Films Seen - September 2002

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER (65) (dir., Jay Roach) Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Seth Green, Michael Caine, Michael York, Nathan Lane [Has any comic ever milked the mass audience so effectively while wallowing so completely in his own preoccupations (however eccentric)? Goldmember is Dutch - that, apparently, is a joke - but how many in the target audience could even find Holland on a map, let alone find Dutch people funny per se? Belgians also feature in the humour, ditto "Daddy issues" (a big Myers obsession), ditto Canada ("Toronto voted best city in the world" reads a newsflash on the scroll beneath a mock-CNN report), ditto cockney slang ("meat and two veg"), ditto the names of assorted 70s pop bands, ditto the problem of whited-out subtitles, a common vexation for the arthouse audience before the advent of coloured subtitles (did research show most POWERS fans to be also closet Cinematheque regulars?). My theory is he made SPY WHO SHAGGED ME on autopilot but was so inspired (and shamed) by its success he decided to throw absolutely everything he had into this third instalment - puns, musical numbers, toilet humour, psychedelic sets, film-within-a-film opening, catch-phrases for everyone, even dear old Basil Exposition ("What's kickin', Basil?" "A lot's kickin', Foxy!") ; repetition doesn't just feel lazy, as it did in SPY, not just recycled but made self-conscious, part of the humour : Dr. Evil and Scott don't even have to be coherent anymore - just the repeated set-up gets a laugh, lines (deliberately) reduced to babble - and Ozzy Osbourne turns up to chastise the film-makers when they repeat the johnson-synonym riff (albeit with a twist). Scattershot, yes ; patchy, definitely (Fat Bastard kills it every time) ; but, like any good joke movie, you never really know what it'll throw at you - and it's quite incredible how Myers resuscitates the traditions of vaudeville and English music-hall, from those catch-phrases to wordplay and innuendo - "You may be a cunning linguist ; but I am a master debator" - to the way Austin or Dr. Evil cracks a joke then pauses to thank the audience, like an old-fashioned stand-up of the 'Take my wife, please' school, or the cosy, all-friends-together intimacy of a Catskills clown or Vegas 'entertainer' : you can imagine Myers at 70 ending up rather like his idol Burt Bacharach, a languid, cheeky figure working the room with his greatest hits. The mole! Threesome with twins! "I have decided to call it ... Preparation H". Ladies and gentlemen, my special guest and close personal friend - Mr. Nathan Lane!...]

WINDTALKERS (52) (dir., John Woo) Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Noah Emmerich, Peter Stormare, Mark Ruffalo, Christian Slater [An excellent film buried inside an overlong, over-noisy, over-phony one. The real film lies in the bits between the (spectacular) battle scenes, when the characters try to make sense of their intractable situation : the contradiction between (alleged) heroism and the guilt it brings ; between accepting total subjugation to a set of rules, the Marine ethos ("This is not a democracy, it's the Marines" - even though you do it for Freedom and Democracy, another contradiction), yet fighting the suspicion that rigidity, blind obedience, just-following-orders is a bad thing ; between banding together to fight a common enemy yet also fighting a racial civil-war between Navajos and whites, and the contradiction within that, that the 'whites' are such a melting-pot of different races anyway. Should've been a film about the need for irrational action (i.e. War) vs. the equally human need to try and rationalise it, the latter never able to defeat the former but sometimes coming close to redeeming it : Cage - more or less reprising his role from BRINGING OUT THE DEAD - rejects religion and seeks answers in little acts of kindness, native mysticism looms as a possible way of making sense of the carnage (not, as in THIN RED LINE, merely escaping it), but the greatest triumph comes perhaps when the mindless racist suddenly reflects that maybe "in another 50 years we could be sitting down with the Japs, drinking their sake - and looking for someone else's butt to kick". So much to work with, yet it all goes wrong, overdoing the battle scenes - falling into the WE WERE SOLDIERS trap of endless, more-is-better mayhem, throwing money at the screen - emphasising all the wrong angles : Cage's duty to "protect the code" isn't really anything to do with his friendship (or non-friendship) with the Navajo - a better film might've had them not bonding at all - more a function of what makes sense in war vs. what feels right between people ; his final act isn't really a sacrifice, more a step on the road to understanding. Ends up not coming together, offering only trite, simplistic resolution - a drab tale of soldiers who become friends and one of them dies ; tension between Woo's overheated martial imagery - bombs fireballing, flags fluttering, the cannons on a battleship lifting into alignment - and equally strong images of makeshift graveyards and tortured spiritual conversations still means something, though. Wonder what posterity will make of these strange, schizophrenic, War-is-hell-actually-it-has-a-certain-beauty post-PRIVATE RYAN Hollywood war flicks...]

