For a ticking-bomb actioner, Japanese import Midnight Eagle is surprisingly profound, going far beyond the conventions of typical thrillers to embrace everything from father-son relationships and East Asian geopolitics to the role of journalists in a dangerous world.

Award-winning photojournalist Yuji Nishizaki (Takao Osawa) has finally seen enough war and has retreated to the Japanese Alps to shoot nature instead. Recently widowed and feeling guilty about his inattention to his dying wife, he’s also abandoned his young son Yu (Hiroki Sahara) to the care of his sister-in-law Keiko (Yuko Takeuchi), a muckraking journalist herself.

While camping, Yuji has the bad luck to witness — and photograph — the crash of a plane that turns out to be a nuclear-armed American Stealth bomber that had no business being in the air over Japan, especially Western Japan, which is dangerously close to North Korea. The Japanese military snow patrol rushes into the mountains to get the nuke, but the “foreign agents” who sabotaged the plane to bring it down are also in the hunt. (It’s funny how no one in the movie ever utters the words “North Korea.”)

Sensing the story of his life, Yuji’s journalist friend Oaichi (Hiroshi Tamaki) also heads for the hills after convincing the reluctant Yuji to accompany him. Eventually, after dodging dozens of white-suited Japanese troops and “foreign agents,” they find the plane, and naturally the classic red digital timer is counting down from 150 minutes. Can they save Japan?

Back in Tokyo, the very worried Prime Minister Watarase (Tatsuya Fuji) is slowly forced to reveal that he’s been giving the Americans a bit too much leeway in their Asian operations, leading to this crisis. As bullets fly on the mountain top, Yuji asks, “Can this be happening in Japan?” He then adds, “We shouldn’t have wars or armies.” The gallant Major Akihiko (A-Saku Yoshida), who is helping them fight off the bad guys, says, “We’re not an army. We’re the self-defense force.”

While the subtleties of philosophical debates about Japanese self-defense and foreign policy are likely to be lost on Western audiences, there’s plenty to keep us engaged throughout. The movie shifts quickly among the Tokyo war room, the snowy mountain, and the streets of Tokyo, where reporter Keiko is trying to make contact with foreign agents to find out what’s going on and to get the password to deactivate the nuke. At the same time, Yuji is tormented by the meaninglessness of his life, wondering what good taking pictures ever did until the Major points out it was seeing Yuji’s war photos that inspired him to work for peace in his military career.

Gunfire, avalanches, explosions, even napalm… Midnight Eagle has it all. There’s even time for endings on top of endings, each one more gut-wrenching than the one that came before. It’s quite a ride. All the boom boom of a Bruce Willis project but with lots of intriguing Asian angles. As they say in Japan: sugoi! Cool!

Aka Middonaito Îguru.

Midnight away from the oasis.

We first meet the real Bob Dylan, lit by a spotlight and blowing into a harmonica with his eyes turned ever-downward, at the very end of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. (The footage comes from a concert filmed in the 1960s.) Though there are six evocations of our hero’s persona and dozens of references to his words and images, his actual visage is kept under lock and key until the solemn credits. To Haynes, the mystery of who the man is behind closed doors should stay that way: Behind closed doors tends to be pretty tedious if not downright boring. It’s more fun to extrapolate: In the open valleys of cultural myth, a celebrity can become any number of things.

At first, he’s a young, train-hopping wanderer who has taken the name Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), from his hero Woody Guthrie. He also plays a guitar with “This Machine Kills Fascism” painted on it. Later, the man appears as an aged Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who can’t understand why the locals are being bullied out of their land by a decrepit Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood). Fitfully, the sequences are shot in the dusty browns of Peckinpah and the hippie westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s. Both stories, along with the others, are consistently interrupted by a press conference with poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), who speaks in a particularly American sarcasm while scrutinizing everyone who questions him, half-mumbling with cigarette in hand.

In a scratched and uneasy documentary style a la Harlan County USA, we are introduced to Jack (Christian Bale) who goes from being a mythical folk singer in the New York Bowery and Lower East Side to a born-again Christian preacher in the south. Aged and ragged, Bale does a terrifyingly acute rendition of “Pressin’ On,” a cut from the much-bemoaned Saved album, with a gospel choir backing. Jack’s early folk ramblings are consequently the subject of a film starring Robbie (Heath Ledger) who no sooner becomes haunted by the songwriter than he falls for an artist named Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Slowly, Robbie succumbs to the habits and beliefs of the rebellious musician, tearing his family apart. Gainsbourg appropriates a concluding speech from Godard’s Masculine Feminine as she ends her marriage to the actor.

