Films Seen - February 2008

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

ASTERIX AND OBELIX AT THE OLYMPICS (49) (dir., Frederic Forestier & Thomas Langmann) Clovis Cornillac, Gerard Depardieu, Benoit Poelvoorde, Alain Delon MISSION CLEOPATRA was faithful to the comic-book and occasionally zany (random inserts of mating lobsters, etc); this is neither, going back to the style of ASTERIX AND OBELIX VS. CAESAR, proficient action slapstick with Poelvoorde taking the place of Roberto Benigni as Guest Celebrity Comic. CLEO, talky to the point of self-indulgence, at least gave the sense of a middle-aged man (Alain Chabat) with fond memories of the actual comics; this is snappier, less verbal - the Games themselves take up most of the second half - and less digressive, squarely aimed at the international kiddie audience. At least we get Delon name-dropping his arthouse roles - is the Asterix audience really au fait with THE LEOPARD and LE SAMOURAI? - though admittedly also a light-saber (?!) and a Rolling Stones reference; also Michael Schumacher, who stops the film dead for 10 seconds so even the least sharp tool in the shed can confirm that it is indeed Michael Schumacher.

THE BANISHMENT (71) (dir., Andrei Zvyagintsev) Konstantin Lavronenko, Maria Bonnevie, Aleksandr Baluyev Much-maligned, in my opinion. First two-thirds operate on the tension between plot mechanics, which are stark and stylised, and incidentals - esp. the use of children and Nature - which are mysterious and open-ended (evoking the young rural postman's remark that "I'm interested in everything"). The central couple move like automatons, their behaviour - e.g. the husband's inscrutable (non-)response to the wife's revelation - stiff and unnatural, as if they're acting out some pre-ordained scenario, and there's very explicitly stylised shots as e.g. when they lie back on the bed at identical-but-opposite angles, so they look like mirror images (there's a similar shot later on, when the hero and his brother sit and brood next to each other, their profiles turned to exactly the same angle); meanwhile, however, the kids are doing spontaneous, improvisatory things (the little girl fluttering her hands at the camera, etc) while the Russian landscape (*) is doing things it hasn't done since the days of (yes) Tarkovsky - but Zvyagnitsev's images may be even more uncanny, because they're less fraught with Meaning (he's less a mystic, more a pastoralist). Magic abounds, the amazing play of light when the boy's watching trains go by, a single image catching the feel (elation, fatigue, a tired happy tingle) of a day in the country just ended, visiting friends just departed - the family on their porch in the evening silence, backs turned to camera, looking out at the deep velvet blackness - and throughout Nature is rolling out in voluptuous layers, barring the frame with tree-trunks, shifting like early-morning fog around a dacha. The point becomes apparent at the end, though in fact it's apparent in the title, stray references to the Garden of Eden and (above all) the girl reading the long Bible passage on the importance of Love; modern Russia is lost, having lost the Love between people - the husband, a gangster-capitalist, treats his family like possessions - just as surely as it's lost the attachment to the land, the Russian landscape and rural symbols like the old peasant women singing at the very end (it's a little bit like "4", but Zvyagintsev is nostalgic whereas Khrzanovsky views old peasant women - and what they stand for - as a mordant joke on the present). Structurally the film is sound, the twist at the end making the tension explicit, showing what happens when one views the world narrowly - or views a film purely in terms of mechanics - ignoring the beauties of Nature and the joy of childhood (what's important in another man's unborn child? that it's another man's, or that it's a child?). Visually it's beyond jaw-dropping, Zvyagintsev and Krichman having perhaps the best eye(s) for framing on the arthouse scene right now (**). Narratively, alas, it's a little laboured, everything from the end of the first two-thirds to the final twist - admittedly the part when things start happening - being stilted and near-comically portentous. Shave those 50 minutes down to a fast-paced 20, and we'd be talking Top Ten list.   

(*) actually shot (I now discover) in Moldova and Sardinia. What can I say? It looks Russian...

(**) and I even missed the first 5-10 minutes, which even haters admit are visually impressive.

