Films Seen - May 2004
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (79) (dir., Michel Gondry) Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood [Define this movie. A (literal) head-trip, a 00s version of SECONDS (without the guilt, or is it?), a bittersweet comment - more sweet than bitter - on the way relationships are doomed to go south and the perverse romantic impulse that makes people try anyway, and even (on some exalted meta-level) a metaphor for digital technology, and its limitless promise of 'improving' the image. Like a film, the couple's relationship gets CGI-ed and manipulated; like a film, it then gets sampled by the Digital Generation - Wood's character, who quotes all the best bits though he doesn't even know what Bartlett's Book of Quotations is (why should he? isn't our culture one big quote nowadays?). Surely there's something in the zeitgeist to explain all these memory-loss movies (ranging from MEMENTO to 50 FIRST DATES), maybe a fear of forgetting too much in our Age of Convenience, where nothing has to hurt and anything is possible - a sense that our lives are too comfortable, based on escapism and denial ("Remember me!" says Winslet, as stark and despairing as the girl in KISS ME DEADLY), that we may have erased too much - a sense of History, perhaps? - in order to be happy. The determinedly scruffy look becomes an act of rebellion - like the stubborn romanticism, even in the face of the Korgis' fatalistic "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" - though the cool, metallic blues and greys do allow one lovely image, an icy lake at night with a convoy of car headlights creeping down a road in the distance (other times the film looks washed out, and frankly unattractive); Gondry makes it hard going at first, an opaque stuttering rhythm, then takes off in the increasingly fervent middle act, but most unexpected is how Kaufman's quirky scripts - plus music-video directors - consistently bring out the best in Hollywood actors. There isn't a bad performance in the movie, special mention going to Winslet who rescues an obnoxious character via glimmers of common sense and self-deprecation, plus her natural sensuality (compare Catherine Keener, who always seems so brittle and aggressive), and Carrey with his special kind of hemmed-in energy - though he's such a narcissist, playing yet another role where the movie-world becomes an adjunct of his character's inner world, after THE TRUMAN SHOW and BRUCE ALMIGHTY. Manna from heaven for shy creative guys with relationship trouble and a weird sense of humour. Detail That Says It All Dept.: hero-as-a-teen glimpsed jerking off to a Robert Crumb comic...]
KILL BILL, VOL. 2 (68) (dir., Quentin Tarantino) Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen [Comments here.]
DEAD LEAVES (58) (dir., Hiroyuki Imaishi) [Just for the record: an hour's worth of manga, looking much like a videogame - Sega's Jet Set Radio is apparently the closest equivalent - with lots of cartoon ultra-violence and gross-out humour, as well as (in the English-language version) a constant stream of side-of-the-mouth rejoinders in "Abso-fuckin'-lutely" vein, which is quite funny when they're spoken by a hero with a TV set for a head. I dug it.]
BAD EDUCATION (56) (dir., Pedro Almodovar) Gael Garcia Bernal, Fele Martinez, Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Javier Camara [Obviously personal for Almodovar - the ending makes it clear, if it wasn't already, that the film-director character is Pedro himself - and it does mix the wild (and very gay) abandon of LAW OF DESIRE with the more considered later films, and does continue, in its tortured (and romantic) priest, the TALK TO HER tradition of sympathy for the indefensible ; suffers from GANGS OF NEW YORK-itis, though, where the must-include elements pile up over decades of gestation till the theme gets lost among the bits and pieces (and the best bits are never as good as the highlights in GANGS, or indeed the similarly patchwork-like TALK TO HER). Theme, if any, seems to be the transference of identity, and how one thing mutates into another keeping bits of both - man into (transsexual) woman, child into adult, angry young man into his dead brother, love for one boy into love for another. The film itself also mutates, but falls increasingly flat - maybe it needed more of Camara (in the Antonia San Juan role) to give it a buzz - post-modern touches often grate (e.g. changing the aspect ratio), and it takes more than just invoking 'film noir' to achieve 'film noir'. Unsatisfying, though the overview of Spain as a brash, confident society secretly scarred - in various different ways - by Catholicism is provocative stuff. Gael Garcia Bernal in drag looks so much like Julia Roberts it's not even funny.]
THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI (65) (dir., Yoji Yamada) Hiroyuki Sanada, Rie Miyazawa, Ren Osugi [Moves to the unhurried pace of Nature, which is also the pace of our hero - a small-time samurai given to fishing on placid river-banks, gathering herbs with his daughters and stopping as he walks to admire the azaleas in bloom; but the placid river also brings the bloated corpses of famine-stricken peasants, and our hero too is forced to kill in spite of himself - in pursuit of unnatural class distinctions - making for a poignant drama in 50s-Master style (the philosophical worldview is Ozu-like, though the attention to landscape and acrid mix of rural idyll and blood-soaked historical closer to Mizoguchi circa SANSHO). There are clichés - e.g. hero going on about how wonderful it is to watch children grow, "like crops ripening in a field" - and the hero himself is a little too sympathetic, a badass swordsman who's also modest and sensitive (not a twisted bastard like Kitano's Zatoichi, who keeps quiet while inwardly laughing at the world, but genuinely humble); yes it's genteel, airbrushing even a senile grandma, and yes, the pace threatens to stop dead occasionally (true confession: I came this close to dozing off a couple of times) - but patience is rewarded, the action gains by being delayed, and the whole thing has so much integrity charges of Manipulative Middlebrow stick in the throat. Ends when it ends, with no drawn-out epilogue and a tribute all the more moving in its simplicity ("I am proud to have had such a father"); visuals insist on natural daylight - to fit the theme - even to the extent of user-unfriendly murkiness, which says it all really.]
BON VOYAGE (54) (dir., Jean-Paul Rappeneau) Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Yvan Attal, Virginie Ledoyen, Peter Coyote [Here we go on the Vichy Express (bon voyage!). There's the diva actress who thinks only of herself but has a way of getting men to do what she wants by throwing herself on the bed and sobbing prettily. You've got escaped prisoners, a German spy, a schoolmarm type who's really a secret agent, and an old scientist with the ultimate McGuffin - "heavy water", a vital part of any atom bomb (and wouldn't the Nazis love to get their filthy paws on that). Our hero is a writer - what else? - the Seine glistens in the sunlight, there's rumours about Russians, hotels filled to bursting and refugee kids milling around; at night, the horizon blazes with the soundless gunfire from distant battles. WW2 played as frantic farce plus a soupçon of romanticism - but the rushing around starts to ring hollow as the film runs out of ideas, and (more importantly) the jolly tone threatens to obscure what's really quite a shameful part of France's recent history: Depardieu as the Pétain-loving Minister is just another character in the shuffle, as opposed to the architect of French capitulation (the film's politics are generally a bit suspect: a working-class crook dies protecting his betters, while the happy ending finds our hero serving his country by escaping to England). Pleasant enough, sometimes irresistible in its rush of old-fashioned incident - but it all feels a bit like a celebrity tour of some poor Third World country, with raggedy orphans looking on, ignored and irrelevant, as the VIPs wave blithely from the train. Bon voyage!]
GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (48) (dir., Peter Webber) Scarlett Johansson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson [Maybe needs the big screen, 'cause it certainly looks good - yet even looking good is a bit of an exercise, like a painting done self-consciously in the style of an Old Master; Vermeer, to be precise. He's Colin Firth, unkempt and unsmiling, intense, an Animal (though not a Beast). He watches from the shadows as the titular girl goes about her business. Their hands touch when he helps her stir the paint and they pause, glance at each other like lovers caught in the act. They can't make love so instead they make Art - "Do it now!" importunes the mother-in-law, dropping the pearl earring in the girl's hand so she can go pose for the Artist. She (the girl) has bee-stung lips and a pale, oblong face radiating empathy and easily-bruised feelings; she wears a cap hiding masses of blond hair, which falls out like gold pouring out of a bag (they were so repressed in the 17th century). Is she a maid - or Scarlett Johansson? Predictable and a little dead, frozen in a certain pose - the carefully-crafted arthouse artefact where emotions are curtailed because they're so precious they might snap (or worse, explode into life) if allowed to express themselves - though obviously the film to see if you want a certain kind of look taken to its limit; even the heads of cabbage look Vermeer-ish.]
