Films Seen - October 2008

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

NIGHT AND DAY (71) (dir., Hong Sang-soo) Kim Yeong-ho, Park Yun-hye, Seo Min-jung Hong in expansive mode, not just running-time-wise but also in his tonal range - it's his most comedic movie (even the Bible getting used as a comic prop) but also his sharpest dig at the boorish Korean male - and the range of effects he tries out, from irreverent burlesque (Beethoven's Seventh over images of dog-shit) to Rohmer-like diary structure to a final dream sequence that's either very interesting or wholly misguided (right now I'm tending towards the latter, pending a second viewing). His relationship with Paris is also ambivalent, sometimes unabashedly romantic - like the scene where our hero gets lost in the rain, roaming the glistening streets to the strains of Beethoven - but mostly wryly sardonic, the upshot being that you can take the Korean to Paris but he'll still be a chauvinist pig (an early shot shows a pig poking at the window of a women's baths), getting drunk, treating women badly and holding on to his prejudices (notably the ones about North Koreans). Our hero's an artist, and apparently serious about his work - but he's silent when the girls ask him to explain what Art means to him (Hong tactfully cuts to something else) and silent again when they ask "Do you still dream of becoming a great painter?"; his problem seems to be intimacy, which may be what's lacking in his work (he specialises in paintings of clouds) and may be why he's so fond of arm-wrestling, a way of making contact (and establishing control); hands - i.e. touch - are an issue, our hero's landlord asking "Do you mind if we shake hands?" (he doesn't, and indeed volunteers to shake hands again before they part) and the whole film existing in a literal and figurative no-touch zone, whether it's the girls or Paris itself. Full of pleasures and possible talking-points, e.g. the recurring theme of authenticity, but I'm writing this three weeks later so most of them have faded; the last 15 minutes (i.e. after he goes back to Korea) still seem like a baffling misstep, though.    

REVANCHE (62) (dir., Gotz Spielmann) Johannes Krisch, Ursula Strauss, Andreas Lust, Irina Potapenko May have failed to pick up a nuance (I was tired), but it definitely feels like this misses a trick at the end, in not making more of the fact that the avenger does get his revenge - or at least a revenge - proving himself to be literally 'more of a man' than his opponent vis-a-vis his opponent's child (machismo matters in this movie; the cop reacts badly to being called "slow" by his mates, and the robber implicitly resents being called "soft" by his boss). Minus any final irony, what remains is a carefully-constructed, rather underwhelming tract, staged in short, brushstroke-like scenes, giving its characters small moral dilemmas - is it right to alert the authorities about an old man's dangerous driving? what's a self-respecting hooker to do when the boss demands a blow-job? - building up to the major central one. Spielmann is intrigued by the notion of ripples flowing out from a central event, not unlike the ripples when a rock gets dropped in the lake in the opening scene, but his scenes are too often on-the-nose (e.g. the mother-in-law, who's transparently there only so the subject of heroine having kids can be broached; it feels inorganic, like that damned wood-chopping) and his staging more thorough than exciting. Still a good film, but I've now seen much of it twice - once in Toronto, when I fell asleep, and once in London, when I stayed awake but definitely woozy for much of the second half (incl. the all-important confrontation between the two protagonists); maybe I should stop blaming myself, in my opinion.    

