Films Seen - October 2003
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
RUN RONNIE RUN (47) (dir., Troy Miller) David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, Nikki Cox ["Mr. Show" obviously a cult (I've never seen it), judging by the parade of celebrity guest stars - including Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and this certainly has a "South Park" quality in subverting cosy targets (a song number in a 50s kiddie musical; an MTV video called "The Greatest Love in History") with vile, gleefully shocking humour (the song number has kick-stepping cockneys and an animated squirrel in a jolly tune called "Give Her a Kick in the Cunt"; the music vid has goateed R&B smoothies crooning "I will stick my penis / In your beautiful vagi-i-ina"). All this and Ronnie too, affectionate redneck humour not-quite balancing the sharp digs at fags and New Age fairies (the worldwide Gay Conspiracy is funny, though); a video premiere, hopefully not because the powers-that-be thought it too outrageous - it's more silly than nasty - but in fact video suits it better, allowing undeniable highlights to shine amid the filler. Personal Top 3 Gags (compile your own!), in order of appearance: (i) avuncular intro by middle-aged dude in the style of Walt Disney in "The Wonderful World of Disney" ("There are 17 swear-words scattered throughout the movie. Kids - can you find them?"); (ii) "Survivor"-type reality show where departing players are speared to death then eaten by the other contestants; (iii) bar full of rednecks whooping and cheering at a TV show called "Fishin' With Guns".]
DADDY DAY CARE (37) (dir., Steve Carr) Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, Steve Zahn, Regina King, Anjelica Huston [Hypocrisy #1: Murphy, working for an ad agency, pushes a healthy cereal called Veggie O's only to find that kids prefer Chocolatey Chocolate Balls - much implicit tut-tutting at this sad state of affairs, giving him the moral high ground - yet his day-care centre, once underway, turns out to be the educational equivalent of Chocolatey Chocolate Balls, all "fun" and no substance. Hypocrisy #2: no-one's more obsessed with giving kids an 'early start' than rich, ultra-competitive Hollywood types - yet they cast Huston's snooty Academy (where kids learn "structure" and become fluent in five languages) as the villain, and Murphy's laissez-faire, discipline-free playground as the model (would they send their own kids to Three Stooges festivals and a wrestling match between a giant carrot and a giant broccoli?). Bottom line: raising kids is a minefield of competing theories, and no way is Hollywood going to alienate even one paying customer by espousing one theory over another, even if the result is flavour-free mush aimed at the lowest common denominator (cute kids acting up and a fat man getting kicked in the nuts). Still intermittently amusing when it drops the plot and lets some talented comedians do their thing ; can't believe I didn't see it coming when Zahn as the obsessive-Trekkie space cadet (a.k.a. the Steve Zahn character) turns out to have read "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care"...]
UNDERWORLD (41) (dir., Len Wiseman) Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy [Sample dialogue: "Fear not, my child. Absolution will be yours". Also: murky blue light, constant driving rain, pale white faces; entertaining exercise in getting in touch with your inner Goth, at least till it goes from portentous ("Leave us!") to unintentionally funny, with the bug-eyed death throes and interminable speeches ("We were slaves once..."). Special mention for example of the Magical Voice-Over Rule (voice-over will magically appear if something needs to be explained, even when there's been no voice-over in the movie for at least an hour) and excellent example - in the opening shoot-out - of the One-Use-Only Machine Gun: automatic weapons are useless when they run out of bullets, and should simply be thrown away with a look of disgust after a couple of clicks on the trigger. Also, Kate Beckinsale is hot; also, Scott Speedman is such a surfer.]
ALEX & EMMA (37) (dir., Rob Reiner) Luke Wilson, Kate Hudson, Sophie Marceau, David Paymer [Not painful, just bland. Wilson's good at drawls and slow burns, which is not so useful when he's doing neurotic in a Woody Allen key (to a pair of gangsters closing in on him: "So, uh, have you guys been working out together?"); Hudson isn't much good at anything, besides narrowing her eyes, snapping out lines to approximate snappy banter and tossing her head back to indicate a joke. Lots of talk, little of it sharp or memorable; lots of those brittle movie arguments that end with both parties turning away in a huff ("Good!"; "Fine!"); some amusing meta-moments in PRINCESS BRIDE vein, but the plot-within-the-plot is negligible, the tone lethargic and the gags increasingly irrelevant (flamenco gangsters? "paying through the nose"?). Movie in a nutshell: mellow Norah Jones on the soundtrack over a montage of the lovebirds browsing secondhand book stalls, taking a boat ride and walking on a bridge at dusk with Manhattan in the distance.]
