Films Seen - June 2005
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
WAR OF THE WORLDS (69) (dir., Steven Spielberg) Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins, Justin Chatwin [Here's a handy "Cyprus Mail" review; I won't say any more except I called it and Jeffrey Wells did not, back in 2001 (see the second paragraph), though it's obv. pathetic that Hollywood only feels able to reflect the collective mood through its blockbusters and summer movies. Not really a 9/11 movie, in any case, but archetypally Spielberg; why does he have so much persecution anxiety anyway?]
KOKTEBEL (63) (dir., Boris Khlebnikov & Alexei Popogrebsky) Gleb Puskepalis, Igor Chernevich, Vladimir Kucherenko [A deadpan, erratic road movie across the vast expanse of Russia that's also a wonder-struck tale of a hero - specifically a child hero - discovering the world. The set-ups have father and son dwarfed against enormous impenetrable landscapes, but the kid keeps asking about birds, worms, gliders, Koktebel itself, leafing through an atlas, taking photos, finding that a nasty-looking railway guard actually turns out to be quite helpful ("You never know," admits Dad) - finally striking out on his own, possibly standing for a young but resourceful New Russia refusing to be tied down by a drink-sodden, weak-willed older generation. Not much style but it's done with a sense of humour, the directors working mainly in becalmed static-camera master shots (one of the few early flourishes is a slow zoom from wide-shot into a close-up of the boy as he sits in a railway car, marking him out as the camera-ego) but playing wittily with the limits of the style: offscreen space intrudes when the ladder next to the boy suddenly starts to shudder alarmingly (it's Dad coming down from the roof), and a moment of excitement as the father tries to jump on a moving train is followed by a pointedly deadpan shot of the duo sitting side-by-side inexpressively eating apples - the drabness is a joke in itself. "Memories of Tarkovsky's MIRROR are conjured," claims "The Guardian", and maybe it's there - as with THE RETURN, it's hard not to think Tarkovsky with this beat and these landscapes - but there's little of the mystical in bits like the hilarious dumb-show between Dad and elderly peasant over a declined glass of vodka, carrying on a whole conversation ('Why won't you drink?' 'It's the boy.' 'What about him?' 'Don't ask...') through significant looks and raised eyebrows. The kid's plucked-chicken look is sweet, though his crying jag isn't too convincing.]
MONSTER IN LAW (34) (dir., Robert Luketic) Jennifer Lopez, Jane Fonda, Michael Vartan, Wanda Sykes [Here's another of those "Cyprus Mail" reviews - a bit flimsy, but then so's the movie. One thing I didn't stress enough is how repellent the constant emphasis on the mother-in-law's wealth and celebrity is - most gratuitous being perhaps when J.Lo's friend, who works in catering, tries an hors d'oeuvre at Jane's mansion during the wedding dinner and gratuitously exclaims, "Oh! These are so much better than mine!". Is the snobbery intended to excuse Jane's behaviour? To conflate character and actress, like the plastic-surgery gags? To give the film a patina of faux-sophistication? Nauseating, in any case.]
WHITE NOISE (42) (dir., Geoffrey Sax) Michael Keaton, Deborah Kara Unger, Chandra West [This is how they plan to end world poverty?!?! (Oh, sorry; wrong Jeffrey Sachs.) Formulaic genre piece, roughly in the RING sub-genre where TV - and technology in general - becomes a portal to a ghostly dimension (can we officially blame the internet for this trend where sitting alone in one's room watching images on a screen allows access to Truth - and a dark, prickly truth - hidden from those in the world outside?). Actually quite fun, in a formulaic way - Sax likes dissolve-heavy montages interspersed with shocks, his preferred soundtrack a cream-and-sawdust combo of piano music and sudden loud static; if there's a silence, you know it's about to get shattered by some loud scary noise - at least till it starts going south. Hero takes the tape with his wife's ghostly voice to listen to in the car - guess he couldn't find that David Gray CD - nearly causing an accident when she calls his name. Beyond-the-grave messages turn out to belong not just to the dead but also the soon-to-be-dead (why? why not!), allowing him to help like a hero in an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Later he talks back to his wife's spectral image on the screen ("Go where?"), even though she's dead and can't hear him; later still, Deborah Kara Unger falls what looks like 10 storeys from a balcony and doesn't die, just lies there and whimpers "It hurts". Not entirely awful, but MAN WITH TWO BRAINS fans will giggle when hero asks dead wife to send him a sign, "just any kind of sign"; Michael Keaton's crap taste in scripts continues apace.]
