolan hadn't become the exemplar for everybody else, especially filmmakers who can't match either his visual authority or his intimations of depth. If the new Total Recall ends up certifying the vogue, people like me may soon take to looking forward to the next Lars von Trier flick to perk ourselves up with a reminder that life has a larky side.

Blazing Saddles: Tom Carson on Luck

With none other than Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte heading the cast—and both doing some of their canniest work ever—the acting's the top reason to check out Luck, HBO's latest contender for Major American TV Drama. But the best reason to stick with it is that David (Deadwood) Milch and Michael (Miami Vice) Mann's bid to turn playing the horses into a pressure-cooker version of life in these United States just keeps getting more engrossing, even for viewers who don't know a trifecta from a daily double.

Hoffman is Chester "Ace" Bernstein, a wily moneybags who's just out after three years in the pen and wants a piece of California's Santa Anita racetrack. That dapper rock Dennis Farina plays his longtime chauffeur and live-in confidant, a relationship as vital to both of these tough cookies as J. Edgar Hoover's bromance with Clyde Tolson. But Ace's maneuvers are only one squiggle in a Jackson Pollock canvas of jockeys, trainers, agents, gamblers, and hangers-on all living for the adrenaline rush of post time. Though Nolte, as an old-school owner, obviously jumps right out—and so does Richard Kind as a stammering jockeys' rep—keep your eyes peeled for the quartet of funkily inspired performers (Kevin Dunn, token pretty boy Jason Gedrick, manic Ritchie Coster, and beatific Ian Hart) playing clubhouse pond scum turned neophyte horse owners after a big Pick 6 score. Half comic relief and half Greek chorus, they could be the funniest bunch of monomaniacs since The X-Files introduced the Lone Gunmen.

In a satisfyingly democratic way, what gives even these skeevy dudes equal rights with millionaires in Luck's milieu is a shared passion—if not addiction, or maybe religion—that trumps family attachments and everything else. The races themselves are shot and scored in a hyperbolic style totally unlike the rest of the show's unromantic tone, dramatizing their charged meaning to aficionados. Not just high-stakes contests, they're also the only transfiguring experiences this otherwise cynical world has to offer. Even Ace succumbs when he acquires a Mister Ed of his own: His look of quizzical wonder in the stalls tells you he's forming the first unguarded bond of his gnarly life. The ultra-American beauty of Luck is that pretty much everyone in sight is mercenary and calculating—and yet, whether they know it or not, they're in it for the poetry.

Featuring Tom Hanks as a downsized mega-mart employee who tries college in midlife and Julia Roberts as his unlikely prof, Larry Crowne is a bewilderingly bad movie. Maybe the stars are no spring chickens, the career dilemma they're both trying to resolve here. But these are still people with resources —options, you know? They don't need to grab at the first crummy, amateurish script that comes down the pike. Even if it's written by—cough, cough—Tom Hanks, in tandem with Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and not much else.

Hanks also directed, increasing the bafflement. He's done it before—in episodes of HBO's Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon, both of which he also produced. Same goes for 1996's negligible (but not bad) That Thing You Do! As filmmaking, none of them would have cost Orson Welles a nanosecond's sleep, but at least they made sense as passion projects. This one? Not so much, unless Hanks was kidding himself that a heartwarmer about average folks pasting things together was Capra for these times. Too bad that what he knows about the "little people" wouldn't fill Tom Thumb's jockstrap.

The story Etch-a-Sketches along from one inept contrivance to another. When we first meet Larry, he's a bustling drone bee in a big-box store, fatuously sure he's going to be named Employee of the Month (again) when he's called in to learn he's being fired on account of his lack of a B.A. Yet he's also supposed to be a 20-year Navy vet, a c.v. gauchely introduced to give this doltish Joe Ordinary a dollop of belated true grit.

Urged on by his next-door neighbor (Cedric the Entertainer, who's looking mighty bored these days with playing the Irrepressible Black Guy for white people), Larry enrolls at a local community college, where he's improbably adopted by a foxy gamine named Talia (the appealing Gugu Mbatha-Raw). She not only gives our hero a fashion makeover but invites him to join her fun-loving—get this—scooter club, making for lots of zesty, put-putting L.A. filler scored to the likes of Tom Petty's "Running Down a Dream." You know how kids today just love hanging out with unemployed old dorks who've got the conversational skills of armadilloes.

