Summer Break 2006
Brief and disposable comments on new films seen July-August 2006.
LOS MUERTOS (61) (dir., Lisandro Alonso) Argentino Vargas ["I'm looking for my daughter Olga. Do you know where she lives?"; "Sure, she's my Mom"; "Oh, okay." There comes a point when Alonso's strategy of conflating his people with the placid unvarying rhythms of their environment turns into indifference to human behaviour altogether, and that point has probably been reached when a lost-long grandfather and grandson reunite with all the emotion of two tapirs meeting on a riverbank. There's artistry in the telling, even though most of the shots (after the impressive opening one) look like descriptive wide-shots anyone could shoot - when they keep ending up on balanced compositions, or keep getting punctuated with dogs loping into frame at strategic moments, you can't say they 'just got lucky' - and it's fascinating just as a procedural, showing how one buys bread in a small Argentinean hamlet, how one sips maté (through a straw, apparently), how one manoeuvres a rowboat in a muddy river, how one greets a stranger if seeking information, how one rummages inside a log for wild honey (also how one kills a goat onscreen with one easy slash of a machete, which is pretty ballsy with bien-pensant types like the Hubert Bals Fund picking up the tab). The final shot seems to indicate ghosts of the "muertos" laid to rest - Vargas puts aside the machete before disappearing indoors - but really it's just mysterious.]
THE AX (57) (dir., Costa-Gavras) Jose Garcia, Karin Viard, Olivier Gourmet [The Dardennes are among the producers, and maybe they're responsible for bringing Costa-Gavras up to speed with developments in European cinema (or maybe he knew all along); the premise is like a Chabrolian black-comic riff on TIME OUT, and some of the incidentals - the troubled teenage son, the somewhat irrelevant snippets of violent TV shows, even the quick glimpse of drummers drumming in unison like in CODE UNKNOWN - are decidedly Haneke-like. Maybe that's another way of saying we've seen it done before, and better - and it's surely unconvincing, the hero's seemingly insane Big Decision coming out of nowhere (he hasn't been set up enough), much of the physical detail just implausible; Chabrol disguises such things by playing up the comedy of manners, Haneke by playing up the visual alienation/desolation (the point, in both cases, being to create an unreality that distracts the audience) but Costa-Gavras is an earnest Message-monger, sounding his theme - middle-class unemployment - at every opportunity, just like he harped on state deception in MISSING and media irresponsibility in MAD CITY; his aesthetic model is Film as Fractal, where everything acts as a reminder of the main pattern(s), so every minor character has a wife and/or brother-in-law out of work and a random discussion (about a school essay) turns out to revolve round the End justifying the Means, our hero's main ethical dilemma. Too contrived, in a word, yet the relentless hustling (and relentless indignation at the State of the Continent) eventually breaks through, in the way of most relentless things; hero's dark mission becomes engrossing, and the literal mind that takes such care to stay on-Message also proves adept at laying out the mechanics of close shaves and narrow escapes (Donald E. Westlake also has something to do with it). Garcia tries hard in a near-impossible role - not the Ripley-style camouflaged sociopath but a man who's in meltdown yet remains (apparently) functional - while Karin Viard is the worried wife, wondering why they don't talk anymore even as he grows increasingly deranged, snatches papers from her hands, and babbles "It's nothing, it's nothing" when she finds him hunched over piles of CVs.]
MIAMI VICE (72) (dir., Michael Mann) Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li [Guess I'll let the "Cyprus Mail" do the heavy lifting. Time is short, I'm off to Toronto, etc.]
ATASH (THIRST) (45) (dir., Tawfik Abu Wael) Hussein Yassin Mahajne, Ahmed Abed Elrani, Amal Bweerat [Admirable use of scant resources - small cast, one location, non-professional actors - but the characters are stale, and it just gets grindingly dull. Palestinian family in Israel, their thirst for water (they live in the middle of nowhere, amid the swirling dust and craggy desert hills) being also presumably a thirst for freedom, though in fact their problem is the family's tyrannical patriarch, refusing to change and holding education in contempt (read: the Palestinian Cause holding the young hostage even more stiflingly than the Israeli occupation); his tyranny is modulated slightly - he does love his family, and gets a moment of pathos over an old postcard - but mostly it's a case of him blustering, sensitive teenage son looking hurt and Mom trying to make things better (the women in general are quite one-dimensional). Water spills, slithering gel-like and resolving itself into labile amoeba shapes. A burst of water, lit from behind, becomes a triumphant burst of light. A rear-view mirror is artfully adjusted to frame, in turn, the harried face of each weary passenger. The dust swirls, a curtain of grenade-pins jangles and the images build a sombre sense of entrapment - suggesting at least that Wael (and/or his DP) may be someone to watch out for.]
