Films Seen - December 2004
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
BAADASSSSS! (64) (dir., Mario Van Peebles) Mario Van Peebles, Khleo Thomas, David Alan Grier, Nia Long, Ossie Davis [Seen on a video double-bill with SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG, which is both the best and worst way to see it: best because everything is (obviously) more meaningful - the film is the tale of how that film got made - worst because SWEETBACK is a formally adventurous, near-experimental movie whereas this tribute - which never looks or feels like the 70s - is as visually unexceptional as a DVD extra (and of course some of the footage it describes can't even be reproduced in our more censorious age). Seems a little obvious too, at first - "Times were changing," says the V.O.; "The [Black] Panthers knew it. The students knew it. But Hollywood was ignoring it", cue facile scenes of Hollywood types asking Van Peebles Sr. to make a nice comedy instead of this revolutionary nonsense. Picks up once the film-within-the-film gets off the ground, esp. given Van Peebles Jr.'s heartfelt involvement - it's a little bizarre yet also touching when, playing his father, he defends the decision to use him, Mario, in what almost amounted to child porn ("He can handle it," says Mario-as-Melvin of Mario-as-Mario, and he's either living proof of the statement or deep in denial). Whole thing is a 30-years-later act of love, all the more potent in mixing the personal and cinematic (Melvin was the father of independent cinema but also ... just a father), infusing the ED WOOD-style shenanigans and building to an absolute knockout of a crowd-pleasing finale; soft-centred maybe, viewing "the [black] community" in a slo-mo montage of folks waving and hanging up clothes, just as it views Melvin's undoubted huckster opportunism as a loveable-quirk-cum-defence-mechanism - yet the very last image is of the man himself, and the filial devotion just about breaks your heart. All this, and a dog named Nixon too.]
METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER (59) (dir., Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky) [Raging machismo meets the therapy culture - but the sparks never fly because the meeting is by mutual consent, despite an early assertion that it's "fucking lame" for Metallica to hash out their problems with a shrink plus Lars Ulrich's disgusted "This is a fuckin' rock'n roll band!". Film rambles endlessly, from one desultory group talk and recording session to another, taking detours (Megadeth, Napster) and adding little bits of the group's common past (I could've used a little more, never having been a raging fanboy), and of course it's an Authorised Biography so it never makes the fairly obvious point that what's really lame is for rock stars to become millionaire prima donnas - though we do get a glimpse of Mick Jagger on the cover of "Fortune" - and that maybe the creative process went better (or at least faster) when James Hetfield really did feel uncomfortable - and worked it out through the music - instead of saying "I feel uncomfortable" every few minutes: probably the last thing rock stars need is therapy's sense of entitlement and emphasis on self-esteem. Not much seen of the therapist himself, though it's startling how psychobabble clichés like "Embrace your fear" can sound convincingly macho if couched in the right tone (bear-hunting Hetfield's eyes light up at the suggestion); not much momentum in general, but the passion of Metallica fans at the final concert - esp. the earnest/pathetic sign that reads "Thank you for existing" - is touching after all the intra-band angst, and Hetfield's speech to the prison inmates (where Metallica are shooting a video) surprisingly eloquent. In fact, the band seem most alive when actually in the same space as their fans - if there's a lesson to be learned it's that music is about performance and communication, not the self-involved noodling of studio work (or indeed therapy); Dylan's got it right, as so often.]
