Films Seen - December 2006
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM (43) (dir., Shawn Levy) Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Carla Gugino, Dick Van Dyke, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, Mickey Rooney Actually one of the year's happier viewing experiences, seen with a pubescent full-house that laughed and whooped like no audience in living memory; the last half-hour was almost inaudible (just as well we have subtitles), almost every line or bit of business getting a round of applause. Guess it fills the kiddie niche for playing soldiers and/or dolls - the thought of a museum turned into a giant playground, with yourself as ringmaster - though I very much hope they're ignoring the saccharine padding about Ben Stiller trying to become Worthy of his Son's Love, not to mention the semi-pernicious padding about Ben Stiller remaking History with a kind of all-purpose humanism, teaching everyone to get along; Attila the Hun just needs love and understanding, Union and Confederacy are brothers under the skin, etc. Hate to say so - esp. in the context of a 'harmless' kids' movie - but that's exactly the kind of sunny American naivety that's led to the Current Quagmire.
CHARLOTTE'S WEB (44) (dir., Gary Winick) Dakota Fanning, plus the voices of Dominic Scott Kay, Julia Roberts, Steve Buscemi Don't mind me, I never read the book - so that all I see is a folksy tale of an "ordinary pig", narrated by a folksy narrator (how happy was the pig? "happy as a pig could be"), with the rather folksy notion that Charlotte (the mentor figure) uses "fancy" words like "converse" and "salutations" to illustrate her wisdom. Words are Magic in general, another notion that probably worked better on the printed page, and though the tearjerking finale has some lovely sentiments they're not really justified by the rest of the movie (though it will make vegetarians of any kids old enough to put two and two together). Actually works best as a BABE threequel, and the little pig is extremely likeable; Charlotte herself - courtesy Ms. Roberts' lifeless vocal stylings - not so much.
GRBAVICA (55) (dir., Jasmila Zbanic) Mirjana Karanovic, Luna Mijovic, Leon Lucev Opening shot: pan across group of women, all with their eyes closed - then one woman (our heroine) suddenly opens her eyes and looks at the camera. "There's no healing without talking," as a social worker says early on, Open your eyes and face the painful past, Women of Bosnia. Heavy going for a while, because every single scene seems to be about the memory of War - the setting is Sarajevo, a city inching back towards normality (heroine takes a whiff of the heady air and approvingly notes that it smells "just like it used to be") - but it gets better once it lets its characters breathe a little, well-observed and convincingly detailed. Still quite unthreatening - the troubled teenage daughter is shown to be loving and affectionate, the gangster type is shown taking care of his old Mom - and so determinedly small-scale it never approaches rage (which is not necessarily a bad thing); titled "Esma's Secret" for UK release though Esma's secret is actually pretty obvious, esp. once you factor in that the war ended about 12 years ago. In the end there's talking, and presumably healing.
SCOOP (59) (dir., Woody Allen) Scarlett Johansson, Woody Allen, Hugh Jackman, Ian McShane In which Woody Allen, having received - via MATCH POINT - the respect/recognition he craves as a serious filmmaker, relaxes into BROADWAY DANNY ROSE mode with himself as a Borscht Belt schtick-master ("Sweetheart, you should live long and prosper..."). Also a farewell to his London sojourn though he's never been more than a tourist, unwilling/unable to create convincing English people - would anyone say "small-time racketeers", like they do in the opening oration? that's pure Brooklyn - and a fond salute to Scarlett Johansson, the ending taking his leave (and reversing the roles of the rather ungenerous ending he gave her in MATCH POINT), just like there's a wry resignation in Woody's character posing as her father (not her lover) and constantly having to remind himself to stay in character; clearly, the five years since CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION have changed our hero (turning 70 can't have helped either). He makes her Jewish, like his London is a New York tourist's London, but she plays along and their byplay is often joyous, more wide-eyed and Nancy Drew-ish than the byplay with Diane Keaton in MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY; they're innocents abroad, their freshness racked against the Old World's macabre undertones - and the pivotal shot, a shadow-faced man picking up a phone in a quiet room, is surprisingly shivery. Otherwise frantic, sloppy and sometimes hilarious. "And stop telling people I sprang from your loins!"
