Films Seen - January 2005
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
THE LIFE AQUATIC (67) (dir., Wes Anderson) Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum [I think I know why people are annoyed by Wes Anderson: it's not (just) the hyper-designed visuals, not merely that the films are 'arch', but also that they're passive-aggressive. The characters, operating behind elaborate defence mechanisms, do passive-aggressive things - like handing someone 50 stamped addressed envelopes with three blank pages in each as they say goodbye, 'just in case' they have time to write - and the films too make their demands behind elaborate defence mechanisms, purportedly detached but actually tender and extremely sentimental, a kind of sentimentality through clenched teeth. He can seem like a salesman, all the slimier for being soft-spoken, the diffident style acting as a guilt-trip (wouldn't it be gauche to refuse his characters their modest epiphanies?) - which may be why this is his best film, because it's the most imperfect and shambolic, and the least effective at disguising its sentimentality. Fear of Death is the obvious theme - it's all around Steve Zissou, from cats to ex-girlfriends - the contrast being between Team Zissou's decay and its meticulously detailed self-absorption, the Steve Zissou pinball machines, nifty gadgets and ubiquitous uniforms (even as they're rushing to a shoot-out with pirates, one of the team pauses to pull on his trademark red cap), which in turn makes the self-absorption seem ridiculous and opens the door to honest bonding in the face of failure - a hopeful communal vibe expressed in the very touching bathyscaphe scene (it's the cheesy synth score that makes it - that and the survival of the "research turtle", a tiny touch that works as a symbol because it's inconsequential). The style is looser - the camera lurches, there's even an action scene and besides it's a road (i.e. boat) movie - but the rhythm is stultifying, short inconclusive scenes piled on top of each other; because the movie qua movie ultimately fails (a lot of it is just plain boring, esp. on second viewing and esp. the Blanchett and Wilson characters) the sensibility seems purer, more untrammeled, less of a con-job. Zissou's decay seeps into the film, loosening its mechanisms and exposing the softness at its centre - yet you still get the best of Anderson, viz. the delightful peripherals. Animated fish. David Bowie songs in Portuguese. A dour-looking handyman trudging onstage at a high-flown film festival, first to take away the mike then later (with the same dour expression) to bring a carafe of water. A poster for "The Battling Eels of Antibes". Willem Dafoe with a mohawk. A financier named Oseary Drakoulias, and a harbour named Port-au-Patois.]
VERA DRAKE (74) (dir., Mike Leigh) Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis, Eddie Marsan, Daniel Mays, Ruth Sheen, Peter Wight [The great and terrible thing about this is undoubtedly the halfway rupture that turns Vera Drake - a brisk, sanguine, constantly bustling and scurrying woman - into a pillar of stone, unable to do more than sniffle, nod and gaze around in bewilderment. It's so shocking - and unsatisfying, because one keeps waiting for Vera's kindly philosophy to impose itself on the proceedings, and it never does - it calls into question the whole concept of how the film views her. There's no doubt it plays differently if you think Leigh sees her as a secular saint or alternatively something less exalted, more sinister - which is obv. related to the pro-choice/pro-life debate, but not necessarily limited by it. For the record I'm pro-choice (on social-utility grounds), yet here's what I said on an online forum after seeing the movie:
"This film really surprised me; the last time I noticed
this kind of structure was (of all things) in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE,
another film where the characters' private world is instantly and
comprehensively demolished by the late appearance of the System. I'm not sure
what it means, though. Certainly I got little sense of Vera as a saint or
morally superior person: she has a reflexive open-mindedness and generosity
(contrasted with her friend's racism, among other things) but she approaches do-goodery
as a kind of housekeeping, in the same way that she performs her abortions as if
she were baking a cake (there's even a shot of her mixing oil with grated bits
of soap in a mixing bowl). Also of course she's a cliché - the whole "nice
cup of tea", pottering-about persona - and obviously Leigh knows that.
"It seemed to me Leigh was making Vera represent 50s Britain, especially
the concept of 'muddling through', a kind of cosy hypocrisy. In the first half
we see a very nice, very warm society, shot through with nostalgia, but in fact
Vera's worldview depends on glossing over class differences - her employers
obviously despise her, from the way that woman steps over her while she's
cleaning the grate to the employer who won't appear as a character witness but
"sends her blessing" - and her abortions depend on forgetting about
women's victim status in pre-Pill days, just like she forgets what she's getting
rid of are in fact "little babies". Also, this whole society is based
on trading, mutual back-scratching: people trade cigarettes for nylons, trade
war stories, trade favours (Vera inviting Reg to tea isn't as selfless as it
appears), even trade dance partners; the only exception, ironically, are Vera's
abortions, which she does for free. But the society is still a construct, held
together by hypocrisy, mutual goodwill and nice cups of tea - and, as soon as it
comes under scrutiny, it just collapses.
"For me, the key to Vera is probably the fact that she herself is illegitimate, and would never have been born if someone like her had been around to "help her mum out" - yet she seems totally unaware of this irony. Her universe is based on muddling through without any logic or self-examination, which is why it just collapses like a house of cards. Unless of course she is aware of it, and carrying out abortions as a kind of obscure subconscious revenge against Life, which would open up wonderful new depths of hidden self-loathing."
