Films Seen - October 2006
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
THE PUFFY CHAIR (66) (dir., Jay Duplass) Mark Duplass, Kathryn Aselton, Rhett Wilkins [A low-fi generational portrait - the generation who say "Dude" and "Awesome", are often 'in a band' (or just out of one), and fear commitment in their language and lifestyles as they do in their relationships - shot with a handheld camera and the focus drifting in and out occasionally, and one inevitably thinks of Bujalski though these guys are slightly older. They're also living in a world more like our own (or my own), with actual outbursts and reconciliations - the girlfriend knocking over the dinner plates in a fit of temper - instead of constant dodging and shilly-shallying, and most people trying to work some kind of angle; everyone lies (that may be the theme of the movie), our hero lies at the motel, the Puffy Chair seller lies about the chair, the wedding vows are a big lie and of course the couple lie in their relationship - and may in fact be lying (to themselves) even at the end, even when they make a decision. That's why their floundering and procrastination is actually quite poignant, because they're trying to work out some Truth about love, or life, or each other (all these films about today's paralysed young things tend to remind me of this article) in an over-stocked world where Truth is the only scarcity; our hero's Dad knows better - but then he comes from another generation. Full of nice touches, including SAY ANYTHING reference, apparent song montage unceremoniously cut short after a couple of bars, and hero pulling an old-fashioned "Let's take this outside" on the mendacious seller only to find he has nothing to say when they do go outside. Duplass is a better writer than actor, but I guess it was this or nothing.]
SAMARITAN GIRL (46) (dir., Kim Ki-duk) Kwak Ji-min, Eol Lee, Seo Min-jeong [Probably closest to SPRING, SUMMER... for Kim-watchers (though the human-statue motif from TIME makes an early appearance), both for its multi-part structure and its themes of spirituality and redemption. The heroine's friend talks of sex having spiritual properties - she styles herself after an Indian prostitute whose bedroom skills were reputedly so inspirational she turned every john into a faithful Buddhist - her Dad talks of miracles and heroine's own sexual crusade is coded (not least in the title) as a force for Good ("We must all live together in harmony," sighs one of the clients in post-coital bliss, while another is moved to call his daughter), though it's also a form of expiation for her unwitting part in the friend's death and her earlier jealousy, the way she secretly longed to have sex with the men and lashed out at them to disguise it (it's as though, by reversing the hooker-client relationship - she's the one paying the money - she's trying to rewind into the past and reverse what happened). Alas, the film changes tack halfway through, shifting from the girl's sexual journey to her Dad's shocked reaction, which isn't very interesting since he just broods a lot and occasionally lapses into violence; the third act seems to be saying he should stop playing Heavy Father and just learn to let go, which may be relevant to middle-aged men with teenage daughters (Kim Ki-duk is 44) but certainly isn't as bold and transgressive as the film's first half. Kim's eye is good but his touch (as usual) isn't very light, from the bluntly-placed phone call to show the musician's callousness - couldn't they have wheeled off the corpse first? - to the final driving-lesson-as-symbolic-coming-of-age. Guess I can see why the aesthetes don't think much of him...]
JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE (43) (dir., Betty Thomas) Jesse Metcalfe, Brittany Snow, Ashanti, Sophia Bush, Arielle Kebbel [17 years on, the Heathers are sidekicks and comic relief while the loser nice-girl (Veronica, was it?) plays at being a vamp before succumbing to the immutable high-school-movie law - at least in Hollywood - that Like always ends up with Like (because we wouldn't want to make things any less segregated and clique-ridden). In truth, she doesn't change at all - despite everyone telling her "You've become so different", etc - whether because Ms. Snow is a very limited actress or because it seemed a safer bet to make them both likeable by changing Metcalfe-as-John-Tucker (he does change, quite radically, from sneering Lothario to lovelorn puppy-dog) than make them both dislikeable by changing Our Heroine. The result is inevitably a bland teenpic - and a dishonest one, since it claims to do one thing while doing another - drawing back from the lively malice of its opening scenes where (among other things) someone points out the unfortunate innuendo in being "head cheerleader" while someone else posits - accurately, I believe - that being a vegan teen activist is usually code for being easy. The plot is by way of Neil LaBute and DANGEROUS LIAISONS but the film lives only fleetingly, in stray lines and incidental details; a brawl in the gym between warring babes in volleyball regalia screeches to a momentary halt with a shot of immaculately posed, makeup-and-eyeliner Goths watching impassively from the sidelines.]