AFTERSCHOOL (68) (dir., Antonio Campos) Ezra Miller, Jeremy White, Emory Cohen A good double-bill with THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS [see below], being another film that literally adjusts its form to reflect its teenage protagonist (the strangeness is made explicit when Robert unveils his "memorial video", and you do have to wonder if Campos' producers ever told him - as Robert's teacher says to him - "Antonio, is this serious?"). Sometimes the camera's identification is cinematically acceptable/constructive/intelligible - e.g. when a teacher talks about Hecuba but we (adopting Robert's POV) look at close-ups of her thighs and ass - but other times it's perverse and downright self-destructive: compositions are off-centre, heads and bodies get cut off, legs appear at the top of the frame, shots look amateurish (see e.g. the slow pointless pan from the investigating cop to our hero) and there's about 20 seconds where the entire image is out-of-focus. It's like the camera isn't interested in people, or doesn't realise what's important about them - which of course is exactly the worldview you'd expect from a troubled kid getting his cues from a YouTube world where a cat playing the piano and the death of Saddam are both equally important, both just a mouse-click away, the subtlety of Campos' approach being that the depth of Robert's dysfunction isn't necessarily apparent from what he does, only from the film's visual style (he knows, of course, and tries to explain to his Mom - "I think I'm not a good person" - but she doesn't want to listen). Campos does finger-wag to some extent, e.g. in teasing with the death video a number of times then dropping the found-footage schtick to show What Really Happened (as if to say our hero - and we - can never know the real truth while beholden to YouTube), but it's too outlandish to seem like a lecture (*), and probably more daring than TRACEY since it doesn't advertise its avant-garde pretensions. Most casual viewers are likely to conclude - like that clueless teacher, unable to see the discomfiting truth in Robert's deadened visuals - it's "the worst thing I've ever seen".    

(*) Also too outlandish for the straight 9/11 metaphor people are seeing - I admit I missed it - though I guess it's nice, at a time when just about everything is being coded as a 9/11 metaphor, that a film can actually be a 9/11 metaphor and not make it blatantly obvious.   

THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (63) (dir., Bruce McDonald) Ellen Page, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Julian Richings More like "The Tracey Coverage", its main gambit (especially in the first half) being to place all components of a scene - master shot, close-ups, reaction shots, inserts - together in the same frame, letting them play out simultaneously instead of selecting and emphasising (i.e. editing). It's a kind of empowerment for the much-abused titular teen, the filmmaker waiving his power to shape her life, allowing it to become 'her' movie both in a YouTube sense and just literally, so e.g. holes appear in the image when she says a boy "opens holes in [her] skin with his mouth"; we even get a film-within-a-film at one point, albeit just the opening credits ("And Introducing Lance from Toronto"), Tracey's life afforded meaning through pop-culture (she also imagines herself on the cover of a music magazine) - and there's even a scene where the film itself pulsates to her rhythm, like an extension of her body, visual 'fragments' shooting out like streamers in time with her breathing. The point is also that it's all connected, all the constituent parts of a scene together just like Tracey is the sum of all her fragments - like the tales she likes to tell about the inter-connectedness of things, how a horse gets transmuted into glue and a dead girl's parents eat her in their breakfast honey - but the film's main pleasure lies in its mechanics, like a post-modern building with the brickwork exposed. It's about the filmmaking process, filmmaking as a kind of exploitation - "No-one can make me stand still," says Tracey, and that means Larry Clark-like auteurs as well as parents and social pressures - McDonald laying bare his role with a kind of artful artlessness, making it truly democratic (the DVD includes the results of a side-project where Ordinary Folks were given access to his raw footage and invited to shape it in their own ways). Plot is weak, but good enough for a 77-minute stunt, and Page has enough inner life to redeem mopey teen-dom.  

MAX PAYNE (34) (dir., John Moore) Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris O'Donnell This isn't movie-watching, it's prospecting; I feel like I should be in the Yukon, jiggling one of those round pan-shaped sieves and sifting for nuggets. (1.) The look, which is often gorgeous (albeit perhaps imported wholesale from the videogame), flurries of snowflakes drifting through urban exteriors, an icy-blue river of dead bodies intercut with hot orange light bleeding through a half-open door marked "BABY"; one five-second throwaway - an establishing-shot of some kind of jetty, with the camera craning up and the city skyline in the background - is among the prettiest things I've seen on a movie screen all year. (2.) Chris O'Donnell getting beaten up - not just casually swiped or backhanded but systematically punched in the nose, again and again - a sight most of us have been waiting to see since the early 90s. (3.) A cameo by one Stephen R. Hart as “Tattoo Artist Owner” - a beaky, seedy-looking giant whose brief appearance makes a stronger impression than second-billed Mila Kunis (I nominate him for Best Cameo of 2008, along with Jeffrey De Munn as the plastic surgeon being polite with Frances McDormand's ramblings in BURN AFTER READING). Finally, (4.) A cop named 'Jim Bravura' (!), begging the question why it took over 100 years of movies to come up with a cop named 'Jim Bravura'. All the above being scant compensation - but (I guess) compensation nonetheless - for the fact that the third act is incoherent, Kunis' character goes nowhere, Max himself is uninteresting and we get dumb clichés like the cop friend calling Max to announce he's found a link between a recent murder and the death of his wife Michelle, but of course neglecting to say what the link is - and of course getting killed before they can meet face-to-face (it's OK though, because Max later visits his office and finds a photo of the victim in a handy file, a tattoo on her arm circled in lurid red ink with the helpful scrawled note "SAME AS MICHELLE?"). We're such suckers, we filmgoers.  

