Films Seen - September 2005
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
THE DUKES OF HAZZARD (36) (dir., Jay Chandrasekhar) Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Burt Reynolds, Jessica Simpson [Never actually seen the show, so I've got no baggage here: all I see are a couple of cheerfully anarchic good ole boys whose main pleasures in life are fighting, fucking, racing cars and blowing assorted shit up, which seems fair enough (the attempt to turn them into eco-warriors is too silly to take seriously). The only questions are (a) Is it funny? (b) Is it reasonably authentic in its deep-fried retro SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT-ness? and (c) Is it well-made?, and the answers are (a) Not really, (b) Not really (though at least showbiz-friendly, media-savvy and otherwise incongruously urban jokes have been kept to a minimum), and (c) Definitely not. The climax is notably inept, doing almost nothing with the rivalry between Bo and the city-slicker Nascar champ - one minute we're zooming around with no real sense of where everyone is, the next they're crossing the finish line - and forgetting to cross-cut to the courthouse, so the whole race-against-time aspect is diminished. Joke I really shouldn't repeat in real life (on account of it's so lame) but probably will: "What happens when you give Viagra to a politician?" "He gets taller!". Zing!]
SARABAND (57) (dir., Ingmar Bergman) Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Borje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius [Ullmann is Marianne but also Liv, implicitly, when she talks to camera at the beginning and end, and Josephson is also Bergman and the whole thing a conscious valediction (I caught at least one Bergman reference - counting off a minute, as in HOUR OF THE WOLF - but I'm sure there must be others) - and of course the central dilemma in the plot, whether to follow one's Art or worry about hurting other people, has surely been Bergman's, with his two divorces by the age of 30 (eager acolyte Woody Allen is also drawn to it, notably in BULLETS OVER BROADWAY). The film is deliberately simple, structured as a series of two-handers - variations on a theme, taking its four characters through various permutations - and generally avoids the indulgence of something like THE WHALES OF AUGUST, but its strengths and weaknesses (as in any personal work) hinge on the person behind it. The father-son relationship seems a bit one-dimensional, based on resentment and humiliation rather than the more complex mix of envy, Oedipal friction and hidden affection (but perhaps one could call it a father-son relationship from 60 years ago, when Bergman railed against his own father), and the teenage girl seems wrong, esp. in her first scene with Ullmann - too intense and open in the way older people may imagine the Idealistic Young, not wary and insecure as they more often are in reality; just as a 20-year-old writer might over-embellish an 80-year-old character with grumpy-old-man affectation, to disguise the fact that he's writing in the dark, so an 87-year-old writer paints a 19-year-old girl as an extrovert mercurial Young Person, overwriting her even while keeping a respectful balance in the characters closer to himself. The best of it is the stuff Bergman knows (or remembers) best, the way an ex-couple semi-consciously hurt each other in casual conversation (as when Josephson and Ullmann talk about the daughter who "escaped" to Australia) just because they know what buttons to push, Josephson recalling the time his wife almost left him, Ullmann recalling how she loved her husband when she was young and naive and admitting in the next breath that he was "a pitiful man", neither sentiment cancelling the other but the two co-existing (and she cries, and says she's crying "for Johan and Marianne"). The answer given to the central dilemma seems to be to follow one's Art but only on one's own terms - the girl takes control of her life - and that's what Bergman has always lived by; if there's a (dramatic) fault in his characters it's that they always speak their mind, which may be a Swedish thing or their creator's own stubborn honesty, both a guiding principle and a form of egotism. This isn't one of his masterpieces in my opinion, but then SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE is also (with CRIES AND WHISPERS) the canonical Bergman I like the least. Maybe you have to be married...]
