Films Seen - November 2006
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
Thessaloniki Film Festival
WINDOWS ON MONDAY (67) (dir., Ulrich Kohler) Isabelle Menke, Hans-Jochen Wagner, Amber Bongard, Ilie Nastasse Not quite a breakthrough for Kohler but enough to suggest - along with the equally excellent BUNGALOW - that he'll someday turn into the Hong Sang-soo of the New German Cinema, as precise as Hong in his thinking, as alive to ambiguity and attuned to the fragility of life (Hong's theme in KANGWON PROVINCE); barking dogs and chainsaws threaten the characters, though not as much as the threat of sudden change/rupture/disaster - a wife and mother walking out on her life, a girl suddenly fainting, a Bloody Mary bottle spilling on a clean shirt - nor indeed as much as their own existential uncertainty. Why does she even pick her own child up from day-care, wonders Mom, why not come home with Lena or Anton instead? ("Because they have shitty names?" offers her husband.) Takes a credibility plunge when our heroine has a liaison with a tennis ace in a luxury hotel (how do they even let her in?), but Kohler seems to be the only one in the German renaissance with a sense of humour and the ability to write clever dialogue ("You smoke like a non-smoker thinks a smoker smokes"); it may seem a little thing when a guy has a two-second political argument with his girlfriend - "They're all the same"; "No, with the other lot we'd be in Iraq now" - but that's what seemed to be missing in stuff like GHOSTS and LONGING, characters with spark and something to say beyond the functional confines of plot. Also elegant and compellingly icy, style grounded in elisions, shallow-focus often separating people within the same shot; the ending is abrupt and ambivalent as the one in BUNGALOW, albeit without the brilliant visual coup. Look for rating to rise on second viewing.
LA PERRERA (52) (dir., Manuel Nieto Zas) Pablo Riera, Martin Adjemian, Sergio Gorfain Useless young man in depressing Uruguayan village. The sun goes behind a cloud, and the place looks even more depressing. Maté is drunk, pot is smoked. Halfway through, his Dad's had enough and kicks him out of the house, seeming to herald a change in the movie; absolutely nothing changes. Sounds like deadpan comedy - and it is, to an extent - but mostly charmless and dingy-looking (lots of muddy greens and browns) with too much emphasis on the house our hero's building, a symbol of his struggle to Be A Man. Rather macho, like a lot of these South American films - the guy's mocked for being an eternal student, not to mention he has trouble with his testicles - and the lazy mood slides into tedium; decent festival fodder, nonetheless.
INLAND EMPIRE (74) (second viewing: 84) (dir., David Lynch) Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton, Grace Zabriskie First the blurry faces. Then the rabbit-people. Then the robotic Russian woman who peers out from behind a fisheye lens and stumbles as she says "It is an interesting role?", like she's suffered a malfunction. Then MULHOLLAND DRIVE's reclusive cousin, or perhaps L'INTRUS with horror-movie stylings - and a different theme of course, a Hollywood star going through various lives/reincarnations ("Tell me if you've known me before"), each progressively more degrading, till her degradation matches that of Hollywood, dying on the corner of H'wood and Vine among the bums and homeless people (the process is cannibalistic, feeding on previous incarnations, just as the industry feeds on older originals without acknowledgment; is Dern's degradation a kind of penance?). Some hate the look, and it's true it only works once things get murky - the first hour is patchy, incl. most of the scenes at the film-shoot - but then we're down the rabbit-hole, the world dissolving into tenebrous half-shapes, a shapeless lump twitching on a bed in an empty room, dirty blues and dun-orange wallpaper and faded-yellow curtains, gleeful porn-star Furies asking "Do you want to see?" and dancing a deadpan Locomotion; there's a shot near the end, just a simple wide-shot with Dern appearing round a corner, that's as much a missive from dream-space as Irma Vep in the cat-suit. It's a trip, and quite bewitching (funny, too); it's the Lynch style, but he's never been quite so equanimous and at ease with himself. Maybe the setting - packed house, late-night screening - played a part, and final rating may have to wait till a video re-viewing; then again, I fully expected to be bored stiff (I was going to pass, but assumed I'd never get another chance to see it on the big screen), so I'm as surprised as anybody. One thing's for sure: odious comparisons to TADPOLE (and more sensible charges of self-parody) notwithstanding, no-one else could've made it. [Second viewing: yeah, it's a masterpiece. I'm partial to the theory that the whole thing is actually imagined by the abused Polish whore, but maybe it's better to view it as a case of Hollywood shedding its carapace of glamour to empathise with her reality (significantly, things fall apart when Dern fulfils the gossip-mongers' expectations by getting it on with her co-star, the kind of tabloid 'truth' that mocks and usurps real reality); Dern the movie star degenerates to Dern the whore, making it a story of redemption - incl. redemption for Hollywood's wholesale theft and constant cannibalism. I could say more (e.g. the rabbits standing for the gulf between 'entertainment' and what's really being represented), but the truth is I was only vaguely thinking of Meaning, the visuals are just so hypnotic and compelling (and Lynch is a great director of actors, albeit in a narrow register). Those who think it looks ugly ... I'm sorry, I don't know what you're seeing.]
