Films Seen - November 2008
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
BLACK SUN (58) (dir., Gary Tarn) Not a sob-story, or even a poetic/abstract meditation on blindness - more a motivational pep-talk by a man who went blind, and not only learned to live with his condition but also found it opening his mind to profound insights, esp. on the subjective nature of Reality and how you need to find a way to "dance with Life". All a bit heavy on the uplift, so that by the end it can even include lines like "Yes, I have regrets; I'd prefer to see" (no, really?), plus of course - like most motivational talks - you wonder if it's really sincere or if Montalembert has (perhaps) tried to redeem his cut-short painting career by turning his blindness into Art (not that he isn't fascinating, because he is; that much is obvious). Really only watched to see whether Meirelles might've done something more in BLINDNESS, but stylistically it's a mixed bag; faces of people in the street take on a powerful strangeness when we know our hero can't see them - it's like we're watching his remembered facsimiles of what people look like ("I was making films in my head," he admits) - but Tarn alternately tries to evoke blindness (making things fuzzy) and ignore it (showing them in their full glory), or both at the same time when he uses a kind of dioptre that leaves half the image fuzzy and the other half sharp. Amazingly, his background is in film and media scoring - 'amazingly' because, though the film is something of a one-man show (Tarn wrote, directed, photographed, etc), his sickly Arvo Part-ish score is easily the weakest link.
INTERKOSMOS (70) (dir., Jim Finn) Nandini Khaund, Jim Finn, Goran Milos A slightly harder sit than THE WILD BLUE YONDER (which it slightly resembles), its humour being more subterranean though the theme's much the same - space exploration as Utopia, entwined (in this case) with the utopian dreams of socialism, set off against Man's unerring ability to turn the sublime into banal, redeemed by the filmmaker's insistence on turning banal into sublime. Herzog in YONDER posited random footage of astronauts in a spaceship as a top-secret tape They didn't want you to see, just as Finn posits random footage of nothing in particular as a "visual memory tape" designed by Interkosmos scientists so its astronauts wouldn't go stir-crazy; he also juxtaposes the vastness of space with a German rendition of "The Trolley Song" - part of a burgeoning romance between two of the cosmonauts - and quotes doctrine on the ways of the bourgeoisie over innocuous footage of a water-park. Most reviews seem to mention the line about capitalism being "like a kindergarten of boneless children", possibly because there aren't many memorable lines to cite; it's really just an ambience - a muffled yearning for all the doomed impossible dreams - and resplendent soundtrack, a marching-song given a mellow Latin swing (with castanets!), thrumming kraut-rock over astronaut training footage that seems to involve synchronised bending and extending of arms while keeping perfectly straight faces. All this, and the "Little Space Pig" too.
SEX DRIVE (48) (dir., Sean Anders) Josh Zuckerman, Clark Duke, Amanda Crew, James Marsden Don't want to pontificate too much about this ROAD TRIP variation being conservative - makes me look cooler than I am, and besides I'd probably be like "Kids Today, have they no morals?" if it weren't conservative - but ... well, it really is. The Amish get the best lines, clearly the most together people in the whole movie (what makes them so together being, significantly, that they get the wild oats out the way at a designated time, then settle down to being sensible, useful members of society), and meanwhile setting off for hot cross-country sex with a tasty-looking stranger -"Ms. Tasty"! - encountered on the Internet is exposed as a Really Bad Idea, the piggish best friend's "Be a dick" philosophy is clearly a red herring and the gay jokes err on the side of being uncomfortable, esp. the predatory stranger in the men's toilets; the older brother's gay insults aren't really shot down (yes he's a bully, but the lines are designed to get laughs: "Try not to come back any gayer than you already are!") and though the final 'twist' puts him in his place, it also comes off as a kind of punishment. In itself, not unfunny - even the opening title is amusing, "sex drive" as a weight pressing down on the adolescent psyche - but a bit too manufactured, like a studio-sponsored contest to determine how much raunch can be crammed into 109 minutes (just so long as it's also - yes - conservative). James Marsden may be up for some Skandie points, once I figure out whether unshakeable commitment in the service of rampant idiocy counts as good acting.
