Films Seen - November 2004
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
SHARK TALE (42) (dir., Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron & Rob Letterman) with the voices of Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Jack Black, Renee Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese [These "Cyprus Mail" reviews sure are handy; here's another one. Apologies for the mostly lame style, but don't forget it's meant for a general audience rather than the rarefied readership we get here...]
DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (55) (dir., Rawson Marshall Thurber) Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Stephen Root, Rip Torn [Wham! Blam! Mostly a case of violent slapstick involving dodgeballs (and the occasional monkey wrench) to the head, groin, etc - my matinee audience was rolling in the aisles - punctuated by pushy-pathetic Stiller-isms, assorted puns on "balls", BEST IN SHOW commentators (incl. a KINGPIN reference), bizarre non sequiturs (David Hasselhoff? a unicorn fetish?), the occasional inspired gag (my favourite, here as in ZOOLANDER: the instructional film-within-a-film, with its manically-grinning little kid), and just enough subtext for the nurturing of Thoughtful Observations. Is it encouraging or discouraging - sign of progress, or a fudge in the name of "family fun" - that the gay team member's gayness is barely commented on (and he turns out to be bi- in any case)? What Does It Say that the joke in THE BAD NEWS BEARS 30 years ago was kids behaving like adults, whereas now it's adults behaving like kids? Ain't it strange how build-up is increasingly dispensed with in Hollywood - there's hardly any set-ups, plot just baldly unfolds - yet the bigger albatross of everyone becoming a Better Person somehow survives? Can a film really equate its heroes with be-yourself slacker-dom - as opposed to Stiller's oppressive self-improvement - yet also play the Better Person card in fulfilling their dreams? (The epilogue is esp. schizophrenic, with Vaughn actually saying "You're fine as you are" then going on to plug his gym anyway; looks like the real intractable division in Divided America is between the fitness freaks and couch potatoes.) Mostly, however, Wham! Also, blam!]
THE FORGOTTEN (60) (dir., Joseph Ruben) Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Alfre Woodard [I think we can now declare Loss of Memory an Official Mid-00s Movie Theme, ranking with the Psycho Within sub-genre of the early 90s (the ones where a trusted friend turned out to be a nutter). Hard to say what's causing this terror of forgetting - see also 50 FIRST DATES, ETERNAL SUNSHINE - and it's probably best not to blame 9/11 and the trauma of a taken-for-granted reality snatched away in an instant, both because everything gets blamed on 9/11 nowadays and because the harbinger of the trend - MEMENTO - pre-dates it (besides, this particular movie has more in common with THE LADY VANISHES); maybe it's just a sense of too much information in our lives or something. The film itself turns out to be sillier than expected - cool special effect of people getting sucked into the sky notwithstanding - and awash in clichés, from news clippings and family photos providing handy exposition to the inevitable unspecified "witnesses" making policework so much easier ("witnesses say" they were alone - and yet we found this...); Ruben doesn't have the chops to make a chase scene imaginative - it's just shots of people running - but he does have a feel for spooky moments involving everyday objects, the blank pages of a photo album here packing as much of a punch as the perfectly-aligned bathroom towels in SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, and he does build an atmosphere of doleful foreboding in the early scenes. Grey-blues and browns in the colour scheme help, James Horner's ubiquitous score - backing piano with what sounds like the distant clang of metal hammers at one point - not so much.]
BRIDES (43) (dir., Pantelis Voulgaris) Damian Lewis, Victoria Charalambidou, Steven Berkoff [Mostly lame "Cyprus Mail" review - which also begins near-identically to the INTERMISSION piece, I am out of ideas, etc - will just have to do. Time is short and so on. Not much more to say, in any case - handsome melodrama turns out to be less about the Immigrant Experience than Steven Berkoff twirling invisible moustachios. Heroine's hair turning grey overnight is one of those cases - like the split-screen in HULK - where a visual metaphor backfires by being too plainly (not to say hilariously) a metaphor.]
JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (51) (dir., Takashi Shimizu) Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara [Thought at first this was going to be a RASHOMON deal, presenting alternative facets of the same puzzle, but it's actually more random, ending up with little in common - just a house - between its various pieces, making it paradoxically more chilling and easier to shake off. Hushed, inert atmosphere does create unease, mostly because it feels morbid, reeking of Death - the film's dramatic deadness works in its favour - yet in fact it consistently turns out to be less interesting than it seems. As in RING and DARK WATER, making the vengeful spirits those of the oppressed and disenfranchised - abused kids, notably - turns the film into an implicit guilt trip, a rebuke to comfortable life in a rich, complacent country (esp. Japan, with its entrenched values and deadlocked political system), and moving from victim to victim makes it even starker (there's literally no-one to identify with, except the 'monster'). Like THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, or even the original DAWN OF THE DEAD, these are films about justice for the weak (a.k.a. Revolution) in an unjust world; but the theme isn't developed, turning the ghosts into a family in effect negates it, and the whole thing degenerates into an empty spookfest. Speaking of ghosts, though, Val Lewton's must be pleased with the success of these suggestive Jap horrors, implying rather than showing; see also Shyamalan, M. Night.]
CELLULAR (72) (dir., David Ellis) Chris Evans, Kim Basinger, William H. Macy, Jason Statham [No preamble! The (fairly irresistible) high-concept plot just erupts, taking exactly one (1) cut to get from cosy Brentwood mansion to dark smelly attic, and the pace - or humour - never falters in a blissful B-movie that makes it its business to be lean, funny and light on its feet. Obstacles keep coming, working every variation on cellphone-related mayhem - Help! low battery, Careful! the signal's breaking up, Oh no! we're in a tunnel - not to mention interference from other phones owned by odious yuppie types; hell turns out, amusingly, to be other people, with assorted Angelenos turning up at the worst possible moment with their own unhelpful problems ("I'm the friggin' victim here!"), and there's hot chicks in bikinis, and bubbles (!) floating through the climax, and all kinds of neat touches like the sketch artist who tries to sell our young hero 'his' picture then, when rebuffed, is glimpsed trying to sell the exact same picture to the guy behind him (not just a joke, but witty shorthand establishing his Everykid status). Something of a cellphone movie itself - small, fast, relentless and yes, quite disposable - but it makes me chuckle just to think of William H. Macy talking about his "day spa", or the lawyer with the perfect teeth and wildly obnoxious manner, or the audacity of having the little boy just get snatched (no preamble!) instead of requiring some lame 'I'm a friend of your mommy's' ruse, or a dozen other instances of tongue-in-cheek dexterity. Effortlessly pleasurable.]
THE VILLAGE (47) (dir., M. Night Shyamalan) Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver [I want this re-made by whoever did the trailer, which made it look like the coolest horror movie ever. Either that or Shyamalan himself, as long as he lays off the lame twists and comes clean about the kind of film he really wants to make - a chamber drama with dashes of Polanski as well as a thinly-veiled comment on the war in Iraq (note how both the paper and radio gratuitously mention soldiers dying in combat when Bryce finally gets out of the woods), with unseen "creatures" and the outside world in general demonised in order to "protect the innocence" of a cut-off community taken back to a time of simple lives and simple values. Of course he'd have to get a co-writer, to cut the flab and liven up his trite, scene-killing dialogue - it's not the talkiness that's the problem, it's the fact that you try to follow the talk and bump up against lines like "You are my cherished one" - though he wouldn't need much help in directorial matters: his sense of drama, forever delaying the money-shot, is really just boundless self-confidence - albeit misplaced in this case - but he also has a knack for significant things peeking in at the edge-of-frame, and silhouettes on the porch at night with the mist over the garden, and a final shot marking the heroine's triumph just by placing her frame-centre, like a queen with her entourage. Friendly suggestions: drop the delusions of genre, keep Roger Deakins, stop casting yourself in pivotal roles: I do not think it Means what you think it Means.]