RETRIEVAL (56) (dir., Slawomir Fabicki) Antoni Pawlicki, Natalya Vdovina, Jacek Braciak The Fallacy of the Sensitive Thug - or maybe just miscasting, but I never believed in this soulful, weak young man as an enforcer for a crime boss (yes, he boxes, but that just seemed like contrivance); "You're irresponsible and childish," chides the girl, but he's not that either. The actor playing his best friend's a lot more interesting, a moon-faced primitive whose eyes light up like a child's when he's happy, but he pretty much recedes in the second half, leaving only nice-looking compositions and use of repetitive sound to punctuate scenes, a phone ringing or a kid scratching over classical-music records in the background while the foreground action unfolds. Though actually that seemed like contrivance as well.
2:37 (36) (dir., Murali K. Thalluri) Clementine Mellor, Joel Mackenzie, Marni Spilane Pan across verdant tree-leaves, then soft choral music over shots of kids milling about in high-school corridors (behold their poor poignant lives). Interviews to camera in sober b&w introduce the characters, who have names but might as well be called The Jock, The Nice Girl ("Marriage is a nice thought"), The High Achiever, The Unhappy Gay Kid and The Misfit (who's both English - in an Australian school - and disabled). But who will turn out to be the Body in the Bathroom? Opening suicide left hanging like a tease as the film goes to flashback, with enough Steadicam same-action-from-different-angles to confirm that Thalluri has indeed seen ELEPHANT (also AMERICAN BEAUTY, and possibly KEN PARK), but no sense of life beyond the lurid and risibly Issue-driven - the only Issue not addressed being racism, which is slightly surprising given the director's ethnic-minority status but maybe he didn't want to do the obvious (so instead he gives the disabled kid two urethras). Hard to say why this trash played Un Certain Regard, though the suicide-by-vein-slashing shot may be the Most. Convincing. Ever. Or at least the messiest.
SPRING SUBWAY (63) (dir., Zhang Yibai) Xu Jinglei, Geng Le, Zhang Yang Starts as urban whimsy in Wong Kar-wai vein, a kind of autistic romanticism in shiny neon-lit corridors and subway-carriages - "I'll be 28 in 41 days. Before that I just want to know: Can love last forever?" - turns into surprisingly heartfelt break-up movie, ends as mushy tear-jerker. The middle section is the best, with husband and wife caught in a "life of lies" and unable to open up to each other. "These seven years are like a piece of flesh torn out of me," muses husband in voice-over; "I can't bear to cut it, even though it's hanging by a thread". "These seven years are like a child drowning before our eyes," counters wife, also in voice-over - and Zhang's flashy style plays off the emotions, matching their intensity (the husband snatches off a table-cloth in rage, dishes and glasses go flying; then again in slow-motion; then again in reverse-motion). The notion of the subway as a kind of community falls down slightly - the supporting characters don't get enough time, relative to the main couple - and the final act is conventional; still worth seeing, as obscure Chinese movies go.
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (40) (dir., Kevin Macdonald) Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy, Kerry Washington Fun for a while, except its youthful-Brit hero is too 00s - irreverent, yobbish, unembarrassed, blithely ignorant about Africa and that "whatsisname Amin" (surely a rebellious young man of the early 70s would take pride in knowing all about the Third World?) - and Whitaker as Idi Amin is a broad comic turn sinking into crude paranoia ("I am surrounded by traitors!"). Like THE CONSTANT GARDENER this is Third World exoticism with just enough blame-the-British rumpus to avoid charges of racism - and when our hero, deep in moral corruption, gets assailed by a montage of voices (including both Amin and his father) as he drowns his sorrows in Scotch, you know a shallow film has turned into a crappy one. Dumbest bit, though you won't know why till you see it: "I set up the meeting. At the Holiday Inn".
DRAMA/MEX (66) (dir., Gerardo Naranjo) Fernando Becerril, Miriana Moro, Diana Garcia Closing credits reveal Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal among the executive producers, which I should've guessed since this drama/Mex is brimming with the same rude youthful energy as Y TU MAMA, albeit without the profound undertow (the final shot suggests that the film's only Message is "Ah, youth"). So much fun it's easy to overlook dodgy detail like an abrasive ex-girlfriend quite enjoying being raped by her macho man, or a schoolgirl hooker (she preys on tourists, her only English being "wan' massage an' oral relaxashion?") catching the suicidal Martin Landau type with a gun to his temple, and taking advantage to filch his wallet (they bond later). Cynical and restless as its cool young things, their brashness offset by the "Moonlight Sonata", nifty camerawork and a clutch of fresh performances; Moro as the relaxashion-minded hooker - plump-faced, explosive, charismatic - is especially irresistible.