The tricky part, in other words, is working out what destroys Vera. If she's crushed by two opposing forces within her - her improvised philosophy vs. her respect for Authority - she becomes a kind of tragic heroine; if, on the other hand, her world just collapses because it's inadequate and she never really knew what she was doing - then she's not a martyr at all, just a blinkered old lady living an Unexamined Life, and the second half is just the inevitable unravelling of a system that never made sense in the first place. Bottom line? A very strange movie - but scene by scene it works, performances are excellent and period detail wildly evocative. Obviously it makes sense for people in 50s Britain to be asking each other "What kind of war did you have?" in that diffident British way - but it's one thing to know that, and another to hear it in a movie as the characters unwind after dinner, and the men talk shop and the women bring out their knitting. Fascinating.]
SIDEWAYS (62) (dir., Alexander Payne) Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh [Comments soon, probably after second viewing. In a nutshell: it's about self-delusion - Miles imagines he's a connoisseur, Jack imagines he's a celebrity. More to come, hopefully.] [Doesn't look like there's ever going to be a second viewing, which itself suggests my lukewarm reaction to this still-quite-welcome semi-comedy. It is indeed about self-delusion, though also I think about class in America. Jack is upwardly-mobile - about to marry above his station - but the film shows he's deluding himself about his place in the world; not only is the one person who recognises him a waitress in a diner (none of the wine-snobs do), but he takes up with a girl who's determinedly working-class - her trashy Mom has no narrative function except to show how working-class she is - and pretends to be something he's not with her, and is punished for it. Miles similarly tries to move up the social ladder - to be a wine-snob (not just an alcoholic) - but finds a happy ending of sorts by dropping his pretensions. Is Payne saying people should 'know their place', or is the film a plea for emotional honesty? Unfortunately I'm writing this eight months later, so I can no longer say. Still no idea why Virginia Madsen was so (over-)praised, though...]
NATIONAL TREASURE (65) (dir., Jon Turteltaub) Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Sean Bean [Why all the hatin'? Sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to Bruckheimer-tude, yet this is the opposite of the hollow incoherent dazzle-them-with-special-effects approach (step forward, VAN HELSING), turning into one of the year's biggest hits while espousing a spirit of low-tech DIY adventuring: at one point, Cage and his cohorts decipher a secret message on the back of the Declaration of Independence (don't ask) using only a hairdryer and a few squirts of lemon juice. Admittedly one of those films where the hero's apparently psychic (most of the treasure-clues are frankly indecipherable) and the villains can't even shoot straight, yet it's not dumbed-down: these characters are always thinking (not deeply, but at least they're thinking) and it's part of its cheesy square-cut charm that it tries to be 'educational', using Bartha as a stand-in for Young People Today - great with computers, no sense of History - and taking every opportunity to Improve him ("Valley Forge was a turning point in the American Revolution," explains our hero for the benefit of Ignorant Justin, and all the Ignorant Justins in the audience). Smart in the sense of 'neat' and 'well turned-out' more than actually 'intelligent', but it plays fair and moves well, and had me from the early match-cut going from our hero as a child to his Nicolas Cage self 30 years later (I'm always a sucker for stuff like that) - and of course the treasure turns out to be History and Knowledge rather than gold, papyrus scrolls from the Library at Alexandria etc, which is ineffably gratifying. Feels very 80s, but I don't have a problem with that.]
ALFIE (31) (dir., Charles Shyer) Jude Law, Sienna Miller, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei [This "Cyprus Mail" review isn't too inadequate, I reckon. (Note it's the second half of a piece that also included AFTER THE SUNSET, which explains the first and last sentence.)]
ELEKTRA (31) (dir., Rob Bowman) Jennifer Garner, Terence Stamp, Goran Visnjic [Someday I'll learn to stop worrying and love the CGI, but not yet, not now. Expert assassin (Our Heroine) called to a "job" two days early, even though there's nothing around for miles except a house where a man lives with his daughter; she befriends them, then finds out they're her prospective victims - but doesn't stop to ask herself why she was brought two days early if not to meet these people, or why the client should've insisted on the world's best killer just to take out two unprotected civilians (it smells like a set-up, and of course it is - but we only find out an hour later). And why, come to that, should Elektra leave her cheerful worldly sidekick - a.k.a. the Oliver Platt figure - behind to stay and face the villains, when he's obviously doomed, might be forced to give them information and could easily have escaped? Because she's a cipher, and because the script is lazy - even the credits are lazy, casting the names in a special font to make them look Greek (because, um, Elektra is a Greek name) but replacing the "E"s with the Greek for "S" so anyone with a semblance of classical education will read DP Bill Roe as Bill Ros (brother of Sigur, presumably?). Action scenes aren't bad, and the villains have fun powers - I like the one who can suck the life out of victims with her touch, a bit like that sad-eyed freak in X-MEN 2 - though Garner is far too soft as fearsome Elektra: "You understand violence and pain," says mentor Stamp, but she looks pouty, and about to start blubbing. Opening Voice-Over to make the heart sink: "Since Time began, a war has been waged in the shadows between the forces of Good and Evil..."]
