Films Seen - January 2006
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (68) (dir., George Clooney) David Strathairn, George Clooney, Frank Langella, Robert Downey Jr, Patricia Clarkson [Had me spellbound from the opening credits - shallow-focus snapshots of nightclub patrons in beautiful, lustrous b&w, with a fine pictorial feel for faces and expressions - though the atmosphere is obviously self-conscious in the way e.g. SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is self-conscious. In fact the whole film is self-conscious, and superbly so, most of it set in drab offices where men (they're mostly men) debate and argue, wreathed in cigarette smoke, using words like "iniquity" and "elocuted"; Strathairn's every move seems stylised and calculated - the hooded look, the slow deliberate speech, the cigarette held languidly at chin-level, like an elegant dandy - and Clooney the director adds to the self-consciousness with live-jazz interludes, making the film even more of a performance. It's a pointed (i.e. self-conscious) wake-up call, recalling a pre-dumbing-down age when not only might a subject quote Shakespeare to make his point, but the reporter might recognise the quote and expand on it - and of course an age when the media stood up for what they believed, unlike today's cowed TV news, hamstrung by the 'two sides' fallacy. You might say it has everything - atmosphere, performances, overlapping dialogue, worthy QUIZ SHOW message, lovely smoky visuals, vibrant compositions (often with Strathairn as a fulcrum at the back of frame) - except one thing, namely a plot; McCarthy's days are already numbered when Murrow takes him on, and the film ends just when you expect it to take off. Also of course it's a civics lesson - "People don't want a civics lesson!" admonish the suits as they sideline Murrow - deploring the triumph of "decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live", to quote one of his literate, brilliantly-delivered speeches - but the fact that the film quotes him at length, and so often, is enough to confirm it as more than a civics lesson. It's a labour of love.]
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (74) (second viewing: 81) (dir., Noah Baumbach) Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline [No real epiphany on second viewing; always knew it was going to soar. Maybe it's because I watched it the first time at a friend's house, so I couldn't quite immerse myself - and it's nothing if not immersive, a plunge into family dysfunction with no dead space and barely any let-up (it also reminded me - slightly - of my own family, but then it seems to remind most people slightly of their own families). Brief and impressionistic, sketched in family shorthand, the nicknames, in-jokes and recurring phrases - "He's not serious", "Don't be difficult" - parents and children use to navigate the chaos of being stuck in a lifetime relationship though they may in fact have little in common. The father is the weak link, too much of a monster (Daniels is great, but the character defeats him), but then every time it gets too painful it's also funny, and vice versa; details stick in the mind - ping-pong, bone structure, nervous Mom having to use the toilet before the big announcement, "One turtle would've made a difference" - and when love briefly surfaces it's like the sun coming out - Mom's unguarded smile when she agrees Walt is getting really good on the guitar, Frank handing Walt the much-contested cat with a borrowed-yet-sincere "That's all right, my brother". I wish "Film Comment" still did their Moments Out of Time, so they could say: 'A young man's face clouds over with defeat, or revulsion - or a first hesitant glimpse of understanding - as he gazes at Futility writ large, mismatched opponents in an intimate dance of destruction: the Squid and the Whale, locked in eternal violence.']
Total drive-by capsules (mostly done in 10-15 mins.) because I desperately need to get rid of this January backlog and catch up with e-mails, start seeing films again, talk to some flesh-and-blood people, etc. Sorry fans.
SEVEN SWORDS (35) (dir., Tsui Hark) Leon Lai, Donnie Yen, Charlie Yeung [Never been a big Tsui Hark fan, but this just seems badly directed. The camera's too close to the action, which might be an aesthetic choice - taking a genre (SEVEN SAMURAI Redux) that thrives on expansive vistas and shooting it like a character drama - except the characters don't seem to warrant it. Action scenes are laboured, choppy and too broken-up. Crucial shots aren't there, e.g. a shot of Fire-Wind dying at the end - it may be a cliché but you need that closure, esp. since the film shows everything else except that shot. The plotting has holes, or maybe I just stopped paying attention (when do they decide to retreat? and why?). Lots of striking shots here and there - dust from horses' hooves reflecting the light, that kind of thing - but mostly an endurance test; I know it has its fans (e.g. Gabe Klinger), but I've no idea what they see in it.]
PRIME (37) (dir., Ben Younger) Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep, Bryan Greenberg [Even in the trailer, I couldn't work this out. So a shrink finds out that her patient is dating her son. So what? They may or may not continue the therapy - I can see there's an ethical dilemma of sorts - but they'll laugh about it, share a couple of stories about the kid's bad habits, and if the couple end up getting married it'll be the big family joke, repeated every Christmas ad nauseam. What's the big deal? Only way Younger can make it work is by making the shrink (Streep) a total Jewish nightmare-mother - decked out in frumpy clothes and red-bead necklaces, so traditional she can't even abide her son's artistic ambitions, forcing him to paint in secret - even though she's also an Upper West Side psychiatrist with a glamorous well-heeled clientele, living in a fairytale Manhattan where people talk about Rothko and join the queue (there's a queue!) outside an Antonioni double-bill. She's so freaked out at the thought of her son dating an older, non-Jewish woman she can only sit there looking mortified as Uma shares details of his sexual exploits and the size of his penis - as you do - then stops talking to him altogether, even though the only way out is obviously to nag him into breaking off the relationship (she's a shrink, for heaven's sake! she should want to talk things out!). You wonder how long the film can sustain this kind of idiocy, and the answer is 'not long': Mom's role all but disappears, and standard relationship stuff takes over in the second half. (Just as well, probably.) Even the dialogue seems off, as when Jewish Uncle says don't worry about rain in Florida, they'll be in a condominium, and Jewish Aunt says "What? Condominium means no rain?" - which is totally the wrong rhythm, if you want to do the Jewish-family schtick it should've been "What? It doesn't rain in condominiums?", with that kind of upward rhythm. And yes, I doubt I'd have noticed that kind of silly detail if the film was working for me.]
JUNEBUG (61) (dir., Phil Morrison) Embeth Davidtz, Amy Adams, Alessandro Nivola, Celia Weston, Scott Wilson [You only have to look at ELIZABETHTOWN to see what an achievement this is. Sidesteps banality, right from the opening credits - and I'm sure Michael's right to say they illustrate "disphasure, two incompatible tempos for living" but they're also, on a less exalted level, a simple recognition that audiences nowadays groan inwardly every time an indie starts with white-on-black credits and a soft piano score. The film itself goes nowhere much but does it delicately, the deck not so much stacked as endlessly shuffled. The well-meaning Davidtz character isn't just a city woman but a patron of "outsider art", her yen for rural culture matched by Adams' gushy openness, crafting the opposite of the usual town vs. country dynamic - it's not two women somehow connecting despite their differences but two women wanting to connect with almost comical enthusiasm, yet somehow not doing so on any meaningful level. Davidtz starts to act girlish, copying Adams' demeanour without catching on to her sad, complicated feelings - she thinks Adams is 'authentic' whereas in fact they're both nostalgists, Davidtz for the 'simple' life, Adams for her old high-school self (and her husband's love). It's part of the way she patronises the bumpkins, like she does with the eccentric artist whose primitive art she prizes (the locals think he's retarded) - but just when she starts to look ridiculous the film makes her confront her denial, notably when she realises she can get the jump on her rival back in New York by playing the anti-Semitic card; her ensuing confusion, torn between stooping to the local wacko's level (after all, 'embracing' his culture can't be wrong) and holding on to her educated moral values, is a great uncomfortable moment. In a way she's better than them, and it's right that the film ends on her and her husband touching briefly as they drive away - leaving You at Home to decide if it's a gesture of optimism (they've Learned Something by their sojourn in the country) or a gesture of relief, as if coming back to the real world. Still a bit soft and self-consciously folksy - and note the gratuitous factory scene showing the husband with his buddies, lest he seem like too much of a grouch - but it could've been worse. Much worse.]