DEATH RACE (44) (dir., Paul W.S. Anderson) Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane Worth a video viewing (*), especially when Jason Statham's tangling with Joan Allen as the prim, icy warden ("Foul language is ... an issue for me"), but I have a question. It's the near-future, prisons have been privatised and prisoners are forced into gladiatorial combat for the entertainment of the masses, racing souped-up cars equipped with napalm and machine-guns. Each race is watched (online) by millions of people. If/when a prisoner wins five races, he's allowed to go free. The fans' favourite is a masked driver called "Frankenstein", who's won four races and only needs one more - but Frankenstein dies on the track, so Joan Allen frames our hero, gets him put in prison and forces him to pose as Frankenstein. If he wins one race - Frankenstein's fifth race - he'll go free. Here's the question, though: If he wins the race, won't those millions of fans (not to mention the prison authorities) demand to know who's being set free, who's the man behind the mask? And once our hero reveals his identity, won't questions be asked - like for instance "How could he win those first four races when he wasn't even in prison at the time?". Lots of other such lapses one could mention (e.g. why, in the final race, does he "drop the tombstone", given what's really going on? won't he need it for when he's being chased?), but the point has been made in my opinion. Remember when the head gets chopped off? That was awesome. 

(*) albeit probably not as much as DEATH RACE 2000, which I haven't seen (yet)

SURFWISE (50) (dir., Doug Pray) Obviously a great true-life story, hence the high-profile backing - Graydon Carter of "Vanity Fair" is among the producers - but a bit of a mess, painting a (fascinating) portrait of a charismatic rebel patriarch out of a Paul Theroux novel ("Mosquito Coast" or "Millroy the Magician") then turning against him with no particular logic. The Simon Wiesenthal Museum marks the turning-point (for some reason), after that it switches from non-conformist euphoria to resentments and family quarrels - then rambles for a while (at one point talking about food, and how everyone eats too much these days), then wraps things up in a bittersweet family reunion ("The good times outweighed the bad..."). More fun for surfers, presumably.

STOP-LOSS (59) (dir., Kimberly Peirce) Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt A shame (though also a relief) that it doesn't become what it briefly looks like becoming, viz. the FIRST BLOOD of War-in-Iraq movies, a disgruntled soldier using the skills learned in an unpopular war - in this case a pervasive paranoia, viewing everyone as the Enemy - against the society that sent him there. Instead it becomes the BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES of War-in-Iraq movies, a much more ambitious (and earnest) genre, turning what could've been a nicely desultory road-movie into a Journey of Discovery with stopovers at the family home of a dead buddy and a rehab clinic for wounded veterans; alas, the broader canvas only exacerbates the problem with War-in-Iraq movies in general - that they're steeped in whiny (albeit understandable) bitterness about this awful place and the awful US government that insists on sending people there, muffling the moral questions in Iraq itself (i.e. the precise nature of the US Occupation) and often toppling over into maudlin sentimentality about Our Boys (possible low-point: a soldier's funeral intercut with little flashback snippets of the dead man looking Young and Alive). Peirce has a woman's forensic interest in male machismo, and it's also rare to see performances so controlled and committed - nor should the special pleading obscure the bold, disquieting message, that many or most returning soldiers are in fact raving sociopaths. Admirable work in a register I just don't enjoy all that much. 