LONGING (54) (dir., Valeska Grisebach) Andreas Muller, Ilka Welz, Anett Dornbusch I'm not convinced by this New German Cinema - and I note "Sight & Sound" subtitled their recent survey piece "All Together Now", which may be part of what fails to inspire me: an implicit consensus approach, right-thinking films with just enough madness to impress Festival programmers, a polite unwillingness to push any specific values-agenda (except liberal humanism), and a sober 'realism' that's actually cosy and sentimental. You can see it here when e.g. Grisebach punctuates a raucous dinner scene with the cute detail of one waitress whispering something to another in the background, when family life means telling stories round the dinner-table and singing a song about a polar bear (don't these people have TV?), when 'ordinary' people are allowed their moments of love and affection ("Granny, you're so beautiful"), probably in the effect - on two different occasions - of a person swaying by him/herself listening to music with their eyes shut, probably in the very deliberate ellipses, definitely in the horribly twee ending when the characters' story becomes Just Another Story with a bunch of kids trying to work it out. There's a cosy parcelling-out of emotion, an unwillingness to get too involved even while making all the right empathetic noises (NB. This is also the political problem I have with the EU, a talking-shop that never seems to do anything except perpetuate its own existence) - though it may also be I'm misreading the characters, so e.g. the scene where hero sways by himself to Robbie Williams isn't a respectful affirmation of his 'space' but in fact a hint of his inability to express his feelings (that would at least explain his final-act behaviour, which seemed simply unbelievable except as proof that feelings often run deeper than they seem to); as in SUMMER '04 - another film I don't really get - it may be that New German filmmakers mean for us to interpret any hint of slippage or loss-of-control as a major rupture, which itself reflects the cotton-wool quality of their work (historical perspective may be helpful: if the Fassbinder generation were the ones afflicted with congenital guilt for Nazi depredations, this generation - born in the 60s and 70s - are the ones who can finally glimpse normality, hence perhaps the craving for domestication in so many of these movies). More than enough True Moments to make it worthwhile - unfaithful husband kisses wife feeling both horny and guilty, his body language half-holding her back, half-pulling her forward - and enough honest craftsmanship (Grisebach doubtless identifies with her metalworker hero), but Haneke or Dumont are touched by the madness of misanthropy while this has the complacent who-really-knows sadness of the modern relativist. "Life itself is a puff of air". How true, how very true.
CRAZY STONE (61) (dir., Ning Hao) Guo Tao, Liu Hua, Huang Bo "East meets West," says a developer type, placing a mini-pagoda atop a scale-model of a skyscraper - and that's the vibe in this lively comedy, doing a Guy Ritchie with a tinge of post-Tarantino Time-shuffling (the crooks-in-adjoining-flats gag is a straight steal from LOCK, STOCK), references to Batman, "Counter-Strike" and AC Milan, plus a fair bit of local colour (did you know Chinese Coke cans still have the old peel-off tabs?). Lots of close-ups and comical low-angles. Whip-pan transitions with "whoosh" sounds. Some scatology and quite a lot of slapstick, people being smacked across the back of the head and so on. "Dollars don't just fall out of the sky," says someone - and the punchline is obvious, but it also links to something that happened five scenes before. In short, clever and cynical, with details like the attempted lottery-ticket scam which (I suspect) relate to actual news stories in China and lots of colourful slang which (I suspect) gets lost in translation. Also notable for perhaps the most hilariously over-extended Eureka! moment - when our hero realises someone's switched the stones - in living memory.
THE PETER PAN FORMULA (47) (dir., Cho Chang-ho) On Ju-wan, Kim Ho-jung, Ok Ji-young The Korean stylistic penchant for abrupt contrasts gets some play - Cho likes to cut straight from a girl serenely playing piano to a stretcher being frantically wheeled down a hospital corridor, stuff like that - but this gradually dissolves into a vague and diffuse teen-angst drama, after starting off quite sharp and specific. Might've done better to take one theme, e.g. the motif of breathing - hero holds his breath as part of his swimming training; his comatose mother can do nothing but breathe; his life stifles him, metaphorically not allowing him to breathe - and run with it, instead of going off in all directions. Very matter-of-fact then suddenly quite melodramatic, with hero swimming out to sea in order to drown himself while heroine writes a love-note on the sand. Characters come and go (the girl in the hospital disappears for a good 20 minutes), major plot strands - like his convenience-store robberies - turn out to be minor, a dream sequence adds its own weirdness; sponge-baths, a lighthouse and a kite-string unravelling make visual motifs, but nothing's holding it together except generic alienation. Sample dialogue: "I brought you some side-dishes." "Will you give me a hand-job?".