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST (56) (dir., Gore Verbinski) Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley [I'd call this the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK of the franchise, at least if it weren't for the gales of mocking laughter such a claim would provoke (oops, too late) - not just because it's unfinished, ending on a cliffhanger, but also because it's pricklier and darker than the bland original. Most of it is scary movie rather than swashbuckler, going for boo! moments and gross-outs - a corpse with its eyes pecked out, a cannibal's sudden leap into frame, a ship swallowed up by the Kraken - and there's a mean streak in the shipload of sailors sacrificed wholesale to plot demands, or the gratuitous flogging scene with money-shot of bloody weals; Depp is mostly comic relief, which actually suits me fine (his mincing and staggering got old from the first instalment). Blame Peter Jackson for ratcheting up the grue-factor in Spielbergian blockbusters, but Verbinski does manage some excellent set-pieces amid the (unconscionably) long sprawl, notably the escape from the cannibals and the lengthy ensemble scene on the island juggling a three-way sword fight, the titular Chest and at least four interested parties intriguing from the sidelines - though he makes a mess of the dice game Bloom plays with Davy Jones, flubbing the rules and not even making it clear when the players show their hands, proving that coherent visual storytelling is hugely harder to pull off than extravagant spectacle. Things I Sometimes Wonder: is the key to a 00s comic cult figure a certain selfishness, a sense of not playing well with others, like Jim Carrey's solipsist aloofness in most of his movies and Captain Sparrow's aloofness from this franchise? Things Only I Could've Told You: the pirates who find Sparrow's hat are in fact speaking in - garbled, but still recognisable - Cypriot dialect.]
UNITED 93 (50) (dir., Paul Greengrass) Ben Sliney, Christian Clemenson, Trish Gates [The question isn't so much if it could've been done better - it couldn't, at least not significantly - as whether it should've been done at all, a question that's been asked (though not enough) of these hyper-real, you-are-there reconstructions since the D-Day scenes of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN - and this risks being the 9/11 theme-park ride, just as that was the WW2 theme-park ride. It's a problem because the film is exciting, filmed not just as docudrama but edge-of-your-seat thriller; there are sadistic touches, like a stewardess before the hijack talking of being "home with my babies" (she'll never see them again!) or an old lady saying she'll need some water with breakfast so she can take her pills (she never did!), there's doomy music and nervy camera moves as the situation escalates, and the will-they-won't-they waiting-dance as the terrorists prepare to make their move is downright Hitchcockian (that you already know the outcome - suspense, not surprise - makes it even more so); is it even moral to use real people's lives for this kind of nail-biter? Most problematic of all is that the film isn't actually objective, being blatantly - and rather surprisingly, given all the stuff that's happened in the five years since 9/11 - pro-War on Terror, which makes a certain sense in a story that's explicitly about fighting back but still raises the spectre of victims used for political point-scoring, not to mention bias creeping in under the guise of truth. The most competent air-traffic controller is the one who says "We're at war" and orders drastic action to be taken, the terrorist who cracks under pressure is the one who calls his wife/lover/mother before the hijack to say "I love you" (implication: most terrorists - i.e. 'good' terrorists - are killing machines with no human feeling), and there's the pointedly European-accented passenger whose role consists entirely of urging appeasement and telling the others "Don't interfere" (and thank god they didn't listen to him!), finally trying to sabotage the resistance and having to be restrained - an especially cheap shot since there's no evidence (is there?) to suggest this really happened. Bush himself doesn't emerge unscathed, conspicuous by his absence of firm leadership, but conspiracy theorists will scoff at the shooting-down of the shooting-down theory. Bottom line? Half great, half offensive - usually at the same time.]