HARD CANDY (57) (dir., David Slade) Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson [The Lionsgate trailers on the DVD are all for horror movies, which is strange since (despite occasional forays into an aggressive juddering style, commonly associated with scenes where the monster rushes out of the shadows) this is really THE BUSINESS OF STRANGERS - or SLEUTH, or OLEANNA - with a twist, and even the twist gets increasingly irrelevant as the 'victim' goes from being a thought-criminal to an actual criminal. That's what makes the early scenes so powerful, the fine line between being a decent person with perverse 'tendencies' and a sicko with a facade of decency - at what stage does a victimless crime begin to warrant punishment? is "preventive maintenance" valid and righteous, doing away with an unacceptable social risk, or hysterical and illiberal? (is there really a difference between the castration of potential child molesters and, say, the ban on smoking?) - made even queasier by Page as the affectless teen tormentor, a post-Tarantino kid from the Mr. Blond school of sardonic wisecracks while you torture ("Was I born a cruel vindictive little bitch? Or did Society make me that way? I go back and forth on that."). Ties in with our increasingly proscriptive culture, also echoes the discomfort of every sensitive man trying to understand the feminist assault on machismo - it doesn't seem like the guy deserves this pain, but how can we pass judgment on the Victim from our privileged vantage-point? - generally makes for back-and-forth sympathies and disturbing viewing (even when his sicko porn-stash is uncovered, it's not like he did anything ... right?). Gets less effective as the plot grows more extreme - the first act is the best, with the relationship teetering on the brink of respectable (the twist, as played, is unconvincing) - but the extended sadism in the middle is mind-crunching stuff; BUG is still the year's best claustrophobic two-hander, but this comes close. I was glad when the whole thing was over, which has to count for something.]
LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD (60) (dir., Albert Brooks) Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Jon Tenney [A clever con, and I must admit I fell for it, not realising till quite late - i.e. not till I was supposed to - that Albert Brooks is in fact playing "Albert Brooks", a painfully bad comic and embodiment of Ugly American insularity and condescension (maybe it's because Woody Allen - and to some extent Brooks himself - has conditioned us to sympathise with the querulous put-upon neurotic, so it's hard to see him as a symbol of Rumsfeld-like myopia; even when he kvetches about not flying First Class it's kind of sweet). He regales Indian audiences with cashmere/Kashmir puns - trying to ingratiate himself, failing dismally - blithely changes their improv suggestions even while thanking them for their valuable input (he's not nasty, just blind) (*), walks right past the Taj Mahal because he's too busy bickering, almost provokes nuclear war with his well-meaning, cack-handed meddling - and if the film has a point it's that what seems cute in the context of an audition for the next Penny Marshall movie (tunnel-vision, ego, insecurity) isn't quite so cute in the context of global geopolitics (subtext: America should grow up and stop seeing the world in Hollywood terms, a generalization that holds equally true - at least in principle - for George Bush cowboy-ing his way in to depose Saddam and George Clooney giving the UN three weeks to send troops to Darfur). Bright gags on the fringes, offbeat characters - like the insanely cheerful female sidekick - and a little bit of Time-capsule interest in the glimpse of a world so messed-up that citizens panic at the guilty memory of having once browsed an al-Qaeda website. Speaking of which, I suppose they know that choosing India - not Saudi, Pakistan or Syria - as a stand-in for "the Muslim world" is the worst kind of cop-out?]