THE UPSIDE OF ANGER (51) (dir., Mike Binder) Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Alicia Witt, Mike Binder [More than a touch of TERMS OF ENDEARMENT - mother-and-daughter(s) conflict, rascally middle-aged neighbour (a former jock), sickness and hospitalisation in the third act - but mostly a question of Who are these people? Point seems to be a tyrannical, interfering, angry mother - her anger even gets briefly conflated with post-9/11 rage - in which case maybe it's just miscasting because Allen is at worst an ice-queen, ending an argument with her daughter not in an explosion of temper but a basilisk stare and clenched-teeth command to "Please finish setting the table" (when she says "I hate that I can't control my emotions" the only possible response is 'Excuse me?'). The message, as in CRASH [see below], is that love is difficult so people take refuge in anger - even as the final twist reveals its hollowness - trying to control others because they can't control their own lives, just as Mom tries to clean the neighbour's house willy-nilly or Wood as the youngest daughter tries to make her hunky boy friend not be gay (a lost cause, obviously) - but the film is soft-centred, not exactly helped by a jaunty score, and increasingly conventional. Costner's reprobate famous-person is smirky when not downright cuddly - one longs for the steel edge of Jeff Bridges in THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR - and though the best, most daring moment may be Binder the actor's withering riposte when the mother accuses him of cradle-snatching (see GUINEVERE for a case of a movie that wasn't smart enough to include said riposte), Binder the director loses his nerve, writing off the character as a Bad Influence so Costner can look 'responsible' by rejecting him. Knew it wouldn't be all bad from the opening shot, a stark composition of a dry-eyed family in the back of a funeral car; knew it wouldn't be all good three seconds later, when the effect was ruined by a grating, trite and frankly ungrammatical voice-over: "A case in point in anger's ability to change us is my mother..."]
CRASH (55) (dir., Paul Haggis) Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, Ryan Phillippe, Thandie Newton, Ludacris, Larenz Tate, Michael Pena, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser [Here's the thing: If I flash a black card at you then a white card, then a black card then a white card, then a black card again then a white card, that's not actually the same as showing you a grey card; it may look the same if I do it really fast, but that's just an optical illusion. The (relatively) high rating here has everything to do with visceral impact - it's hard not to flinch when a little girl leaps in front of a bullet to save her daddy, even if you hate Haggis for doing it - the strikingly beat-up look (not including the most gorgeous LA-street-at-break-of-dawn shot I've ever seen) and a couple of terrific one-scene turns (it's a shame "Film Comment" no longer do their end-of-year "Collector's Items" sidebar, or William Fichtner and Keith David would both be shoo-ins); I can even justify/accept Michael's main problem - that the film equates/equalises the various kinds of bigotry - as an idealistic assertion that we're 'all the same', equally deserving of respect in some perfect world, even if the wealth-and-power gap between the races makes such reductionism naive and a little offensive in this one. The real sticking-point is the flipside of this (possibly well-meant) egalitarianism - the black card/white card effect, the way Haggis keeps building and chopping down characters like some manic toddler fixated on making all his Play-Dough people the same size: if Dillon's cop goes on a racist power trip he then has to find himself on the receiving end of a (black) doctor's power trip; if Cheadle sounds mean to his momma on the phone he's then redeemed by making her unsympathetic when they meet in person; if Phillippe stands up for a black man in front of his racist cronies, he must then undo all his good work by succumbing to tragic paranoia with another black man later. Even more than the other devices marking this out as a 'writer's movie' - the deliberately wild coincidences announcing a fantasy world, the "invisible cloak" scene and Disneyfied sense of children as tiny repositories of 'magic' - it's the stifling manipulation of characters in pursuit of (alleged) grey areas that grates, esp. in a film that calls for generosity and diversity. Above all one contemplates the culture that spawned such a vision, an LA bereft of human contact (no sense of touch, claims the opening line) full of pointlessly angry people going "Don't patronize me", "Don't 'ma'am' me", "You're not listening to me"; when a heavenly choir is employed on the soundtrack to accompany a cop's abuse of power you know there's a weird kind of fetishisation going on, racist rage being held up for our delectation in itself, as an Issue, part of a tabloid world we claim to recognise but don't actually live in. The film's effective as Hollywood drama, slick, smartly written - there's a reason why, as of this writing, it's #51 on the Top 100 films of all time at the Internet Movie Database - but also exemplifies Hollywood's tunnel-vision and abiding self-regard, that racism is everywhere though of course not here, not in my comfortable life where people are polite and don't behave like movie characters. Haggis puts himself in a double bind: the more right he is about the existence of the problem, the more irresponsible he is in turning it into a construct.]
THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN (49) (dir., Judd Apatow) Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen [Obviously we've come a long way from the days of PORKY'S, or even from three years ago when the "Sight & Sound" reviewer poked fun at the premise of 40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS - though of course that was Britain, a society not (yet) as conservative and abstinence-minded as America's, nor as spread-out and isolating; there's an essay to be written on how easy it is to remain a virgin nowadays, with the communal societies of youth - esp. high school - so clique-ridden and the adult world so introverted and compartmentalised, people behind their cubicles at work then living self-sufficient lives at home with internet chat-groups and home-cinema systems. All of which is to say that the title character isn't mocked (the erection gags serve also to affirm his virility, ensuring he doesn't come off too pathetic) - but that's no surprise in a film that begins as sex farce and becomes much more about relationships, the gap between the genders and even (gasp!) true love - a.k.a. "putting pussy on a pedestal" - Carell's macho colleagues (tyrannised by a female boss) as confused and dysfunctional as he is. It's all very admirable, growing richer as it goes, managing to enfold both the frat-boy and metrosexual crowd in the same wry group-hug - so why am I sitting there fidgeting and squirming, going 'the pacing is so flat' and 'did we really need that scene with the black customer?' and 'okay, I get it with the chest hair already' and 'is she going to sing the entire Guatemalan love song? jesus, will someone put this scene out of its misery?', and just generally 'is this movie never going to end?'. Insanely overlong and self-indulgent, with a comic rhythm that felt slightly off throughout, what you might get if you took a sitcom and re-played it with the audience laughter removed, so the actors seem to be reacting to stuff that isn't there. I assumed "Heat of the Moment" was the climax - and actually got a little misty-eyed - but in fact there's still two more climaxes to go. 'Nuff said.]
DANNY THE DOG [US title: UNLEASHED] (45) (dir., Louis Leterrier) Jet Li, Bob Hoskins, Morgan Freeman, Kerry Condon [Consider the plight of the European action filmmaker, trying to match Hollywood for the all-important global audience but also wanting to add something more, some kind of Old World gravitas; the result is dialogue that often sounds awkward, self-consciously slangy ("I'll buy that - Not!"; "No way"/"Yes way"), as if written to imitate something someone saw in a (Hollywood) movie, but also a strange structure with bone-crunching action scenes bookending a lengthy middle section where our hero tries to escape his bad masters and takes refuge in normal life, Oliver Twist-style - slow-paced and soft, which is unusual for the genre, but also rather leaden in its twee sentimentality. Consider the plight of the jaded viewer, trying to decide if the film really is a little dull or if he, the viewer, has been brainwashed to expect a certain kind of slam-bang action rhythm. Consider the plight of Jet Li, who's always been known as a fighting machine - just like Danny the Dog - never been able to stretch himself into human emotions, and also perhaps (again like childlike Danny) never had a proper childhood to grow out of, training in martial-arts academies from the age of 8. No doubt this means a lot to him, or at least means more than doing "Cradle 2 The Grave Returns"; no doubt aptly-named Leterrier (terriers, dogs, geddit?) and writer-producer Luc Besson feel they've done their bit for Europe, an action flick with pathos and compassion. Still a bit dull, though.]
BEWITCHED (37) (dir., Nora Ephron) Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, Jason Schwartzman [But Dad, I don't want to see a dumb 60s sitcom ... No problemo in this highly bizarre movie version, wherein the show loses all reality to become a kind of artefact - it could literally be a non-existent show, made up by Ephron for the purposes of a wacky comedy about Life imitating Art on the set of a TV sitcom (significantly, though almost all the seasons of "Bewitched" were in colour, the clips shown are b&w, emphasising its remoteness from the target audience). You kind of wonder what the point is in pouncing on a brand name only to blur its contours with this kind of artificial distance, but perhaps the blurring is appropriate given how films are consumed nowadays, in a multiplex with only a vague idea of what to watch beforehand: this isn't a film of "Bewitched" - it's a film for people who meet in the lobby, look at the posters and decide to watch the 'Nicole Kidman movie with the guy from ELF' (the title, if it's recognised at all, acts only as a vague Seal of Quality). The film seems to realise its own nullity - the last half-hour collapses in a puff of smoke, and the set-up is so dopey it can only work by making Isabelle/Samantha simple-minded (Kidman channels Marilyn Monroe in kewpie-doll mode, switching to Meg Ryan after the worm turns) - but the showbiz jokes are sometimes okay (Ferrell freaking out - "Wednesday is Cake Day!" - in the meeting with the producers) and it's fun trying to figure out where Jason Schwartzman is likely to end up in the scheme of things, given how similar-yet-different he is to anybody else in the movie; he's totally showbiz but his idea of showbiz is a million miles from Ephron's yapping girlfriends with arms flapping excitedly, or even Ferrell's nice-guy pixillation (like all actors he's conceited, unlike most he feels no urge to hide it; Max Fischer may be the best part he'll ever get). Random guess: tries for stardom, settles for character actor, grows into Stanley Tucci parts as he hits his late 30s, finally becomes a household name in middle-age thanks to a TV show about a former rock star turned amateur detective.]