OSAMA (46) (dir., Siddiq Barmak) Marina Goltahari, Khwaja Nader, Arif Herati ["Interesting, huh? Come see the revolution!" says a small Afghan boy, speaking directly to camera as a group of women demonstrate against the Taliban behind him - and gets a dollar bill for his trouble. Hopes of a new sophistication, acknowledging that films like this - half-education, half-exploitation - are basically made for voyeuristic Western audiences (and the ultimate hope of Western cash for Third World casualties), are quickly dashed as it turns into the usual Makhmalbaf-ish tract, though it has its moments (and does more with its gender twist than the not-very-similar BARAN); Barmak definitely has an eye - the women's demo a sea of blue chadors amid dusty brown buildings; later on, a shot of the street through the outline of a stick-figure girl drawn on a steamy window, or a gang of boys scuttling like white-turbanned rats round an abandoned car - but either doesn't do enough to develop the plot or does too much (the ending would be so much more powerful if we didn't follow Osama to the new husband's house, just left her to an undefined fate-worse-than-Death); and of course we get the lame kids hobbling in makeshift hospitals, and a wise old grandma telling a story about a boy and a rainbow, and rather self-conscious local colour ("Do you know Rahim?" "Which Rahim?" "The left-handed one"), etc. "May hell swallow up the Taliban!" cries a woman, though the opening caption piously quotes Nelson Mandela: "I cannot forget, but I can forgive". Western hypocrisy in a nutshell: demonise by all means, but don't ever let go of the moral high ground.]
SHATTERED GLASS (67) (dir., Billy Ray) Hayden Christensen, Peter Sarsgaard, Chloe Sevigny, Hank Azaria, Steve Zahn [Not subtle, or even very well-made, but completely engrossing: it's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" (Glass-hopper?) set in the world of journalism, as we wait for the flashy, insincere Grasshopper (standing in for the flashy, superficial non-journalism of "colour pieces") to get his comeuppance while the quiet, studious Ant (standing in for serious reportage on the situation in Haiti, interviews with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc) labours in the background, and is finally rewarded. Sounds moralistic and it is, to an extent, but there's also comedy in the Mozart-Salieri relationship between childlike, popular Glass, hyped-up and forever chattering (it's a nice touch that his silence is what finally seals his guilt) and withdrawn, smouldering Lane, even if the film might've done more to ponder his coldness as a person (it's way too generous, using the other staffers to elicit sympathy by treating him unfairly). There's a light, caricatural quality keeping moralism at bay - Glass is a lot like ingratiating squirt Ponty in HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING - and the characters retain a certain mystery as well, partly because the emphasis is so much on their work lives: we only get a couple of hints on why Glass is the way he is - confused sexuality and domineering parents (both volunteered by himself, hence unreliable) - and Lane just gets a wordless scene or two with wife and baby ( = he's a grown-up, unlike his opponent), making it oddly poignant to learn he left the "New Republic" after all - you feel a sense of loss, as for someone you never really got to know and now it's too late. Ray's style is slick and not too original (he likes montages), but he must be doing something right because the film just glides along. Sarsgaard underplays, Christensen has fun, George Lucas has some explaining to do.]