Thessaloniki Film Festival
THE COUNTRY TEACHER (63) (dir., Bohdan Slama) Pavel Liska, Zuzana Bydzovska, Ladislav Sedivy Slama's WILD BEES seemed a bit intolerant of Otherness (i.e. the Michael Jackson impersonator), and some gay viewers may discern the same in this rustic drama where being homosexual is no fun at all, (admittedly closeted) hero tortured and tormented by his 'problem' - clearly, he'd rather be straight; his obnoxiously self-confident friend is apparently bisexual - going against the prevailing GLAAD nostrum that being gay is something to celebrate. Then again, maybe that's why Slama gets such a plausible country vibe, relaxed in some ways, e.g. over teenage drinking and snogging - because it's 'natural', just as our hero (a science teacher) likes to study Nature, just as he implicitly feels his condition is 'against Nature' - conservative in others; not just the usual misfit-among-Puritans scenario (as we might've got with a more right-on director), nor does Slama play the usual Victim card when secrets are revealed, the emphasis being instead - much more affectingly - on the kindness of a good woman. We're often a step behind the characters instead of vice versa, e.g. hero knows he's in love with the boy long before it's vouchsafed to the audience, the structure generally managing to avoid obvious short-cuts and blatant indicators - at least till the ending, which is pat, meretricious and on-the-nose (there's actually a speech in praise of diversity!) and took it down a couple of points all by itself.
DAYTIME DRINKING (49) (dir., Noh Young-seok) Song Sam-dong, Yuk Sang-yeop, Kim Kang-hee Much-applauded by a Friday-night crowd which consisted mainly of students - and would, I suspect, have applauded anything that involved copious drinking and a slacker hero - but this kind of deadpan farce needs a little more art than it gets here. Passive protagonist pinballs from one awkward situation to another, his Achilles' heel being his inability to say no (especially when drinks are being offered), though in truth he could've helped himself a little more - except that if he had, e.g. by explaining to his friend that he'd been robbed, the whole situation might've collapsed, which is obviously a mark of threadbare writing. Direction not much better (boredom represented by comical jump-cuts from hero sitting in one posture to hero sitting in slightly different posture, etc) though Noh clearly needs to be commended for his DIY achievement - and it's nice to see Korean drunken philosophizing is much the same as any other drunken philosophizing: "Women are like the wind..."
FLOWER IN THE POCKET (26) (dir., Liew Seng Tat) Wong Zi Jiang, Lim Ming Wei, Amira Nasuha Binti Shahiran A film of no interest - non-characters, uninspired staging, flat video visuals - except perhaps as occasional comment on Malaysia's Chinese-Muslim divide, and how awkward moments can ensue when a Chinese man tries to shake hands with his son's Muslim teacher and etc. Also, I guess, as an exercise in naturalism, insofar as the two child actors are clearly improvising much of the time, but they're rendered so cutesy it's hard to care. Wondered why something so inept was even in a festival - there's also a vestigial family-values Message, insofar as the two kids' shenanigans are occasionally intercut with their absent father in his workshop, all very lazy and emaciated - but it's actually won awards at Pusan, Rotterdam and Deauville, so don't mind me.
TALE 52 (61) (dir., Alexis Alexiou) Yiorgos Kakanakis, Serafita Grigoriadou, Daphne Lambroyianni Worst Director Intro Ever: "Someone watched this at another festival," quoth Mr. Alexiou, "and said to me: 'I didn't really enjoy your film, but I'm glad I saw it'. So ... I know it's not the most enjoyable film ever made but ... I hope you like it. Thank you." Talk about giving your movie a mountain to climb - and it mostly climbs it, though it's no surprise (given that intro) that our hero is rather inarticulate. He gets involved in an ETERNAL SUNSHINE-like time-loop (Alexiou also cites JE T'AIME JE T'AIME as an inspiration, to which one might add MEMENTO and GROUNDHOG DAY), going back in dreams to fix, or try to fix, a failed relationship - and the prolix plot eventually catches up with the style but it is quite stylish in a fuzzy, low-tech way, using hot light, shallow focus and commendably brisk cutting (even more commendable in a Greek movie). Not much more than a calling-card, but it works very well, and may also signal a new sophistication in stodgy Greek cinema. Here's hoping.