As for Mercedes "Mercy" Tainot (Roberts), she's stuck in a bum marriage with a writer husband (Bryan Cranston) who's given up making a living for the joys of surfing the Web. It says a lot about the script's keen grip on modern life that the proof Hubby's a skunk is his sneaky yen for online porn—which isn't even porn, just pretty timid cheesecake. Gotta protect that PG-13 rating, after all. Watching a gifted actor like Cranston (Breaking Bad") rasp his way through a straw-man part like this one makes your heart go out to his wallet.

Then Larry enters Mercy's classroom, and magic happens. Except it doesn't, really: These two stars would be better off enrolling in a chemistry class instead. Apparently, we're meant to swoon at the mere idea of "Hanks and Roberts—Together at Last," but honestly, who was pining for it? It's no help that, while Larry's age is kept vague, Hanks is clearly hoping to pass for a few years younger than the 54 he is in real life; you wince at the makeup and what looks to be the bad dye job on his hair. As for Roberts—though she's still got That Smile, which doesn't get much of a workout here until the climax—she not only looks gaunt but seems eerily unaware of how humongously unpleasant her character's behavior is for about nine-tenths of the movie's running time.

Because her acting has stayed unblemished by anything resembling craft in 20-plus years as a box-office draw, Roberts needs lots of directorial TLC to sparkle—something you'd expect this particular director to be attentive to. But Hanks leaves her stranded in bit after toxic bit that gives Mercy the charm of a ranting bag lady with a graduate degree. She's hailed at movie's end as a "great" teacher, but we see an atrocious one: peevish, bored, disdainful and incompetent. (It's fairly incredible that nobody thought of giving Mercy a scene in which she's actually shown improving a student's communication skills.) About the only thing that seems to give this dame pleasure is malice—e.g., when she gleefully whoops it up at seeing Cranston pulled over for a DUI after a marital spat. Maybe the young Katharine Hepburn could have pulled off the contemptuous-shrew routine and made it charismatic, but not our Julia.

And so long as we're into invidious comparisons, isn't it fun to remember how Hanks used to be called the boomers' Jimmy Stewart? He even deserved the accolade at one point, but when Stewart was middle-aged, he didn't only make mush like Harvey. He played the richest and darkest parts of his career for Hitchcock, Anthony Mann and Otto Preminger, too. Even more than Stewart, Hanks is in a position to do whatever he wants, and yet the last real acting challenge he took on was Saving Private Ryan—13 years ago. Larry Crowne is his project from start to finish, but he's so uninterested in his own performance that it looks like a paycheck gig instead. If anyone under 30 goes to see the damn thing, which isn't likely, I swear they're going to wonder why he was ever a star.

Dead Kennedys

It hurts to blow my invite to Caroline Kennedy's next New Year's bash—and things were looking so promising, too. But I cannot tell a lie. Despite the toxic rep it acquired before a frame was filmed, Joel Surnow's much reviled The Kennedys has turned out to be the best depiction of this doomed and overreaching clan ever put on TV. Too bad you have to be a subscriber to the mighty Albuquerque-based ReelzChannel to find out.

Starring Greg Kinnear as JFK and Katie Holmes as Jackie, Surnow's take on America's necrophile answer to the royals started life as a bid for prestige—the History Channel's first-ever dramatized miniseries, and about Camelot yet. What could possibly go wrong? For starters, signing up the producer best known for creating Fox's 24.

Surnow's right-wing politics are no secret, enough in itself to damn the project in Kennedy loyalists' eyes. Packed with juicy sleaze about a JFK with ants in his pants and nothing upstairs, a leaked—and swiftly disowned—early script got ripped six ways to Dallas by the usual glad-to-oblige historians. Agitprop documentarian Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) launched a preemptive Web site called Stop Kennedy Smears before The Kennedys had even been cast. Then Caroline got into the act.

She comes across as a fairly docile little girl in The Kennedys, but Surnow has learned better. By coincidence, Caroline has a book of her mother's post-assassination interviews coming out in September from a Disney/ABC subsidiary. One guess who also owns the History Channel. Of course, only a real fink would suspect that Caroline's reported threat to pull the plug on a boomer payday any publisher would drool at had anything to do with inducing the mini's original venue to bow out. After Showtime and others passed, too, The Kennedys was finally picked up by an unpedigreed outfit whose 56 million lucky subscribers will probably pull down the blinds in shame before tuning in the April 3 premiere.