(*) Many thanks to reader Eugene Novikov for pointing out that this is actually an old Albert Brooks routine (I didn't know; I only know him from his movies), meaning that "Albert Brooks" may also be doing it as a routine, changing the improv suggestions as part of the joke. I've gone back and forth on Brooks' possible intentions here, and I still think it makes more sense for him to be mocking "Brooks" (just as he presumably mocked improv in that old routine) than for "Brooks" to be doing a post-modern routine that flops with Indian audiences; the latter just shows there's a culture gap - i.e. that the US and India have a different sense of humour - but the former makes a political point, i.e. that "Brooks" is like America, reaching out (supposedly) to its allies in the Middle East while in fact pursuing its own agenda. If "Brooks" knows what he's doing, he's actually helping the Looking for Comedy project even though he flops as a comic (because he can write "Muslim audiences don't appreciate showbiz meta-gags" in his report); if "Brooks" doesn't know what he's doing, he's exposing the project as absurd and condescending - which I think is also the film's intention. On the other hand, he also becomes an implausibly bad comedian, and a long way from the real Albert Brooks - so where does one begin and the other end? It's a tough one...
THE PROPOSITION (45) (dir., John Hillcoat) Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Emily Watson, John Hurt [Partly because of John Hurt's florid speech when he first appears - "Forgive me, sir", "a citizen of the world", etc - which plays like an ancient vaudevillian 'doing' drunk by staggering around and waving his arms. Partly because of Danny Huston as a New Age monster, admiring the sunset and decapitating prison guards with equal relish. Partly because of Ray Winstone as the man with a mission to "civilise" this "beleaguered land", sitting down to a proper Christmas dinner - albeit in Australia's summer heat - just as what he unleashed comes back to haunt him (he's a hypocrite, trying to compartmentalise his life so unpleasant reality doesn't impinge on his happy home and connubial bliss). Mostly because all these things are self-consciously 'complex' yet with an ugly reductiveness clinging to them, a pocket nihilism asserting that Australia was founded on violence, grime + clotted dirt = realism, and an idealist can only fail in a brutal world - though also because the plot grinds to a halt after Pearce rejoins his brother (the "proposition" never really goes anywhere, and seems pretty foolish in retrospect) and because 'complexity' leaves the characters looking like patchworks of offbeat traits instead of coherent wholes. Oh, and because of the baffling pre-credits caption, warning that the film "might be offensive to indigenous peoples" though white men acting like evil barbarians is apparently par for the course - besides, why should white men today be offended by the depiction of white men in 19th-century Australia, those were completely different white men, unlike the Abos who are all basically the same. Wait, no, that didn't come out right...]
WORLD TRADE CENTER (42) (dir., Oliver Stone) Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon [Nicely-made and everything, and I'm sure much of the early 9/11 minutiae must be heartbreaking for New Yorkers - the reminder of the actual shops (Crabtree & Evelyn!) in the Concourse level of the WTC, or that panoramic wide-shot of the NYC skyline at dawn with the Twin Towers snugly in their proper place - but then it turns into POSEIDON or one of those "Trapped: The Story of Bunny McDuffy" movies, with the wounded men struggling to stay alive ("My mouth feels like a beach") while their families freak out and wring their hands, and even the final-act hallucinations (Jesus and the wife) are unworthy of the peyote-freak who made THE DOORS and ALEXANDER. Such a dull little movie on such a momentous event, it's tempting to think Stone must've intended it as metaphor - America itself trapped beneath the rubble, hoping for some kind of rescue - and it's worth noting (just like in UNITED 93) that the only person who realises straight away that "This country is at war" turns out to be the closest thing to a saviour - except in this one (unlike UNITED 93) he's also an obvious psycho, suggesting that desperate times call for desperate men or the War on Terror is a psychotic delusion, according to taste. When the nut in question (an ex-Marine) heads off to re-enlist at the end, because "they're going to need some good men to take revenge for this", you wonder if this is the same Oliver Stone who experienced war first-hand, and even made a pretty good movie about how easily good intentions spiral into mass psychosis.]
