Films Seen - March 2008

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

STEP UP 2 THE STREETS (28) (dir., Jon Chu) Briana Evigan, Robert Hoffman, Adam G. Sevani Gotta-dance clichés, generic young-love scenes and any number of inspirational speeches (the heroine gets a 'Do this for your dead mother' speech; the uptight dance-school instructor is won over with a 'Remember why you started dancing in the first place' speech; our heroes sweet-talk the Streets - a dance contest - into letting them compete with a 'We thought the Streets was about different people coming together' speech); all this plus a rather worrying subtext, making the white-middle-class appropriation of hip-hop as explicit as any film I've seen. Heroine initially hangs out with her ghetto "family", a street-dance gang called the 401, first seen invading a subway carriage with their dance routines, playing on white commuters' fears - one old man clearly thinks he's about to be mugged - getting chased by the cops, making dancing synonymous with danger; alas, the 401 turn out to be the villains of the piece, outdone and finally outdanced by our heroine's nice-kid, rainbow-hued (but mostly white) classmates at the Maryland Dance Academy - except, in a final irony, it's the school misfits who end up being heroes, those who dance "under the radar", and the school duly sees the error of its ways and rewards them (the poor bastards of the 401 aren't so fortunate). Not just a piece of corporate teen culture, steering its audience to the congenial and unthreatening, but an artefact from the Age of MySpace, illustrating the co-opting of 'subversion': doing authentically dangerous work outside the System is doomed to failure, but you can totally break the rules, be original, Do Your Own Thing - as long as you do it in a recognised corporate forum, where the powers-that-be can keep an eye on you. None of which would matter very much if the dancing were amazing, but it isn't. Why does Chu cut away every five seconds? And does no-one care that this so-called "street-dance" is just 80s break-dancing with a smidgen more Attitude? They even have the same moves, forcryingoutloud! 

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (51) (dir., Julie Taymor) Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson Warning: Don't watch this on video. Took me nearly five hours to finish, because I was forever getting up to check my email, have a snack, Google "music rights Beatles", etc - not so much out of boredom, just because it's hard to concentrate for any length of time on a random collection of music videos held together by the merest semblance of plot and/or ambience. Tempting to say it could only have been made now, when the 60s Narrative has receded enough to permit its reduction to a series of evocative captions (we were young, we made love, we fought the cops...), but in fact HAIR was 30 years ago and that one seemed equally sketchy so maybe it's just down to the counter-culture itself being a matter of broad-strokes idealism, unencumbered by too much thorny detail. Clearly a labour of love, but in fact the Beatles-songbook approach soon becomes a ragged game of can-you-top-this?, pitting mad juxtapositions, unusual orchestrations and imaginative settings - "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is surprisingly affecting when sung by a sad-eyed cheerleader on a football field - against the sheer familiarity of the songs themselves; when "Dear Prudence" actually gets sung to a woman named Prudence who's locked herself in her room ("Won't you come out to play?") one reacts with wary bewilderment, staying on the alert for the tap-dancing soldiers or psychedelic elephant that's bound to crash in at any moment. Cheers for the brilliantly theatrical device of reducing Vietnam to a scale-model of a jungle landscape trampled by (full-sized) American soldiers lugging a Statue of Liberty; jeers for then including conventional grunts-in-'Nam footage anyway.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS (47) (dir., Wong Kar-wai) Norah Jones, Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman What's Wong with this picture? The love at arm's-length, exacerbated by the lovers being hundreds of miles apart, is very Wong; the way it imbues inanimate objects with Meaning - from sets of keys to security-camera tapes - is as Wong as the onetime obsession with pineapple tins in CHUNGKING EXPRESS; the emphasis on addictive behaviour, drinking, gambling or of course becoming obsessed with a person, is as Wong as it gets. What's not-Wong is perhaps the (quite American) faith in self-improvement, Jones coming back from her road-trip a different person - she admits as much - having learned from her experiences, also perhaps the upbeat implication that getting involved with people can be useful insofar as they're "mirrors" for our own flaws and virtues (previous Wongs found it goofy, sweet or tragic, but never useful), and certainly the rather too-explicit dramas of the people Jones observes - they spell out their problems in so many words - a rare concession for this most elusive filmmaker. Definitely low on inspired ideas, though still lots of shooting through painted glass, banded veins of window-blinds and so forth, plus a few trademark shots of subway trains at night, neon lights glowing in their empty carriages; quite effective in its emphasis on love's detritus, all the wreckage left behind, also probably right to go for tenderness over passion - but two rights don't make a Wong.

