Scott Coffey's Life of A Lower-Rung Hollywood Nitwit, Ellie Parker, is interesting only as a showcase for the shape-shifter charms of Naomi Watts, a performing chameleon with an endless repertoire of faces (sultry, girlish, devious, ravishing, vacant). The film might actually be more worthwhile, and would certainly be more bearable, with the sound off, sparing us the interminable feather-headed nattering of its deliberately shallow, narcissistic characters, and allowing us to concentrate more fully on the thespic acrobatics of Watts, who, through the character of struggling, stubborn, wayward Ellie Parker, is afforded a chance to show off her near-freakish ability at sudden metamorphosis, going from harried phone-talking California twit to foul-mouthed gum-chomping Jersey girl and back, working the shift, the brakes like a race-car driver navigating the twists and turns of Watkins Glen. It's a show-off performance but Watts is not a show-off, she occupies the character of Ellie Parker fully, never tipping her hand. Her commitment to the role is commendable, her willingness to place herself in absurd situations, to unmask herself a little (some of Ellie's struggles are no doubt culled from Watts' own biography), but it's all in service of material that's not worthy of her, that cheapens her accomplishment, diminishes her. It's a thin gruel of a movie, lacking in insight, full of scenes that don't go anywhere, shot like a film student making an audition reel.
Reviews
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Code 46
(2003)
Winterbottom Goes To Alphaville, Plot Lost With Luggage
19 April 2006
Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 seeks to conjure the ghosts of Godard's Alphaville, the sophisticated approach to grunginess, provocative sci-fi texture accomplished with a minimum of technical trickery, a haggard protagonist discovering love amidst the dehumanization. Godard, however, was an artist, a dazzling manipulator of form and a pop-imagist to rival Warhol, where Winterbottom is merely a poseur. What Code 46 achieves is not a vision but a day-dream, the spooky, drifting quality of a Nyquil reverie. The director's off-hand approach is meant to call forth a sense of mysterious undertones, ideas moving beneath the action, a certain spiritual hum, but what he accomplishes instead is an insufferable meaninglessness, the sense of throw-away characters occupying a disposable story, Tim Robbins trying to seem enigmatic but only looking wrung-out, Samantha Morton voice-overs offering philosophical nuggets that don't have to melt in your mouth because they've already gone to goo.
The plot might've made for a decent sci-fi potboiler, telepathic insurance investigator travels to multi-cultural Shanghai to uncover fraud involving temporary passports, falls for girl involved in crime, tries to flee but is drawn back, becomes embroiled in genetic weirdness, crazy future laws, the sense of a world where ethnic identity is disappearing, except that Winterbottom the artiste thinks himself above his own material, cannot condescend to treat any of it with a real storyteller's touch (or simply doesn't know how to). It's all dimly interesting but never really engaging, not intellectually and certainly not on the pop-level most movies like this succeed at (even Alphaville, for all its scruffy/elegant ambiguity, has pop-cred). Winterbottom is going for something quite beyond his talents, a mix of the tangible and the elusive, the very thing Godard achieved in Alphaville, lofty ideas sprung from pulpish places, a dogged romanticism existing within a vaguely nightmarish vision of humanity's future. Winterbottom is simply not enough in the spirit of what he's trying to do, doesn't love images enough to carry off such a conception. He comes across like a music video director who's gotten in over his head.
The plot might've made for a decent sci-fi potboiler, telepathic insurance investigator travels to multi-cultural Shanghai to uncover fraud involving temporary passports, falls for girl involved in crime, tries to flee but is drawn back, becomes embroiled in genetic weirdness, crazy future laws, the sense of a world where ethnic identity is disappearing, except that Winterbottom the artiste thinks himself above his own material, cannot condescend to treat any of it with a real storyteller's touch (or simply doesn't know how to). It's all dimly interesting but never really engaging, not intellectually and certainly not on the pop-level most movies like this succeed at (even Alphaville, for all its scruffy/elegant ambiguity, has pop-cred). Winterbottom is going for something quite beyond his talents, a mix of the tangible and the elusive, the very thing Godard achieved in Alphaville, lofty ideas sprung from pulpish places, a dogged romanticism existing within a vaguely nightmarish vision of humanity's future. Winterbottom is simply not enough in the spirit of what he's trying to do, doesn't love images enough to carry off such a conception. He comes across like a music video director who's gotten in over his head.
