Films Seen - May 2007
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
PARIS JE T'AIME (DNF) (dir., various) Steve Buscemi, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Juliette Binoche, Nick Nolte, Margo Martindale, etc Kudos to Payne and the Coens for spotting - and sending up - the Chamber of Commerce aspect to the project, a fragmentary view of Paris burnishing (if possible) its well-known credentials as the City of Love; in other words, a tourist's experience par excellence. Kudos also to Gus Van Sant for illustrating the instant and quantifiable effect of a cinematic 'eye' - even if the setting hadn't changed, you know you've left Gurinder Chadha Land when you see half the frame transformed into double-exposure via the nifty expedient of shooting through a glass doorway. Payne's segment easily the best of the nine I watched - the first six, plus Assayas, Tykwer and Payne himself - limning a familiar epiphany I don't think I've ever seen onscreen before, though it goes soft at the end as well as raising all the usual questions about his cruel sense of humour (it's a low blow when e.g. his heroine mispronounces Simone de Beauvoir as Simon Bolivar, souring our empathy for the sake of a cheap laugh); actually most of the shorts reflect their directors' signatures, which is interesting - but mostly the whole thing reminded me that I too made a short once, and took it to a couple of shorts-only festivals, and realised that I don't particularly enjoy watching shorts, especially a lot of them at once. YMMV.
MISS POTTER (51) (dir., Chris Noonan) Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson There's a moment - when Miss Potter is serving an enforced three-month vacation in the Lake District while her parents wait for her "ardour to cool" over the man she loves, and she runs into a farm-boy she used to know, all grown up now - when our heroine (and the film) seems about to surprise us by doing something non-virtuous, taking empowerment too far by dallying with another, breaking the heart of her adoring fiancé (their love is so complete one waits for the inevitable disaster - but it'd certainly be surprising if Miss P. herself destroyed the idyll). It doesn't happen, of course - and perhaps Noonan had no choice, since it didn't happen in real life - tragedy strikes in a more acceptable form and Heroine suffers nobly in familiar Victim mode, her Art helping slightly though a late-breaking eco-Message ends up helping more; Peter Rabbit and Co. become almost irrelevant, which is also an intriguing strand (even Art has its limitations), had it been developed. Quite a few "If you please"s and "Oh, well, I say"s along the way, though Zellweger is a liability, bobbing and clucking like a kindly hen and evincing secret pleasure in the prim Bridget Jones way. So understated it barely exists, though I guess that's better than aggressive tearjerking.
ANGEL-A (36) (dir., Luc Besson) Jamel Debbouze, Rie Rasmussen Would WINGS OF DESIRE be improved if the angels plied their charges with therapy-speak and helped them raise their self-esteem and get in touch with their feminine side? If they served the director's penchant for goofy gags ("And stop saying OK all the time!"; "OK") and a vision of France forced - like our hero - to stand on its own two feet instead (incidentally) of looking to America for help? If they beat up thugs and potential clients - casual violence being apparently more okay than casual sex - fell unaccountably in love and burst into tears? If they looked like blonde, long-legged, freakishly tall Scandinavian supermodels? Well, maybe the last part...
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (45) (dir., Gore Verbinski) Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom Here, to save time, is my "Cyprus Mail" piece, with the usual caveats about a different style for a different audience, etc. One detail typifies the whole skilful but incredibly overdone enterprise: You know the part at the end that's supposed to set up PIRATES 4 - the little coda that's usually a couple of shots and a quick visual joke? Here, it takes 5 minutes. 'Nuff said...