OCEAN'S TWELVE (62) (dir., Steven Soderbergh) George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Matt Damon, Vincent Cassel, Julia Roberts ["There's no downside here," claims Clooney of some suitably preposterous plan, but yes, there is in fact a downside here - harsher, darker images and jerkier camera moves than in O11, none of that luxurious Vegas hedonism, no fountain scene scored to Debussy (no heart, basically), yet still the same smooth nonchalance and movie-star glamour; what's the point of having everything go wrong if it barely makes a dent in the collective sangfroid? Soderbergh's rhythm comes and goes - the early scene when Benedict visits each member in turn gets increasingly strained and long-drawn-out, though it also gives the punchline (the gang arguing over the name "Ocean's Eleven" when they finally come together) more of a kick - but trapping a sharp mischievous movie inside a lazy bland one also enfolds a number of small pleasures (too small to register on my first viewing - a 48 - when I went in feeling tired and just got impatient with the film's messy meta-frivolity): Pitt cryptically replying "Yeah, but it's a nice place" to one of the Chinese guy's many untranslated contributions; Damon visibly deflating when told his plan is "wrong" ("You mean ... morally?"); an overheard "Don't touch my food" as the gang brain-storm; Zeta-Jones' conference address played off a junior colleague nervously approaching in the background (Soderbergh's the only director who knows how to use her, having now elicited her only two bearable performances; he understands her coldness and bossy unyielding head-prefect quality, so her moments of vulnerability actually work). Also got the SIXTH SENSE gags on second viewing - and is that an OUT OF SIGHT in-joke when Casey Affleck cites Gary and Aunt Celeste in his speech at the wedding party?...]
HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (47) (dir., Zhang Yimou) Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Zhang Ziyi [You know sometimes when you order a steak and it arrives smothered in gunk? Well, a bit like that. Guess I wouldn't mind if the gunk was pretty to look at, but I seem to be alone in finding Zhang's visuals - both in this and HERO - gaudy and over-decorated, sometimes toppling over into kitsch; Zhang Ziyi comes to kill her beloved in a fetching lime-green dress (he's in a dark-blue number with a floral pattern) and the camera gazes down at them as they huddle on the grass before corkscrewing upward to take in the contrasting hues of flame-red forest over digitally-desaturated field (and why does it feel like Zhang cared more for the desaturated field than Zhang Ziyi's dilemma?). Climax heads into calendar-Art as autumn leaves give way to falling snowflakes, though it does briefly seem to be working out a memorable finish where all three characters will offer themselves in self-sacrifice, each for their own reasons (alas, it doesn't quite happen); earlier, the first half - the escape through the countryside - builds up a certain dreamy power but the spell is broken once the twists begin, esp. since they're as senseless as in any Hollywood actioner. Why, most notably (spoiler coming up), should they get Kaneshiro involved in the first place, if both Lau and Zhang Ziyi are part of the Flying Daggers? Why not just have Lau run off with her, or - if they don't want to blow his cover - have her escape and have him come after her, bringing the General's troops along for ambush? I don't get it. At least the fight scenes seem well-choreographed, though isn't the bamboo forest rather similar to the fight-in-the-treetops from CROUCHING TIGER? (*)]
(*): Zach Ralston, one of the film's biggest fans, says in response:
"Um, no. Actually not at all. The
CTHD scene plays more like a quiet duet, with two characters floating around
each other through the breeze, with no harm done. It's a teacher and student for
the most part, one toying with the other and just trying to get his sword back.
In HoFD, it's a tough, loud fugue, with spears raining down and smacking into
the turf, hordes and hordes of people climbing the trees, and a lot of danger
afoot. And it's darker.
"The only thing they really have in common is humans defying gravity on
trees, but that's a gimmick used in many wuxia films; not just the two you
remember most recently."
THE POLAR EXPRESS (64) (dir., Robert Zemeckis) with the voices of Tom Hanks, Daryl Sabara, Eddie Deezen [Zemeckis has an artist's eye for detail, a conservative's taste for conformity, and the sensibility of a man who takes clocks apart and puts them back together just to see how they work: again and again he's tackled impossibly Big Subjects - survival on a desert island, post-WW2 American history, even inter-planetary contact - each time laying out the mechanics sensibly and thoroughly, making it intelligible (if not too poetic) and favouring the personal over the conceptual (the aliens' message in CONTACT turns out to be different for each individual), like a pop-scientist simplifying matters by asking us to imagine the Earth as an apple. The notion of a trip to the North Pole, and how Santa's workshop might actually operate, is made simultaneously magical and convincing, and much of the magic has to do with the conviction (the "performance capture" animation really does look like a storybook come to life); the artist's eye for detail emerges in e.g. the tiny crunch of slippers in fresh snow, but it's mostly patience and diligence - a craftsman's virtues - that make the first half work so incredibly well. Zemeckis' trump card may indeed be his literal-mindedness (it's how he tames these Big Subjects), going hand-in-hand with a certain psychological realism - he knows, or perhaps it comes naturally, to make the trip a little scary, the conductor a little bit fierce - though it also makes him prone to gigantism: he'll always tend to show a big mountain of presents, or a herd of thousands of caribou, never try to come at the image sideways or describe it by allusion. The second half, alas, introduces sappy songs, three or four rollercoaster rides (when even one might've been too much) and the somewhat creepy schema of our kid hero having to "believe" in order to join the happy throng of gift-festooned believers (or is it Believers?). Also kind of wondered what effect the whole thing might have on real-life 6-or-7-year-olds, those - like our hero - who may just be starting to see through the whole Santa business, only to end up being brought back into the fold by the film's dexterity; won't they someday resent such elaborate, straight-faced propaganda in the service of a lie?...]
