Films Seen - May 2008

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING (73) (dir., Marwan Hamed) Adel Imam, Nour El-Sherif, Issad Younis Guess I should probably decry such things as the antiquated view of homosexuality - gays are predatory, and corrupt innocent boys with their wily un-Islamic ways, but they (the gays) were themselves corrupted in childhood which is why they have this terrible disease - but it only added to the sense of a Time-warped other world, to be honest, a Dickensian warren of quests and reversals; as in Dickens - or Naguib Mahfouz - almost everyone's a Character, carrying themselves with portentous affectation (Jaggers from "Great Expectations" would fit right in with these rotund lawyers, ageing chanteuses, shady patriarchs and venal politicians) or a kind of mournful pathos. The stories are soapy, detail sometimes verges on the risible, but the pace is brisk, its three hours feel like two, performances are memorable - esp. Imam as the dandyish middle-aged wastrel, who assures a lady friend he's "the last of the respectable men" - and the glimpse of Egyptian values is fascinating (I suspect people are giving its sexual politics a pass because it's a missive from the Other, those inscrutable Muslims); little things stand out, like the curt way a not-unsympathetic hospital doctor informs parents of their son's death, with a brief "God grant you patience" - but the real surprise is the film's nostalgia for an elegant Europeanised past (the titular Building itself a relic of a pre-Nasser Egypt) coupled with refusal to judge Islamist militants too harshly, their Cause (even terrorism) seen as a valid response to corrupt state institutions and rampant snobbery and class injustice ("God's law" is never belittled; what's mocked is the surface religion of a functionary who seals an illicit deal with a prayer from the Koran). Flawed but riveting drama, full of crushed dreams, betrayals and intense emotions, cramped in sepulchral lighting and the sense of an oppressive, unforgiving society where - as in Dickens' Victorian England - public propriety is all. Again and again, fearful characters upbraid each other with the same five words: "People are looking at us!".   

BLIND MOUNTAIN (37) (dir., Li Yang) Huang Lu, Yang Youan, Zhang Yuling Promising plot (city girl finds herself forcibly married and kept prisoner in a remote mountain village), which could've developed in any number of intriguing ways. Could've made an Imamura-like descent into rural savagery and the bestiality of Man, a Stockholm Syndrome drama where the girl falls in love with her husband/captor, a pointed allegory of the old mountain China vs. the emerging capitalist China (it's set in the early 90s) - even a Pagnol-like rural comedy, which sounds like a stretch but did occur to me when the village headman looks up from his friendly game of cards in the local coffeeshop to promise that "the Council will look into this". Instead, Li goes for the most obvious route, playing for melodrama - can the girl escape?, etc - in a flat naturalistic style that's peculiarly un-suited to melodrama, trying not for intense NARAYAMA-like visuals but such bland detail as our heroine's burgeoning friendship with a cute little boy. Final twist not offensive, but so unearned it just kind of sits there.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (59) (dir., Francis Ford Coppola) Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz Thought I liked this more, at least till I noticed other people doing complicated readings of its hidden narrative - this guy reckons the protagonist has been "given a mission to create a record of human language/consciousness because a nuclear war will occur in the near future, and the next generation of humanity will need that as a reference" - as if it were 12 MONKEYS or something, and realised I was never sufficiently involved to believe it all added up to anything - except a recurring motif of dualities and dichotomies, our hero becoming an "intermediary being" (an angel, if you will) existing in a Zone of Infinite Knowledge between "Man and the Divine, Reason and Eros, Darkness and Light, Matter and Spirit". To which one could add - and Coppola would add - Reality and Film, the images in Roth's dreams upside-down like the image produced by a lens, the spiritual awakening in India existing simultaneously with a camera crew filming said awakening; one might say our hero is re-born as a movie character having movie experiences, straying through the WW2 Drama (mad-scientist Nazis, newsboys in the street shouting "War clouds over Romania!"), the Lush Romance and, briefly, the Gothic Horror. In the end its pleasures are intangible and a little distant, a perfectly pointless riddle like the briefly-mentioned story of the king who dreamed he was a butterfly, which dreamed it was a king, who dreamed he was a butterfly ... Unless of course it means something.

