Summer Break 2004
Brief and disposable comments on new films seen while this site was on hiatus.
13 GOING ON 30 (57) (dir., Gary Winick) Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, Andy Serkis [Not so much a riff on BIG as a riff on BACK TO THE FUTURE (mostly PART II, when Marty sees himself in the future and realises he's become a terrible person), which is much more poignant - though you do have to wonder, what with this and FREAKY FRIDAY, when it was that films aimed at kids started painting adult life as No Big Deal (must be part of that self-esteem business). Barely-teenage heroine is unfazed by life as a high-powered 30-year-old, takes it in her stride - except of course for the sex thing, which is totally gross; seemingly the other way round from my (vague) memories of being 13, when the adult world seemed big and scary but libido was already stirring (not to get too pervy but you'd think she'd sneak a peek at her adult self's boyfriend in his bulging briefs, esp. since she's confident enough chairing meetings and taking the lead at fashionable parties). First half not much more than fluffy, but it moves up a gear in the second half as heroine starts to long for the idyllic past, things left behind and lost in the mists of Time - all the stuff that gets to me (Winick too, I suspect) against my better judgment - immeasurably helped by the New Ruffalo, in the same scruffy-sweetness mode as his role in ETERNAL SUNSHINE. Probably callous to speculate on such things, but his real-life illness seems to have brought out a humility in him - you get the sense he makes no demands on Life or the audience; his scenes with Garner have a wide-eyed, sincere quality that's surprisingly beautiful to watch (also second Michael on that "jarringly perfect edit"). Throwaways Are The Best Jokes Dept: Time-warped heroine peruses photos on a wall, comes across a picture of Rudy Giuliani - and simply moves on.]
IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE (37) (dir., Thomas Vinterberg) Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, Douglas Henshall, Sean Penn [This year's MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL, though the visuals are less remarkable (then again, Phoenix is an improvement on Jeremy Davies); dreamlike and even eerie moments - the doppelgangers meeting in the corridor - drowned in ba-a-a-ad dialogue and the kind of clumsy visual devices that no doubt seemed (on paper) like poetic symbols for "all the disorder in the world". The kind of film that makes you want to point out little pathetic implausibilities - would a guy with a Ph.D in Polish Literature really need a translator to understand the language? would a woman leave her front door ajar after opening it to find Nobody There? - not because these things are important but because they're also important, and there's arrogance in casting them off as unworthy of Vinterberg's 'vision' (especially when the Love vs. Ice theme is about as deep as a Valentine's Day card). Final shot of floating masses tethered to the ground with ropes (!) almost justifies the Visionary tag, but also recalls the earlier (hilarious) TV interview with a solemn Ugandan peasant, bemoaning the spate of levitations in his country: "I do not want to fly. We are not angels. We are human beings". Yes. It is hard to be a flying Ugandan.]
HELLBOY (56) (dir., Guillermo del Toro) Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Rupert Evans, John Hurt, Jeffrey Tambor [Someone's got an eye here, and no mistake: carefully designed as Reds vs Blues, going e.g. from the hot-ochre filters of the scene where HB watches his beloved from the rooftop, straight to metallic-blue as the mummified Nazi reawakens in the lab (then the overhead shot of grey-blue umbrellas at the funeral); fireballs and tongues of flame set against dank night-scenes in driving rain; Hellboy is of course bright-red, his aquatic C3PO-ish colleague surrounded by blues and greens; pyrokinetic Selma produces blue flames, turning fiery-orange when actually thrown. What's bizarre is how much time was (obviously) spent on colours and visual felicities - snowflakes at night in the graveyard - with care also taken on Hellboy's snarky sardonic attitude, but almost nothing done on story or narrative invention: the fights are mostly punch-ups - no special powers - the villains functional, the you-have-a-choice finale lame, and the whole thing runs out of ideas between first-act set-up and extended climax, spending time on such non-events as the hunt for the eggs (random thought: comic-book blockbusters as the movie equivalent of the dance/techno explosion in pop, delighting fanboys with their plastic qualities while downgrading literary elements like lyrics or story). Hero with divided loyalties is a popular sci-fi trope, going from cyborgs - half-men, half-machines - probably all the way back to Jesus, half-man half-God (could Messiah-myths be called the First Sci-Fi?), but division is perfunctory in this case (might be nice if HB was at least tempted by the Dark Side); iconographies clash, to fun effect - Nazis and ghosts, with a dash of "The X-Files" - though Jeffrey Tambor walks away with a lot of the show, as the film belatedly realises: "Could you hurry up? It's ... kind of spooky in here."]