CHILDREN OF MEN (61) (dir., Alfonso Cuaron) Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor Not entirely sure what the point is - 'You know how everything is shit right now? What if it got even worse?' - but a dystopian chase movie with (mostly) good directorial decisions. The decision to score the film with 60s and 70s songs, creating both a subtle sense of Time-dislocated and a suggestion of lost ideals (which is the theme of the movie and part of its topical thrust, though hero regaining his 60s-style youthful idealism doesn't apparently translate into 60s-style activism, i.e. making common cause with the 'terrorists' and rebels). The decision to trust Clive Owen's ravaged face when we learn about his dead child, Owen in the foreground while the story is related - out-of-focus, in a single take - in the background. The decision to make post-nuclear 2027 not especially different to 2006, so the things that are different - the sudden appearance of an angry mob, refugees in cages, the sign for one of the Zones into which the city is divided - are more shocking and effective. The decision to hire Emmanuel Lubezki, whose closed-off grey light, esp. in the early London scenes, superbly evokes the atmosphere of a world "without children's voices". The decision - though this is controversial - to favour long takes where the chaos builds and builds, reinforcing the sense of no escape (because a cut offers some relief, even if subconsciously), setting up the money moments like a battlefield stilled by a newborn's cries. Still a bit patchy and pointless - but I even liked the decision to compare Guantanamo (or equivalent) with a Nazi concentration camp, even if it means the inmates alternately seem to be Eastern European quasi-Jews and Arab Islamists.
SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS (27) (dir., Todd Phillips) Jon Heder, Billy Bob Thornton, Jacinda Barrett School for Jerks, more like - the kind of jerks who read "The Game" (OK, the kind who read "The Game" and take it seriously) and look on other people as milch-cows to be hustled dry ("Jesus, that's an easy takedown," says Thornton when our hero outlines his girl trouble). Frat-boy obnoxiousness - incl. gratuitous gay jokes - is actually less of a problem than all-round incompetence; hero's transformation seems to happen overnight (and he doesn't seem to change that much, which may be the script's fault or Heder's), most of the potentially dangerous scenes are muffed - like his big date where he applies the school's dating principles ("No compliments, ever"; "Lie, lie and lie some more"), with results that should be cringe-making but are just thinly charming - and the big climactic twist (such as it is) is glaringly obvious. Spectacularly half-assed, though of course I thought the same about Phillips' OLD SCHOOL.
SOPHIE SCHOLL: THE FINAL DAYS (44) (dir., Marc Rothemund) Julia Jentsch, Alexander Held, Fabian Hinrichs "Based on historical facts", trial transcripts, etc, but there seems little point in an opening caption when the thing is such a hagiography - indeed, practically a Passion of the Christ, with a Pilate-like interrogator symbolically washing his hands of our heroine. There's a certain power in its just-the-facts plainness, but it needed a Straub or Bresson, not this director who starts off with Sophie and girlfriend giggling as they sing along to the radio - cutting fast and going in close to emphasise her ordinary-girl freshness - then layers pulsating thriller music over the scenes at the illicit printing press where Sophie and friends carry out their heroic subversion. Speaking of which, it seemed excessive when some criticised DOWNFALL for letting the German people off the hook by portraying them as Hitler's victims, but there's certainly some such revisionism going on - albeit more here than in DOWNFALL, Sophie representing the pious outrage of Germany Now grafted onto Germany Then. The world will hate us for tolerating Hitler, she warns her tormentors - and would any German in 1943 really confront a Nazi with "How can you think the Jews are different than we are?"? Charge them with cruelty, sure, but charge them with racism? Looks like hindsight, somehow.
