Films Seen - May 2006

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

Cannes 2006

Overheard on the Croisette: 

"Well, I doubled the lead guy so I did the main ... y'know, crocodile-fight stuff"

"She plays a character who can morph into anything she wants to"

"... going to struggle to get into the UK market ..."

"You're the one who said Give him the thing. I said, Don't give nothin'!"

"A-nge-lo-pou-los. Angelopoulos."

PAN'S LABYRINTH (49) (dir., Guillermo del Toro) Sergi Lopez, Ivana Baquero, Maribel Verdu, Adriana Gil 'Fanciful', I guess is the word, with an imaginative little girl - a revolting grasshopper thing crawls into view and she rushes to her mom whispering "I just saw a fairy!" - an ogre with eyes in the palms of its hands and Pan himself, who has "names only the wind and trees can pronounce" and looks a bit like a scarecrow with horns. No idea why the fantasy stuff is side-by-side with the post-Civil War political stuff (even though the latter is two-thirds of the movie), except perhaps some vague Message about Pan embodying the opposite of blind obedience - hence the nature of the "Third Task" - while the Fascists stand for the suppression of Spain's collective imagination; THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE had the same problem, but at least that did the genre trappings reasonably well - whereas here, no amount of magical toads and swooping-and-gliding camera moves can forestall questions like 'Shouldn't she be taking that hourglass along with her? How's she going to know when time is up?' or 'She's not going to eat that grape, is she? Tell me it's not so retarded'. It is.     

CRONICA DE UNA FUGA (58) (dir., Israel Adrian Caetano) Rodrigo de la Serna, Nazareno Casero, Pablo Echarri English title is apparently going to be "Buenos Aires 1977", which seems as wrong as calling A MAN ESCAPED "Fort Montluc 1943". Escape has to be in the title, consciously removing any tension over what's going to happen just as the opening caption makes it clear the film is based on testimony from survivors of torture; it's supposed to be a procedural, not a cheap thriller (though it threatens to turn into one during the escape in a rainstorm), because milking the story for suspense would be offensive to the men who actually lived it. The result is a film that's hard to gauge, because it sticks so determinedly to the facts yet is obviously not documentary - the slightly underexposed look gives a tinge of burnished sadness (as it did e.g. in MUNICH) and the low-angle shots when the prisoners are first brought to the house, the evil structure looming over them, makes it look for a moment like the tortures are going to be played as TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE horror movie (which would obviously be awesome, if offensive). Certainly vivid, and it does find a fleeting glimpse of the true horror of a police state, viz. that it's really a bureaucracy - there's no appeal to humanity; names must be extracted to feed the machine, so the torture must continue till the names are extracted. Probably went by faster than any other film in Competition (even the Kaurismaki, which is 20 minutes shorter); not much to say at the end though, because ... what can you say?

CHANGE OF ADDRESS (45) (dir., Emmanuel Mouret) Emmanuel Mouret, Frédérique Bel, Fanny Valette ... or, "The Man Who Had to Choose Between Liv Tyler and Lisa 'Phoebe' Kudrow". A kind of French sitcom (though the poster prefers to cite Rohmer and Woody Allen), charming in bits and pieces, clearly made on a low budget with the boom occasionally visible and the writer-director also starring, his character unusually hapless and childish even by the standards of the genre. He's a musician, his instrument being the French horn which Phoebe (a.k.a. the dizzy blonde) doesn't know much about, and oh! the innuendo as he tries to explain - "It's best if I show it to you"; "They all look alike, but they sound quite different" - then serious-looking Liv comes along, lending her angelic gravitas to the situation (He: "Isn't life magical?"; She: "Life is always miraculous, because you can't explain it"), and our hero's smitten. He does look very French, strolling down Paris streets in his student's scarf and jacket, carrying the horn in its case, which will be enough for some people. 

Spotted on the Croisette: 

- A Batman in a Batmobile

- Tim Roth

- Mrs. Doubtfire

- A grey vintage convertible at 1 a.m., with a sixtyish guy in the passenger seat, a chauffeur driving and three young ladies in the back

- Cows holding placards reading "Stop the Killing" and "Save Our Comrades" (actually I suspect they were people dressed as cows to promote FAST FOOD NATION, but you never know)

- Two French teens going up to every hot woman with the chat-line "'Ello, you are Britney Spears?". The strategy finally paid off, and one delighted Britney agreed to autograph one of the teens' bare stomachs.

WHITE PALMS (71) (second viewing: 76) (dir., Szabolcs Hajdu) Zoltan Miklos Hajdu, Kyle Shewfelt, Orion Radies Why should I need my experience validated? (I assume it won't be, though "Variety" did call it "uncommonly resonant".) A broad-strokes yet firm, flinty drama - based on the star's own life story, though it adds nothing to know that - that becomes emotionally overwhelming, though reviews may carp at the melodramatic ingredients (monstrous coach abusing boy gymnasts) and call the style slick and over-busy. In fact the style is fevered and impressively controlled, especially in the climax which leaps from past to present with astonishing fluidity - fast cutting is one thing (and not very impressive) but the shots here have obviously been mapped out so shot size, orientation and rhythm all fit together, melding Trauma and (attempted) Redemption; earlier, we go from a present-day prologue in Calgary, heavy on the restless jerky-cam, to the still, pregnant atmosphere of the Old Country, the boys waiting for the coach to arrive, gently treating yesterday's bruises and looking over wistfully at the girls across the gym; their training session is a flurry of brief shots that build transparently, without doing anything flashy - each shot adds something to the one before till at some point you realise you're watching not just a scene but a set-piece, a mini-symphony ("Variety" cites BEAU TRAVAIL, though I think that's pushing it). Hajdu works with shorthand, so e.g. the Olympics climax reduces the complexities of judging the 'horse vault' to the single (visual) detail of whether the gymnast lands steady or shifts his feet, the primitive power enhanced rather than spoiled by the rough edges - the fact that real-life gymnast Shewfelt isn't much of an actor, or that the kid who plays 'Dongo at 13' obviously isn't much of a gymnast (but he looks strikingly like his brother, who plays 'Dongo at 10'). Heartfelt and skilful, a rare combination. [Second viewing: I think this may be the most impressively-edited film of the year, actually. Both times I saw it I held my breath during many of the big sequences - the boys waiting for the coach to arrive, their subsequent training routine, the amazingly fluid climax - only seeming to exhale once the sequence was over; it's obv. not organic cutting (i.e. these are set-pieces) but each shot lasts just long enough to create a coherent identity before being supplanted by the next, then the next, and they all fit together. Hajdu's sense of rhythm is impeccable, and though I wish the coach were less of an ogre it's clear his role is to be an ogre; there wouldn't be any point in complicating him (plus it's made clear he's proud of his gymnasts in the interlude with the circus people). Also intrigued by the fact that the ending is nominally a happy ending - since, after all, it's the actor's own story, and he must've made peace with his traumas to be able to act them out - but it's clearly a story of failure; the shots of ersatz Vegas landmarks make it clear that what Dongo is doing is also ersatz, fake, second-best. Is the director secretly undermining his actor brother here?]

COLOSSAL YOUTH (49) (dir., Pedro Costa) Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte Is it part of the script when our hero (Ventura as "Ventura") gets the names wrong, calling the girl Zita when she's supposed to be Vanda, or did they leave it in because it was 'real' - real as the people (played by real-life Zitas and Vandas), presumably real as the stories they tell about their lives, usually in 10-minute takes with a static camera (and in fact he gets the name wrong at the end of one such take, so maybe they just left it in because no-one had the heart to start again from the beginning). Sometimes the results are miraculous - the toddler's solicitude is obviously 'real' - sometimes Costa's visual effects are sublime: the child's face caught in a corner of light in the final shot, or the brilliant trick (much) earlier on where the sky is pitch-black yet apartment blocks seem washed in bright white sunlight. More often, scenes shade into a kind of absurdism that's too inert to be really very funny - A asks for a pen to write a letter, B says "There are no pens in the shack", A says "There are no pens in the shack? ... (unconscionably long pause) That's sad" - or just exist in a state of perpetual twilight, characters trapped like insects in bands of weak light among the murk. Portuguese title translates as "Youth on the March", which is obviously ironic since the characters are long past their youth and don't have the energy to move, let alone march; Costa clearly has a sense of humour. He's also part of "an ancient, easy world" - the culture of Portugal, lying forgotten and remote at the edge of Europe, and its cinematic culture, becalmed to the point of being listless - pointedly contrasted (by a man from Cape Verde) to the teeming, grasping poverty of worlds further south. Muggy atmosphere, not a lot of human behaviour; pointless and (for all its austerity) quite decadent, which are not necessarily faults in a Work of Art. 