KINSEY (59) (dir., Bill Condon) Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Peter Sarsgaard, John Lithgow, Chris O'Donnell [Overall a Good Thing, making sensible points that need to be made in the Current Climate (tm) - above all that sexuality is endlessly diverse (a point smartly conflated with America's melting-pot acceptance of diversity in general), and totally 'normal' behaviour a tiny minority - and scrupulously fair-minded, not just mocking the uptight reactionary know-nothings (though it does that too) but also showing how oppression can exist on both sides of the conservative/permissive divide: Kinsey turns into the polar opposite of his father, and just as dogmatic; his disciples practise free love, and end up getting hurt. Even gets in a good joke at the team's scientific rigour, with O'Donnell remaining punctiliously straight-faced when an Italian-immigrant subject admits to sex with a horse - only to bewilder the poor man, who'd merely been confessing to a fondness for "whores". Also gets shamelessly Freudian in locating Kinsey Sr's repression in a childhood body-harness that literally separated him from his budding sexuality (it's so unlikely it has to be true), subscribes to the fallacy that anything which occurs in Nature can not therefore be "unnatural" - talk about stripping a word of all meaning - and gives Kinsey an undeserved (and inaccurate) happy ending - but then what can you expect from this kind of Oscar-bait? About as true, compassionate and humorous as a Hollywood lecture on sex can be; would you really rather see the Catherine Breillat version?]
Slam-dunk capsules due to lack of time, burnout, etc:
BEING JULIA (52) (dir., Istvan Szabo) Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons, Bruce Greenwood, Shaun Evans, Michael Gambon [Fluff, insofar as it avoids the moral scope of what it's showing; Julia's revenge is satisfying but also unprofessional, in the sense of jeopardising the production for her own personal reasons, and the film is far too easy in letting her get away with it. The larger question is how much Acting should be an act of vanity - "Now, you buggers, pay attention to me!" as Gambon puts it early on - not unlike the vanity of an Older Woman taking up with a younger man; the film seems to punish her for her presumption - the boy is a user, and breaks her heart - but then loses sight of the issues, driven mostly by the fact that (a) Annette Bening is a glamorous movie star, and (b) the film's target audience are middle-aged women - and perhaps (c), as someone claims, that "Theatre is the only reality". Still very pleasant, and Bening's fake plastic quality hasn't been so effective in a role since THE GRIFTERS.
WHO KILLED BAMBI? (65) (dir., Gilles Marchand) Sophie Quinton, Laurent Lucas, Catherine Jacob [A nice bit of mischief, because the opening scene has a head nurse telling her charges to "remove ambiguity" about Death, and the title certainly seems to be laying open the ending - yet ambiguity survives in the conventions themselves, the unknown-watcher shots and prowls down night-time corridors fostering a sense of paranoia and did-it-really-happen? (even when we 'know' we're not quite sure; it's like an exercise, testing purely cinematic cues against the power of logic), and the ending raises the spectre of another ambiguity, a poisoned relationship that might, in other circumstances, have worked (to those who complain the title cheats, please note the title is not "Who Killed Isabelle?"; think about it). Admittedly perverse, but the lush score and stark suggestive blue-and-grey visuals give it a Lynchian feel - inevitable in the way a dream is inevitable - and there's stunning surprises like the "Guess my dream" sequence. Where did that come from?]
SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN (68) (dir., Tian Zhuangzhuang) Jingfan Hu, Jun Liu, Bai Qing Xiu [Stately long-take mastery, exquisite as cherry blossoms or flower arrangements; indeed, so exquisite I can't do it justice in a proper review.
Like an old haiku,
Finding serene perfection
In simplicity.
Nah, too descriptive. And we have to mention the political subtext (one of the love-triangle trio is a Party man, just returned from a trip along the route of the Long March).
Puzzling dilemma,
How to perceive the Long March
In my Western mind.
Oh come on. Too prosaic, too philistine. Let's try again.
The sweep of a hill
Like the strong back of an ox
In a dry valley.
Brown and beige. Blossoms
In spring, a boat on a river.
A trap. A teardrop.
Much better...]
ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY (61)(dir., Adam McKay) Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell [Like a vaudeville act where a man puts on dozens of hats at lightning speed, one after the other, while keeping a completely straight face. You never know what you're going to get - Ferrell as Ron Burgundy, "a voice that could make a wolverine purr", but also Bobby Riggs, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin circa Wild and Crazy Guy - and whether the next bit will be uproarious (like 'Afternoon Delight', or the climax in the bear-pit) or just okay; and of course, at the end of the day, it's just a guy trying on a bunch of different hats. Still notable for getting beyond the turtlenecks and polyester suits to a sense of 70s attitudes, not to mention For Your Consideration: Baxter the dog, funniest canine performance since Milo in THE MASK.]
LES DALTON (17) (dir., Philippe Haim) Eric Judor, Ramzy Bedia, Til Schweiger [Some might say it's a shame how European comic-book movies (usually comedies as opposed to action) never travel outside Europe while the Marvel superheroes are everywhere - at least till they see this travesty, supposedly (according to the credits) a homage to Morris and Goscinny, authors of the original "Lucky Luke" whence the Daltons are taken, but in fact verbose and unfunny. Stuff like a "magic hat" or a potion that makes you look different is just pandering to the kids - and a betrayal of the original's tone - but most of it is actually the opposite, smartass loud burlesque giving Bedia - who also co-wrote, and seems to be a well-known TV comic in France - a chance to hog the spotlight as Averell (the dumbest Dalton) while Judor as Joe (the chief Dalton) deals with his gay crush on Lucky Luke, a different kind of betrayal. Might still have worked, but the execution is chaotic and mindless: "Thinking is a waste of time. Let's do this the Dalton way!".]