I AM A SEX ADDICT (75) (dir., Caveh Zahedi) Caveh Zahedi, Rebecca Lord, Emily Morse, Amanda Henderson One of many movie diarists in our age of compulsive truth-telling - Nanni Moretti, Henry Jaglom, Ross McElwee come to mind - but Zahedi is perhaps the most compulsive, making reckless imperative honesty part of his persona (it's what ruins his various relationships) and extending this honesty to the film itself - breaking the fourth wall to discuss its making - and even the personal lives of his actors ("The actress playing Devin actually had a drinking problem in real life as well ... But back to the story."). The fact that his 'truth' is ambivalent - that there's no guarantee he is in fact being honest, despite his purported honesty - is one kind of tension, the conflict between logic and libido is another, the one that drives the plot itself; Zahedi's constant voice-over tries to rationalise his addiction, make it intelligible, and the conflict is between mind and penis (how ironic that his constant refrain to prostitutes, after haggling over price and fucking/sucking requirements, is "I need to think about it") as well as more exalted pretensions when he tells himself (and us) he had a "mystical experience" in the midst of all the sleaze. The film does get sleazy, and sadder than e.g. McElwee's detached misadventures - CZ reduced to getting a blowjob from a New York hooker in a back-alley so dingy the woman has to crouch down instead of kneeling on the ground, because of all the broken glass - but our hero is also very funny, funnier than most other diarists (Moretti's worldview is funny, not so much his persona); when his wife is weeping and he tries to comfort her then looks at the camera in deadpan despair - as if to say 'Help! How does this work?' - there's an infantile Stan Laurel quality to his dazed scrawny presence, and the first half-hour works like a mime-show with little comic symbols and visual synecdoche to illustrate the voice-over ("wedding" gets a shot of a ring, "transcend" a glimpse of Jesus with arms outstretched, etc); then there's the details of romantic life itself - the irrational jealousies, bizarre delusions and the way relationships can seem like a leaky boat, one hole plugged only for another to bubble up - then the actual poignant moments of something like Truth, as when Caveh looks in the woman's eyes and "sees her soul" which is really just the sudden realisation that she exists independently of his lust for her (he's so self-centred, seeing another person as a person counts as a spiritual experience - but hey, there's some truth in that). Slightly over-extended (these things often are), still among the best films of the year.
BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (43) (dir., Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe) Harry and Luke Treadaway, Diana Kent, Tania Emery Thought at first the point was how the media and music industry turn celebrities into freaks - hence the irony in rock stars who actually are freaks - but that doesn't seem to be it (certainly the emphasis is much more on the Siamese-twin brothers themselves than the circus around them); maybe it's more the claustrophobia of fame rhymed with the claustrophobia of living your life permanently joined to another person, or the irony of the rock'n roll lifestyle - "freedom", wild individualism - crashing against the reality of not being an individual (maybe it's all of the above, which is another way of saying the film is half-baked). Looks great but rapidly devolved into flashy escapades for their own sake, and oddly unconvincing for a film made by documentarians - stuff like the montage of audience members is very nondescript. Great final shot, however, and is that a CITIZEN KANE reference when the twins are sold?
CHANGING TIMES (57) (dir., André Téchiné) Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Malik Zidi Times change but Deneuve and Depardieu remain (the final shot is a kind of reassurance), representing not just French film but white, pre-multi-culti French film (references to Iraq and al-Jazeera - plus the Moroccan setting - make it clear West vs. Islam is among the implicit themes); he's first glimpsed berating Arab workers, she forgetting an Arab child's name. The film itself lives somewhere in between, dealing in doubles (even literal twins) and half-and-halfs (ethnically, even sexually); it's jittery - like the camerawork - and often abrupt, veering off in wildly unexpected directions; the talk turns to witchcraft and suddenly we're hearing of spells being cast and watching sheep being sacrificed, later there's a crisis and we suddenly get slowed-down, near-abstract shots of earth being churned and flung around by an excavator. Very artful, but it doesn't commit to anything (except perhaps the changing of the times) - even the druggie girlfriend or Depardieu carrying a torch for 30 years (true love!) are simply there, part of the fabric. Hard to get excited, consequently.
CASINO ROYALE (65) (dir., Martin Campbell) Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench Here's the "Cyprus Mail" review, which is mostly descriptive but I don't have a lot to say in any case (the other film I was reviewing that day was THE WICKER MAN, hence the opening gambit). One thing, though: I revisited the old CASINO ROYALE just to remind myself, and even though it's still pretty dire - and even though I like this new one quite a bit - that Burt Bacharach title-song has been stuck in my head for days, whereas I'm having real trouble recalling highlights from the new ROYALE. Take that for what it's worth (very little, probably).
SHERRYBABY (60) (dir., Laurie Collyer) Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ryan Simpkins, Danny Trejo, Giancarlo Esposito It's a fine line between a character who's tough-yet-vulnerable and one who's tough in some scenes (e.g. confronting the girl at the halfway house: "I will hurt you!") and vulnerable in others. This is rather glib, e.g. the scenes with the day-care kids to show what a great mother she could be (if they'd only let her) but there's a fine character study among the too-easy contrasts - self-absorbed, maybe a little nuts (she's first seen running after a man who happens to bump into her on the street, yelling for an apology), often a pain in the ass e.g. when she practically forces her family to listen to her sing, and Gyllenhaal's performance is indeed 'fearless' (as they say at the Independent Spirit Awards). Flirted with 70+ for quite a while, but it kind of ended up in a conventional place and the big scenes - as when Sherry gives in to drugs, moody-ethereal music and wasted-looking Maggie - mark it out as glossier than it likes to come off. Finally she learns her lesson, or at least a lesson - "Please help me raise my daughter," she pleads, no longer egocentric - and the movie ends.
