Films Seen - February 2006

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION (47) (dir., Len Wiseman) Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Tony Curran, Derek Jacobi [There's a very simple way to enjoy this movie, which is to watch it immediately after MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (worked for me). Endless crash-bang-wallop climax lets it down - I'll never understand why these films build up heroes and villains with mysterious occult powers only to culminate with everyone shooting and punching each other - but before that is a sequel with much-upgraded gore factor, vampirettes in bikini tops, Freddy Krueger lookalike with louring demon-wings and extendable pincers, one vampire felling a horse to feast on its neck (!) and another sitting down to a plate of vegetables in a vain attempt to curb his bloodlust. Beckinsale wields a mean crossbow and offers useless-himbo Speedman her wrist to suck when he needs a transfusion; then they make love with plenty of dissolves and tasteful nudity, though the positions suggest - it's hard to tell in the tangle of limbs - that there should be an erect penis onscreen somewhere (flesh-suits? airbrushing? Speedman-castrato?). Clichés We Have Loved, Part 289: "I don't know," admits heroine to hero, "but I know someone who might" - and instantly cut to them walking towards the car as she explains further: "Adrian Tanis. Official historian of the Covens..."]    

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (44) (dir., Rob Marshall) Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Watanabe, Koji Yakusho [Not a whore or courtesan (perish the thought), but a geisha - a "moving work of Art". The very word "geisha" means "artist" (apparently), and her beauty goes hand-in-hand with pain, the pain of creating Art - though not too much pain; a 10-minute primping-and-preening montage is all it takes for Yeoh to pronounce "You are ready", and a brief dance in paper snowflakes (you can barely make out what she's doing) is enough for our heroine to become "the most celebrated geisha in all Miyako, and the most desired". It's a lot like Marshall's own artistry, skimming the surface and simplifying thorny situations - the borderline-offensive casting is typical, lazily implying all Orientals are the same anyway (it's weird how the female leads are Chinese and the male leads Japanese but maybe it works on some obscure subconscious level for Americans, the scary future made to defer to the old vanquished enemy). Effective moments, top talent in all departments - and of course Yo-Yo Ma does the cello solos - but Dion Beebe offers a hazy snow-and-lanterns look that veers close to kitsch and Pietro Scalia sets a monotonous rhythm that barely varies, which I guess is pretty convincing proof of the auteur theory; the problem is the overall sensibility, reducing emotions to well-meaning bromides like the Search for Self-Esteem ("I am not worthless!" cries the heroine, then bursts into tears) just as it turns culture-clash into grotesque spectacle (the naive 'Pumpkin' smoking Chesterfields and yelling "chickadee"), melts down the plot into Good Geisha / Bad Geisha soap and perpetuates the idiocy of foreigners speaking slightly formal English and exchanging Fu Manchu verbal cryptograms ("That would be like releasing the tiger from its cage"; "Ah, you have the gift of expression!"). Needless to say, what it means to be a geisha gets lost in the mix - the free-floating aspect of catering to men's whims not as passive subservience but an act of Zen philosophy, positing Grace as the only true response to an arbitrary universe - beyond the usual female-empowerment fable and button-faced Zhang as a rather wan enchantress. Movie in a Nutshell Dept.: "A story like mine should never be told".]           

THE PINK PANTHER (33) (dir., Shawn Levy) Steve Martin, Kevin Kline, Emily Mortimer, Jean Reno, Beyoncé Knowles [The trailer made this look like the worst film ever; in fact it's merely dull, not a death-blow to a much-battered franchise but certainly a misunderstanding of its rhythms. Edwards stretched Clouseau's debacles out, unafraid of dead time, playing on audience anticipation of disaster like a comic anvil suspended above the action, poised to fall at any moment. He worked in set-pieces whereas this works with gags, almost all of them slapstick - and if the slapstick is occasionally inventive that's scant consolation for being so disposable, and for our brain-numbing knowledge that it's going to be succeeded by another bit of slapstick, then another and another; Clouseau knocks a metal globe off its moorings, stabs Chief Inspector Dreyfus with his police badge, opens his car door and hits a passing cyclist, cuts a cable prompting a chandelier two floors down to crash to the ground, etc etc. They also try for pathos - "It was an honour serving under you," says sidekick Jean Reno with a straight face - which is obviously a travesty, and Martin adds bizarrely fey touches like the prissy way he exclaims "It's my personalised cellphone ring" (or the apparent non-sequitur dialogue: "Do you ever get lonely?" "Not since the internet"), as though his Inner Monologue about the character was that Clouseau is a closeted gay man using policework as a channel for emotional neediness; at least he doesn't ham as outrageously as in LOONEY TUNES, but it's painful watching him do a 'funny dance' and go overboard with the accent. The ending solves the mystery by passing it off as an elaborate red herring, which sounds about right.]              