TONY MANERO (65) (dir., Pablo Larrain) Alfredo Castro, Amparo Noguera, Hector Morales That rare thing, a 'con' that turns into a 'pro'. Even half an hour into it, I was hating the grey dingy ambience and unpleasant characters - but in fact the protagonist is so unpleasant (violent, taciturn, tyrannical, lusting after his daughter - oh and p.s. also a serial-killer) it becomes fascinating to see what he'll do next, and the film is so grey and dingy it totally defeats MURIEL'S WEDDING Syndrome, the painful condition wherein retro music acts as kitschy counterweight to doleful drama. Disco nostalgia doesn't stand a chance - instead, Travolta-worship becomes part of our hero's dour obsession, FEVER his personal Gospel and misguided bulwark against Time ("We're getting old," says his wife, but he's convinced he's found something real in Tony's gyrations: "It's not just fashion"); in short, Tony Manero is almost as deceiving as the film's other deity, unseen Pinochet whom our odious hero also admires ("Things are finally working in this country"), Larrain finding a surprisingly potent metaphor for the wilful blindness and sugared-pill violence of Chile in the 70s. Mostly, however, it's just overpoweringly nasty, the grey grainy murkiness so chilly it seeps into your bones, our hero gasp-inducingly evil. Why's he squatting down over that white linen jacket? Why's he taking down his pants? He's not ... ? He is!
LAKE TAHOE (68) (dir., Fernando Eimbcke) Diego Catano, Hector Herrera, Daniela Valentine As in DUCK SEASON, po-faced comic style - static shots, frequent fades to black, real-time inertia interspersed with wacky asides (a kid suddenly launching into kung-fu moves) - gradually builds into humanist tenderness, albeit a little too tender in this case (DUCK SEASON skews a little edgier). Still very funny, worried-looking hero Catano encountering various obsessives in flat suburban spaces, the camera taking in the empty streets and small, near-identical homes. There's also a dog called Sica, which could be a shout-out to Vittorio de Sica (probably not, but it would be appropriate), and an old man who owns the dog but finally lets him go, a touching affirmation of the film's underlying message: everything dies, and memories - as of Lake Tahoe - are all we have to live on. Eimbcke's worldview is fundamentally sombre, which is why all the bonding never becomes saccharine. Hopefully he'll do something else for his third film, though.
WINDS OF SEPTEMBER (43) (dir., Tom Shu-Yu Lin) Rhydian Vaughan, Chang Chieh, Jennifer Chu Interesting for about 10 minutes, when it seems the point will be the gang of teenage friends systematically letting each other down, undercutting the hi-jinks of the first half. They don't (at least not systematically) and it doesn't, merely replacing boisterous high spirits with a tinkly piano score and furrowed-brow filmmaking for the final act. Set-up dimly recalls A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY but this is thin and novelettish, hitting one conventional note after another; vaguely homoerotic teen shenanigans interspersed at regular intervals with the TV news talking of a Taiwanese baseball corruption scandal - the kids are all baseball-mad - acting as a metaphor for their Loss of Innocence. I rest my case.
DELTA (60) (dir., Kornel Mundruzco) Felix Lajko, Orsi Toth, Lili Monori "Once I didn't eat for a year"; "Why not?"; "I wasn't hungry." Clearly the kind of film that's likely to have some viewers bashing their head against the back of the seat in front of them - but still very moody, rising to occasional heights of baroque splendour. A naked girl on a timber bridge at half-light. Glassy expanses of water, bridged by our David Thewlis-like hero just as he tries to bridge rural suspicion and hostility (actually feels like a bayou movie, the score often veering into Cajun territory). A rape shown in one stunning wide-shot, runaway girl chased by stepfather through muddy shacks and outhouses, forced down, assaulted - a half-minute of distant, thrusting flesh - then left weeping. Also a pet tortoise, which is all too appropriate given the pace - but "Faces en route to a funeral" (soundtracked with majestic crashing chords) is a dead cert for Skandie points, if/when this gets a US release.
SERBIS (53) (dir., Brillante Mendoza) Gina Pareno, Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz Opening shot has a naked girl preening in front of the mirror - immediately followed by a cut to a voyeur kid watching from the shadows! Mendoza's aim may be to implicate the audience (which is why it ends with film burning in the gate) but there's nothing too incendiary about this material - a couple of walkouts notwithstanding - being composed mostly of family squabbles, a woman trudging endlessly up and down stairs, various people grooming themselves (clipping toenails, lancing boils), sashaying and loitering, plus a busload of mincing queens turning up as comic relief. Assorted signs punctuate the action, mostly porno-movie posters and signs forbidding this or that activity - though everything is seemingly permitted, which could (I assume) be a comment on notoriously chaotic Filipino society. Much of it begs to be viewed as metaphor (rundown movie house, family at each other's throats, Gloria Arroyo-like matriarch running out of funds), which is another way of saying it seems to lack any discernible point. Enjoyably seedy, nonetheless.
