Films Seen - April 2005
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
SIN CITY (74) (dir., Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller) Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Nick Stahl [Went in thinking "I bet it sucks", which is why I didn't even take a notebook (never been a big comics fan, and the combination of digital video and slavish fidelity to the source - a blatant sop to the AICN crowd - sounded deadly). Instead I was enthralled, except now I don't have any notes and I'm finding it hard to articulate why I was enthralled. Comments to come when I see it again, hopefully on the big screen; bet it sucks on second viewing...] [Except it didn't. Taken me two viewings to say it with confidence but this really is a fabulous movie, not just stylising the violence - it's an ornament, an objet d'art - but giving it its due, unlike the laddish Guy Ritchie knock-offs where violence is depicted as a laugh; there are jokes - a talking head, the thugs with "delusions of eloquence" - but the hard-boiled machismo gives it gravitas, the weight of having to be a Man (or indeed "warrior woman") despite impossible odds, a "bad ticker", the injustice of the world, a cruel corrupt Establishment stacked against you. Still adolescent but the visuals come to the rescue - Marv swimming to the surface with the sinking car behind him, a massacre redeemed by the line of Amazons posed like a Lewis Klahr cut-out (sorry Chris) against a blood-red sky - and maybe it moves so well because the pace was already thought-out as a comic book, and maybe each frame is so perfect because they were already discrete frames in the original, but Rodriguez deserves massive props for pulling no punches and staying true to the vision - and how to explain Elijah Wood's blood-chilling Kevin, accomplished with no dialogue, no visible 'acting' and a minimum of screen time? Primal emotions are being evoked (not to mention castration anxiety), from a time when men were warriors and gladiators - the point is explicitly made vis-a-vis Marv, a man out of Time who "gets confused sometimes" - and the loquacious faux-poetry seems to explode the very concept of language as a civilising force - the words bump against the violence like waves on a rocky shore, giving it grandeur but changing nothing of its essential hardness, collapsing in their own florid accretion of metaphors, "helpless as a palsy victim performing brain surgery with a pipe wrench"; like those waves crashing on the shore it creates a thing of beauty out of the collision of two great forces, one bombastic and blustery, the other rock-hard and pitiless. Also revolutionary in the way it was made, even more inspiring than PRIMER in demystifying the filmmaking process; why are people tut-tutting and wasting time on hollow accusations of misogyny - why aren't more people touting the Rodriguez Way Forward? "I can only express puzzlement bordering on alarm".]
FROZEN (w/o) (dir., Juliet McKoen) Shirley Henderson, Roshan Seth, Jamie Sives [If this were any fun - like an action flick, or a Deep South melodrama - one might call it a genre movie; as it is, it's just full of clichés, stuck in the genre marked Pretentious Drama, British Miserablist Division. Shots of a beach at low tide; blurry images from a surveillance camera which the heroine plays and replays, looking for Truth; working-class life expressed as factory and pub, with conspicuously 'harsh' talk of drinking and shagging; Roshan Seth in the silliest role ever, a sad-eyed shrink (he's also a priest) who nods wisely as he listens to our heroine and says things like "The search for understanding is the search we're all on". The synopsis claims it turns metaphysical at some point but I bailed on 41 minutes, unable to take any more of Shirley Henderson's pinched little face and nasal whine, or the many symbols of emotional frozen-ness (she actually explains she feels "a frozen void within"), or the British Miserablism in general. Mileage may vary, I assume...]