PROOF (48) (dir., John Madden) Gwyneth Paltrow, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis [Another SYLVIA, and I can't understand why they keep casting Gwyneth Paltrow as a woman on the brink of madness. Something about her defuses the grand emotions (is she too limpid? too pretty? too well-bred?); when she gives that sad-eyed look she doesn't look like a woman who fears she may be losing her mind - she looks like a little girl gazing wistfully out the window on a rainy day. The film itself is A BEAUTIFUL MIND with added female masochism and the kind of Idiot Dialogue where people talk around stuff instead of stating the obvious - the big scene with the notebook could've been resolved in two seconds (all Gyllenhaal has to say is "Show me your handwriting and we'll see if it matches") but instead it dilates and escalates, argues for the sake of arguing, reaches a climax ("It's your father's handwriting!") then subsides into silence, ready for the next big discussion. It's a stage rhythm for a stagy movie, complete with dramatic show-stoppers. "I didn't find it ... I wrote it!". Collective gasp, end of Act One.]
PARADISE NOW (43) (dir., Hany Abu-Assad) Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal [Wow. What with this in Foreign Language Film and MUNICH in Best Picture, the old saw about the Jews running Hollywood is looking more tired than ever (unless they're self-loathing Jews). Maybe the Danish cartoon row will be the spark, and people will look back on 2005 as a shameful time of Appeasement when we tried to make nice with Islamo-fascists and Oscar-nominated their propaganda - then again, maybe this will be the end of mindless demonisation (remember when Cherie Blair said she could sympathise with suicide bombers and Israel demanded an apology? remember the outcry when Bill Maher pointed out the 9/11 bombers weren't cowards?) and the start of trying to understand what makes people want to blow themselves up over a Cause. The reason is apparently that life in the Occupied Territories isn't a life - "We're dead anyway" - and the film is much angrier and more partisan than, e.g. DIVINE INTERVENTION, having the chief bomber justify his work by saying Israel would never accept a two-state compromise (implying the Palestinians would), among other slightly questionable moments (another one is having the bombers target soldiers, when in fact real bombers have been much more indiscriminate). Unfortunately it's just not convincing, whether due to casting, scripting or staging; the hero seems too sensible to be at the end of his tether, too down-to-earth to believe that angels will pick him up and take him to martyrs' heaven after he blows himself up, and too low-key to seem like he's living through his last day on earth. Plotting is haphazard (esp. in the second half) and ideas are scarce beyond the main idea, which is to debate the pros and cons of suicide bombing - with strong emphasis on the pros, the human-rights woman's assertions that "Resistance can take many forms" and "If we kill there's no difference between occupier and victim" coming off as misguided and irrelevant to daily life in the West Bank, the kind of things an outsider (and a woman) might say. Will the Academy really vote for this? The same Academy that booed Vanessa Redgrave for denouncing Zionists 25 years ago? Amazing.]
DEAR WENDY (42) (dir., Thomas Vinterberg) Jamie Bell, Danso Gordon, Michael Angarano, Mark Webber, Alison Pill [I think I know how these things get started. Danish intellectuals sit around chewing the fat, playing the European parlour game known as Trashing America. "It's terrible how they love their guns in America," says one intellectual. "Why, they love their guns as if they were women." Another intellectual (call him Lars) sits up slightly when he hears this, then goes home and writes it as an exercise - illustrating the cliché with a perfunctory storyline - and gets his mate Thomas to shoot it as an exercise, with stylised sets and a score which doesn't just plunder The Zombies but self-consciously admits to doing so. And there you have it - another of Von Trier's bracing attacks on hypocrisy, only with a dull climax and one-tenth the care lavished on DOGVILLE. And all because some Danish intellectual couldn't keep his mouth shut.]
THUMBSUCKER (54) (dir., Mike Mills) Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D'Onofrio, Keanu Reeves [Of all the films I watched in the pre-Skandie January bonanza, this may be the one I remember least - but it's pretty good. Starts off gauzy and sensitive (Elliott Smith and the Polyphonic Spree, fortunately not at the same time), its doe-eyed, floppy-haired hero looking like a Tim Burton creature; turns into a teen-movie BIGGER THAN LIFE - though GARDEN STATE also spoke out against the culture of medication, so it could be an emerging-zeitgeist thing - then takes another turn into sweet-natured whimsy, or maybe it was sweet-natured whimsy all along. Maybe it's actually about reinvention, and not trying to find a single Answer but accepting people as they are - or maybe it's like Tilda Swinton says, "We're all addicted to something". Hey, I'm trying...]
L'INTRUS (45) (dir., Claire Denis) Michel Subor, Gregoire Colin, Katia Golubeva, Beatrice Dalle [So I thought I'd just groove along to this one, having already seen much of it at Toronto '04 (I fell asleep, but not out of boredom), knowing more or less what happens and happy just to flow with Denis' funky stylings. Turns out it's harder to groove along to than I thought, both because I'd missed quite a lot in Toronto (more than I thought) and because Denis' rhythm isn't sensual and enveloping as in TROUBLE EVERY DAY - it's knotty and staccato, with short scenes and (surprisingly sparse) music favouring a few doomy notes per cue, like Neil Young's in DEAD MAN. I recalled the film as fresh and playful, but in fact it's stark and (yes) pretentious. Nearly fell asleep again, and I barely remember it except for the almost self-parodic travelogue shots (So he left that place and went to ... Tahiti!), though I think I got the 'meaning', for what it's worth: borders and intrusions, like I figured last time, with the rider that perhaps we are borders - between the past and future, between our inner world and the world outside. Subor's character tries to 'intrude' into his past, cross the border from his inner self to the world-at-large, but his soul rejects the intrusion just as his body rejects the transplanted heart. Something like that, anyway. Third viewing is unlikely, and unlikely to be more revealing.]
CAPOTE (63) (dir., Bennett Miller) Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr, Chris Cooper [A film of careful contradictions, carefully laid out. Truman seems fey and frivolous, but in fact he's tough as nails. (Exhibit A: "Folks think they have me pegged, and they're always wrong.") He seduces the young killer, falls in love with him, but also uses him to sell his book with cold, calculating self-interest. (Exhibit B: "I'm using him, but I fell in love with him.") He could perhaps have saved him but the fact is, he didn't want to. (Exhibit C: "The fact is, you didn't want to.") Actually quite gripping, despite the overkill - Hoffman's in his element and the visuals are crisp and tidy - but it's slightly depressing that a film designed as Oscar-bait (i.e. addressed to a more film-literate audience) should feel the need to be so explicit. Could someone explain why the fuss over Catherine Keener in this movie, btw? Is it just displaced affection for "To Kill a Mockingbird" or something?]
THE CONSTANT GARDENER (46) (dir., Fernando Meirelles) Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy [I really hate using my "Cyprus Mail" reviews here - different style, different audience - but Time is short so here it is. More on this in the review itself but just to emphasise, for those who didn't like CITY OF GOD, how making explicit what was implicit in that film (the uncomfortable feeling of being witness to Third World misery) weakens the result and makes it much less disturbing. Also apologies to Kent Jones for stealing his description of the lighting scheme in "Film Comment" - though I still have no idea how he can find this plodding beast "loose-limbed and improvisatory".]