THE LAST HOMECOMING (43) (dir., Corinna Avraamidou) Stavros Louras, Chris Greco, Maria Kitsou Needs to be taken for what it is, an attempt (by a director who's worked exclusively in TV) to create a viable film that people actually want to see in a country - Cyprus - with no film industry to speak of, hopefully paving the way for more (and perhaps more exciting) films. Worthy but a little flat, the major problem being a lack of coverage; the build-up works well enough, but the big scenes beg for something more (the post-coup exchange where the nationalist begs his old flame to have faith even though "it might seem like we've done something foolish" is a pivotal scene, yet it's shot in a single two-shot without even close-ups). Recently opened at local multiplexes - the first Cypriot film in five years to achieve that kind of exposure - which is all that matters really.
GITMEK: MY MARLON AND BRANDO (58) (dir., Huseyin Karabey) Ayca Damgaci, Hama Ali Khan, Cengiz Bozkurt Maybe I'm being obtuse, but surely it makes a difference that Hama Ali Khan's (real-life) love letters, delivered on video to his long-distance beloved, make him sound like Borat's Iraqi uncle (esp. when punctuated with film clips of Mr. Khan as the "Iraqi Superman"); specifically, having him look such a buffoon - at least to a Western audience - makes him seem unworthy of her love, and having her respond in kind ("You are the F-16 in the news. You is the big fat angel sitting in my bathtub. You are the last letter of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I am the fat widow with burning desire in Zorba") makes their love seem bizarre and irrational. All of which is actually an asset in the first half - yes, I do know love is supposed to be bizarre and irrational - creating a surreally incongruous mix of moods that's often extraordinary, but then she goes to Kurdistan trying to track him down and the film becomes a tale of "borders and nations" crushing their love, playing things quite straight and a little didactic (border guards being assholes; women having to cover their heads in Iran; an ethnic-tourism interlude with an irrelevant wedding - "Sorry brother, when I see a wedding I have to join in the dancing" - then back to the quest). Not a million miles from e.g. HALF MOON, except in that case the magical-realist elements were incorporated in the movie; here they seem unintentional - presumably Ms. Damgaci (playing herself) doesn't realise how odd she comes off - made even odder by the fact that her real-life passion is being recreated for the camera so the fervent declamations, which sound so over-the-top they must be fake, actually are fake. Iraq War message comes second, despite glimpses of an anti-US demo early on, though the point about modes of expression - a play, the videos, the film itself - implicitly crushed by wartime is obviously heartfelt.
A WEEK ALONE (73) (dir., Celina Murga) Natalia Gomez Alarcon, Manuel Aparicio, Ignacio Gimenez Think NOBODY KNOWS in the style of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES - not necessarily the same dreamy style as Coppola (Murga's eye is naturalistic) but the same limpid sense of privileged childhood, burgeoning sexuality and something dark beneath the pristine surface. Poised and beautiful to look at, but also seething with inner life, the kids - who at first seem almost interchangeable - showing subtle hints of the kinds of adults they're likely to become: one girl says she believes in God "just like everybody else" (and also likes to draw houses, something cosy and safe), while the most aggressive boy is clearly insecure, uncomfortable around girls (he roots loudly for boys to beat girls when they all play a game together), unpleasant with the working-class kid who joins them in Act 3. Murga has a knack for small, privileged moments - one girl painting another's nails with a pop song in the background; the boys temporarily united as they lounge on the couch watching a stupid comedy - and details that speak volumes: a single throwaway line (boy on the phone to Mom, asking her not to call him "darling": "You call everybody 'darling'") fully sums up the rich, absent parents (we never see them, and we don't have to); actors never strike a false note, nor does it hurt that Gomez Alarcon looks like Anna Paquin. Perfectly controlled, and likely to have no commercial life whatsoever.
UNDER THE BOMBS (36) (dir., Philippe Aractingi) Nada Abou Farhat, Georges Khabbaz, Rawya El Chab I love Lebanon, it's right next door, I lived there as a child, I'm sorry for their troubles - but this glorified infomercial, wherein a mother looking for her son wanders through war-torn Lebanon meeting various refugees who tell her their melancholy stories ("Houses can be rebuilt, but all the lost souls?"), is heavy going even with the best intentions. "Israelis are just like us," marvels one man; "Merchants like us, only richer!" "The hatred is growing," warns another. "We've known nothing but war," laments a woman, adding a handy potted history: "1975, 1982, 1984..." - and meanwhile our heroine listens horrified, also engaging in forced banter with the taxi-driver who ferries her around (she's aloof, he's a bit of a hustler, but of course they bond eventually). Missing only a URL for sendmoneytolebanon.com in the final captions - though I do have one caveat, which is that the plot recalls THE SEARCH which was similarly derided in its day as simplistic (e.g. by James Agee) but packs a massive wallop today, partly because its starving WW2 kids and other documentary trappings have the weight of History; will this also gain in potency - and will my comments seem snide and unfair - in 50 years' time?