THE LIZZIE McGUIRE MOVIE (62) (dir., Jim Fall) Hilary Duff, Adam Lamberg, Yani Gellman, Alex Borstein ["Some call it juvenile. I call it genius!" sez the pesky little brother; I wouldn't go that far, but reviews have been depressingly myopic for this wistful, surprisingly wide-eyed movie, and it's weird how critics seem to single Duff out as the redeeming feature when she's easily the least interesting thing about it. Her character, on the other hand, is intriguing (esp. compared to the spoiled narcissist in WHAT A GIRL WANTS) - unformed, lacking confidence and waiting for her life to begin, even though she actually lives in a world of Girl Power: can't recall the last film with so many foolish men and take-charge women - Ms. Ungermeyer, obviously, but also the fashion designer surrounded by male assistants, the bro's little girlfriend whose only function is to boss him around, and of course Lizzie's 'twin' who's able to "deal with her fears" and acts as enabler for Lizzie's own actualisation. It's a Cinderella story with a twist, twist being that the prince is a fraud and there are no evil sisters after all - girl inspired by (male) "artist" in the city of (dead white male) "culture" only to find she, or her doppelganger, is in fact the true artist, the one who really sings; the final shot celebrates her taking the initiative ("making [her] own luck," as Ungermeyer proclaims at the fountain), marking her step into take-charge womanhood, yet is also touching because the characters aren't consciously aware of it - the film breaks cover after they're gone, speaking to us directly for the first time without middle(wo)men like the cartoon Lizzie - and because the fireworks connect so perfectly to the earlier crane-down to Gordo on the roof (when the fireworks were what was keeping them apart), and because it's love, goddamit. Sensibility is really what clinches it, the fact that this is totally unlike the cramped, jostling tone of WHAT A GIRL WANTS or JUST MARRIED (to cite two young-Americans-in-Europe flicks), more like those old Disney movies where kids went somewhere exotic and got involved with smugglers or jewel thieves - airy, goofy, romantic in the wider sense of being open to adventure. Otherwise kind of problematic, the more you think about it, with oddly isolationist agenda: why the emphasis on self-creation, why the aversion to public life (esp. being filmed)? is it saying girls should be their own women even at the expense of "adventures"? doesn't Paolo give our heroine confidence, even if he's ultimately using her? Hard to process yet still a tiny miracle, making something fresh in a tired, cynical genre; you'd think there'd be one critic somewhere to appreciate its unexpected charms. Just one...]
DOWN WITH LOVE (60) (dir., Peyton Reed) Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson [Light soufflé that collapses slightly when hit with a mild case of IDENTITY-itis (if ever a film didn't need that kind of pull-the-rug-from-under twist...); lots of fun before that, if somewhat over-busy in the Baz Luhrmann manner with a performance to match from Zellweger, smothering her character in a battery of moues, knowing winks and breathy ooh-la-las. Day-Hudson comedies (which were actually quite bland, imho) turned up to eleven, with a kitsch whirlwind of shocking pinks, double entendres and fluid wordplay; clever stuff, but too beholden to really take off in its own right, and it doesn't really know how to end - obviously needs to subvert the sexist endings of the originals, but merely reversing the gender roles is too on-the-nose (a sitcom solution). Best gag: the split-screen sex. Best line, by David Hyde Pierce as Tony Randall (it's all in the delivery): "Where's my geisha? I need my shoes..." Why do I never seem to have anything useful to say - beyond a general thumbs-up - on Peyton Reed movies?]