MONDOVINO (59) (dir., Jonathan Nossiter) [So obviously biased it's almost funny, watching frantic Nossiter furiously try to summon up every possible way - however outrageous or elaborate - to make it clear that "individuality" / local terroir good, globalisation / man-made flavour bad. Can we cut from a wise Sardinian peasant saying people nowadays are "carried away with consumerism" straight to jet-setting wine consultant Michel Rolland talking of celebrities on the phone in his expensive car? Can we shoot the Mondavi family (kings of the new global wine) so they look like gangsters, decrepit patriarch Robert Mondavi looking on in silence from the back of frame like the Don in PRIZZI'S HONOR, shrivelled but still potent? (When another big producer happens to mention GODFATHER PART II, you can almost hear the gleeful behind-the-camera cackling.) Can we zoom in on kitschy art or Ronald Reagan photos on the wall at every opportunity? Can we shoot the new breed of winemaker out-of-focus when he talks terroir, to show he doesn't really understand it? Can we focus on a publicist's pre-interview concern re: what camera angles Jon plans to use in shooting Mondavi, even though the publicist probably didn't imagine she'd be in the movie (below the belt, Mr. Nossiter!), to illustrate how it's All About Image? It's so blatant you can't even get angry, at least not very - no doubt it helps that I agree with the sentiments being expressed - and the look is very acceptable, at least on video (the skin tones gleam on that wise Sicilian peasant), albeit never as adventurous as in SIGNS AND WONDERS. Obvious Metaphor Alert (admit it, you knew it was coming), but if this were a wine its style might be to burst onto the palate in an overpowering rush of flavour - crude, but not unpleasant - going through an awkward phase as the initial burst subsides (that's when it starts spinning its wheels in digressions about selling wine to the Nazis), finally rescued by a surprisingly complex aftertaste - Nossiter's sense of the philosophical as per his previous movies, gradually coming through as his righteous indignation fades. Links are made - dogs, definitions of wine, talk of famous dictators - a wine world emerges that's all about family ties (the film is dedicated to Nossiter's parents), wary children and ornery patriarchs, and even globalisation finally shows another face, taking wine to new frontiers, new ways of thinking - winemakers in Brazil full of hope, just starting out, incidentally disproving the old French farmer's solemn declaration that "wine is dead". In the end, you see, wine is All About People, like the widow who planted vines after her husband's death and tends them as an outlet for her love; often boring but never not fascinating, if that makes any sense.]
HERBIE: FULLY LOADED (39) (dir., Angela Robinson) Lindsay Lohan, Michael Keaton, Justin Long, Matt Dillon, Breckin Meyer [Fully loaded, all right - loaded with fatuous new features incl. a love interest, Herbie-cam POV shots and a radio that turns itself on to play Van Halen when things get emotional (the soundtrack is eclectic, to put it mildly). Seems to be some uncertainty on what modern kids will go for, hence the half-baked suggestion that Herbie and his mistress are "connected" (or maybe it's just not PC to have a girl sitting passively behind the steering-wheel while a male does all the work); has a certain charm in the middle section when they realise he's just a mechanical version of anthropomorphic Disney animals of the 60s, whimpering when hurt and shaking himself like a dog - but it's also needlessly complicated with the usual family-movie spinach, Dream to be Followed and Over-Protective Dad who disapproves but finally discovers he has to let go (don't they know kids hate that stuff?). Pity Michael Keaton for sinking so low - and pity Lindsay Lohan, not just stuck with lines like "For a car, you're not a very good listener" but already looking like a harried 30-something soccer mom: her smile is wary, her expression tired, and she has little crow's-feet under her eyes.]