HEARTBEAT DETECTOR (68) (dir., Nicolas Klotz) Mathieu Amalric, Michael Lonsdale, Edith Scob, Lou Castel Perilously close to a cinematic illustration of Godwin's Law, ultimately equating Europe's Nazi past both with the ruthless people-shedding of a company in the throes of restructuring (didn't the Nazis also run a "factory"?...) and the controls used by Western governments against illegal immigrants (including the titular device, used to draw them out of hiding); "Company parties remind me of mass burials," says someone, and parallels are drawn between corporate life and a Fascist mentality, right from the early scenes of executives eating, clubbing, even pissing together like the happy Hitlerjunge in Leni Riefenstahl. Otherwise hypnotic, making melancholy use of deserted space and mopey music, the better to evoke the emptiness inside Lonsdale's captain of industry and even Amalric as our wandering hero, his confidence slowly ebbing as he feels the icy breath of the irreducible. A near-great film as long as you don't think too hard about what it's saying, questionable premise trumped by human incidentals - the French title is "La Question Humaine" - like the normal-looking junior exec who can do most things well enough but can't prepare a meal, because touching food makes him nauseous. "Born Slippy"-ish music (and dialogue like "You've heard of raves, right?") suggests either that the French are pretty old-school when it comes to clubbing, or that the original novel was written (and/or set) in the 90s.
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (63) (dir., Eric Brevig) Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson, Anita Briem Going for the "Cyprus Mail" review, mostly because it also features BANGKOK DANGEROUS [see below] so I kill two bits of fluff with one stone. And I don't have a lot more to say about this film (except that I enjoyed it), to be frankly honest.
BANGKOK DANGEROUS (35) (dir., Danny & Oxide Pang) Nicolas Cage, Shahkrit Yamnarm, Charlie Young Here's the "Cyprus Mail" review, taking you halfway down the page, the other film discussed being JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH [see above]. All a bit superficial, but give me a break; I'm making bricks without straw here.
REDBELT (64) (dir., David Mamet) Chiwetel Ejiofor, Emily Mortimer, Tim Allen, Alice Braga, Joe Mantegna Mamet's conversion to übermensch philosophy (in line with his general turn to the right), which began in SPARTAN, finally goes all the way - it's also of course the kind of thinking that made the worm turn in EDMOND, so maybe it was always there but disguised as black comedy - and anyone familiar with his various obsessions will be amused to see his old compadres, Joe Mantegna and Ricky Jay, still espousing the same cynical philosophy about the world being venal and men scurrying to gain some advantage, only now being treated as the villains. Strangely (or not), his kung-fu fighters live by a similar code to his hustlers and con-men, based on discipline ("Control your emotions"), self-knowledge and rigorous attention to detail - there's always an escape to every lock; you just have to look for it - the all-important difference being they're "too pure to compete", turning their backs on the world rather than attempting to fleece it. Recognisably Mametian, same kind of style - he tends to skimp on the reaction shots, which is partly why his dialogue plays so weird; people repeat themselves or change tack in mid-sentence in response to something they see in their interlocutors, but we don't always see it - just totally different in its aims, making for a certain auteurist fascination. Also builds to a great climax, Ejiofor oozes steely presence, and the bits of cryptic Mamet-talk are like old friends. "Let the wheel come around..." "Give me some velocity. I need velocity..."
BOY A (58) (dir., John Crowley) Andrew Garfield, Peter Mullan, Katie Lyons Constant back-and-forth between excellent detail - most of it in the gangly lead performance, with lost tentative eyes and crooked, ingratiating grin - and plotting which is lame or actively simplistic, above all in making our hero such a Victim: a victim of his home life, his delinquent best friend (in turn 'explained' rather glibly, in terms of abuse) and especially circumstances, given that even the childhood crime - in contrast to the cold-blooded Jamie Bulger case, which loosely inspired it - isn't his fault (as presented here, it's really just a kids' quarrel that got out of hand). Basically likes its hero a bit too much, though the upside is that it protects him and stresses his 'normality'; watching him freak people out would've been too painful, and indeed I was cringing for the first half-hour till I realised nothing too sadistic was going to happen (the sex scene in particular is treated so delicately it becomes quite touching). Garfield never falters, except perhaps in being too gangly and ingratiating to make the violent streak convincing, not doing anything too flashy but inhabiting the role with conviction (his reactions seem consistent from scene to scene, which is surely a marker of good acting) - but did he literally have to save a little girl to make up for the one in his past? and did the other boy have to give that speech about thinking of "a room with hundreds of doors" to keep from crying during the abuse? Don't they know that kind of speech never works, especially in the mouth of a child? Keep it simple, florid writers of the world.