FEAR AND TREMBLING (70) (dir., Alain Corneau) Sylvie Testud, Kaori Tsuji, Taro Suwa [Puts both LOST IN TRANSLATION and SECRETARY in the shade - the former because it goes beyond easy point-scoring (though Japanese viewers are unlikely to be happy, or mollified by the early-90s setting), the latter because the heroine isn't coded as 'damaged' (she just wants to belong), nor is the - psychological - sadomasochism reduced to differently-abled love story wending its way to self-fulfilment. Testud's character - unlike the superlative actress - doesn't seem to know what she's doing, not just stumbling into cultural misunderstanding but seeming to wallow, almost delight in Oriental Inscrutability, sinking further and further into semi-voluntary humiliation - her humiliation is a kind of perverse unspoken compromise, a tacitly-agreed acknowledgment that she wants the impossible (to be Japanese); it's as though, by humiliating her, her hosts are accepting her wish to subjugate her identity, albeit without being able to grant it in the way she wants. The result is Kafkaesque (or even Mike Judge-esque) office comedy, putting ironic spin on the various mentions of Japanese history and/or national character: it has a bad-dream quality, not so much stating a link between salaryman culture and the rigid cruelties of WW2 or blind samurai fealty (the title refers to a supplicant's appropriate state of mind when addressing the Emperor) as conflating their Japanese-ness in our heroine's addled mind. Whimsical touches - e.g. floating over Tokyo - help, ditto the "Goldberg Variations"; a poised, mordant comedy, finally retaining much of its mystery.]
WHITE CHICKS (37) (dir., Keenen Ivory Wayans) Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Frankie Faison, Terry Crews [Wayans Bros. do SOME LIKE IT HOT (Terry Crews is funny in the Joe E. Brown role), with a notably weak set-up and an object lesson in the dangers of over-writing: juggles lots of strands, as mandated by the Hollywood Machine, but few are developed - partly because it wastes time in the middle on gross eating and going-to-the-bathroom gags - so it actually seems worse than if it had kept things simple (plus it lasts 109 minutes, when it could easily have been 20 less). One moment for the time-capsule, though, when the Paris Hilton-type heiresses (really black men in disguise) sing along with a hip-hop song on the car radio and their shocked friends go "You said the N-word!" - prompting the reply "So? Nobody's around", upon which the whole carload of Paris Hilton-style heiresses nod in 'oh yeah' fashion and also start singing. Comment on the hypocrisy of white America's PC language, or (consider the source) black America's paranoia that whites are routinely racist when left to their own devices? This is why I keep watching crappy comedies, basically...]