EDISON (21) (dir., David J. Burke) Justin Timberlake, Morgan Freeman, LL Cool J, Dylan McDermott, Kevin Spacey, Piper Perabo, John Heard [Justin Timberlake: Worst! Actor! Ever! GASP as the baby-faced pup plays an idealistic reporter in this 'gritty' urban drama (where gritty = everyone says "Fuck" a lot) with squeaky Jimmy Olsen voice and pouty expression, like a teen who's just been grounded (if he had a thought-bubble it might read, "This is so not fair!"). WONDER why he bobs up and down all the time, the climax being a massive gun-battle interspersed with shots of Justin bobbing up and down going "Fuck! ... Fuck!". GIGGLE as he comes face to face with a hitman: "Fuck! W-what do you want?"; "Time to punch your ticket, paper-boy!". He breaks the story - on police corruption - so girlfriend Piper Perabo won't think he's a loser (she reads his first draft, and is so moved she nuzzles his neck lovingly), having first got the facts from a jailbird framed by the cops who spills the whole sordid tale in exchange for talking into Justin's tape recorder, so his sick Moms can hear his voice. The story's uncorroborated, the source gets killed and it only involves bad-apple cop Dylan McDermott anyway, but is somehow enough, in a totally corrupt city - "You just showed me the bones of a corporate fascist state!" - to get everyone's panties in a twist, the FBI promising action and Justin on the run. Then Morgan Freeman dances. Then police chief John Heard shoots McDermott and gives a little shrug as if to say 'It had to be done', or perhaps 'I do this all the time'. Then director Burke does time-lapse and split-screen, and flashbacks with a camera-flash effect (Flash! Flash!). Then Cary Elwes (of SAW fame) goes off on a big hysterical tirade, culminating in "And there's a dead BODY outSIDE my FUCKing OFFICE!". Good (i.e. So-Bad-It's-Good) To the Last Drop Dept.: almost the last thing we see is an egregious typo - news that one character has become a "White House Special Council" - in a fake front-page headline.]
LAND OF THE DEAD (72) (dir., George Romero) Simon Baker, John Leguizamo, Asia Argento, Dennis Hopper, Robert Joy [Hero longs for "a place with no fences", then later "a place with no people"; the two are interchangeable in Romero's uniquely misanthropic vision, where people are so naturally petty and oppressive they'll build a class-based society even in the last tiny bastion of a world overrun with zombies. Dennis Hopper as the George W. Bush figure - he literally meets his demise at the confluence of oil, guns and money! - is a masterstroke (casting Dennis Hopper is part of the masterstroke), while the zombies are of course the underclass, the disenfranchised, easily distracted with fireworks (i.e. tabloids and trash-TV), wandering around the no-go areas while the rich eat and shop in their walled-off enclaves. They gradually develop a consciousness because they're also Death, the inevitable Marxist death of the ruling class but also encroaching Death itself - it's important that Romero's zombies (unlike Zack Snyder's) shuffle and stagger, that humans are stronger and livelier and fight back (it seems) successfully yet still can't escape; the Dead are a spiritual as well as a political reproach, slow yet inevitable Death inching closer, 'turning' people when they let down their guard for a moment. It really needed hordes of CGI zombies for the point to be made - there aren't enough to really make an impression - but I guess the budget wouldn't stretch that far, or maybe Romero himself consciously preferred the low-tech, emblematic approach, using archetypes in the Hawks manner. It's a very Hawksian film, from the team looking out for each other and trying to be "useful", to the mutual respect in a purely professional relationship (between Cholo and Riley, two people who otherwise hate each other), to the conflict between self-interest and community, to the care lavished on minor characters ('Mouse', defined by a pet rat and a skateboard reading "Anti-Hero"), to the whole egalitarian philosophy underlying it all - epiphany comes in the realisation that the zombies are "the same as us", both in the political sense and because we're all dead in a sense ("pretending to be alive", like the man says), we just don't know it - to some gloriously terse hard-boiled dialogue. "You told me nothing bad ever happened to you!" remonstrates our heroine when hero tells the chilling tale of how he had to kill his own brother after he turned zombie; "That happened to my brother," he replies - and that may be the greatest hard-boiled line of the 00s. Sly, trenchant and very witty though the meld of action flick and splatter movie gets a bit monotonous, seeming to run out of new ideas after the zombies cross the river. How come Simon Baker seemed so generic in the likes of RING 2, and comes through so strongly here?]