TROY (71) (dir., Wolfgang Petersen) Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Peter O'Toole, Brian Cox, Brendan Gleeson, Sean Bean [Maybe not a war drama for the ages (that CGI gigantism is pretty lame) but definitely one for this age, Benioff's script being as laden with echoes of Iraq - though apparently written earlier - as 25th HOUR was with 9/11 metaphors. The main dilemma's similar in both, men shouldering a burden because it's the proper thing to do even though they're tempted by the pleasures of home and hearth - Monty at the end of HOUR, Hector in this one, the film's conscience and the one who makes it clear that "We can't win this war" and "There's nothing glorious about dying", even (or especially) in battle. That's the key line - tying in with Helen's "I don't want a hero", Achilles' realisation that glory isn't worth the pain of taking a son from his father, and Hector's bitter "You speak of War as if it were a game", confirming the film as the anti-LORD OF THE RINGS: that was all about Glorious Death, thousands of troops nobly laying down their lives to vanquish a Middle-Earthian 'axis of Evil', whereas this is about a war no-one particularly wants to fight, waged over a non-cause (a woman choosing to leave a man she doesn't love) and one man's lust for Empire driving a loose, often resentful coalition, quickly turning into a quagmire. Visually sombre - the palette emphasising grey, brown and sandy-yellow - and dramatically complex, muddying notions of good and bad and making it genuinely difficult to know who to root for in scenes like the Paris-Menelaos showdown (the craven but sensitive pretty-boy, or the cruel but righteous warrior?) - though its greatest achievement is perhaps the way it sharpens Homer by equating the gods with any other ideology, invariably unseen, often misinterpreted, used to justify War or invoked in its support (Priam listening to omens over logic, Agamemnon crying that "The gods protect only the strong"), its wry conclusion being that the gods, if they even exist, envy us because we're mortal, and able to appreciate each moment of our lives ("We will never be here again"). It's the rare war movie whose message is essentially "Choose Life", banal in some things - copying GLADIATOR with the ululating voices on James Horner's score - but mostly intelligent and gripping, faithful to the spirit of compassion in Homer, studded with surprisingly fine performances: Bana a study in controlled intensity, Pitt bringing both rueful gravitas - "I chose nothing. I was born, and this is what I am" - and a hint of his deranged 12 MONKEYS side (though he falters in his big scene with O'Toole, looking petulant and low on confidence), and the tag-team of Cox and Gleeson playing Agamemnon and Menelaos as a pair of burly, hairy, permanently pissed-off Celts, the "Iliad" as interpreted by the Savage brothers from MYSTIC RIVER. All this and the as-seen-in-the-trailer ultra-awesome pull-back from a single ship to a million zillion others too.]
TOUCHING THE VOID (52) (dir., Kevin Macdonald) [Not remotely fatal that the two mountaineers tell the story, i.e. we know they survived - works like a stranger's amazing account of some real-life ordeal, as recounted at the pub or waiting for a bus to arrive; but he's still a stranger, and that's a problem. Waited (and waited) for this to turn into more than an illustrated lecture with talking heads plus reconstruction - waited e.g. for the reconstruction to take over, pushing the borders of where documentary ends and drama begins - or alternatively to go deeper, exposing the characters; nothing happens, and though the story itself is absorbing you can't really feel people's distress unless you get to know them, no matter how many times they describe feeling "desperately thirsty" or talk of "excruciating pain". The real story comes in the interstices of the True Life Adventure, in details like Joe recalling how he felt so groggy he thought he'd woken up in a car park and "been beaten up again" (again?), or his mention of lapsed Catholicism, or the appeal of mountaineering defined as allowing you to "get away from the clutter of the world" (clutter?). Too much left unexplored - deliberately, I assume, i.e. choosing action over back-story, but it feels like a missed opportunity. Protagonists barely register, beyond working out that Joe is the intense one with close-cropped hair and a hint of John Cleese briskness, and Simon the jug-eared one who talks like Wallace and Gromit.]
THE MOTHER (43) (dir., Roger Michell) Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Cathryn Bradshaw [A character drama - which is tricky, since so much depends on the characters. Easy to imagine people finding it profound and perceptive if they can e.g. see the daughter being justified in her increasingly hysterical rage against the mother - instead of a selfish, insecure woman with a fragile ego and diet of New Age platitudes, lashing out where a more mature person might've handled the situation. Characters generally locked in annoying pattern, making everyone round the middle-aged, rather stolid heroine (on hearing that daughter's talking to a therapist: "Can't you talk to your hairdresser like everybody else?") more and more unsympathetic so as to heighten her plight, leaving her alone the better to dance the Victimhood ---» Empowerment dance: See her blossom at a younger man's attentions! Gape as he turns on her in a coke-fuelled rant, breaking her heart! Cheer quietly as she sets out on her own, beaten but unbowed! Looks dull - like TV, in fact - but it's dullness of vision that's the problem; yearned about 100 times in a 112-minute movie for what Mike Leigh might've done with this material.]