ALEXANDER (66) (dir., Oliver Stone) Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Jared Leto, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins [By the sweet breath of Aphrodite, what an eccentric version - and I don't just mean the Irish Greeks or psychedelic near-death scene, or the leaps in biography so the connecting voice-over sometimes seems to be coming from a different movie (a downbeat, inconclusive battle is followed by "And so the Persian Empire was destroyed"). Stone the auteur doesn't do biography - no Gordian Knot, no Battle of Tyre, whole campaigns ignored or reduced to footnotes - taking only what interests him, which is (a) a strictly Oedipal reading of Our Hero, and (b) his usual attraction to excess and oblivion (his trademark style courts oblivion, all those flashing film-stocks - albeit not in this case - till you don't know where you are anymore). The two are related, of course, Alexander venturing ever further into the unknown - ending up Aguirre-like, king of the monkeys amid failure and paranoia, monsoon rains and jungle, wine-sodden troops and writhing male dancers - not because he cares about Greece but because he's trying to escape his childhood demons: hatred of his father, obsessive love of his mother and, above all, implicit sense of failure because Mom pre-empted him - in effect, emasculated him - by (literally) killing Dad before he could (metaphorically) do it himself. Very Freudian (lots of snakes and mastering of horses), also very gay - with a sense of rampant gayness, even a glimpse of a young catamite being led away at a banquet - but 'explained' as Our Hero's quest to possess his mother, wanting no other woman but her (or closest facsimile, viz. another 'barbarian' princess); in reality, of course, Alexander had several wives, but it's bracing to see Stone - himself the son of a powerful father and 'foreign' mother - taking on History so unabashedly, eschewing the whole then-this-happened rhythm, stripping everything down to his vision, his dream; "The dreamers exhaust us," says Ptolemy of Alexander, but the same may be said of the director (and critical response to this very personal - if exhausting - movie). Jolie, as a Jewish-mother type - build your son up yet nag at him constantly - flashes her eyes deliciously, Farrell lacks something in stature but fits the hysteria of the final section; Stone's image-making is superb, and not all battles either (a refreshing change at a time when War Epic = LORD OF THE RINGS), though the battles feature rains of arrows, elephants and camels, chariots with spikes plus the very awesome 'eagle's eye' shot mapping out the full scale of the confrontation. This year's APOCALYPSE NOW - War as labyrinth, quagmire, festering swamp of intrigue and psychosis, ever-more-introverted journey - and can we agree right now that Rodrigo Prieto is one of the world's great DPs? And that Failure is currently out of fashion (unless played by Paul Giamatti)? And that, if APOCALYPSE NOW came out today, critics wouldn't know what the hell to do with it?]
P.S. (61) (dir., Dylan Kidd) Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Paul Rudd [Obviously a good double-bill with BIRTH - both built around the spectre of reincarnation, a loved one (seemingly) coming back from the dead: Glazer gave it a sci-fi sheen, flattened-out emotions and lugubrious spookiness, Kidd - more soulful, if less prodigiously talented - uses it as a gateway to explore issues of Past vs. Present, Time inexorably passing and the trauma of getting old. It's everywhere around our heroine, in herself and her own mother - "growing older," admits her brother sadly - and the realisation she's still in love with a man (or the ghost of a man) literally young enough to be her son; the past turns out to be an unreliable crutch - just as her marriage turns out to have been a sham - and a new realisation dawns, that "the universe doesn't care" and the passage of Time can be a connection as well as a chasm, a humiliation we can all share in (except the young, the blessed "perfect" young). No surprise that it's based on a novel, because it's built like a novel - little sub-plots feeding off each other in a way that works on the page but tends to look contrived on film (because, in films, everything's related, and the audience already knows this); more about the performances in any case, Linney's technique scarily accomplished - every blink and nod seems to have been thought-through; a tear falls and surprise flashes as she brushes it away, just as if she didn't know it was coming - Grace hampered slightly by the fact that his character becomes a bouncing-board in the second half (he starts off as something of a dopey slacker type - "I completely spaced"; "That was fuckin' awesome" - but that kind of gets forgotten as the film goes on). A slight disappointment, turning conventional just as it's about to take off; still has its moments, and the stunning mirror scene is the best scene of its kind since the brutal honesty in LOVELY & AMAZING.]