TRIPLE AGENT (75) (dir., Eric Rohmer) Katerina Didaskalou, Serge Renko, Emmanuel Salinger [A dry, sour little anecdote in a style best described as stagy, or just old-fashioned - a scene in a hotel prefaced with an insert of a sign reading "Hotel", stuff like that - full of tension not so much in terms of plot as hidden undercurrents swirling round the characters as they go through everyday decisions, momentous events taking place offscreen; we always know WW2 (and by extension disaster) is just around the corner, and Rohmer makes the passage of Time part of the drama - chapter headings count off the months, and e.g. a pleasant dialogue scene will cut abruptly to an inter-title implacably reading "September". The theme is his favourite theme, denial and self-delusion (which of course was also the mood of the time circa 1937) - the wife "completely wrapped up in my painting" as she happily admits, trying to be the voice of conscience when it's too late (her name - Arsinoe - seems significant but my Greek mythology isn't up to it; all I can find is the wife of Alcmaeon, who protested against a murder only to find herself falsely accused of it), the husband too delighted by his own cleverness - and perhaps too vain - to appreciate the truth about Stalin's Soviet Union; significantly he can't appreciate modern Art either, like the literal-minded friend who praises the wife's landscapes with "You can almost smell the grass", unlike the Commies downstairs who own a Picasso (and "Guernica" too gets a mention, visually surreal yet seeing the Spanish Civil War for what it is, not just the bloodless Great-Power chess game described by the husband). Not over-ambitious, but it hits its marks perfectly - and it's full of secret thoughts, like the "pensive child" who appears in a minor role but disappears before we get to know her; we dimly grasp there's more than what the characters perceive, and perhaps if we grasped it more fully it'd be less of a movie. The very last line, with its leap into out-and-out theatricality (two men speaking the line at the same time) - as if to detach us from the action, turning life and death into a game because of course it is, in the vast expanse of History - sent a little chill down my spine.]
BATMAN BEGINS (62) (dir., Christopher Nolan) Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman [Here's a helpful "Cyprus Mail" review due to being pressed for time, etc. One thing I'll say is that the film hasn't grown in my mind - maybe it's too much of a piece for things to stand out, or maybe its imagery is a bit too cramped and squared-away. Pretty good, nonetheless.]
SPANGLISH (56) (dir., James L. Brooks) Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman, Sarah Steele [Can't go much higher on something that took me three sittings to finish - it's too long, and doesn't seem to build or flow properly - but there's fascinating stuff here, a simplistic movie struggling with a more open-ended one. The simplistic one mocks Leoni's wealthy WASP for being driven and over-motivated, getting her told off by her alkie mother ("Your low self-esteem is just good common sense") and made up so she looks like shit in the humiliating climax. The simplistic one sides with Sandler's conspicuously under-motivated nice guy, and of course Vega's idealised immigrant mom who bristles with dignity and also says "Be happy" with a smile like the sun coming out. The more sophisticated one vaguely senses that when Téa deliberately buys nice clothes in a smaller size for her chubby daughter (Sarah Steele as the year's most unique movie presence, sweet and goofy in a role that cries out Victim) it's an act of love, not sadism - because painful dedication, the kind that has her jogging like a demon through the streets of LA, the kind the daughter will need in order to lose weight so she can fit into the clothes, is the way she lives her life. The more sophisticated one makes it clear Sandler's self-abasing passivity (his ultimate threat: "I'm going to set my hair on fire and start punching myself in the face!") is as weird and dysfunctional as his wife's acting-out. Vega is both films' weak point, because Brooks has nothing much to say about her - he can see her daughter (our narrator) becoming an insensitive brat seduced by the good life, but can't accept the mother as venal or corruptible enough to make her dilemmas interesting; probably the film should've skipped the dilemmas altogether and stuck to screwball, making Paz a Godfrey (as in MY MAN GODFREY) figure - Brooks's true people are the neurotics, that congenitally urban species, riddled with insecurities, familiar from the other (Albert) Brooks and Woody Allen, their disease a chronic self-consciousness. When Leoni - a great comedienne - says she's "very loose and meticulous at the same time" she could be Judy Davis in HUSBANDS AND WIVES, interrupting foreplay to explain "I can't go that fast; metabolically, it's not my rhythm"; when Sandler learns she's seeing someone else he instinctively recoils from his emotions, examines them as if outside himself ("I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to avoid knowing ... No, I guess there isn't"). Not, perhaps, a very good film but a prime slice of social anthropology, and a perfect expression of an insecure, articulate, middle-aged film-industry professional who desperately wishes he could be a young Latino mother living in the barrio, taking life as it comes - but instead finds himself surrounded by self-conscious, over-analyzed people saying stuff like this: "I agree with everything you said. I admire you for your feelings, and I hope to adopt them as my own."]