SLITHER (67) (dir., James Gunn) Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry, Michael Rooker Always up for a monster movie (it's my 80s training), even-or-especially when it morphs into a zombie movie then a latex-fest in the style of THE THING and SOCIETY; sharp lines keep it going - "Don't you judge me!" yells a zombie, and much of the fun comes in the fact that afflicted humans nonetheless remain human ("Didn't want no-one seeing me like this," muses a gross balloon-woman, and it's sweet as well as snarky) - while Nathan Fillion does his imperturbable hero out of SERENITY ("My easy-going nature is getting sorely fucking tested"). Not a lot of subtext, though it's funny that a town of macho hunters should be menaced by phallic worms fostering a burning hunger for red meat; raucous and cartoonish with a gleeful white-trash element, made by the writer of both SCOOBY-DOO and DAWN OF THE DEAD, but alternately tense - slithery worms in the bathtub! - and sardonic. No punches pulled, no Divine Dog Syndrome. Line to Quote: "I don't care if you're a lesbo, you don't deserve this shit!".
BATTLE IN HEAVEN (66) (dir., Carlos Reygadas) Marcos Hernandez, Anapola Mushkadiz, Bertha Ruiz The thing-ness of things. A naked man's middle-aged body, his man-breasts and the jutting dome of his belly. The dirty-blond thatch at his midriff - a rug? a piece of cloth? - that turns out to be the back of the head of a woman giving him a blow-job. The curve of his shoulder, seen from below, as he's wearing a vest. The abundance of flesh when he and his wife copulate. The traffic from behind the windshield of his car (lots of VW Beetles in Mexico City), a little kid walking along in a subway station before being snatched away by his mother, a hunched old man with a cane, people waiting for the train doors to close (and our fleeting realisation that one of them, for some reason, is wearing a mask). Sunlight flooding a man's face as the sun rises over the horizon. A cloudbank on a mountain. A car disgorging numerous inhabitants, an entire family sliding out like juice from a fruit. Other, bug-like cars in a geometric pattern, seen from high on a skyscraper. Like JAPON it fades in the third quarter, and there isn't a believable moment from beginning to end (the themes, incl. rich vs. poor and guilt/penance, are half-baked) - but there's at least two dozen visually arresting moments, a filmmaker mining and transforming his environment to create a personal landscape. It's good enough.
EDMOND (62) (dir., Stuart Gordon) William H. Macy, Julia Stiles, Joe Mantegna, Bokeem Woodbine Looking for the Irony key here, and I couldn't find it - possibly because Mamet's stylised style makes Irony the default setting, raising the suspicion that he's actually dead serious underneath. Certainly, naming his hero after Edmund Burke, a conservative rebel - famous for speaking out against the French Revolution at a time and place when it was trendy to support it - suggests he's not a figure of fun when he erupts in politically-incorrect rage ("God respects the strong!"), that the film really is about the primitive lurking inside every respectable drone - yet how can he not be a figure of fun when he goes about his "release" from repression haggling with hookers about the price ("That's too much!") as if buying tubs of grout, or when he gets unceremoniously rejected (or worse) each time he tries to 'reach out' to people (the hotel clerk, his wife in jail)? There's doubtless a sequence at work here - Denial, Anger, Acceptance perhaps (certainly the ending is Acceptance), with racism as the main indicator - but it's hard to shake the feeling that the film isn't really that complex, and would seem less complex if not for the belligerent dialogue, 'raw' situations and malarkey about coincidence (the number 115) and destiny. Lots of fun, however, with a haunting urban sheen - opening skyscraper montage may be the year's best, and the barroom conversation is the year's second-best (after "4"); why didn't Joe Mantegna stick to acting in Mamet movies?
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (54) (dir., Mary Harron) Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris Lots and lots of production design but the 1950s on display is pretty campy, played for rib-nudging condescension - an Investigative Panel starts with the judge apologising that there's no smoking in the building (imagine that!), then it's all talk of "juvenile delinquency" and what-is-this-bondage-of-which-you-speak naivety - taking the edge off the film's most interesting angle, that Bettie Page (for all her notoriety) was a 50s girl with strait-laced 50s attitudes. It also clashes with another angle, the implication that her bondage persona was where she really found herself as a woman - "restraint" as a kind of liberation - not exploited or used by men for the first time, which is why (I assumed) the film switches to colour once she becomes "Bettie Page" - but in fact the colour scenes are erratic, and her final choice to give it all up for God isn't presented as a wilful blindness or regression (it's her choice, and respected). A near-miss, amusing rather than incisive - but Mol comes into her own, and when she does the saucy tigress thing you just want to spank her.