MY MOM'S NEW BOYFRIEND (32) (dir., George Gallo) Meg Ryan, Colin Hanks, Antonio Banderas, Selma Blair Beware the third quarter! That's where bad movies display their inadequacy, after the central joke (such as it is) has played itself out, before the shenanigans of the comic climax - which is bound to be lively, even in a bad movie - when ideas run out and it just stands there radiating straight-to-video flop sweat. Also beware the director who frenziedly tries to disguise its sagging structure, apparently unable to see how absurd it looks when every other scene transition is a wipe or flip or one of those revolving-door effects; then again, it seems Meg Ryan - frenziedly trying to disguise her own sagging structure - also can't see how absurd it looks that her lips are puffy and her smile like a pasted-on rictus from all that Botox, making it vaguely hilarious when her character says her philosophy is that "Life's too short for lies" (starring opposite the real-life son of her former co-star, meanwhile - albeit as his mother - is vaguely creepy, inviting memories of the old relationship(s) with Tom into the relationship with Colin). I suppose it's easier for men; then again, Antonio Banderas - breezing through this nonsense with the air of a bemused visitor - is rapidly edging into middle-age as the best comedian Hollywood never knew what to do with.

IT'S A FREE WORLD... (66) (dir., Ken Loach) Kierston Wareing, Juliet Ellis, Leslaw Zurek Laverty (Loach's bugbear) hasn't suddenly learned how to write - the saintly Polish boyfriend who misses "pickled cucumber" is especially galling, and at one point the film simply stops so an Iranian-immigrant family can tell their story - but he seems to have stumbled into a perfectly-weighted, endlessly complicated situation and a rather compulsive character, the single-mother entrepreneur doing dreadful things for good, or at least understandable, reasons. Clearly, the filmmakers think she's betrayed her class - she doesn't stick up for her workers, and does unconscionable things like invite them over for sex (how can they refuse?) when she's feeling horny - but it's also clear she's only trying to survive in the System (just like she uses her body to promote the business in the first place, even though we've already seen she has her pride and violently resists any attempt at sexual harassment), and even her Old Labour dad, whom the film clearly approves of, comes off sounding like a bit of a racist when he says all these immigrants should go back to their own countries (admittedly his point is they might do more good there - i.e. having them in England contributes to a brain-drain - but it still goes against the Blairite multi-cultural ideal, which Loach may not share but surely can't dismiss). Wareing helps, carrying a bruised tenderness - an Ellen Barkin quality - despite everything, though the film qua film still stumbles occasionally; might be just a pet peeve, but when two characters are having an argument and one of them tells the other to "Look at me ... (pause) Look at me!", that second "Look at me" is where I cry hackneyed. 

THE STRANGERS (58) (dir., Bryan Bertino) Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman An exercise in 'pure' stripped-down horror, genre mechanics divorced from plot twists and character back-story, which is interesting and surprisingly arty - Haneke being the obvious example, and it could actually have been called "Funny Games" (the setting is our hero's childhood home and some scenes have an undertow of childhood games, esp. hide-and-seek), but there's also a Lynchian echo when the camera burrows into patches of pure darkness, and even the trio of masks have the deadpan unreality of e.g. the 'rabbit people' in INLAND EMPIRE. Trouble is, after a couple of jump-out-of-your-skin moments when the predators first appear, most of it just becomes a case of watching the couple run, crawl and cower as they try to escape, the plainness of the concept working against it since the nameless Strangers are tagged as simply bogeymen (Peter and Paul were a lot harder to get a handle on, hence more unsettling). Honourable failure, for the simple reason that I found myself getting restless in the second half, but the home-invasion horror has a primal power and there's certainly lots to like: the way it starts with an unhappy rather than happy couple (see also VACANCY), bolstering audience sympathy - we instinctively feel this gloomy pair don't 'deserve' any more bad things to happen to them - and overturning the cliché of shiny happy teens getting slashed; the strange girl at the door, with her stoned mien and face obscured by darkness; the breathtaking effect of the masked man seeming to materialise out of thin air at the back of the frame - and the sly, sadistic sense of humour as oblivious heroine doesn't see him, and he inches closer and closer and closer...  