p.s. For the sake of completeness, and because it got some okay reviews, I also watched the TV movie FLIGHT 93 (4) (dir., Peter Markle) Jeffrey Nordling, Brennan Elliott, Kendall Cross, a travesty so awful it had me laughing in disbelief. It races through the build-up (United 93 is in the air and the other planes have hit the WTC before the film is 15 minutes old) so it can concentrate on the middle section, the anguished phone calls home by the people on the doomed flight - and, though hype insists the script was based "solely on what has been revealed in the public record", I sincerely hope the dialogue was dramatised, otherwise it means the culture is now so debased that people speak entirely in vapid TV-movie clichés at times of crisis. Too much awfulness to describe, but I single out the bit where the cute little girl looks at the burning Towers on TV and asks "Is it a mooo-vieee?" (and didn't we all ask that question, I know I did, etc etc), plus the hilarious moment when the actress reciting the Lord's Prayer seems to stumble over the second line, so it comes out "Hollywood be Thy name". Clearly, Greengrass' staging deserves all kinds of awards; still have some problems with his movie, though.
SOMERSAULT (48) (dir., Cate Shortland) Abbie Cornish, Sam Worthington, Lynette Curran [Turns out women - teenage girls, even - like to use their sexuality, being neither Victims nor passive receptacles; did it take a female director to notice this, or were men just embarrassed to tell it like it was? This one - the teenage girl, not the female director - is kittenish as she giggles over a pair of red mittens, childlike as she sings little rhymes or practises her smiling in front of the mirror, vulnerable when she asks the repressed-macho boy ("I'm not a big hand-holder") if he loves her, and the most sympathetic person in the movie just because she's the most honest, most in touch with her feelings and, for better or worse, the most open. Alas, the film declines into buzzword territory - latent homoeroticism, a symbolic kid with Asperger's - and she becomes a Victim anyway, persecuted by the small community, while the final moments (heroine going home, gazing out the car at the changing landscape with MOR rubbish on the soundtrack) make it clear that lessons have been learned, maturity attained. Various reviews also mention Nan Goldin references, making me wish (yet again) I was more in touch with the international arts scene.]
LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN (56) (dir., Paul McGuigan) Josh Hartnett, Lucy Liu, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis [Why do I get the sense this was written by a 100-lb. weakling with buck teeth and glasses? (Maybe he's cultivated a goatee to try and look cool, but he's too baby-faced and the goatee hasn't grown properly, so it looks straggly and anaemic.) Something to do with transparent fake machismo cloaking irrefutable evidence of rampant geekery - the snappy comebacks in the face of grievous bodily harm ("Who are you?" "Philosophically speaking?"; "You should really play ball, kid" "You really think I'm tall enough?") being the comebacks Jason Smilovic - the aforementioned writer/weakling - wishes he'd made in real life, except he always thought of them a few minutes too late when the bullies had already gone home. The final-act detailed unpacking of the Big Twist - there's always a Big Twist - is like a pre-emptive strike against the excitable, could-it-really-happen adolescents at AICN, daring them to find a flaw as they go through the film with a fine toothcomb (and of course establishing 'plausibility' in such detail doesn't make the film any more convincing, since no-one actually behaves like that in real life; it's just playing to the plot-twist whores). Still amusing, and McGuigan gives it the junky style it needs (that wallpaper!); no-one uses two words when twenty would do - Hartnett, asked what he plans to say to the villain's offer: "As the man with two penises said when his tailor asked if he dresses to the left or the right ... 'Yes!'." - and when our hero makes love to the girl their post-coital conversation has them debating who the best James Bond was. Points for Discussion: Is it just me, or is Bruce Willis turning into the new Christopher Walken?]
TAKE THE LEAD (34) (dir., Liz Friedlander) Antonio Banderas, Rob Brown, Yaya DaCosta, Alfre Woodard [DANGEROUS MINDS with ballroom dancing, (mildly) notable only for Banderas' suave star-power and Ms. Friedlander's attachment to / obsession with cross-cutting, presumably because she knows how tired the material is. It works when she does it over the opening credits, alternating between our hero's foxtrot (waltz, tango, whatever) and the kids' hip-hop, using editing rhythms to draw a connection between them - they're not so different, after all! - but then she keeps on doing it, cross-cutting vigorously between Banderas' dance class and the other teachers talking in the staff-room, and by the time we get to the point where someone draws a gun and points it only for the film to cut away to a dance contest (the gun's still pointed when we get back), or someone else says "Hey, look what I got!" only for Friedlander to switch locales, leaving us with the cliffhanger, a useful tool has mutated into a full-blown stylistic tic. Still works for a while, then the clichés overpower it; "Everyone calls them the school rejects..."]