HOW I SPENT THE END OF THE WORLD (42) (dir., Catalin Mitulescu) Doroteea Petre, Timotei Duma, Ionut Becheru Turns out the Romanian revolution (against Ceaucescu in 1989) was as much of a surprise to Romanians as it was to the rest of us - which is interesting (if true), but makes for a pretty standard coming-of-age-under-Communism comedy enlivened in the last 10 minutes by talk of political upheaval. The "end of the world" barely figures, the structure mostly teetering between a cute kid (he looks like the one in CINEMA PARADISO) and his rebellious teenage sister, along with their under-developed supporting parents and neighbours; Dad does Ceaucescu impressions early on (but doesn't actually have dissident tendencies), the cop's son next door is a bit of a tearaway, everyone thinks about escape but there's no real ferment or tension, no sense of a regime about to implode. A nationalist song is played quite straight, making clear that - as in Russia - shame of a Communist past shouldn't be confused with any kind of shame at being Romanian.

English buyer, filing out of A SCANNER DARKLY, tries to explain to a French colleague:

"C'est un film tres tres difficile pour marcher ... [colleague looks puzzled; 'marcher' means 'to walk'] ... marketing. It's very, we say in English, wordy. Parle parle parle parle parle parle parle." 

Target audience, also filing out of the same movie:

"No, but I actually know guys who are like that."   

A SCANNER DARKLY (64) (second viewing: 62) (dir., Richard Linklater) Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder Closing credits are preceded by a lengthy dedication (presumably taken from the book) by Philip K. Dick to all his friends who died or were damaged by using drugs - which is unexpected, because it's so not that kind of movie. Actually stopped taking notes, because there didn't seem much point - it's almost all on the same level, a trippy wander through the "grey area" induced by getting high with snarky sidebars on scrambled identity and the paranoid feeling of surveillance within surveillance (like the guy who became an impostor within an impostor), as enjoyable, and more or less familiar, as Downey Jr's motormouth routine. Evokes the experience of being on drugs - which would be even more awesome if there weren't already other films that evoke the experience of being on drugs. [Second viewing much the same, though I'm not sure I get the ending: Is drug addiction being blamed on the System - part of the military-industrial complex, illustrated by the final revelation that those supposedly fighting a War on Drugs are actually growing the stuff - or on the addicts, the "enemy" within as per the final roll-call? (Or is it another of the many Grey Areas noted along the way?) Rhythm seemed more repetitive this time, and I still think it's not saying much beyond all-purpose paranoia. Here's another take, however.]  

DAYS OF GLORY [INDIGENES] (68) (dir., Rachid Bouchareb) Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Sami Bouajila, Roschdy Zem A French GLORY, only with exactly the opposite message. The trouble with GLORY was the way it saw War as a sign of hope, black and white corpses lying next to each other on the battlefield presaging the later equality of civil rights; here, on the other hand, WW2 is the last flicker of hope (the English title is appropriate), the last days when Arabs could believe in being equal in the eyes of the "motherland", or believe in being properly rewarded. "If I free a country, it's my country," says one of the Algerian soldiers, speaking of liberated France - and the audience (esp. a French audience) knows the exact same words could've been spoken (and probably were) of Algeria a decade later. It's the last days before polarisation, the days when a Muslim might stop his own brother from looting a Christian church because it's a sin - "their god suffered a lot" - making the film not just poignant but also full of quiet rage, because what it shows was a missed opportunity: if only France had acted more fairly, if only it hadn't been racist, betrayed Algerians' trust, destroyed their dreams ... Not much more to it than that - except it's also very solid, using the familiar GLORY structure (a motley band of soldiers - an educated man, an angry cynic, an illiterate innocent) and building to exemplary action scenes in the classical manner (admittedly not "gonzo" or Sam Fuller-ish, as non-fans complained); bit too much clumsy exposition, but that's the only flaw. Stirring, accessible and very powerful.

THE FAMILY FRIEND (62) (dir., Paolo Sorrentino) Giacomo Rizzo, Laura Chiatti, Fabrizio Bentivoglio A nun is buried up to her neck in sand (why? why not!) in the opening shot, which starts as an ECU then cranes wa-a-ay up for no good reason - just as the opening credits show a volleyball game (irrelevant to the movie) from every conceivable angle, now from the POV of the ball, now overhead, now just an arm or a leg. Sorrentino's flashy style isn't my idea of good filmmaking but it's much more appropriate here than in CONSEQUENCES OF LOVE both because it's a comedy (or more of a comedy) and because it finds an equivalent in the lead character - "Geremia Heart-of-Gold", sixtysomething moneylender, garrulous and "extremely hideous", who smells foul and sweats profusely, like a cross between the demonstrative "Madonna!"-ing Neapolitans in 60s comedies and the creepy dessicated Don in PRIZZI'S HONOR. The film's terrific fun when it stays on Geremia (with his single long fingernail, the better for scratching himself with) sharing pearls of wisdom he read in "Reader's Digest" and assuring all and sundry that "My last thought will be for you" - but his infatuation isn't too convincing (as in LOVE, it feels like something being used to advance the plot) and the occasional philosophising is lost in translation, coming across as a desperate search for Theme in a film that's really about the flashy tricks; when characters start exchanging dialogue like "Good men die children"; "But children are immortal!", or opining that we all think we're dead but in fact we're really angels, the discerning viewer will roll his eyes and take a popcorn break. The ending, in a word, is incomprehensible.  

SILK (40) (dir., Su Chao-Pin) Chen Chang, Barbie Hsu, Berlin Chen Amusing Anecdotes Dept.: watched (some of) this with walkout specialist Mike D'Angelo, who duly headed for the exits after the statutory two reels - which shocked me, since the film seemed quite promising, starting strong (flickering-ghost effect followed by splendid action scene demonstrating our hero's sharp-eyed talents as a hitman, shooting his prey in the split-second before starting to speak a word and actually speaking it) as well as building a mystery in the gradual revelation of what happened to the little-boy ghost. Started going wrong soon after Mike left, and by the end the audience was openly laughing at the onscreen idiocies - ghosts crawling out of noodle bowls (!), the boy shrunk to micro-size and climbing out of the heroine's pocket (!!), vengeful spirits scuttling on all fours like something out of THE EXORCIST, plus some ba-a-ad effects like the kid obviously CGI-animated in the scene where he jumps off the balcony. Guess Mike just has a better radar for incipient suckiness than I do...           

"There's no reason why a film called MARIE ANTOINETTE should be about Marie Antoinette" - Mike D'Angelo, driven to insanity by one of our many discussions on the film's merits.

MARIE ANTOINETTE (44) (dir., Sofia Coppola) Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Asia Argento 

 There's more to say about the Cannes reaction to MARIE ANTOINETTE - from the infamous catcalls (though there wasn't that much jeering at the screening I attended) to its anointment as Palme d'Or favourite - than MARIE ANTOINETTE itself. There's a very good reason for this, namely that the film is thin and flimsy; there isn't much there, which perhaps is why it's able to absorb and reflect back (like a clear empty pond) anything you throw at it, from "Kirsten Dunst trapped in a costume drama" to "a reflection of today's consumerist, celebrity-obsessed society". A.O. Scott even called it a comment of sorts on Cannes itself, with the Festival cast as Versailles, asking "are we [the critics] courtiers or Jacobins?". (I also like the one equating Louis XVI's troubled court with Francis Coppola's troubled Zoetrope, with Sofia - in this reading - being deeply affected as a young girl by the implosion of her father's pet project.) At least no-one's offering a 9/11 metaphor.

 The main casualty is Marie herself, on whom the film seems to have no interesting or consistent take. This isn't a question of historical veracity, nor am I among those (if they even exist) who wanted more sans-culottes and guillotines; the film is at its worst in the French Revolution finale, when a Rent-a-Mob lays siege to Versailles rhubarbing darkly as the Queen stands on the balcony. It's just that there seems little point in taking a famous story only to reduce it and hollow it out, adding nothing of substance; possibly the best defence I've heard came from Stephen Garrett (ex-"Time Out New York", and one of the film's many fans) right after the movie, who pointed out it's really just a teen movie, and showed - in a calm, scale-down-your-expectations tone of voice - how it's really a film about this girl, who's a nice normal girl ("neither a bimbo nor a great intellect"), and how she finds herself in a new place, in a difficult situation, married to a nice but awkward man, and gradually learns to make do. How she finds her own space, away from the madness of public life. How the relationship with her husband gradually blossoms into mutual respect. How she makes friends, and has fun like any normal teenager. Finally, how she's forced to deal with a crisis, and proves herself equal to the task. That's the film in a nutshell, summed up Stephen (I paraphrase), and he's right - that's the film in a nutshell. And it's so boring.