VALENTIN (38) (dir., Alejandro Agresti) Carmen Maura, Rodrigo Noya, Julieta Cardinali [Grumpy (but loveable) grandma. Feckless (but loveable) uncle. Cross-eyed (but ... um, yeah) precocious kid. Family lore, like the aunt who ran off with a cabdriver or the bad-tempered Dad who almost died as a baby (the film is apparently autobiographical). The kid wants to be an astronaut, and practises holding his breath in the bathtub. An eccentric pianist lives across the street. Agresti gives it no particular style, beyond electing to play some scenes (but not others) as single-take tableaux; at one point - the scene in the park - he slowly zooms way out for no particular reason, then slowly zooms in again; early theme of kid's obsession with escape from Life - whether into outer space or Death itself - turns out to be a red herring. Still a certain tenderness, and a sense of late-60s Buenos Aires as a leafy, tranquil place with little traffic. Too-sudden ending, but at least it's short.]
SPARTAN (64) (dir., David Mamet) Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy [Mamet's an old pro trying his hand at genre thrills, and smart enough to know the best way to make ridiculous things look plausible is to just run through them without over-elaborating (the famous KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid). Our hero gains access to a top-security mansion by tagging along on a guided tour then simply dropping his "Visitor" badge, loitering discreetly for a few seconds till the tour moves on without him. A Swedish film crew happens to turn up just when it'll do the most good. Easy to accept, when brazenly set down on the table and dressed up in Mamet's distinctive macho - "I want camaraderie, I'll join the fuckin' Masons" - car-chases down neon-splashed streets and above all the superb sense of pace that doesn't try for breathless speed or rat-a-tat cutting (the inevitable sequence with 'the team' rushing around planning strategy has a lot more held-long shots than you'd expect) so much as taking out the neat transitions, having things just happen, keeping rhythms 'off' - cutting straight from the prologue in the training camp to the assignment itself, hours or months later - and withholding information to keep the audience on their toes; there's even a visual joke - so much for Mamet's all-verbal rep - when the three panels of a sign on the wall are gradually revealed by having people walk off one by one. Do think about badass Kilmer, poignant cameo by "the girl" and enjoyably exotic John le Carré-ish characters saying "merrymakers" in casual conversation; don't think about facile ending, half-baked political comment (though our hero's fist-flying interrogation style makes a mischievous comment on Bush's "worker bees") and why a girl in trouble would draw a secret sign known only to her closest friends on the window of her prison - as opposed to, say, "Help" or something...]
SHREK 2 (50) (dir., Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury & Conrad Vernon) with the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Cleese, Antonio Banderas [Here's my "Cyprus Mail" piece, artfully padded out to disguise how little I have to say on this movie - though it could hardly be worse than the original. N.B. Released in Cyprus at the tail-end of summer, after the usual movie drought, hence the first 'graph and final kicker.]
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (55) (dir., Luke Greenfield) Emile Hirsch, Elisha Cuthbert, Timothy Olyphant [Movie In A Nutshell: "I just don't care anymore". So many twists (too many), smudging of the line between reality and fantasy, and a tone that leaps as mercurially as charming psycho Olyphant. There is something about it, though - a slippery quality that's actually quite suggestive, like a visualisation of the hormonally-charged state where everything is sex; first half-hour especially has a hungriness, a sense of crowded frames and bodies pressing, from the teen-life montages to the slo-mo nymphets in the cafeteria ("How do you want me?" is the opening line, turning out to be an innocent question for the school photo). Pretty worthless, of course, esp. compared to its nominal inspiration, RISKY BUSINESS - no sense of class, in either sense of the word, just beautiful people (even Hirsch is directed to be winsome, biting his lip and scrunching up his face, giving a queasy Calvin Klein effect) and ungenerous treatment of the title heroine - 90% fantasy figure, 10% pathetic victim, dropping out entirely for much of the second half. Still quite exciting in its way - like the iPod soundtrack, skipping blithely from Echo and the Bunnymen to David Gray, it seems to speak for a taboo-less generation ready to try - and have - it all. Movie In A Nutshell, Take 2: "The kids today are so screwed up, this may be the only way you can reach them".]
