Films Seen - April 2006
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
THE DYING GAUL (57) (dir., Craig Lucas) Peter Sarsgaard, Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott [Not sure I get the dynamics here. Obviously a case of hetero couple exploiting/co-opting gayness - the wife by posing as Sarsgaard's dead lover on the Internet (tainting a pure "unconditional" love, a love without lies), the husband by venting his homosexual side though not entirely seriously, certainly never intending to destroy his marriage (the relationship means less to him than it does to Sarsgaard's character, who's still very fragile - his violent hiccupping crying jag while they're having sex is a stunning moment), all of which clearly ties in with the writer's script being co-opted/exploited by Hollywood; they want to use but disguise (or destroy) his gayness, just like the couple want to play at homosexuality without of course becoming homosexual. Fair enough, but is this kind of false appropriation really such a common or serious issue - sounds like the fact that "most of America hates homosexuals" would be more of a problem, unless you subscribe to the theory that straight people are all in denial anyway - and how does it link up with (a) the Buddhist talk of "self-salvation" or (b) the title? Those showing compassion to "the enemy" (the Dying Gaul) are presumably the couple, but it's hollow - not to say offensive - compassion and besides it's Scott, not Sarsgaard, whose posture approximates the titular statue's in the final scene (the Alternate Ending on the DVD explains more, yet manages to be even less illuminating). Wouldn't matter so much in a different movie - but theme is important in such a writerly one, and it's frustrating when you can't connect the dots: why the cross-cut between the couple having sex and Sarsgaard jerking off sadly in front of his computer? (Is Lucas making a point, or just a striking effect?) What's the significance of the violent videogame? No arguing with performances, though, or the bits of embittered Hollywood satire - e.g. Scott the studio exec quoting TOOTSIE as an example of how to make a 'political' movie - or some wry background architecture. What's that they say about people who live in glass houses?...]
BASIC INSTINCT 2 (26) (dir., Michael Caton-Jones) Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, Charlotte Rampling, David Thewlis [Fun with set design! His office is in the "Gherkin" Building - the London landmark that looks like a rocketship, or giant alien egg - and when he stands by the window he's backed by criss-crossing beams in enormous 'X' shapes, like an overlord in METROPOLIS; her apartment is a mad, cavernous hybrid of mansion and gallery-space, with a fireplace at one end, not one but two staircases on opposite sides of the living-room (you descend from the front door, then go up again in a 'V' shape to access the rest of the house), a bar stranded in the middle, cylindrical columns out of nowhere and a wall-length, ceiling-high window slanting over the whole thing at a precarious angle. The garish spaces and metallic blue-and-greys make it semi-interesting, visually, but most of it is like We couldn't get Clive Owen for this project so here's David Morrissey, who sounds very similar (he does, actually) or We couldn't get Verhoeven to come back so here's Michael Caton-Jones who's ... nothing like him at all. Only Sharon's back, once again the cold-eyed babe who doesn't need men (she's both bisexual and intellectual), straddling a chair with her legs splayed out, purring "When you think about fucking me ... and I know you do ... how do you picture me, Doctor?" - and at least he has the good grace not to reply, 'Actually, I like to picture you the way you looked in 1992', though in truth she looks terrific, just the skin a little tighter and the look a little deader. Most Hilarious Line: psychiatrist Rampling, on hearing that Shaz walked out of a therapy session: "She just walked out? How Lacanian!". (Um, Lacanian?) Runner-up: Sharon herself, consoling our hero on being outwitted by her feminine wiles: "Don't take it so hard. Even Oedipus didn't see his mother coming." Um, Oedipus?...]
THE CONSEQUENCES OF LOVE (47) (dir., Paolo Sorrentino) Toni Servillo, Olivia Magnani, Adriano Giannini [Feels like it ought to be a short, made in the flashy calling-card style one associates with shorts - right from the opening image, an extreme wide-angle shot of a tube-shaped, neon-lit corridor stretching deep into frame, a man gliding slowly closer on a conveyor-belt as the credits roll - keeping characters thin and archetypal, plot never really fleshed-out, sexed-up with truculent Mafiosi and needless violence (is there any reason why we need to see the hitman in action? I can't think of one). Dead-end stasis of the early scenes feels like an exercise, the impassive Martin Landau-ish hero such a caricature of the misanthropic loner - "Please, I can't stand my face being touched" - I assumed it was a joke, except there isn't really a punchline; meanwhile the score deals in trip-hop and Philip Glass, there's slick soundtrack jokes like the rustle of money stopping and re-starting to punctuate a dramatic moment, and Sorrentino does all sorts of eye-catching things (crossing the line, swooping down vertically from high-angles to low). Ends up quite distinctive, the ending releasing an emotional through-line that isn't really in the movie, and it does contain an extraordinary camera move - approaching the hero from behind as he sits on a bed, soaring to an overhead angle looking directly down on his bald pate, dipping down to gaze at his face upside-down (he helps by tilting his head back) then slowly withdrawing and circling round again as he lies down on the bed. Possibly the most virtuoso shot of the year - and one of the emptiest.]