And score one for Surnow's friend Rush Limbaugh, whose fantasies about the Vast Pinko Media Elitist Whatchamacallit rarely get this much traction from contact with reality. To anybody steeped in the lore, the supposed distortions most frequently cited as proof Surnow and scriptwriter Stephen Kronish were up to no good just didn't cut it as libel. To be honest, my inner Cartman was looking forward to some bare-knuckled, sordid, Marilyn-in-the-woodwork pulp revisionism after decades of big-screen hagiography.

I'm so disappointed I could spit. Do you know what this damn thing is? It's thoughtful, that's what: an interpretation, not a mugging. While the interpretation may not be one that Camelot flame-keepers cherish, that's not the same thing as calumny.

···

The thesis of The Kennedys is twofold. One, that patriarch Joe Kennedy, glintingly played by Tom Wilkinson at his shrewdest, warped his gifted sons by turning them into the vehicles for his own ambitions to belong and/or rule. Never wondering whether that was a contradiction in terms in a democracy, he paid a price for it any Greek dramatist could have predicted.

Two, that Jack—the substitute apple of his father's eye after firstborn son Joe Junior's death—might have been happier as a non-clockwork orange. When Holmes's breathy Jackie tells the young congressman from Massachusetts that he talks like a writer, he answers with believable ruefulness, "That was the plan at one point." He's portrayed as someone miscast for the presidency who measured up just in time for the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Surnow and Kronish give JFK full props for having the sangfroid to win that standoff without blowing the planet up, all the more movingly since this time—for once—fealty isn't a given.

If either of these notions is heretical, I'll eat my dad's old PT-109 tiepin. They're the underpinning mythology of the only great work of popular art arguably inspired by the Kennedys: The Godfather, in whose chronologically misarranged sons anyone can recognize Bobby (Sonny Corleone), Teddy (Fredo), and Jack (Michael). Not to mention Joe senior, disguised as a courtly Mafia don instead of an Irish-American bootlegger on the make—and even Jackie, recruited to add broodmare class to an upstart dynasty. In both clans' cases, respectability is what power buys on its way to the top: "We'll get there, Pop. We'll get there" could be a line from either Coppola's epic or The Kennedys. (It's from Coppola.)

Like it or not, Surnow and Kronish have brought things full circle by making The Godfather their acknowledged template. You can object to their point of view, but at least The Kennedys has one. That's just what's been lacking in most of the many screen treatments of the family, which usually oscillate between fan-mag glamour and generic history-book Greatness.

Unless you count the final episode's sneak gotcha—which may be debatable, but isn't invented from thin air—the salacious stuff is downplayed in the finished version. Though Jack and Jackie do still get speed injections from the society sawbones known as Dr. Feelgood, most of JFK's dalliances with everyone from society dames to White House secretaries happen off-camera. Even the Marilyn Monroe angle is mostly handled via Bobby's role as the discomfited mediator sent to L.A. to talk her out of her bubblehead fantasies of replacing Jackie as first lady.

One explanation for the relative reticence about Jack's torpedo fetish may be that there's only so much you can ask of your leading man. Kinnear played a sex addict brilliantly in Paul Schrader's Auto Focus, but here he can't quite reconcile that compulsion to Kennedy's other dimensions. Perhaps the only actor with the guile and firsthand know-how to bring it all back home would have been the fey, cool young Warren Beatty, incidentally JFK's own choice to impersonate his youthful self in PT 109. Though Tinseltown's most compulsive 1960s swordsman didn't get the part, that little factoid has always been a tantalizing hint our president knew himself better than his compatriots ever wanted to.

What Kinnear can do is what he's always done best: draw us into the private anxieties of a man caught in a job that doesn't quite match his soul. Helped along by a physical resemblance that's downright eerie, he's the first of the platoons of actors who've tackled the guy to endow him with a credible inner life. The performance's real subtlety gets made manifest when you catch yourself feeling impressed during the missile-crisis episode at how Kinnear has grown into the part. Then you realize he hasn't: JFK has, and Kinnear's been preparing us for that metamorphosis all along.