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (74) (dir., Hou Hsiao-hsien) Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Fang Song Who's the filmmaker? Is it the Chinese girl (Hou's surrogate) with her arcane-sounding short that evokes childhood, "deep feelings I'd almost forgotten"? Is it the little boy, borrowing her camera to explore the world around him? Is it the Red Balloon itself, looking down on all the characters from its godlike perch above the roofs of Paris? (No surprise that the film also features a puppetmaster.) Even the blind piano-tuner is a candidate - because he has his own Way of Seeing - though you'd have to be blind not to appreciate the beauty of Hou's doubled surfaces, a visual evocation of the co-existence of two different levels of reality (or just sensibility), the Balloon standing for the more exalted level (Art, Imagination, call it what you will). A repeated master-shot inside the house juxtaposes two kinds of light, (implicitly more crafted) yellow lamp-light in the living-room vs. daylight streaming in through the kitchen windows in the background; many shots offer a 'double image', like the pinball-playing kid doubled with buildings reflected in the café window, or the magnificent shot of Binoche in the car with the passing world reflected in her windshield (*); then there's the boy - a gentle, magical presence - caught between various lives, his rather fraught, shabby life with his mother, an occasional parallel life of mint cordials and jukeboxes with his "pretend sister", then the half-hidden creative life of piano lessons and trips to art-galleries. What does it mean that the only successful artist among the characters - Binoche - is the only one guilty of ungenerous behaviour, and the one who views the transfer of her 8mm. home-movies (another Way of Seeing) mostly as a job to be paid-for, and the one who drowns her obvious love for her son in waves of self-absorption and negative energy? The Balloon knows, but it isn't telling.   

(*) which I realise are the kinds of shots I call "flashy" in the capsule immediately below, but what can I say? It's all in the playing.

THE YEAR MY PARENTS WENT ON VACATION (65) (dir., Cao Hamburger) Michel Joelsas, Germano Haiut, Daniela Piepszyk Coming-of-age films good and bad: the football World Cup backdrop recalls MIRACLE OF BERN (bad), the Jewish / South American axis evokes memories of ACNE (bad), the Leftist parents' politics making life chaotic for their child is like BLAME IT ON FIDEL (mixed) - but the main relationship is also like THE TWO OF US in reverse (good, supposedly), with the old man being (Orthodox) Jewish, hence prone to weird rites and rituals, while the fugitive boy is not. Above all, the story of a kid forced to fend for himself recalls KING OF THE HILL (good, undoubtedly) and what lifts the material - as in Soderbergh - is Mr. Hamburger's light, sure touch and some fine performances, as well as a preference for clipped rhythms and burnished visuals (the flashiest he gets is some ill-advised cross-cutting between celebration and demonstration, plus a liking for shots of reflected cars or skyscrapers as the boy looks out of windows). Not without its dreaded cutesy quotient - the kid narrates in V.O.; the elderly Jews are mostly quirky; the boys pay the little girl next door to let them peek into the fitting-rooms of her mother's dress shop - but the old man never stops being taciturn, abandonment angst hangs over our hero like a black cloud, and the last 10 minutes are quietly devastating. Compare the final scene of this with the final scene of BLAME IT ON FIDEL (the Benetton-approved multi-culti school), and it's clear not all coming-of-age films are created equal.         

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY (45) (dir., Bharat Nalluri) Frances McDormand, Amy Adams, Ciaran Hinds, Shirley Henderson Miss P. is a penniless spinster circa 1939, though it actually feels more like the flapper era of the 20s and early 30s (the wall-to-wall swing score doesn't help) and she's actually supposed to be fiercely moralistic, which isn't immediately obvious as played by McDormand - she seems shabby, diffident, a nonentity; she doesn't have the moralist's righteous self-confidence. Based on a book, so it may have been a case of repressed Miss Pettigrew opening up under the influence of fun-loving show folk, incidentally learning to love herself - "I suppose I never felt I really deserved it," she admits after her "fixie" (i.e. makeover) - but that dynamic is quickly forgotten (just as well), given how easily Miss P. accepts her new friends (this is the woman who walked out on a previous employer because she was "fond of the sherry"?) and how easily they take to her. There are songs, mild sauciness, lots and lots of talk and an ending that's obvious even before the halfway point. A pleasant enough time-killer, at least if Life weren't short and precious.