DEMONLOVER (75) (dir., Olivier Assayas) Connie Nielsen, Chloe Sevigny, Charles Berling, Gina Gershon [Seems to me this is mostly about the lure of Oblivion, putting it closest to COLD WATER in the Assayas oover - the temptation, in the midst of personal drama, to let it all go to pieces, lose the intractable problems of life in a wild, shapeless, overwhelming party (the final scene of IRMA VEP serves a similar function), except of course the problems are still there once the party's over. It's there in the opening scene, on a TV screen showing action-movie fireballs and explosions - ignore it if you can - as the masters (actually mistresses) of the universe plot their intrigues; it's there in the bursts of throbbing, wall-of-sound electronica (music to lose yourself in), it's there in the classic Assayas ploy of aimless-driving scenes interspersed between the plot, it's definitely there in the extended clips of manga and porn into which the film plunges with abandon (almost relief), filling its senses with nothing but motion and colour, and the primal pleasures of sex and violence; and of course it's there in the way it develops, ice-queen Nielsen morphing into unreal Lara Croft cyberbabe as the film mutates from corporate-espionage thriller into something more ambiguous and evanescent, heroine turning herself into anonymous fodder for an Internet torture site (how much more passive can you get?) and becoming visually insubstantial, reflected in mirrors and windows: film's true climax is perhaps the scene where Sevigny looks at the reflected Connie, starts to ask a question then changes her mind - the ultimate in shapeless fragmentation. What's new (and exciting) is the connection to a world - our world! - where Oblivion is closer than ever, because the real is increasingly unreal - a fine line, like the CEO who likes to stay only just "within the limits of the law" - a globalised world blending places and languages in an artificial landscape of airports, Japanese hotels showing CNN and Parisian restaurants serving prawn tempura - and of course images everywhere, ready to offer little shots of happiness and temporarily replace / misplace real life. Assayas is the classic intellectual-turned-filmmaker, because he's tempted by the plastic qualities - visceral Oblivion, where you feel instead of thinking - yet constantly aware of the line being crossed, and aware of the lie in gratification: movies are products controlled by men in suits, just like the heroines in this case are forever sex objects, prisoners of a patriarchal system (a male gaze) even when they chair meetings and play racketball, even when they switch to English and turn into action heroines, even when they finally kill their masters. As a film, slightly tedious in the final stretch - the Berling-Nielsen conversation is too long, though he does define her as "there and not there" - but the ending is incredibly desolate, positing Oblivion as a state of non-Being as ruthless (yet peaceful?) as the blank piece of paper in COLD WATER. Like the Sonic Youth pickings and dabblings over the final credits, you keep expecting it to break out and it never does, quite; damned if it isn't haunting though.]
AMERICAN WEDDING (35) (dir., Jesse Dylan) Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Eugene Levy [Not unlike the first two PIEs, a collection of elaborately contrived comic set-pieces (best being : the restaurant, the bachelor party, the "chocolate truffle") separated by pleasant filler - except this time the filler is so stilted, the actors look so bored and the whole thing is so cynical it becomes whorish and ugly, and impossible to enjoy. Horrendously directed, Dylan nearly ruining the restaurant scene with a pointless change of angle (suddenly going behind Jim) at the punchline, leaving dead space between the lines and encouraging Scott as Stifler to mug egregiously; worst of all is what they've done with smut-minded pixie Michelle, barely in the picture after the opening scene (no surprise that this franchise shouldn't know what to do with a sexually adventurous woman). Only really works as a kind of comedic FINAL DESTINATION, watching all the dominos being set up so they can knock them down - a cold heartless pleasure at best. Eddie Kaye Thomas should be kept in mind if they ever decide to make "The Harry Langdon Story". Unlikely, I realise...]
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (28) (dir., Stephen Norrington) Sean Connery, Shane West, Jason Flemyng, Stuart Townsend [The Invisible Man: "Here I stand for all to see". Sean Connery, following a henchman down an especially long staircase: "Where are we going? Aushtralia?". Literary reference: "You made good time getting here"; "Not as good as Phileas Fogg. Around the world in 80 days!". The trouble with this uninspired action flick (never read the graphic novel) is it isn't smart or witty even in the early, foolproof scenes, as the titular League (deeply flawed heroes, finally forced - in a neat subversion - to save the world from themselves) are assembled Seven Samurai-style - let alone later on, as the plot heats up and the film collapses in a heap of arbitrary twists, lame one-liners and singularly uninventive action. Is there anything more depressing than cardboard characters lunging and shooting at each other to the shrill acclamations of a Hollywood-action score? Is there anything more fatuous than a protagonist given no distinct personality or significant detail but dutifully getting a back-story - trying to get over the death of his son on a previous mission - as decreed by the screenwriting rulebook? Also, Mr. Hyde wasn't a giant and Dorian Gray was blessed (or cursed) with perpetual youth, not immortality; do it right or don't do it at all, I mean jesus.]