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (61) (dir., Steven Spielberg) Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen It's another functional "Cyprus Mail" review! If I were writing it here I'd put the last paragraph first, but you can't hit a general audience with too much egghead subtext.   

MOTHER OF TEARS (45) (dir., Dario Argento) Asia Argento, Adam James, Udo Kier, Jun Ichikawa "Harrietta Potter and the Hot Lesbian Witches", starring Asia Argento as the Girl Who Lived - albeit more through luck than brains, judging by her fuddled hysteria when things get hairy - summoning the powers she never knew she had to take revenge on the all-powerful witch who killed her parents. Those powers are left somewhat vague, to put it kindly - translation: the climax is almost comically undernourished, Apocalypse averted (and a roomful of witches vanquished) by the simple expedient of stripping off the MoT's cloak and chucking it in the fire - just as Argento has no real interest in fleshing out such cool-sounding concepts as witches converging from all over the world, or Rome convulsed by an epidemic of random violence (we just get a few half-hearted shots, albeit including the classic bit where a mother cradles her baby then tenderly slings him off a bridge). Instead he goes for T&A and hardcore splatter, intestines spilling out and so forth - kind of a shock, given I've seen nothing of his work between SUSPIRIA and this; when did he get so downmarket? - plus a suggestion of equation between black magic and homosexuality, both defiant subterranean acts with a touch of camp (the cackling witches terrorising passengers at the airport may as well be drag-queens swinging handbags). Sometimes fun but the laziness is disheartening, ditto Our Heroine's epochal stupidity, see e.g. the bit when she and Hero hide out in a house, pursued by witches. "No lights!" "Why?" "We don't want them to see us." Oh, right...

OPERA JAWA (40) (dir., Garin Nugroho) Martinus Miroto, Artika Sari Devi, Eko Supriyanto Ignore the rating, it just means I'm unqualified to deal with this - though I loved PRINCESS RACCOON, which it resembles in some ways. Musical genres are traversed, albeit not as consistently or flamboyantly as in the Suzuki - one smoky number in the middle might be a blues ballad, despite or because of lyrics like "My sperm sparkles on the heavens" - and ethnic/exotic opera is kitted out with a meta-layer (actors' roles reflected in their lives), an Adam Smith reference and a smattering of what-the-fuck detail (like the woman doing what looks like a stylised fan-dance in her living-room while a man busies himself shutting windows and scurrying around behind her). Also a political dimension, though I've no idea why - is it that globalisation again? does talk of rich exploiting poor tie in with that aforementioned Adam Smith reference? - since it seems irrelevant to the central love triangle that the lover is rich and the husband is poor (it's not like either man gets a lot of personality); is it just my own impatience with opera, or is there actually a fatal incoherence beneath the pretty colours and exotica? Note e.g. the final caption, trying to up the ante - and nudge Western memories of the Asian tsunami - by calling the film "a requiem for victims of violence and natural disasters", as if those were the same thing. They're not, you know.

THE WITNESSES (61) (dir., André Téchiné) Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Béart, Sami Bouajila, Johan Libéreau First half acts as a reminder of what's been missing in Téchiné's last two films (apparently it was there in LOIN, which I've never seen): a nervous energy, exemplified in tight cutting - with a handful of jump-cuts, but mainly a question of leaving no air at the end of a scene - and camera movement which is frequent without being sufficiently extended or elaborate to appear fluid (the camera seems to move because it's unsure, not because it's omniscient). It's a bit like Chabrol without the genre trappings, basically creating a taut atmosphere where you know something tragic's going to happen to these well-heeled characters with their turbulent feelings buried in comfortable lives; alas, the tragedy turns out to be Issue-driven, which perhaps is why the energy deflates in the second half - and we didn't need it to be made explicit e.g. that Blanc is acting as much out of self-interest as compassion in looking after the young man (Béart as the writer pointedly acting as Witness is also a little heavy). Still affecting when the dazed Witnesses sail off on their boat at the very end, not least because the film doesn't necessarily view them approvingly; there's an undercurrent of anger from this gay director (reflected in Blanc's character, the convivial doctor turned furious gay activist) - at hypocritical homophobes who survived, golden boys who didn't, above all perhaps the straights who offered virtuous sympathy for AIDS victims but weren't quite as dignified or virtuous - indeed, nearly shat themselves with fear - when it looked like the disease might also affect them.