 18th-century Versailles gets the role Japan played in LOST IN TRANSLATION, a place of weird rituals so arcane and absurd, a modern girl can only cock her head and say "This is ridiculous!" - which is exactly what Marie says ("This is Versailles!" she's immediately admonished). Despite being an Austrian aristocrat she doesn't seem to have much class-consciousness, and causes a fuss by embracing her servant when the latter is presented; she's also strangely uninterested in politics, and fairly blasé about matters of protocol; you might say she behaves exactly as you or I might behave if we were dropped in 18th-century Versailles, at least if you or I were so vapid we tried to keep our 21st-century sensibilities instead of adapting to a new environment - though she's not supposed to be vapid, just normal. A pre-credits sequence shows Marie mischievously eating cake, as per her most notorious pronouncement (which she later denies having made) then winking at the camera, a clear earnest of the film's revisionism - but revisionism implies a point of view, and the film is consistently half-baked. For a while it looks like Marie's about to crack from the pressure (and sexual frustration), the infamous 'shoes montage' seeming to herald a corruption from fresh-faced girl to Imelda Marcos - but in fact she doesn't get corrupted, just ... wears lots of shoes, otherwise staying much the same. For a while in the second half, after Marie's coronation, when she moves away from the palace to a kind of gazebo and turns into a hippy artist chick, it looks like Coppola's about to make LAST DAYS (or THE VIRGIN SUICIDES), a stylised idyll with morbid undertones and Death (the Revolution) just around the corner - which would obviously be great, but that doesn't happen either (instead she's called back to the Palace, and the idyll ends). For a while it looks like - if nothing else - it'll be anti-heroic, and I guess there's something to be said for a film that takes an exciting historical time and posits that actually, it wasn't that exciting (at least it's a kind of revisionism, implicit in the thinking of fans like Mike D'Angelo who like it because it doesn't give two hoots about the history) - but then the Revolution comes and Marie shows true courage, facing the mob with dignity.   

 The result is almost as smug as LOST IN TRANSLATION without even the consolation of visual flash and dash - the images are pretty but unmemorable - a facile case of Girl Triumphant. A provocative reading of the film (I forget where I saw it) has it that Marie's bow to the mob from the balcony is a conscious performance, an artist making the Revolution her private work of Art - and of course if Marie = Artist then Marie = Sofia, chafing against the rituals of Versailles (the film industry?) and struggling to be herself. A clever reading - but then what to make of the film's lack of conflict, Marie's unfailing good spirits, or the fact that Dunst's modern performance is hardly out of place in the ensemble (Schwartzman's fey King is also in on the joke, and Torn plays Louis XV like a Texas oilman); in short, if Marie's supposed to be struggling, why is the film so completely in her image? Could it be because Sofia's artistic passage was just as easy, her struggles just as painless? At least that would explain the complacency in both this and LiT - though I still don't know if having Marie quote Rousseau (patron saint of the Revolution) is meant to imply she was in sympathy with the forces that killed her, making her not just out of place but actually ahead of her time. Also: how can someone put Adam and the Ants' "Kings of the Wild Frontier" on the soundtrack - in this of all movies - and leave out the part that goes "A new Royal Family..."?        

THE RIGHT OF THE WEAKEST (73) (dir., Lucas Belvaux) Eric Caravaca, Lucas Belvaux, Natacha Regnier, Patrick Descamps [NB. Probably more spoilers than usual.] "He's an honest man," they say of Belvaux's ex-con character, and this is an honest crime drama, spelling out the risks of the heist more carefully than any other heist movie: if something goes wrong, the ex-con warns the family man, your wife will have found another guy by the time you get out, your son will be as old as you are now and you'll have failed him, taught him nothing, you'll see it in his eyes every time he looks at you - and the father-son dynamic, as tender as the one in THE FULL MONTY (which this resembles), avoids sentimentality precisely because it's an ideal, what stands to be lost. The heist goes ahead, of course, because that's how people are - unwilling or unable to appreciate what they've got, letting pride get in the way (their motive isn't poverty, it's "humiliation"), just as they'd wreck a perfectly good relationship over a stubborn clash of egos (over a moped, for god's sake). Belvaux's pessimism is extraordinary, as complete as Melville's though this is a slightly different film, more in thrall to old-fashioned humanism - and a bit too cosy when the would-be crooks are cooking and singing together in someone's kitchen (the kid gets up on a chair to join in). It also muffs its final act, painting itself into a corner by having Caravaca shoot the guard which means he's going down, no self-sacrifice can help him - but maybe self-sacrifice was never on the cards, Belvaux's character merely doing something for himself in the finale (as the others did in carrying out the heist), going out the way he wants to even though he knows it's self-destructive. It's not about people being noble but people being people, doing crazy things out of rage or desperation - and the unforgiving world that cuts them down anyway. A flawed, subtle film, more profound than many give it credit for.

TAXIDERMIA (58) (dir., Gyorgy Palfi) Csaba Czene, Marc Bischoff, Adel Stanczel Not exactly what the world expected after HUKKLE, though I guess it fits with that film's emphasis on the physical workings of things (e.g. that shot of someone's insides as the food goes down). Bodies get abused throughout, notably in the middle section set in the (frankly gross) world of speed-eating - "Do you know who I am? I had a vomiting technique named after me!" - though also in the taxidermy-heavy third act, slicing through the fat and gristle beneath our skins, and of course it opens with a penis spouting flames (don't ask), the little fellow later getting submerged in icy water and pecked by a chicken while in full tumescence (the penis, not the chicken). Three-generation family saga punctuated by details like a newborn sucking on a gigantic tit, another baby born with a pig's tail - someone duly chops it off with pliers - and a storybook that literally comes to life; close to a Hungarian John Irving (but more grotesque) or a more sardonic Kusturica, but really Palfi is unique, visually imaginative and often very funny. I look forward to his follow-up, which hopefully will not include the sight of a disgustingly obese bed-ridden man disembowelled by his own hungry cats. 

HALF NELSON (72) (second viewing: 65) (dir., Ryan Fleck) Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie Very high-calibre observational drama, and it's no wonder Fleck shares the "A Film By" credit with Anna Boden since the editing rhythms are a large part of its charm (Boden also co-wrote), never settling long enough to become dull or over-explicit. Also propelled by Gosling's effortless charisma as a man torn by "opposing forces" - his life as a teacher vs. his life as a druggie, though also his liberal parents' anti-Vietnam ideals vs. his (and our) own society with its dead-ends and grey areas (it's no wonder he's drawn to Eastern ideas of yin and yang, the notion of a thing being itself and its opposite at the same time); "History is changes," he tells his pupils - he's a History teacher - but his shifting contradictory values may (perhaps) be anchored by a quiet little girl with a sweet, infrequent smile. Worth seeing just for Gosling, talking half to himself - "That was weird" - flashing a roguish smile after "Same old, same old" or turning down his mouth apologetically after totally murdering the Interrupting Cow joke. And the nominees for Best Ending of 2006 are... [Second viewing, June 2009: Not sure what's changed, except that we've had THE CLASS in the 3 years since - which is both bolder and subtler about making the teacher seem weak and misguided - and also SUGAR, suggesting some banality in Fleck & Boden's open-ended approach (also perhaps FRACTURE, establishing Random Jumpiness as the default Gosling style). Also, much of it - including the symbolic Clash of Opposites motif, and very much including that ending - just seemed way too studied this time round.]

Breaking News: 50% of Namibians polled by a radio station said they wanted the birth-date of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's baby to be declared a Namibian national holiday!

BABEL (58) (dir., Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, Rinko Kikuchi Probably the best of the (very) loose trilogy following on from AMORES PERROS and 21 GRAMS - not really a trilogy at all, but we call it that in the hope that Gonzalez Inarritu will do something different next time - at least till it descends into cheap melodrama and frankly absurd situations (the scene with the border guards is exasperating; why doesn't she just say 'I'm their nanny' or something?). Before that, undeniably exciting to watch, though I really think Rodrigo Prieto is the MVP (his knack for seductive images being well-established with other directors), as opposed to Gonzalez Inarritu who does crass, faintly embarrassing things like cut straight from a scream (as a woman's being sewn up) to dead silence (a deaf girl's POV of the world), or cuts in a shot of the two brothers playing together in happier times to punctuate the Moroccan kid's unhappiness after the tragedy; it's certainly not writer Arriaga, whose dialogue is often banal, characters one-dimensional (though that one dimension can be powerful, e.g. Rebellious Deaf Girl) and insights mostly on the level of 'Handicapped people face discrimination sometimes' and 'The First World does not understand the Third' (insert 9/11 reference here). It's axiomatic in such films that 'real' life can no longer be found in the developed world, giving Western audiences a little masochistic buzz, though you'd think a link could be drawn between e.g. the pills taken by the teens in Tokyo and the hash-pipe casually offered by the grandma in Morocco; fortunately, the look of undisguised shock on the face of a little Californian kid at a Mexican wedding, as a rooster is beheaded right before his very eyes, makes up for a lot. 