WATER (45) (dir., Deepa Mehta) Sarala, Lisa Ray, John Abraham Maybe if the songs were audacious Bollywood dance numbers instead of background noise. Maybe if the rhythm weren't so placid, not to say soporific. A discreet but very firm attack on organised religion - saying in so many words that Conscience should always trump Faith - indicting the corrupt, superstitious India of 70 years ago (at least till the final caption, implying that not much has changed) and setting up Gandhi as a secular saint, a new religion preaching Truth over God (our heroines' suffering in an ashram for widows is interspersed with coy references to the rise of the Mahatma in the outside world: "Have you heard about that Gandhi?"). Water is perhaps the Great Ineffable, washing away sins and quietly accepting one of the women when Love is destroyed and all hope is lost - or maybe it refers to her line about living "like the lotus", a beautiful bud untouched by the filthy water it's forced to grow in. Very symbolic, in any case.
RUSSIAN DOLLS (42) (dir., Cédric Klapisch) Romain Duris, Kelly Reilly, Audrey Tautou, Kevin Bishop Here they are, the Euro-brats, living in a globalised world of flat-sharing, odd jobs and casual encounters, language-hopping and bed-hopping yet depressingly uniform ("We may come from different places, and speak different languages..."); meanwhile the style goes Time-hopping ("To explain why, we have to go back a year"), hopped up on split-screen and CGI backgrounds. Not sure why I liked L'AUBERGE ESPANOLE and found this sequel horribly annoying, except perhaps that the lively style isn't really sustained - petering out after the first few scenes - and AUBERGE was an ensemble film about students (hence the carefree tone) whereas this is mostly about Romain Duris being charmless and egocentric. Lacks only a pointedly gay couple at the wedding to confirm Klapisch's bona fides - though there is a lesbian couple earlier on - but it still feels as dated as the trip-hop on the soundtrack over shots of the London Eye. Possible low-point: a model is compared with "the street of ideal proportions".
FRIENDS WITH MONEY (62) (dir., Nicole Holofcener) Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack Multi-character dramas are a blight upon the land, but this goes some way towards redeeming the genre. The bad side is the usual contrived glibness, where everyone gets a character trait and keeps on reinforcing it - McDormand is constantly Angry as the Angry Friend, and 90% of the in-denial gay guy's role has to do with being an in-denial gay guy. The good side is Holofcener's thoughtful philosophical undertow: a fascination with physical flaws, bad breath, spreading hips, greasy hair (cf. That Scene from LOVELY & AMAZING), implicitly asking why we should maintain this failing body when we're just "waiting to die" - and the answer to that, consideration for other people (not cheating, or cutting in line, or building an extension that'll spoil the neighbours' view) as a way of atoning for our bodies, as if forgiving each other's failures. Money thus becomes more than a status symbol - it becomes a test of one's humanity, expressed in how you use it, how you flaunt it, whether you give it freely to a friend in need, whether you demand 'your cut' irrespective of love and affection. Annoyances include Jennifer Aniston at her most put-upon plus the old reliance on zingers, e.g. deflating a serious conversation with "How are her tits?" (a-a-and cut) - but Aniston is poignant in the final scene, and Holofcener nails the early-middle-ager's abiding anxiety about a too-settled life: "No more wondering what it's going to be like..."
TIDELAND (61) (dir., Terry Gilliam) Jodelle Ferland, Brendan Fletcher, Janet McTeer "Alice in Wonderland" references notwithstanding, best experienced as a little girl in her own private world rather than a tourist in a foreign world (but perhaps "Alice" was both); Ferland is remarkable, arguing with her dolls - actually severed heads - trying on a feather boa, laughing at things then instantly taking them seriously in the mercurial little-kid way. Second half brings in other people she can relate to - parents don't count - making for a sub-SLING BLADE dynamic that's less compelling; and of course, this being Gilliam, the lights are a little too hot and the angles a little too grotesque. Still, how can this fervid beating heart of a movie be deemed unreleasable while the cacophonous BROTHERS GRIMM tries for blockbuster? Once again, I don't get the conventional wisdom.