THE BROTHERS GRIMM (47) (dir., Terry Gilliam) Heath Ledger, Matt Damon, Peter Stormare, Lena Headey [Another "Cyprus Mail" review, though it's not like I have much more to say (apologies for the second paragraph, which is pure padding). Meta-layer is the most interesting (last two 'graphs of the review), the Grimms already creators - like filmmakers - but not yet storytellers, working just for money instead of "magic beans"; Gilliam's faith in Imagination is touching, and it is borne out by his work, but he's crazy if he thinks he's a storyteller. Also, remember how the French are like Nazis and the Germans are oppressed. That was awesome (or at least mildly amusing).]
SYRIANA (68) (dir., Stephen Gaghan) George Clooney, Matt Damon, Alexander Siddig, Jeffrey Wright, Christopher Plummer [A cautious, rather shamefaced thumbs-up, because not only is it presumptuous - Hollywood playing geopolitics - reductive in the TRAFFIC style, verbose and overly wonkish but also, it seems ... just plain wrong, or at least outdated. The point seems to be that "Syriana" (the policy objective of creating a Middle Eastern country in the West's own image) is a myth, that in fact chaos in the Middle East suits Western oil interests, therefore Western governments, just fine - but in fact, if the past two years have shown anything it's that Syriana (or Iraqiana) is more prevalent than anyone thought possible, the biggest surprise being how easy US policy-makers imagined it to be. The film seems to be stuck in the old, 70s-derived mindset of government spooks - invariably in the pocket of Big Business - wreaking havoc for their own Macchiavellian ends, ignoring both how recent failures of intelligence have declawed the potent myth of the CIA (the notion of US agents masterminding assassinations à la PARALLAX VIEW seems a bit quaint nowadays, with known terrorists striking at will on a daily basis) and, more importantly, how the threat of Islamic terrorism has transformed Western priorities; despite the (rather half-hearted) suicide-bomber strand, one gets the impression Gaghan mapped out his script several years ago - certainly, what he seems to love are the old-style, murkily-photographed intrigues and conspiracies, Power and Money engaged in mutual back-scratching and "the illusion of due diligence" (the War on Terror barely gets a mention, though that could be a deliberate ploy to illustrate what a sham it is). Fortunately I love that stuff too, and the film is wildly enjoyable - informants whispering a name in a darkened room, corporate lawyers taking down a colleague with barely a flicker, blank-faced CIA bosses deciding to "put some space" between themselves and an agent in trouble - not to mention admirable; yes, it's annoying how it basically regurgitates all the stuff Gaghan read during his research (everyone talks like a position-paper) and yes, it's simplistic how Damon's family troubles act as a way-in (it happy-ends with him staggering back to the nest, bruised by his adventures in the Big World and ready to rejoin the wife and kid) - but how many Hollywood films have forced an audience to pay attention (and read subtitles) recently, or tried to spark discussion on current affairs? How many people even knew, or considered, that China's also on the hunt for cheap oil, and has a vested interest in Middle East stability and a secular, free-trading Iran so it can build a pipeline from the Persian Gulf through Kazakhstan and points east? A better film might've shown the conflicts this creates for Western policymakers - how the dream of Syriana is actually bad for business, and Arab sheikhs must be kept ignorant and irresponsible for the sake of short-term oil - instead of obfuscating with too many strands and trying to tar everyone with the same brush (hypocrisy in Texas boardrooms but also in Tehran nightclubs); a better film might've set out a vision instead of a glib little game of Everybody Loses. This one just wallows in exotica but it's good exotica, Chinese bosses in Saudi Arabia and Pakistani workers playing cricket; no-one says "Eye-ran" or "Moss-cow", though Damon does draw Kazakhstan on the map as he briefs the big-shots.]
IN HER SHOES (62) (dir., Curtis Hanson) Toni Collette, Cameron Diaz, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein [Kudos all round: I was dreading this movie, but I kind of enjoyed it. Clearly, any film where Mr. Right woos the heroine with gourmet food - "I'm an expert orderer" - is aiming for the kind of demographic that remembers sex along with tie-dye T-shirts and Nixon's impeachment, but even the 'feisty' retirement-home folk aren't allowed to overwhelm and MacLaine gives a real performance for once, tamped-down and a little world-weary. Takes its time, gives everyone their due and strikes a fine balance between the sisters: Diaz as the ditzy irresponsible one (she's not really stupid, just dyslexic) is revealed as a woman in denial, both about the past - she's blocked out all the bad stuff about her parents - and about the future, the fact that her looks are going to fade and she'll end up with nothing; Collette, the harried workaholic one, refuses to delude herself (it's a joke but also significant when she takes a photo of her sleeping lover, to have "proof" that she's found herself a man) but loves her sister despite all her flaws, nearly wrecking her relationship with Mr. Right by refusing to tell him of Sis's misadventures because "he'll hate her". Both are sympathetic, both problematic, and the result is a well-upholstered chick-flick made with laudable sincerity. I'd like to think the sun just came out accidentally or something when Diaz opens a book (ready to conquer her dyslexia) and the light suddenly changes - as though light were emanating from the book itself - but it's still somewhat sweet that they'd try for that kind of effect in this kind of movie.]
THE EDUKATORS (47) (dir., Hans Weingartner) Daniel Bruhl, Julia Jentsch, Stipe Erceg [Ever seen that "Far Side" cartoon set in a suburban living-room, with a bunch of swarthy goombahs meticulously moving tables and chairs in the background - one man standing slightly apart and guiding his fellows as they shift stuff around, to ensure nothing gets broken - while, in the foreground, the chief goombah tells the owner of the house: "Next time it won't be just your furniture we rearrange"? That's the Edukators, politely rearranging furniture and calling it a revolution - though their claim that nothing could be scarier for their rich-bourgeois victims than knowing they're being watched (scarier than being burgled, apparently) resonates oddly with HIDDEN, raising the notion of a coddled, guilt-ridden Europe where a bad conscience becomes a stand-in for anything bad actually happening. Also resonates with the film's (intriguing) theme, which is the impossibility of revolution when all its trappings and emblems have already been co-opted by the 60s generation, and the stalemate in the final act between the ex-hippy victim and his neo-rebel captors could've been eloquent if more had been done with it - but in fact the film grinds to a halt, petering out in simplistic political debate and inert characters; the hero's introduced as "weird" and a bit of a wild man but becomes increasingly conventional (casting the puppyish Bruhl doesn't help), while his tirade against Modern Society comes off as an incoherent rant (nobody's happy, people look like "scared animals", etc) rather than insightful or meaningful, least of all ideologically. Its impotence - the fact that it lasts 130 minutes and has nothing to say - is tiresome yet interesting, making the point better than Weingartner ever could; reading something like B-H L's smug missive to the American Left, it's hard not to think that at least America's polarised, with an intelligentsia fiercely opposed to the current government, just as the fundamentalist flank will presumably be opposed to the next (or next-but-one) government. How much longer can Europe go on with all its elites in agreement, united behind liberal, "inclusive", EU-approved rights and values, giving its numbed and jaded youth no recourse to rebellion except the lure of violent nihilism? Discuss, etc.]