VANTAGE POINT (58) (dir., Pete Travis) Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver Blame "24" if you must, though it hardly invented the gimmick thriller (even "24"'s real-time schtick ripped off NICK OF TIME, not to mention HIGH NOON - not to mention Aristotle's Unity of Time, albeit condensed for effect); point is, the gimmick here works - "8 Points of View. 1 Truth" - mostly because any film which (by definition) goes to cliff-hanger every 10 minutes is bound to be exciting, esp. when it's also constantly adding new wrinkles to its plot. Just needed adequate handling and it gets a lot more than that, though it takes a climactic car-chase to make it clear that the people in charge know exactly what they're doing (it may be time to start noting editors as well as directors and DPs; this one is Stuart Baird, as safe a pair of hands as you can find in the blockbuster business). One could even claim it's making a point on the War on Terror, its ostensible subject - viz. that things look different depending who you talk to - though in truth repetition dulls its impact; watching the terrorist explosion again and again just makes it seem like ... well, a gimmick.

DOOMSDAY (56) (dir., Neil Marshall) Rhona Mitra, Adrian Lester, Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell Starts like 28 WEEKS LATER, a killer virus threatening humanity - or at least Scotland - then takes a left turn, revealing not the usual flesh-eating zombies but a MAD MAX rip-off, a post-apocalyptic commune of rowdy scruffs led by a Mohawked sadist; then it shape-shifts again and suddenly you've got medieval knights in armour, Malcolm McDowell as a mad scientist and gladiatorial combat in a kind of improvised Thunderdome - then it shifts again and our steely heroine's at the wheel of a sleek sports car with a full tank of gas, pursued by home-made death chariots (a riff on the chase climax in THE ROAD WARRIOR) with Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" on the soundtrack. As cheerfully sloppy as THE DESCENT was tight and claustrophobic, and Marshall still doesn't care very much about character arcs or dramatic punchlines (the love-triangle sub-plot in DESCENT was tossed away; the heroine's "personal quest" in this one - as implied in the prologue - is deliberately forgotten); actually more reminiscent of genre-fusing hybrids like RESIDENT EVIL, though this kind of promiscuous mix-and-matching seems to be a British thing - HOT FUZZ did it too, albeit played for a different kind of laughs (modern British culture seems very magpie-ish in general, from sample-heavy dance hits to the world map of London's restaurants). Still exciting, for all the wilful cheesiness, kickass action scenes including the final pursuit, the chase through the city that culminates with Mitra leaping on a train at the last possible moment, and the one-on-one with the armoured giant. Shame about the frantic over-editing though.    

OUR DAILY BREAD (50) (dir., Nikolaus Geyrhalter) Diminishing returns, but the best of it - especially in the early scenes, when its people are mute and remote - kindles an effectively eerie vision of humans as alien masters of the planet, dominating the lower orders with their uniforms, computer screens, intricate machines, neon-lit corridors and implacably efficient industrial killing-spaces (the mind, inevitably, goes to concentration camps); even on their coffee-breaks these people seem impregnable, a more cold-blooded, doubtless more advanced life-form than the singing slaughterhouse-workers in BLOOD OF THE BEASTS. Trouble is, it feels the need to explore every aspect of agri-business (even a little mining and quarrying, which is surely a cheat given the title) but the animal-related stuff is hugely more compelling than the fruit-and-veg stuff; there's only so much tomato-picking a person can take, but scenes like the assembly-line for baby chicks, or the woman whose job is to cut off (dead) pigs' trotters all day long, slicing them off with a pair of shears as they roll by on hooks upside-down - or the final slaughter of the cows, or indeed the scene where a calf is born, gasping its first painful breath on the road of life (if only it knew...) - should be seen by everyone.  