MELINDA AND MELINDA (45) (dir., Woody Allen) Radha Mitchell, Will Ferrell, Chloe Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor [Woody and Woody - Jazz Woody and Classical-Music Woody, according to the opening credits. Comedy and tragedy - though the tragedy has laugh-lines ("Oh I'm sorry, did that come out harsh?") and funny Woody banter about neurotic husbands and a dentist who likes to hike, and the look is disappointingly similar from one to the other, gentle interiors and a warm orange glow for the dinner parties. "If we find it increasingly difficult to tell where comedy ends and tragedy begins - well, that's pretty much the idea," claims Trevor Johnston in "Time Out", but it seems a pretty woolly idea, ditto the line in "Sight & Sound" about the stories being not a mirror image but "a mutual provocation". For one thing they're so different you can't make a meaningful connection - shouldn't the starting-point at least have been identical, as opposed to broadly similar? - and though it may be true that unrequited love is 'comic' and betrayal by one's best friend is 'tragic', there seems little point in putting the two side-by-side; I actually saw the first hour twice on consecutive nights (fell asleep the first time; not the film's fault, I was exhausted), and the two audiences laughed at completely different points, confirming the suspicion that the film maintains a serio-comic tone throughout, never shaped in terms of Confrontation vs Escape (as per the tragedian/comedian opening dialogue). Props to Will Ferrell for speaking archetypal Woody dialogue - esp. when he grumbles about the 'perfect' dentist, echoing the dissing of Alan Alda in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS - without losing his own deadpan style (maybe the answer was always to hire a professional comic, instead of the Cusacks and Branaghs), and to Mitchell for speaking her big 'tragic' monologue in a wholly different rhythm from the brittle style of women in Woody Allen films (also, I guess, to Ejiofor for being his first character-who-happens-to-be-black), but it's hard to shake a feeling that the movie-a-year pace is now too much for Woody, and he's churning out half-baked unpolished stuff that could've used a few extra drafts. Maybe he's just getting old, which would also explain why he thinks a husband in the kitchen is automatically the stuff of comedy. Note the gratuitous references to Time passing, "those days are gone", how great it is "when it's all stretched out in front of you", etc - a reminder that it's already been a decade since the singing ghosts enjoined our hero to enjoy himself, "it's later than you think"...]
EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS (50) (dir., Kenneth Bowser) [Irresistible, even inspiring, but a(nother) restatement of the new orthodoxy about the 70s being the Greatest Decade Ever, movie-wise, as well as a case of scurrilous gossip turned into Film History 101 - probably an improvement, but somehow unnecessary. The book was a slavering tabloid account of how a bunch of people in the 70s got totally fucked up on ego, sex and drugs and also made some movies, whereas this is the standard spiel about ailing studios power to the filmmakers Golden Age personal vision money taking over gradual decline STAR WARS changed everything, etc. Notable for briefly-mentioned political angle - the new directors initially in touch with the counter-culture but gradually getting lost in their stylish bubble-worlds even as Vietnam raged and the ghettos burned - but it's hardly a theme or anything (wonder why no-one ever cites De Palma as the prime illustration of this, but maybe it's because even fans can see GREETINGS and HI MOM! as evidence of trendy dabbling rather than any real political commitment). Rating might conceivably change, had I the patience to wade through the literally hours of bonus material on the DVD; probably some good stuff there but life's too short, y'know?]
TESTOSTERONE (45) (dir., George Panousopoulos) Dimitris Liakopoulos, Natalia Dragoumi, Dimitra Matsouka [Nice idea: the old chestnut about hapless man pursued by women - as in SEVEN CHANCES, THE BEGUILED or all those coming-of-age films like DEEP END, where everything's infused with a latent sexuality - pushed into Polanski-like psychological horror movie (a scene with a doctor works in the same way - and at structurally the same point - as the one in ROSEMARY'S BABY) or perhaps those Euro-horrors DAGON also riffed on, about Islands of Terror. Needed a lot of care, though, which it doesn't get, veering into noxious misogyny in its final stages; also tempted to call it a tormented gay man's fantasy (women obscurely desired then conspicuously rejected) but that may be presumptuous - though the screenwriter does appear in drag at one point, singing a torch song and talking indecipherably (sound quality is often abysmal for such a high-profile movie). Queasy-making in all kinds of ways, esp. the depiction of non-Greek women, sluts one and all (the traditional village girl is the most sympathetic, and there's at least a suggestion of foreign evils - from tourism to Internet gambling - having corrupted a decent society). Ugly film; nice idea, though.]
KUNG FU HUSTLE (59) (dir., Stephen Chow) Stephen Chow, Yuen Qiu, Yuen Wah, Leung Siu Lung [Rooting around on the border (such as it is) between elegy and spoof. Actually saw this one-and-a-half times, stuck in a multiplex with nothing to do, but it never quite came together for me - maybe because I'm not really into martial-arts, maybe because its champions invoke Tati and Jerry Lewis (and might also invoke Buster Keaton), none of them entirely on my wavelength, maybe because it takes a while to find its tone and/or settle on its characters - prologue is sinister and a little unpleasant; then it turns to cosy neighbourhood comedy, then cartoonish action movie - though also in truth because the gags seemed a lot less inventive than promised. The hilarious slapstick with the knives, finding assorted ways for Chow to get stabbed - capped by his slow-witted sidekick pulling out one of the knives, then hurriedly sticking it back in when he screams in pain - is the rare bit that's actually milked and structured, as opposed to just thrown in the mix, though of course one appreciates the eclectic style and kinetic joy-in-movement of the action scenes. Might be a good double-bill with RAHTREE as a case of the old-fashioned 'hood rubbing up against the supernatural, even better as a chaser to GOODBYE DRAGON INN, in a double-bill of new Chinese filmmakers paying semi-ironic tribute to the classic kung-fu movie. I blame those Shaw Brothers DVDs myself.]