CHAIN (69) (dir., Jem Cohen) Miho Nikaido, Mira Billotte [Chris Marker gets a much-deserved thank-you in the final credits but these free-form, avant-garde-influenced quasi-docs seem to be part of the zeitgeist at the moment - this is the third one I've loved this year, after TIME WE KILLED and THE WILD BLUE YONDER. Tempting to view it as proof of the liberation of filmmaking - the chestnut that 'anyone can make a film these days', with hi-def and the rest of the hi-tech revolution - except Cohen clearly isn't 'anyone' and this film clearly wasn't made on the fly (or on hi-def); it actually took six years, longer than most studio movies, though it's too bad he couldn't have developed the two women 'characters' in all that time. Some try to see them as actual characters but they always felt schematic, a rather narrow shorthand on two different ways to approach the Machine: the Japanese yuppie worships globalisation (it's ironic that she can't say the word "world") and all things corporate - she thinks Disneyland is "very beautiful" - but learns to her cost that her icons lack human values, including compassion; the homeless girl treats the System warily, like a woman in a world run by aliens, using it for sustenance, freebies and whatever stray moments of uplift it can offer (a few notes on a storeroom piano, before being turfed out by the salesman) - keeping alive the possibility of escape, finally (inevitably) swallowed but not destroyed, like Jonah in the belly of the beast. She exemplifies Cohen's approach, which is not to try and fight but to keep a distance, catching whatever beauty he can - and the film is very beautiful, more than I can probably describe: building sites at magic-hour, right-angled roofs cutting into clear skies, lonely planes chugging through clumps of cloud, and of course the shiny spaces of the shopping mall. The camera seems to be everywhere, watching a shaky old couple, a brother and sister lazily teasing, a boy thinking, a bird nesting, tourists, men with cellphones; the mall becomes the world - as confirmed by the final surprise, when you check to see where the film was shot - and a soothing world, even a seductive one. The style is like early Talking Heads, its plastic perfection both disguising its neuroses but also expressing them (because it's too perfect, too plastic). More zeitgeist detail: the steel factory turned into an amusement park, as in WORKINGMAN'S DEATH - another of the great free-floating tone-poems of 2005.]
THE ICE HARVEST (70) (dir., Harold Ramis) John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Platt [Ramis directs but Robert Benton co-wrote, and this is a film - like TWILIGHT and NOBODY'S FOOL - with a flimsy plot but so many peripheral pleasures it's impossible not to be charmed; I guess it's reassuring to know that money will always corrupt, and thieves will end up at each other's throats, but the real genius is the atmosphere, mordant humour and ironic sensibility (and performances: Cusack's nervous-rabbit quality has seldom been better used, though it's a shame they couldn't give BBT more to do). I appreciate the Scrooge-like Yuletide cynicism - "Ho ho fuckin' ho" - and the opening credits, scored to a doleful rendition of "Little Drummer Boy", showing lonely streets and fading decorations on a bleak wintry night, the creepy desolation of a town emptied by Christmas. I appreciate the voluptuous nudity in the strip-joint scenes. I appreciate Oliver Platt's raucous drunk act, and the way it shades into toxic and pathetic when we see him with his family. I appreciate the hard-boiled, rueful detail, the crushed resignation of late-night bars and drinking alone, and Connie Nielsen telling our hero: "It's against my religion to give out personal advice, but you should either sober up or get real drunk" (it's about as close as the film gets to affection). Above all I appreciate the Hemingway - or perhaps John Huston - tenor of its macho existentialism, the bitter sense of dreams worn out (mingling with drunken self-pity), and when Cusack tells the story of his father and uncle. His dad was respectable and upright, his uncle a drunkard and whoremonger; his dad died suddenly one day at age 54, his uncle died the day after. The moral of the story? "It is futile to regret. You do one thing, you do another ... So what? Same result". Disappointing final act, trying to resolve into a film noir with Nielsen as a late-in-the-game femme fatale, but it doesn't really matter; better to see it as a muted, deadpan joke, malicious and sardonic. "In this country, all that's left for men is money and pussy."]
MATCH POINT (55) (dir., Woody Allen) Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox [Woody dips a toe in a posh British milieu and finds (or creates) another nice Jewish family: Mum's a worrier and a bit of a nag, Dad - so we're told - likes nothing better than doing things for his family (whatever happened to the Evelyn Waugh style of packing the kids off to boarding school at the first opportunity?), the family business looms large for prospective sons-in-law and of course there's a mousy, methodical sister to court and marry - though of course she can't compare to the glamorous shiksa with the bee-stung lips. Scarlett Johansson is so much starrier, more incandescent than anyone else in the movie she seems to come from another planet, which is partly a good thing - she lifts the proceedings - but mostly not, because the class-divide aspect required her to be a little tawdry (she makes the aristos look hopelessly bourgeois); Allen seems torn between identifying with the hero - an interloper, like himself - and identifying with his urges, like Charles Grodin in THE HEARTBREAK KID (or indeed Woody himself, in his pursuit of various shiksas over the years), which may be why the film runs an untypical two hours, as if he needed time to convince himself Hero was doing the right thing (part of his solution is to make Scarlett increasingly hysterical, which is both out of character and uncomfortably close to the misogyny also implicit in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS: hysterical women are dangerous). Then again, maybe it runs two hours just because it's so long-winded, its architecture painfully obvious - the tennis-as-sexual-metaphor, the final musical symbolism (he could've had opera but instead chose ... Lloyd Webber), Meyers twice insisting on paying his own way in the early scenes so as to establish his concern about (lack of) money and concomitant ambition (strangely, the references to money disappear once that's been established); dialogue often thuds - "Shall we go to your place or mine?" "He's right, my dear, I think you've had one too many G&Ts" - reaching a nadir in the cops' stiff exchanges, and some scenes, like the first lengthy conversation between Meyers and Mortimer, could've been trimmed to a quarter of their length; it's very obviously a film made by a 70-year-old auteur. The "exuberant godlessness and embrace of chance", to quote Amy Taubin in "Film Comment", is indeed mildly bracing, but even that is fuzzily worked out - the resolution actually includes two acts of chance, the first illustrated by the tennis-net motif (hence apparently significant) yet cancelled out by the second. At least when Hitchcock told a Cosmic Joke he didn't fluff the punchline.]
TWO FOR THE MONEY (38) (dir., D. J. Caruso) Al Pacino, Matthew McConaughey, Rene Russo, Armand Assante [As with many bad (or blah) films, a case of narrative muddle, mixing up its through-lines so it's neither one thing nor the other. Pivots round a basic reversal - gambler with a golden touch losing his touch - and what destroys him should be the realisation that he's been played and betrayed by his mentor figure, except the film also twists another, cheesier strand, making him a "pure" country boy corrupted by success and the good life (he stands for the Spirit of Sports, which is why he's able to predict sports results so instinctively). Maybe it's a case of protecting Pacino's mentor character, throwing in the trite Rise and Fall stuff so he won't seem like too much of a bastard - esp. since he's playing his patented Life Force ("Every day with Walter is an adventure") with a touch of the Victim (he's an ex-addict with a weak heart), making the film near-insufferable when it could've been merely bewildering. Random annoyances, adding nails to the coffin: smarmy McConaughey pulling the hottest girl in a classy restaurant just by sidling up to her and whispering, "You're beautiful. I want to get to know you" (it's the way he tells 'em), then later becoming top dog by the well-worn expedient of waiting till the other salesmen have yelled themselves hoarse making their pitches, then looking the TV audience straight in the eye, throwing away the script and Being Honest ("I'm not gonna sell you..."). Concept of Pacino and Russo as a husband-and-wife team - both damaged people, speaking the secret language of recovery - is a good one, but Pacino's so top-heavy with barking Italian blarney nowadays he's like an ageing prosciutto, doing Falstaff in a drunken stupor: "So the object here, my tall athletic religious friend, is to win..."]