DATE MOVIE (7) (dir., Aaron Seltzer) Alyson Hannigan, Adam Campbell, Eddie Griffin, Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge [I don't like to blow any film off, but this made me physically sick (seriously; I get a little queasy just thinking about it), both with the grossness of some of the gags and the tackiness, opportunism and neanderthal levels of stupidity on display. I'm supposed to write something for the "Mail" - that's why I saw it - so maybe I'll link to that someday, but I'd rather just forget the whole thing ever happened, to be honest. Alyson Hannigan: Why???]
A TALE OF CINEMA (65) (dir., Hong Sang-soo) Lee Ki-woo, Uhm Ji-won, Kim Sang-kyung [Re-watching POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE made clear Hong's always-subversive relationship with the master-shot style - in effect, though his camera in that film seems to be observing Life-as-it's-lived, Hou Hsiao-hsien style, our knowledge of hidden connections negates any sense of master-shot transparency, upending the modernist emphasis on the viewer's gaze (though of course that knowledge is ex post facto, which is why the relationship is subversive as opposed to destructive), incidentally adding a spiritual dimension with Hong himself as high-priest. This one explodes master-shot aesthetics in a whole new way, most obviously with the frequent zooms manipulating screen space - though I can't agree with Michael that the zooms are inelegant per se; in fact, there's a major difference between those in the first half and those in the second, because the former are motivated zooms in line with good film grammar, heightening dramatic moments (e.g. hero and heroine reunited after many years) and/or prompted by onscreen cues (one is cued by the line "Tell me the truth", another by our hero falling to his knees in entreaty), whereas the latter are random and meaningless. It's part of the film's somewhat heavy symbolism - once you twig to the relationship between first half and second - just like the cinephile/stalker throwing away his pack of Marlboro Reds (which typified the film-within-a-film in his mind) in the final scene, adding in V.O. he must "stop smoking" to mean he must stop being film-obsessed, or the director in the scene just before shouting "I don't want to die" in direct contrast to the suicide-pact lovers in his own movie, waking up our anti-hero to the difference between Life and Film; something like KANGWON seems more daring in working against its own form, whereas this merely makes a point about form in general - viz. what fits in one context (Film) won't fit in another (Life). Most interesting are the layers of self-delusion - cue Hong as the 'Korean Rohmer' - which seem to bleed from Life into Film: our hero's obviously deluded in thinking Movie Love is real, but in fact it isn't even 'real' in the film-within-a-film context, the lovers inconstant, lacking trust, constantly betraying each other, their grand gestures shopworn and secondhand (the boy's cry of "Mother!" borrowed from the old play he watches). He fixates on the song about their love being deep - and perhaps fixates on the New Wave-ish style (hence the zooms) and the theme of reckless young love (hence his own immaturity), trying to translate them to his own life - but actually behaves like a very bad viewer, seeing only whatever's on the surface; the heroine nails it when she sighs "I don't think you really understood the movie", just like she nails it when she says "We all think the world revolves around us" (she's obv. the Hong surrogate, another reason why the film seemed more on-the-nose than previous ones). Not so much a caution against cinephilia as a call for perceptive viewers - like those who appreciate Hong himself, with his subtle dynamics, meticulous technique and startling flights of fancy (the hero's non sequiturs, as when he praises a friend's wife for a delicious steak she cooked years before - she's nonplussed, obviously - or asks another friend, apropos of nothing, "Have you always had that limp?"). Second viewing was a slight disappointment - partly because I wasn't sure how to view the first half, knowing what I know - but maybe third time will clinch it.]