OWNING MAHOWNY (72) (dir., Richard Kwietniowski) Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, John Hurt, Maury Chaykin [Predictability not a fair criticism, seeing as the film all but gives away the ending before the opening credits; Kwietniowski is entirely interested in the process, with the same dynamic as in LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND - following a doomed, self-destructive obsession to the bitter end, walking a tightrope between sadism and comedy. Films where the hero has a secret (or secret life) and we wait for the world to expose and destroy them can be unbearable - nail-biting in e.g. TALENTED MR. RIPLEY and just too painful (for me) in the case of LONG ISLAND, because the hero there was a sensitive soul who'd be crushed by rejection (even if the film ended up protecting him from humiliation); this uses solipsism as a safety-net, not unlike Chad in IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, creating heroes who (we feel) can handle their inevitable downfall, not because they're thick-skinned but because they're so alienated, caught up in their own world. The central - and, let's face it, hilarious - thing about Mahowny is that he treats his gambling addiction exactly as if it were work, a day at the office - never smiling or celebrating, never taking advantage of available perks and distractions, hunched over the tables moving thousand-dollar chips around as if they were spreadsheets; Hoffman does a great character role, breathing hard in too-tight suits, piggy eyes lost behind thick glasses and folds of flesh (he looks a bit like Stephen Root in OFFICE SPACE), but the joke is this useless little man making millions by doing nothing, giving in to dumb luck at the casino and even more so outside it, where his transparent frauds and machinations somehow go unchallenged (his face in the elevator, when his boss somehow contrives not to expose him, and even inadvertently to help him, is the face of a man unaccountably saved from a lion's jaws by a falling anvil). Minor but delectable, not always well-done - Minnie Driver's role is shockingly underwritten - but always compelling, because it's not judging the addict but tapping into the insanity of addiction, the way consequences pile up cartoonishly as a result of something utterly prosaic and banal, a fat Canadian bank clerk who likes to gamble. Not entirely sure if the script realises that - seems not-quite-right to end on Mahowny affirming what a thrill gambling gave him, unless of course it's part of his delusion - but elegant Kwietniowski surely does; very sly, and richly ironic.]
THE THREE MARIAS (61) (dir., Aluizio Abranches) Marieta Severo, Julia Lemmertz, Maria Luisa Mendonça [Revenge melodrama with a kickass first half-hour: opening shot is wide-angle crane down mountain ledge to reveal spectacular cliffs all around and tiny human figures in a corner of the frame; move on to murder and vendetta - music pounds pulsatingly - gouged-out eyeballs, a silent scream; pull back slowly from a grieving mother looking out her window to reveal a garden overgrown with cactus, like gnarled hands reaching out; introduce the Three Marias - proto-feminist avenging angels - one by one as they walk down the church steps, each girl revealing the next; crane into mother at the head of a long dinner-table, ending on her fiery eyes as she vows revenge - "You should never feed pain without first giving sustenance to hatred". Gosh! Alas, things get more and more perfunctory, style for the sake of style (love those montages though), plot undernourished, religious iconography - angels, saints, serpents - thrown in purely for effect. Best speech by psychotic killer seeking to explain his métier : "I am God's Vulture. I am the Devil's Horse. I relieve God of carnage, and give the Devil something to eat. Those I kill I cut in half, split in two, so there's no arguing between Satan and Jehovah". Is there a pension plan with that?]
DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY (69) (dir., Guy Maddin) Zhang Wei-Qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, David Moroni [Blood-as-sexuality angle really gets literalised, more than in previous versions: "You let him give her more blood than I," complains a suitor when fair damsel Lucy needs a transfusion; "Well, he's going to marry her one day," comes the reply (which would also explain why a woman out for blood is especially dangerous, and Van Helsing's satisfied smile as he chops off the head of a vampiress - there's at least as much punitive violence against women as against Dracula). Immigrant angle also emphasised - both related, of course, with fear of immigrants = fear of miscegenation and impure blood polluting the blood-line - Dracula conflated with the other visitors from the East, ripe for exploitation (literally oozing money) but also persecution. Inventive enough to stand out as a new adaptation, though you don't get the sense anyone cared overmuch about the new gloss on the text (hard to say why, beyond the knowledge that they had to spice it up somehow, and these things were already implicit in previous versions), just as Maddin doesn't seem to be stretching himself very hard - though his trademark virtues are all in place, from jokey intertitles ("Fleshpots!") to gauzy visuals and ethereal scenes like the snowfall in the graveyard. Doesn't come across as a film that absolutely had to be made, and of course it's a ballet performance more than a 'proper' movie; music + Bram Stoker + dance + Maddinesque visuals + expert sense of rhythm = smoothly pleasurable viewing, though.]