REQUIEM (69) (dir., Hans-Christian Schmid) Sandra Hüller, Burghart Klaussner, Imogen Kogge Legislation currently being tabled to make sure everyone who sat through EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE also watches this fascinating mirror-image - even though at first it seems to be equally obvious, only coming down on the other side: EMILY ROSE paid lip-service to both sides but made it clear the trouble was supernatural whereas this pays lip-service but makes clear the trouble is psychological, a disturbance or trauma caused by a cold, unloving mother (contact with Mom sparks off most of our heroine's fits, whether being home from college or touching Mother's rosary). Goes deeper than that, however, finally becoming a mirror-image in a more telling way: ROSE was about a truth unknown to the audience (at least for a long time, our identification figure being Laura Linney's unbeliever) but known to the possessed girl and her family circle, whereas this is about a truth known to the audience - the film makes it obvious - but unknown to the 'possessed' girl and her family circle, making the goings-on - the girl's mental collapse and gradual deterioration - intensely sad (Huller is perhaps too normal, even taking charge with the new boyfriend, but that only makes it startling when she ends up screaming demonically). A brisk, chilling study of growing frustration and descent into madness, though I do wish this German Renaissance weren't so visually earnest; shot of heroine dancing alone at the disco recalls LONGING, and seems to be one of the few poetic coups these guys permit themselves.
DELIVER US FROM EVIL (49) (dir., Amy Berg) "Bring forth what is within you" and "what you bring forth will save you" promises the opening caption - obviously aimed at the Catholic Church hierarchy which (apparently) prefers to cover up sexual abuse by priests, but also applicable to paedophile priest Oliver O'Grady who does try to bring forth what's within him (explicitly calling the film his "confession"), only to seem deranged and delusional. It's hard to complain overmuch, since only a very brave - or misguided - film could've tried to make O'Grady sympathetic, but there's an element of bad faith (no pun intended) in the way Berg draws him out only to emphasise his monstrosity, pointedly filming him surrounded by kids, deriding his attempted "invitation" to his adult victims and informing us at the end that he's still "roaming free", like the Big Bad Wolf. Maybe the filmmakers genuinely intended at first to 'understand' him, hoping to contrast his openness with the Church's denial, but were too appalled by what they found - which is fair enough, but it also leaves them with nothing much except unrelieved villainy vs. weepy victims, especially the final stretch which seems to wallow in people's pain (here's another close-up of the raging Dad!); points made against the Church itself seem reasonable, esp. the point that enforced celibacy leaves priests with an imperfect understanding of human relationships and might result in them seeing children as their "psycho-sexual peers" (the charge that oppression of docile followers is inherent in Catholicism itself is more controversial, and some attempt at rebuttal might've been useful). In itself, slickly-made to the point of being heavy-handed, with dissolves and photo montages, discreetly doomy music building to dirge mode at the climax, and people often interviewed while they're walking or driving - especially the lawyers and activists, because they're dynamic! Moving forward! Can't stop to chat with every passing documentary-maker. Or something.
INFAMOUS (65) (dir., Douglas McGrath) Toby Jones, Daniel Craig, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Daniels Way more fun than CAPOTE, and more Capote-ish too - more cartoony, spicy, camp, hysterical - though it's even more explicit in spelling out its themes (on the success of "In Cold Blood": "It made him, and it ruined him") and somewhat less complex in the relationship between Truman and Perry. Making Truman silly and inept when he first comes to Kansas reduces him from the beady-eyed, deceptively smooth operator in CAPOTE, making it the tale of a fey little man transformed by the murder case and his love affair with the killer - the scene where he weepily recounts his mother's suicide is apparently intended as a bona fide character transition, despite the warning in the opening scene that 'sincere' emotion is usually a put-on when affected by artists - also playing down his final betrayal of Perry for the sake of the book; that said, this is much more about Capote as a writer (McGrath himself is best known as a writer and of course it's based on a book by George Plimpton, of the "Writers at Work" series among other things) - the way he tries out sentences on his friends to find the best formulation, his fascinated look when he hears about Perry having corrected his sidekick's grammar (the two men bond partly as writers, Truman handing over his drafts to keep Perry talking). Jones is more memorable than Philip Seymour Hoffman - yeah, more of a caricature, whatever - and Bullock a warmer Harper Lee than Catherine Keener, the relationship more recognisable; when she and Truman have their little spat ("What's your stupid fucking point?"), it's exactly the querulous, edge-of-tantrum bickering of two people who've known each other since they were children.