V FOR VENDETTA (58) (dir., James McTeigue) Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt, Stephen Fry [Here's a shallow but solid "Cyprus Mail" review that says most of what I have to say. Except perhaps to emphasise how annoying I find the Wachowskis' recent case of logorrhea (see also: The Architect), both in terms of over-elaborating - "You started as a botanist, didn't you?" - and just too much talk, too many words; Unintentional Hilarity prize goes to the scene when 'V' launches into an absurdly verbose speech on TV, having hacked into the system, and we cut to various Everypeople all watching rapt on their living-room couches as he circumlocutes and pontificates (wouldn't just one little boy turn to his parents, one wife turn to her husband and ask, "What the fuck is he babbling about?"?). Generally works, though, and it hits pretty hard for a big-studio trifle.]
FINAL DESTINATION 3 (48) (dir., James Wong) Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche [Effectively morbid, but too intense to be really fun. This franchise is meant to be a joke, albeit a dark cosmic one - whatever you do, Death will get you, presumably playing to adolescents' dim perception that their youth and energy are really a chimera (the perception isn't quite so dim for older audiences) - but this often feels like we're just ... watching people die, often in excruciating detail (most awesome death in the series is the out-of-nowhere bus in the original; least awesome, for the same reason, are the burning bimbos in this one). The rhythm is strident when it should work in a kind of lightning-fast syncopation - who's gonna die? is it that guy no it's this guy - and the mechanics of the complicated death-machines aren't made sufficiently clear to appreciate the interlocking complexity - I still have no idea what exactly happens with the guy stacking crates in that warehouse, except it involves various hooks catching, pulleys straining and chains unwinding, and of course ends in tears. Even when the details are clear, the mechanism isn't always that complex (the bimbos' death is about drops of water causing a short-circuit, the rest of the elaborate cross-cuts being just window-dressing or tying up loose ends), not to mention the clues-in-photos angle is too nebulous (the clues could refer to anything), not to mention the final joke is just nasty whereas the end of FD1 was a case of the Perfect Mousetrap. Unnerving, like both previous FDs, but also gruellingly unpleasant, making the subtext even more obvious (and alarming): the helplessness of modern life - incl. the foolishness of thinking you're ever in control - the emphasis on absolutely everything as a potential source of danger, the futility of any gesture of compassion or companionship (you think you can help, but you'll only make things worse). It's a baleful metaphor for a society ruled by vast, implacable forces - Death = governments, lobby groups, conglomerates - its people increasingly isolating themselves in risk-averse bubbles, no longer trying to intervene, submitting to the inevitable ironing-out of individual vision: "Everyone is equal in Death's eyes."]
LEMMING (58) (dir., Dominik Moll) Laurent Lucas, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, Andre Dussolier [Moll isn't a Chabrol fan, according to his interview in the latest "Sight & Sound" - which is too bad because middle-class mortification may be his strongest suit, the dinner-party that goes horribly wrong here not unlike the sight of politeness for a troublesome guest stretched to its limits in HARRY, HE'S HERE TO HELP. Instead he likes to start that way then "discover other worlds", but the world he finds in this case is bizarrely "Twilight Zone"-ish as opposed to Hitchcockian - except maybe the possessed-by-Carlotta parts of VERTIGO - and the hero isn't guilt-ridden, just unfortunate and rather accident-prone; at one point, after he's lost his wife, been bitten by the titular lemming and banged his head against a table, you wonder if it's really a thriller or just a secret plot to figure out how many disasters it'll take for plank-like Laurent Lucas to show some emotion. Not that it has to be Hitchcockian (or indeed Chabrolian), of course, and there's certainly enough disquieting intimations to make it work, scene by scene: the uneasy sequence - with death-rattle effect on the soundtrack - when Gainsbourg walks at night, the "flying webcam" getting crushed in the jaws of a closing door, car headlights appearing in a rear-windshield, a Strauss waltz adding a touch of the unearthly, the carefully cramped composition of the boy next door ('source' of the whole lemming problem) kicking a football around in the last scene, Gainsbourg watching opaquely and "Dream a Little Dream" on the soundtrack. Moll should perhaps make a science-fiction movie next - he's got the right feel for strangeness in the everyday - as opposed to these amusing but rather shallow dips in psychological thriller. Charlotte Rampling is the Lemming, by the way, clogging up the 'plumbing' in the model couple's model home; just in case that wasn't blatantly obvious.]
MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS (60) (dir., Stephen Frears) Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Will Young, Kelly Reilly, Christopher Guest [Hard to describe why this works and, say, BEING JULIA doesn't, or why it rises above the usual Weinstein pap: mostly, I suspect, it's rhythm, cutting early, using music to grease the wheels and keeping scenes short - plus e.g. not giving Mrs. Henderson a speech when she visits Alec's grave - thus discouraging the genre's biggest flaw which is to protect its characters. It's certainly crowd-pleasing (even an American-themed number for transatlantic appeal), but it also hints at the hypocrisy behind Van Damm's talk of Art and Botticelli nudes - doesn't he supply the mice that send his naked ladies scattering? - and leaves it an open question almost to the end whether Mrs. Henderson is too vain, too frivolous, though her frivolity does take the edge off the usual showbiz-worship (talk of our little theatre "family", etc). Of course it could also be simply that the stars are in top form, Hoskins in full smoulder - he always works well against bossy women - Dench trying harder than I've seen her in years; they're delightful arguing about what to call the chorus line (she opining that "the Millerettes" sounds like "midgets working in a factory"), and when she gets her show-stopping punchline - "Why, Mr. Van Damm, you are Jewish" - she knocks it out of the park. They can't redeem the very last scene, which is shameless, but Frears deserves a lot of credit for marshalling the rest of it; put it side-by-side with, say, CHICAGO to illustrate how good taste and lightness of touch can make all the difference. A film I'd been dreading - had the disc for months, couldn't bring myself to watch it - but it's not so bad really.]
SCARY MOVIE 4 (50) (dir., David Zucker) Anna Faris, Craig Bierko, Regina Hall, Leslie Nielsen [Sometimes very funny but there's also a level of hostility, most apparent in the Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah epilogue but present throughout in the film's m.o., which is (a) to faithfully recreate a scene from a recent blockbuster then (b) to immediately explode it through unmotivated violence, sometimes just ratcheting up the violence that's already there but mostly using violence as an arbitrary, childish destructor of Hollywood norms; it's like a little boy playing with his action dolls, and the way kids often start off by having the dolls mimic adult behaviour - 'Hello, Mr. Bear' 'Hello, Mr. Dog' - only to degenerate into having them hit and bash each other in gleeful Punch-and-Judy fashion. The point is that those kids are outsiders in the world of adults, their violence a kind of release-valve for their frustration, and maybe that explains the success of these primitive spoofs as well - in a world so infested by celebrity culture, they act as obscure revenge, letting us work off our hostility to the super-beings who loom so large and untouchable (does this mean Hollywood has finally succeeded in infantilising its target audience? yes; yes, I'm afraid it does). In itself, exhausting and repetitive - with special emphasis on innocent violence, done by accident or while trying to help - but not always stupid, with even a film-grammar gag like when Cindy jumped at the scene-bridging sound in SCARY MOVIE 3 (in this case it's the camera craning towards her and carrying on past her shoulder as she gazes at the scene of a tragedy, as if about to show something malign in the house behind her - except she runs back and puts herself in-frame again, refusing to relinquish her close-up). Charlie Sheen's Viagra moment is a keeper, ditto "Horace P. McTitties", ditto gay homeys and "Hello"; Michael Jackson should sue, so should the City of Detroit probably. Human After All Dept: it's not just me - everybody wants to hurt Dakota Fanning.]
16 BLOCKS (46) (dir., Richard Donner) Bruce Willis, Mos Def, David Morse [Why I'm happy to keep trawling through the muddy sludge of big-studio also-rans: A scene like the first confrontation between Willis and Morse, the latter monumentally cool even as things start going wrong (if you go out that door "I can't help you", he tells Willis, and they both know it means 'I'll have to kill you'), the former giving nothing away, using every ounce of his movie-star presence as a man at the end of his tether, the sense of moral compromise and jadedness thicker than in any cop thriller since TRAINING DAY. There are other felicities - the scene where time stands still just after the first shot is fired (Donner slows it down with dissolves and multi-angle shots of Willis reacting, then suddenly all hell breaks loose), sober colours, a certain overcrowded NYC atmosphere - but the film gets increasingly tedious, grinding out plot and labouring the hero's redemption-arc till you almost hear the writers say 'Actually, the whole thing is a parable on Doing the Right Thing'. (To whom it may concern: Please stop using riddles - in this case involving a hurricane, and which of three people you should help if you can only help one - as a none-too-subtle vehicle for your film's 'hidden' subtext. Signed, A Friend.) Mos Def, for the first time, is annoying, Willis does the facial hair and ashen-faced fatigue but seems just a few signs of life away from full-on catatonia. Awesome confrontation scene, though...]