CQ (53) (dir., Roman Coppola) Jeremy Davies, Angela Lindvall, Elodie Bouchez, Giancarlo Giannini, Jason Schwartzman [Often captivating, when it isn't being an incoherent mess. "There are two kinds of movies - those with an ending and those that don't have an ending," says Giannini's Carlo Ponti / Joseph E. Levine figure (CONTEMPT is an obvious reference-point, with the woman-sprawled-on-bed signature-shot appearing twice - once nude, once clothed - in the first 10 minutes), and guess which kind of film this is ; "You need to connect things so that they make us feel something," says a fictional critic at our hero's imaginary Press conference, maybe even the one played by L.M. Kit Carson (DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY is another obvious reference-point, with our hero obsessively documenting his everyday existence), and guess what Mr. Coppola neglects to do. He does have an eye for the striking image - not just set design and pastiche BARBARELLA but sudden startling moments like our black-caped hero posed before a giant arch lit with myriad candles - and it's certainly appropriate that someone cites Cocteau's famous credo "Astonish me" (from ORPHEUS - another obvious reference-point, with mirrors featured in the visuals and doppelgangers in the narrative) ; often fun but marred by a kind of art-school shallowness, dealing in half-baked ideas and affectedly whimsical asides : "I wish cats could talk," says Ms. Lindvall, apropos of nothing very much. I wish Elodie Bouchez wasn't stuck playing the nice-but-dull girl who loves our hero. I wish I knew the family dynamics behind the fact that both this and VIRGIN SUICIDES feature kindly, rather doddering professor types as fathers, when Francis Ford is clearly none of the above. I wish Jeremy Davies wasn't in this movie.]

IVANSXTC. (64) (dir., Bernard Rose) Danny Huston, Peter Weller, Lisa Enos, Adam Krentzman [Bad news for those pinning their hopes on DV as revolutionary film-making tool : there's no joy in the new medium - or I guess there is but you have to work for it, its au naturel state (judged by this film, which famously claimed to have kept production values as minimal as possible) being a depressing near-monochrome shabbiness. Fortunately that's ideal for this particular material, the result being a film that could never have been quite so effective on mere celluloid - a formidably creepy evocation of Hollywood soullessness, with a haunting mood of despair seeping into the bones of the story (as opposed to being contructed, PLAYER-style) ; it's in every image, from the sad washed-out opening shots of LA at dawn to the clenched-tight drabness of hospital corridors at the very end, almost redeeming Rose's pretentious conceit, which involves overlaying this spiritually dead world with Bach, Schubert, etc, symbolising title-hero Ivan's existential crisis as he comes face-to-face with mortality. Something rancid and presumptuous about it all - Rose putting himself above his characters, because he alone can see the emptiness in their venal souls - but the fact remains the film is hard to shake, not to mention that it's mostly an actors' piece : Weller rants and flashes his mirthless wolf-grin (wouldn't he and William Fichtner make ideal movie brothers?) as a cokehead star, real-life agent Krentzman will always be how I picture agents from now on - compact, shrewd, inscrutable - and Huston is superb as Ivan, crumbling face stitched together by a near-permanent smile (his scene with the doctor is priceless, a professional schmoozer trying and failing to cut a deal with cancer). Seen it all before, but seldom so convincing and matter-of-fact ; or maybe 'ugly' is the word I'm looking for...]

RESIDENT EVIL (57) (dir., Paul W.S. Anderson) Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy [Bit of a shape-shifter, not always on the same level. Opening is masterly, cross-cutting sharply and mysteriously between various groups in various kinds of jeopardy as we try to glean who (if any) are our heroes ; when the chaos gives way to Milla's first appearance - shots held long, eye opening as if from a dream, heroine slinking across a closed, antiseptic room finding a bizarre letter with the single line "Today all your dreams come true", surveillance cameras watching her movements - I was definitely thinking De Palma. Elegance gives way to soldiers-on-a-mission action thriller (boring) then, unexpectedly, full-fledged horror movie in Romero vein, finally back to action with escapes to be made and a monster in pursuit ; picaresque quality probably a function of its videogame roots, ditto surprisingly open ending (meant, I guess, to position the film as a prequel to the game, though - knowing nothing of the latter - I enjoyed it just as a surprisingly open ending). Clearly made by someone who never quite outgrew that little-boy game where you try and come up with the grossest and / or most sadistic ways of killing people (sealed room full of water, check ; sliced in little cubes by death-ray lattice, check), but also made by someone who's into the genre and gets imaginative pleasure out of it ; artificial intelligence, but it's good enough for present purposes. Possible coolest moment : Milla karate-kicks a zombified Dobermann. Possible funniest exchange : "All the people working here are dead" ; "That doesn't stop them from walking around".]