RELATIVE STRANGERS (23) (dir., Greg Glienna) Ron Livingston, Danny DeVito, Kathy Bates, Neve Campbell, Edward Herrmann [They should show this at film schools, and I'm not remotely kidding. There's no point showing CITIZEN KANE, or great movies in general - it's impossible to know or define, much less reproduce, the alchemy that goes to make a great movie - but anyone can learn what not to do from this utterly flat comedy, staged so prosaically (and I suspect ineptly, in terms of getting the coverage) a more-than-decent cast can only mug and flounder, and the few good jokes struggle to make a difference. Sometimes it's a case of a needless scene they could've snipped altogether - e.g. hero telling fiancée he's found his real parents, which we already know and she's going to find out anyway - sometimes a case of killing the joke by moving too slowly or including too much, e.g. DeVito saying his and the missus' courtship was a case of boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, boy-goes-to-jail-for-impersonating-a-meat-inspector, which really just needed a puzzled beat from his listeners followed by some kicker (maybe some tiny bit of business) but instead gets two flat, superfluous lines - "I'm sorry, what was that last part?"; Mrs. DeVito: "It's a long story" - before being put out of its misery; sometimes it's just a lack of imagination (or coverage), like going baldly from an outrageous speech to a shocked reaction when e.g. breaking it up with an insert of listener's mounting outrage might've set up the joke better. I did smile a couple of times - e.g. at the CAPE FEAR gag - and it's all quite 'good-hearted', but it just lies there and dies there. At least it can have a useful afterlife as a teaching-aid for thousands of eager youngsters; either that, or cut up the negative for guitar-picks.]
LADY IN THE WATER (63) (dir., M. Night Shyamalan) Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright, M. Night Shyamalan [Maybe double-bill with THE FALL (another fractured fairytale by an Indian-born auteur) as a story that's largely about telling stories, and takes on a life of its own after a dopey start - though it also picks up where THE ALLEGORICAL VILLAGE left off, pointedly set in wartime with a TV (like the radio in THE VILLAGE) giving news of Fallujah and Iraq not long after we learn about the "narfs", fragile nymphs from a "magic world" who stand against the violence of men ("They still try to help men," laments the preface, "but men may have forgotten how to listen."). Shyamalan drops so many hints of what the film is 'really about' - from the writer (played by himself) having written a book with his "thoughts on world leaders" to the closing credits punctuated by "The Times They Are A-Changin'" - it's no surprise that he barely deigns to craft a convincing narrative, nor am I surprised that at least one real-life writer I know (no names bud) can't stand his work; it treats all the things writers slave over - structure, exposition, connective tissue - with Korean Grandma Syndrome, a casual condescension wherein an omniscient Korean grandma shows up to propel the plot forward each time the characters find themselves in a corner - and in fact this particular film ranges itself against all notions of 'good' writing, insofar as they involve hewing to formula or convention. Balaban's "critic" character actually stands for the Establishment (he might've worked better as a studio executive), totally conformist and cynical about the development of story - the narf's name is Story - totally certain there's no such thing as original thinking; the film ends up describing itself - everyone helps the story/Story - then breaks off self-consciously to make its point(s), namely that the critic is wrong, that there is such a thing as original thinking, that it lies in finding "meaning in the everyday" and "special"-ness in everyone - thinking less like a critic and more like a child - and that, last but not least, only this kind of thinking (un-jaded thinking, innocent thinking) can help humanity in these desperate times (THE VILLAGE identified a problem, this one posits a cure, albeit a woolly ill-defined cure). Actually consistent with Shyamalan's twist-happy previous films, his concern being with upending predictable narratives, except now he's doing it as a political gesture; seems a bit silly because his mind is so literal and his idea of predictable narratives is so limited (it's the idea of someone who's never strayed beyond the multiplex, another reason why his critic is so unconvincing as a critic) - but he has his moments of visual felicity, like the shot from behind the water-sprinklers or the overall air of ethereal claustrophobia (it's tempting to credit DP Christopher Doyle, but in fact THE VILLAGE had a similar air), and its cheesy earnestness isn't far removed from wide-eyed wonder. Charmingly naive, though I'm guessing Shyami wouldn't take that as a compliment.]