MY SUMMER OF LOVE (61) (second viewing: 62) (dir., Pawel Pawlikowski) Nathalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine [As in LAST RESORT, Pawlikowski is a trite, unsurprising filmmaker somehow ending up in an interesting place - though only in the last half-hour, when it becomes clear the Considine character's born-again religious fervour isn't being offered in opposition to the girls' passion but in fact as a correlative (which is itself pretty daring, given the usual chasm between religion and homosexuality). Everyone's trying for something real - it's "the real me", claims Considine - and everything turns out to be fake and hypocritical, "just playing a part". Grand passion turns out to be impossible, just a chimera - "God is dead," says Blunt (via Nietzche); this is all there is - which is why the final act of violence is also the purest act of love in the whole movie, refusing to accept the damped-down betrayal of Emotion. Before that, I wasn't too impressed to be honest; Press has an amazing air of sidelong sensuality, as if listening to a joke she's heard before and smiling as she waits for the punchline - she looks like she's made of wax and straw, but her gaze has a greedy catlike covetousness - but Blunt is a less compelling presence (to be fair, they've been cast to be complementary, HEAVENLY CREATURES-style), leading with hooded condescension and a transparent air of 'breeding', while Pawlikowski's choices are mostly banal. Too many shots of the first prayer meeting so it starts to look silly, birdsong and glinting spider-webs for rural 'lyricism', too-obvious CU of a horse's flaring nostrils (ooh, passion) when the two first meet, love blossoming as they dance in the living-room (to Edith Piaf), ride on a motorbike, splash in a brook, Blunt playing the cello as Press looks on in awe ("That was 'The Swan' by Saint Saens"; "I live above 'The Swan'! You know, the pub"), shot of dancing in a nightclub straight to shot of crying on each other's shoulders - it's the often-abrupt editing style of Desplechin and Assayas but without their devil-may-care quality, so it looks like affectation. Pleasing-but-bland tale of different-yet-similar girls - one's 'lost' a sister, the other's 'lost' a brother - becoming one; the ending lifts it into 60+ territory, but I'm still rolling my eyes a little in anticipation of Mr. Pawlikowski's next movie.] [May 2007: No surprise that it works better on second viewing, knowing how the narrative is booby-trapped; most of the film makes it seem like the two girls are alike, but the twins are actually Press and her brother (both on the quest for something more, etc). Knowing the truth allowed me to ignore its apparent mockery of born-again Considine, and appreciate both the funny moments - surprisingly plentiful - and Pawlikowski's contrived but impressive framings (e.g. the two-shot where Blunt's cigarette pointedly obscures Press' face). Turns out you can take the soulful Polish-Catholic out of Poland, but you'll never turn him into a cool secular Englishman...]
THE MACHINIST (56) (dir., Brad Anderson) Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside [Twenty bucks says Anderson and his DP talked of 'metallic colours' while prepping for this atmospheric mind-trip: underexposed, skin-tones bleached, colours have no sheen. An early shot - black clouds in the sky looming over flat, slate-grey ground - has a touch of the apocalyptic, just as the early shot of Bale lugging something on his shoulders, straining under the weight - shot from below, with haunted eyes in skeletal face - has a touch of Calvary and Jesus tottering under the weight of the Cross; shades of DONNIE DARKO, another troubled Christ-figure with an invisible friend, though in this case it's guilt that's the motivating factor, not a quest for martyrdom (there's also a glimpse of "The Idiot" - rather unlikely reading-matter for a nutso machinist - Prince Myshkin a man tormented by his own inadequacies). Powerfully done, but of course we know without being told that much of it is taking place inside its hero's head, just as it's stale to hear locker-room talk about chicks with dicks and it's stale to find a sympathetic hooker with a bruised heart of gold (it's even more stale that she's played by Jennifer Jason Leigh). Bale's skin-and-bones look is distracting, a knot of spine bulging when he bends over and his stringy muscles as he lies in bed, though he does get a Moment when he jiggles like a dancing skeleton to gross out his girlfriend; as an actor he thrives on eccentricity, which can be original - unexpected line readings, etc - or just seem like preening. Not sure I got all the stuff about the Significance of mothers (incl. the hero's own mother), but it's not the end of the world in this kind of head movie. Best bit of style: the villain's car reflected in the passenger window of Bale's car as he's about to get in, camera looking down on the reflection so the car drives off and it looks like a snake uncoiling in the passenger seat, waiting for our hero to approach...]