IMPOSTOR (46) (dir., Gary Fleder) Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D'Onofrio, Mekhi Phifer [May be under-rating this a teensy bit, but it's just so disappointing that it starts as meditation on Identity - how can we be sure we really are who we think we are? - then turns into a riff on THE FUGITIVE, esp. such a formulaic riff (TOTAL RECALL - to cite another Philip K. Dick adaptation - wasn't really all that different, but the middle section there worked in its own right). Fleder whips it mercilessly forward, breaking up a short D'Onofrio speech into three or four camera angles, though he does also get some visual grandeur in the giant tunnels and Expressionistic sets - a scene in a hospital chapel is like something out of CALIGARI, with great canted beams over the characters ; also thought I spotted some post-9/11 relevance in the enemy-within angle, world placed under "global leadership" and concept of a permanent war against shadowy, imperfectly-understood aliens, but that may be stretching the case. Still an above-average genre piece ; only just, though.]

CHANGING LANES (18) (dir., Roger Michell) Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson, Sydney Pollack, Amanda Peet, Toni Collette [To be fair to myself, I didn't just dismiss this as a lost cause even when it became clear practically every event or character decision was going to be far-fetched, movie-contrived and generally implausible (too many to go through - lawyer doesn't even note down a licence number? doesn't ask court for a time extension even after opposing counsel admits he's "not in a rush"? - but my favourite is the 20-minute stretch that could've been entirely avoided by the simple line "Excuse me, I got a phone call about my kids"). Should've switched it off in disgust but I persevered, hoping it might yet turn out to be thematically interesting - only to find the worst kind of moralistic twaddle, in which all the unpleasantness could (allegedly) have been avoided had the morally corrupt yuppie just been a nicer guy towards the down-on-his-luck, recovering-alcoholic black dude (the semi-explicit racial angle - all this unreasonable behaviour should be accepted because that's how white people habitually treat black people - is a crude attempt at trial-by-guilt-trip) ; "What do you think the law is?" our hero is lectured - the answer being Justice, fair treatment, doing the right thing, etc - prompting the thought that American lawyers could totally make billions if they got together and sued Hollywood for libel in a class-action suit. Film trudges through sickly pieties - people should take responsibility for their actions ; helping others should be done for its own sake, not financial gain - dressed up as ethical questions ; Michell tries to run his way through the gauntlet, slathering electronic score over the credits and cutting tight so the sound for one scene starts over the one before, but only makes it worse ; final section toys with possible endings, dithering over the existential one ("They have to write their own letters"), cynical one (Pollack's speech - everything is corrupt) and daringly wide-open one before opting (hooray!) for the fluffy happy one. Quelle surprise.]

ABOUT A BOY (59) (dir., Paul and Chris Weitz) Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz [Tough one to disentangle, because it works so well yet is also so fraudulent - basic trouble being perhaps that it's predicated on our hero being dysfunctional yet he isn't really ; as in HIGH FIDELITY, character flaws (anal-retentiveness there, wilfully shallow egocentrism here) don't actually get in the way of being effective and sympathetic, i.e. in control of situations, scene for scene (his 'failure' is only in the long term, noted only in the abstract). No-one gets the better of him, nor does he ever apologise, his indignant rage when Colette accuses him in public of sexual interest in the boy (the kind of situation where many a movie hero has faltered or dug his own hole) both dramatically necessary - to dispel any such idea in our own minds - and immensely satisfying : he's like a beacon of unreconstructed male heartlessness, insincere and proud of it, lighting the way against everything New Age or PC ('sensitive' folk are portrayed as humourless, casting frosty looks at his 'inappropriate' one-liners - e.g. "Your place or mine?" at the hospital - and the treatment of Colette as flaky neo-hippy is ungenerous at best). The film hovers on the brink of being offensive, pandering to its (young male) target audience's inflated idea of themselves - but is saved, like its hero, by the boy : the idea of competing voice-overs - now Will, now Marcus - is inspired, finding the equality that's so often missing in this Pollyanna genre (cold-hearted adult melts under the influence of a child), adding both detachment and a focus away from the characters to the bond between them, above all checking Will by equating him with the kid. The message is conformist - pair of misfits gradually incorporated into the whole - the climax nauseating, much of the detail twee or manipulative ; but the balancing-act is impressive, letting our hero change on his own terms even while revealing him (shades of AMERICAN PIE) as a lot less confident than he likes to pretend, the central relationship intriguing (father and son? friends together? co-dependents shyly pulled along by each other's development?) and the fringe benefits considerable, from compulsively hummable Badly Drawn Boy soundtrack to one Augustus Prew as a terrifying child-of-divorce with monstrously screechy voice, permanently on the brink of hysteria. A good film I can't quite recommend, that's to say a 61 with two points subtracted as a matter of principle ; oh no, I sound just like a Nick Hornby character...]