ICE AGE 2 (43) (dir., Carlos Saldanha) with the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah [It's official: I no longer care to wait my turn while these broadest-possible-appeal Fox cartoons work through their committee-driven synthesis, tuning out the parts that were never meant for me - fart jokes for idiot children, happy-family messages for parents in need of reassurance, JERRY MAGUIRE references for the terminally bored - till I finally get to something I like (mostly Scrat the single-minded squirrel, in this case). I'm surprised people take it in their stride, actually, but maybe it stems from hardcore TV-watching and a lifetime of channel-surfing - the sense that incongruous things can follow each other in quick succession, and you have to wade through some rubbish to get to the good stuff. Cartoon auteurists may like to note how the Fox animators, who snuck an anti-corporate subtext into ROBOTS, sneak an equally mordant self-portrait into this one, in the scene where Manny and Diego's storytelling gets focus-grouped by an audience of demanding kids who tell them it needs "more relatable" characters and a more satisfying ending (whether the kids represent Fox execs or the actual all-powerful kid audience is debatable); anti-Bushites and zeitgeist-watchers may like to note how global warming is finally becoming reality, even in kid movies - though also vitiated by the happy ending, and generally shown (in line with US policy) to be no big deal. The whole thing reeks of empty reassurance, the promise of a melancholy streak turning out to be a sham: even the mammoths aren't really extinct, and the scary vultures take a break from Waiting for Death for the film's only song number, a high-stepping version of "Food Glorious Food".]
HOSTEL (59) (dir., Eli Roth) Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eythor Gudjonsson [Almost as slapdash as CABIN FEVER but Roth's ideas are much, much better this time - esp. the notion of Europe's anti-Americanism as a kind of guilty obsession, carried out within the very framework it despises (i.e. in a context of thriving capitalism, closer by the day to the US model), though it needed more rigour to really work. Thought 13 TZAMETI was unique, or at least unusual, but it must be something in the air - probably a function of a mid-00s world (or the popular conception of a mid-00s world) that's (a) ruled entirely by money, and (b) marked by cultural exhaustion and a cynical hunger for thrills, the more extreme the better. It's a charge the film also directs at its target audience of jaded gorehounds - who probably won't mind seeing bits of themselves in the well-off clients revelling in violence but may well balk at identifying with the repressed homosexual who eats his food with his hands, to have a "relationship" with it, then later becomes a sadist to have a relationship with otherwise forbidden human flesh (not only is violence "a rush", it's a form of primal connection in an over-civilised world where food is processed and flesh assiduously protected; why are gorehounds so often the ones without a girlfriend?). The rabid machismo of the first, teenpic half - consciously studded with gay jokes - also fits in here, though of course it's also the old horror thing of promiscuous teens getting punished (it's also quite amusing if you've ever backpacked, certainly funnier than THE BEACH); otherwise a case of drills through thighs, chainsaws on fingers and Achilles tendons getting slashed, plus a revenge finale that's cathartic but makes no sense (since Pax Americana never saw what happened to his friend) (*) (**). Better than expected, with striking touches like the gang of urchins or the girl's touch of sadness when she says "I have seen this show"; also nice to have nudity back onscreen, though someone should explain to women that plump 70s bodies are so-o-o much more sexy than taut, gym-toned 00s ones.]
(*) Many thanks to reader (and fine writer) Matt Prigge who reckons I may have been asleep at the wheel here: "I seem to recall," sez Matt, "that when [Pax] was being brought into the place, the first thing he saw was his friend, by then dead, getting worked over by Mr. Eats-With-His-Fingers" - meaning the revenge finale does make sense, in its stupid way. Actually I do recall that scene, but my (vague) memory is that the person poised over the body wasn't Mr. E-W-H-F but merely some charnel-house employee cleaning up after the 'client', i.e. the significant thing was that Pax sees his friend dead rather than seeing whodunit. I'm probably wrong, though, so thanks etc.