THE HOLIDAY (61) (dir., Nancy Meyers) Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Jack Black, Eli Wallach "I've never met a guy who talks as much as me," says Diaz (as the "complicated wreck"); Nancy Meyers must get that feeling a lot. No surprise it takes 135 minutes when everyone can't shut up, though the lengthy speeches - Winslet on the aftermath of bad relationships, Diaz on her parents' divorce, Law (who simpers a lot and generally seems to have turned into such a bad actor) on the compartmentalized life of the single father - are at least literate, as befits the film's fealty to Old Hollywood, seldom relying on easy zingers and cheap effects. Both heroines have glossy parasitic jobs - society reporter, maker of Hollywood trailers - and initially yearn for something more substantial, but Winslet realises the serious writer (who likes First Editions) is in fact a total bastard, and Diaz realises that reading good books won't make a girl feel any less lonely; by the end, they're at peace with their fluffiness - the career woman learns how to cry; the serious girl models herself on old romantic comedies - making the film unabashedly plastic, and yes, it's annoying how the Hollywood mansion gets endless oohs and aahs (the pool! the DVDs!) while the cosy cottage in Surrey is equated with terminal boredom (take a walk in the woods, at least). But the cast - esp. Winslet - are very personable, the COUCH IN NEW YORK-ish plot keeps things flowing and also keeps something in reserve (the ending is special just because it's the first time both women appear in the same frame), and I must admit it got to me. "I like corny. I'm looking for corny in my life." Yeah, I'm a sap.
BLACK CHRISTMAS (20) (dir., Glen Morgan) Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert, Andrea Martin Anonymous teens get ritually slaughtered. Any questions? Two of the main things that gave the original its charge - the killer's cryptic (lack of) back-story and the girls' delusion that they're safe in the house - get trashed, the former via lurid and pointlessly extended flashbacks, and once you have the victims knowing there's a killer in the house, bumping off their friends one by one, the arguments about leaving the house or hanging around are really incredibly stupid (though plausibility is the least of its problems). Unpleasant little finale, too.
DEJA VU (68) (dir., Tony Scott) Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel After the hitman who got religion in MAN ON FIRE, Washington and Scott present the cop who turns into a Christ figure - literally raising from the dead (inspired by a sign for a church "revival"), finally offering himself in self-sacrifice. The motive is the same in both cases, and even though here it's infatuation Denzel looks at Paula Patton in the Time-cam footage the same way he looked at Dakota in MAN ON FIRE - the melancholy knowledge that he's seeing what he can never have (normal family life in Dakota's case, just to make that clear), lending the film his magnificent gravitas. All this in addition to a gimmick that pretty obviously equates the techies handling the "Time-window" with directors making a movie (aren't all films ineluctably a case of looking into the past?, etc etc), as well as some TWELVE MONKEYS moments of trying to change the inevitable - e.g. when he asks the girl to wear a blue instead of a red dress, trying to pre-empt that particular future (his micro-management of her wardrobe also echoing the similarly-necrophiliac VERTIGO) - and Scott's usual way with visual overload, honed to a pitch of fluid intensity. Prosaic final act holds it back, going for nick-of-time rescues and giant fireballs when it could've gone for poetry and preposterous sci-fi.
CLERKS II (52) (dir., Kevin Smith) Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Trevor Fehrman Did you ever have a gang? A gang is the people you've known since high-school, or maybe college. You all did some wild stuff together, back in the day. The gang became semi-legendary, developing its own lore and in-jokes - Jeff who was always outrageous, Brian and Kevin who had the same facial hair. Remember the time we went to that funeral? When you were younger, you figured the gang would last forever. The gang was so unpretentious, and everyone liked each other; no-one could make you laugh like the gang did. You smiled at the thought of the gang in their 30s, all wildly successful, still hanging out like they'd always done. But the gang did grow up - some more successful than others - and going to the same hangouts, mostly the same few people, started to seem a little weird. Even when it jokingly acknowledged its own insularity - "Here we are again", etc - the gang seemed a little stifling. It was still fun, it could still make you laugh, but mostly the in-jokes were an end in themselves. (Remember when we spazzed round the boombox?) It got to be more about reassurance and self-congratulation than anything challenging or positive. And the gang broke up.