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (39) (dir., Tom Vaughan) Ashton Kutcher, Cameron Diaz, Rob Corddry, Lake Bell, Dennis Farina Why are they making comedies of remarriage for 12-year-olds? 12-year-olds don't get married. Not unpleasant, just consistently idiotic, and it's no surprise when Kutcher's brain-dead frat-boy routine instantly charms the high-flyers and captains of industry at Diaz' Wall Street "retreat": no-one really likes smart people, everyone - even the rich and powerful - secretly wants a crude high-fiving idiot making 'Dude, is your name really Dick?' jokes (just keep telling yourselves that while you're serving my fries, target audience). Vaughan's capable of more - capable of actual charm, as in STARTER FOR 10 - and seems a little shell-shocked, taking refuge in over-emphatic cross-cutting as if trying to flog this dead horse back to life through sheer frenzied energy, but he also manages to curb the stars' worst excesses - both are actually halfway-tolerable - and lets the sidekicks run free, Bell's withering contempt only slightly funnier than Corddry's rampant piggishness and unlikely pick-up lines: "Did I invent hip-hop? No. But I was there..."

CJ7 (64) (dir., Stephen Chow) Jiao Xu, Stephen Chow, Chi Chung Lam As in KUNG FU HUSTLE, values are old-fashioned - work hard, keep your dignity, don't let kids have whatever they want - and the references retro, not just E.T. but even Boney M. There's a certain populist subtext, a fantasy for poor people feeling left behind in a hi-tech world: "It's hi-tech," is the catch-all explanation for CJ7's powers - making it curiously moving when it turns out he only has one power, the Jesus-like ability to vault Death and restore life, even at the expense of his own (there's a lot of self-sacrifice in general, the Chow character also "killing himself" working for his sometimes-ungrateful son; a US equivalent might've painted him more explicitly as 'neglectful', whether because the US is more child-centric or just more guilt-ridden at working so hard). Chow understates, acting as foil to the hilariously manic kid - his (actually her) increasingly demented reactions to the alien's first appearance, culminating in a huge silent scream ("Are you on drugs or something?" asks Dad) are indeed pretty funny - not quite subverting the genre but keeping it under control, focusing on chop-socky slapstick and making the schmaltzy ending count; like CJ7 himself, more incompetent furball than E.T.-like Superior Being, lower expectations actually work to its advantage. Best straight-up kids' film - as opposed to wink-and-a-nudge ironic kids' film - we're likely to see all year.

MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM (57) (dir., Zach Helm) Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Zach Mills, Jason Bateman The ending is lame, and the whole thing might've worked better with different stars (or at least anyone but the hammy, insufferable Hoffman, seemingly channelling Rain Man at one point in Magorium's shuffling walk), but there's something beguiling here - a goofiness born of introversion, a veiled acknowledgment that Imagination isn't the Life-affirming force shown in corporate kidpics (see e.g. ROBOTS) but more often a companion for sad little boys who have no friends (it's a bit like the freak-celebration in Tim Burton, but not so emphatic). It's there in the kid hero, a solitary boy who collects hats (!) and supplies a self-consciously zany voice-over - "Some called him a genius. Others called him eccentric. This guy from Detroit inexplicably called him 'Steve'..." - it's there in Magorium's Willy Wonka-like unsocialized quality, above all in the bond that develops between the kid and Bateman's repressed accountant (the bit where they communicate through a pane of glass by writing messages and holding them up to the glass is poignantly infused with their mutual emotional reticence, a kid who's a freak and a man who's a "mutant"); just about everyone in the film is "stuck", giving a bittersweet tinge to the cutesy goings-on in the Emporium and glib 'carpe diem's spouted by kidpic convention (the revolving door with different settings opening into different rooms is a straight steal from HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE, and the film carries a hint - certainly more than most Hollywood kidpics - of the mixture of sweet and reserved in Miyazaki). The main Message is "Believe in Magic", which is totally part of the Big Lie peddled by pop-culture to keep society unthinking and infantilized - but the secondary Message is "Learn to Accept Death", which is totally not. 