THE EXTERMINATING ANGELS (61) (dir., Jean-Claude Brissau) Frederic van den Driessche, Lise Bellynck, Maroussia Dubrueil "I only film what I know," claims the Brisseau stand-in, preparing a film that's suspiciously like SECRET THINGS and plagued - plagued! - by nubile young actresses shamelessly provoking him during their auditions, just like they must've done in real life. "Aren't you frustrated sitting there, bound by a promise not to touch us?" tease the brazen hussies as they fondle and grope themselves and each other - as they must've done in real life - telling him they see him as a father-figure and they imagine him taking them roughly from behind, like an animal, while he thinks virtuous thoughts of his wife (as he must've done in real life), finally conspiring to have him convicted of sexual harassment and put in jail - as indeed he was in real life. The whole thing is blatant self-justification but so audacious it's kind of irresistible, with the titular Angels made literal, not just the actresses but also a couple of demonic ghost-women - those women! always those women! - who are out to exterminate him, and of course the actress finally admits they tried to destroy him because they were so blindly, unbearably in love with him: "You set off these deep, intense things...". "An odd mixture of intelligence and foolishness; but he's really a child," someone describes the Brisseau alter-ego, and the man himself may be described as an odd mixture of sleazy creep and glorious, unrepentant sensualist; among the sky-high skin-factor is a great shot, the two girls making out in a hotel room with the door left deliberately open - half the frame showing soft-core lesbian action, the other half showing the hotel corridor where someone might appear at any moment (we hear their voices slowly drawing closer). Where you look defines who you are, the shot acting as a test - if you can't help staring at the girls you're like Brisseau, recklessly in lust, if your eye keeps straying to the corridor you're like those who'd judge him, responsible, respectable, maybe a little repressed. Programmers of the world: screen with SEX IS COMEDY for that "Controversial Auteurs: In Their Own Words" double-bill! 

MADEINUSA (44) (dir., Claudia Llosa) Magaly Solier, Carlos Juan de la Torre, Yiliana Chong 'The final twist seems to have nothing in common with the rest of the movie' I wrote immediately after seeing it - but now I'm wondering if in fact the whole thing is darker than it seems, and I just got lulled by the local colour (the setting is a small Peruvian village) into dismissing it as ethnic-picturesque. There's certainly a lot of local colour, like the old man who acts as a human clock - but the real problem are the main characters, he too much of an urbanite, walking like a punk and looking like he's stepped out of a jeans commercial, she opaque and hard to make out (pure and naive, but gleefully keen to fall into sin as long as it's "Holy Time"); Llosa seems to have preconceived ideas about the village, or maybe what seems 'cute' to a European or North American seems sinister and backward to a native Peruvian; the whole thing might actually play better if it were shot like a horror movie about evil yokels. Instead the look is godawful video - fuzzy colours, no detail in the shadows - which doesn't help at all. Second viewing unlikely, even if it turns out I misread it.  

Signs on the Croisette: 

- "I  STILL Want to Help" - spotted on Day 8 (unfortunately I missed this guy's original sign, presumably saying he wanted to help on Days 1-7)  

- "Actor Needs Job" - stapled to someone's shirt

- "Please! Oh, please! One invitation. Thank you" - one of many, many requests for invitations (tickets) greeting Festival types as you come out of the Palais; I didn't have the heart to explain my blue Press badge barely got me into screenings, let alone hangers-on

FLANDERS (67) (dir., Bruno Dumont) Samuel Boidin, Adelaide Leroux Surprisingly ordinary for Dumont - nobody floats, for one thing - mostly a case of his trademark rugged eye for Nature and stripped-down, animalistic view of people applied to the subject of War, shown as a pretty much uninterrupted procession of killing and fucking. For me, his most satisfying film, though the ending - outrageously tender, for Dumont - is actually not very satisfying; the rhythm is stately rather than punishing, and the French settings so desolate it's quite a surprise when the heroine's friend tells her "Everyone's calling you a slut" (because we haven't seen anyone). A film of rare craftsmanship and austere sensibility - acting as corrective both to the war-as-circus genre ushered in by APOCALYPSE NOW and the hyper-realist shenanigans of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN - but the real joke is that War turns out to be merely a continuation-by-other-means of brutish life in the grey Northern France of L'HUMANITE. The moment when the seething undercurrent of the peacetime scenes - two men's jealous rage over a woman - becomes explicit on the battlefield is absurd and startling, as if the whole business of war had suddenly been translated (or reduced) to the petty rivalry of a pair of boorish sub-literates. Which is kind of true, if you think about it.

MELVIL (33) (dir., Melvil Poupaud) A vanity project so flagrant it becomes hilarious, esp. in the final section when we drop all pretence of avant-gardism (photographic-negative effects early on, giving psychedelically-tinted purple frogs and blue-skinned people) and just concentrate on Melvil Poupaud (as himself). Melvil on a film set, getting made up. Melvil wandering through a forest, taking a bite of a cigarette (!), writing text messages to himself on his cellphone. Melvil taking a bath. Melvil soaping his legs. Melvil drying himself with a towel. Melvil on the toilet. Melvil straining, followed by the sound of a reassuring 'plop'. Melvil watching TV, naked on the bed, the camera observing him full-on at crotch level so we get an excellent front view of his limp, large penis. Zoom in slowly on Melvil's limp, large penis. "C'est pas possible..." groaned the woman sitting next to me.

TEN CANOES (63) (dir., Rolf de Heer) Crusoe Kurddal, Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin Acclaimed as (predictably) Herzogian but it actually reminds me of THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY, slammed by right-on types for being racist and condescending back in the day - but of course that was South African whereas De Heer is patently trying to be 'true' to Australian Aborigines, the credits confirming he co-wrote it with "the people of Ramingining" (he even puts his directorial credit way down at the bottom). Wry voice-over insists on the tribespeople's culture, broaching Western storytelling tropes - "Once upon a time", etc - only to reject them, and the film tries hard to avoid the kind of remote ethnography that might make the Abos pristine 'specimens' - they fart, talk about women, etc - though of course it's so obvious that's what it's doing, it becomes slightly patronising anyway. Oral storytelling tradition is respected, even approximated - e.g. screen-filling close-ups of each person as they're introduced by the narrator - and in fact it's about telling stories, as a part of native life; they tell stories as they work, the older men to the younger to "help them live the proper way" (the youngsters "learn by watching"; it's an organic way of life), and in fact everything's a story - each person's theory of what could've happened or how best to solve a problem becomes a story (we see it acted out), the point being that stories are a primitive culture's way of creating the world; we have too many facts today, our world's already known, so our stories lose their potency (indeed, the story told within the film turns out to be fairly irrelevant to the purpose for which it's being told, not really helping the younger man's dilemma; the story has a power in itself). Whole thing is played as a jape, its Abos as naturally funny as the Bushmen in GODS MUST BE CRAZY, with a lazy rhythm and folksy tone. Self-conscious, but surprisingly enjoyable.    