LONESOME JIM (60) (dir., Steve Buscemi) Casey Affleck, Liv Tyler, Mary Kay Place, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan Good to see a film where the fashionably depressed, cynical hero(ine) - "What's your problem?" "Chronic despair" - is also shown to be a bit of an idiot (shades of GHOST WORLD, another Buscemi triumph albeit not as director); he doesn't appreciate his girlfriend (hard to see why she appreciates him, given he's a loser and his opening gambit - they meet in a bar - is to try and impress her with the fact that he once lived in Manhattan), hurts the feelings of his ever-cheerful mother - she's exasperating, but also indomitable - sponges money off her then steals a little more when she isn't looking, presumably to pretend to himself that he doesn't need her. Buscemi's gift, as in TREES LOUNGE, is to favour down-to-earth over 'quirky', viewing Jim with no-nonsense candour, making Family recognisable even while showing them to be problematic (they have a knack for butting in at inopportune moments); technical hitches - occasional shots that don't cut, etc - add to the real feel, though in fact there are visual flourishes, like the shimmery opening shot or the camera pressing into ECU flesh to evoke messy drunken sex. Happy ending really hurts it, though of course that was always going to happen.
CALVAIRE (56) (dir., Fabrice Du Welz) Laurent Lucas, Jackie Berroyer, Philippe Nahon Another in the genre "Let's Beat Up on Laurent Lucas", taking full advantage of M. Lucas' prim-faced wet-blanket-ness; also to be filed alongside LEMMING, under French films that start off psychological - seemingly about the limits of strained politeness - and turn weirdly supernatural. Still a bit thin in the first half, at least till it amps up the evil-yokel theme to surreal levels, and results may be mixed but it's good to see a horror film take off into something so unreal, baroque and (for want of a better word) arty. Laurent actually gets half-forgotten, which is a pity since his character is nicely ambivalent, foreshadowing the main twist - we first see him putting on makeup, and his gestures are a bit effeminate when he sings; and why does he freeze when the girl comes on to him? Instead, Du Welz goes to bottle-green and yellow filters for the village scenes (also: Philippe Nahon), dwarves in red cloaks spotted en passant in a forest glade and yokels getting up, zombie-like, to sway with arms stiffly outstretched while another inbred redneck stabs at the piano in the village café. You can almost smell the peat-bogs in the dank Belgian wetlands.
HEADING SOUTH (50) (dir., Laurent Cantet) Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Ménothy Cesar Middle-aged white women meet black Haitian bucks; they exploit them politically - blind to the island's sad realities - so it's only fair that the men should exploit them emotionally, though in fact Cantet has contempt for the women's veiled condescension (they reflexively promise the young man an American passport, revealing their prejudice about the superiority of their own culture; he, of course, refuses, feeling no desire to betray his country); they'll never understand him, and Rampling - who at least realises this, keeping herself at arm's-length in the relationship - ends with a measure of dignity, while lovelorn Young, gushing and misguided, ends up a professional tourist, roaming the Caribbean with her corrosive lust and dollars ("I want to know them all," she gushes with unwitting irony, since she'll never really know any of them). Absorbing for a while, but it never should've strayed outside the complex - it might actually have worked better had it not given the Haitians any life of their own, becoming a study in the women's detachment and denial - much less strayed into a half-baked thriller plot; also prone to dead spots, like a proud waiter at the resort musing (to camera) how sad his ancestors would be to see him serving white people. Not a disaster, but it needed more work - not to mention some semblance of a 70s ambience.