And then there’s Jude (Cate Blanchett), the androgynous approximation of Dylan-going-electric. The tonal residue of 8 1/2 and a Richard Lester marathon, Haynes style becomes wholly ambidextrous in the black-and-white milieu of Jude’s confrontations with television journalist Mr. Jones (Greenwood again). The set pieces play like metaphorical jungle-gyms: a Warhol apartment screening a projection of Lyndon B. Johnson with “Tombstone Blues” subtitles, a fluid trip from fooling around with the Beatles to chasing Coco (Michelle Williams), a former lover, through the forest. All the performances are brilliant but Blanchett’s is an act of wonderment; she plays Jude like a marionette ambivalent to its puppeteer, contorting and shifting to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” body unencumbered by formal ways of movement.

Densely interwoven, I’m Not There fills in the gaps of Haynes’ similarly-minded Velvet Goldmine by disregarding the idea of the outsider. In Goldmine, Bale played a man obsessed with the glam identity but not embroiled in it; an agent of free will outside the provocateurs of glam. His closest approximation here, Ledger’s character, refuses to be excluded from the melee and becomes part of the landscape along with all the other personas. In fact, the film most closely resembles Far From Heaven in daring to take an accepted and popular style and imbuing it with modern themes.

In the same realm as Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, I’m Not There engulfs and nearly drowns the viewer in the widespread apparitions, intimations, and projections of the artist rather than attempting to possess him. What ultimately devalues films like Ray and Walk the Line is an attempt to assign these legends to the realm of humanity; a nagging dream that we could be like them since we’ve been through similar human experiences. But I’m Not There is wholly uninterested in the pitfalls of sex, drugs, marriage, affairs, and children. Haynes’ film, certainly his masterpiece to date and one of the year’s best, elusively evokes everything Dylan has reflected while keeping him, as always, ostensibly unknowable. In the words of Bobby Zimmerman, the very ones Haynes ends his film on: “It’s like the past, present, and future sitting in the same room together.”
I’m right here.

Last week the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its final report and declared global warming to be an undeniable, “unequivocal” fact. But forget the international scientific panel. Last year, Al Gore’s potent and conclusive slide show, An Inconvenient Truth, made a very convincing argument that global warming is here and cannot be denied — and along the way, the film not only became a significant box office hit but also ended up winning an Oscar.

Now that Al Gore is not only a movie star but also an Oscar and Nobel Prize winner, what can concerned environmentally conscious filmmakers do next to go for the public’s jugular vein? With the release of Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand’s lighthearted documentary, Everything’s Cool, about the impending doom of the human race, the bar of awareness will be raised to new heights, prodding a rabid public consumed with forebodings of environmental disaster to seize control of the reins of government and change the retrograde environmental policies once and for all. Right?

Wrong.

Everything’s Cool looks like a film made 10 years ago, a time when the polar ice cap was fairly solid. The film addresses the problem of making an American public aware of climactic catastrophe as if it were 1999 and Clinton still the president. But today, in 2007, the film’s concerns are old news. When Fox News continually flogs Gore’s environmental millennialism on a daily basis (in the film, Fox’s “fair and balanced ” coverage of global warming is seen in a logo reading in shock letters, “Climate of Fear”), you know the subject of prodding public awareness on global warming is like le grand fromage. And their lighthearted tone in the spirit of Michael Moore (but without his passion) belies the tragic conclusions of the film — I’d hate to see how Shoah might have turned out had Gold and Helfand directed it.

In Everything’s Cool, the intrepid filmmakers take to the road in 2004, valiantly following a collection of environmental activists as they spread the word of environmental meltdown to an apathetic public. 2004 was the year in which Eric Idle joked about global warming in England, “We’re actually in favor of global warming because it’s the only way we’ll get the climate changed. We actually had two warm days last year.” And this is echoed in the film by an American lout who declares, “Come on guys. Use your head. It’s anti-American.”

Nevertheless the save-our-planet emissaries attempt to get the word out: Bill McKibben, the “Poet Laureate” of global warming who issued the first serious bleat of the dangers ahead with his book The End of Nature in 1987; Ross Gelbspan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose tireless quest for public awareness led to his exhausted retirement (”A part of me wants to say, ‘Why bother?’”); Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel’s on-air climatologist who through the course of the film takes a journey from her first five-minute segment to hosting her own half-hour show; authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, whose essay The Death of Environmentalism leveled its sites at both friends and foes of environmentalism; whistleblower Rick Piltz; and snow groomer Bish Neuhouser, who is seen trying to concoct a bio-diesel fuel for his 20-year-old Cadillac.