Another great performance is Wilkinson's, all canny cogitation masking primal and ultimately devastated emotional drives. As taut, flinty Bobby, Barry Pepper is sometimes undone by his makeup, but Pepper goes from good to extraordinary once RFK emerges as his murdered brother's burdened heir. Beyond that, for connoisseurs of the genre—and believe me, Kennedy docudramas are one—scoring the performers is like watching our fifteenth or twentieth production of Hamlet. At least this one is the first to uncover something genuinely Shakespearean in Jack and Bobby's pious but deftly maneuvering mom: the phenomenal Diana Hardcastle, an actress I'd love to see doing Gertrude of Denmark for real.

As for Mrs. Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes is…um, sweet. Her rendition of Jackie blossoming under Dr. Feelgood's care wouldn't look too out of place in Shrek Forever After. Even so, Holmes's jitters capture something almost forgotten about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. That's how young and unprepared she was when the world spread the red carpet and then caved in on her.

Farther down the glitter list, The Kennedys features a dud Frank Sinatra (Chris Diamantopoulos) but a terrific Sam Giancana (Serge Houde, and where has this formidable actor been all of Martin Scorsese's life?). It will probably set off Camelot guardians' alarm bells to hear that Giancana, the Chicago Mob boss, appears at all—and tête-à-tête with papa Joe, who's committing hubris's fatal error by negotiating with him. But since we'll never really know the deals Joe made to help elect his kid president, the Surnow-Kronish version is an acceptable mash-up of fact and legend. In 2011 the test of veracity in dramatizing the Kennedy saga ain't Dragnet or courtrooms, kids. It's more like The Tudors.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that The Kennedys, good or bad, is irrelevant to modern politics. This clan has reached the stage when art, interpretation, actorly wiles, and speculation get to take over from living memory. Call the miniseries part of the Great Right-Wing Conspiracy to Tarnish Liberalism if you like, but I didn't need Joel Surnow to tell me John F. Kennedy was a mighty peculiar president of these United States. I'll only go for Surnow's throat the day he tries to convince me Ronald Reagan was a great one.

Hot Prima-on-Prima Action!

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is the Rorschach-blot movie of the year. As you may have heard, this unpredictable director's feminocentric bookend to 2008's The Wrestler is a ballet story that fuses the lofty anguish of The Red Shoes—the granddaddy of all Capezio epics—with the nasty creep-show twists of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. That alone guarantees a giant "WTF?" from America's heartier multiplexers, who aren't likely to appreciate the implied equivalence between Mickey Rourke doing what a man's gotta do in grubby wrestling tights and Natalie Portman going cuckoo in a tutu.

For those of us who love the damn thing, watching Aronofsky's uptight heroine lose her marbles under the strain of preparing to wow New York's tux mob in Swan Lake is definitely an experience. We just can't agree on what kind, since the two very different movies that fans come out raving about—the wrenching one that exalts Portman's Nina and the sensational black comedy that's all wised up about her hysteria's provocations—are both on the screen. So is a lot of kink, given that one bright way our gal acts out her derangement is to either have or imagine having frantic, druggy sex with smokin' Mila Kunis, who plays an uninhibited fellow dancer representing everything she's not. If you prurient bastards think that's the only scene that'll rivet you, though, you don't know Aronofsky: He's got kinks in places where most people don't even have opinions.

A driven but emotionally stunted young perfectionist whose idea of company in the bedroom hasn't graduated yet from disturbingly oversize stuffed animals, poor Nina—it rhymes with "ballerina," kids, and somewhere Edward Gorey and Al Hirschfeld are both smiling—is still little-girl-bossed at home, courtesy of her controlling mother (Barbara Hershey, giving a fair impersonation of what the Cheshire Cat looks like when unsmiling). Her ostensible rescuer is someone even better at head games: Vincent Cassel as Thomas Leroy, her Manhattan ballet company's artistic director and resident sadist disguised as a guru. Humiliating the troupe's aging star (Winona Ryder, maliciously well cast) into literally taking a walk into tra∞c, he cranks Nina's latent anxieties into overdrive by handing her the lead in Tchaikovsky's ornithological weeper.