SAW II (29) (dir., Darren Lynn Bousman) Donnie Wahlberg, Shawnee Smith, Tobin Bell [To paraphrase Faithless: 'God is a serial killer'. Deification of the central nasty is the most depressing part of this very depressing movie - "testing us" for our own good, confronting his flock with Death to make them "appreciate Life" - though the total absence of plausible plotting runs it a close second, cynically assuming the audience won't care as long as they get their pound of flesh (and blood). I knew the original SAW was going to be dumb when the man under death sentence threw a handsaw to his prospective killer without having first cut off his own chains, and I knew the sequel was going to be dumb when the six people trapped in a house, knowing they're being poisoned by slow-acting nerve gas, are told they can find the antidote if they work out what they all have in common - and MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO SOLVE THIS RIDDLE till the film is half-over, preferring to yell, curse, break down doors and rush around wildly ("No more talking!" yells someone, which is kind of hilarious since talking is the one thing not on the menu). The film ups the gross-out factor on its predecessor, going the FINAL DESTINATION route of elaborate deaths - most spectacular is perhaps a girl who falls into a pit full of syringes, emerging with needles sticking out of her face and limbs; most convoluted may be a guillotine-like contraption round a character's neck, the blades timed to close (and decapitate him) unless he finds a key which has been sewn into his face, forcing him to tear out his own skin with a Stanley knife - but the cartoon violence, once employed for subversive ends in old splatter movies, is now firmly in tune with the times (at least in America). The Hannibal Lecter-like psycho allegedly tests for Darwinian instincts, ensuring the "survival of the fittest", but in fact anyone who takes the initiative dies horribly and the challenges are impossible anyway; only if you "play by the rules" do you stand a chance of survival, even when the rules are counter-intuitive - thus, the cop is apparently expected to stand by and watch his daughter get killed (as opposed to attacking her killer), a test with obvious echoes of Abraham and Isaac; like TV reality shows and so many other 00s artefacts, what pretends to reward individual enterprise is actually rewarding obedience and conformism. The film's thrust is clearly authoritarian, its religious undertones dishonest, its view of mankind bleak, its violence righteously nasty. What kind of audience would ignore all this and wallow in sensationalist gore? "Obviously you've never been drunk"; "Of course I've been drunk. I spent three years in college!"]
THE WILD BLUE YONDER (75) (dir., Werner Herzog) Brad Dourif, Franklin Chang-Diaz (as himself) [Rating is provisional - i.e. could go up - due to the trio of asshole Russian twentysomethings who came in about halfway through, sat down next to me and almost wrecked the movie (a) by talking Russian in outrageously loud voices, oblivious to my shushing (presumably part of some psycho-fallacy whereby knowing other people can't understand what you're saying fosters the delusion that you can therefore say anything, in whatever tone or volume), and (b) by coming in just as the film took off into glorious abstraction, analogous to someone talking through the second (but not the first) half of TROPICAL MALADY. The film is in the same ballpark as that one, though also the same as GERRY in being very deadpan-funny in its early stages - Brad Dourif as a grumpy space alien, informing us that "aliens suck" - and of course the same as LESSONS OF DARKNESS and Herzog's ongoing quest to find magic in the visible world. KOYAANISQATSI and its ilk are also similar but Herzog is more loose-limbed, more poetic - even though, in this case, he uses ethnic chanting as relentlessly as the QATSIs did Philip Glass - and more tongue-in-cheek; footage of astronauts doing nothing very much in their spaceship is solemnly introduced as a "secret tape" They didn't want you to know about, but the payoff is an endlessly lithe and lovely shot of free-floating crew members gliding into bunk-bed sleeping-bags in graceful tandem, enfolded in a single fluid vanishing like synchronized swimmers or flowers blooming in reverse-motion. Later they go after new worlds, trying to escape alien microbes - "even though the alien microbes turned out to be no big deal," adds Dourif grumpily - and the film eases into trippy wonderment, proving (as a NASA scientist points out) that creative chaos may be the secret to the universe, and increasingly showing its contempt for Man who'll colonise anything if a shopping-mall can be erected on it - though in fact it turns out the aliens are no different, making the film a kind of paean to dumb mysterious Nature, unimpeded by sentient beings. Best closing thank-you of the year: "We thank NASA for its sense of poetry."] [Second viewing, no change in rating - but since the film has come and gone (and been mostly ignored) in the meantime, I may as well explain what I think it's doing, which begins with mapping an alternative, consciously absurdist dream-world. What if the people in old b&w aviation footage were really aliens? What if a deserted building somewhere in heartland America was really a remnant of an abortive culture started (and abandoned) by extraterrestrials? What if astronauts on a perfectly uneventful moon-trip were actually carrying out a top-secret mission to save the world? Herzog encourages the viewer to spot the magic in the ordinary - the possibility of things, like the startling beauty of a zero-gravity somersault on the 'boring' space trip - but then he does more: When extraordinary images finally appear (the underwater world, strikingly beautiful) they're played down, deflated and casually dismissed by Brad Dourif's grumpy alien. There's a push-and-pull in WILD BLUE YONDER, our spark of transcendence (our own 'possibility') vs. our limitations as human beings. At first the universe seems unmanageably big; then the NASA scientist points out a possible way to navigate it - worm-holes burrowing through space-time - raising the thought that Man (through Science) may actually triumph someday; but Man (says Herzog) is shabby and petty, and if we do ever touch the extraordinary it'll only be to bring it down, domesticate it and use it for shopping malls. The film captures the conflict inside every adventurer - longing to climb the mountain while secretly knowing it's best left unconquered (only pristine Nature, a world without people, is truly extraordinary) - and the conflict inside every poet, longing to find the hidden Truth of things (beauty in the everyday, magic in the ordinary) even while secretly knowing the Truth about things is drab and unpoetic; how could it not be, when they're part of the world of humans? Hard to get into (I guess) if you're not already on the wavelength; Herzog doesn't make much of an effort to explain himself. But I think I get it, and I think it's fascinating.]
HUSTLE & FLOW (54) (dir., Craig Brewer) Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson, D.J. Qualls [Vaguely retro credits with a 70s feel and pointed gratuitous nudity in the dancers' dressing-room raise hopes of a DEVIL'S REJECTS melding of hip-hop and blaxploitation - but meanwhile Brewer is reflecting neon signs in puddles and working a sleek, ingratiating style. Wishful thinking finally wears off, exposing its very soft centre - the lure of Da Pimp seducing a brash young filmmaker, though also playing into his commercial instincts. Even when our hero throws a whore and her baby out into the street he's cold and intense but not really ugly (there's a kind of controlled grimness, no sadism), and it's a moot point whether that's because Brewer doesn't want to make him ugly or doesn't want to make anything ugly; woman-bashing lyrics barely register in the film's wide-eyed, let's-do-the-show-right-here optimism, reflecting the director's own energy and verve. Some may wince at the blind wholesale adoption of Black culture (because it's cool, and questioning it might be racist anyhow) and "by any means necessary" - black-American rhetoric from an earlier age - now used to fuel the dream of hip-hop stardom, almost as perverse as the strong egalitarian vibe (a middle-class wife learning it's okay to mix with hookers; a famous rapper rapped for putting on airs and forgetting the 'hood) in a tale of Making It Big, and moreover Making It Big in a genre that emphasises endless self-aggrandizement. But who cares when Howard's nailing everything from a noble smoulder to the heart-in-mouth euphoria of being transported by a piece of music, and DJ Qualls is waxing philosophical and the cast raise the roof in the year's most exuberant show-stopper? Whoop that trick...]