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES (47) (dir., Mark Waters) Freddie Highmore, Sarah Bolger, Mary-Louise Parker Quite refreshing to see a kidpic geared to red-blooded action instead of portentous fantasy - the house-under-siege, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13-ish climax is exactly the kind of messy hand-to-hand combat we've been waiting years for from that Potter boy - even better that it's John Sayles co-writing, getting in touch with his B-movie self from 30 years ago (I like to think a focus-group gasped out loud at the scene where our hero takes a kitchen-knife to his own father). Odd, on the other hand, to see a kidpic with terrible lead performances - a sense of conviction is usually a given but the always-overrated Highmore is stiff as a board, especially when acting with himself in his double role (the whole twin thing seems unnecessary, but maybe they just toned it down after seeing Freddie's wooden readings and excessive reactions - he mugs to almost every line - in the brothers-together scene). Score is over-active, tension mild, rhythm fast but monotonous. Also, are there really parents in the world who chastise their truculent kids with "At least acknowledge this is not the right way to deal with your anger"? Jesus.

VIBRATOR (56) (dir., Ryuichi Hiroki) Shinobu Terajima, Nao Omori Intimate Strangers - two lonely people coming together - is a perilous genre, especially played as road-movie; might be too on-the-nose, the couple's relationship shifting with the shifting surroundings and so on, and of course the bonding itself will almost always feel familiar (it's a festival-film cliché, not to mention LOST IN TRANSLATION). This gets points for being spiky, esp. when the heroine veers close to full-blown psychosis - she's a sad-eyed singleton with an eating disorder and tendency to hear voices; he's a working-class trucker and former yakuza who's kind "out of instinct", treating her gently not necessarily because he loves her but because he senses she's damaged - and it also avoids the trendy trap of withholding information about its heroes (i.e. being the kind of movie that refers to the couple as "The Man" and "The Woman"): we get a fair idea of who they are albeit mostly, and not incidentally, of his outer world and her inner world (her thoughts appear as intertitles, jaggedly intruding on the action, often at odds with her apparent expression). Still a bit dull, for whatever reason; maybe an absence of style - maybe you need Claire Denis in FRIDAY NIGHT mode for this kind of thing - maybe a slight over-obviousness in dramatic devices (bulimia? yawn) and the lonely girl wanting to touch someone and the ham-radio in the truck being CQ which (we're told) stands for "Seek you", etc. "Am I being too self-conscious?" Little bit.   

THE KING OF KONG (67) (dir., Seth Gordon) "If you do not know the next pattern coming up in a Tron light-cycle event, you will lose your life!". Videogame geeks taking themselves waaaay too seriously is the oft-repeated joke here, set against self-deprecating family man Steve Wiebe, also tying in (I'm betting consciously) with the gaming industry's current re-branding drive as it aims to make itself totally mainstream and reclaim gaming from the geeks - "Work is for people who can't play videogames," sneers arch-villain Billy Mitchell - for the ordinary joes (the fact that even Wiebe's own mother admits he's probably autistic kind of gets lost in the shuffle). "He is not cunning and manipulative," explains Wiebe's wife - which is ironic because the film is, taunting Mitchell with "Everybody Knows" to make a non-libellous case for his cheating as well as (I assume) staging phone calls and adding demonic inserts to make him look as nefarious as possible, incidentally invoking the debate on how far documentaries can borrow fiction-film devices without compromising their claim to truth (it's one thing staging visuals to illustrate a certain state of mind, like the kids dancing on the hilltop in MAD HOT BALLROOM, quite another when judgment's being passed and one character pitted against another). There's a good guy and a bad guy - and it works like gangbusters, it'll make you stand up and cheer, etc, especially the ending when Wiebe gets accepted in the gamer community (that being ultimately the truest definition of winning and losing), yet it might've been made by that very community, using sneaky Billy Mitchell tactics to trumpet the paradigm-shift from Mitchell to Wiebe. Gripping, slick and secretly fascinating; could've used more close-ups of DDG girls, however.     