(**): More reader mail from film-loving vintner Steve Carlson! "Regarding the film's final scene: Didn't Jay Hernandez stumble across the body of his friend while running around the corridors of the warehouse? I think he did." I think so too, the more that I think about it. "Of course, that doesn't answer how he knew the creepy ambiguously gay guy was the one who killed him. Okay, never mind. It doesn't make sense except as audience-rousing catharsis". Well, that's what I said...
WOLF CREEK (62) (dir., Greg McLean) John Jarratt, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Nathan Phillips [Obviously tempting to lump all these ultra-violent horrors together, but in fact the SAWs are incoherent, HOSTEL a gross-out with some good ideas whereas this is lean and surprisingly taut - an Aussie take on TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, with inevitable echoes of CROCODILE DUNDEE and PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. The former is made explicit, the latter left implicit, mostly in the sense of wild Outback nature - a sky full of stars, breakers rolling down on a deserted beach, the vast meteorite crater at Wolf Creek itself - dwarfing the characters, as primal and irrational (not to say incomprehensible) as the Outback Killer they try to escape. Takes its time, happy to build character, and the style throughout isn't of a brash young punk trying to shock, more a low-budget filmmaker trying to make a virtue of limited resources - the second half (after a portentous fade-to-black) is sadistic but there's also tension-building shots of cars on remote country roads, and eyes gleaming in the dark, and heroines having to keep very quiet and hide from the boogeyman. Bonus points for the neat ending, managing to hint at the probable truth while avoiding the laws of libel - though the opening "Based on actual events" caption should perhaps have been changed to "Based on one person's somewhat dubious account of actual events, though whether you choose to believe an insane serial-killer is really stalking the wilds of Queensland when a more plausible explanation is staring you right in the face is entirely up to you".]
MUNICH (60) (dir., Steven Spielberg) Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds ["People are fragile things / You should know by now..." Oops sorry, wrong "Munich" - or is it? Spielberg doesn't just reflect political comment through his characters' emotional crises but makes the two indistinguishable - and I'm pretty sure it was Mark Steyn in "The Spectator" (I believe re: this one, though it may have been WAR OF THE WORLDS) who pointed out that Spielberg upends Bogie's dictum in CASABLANCA: in his films, it's this crazy world that doesn't amount to a hill of beans next to the problems of three little people. Politics junkies will feel he's selling this crazy world short - but then the film is surprisingly dull, politically; only likely to prove controversial if you think Israel is 100% justified in killing Palestinian fighters/terrorists, and not just in a retaliatory, tit-for-tat way but morally justified, as e.g. the state is justified in punishing criminals. The film itself knows from the start that both sides in war are equally culpable, building equivalence by showing both Jewish and Arab relatives as they watch the Munich tragedy unfold, even pointing out the hypocrisy of Israel imposing its own equivalence - 11 Palestinians for 11 Jewish victims - while insisting on its moral superiority (one recalls the hollow indignation years later, when Hamas killed the Israeli Minister of Tourism in retaliation for the - equally unlawful - killing of one of its own leaders); Spielberg sets out to demolish cuddly stereotypes - Golda Meir presented as a soulful Jewish auntie ("These people..."), the Mossad accountant insisting on receipts like one of those crotchety store-keepers once played by S.Z. Sakall - trying to shake Jewish complacency, show the ugly face of Zionism, show how a nation risks losing its soul by resorting to violence (meanwhile the PLO victims say things like "Home is everything", and talk eloquently of Palestinian suffering). "We're Jews! We're supposed to be righteous!" says someone, which is when I realised I'm probably not the target audience for this movie, having never bought into Jewish exceptionalism - or indeed American exceptionalism, and the War on Terror parallels are instructive (if incidental). The weakness, as usual, is Spielberg's lame touchy-feely definition of what 'losing one's soul' entails, tied in with home and hearth and crying silent tears as you talk to your little baby daughter on the phone (conflating political and personal again, reducing the former to the level of the latter); "You are my country," says sensitive Bana to his wife, and though the film apologises for being corny it clearly agrees with him - but even if a love of country doesn't justify the unthinkable, there's surely something more to it than canoodling in the kitchen and attending PTA meetings. Haunting picture of the shadowy 70s - a time of "intersecting secrecies" - makes up for a lot, Janusz Kaminski using blasted colours and occasional echoes of pink-tinged 70s film stock, though obv. taking some poetic licence: don't know where they shot the Cyprus sequence, but it really doesn't look like that at all.]