NEW GUY (40) (dir., Bilge Ebiri) Kelly Miller, Scott Janes, Jonathan Uffelman [Found it hard to get beyond the flat video look and low-budget visuals - in one case, the early shot in the corridor where hero's colleague tells him about his psycho predecessor, I was so distracted by shadows on the walls I could hardly enjoy the dialogue - and the warmed-over OFFICE SPACE comedy of the first half never really gelled, beyond the voice in the men's room and occasional felicities like the awkward silence while waiting for a Polaroid to dry. Gets a lot better as it goes along, intimations of THE SHINING morphing into a claustrophobic second half and bizarro ending where ... well, I don't really know what happens (but in a good way). Wonder if the guy covered in Post-Its was initially a BRAZIL reference, before it made the cover of OFFICE SPACE...]
FINDING NEVERLAND (45) (dir., Marc Forster) Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell ["Everyone is famous for something," said the real J.M. Barrie, "and I am famous for living opposite George Bernard Shaw". No such becoming modesty in this windy concoction, which casts him as the Genius Eccentric, the Spirit of Eternal Youth and of course Johnny Depp, professional free spirit. Have to admit I choked up during the "Peter Pan" scenes - because they're about something real, the transformative power of Art, as opposed to well-meaning hooey about childhood magic and the power of the imagination - but it's still a poorly-made film, Depp asking the kids to imagine his dog is a dancing bear and Forster cutting to not just a bear but a whole three-ring circus (so much for challenging our imaginations). Winslet does well but pity poor Radha Mitchell as Barrie's long-suffering wife, implicitly censured because she'd rather be in Society than join him for walks in the park, and struggling with some less-than-felicitous dialogue: "Something tragic happened to her husband ... (thinks) Oh yes - he died."]
TAXI (37) (dir., Tim Story) Queen Latifah, Jimmy Fallon, Jennifer Esposito, Ann-Margret [They've got Queen Latifah saying "oh shoot" and "Motherf-" but she still gets some joy into the character - especially a joy in fast cars - even as infantilised Fallon sings falsetto and deals with lines like "You didn't see my 'nads, right?". Trashy fun, with the supermodel bank robbers and cheerful alkie Mom, though wouldn't they usually block off an exit if the highway's gone, so cars don't fall into the yawning chasm and so on? And why does a minor character of no particular politics bear the name - or as near as makes no difference - of a famously conservative Supreme Court Justice?]
MEAN CREEK (38) (dir., Jacob Aaron Estes) Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan [A major disappointment: hoped for the disquieting alienation of RIVER'S EDGE but this is more like the melodramatic moments in STAND BY ME - the ones where the boys burst into tears and confront their demons - done in the coy rural-idyll style of David Gordon Green. Almost everything feels fake and overwritten, from the contrived games between the characters (Games Adolescents Play: "Jennifer Lopez, or the girl who sits behind you?") to the pivotal scene itself, which visibly pulls levers first to humanise the victim then prepare his demise, after which the final act is pure anti-climax. All that said, the image of mismatched youngsters playing a game of truth-or-dare on a small boat on a balmy Saturday morning, somewhere in rural America, captures something about childhood - a sense of claustrophobia and close-quarters savagery, etched against paralysed stillness and the uncertainty of waiting to grow up - that's proved surprisingly hard to shake.]
AFTER THE SUNSET (53) (dir., Brett Ratner) Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Woody Harrelson, Don Cheadle [This "Cyprus Mail" review isn't too bad, though apologies for the lame (non-)style. Bottom line: glossy THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR one-upmanship and heists so elaborate they beggar belief (example: the opening ruse requires Brosnan to get up and make his way out of his seat in the stands during a ball game, presumably stumbling over bags and stepping on people's feet, in the few seconds when watching cops are distracted by an accomplice), with one notable moment when it looks like it might be more - when Pierce uses his friends to carry out the heist, looking very smug and pleased with himself, only for his smile to fade as they walk away in disgust. Looks like the natural conclusion of a theme that's been developed throughout the movie - camaraderie between the cop and thief trumping their differences - but Ratner is too blind or shallow to make much of it, and we're soon back to the twists and playful banter. Also perhaps the first film where Don Cheadle's brand of offbeat roguishness starts to seem a little tedious; "alternative lifestyle parameters", I mean come on.]
TRILOGY (63) [ON THE RUN (53); AN AMAZING COUPLE (58); AFTER LIFE (51)] (dir., Lucas Belvaux) Lucas Belvaux, Ornella Muti, Dominique Blanc, Francois Morel, Catherine Frot [The first one is well-crafted but rather dull, the second one reminds me of POUR RIRE without Jean-Pierre Leaud, the third one's too dependent on regurgitating the plot (as well as the bedraggled, plaintive-looking Blanc, whose needy junkie is frankly a bit of a drag). The concept, however - separate-but-related stories tangentially impinging on each other, peripheral information in one story starting to make sense once you know another - is fascinating, a comment on interconnectedness as well as the political activism that informs the whole thing (from protesting students to a superannuated terrorist), because of course activism depends on the belief that everything is connected, and individual acts can have social consequences. Shame they don't do more with it, but commercial considerations no doubt played a part (it's hard enough trying to market three separate films without the audience having to watch all three of them); obsession also seems to be a theme, shading into paranoia - the damaged idealist's, the suspicious husband's, the addict's - but Belvaux's doleful rhythm tends to flatten everything out. Movie In A Nutshell: "We don't pay enough attention to strangers".]
WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (55) (dir., John Curran) Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts [Ryan is right that CLOSER is about the gamesmanship whereas this is about the relationships; trouble is, those relationships are dull, each character getting one trait which they carry through the sub-Cheever/Updike suburban shenanigans. Dern = wants love. Ruffalo = feels guilty, therefore needles wife into hating him. Krause = creative narcissist, thinks the rules don't apply. Watts = frustrated wife (insufficiently developed even to have a trait). Marriages go stale, people try to hurt those they love then say "I'm just kidding" to cover up, quoting Tolstoy when they're actually quoting themselves: "What had seemed impossible before, that he had not spent his life as he should've, might after all be true". Some neat detail - adulterous pair spending most of their trysts talking about their spouses, wife and mistress both asking "Did you eat enough?", kids arguing over nothing in the background - but needed more offbeat images (there's one, when a group of solemn little girls perform a kind of Irish jig, and it gives the film a welcome lift), possibly more nudity - the love scenes are stylised in a strange, stifling way that doesn't quite work - or just some of the eerie atmosphere of DOOR IN THE FLOOR; and it certainly didn't need the shot of a red light turning to green in the final moments.]
THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR (69) (dir., Tod Williams) Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster, Mimi Rogers, Elle Fanning [Bad news on the Fanning front: apparently, there's two of them. Otherwise superb, from its restrained mournful score over the credits (you get the sense it's holding something back) and slyly out-of-focus opening shot; the whole film deals with the repressed and imperfectly-seen, and finds an unlikely hero in Bridges' selfish, implacable writer with his hard-soft voice - like a wave lapping on a gravel beach - and cold steel behind the lazy drawl, wandering around in flowing robes and wide-brimmed hat, unabashedly naked yet closed-up inside, lacking some measure of human empathy; his writing, monstrously, exploits his own tragedy - at least till the end when we realise the writing is what's kept him sane, letting him open his own Door in the Floor, just as his resentment for his wife - a bad mother, he sneers - isn't callousness but a sadness that she's not able to join him, isn't able to break through. Basinger excels as the wife, stirring at a young man's attentions, Foster is touchingly awkward as the boy she uses to salve her grief - in fact they use each other, not out of malice but simple need - even little Fanning gets a brief Moment For The Ages when she announces, "I've got sand in my crack" - but it's Bridges' film, a sad and serious man in buffoon's raiment, showing how a person can be good yet completely amoral; and the writer-director's film as well, building atmosphere through sounds in the distance (birdsong, a car alarm), calm and pitiless images, above all a sense of humour, or more properly a sense of absurdity. Just one question: what's the hip-hop song doing on the radio, when typewriters and Rubik's Cubes seem to establish the time as the mid-80s?]
GARDEN STATE (38) (dir., Zach Braff) Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm ["Last night your mother drowned in the bath"; cue Coldplay. Over here, over-medicated and waaay over-sensitive, at least in their solipsistic minds, it's a new generation of whiners and ennui-mongers - bored at a wild drugs party with quick lesbo kiss (there must be more to life than this...), terrified of feeling "numb" and emotionally remote (see also Scarlett "I didn't feel anything" Johansson in LOST IN TRANSLATION), desperate to do something original, scream into the abyss, get to grips with capital-L Life. Starts off so aggressively quirky - Zach in his all-white apartment, Zach's floral shirt blending into the carpet, Zach accosted by weirdos at the funeral (does he have an adenoidal Ray Romano quality, or is it just me?) - it feels like it might take off into home-grown surrealism, but instead we get Portman as the kook (forever offering too much information), Zach the long-suffering identification figure - who is not, please note, some loser, but an acclaimed celebrity forced to put up with this shit - forelock-tugging stuff about "the time when the house you grew up in is no longer your home", and the buck-passing, therapy-weaned Junior Narcissists flaunting childhood traumas because it's Not Their Fault, none of it is; "Still wanna compare fucked-up families?". The bad news? It's insufferable. The good news? It gave rise to this hilarious putdown. Good job Waz.]
CLOSER (76) (dir., Mike Nichols) Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman [Telling lies is often a kindness; telling the truth is often a form of cowardice. Maybe the theme gets underlined once too often, but it didn't wholly come together for me till the very last scene (when the true provenance of "Alice Ayers" becomes apparent), so I can't complain: the point isn't just that truth-telling is a minefield in relationships but also - more intriguingly - that we're all strangers anyway, we don't really know the first thing about each other, so it's better not to probe too much, the ideal of perfect honesty being itself a lie. Law's character - a writer of obituaries - works with euphemisms ("a convivial fellow" meaning a drunkard, etc) but likes the unvarnished truth in relationships, unable or unwilling to see he's just being a hypocrite - telling the truth that suits him in order to exculpate himself - when e.g. he breaks up with the earnest kiss-off line "I'm selfish, I'll be happier with her" (in fact he's emotionally a child, as other characters keep pointing out: "What are you, 12?"), and throws away his best chance of happiness with his insistence on Truth-telling as a test of fidelity; Owen's character, on the other hand, has no respect for Truth - "Without the truth we're animals," says Law, and that's exactly the word he later uses to describe his rival - elicits it just to throw it back in people's faces, finally ends up in a relationship - with a photographer, purveyor of another big lie - based on mutual deviousness and manipulation (yet, somehow, happy, or at least not unhappy). A splintered, dazzling film where everything can and does turn out to be something else, or another version of itself - the hall-of-mirrors scene is especially apt - just as lies can look like truths and vice versa (as when Portman gives her 'real' name at the strip-club), just as "stalking" can also be "lurking", and "spying" can be "lovingly observing". Nichols does wallow in the nastiness a bit, the red-in-tooth-and-claw view of Love (the heart as "a fist wrapped in blood"), setting it off against e.g. the minimalist design of Roberts' house, or the use of classical music over the chatroom scene (there's a moralism there, as there was when Kubrick used it in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), but the chatroom - and Portman's young, crystalline character - is also the brave, scary future, when Truth will be irrelevant and we'll all be whatever version of ourselves we choose to be. A fist in a velvet glove, airy dialogue with ferocious performances, a gripping combination of breezy and intense; Portman should perhaps have done that nude scene, though...]