THE YES MEN (57) (dir., Dan Ollman, Sarah Price & Chris Smith) [Funny and, yes, inspirational - the Yes Men are a bit like the Beastie Boys, doing fearless and madly creative stuff while coming across as laid-back, eternally youthful and reassuringly nerdy - but way overlong even at 80 minutes, totally self-congratulatory (the URL at the end makes it feel like an infomercial) and slightly ingenuous in playing up its heroes' klutziness (they can't even cut their own hair), keeping them on a first-name basis - "Sal's House, Los Angeles" reads a caption - and dodging tricky questions like How can they afford to devote so much time to this 'hobby'? Are they really amateurs, or sponsored by some anti-globalisation lobby?, etc. As with Michael Moore's work - he shows up, inevitably - the emphasis is on casual DIY activism, the dream being presumably that a new generation of kids will see these docs, go 'Yeah, I can do that' and hey presto, you've Won the Future. Good luck to them - but it's all a bit transparent.]
THE PRINCESS DIARIES 2 (49) (dir., Garry Marshall) Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews, Chris Pine, Hector Elizondo, Heather Matarazzo [Not exactly good - pacing flags in the middle, too many samey two-person scenes, dubious royalist attitudes (people, i.e. The People, asking for help on bended knee) and consumerist young-girl fantasy ("I have my own mall!") - but leavened with a sense of humour that perhaps couldn't have come from a younger director, using zany detail to make fun of pomp and circumstance exactly as they did in 30s comedies with butlers and other screwball foils: fat politicians with impressive beards, a pair of self-important twins pouting and puffing like little boys, madly-curtseying maids, MPs in funny wigs, the entire company dropping everything to intone "King Rupert, may he rest in peace" whenever the late King's name is mentioned, however fleetingly. Probably enjoyed it more than it deserves, but I'm always a sucker for this kind of silliness. Low points: Macchiavelli Explained for the sound-bite generation ("Power means never having to say you're sorry"), sugar-coated Girl Power message and dear old Julie Andrews telling Mia: "As a Queen I absolutely can not condone it - but as a grandma I say, 'Right on!'" (she also sings, by the way). Bizarre but Undeniable High Point: a poster for AMARCORD prominently displayed on Mia's bedroom wall. Why? What's the significance? I don't know...]
LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (43) (dir., Pen-Ek Ratanaruang) Tadanobu Asano, Sinitta Boonyasak, Takashi Miike [Another bout of Asian anomie, echoing the disaffection in sick-soul-of-Europe movies from the 60s (Alternate title: "All Your Ennui Are Belong To Us"), though it's absence of feeling more than any firm disaffection, playful about its own melancholy (our heroes meet when she interrupts him committing suicide) - not to be compared even with the emptiness in YI YI, where the use of English as lingua franca between folks from different Asian countries seemed so much more suggestive and Significant. Title comes from a children's book - about a lonely lizard, if you must know - and the look does have something of a storybook, esp. the pale pastel colours in the early scenes (they get more vibrant as the film goes on) and the clean, very defined compositions with lots of empty space and hardly any close-ups (even when the people are at table they're viewed from a distance, behind plates and bottles; Ratanaruang's most striking shot is a slightly-tilted overhead, as if glimpsed by God or a security camera). Only really notable for a certain languid weightlessness - though when it gets literally weightless, heroine surrounded by floating objects in a daffy-surreal interlude, it looks like a music video - otherwise pointless, with sophomoric stuff (fart jokes, comic Yakuza) on the fringes; placing your opening title 30 minutes into the movie seems to be A Thai Thing, but it felt bracingly demented in BLISSFULLY YOURS while it just feels like contrivance here (our romantic couple are the Last Life in the Universe). Shameful Admission #2,817: I honestly didn't realise the heroine was being played by two different actresses till I read about it in "Sight & Sound"; do Asian women have similar problems with white-guy faces?]