RENAISSANCE (36) (dir., Christian Volckman) with the voices of Daniel Craig, Ian Holm, Catherine McCormack [English-language version] Strange but true: almost any individual frame gives more pleasure than the film as a whole. Or not so strange, since it's loaded down with a B-movie plot and acres of banal dialogue (admittedly in translation, but language barriers fade before exchanges like "I want all the details, and I want them now!"; "You forgot to say please"). The animation style - something like pencil drawings in gleaming b&w - makes for pleasing physical detail, esp. when sketching wraith-like reflections or white tracks of rain on an inky-black sky, but faces tend to be inexpressive and the style is slightly dead in any case. You might say it appeals to people who'd rather look at photo negatives than the actual photos - at least if digital cameras hadn't ruined that particular analogy.
CZECH DREAM (67) (dir., Vit Klusak & Filip Remunda) Capitalism is just a facade, people are creatures of corporate propaganda, etc etc - but also lots of trenchant moments re: the world of marketing and consumerism, from the glib (an ad exec citing the Sistine Chapel as an early example of marketing, with the Glory of God as the "product") to the startling (a sweet young girl comparing the experience of shopping in a hypermarket to the sun coming out on a rainy day), not to mention the amazing - surely staged - scene of a mom and her two little daughters singing an impromptu song in the hypermarket parking-lot, the refrain promising (in English) that "Everybody will be happy" (even creepier when sung by a smiling little blond girl looking up into camera). Klusak and Remunda seem to be defensive about their stunt, taking pains to make it clear they're not liars (they're scrupulously honest about such things as Hugo Boss product-placement), and the film takes equally great pains to point out that everyone lies - banks, politicians, even the government's EU campaign - no less in 2004 than during Czechoslovakia's great lie of Communism (intriguingly, emphasis is also laid on a marketing man who claims he'll never lie for a client), all of which is fine but perhaps excessive, a case of protesting too much. It's a clever prank, and that's the main thing; filmmakers don't need to be saints.
LET'S GO TO PRISON (57) (dir., Bob Odenkirk) Dax Shepard, Will Arnett, Chi McBride, Michael Shannon I don't think we're in STIR CRAZY anymore. Prison is played shockingly straight, at least within the confines of its vexed hypocritical role in Western society (we don't like to be sadistic to prisoners anymore; we get other prisoners to do it); it's also moderately funny, though most of the jokes are over-milked, from the smooth prison daddy with the Barry White moves to the preppie newcomer being mistaken for a badass - it's one of those comedies where the Vern review is likely to be funnier than the film itself - and the class-revenge angle kind of dissipates, Shepard's underclass victim consistently less interesting than Arnett's privileged rich kid (we end in a bizarre halfway-house where they team up as winemakers (!) but really bad winemakers; so I guess that's okay then). Possible highlights: "Lucian-Freud-looking pussy", Dylan Baker as the warden with a taste for mindfucking ("I have a notoriously dry sense of humour") and a classic line, delivered to an ugly hooker: "I'm not that horny. I just got out of prison."
SUNSHINE (64) (dir., Danny Boyle) Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne Accurately describable as a remake of ALIEN where the style is intact but the plot is no longer a horror movie (instead it's a sci-fi drama, culminating in 2001-style light-show) - and if someone were to ask "Why make it in the ALIEN style if it's not actually a horror movie?" the answer would have to be ... "Well, exactly". Seldom has a film been so exciting to so little purpose - but it is very exciting, and Boyle hides the relatively low budget superbly (it's only apparent in the absence of scenes we'd otherwise take for granted, e.g. not showing the mechanical details of the ship docking on Icarus 1); images tend to be stark, mostly showing screens, flashing lights, clanking and beeping machinery, a contrast of pitch-black darkness and fiery sunlight - and human faces caught in between, often half-obscured, a feeling of people pinioned by unnamed forces stronger than themselves (esp. the Sun, its full light - indeed, more than 3.1% of its light - inaccessible to the human eye, towering over the drama like a godlike presence which the astronauts have to somehow broach and harness). Lots of mystery and edgy style - even the monster is a twitchy epileptic blur - more or less disguising the fact that the plot goes nowhere much. Also very MISSION TO MARS, down to the space-walk for emergency repairs being perhaps the best scene - but it's edgier here, very dark and without heroics, just faces wincing and sweating. Then again, at least De Palma had the courage of his own cheesiness.