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (63) (dir., Eric Bress & J. Mackye Gruber) Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Melora Walters, Elden Henson, Eric Stoltz [This is such a weird movie: kind of like Jerry Springer does BACK TO THE FUTURE, Time-travel and alternate realities in a world packed with paedophiles, psychos, catatonics, evil fathers, grotesquely sleazy hookers and hellish prisons where new inmates are greeted with the line "Shit on my dick or blood on my knife" (still can't believe I heard that in a Hollywood movie). So much doesn't even make sense, like the way our hero is initially just a passive witness to his past - the film even primes us to compare it with watching a movie - then suddenly starts taking part in it and changing it, having (somehow) figured out he can (for some reason) shape the "movie in [his] head"; characters react in absurd ways, and of course the hero could save himself a lot of grief by going back repeatedly to the same moment (viz. the one in Eric Stoltz's basement) and fine-tuning it, rather than trying to change a different memory each time. Hard to say why the lapses add to the demented quality instead of sinking it, but maybe it's because there's a consistent worldview - it doesn't just feel lazy; you feel it might even make sense, in some gonzo comic-book universe where intervening in your own memories is totally normal - albeit a vicious, tabloid-y, unremittingly dark worldview where babies and dogs die horribly, college means either arrogant frat-boys or a gross masturbating Goth roommate, and no matter what our hero does it ends in disaster. Could be just the novelty value of seeing Mr. Demi Moore in something like this, though it also (with FINAL DESTINATION 2) confirms Bress and Gruber as purveyors of a startling new cruelty, the spirit of SEVEN crossed over to the teen movie; at least the emotional sensationalism fits the sci-fi plot more than it did, say, PAY IT FORWARD, and some of the devices - the blackouts causing sudden plot lacunae, or letters dancing around on the page as the Magic Flashbacks take effect - are pure pulp heaven. A cult movie waiting to happen.]
VAN HELSING (32) (dir., Stephen Sommers) Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh [Kate Beckinsale: "You make my skin crawl". Count Dracula: "This is not all I could do with your skin". It wasn't the CGI, it was dialogue killed the beast - and monotonous pacing, never letting up (or building up) over 145 minutes. Worst of all is the lack of invention - Van Helsing never has a plan or does anything clever, just charges in and hopes for the best, and the plot lurches in arbitrary ways e.g. in deciding only a Wolf Man can kill Dracula (how? why?). Whole thing gives the impression of having been thrown together - like Frankenstein's Monster - from scraps of assorted other movies: Van H. has a touch of the James Bonds when he greets trouble with a suave "Good evening" (his gadget-mad sidekick is obviously a 'Q' figure), the bit of doggerel ("Even a man who's pure in heart...") is from the original WOLF MAN, Mr. Hyde seems to be modelled on Andre the Giant via LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTS, etc etc (I even saw a touch of the STAR WARS Jawas in Dracula's hooded, scuttling assistants). No surprise that it tries for pathos at the end, hero losing his beloved (it's the new fashion, post-SPIDER-MAN), but Sommers does seem to be taking the thing quite seriously - even dedicates it to his Dad! - adding subtext about Van's battle with his own dark past, or going for poignancy with the Frankenstein's Monster (and the line about monsters becoming "the men they once were"); this inert film might actually mean something to its maker, which would be stranger and more intriguing than anything onscreen. Visuals are the only real pleasure, though it's hard to know how much stunning landscape is non-CGI these days (none, probably); Brides of Dracula are the coolest image, deathly pale with flame-orange hair and broad gryphon-like wings when they fly through the air. Otherwise dull spectacle, Roxburgh a fey Count, and more dopey dialogue. "Why do you do it [hunt monsters]?" "Maybe for some self-realisation..."]