STORMBREAKER (37) (dir., Geoffrey Sax) Alex Pettyfer, Mickey Rourke, Bill Nighy, Sophie Okonedo, Alicia Silverstone, Missi Pyle, Stephen Fry, Damian Lewis [The name's Littleshit. Annoying Littleshit. Cooler-than-thou entitlement oozes from every pore of Mr. Pettyfer's body - they're ruining kids with this high-self-esteem stuff - and the James Bond references (Oddjob-type thug, a car being pulped, marine monster in a tank in the villain's headquarters) mix uncertainly with the spoofy detail, broad comic performances and shrill Teutonic henchwoman out of a Mel Brooks movie. The starry cast seem to have been roped in on the promise of a new British franchise, but in fact every time it tries something Hollywood - like the training montage (with Gorillaz backing), or the fight with film-clips, or the excerpts from the Stormbreaker game itself, virtual-reality dinosaurs and so forth - it comes off low-budget and naff (i.e. lame, chintzy, tacky); also, jesus is that kid a bad actor. AGENT CODY BANKS, your country needs you...]
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (65) (dir., David Frankel) Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, Emily Blunt [This "Cyprus Mail" review waffles a bit, but I think it's basically sound. Take the last sentence with a grain of salt, however...]
TRANSAMERICA (48) (dir., Duncan Tucker) Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnulla Flanagan, Graham Greene [Enjoyable, just not very believable. Transsexual's shrink all but blackmails him to go after long-lost son, refusing to sign him over for the operation till he's "ready" - but then, when he comes back just before the hospital date, obviously distraught and with his face bruised, shows him happily into surgery without even a question, let alone a debriefing session (it's a detail, but it stuck in my craw). Transsexual himself finds the son more or less under duress yet instantly starts acting like a parent, though he didn't even know the kid existed till a few days before, telling him to eat his greens and correcting his grammar - and doesn't even check him out or cast a longing glance when the boy strips down (not knowing who he is) and practically throws himself at him. Hard to know where the broad comic strokes end and sober observation begins - bigoted silver-haired Grandma going "That dog is a sex maniac!" obviously among the former, but what about Huffman's deep tranny voice, which sounds like a person with a blocked nose or perhaps Amanda Bynes' slowed-down man-slur in SHE'S THE MAN (or Ellen DeGeneres 'talking whale' in FINDING NEMO)? What about the local colour as the mismatched pair roam the red states, including revelations of sexual abuse in Kentucky, hippie hitch-hikers in New Mexico and making out with random white-trash runts in Arkansas? And what about the interlude with a roomful of (real?) transsexuals who say things like "We're not gender-challenged, we're gender-gifted" and sing a bowdlerised version of "Home on the Range", like Robert Preston in VICTOR/VICTORIA? Sounds like a sympathetic glimpse at a much-maligned American sub-culture - or do I hear Duncan Tucker giggling under his breath on the sidelines?]
THE BLACK DAHLIA (58) (dir., Brian De Palma) Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Fiona Shaw [Is it deliberate that this consists of two separate halves that don't quite meet in the middle - exactly like the sprawled bisected body of the Dahlia herself? Sounds like a long-shot but in fact this is one of those rare films (VERTIGO is another) that's ruled by a corpse, De Palma identifying more with his dead catalyst than any of his nominal heroes. Themes of outsider-dom run strong throughout, starting with the opening sequence (Zoot Suit Riots, targeting Mexicans), and De Palma himself is an outsider just as our hero 'Bucky' - "I'm just the other guy" - is an outsider by virtue of his cop status and immigrant father (who won't even speak English), and of course the Dahlia is an outsider, used and finally killed by the Establishment (even her murder is visually outsider-ed, glimpsed in the background of a complicated crane-shot like it's "just the other murder"). All we see of her are screen-tests, and it soon becomes clear her talent is for sex, not acting - just as De Palma's (more metaphorically) is for sex, sensually pleasing films that often fall down on accepted notions of 'performance'; the voice of the director who mocks and belittles her is De Palma's own, just as he himself has been mocked and belittled, and her fixed smile - carved, ear-to-ear, by a killer's knife - might be his own sardonic riposte to all those seduced by Hollywood's mask of wealth and glamour (of course I don't know how De Palma feels about his career, but someone with his talent for spectacle must occasionally wonder why he never became the second Spielberg). Maybe that's why audiences rejected the film, because they instinctively sensed how morbid it is and shuddered at its lush necrophilia - or maybe a Dahlia-like structure just isn't very satisfying, the Eckhart-and-Johansson strand more or less irrelevant to the main action, and certainly the Ellroy adaptation here isn't as elegant as in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL; plotting is one thing after another, scenes packed together and treading on each other's toes. Also, Hilary Swank is awful as a femme fatale - too eager, too blatant - also the Grand Guignol climax may be too much for some people. Flawed, claustrophobic and creepy as fuck, but I think I like it.]