ZODIAC (68) (dir., David Fincher) Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox The APOCALYPSE NOW of serial-killer movies, working as procedural for about 90 minutes then taking a leap into something else and daring you to keep up with it. It turns into a study in obsession, the case itself (the object of obsession) disappearing into false leads, dead ends and pure guesswork - the need to solve the puzzle taking over - and there's even a comic sensibility in Fincher's take on the Zodiac case. The way it fused with the media in a weird symbiosis is one thing - the killer taking credit for murders he read in the paper, giving himself a wicked persona inspired by a watch ad (just like Downey's character gives himself an exciting persona, "the Marked Man"), the persona becoming more real than his real-life self; "It's very real. How do I know? Because I saw it on TV" - but there's also the farcical side, the bureaucratic slapstick of having to liaise between different jurisdictions, the outrageous errors (like describing the suspect as a black man, thus allowing him to get away), the "I'm Not Paul Avery" badges, Graysmith worried that people are calling him a retard behind his back. It's easy to imagine Fincher - by all accounts an exacting perfectionist - looking with a wry smile at the way things went to hell in a world of human error, not to mention a low-tech world of snail-mail and telefaxes; when "Pong" appears it's not just a gag - it's the dawn of the computer age, when technology can solve cases with DNA exactitude, just like it helps people like Fincher realise their cinematic visions. The film's final stretch is transcendence, away from everyday blunders and cop limitations ("Stick to the evidence") into a realm of pure monastic dedication, where a man literally destroys his life - gives all he's got - in the service of a higher Cause (the Cause itself finally overshadowed by the dedication); Fincher, like Michael Mann, subscribes to a minimalist Zen machismo that's profoundly anti-social, viewing other people as essentially distractions. Those who say it feels like a film made by a serial-killer have a point, and it's just as well that folks like Mann and Fincher are making movies as opposed to working in offices as middle-managers. Still beautifully-crafted - and, if it lacks the impact of his 90s films, maybe this one's more personal.
THE REAPING (32) (dir., Stephen Hopkins) Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba Limp religioso horror with some very poor shock moments, partially redeemed by a clever (if obvious) twist in the tail. Religious propaganda in EMILY ROSE vein, with atheist Swank finally weeping "I'm so sorry! I was so wrong!" as the Biblical plagues pile up - having previously scoffed, "The only miracle is that people keep believing" - notable mainly for being even more fire-and-brimstone; if ROSE's motto was the gravestone reading "Work Out Your Own Salvation With Fear and Trembling", this one's is the small-town sign that warns "Our God is a Gentle God - But Don't Push It", making clear that Jesus comes with a sword and terrible events can often be a case of the Man Upstairs working in mysterious ways. Guess it's what comes of hearing atrocities reported on a daily basis - and having to be reconciled with notions of a righteous war - in the Current Climate.
OFFSIDE (75) (dir., Jafar Panahi) Ayda Sadeqi, Safdar Samandar, Mahnaz Zabihi If this was actually shot during the Iran-Bahrain qualifying match (meaning almost all of it was done in a couple of hours, with the clock ticking against the filmmakers), that's a technical achievement to match RUSSIAN ARK, especially with non-professional actors - but technical excellence is just one of its many layers (besides, the lengthy scenes in the holding-pen could've been shot at any time). Truly subversive, unlike the flat self-righteous condemnation in THE CIRCLE, obviously critical of the rule forbidding women from attending football matches in Iran - as well as adding little jabs, e.g. the hypocrisy of not enforcing it too strictly because there's lots of "foreign journalists" at the game and the mullahs don't want to look bad - but playing the polemic as a debate among the characters (who try to explain the rule to each other, working around it if possible) and also, rather cleverly, playing it in a context that emphasises pride in Iran as a nation, getting Panahi off the hook; even the diversity of the soldiers - one from Tehran, another from Mashhad - has a patriotic subtext, like the where-you-from? moments in American WW2 movies. Thorn-in-side political filmmaking of a high order (no wonder Panahi's pissed at being treated like an enemy alien each time he tries to enter the US), but also superbly worked as a movie, often very funny - the farcical scene in the men's room is priceless - and sketching an array of vivid characters, esp. the tough tomboy fan and the long-suffering Azeri guard wanting only to get back to his cattle; not everything works (some scenes feel contrived, e.g. the bit where the girls recreate the football match in their holding-pen), but the twinge of something greater near the end - when the first girl reveals her true motive in going to the game, silencing both fans and soldiers - jerks surprising tears, and the girls' final release into the jubilant crowd feels like poetic liberation. There's a footnote to be written about Panahi's taste for slightly grotesque, misfit-looking actors (Michael's take may be one good reason), and the string-bean Ms. Zabihi can only be described as a female D.J. Qualls.
CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (52) (dir., Zhang Yimou) Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou Note-perfect irony that much of the plot hinges on a potion that makes its drinker slowly and progressively more cretinous - because of course the same may be said of Zhang's career, and in fact you can chart its decline within this one movie. Starts off with royal family intrigues in an enclosed space - Emperor makes Empress drink the aforementioned poison without her knowledge, Son No. 1 is having it off with a servant girl while lusting after Mother, Son No. 3 feels unloved and unappreciated - in the style of THE LION IN WINTER or (of course) JU DOU and RAISE THE RED LANTERN, and it's surprisingly absorbing - but then spectacular excess starts to take over, abseiling ninjas, sky-darkening volleys of arrows and lances, God-shots of human patterns, and far too many people running or marching through Tiananmen-like spaces. Certainly works as kitsch - the palace with its psychedelic pillars, yellow of chrysanthemums and red of blood (and lipstick), plot collapsing into grisly melodrama - but there's a reason why Busby Berkeley was never a world-class director.
CRANK (72) (dir., Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor) Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Dwight Yoakam, Jose Pablo Cantillo D.O.A. speeded up - not just a few days to live, but a few hours! - with a twist that slyly references the action genre's quest for adrenaline rushes, however gratuitous (the adrenaline rush becomes, quite literally, an end in itself). Fourth walls are broken all over the place - my favourite: subtitles on one shot also appearing (in mirror image, as if stencilled on the camera lens) on the reverse shot - the visuals are stylistic bedlam and the barrage takes in split-screens, ultra-violence, a severed hand, a random snatch of "Everybody's Talkin'" and a glimpse of Jason Statham's arse. Perfect 2 a.m. viewing, though also a pretty good example of Vertovian (or Vlada Petric-ian) kinesthesia, for those so inclined. "Do I look like I have CUNT written on my forehead?" Actually...
QUINCEANERA (49) (dir., Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland) Emily Rios, Jesse Garcia, Chalo Gonzalez White Newcomer in Gentrified Neighbourhood: "You live in a whole other world"; Troubled Latino Youth: "Nah, you do." A peek into a whole other world - not quite ghetto, but certainly ethnic sub-culture - for the Sundance crowd, and I'm no part of that sub-culture but it still seemed unconvincing. Not so much a case of the details being implausible - though you have to wonder: A loving mother never visits her pregnant runaway 14-year-old? A school counsellor never talks to her, never checks her story? (It's easy enough to confirm if she's still a virgin.) No-one ever asks what's going to happen to the child? - more a case of sensing that the film cares more about establishing affection (and/or solidarity) with the people and milieu than giving them a story to act out. Actually the whole thing is suspect, a slice-of-life where the directors spend a large chunk of the running-time on a thinly disguised version of themselves, a very urban drama (the opening rural landscape turns out to be a backdrop) dealing in cute picturesques like the old man selling champurrado; as in GIRLFIGHT, REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES etc, the Whole Other World is exotic on the surface, familiar underneath. Intolerance is a problem, but I guess they don't know any better - and they'll shed those primitive immigrant ideas eventually.