MEMORIES OF MURDER (76) (dir., Bong Joon-ho) Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung, Kim Roe-ha [Knowing the ending - not a spoiler, since Korean audiences would know how the (true) story ended - probably helps here, making it less a police procedural (though it's obv. that as well) and more a film about creating narrative - a pattern, a story - to try and make sense of chaos, to set about knowing the unknowable. The theories the cops come up with in trying to find the killer, the clues they claim as clues, the stories they weave, sound fanciful verging on ridiculous - the killer preys on women wearing red dresses; the killer only kills on rainy nights, and only after playing a certain song; the killer is a man with soft hands; the killer is a monk with no pubic hair - but the point is that you have to build a story (like SILENCE OF THE LAMBS it treats cops as artists, and detective work as a form of Art), and the point is also that absurd stories act as a mirror of an absurd society, late-80s Korea with its institutionalised violence, student riots, police brutality and corrupt old-boy system (it may be deliberate or just coincidence that at one point the killer escapes on a bus emblazoned with the logo of Daewoo, Korea's biggest bankruptcy scandal of the 90s). The climax is a little too frantic, the coda conceptually fascinating but clumsy - a lot of it is overstated, esp. in the later stages, and you also get moments like a cut from a corpse to a plate of raw meat - but Bong has tremendous verve, as adept at genre thrills (a stakeout in the forest; the killer's low whistling behind a frightened victim) as the more suggestive stuff on randomness and unknowability, establishing a sense of chaos and disorder from the opening scenes (the strange little kid who repeats everything, the rogue tractor trampling over the evidence), playing a pivotal moment with a thrilling slow track-in to a baby-faced suspect, and rescuing the finale with the year's second-best Korean-movie shot (after SPIDER FOREST) of a man in a tunnel - looming behind the pale-faced wraith like a cave, dark and unknowable (have I mentioned the word "unknowable" enough times?). The plot could be SEA OF LOVE, but the worldview suggests Michael Haneke; I guess "Memories of Entropy" just didn't sound as sexy.]
NOT ON THE LIPS (73) (dir., Alain Resnais) Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, Lambert Wilson, Audrey Tautou [Is charm enough? Probably, but there's so much more in this 1920s farce preserved - in the sense of not subverted - yet also examined as an artefact : the Passage of Time underlies the device of having people slowly vanish as they exit a scene (inevitably prompting the thought that the actors for whom the scenes in written in 1925 have now vanished) as well as the references to modernism, things being "out of date" and aggressively 'new' movements - from Cubism to a belief in Science as a measure of everything, even love - now old or defunct. Time passes, conventions fade away like the conventions of behaviour in a specific time and place - Resnais has the actors look into the camera at every opportunity, pointing up the artificiality - convoluted plot with everything at cross-purposes (everyone seducing A when they really want B) becomes irrelevant just as day-to-day problems grow irrelevant, leaving only the stuff that vaults generations. Meaning what, exactly? Superficial 'relevance' to some extent - Franco-American tension then as now, railing against immigrants, free love vs. societal norms - but more importantly the abiding virtues of finesse and elegance, clever songs with outrageous rhymes (subtitles do the film a major disservice because - at least on the R1 DVD - whoever did them felt the need to do them in rhyme, only substituting his/her own lame conceits for the original's sparkling ones), and a certain resignation in the face of Life, with its habit of improvising happy endings out of plans gone awry, conjecture and coincidence. Speaking of coincidence, imagine Lambert Wilson's secret glee, playing an Ugly American - and stealing the show - right after swallowing his pride and taking the big bucks to play a mangled Frenchman in the MATRIX sequels. Revenge is sweet - or at least it would be, if anyone outside France had actually seen the thing.]