MORTADELO & FILEMON: THE BIG ADVENTURE (42) (dir., Javier Fesser) Benito Pocino, Pepe Viyuela, Dominique Pinon [Don't know the names of the various comic-book practitioners, but it does seem like cartoon slapstick with a cruel, grotesque edge is more prevalent in Europe (esp. Spain and Italy) than across the Atlantic. This is very much a kidpic, but highlights include a live cat getting put through a wringer then ironed as if it were a shirt; a man guillotining himself, his head plopping comically to the floor as the blade falls; and Character A giving B the all-clear to cross a busy street - "Now!" - at which point B starts to cross and is instantly flattened by a car FINAL DESTINATION-style, much to A's delight (you can just see the Disney legal department clearing that one for Copycat Potential). Not as transgressive as it possibly sounds, really just a live-action cartoon with an exhausting, monotonous rhythm and random digs at the Pope and Queen Elizabeth II; kiddie knockabout, but still enough there for evil-minded adults to derive the occasional buzz. Typical gag: man gets knocked on the head by a lamp-post and thoroughly squashed, scuttling away as a two-foot-high concertina with feet.]
THE WEEPING MEADOW (54) (dir., Theo Angelopoulos) Alexandra Aidini, Nicos Poursadinis, Giorgos Armenis [A revelation for me, being the first time (in four attempts, the last one six years ago) I could really appreciate the Angelopoulos style - though apparently not in the ways intended. He himself calls his long-take approach "totally realistic" but it seems a more complex, contradictory beast, pretending on the one hand to real-time depiction of events - the whole Bazinian ideal of objective documentation - but also so dependent on artful and elaborate camera moves it's no closer to 'real life' than one of Ophuls' lush romantic melodramas; and of course he's also claimed to be making "human" stories, whereas the thrust of the style is a kind of magnificent anti-humanism, or more accurately supra-humanism. When the entire life of a village is exposed in a single sweeping pan, an intricate choreography of movement absorbed and recorded in the eye of a placid omniscient camera, Time and History itself seem to have been stilled by the power of Cinema - which for a long time I thought was also the theme of the movie, Art as a haven from historical turmoil (the couple take refuge in a theatre, then among a band of musicians playing all styles from jazz to bouzouki, i.e. Music with a capital M). Then of course the old tired politics come in - the band are syndicalists, civil war takes its toll, History rolls on like the river on whose banks the village is built, etc - and themes get lost in muddy storytelling and generic characters; still image-making on a grand scale, though you sometimes wonder where the grand scale ends and gigantism begins (a dead sheep hanging on a tree isn't 'powerful' enough; we need to have sheep hanging off every branch). Angelopoulos is a lonely man on an oft-ploughed furrow - and probably not as sophisticated as he thinks, esp. about people - but at least now I've learned to stop worrying and love that languorous camera. Bonus points for the unravelling thread acting as a physical link between the lovers, probably the only instance of narrative/conceptual poetry matching the visual kind.]
BLIND SHAFT (67) (dir., Li Yang) Li Yixiang, Wang Shuangbao, Wang Baoqiang [Piles it on a bit heavy with the politics - the State of Modern China and so on - esp. when the characters are singing "Long Live Socialism" in a brothel or telling each other that "only money matters". Piles it on a bit heavy with the characters too, esp. the boy's loveable naivete: he's so good it soon becomes clear only one ending is possible, and tension becomes a mere matter of wondering how they'll achieve it. Still absorbing, driven by the gradual termite-like attrition of innocence chipping away at a world of cynicism, and physical detail - the barren hills and mining towns, with a sense of breath turning steamy in the ice-cold and people sweating indoors beneath their cheap windbreakers - that lodges in the mind. I join with Michael and Skander in proclaiming it "solid".]