DON'T COME KNOCKING (51) (dir., Wim Wenders) Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth Key line may be Roth's little speech about not letting in the outside world, and themes of interior/exterior resonate throughout, made literal when the estranged son throws all his belongings out the window so the street becomes a furnished arena where private problems can be worked out in public. That also fits in with the theme, which is movie-star cowboy Shepard breaking out of his cocoon (the world of movies, though also the iconic laconic world of macho cowboys) to engage with emotions he's repressed, events he's forgotten and consequences he's denied - and the film, as suggested by the (charming) final scene, doesn't try to explain him ("Who is Howard?" goes the song at the end, "Where is Howard?") though it does nudge him out of hiding. Not much going on plotwise, and Wenders' direction is stodgy - but he does have an eye for colour and location (the crisp open spaces of Butte, Montana), reflections within the frame and a trompe l'oeil shot where a motionless man in a lighted window momentarily looks like a billboard. Shame he didn't go to two-shot and let the scene play out, observing the chemistry, when Shepard and real-life wife Lange meet for the first time, though...
THE WICKER MAN (14) (dir., Neil LaBute) Nicolas Cage, Ellen Burstyn, Molly Parker Remake issues aside, incredibly dull and stilted (we always thought LaBute wrote that way to create ironic scare-quotes round his dark comedies, but it seems he can only write that way), with Cage hilariously bad - at first inexpressive, later resorting to parody as he does double-takes on seeing the same woman twice ("Didn't I just speak with you?") and wrestles with lines like "Step away from the bike!". Then there's the actual remake issues, like making him a cop who's out of his jurisdiction (not just in terms of the island being private; it's in Washington, and he's from California) so he can't wax self-righteous like Edward Woodward in the original, or giving him a personal stake by making the lost girl his daughter (which becomes another story altogether); also, of course, there's the change from a pagan society to a matriarchal one - which makes a little bit of sense in that the 'femininisation' of society is perceived as the same kind of threat today as hippie ideals were in the early 70s, at least in some quarters, but also sacrifices eerie supernatural undertones for the sake of Gender Studies think-piece (lamest detail: changing the island's product from apples to honey to enable laboured subtext about drone males and worker bees). Almost unwatchable.
ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL (49) (dir., Terry Zwigoff) Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent [A parade of freaks - "living clichés," the film calls them - who might inhabit some malicious art-school caricature; also, however, a story of failure, which is rare in American (albeit not Zwigoff-ian) cinema. Most intriguing aspect is perhaps the gradual realisation that our hero - sober, well-meaning and hard-working - is as much a fool as the barefoot vegans, "angry lesbians" and insecure babies around him, his idealism a naive ludicrous thing lacking nuance (he claps like a maniac when a speaker lauds "truth and freedom", even though the speaker is an asshole calling for the freedom to be an asshole), his talent probably minuscule or at least inadequate. The film is remarkably sour, its contempt for sensitive losers going deep - 'successful' artists, the rare 1 in 100, are the worst of the lot, dried-out middle-aged men brown-nosing agents, railing at the world or ending up dejected art-school teachers - and it's no surprise that it seems to hate even itself, its own satire; grade inflation and political correctness make half-hearted cameos and the satire peters out, getting increasingly perfunctory till a (mediocre) gag like the effeminate roommate's coming-out just gets tossed in the mix, as though the film itself were disgusted with its inability to change anything. The last half-hour, when it tries to rely on plot, is increasingly clumsy and tedious, and it's sad to see Zwigoff feeling the need to include a line of dialogue explaining how a lit cigarette caused the fire, or writer Clowes playing join-the-dots to contrive things so the undercover cop reveals his identity. Still a feelbad clarion-call for despairing, self-loathing, unhappy-with-their-work, useless-with-women artists everywhere; oh, and memo to Michael - the guy hasn't spent 25 years painting triangles, it took him 25 years to learn how to paint triangles. It makes a difference.]
DAISY (40) (dir., Andrew Lau) Jun Ji-hyun, Jung Woo-sung, Lee Sung-jae [Very bad timing, watching this straight after THE DEPARTED - it's as contemplative and wannabe-ethereal as that one is propulsive - but I'm pretty sure it'd come off as a dozy romantic drama at the best of times. Lau self-consciously strives for something 'sensitive' (his hitman hero likes flowers, Van Gogh and classical music), but only succeeds in slowing things down - it's even worse when his heroine loses her voice in the second half, so she mostly casts wounded glances and weeps on the inside - and raising impertinent questions: Do Interpol cops carry Interpol cards in their wallets? Why is his boss Korean if he works for Interpol? Why doesn't heroine stand outside and wait for the delivery-man to bring the flowers (which arrive at the same time each day) so she can find out more about her secret admirer? Why does a poster for an exhibition taking place on April 15 say 4/15 if the film is set in Holland? (Should be 15/4.) Do Korean films still use a variant of the fake orange blood from 70s cop dramas? Also, why does Andrew Lau want to be Wong Kar-wai? There can be only one, etc.]