Make that leads, plural, since the ballerina cast as Odette, the angelic "white swan," traditionally also dances the part of the "black" one: Odile, her evil-temptress opposite number. Time for our repressed heroine to say hello to adulthood's demons, don't you think? And for Aronofsky to say hello to David Cronenberg, since the mysterious rash that develops on Nina's shoulder blades turns out to be black swan wings desperately trying to sprout.

The cause of her, how you say, body issues isn't only that Mom's seething resentments of her daughter's success are starting to manifest themselves in unsettling ways, like celebrating Nina's Swan Lake gig with... a giant, gooey, calorie-rich cake. She's also traumatized by Thomas's ploys to get more passion out of her, from ridiculing her lack of sexual allure to brusquely sending her home with instructions to masturbate—setting up a mindblower of a cutaway shot to another audience besides teddy bears when she dutifully and then ecstatically complies.

No wonder Nina can't tell whether she's being liberated or egged on to destruction when Kunis's bad-girl Lily, all come-hither smiles and lubricious charisma, beckons her to walk on the wild side. Unless, of course, Lily is just the heroine's fantasy life acting up, a solution Aronofsky teases us to buy with every editing trick in the book. But just when we're feeling complacent about being onto his game another casually planted switcheroo catches us off guard. From then on up to the hallucinatory finale, whether we're watching a born victim's martyrdom or the triumph of a budding monster is anybody's guess.

···

From Aronofsky's perspective, however, there's no reason it can't be both. That's what makes Portman's faintly unnerving combination of pathos-inducing frailty and otherworldly privilege so right for the role. Even at her most affecting, Harvard's answer to Tweety Bird has never been the sort of actress you daydream about taking to a Knicks game, you know? Since Aronofsky is careful to keep Nina's ambitions outside the realm of comfortable viewer identification—she isn't pursuing perfection for acclaim's sake but for something more fanatical and twisted—Portman is convincing in a way she hasn't been since her turn as the expat stripper (now, there's a modern job description) in Closer.

Kunis, on the other hand, just saunters into the movie and walks off with its breeziest laughs. Though Lily may embody every fear and desire Nina has repressed, to us she's a welcome ambassador from Planet Normal, merrily immune to the nuttiness around her. The difference between Kunis's and Portman's acting styles suits their respective characters to a T, since the day Portman relaxes on-camera will be the day Glenn Beck quotes Jean-Paul Sartre. But Kunis, whose comic timing on That '70s Show I should have probably paid more attention to, has turned into the kind of screen natural whose instincts make other people's hard-earned craft look like homework.

Because she doesn't move as if she's alienated from her own body, Kunis is also more believable than her co-star as a professional dancer. But unlike The Red Shoes' Moira Shearer, who was a for-real ballerina turned actress and rejoiced in proving it, Portman doesn't have to show us what a virtuoso does to communicate the stresses of trying to be one. The perverse brilliance of Black Swan's twist on the florid romanticism of traditional Capezio epics isn't just Aronofsky's equation of talent with psychosis. It's in the dawning recognition that he digs ballet for the spectacle at about the level Hitchcock was interested in what Norman Bates's mother was really like.

The paradox is that few directors have ever gotten so much atmosphere and tension out of ballet as a specialized milieu. As he did in The Wrestler, Aronofsky involves us in Nina's world by fetishizing its workplace details: the pointe shoes being rubbed in ground glass to scuff them properly, the muscles in a rehearsal coach's back that summarize a whole career in one glance. He never lets us forget that Nina's idea of self-expression is to follow orders flawlessly, and that means the real drama is who she's going to take them from—including, most demandingly of all, the fanatical puppet master inside her own head.

Nina clearly horrifies Aronofsky in a way Mickey Rourke's wrestling pro didn't. That doesn't necessarily mean he identifies with her any less. Both movies have the intensity of rechanneled autobiography because they're about the physical and mental punishment involved in producing an illusion, not exactly a topic foreign to this filmmaker's career.

That's not all there is to either of them, obviously. The Wrestler transcended its setting by turning its battered hero into not only an emblem of masculinity's undying demands but the unlikely stand-in for a generation's midlife tenacity in a newly hostile world. Black Swan is just as evocative on the female and youthful side of the coin. Nonetheless, the Rourke character's doggedness undoubtedly attracted Aronofsky as a metaphor for his own resilience after the debacle of 2006's The Fountain, a project dear to his heart that nobody gave two hoots about when—much diminished from Aronofsky's grandiose original vision—it finally reached the screen. And Black Swan's heroine is someone whose disfiguring, formidable ambition to achieve perfect beauty he knows all about, too.