ERAGON (48) (dir., Stefen Fangmeier) Edward Speleers, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Guillory, Robert Carlyle, John Malkovich What can you say about a book (now film) written by a 15-year-old boy where the dragons are female? "I am Saphira. And you are my rider"- and he rides her hard, getting increasingly adept though of course the first time is awkward ("Where's your dragon?" our hero asks middle-aged bachelor Jeremy Irons; "She was murdered by another rider," he replies, the memory of that unhappy triangle still raw). Bits of STAR WARS - esp. scenes like returning to the homestead to find his uncle dead - LOTR and THE NEVERENDING STORY, though kudos for refusing the martial bloodlust of Peter Jackson ("Death is nothing to celebrate"), pointedly bloodless in the NARNIA manner; also a good film if you like scenes of minions being upbraided after failing to find/kill our hero. Campiest John Malkovich line: "I suffer without my stone!".
WAH-WAH (57) (dir., Richard E. Grant) Nicholas Hoult, Gabriel Byrne, Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson More deeply felt than most coming-of-agers - in many ways a much-too-late love letter from a son to a difficult father - lacking nothing except perhaps the mysterious alchemy that would tie its various parts together. Much of it is last-days-of-Empire quasi-satire, expats fending off boredom with snobbery and hypocrisy - incl. some rather too-broad sketches of pompous Lady Bracknell-ish hauteur - but then quite a lot of it is family-meltdown drama which could've been set anywhere (the Swazi landscape isn't really used - just the occasional shot of brown plain and savannah - which is odd when you consider Grant grew up there). Turns into a tear-jerker, which is touching in an unexpected way, as though Grant the Movie Star were giving up his privileges - the privilege to laugh at the idiocies he left behind years ago, or to vent against the wrongs done to his teenage self - opening his life to our un-ironic scrutiny (for a while he seems to be that sad, bereft teenage boy again); still a bit slapdash, with uninspired visuals and silly detail like a montage in the style of a home movie. Mom turns out to be the villain, no surprise in a film that begins with an adulterous version of the Primal Scene.
JOYEUX NOEL (53) (dir., Christian Carion) Benno Furmann, Daniel Bruhl, Guillaume Canet, Gary Lewis, Diane Kruger Pan-European cast packed with names, pan-European subject (Germans, French and Scots in WW1), clear but implicit pan-European overtones of 'Never again!' and 'We're all brothers now!'. Nationalism and propaganda are the main villains, overall Message being that people will put tribal differences aside if left to their own devices, which seems a little too sanguine; I realise it's a true story but I'd still have preferred if brotherhood were shown to be fleeting, and men started reverting to the habits of a lifetime - even maybe exploiting the ceasefire for personal gain - once the initial joy had worn off (lingering resentments are shown, to the film's credit, and it seems clear the soldiers were motivated by a common protest against trench conditions as much as latent pacifism). Build-up implies a stray, one-off moment of fraternity - the music, and Christmas, and general exhaustion letting down everyone's defences - but the final third makes it look like the war might have ended in a universal love-in if Army and Church hadn't clamped down on the dissidents (a Bishop preaches genocide in so many words, which seems a tad heavy-handed). Toes the line in every didactic way - but it means well, and production values are high; a satisfying two-hour slice of Europudding.
THE YEAR OF LIVING VICARIOUSLY (63) (dir., Amir Muhammad) "We're sometimes unsure which version of History is correct," says one of Muhammad's Indonesian subjects, and that's where the split-screen comes in - not what he does with it (which isn't much) but its existence, a reminder that no matter what you're looking at there's always something else going on, some other version. History is (implicitly) the key to a country's maturation - someone mentions that student demonstrators (whom the film generally disapproves of), in their zeal to protest, attacked the official Archives and did irreparable damage to historical records, the country's collective memory. The Sukarno-Suharto transition of the 60s is a historical gap - records don't exist - and a gap in a different sense, because it hides the violent suppression of the Communist Party; that gap resonates in the country illustrated by the movie, an Indonesia that remains nationalistic, often authoritarian (only a European, one "John Maxwell", is scathing about the role of the military, rather smugly pointing out that in his country the Army isn't allowed to get out of hand) and beholden to idols, incl. the democracy protester being idolised in the film-within-a-film hagiography. One gets the impression Muhammad, in his Westernised-intellectual way - and I'd love to know if another title exists, one that doesn't play on our knowledge of a Mel Gibson movie, and if another version of the film exists, one without the captions in English explaining Indonesia to Westerners - rather looks down on these people, who voted Megawati because she's Sukarno's daughter and clearly aren't 'ready' for democracy - and may never be, because it goes against their culture. Fascinating, though it's just an hour of talking heads really.