HEAD-ON (58) (dir., Fatih Akin) Birol Unel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck [Powerful, but done for effect rather than conviction; not only is the premise itself unconvincing - and the film even has a cousin asking our heroine "Why did you have to get married? You have so many other options" (it's true! she does!) - but the characters change according to the script's demands. Thought at first it was going to be about hero's wilful blindness to the woman he married, the way he's seduced by love and stops seeing her flaws - she suddenly becomes quite stable, no longer self-destructive, and her sleeping around is kept discreetly offscreen so she remains pristine in terms of the movie - but in fact he's not fooling himself and she does suddenly change, their love taking over and triggering the final-act gear-shift to all-out melodrama. Akin has a knack for the sudden stylistic flourish, breaking the rules at significant moments - the freeze-frames when hero yells "Punk is not dead!"; the switch to English when he finally opens up to declare his love simply, without cross-cultural baggage; crossing the line (a shot from the hero's left side, when all previous shots were from his right) to indicate a change in emotional temperature in the scene with the shrink - but he seems unable to find the right distance, whether it's the hero's quasi-punk lifestyle - a bottle-breaking, barroom-brawling, lines-of-coke-immediately-followed-by-rough-sex riot as iconic and basically fake as the A-for-Anarchy sign that makes a fleeting appearance - or the take on the characters themselves. Opening shot turns out to be a recurring motif - a Turkish folk ensemble playing old songs beside the Bosphorus, subtly wrong because the colours are a little too bright and a girl is singing songs obviously written for a man - and the Turkish element should perhaps have been kept to that, an imperfect cultural memory casting its shadow over the characters. Everything deflates once the action moves to the motherland - esp. since Istanbul doesn't feel substantially different to Hamburg.]
ROBOTS (52) (dir., Chris Wedge) with the voices of Ewan McGregor, Robin Williams, Halle Berry, Mel Brooks [Help me, Doctor Spielvogel! I'm a fake, a fraud, a squeaky-voiced pisher in grown-up clothes. Not that I don't have a good job, touch wood, things are going great at Fox Animation - I mean we're no Pixar, but hey. We're up and coming. My wife's incredible, even better since the operation, we've got two great kids - that's Jacob, he's eight, see that grin? he's gonna be a heartbreaker - but I ... well, I feel inadequate. Like I'm not a real man. I mean take this movie ROBOTS, it's our Spring '05 blockbuster. You know how hard I worked on this movie? Like a dog I worked on this movie! Weekends I worked, holidays. I missed my kid's Christmas pageant. I came home at night I was so tired I couldn't make love to my wife, god forgive me. And for what? For what, Doctor? What am I doing here, a 35-year-old grown man, eleventh in my class at Yale? Writing a scene about a farting contest, Doctor! Jokes about a woman with a huge butt! A loud meaningless climax with bits of STAR WARS and the WWF. But it's more than that - I'm making something disposable. Something for kids to yell and whoop at and throw popcorn at the screen, keep their parents happy for 90 minutes. I'm not an artist - I'm a glorified babysitter. Cinematic junk-food, that's all it is. But I'm not a robot, Doctor! I'm a human being! I have dreams, ideals. This is not a job for a grown man. Oh sure we throw a few 'sophisticated' gags in there, maybe we can even get critics making WHITE HEAT references - but it's not enough. What can I do? ... What? What's that you say, Doctor? "Sublimate self-loathing into self-reflexive subtext"? Wait, you mean make one of those Big Business products that's actually a semi-hidden screed against Big Business? Doctor Spielvogel, you're a genius! A true Freudian! Yes, I see it now: the bad robot wants to force robots to "upgrade", make them feel inadequate about themselves so they'll buy his products - just like consumer culture, plastic surgery, celebrity worship, the Beauty myth, materialist society in general. The robots' world is our world! B-but our heroes - the poor and disenfranchised - rebel! "We are not junk!" they protest; "We won't be treated this way!". And our hero - clad in humble hand-me-downs, painted explicitly as a poor boy - pines for a more socialistic (yet also echt-American) society, where the gates of Opportunity are open to all! "The world you're looking for no longer exists," explain the agents of modern capitalism. Yeah, that'll do it! That'll show them! Take that, Fox Animation! I'm a punk, a rebel, not just a sad corporate drone. A real man at last! Thanks Doc, you saved my life with your perverse yet effective advice. Don't know why I'm so ashamed of my emasculating job, though. Maybe it's because I was breast-fed till the age of 13.]