Transamerica
(2005)
Don't Gag, But Here Comes Another Heart-Felt Indie Road Trip
20 March 2006
The pre-operative transsexual hero/heroine of Duncan Tucker's Transamerica is something of a novelty in the annals of moviedom, a gender-conflicted, misfit character who isn't flamboyant or exhibitionistic, who has no desire to join some wacky underground scene, is not in the least bit a freak (a freak being a person who deliberately plays up their oddness, seeking to shock or offend). Bree, the soon-to-be-female telemarketer, is not an Andy Warhol sort of jabbering, dissipated fruitcake, a garish John Waters monstrosity, an Almodovarian flake done up in feathers and face paint; she's a nobody from a nowhere town whose desire for gender reassignment is not some quasi-suicidal impulse, some urge for self-nullification, some act of defiance in the face of a world that refuses to recognize her. Bree's motives seem clear enough - she hates being a man, would rather be a woman. This is the sort of "non-mainstream" character a person can really get behind, one whose intention is not to flaunt their otherness, make a show of their peculiarity, but simply to live and be happy.
The performance of Felicity Huffman as Bree is something of a tight-rope act; we watch it with the same fascination as a circus attendee craning their neck at the wack-job on the wire trying to balance a chair on their nose. We want to see her pull it off, but are morbidly attracted to the hope that she will fall and break her neck - either way we get our money's worth. Huffman gets through the movie with her vertebrae intact. She manages the trick of playing a role that's heavy on technique, outward mannerism, unique body language, without turning into a walking robot, a hollow Streepian acting clinic. Bree is a man who wants to be a woman who sometimes forgets she's trying to be a woman and reverts to being a man; Huffman plays her with a particular consciousness of movement, the sense of someone who's still learning how to control their body, still has to check the manual to know which button to push. She walks like she's trying to hold an egg between her legs, swings one arm in a bizarre parody of lady-like poise (she's always trying to keep her poise, avoid being exposed as a fraud), but in moments of stress she sits with her knees apart. Bree is a work-in-progress; her entire life has been an act of self-invention. She went to college not for a degree but to acquire intellectual refinement (she studied geology, had no intention of using it), views gender-reassignment as the final act of becoming. It's a protracted adolescence; the movie is not about self-discovery as much as maturation, the passage from childhood awkwardness into adult confidence. Bree acquires a stronger sense of herself by interacting with her long-lost son, Toby (Kevin Zegers), whom she rescues from jail, takes on the road with her, hides the truth from, squabbles with, admonishes to eat his vegetables and not do drugs (she has the nagging part down at least).
Huffman's performance is not a suck-the-air-out-of-the-scene performance; it's a delicate one, a balancing act of concealment and revelation. This is good news because the movie is too wispy and fragile to support anything stronger. The scenes are never anything special except for the way Huffman plays them, the extra zip the other, more naturalistic performers attain by being there with her. It's a pale sort of movie, a little wan, but energized by Huffman's focus, her proficiency, and not overwhelmed by her talent. Part of the balancing act is being able to play this strange, disjointed character, all mannerism and nose-bleed self-control, and still occupy the same space as the other characters believably. It's a well-directed movie in that Duncan Tucker has successfully blended different levels of performance into something more-or-less seamless, but Tucker is no budding cinema master. His movie is in danger of falling into the void of touchy-feeliness at any moment, becoming another earnest indie road-movie with nothing much to say. The best thing Tucker did was hire Huffman to play his character, help her correctly modulate her performance. Beyond this accomplishment, there isn't much to be said about Transamerica.