OLD JOY (68) (dir., Kelly Reichardt) Will Oldham, Daniel London Very subtle take on the splintering of the American Left that's also an elegy for Lost Friendship; these two guys should be on the same side, and once they apparently were, but now one has grown domesticated (moving into "real" life), listening to right-on radio and keeping only the neo-hippy vernacular - as when he devotes one afternoon a week to a "really happening community garden" - while the other has veered off into wacky theories about a teardrop-shaped universe. First half is sometimes tiresome because it's so obvious from the outset that the friends have grown apart, but once they reach their destination - a tranquil, oasis-like hot spring - it becomes quite affecting, a final moment of contemplative harmony (and "real quiet") before they go their separate ways, probably forever. Nature explains nothing, merely dwarfing the protagonists - but perhaps 'explains' something in the way Oldham mentions, of climbing a mountain and gaining some perspective on its tangle of trees and paths (we're allowed to glimpse this hidden layer; the men are not). Light reflecting on a windshield as they drive reinforces the opaque "something" in the way of their relationship, and the woozy, neon-lit strangeness of driving back into the city after a day in the woods has never been caught more exactly.
FLUSHED AWAY (65) (dir., David Bowers & Sam Fell) with the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis One of the best kids'-animation purveyors teams up with the hands-down worst; Dreamworks (the latter) gets much of the first 20 minutes, with pop-culture references - FINDING NEMO, MARY POPPINS, pirates - and some coarse humour, but once Roddy the Rat gets definitively "flushed away", ending up in a subterranean parallel world, Aardman humour comes to the fore. US influence seems limited to a more confrontational sensibility (i.e. people argue more, and more aggressively) - not so much the snappy rhythm, which was also in CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT, and they've wisely ditched the idyllic, nice-cup-of-tea Englishness which made that film (imo) a little cosy and complacent. No point listing all the good jokes, but many are genuinely clever and the Aardman imprimatur (or perhaps the hand of veteran Brit scribes Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) is clear in e.g. the much-dissed French, the villain's collection of Royal Family memorabilia, the thug with pink mittens ("You've got your mother's hands"), "Millicent Bystander", the singing slugs (shades of the white mice in BABE), the bug discovered reading Kafka's "Metamorphosis" behind the kitchen stove, and of course the newspaper headline "England Lose On Penalties", a joke only Brits can truly appreciate. Great fun, though the breathless pace of kidpics is becoming a cliché. "Where are we going?"; "I have no idea, but we're going to get there really fast!".
NACHO LIBRE (47) (dir., Jared Hess) Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera, Hector Jimenez Proof that any random word or phrase - "floozie", or "PJs", or "When you are a man, sometimes you wear stretchy pants" - can be funny if spoken in a broad Mexican accent. Actively hilarious whenever it makes use of a gloriously straight-faced anthem called "Hombre Religioso (Religious Man)", i.e. in the climax and the first few minutes, when the song is followed by a gloomy little boy looking at a plate of refried beans and musing, "How come we can't ever have jus' like a salad?"; highlights later on include Black's rendition of a song called "Incarnacion" and the heroine saying "My favourite animal is poopies", but too much of it hovers repetitively between uninspired wrestling scenes - best fighting midgets since THE RUNDOWN! - and our hero stuck in mopey, sentimental inertia. Minor kudos to Hess for sticking with talented unknowns - doubtless a consequence of feeling like an outsider in Hollywood - all respect to Black for being a male version of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, a tubby boy living out his fantasies (rock star, wrestler) and making them come true just by sheer exuberant energy. No wonder they called the band Tenacious D.