THE RING 2 (39) (dir., Hideo Nakata) Naomi Watts, David Dorfman, Simon Baker [Cold, discreet, underpopulated: very much a Hideo Nakata Movie in the style of the original RINGU, but he's obsessed - see also DARK WATER - with lost kids seeking surrogate mommies, and there's so much more this could've been about. Verbinski's flash and dash are eschewed but so's the children-of-TV theme from THE RING (television as the sole source of love and connection in a disconnected world) as well as that film's shift from personal to universal (no equivalent to the shot of an apartment block with a TV in every home); worst of all, its most distinctive elements - the seven-day countdown, the distorted faces, the whole idea of TV-as-monster - have been shunted to the margins, with little to replace them. The prologue opens up a pitch-black comic notion of a world where everyone tries to pass on the curse to someone else before their seven days are up (nothing comes of it); the videotape itself, with its media-age resonance, hardly features in the plot which instead - unwisely - is EXORCIST-based; heroine's guilt from the end of THE RING - i.e. what she had to do to save her son - might've made an organising principle, is briefly alluded to, but again abandoned. The mommy-child dynamic has some interesting facets - the A.I.-ish creepiness of a child's unconditional love or the part where Naomi, Abraham-like, contemplates filicide "to be a good mother" - but it's kind of limited, and the shocks are few; a nightmare scene is too-obviously a nightmare (we've all been here too often), and there's nothing especially terrifying about a flooded room or a tree-shaped flame pattern or a pack of killer deer (I mean come on). One abiding sense-memory (also in the trailer): a harsh scratching sound, whether fingernails on a wall or scissors across a piece of paper. The rest is silence.]
SEX IS COMEDY (64) (dir., Catherine Breillat) Anne Parillaud, Gregoire Colin, Roxane Mesquida [Obviously problematic in all sorts of ways - an act of revenge against an actor (the male lead from FAT GIRL) who isn't there to defend himself or even confirm the truth of the accusations; an act of self-justification from a director who, while not making herself look good necessarily, explains her work as a quest for "the truth" ("Fear of being obscene makes one obscene," she adds, in a sideswipe at moral-majority critics). Shouldn't, and can't, be taken as a documentary account - impossible to know how much is what Breillat/Parillaud actually did, how much what she wishes she had done - but an amalgam of fact and fiction including the main theme of FAT GIRL itself, the separation of sex and true intimacy: the director is herself like a lover, her relationship to the actor charged with sexual tension (at one point she kneels down, sliding suggestively out of frame, to check his prosthetic penis), teasing then withdrawing, wanting only one thing - "a predator", a user. In the end she gets what she wanted - "the truth" - but only an uncomfortable truth because, in truth, she makes people uncomfortable (the Eric Stoltz-like assistant is her only real ally); Breillat accepts this, just as she accepts that her 'truth' is a performance - we pull back from a sex scene being rehearsed to the crew standing around watching, voyeurs shattering the illusion of apparent intimacy - and laughs at formalists by pointing out the messiness of moviemaking : if a love scene is done in one shot it may be for less-than-artistic reasons, viz. so the actors won't be able to change their minds about doing nudity. Despite the premise, Breillat's most self-deprecating film - and perhaps the most honest, in admitting the not-often-admitted: that her films aren't about their plots or characters, let alone Gender or Post-Feminism, but in fact about Catherine Breillat.]
LOOK AT ME (69) (dir., Agnes Jaoui) Jean-Pierre Bacri, Marilou Berry, Agnes Jaoui, Laurent Grévill [THE TASTE OF OTHERS was a slightly dreary comedy lifted by a sublime ending, but this new Jaoui is almost the opposite - slightly let down by its ending (it might've done better to cut suddenly as Marilou is rushing to her lover) but superb, if not quite sublime, for most of its length. Woody Allen-ish comedy of obsessions and insecurities - incl. socio-political insecurities, like the Rachid who calls himself Sebastien - set in a cultured world of books, good wines and fine desserts but dealing in hurt feelings and awkward silences, with co-writer Bacri sharper on himself than Woody ever was, a selfish man unable to show love, redeemed only (if at all) by being totally unapologetic. The secret is it moves like a farce - the middle section puts all the characters in a country house, shifting them around like pawns in the chess game two of them play - but the tone is humanistic, willing (and eager) to listen to the characters and let them work out their problems on the film's time. One might say - if I'm understanding this correctly - its emotive power comes from characters who seem less free than ourselves, the audience (i.e. more locked, predetermined), turning out to be more. Also, it's pretty funny.]