BLINDNESS (47) (dir., Fernando Meirelles) Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal Change the 'i' in the title to an 'a' for most accurate results, despite Meirelles' (over-)emphatic attempts to visualise "white blindness" with white light, shallow focus and that bleached grainy look he likes so much. Haven't read the book but I've skimmed it and it looks very stylised, with no actual dialogue (it's all reported speech) and paragraphs that run on for pages - making, I suspect, for the kind of trance-like detachment that might support this kind of all-purpose allegorical fantasy, but it just plain dissipates when you watch it unfold like a normal movie. The problem is simple: what we see isn't very convincing (why doesn't Moore use her secret weapon to stop the chaos getting out of hand? all she'd have to do is sneak up behind Garcia Bernal and bash him with a table-leg), and even when it does convince it seems to lack much point - just the "Lord of the Flies" truism about savage instincts taking over in times of crisis, made even thinner since human nature is shown to be flawed even before we get to the camp, when the thief pretends to help the blind doctor only to rob him; the worldview comes across as glib and cynical, an arty variation on ‘People suck'. Lots of concentration-camp (or Guantanamo Bay) imagery, dogs feeding on a corpse, a daisy-chain of women in a dingy corridor, and performances firmly in the register marked Apocalyptic; at the end, with the virus receding, someone muses that it wasn't so bad, that they’ll miss "the intimacies of blindness" - and you wonder what they're on about, since the film offers no such ambivalence. On the other hand, Moment Out of Time: Silhouetted survivors emerge to an empty city, its skyscrapers reflected in mirage-pristine lake like a lost dream of civilisation.
QUANTUM OF SOLACE (57) (dir., Marc Forster) Daniel Craig, Mathieu Amalric, Olga Kurylenko, Judi Dench What everyone else said: Bond is back, he's all-action (clearly having had a word with Jason Bourne), and he's stopped making jokes; “Time to get out” - spoken to a man trapped in the trunk of a car - is about as jocular as it gets (I don't count his sardonic fuck-you when he's got the villains over a barrel at the opera house; the point of 007's quips was always debonair irreverence, deflating grim situations with inappropriate levity). The worst of it is Forster's incoherent way with action and the trendy attempt - see also Batman and Spider-Man - to impart psychological weight to a fantasy figure, thus e.g. Bond trying to reverse the destructive pattern whereby "everything he touches withers and dies"; Craig seems especially committed to the New Seriousness - see also his fatuous public comments about the possibility of a black actor playing Bond, as if Ian Fleming's fag-end-of-Empire anachronism were a kind of putty to be stretched unprotestingly into modern shapes and attitudes - playing the role with an all-purpose scowl that quickly becomes generic, equally applicable to a secret agent looking for revenge or a man in a restaurant who ordered the veal but instead got the chicken. The best of it is the pointed acknowledgment of Bond's (i.e. Britain's) new global role since Fleming wrote the novels, fully in thrall to the transatlantic "cousins" - who are quite unfriendly in this instalment - as well as making clear that Good and Evil are often muddled in the real world: If we didn't do business with villains, snaps the Foreign Secretary, we couldn't do business at all. Also M's maternal role, Mathieu Amalric's banshee shrieks in the final showdown, and an Oscar Niemeyer-ish hotel in the middle of the desert. All in all, more 'pro' than 'con' - but you have to wait till the closing credits to find out that "Agent Fields" is in fact "Strawberry Fields", presumably because that kind of Pussy Galore-ish frivolity has no place in a Serious Spy Movie. Yeah, whatever.