MY NIKIFOR (51) (dir., Krzysztof Krauze) Krystyna Feldman, Roman Gancarczyk, Jerzy Gudejko [Its strength is also its weakness - namely, that the Art isn't included. For those unfamiliar with Nikifor - apparently a famous Polish folk-naive painter - it's hard to know if our hero (a younger, less famous, more 'scientific' painter) befriends the eccentric old man because he admires his work, because he feels envious and expends his envy in charity, or just because the old coot's in bad shape and he takes pity. The magnitude of his sacrifice - helping Nikifor costs him his marriage, and finally his career - makes the absence of overt motivation puzzling, then fascinating, but also leaves the film scrambling to placate confused viewers by underlining Nikifor as a great peasant 'character', like the grandma in SINCE OTAR LEFT: Nikifor putting spoonful after spoonful of sugar in his tea (he tastes it after four or five spoonfuls, makes a face, heaps in another spoonful, tastes again, smiles contentedly), Nikifor being ornery, Nikifor trying to negotiate a revolving door. The film inches close to cuteness, and Krauze in any case soft-pedals the dangerous friendship with a string score, snowscapes and simple tableaux - one, repeated shot is a soothing, harmonious composition of snow, trees and fence (the fence balances the trees as a spindly horizontal to their spindly verticals). By the end, one's almost pegged the film as a heartwarming tale of a prickly yet endearing old man - the actor (actually actress) helps, with her caved-in face and wheedling cantankerous manner - so the rich procession of paintings just before the credits comes as a shock, re-casting it as an AMADEUS-style drama of artistic mystery, the secret of creative genius in an unworthy-seeming body. Except of course it's what AMADEUS might've been without any of Mozart's music until the final credits, plus a lot more shots of country fields and snowfalls. Mileage may vary, esp. if you're up on Polish art history.]
THE SUN (54) (dir., Aleksandr Sokurov) Issey Ogata, Robert Dawson, Kaori Momoi [Quite reminiscent of MOLOCH - especially the streak of zany humour and when Hirohito walks out, a lone figure in a top hat, into foggy daylight, pale and dreamlike - but if there's one closest equivalent it may be Jay Rosenblatt's HUMAN REMAINS, humanising a dictator not to justify or make sympathetic but to emphasise his mystery by (paradoxically) reducing him to functions of flesh and blood, as if to wonder how this bag of bones who ate and slept and shat every day could yet be Mao, or Hitler or Stalin. That's partly the theme here - Hirohito's conscious abdication of his godlike status, joining the ranks of men in what's both humiliation (the last thing we hear is of a courtier having committed harakiri) and cathartic redemption. The camera records his (presumably real-life) quirks, like silently working his lips as he listens or waits to speak, or else focuses on detail like the sweaty crown of a retainer's head as it appears from the Emperor's POV - because of course the Emperor (like the film) looks at human beings with the coolly astonished eye of a naturalist, happily alert to the specimens' common humanity; that's how he bonds with MacArthur, and how he knows, finally, to do the right thing. Sokurov colours everything shades of brown, strips down his soundtrack to bird-chatter, static, the rumble of planes in the distance - rising to explosions and screams when the Imperial hermit-crab has his dream of War - approximating the lonely inner world of a man who had everything, and only wanted less. Hard to love a film about negation and introversion, but it's good to see a return to (relative) austerity after the slickness of FATHER AND SON. Did I mention how brown it is, though? It's really brown.]
FUN WITH DICK AND JANE (42) (dir., Dean Parisot) Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Richard Jenkins, Alec Baldwin ['Satire or slapstick?', as they say in the comedy supermarkets - and it goes for slapstick almost every time, blunting a potentially sharp fable of downsized expectations in the "land of opportunity" via consistently too-broad comic choices aimed at Carrey's core constituency (who presumably still have the same sense of humour as when they were in high-school or college round the time of the first ACE VENTURA, except they're now taking out mortgages and wondering where the good jobs went). It always goes too far, taking the edge off the joke - Dick and Jane starting to frequent all-you-can-eat buffets as they scale down their lifestyle is satire, soaped-up D&J crawling under a neighbour's lawn sprinklers to take a shower is slapstick; a menial job greeting customers at "Kost Mart" is satire, a menial job as an aerobics teacher (cue clueless flailing around) is slapstick; Jane helping hubby escape when he gets arrested as an illegal immigrant is satire, hubby escaping along with a carful of illegals who promptly pile into their car is slapstick; Dick's attempted straight face and cat-that-swallowed-the-canary grin as he ascends the elevator to the Executive Floor is satire, letting loose (in the elevator) with a spastic rendition of "I Believe I Can Fly" is slapstick. The premise too gets slapsticked, esp. the emphasis on silly disguises and when it emerges other employees have also been turning to a life of crime, though in fact the life-of-crime high-concept takes up barely a third of the movie; you almost wonder why they chose to remake this property - but the clue is perhaps the one angle where satire prevails over slapstick, viz. the politics of crooked corporations. Dubya appears repeatedly (at one point lauding "an age of unmeasured prosperity") and also appears when Baldwin - as the nasty CEO - appropriates his infamous "Now watch this shot", while the credits sarcastically thank Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen et al., as if the film had been an excoriating exposé instead of a goofy comedy. One gets the sense Hollywood types feel guilty about being stuck in a frivolous profession, and desperately long to engage with the Issues of the Day; then again, one also gets the thought that if they started doing their jobs properly - e.g. by making a comedy with teeth instead of copping out again and again with raucous slapstick woo-hoo moments - maybe they wouldn't feel so guilty.]
DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE (58) (dir., Hubert Sauper) [More and more, docs are indistinguishable from 'real' movies; even this one, which isn't especially stylish - let alone flashy - does artful things like the shot of two guys in a field talking mysteriously of something "overloaded" then a distant rumble cueing a pull-back and pan-to-the-right, showing us what they were talking about (the wreckage of a plane right beside them) as well as the source of the rumble, another plane taxiing in the background. The 'plot' depends on an analogy, the Nile perch - a species of predatory fish which has annihilated the ecosystem of Lake Victoria in Tanzania (being more powerful than the other fish, a nightmarish extension of 'survival of the fittest' as per the title) - as analogous to the First World's domination of the Third, exploiting its resources and leaving its inhabitants to starve and die of AIDS; like the perch, Europeans are outsiders (no-one even knows how the fish ended up in Lake Victoria), like the perch they're good for business but wreak devastation, and there's even a scene of African leaders consciously overseeing the conversion of the lake into a money-making wasteland, just as they're generally happy to "sell [their] country" to the exploiter. Nothing wrong with any of this, except once you've grasped the analogy there isn't much to see except poignant scenes of the lakeside inhabitants' miserable lives (street-kids sniffing glue, a prostitute wishing she had "more education"), a little of which goes a long way - Sauper could've shown only the single, shocking shot of a cop grabbing a kid by the scruff of the neck and punching him full in the face, and still made his point - and it's hard not to wonder how valid the analogy is in any case, since the perch's destruction of the ecosystem is, ecologically speaking, an unqualified disaster whereas turning the lake into a giant fish-factory can (presumably) have long-term benefits; we're told perch-fishing created jobs, and even though those jobs are low-paid and dirty, workers who used to be farmers further inland confirm that life on the farm was even worse. Might've been useful for Sauper to dwell less on grim living conditions (however fascinating) and bring more evidence e.g. that the lake's current ecosystem isn't viable, maybe because the perch themselves can't survive in a devastated lake (already the water is murky, because the fish that used to feed on algae have been wiped out), though the film is really more a social document - and wallow in misery - than a lawyer's brief. As it is, it's at least possible to imagine an unseen, nascent middle-class between the factory owners and glue-sniffing street kids - not this generation but perhaps the next one - and to hope that things can get better, even in a globalised world ruled by the World Bank and IMF, as long as the money keeps rolling in. I'm sorry, it's the "Economist" reader in me.]