PISTOL OPERA (66) (dir., Seijun Suzuki) Makiko Esumi, Sayoko Yamaguchi, Kan Hanae, Jan Woudstra [Easy to see why some people worship Suzuki and also Paradjanov : same emphasis on ritualism, penchant for posed figures (very Kabuki, in this case), riotous use of colour - esp. yellow and red, though without a drop of blood - and interest in the play of shapes within the image more than the play of images against each other (it's only really watchable moment by moment, rhythm being as stop-and-start as the plot). Clearly a grand summation for Suzuki, moving beyond the killer-cool aesthetic that makes BRANDED TO KILL insubstantial (imho): works as a lament for Japanese values (Seijun Suzuki is 80), a world based on codes, rigid hierarchy and exaggerated courtesy - a killer asks permission to blow his nose - now supplanted by English-speaking kids who dismiss poetry and want to kill for fun, wrecking the structure that enfolded Death into social behaviour (both a wrecking-ball and a bulldozer feature prominently among the images). Mishima gets referenced, obvious symbol of the old way - a man who turned suicide into creative expression, just as our heroine makes "killing bloom into an artwork" - but Mishima is no more, and (as per the old lady's dream) can never be brought back; a profoundly sad film, thrown into relief by the glory of its images (the golden-hued scene described by J. Ro as a "lava-lamp version of an afterlife" being notably mind-blowing). Actually had the opposite reaction to Mike, initially dismissing it as incomprehensible and preparing a number in the mid-30s before gradually adjusting to its rhythm and seeing the error of my ways; I am ashamed, etc.]
CAMP (58) (dir., Todd Graff) Daniel Letterle, Joanna Chilcoat, Robin de Jesus, Don Dixon ["It's nice to be normal for once," says Vlad - an "honest-to-God straight boy" in a camp full of freaks - replacing the show-tunes on dorky Ellen's stereo with more "normal" music; Vlad is a problem, despite an (unconvincing) attempt to complicate him - maybe it's the actor, too dazedly sweet and grounded - acting as a bridge-cum-identification-figure to make the losers and trannies palatable to a mass audience. Kind of sad that this is what American independent cinema's been reduced to, playing outsiders as exotic and basically unthreatening, but the film itself is a guilty pleasure of 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS proportions, attractive partly in setting its terms so low: makes it clear from the start it's going to treat 'real life' as a musical-theatre convention, corny plot threads interspersed with showy numbers, and the artificiality is its own reward - you don't feel worked over in the hard-sell, welcome-to-the-Revolution manner of MOULIN ROUGE, and it sees the absurdity of teens trying to sing "I'm Still Here" (the tough old broad's song from "Follies"), but the idea is to give the teens their own space (however insular), allow them to perform without being judged on personal choices, the better to facilitate their escape from the real world: it's frankly separatist, which is the source of both 'guilty' and 'pleasure'. In the end, even Vlad's "normality" seems like wish-fulfilment more than condescension - as though the freaks got their own private straight-white-boy for Christmas - and the broad strokes mostly forgivable; also these kids are pretty damn talented, esp. the little girl who nails "The Ladies who Lunch" despite looking about 12 years old. As the cynical alcoholic writer puts it, just before the all-singing all-dancing campers melt his middle-aged heart with a lively rendition of his (not very good) song in communal-hoedown mode: "Who are you people? What planet did you beam down from?"]
