Films Seen - September 2007

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

EDUART (50) (dir., Angeliki Antoniou) Eshref Durmishi, André Hennicke, Ndricim Xhepa Mild (but genuine) kudos for daring to make its hero selfish and weak, when he could've been just a Victim (Dad is apparently the problem; "You never believed in him!"). Alas, once it's established that he needs to grow a conscience - "Learn how to live", like it says in the Book - it's one didactic scene after another, culminating in a payoff so cheesy it fully earns its final freeze-frame. A handful of glorious images - Albanian mountain village caught on the verge of morning sunlight - and a fair bit of prison-movie action, if that's your bag.

STARTER FOR 10 (56) (dir., Tom Vaughan) James McAvoy, Rebecca Hall, Alice Eve, Dominic Cooper McAvoy does geeky very well - surprisingly well, given his arrogant young pup in LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (looks like he really is the new Ewan McGregor); a moment when he tries to do a dance-move on entering a party then thinks better of it halfway through, so he ends up looking like a dork, deserves to be anthologized. Slick and very pleasant, except the source novel seems to have tried for more (thus e.g. a half-baked upward-mobility-in-the-age-of-Thatcher angle, which might've justified the period setting), and it also (a) relies overmuch on our hero's tendency to blurt things out, to an extent that isn't really convincing - it's thematically apposite, since he's a quiz-show geek who always has the right answers yet constantly says the wrong thing in real life, but that connection isn't really made - and (b) relies overmuch on one of those generic 80s soundtracks, culled from all over the decade, which is kind of infuriating for those of us who lived through those years and know what 1985 (when the film is set) sounds like. I'm glad someone featured the title-song from Tears for Fears' "The Hurting" - which I don't think I've heard since I was 14 years old - in a movie, though. 

SERAPHIM FALLS (61) (dir., David Von Ancken) Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, Michael Wincott, Anjelica Huston My life with SERAPHIM FALLS: thought I'd watch a little bit on video, just to get an idea (had to write a short capsule for the paper), but was so bowled over by the opening half-hour - an intensely physical, almost dialogue-free Western with Brosnan a howling force of Nature - I knew I'd have to watch the whole thing, even while suspecting it wouldn't be able to sustain that level of intensity. It doesn't, though the problem doesn't turn out to be the plot, the guilty secret, What Really Happened at Seraphim Falls - which is harrowing and even a little surprising when finally revealed - but a final section that unwisely tries for surreal parable, flirting with the ludicrous and apparently pushing the (feeble) Message that war destroys everyone, no matter who's right or wrong. Gets self-conscious in its grittiness ("Ain't no God out here!"), but it does evoke the whole Peckinpah vibe (also THE SHOOTING) - and the first half-hour is magnificent cinema.

HANNIBAL RISING (27) (dir., Peter Webber) Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Rhys Ifans, Dominic West Part of the problem is that young Hannibal isn't much like his multi-sided older self, the psycho as bon viveur and intellectual; lip-service is paid to his genius (he's the youngest student in medical school, etc) but he's not witty or bitchy or eloquent, not even especially articulate, and even though he's college-age he never evinces any interest in books or ideas; he's just a psycho, and since he's a psycho even during his first kill (the butcher who insults his aunt) we don't even get the tension of a slow descent into madness. Another part of the problem is that, despite all the various attempts to make him sympathetic - he's tormented by nightmares; he's the product of larger 20th-century monsters (Nazism, Stalinism, the horrors of WW2); his victims are evil men and/or war criminals - the film's only possible point is to wallow in his sadism as he teases victims, then kills them bloodily. Possible silliest line (though there's competition), Hannibal looking at an Old Testament fresco: "Do you suppose God intended to eat Isaac?". 

I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY (48) (dir., Dennis Dugan) Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Jessica Biel, Dan Aykroyd Sandler's always stood up for misfits and the marginal, the put-upon and disenfranchised, making his latent homophobia (veering close to homoeroticism) all the more inappropriate - MR. DEEDS was all about sticking it to the Establishment, yet Deeds' rival was a pointedly effeminate type gratuitously glimpsed soaping his ass in the shower (I guess it all comes from the same place, a working-class mindset that rails against toffs and intellectuals but also has reflexive contempt for queers; the values are certainly old-school, and the Sandler who told a mugger to "get a job" in DEEDS is clearly the same one who punishes a stoner in this one for starting a fire with his joint). No surprise, in other words, that he made this film, though it's obviously seen as a risk. Quirky minor characters all over the place, from the game-show-watching maid with stinky feet to Rob Schneider's Japanese minister - gay stereotypes are questioned, Oriental stereotypes not so much - and the gay postman with his postal double entendres (he'll "handle with care" and he's "happy to come in through the back door"), all designed to distract the Sandler audience from the fact that they're watching a faggot movie - at least till the final third when it turns into propaganda, if the word can be used for a message so moderate and un-incendiary. Briefly, being gay is something one is born with (your own child might be gay!), the most unlikely people turn out to be gay and it's all a state of mind anyway (a male butt can even be mistaken for a female one), so let's not "dictate" what people can do - and our heroes are conspicuously straight, in any case. Funny in spots, which is more than I ever hoped for.   