THE LADYKILLERS (41) (dir., Joel & Ethan Coen) Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons [Everything's wrong in this cacophonous remake. The old lady isn't defined against the gang, and the gang aren't implicitly aligned with the cops outside (part of the same worldly world), as in the original - instead the gang are strangers in a Deep South cartoon, and the dynamic seems to have the Professor more in tune with Miss Munson (they share an old-fashioned worldview) than his own men, which throws the whole thing off. The old lady is still (just about) an innocent, in her own way, but much more aggressive and domineering - and actively anti-intellectual - which blunts the joke about sweetness and light unwittingly causing a massacre; and what she represents are no longer superannuated Victorian values - as in the original's best moment, when she reminisces about the night the "old Queen" died - but red-blooded fundamentalism which (inadvertent irony!), far from being obsolete, is stronger than ever. Even if no original existed, the Coens' imagination is at its coarsest here - screeching fat women, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, a cat running off with a severed finger - though I guess you have to expect the grotesque in a film that kicks off with a shot of a gargoyle. Hanks' gasping-for-breath laugh is a memorable bit of business but his florid diction gets a bit much, as if the garrulous John Goodman Character in previous Coen films - like his Cyclops in O BROTHER, who thanked Ulysses for the "conversational hiatus" - had unaccountably been given a film of his own; the Coens can still do striking images - like the cape fluttering in the breeze at the very end - and the final act has a nicely acrid tone (then again, that comes from the original), but it's no more than a jittery burlesque on mortality, whereas THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE was a full-on meditation. Ethan Coen is now 50 years old...]
INTERMISSION (61) (dir., John Crowley) Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Cillian Murphy, Colm Meaney, Kelly Macdonald [Remember when I said there were going to be changes to make my life easier? This is one of those changes. No way would this superficial "Cyprus Mail" review have been enough in the old days, but Time is short so I guess it'll have to do. Couple more things to mention: (i) it's surprisingly well-disposed to Meaney's ugly cop; (ii) as in Guy Ritchie, the erudite use of language comes with its own in-built irony (surrounded as it is by conspicuously harsh, in-your-face life-detail), making the real thrust of the film anti-intellectual; (iii) Crowley has a (hugely annoying) thing about tiny, meaningless zooms while people are talking, obviously intended for that 'edgy' feel - but at least he also (iv) knows his DON'T LOOK NOW references. So I guess it all evens out.]
STRAYED (56) (dir., André Téchiné) Emmanuelle Béart, Gaspard Ulliel, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet [Somewhere between the real-life WW2 newsreel footage that opens it and the first actual Téchiné image we see - a long, complex and of course utterly manufactured crane-shot - though the balance between naturalism and dreamy re-imagining seems uncertain, to put it kindly. The 'real' world of Nazis and battles becomes increasingly irrelevant as the characters nest in their sanctuary - that's the point - but they never quite descend into anything perverse or taboo-breaking either, carrying enough from the outside world (class tension, sexual decorum) to measure their behaviour. Previous Téchiné films (LES VOLEURS, or SCENE OF THE CRIME) carried the threat of fantasy or violence - the two are often the same - to flavour the pot, but this just seems inert and a little passive - which of course was the mood of France as the Germans advanced, but historical analogy doesn't seem to be the point; and the recurring motif of Lost Children doesn't seem to have a payoff either; and I still can't decide if the final shot is meant to depict digging - as in digging up secrets - or building, as in rebuilding shattered lives. A puzzle, not always in a good way.]
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (34) (dir., Paul W.S. Anderson) Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner ["Oh my God! Take a look at this!" says someone, but all we see are bits of hardware in a metal box. Typical, really: Anderson has a strong visual sense, this being his symphony in black and grey, and the set-up - all ice and darkness - is intriguing, but everything (incl. the monsters) just becomes mechanical and hardware-heavy once the plot gets underway - and, as in FREDDY VS. JASON, the monster match-up proves a sham as convention forces the film to take sides, making one creature (in this case the Predator) sympathetic. Still some striking images, and it may or may not be a good joke (it's not clear if Anderson sees the joke) when the Bremner character becomes an incubator for baby aliens, having previously gone on and on about his kids and what it means to be a father. Not too many other jokes, but note the cold Antarctic riff on the old What's-that-noise-oh-it's-only-a-cat ploy, with the feline intruder turning out - inevitably - to be a penguin.]