HOTEL RWANDA (67) (dir., Terry George) Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix [Often flawed, both in overplaying the plight of "the children" (cringe-worthy detail: the little girl who screams "Don't kill me, I promise I won't be Tutsi anymore!") and in tweaking white-liberal guilt so relentlessly - and sometimes unfairly. "The Belgians created the division" between Hutu and Tutsi, but in fact the latter had been lording it over the former since the 18th century, and there's so much emphasis on the outside world's failure to intervene in Rwanda (for quasi-racist reasons, it's implied, and the first thing we hear is President Clinton talking about Sarajevo, pointedly forgetting Africa) it's almost like the film itself is forgetting the massacres were in fact carried out by Africans - plus it's totally a cheap shot to criticise Western viewers for tut-tutting then going back to eat their dinners after watching the atrocities on TV, instead of doing ... what, exactly? (Ironically, the same people who rail against globalisation are usually the ones who want to impose a globalised duty of care.) Smart move keeping the murders just out of sight, however - if nothing else it makes it easier to identify, turning the massacre into the same nameless threat we (sometimes) feel looking out at the Third World from our own five-star-hotel societies - making the most of occasional glimpses (the first sight of bodies on a manicured suburban lawn, after the horror-movie build-up of the first 20 minutes, has the sickening power of Sarah Polley walking out into a world gone mad in DAWN OF THE DEAD Redux). Above all, major props for resisting any impulse to make the hero heroic; his motives may be pure but his weapons are ignoble - bribery, blackmail and the remnants of vestigial respect for white colonials' money and power. It's a bitter irony that fear of the West is finally what saves our hero, and unexpected to discover - assuming, of course, the story is true - that Rwandan killers weren't just caught up in a frenzy of killing but somewhere, in the back of their minds, thought about being someday called to account for their crimes; maybe intervention could've worked, after all. Deduct two points from the rating for each of the following: (a) if you're not a current-affairs geek; (b) if you don't vividly recall following the story on TV back in 1994; (c) if you're not a fan of 80s foreign-correspondent dramas like UNDER FIRE, THE KILLING FIELDS and THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY.]
THE PACIFIER (45) (dir., Adam Shankman) Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Faith Ford [Well, yes. I mean, it's right there in the title! Also quite authoritarian, though these surrogate-parent-taking-over-family movies often are (from UNCLE BUCK to RAISING HELEN) - it just seems more obvious here because Vin's playing a military man. Surprisingly he doesn't embarrass himself too much, perhaps because his flat, not-quite-there quality is for once an asset - an actor has to try for something before he can embarrass himself - and the film is genial and agreeably light on the poopy-diaper jokes (at least compared to the trailer); can indeed be seen as an "endorsement of all things military", to quote "Sight & Sound", but it's more that the hero isn't knocked for being soldierly, as in most such movies (see e.g. MAJOR PAYNE) - his methods work and the film doesn't mock him, but it's not as if he forces the family's teenage son to quit acting in pansy musicals and join the wrestling team (in fact, the opposite is true). A pleasant surprise, and it's nice to catch a glimpse of the famous Lauren Graham (presumably she gets more to do in "Gilmore girls") - but still far from a good movie, and I wish they wouldn't pander to the soccer moms' inflated sense of victimhood so much. "And they say war is hell..." pants Vin, exhausted by the rigours of rebellious teens and Girl Scout meetings. Yeah, whatever.]