FIND ME GUILTY (55) (dir., Sidney Lumet) Vin Diesel, Linus Roache, Peter Dinklage, Ron Silver So audacious it'd even be startling without the shock of a good Vin Diesel performance; unfortunately, it shoots its wad in the first 40 minutes. Lumet does something so 'inappropriate' it actually works, playing Mafia shenanigans and courtroom drama in the light-hearted manner favoured by our hero, the goombah as stand-up comic (it's not just him, it's his whole universe: "Wanna give me a hand?" he gasps, struggling with a heavy chair in the prison corridors, and a warden duly obliges with a round of applause, Lumet shooting in extra-wide shot for added quirkiness); a jocular jazz score all but drowns out the proceedings, and even tiny bits are boldly done, like the editing when Roache's hardass prosecutor kicks over a table - there's a distracting near-subliminal snippet of Diesel's reaction just before the main shot of the table overturning, giving the violence a jump-cut effect. At first extraordinary, then increasingly ordinary, then actively shoddy; Diesel's palooka act is muddied with sentimentality (inspiring "the boys" with his speech about loyalty) and his courtroom hi-jinks grow repetitive. Speaking of which, I know it's supposed to be real courtroom testimony, but our big-hearted hero regaling the jury with stories of his coke-fiend days helps him fight the drug-dealing charge ... how, exactly?
SPIDER-MAN 3 (61) (dir., Sam Raimi) Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Topher Grace, Thomas Haden Church Never really read many comics but I seem to recall villains motivated by dreams of world domination, or at least the fiery destruction of significant numbers of people; not so in this sappy, scrappy threequel, where they're motivated by avenging personal slights, redeeming themselves, trying to prove they're "a good person", winning a father's posthumous love or belatedly being reunited with a sick little daughter (the Sandman also likes to rob banks, but this is treated as the minor irrelevance that it is). The confluence of comic-book action and daytime soap - not just comic-book but action in general, see e.g. "Lost" - that began in SPIDER-MAN reaches its pinnacle here, everyone looking for happiness and acting like lovestruck high-schoolers: Harry takes revenge by making Peter break up with Mary Jane, who incidentally has become quite neurotic and also has unresolved daddy issues (did she always?). All rather silly - and the structure is terrible, zigzagging haphazardly between its too-many villains - but I like its sketchy hothouse melodrama (slightly) more than the po-faced Part II, some of it (notably Harry's amnesia taking them back to the good old days) is surprisingly affecting, and it does embrace its own silliness at the same time; bad things happen to good people, most of the cast are assailed by flashbacks, but there's also an obnoxiously French maitre d', a little boy horrified at the prospect of Spidey in a clinch with a girl ("No, Spider-Man!"), the so-called "Dark Tobey" interlude plus the Spider himself after a fight with the Sandman, spitting out sand and emptying out his shoe as he wonders rhetorically: "Where do all these guys come from?..."
MY ARCHITECT (60) (dir., Nathaniel Kahn) Works, despite itself - and despite Mr. Kahn Jr., who tries to make himself endearingly childlike (startled by a ship's horn, dropping his yarmulke, roller-skating in the plaza outside Kahn Sr.'s building) but ends up getting dwarfed by the father he's trying to connect with. Main (I think intentional) irony is that Louis based his style on crafting monumental buildings, edifices designed to leave a mark like those of the ancients, yet the mark he himself left on Nathaniel's life is faint and fuzzy; fortunately, other folks seem to remember him quite vividly, making for some lively interviews - a parade of the eccentric and emotional, from the ship's captain who breaks down when he learns Nat's identity to the elderly, splenetic city planner who still boils over at mere mention of Louis Kahn - except that the interviews (and Lou's emerging life story) are considerably more interesting than the filmmaker's own journey, which never transcends self-indulgence; the scenes where he interviews his Mom or meets up with his half-sisters come across as wilfully trite amid the talk of creative philosophies and great artistic works, like the curator of a photography exhibition unaccountably choosing to insert his own holiday snaps among the exhibits. Maybe it's just that Jr.'s attempt to parallel his own "accidental existence" with Sr.'s feels misguided, since one man is touched with genius and the other is not; having said that, I don't know much about architecture but most of those buildings look like scary (and impractical) gigantism - albeit with a sense of humour.