JERSEY GIRL (28) (dir., Kevin Smith) Ben Affleck, Raquel Castro, Liv Tyler, George Carlin, Jennifer Lopez [Sloppy and Dispiriting, Part 1: Smith's cliché-ridden visual style, his favourite shot being a slow camera-retreat from the aftermath of drama - e.g. down a hospital corridor after man learns his wife is dead - that screams out Poignant Moment; he even does the thing where a crowd sits stone-faced after a performance, then gradually one person claps, then another, then suddenly it's a standing ovation. Sloppy and Dispiriting, Part 2: Ben Affleck's vapid, lazy smugness - when he makes the tearful speech about "I loved your mom so much" you have never seen a worse actor. S&D, Part 3: the little girl speaks every single line with precocious Attitude, and when she, Gramps and Affleck do the production number - from "Sweeney Todd"! - in the school pageant, their set seems far too elaborate, and their moves far too slick (it's part of Smith's unconscious irony that he sees himself as a Poet of the Common Man yet has the kind of sitcom mind that thinks in terms of buzzwords and celebrities: he thinks any sentence with the words "labia", "George Michael" or "coked-out whore" is automatically funny in itself). S&D, Part 4: "to impugn" doesn't mean "to criticise", and Will Smith was already a well-known movie star - having made BAD BOYS - in the days before ID4, I mean jesus. Postscript: if you're going to make a bad movie, setting parts of it in a video store - where viewers can glimpse the titles of much better films, and wish they were watching those instead - is a case of Insult to Injury.]
MEAN GIRLS (57) (dir., Mark S. Waters) Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey [Funny film, ugly message. In itself, all kinds of clever, with spot-on incidental detail - the "cool mom", the "slut rule", little sister gyrating to "Milkshake" on TV, pathetic geek saying (of the popular teen-queen) "I hear her hair is insured for $10,000", snarky Goth-girl musing that seeing a teacher outside school is "like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs" - but e.g. HEATHERS pushed this kind of thing into fantasy satire (from its opening croquet scene) whereas this walks a cagy line between making fun of the whole silly set-up - cliques, rigid hierarchies etc - and pandering to the amour-propre of teens (and a broader, youth-worshipping culture) who'd like to believe that yes, high-school really is like that. Jungle metaphor flatters the target audience, and of course the collapse of the system into moral homily - climactic admonition to be honest and egalitarian - is compartmentalised into an Author's Message (physically enclosed in the gym where the girls are convened, as if to cut it off from the rest of the movie) so as not to spoil the real, cynical message: the prom climax finds everyone paired off, but only like with like - freak with freak, Plastic with Plastic, teacher with teacher. There's a rancid self-pity beneath the comic trappings - and speaking of which, how many more of these films and shows do we need where the freaks and geeks (aforementioned Goth-girl and flamboyantly gay boy, in this case) affirm their superiority over the popular WASPs? The nerds have had their revenge; move on, please...]
CONNIE AND CARLA (35) (dir., Michael Lembeck) Nia Vardalos, Toni Collette, David Duchovny [There is a film called SOME LIKE IT HOT and a film called VICTOR/VICTORIA, and never the twain shall meet - especially with Nia Vardalos doing the introductions. There's an odd mismatch between her bouncy mien and basic squareness, just as there is between those bright eyes and toothy smile and that determined little chin: she's like a super-motivated aerobics instructor, jollying the class along with jokes and songs while her brain is thinking "Buns of steel! Buns of steel!". The film itself is harmless and negligible, with a bunch of gender-reversal jokes, drag-queen jokes, a romantic sub-plot, a gay-prejudice sub-plot, a couple of gratuitous digs at subjects (Botox, anorexia) Vardalos obviously wanted to rant about - or maybe she thought her middle-aged target audience might appreciate them - and so many show tunes and musical numbers it might as well have been titled "Chins Up, Boobs Out, It's Showtime". Sample moment: a dour Russian henchman slurs his way through an entire verse of "Mame" (when a snippet might perhaps have been enough). Other sample moment: "It really feels safe here," says Connie to Carla - then jumps at the sound of a gunshot.]