GLUE (64) (dir., Alexis dos Santos) Nahuel Perez Biscayart, Nahuel Viale, Ines Efron Utterly familiar territory - bored adolescents, sexual awakening of - which however isn't a deal-breaker in this genre because the dynamic is frozen to begin with: youthful heroes can't do wrong in this kind of film, because they're defined by the fluid, tentative stage in their lives - the more they fuck up, the more they're Experimenting (it's not even a question of the film morally approving of their actions; even something like HEAVENLY CREATURES - which obviously doesn't approve - draws its tragic power from the in-built reflex protecting its protagonists). The genre therefore operates on empathy, identification and - to some extent - nostalgia, which is why the slightly shopworn verité style in this case nonetheless works, going in close and intimate (and apparently improvised) with a restless camera, epileptic editing and filtered/saturated visuals (Dos Santos in the DVD extras says the film is itself "like a teenager", which is fair enough; only once is our voyeurism really implicated, when the masturbating hero is filmed from behind a half-open bedroom door). Whole thing has the tender-volatile energy of Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN - except a homoerotic kiss isn't a problem for these boys; all part of growing up - and obvious hints of autobiography even before the closing credits thank the Violent Femmes for having inspired the movie, conjuring images of Dos Santos too having spent his mid-teens listening to "Blister in the Sun" on his headphones (one wonders if it's even set in the present day, but maybe they still have un-ironic discos playing fluffy Europop in Deepest Patagonia). Hard to defend any one element in isolation - the home-movie style; the heroes' banal V.O. thoughts ("If my parents had made love 2 minutes before I was conceived, would I still be me? Or some other boy?"); the awkward boy-girl encounters, heavy with the same clotted feel as THE VIRGIN SUICIDES - but they're put together with verve, lemur-eyed Perez Biscayart makes a great comic hero (best detail: taking ages to mould his impressive quiff into spiky points in front of the mirror, only to ruin it all when he puts on his T-shirt), and the final intimations of a world beyond - first time in a plane, first mention of politics - make a satisfying coming-of-age. What's this Argentinean fondness for family members literally on top of each other, though, huddled like animals in a visual translation of emotional intimacy? I'm looking at you, LA CIENAGA and ROLLING FAMILY. 

10,000 B.C. (53) (dir., Roland Emmerich) Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis And the Great Warrior Tic'Tic came down from the Mountain of the Gods, walking tall through the Valley Without Sun, and spoke of the Legend of the Child With the Blue Eyes. And D'Lein said to the sabre-toothed tiger, "Do NOT eat me when I set you free!", prompting rude mirth among the cellphone-wielders and popcorn-munchers, but some of them enjoyed the pretty vistas and impressive design elements - esp. the DeMille-sized climactic set, where mammoths stampede down a giant ramp and Erich Von Daniken aliens (or exiles from the Lost City of Atlantis) organise a Pyramid scheme. Elsewhere, indulgence is required, a few days' hike taking our heroes from snowy peaks to scorching Sahara, a few moments' guard-bashing proving sufficient to get them in the slaves' hut without being spotted, etc etc. "Fire still lives in these stones!" said Tic'Tic - the one who carried the White Spear, and blew the Whistle for the hunt - and hurried on to further adventures.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (61) (dir., Christian Mungiu) Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov Hard to put one's finger on it, but there's something slightly inelegant to the mise-en-scene here; even the opening shot, a zoom-out from a table to a wide-shot of the room, feels inorganic, maybe because there was no good reason to be looking at the table (it doesn't help that the camera movement itself is a little uncertain), and a later shot with a telephone huge in the foreground feels like we're back in the 60s and Blofeld is about to purr "Good evening Mr. Bond". One might say Mungiu either does too little or too much - mostly it's head-on, uninflected master-shots (esp. the first half) so when he goes for an effect, above all the five-minute shot of our heroine sitting stock-still at the table with empty chatter eddying around her, it's very obviously an effect. Didn't find the goings-on unconvincing - except perhaps the otherwise meticulous abortionist forgetting his ID card at Reception, but I always assumed, given his line of work, he had good connections with the cops or secret police and was never (despite his protestations) really worried - but the best of it is clearly the sense of place, everyday tensions and hassles of life under Communism: black markets in cigarettes and video tapes, lengthy negotiations with surly hotel clerks, lines for food, no gas after 8 o'clock, no guests in the rooms after 10 o'clock - and everywhere fear of authority, bus conductors prowling for intruders, bureaucrats and petty functionaries (not to mention cops) asking for ID cards. The setting - grey skies, rubble-dotted streets, clothes on clothes-lines on tiny balconies - is also the people, an oppressed backward people barely out of feudalism; when the sadly pathetic Gabita lets slip a superstitious remark ("Don't look back") like an ignorant old woman from a Transylvanian village, one begins to sense the true reason for Ceaucescu's longevity.