SHALL WE DANCE (51) (dir., Peter Chelsom) Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Jennifer Lopez, Stanley Tucci [Haven't seen the - subtler, by all accounts - Japanese original but I'm not sure greater subtlety and delicacy would be much help in any case, given the piece's Be-Yourself, Follow-Your-Dream feelgoodery; at least Chelsom (and DP John de Borman) fill the dance-class interiors with warm amber tones, though of course they also domesticate the hero's one lapse into nonconformity (did the original also end like this? guess so, since the whole detective business and Susan Sarandon's part as the wife would be fairly meaningless if it didn't, poignant speech about marriage being the need for "a witness to our lives" notwithstanding). Best surprise is Gere, who always seemed callow and insufferable but now finally, in middle age, looks like he's going to be effective playing disappointed older men - the fleshy nose and blank, narrow eyes give his face a recessive quality, and his natural coldness translates well into deadness (he still looks smug when he's happy, though); dancing-as-sex metaphor intrigues - the school, from the outside, looks like the sign for a brothel, all lurid colours and a girl at the window; "Oh my god, what are you doing?" respectable Gere tells himself as he climbs the stairs for the first time (he doesn't even take off his jacket for the first few lessons) - but of course remains undeveloped, unless we're saying middle-aged marrieds can always look to their wives for sexual satisfaction greater than any affair. Character actors save the day, as usual - Richard Jenkins can get laughs slurping on a Coke - and it's downright scary how quickly and completely "Moon River" conjures up a mood of heart-swelling pathos; then J. Lo starts to dance to it, fixes the camera with a tragic diva expression, and the spell is broken.]
THE INCREDIBLES (77) (dir., Brad Bird) with the voices of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Jason Lee, Samuel L. Jackson [No escaping the fact that the Message here is almost as worrisome as HERO's - namely: that the emasculating, egalitarian, anti-competition, everyone-is-special culture of political correctness is compromising America's ability to fight a new kind of enemy (guess who!) who "will not exercise restraint", the only solution being a return to red-blooded aggression closely tied to family values - though the spectacle of kids as killers didn't bother me as it did others (it's just playing war, really, and besides it's justified by the "exercise restraint" speech which gives them licence - indeed, exhorts them - to act like adults). Even more worrisome than the Message, on the other hand, are some people's mention of Michael Bay, apparently proving that Bruckheimer-tude has fatally dented critics' ability to appreciate expertly edited, wondrously witty action (favourite bit: the breathless choreography of Elastigirl literally bent out of shape as various doors slam across her stretched-out torso): Pixar moves up a level, from cuddly kiddie fare to James Bond pastiche - love that faux-60s score with the brassy riffs - and the results are entirely successful and enormously exciting, even better for not having lost the trademark clever comedy of earlier features (the opening b&w 'footage' in the same snarky spirit as the closing-credit outtakes in A BUG'S LIFE) or loveable detail of THE IRON GIANT, Mom's encouraging grimaces while feeding the baby or young Dash Incredible fiddling with a stalk of broccoli (Mr. I. in his tiny cubicle is more like a gone-to-seed Johnny Bravo). Exhilarating to watch, though not exactly 'magical' in the Miyazaki way nostalgic adults always wish cartoons to be - it hustles and bustles, albeit never lapsing into cheap irony - and that Message ("Doubt is a luxury we can't afford anymore!") is admittedly hard to live with; but I guess it's a sign of the times and besides, I do at least agree with some of it - a culture that "celebrates mediocrity" soon loses sight of what's really "special". Haven't Pixar always stood for uncompromising excellence, while the undiscriminating likes of SHREK throw everything in the mix - everything equally 'super' - and hope for the best?]
[Side-note to Michael re: BOUNDIN', the accompanying short. The point, imo, isn't so much that the short is too stupid and innocuous to be offensive as that it works just as well without being politicised, as a feelgood tale of Reboundin' after any mishap or tragedy. I bet most people see a Message (if they see it at all) along the lines of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" - when it comes to the mystery hand snatching away the poor little lamb, they see God while you see Man, or more properly The Man. That's because you are (yes!) a freakin' Marxist...]