The performance of Felicity Huffman as Bree is something of a tight-rope act; we watch it with the same fascination as a circus attendee craning their neck at the wack-job on the wire trying to balance a chair on their nose. We want to see her pull it off, but are morbidly attracted to the hope that she will fall and break her neck - either way we get our money's worth. Huffman gets through the movie with her vertebrae intact. She manages the trick of playing a role that's heavy on technique, outward mannerism, unique body language, without turning into a walking robot, a hollow Streepian acting clinic. Bree is a man who wants to be a woman who sometimes forgets she's trying to be a woman and reverts to being a man; Huffman plays her with a particular consciousness of movement, the sense of someone who's still learning how to control their body, still has to check the manual to know which button to push. She walks like she's trying to hold an egg between her legs, swings one arm in a bizarre parody of lady-like poise (she's always trying to keep her poise, avoid being exposed as a fraud), but in moments of stress she sits with her knees apart. Bree is a work-in-progress; her entire life has been an act of self-invention. She went to college not for a degree but to acquire intellectual refinement (she studied geology, had no intention of using it), views gender-reassignment as the final act of becoming. It's a protracted adolescence; the movie is not about self-discovery as much as maturation, the passage from childhood awkwardness into adult confidence. Bree acquires a stronger sense of herself by interacting with her long-lost son, Toby (Kevin Zegers), whom she rescues from jail, takes on the road with her, hides the truth from, squabbles with, admonishes to eat his vegetables and not do drugs (she has the nagging part down at least).
Huffman's performance is not a suck-the-air-out-of-the-scene performance; it's a delicate one, a balancing act of concealment and revelation. This is good news because the movie is too wispy and fragile to support anything stronger. The scenes are never anything special except for the way Huffman plays them, the extra zip the other, more naturalistic performers attain by being there with her. It's a pale sort of movie, a little wan, but energized by Huffman's focus, her proficiency, and not overwhelmed by her talent. Part of the balancing act is being able to play this strange, disjointed character, all mannerism and nose-bleed self-control, and still occupy the same space as the other characters believably. It's a well-directed movie in that Duncan Tucker has successfully blended different levels of performance into something more-or-less seamless, but Tucker is no budding cinema master. His movie is in danger of falling into the void of touchy-feeliness at any moment, becoming another earnest indie road-movie with nothing much to say. The best thing Tucker did was hire Huffman to play his character, help her correctly modulate her performance. Beyond this accomplishment, there isn't much to be said about Transamerica.
Three... Extremes
(2004)
Cannibalism, Abortion, Mutilation, Incest - Bring the Kiddies!
6 March 2006
Three...Extremes is an Asian shock-cinema sampler that might leave the uninitiated wondering what all the fuss is about. This compendium of short works by an all-star team of Oriental directors - Hong Kong's Fruit Chan, Korea's Chanwook Park (or Park Chanwook if you prefer), Japan's Takashi Miike - gives barely a taste of what these filmmakers have to offer, a nibble of the frenzied energies, the sadism, the existential nuttiness that makes extreme Asian film so perversely amusing to those who are into that sort of thing.
The first short, Dumplings, is by the least well-known of the directors, Fruit Chan, but is probably the most successful in pure storytelling terms. It's about a fading TV star who, in search of a youth-potion, something to make her alluring again to her Anderson Cooper-looking husband, becomes a customer of the pretty but devilish Aunt Mei (played with a measure of restraint by exhibitionist wacko Bai Ling), who offers magic dumplings (they look like fleshy objects made from vagina-molds) stuffed with chopped-up aborted fetuses as a cure for being over-the-hill. This idea, the witch who serves children in her dumplings, has a dark fairy tale quality, which Fruit Chan has the good sense to not play up in literalistic fashion; he attacks his unnerving, repugnant story the only way it can be attacked, head-on, playing chicken with good taste, the audience's gag-reflex, etc., The story's real subject is narcissism, the vanity of the TV star with her feminine-but-business-like outfits, her red designer hand-bag, how she's willing to do anything to stay young, what this says about the mania for youth and sustained sexual drive in today's culture. The real "magic" of the fetus-dumplings is that, in eating them, one goes so far past any recognizable limit that it then becomes a breeze to be assertive in bed, no longer sweat small stuff like not being as attractive as you used to. There's a Cronenbergian dimension to this fable, the horror of the body in a state of violation, the fetus as a kind of parasite. It's determinedly repulsive.