MR. & MRS. SMITH (52) (dir., Doug Liman) Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Vince Vaughn, Adam Brody [Liman seems to be increasingly the master of films that move well and brim with clever touches yet have absolutely no weight (why do I suspect I'll forget this as quickly as I did THE BOURNE IDENTITY?). The final shoot-out is glorious John Woo pastiche - slo-mo, incongruously romantic song on the soundtrack, camera gliding round the action - before that the double entendres conflating genres, romance and action ("How many?" asks Mr., referring to past victims rather than lovers, and is predictably unnerved when Mrs. admits the truth, adding "Some were two at a time"), are all very bright and engaging. And yet, and yet ... There's no hatred in this stale marriage, as there was in WAR OF THE ROSES, no cold ruthless streak behind the relationship as revealed in PRIZZI'S HONOR, not even much of the TRUE LIES jokey sadism (this is basically TRUE LIES with equal opportunities): Mr. and Mrs. are secretly grinning even as they go about trying to kill each other - it's a dare, a game to impress and show off, a mating dance - and the big drag-out fight (punches landed, meat-cleavers thrown) gets jolly music and lines like "Your aim is as bad as your cooking" (then they make love, and in the morning have breakfast in the bullet-riddled ruins of their kitchen). Not that hatred would've been appropriate for the film's schema, which celebrates the sly, humanising irony of the unpredictable detail above all else - the resident computer geek being a girl rather than a guy ("Are you a vegan?" asks Brad), or Vince Vaughn's 101 offbeat touches as he offers advice, yells at his mother Rupert Pupkin-style or orders chocolate-and-vanilla ice cream - all of it implicit, ingratiating acknowledgment of the film's meta-nature, Brad and Angelina's Brad-and-Angelina-ness, and the audience's complicity in the whole instant-blockbuster apparatus. There's a level at which breaking up a shoot-out with a quick shot of Mr. and Mrs. in the elevator - looking bored, waiting for the action, listening to 'The Girl from Ipanema' - is all you really need from a movie, especially this kind of movie; that sense of play, that knowing sensibility. And then there's a level at which you're like, Wait, is that it?]
CURSED (44) (dir., Wes Craven) Christina Ricci, Joshua Jackson, Jesse Eisenberg, Shannon Elizabeth [Kevin Williamson's still making SCREAM, Wes Craven - on this evidence - never saw the joke in the first place. Hopelessly un-scary, which is actually not that big a deal except it does seem to be trying for 'boo!' moments and straight werewolf thrills (only when the Beast starts giving cops the finger does Wes acknowledge that the game is up). No pressing reasons to see it, except perhaps a clever subtextual one: all the indicators (incl. a gay man as scriptwriter) point to a 'coded' werewolf movie, where lycanthropy = homosexuality - talk of being "cursed", victims forced to hide their true selves, werewolf-ism turned into an AIDS-like condition passed on through sex - but in fact Williamson is turning the coding on its head so the 'curse' is in fact rampant heterosexuality, with the chief werewolf being the main hunk, scorned ex-girlfriends going werewolf to get revenge, a kid teased as gay using his increased werewolf strength to prove his 'manhood' (and get the girl), etc; being gay, far from being the disease, is in fact the redemption, so that coming out of the closet turns an obnoxious homophobic jock into the film's sweetest character. A deft reversal - and intriguing reflection of how far Hollywood (like TV) has come in the past decade - making up for a dearth of surface pleasures, though it's fun to see the old Maria Ouspenskaya role now played by assorted werewolf sites offering advice and dire warnings on Google; and let's hear it for Jesse Eisenberg, breath of fresh air and geeky-teen sidekick of the year.]
MY LITTLE EYE (43) (dir., Marc Evans) Kris Lemche, Sean Cw [sic] Johnson, Laura Regan [Flash and dash aplenty, esp. when the night-vision photography bathes the house in a green haze and makes everybody's eyes glow like possums' - but it never convinces, not the premise or plotting or style. Camera angles aren't much like a reality show's, the whole vibe is flat, character relationships not rich enough - after months together you'd expect the group to be buzzing with in-jokes, feuds and clique-talk, but they come across like a cross-section of stereotypes who barely know each other - and then the final act stops making sense altogether; not to get too spoiler-y, but why would people bet on the outcome of the game, given what's really going on? (It's not exactly left up to chance who survives and in what order.) One good shock - the plastic bag! - and one good paranoia scene, huddled round the internet, but it's hard to stifle a grin when one of the contestants turns to camera and exclaims, supposedly addressed to the reality-voyeurs following their every move: "I pity you! Why are you watching?".]