The hyperbole of her ascent—not descent—into madness resurrects the Aronofsky of The Fountain and the nuttier bits of Requiem for a Dream, but all the self-aware wit spiking the mix adds a new dimension of audience delight at no cost in intensity. People who don't recognize how heartlessly funny the movie often is aren't missing the point—just advertising their own temperament. He's so in control of the material's meanings that each fresh tonal shift and "Gotcha" heightens the overall effect, from horror-flick shudders to the sick-joke sitcom of the mother-daughter confrontations to the way the relationships among Portman, Kunis, and Cassel simultaneously parody and re-poeticize Swan Lake itself. In every scene, the sheer filmmaking savvy on display is a knockout.

That won't stop some carpers from grumping that Black Swan is too overwrought for its own good. The downbeat, testosterone-soaked naturalism of The Wrestler made it Aronofsky's most atypical film, but that's also why it's the one the audience had the easiest time embracing. Well, the male one, anyhow—but we're not the experts this time out, gang. Whatever you make of Nina-rhymes-with-ballerina's Pyrrhic victory over her phantom jailers and secret selves, don't be surprised if your date comes out raving that Black Swan is her favorite documentary of all time.

Zombies, as American as Apple Pie

The day I get fed up with zombies will be the day I become one, and I know I'm not alone. Sinatra's voice, the electoral college, random squads of flesh-munching post-humans with Heinz 57 facial makeovers—these are the indigenous relics we all know will endure until Alpha Centauri scientists get busy sorting out our idea of fun. We're in hock to Europe for vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein's monster, but sorry, world: Shaun of the Dead or no Shaun of the Dead, we own this turf. Ravenous dorks in bloodstained Dockers and cheerleader togs are as American as Adam's-apple pie.


Partly because there's no way to make 'em elegant—sooner or later, even the most stylish director has to either show them chowing down or be accused of cheating—the planet's most democratic monsters never used to get much respect. The latest cycle of the zombie meme also got pretty cutesy for a while, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Woody Harrelson and the pre-Social Network Jesse Eisenberg bashing in pumpkin-head skulls for laughs in 2009's very funny, far from dumb Zombieland. But then AMC's The Walking Dead came along, and whammo: America's ultimate conspicuous consumers were back in all their foul, decaying glory. The reason zombies can't jump the shark is that they are the shark, baby. Now they've finally gotten the epic TV showcase they deserve.

Based on Robert Kirkman's graphic-novel series, The Walking Dead—whose six-episode debut season is due out on DVD March 8, and hosanna—stars Andrew Lincoln as small-town-Georgia sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes, who awakens from a Rip van Mayberry coma after a shoot-out with a random perp puts him in the hospital. That's when he discovers the world he once knew has turned into a gory-jawed John McCain look-alike contest overnight.

Since he doesn't want "I Ate the Sheriff" to end up getting played at his funeral, he sets out for a failed panacea: Atlanta, which turns out to be overrun with lurching ghoulies. Once he's gotten out of that one and located the rest of the cast, his next try is a CDC complex whose sole remaining factotum ends up making the joint go kablooey in a fit of suicidal despair.

What Rick doesn't know is that his wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), and former partner, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), got into making each other's bacon sizzle back when they thought he was history. Naturally, along with Rick and Lori's son, they're both part of the ragtag Grimes-led caravan we last saw road-to-nowhere-ing it across a smoke-plumed wasteland in the season finale. And yep—as Huck Finn used to say, we've been here before. Does anything top that primal American fantasy of an improvised community on the move in search of an elusive promised land?

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If you're still in any doubt that zombies graduated long ago from one-joke creeps to all-purpose metaphors, The Walking Dead will cure you in a jiffy. Vampire snobs can call the basic concept rudimentary all they like. A big plus for Team Living Dead is that, what with the poor personal hygiene and worse social skills, zombies are hard to get romantic about—preventing millions of teenage girls from ruining everything for the rest of us by fantasizing how dreamy it might be to date one. Never stop being thankful that the zombie equivalent of Twilight would be Dinnertime.