YELLA (46) (dir., Christian Petzold) Nina Hoss, Devid Striesow, Hinnerk Schonemann Who is this Yella? Initially she seems rather cold, in the way she closes down her estranged husband's overtures - but it turns out the husband is unstable, possibly abusive. Later she proves dishonest with the nice(ish) guy who gives her a shot at getting her life back together, trying to steal his money and send it to the husband - is she scared? weak? money-obsessed, as suggested at one point? - later still she tries her hand at blackmail, which seems wildly out of character, and all the time Hoss' opaque performance gives nothing away. Works best (or solely) in a kind of Goldilocks zone, not too deep, not too shallow: just beneath the surface are intimations of interesting things, Petzold drawing possible connections between the world of business and the world of relationships - both based on negotiation, plus occasional bluffing and posing - as well as infusing the flat visuals with indicators of unreality, a mysterious offscreen bang, a random child shouting "I tricked you!", tiny ruptures in the fabric of Yella's rather Lifetime-ish journey to empowerment. Looking even deeper, however, the film grows dull again - mostly because the ruptured style needs the rigour of a Haneke, that sense of far-off dread accomplished by formal(ist) control, and Petzold doesn't seem anywhere near that; just to give an example, there's a brief scene where Yella's lying naked on a bed while her friend sits beside her, peeling an apple, and it's executed in two shots from behind Yella interspersed with two more from in front of her (plus a close-up of the apple) - a random, un-specific way of shooting that dilutes any atmosphere of coiled menace or things unseen. One of the year's more inexplicable arthouse hits, though most of this New German Wave (Ulrich Kohler excepted) is passing me by, to be honest. 

SHOOT 'EM UP (45) (dir., Michael Davis) Clive Owen, Monica Bellucci, Paul Giamatti It's John Woo, it's Looney Tunes, it's James Bond, it's TRANSPORTER 2 (the shoot-out-while-skydiving easily one-upping that film's fight-in-a-plummeting-plane for the Madness at 10,000 Feet stakes); it may even be a sincere plea for gun-control audaciously placed in the year's most gun-happy movie (all the more audacious for being so cynical), and an action flick about child-raising in the way that e.g. RAISING ARIZONA was a comedy about child-raising. It's not very good - but it is (or could be) all those other things, which at least gives you something to think about when invention flags, as it does quite often; Owen helps, shooting off the lamest of quips with a perfectly straight face and parlaying his congenital disaffection into monumental, angriest-man-alive pissed-off-ness. "Besides, violence is one of the most fun things to watch..."

REPRISE (64) (dir., Joachim Trier) Espen Klouman-Hoiner, Anders Danielsen Lie, Viktoria Winge What hath RUN LOLA RUN (and/or Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN) wrought? What-ifs and possible futures mingle with present and past, lending a post-modern sheen even to the fresh-faced, distractingly Hugh Grant-like hero and fairly banal youthful hi-jinks - yet it does evoke a certain ambience, the closeness of living in a small, liberal country (it could just as easily be a campus novel; everyone seems to know one another) and the immature romance of post-adolescent creative idealism, the time when nothing matters except capital-W Writing, listening to the right music, setting oneself apart from the "understimulated bourgeois retards". The heroes' artistic 'purity' is a form of machismo - "Guys in long-term relationships become so lame, they get sucked into this feminine sphere of TV series and nice dinners" - which Trier seems to realise, though in fact his busy style is quite laddish and arthouse-Guy-Ritchie (favourite tricks include cutting sound abruptly and playing two different scenes concurrently, so dialogue from one hovers on the soundtrack of the other). Just enough rueful sadness to avoid charges of pandering, just enough restless energy to keep things feeling glamorous; shallow but effective, the broad satire of successful 'media' types ("I like the edge. It's quirky, it's weird, it works!") being perhaps the defensive reflex of a filmmaker who has more in common with them than he likes to admit. 

MEET THE SPARTANS (9) (dir., Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer) Sean Maguire, Carmen Electra, Kevin Sorbo, Ken Davitian Credit where credit's due: this is very, very mildly - like, infinitesimally - amusing for the first 10 minutes or so, raising a couple of almost-semi-smiles (killer penguin, child abuse, "This is how MEN greet each other in Sparta!"). After that it's 'interesting' solely as a time-capsule of what brain-dead people gave a fuck about in the year 2008 - TV talent-shows, Brangelina, YouTube, Britney, Budweiser ads, STOMP THE YARD, etc. Small Mercies Dept.: presumably made just a few weeks too late to take advantage of 2 Girls 1 Cup.