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL (46) (dir., Gore Verbinski) Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom [Problem: dead pirates are invulnerable, making the various attempts to kill them - sword fights and sea battles - little more than dead time. Most intriguing for its obsession with rules - rules of propriety, the rule of law, the rules of engagement and of course the Pirate Code ("more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules") - and final admission that sometimes breaking the rules pirate-style is the only way to do the right thing (are you listening, Jack Valenti?); shame Verbinski & Co. couldn't have broken the blockbuster rules and made a film based on brain rather than brawn, though Depp's character - a crafty bugger, played in campy Carry On style - is a step in the right direction, and his realist's code, based on what is and isn't possible, may well be the film's own (he's on the fringes yet a guiding spirit, like Bluto in ANIMAL HOUSE). Parts where characters make "accords" and try to outsmart each other are the best of it, though slackly plotted (why doesn't Sparrow speak up when the Pirates are blowing up the ship with his "leverage" inside? why does he even take Will with him on the trip to the treasure cave - isn't that like leaving his winning card where everyone can see it?), action scenes handsome but dull, with nothing at stake; pointed nods to both THE CRIMSON PIRATE and EVIL DEAD 2, but both those films sped by and neither was (yikes!) 142 minutes long. Last 30 seconds are genius.]
SEASIDE (41) (dir., Julie Lopes-Curval) Bulle Ogier, Hélène Fillières, Jonathan Zaccai [Mostly told in MS, almost always putting two or more people in the frame as if to tease out the connections between them: connections make community, which is what's being put under the microscope in this picture of a faded seaside town. Ends strongly, with a grand perspective not really earned by the rest of it, which is cramped and a little dull: the town is small and dead ("She doesn't like TV," say the neighbours of Ogier; "What else is there to do here?"), and it soon becomes clear the characters are fairly one-dimensional, driven by simple dissatisfaction for the most part. Failure hangs over everything - inadequate hero trying to keep a pretty girlfriend (knowing deep down it's hopeless), rich family gone to seed, all the paths not taken: marrying the boss, becoming a model, maybe staying with the boy who was once a childhood friend ("I can still see the two of you, paddling together in the water," says his mother - and the heroine just looks at her sadly and excuses herself). Emotional currents don't match the spaciousness of the concept - we should be getting a picture of a world (however small), but it seems to be a world composed entirely of stunted introverts, and it's a bit schematic that e.g. the three families we follow represent the three social classes (local aristocracy, bourgeoisie, working class; not a bad idea, but it does tend to contract rather than expand the film's scope). Last 10 minutes suddenly more interesting, making me think I'd have to reconsider the whole rating; fortunately, very last shot is banal and unnecessary - so I didn't.]
THE SHAPE OF THINGS (39) (dir., Neil LaBute) Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd, Gretchen Mol, Frederick Weller [Definite points for audacity - though just cannibalising IN THE COMPANY OF MEN really - but wildly unconvincing, and finally too confused to have much impact. Weisz character hates "Art that isn't true", spends the whole film looking for something real - even if it's just a performance artist finger-painting portraits of her father with her menstrual blood - yet also blithely excuses her deceit by telling our hero their relationship was real if it was "real for you" ("It's all subjective"). Doesn't take a genius to spot the contradiction - yet that's also the only way she can dodge the fundamental flaw in 'reality Art', viz. that as soon as you play it for the camera it ceases to be real ; thus, her provocation is a hollow, insignificant thing, but LaBute either doesn't see this or doesn't make it clear enough. Wouldn't be a serious problem if it worked as a story - God knows intellectual cohesion isn't what we go to the movies for - but these characters are designed for the stage, to put it kindly: Rudd (over)does puppyish energy, and comes across like Ryan O'Neal about to be flustered by kooky Barbra Streisand; Mol simpers like a 50s housewife ("Does anybody want dessert?"), Weller's such an OTT boor you begin to wonder in what remote universe he and Rudd could be best buds, and Weisz is just a construct, Angry Artist Babe. Dismal stuff, but LaBute's heightened brutalist-fantasy dialogue (or whatever it is) still has a rhythm, and I liked the way the opening credits define the cast - and of course the characters they play - as "Actors" and "Actresses": truth in advertising.]
CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES (54) (dir., Eric Byler) Michael Idamoto, Jacqueline Kim, Eugenia Yuan [Scene where I realised I wasn't quite in sync with this one probably the bit where Michael and Charlotte are walking home for the second time - with their intimacy nearing its peak, and sex very much in the air - and Byler takes great pains to keep them in separate frames throughout the walk, even including a shot where Michael turns towards her (with lots of empty space to his left) and we then pan to Charlotte (with lots of empty space to her right), even though the two are next to each other and a two-shot would've been entirely natural. Seemed a clumsy device, warning us not to trust this relationship - Rohmer never tips his hand this way - damaging the narrative tension and also quite unnecessary, since I never warmed to either party in the first place (Byler should've been trying to sell the romance, if anything): hero's just a lump, and it's no doubt relevant that Kim's the kind of actress - maybe I should say the kind of woman - I dislike, the Catherine Keener type hiding loneliness beneath a veneer of brittle flippancy and insensitivity. Film itself very Hal Hartley-ish (esp. the music, playing off sparse dialogue to create emotional tension), but only intermittently impressive; liked e.g. Lori warning her sister off her boyfriend even though she's actually quite unhappy with him - combination insecurity and subtle point-scoring, just because she can - but a good scene like the boyfriend impatient with her games (that piece of fruit she keeps pulling back at the last moment) is invariably followed by a clumsy one like "Tell me you love me" five minutes later. Chinese auntie - with her Professor Sunshine story - also turns out to be a red herring ; is there any reason, beyond admirable colour-blindness, why the characters should be Asian in this movie? (*)]
(*): I'm now informed that Eric Byler is in fact half-Asian so there is in fact good reason for the characters to be Asian, viz. the director has some special insight into the sub-culture. Apologies - I thought he was some white dude setting his film in the Asian community to score multi-culti brownie points. Sorry ambiguously Asian Eric, too bad the movie's still not very good.
BAD BOYS II (57) (dir., Michael Bay) Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Jordi Molla, Joe Pantoliano [Why 2 1/2 hours? Lots of padding in between the undeniable highlights - rhythm fast but finally monotonous - but I guess it's part of Michael Bay's glorious liberation from convention (incl. the conventions of good taste), just like the structure that decides to fly off to Cuba for an extended climax at the point when most other films are calling it a day, and the shot that follows a bullet's POV - arcing in slow-motion through a couple of bottles, winging a cop then finally exploding (splat!) in a villain's throat - and the other shot that zooms down what looks like a plumbing system, zigging and zagging down various water-pipes, finally emerging in a shower where a bevy of naked girls happen to be freshening up (you bad boys!), and the often sloppy continuity (look closely at the $100 bills, or the word "Tactical" when the Chief underlines it), and the many, many crimes against bien-pensant liberalism, throwing out the blockbuster rulebook that says you appeal to as many people as you can and offend as few as possible. Corpses get manhandled in the worst possible taste (even get entangled on the hood of a car), heroes tap phones and gain illegal entry, only one person mentions that suspects have rights - and he's a Ku Klux Klansman - Smith mows down baddies with a sub-machine gun then tells his more diffident partner, "Now show 'em your badge", and the two join forces to terrorise a teen with gay taunts - even though it's entirely plausible to see the pair as a gay couple, with Smith the 'man' and pointedly flaccid Lawrence as the 'woman' ("I wanna go home to my babies"), what with talk of "our relationship" and lines like "You and me, we're over" and "My ass still hurts from what you did to it the other night" (source of the film's funniest joke). Casts its heroes as real men with "emotional anger issue problems" surrounded by a world that wants to feminise and emasculate them - which is obviously screwed-up given the homoerotic subtext, but at least honestly screwed-up: one gets the sense the contradiction is central to the Bruckheimer worldview, just a bit too fixated on guys being guys. Wild, raucously funny, thoroughly irresponsible and scarily illiberal - but what can you expect from a film that begins with gratuitous mention of 9/11 and ends at Guantanamo Bay? Joe Pantoliano is God, probably.]
HOLES (61) (dir., Andrew Davis) Shia LaBoeuf, Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Tim Blake Nelson [Something we don't see very often: a film where the audience is allowed to get way, way ahead of the characters (the "Kissing Bandit"'s identity is obvious long before it's revealed, and the ending is more or less a given once a character divulges his surname, with half an hour to go); it does this because it's a kids' movie structured like an Atom Egoyan movie - three strands developed side-by-side - and needs to give its audience some breathing space, plus of course kids tend to enjoy familiarity, and knowing how a story will turn out. For an adult, result is that long stretches are spent waiting impatiently for the inevitable to happen - yet the ending, when it comes, is deeply satisfying (and surprisingly surprising), leaving you in a warm glow of promises fulfilled and loose ends tied together. Minor deductions for some over-broad touches and SHREK-style soundtrack of 'alternative' hits. Incidental props for: likeable LaBoeuf as klutzy young hero, God's-eye shot of barren desert landscape pockmarked with thousands of holes.]