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT (39) (dir., Justin Lin) Lucas Black, Bow Wow, Nathalie Kelly, Sonny Chiba [What exactly is "drift"? Japanese culture-shock for twangy hero Black, like his cramped Tokyo house and the weird food in the school cafeteria (why he's been enrolled in an all-Japanese school when he doesn't speak a word of the language remains unclear). Something Japanese boys do to impress girls, the link between cars and sex being slightly more pronounced than in previous F&Fs ("Boys! All they care about is who's got the biggest engine!"). Something designed to give this sequel a touch of much-needed originality, though the action scenes flatter to deceive - the climactic race is cut really fast (and quite excitingly), but not plotted; it's really just the same shot of two cars racing side-by-side repeated again and again, till one car veers away and the race is over. All a bit boring, but look out for the Japanese kids saying "Where's your ride?" and "We're done here", and the Yakuza boss who quotes (in Japanese) an old Oriental proverb: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost...". Guess we're all brothers under the skin and so forth.]
CLICK (59) (dir., Frank Coraci) Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Walken, David Hasselhoff [Important Note: If I'm in the car and Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" comes on the radio I usually pull over, worried I'll start crying halfway through and drive into a tree or something; adjust your expectations accordingly. This is that song - there's even a "He'd grown up just like me" moment in the final act - much more than its high-concept, which isn't really milked beyond some brief jokes about Japanese businessmen. The fast-forward button is easily the most-used feature on Sandler's universal remote, the message being Slow Down, Enjoy Your Life (Even the Dull Bits), etc; the more subversive message - that modern life is now like television, pre-processed corporate experience tricked out with labour-saving short cuts - doesn't seem to have occurred to Sandler, and after all (speaking of pre-processed experience) an Adam Sandler movie is now a product, down to the obligatory Rob Schneider cameo. Also erratic, like 50 FIRST DATES, going from coarse jokes to full-on schmaltz, and kind of a mess - watch for the Now We'll Throw In The Strokes On the Soundtrack Out of Nowhere moment - but I must admit it got to me. Surprise villain of the piece: TiVo!]
SUPERMAN RETURNS (46) (dir., Bryan Singer) Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, James Marsden [It's another of those "Cyprus Mail" reviews, this time featuring amateur sociology as well as incisive cinematic observations. How do I do it, etc.]
THE BREAK-UP (56) (dir., Peyton Reed) Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Joey Lauren Adams, Jon Favreau [Here's my "Cyprus Mail" review, which is shallow but enjoyable. Just like the movie, no?]
THE HILLS HAVE EYES (35) (dir., Alexandre Aja) Aaron Stanford, Kathleen Quinlan, Dan Byrd [Too much set-up, not enough nightmare. We didn't need the filling-station guy to have a motive in steering the city folk into the killers' path (they've found a bag of stolen loot, and he's scared they'll talk). We didn't need the mutant killers to strategize, arranging a distraction to get the family out of their trailer or abducting a baby to hold as hostage (they should just be evil, and unknowable). We didn't need them to have a back-story - about being the victims of nuclear testing - and we didn't need them saying "You made us what we've become!". We didn't even need the half-baked political angle, pitting wimpy Democrat hero against his macho Republican father-in-law - when he grabs an American flag from the mutants' lair and uses it to impale the chief monster, you might say he's 'reclaiming America' - esp. if it seems to be saying that Democrats need to out-hawk their opponents if they're going to win the red states. Or rather, all of the above might've been acceptable if the film's overall thrust was towards nightmare - an irrational, mysterious thing, like when the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE spiralled into absurd black comedy - but, taken with simplistic action and blood-spattered hero going to confront the monsters wielding a baseball bat, faithful dog by his side, the details just confirm it as a straight action thriller with extra sadism, not the paranoid dream implied by the title. Trend of the year (see also SHORTBUS and SOUTHLAND TALES): ironic use of the "Star-Spangled Banner" in conjunction with deviant behaviour. Sign of the times, etc.]