GOOD BYE, DRAGON INN (67) (dir., Tsai Ming-Liang) Lee Kang-Sheng, Chen Shiang-Chyi, Kiyonobu Mitamura [Opening shot - after the clips from the titular martial-arts movie as it plays in a theatre - has the camera perched just outside the auditorium, peeking in through the curtains at the film as it unspools in the background. Translation? Films are the focus, the object of desire, but they're only a corner of our lives - there's also the curtain, taking up most of the frame, drab existence which is what Tsai observes in his (admittedly) rather calcified style. The style is slow but finally life-affirming because it works with frames-within-frames, different parts of a shot tweaked into harmony - see e.g. the early composition where a corridor takes up most of the frame but we also see a woman washing up in a room just off the corridor (both parts feature action, independent yet interdependent), or the (hilarious) wide-angle shot in the men's room, which starts off with a man at a urinal and slowly fills with people like an arthouse equivalent of the stateroom scene in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA. The movie-watching scenes are especially striking, the camera changing position all the time - now in front, now to the side - as it observes the (handful of) spectators so the sight-lines and angles get all jumbled up, creating a dynamic to match their swirl of emotion: Onscreen and Offscreen are in contrast (most obviously in the crippled old woman watching her badass onscreen sister) yet film-watching also gets equated with the complexity-in-simplicity that typifies the Tsai aesthetic, making it integral to Life in his worldview (and earning the melancholy, Death-of-Cinema ending). Tsai does need to move on, yet I wouldn't be surprised to hear this is his most autobiographical film; a minor, cinephile work of gemlike beauty.]
HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (52) (dir., Danny Leiner) Kal Penn, John Cho, Ethan Embry, David Krumholtz [Harold and Kumar go to White Castle! Ethnic minorities reach for the American Dream, which is open all hours but requires them to survive a tricky obstacle course (or something; it's a sad day when a stoner comedy comes equipped with its own just-add-water subtext). About 60% of jokes work - those that don't including "Battleshits" and the various gay-panic gags (also a motif in DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR) - but the scattershot, wide-ranging, top-this-if-you-can sensibility is its own reward. Bonus points for one of 2004's most intractable questions: "What's the deal with Neil Patrick Harris? Why is he so horny?". Why indeed.]
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (67) (dir., Thom Andersen) [For a film buff, this has to be the year's easiest sit; could've gone on twice as long and I'd still have been hooked by Andersen's parade of clips, even as his voice turns increasingly tendentious and tiresome. Starts off as a conscious exercise in deconstruction, foregrounding the background in Hollywood films - Los Angeles itself - in order to fight their seduction, their direction of our "voluntary attention", the hijacked and manipulated version of LA that amounts to a big lie; the film lives the charming fiction that architecture plays a 'role' just like actors do, so that e.g. a style of house that keeps getting used as an abode for movie villains can be said to be typecast or forced into unworthy parts. The point is that movies are a "betrayal of [their] native city", making the subversion appropriate - reclaiming the Reality that's been submerged into Image, bringing a sense of the past (indeed, a sense of self-esteem) to a city without history, calling in effect for a new way of seeing - at least while Andersen is drawing out his alternate reality from the background of movie reality; the film grows less interesting as LA becomes more central to its images (from "The City as Background" to "The City as Subject"), straying necessarily into conventional points on e.g. the anti-Hispanic "Zoot Suit riots" of the mid-40s, or the shocking revelation that the LAPD is indeed not much like Sgt. Joe Friday of "Dragnet" fame. Meanwhile, Andersen himself sounds increasingly dyspeptic, the kind of compulsive pedant who loves to point out the "bathrooms without toilets" in genteel 50s movies, the kind of spiteful academic with obscure axes to grind (what did David Thomson do to deserve this?), the kind of grumpy polymath who can't resist a rant or digression, from the intrinsic conservatism of disaster movies to the evils of "urban renewal" - and, for a man who complains so much of Hollywood "condescension", he doesn't do badly himself: "You could call it 'independent'," he notes acidulously (with invisible raised eyebrow) of his pet project, a forgotten 60s drama about Native Americans in the big city, "but it's not exactly PULP FICTION..."]