SUPERHERO MOVIE (47) (dir., Craig Mazin) Drake Bell, Sara Paxton, Christopher McDonald, Leslie Nielsen Primitive but effective, spoofing not by sterile name-dropping - as in MEET THE SPARTANS and the rest of the Friedberg-Seltzer monstrosities - but sudden explosive slapstick, often unfolding into set-pieces of anarchic, extravagant chaos; it's a Mazin speciality - my fave being perhaps the scene in SCARY MOVIE 3 where the line "It's a wake" triggered escalating scenes of pandemonium in a funeral parlour - highlights here including killer bees and young (super)hero accidentally offing his parents, not just once but again and again. It works because of course that's what comedy is, a ritual act of violence where repressed-Id irreverence rises up to smite convention (the part of Margaret Dumont will be played tonight by SPIDER-MAN), though the violence is usually more coded - or at least more elegant - than here; the film's outrageous ruptures often seem to come from some pre-cognitive impulse of destruction for its own sake, like a toddler's instinctive bashing of his toys (is it even a joke when our hero says "Oh shit!" then looks up to find he's standing on the corner of Oh Street and Shit Avenue?). Diminishing returns, but the tastelessness is bracing; Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with live kittens sounds delish, and "We are gathered here today to say goodbye to our beloved XYZ" will never sound the same again.  

FOOL'S GOLD (24) (dir., Andy Tennant) Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, Donald Sutherland, Alexis Dziena, Ray Winstone Nothing so depressing as a stale 'romp', and this manages the not-inconsiderable feat of making its supporting characters even less attractive than the deadly duo of McConaughey (slack, ragged, tending to slouch and mug) and Hudson (prim, phony, forced in her comic timing). Worst of all in Dziena's bimbo character, both overwritten and made self-conscious about being a bimbo - presumably out of fear of offending real-life bimbos - which is surely a terrible idea, turned into the Worst Idea Ever when they also try to work in some serious father-daughter bonding. Before long, one starts being obscurely irritated even by little things, the hallmark of a film that isn't working: Why are Winstone and Ewen Bremner's accents so godawful? (The former alternates between Southern drawl and Sarf London.) How come Winstone's character suddenly goes from foe to friend? How bad is the endless exposition scene where Matt'n Kate explain about the gold, ineptly broken up with inserts of Sutherland and Dziena looking vaguely interested? How annoying is the frequent reliance on nudge-nudge sex to spice things up, reaching a nadir when the bimbo incredulously asks "You spent your honeymoon in a library?" and we cut to a 5-second shot of orgasmic moaning behind a stack of books? I could go on, but why bother? Makes me wince just to think about it. 

EX DRUMMER (64) (dir., Koen Mortier) Dries Van Hegen, Norman Baert, Gunter Lamoot Anyone who's read British music magazines knows their Anarcho-Punk Fetish, esp. in the older-skewing mags ("Uncut" is especially bad at this) where wrinkly rockers recall 70s gigs in scummy halls where the audience spat, threw chairs and finally set upon each other (and the band) with broken beer-bottles - all of it recalled for the slumming delectation of the mag's solidly middle-class readers. That's the kind of hypocrisy - not to say exploitation - skewered in this sharp, deceptive (if undoubtedly unpleasant) black comedy, the titular Drummer being a middle-class tourist who infiltrates the underclass ("I want to step out of my happy world for a while," he explains to his wife, who always likes to hear amusing tales of his exploits) and uses his status - and relative celebrity as author and musician - to berate, belittle and manipulate the losers he finds there (you might say he plays God, and a rather surreal scene finds him typing out the dialogue for the next scene on his computer before it happens - as though these people were his own creations - though he also implicitly uses them to channel his repressed prejudices; presumably he's not so casually homophobic with his wife or publisher). Mortier shoots as if from the hero's POV - or the POV of those music-mag writers wallowing in scum-rock squalor - espousing a flashy style that accentuates grotesque and verges on the mindless (the upside-down freak hanging from the ceiling as he spouts his misogynist rants is a clever touch, but why the unmotivated God-shots or askew composition with acres of head-room?), as well as a fiercely adolescent sensibility with jokes about stinky snatches and comically big dicks - but the big dick turns out to be a sad, painful prop ("You can have it," sighs its owner, addressing all the men who think it might be awesome), just as the girl who lusts after it turns out to have a sad, painful reason for doing so, just as the film's grotesques are a bit more complex than they seem to the middle-class spectator. Not exactly humanist, and itself a little hypocritical since it does provide the wild punky energy - the climactic concert is hilarious, with aggression run amuck and thrash-bands with names like Six Million Jews - while decrying its indulgence, but e.g. the singer who "specialises" in assault (first seen bashing some unfortunate bystander) is a lot like TRAINSPOTTING's Begbie, except he ends up betrayed and abandoned while Begbie's rage never went beyond a callous, my-mate-the-psycho gag. The contrast is instructive.     