THE DEPARTED (74) (dir., Martin Scorsese) Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin [Not entirely sure if there's a through-line, but perhaps class comes closest. The two "rats" are both confused about their class - DiCaprio's character shuttled back and forth between his upscale mother and blue-collar father throughout childhood; Damon's ghetto kid has ideas above his station, and moves into an apartment that'll make him "upper-class by next Tuesday" - whereas both cops and gangsters are coherent communities, rich in argot and raillery, joined in solidarity which in turn is a function of Family; both leaders are father-figures - Leo's cop superior welcomes him into his house, sits him down and offers him dinner - and the gangsters call "Mom" and "Dad" to say they won't be coming home to dinner when they want to warn of a police raid. As in THE GODFATHER, the strength and closeness of relationships far outweighs their moral context, and the theme of sticking to your own class (reinforced by the very last scene) may well resonate with Scorsese, who's spent the past few years trolling for Oscars instead of being a quote-unquote poet of the streets. Maybe the family angle explains the biggest plot snag - the fact that Nicholson's gangster really ought to work out straight away who the spy in his organisation is (it's not like we're shown many other options), even allowing that the ex-cop New Guy comes from "reliable" stock - and the plot kind of stutters in the final stretch, though it doesn't ruin proceedings when the rhythm is so compelling. Scorsese (and Thelma Schoonmaker) stretches out scenes with creative cross-cutting - not linking scenes in Time but drawing connections across the cops-and-robbers divide - then cuts other scenes abruptly (see e.g. Leo and his cousin on the porch), building a rhythm of luxurious propulsion studded with small eruptions, like a limo-ride through a war zone. Music throbs low in the background, like a beating heart, dialogue is scabrous and often hilarious - "I wanna smoke," sez Baldwin, all in a rush of verbiage, "you wanna smoke no I forgot you don't smoke what are ya one of those fitness freaks go fuck yourself" - Wahlberg getting many of the best lines as a terrier-like pro with a fierce instinctive loyalty and killer way with words ("Who the fuck are you?"; "I'm the guy doing his job. You must be the other guy"); even Jack's unfortunate Jack-ness is semi-appropriate, despite a misguided emphasis on his 'demonic' side à la WITCHES OF EASTWICK. Somewhat hollow, but also one of the rare films (only the second one this year for me) that you follow in your bones - your body tenses, you block out the chattering people behind you, eyes and fingers freeze so you can't take notes or check your watch. A through-line would be nice, but I mean come on.]
THE MATADOR (71) (dir., Richard Shepard) Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Hope Davis, Philip Baker Hall [Deft and constantly surprising, both in style and content; Shepard's soundtrack choices make it clear he's no spring chicken, but I still assumed he must be a first-timer just because no-one with such assurance could be knocking around for over 15 years without (really) getting anywhere. The opening scenes are all misdirection and sudden tone-shifts, raddled Brosnan waking up next to a strange girl followed by the offbeat bit of business with her black toe-polish then The Jam's rollicking "Town Called Malice" over bullfight footage for the opening credits; later he gets into an argument with a 10-year-old seconds before someone dies violently and a screen-filling caption proclaims "Denver", later still comes the Mexican hotel with its garish colours - yellows in the room, fluorescent-green in the hotel bar - and the odd couple sharing margaritas in the middle, monstrous hitman (both for what he does and what he is, a joyless creature sapped of human feeling) and wide-eyed Everyman. Must admit I expected cheap twists, maybe the Mamet double-binds of e.g. THE SPANISH PRISONER - at the very least I thought the hotel meeting would turn out to be a set-up - but the film has nobler things on its mind, two very different men awakening each other to their common humanity; 9 out of 10 films would make this a tale of Kinnear's corruption - mostly because hitmen, even (or especially) burned-out cynical hitmen, are more glamorous than square family guys - but this is a tale of two opposites meeting halfway by becoming (at least temporarily) each other, which is really the gift offered by any friendship (in this context I didn't mind the pulled punch at the end, which might've overbalanced things by making Kinnear's transformation too visceral); the hints of corruption in the final act, e.g. the visual rhyme as the two men stand by the window, may be put down to more misdirection, tempting us to leap to a cynical conclusion (i.e. that Kinnear sold his soul that night in the hotel room) when the truth is more complex. Brosnan - applying a dab of sun-cream to his nose, staring inscrutably at the tequila shaker, slumped in his hotel room in a giant sombrero, laughing uproariously at a cruel joke gone well, talking in a Clive Owen voice of Bangkok hookers and a jail in Mexico - is magnificent, building on his wrecked quasi-Bond from THE TAILOR OF PANAMA, and Kinnear shows he's even better playing good-natured dopes ("You're ... very rude") than cold-hearted bastards. The bit where he believes - after a moment's hesitation - his hitman friend's straight-faced assertion that he always wanted to be a cheerleader, and even starts telling an anecdote about his brother-in-law who's a male cheerleader before being cut off by an exasperated roar, is just priceless.]