THE GRUDGE (50) (dir., Takashi Shimizu) Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, Grace Zabriskie, Ryo Ishibashi [Props to Shimizu for not going the George Sluizer route (whatever happened to George Sluizer anyway?), more or less retaining his original vision. This is near-identical to JU-ON, except in making Buffy a more central heroine and building to a proper climax - which itself, added to the better production values, Dolbyfied sound (is it just a matter of watching it on the big screen?) and fancier FX, is almost too much. The original's desultory low-tech air gave it the morbid melancholia of a handwritten suicide note whereas this comes close to exposing the cynicism behind the whole enterprise, the way most of it is actually filler, marking time while waiting for the next shock (on the other hand this is scarier precisely because it's more blatantly mechanical, inimical to - and unsoftened by - human feeling). Not sure if the Alienation Factor of putting Americans in Tokyo is really there, beyond lip-service - but is it just over-familiarity which makes that establishing shot in the opening minute, scruffy and variegated where you expect to see sleek downtown skyscrapers, such a breath of fresh air?]
CRIMSON RIVERS 2 (46) (dir., Olivier Dahan) Jean Reno, Benoit Magimel, Christopher Lee [Luc Besson no doubt fancies himself as the emperor of a Hollywood-by-the-Seine but he's more like a French Roger Corman, making genre pulp with flash and imaginative touches but no real coherence or follow-through. CRIMSON RIVERS at least kept getting weirder even as it stopped making sense, but this one gets less interesting once the partners team up (Magimel a very poor man's Vincent Cassel) and especially once the mystery starts getting solved, though it's still not quite clear why French-speaking Christopher Lee and his cohorts like to kill their victims in such outlandish and/or Biblically appropriate ways ("to intimidate the others," it's explained, unconvincingly). As in the first one, it's the eclecticism of the mix that's so enjoyable: we go from NAME OF THE ROSE-ish goings-on at a dark funereal abbey where it always seems to be raining to a furious martial-arts scrap (with pounding rock score) in a drug-dealer's apartment, then a cross-town chase with a monk in a cowl leaping from roof to roof like Jackie Chan; even the French Resistance gets a mention. Hard not to smile when a machine-gun emplacement rises up out of the forest floor, or Reno's dishevelled cop is asking Sherlock Holmes questions ("Why are the monks' fingernails so dirty?"), but it's too careless to make much impact, its climax hardly bothering to explain how our heroes get untied as the room fills with water, or why their female sidekick isn't with them (except that someone had to be outside, in order to save them). Best bit: the chase scene played out - or at least observed - on a supermarket's closed-circuit cameras; hope they keep that in the remake...]
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (56) (dir., Jonathan Demme) Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, Jon Voight [Fussy, sometimes choppy remake of a cool sardonic black joke, with added resonance and more human heroes (Schreiber is way more sympathetic than mask-like Laurence "I'm not loveable" Harvey; Denzel shows a vulnerable side, esp. when he's reduced to babbling like a crazy person). Demme was right to dispense with the original's famous, untoppable elements - the garden club, the dialogue on the train, the Queen of Diamonds - replacing them with shock cuts (from quiet scenes to strident TV reports, noisy rallies, even a speeding train), shallow-focus images and enormous close-ups for the big scenes. Also of course a screed against the culture of fear, curtailment of civil liberties and War on Terror, with the brainwashed war hero probably meant to represent the Democratic Party itself, keen to implement a "new agenda" (based on the environment, job creation etc) but hijacked by shrill talk of a "safer America" as well as his/its own schizophrenia; indeed, the real difference between this and the original may be that Frankenheimer dealt in something - Reds-under-the-bed hysteria - that was already a bit of a joke in '62 (McCarthy long since discredited), whereas Demme is deadly serious about the terror smokescreen and how it plays into corporate interests. Trouble is, he's not really right for a screed, too much the woozy humanist; what Streep's monstrous mother is railing against is the notion that "people are essentially good" and that's also been the animating force in his work (esp. in MELVIN AND HOWARD days), the film fizzing messily - tonally unfocused, from satire to melodrama via paranoid thriller - when it should perhaps be calm and caustic, like a Rosi or Costa-Gavras. Demme's heart is with the extended shots of soldiers playing cards under the opening credits, or the fat extra with the massive sideburns and Elvis-impersonator mien who sits in the background beside Denzel when he's checking out Manchurian on the internet; Demme's convictions do him credit, but he really needs to lay off the Statements and go back to making films about that extra.]
WICKER PARK (43) (dir., Paul McGuigan) Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard, Diane Kruger [Don't really remember L'APPARTEMENT after all these years, but I think I'd probably remember it if it were as simple (and simple-minded) as this remake, which shoots its wad halfway through and becomes a sorry little tale of the Wallflower's Revenge, spiced with ever-more-ludicrous ways for hero and (real, not wallflower) heroine to ju-u-ust avoid meeting each other - she calls but he's in the shower, he approaches on the street just as she's getting sidetracked by a little old lady asking directions, etc. (I'm also confused about how the Vengeful Wallflower can just produce the letter out of her handbag like that; has she been carrying it around all these years?) McGuigan builds a Wall of Style, but the gleaming look - split-screen with dissolves, lots of mirrors and reflections in a visual echo of the plot, incongruous bit of fast-motion when the duo get together - only succeeds in creating a distance; seems both too fast and too drawn-out, as well as aggressively contrived: "I can't leave it on his machine, it's too complicated," says Kruger, explaining why she absolutely must write a letter (thereby kicking off the plot), ignoring Rule 8121a of Good Movie Writing: If you need to explain it, it shouldn't be there.]