And to think we owe it all to what used to be called the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh. It's not like director George A. Romero made everything up from scratch in the original Night of the Living Dead. Revived corpses had already featured in all sorts of creepy tales, from voodoo myths to Russian literary titan Nikolai Gogol's scary 1835 story "Viy." But pretty amazingly, the basics of zombiedom as we know it today—the shambling walk, the appetite for human flesh—were improvised for a single shoestring-budget indie flick in 1968. If we're talking cultural ubiquity as opposed to artistic impact, NotLD has a fair claim to being the most influential movie of all time.

Social satire came front and center with Romero's shopping-mall-set Dawn of the Dead a decade later. It's never been MIA since. What's unique about zombies as horror figures is that—partly because they used to be just like us and still dress the part, and partly because they're so stupid—they're intrinsically funny. While a comic vampire movie is a spoof, a zombie flick without any laughs usually just isn't doing its job.

What makes them a great American joke is that the joke can be on us without quite being about us, or maybe it's the other way around. If vampires are a fantasy of elitism—a riff on decadent old-world aristocracy—then zombies, in their "We the Ex-People" way, are the sickest possible parody of Jefferson-style egalitarianism. They give us permission to add a fun coda to "Pogo" cartoonist Walt Kelly's best-known quip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us. Now hand me a baseball bat."

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"Permission" is the right word, too. Unlike sci-fi's doomsday scenarios, zombie movies are mainly fantasies of wholesale social breakdown. That's their attraction, not just their scare machinery. Never underestimate the galvanizing effect on any healthy American male of an anarchic U.S.A. in which our lumbering, drooling former co-citizens can be blasted like skeet.

Coming in a close second is the turn-on of material goods suddenly free for the taking, something The Walking Dead poeticized when Grimes the lawman—gently saying, "I don't think those rules apply anymore"—let a fellow refugee (Laurie Holden) swipe a mermaid necklace from a department store. With Hummers, weaponry, and whole supermarkets up for grabs, the pilfering scenes in a zombie movie are capitalism porn that outdoes any shopping-spree montage in a chick flick. And since we also kind of hate all the pointless crapola consumer culture nags us to buy, Zombieland was at its shrewdest when the heroes trashed an inoffensive tourist-trap souvenir shop as gleefully as if its trinket-crammed notion of charm had been oppressing them for years.

At the same time, downright touchingly, zombie movies have also become the garage-sale repository for fables about our hardy national spirit. The irresistibility of World War Z, Max Brooks's best-selling "oral history" of a future zombie war, was all in his resurrection of the kind of heroic America—with everybody in the new Greatest Generation selflessly doing his or her part for victory—that these days seems more chimerical than ever.

At its most involving, The Walking Dead pulls together these resonances and undertones more consciously than any zombie saga before it. It's not just that Grimes, who pointedly still wears his old-timey sheriff's hat, rode into town on horseback in the premiere, or that his cuckolding second banana probably isn't named Shane by accident. As the caravan's Wise Old Coot, Jeffrey DeMunn is patently the postmillennial version of Walter Brennan manning the chuck wagon on Red River's cattle drive—and with a brainy Asian-American dude (Steven Yeun) and a stalwart African-American one (IronE Singleton), among others, aboard for the ride, the series has one foot planted in the melting pot and the other in The Road Warrior.

Thanks to the Georgia setting, a whole other set of associations is in play as well. Civil War buffs who got a jolt from a character recalling "when Atlanta fell" no doubt also recognized the likely source of Rick Grimes's stunned walk past body-bagged corpses as he left the hospital: Scarlett's trek among the railroad-station casualties in Gone with the Wind, hands down the most moving crowd shot of all time. All that was missing was the Stars and Bars mournfully flapping away as the camera pulled back and the orchestra broke into "Dixie."

Before you get all p.c. about the implications of equating modern-day America with ye olde Confederacy, remember that context makes a difference. Because a pang of involuntary identification isn't quite the same thing as an endorsement, what registers isn't "They were wrong"; what registers—and haunts us—is "They lost." We also know that all those dead relatives and neighbors aren't coming back, at least once a head shot has disposed of their posthumous incarnation. Even if it ends up having a happy or "happy" ending, The Walking Dead, like the best of Romero, allegorizes an inconvenient truth that most of our chipper culture hasn't given up on sugarcoating: The world that was can never be restored.