RUNAWAY JURY (51) (dir., Gary Fleder) John Cusack, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Weisz [Due to massive time constraints I'll go with what I wrote for the "Cyprus Mail", though I'm not too happy with the way it came out (written in a rush, etc). Note the rating is really in the low 60s, with the final act in the 20s or 30s: it's a good film that simply lacks the courage of its convictions, and a stark illustration of the conflict between, on the one hand, Hollywood's acceptance (even admiration) of money-driven cynicism - the kind that rules its everyday transactions - and, on the other, the liberal idealism it still clings to when push comes to shove, whether out of guilt or some Capra-like illusion of expressing the American Dream. The ending makes no sense, with the jury making [SPOILER!] the 'right' decision (i.e. against the evil corporation) on zero evidence, just because no other ending is conceivable - and no-one seems to have noticed how cynical it is (even while trying to be inspirational), with Hoffman's idealistic faith in the System turning out to be misguided: it's actually Hackman's values that emerge triumphant, with deus ex machina Cusack getting the jury to vote his way (which also happens, coincidentally, to be the 'right' way). Should've been - and almost is - an exposé of the chicanery that goes on in the justice system, perhaps with ironic ambivalent ending à la ANATOMY OF A MURDER; instead it offers feelgood idiocy and reflexive up-the-people claptrap. It's disgraceful, really.]
ALI G INDAHOUSE (58) (dir., Mark Mylod) Sacha Baron Cohen, Michael Gambon, Charles Dance, Kellie Bright [Is it because I is immature? Not a comment on celebrity culture (like Ali G's infamous celebrity interviews) or a comment on white-boy appropriation of hip-hop culture (like his TV show and general persona) - just schoolboy humour, with a few nods to suburban gangstas (a joke that quickly grows repetitive), acres of smut and political incorrectness and a couple of killingly funny scenes in Carry On / music-hall vein, innuendo stretched as far as it'll go. Could perhaps be seen as a satire of 'inclusive', irreproachably 'sensitive' society - with Ali as the idiot-savant politician speaking the unspeakable, viz. that it's all about the weed and "fit" women - or alternatively a devastating dig at machismo, linking adolescent-male braggadocio with sexual insecurity and a very small penis (see also the Myth of the Black Man). But I'm happier with the thought of the President of Chad being royally reamed by the British Prime Minister (who then smilingly invites the President of Burkina Faso to join him upstairs), or Ali G telling the Cabinet about his porno mags with German blokes who go in through the back door, prompting the butch dykey woman politician - who thinks he's talking about asylum seekers - to opine that yes, I myself have been to Germany and had personal experience of this, I remember one time when these two huge African men somehow managed to squeeze themselves into (looks down sadly) this tiny box. It's a laugh, innit?]
THE HAUNTED MANSION (35) (dir., Rob Minkoff) Eddie Murphy, Terence Stamp, Nathaniel Parker, Marsha Thomason [Messages? At least three, by my count: (i) Dads should spend time with their family instead of working all the time (why is this such a popular theme in today's kid movies? should kids even be hearing this - won't it just make them resentful when their Dads do end up staying at work till all hours?); (ii) Never Give Up! and (iii) It's okay to be afraid, though you also need to confront your fears. Pop-culture jokes? Just one, as I recall (the kid saying "I see dead people") - shockingly low in the age of CAT IN THE HAT, and possibly why it wasn't a bigger hit. Does actually try to reproduce an old-fashioned haunted-house movie (or Disney ride, though the pace is slowish), with cobwebbed secret passages and statues on the wall that turn to follow our heroes with their eyes, which might be fun if it weren't so uninspired in the telling. Memorable images? None, really - maybe Jennifer Tilly's head in a crystal ball, wreathed in plumes of green smoke. Scary bits? Two, though maybe more if you're under 12: (i) Wallace Shawn doing cute comic relief in a kiddie pic (no, THE PRINCESS BRIDE doesn't count); (ii) Christian iconography totally upfront - in a Disney, no less - with Heaven and Hell for goodies and baddies to ascend and descend to, something kidpic honchos would probably have tried to soften or disguise in the name of multi-culti sensitivity a decade ago (imho). Opulent and lush, as you might expect with Remi Adefarasin DP'ing. Inoffensive as an 8-year-old's birthday treat, and about as tedious.]