EXILES (43) (dir., Tony Gatlif) Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Zouhir Gacem Boy and girl dance, bum rides, fool around on a football field (she whispers: "Your penis is as hard as a clarinet"), expose themselves to the camera - which I thought might be code for a scarred psyche or something (the girl was abused in childhood) but is probably just more sub-Godardian larking-about (the film's sensibility is typified by the early scene where Duris casually drops an empty glass from an apartment balcony and there's no cut to show where it fell or whether anyone was hurt - instead he turns around for a spot of gratuitous full-frontal - because who cares what happens to the little people). Trouble is, larking-about makes an awkward fit with Gatlif's pointed, not to say didactic focus on ethnic sub-cultures - the message of Exiles finding their roots in North African culture, implicitly more 'authentic' than mongrelized, compromised France, is the opposite of carefree - and the characters lack vulnerability, smug from beginning to end (even their dark past is a source of pride, literally showing each other their scars). It's ethnic tourism, wallowing in fringe gypsy lifestyles and Third World exotica, and one might think the repressive side of traditional Arab culture would get in the way of Gatlif's agenda but in fact our heroine finds a simple solution to the problem of having to wear hijab - she takes it off, and no more is said about it! (Why didn't other women think of that before, eh?). All a bit facile, to put it mildly, even the shamanic rhythms in the (admittedly hypnotic) climax coming off wrong - the music of ostrich-like young Europeans, preferring to lose themselves in the beat than think very hard about their own societies. 

P. S. I LOVE YOU (40) (dir., Richard LaGravenese) Hilary Swank, Gerard Butler, Harry Connick Jr., Lisa Kudrow Ever since KNOCKED UP (*) I've stopped trying to gauge women's reactions to movies, but I hope the target audience for this chick-flick will listen (as I did) to Our Heroine's late husband saying how much he loves her on the secret tape he made before his death and also think (as I did) 'Dude, gross, that's a dead person'. I hope they too will find Harry Connick Jr. as her new best friend, who has a kind of autistic condition and doesn't filter his thoughts before blurting them out ("How'd he die?" "Brain tumour" "Nice!"), more alarming than charming. I hope they'll agree that Hilary Swank lacks a certain something, the kind of movie-star nonchalance and carelessness that doesn't win Oscars but makes fluff tolerable - she's almost there, but it somehow doesn't click; she's like Rosanna Arquette for the 00s - that the conceit of the super-relaxed husband (the "carefree Irishman who sings") planning this complicated posthumous manipulation is unconvincing (it might work better if he'd been shown as the control-freak from the start, instead of her; but then of course it'd be creepy), that the letters from the grave don't really help very much, except in prompting lengthy flashbacks, that a 20-something heroine wouldn't necessarily grieve by watching Bette Davis and Judy Garland movies (though a 40-something writer-director might). I don't expect anyone else to cringe at the use of "Fairytale of New York", though, that sloppy sentimental anthem for people who think they're being cool and Shane MacGowan-ish. That one's just me.

(*) where at least one female friend has said she finds Seth Rogen charming, and Paul Rudd something of a jerk; go figure

SWEENEY TODD (63) (dir., Tim Burton) Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen Not unappreciative (hence the rating), but sometimes there isn't much to say. "Cruelty of men" theme - locating Sweeney as reflection of (and, to some extent, antidote for) the brutality, exploitation and class tyranny of 19th-century London, in a kind of musical Ripperology - is right there on the surface, and the Gothic damp-and-fog visuals are Burton at his Burton-est. The stars garble the words when they sing, which is very damaging - Bonham Carter's song about "the worst pies in London" was nearly unintelligible - since you miss internal rhymes and wordplay, but I don't find Sondheim as impressive as most people seem to (besides, I had Greek subtitles). It is what it is, building to a properly doomy climax, and I doubt it could've been done better - which is not the same as calling it a masterpiece.