SAHARA (57) (dir., Breck Eisner) Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penelope Cruz, Lambert Wilson, William H. Macy [Operates on the same general principle as a dog show, only instead of dogs it's a parade of action set-pieces - some smartly turned-out, some frankly stupid, not especially related except insofar as they all appear in the same dog show. McConaughey looks like he should be renting out water-ski equipment - beach-bum tanned, with a smooth easy smile - placing him a long way behind Indiana Jones in the adventurer stakes, though admittedly it's hard getting lines like "Salaam aleikum. My name is Dirk" to come out right; his conspiratorial, tongue-in-cheek rapport with Zahn - as they go after a dictator so evil he "put the 'war' back into 'warlord'" - just about holds the film together, and the action rises to enjoyable heights whenever it's more than just a shoot-out - speaking of which, has there ever been a film with so many bullets missing their target? African landscapes are wonderful, Cruz does the self-righteous eye-flashing as a loveable world-saving medic ("It's a dangerous place for foreigners," she's told of Mali - not, presumably, the real Mali - and retorts, "I seenk more dangerous for locals"), the US government turns out to be reassuringly inept, and William H. Macy smokes some of the biggest cigars in 00s cinema; meanwhile, at least one of the five credited writers is playing smart, throwing in references to the Iraqi National Museum and lines like "This is Africa. Nobody cares about Africa" as if to say 'I haven't always done this, you know! I went to Yale!'. Give it up and write that novel, bud.]
UNDERTOW (48) (dir., David Gordon Green) Jamie Bell, Devon Alan, Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney [DGG tries a couple of tricks in the opening credits, but soon settles back into the ol' cornpone poetry ; country lore and superstitions - fireflies as "Nature's night-lights" - tow-trucks and rundown shacks, talk of chiggers by the side of the river, copses and forest glades with a timeless feel (actually it feels like the 70s, from the United Artists logo to the younger kid's floppy haircut). Green is so uniquely attuned and alive it can only be a matter of time till he makes his masterpiece - unless he already has, and it was called GEORGE WASHINGTON - but this just slides into half-assed irrelevance, dying a little each time someone utters one of the indigestible cute-nuggets that are still this director's biggest problem ("She was kind of good-looking ... for a Mom", or how about the lover who tenderly asks "Can I carve my name in your face?"); most reliable test is that it grows less interesting as it goes on, esp. the relationship with bad-father Lucas who at first gives the boys a taste of freedom only to degenerate into a standard villain (the NIGHT OF THE HUNTER template doesn't really fit this story), and the happy ending is the final insult. Maybe Green should just work with kids - at least till he grows out of this sub-Malick phase - whose natural gravity redeems his lyrical excesses; Alan is wondrous as the younger sib, even if he does arrange his books according to the way they smell. David Gordon Green in a Nutshell Dept.: "Sometimes it's the strange moments that stick with you".]
NO REST FOR THE BRAVE (74) (dir., Alain Guiraudie) Thomas Suire, Thomas Blanchard, Laurent Soffiati [The best Raul Ruiz movie in ages - sly, shape-shifting, whimsical, (self-)consciously dreamlike - except it's not actually made by Ruiz and, unlike the rather Olympian older man, Guiraudie is all about the people; indeed, as the final V.O. explains with disarming straightforwardness, other people are what makes life worth living - and why the film's hero, having tried throughout to run away from Death, finally accepts things as they are (as a bonus, the very end of the end credits brings the return of a character thought dead, and everyone walks off together into the proverbial sunset). There are surreal interludes, parallel universes, stories morphing into other stories, but also long dialogue scenes where the camera sits back and just observes people drinking, playing pool, conversation ebbing and flowing (one guy keeps trying to find out why his fridge switches off every time he turns on the lights); the central odyssey is punctuated - and undermined - by commonsensical comments from various rural bystanders (a bartender, a middle-aged couple by the side of the road), a negotiation with gangsters turns into a chat about the weather; there's a constant tension between Ruiz-like games and the garrulous realist-humanism of Renoir or Pagnol (or even the laconic realist-humanism of Guiraudie's own THAT OLD DREAM THAT MOVES) and meanwhile the film keeps mutating, from thriller to same-sex love story to neon-lit gangster movie (the soft DV look, initially a problem, becomes an asset in the final section), changing tack with airy abandon and a deadpan sense of humour. I know it's obscure French-arthouse festival fodder, but it's also ... well, really funny; the window gag is indeed priceless, but I think I like the 20 seconds of sudden spastic dancing as the band plays 'Pretty Vacant' even more.]