THE EYE (38) (dir., David Moreau & Xavier Palud) Jessica Alba, Alessandro Nivola, Parker Posey Can't recall the Chinese EYE, six years on (I'll be lucky to recall this one six months from now), but presumably it also put its eggs in the wrong basket, going for SIXTH SENSE Redux - its famous tag-line actually quoted in the dialogue - instead of the scarier premise of the Eyes being possessed by their previous owner's vision, MAD LOVE-style (the mirror scene - easily the movie's high-point - evokes the discomfiting feeling of your self not really being yourself). First hour is generic I-see-dead-people stuff, and deeply boring - something lunges, music crashes on the soundtrack, cut to Alba panting in terror - second part (once the donor is identified, and a plot emerges) better but finally too simple. Doesn't entirely Make Sense, as you might expect - why should heroine's alter ego distort her reality (rooms mutating into other rooms, etc) if she only wants to 'send a message' à la MOTHMAN PROPHECIES? - but the most obvious question is this: If a high-functioning blind woman finds her newly-restored sight causing problems, why panic and go to pieces - when she can just shut her eyes and behave as if she were blind again? 

IRON MAN (53) (dir., Jon Favreau) Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard Does this mean we can finally go from "post-9/11" to "post-post-9/11"? Notable mainly for what it doesn't do, viz. use its hero - an arms manufacturer who gets a Road-to-Damascus moment after a run-in with Afghan terrorists - to make any kind of comment on America's wars in the Middle East (the terrorists' beliefs are irrelevant, nothing suggests any parallel with America's 80s arming of the Afghan mujahideen and Osama bin-Laden, and our hero's dismay at having sold arms to the 'wrong' side isn't implied as patriotic, merely dismay at having sold to bad people; Afghanistan itself barely features in the second hour, mirroring the way it's receded along with the lame-duck Bushites). The precise nature of his transformation is glossed over, so on the one hand he stops supplying guns but, on the other, doesn't seem to have turned pacifist, still pals around with his high-ranking military chum - who sneers: "What, you're a humanitarian now?" - and even strikes back at the terrorists, albeit mainly in (what looks like) a one-off revenge strike; "Iron Man 2" will presumably fill in the gaps, but vagueness hurts Part 1's dramatic impact - shading into indifference, just like its political indifference. In the end, it's really just a film about Downey's comic stylings (getting kind of stale, truth be told) and the kickass metal body-suit that's the real star of the show - but the suit isn't a personal superpower (like Spider-Man's), merely a super-weapon (like Robocop), so it's just a cool accessory unless they build a character to go with it. On the one hand, Howard talks of manned aircraft always trumping the unmanned - a slam at Rumsfeldian hi-tech tactics, a reminder of the physical humanity in warfare - on the other, our unfeeling hero only 'gets a heart' once he gets a chunk of hi-tech metal in his chest, an irony the film seems ill-equipped to figure out. Focuses most of its energy on varying the SPIDER-MAN template, getting back to comedy after the over-lachrymose SPIDEY 3 - hence the very last line, putting a raucous spin on the inevitable "I am..." consummation - which is fair enough but leaves it rather stranded; best seen as a stepping-stone in Marvel's long-term business plan than a movie in its own right.