THE HOST (60) (second viewing: 70) (dir., Bong Joon-ho) Song Gang-ho, Byeon Heui-bong, Park Hae-il Slightly disappointing, but only insofar as I spent the first half-hour thinking I was witnessing the birth of a New World Order - Asian action cinema climbing out of the fanboy ghetto to take its rightful place in the world's multiplexes. The build-up, and the first action sequence, have a mainstream sensibility - they're aiming for rollercoaster-ride exuberance, not the OTT flash of a Corey Yuen or Johnnie To - but feel somehow different, richer, not stale and dumbed-down like so many blockbusters; the monster's first appearance is imaginatively staged - wouldn't be fair to give it away, but the timing should catch even the most jaded geek unawares - and Bong, as in MEMORIES OF MURDER, keeps upping the ante with shocking changes of tone; a child is killed, which is surprising in itself, and then we see the family grieving, which is even more surprising, but then the wake turns into violent slapstick comedy, which is even more surprising. Alas, the film gets bogged down, going down too many paths, some of them - again, as in MURDER - dealing with Korea itself; the family acts as a microcosm, the father standing for the bad old pre-democracy days (his first, outdated impulse is to bribe the cops, but he's still programmed to accept whatever the government puts out as the Official Story), the fiery older son marked by the student riots of the 80s and 90s ("The generation gap is pretty big," observes someone). Elsewhere, the authorities are obstructive, government scientists inept, and though it's hard to say what the daughter's archery fetish signifies - the real question being when the bow and arrow will be used against the monster (answer: just when you've forgotten all about it) - one thing is clear: ultimately, the Americans are to blame for everything. Structural problems, the tenor consistently intense and action-packed but the action increasingly confused and inconsequential. The best comparison is with a Larry Cohen movie, which is no mean feat - but it looked like a new improved Spielberg for a while there. [Second viewing: still think the through-line is weak, but scene-for-scene it's undoubtedly awesome - and it works much better when you know it's not going to be the new Spielberg. Also, having now watched it work two different audiences, I must concede it's just a formidably effective action thriller.]        

URO (52) (dir., Stefan Faldbakken) Nicolai Cleve Broch, Ane Dahl Torp, Ahmed Zeyan Norwegian cop drama (confusingly, another Norwegian film called UNO is also doing the rounds at the moment) that starts strong but gets bogged down in sub-plots about dysfunctional father-figures - the drug boss, the police chief - when it probably should've been about the undercover cop's various lies (not least to himself) as he tries to walk a tightrope between the two sides of the law. Still some good grainy visuals and handheld moves, esp. in the first half, also if you ever need to mop up a pool of blood a cocktail of chlorine and rubbing alcohol will apparently do the trick; mix 'em together, apply with a mop, leaves your floor looking shiny and new. You're welcome, readers.

THE CAIMAN (72) (dir., Nanni Moretti) Silvio Orlando, Margherita Buy, Jasmine Trinca, Nanni Moretti All credit to Nanni Moretti for wanting to make a film about Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's dangerous buffoon of a Prime Minister (and Murdoch-style media tycoon). Even more credit for realising the kind of film he can't make - not a straight biography ("Everybody knows that already!" protest the characters), not a Michael Moore satirical stitch-up either, making fun of Berlusconi's various gaffes and faux pas - "That's what the left-wing audience wants to hear". Credit, above all, for suggesting something truly heretical about Cinema - that it may in fact be useless when it's faced with truly important subjects, suited more to tales of adventure like the hero's young sons love to hear. He's at his best as a Dad when telling them such stories, based on the B-movies he produces, or when he calls up his younger son and pretends to be in magical Lapland, where the sun never sets; he's at his most useless when having to tell them he and Mom are splitting up - in fact he can't tell them, and even gets in the way when she tries to do it ("Don't we have a great Mommy, don't we love her!" he cries, jumping on top of her and encouraging the delighted kids to follow suit) - which is no surprise because he's a fantasist, a dreamer in a dreamers' profession. Even if the medium itself were redeemable (Moretti, a well-known cinephile, may be more hopeful than he lets on about that), the Italian film industry is mired in impotence, lack of funds and lack of culture, making vapid historicals about Columbus instead of tackling the country's problems - all of which comes back to Berlusconi, because it was his government that cut the funds and (more importantly) his trash-TV channels that ushered in a culture of empty distractions and insipid game-shows, and all of which comes back to the hero's shambolic life, the wife he can no longer talk to, the mysterious missing Lego piece his kids spend hours trying to find. He is Italian Cinema, nodding in agreement when an actor says they must go back to making political films like when Gian Maria Volonte played that industrialist (in THE MATTEI AFFAIR), but the actor can't recall the title of that movie - they just know something's missing, like the Lego piece - and ends up double-crossing our hero anyway, so he can play Columbus in the vapid historical. A splendid study of personal and institutional failure - and the best possible film about Berlusconi, showing how populist authority ends up insulating itself from criticism without even trying, just by rotting the culture - and if it had ended on the "Blower's Daughter" scene (esp. without "The Blower's Daughter"), maybe on an image like the ex-spouses' cars going their separate ways, it would've been a masterpiece; even with the ending it has it could've worked, had it been an IRMA VEP ending - a radical departure (e.g. shot on cheapo DV), as if to show that Cinema can work but only if it gives up its bad habits. Instead it does what it previously spent 100 minutes refusing to do, namely make a film about Berlusconi, the only (slight) twist being that Moretti himself plays "The Caiman" despite (his character) having previously claimed he only wants to do comedies; presumably a case of 'No time for comedy, now is the time for every good Italian', etc etc - but the film was about so much more than that. Possible best joke: "Maciste vs. Freud". Runner-up: "Our ice-cream is different..."     

The Austrian Airlines in-flight magazine - I flew in to Cannes via Vienna - lists all the in-flight movies you can watch, with information on each. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is listed as being unsuitable for children under 12, which seems about right (a little lenient, if anything) - but then, on the next page, 50s Western BROKEN LANCE is listed as being unsuitable for children under 16! Save our kids from those Spencer Tracy Westerns in my opinion. 

I should also mention that Vienna Airport has a sex shop, where transit passengers can buy adult magazines and DVDs. I browsed through this sex shop, and one of the adult DVDs on sale in this sex shop is called (I'm really, truly sorry about this) "The School Girls' Diarrhea". Why would I make it up?...  

And now back to the Cannes Film Festival! 

LIGHTS IN THE DUSK (62) (dir., Aki Kaurismaki) Janne Hyytiainen, Maria Jarvenhelmi, Ilkka Koivula Static compositions with splashes of rich primary colour offsetting the people's inscrutable expressions, check. Put-upon loser(s), check (actually a bit more than usual). Dream of starting a business, check. Deadpan humour, check. Little dog on the fringes, check. Three Russians walking down the street drinking vodka and arguing about famous Russian writers ... actually, I think that one's new (still, it fits). Seems there's always a sandwich-van that stays open late, its neon lights twinkling in the gloom (or dusk), seems there's always an unsympathetic bank to refuse our hero's loan application (he's then asked to leave through the side-door). All it really needed was a strong ending - like DRIFTING CLOUDS has the song as they gaze up at the sky - but it's still fairly solid second-tier Kaurismaki. She: "What was [prison] like?". He: "You couldn't get out. All the doors were locked."

CLIMATES (55) (dir., Nuri Bilge Ceylan) Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Nazan Kirilmis Climates change - seasons change - but Nuri Bilge Ceylan stays the same - or at least "Nuri Bilge Ceylan", the character he plays in this movie, who's a control-freak and something of a misanthrope and claims "I've changed" but hasn't really, stifling his wife just as much after their attempted reunion (he also makes a lover eat a peanut that's fallen on the floor - a subtle joke suggests that when he forces himself on her it's as much to make her eat the peanut as have sex - and plays tennis in the rain just because he said he would and refuses to back down). "Nuri" may well have a lot in common with Nuri the filmmaker - equally stubborn and controlling in the way he operates - making for intriguing confessional overtones, but it's a shock to see Nuri the ace cinematographer gone AWOL (the film, shot on video, often looks ugly, esp. the skin tones; the wife looks almost yellow when she's sitting outside at the beach-house), and Nuri the director of actors also seems to be trying too hard; there's a lot of 'acting' going on, esp. from Mrs. Ceylan (her tantrum after the motorbike crash, her affected unconvincing gulping tears on the bus), and lingering on faces for a long time doesn't make emotions more real, often the reverse (non-pros tend to fill pregnant pauses by biting lips, shaking head, looking down then up again, etc). Nice touches, esp. in scene-by-scene detail - old not-quite-friends meeting in a bookshop, unhappy wife's nightmare of being literally suffocated, same frustrated wife bursting into involuntary derisive laughter when the small talk turns to the thundering cliché of tourism having changed everything ("I remember when there was nothing here", etc) - but the more complex stuff feels forced and clumsy. Moral of the story: get some real actors if you want to do elaborately-choreographed ambivalent love scenes.   