LICENSE TO WED (37) (dir., Ken Kwapis) Robin Williams, Mandy Moore, John Krasinski What you might get if one of those grumpy Christians who fulminate against godlessness, irresponsibility and the sky-high divorce rate decided to make a fluffy romantic comedy. An immensely strange film, positing Williams as virtuous and likeable - a wacky priest, a Patch Adams of God - even when he's snooping and prying (in fact he's a bully, publicly humiliating the couple for being late to church), and not just demythologizing romantic love but going out of its way to paint the process of mating in the bleakest possible colours. Bickering and nagging are the natural state of married life (a hen-pecked best friend and disillusioned divorcee sister add their comments from the sidelines), childbirth is scary, babies are monsters, and the couple aren't even allowed the release of sex while going through their marriage-preparation course; the message is presumably that youngsters should be 'ready' before they embark on the Great Adventure That Is Marriage, but it comes off more like hairshirt masochism - and wrong, to boot, since it's saying you're only ready for marriage when you've confronted each other's flaws and opened up about the things you hate, whereas many (or most) durable marriages are built on discretion and silent acceptance (and yes, it's denial, but Love itself is denial, consciously imposing the Ideal on a person you know must be riddled with flaws). The whole film is stuck in a no-man's-land between PG family fun ("You didn't seriously think I was going to let you see that?" winks Williams as the bedroom door closes on the couple) and cynical pessimism, with a side-order of religious fear; Father Frank is like God, constantly watching and judging. In itself, pretty worthless, going through the usual rom-com rigmarole - couple in love, rent apart by patently stupid behaviour which could easily have been avoided, brought back for no good reason except they miss each other and decide to ignore everything that happened in the previous 80 minutes - but also fascinating. One of those films they'll be watching decades hence in Cultural Studies, trying to make sense of mid-00s America.     

Toronto International Film Festival, September 6-15 (48 films)

THE NANNY DIARIES (34) (dir., Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini) Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Nicholas Reese Art, Alicia Keys Family values I can handle, even when they come in such an onslaught, but the pretence (even jokey pretence) to anthropological study of Upper East Side types when everyone is so one-dimensional and thinly-detailed is kind of infuriating. The Rich Are Different, it turns out, observed in their natural habitat so the film can wallow in their swanky apartments and fancy restaurants while also chiding them for their horrendous sense of child-care; snobbery and self-righteousness in one handy package, allowing the audience to gawp like plebs while also feeling superior. Scarlett takes to nannying like a duck to water - it takes her about 2 minutes to win the kid over with a jar of peanut butter, beating Mary Poppins' record of 13 minutes plus a musical number - but seems to have developed a touch of the dreaded Juliette Lewis Disease, where the lips move but the face remains immobile. Sharp feminist subtext about gender stereotypes - heroine nannying for the rich when she could/should be one of them, as per her mom's dream of making her a corporate CFO - turns into limp Be Yourself subtext (heroine going off to study Anthropology, cf. her mom's dream of making her a corporate CFO), which seems about right.  

ONCE (44) (dir., John Carney) Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, Bill Hodnett Hero sings a bit too loudly and raucously on the bus, and immediately apologises to the nice old lady sitting in front of him - and she looks back and smiles, as if to say 'young people today, aren't they adorable'. Deprived-looking street-folk hang out on the heroine's stoop, looking rather grim - but she greets them as she passes, and it turns out they're polite and delightful. A cynical producer stands in the way of the band's music-making, undermining their enthusiasm with his jaded air, and it looks like he'll have to be confronted - but instead he's converted, loves the songs and turns out to be a valuable friend. Determinedly feelgood (a product, you might say, of a contented Ireland riding high on EU cash and a Tiger-ish economy), the kind of film where music brings the whole world together - even the small-loans manager at the bank turns out to be a closet musician - which might be fine except that (a) the music in this case is poor (imho), singer-songwriter dirges without much excitement (which is awkward, since much of the plotting hinges on the music being awesome), and (b) it's slightly insulting, when so many films make demands on the viewer and fall by the wayside, for arthouse slots to be taken by a film that demands so little. Also (c) it subscribes to the Fallacy of the Eastern European Heroine, wherein she's never judged as harshly as the hero (it's okay for her to be pushy, not okay for him) because she's an immigrant and lives in a conspicuously 'ethnic' household with a mother who knits and makes pronouncements in Czech. The final shot is lovely but the bittersweet ending makes no sense psychologically, the heroine's decision only explainable in terms of her Otherness; there's a great film to be made which might've worked psychologically by glimpsing the dark side of the creative process - a film where the heroine would've realised that whatever makes the hero a good musician also makes him an unstable mate and bad potential husband, hence her decision to call her long-lost hubby because of the joyous musical weekend they've just shared. Needless to say, this isn't it.