GILLES' WIFE (67) (dir., Frédéric Fonteyne) Emmanuelle Devos, Clovis Cornillac, Laura Smet [A classic female-masochist scenario - woman desperately loves man, increasingly degrades herself to try and keep him, finally realises it's all in vain anyway - made with consummate control, though at its best when it's most ambiguous. Devos is remarkable, working with very little dialogue and lingering, mostly reactive close-ups, but it seemed at first (to me) like she was in two minds about the titular Gilles, devoted but also slightly tired of married life (there's a weary look she gives as he's playing with the kids after coming home from work), just as it seemed at first like it was going to be a study in paranoia, our heroine obsessively jealous of her younger sister. Neither of those is accurate (turns out the weary look is supposed to be one of quiet contentment), and the film grows less interesting as its true contours become apparent, though it does preserve some ambiguity: Gilles himself is well-meaning but also a violent man - our first impression is a violent shock-cut, going from symmetrical wide-shot of a quiet street straight to Gilles tramping down the street in screen-filling close-up - and the Wife's conflicting feelings are exposed when e.g. he finds Gilles beating the sister mercilessly for wanting to marry someone else - and eventually intervenes, but only after she realises her rival is indeed getting married (would she have let him beat her to death otherwise?). Fonteyne belabours nothing, painting in light elegant brush-strokes, showing us everyday scenes and tiny moments from which to glean emotional turmoil (a lot of it is also very handsome, albeit with a hint of calendar-art in the exteriors); then the storm breaks and the house becomes a stage, husband and wife caught in orange glare as if in a spotlight. We sense it can only end badly, but Devos keeps the bad thing in abeyance - it's the kind of performance, like a warmer version of Isabelle Huppert's in LA PIANISTE, that's intensely committed yet impossible to parse fully (there's something opaque and inhuman about such intensity). You don't know what she'll do, but you know it won't be pretty.]         

CHARITON'S CHOIR (40) (dir., Grigoris Karadinakis) Georges Corraface, Akilas Karazisis, Stefanos Karadinakis [Will this break out of the Greece-Cyprus ghetto? There's a decent chance, given the ingredients: village setting, child's-eye view, period flavour (Greece in the early 70s, under the junta), a choral contest, Kusturica-like scenes of people brawling and singing, Italian-farce-(or MALENA)-like scenes like the sexy teacher dropping a pencil and every single boy in the class peering forward to look down her cleavage. Corraface indulges himself as the randy, much-beloved headmaster, a thorn in the side of the nationalistic/militaristic authorities, Karazisis impresses as his canny antagonist (there's a DON CAMILLO vibe only in reverse, the Commie now cast as the cuddly one); but the film is bitty - the boy's family are established early on, then forgotten for almost an hour - the choir angle underused, the style merely functional (Karadinakis' background is in Greek TV), and the wish to make something inoffensive, set in a securely remote past with just enough sex to raise a smile and just enough left-leaning politics to curry favour with the anti-Hollywood brigade, is dispiritingly obvious. Oh, the Irony Dept: produced by an outfit called the "Safe Company".]     

WALK THE LINE (50) (dir., James Mangold) Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick ["You can't wear that one, it's black! You look like you're going to a funeral." It's in there, unfortunately, and we also get to see the "little shoeshine boy" just minutes before "Get Rhythm", witness any number of 'Elvis, meet Jerry Lee' moments and watch Reese-as-June-Carter sitting in her car getting what could ... be ... an idea ... ("And it burns, burns, burns..." she suddenly mutters, apropos of nothing in particular). No-one's idea of a good film (I hope), but framing it as a love story as much as a biography adds an emotional kick that's often missing in the genre's then-this-happened structure - it's a lifelong romance, Johnny first beguiled by June's voice on the radio when they're both little kids - and Ms Witherspoon handles everything they throw at her, even the lame car scene. Her face isn't always beautiful - sometimes it's tense, and she looks almost skeletal - but it's transparent, mirroring the woman's inner life (of course she's also a great actress, able to control and modulate what the face registers), emotions shading into each other as if being described on a page; it's a sharp face softened with personality (like Katharine Hepburn's), and an atypical movie-star face in being at its least attractive when it's in repose. She's quicksilver, playing off Phoenix's dour intensity, though he's not really Cash - his sullen violence has a touch of the gangster, whereas Cash's had a touch of the warrior - and his voice clearly isn't up to it (the Man in Black's booming tones are unmistakable on the songs where Phoenix is dubbed). Elsewhere we get Dad resenting Johnny for the death of his brother - "He took the wrong son!" - mucho shots of Johnny on The Bottle, record execs trying to hold him back and wife wanting him to speak of "regular things"; then they fight, and Mangold cuts to their kids watching and crying from the doorway.]  

THE NEW WORLD (71) (dir., Terrence Malick) Q'Orianka Kilcher, Colin Farrell, Christian Bale [Comments to come; downgraded slightly after second part-viewing, for those keeping score.]

13 TZAMETI (65) (dir., Gela Babluani) George Babluani, Aurélien Recoing, Philippe Passon [Really just a high-concept triumph: the first half is poor, style increasingly impersonal, settling into descriptive medium-shot after a fancy opening salvo breaks up a wide-angle master with an unexpected close-up; things become sketchy, the plot poorly-constructed (I really didn't buy Hero taking the other man's place, instead of e.g. trying to extort money for the valuable letter). After the twist kicks in, however - alternative title: "Georgian Roulette" - it's all pungent group-shots of sweaty, unhappy, belligerent men shouting and horse-trading, and it turns into the kind of cultist's delight you tell your friends about years later ("Ever see that weird French thriller with the game where they...?"). Emphasis on ruthless wheeling and dealing - human life turned into a commodity - is an obvious link to the grim oligarch capitalism in the ex-Eastern Bloc, though one wouldn't necessarily have made the connection if Babluani wasn't Georgian (ditto the soulful Slavic undertones peddling weary fatalism and "Everybody dies"); the ending is banal, but the final shot - freeze-frame as he slumps in the train, flanked by a ghostly reflection - is a keeper. Programmers of the world: give your audiences a cheap thrill with a Dangerous Games Euro-double, pairing this and INTACTO!]