PURPLE BUTTERFLY (63) (dir., Lou Ye) Zhang Ziyi, Liu Ye, Toru Nakamura [Why do I tune out so often in Asian movies? For a while I used to worry it was the language or (even worse) they-all-look-the-same confusion about the characters, but now I'm starting to think it's the way they're edited - specifically a relaxed attitude to shot-by-shot spatial continuity, the matching/motivated cuts and geographical coherence we take for granted in Western storytelling. Not talking jump-cuts, or deliberately muddied action editing Michael Bay-style, but a sense of freedom when it comes to shot-sequencing, so that (for example) if you take the early bit where our hero finds a trinket in his room, the action (and it's all one action) begins with a MS looking into the room from the window, followed (for no reason) by two MS in the other direction - from the other side of the hero, with the window behind him - followed by a closer shot diagonally behind his left shoulder, followed by a slightly wider shot looking at him from the right; later, when a minion is told to "Follow that woman", Lou observes head-on, i.e. characters walking to camera, then cuts to a POV rotated by 90 degrees without warning, then back to the previous position; a little earlier, when hero and heroine are reunited (when he asks, "Remember when we were at school?"), the whole scene is staged and cross-cut so it's not at all obvious where they are in relation to each other. That could be deliberate, of course, and it makes for a dreamlike disorienting feel that's quite effective - maybe that's what draws aficionados to Wong Kar-Wai, or e.g. Tsui Hark's TIME AND TIDE - but the less Cartesian editing, if that's the right word - by which I mean less lucid, syllogistic, transparent - made it hard work getting into the story, at least with my baggage; I almost wonder (huge generalisation coming up) if it isn't a consequence of a pictograph-based culture that puts the emphasis on individual entities - each shot seen as a work of art in itself - whereas our alphabet-based culture is more hung up on transitions and sequences. The film itself works best in patches, a breathtaking track down a train-station platform - leading to a 20-minute stretch that's pure magic, a headlong rush of images - or an extraordinary minute-long close-up as our hero listens to music, fading out as a single teardrop falls (no idea how he managed to time that so well; then again, I don't know how they got the train to appear right on cue in the earlier shot, either); doomed lovers dance in a room, orange lamplight against the dusky-blue evening outside and the sound of rain beating a tattoo - then the climax has them dancing again, trying to dance away all the sorrows in between, in a pure hit of swooning romantic melodrama. Lou's work is vastly more impressive here than in SUZHOU RIVER, which came across as watered-down WKW; but it's still overlong, and blank-faced Zhang Ziyi totally muffs the tear-jerking coda.]
IN GOOD COMPANY (48) (dir., Paul Weitz) Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Scarlett Johansson, Marg Helgenberger [Pity (or mock) Paul Weitz, cashing in the last of his AMERICAN PIE cachet to secure big-studio funding for what should all too obviously have been an indie. Pity (or mock) the studio - Universal, in this case - trying to market the unmarketable, a cry of rage against globalised corporate culture - where the conglomerate is king, a magazine is merely "a portal to a synergized world of cross-promotion", and obscure parent-company feuds on the other side of the world trickle down to people losing their jobs in the here-and-now - as well as a film with a spare, chilly style, bare compositions and little or no background music. Weitz has a commitment to the Truth - even the little things, like the hero's black eye that persists for many scenes after he gets it - but the multiplex audience doesn't care that he gets the depressing listless feel of going to work on a Sunday exactly right, and the film's attempts to be more ingratiating almost wreck it - esp. in Grace's character, a bright-eyed klutzy puppy who's risibly unconvincing as a corporate "ninja assassin". Quaid - the movie's Conscience - spends a lot of it looking pained and indignant, and the whole thing has a streak of outraged virtue, whether pointing out that "people don't read anymore" or having the caffeinated young capitalists yell "Pfg!" at each other then explaining that it means "Pretty fuckin' great" (*), as if to say 'look at these barbarians with their crass macho acronyms'; obviously admirable but it comes off misjudged, rather like the use of David Byrne's (excellent) "Glass, Concrete & Stone" over the opening credits as Quaid gets ready for work - a song that means nothing either to the character or the vast majority of the audience. Falls between two stools, but it might've made a fine corporate nightmare at one-tenth of the budget, with Leo Fitzpatrick as Toph and Lodge Kerrigan behind the camera.]