TORREMOLINOS 73 (43) (dir., Pablo Berger) Javier Camara, Candela Peña, Juan Diego [Unreliable rating due to faulty DVD (the Tartan (UK) disc kept disintegrating, which could be just my copy but beware, take care etc), but I'm pretty sure I saw 80-90% of it - and I wasn't too impressed, esp. after the period flavour of Spain in the late Franco era wears off in the second half (a society so conformist that TV schedules apparently ended with cartoon kids exhorting viewers: "Now let's all go to bed, so tomorrow we can all go to work!"). Perched uneasily between comedy and drama, and it fudges the most intriguing aspect - viz. that our heroes think of themselves as artists but are actually whores, having sex (albeit with their spouses) for money. Might've been the germ of a statement on the compromised nature of filmmaking, esp. since filmmaker-husband Camara increasingly merges with his camera - in the end it 'does' what he himself is unable to do, namely impregnate his wife - but the conflict never really arises, and the switch from whore to artist is disappointingly easy. Not really funny, or incisive or outrageous or anything; guess all the good stuff must've been in the bits I missed.]
THE KEYS TO THE HOUSE (64) (dir., Gianni Amelio) Kim Rossi Stuart, Andrea Rossi, Charlotte Rampling [Estranged father meets disabled son; I was dreading this, based on the plot - but I hadn't reckoned with Gianni Amelio, surely among the most under-appreciated masters working today (yes, I know about his Golden Lion); he works in a similar register to another under-appreciated Italian master, Ermanno Olmi, what might be called poetic humanism except that's a meaningless term - it's really a case of dealing in people, making them the building-blocks of one's art, yet also determinedly allowing them their dignity so the key to their condition must be found in rhythm, environment and the steady observation of action and reaction. It's also a case of having an eye for the eloquent image - and the film is riveting right from the first shot, a man's doleful face set off against a background of glittering lights and out-of-focus shuffling (he's sitting on a bar stool, with people coming and going behind him); later there's a long-shot conversation lost amid the din of a subway platform, later still a train corridor reaching back, vortex-like, behind our hero - all before he even meets the disabled son, observed with a startling ease and vivacity that takes over the movie. Played by Rossi, a real-life teen with muscular dystrophy, he combines joie de vivre with a deep abiding strangeness, opening up straight away - none of the usual hackneyed moody resentment giving way to shy bonding - yet never quite revealing himself, coming off almost autistic, unnatural, like an alien or a ventriloquist's dummy. Locked in his misshapen body, leaning on a cane as he tries to walk, he acts like he's never really learned human responses, alternately patient as an old man (e.g. when he gently asks his dad not to hold on to him: "I'll tell you one last time: I can do it alone") and raucous and impulsive as a 3-year-old; he's a great character, sailing right past his disability not because he's 'brave' but because he's oblivious - and because he's a child, and the point is made that he won't find the same sympathetic response (and may well lose the joie de vivre, or retreat into his world) as he grows up. Amelio doesn't ask for pity, not once - indeed some might say he makes the boy too cute, too charismatic (though Rossi doesn't give the impression of having been directed) - but nor does he pretend that everything (or anything) is going to be okay; another (more) disabled child's mother quietly wishes her daughter would just die, and the film ends in irresolution and a harsh, ungiving landscape, father and son still profoundly apart. The father is the film's biggest problem, Stuart's bland handsome face nearly wrecking the movie, diminishing both his character and the central relationship - one regrets the father wasn't played by that dour stocky actor in the opening shot - and Rampling does her best in an awful role, mostly there to enable exposition and ask questions like "Why do you do it? You want to redeem yourself for something?". Still less maudlin (and more haunting) than it had any right to be; I really need to track down OPEN DOORS and THE WAY WE LAUGHED now...]
MAD HOT BALLROOM (50) (dir., Marilyn Agrelo) [Very, very SPELLBOUND, not just in being structured around the contest ("8 weeks until competition" reads a caption before we even know who anybody is) but also in the sanguine view of melting-pot harmony - kids of all races and creeds united in dancing; only the Muslim kids don't dance because it's against their religion, but they're (seemingly) happy to sit on the sidelines and DJ. Gets a bit more thorny when the subject of competition comes up - whether losing hurts the kids' self-esteem (and should be downplayed) or constitutes "learning for life", and should be confronted - with intriguing, perhaps unintended class-struggle contrast; the middle-class school, where the kids talk of nannies and gay marriage, the principal doesn't like the idea of competition and a touchy-feely teacher literally breaks down at the thought of 'her' kids growing up, doesn't get very far in the contest - the aforementioned teacher huddles with the kids crying floods of tears when they get knocked out and one kid walks around in bewilderment saying "I don't understand", clearly unfamiliar with failure - while the Brooklyn Hispanic school with the tough-love teacher, win-at-all-costs mentality and 97% poverty rate literally dances rings around them (it's like two competing versions of the American Dream, the new harmonious one elbowed out of the way by the old rude vision of the hungry immigrant). As a film, not as skilful as SPELLBOUND - you can tell which school is going to win, for one thing - and more nakedly manipulative, dwelling on the kids' precocious sayings and cute little faces (one of them, the "very special" Wilson, has a Hollywood career his for the asking); very slick, obviously filming with several cameras - there's reaction shots, like in a normal movie - and staging bits for visual/dramatic impact (a boy and girl dancing on a hilltop, stuff like that), not to mention all the carefully contrived scenes of eavesdropping on the kids' private conversations - which don't feel fake exactly, just inorganic. Guaranteed to get any audience clapping and cheering, and maybe that's what documentaries should aspire to nowadays.]
LILA SAYS (34) (dir., Ziad Doueiri) Vahina Giocante, Mohammed Khouas, Karim Ben Haddou [What does Lila say? This, for instance: "See how tiny my mouth is. It's incredible." "What's incredible?" "That I can fit a great big penis into it". She scandalises the Arab-ghetto neighbourhood - esp. when she claims to have given head to the Devil himself - bewitches and bewilders our teen hero who's a "talented writer" and could go take a special course for budding writers ( = assimilate into French society) but prefers the GOOD WILL HUNTING approach of hanging out with his delinquent buddies. Clearly, Lila is either (a) a total male-fantasy figure or (b) a sad virginal girl putting on a pose, but one isn't drawn to examine her true nature with inexpressive Vahina - I almost said Vapida - Giocante in the role; nothing feels fresh or convincing, from the ghetto trash-talk to the creaky framing device where the kid's writing a book about Lila (the film is based on an autobiographical novel) and recalls How She Changed His Life, to scenes like the young lovers taking a ride on his moped with French pop on the soundtrack. Five days later, I've almost completely forgotten it.]
KEEPING MUM (36) (dir., Niall Johnson) Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Patrick Swayze [Not your grandmother's black comedy - though in fact it's exactly your grandmother's black comedy, with Maggie Smith as Granny herself, serial-killing in a good cause like the little old ladies in ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Firmly in the WAKING NED DEVINE mould where a smidgen of 'edgy' material is released in a cosy village setting and systematically smothered in genteel mitigation till nothing remains but a slight astringent aftertaste - the murderous old lady is a Mary Poppins, standing for old-fashioned values like God and good manners, smart and very sensible (she doesn't twitter or seem gaga like the killer innocent in the original LADYKILLERS), and as soon as the plot looks like forcing the characters to accept her 'immoral' worldview the film cops out with a shameless twist, ensuring our sympathy (who can hate a granny looking out for her family?). As in much British comedy (paging Richard Curtis!) it's the tepidness that's really offensive, sticky rural whimsy - the village is called Little Wallop - gingered up with occasional smut so it's cute but not too cute, a clear spiel for God-fearing values cancelled out by a gormless vicar (embarrassing everyone when he tries to pray) and a sharp teenage daughter who opines that "people who find God lose their sense of humour"; just harsh enough to flatter the audience they're watching something 'real' (a bullied son, a wife on the verge of a nervous breakdown), dark enough to make them feel a little naughty, then softened and diluted so it's perfectly acceptable and sends them out in a glow of good feeling. Blech.]