MONSTER HOUSE (70) (dir., Gil Kenan) with the voices of Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner, Spencer Locke, Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal [Wondrously retro, rooted (like E.T., THE GOONIES and most Joe Dante films) in a vision of small-town America, not self-consciously nostalgic like CARS but happily wide-eyed, a style reinforced by the square-cut 'storybook' look - and maybe it's wrong to praise this kind of kidpic while hating the likes of MADAGASCAR, aimed at today's media-savvy youngsters (kidpics are for kids, not grown men looking back fondly on their 80s childhoods), but it's equally true that it has more emotional range than the plastic po-mo stuff, and skews impressively darker (the build-up is like a horror movie, with eerie detail like the tinny phone sound across a vast silence), and I also suspect the more classical gender roles (dorky boys fighting over girl, acting suave to impress her) are still more accurate than the non-sexist egalitarianism of the similar trio in HARRY POTTER. Early scenes teem with echoes of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, though the kids are older and puberty is explicitly just around the corner - like the house across the street, and it's apt that the "monster house" finally demands to be understood not in the childish terms of scary bogeymen but the grown-up terms of perverse love and amour fou. Solidly plotted and surprisingly funny, though I'm sure it also helps that most kids' cartoons are so dire - and perhaps its real triumph lies in approaching its target audience with respect, neither treating them like babies, fobbing them off with toilet humour and fatuous Messages, nor forcing them to lose their childhood sense of wonder and join the ranks of the ironic. Also rejects the incoherent, profit-maximising 'umbrella' approach of ICE AGE 2, not trying to be all things to all people but pitching itself at a certain demographic - pre-adolescents, plus the stray nostalgic 30-something - with jokes that encourage them to laugh at themselves (e.g. the embarrassment of a pre-teen boy showing a girl to his room for the first time: "Yeah, the posters are stupid. I keep meaning to tear ’em down and put up some Art..."). Also, has there ever been another movie - let alone a kids’ movie - in the whole history of movies that's based one of its gags on the confusing similarity between the words "uvula" and "vulva"? I think not.]
TICKETS (67) (dir., Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami & Ken Loach) Carlo Delle Piane, Silvana de Santis, Martin Compston [What are the defining features of a train journey? People in close proximity, each with their own hidden stories, but also (unlike planes) freedom of action - you can move around, change your plans, get off the train if you like, and also get involved in the lives of others, all of which is employed and exploited by this train-set three-parter. The Loach is by far the worst of the three (it's also, perhaps coincidentally, the only one that makes a point of explaining why its characters took the train instead of flying, so maybe writer Laverty just doesn't understand the milieu), killed by some awful scripting - esp. the scene where a refugee mother makes an impassioned speech to explain her family's plight ("We sold everything there ... Everything," she says, and that second "Everything" is what bad writing's all about). The Kiarostami is by far the best, light and allusive as a short story and depressing only in showing what a master he could still be, if he hadn't set his mind on the avant-garde - though the shot where the old woman gets dressed behind the slats of half-open Venetian blinds, each slat reflecting a whirl of landscape as the train rumbles on, is more visually inventive than anything he's done post-TEN (by all accounts). Sympathy shifts between the characters - its most subtle achievement being in making the obnoxious old lady finally sympathetic, just because our last glimpse of her makes her look so vulnerable - with hidden lives reflected in the weary lupine features of the passenger with the cellphone, or the thin ratlike face of the tentative girl with the big nervous smile that reveals her braces. The Olmi's pretty good as well - esp. as it becomes clear he's interweaving dream and reality, like in SINGING BEHIND SCREENS - and there's an overall tone bridging the segments, the constant train sounds (whistling wind, intermittent rattle of another train passing alongside) and underlying tensions of refugees and security fears, played off the fact of people in proximity. Underrated.]