DECK THE HALLS (37) (dir., John Whitesell) Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito, Kristin Davis Wouldn't it be great if this were really 'about' gay marriage? Broderick has two weirdly homophobic moments - when he's so disgusted by the cross-dressing sheriff he walks out of his office without filing his complaint, and when he freaks out on finding himself sharing a sleeping-bag with a nude DeVito (who's just trying to "warm him up" after he falls in the lake; it's complicated); he also keeps going on about "tradition", seems oblivious to the fact that he's pretty much the only 'straight' person in his zany small town, gets terribly upset by DeVito's unorthodox Christmas lights - but finally allows that "we could use some new traditions" during the climax, when the light is pointedly supplied by an inclusive combination of candles and cell phones, the old and the new (also it's set in Massachusetts, the only US state to have legalised same-sex marriage). Otherwise, maybe it's about competition - rivalry over the lights - which is an offshoot of capitalism, which is what's destroyed Christmas (but then why does Broderick break his son's little heart by refusing to take him to the mall for a bit of Yuletide consumerism?); or maybe it's just what it looks like - dopey, predictable seasonal tripe with a way-overdone happy ending. But that would be boring.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS (41) (dir., Isabel Coixet) Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Julie Christie, Javier Camara What Lies Beneath: the tons of water beneath an oil-rig (where much of the film is set), the roiling secret thoughts within each human body ("It's only a body"), the hidden lives beneath conversations, the hidden meanings behind dreams and stories - see also the title - the scars (literally) beneath the shirt of a traumatised war victim. Polley is the victim, a reserved joyless woman, her fragile mental state expressed early on by distractingly fluttery handheld camera - it's no surprise that Coixet is her own camera operator; no working cameraman would've done something so (deliberately) inept-looking. She reads John Berger's "Ways of Seeing", mostly because Coixet thinks it's great (no point asking if it's suitable for the character) - the film is dedicated to Berger, as well as a real-life woman (played by Christie) who counsels war survivors and records their memories - lest we forget, etc - except the lengthy scene with this woman is unrelated to what came before and too important to be consigned to a single scene (it feels like she deserves her own documentary), so the effect is just of filmmaker and actors lending their time to a Good Cause. Before that, pretentious dialogue, wearily quirky detail - two old biddies on the bus debating Vin Diesel vs. Jean-Claude Van Damme, that kind of thing - and Tim Robbins as the world's least convincing oil-rig worker. Also, I know actors love that business of recalling a terrible story (the Guilty Secret) all in a single lengthy speech - but has it ever worked, outside of maybe WINTER LIGHT?
A GOOD YEAR (39) (dir., Ridley Scott) Russell Crowe, Marion Cotillard, Albert Finney, Abbie Cornish "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing!". Not so. There is also fixing up a dilapidated farmhouse (which takes about 10 minutes), talking terroir with the resident vine-grower ("I live in them! I breathe in them! They tear my hands!"), playing tennis in the clay court in the garden, sparring with the inevitable French cyclists, sitting in the picturesque village square where the band plays "Boum" and a makeshift screen shows clips from beloved French movies. Enjoyable, even somewhat sensual, but every time it threatens to go in an interesting direction - hero sacrificing himself in Daddy Long-Legs fashion, so the girl never knows her true benefactor; the final puzzling flashback with the little girl, raising the intriguing possibility that he's making up (or at least embellishing) memories to suit his present needs - it snuffs out the threat and veers right back into banality (though I do slightly wonder if Richard Corliss is right, and critics just naturally mistrust life-is-beautiful movies). Go back to your pine-scented villa, Ridley Scott, and take the Aussie with you.
TWELVE AND HOLDING (46) (dir., Michael Cuesta) Conor Donovan, Jesse Camacho, Zoe Weizenbaum What, no incest? Title makes it sound like the lives of ordinary 12-year-olds, but it's more like a litany of talk-show Issues - child obesity, kids with guns, paedophilia (with a twist: the child as predator), bereavement and "closure" - made with a sense of the grotesque and one of the three stories played as horror movie, climaxing on a dark and stormy night. That one's vivid, in a freakish sort of way, but the other two are just drably melodramatic, and the three kids (supposedly best friends) have no inter-relationship. Stranger than expected, though also harder to take seriously.