PRETTY PERSUASION (56) (dir., Marcos Siega) Evan Rachel Wood, James Woods, Ron Livingston, Elisabeth Harnois, Selma Blair [Alternate title (borrowed from a current UK bestseller): "Is it Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit?". Uncomfortable viewing, way beyond the mixed motives of the (superficially) similar ELECTION, because it builds to an indictment of a whole society founded on fear and hypocrisy - the fear ranging from fear of Jewish conspiracies to middle-class women's fear of leering car mechanics, the hypocrisy trying to disguise the fact that everything is driven by self-gratification. The heroine's base motives - just a jealous girl trying to get her kicks - are equated with her monstrous Dad thinking only of himself, with the Columbine-style school-shooter - only he doesn't even pay lip-service to hypocrisy, openly admitting that it felt good, which is why everyone's so scared of him - and, most daringly, with quote-unquote Operation Iraqi Freedom and the US foreign policy that invokes pious motives but is really only after its own gratification (I'm ashamed to say I didn't realise what the Arab girl signified till it was made explicit, though kudos for not actually using the term "collateral damage"). Builds up a memorably rancid atmosphere, the sense of introversion and dead-endness - and sense of a secondhand culture - echoed in quotes and repetitions; Kimberly repeats porn-movie dialogue and snippets of phone-sex (the ending finds her in front of the TV, transfixed by the media labyrinth now including herself), Mr. Anderson the closet-perv teacher - another kind of hypocrisy - gets his wife to quote from her essay, and of course flashbacks act as another echo-chamber, quoted almost always unreliably (one pointedly shows a conversation which the person having the flashback couldn't have heard); it's like characters forever performing, forever cloaking themselves in whatever raiment will best get them off - or get us off, and it's typical that the prurient first image (Evan doing a sexy dance) turns out to be her performance for an audition. Siega's restrained style adds to the creepiness (the family dinner in wide-shot, the three girls on the couch talking in a single long take), denying us the easy escape of flash and dash, but much of the middle section sags - the useless lawyer's antics in the courtroom aren't all that funny, and the one-month-earlier/later back-and-forth comes across as a gimmick to disguise a lack of inspiration. Awesome worldview, patchy movie qua movie; still enough peripheral wit, HEATHERS snark, malapropisms and twisted one-liners, as well as enough caustic rage to make you wish you never have to meet the writer in real life. Unfortunately, I already have.]
SKY HIGH (53) (dir., Mike Mitchell) Michael Angarano, Kurt Russell, Kelly Preston, Danielle Panabaker [Clever and amusing, but most of the humour is on a par with the street-signs given a piscine twist in SHARK TALE or the anatomical puns in OSMOSIS JONES (where Osmosis and his girl talked of going down to the kidneys to see the Stones) - high-school conventions transferred to a high school where everyone has superhero(ine) powers, so e.g. the school nurse says "Let's take a look at that chest" and proceeds to do exactly that with her X-ray vision. Plot trajectory is predictable and the subtext (Special Powers = Puberty) is actually text, nor am I enamoured of the self-esteem Message about sidekicks being the real heroes - esp. since the young protagonist does eventually find his super-powers, making the whole deconstruction rather hollow (I'd hoped for something smarter, like contriving a situation where his ordinary-kid-ness actually became an asset - a death-ray that makes everyone else's special powers backfire or something). Still, it has 'heart', plus a good-natured retro feel and smattering of laugh-out-loud moments. "You're not that boy with the six arms, are you?..."]
JARHEAD (46) (dir., Sam Mendes) Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Lucas Black, Chris Cooper [The ultimate 'Against the war, For the troops' movie, though in fact it's even more schizophrenic. The APOCALYPSE NOW scene in the first half clearly says the Army has turned these young men into desensitised killing machines, but the final act - esp. the key scene where Sarsgaard breaks down when denied the release of killing, and the bit with the old Marine on the bus - comes surprisingly close to saying it's a shame how soldiers aren't allowed to be soldiers anymore, that they've become obsolete in the new hi-tech warfare run by bureaucrats and desk-jockeys; one can even take the recurring theme of fidelity - unfaithful girlfriends vs. "Semper Fidelis" - to imply that our heroes have been betrayed by the Corps, having joined with the promise of good red-blooded carnage and mayhem only to find themselves standing impotently by while fighter planes blow the Eye-raqis to pieces. There's an obvious irony there - but Mendes lets it slip away, misjudging the distance from his jarhead protagonists, adding too much camaraderie and pro-soldiering scenes that didn't even have to be there (e.g. Sergeant Foxx in contemplative mood, telling how much he loves his job); even the boredom isn't allowed to get too boring, broken up with superficial incident, so there's no momentum for the eerie wartime images (a horse wandering through burning oil-fields, etc) to actually become eerie. Maybe it's that gung-ho, give-them-hell militarism - the kind where troops shout in unison about going out to "kick some Iraqi ass" and their CO grins and says "Oh boy, I just got a hard-on!" - is already a joke for the movie, whereas e.g. FULL METAL JACKET is more powerful because Kubrick is partly in sympathy with the military mind; his sensibility was exacting whereas Mendes' is sloppy and flashy - he sticks "Don't Worry, Be Happy" over scenes of basic training; he shows a sign reading "Oil" in Arabic and troops lining up beneath it, as if in worship; he overdoes the desert heat as bleached-out light so excessive it looks like the lab screwed up the print. He's a broad-strokes director and doesn't have the mental scalpel to dissect his characters, or the coolness to detach himself - so they're good guys getting a raw deal, and isn't it a shame how young men waste their lives this way, wars are so unnecessary in this day and age, etc (meanwhile the film's centre of gravity tips over into sympathy for soldierly bloodlust, though Mendes would presumably be horrified to hear that). The scene where the guys celebrate war's end by firing their guns in the air to the strains of "Fight the Power" is so mind-boggling - Fight the Army for dehumanising them? Fight the High Command for not giving them a chance to fire guns in anger, like proper soldiers? are US soldiers co-opting a song written for the ghetto? is the whole thing an ironic joke because US soldiers are co-opting a song written for the ghetto? - I can't even parse it.]
INSIDE DEEP THROAT (65) (dir., Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato) ["You think it's a good movie?" someone asks DEEP THROAT director Gerard Damiano. "No," he replies almost sadly, "I don't think it's a good movie". And he's right - but it gets more than it deserves with this rollicking doc, even though it once again reiterates the standard spiel rehearsed in EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS (not to mention BOOGIE NIGHTS), the early 70s as a Golden Age destroyed by the twin forces of conservatism and corporatism (in this case represented by censorious puritans and a cynical porn industry, respectively); the most honest comment in the whole movie may be Al Goldstein of "Screw" magazine, inadvertently explaining the appeal behind this kind of story: "Now it would take 5000 Viagra to get me hard - but back then I was young and virile..." Still great fun as it skims through the DEEP THROAT controversy, armed with memorable characters and colourful detail - the judge asking for an explanation of the clitoral orgasm - and turns it into more, the first rallying-cry of the nascent Religious Right and the first shot in the US culture-wars that now rage out of control; also quite poignant as a snapshot of what did seem the dawn of a new era, and even Hugh Hefner's confusion is sweet (lighting his pipe, in unconscious imitation of a 50s patriarch) as he waits, on a talk-show, for women - men's "partners" in the new revolution - to quit this feminist righteousness and come to their senses. Linda Lovelace at 40 looks, in a weird way, even sexier, though it's clearly just my fantasy of the slutty porn-star lurking within every respectable, gone-to-flab housewife.]