SHORTBUS (53) (dir., John Cameron Mitchell) Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Lindsay Beamish, Justin Bond "Voyeurism is participation," says someone at the Shortbus - "a salon for the gifted and challenged" - which sounds like a game-if-slightly-desperate attempt to include Us the Viewers in the general love-in; after all, everyone else is getting off, no matter if they're old, fat, gay, "pre-orgasmic" (i.e. non-orgasmic) or just want to do it alone, "in the dark, like a worm", the point of the exercise being that everyone should be free to express his/her sexual desires - which may be why we open on a shot of the Statue of Liberty (oh dear). Actually that opening sequence is the best part, a stand-alone short following a trio of bizarre sexual encounters in New York, the city itself played by a candy-coloured scale model that's CGI but madly creative (the buildings look like they've been cut out of cloth); what follows is a brittle, very gay depiction of damaged people in dysfunctional relationships, interspersed with puns - the performance artist whose act uses menstrual blood for makeup: "It's a period piece" - pointedly random references to Iraq and 9/11, set-piece distractions like "The Star-Spangled Banner" and moments where sex seems about to be equated with self-improvement, before the film comes to its senses and gets back to jokes (the moment where sex literally becomes equated with modern Art, however, is one for the clip-party). Alternate title: "The Importance of Being Permeable", with Justin Bond - a real-life person, presumably a fixture on the NYC club scene - as Oscar Wilde 2006, the neo-hippy libertine philosopher with unbounded tolerance and a quip for every occasion: "I used to want to change the world, but now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity."  

SOUL KICKING (39) (dir., Yiannis Economidis) Errikos Litsis, Vangelis Mourikis, Maria Kehagioglou Half-emptied a crowded Cannes theatre, and there's something to be said for that - because the audience weren't bored but indignant. "Do Greeks think that women are inferior?" asked an outraged old lady, and it's hard to avoid crying misogyny given some of the dialogue ("Smack 'em and fuck 'em," is one character's motto; "Women have no soul," opines another, "all they care about is sex and money") - esp. for non-Greek-speakers who miss much of the stylised language, working with repetition and relentless use of expletives (actual tag-line: "The Torture Never Stops"), repeated till the words lose their meaning and only the rage remains; Economidis is a Gaspar Noé fan, using a similar sledgehammer strategy as in I STAND ALONE, but his visual palette is drab and the whole thing so constricted in its worldview it risks becoming a kind of novelty item, That Film We Saw Where They Swore All The Time. Bukowski comes to mind - though the director denies it - also NIL BY MOUTH, but both of those seem rooted in real-life experience whereas this often seems a concoction, designed to shock. No idea why there's such an angry streak in Greek culture, incidentally (far from a violent society, in terms of crime statistics): sitcoms and old Greek comedies often degenerate into shouting and ranting, and even the language sounds pissed-off to a non-speaker. Only the Jews do it better.

FAST FOOD NATION (67) (dir., Richard Linklater) Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ashley Johnson, Ethan Hawke, Wilmer Valderrama, Bruce Willis Kind of dull and didactic for a while, but improves mightily as it becomes less about McDonalds and more a potent call to activism against "the Machine", playing nicely into Linklater's trademark love of oddball humanity - the turning-point being perhaps the scene with the hotel clerk's mechanical series of questions, not even listening to Kinnear's replies, making clear that junk-food (the industrialisation of food) is just another symptom in the industrialisation (mechanisation, corporatisation, call it what you will) of modern society. Trouble is, we're all too comfortable to do anything about it, just like the cows who refuse to escape even when the fence is cut - they've forgotten how, and so have we - lending righteous edge to the film's angry injunctions ("Don't just hope. Do something!") and placing it firmly on Participant's roster of smart, zippy Films That Saved America. The final freeze-frame, tying up the strands and bringing it back to McDonalds (now a symbol, per the title), is a perfect ending - making it bizarre that they choose to spoil it with a lame and needless post-credits sequence.  

Apologies to those who've heard this story before, but I can't ignore Film Student Guy and Aspiring Actor Guy who stood in line behind me for FAST FOOD NATION, having just watched SOUTHLAND TALES which they both agreed was "way mental". 

Film Student Guy is 23 (I know this because it was his birthday, and Aspiring Actor Guy said "Dude I can't believe you're 23. I thought you must be like 27, because you're so calm, so focused"). Aspiring Actor Guy is slightly younger. FSG is at a prestigious American film school, where apparently next year he is "not directing a film but filming someone's direction", which makes no sense at all but whatever. AAG once wrote a story about a family during the Depression - and one of them was blind! They're staying in Cannes with a producer who "worked on CRASH" and generally having a good time, though AAG admits his stomach feels like "I shouldn't eat any dairy". Any other problems? "I wish I could speak French," sighs FSG, looking around him sadly. "Or Spanish," adds AAG. 

Anyway, the one thing they totally agree on is SOUTHLAND TALES, which is "way mental".

AAG: It's way mental! 

FSG: Totally. I don't even know how you'd describe it to someone. 

AAG: It's like apocalyptic ... It's like APOCALYPSE NOW meets BLADE RUNNER! 

FSG: Like a futuristic - 

AAG: But you know one thing that kinda bothered me, it should've been more futuristic.

FSG: Yeah, maybe. 

AAG: I mean, [the setting] was only, like, 2008. They could've done it, like, 2012. 

FSG: And there weren't that many action sequences. 

AAG: I liked VENDETTA more. VENDETTA had a better pace, and those really cheesy accents. But you know what was a good part where the acting was really good? When Mandy Moore's in that room with her dad. The energy was good, the energy was very up. 

And now ... SOUTHLAND TALES!

SOUTHLAND TALES (38) (dir., Richard Kelly) Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake [NB. The following refers to the 160-minute Cannes cut, which will almost certainly be trimmed and changed for commercial release; I assume they'll make a more coherent and watchable film out of it - but they can't make it smart, unless they add lots of new stuff.] It's not that this film isn't Relevant, as some (misguided) critics are claiming; it's that its Relevance makes it even more depressing, because it's so consistently stupid - which in turn reflects how stupid the culture-at-large has become. It's like the Harry Knowles version of "Gravity's Rainbow" (HUDSON HAWK also comes to mind), like someone decided to write a grand satirical extravaganza even though their only points of reference were STAR WARS, BLADE RUNNER and a few undigested gobs of T.S. Eliot - the film is so ambitious, yet everything about it (its worldview, sensibility, sense of humour) is so impoverished. "Fluid karma" say the characters (most of whom have wacky Pynchonian names like Simon Theory and Baron Von Westphalen). "Quantum teleportation". "Global deceleration". "Planet Telex" (yes, a Radiohead reference). "The secret of creation". But before long we're down to fart and vomit jokes, and "Get the fuck out of my ice-cream truck, you Cro-Magnon bitch!", and a TV reality-show where one bimbo says "Violence is a big social problem, that's why I don't do anal" (that's the satire part), and Time-travel and song numbers - like in Pynchon - and reference to troops in Syria and the "Star-Spangled Banner" gets another workout (see also SHORTBUS). None of it coheres, or amuses, but I guess it is Relevant - even apart from the (ludicrously thin) political comment, there's e.g. a car commercial with two cars humping, the joke being the car-sex will only appear in the "European version" of the ad, and in fact there was a very similar ad at the Cannes Festival (for a subtitling company) with two flowers humping; but the real-life ad was just as stupid as the movie one, no-one laughed in the audience, and having seen it unwittingly spoofed added nothing either way. Feels like it could be a cult (among stupid people), esp. at its current self-indulgent running time - though you'd think they'd at least cut exchanges like "Shall we fuck or watch a movie?"; "Let's watch a fuckin' movie". Only The Rock - excuse me, Dwayne Johnson - finds his way through the mess, obviously employing his BE COOL experience.       

THE WEDDING DIRECTOR (65) (dir., Marco Bellocchio) Sergio Castellitto, Sami Frey, Donatella Finocchiaro Made in the same fevered style as Bellocchio's previous two, but loopier, more puzzling and definitely weaker. The connecting tissue - religion in MY MOTHER'S SMILE, Left-wing politics in GOOD MORNING NIGHT - is harder to spot here, though perhaps it's filmmaking, with Castellitto (irresistible) as the Artist who's "often an idiot, but sees what mere mortals don't". He becomes besotted with a mysterious princess in a tower - whose entrance is always accompanied by a snatch of Satie - and the point is perhaps (as in THE CAIMAN) the way the Italian film industry remains beholden to an old world ("In Italy, the dead command"), unable to make films because it doesn't know how to live, as someone puts it; our hero, a specialist in shaking up the world of rituals (i.e. weddings), finally succeeds in shaking up the old world that stands in the way of his love - but only by sabotaging his work, the grand wedding he's supposed to direct, and maybe the true Artist can only thrive in Italy by turning against the industry, with its politics and petty in-fighting, and following his heart. Then again, it could mean something else altogether - and it wouldn't matter. Operatic fragments, out-of-nowhere crescendos and some pretty good jokes, plus Castellitto's flamboyant weary melancholy (he always looks on the point of taking out a sword with a great weepy flourish then falling on it). Scene-by-scene magnificent, slightly lacking overall.    