HAUTE TENSION (63) (dir., Alexandre Aja) Cecile de France, Maiwenn, Philippe Nahon [Note to horror-movie characters: should you come across a mirror on a bathroom closet, open the closet if you want but know that you will see someone reflected in the mirror, standing in the room just behind you, when you shut the closet three seconds later - though they actually pull the mirror gag twice, once to parade the cliché and once to subvert it, just as Aja quotes TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE at the end (when his heroine manages to flag down a car) only to go it one better. It's typical of this dumb-smart thriller, which starts off showing some familiar cards - will the heroine be punished for being slutty and looking down on the bumpkins? here comes the killer, car headlights inching down the road, as she lies in bed masturbating! - only to grab the deck and throw it in your face in a burst of gleeful ultra-violence; brutally simplistic (ratcheting the tension, turning the pursuer into Pure Evil) in a way that revels in being simplistic, and thus becomes quite knowing - sailing past the usual horror-movie justifications and hypocrisies, bringing the genre face-to-face with its own because-it's-coolness (why the heads ripped off, geysers of blood, masturbating heroine? because it's cool). The final twist is more of the same - and not exactly recommendable, but it seems to be the twist du jour (I can think of a half-dozen other recent films with the same last-act descent into solipsism) so maybe the sociologists can make sense of it. At the very least, an exercise in style - and anyone who knows Muse's "Newborn" must've waited years for a movie to use it just like that.]
A TALE OF TWO SISTERS (55) (dir., Kim Ji-woon) Lim Su-jeong, Yum Jung-ah, Kim Kap-su [Wish I could say more on this, but there's not much to say (unless you want to focus on deciphering the plot, in which case start here). At some point these rug-pulling, layers-of-Reality things get too much - at best a souped-up version of the now-discredited 'it was all a dream' cliché but more than that, a negation of the visible world as irrational and counter-productive as UFOs and conspiracy theories. This is a superior J-horror with many of the genre's familiar totems - a girl with straight black hair obscuring her face; a water motif including hands in a bowl (the opening shot) and legs dangling in a lake - but so big on mystification it's easy to spend all one's energy trying to separate the real from the imagined, instead of noting the jagged cuts and striking use of colour (I won't spoil the twist, but think IDENTITY with a dash of THE OTHERS). On the other hand: the dinner-party scene, an out-of-nowhere blast of unmotivated hysteria - and all the better for not knowing what the hell is going on.]
DEAR FRANKIE (43) (dir., Shona Auerbach) Emily Mortimer, Jack McElhone, Gerard Butler [Exactly what it says on the label - Mom hires stranger to pose as deaf kid's absent Da; and of course they bond - done with restraint if not much imagination. Piano score helps, the kid is winsome (one scene, in the library, seems designed for the sole purpose of showing what a cute little rascal he is), the semi-rural Scottish setting picturesque (one scene, looking out over the town, seems designed for the sole purpose of showing how lovely the view is), the palette is discreet - lots of dun-brown and beige - there's a gruff chain-smoking grandma and barely a raised voice from beginning to end. Making the man a fantasy-figure was the best idea, and the ending (mother and child moving on, with the balm of a beautiful memory) is almost a heartbreaker - but the wise-child, knew-it-all-along coda is a terrible cop-out.]
THE ISLAND (44) (dir., Michael Bay) Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou ["We've based our whole system on predictability" - and I'm surprised no-one's jumped on the clone factory as Hollywood-on-Hollywood metaphor, maintaining "consciousness" but deliberately holding down maturity to the level of a (rather slow) 15-year-old ("We find it simpler to eliminate the sex drive," explains the head-man blandly). The film itself is rather misbegotten, as you might expect when they give away the main twist in the frickin' trailer; the dystopian detail and Big Brother-isms are the best of it but get demoted to extended-prologue status, while as soon as the clones escape the thing devolves into Bay's muscular flash - camera doing mad 360-pans round the desert landscape - and action scenes played as abstract patterns of flame and shards of glass. Never goes far enough in giving the clones personality, even comic personality - they seem bland (and competent) enough, then a gag or bit of business comes up to remind us they're less than human - the comic relief is tired, elaborate third act is tiring (as in BAD BOYS 2, the action climax starts just when the film seems to be over), and Djimon Hounsou's moral volte-face may be the most unconvincing in living memory. Guess it's all a question of knowing one's place (and maybe Bay will head back to slam-bang genre pieces after this debacle): a car chase down the highway where a truck sheds its cargo of heavy metal axles, the barbell-like monsters hurtling through the air at pursuing cars, spawning fireballs and smashing into windshields, is fairly irresistible; concentration-camp imagery at the factory - imprinted serial numbers, unsuspecting clones herded into a death chamber - not so much.]