TROPIC THUNDER (49) (dir., Ben Stiller) Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Jay Baruchel, Tom Cruise "It's beyond me," says actor Downey (i.e. the actor being played by Downey), speaking of his craft - not unlike Geoffrey Rush babbling "It's a mystery" in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE and this, for all the hysterical tone and often-gross gags, is cut from the same cloth, another inherently-smug look at Actors being Actors. Indeed, it may be even more self-indulgent, not just placing its thespians in extremis but also in a shifting world where reality blurs into fiction - a movie turns out to be real life; a war hero turns out to be a fraud - as if to say their actors' dedication, their silly "countdowns" and shop-talk and 'what's-my-motivation's, may be the only thing that's real. It's a Stiller trademark to hover on the edge of narcissism, disguised as zany comedy - so e.g. casting himself as the world's greatest male model in ZOOLANDER was 'obviously' a joke but also not entirely - and any film written by two actors is bound to let them run on too long: "full retard" deserves to be film-critic shorthand for years to come, but the scene where it's defined takes about a minute of aimless riffing to get to the punchline. Most of it is just too disjointed (i.e. didn't make me laugh, beyond the opening trailers and best-ever use of Enigma's "Sadeness") but again that's the same sensibility, the actorly worship of improvisation (like musicians' jam-sessions) with implicit rider that you need to Work Through your creative process to get to the good stuff; Tom Cruise dancing to a rap beat is just pointlessly grotesque, but if it takes that kind of excess to reveal the kernel of his performance - the most shrill and monstrous studio head since Michael Lerner in BARTON FINK - I guess it was worth it.   

STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS (32) (dir., Dave Filoni) with the voices of Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylor Probably more thrilling than ATTACK OF THE CLONES, inasmuch as it's wall-to-wall action without any deadening talk, but watching a Saturday-morning cartoon at the multiplex feels more than usually pointless, even without the embarrassment of said Saturday-morning cartoon being the new STAR WARS movie (it even kicks off with a plot-so-far, 'Last-week-on-Clone-Wars' montage!); little padawan girl is obnoxiously pushy, Yoda no longer speaks in aphorisms and pronouncements (they just put the subject at the end of his otherwise-conventional sentences, e.g. 'Go to this planet and do this thing, you must'), but animated Anakin is at least animated, unlike Hayden Christensen. Only recommended for 10-year-old boys who like to play war - AND NOTHING ELSE! - as well as those rabid STAR WARS fans who'd happily watch two hours of a fat woman waxing her legs as long as it was called "Star Wars: The Leg Waxing".

WILD CHILD (35) (dir., Nick Moore) Emma Roberts, Kimberley Nixon, Alex Pettyfer, Natasha Richardson, Aidan Quinn Starts with teenage heroine being bratty and impossible - but she also has a little sister and likes to help little Sis by cutting the crusts off her sandwiches, at which point you can probably walk out, secure in the knowledge that she's basically a good person who'll soon buckle down, make friends and indulge in the double-whammy of movie girlhood, the trying-different-clothes montage followed by the getting-your-hair-done montage. Not worth getting angry (I'm hardly the target audience) but it is spectacularly half-assed: the headmistress's rehabilitation-through-books strand - or is it just an "Alice in Wonderland" strand? - goes nowhere, the collective-punishment device is soon forgotten (instead, the dorm-mates help our heroine in her attempts to get expelled) and indeed the whole Victorian-boarding-school milieu is doomed to failure (I blame Henry Porter), (a) because they can't follow through on its authoritarian implications without scaring off the target audience, and (b) because it just sounds stupid when English teens don't know what "FYI" means. Nothing is at stake, heroine a Valley Girl caricature, villain a horsey-aristo caricature, and it soon settles down into bargain-basement snark - "Someone call Al Gore, the Ice Queen is melting!" - and low-budget juvenile fiction, most hilariously low-budget when Poppy rescues her friend from a burning building but all we get is a slow-motion shot of her rushing in (then cut to the aftermath, and everyone telling her how brave she was). As in STORMBREAKER, British films should probably check with their accountants before aping Hollywood.