RED ROAD (57) (dir., Andrea Arnold) Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Natalie Press Poor James Stewart, getting into all that trouble just for peeking at the neighbours 50 years ago; little did he (or guilt-ridden Hitchcock) know how things would change in the blithely Big Brother-ish 00s. Spent most of this one waiting for someone to acknowledge that using CCTV cameras to spy on people is kind of problematic - even, or especially, if you're working for the government and abusing your position for your own ends - but it seems it's now morally okay for the State to monitor our movements, at least in British ghettos and at least in the service of a crypto-feminist revenge drama. It's a tale of empowerment - empowerment as a woman, because our heroine uses her body to get what she wants, and empowerment within the narrative, since she plays God and gets away with it - though it mostly impresses as a panorama of working-class life, housing estates and grey Glasgow skies; a party scene feels exactly right, a small apartment with a side-kitchen as you come in, a spaced-out girl in the kitchen then an angry glare of dim orange light from the living-room, a cramped shuffle of bodies and belligerent singalong to an Oasis anthem, everyone dancing on their own. Then it goes totally wrong in the final act, with Redemption for victim and avenger (plus a symbolic little dog), putting it a long way behind - say - THE SON as a study in the dynamics of forgiveness; then again, you'll never catch the Dardennes being so casual about voyeurism.    

BUG (69) (dir., William Friedkin) Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr Based on a play, which becomes obvious later on but certainly isn't obvious in the opening scene - a helicopter-shot down to a motel in the middle of the desert, where Ashley Judd smokes roll-ups and fields mysterious phone calls while Mexican music plays low in the background. It's moody, atmospheric and Ashley seems already a bit unhinged, getting worse as she slips into rampant paranoia; Friedkin establishes intimacy - showing her e.g. on the toilet, which they probably didn't onstage - knowing that everything depends on her character arc, the way she perpetuates a life-pattern of masochistic relationships by letting herself be taken over by the creepy stranger ("I make people nervous," he admits, though he likes her because "you don't speak the codes"). In truth, it doesn't wholly convince, but the whiff of stagy contrivance can't repress a film that goes gloriously loco, working a bit like THE FLY - the more gross it gets, the fiercer the true romance at its centre - while also making something of the way paranoia acts as a solution to broken dead-end lives, providing explanation and the more outlandish the better. When the couple recoil at the sound of a pizza-delivery man - pizza with "everything"? what's he mean, "everything"? - you know the film's achieved a plateau of glorious insanity. When Ashley Judd raises her arms to the heavens and cries out "I am the Super Mother Bug!!!!", you know it's climbed even further.

VOLVER (52) (dir., Pedro Almodovar) Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo "Volver" means "to return" (apparently) but Almodovar wouldn't necessarily return to the life of the village, superstitious, morbid and full of guilty secrets - besides, city life is itself like a village, with neighbours (including the inevitable friendly hooker) helping our heroine in times of need. Female neighbours only, of course - the only man we ever get to know is first glimpsed swigging beer and checking out his 14-year-old daughter - and Almodovar's universe seems to have reached a point of blissful insularity where familiar motifs gently swirl into each other: women's resilience and self-sacrifice (esp. if they're mothers, and of course Cruz instantly offers to take the rap when her daughter is in trouble), melodrama wrapped in (increasingly faint) ironic scare-quotes, nods to 50s movies (BELLISSIMA, in this case), nostalgic evocations of childhood Spain (a song, an old toy) balanced by post-Franco transgression, the former increasingly prevalent as Pedro grows into middle age. It's like a Greatest Hits and maybe that's why it seems under-dramatised, as though - like Woody Allen - Almodovar now depends on his Almodovar-tude to carry the day, throwing out brilliant ideas without really bothering to build or plot them. The main source of narrative tension - when will Cruz come face-to-face with her mother, incidentally giving her friend from the village the closure she seeks? - is built up, bounced off the harried sister (who's harbouring Mom without Cruz knowing) then thrown away, dramatically speaking - the sister just takes her aside and says (I paraphrase) 'There's something I have to tell you...' (the friend from the village gets her closure in equally pedestrian fashion: the mother just goes over and says - I paraphrase - 'There's something I have to tell you...'). Tone shifts erratically, our heroine going from mopping blood and disposing of corpses to happily cooking lunch-for-30 in the space of two scenes, but maybe that's just part of its free-spirited Pedro-tude; still smooth and poignant, the old village past as ineluctable as in BAD EDUCATION, old traditions and even (yes!) the smell of Mother's farts, but still - enough volver-ing to past glories. Time to move on in my opinion.  

Breaking News: the French DVD title for DUCK SEASON is "Mexican Kids"! (I'm running out of local colour, can you tell?)

LES AMITIES MALEFIQUES (42) (dir., Emmanuel Bourdieu) Malik Zidi, Thibault Vinçon, Natacha Regnier, Dominique Blanc Bourdieu was co-writer on MY SEX LIFE and ESTHER KAHN, and you can actually see what he brought to those movies - the concept of hero(ine) who's ornery, self-absorbed and a bit of a jerk, as well as the fixation with classical art and literature (the title evokes Laclos, as well as "Les Amities Particulieres") - but you can also see what Desplechin brought: adding that indirectness and eccentric touch that's missing here, the characters over-explicit, esp. the anti-hero who runs his friends' lives (telling them how to dress, what to write, what to say) then self-destructs in the second half. He's a charismatic figure, supposedly brilliant, a narcissist, a know-it-all, a cruel elitist, and acually tells the others that he acts as their Conscience - they improve their lives in order to please him - just as he tells them at the end that they needed him, though they now despise him; it's the kind of role that may work in novels but is almost impossible for an actor (all they can do is turn on the charisma, but the more they do, the more artificial they seem), and the film's earnest approach points up the problem where e.g. Desplechin and Amalric in KINGS AND QUEEN solved it by coming at the character sideways, making him a dotty eccentric in his own world. "Why do some people write? Because they're too weak not to write" is the Karl Kraus quote repeated at regular intervals, and Bourdieu's point - that insisting high-mindedly on writing being "necessary" is a sure way to atrophy the writing muscles altogether - is a good one, in a literary kind of way; but the characters don't convince or compel, and when e.g. the hero declines sugar in his coffee despite having previously declared, in his usual insufferable way, that coffee without sugar is no coffee at all, one isn't quite sure if he's changed in the interim or was full of shit all along. Sample dialogue: "I never joke about literature."  

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (60) (dir., Kirby Dick) Valuable and highly entertaining, except it spends most of its time taking shots at easy targets - orgasms censored because they were "too long", films NC-17'ed for a glimpse of pubic hair, etc - rather than asking the difficult questions; Jack Valenti is a creep and a liar, but his "Valenti's Law" is basically correct - if people want to see a film, ratings won't stop them, and if they don't then a rating won't help. The point is, there's absolutely no reason why an NC-17 should be a big deal, except the studios didn't (and don't) have the will to make and market films for adults; Europe keeps being mentioned as a shining ideal, but edgy art-films will be rated '18' in e.g. the UK, and that rating will be enforced - the problem isn't that so many films get rated NC-17, it's that so few films get rated NC-17. The real question isn't what the MPAA - a bunch of ignorant stooges - see fit to reject or censor, nor even the fact (alarming though it is) that the studios use the MPAA to harass independents and abuse their position - it's that the studios have no place in their business plans for an adult rating, and the rest of America doesn't clamour for change. It gets addressed, but briefly (something about ratings turning us all into a nation of children), Dick choosing not to grill studio heads and newspaper proprietors who refuse to take ads for NC-17 movies, instead mostly concentrating on snappy presentation - funny animated interludes, "Fun Facts", split-screen comparisons - and the private-investigator angle, which is absorbing (no surprise that documentarists and private 'tecs have things in common, see also Errol Morris) but mostly irrelevant and possibly counter-productive, at least if the MPAA can deflect the movie's criticism by agreeing to publish raters' names from now on - which would be seen as a huge, huge triumph (at least within the movie's parameters), but really wouldn't make much difference. It really wouldn't.