I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD (73) (dir., Mike Hodges) Clive Owen, Charlotte Rampling, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Malcolm McDowell ['Ludic', I think, is the word here (I've been wanting to use that word for years). Starts on a beach, and it could be the same beach where GET CARTER ended all those years ago ("Memories deceive," cautions the voice-over), this being another tale of a returning hard-man come to take revenge for a brother's death - but odder, more waggish and original, and perhaps an implicit reproach to all those recent, uproariously violent gangster Brit-pics that claimed kinship with GET CARTER while betraying its mordant, amused quality. Neo-Noir rather than LOCK STOCK, set in a windblown world of shadows and night, chance meetings, deserted train stations, missed connections, messages on answering machines, staccato dialogue and Owen as the most reticent, recessive hero imaginable, violence seen from afar or not at all, a film so allusive we wait 20 minutes for the big revelation - Owen to find out what happened to his brother - only for it to happen, when the moment comes, discreetly offscreen. Except, that is, for two scenes: the discovery of a suicide - where this allusive film suddenly turns melodramatic, stretching out the process of finding the body (up the stairs, into the apartment, calling out his name..) and showing the resultant shock and grief head-on, in drawn-out detail - and a doctor's exegesis of gay rape, where this reticent film suddenly starts crossing 't's and dotting 'i's, like a Message movie. Seems at first like a mistake, but in fact the jolts in rhythm are a bold (and funny) way of echoing the lopsided nature of this macho world, where any sign of weakness - the common point between suicide and sodomy being perhaps the giving-in to violence, with the victim as a passive (even, here's the scary part, willing) recipient - causes comical over-elaboration and hyperventilation ('normal' violence, on the other hand, causes not a murmur). Clearly impossible to see the film itself as being 'about' gay sex, or particularly bothered by it - it's about the topsy-turvy idiocy of a world that panics so defensively over it, making the whole thing a wry, playful (indeed, ludic) joke; the garrulous doctor, as others have noted, works like the shrink at the end of PSYCHO, the question being not what he says but why we need him in the first place. Hodges walks the tightrope magnificently, his shots made suggestive by a flapping curtain in a corner or glimpse of car-hubcap jutting into the foreground, adding touches of humour like the business with the rubber duck in the back of the car; the ending offers nothing, disconnection and incomprehension even more complete than GET CARTER's. You have to laugh, or you might as well kill yourself.]
CONTROL ROOM (71) (dir., Jehane Noujaim) [Riveting stuff, the only problem being it's a complete non-story: even the State Department admits Al-Jazeera try for balance, at least in the sense of inviting representatives from both sides, and of course they reflect - as suggested by the early scene in a coffeeshop - many of the opinions of the Arab 'street', not to mention being useful in decoding spin, telling us what those 'jubilant' Iraqi kids are really chanting about Bush, etc, so that, if you ignore that mad dog Donald Rumsfeld (which most thinking people will anyway), it's hard to see much of a case against them. Actually went in expecting a complete love-letter, so it was refreshing to find - is it just me? - that the military (esp. the cold-eyed but reasonable, obviously intelligent Press Officer) came off much better than the journalists, esp. the corpulent ex-BBC guy with the self-righteous air - "Democracy," he notes sardonically, pointing to footage of a bombing raid - and incipient martyr-complex (bragging he's going to "get grief" from the Americans) who's easily the most insufferable character I've seen on a screen all year. Noujaim definitely tries to make the channel look good - "Are we sure about this news?" asks a producer piously, right after we've heard Al-Jazeera being trashed by the US and UK for irresponsibility - but, unlike in most docs, there doesn't seem to be any character who's deliberately being given rope in order to hang himself. The film's impulse is generous and cautiously optimistic (it ends with the self-righteous hack inviting the Press Officer to his home for lunch), concerned with un-demonising the Other, showing what the two sides have in common - the Press Officer admits Al-Jazeera is really the flipside of Fox News; a senior producer admits he wants his children to study, and if possible live, in America - and shedding light on the facts of this very strange war: the Army's attempts to spin the media, and explicit preference for "embedded" journalists over loose cannons; the Arabs' own self-delusions, like their shock at the quick fall of Baghdad; the instantly-dated talk of "victory", receding ever further a year after the film was made.]
SON FRERE (49) (dir., Patrice Chéreau) Bruno Todeschini, Eric Caravaca, Maurice Garrel [It's the Designer Stubble Brothers! A sober low-key effort by Chéreau after the misstep of INTIMACY, though his roving camera never seems to probe enough (as opposed to, say, Assayas') and, despite the sheen of raw realism - e.g. showing us full detail of the patient being shaved prior to an operation - his actors always seem to be acting, as posed and affected as that designer stubble (even Garrel, in a small role as an old man, oozes Old Man tics and sage expressions). Interesting questions raised nonetheless: What does it actually mean to have a brother? ("You share a few things" then each leads his life, scoffs our hero, at least initially.) What does it mean to care for someone - is it really that special or just a mechanical response to a human need, something we might do for anyone who asked? Does a sick man use sickness and self-pity to take advantage of those who care for him? Nothing gets developed much, even our hero's gayness - the most intriguing aspect, insofar as being gay is what alienated him from his brother but also, in a roundabout way, what brought them closer ("He was the first boy I ever knew") - and the final act is just maudlin. Watchable, but it's no FAMILY DIARY.]