MEN IN BLACK 2 (42) (dir., Barry Sonnenfeld) Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rosario Dawson, Rip Torn [Amiable, maybe even fun - just unnecessary. Heard that anal-probe gag just last month, in EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS (it's really not that funny, guys) ; mix of sci-fi and New York humour already (over-)familiar from the first MIB ; Frank the dog is Joe Pesci in the LETHAL WEAPON films, gag about a world being in fact a tiny part of a much larger world is as old as the hills (or at least "The Twilight Zone"), hyper-speed aerial chase is pure STAR WARS ; even those spindly opening credits look familiar, though I can't recall if it's from the original or some other movie. Bottom line? Some amusingly designed aliens - esp. Johnny Knoxville as a riff on Monty Python's Three-Headed Knight - vague attempt at emotional resonance (loneliness of being a MIB, etc), personable stars 'doing their thing' ; little wit or imagination, and how lame is it that the Agency now turns out to have an official de-neuraliser, bringing back lost memories and smoothing out the first film's only (mildly) unsettling concept. $190 million domestic? Shameful.]

Toronto International Film Festival (45 films), from September 5-14

THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE (68) (dir., Nanette Burstein / Brett Morgen) [Robert Evans has no self-awareness, nor any sense of perspective : he trumpets his acknowledged triumphs (producing THE GODFATHER and CHINATOWN) as unstintingly as the cheesy-looking TV special he made in his wilderness years ("Get High On Yourself" : "the Woodstock of the 80s", apparently) ; mega-flops like POPEYE or THE GREAT GATSBY are simply elided, beyond a flattering GATSBY photo showing off his resemblance to Robert Redford ; most revealingly of all, the 'happy' ending finds him making a comeback, once again ensconced in his old office after years as an outcast - and a final caption shows, with no apparent irony, that he's made nothing but bad films in the years since (incl. undisputed stinkers like JADE and THE PHANTOM), without this detracting in any way from his triumph. It is, in other words, the ultimate Hollywood-insider's movie, interested not in films per se but in power struggles and the art of the hustle, not to mention colourful stories (Evans-as-narrator acting out all the parts, including Mia Farrow's hysterical falsetto) and the settling of old scores ; all quite fascinating once you take it for what it is, aptly made in a style both fragmentary and over-saturated, reflecting both these moguls' sketchy relationship with reality and the odd intensity of their closed, dreamlike lives - still photos set against swirling backgrounds, ZENTROPA-style mixings of b&w and colour (monochrome Sinatra with piercing blue eyes, against a blood-red background), dissolves and dolly-shots played to lush Max Steiner-like music, pop songs adding little tremors of exhilaration. Might be a companion-piece to 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE - the life and hectic times of another selfish, childlike, basically lonely man - without the extra layer of po-mo, Evans too much in love with his own story to disrupt it by shattering the fourth wall, or just too much of a loveable scam-artist to lose the suckers by admitting it's all just a scam. There are three sides to every story, he asserts in the prologue : "Your side, my side and the truth. And no-one is lying". Talk about LA logic.]

THE CAT'S MEOW (45) (dir., Peter Bogdanovich) Kirsten Dunst, Eddie Izzard, Edward Herrmann, Cary Elwes, Joanna Lumley ["Welcome to Hollywood, a land just off the coast of planet Earth". Oh, please. Bogdanovich used to take a buff's delight in resurrecting Golden Age phantoms but nowadays he can't even summon up the energy to give this material the sly CITIZEN KANE reference it's so clearly crying out for (being a tale of William Randolph Hearst), going instead for obvious in-jokes, rudimentary sops to the nostalgic TCM crowd - Izzard as Charlie Chaplin talking of THE GOLD RUSH but referencing only its most famous gag, the one everyone can pride themselves on having heard of - and a stale facsimile of Jazz Age breathless banter ("I'm actually a physician by trade." "Really? How very, uh..." "Medicinal?"). Complacency is the order of the day, actors sticking close to the bright-young-things faux-Fitzgerald template, launching into Charlestons at regular intervals - they dance, but their hearts are breaking - while story trades heavily on lives-of-the-rich-and-glamorous notoriety ; good moments nonetheless - mainly from Dunst and Herrmann - and one can always kill time by wondering how much of it (esp. the "California curse", wherein "you see yourself as the most important person in any room" and "accept Money as the strongest force in Nature") is meant as Bogdanovich's own bitter comment on modern Hollywood. Better than nothing, I suppose...]