THE WEATHER MAN (55) (dir., Gore Verbinski) Nicolas Cage, Hope Davis, Michael Caine, Nicholas Hoult [It's the Weather Man Game! Give yourself 10 points if you guessed Disaffected Hero is a weather man because reading the weather is a hollow, uncertain science, just like his own life is hollow and uncertain! Give yourself 18 points and take an extra turn if you guessed he's drawn to archery because it grants some unequivocal sense of connection, a place where he can truly hit the bull's-eye - but subtract 5 points if you glanced at the tag-line first, which reads "In life, accuracy counts" next to a picture of Cage with bow-and-arrow. Grab yourself 6 points and a shot of rotgut bourbon if you know why we keep cutting to a shot of iced-over Lake Michigan (hint: it's because his relationships are also iced-over, metaphorically speaking). Give yourself 25 points if you guessed why he keeps getting pelted with junk-food by total strangers, but zero points if you only guessed after the film unsportingly gives it away by actually having him say "I am junk-food!" (jesus, Verbinski). Worth a look despite everything, a clear attempt to do something brave on the back of box-office cachet - novelistic detail, an immature hero who's foul-mouthed and sex-mad (though neither is really developed, and he vacillates in any case between victim-Everyman and champion asshole) and a certain PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE vibe, especially in the early scenes (greens and blues, over-active score, protagonist dwarfed by spaces or awkwardly framed in doorways). Clearly, Verbinski tried to stake his claim to edgy character drama, put his obvious (and considerable) talents to work but couldn't quite let go of the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN audience - the old Hollywood chestnut of self-loathing zillionaires addicted to their own commercial instincts - so we get all the symbols writ large in the final act, and over-explicitness and Michael Caine in wise old Dr. Larch vein saying stuff like "Nothing that has meaning is easy" (he's dying, of course). Flatters to deceive, but it has its moments. Ickiest line: "Your b.j.'s lacked enthusiasm".]
DEAD MAN'S SHOES (40) (dir., Shane Meadows) Paddy Considine, Gary Stretch, Toby Kebbell [A revenge drama that works as a slasher movie - when will the killer strike again? - which is interesting, since it makes the nominal villains sympathetic, but no amount of quirky detail (our hero in a Creature From the Black Lagoon mask; the chief thug unaccountably answering the door in mascara and makeup) can tart up a tedious plot, though admittedly I've never been a fan of GET CARTER and its various progeny (maybe that's why I loved the genre deconstruction in I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD). "God will forgive them. I can't live with that," intones the avenger, going about his righteous work, but those who think it 'dark' should note how solidly in control he remains throughout - bringing his own built-in ambivalence (a quiet badass, a noble psycho) to pre-empt our judgment, finally turning the gun on himself when laddish violence threatens to escalate into something truly monstrous. Maybe you could call it post-modern, since revenge-drama tropes are consciously on show - there's never any doubt what our hero is planning (indeed, he admits it). Me, I just worry about the final dedication "In memory of Martin Joseph Considine", and wonder if Paddy wrote this tale of a man avenging his brother's death as a eulogy to some real-life brother - maybe as a fantasy on his own feelings of rage after his death, the vengeance he wished he could wreak? - or whether he's just taking a cue from his bud Jim Sheridan and IN AMERICA, adding a misleading dedication for spurious emotional resonance. I vote (b)...]
BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE 2 (22) (dir., John Whitesell) Martin Lawrence, Nia Long, Emily Procter [This is where I wish I had Jared Sapolin's hard-nosed distinction between "Unwatchable" and "Unwatchable and offensive", because this isn't quite the latter but very close to the former - though a fairer description might be "Watchable, but why should you bother when there's so much else to watch?" (even THE PACIFIER is vastly superior). There's a lovelorn chihuahua, a 3-year-old who likes to jump off high places - landing unhurt with a satisfying splat - a bevy of ball-busting women and too many scenes like the following: 'Big Momma' (the white man's Madea), doing a Mary Poppins in the home of a prime suspect, visits the man's workplace along with the 3-year-old - for no special reason, just 'to see Daddy' - tricks his/her way into his private office and listens in to a dodgy videoconference he's having in another room with a fellow crook. The man realises an intruder is listening in, quickly cuts off the call and rushes to his office - where Big Momma is just sauntering out, having dropped in for no reason at all. Does he suspect the unlikely new nanny may be the mystery intruder? He does not. Maybe Jared's distinction is superfluous after all...]