I AM LEGEND (60) (dir., Francis Lawrence) Will Smith, Alice Braga, Abbey and Kona the dogs Zombies or not, this often seems to hail from the same place as PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (Smith clearly didn't get that memo about never working with children or animals) - a tale of urban alienation, with an overachiever hero working overtime to change his situation (he has to rely on himself; he doesn't have much in common with the people around him), underlain with a humanist conviction that the wish for community and friendship is the most ineluctable of human desires and a solidly Republican belief that God (name-checked a number of times) will help those who help themselves. In itself, torn between plumbing psychological depths and pleasing the target audience - eerie shots of deserted NYC give way to a red sports car, and how awesome it'd be if you had the city streets to yourself - but it manages both some very tense scenes (hero dragging himself to the car with the sun going down and zombies poised to attack) and a couple of dramatically intense ones. Everyone keeps saying what a cop-out the ending is, but it seems pretty bittersweet in my opinion. 

CASSANDRA'S DREAM (62) (dir., Woody Allen) Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, Tom Wilkinson, Sally Hawkins Takes about 20 minutes to start kicking in - 20 minutes of utter wretchedness wherein Woody Allen veers even closer to what he's been threatening to become for the past few years, viz. a modern Ed Wood (albeit not through lack of talent, more - presumably - a case of ageing synapses struggling to maintain that one-film-a-year schedule). Staging is bald and uninventive - the discussion with the boat-seller tossed off in a single master-shot - dialogue thuds again and again, everyone speaking without personality ("I need financial backing" is too formal for family conversation; Ewan and girl's post-performance chat in a pub - "I do think the writing is pessimistic" - has no hint of flirtiness; really everything sounds flat, those are just the ones I took notes on); oh, and having people sing lustily and swig bottles of beer to show they're having a good time is pretty damn lazy, oh and no-one - though this one comes later - no-one says "I suspect Louis, the bookkeeper" when both parties already know who Louis is. Doesn't necessarily get better as it goes on, but one senses - as with Ed Wood - a sincerity in the goings-on, a writer-director making a film about things that actually interest him: Conscience, and the chastening randomness of whether or not one feels it (one brother does; one brother doesn't, like Cheech in BULLETS OVER BROADWAY); the enormity of doing something wrong, the process of rationalisation, and the question one shies away from and inevitably comes to - "What if there's a God?", incidentally taking Woody back to his old sub-Bergman phase (and of course it first appeared in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, but it's intriguing to note - given what an obsession murder seems to have become with Allen in his last three movies - that he first based a film around a killing in MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY, made immediately after his great real-life wrongdoings of the early 90s). Also, despite the amateurish devices, low production values - is it deliberate that actors stumble over their lines once or twice, or did they just flub and Woody couldn't be bothered with a second take? - and suspicion that he shoots his first drafts and sets the films in Europe so fellow New Yorkers won't call him on the tin-eared dialogue, Mr. Allen still knows how to tell a gripping story. Unlike Ed Wood.

FOUR MINUTES (58) (dir., Chris Kraus) Monica Bleibtreu, Hannah Herzsprung, Sven Pippig Respect! Wasn't looking forward to this, based on plot - ornery old-lady piano teacher bonds with feisty young inmate at a women's prison over the Magic of Music - but it avoids most of the obvious pitfalls, even when it looks like a case of being different for the sake of it (when Feisty attacks a warden we hear the fight in the background and close-up on a fluttering insect struggling to right itself on a table; is it symbolic, or just unconventional?). In the end, neither character is allowed to dominate the other - their relationship just supplies an impetus to change their lives - and the old lady isn't forced to eat crow over her dislike of "nigger music" just as the girl isn't forced to make up with her abusive (but apparently remorseful) stepfather; the ending seems wrong, insofar as it's viewed as a triumph but feels like a betrayal - the 00s emphasis on personal empowerment trumping the old heroine's clarion-call for High Art in a dumbed-down culture (see e.g. the "Mozzarella" gag) - but I guess that's also part of the film's unexpectedness, putting a twist on the Magic of Music. Works by garnering enough character detail (lesbian depths, Nazi past) to make it interesting without tying down that detail in a framework to make it obvious, and it might be a cop-out but it does keep you thinking.