THE COUNTERFEITERS (61) (dir., Stefan Ruzowitzky) Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow Hello and welcome to those lucky few experiencing this as their first Holocaust movie - can you tie your own shoes yet? - but most of us view it only in relation to other Holocaust movies - and at least it belongs in the more complicated tier, taking in the pernicious Jewish denial of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL as well as the irony of victims turned manipulators, implicitly turning against their fellow Jews by living apart from the doomed, helpless inmates, a Holocaust-movie sub-strand from KAPO to SEVEN BEAUTIES to most recently THE GREY ZONE. That's a hugely more powerful film - but this one isn't bad, a brisk twisty yarn with a memorable hero, a survivor thinking only of survival, happy to use his talents (he "could've been a great artist") for the mundane purposes of currying favour and "adapting"; it's a form of denial, of course, but Ruzowitzky doesn't make the character-arc too blatant (showing the whole thing in flashback is a good idea, not just confirming him as a survivor but confirming that he doesn't really change, except in regrets and memories). That said, we could've done without the idealistic prisoner acting as the Voice of (Communist) Conscience, or indeed the nice German hausfrau who makes our hero a cup of tea and enquires "Do you Jews take sugar?", or even rather tawdry bits of style like the prefatory silencing of soundtrack so our hero's explosion of rage will explode more effectively. Notable (I guess) as a WW2 film made by a German in which the chief German is as sympathetic - or at least sympathetically sketched - as the chief Jew, another step in the path to normality paved by DOWNFALL; hard to see how much further they can go in self-exculpation, seeing as they did commit mass-murder on an unimaginable scale and so on.
SWING VOTE (24) (dir., Joshua Michael Stern) Kevin Costner, Madeline Carroll, Paula Patton, Kelsey Grammer, Dennis Hopper a.k.a. Why the Democrats Hate America (and America Hates the Democrats), though of course it's punctilious about not being partisan: it doesn't matter which party our hero votes for (it claims), as long as he votes - and indeed his final choice is conspicuously elided - but the film's own views are clear when it shows Republicans dealing in the Politics of Fear on the eve of the election (instructing a minion to scare off elderly Jewish voters) while the Democrats talk about "the Issues". Trouble is, the Democrat campaign manager has lost six elections in a row - and the film blames cretins like Costner's disreputable yokel, who doesn't even know who's running (let alone care about "the Issues") and, faced with the biggest decision of his life, merely drinks beer and looks confused; it's left to his impossibly precocious 12-year-old daughter - who says priggish things like "It's your civic responsibility" and doesn't like him using "Jesus as a cuss-word", not to mention being best friends with a sad-eyed little black boy - to sigh at the foolishness of the grown-ups around her, reflecting a cynical despair in 00s America. Our hero is a lot like Mr. Deeds, an un-intellectual bumpkin, but back in the time of the Depression (to which the Current Crisis is often compared) Capra and LaCava made populist films where the Common Man turned out to be a fount of common sense; Deeds knew how to think when push came to shove, scratch a boob and you found a proud American - but Hollywood today has lost that faith, hoping instead for a new generation of implausibly smart kids who (of course) will hold all the right opinions (there's an edge of sadness to Obama's emphasis on the "youth vote"). Rancid with embittered condescension, leaving a horrible taste in the mouth, but it's pretty dire even as a movie - inept in its plotting, feeble in its set-ups (the polling-station guy's taking a nap? come on!), half-hearted in its jokes, lame in its one-liners ("This isn't life, this is bigger: this is television!"), stunted in its characters. Really just a glorified infomercial, designed to dissuade Joe the Plumber from the toxic belief that "voting doesn’t count for a goddam thing" - though of course the film seethes with the unspoken implication that it might be better if he didn't vote at all, adding hypocrisy to its other sins. Pretty awful.
KABLUEY (62) (dir., Scott Prendergast) Scott Prendergast, Lisa Kudrow, Conchata Ferrell Obviously this should've been a 20-minute short about a loser who gets a job handing out leaflets while dressed as "Kabluey", a gigantic blue mascot with the approximate look of a light-bulb on legs; watching his clumsy ballet as he hovers by the side of a remote country road, or his slouching gait as he tries to walk home, like a benign blue alien hopelessly lost amid the cornfields - all of it shot in deadpan comic style - is among the Indelible Images of 2008. The rest of it - how he got to that point, how the big blue suit affects his life, etc - is a lot less memorable, though the first half at least is pretty funny, with our slacker hero looking dazed and confused as everyone around him acts outrageously rude and unreasonable (or just annoying, like the weirdos on the bus). Prendergast the director aims low, with a jaunty wall-to-wall score and all-purpose quirkiness (our hero's first name is Salman), but a zany surreal sweetness breaks through, an arch amusement which we still after all these years call Hal Hartley-esque. Possible MVP: Angela Sarafyan, out-Zooeying Zooey as a kooky supermarket clerk.