SPIDER-MAN 2 (61) (dir., Sam Raimi) Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Alfred Molina, James Franco [... or 'The Last Temptation of Spidey', having to choose between fulfilling his Destiny - being a hero, doing the Right Thing; "with great power comes great responsibility" - and doing what he wants, which is to love Mary Jane and stay out of trouble; a popular dilemma this summer, having also been Hector's in TROY, but applied to a guy in a Spider-suit the endless soul-searching starts to seem bombastic and pretentious, esp. since it's all so talky (Aunt May's infamous pep talk being only the worst offender). Lots of good things, from much-improved action scenes to offbeat touches on the fringes (the Semitic landlord out of a 40s tenement movie being presumably Michael Chabon's contribution), and it's witty how e.g. the Spidey costume keeps turning up - hanging in a closet, scrunched up in a washing machine - like a bad conscience. Also I guess quite satisfying how the constant oppression of the first half - even when Peter reaches for the last snack on a tray of hors d'oeuvres, someone else snatches it away - gives way to kinetic release in the second, but by that time I was past caring (seeing it with a fidgety matinee audience didn't help). Might've worked better on the page, and you have to wonder if there's something about the actual comic-book form - each image imprisoned in its frame, as opposed to movie form where they melt into each other - that makes it conducive to stories of oppression (or is it just an echo of the target audience's adolescent frustration?); also far from clear how the Spider-powers knew he wanted to quit (hence disappeared) and, even more mysteriously, knew he was 'ready' to resume (hence came back), but I guess it's all extended metaphor anyway.]
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (50) (dir., Frank Coraci) Steve Coogan, Jackie Chan, Cécile De France, Jim Broadbent, Arnold Schwarzenegger [Conception of Phileas Fogg has totally changed - and not in a bad way. Whereas in the 1956 version (and Jules Verne) he was an imperturbable imperialist, using money to buy his way out of trouble - never once flinching at those foreigners and their savage ways - now he's more like one of those goofy Disney inventors, his upper lip no longer particularly stiff. Some of this is a mixed blessing, e.g. it was wonderfully civilised that 1956 Fogg made his around-the-world wager over a game of whist, making sure he finished the game before departing - the set-up is much more aggressive now, with hysterical raising of the stakes. London scenes in general are a bit disappointing - too cartoony - but it hits its stride as it goes on the road, and Chan's slapstick is always inventive (if no longer as agile), using handy props to fell opponents or stopping to save a mother and child from a burning house en route to leaping off a rooftop for the dangling rope of a hot-air balloon (don't ask). Worth seeing for larky, good-natured tone and Governor Arnie in a (pre-Governor) cameo, lounging in a hot tub and admitting, "I'm always embarrassing myself in front of visiting dignitaries!". It was worth a remake just to hear him say that.]
DAWN OF THE DEAD (59) (dir., Zack Snyder) Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer [So well-made it's impossible to believe those who made it didn't see or understand the layers of meaning in the original; it must be that they just didn't care. Thought I spotted subtext at first, in the classic dilemma of what to do with the sick, those who've been bitten, whether to kill them pre-emptively or respect their humanity - do we tolerate or annihilate those who are Different? - but it's totally fudged (one man is spared, but has the decency to die soon after so the decision to spare him isn't tested; others 'turn' right after being bitten, hence can be blasted with a clear conscience); also thought I spotted subtext in the fascist guard being given the line "America always sorts its shit out" - but then he does a U-turn and becomes a self-sacrificing hero, while the snarky Gen-X guy is revealed as dangerous and unreliable. No materialist satire either - the mall might as well have been a hospital, or factory - and the lines "Why do they come here?" "Memory, maybe" (borrowed from the original, iirc) have no resonance: the living dead aren't there because of any vestigial memory, nor do they represent the disenfranchised standing forlornly outside the doors of plenty - they're there because they're hungry, and out to kill. Nor are the zombies very interesting or ambivalent (though they're much scarier) now that they're no longer shuffling and pathetic - leaving only action-movie thrills, and some memorable images (the truck in the glare of headlights, surrounded by a teeming swarm of zombies). Good stuff for what it is, but what drew Sarah Polley to a role so generic? And why didn't they just call it "Zombie Apocalypse" or something, if they're going to pretend the original doesn't exist? And how do flat, faded 70s colours manage to be evocative while the quasi-video visuals here are so damn ugly?...]