The filmmakers intercut their travails and segment the film with quirky animated sequences and lightly demonstrate the difficulties these heroes of environmentalism encounter when they go against the prevailing winds to keep the public informed. Pre-Gore, the frustrations of these emirs of the environment are palpable as they are greeted with skepticism and stonewalling at every turn. But that is now all in the historical past.

What is new and depressing, and touched upon in the film, is how straight scientific evidence of global warming is twisted and contorted into a political agenda by the government, corporations, and the media. Because of this dangerous polarized landscape mapped out by Bush, Murdoch, and other sundry reprobates, facts have become grist for the political mill and a subject that should not have a Democratic or Republican taint across it has just become another Hannity and Colmes sound bite to be haggled over until the next commercial break like Social Security reform or Hilary Clinton’s laugh.

When politics is involved, nobody wins — least of all planet earth. As one of the tub-thumpers for Greenpeace remarks in the film about the phony battle lines that have been drawn, “They just think we’re wrong, and we think they are as dumb as bricks.”

Relax, it’s a methane-powered truck.

If I didn’t know better, judging by the title, I’d say a new horror film called The Mist might just be a throwback to the campy slasher flicks of the early 1980s. It sounds suspiciously like a new name for yet another remake of John Carpenter’s classic, The Fog. Well, The Mist is neither cheesy nor remade. In fact, it’s a very simple title for a complex and intriguing tale that’s more about humanity than a bunch of monsters.

Based on a novella by Stephen King, the worst electrical storm on record has a small coastal Maine town assessing the damages to their homes and businesses. Locals have flocked to the town’s only grocery store to stock up on supplies while police, fire, and military personnel blanket the surrounding area. As a result of the storm, everything is out — power, phones, and radios; the town is cut-off from the rest of the world. Oh, and the storm has also left behind an ominous mist that quickly shrouds the town, trapping those inside the grocery store when it appears that bloodthirsty, inhuman monsters are lurking outside.

Panic and confusion set off inside the store over what to do next. Three distinct groups begin to emerge: 1) those that want to find a safe means to escape, led by painter and family man David Drayton (Thomas Jane); 2) those that choose not to believe there’s anything evil in the mist, led by David’s neighbor, Brent Norton (Andre Braugher); and 3) those that embrace the chaos, believing the world is coming to an end, led by the religious zealot Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden).

With the emergence of these groups, The Mist transcends normal horror movie conventions and becomes an enlightening study of religion, class, and human nature in the face of tragedy. People once friends and neighbors suddenly become enemies because of the group they’ve chosen. David and the maintenance crew clash over how to fix the store’s backup generator. David insists that the crew shouldn’t risk their safety by going onto the store’s roof to fix it, but the crew proceeds because only they (and not David) have the skills and training to make the right decisions.

Later, Brent and David clash when a bloodied David tries to describe the abominable creature with sharp tentacles that attacked the maintenance crew as they tried to fix the generator. Brent believes David fabricated the story as retaliation for a lawsuit Brent filed against him several months back. All the while, the insufferable Mrs. Carmody is gaining support amongst the scared with her doomsday preaching and calls for expiation and human sacrifice of those whom she believes are at fault.

Initially a safe haven from the threat outside, the grocery store then becomes a bigger liability. Writer-director Frank Darabont does a tremendous job building and sustaining the suspense both inside and outside the store. The monsters lurk quietly in the mist, never totally visible until Darabont decides to thrust an attack upon us at the most unanticipated moments. Once the immediate threat from the mist has subsided, and before the next one arrives, Darabont turns on the tension within the store as the forces battle over complex societal issues and right approach to dealing with the situation.

For The Mist, the monsters are only a small part of the larger supporting cast. Although never fully exposed or explained, Darabont’s terrifying creatures can best be described as flies, spiders, and other inserts on steroids — 10 times their normal size, with razor sharp teeth and penetrating claws. As the hero, Thomas Jane is a believable everyman with whom we can all identify. He’s not overly strong or domineering; he just wants to do the right thing for his family and others. The most frightening character of all may be Harden, whose self-righteous, apocalyptic cries for atonement are more piercing and menacing than the savage flesh eating beasts of the mist.
Aka Stephen King’s The Mist.
Someone turn off this humidifier!