BIRTH (63) (dir., Jonathan Glazer) Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall, Anne Heche [Key line: "I'm going to break this spell". If the kid stands for anything it's probably Magic, a stubborn belief in the irrational tied to a search for solutions to repressed, buried feelings - the trouble that flashes across Kidman's face as music swells and dips around her in the extraordinary, held-long close-up at the concert; Glazer too weaves a spell, in the use of music, character tableaux in wintry light - as if Time itself stood still - and such little touches as the breeze that ruffles Kidman's hair when the door opens bringing in the letter from the boy, like a spirit's invisible caress. The film is touched by magic, a discomfiture of rational ways-in: Glazer does consecutive, unmotivated shots of Heche from different angles early on - not quite jump-cuts, more a ripple of visual disturbance (we don't know why the shots should've been constructed like that) - and the plot plays out among nerveless sophisticates, giving it an air of abstraction: they talk about it as if it were unreal, or happening to someone else (Kidman and the boy in the ice-cream shop, calmly discussing her "needs") - and it may be significant that water recurs as a motif (the early shot of a submerged baby, the bathtub, the ocean at the end), our rich clever heroine reaching out to something hidden and primeval (Magic, again). Trouble is, the spell peaks too early - the film feels entranced from the beginning - and peters out long before the end; as in SEXY BEAST, Glazer's a slave to style and subtext, content to let the people grow sketchier as they go along. Kidman tries hard but gets nothing to play; Heche steals the show, if only in cutting through the stultified air of tasteful prevarication (how could this film have offended anyone?) to connect unblinkingly with the forbidden: "You should've come to me first," she informs the boy with a meaningful twinkle in her eye; "I'd have explored this possibility..."]
SECRET THINGS (66) (dir., Jean-Claude Brisseau) Coralie Revel, Sabrina Seyvecou, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice Deville [Fuck this 'objective rating' bullshit: one of the year's most remarkable films (70+, easy), but badly let down by a dull middle section - partly, no doubt, because Brisseau already knows the girls' use of sex as a weapon and their naked (so to speak) ambition is going to be a red herring: the cruel, inhuman boss, who believes "we're just pieces of wood", shows the psychopathology of divorcing sex from love and reveals the film for what it always was, an ode to to the (lesbian) love that dared not show its face. The final scene is classic weepie stuff (think UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG), with the girls half-acknowledging their love when it's already far too late, the climax that precedes it is everything the orgy in EYES WIDE SHUT should've been, and the opening is a stunner, theatrical lighting - islands of light floating on blackness - then a shift of the camera exposing Intimacy as mere Performance. Maybe that dull middle section needs to be seen as Performance too - the film is studded with references to dares, games, etc - acting out a kind of sexual heist meticulously planned from beforehand (certainly, some of the details are hard to take at face value, like the scheme with the mugger or the brilliant Seyvecou lifting a leg coquettishly at the end of her strip-dance), or perhaps just a case of Brisseau illustrating the concept of Post-Feminist Self-Objectification (girls battling exploitation with exploitation) in invisible quotation marks. "First it has to happen in your head," says the heroine, which is true enough; but a movie, like life, only begins once you get past that.]
EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING (39) (dir., Renny Harlin) Stellan Skarsgard, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy [Renny Harlin: Not a Hack! Spent a large chunk of this thinking auteurist thoughts, though I might not have bothered if they'd only put the DP's name in the opening credits. Still more Harlin than Storaro, with his extravagant CGI swoops and super-packed images (you will always see the ceiling fans in a Renny Harlin Picture): an early shot of a smoke-filtered battlefield features piles of corpses in the background, a crow perched somewhere on the right and a hirsute warrior’s locks blocking out frame-left in the foreground, followed by an obviously-impossible pull-back to a landscape full of dead and dying - not exactly subtle, but it has the kind of over-ripe grandeur Coppola brought to the prologue of BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA. The film itself is stupid, an EXORCIST with a touch of THE OMEN (a young devil-kid, unaccountably turning out to be a red herring in the later stages) and a touch of the concentration camps and colonial oppression, acting as reminders of Evil through the decades - doubtless the kind of forelock-tugging Paul Schrader's version was aiming at - plus of course bats, swarms of flies, demons, Tarot cards, Aramaic inscriptions, 'boo!' moments (eyes snapping open in close-up, sudden intruders jutting into frame) and random unpleasant detail: a woman gives birth to a maggoty baby, the camera lingering on its pale repellent body; a boy is torn apart by hyenas, pitiful screams included. Little of the original's po-faced solemnity, but Harlin's excitable way with an image wouldn't have fit the original anyway. "Sometimes the best view of God is from Hell," declaims Ms. Scorupco, which of course makes no sense whatsoever.]
BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON (21) (dir., Beeban Kidron) Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent ['Good fun', I guess, but I've had about enough of this infantilised culture, with Bridget - supposedly an educated media-industry professional - turned into a cartoon (even the effects are cartoonish: joke subtitles, a 'jellyfish count'), an insecure child who literally can't carry on a grown-up cocktail-party conversation, smokes on the sly and is terrified people will say "Get out of here, you're ridiculous", turned into a moron in order to gratify (and reassure) every moron in the audience: Bridget is an idiot yet everything turns out fine - she's ashamed of her "wobbly bits"; Darcy loves her "wobbly bits" - and meanwhile any hint of genuine satire about real thirtysomethings' emotional dysfunction goes out the window. Wall-to-wall song cues nudge you in the ribs, simplistic reversals amount to a kind of verbal slapstick - if Bridget calls herself a "mature sophisticated professional woman", it can only be a prelude to embarrassing herself or falling on her arse - and the film, like some horrible party where everyone keeps boasting about how drunk they are, expects every character to make a fool of him/herself (even Darcy has to yell "I love you" at the front door and get hooted at by passers-by) as the price for being accepted: it's the loathsome English self-abnegation of NOTTING HILL, where the characters' masochistic kowtows to the Hollywood goddess were the price to be paid for a happy ending. Pure pandering, totally humiliating its heroine for the delectation of fat lonely inadequate women everywhere - and so infantile. When this bovine simpleton finds her emotional epiphany - "I have been the world's biggest fool!" - by listening to tales of abuse and exploitation in a Third World women's prison, it has all the sly wit of a sulky 8-year-old persuaded to eat his dinner by recourse to all the starving children in Africa.]
THE MIRACLE OF BERN (41) (dir., Sonke Wortmann) Louis Klamroth, Peter Lohmeyer, Johanna Gastdorf [Anyone who thought THE RETURN too one-note needs to check out the returning Bad Dad in this one, who props up each scene with the same grimly unsmiling expression - sucking energy like a black hole - and also says "Kids need discipline" within five screen minutes of arrival (he also slaps our kid hero then says "Germans don't cry"). Plot is football/soccer-related, which occasionally looks like it's going to provide a comment - the gruff-but-fair football coach as a 'good' father vs. the intolerant, crypto-Nazi one - but ends up just a crowd-pleaser (though of course any true football fan will already know the result of the 1954 World Cup final, making its lengthy climactic depiction something of a non-starter); much of it is just rather lumpy, e.g. introducing the sportswriter (a needless sub-plot) just before the Dad's return, which weakens the impact of his arrival, though the picture-postcard Swiss settings and period design on the edge of kitsch - leather shorts for the kid, pink slacks and checked dresses for the writer's wife, gleaming primary colours for that Kodachrome look - are pleasant enough. In the end, of course, Dad turns out to be a sweetheart, unconvincingly softened by the Beautiful Game ("Germans do cry sometimes," winks the kid, with not a dry eye in the house), and it's nice to see the two things Germany does best - football and Nazis - working together so smoothly. Also, for what it's worth: Katharina Wackernagel is the German Geena Davis.]
SAVED! (36) (dir., Brian Dannelly) Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Martin Donovan, Patrick Fugit [Still waiting to hear why a very ordinary teenpic made "Film Comment"'s Must-See Movies list. Presumably the anti-fundamentalist Message - "It's all a grey area," ponders the wrap-up speech at the end - though all it really does is tweak the standard MEAN GIRLS formula so Most Popular Girl is not only Most Bitchy but also now Most Christian (and the misfits with the knowing smart-ass sensibility are not just Alienated but also un-Saved); except that MEAN GIRLS is funny and inventive whereas this is flimsy and blah, and the final exhortation to an unspecified, fits-all-sizes God ("You just have to feel it") dilutes even the one brave - though not all that brave - thing about it. Moore is just a more substantial Olsen Twin, really, but Culkin - with his odd mix of delicate features, full lips on sallow skin and hints of an inchoate decadence - could be a new Crispin Glover once his voice finds its timbre.]