INSIDE MAN (71) (dir., Spike Lee) Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe [You couldn't get a heist movie like TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE nowadays, those films that thrive in the recesses of a situation, seeking only to try and flesh it out through memorable detail (I know because I wrote one, and everyone who reads the script says it needs more "surprises"); something gets lost when the audience is taught to turn up its nose at genre, and this one loses something in tension when it makes it clear early on - even the trailer made it clear - that it's no ordinary heist movie. Nothing makes much impact (e.g. when a hostage is killed) because we know it might be a put-on, and the film itself doesn't seem to take the robbery very seriously, giving it a laid-back jazz score, spinning off into sideways gags ("Five bucks?" "Tijuana. Don't ask") and veering into outright comedy when e.g. the FBI start arguing over a riddle set by the hostage-takers; at best, it's an elegant puzzle for the audience to solve while watching the real movie, which in OCEAN'S ELEVEN was a celebration of iconic stardom but here is something tougher and sharper. Its real currency is mind-games and power-plays - not just crooks vs. negotiator but cops vs. hostages in the flash-forwards and even the various canny New Yorkers vs. anyone they can browbeat or hustle (the Sikh griping about his turban, the Albanian woman who exacts a price for translating the message), plus of course Foster's character ("Miss White"!) vs. Denzel, making a mockery of those who'd consider this an 'impersonal' project for Lee. Heist movies end when the heist ends but this one keeps going, following the cop as he uncovers the truth; he’s the Outside Man (Foster smugly warns him not to poke his nose in matters "above your pay grade") who becomes an Inside Man, forcing his way into the corridors of power - and of course he and his partner are also a couple of black men striking at the heart of the white Establishment, exposing a secret that has everything to do with racism (albeit indirectly). The result is a triumph of sly misdirection, smuggling in a socio-political Message just as the plot itself teems with smokescreens and red herrings (e.g. making us think the gang plan to tunnel out, when their plan is much more twisted and original), and plays with expectations of violence by having the bloody denouement exist only in the cops' fevered imaginings (a brilliant joke); Denzel does his mad imperturbable bark like he did in TRAINING DAY - messing with minds just for the fun of it - and Spike adds his own eccentric touches, like a noir-ish final shot that's as perfect as it's unexpected. Strange how the plan depends on suppressing the hostages' individuality, in effect creating clones like (e.g.) the army-of-V's in V FOR VENDETTA; something in the zeitgeist, perhaps - egalitarianism as a new fascism? Or just clever men learning to subvert a world of increasing uniformity?]      

STAY (48) (dir., Marc Forster) Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Naomi Watts, Bob Hoskins [Someone must have been transporting Ewan M. to a parallel dimension, because one day his reality started morphing in mid-sequence, scenes re-launched in the middle of playing out, visuals started breaking up into jump-cuts and fragmented editing, and he found himself looking down in extreme close-ups or approached at an angle by a tilted camera. ('This is even weirder than my round-the-world trip with Charley Boorman (now available on DVD),' thought Ewan.) Forster's style is certainly eye-catching but doesn't illuminate the sub-JACOB'S LADDER shenanigans, except to make it clear that yes, Something Weird is going on (betcha Benioff's script was something he wrote years ago and resurrected after his success; it's got that slightly desperate, I-want-this-to-be-noticed-by-script-readers quality); the camera cranes up and down pointlessly, the frame broken up with glass surfaces (mirrors, windows, etc) and assorted bric-a-brac, the action sliced by momentary flashbacks and home-movie snapshots - but the only real asset is Ryan Gosling, all the more chilling for the snarky edge he brings to his troubled-young-man ("I'm hearing voices now"). Freud and Buddha get cited in attempts to explain what's going on, yet the line that makes it totally clear - the one that explains the title - seems to have been snipped, though it was included in the trailer (*); looks like trailers don't just give away too much nowadays, they give away more than the actual movie. Memo to Naomi Watts: Either stop taking decorative roles or fire your agent; a 10-second suicidal-tendencies back-story does not a character make.]   

(*): I got this slightly wrong: the explanatory line in the trailer was actually spoken by Mr. Trailer Guy, i.e. it was never part of the movie. Still, the point stands - both about the trailer being over-explicit and the film being needlessly obfuscatory.     

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3 (63) (dir., J.J. Abrams) Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Billy Crudup, Ving Rhames, Michelle Monaghan [Trivial yet revealing anecdote about this movie: the preview theatre where I watched it misplaced a reel - the one between triumph and tragedy, going straight from Davian on the plane to the girlfriend being kidnapped, missing out the shoot-out on the bridge - and my heart initially soared to see such audacious ellipsis in a summer blockbuster. Then of course they found the reel, apologised and played the film again, making clear just how boringly it shows the tables being turned - but the point is it could've been audacious, the ellipsis could plausibly have been there, which is something you'd never have thought in the middle of M:I 2 (for one thing, the middle of M:I 2 was in the middle, not in a fevered flash-forward making for a great pre-credits sequence). Handing the gig to an up-and-comer seems to have brought some badly-needed energy, and an "Alias"/"Lost" influence is also clear in the way action co-exists with melodrama, a long way from the cool heroics of the second instalment; that one tried to make Ethan suave, like a cooler James Bond, but here he's close to tears more than once in the first half-hour (his eyes even glisten when he's forced to lie to the fiancée about his true identity), and rock-climbing stunts have been replaced with wrenching displays of emotion - though of course the team still have gizmos, performing instant brain-scans when the need arises, and still wear disguises and trade banter during shoot-outs ("How many rounds you got?" "Enough"), and the thrilling leap between skyscrapers will surely win some Golden Wheelchair - or whatever they give out - at the stuntman Oscars. Still conventional but smart and semi-heartfelt, and I like the way Laurence Fishburne adds "Wells, not Ellison" after calling the bad guy an Invisible Man, and all sorts of snarky comments could be appended about the scene where Tom Cruise admits that "people like us" can never have "real relationships"; though not here, because we don't want his lawyers to shut down this website.]   

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (52) (dir., Tommy Lee Jones) Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Dwight Yoakam, Melissa Leo, January Jones [Powerfully-made but there's a glibness, e.g. in defining characters according to their sexual health: the villain - though it takes a while to work out he's the villain, as opposed to a laconic Texan macho - takes his wife roughly from behind, like an animal; the sour, ineffectual local sheriff is of course impotent; Tommy Lee's stubborn Man of Honour gets it on with Leo's good-hearted, very decent waitress - but Melquiades himself is too good for sex, shyly standing back till the girl suggests they watch TV instead (we first glimpse him caught in a pool of sunlight, like an alien or Messiah). No surprise, since he's Mexican and the film has a special romantic reverence for Mexico, seen as an unspoiled land of dreams - a place where a gringo can sit in a cantina, with a piano playing tunelessly and some old movie on b&w TV, and feel himself melting into tranquil acceptance (unlike Texas itself, which is full of fat ugly people and even little kids yell "You goddam sumbitch" at each other); even the villain finds redemption of sorts, shucking corn with the Mexican women, though only after he's been burnt, bitten, dunked, cut, punched and generally tormented. It's part of the film's design, conceived on grand lines like an ancient epic or Old Testament fable - esp. the cross-border Journey, with the dead man watching like a totem and encounters including a blind hermit, like a Texan Tiresias - but it can't quite disguise the mealy-mouthed Message with its self-loathing platitudes. The last line implies it's a Journey to becoming a nicer, more thoughtful person, which isn't much reward for 121 minutes.]             

PRINCESS RACCOON (73) (dir., Seijun Suzuki) Zhang Ziyi, Jo Odagiri, Mikijiro Hira ["Man cannot fall in love with Raccoon. It is ridiculous," asserts the storyteller, and Suzuki's eclectic style may actually have thematic point in signifying tolerance and diversity, lots of musical idioms under the same umbrella - at least that would explain the misguided (if cheesily enjoyable) rap number - just as it veers between the Man and Raccoon of screen space and stylised stage-space, Suzuki becoming the third senior-citizen in as many years (after Resnais and Olmi) to seek refuge in proscenium dramatics, maybe as a way of maintaining control as ageing reflexes make location-work more arduous. In fact, it wouldn't matter if it 'meant' nothing at all, so eye-popping are the images and exhilarating the sense of detail - a vat of bubbling liquid behind the evil father (who's obsessed with being the fairest of them all, like the Queen in SNOW WHITE), prepubescent sumo wrestlers in Raccoon Palace, a woman's pink robe billowing on an empty beach. Having never cared much for the Yakuza hi-jinks of Suzuki's previous work, I didn't miss them here, and I agree with those who sense a new serenity in his filmmaking - as if he can finally let go the crowd-pleasing violence and indulge his love of oddball humour, supple compositions and the interplay of colours without feeling guilty; the story gets in the way, as it did in Guy Maddin's DRACULA (a similar project in many ways), and the first half is better than the second, but it can't dispel the film's nutty charm. Good Housekeeping tip: "Break the ice" at your next film-nerd party by having it play in a corner, with the sound turned down, on as big a screen as possible!]