(*): Thanks to reader and fellow online critic Dan Meyer for pointing out it's actually "pretty freakin' great", being (as he notes) "another example of the film falling into the large rift you describe, wanting the hard macho vibe really badly, but lacking enough dedication to pursue the requisite R-rating". Yes.
CONSTANTINE (33) (dir., Francis Lawrence) Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBoeuf, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare [Things were so much simpler at the time of THE MATRIX - not just another film with Keanu Reeves as Jesus, but also another film explicitly about Choice: you chose the red pill (or was it the blue pill?) and accessed a spectacular digi-world, like the limitless promise of the information superhighway. Six years later, it's not so clear. "It's always been your choice," Keanu is told, and smoking is used as a symbol of individual Responsibility, choosing to do (or not do) what's good for you - except that smoking is a classic real-world case of Responsibility avoided (it wasn't us, claim smokers in the courts, it was TV ads and Big Tobacco), and the film similarly muddies Keanu's choices with the abrogating presence of the Devil (taking over Responsibility) and the mantra that "God has a plan for us all"; the climax invokes higher forces, exposing the plot as a kids' game for Daddy (Stormare a campy Satan) to break up, while God does indeed have a plan for our hero, offering forgiveness without being asked despite the film's own theology. Someone (not me) should write a piece on resurgent religiosity in the early-to-mid 00s casting its shadow on the hi-tech cyber-ideals of the new millennium, though it might be nice if the film were enjoyable qua film as well as a Fascinating Artefact; alas, almost nothing impresses, from the cheesy tour of Hell - dark skies, fire, gusts of wind - to the lame attempts at badass humour (Constantine giving a demon the finger, etc). Keanu looks frozen, the film feels machine-tooled; it's a sad day when Shia LaBoeuf's goofy-kid schtick is the only thing vaguely resembling human behaviour.]
2046 (52) (second viewing: 57) (dir., Wong Kar-Wai) Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Gong Li [Never seem to have anything useful to say about Wong Kar-Wai, for some reason. All I can offer are prosaic criticisms, noting e.g. that this might've worked better with 2 contrasting stories - like CHUNGKING EXPRESS and FALLEN ANGELS - instead of 3 (esp. since the ur-romance with Gong Li is so undernourished), or that the Zhang Ziyi story, with its coquettish heroine and Lothario hero, back-and-forth banter and half-playful face-slapping, is busy rather than dreamy in a way that doesn't quite mesh with Wong's shimmery style. That style could be likened to a feather being repeatedly swept across one's scalp in a light caress - a sensation that's at first vaguely pleasant, then irritating, then (at some point, once you succumb) soothing and even hypnotic: fragile half-suggestion is transformed, by force of repetition, into meditation and even lament for lost/unrequited love, building an emotional beachhead like the prisoner who builds a tunnel by scraping his spoon against a stone wall again and again, for years on end - at least that's the idea; but this tentative style floats into the ether without something to anchor it, which could be the reality/sci-fi dichotomy (at least if the sci-fi angle were more developed), or perhaps the memory of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE - implicitly explaining the hero's defence mechanisms - and I might indeed like this film more if I had a more powerful attachment to that one. As it is, it just seems half-baked. I'm sorry - I got nothing. Try Sicinski instead; as of this writing, it's his Film of the Year.] [Second viewing, and I think I may have found my way in - which is simply this: The women aren't important. None of them is (except of course the one we never see). Any emotional investment in the various affairs can only lead to disappointment, given how perversely (and shoddily) the film is structured - seeming to offer two contrasting stories except they don't really contrast, then dissipating audience goodwill on a too-short interlude with Gong Li followed by a burst of Zhang Ziyi without adding much to what we already know. All that matters is our hero, dreaming of stasis - 2046, a place and time where nothing changes - traumatised by the past, telling Zhang "there's a part of me I'll never lend to anyone"; the film wallows in his trauma, which is why it gets steadily less interesting, but at least I know how to approach it now. Starts off strong - the early scene with 'Lulu' would make a great 10-minute short - and the view of love as a gamble (bets and games of chance are a recurring motif), a series of high-stakes bluffs and risks - one party pushing, the other rebuffing; one party opening up, the other shooting down - is quite effective.]