WINGED MIGRATION (50) (dir., Jacques Perrin / Jacques Cluzaud / Michel Debats) [Birds! They twitch their beaks, roll their button eyes, fly in formation (music soars appropriately) and feed their squalling young. Birds! Birds of prey chase little birds, caged birds caw as free birds fly overhead, condors look mean, penguins look dorky, mother birds flap wings for the benefit of baby birds. Perrin & Co. find one awe-inspiring image after another (most memorable: desert crabs closing in on a bird with a broken wing as it tries to hop away with pitiful "eep! eep!" sounds), sometimes editorialising when it comes to the various man-made perils encountered along the way (a tractor hurtles down towards a bird's nest lying on the ground with a baby inside - a cheap shot, since the filmmakers presumably got the nest out of harm's way after yelling "Cut!"). At its best, works as a sub-culture movie, laying bare another world that's right in our midst yet invariably ignored; at its most effective, the shots of timeless landscape punctuated only by bird-cries recall the early scenes of 2001, and the images inspire all kinds of questions - How do these birds decide when to eat? Is there a leader, or do they all somehow get a craving for a snack at the same time? Why did Nature create a species that spends half its life going from A to B and back again, anyway? Questions unanswered, of course; pointless New Age twaddle at the end of the day, and of course it ends with Nick Cave singing the solemn "To Be By Your Side" when it should have ended with They Might Be Giants doing "Birdhouse in Your Soul". Birds!]
DARK BLUE (43) (dir., Ron Shelton) Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Brendan Gleeson, Ving Rhames, Lolita Davidovich [Threadbare genre thrills, which wouldn't be so bad except that it builds to a Statement, with reality butting in on fantasy and the Rodney King riots acting as moral punisher / redeemer. Generally speaking, Shelton handles losers well (he gives them confidence, which becomes poignant in the context of their loser-dom) but goes overboard with rascally winners (see also BLAZE): Russell's rogue cop, unabashedly racist and macho - on learning his son has a girlfriend: "At least he's not a fag!" - is flamboyantly over-drawn in the manner of Richard Gere in INTERNAL AFFAIRS, doling out pain and largesse in equal measure (which wouldn't be a problem, except that it builds to a Statement etc). Fun but unconvincing, almost always taking the easiest route - a corrupt judge is briefly seen sipping a Martini (!) as he signs warrants without even reading them; a man is killed in cold blood with a little girl looking on for extra traumatic pathos; Ving Rhames as the One Honest Cop is a born-again Christian who promises to swoop on corrupt colleagues "like the Lord's fury" - and after a while it's not even much fun anymore (based as it is on blanket contempt for the LAPD). I have no idea if street-tough gangstas in LA really talk like that, but if they do I bet they learned it from the movies.]
MANIC (63) (dir., Jordan Melamed) Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Cheadle, Elden Henson, Michael Bacall [Disturbed teens, zoom-ins, shaky-cam: oh no, another THIRTEEN - yet it somehow works, maybe in anchoring THIRTEEN's concerns to the enclosed, intimate setting of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (the Indian kid an obvious reference to that film, though his role is much more despairing), maybe just because it's much better acted. Or at least more intensively acted, the actors working harder - there's a lot of unconvincing stuff (nervy style is mostly a distraction, and the characters are movie types in so many ways: the bully, the punkette, the withdrawn girl, the clownish smart kid), but it stays focused on the characters and finally draws a few nuggets of what feels like truth (favourite moment not involving the righteous Don Cheadle: Gordon-Levitt and the other kid asking each other "So, what d'you listen to?" - even if it does turn out to be Rage Against the Machine). Teenage heroes are as likely to be inspired by Van Gogh as debating who might win a Batman vs. Wolverine deathmatch, which seems exactly right; what's the world coming to when the Music Supervisor on a low-budget movie with a fairly ordinary soundtrack needs to have three Assistants, though?...]