MIRRORS (39) (dir., Alexandre Aja) Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart It's the mirrors! They're alive! ... A fairly irresistible horror premise - albeit not new; a variation appeared in THE EYE (another Asian-horror remake) just a couple of months ago - with which the movie does surprisingly little; the best part is actually the quest, when our hero goes looking for the Sadako figure (here called "Esseker") behind the whole business (finding the answer in a monastery, a twist seldom seen since CRIMSON RIVERS; must be a French Catholic thing), which has nothing to do with the mirrors at all. Actually quite hard to figure out what the mirrors are thinking, since there appears to be a network of mirrors - the evil mirrors in Kiefer's workplace being in league with the mirrors in the home of his lovely-but-estranged family - so presumably the mirrors can go anyplace where there are mirrors, yet their m.o. isn't to terrorize those who actually knew "Esseker" but instead to demand results from random strangers who can hardly be expected to know the details of the case (it's not like they're given any clues, either). No surprise that Aja more or less gives up on his main premise, turning his energy to irrelevant set-pieces like the spectacularly nasty murder of a minor - and very naked - character, her jaw prised open till her face literally tears in half. Da mirrors, baas, da mirrors...
CARAMEL (56) (dir., Nadine Labaki) Nadine Labaki, Yasmine Elmasri, Joanna Moukarzel Comes in two flavours, Sassy Girl and Poignant Pathos - the latter including the senile old woman pining for her (non-existent) fiancé, the young coiffeuse who spends hours cleaning up a sleazy motel room for her (married) lover's birthday only to be stood up with a cursory phone call, and of course the middle-aged actress obsessed with looking young and beautiful. She obviously hasn't seen the sign above the door of the beauty salon where the main action takes place, a letter missing so the name of the place, "Si belle" ('So beautiful') becomes simply "Si elle" ('so her', or perhaps 'so herself'). Looks like it's gearing up for a massive love-in where the old people are going to find love and the lesbian is going to find love (still discreet by Western standards, though not as outrageously retrograde as in YACOUBIAN BUILDING), etc etc - but in fact that sign is right, and everyone is simply themselves at the end, only more so (the actress is still lying, even when it's just to jump the queue for the ladies' room); looks like the only effect of a two-decade-long civil war - the film is dedicated "to my Beirut" - is a lower Sappiness Factor in shameless chick-flicks. Tries a little hard for ethnic colour, possibly to distinguish itself from other shameless chick-flicks - narrow streets with clothes hanging on clotheslines, voluble families all shouting at once (the cliché SECRET OF THE GRAIN redeemed by sheer intensity), the bride-to-be who's worried that she isn't a virgin - and of course it's all very you-go-girl; but it does please the crowds, and watching dusky Middle Eastern ladies flirting with cops, swinging their hips voluptuously, smoking languidly and drawling "Bonsoir" in that thick-vowelled Lebanese way is hardly my idea of a bad time.
SNOW ANGELS (57) (dir., David Gordon Green) Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Angarano DGG giving it a brisk, accessible rhythm but still holding on to his penchant for off-centre characters exchanging non sequiturs ("I like your shoes"; "What are those underpants?"), not to mention the high-school band playing "Sledgehammer". Lots of fine detail, but the main problem - leaving aside the weird flashback structure, which just seems modish - is it's hard to accept that elegant Kate Beckinsale, who looks like she just stepped out of a perfume ad, and scruffy, raucous Sam Rockwell were ever together, let alone married ("He used to make me laugh," she explains, and the viewer reflexively adds "... at how pathetic he was."). The other major problem are the kids, who are way too cool and likeable compared to their screwed-up elders - call it Alan Ball Syndrome - throwing the whole thing off-balance, and the other problem is the Rockwell character's overbearing psychosis, not exactly underplayed by the actor though his full-bore derangement does allow the quiet(er) moments to be poignant, like his awkwardness with his little daughter (he insists on high-fiving) or the bit where he stops by the factory to thank the man who tried to help him; even his born-again certitude is poignant, convinced there "has to be a Meaning" not because he feels much connection but because he didn't die in a car crash. Keep thinking I may have overrated it - but then I recall Angarano's subtly dislocated POV-shot with his divorcing parents bunched together in a corner of the frame, or the striking effect (a cut to wide-shot followed by a zoom) when the cop drops the photos, or the scene late at night in a bar, when a wasted Rockwell ends up swaying next to a lost-looking barfly in a stripey, Freddy-Krueger-style T-shirt.