The second episode, Chanwook Park's Cut, begins with one of the crazier images around: a man stands motionless in the middle of a big, sparsely decorated apartment, his neck being nibbled by a pale, garishly attired vampiress; the camera circles the two figures until we realize the man is, literally, frozen solid, a human popsicle. This audacious opening is probably the best thing in all of Three...Extremes; the story it leads into, the travails of a movie director who's kidnapped by a psychotic extra and forced to watch as his wife has her fingers lopped off one-by-one, alas does not live up to it. Dumplings may be a fairy tale, but Cut is more of a sick joke, a little in the tradition of Park's Oldboy (the director must spend half his life dreaming up outlandishly elaborate revenge scenarios) but not as staggering in its elegant disjointedness. Given Park's talent for manipulating space and time, it's a tad disappointing that he chooses to restrict himself mainly to this Chamber Drama set-up, one room and a few actors, the opportunity to compose a few bizarre tableaux along the way (a guy restrained by a super-sized rubber-band, a girl at a piano with her fingers held in place by wires like the victim of a giant arachnid). Park goes after his favorite theme of ensnarement, how people are driven to act by forces beyond their control; the room becomes a microcosm of Park's world, one where people become each other's puppet-masters, fueled by class anger, envy, the thirst for retribution. After the feast of Oldboy, Cut feels like lukewarm left-overs.
And speaking of leftovers, that's about all that remains by the time we get to the third segment, Takashi Miike's Box, some tripe about an ex-circus performer (the delicately beautiful Kyoko Hasegawa) beset by ghosts from her past, some horrible guilt about murdering her sister, circus imagery made slightly more interesting by its Japanese flavor but still feeling like Jodorowski on sedatives thanks to Miike's deliberate pacing, his utter indifference to story, sense, audience patience. The guy who gave us the chick drowning in a kiddie pool filled with her own excrement, the chick who fell in love with a guy's penis so much she kept it with her after he was dead, and the dude who slashed his own cheeks so he could open his mouth wider and swallow people's heads whole might've been expected to provide the piece de resistance, but offers instead the dud finale. Maybe it's the old story of the showy actor who underplays to get attention; Miike has such a reputation for outrageousness that he figured the only cool thing would be to play against type, not splash blood all over the place, show people torturing each other in outlandish ways, have main characters sprout weapons in place of their appendages in lieu of a proper ending. Three...Extremes, as one might have predicted, is uneven, only spottily satisfying as a shock-cinema experience.
The first short, Dumplings, is by the least well-known of the directors, Fruit Chan, but is probably the most successful in pure storytelling terms. It's about a fading TV star who, in search of a youth-potion, something to make her alluring again to her Anderson Cooper-looking husband, becomes a customer of the pretty but devilish Aunt Mei (played with a measure of restraint by exhibitionist wacko Bai Ling), who offers magic dumplings (they look like fleshy objects made from vagina-molds) stuffed with chopped-up aborted fetuses as a cure for being over-the-hill. This idea, the witch who serves children in her dumplings, has a dark fairy tale quality, which Fruit Chan has the good sense to not play up in literalistic fashion; he attacks his unnerving, repugnant story the only way it can be attacked, head-on, playing chicken with good taste, the audience's gag-reflex, etc., The story's real subject is narcissism, the vanity of the TV star with her feminine-but-business-like outfits, her red designer hand-bag, how she's willing to do anything to stay young, what this says about the mania for youth and sustained sexual drive in today's culture. The real "magic" of the fetus-dumplings is that, in eating them, one goes so far past any recognizable limit that it then becomes a breeze to be assertive in bed, no longer sweat small stuff like not being as attractive as you used to. There's a Cronenbergian dimension to this fable, the horror of the body in a state of violation, the fetus as a kind of parasite. It's determinedly repulsive.
The second episode, Chanwook Park's Cut, begins with one of the crazier images around: a man stands motionless in the middle of a big, sparsely decorated apartment, his neck being nibbled by a pale, garishly attired vampiress; the camera circles the two figures until we realize the man is, literally, frozen solid, a human popsicle. This audacious opening is probably the best thing in all of Three...Extremes; the story it leads into, the travails of a movie director who's kidnapped by a psychotic extra and forced to watch as his wife has her fingers lopped off one-by-one, alas does not live up to it. Dumplings may be a fairy tale, but Cut is more of a sick joke, a little in the tradition of Park's Oldboy (the director must spend half his life dreaming up outlandishly elaborate revenge scenarios) but not as staggering in its elegant disjointedness. Given Park's talent for manipulating space and time, it's a tad disappointing that he chooses to restrict himself mainly to this Chamber Drama set-up, one room and a few actors, the opportunity to compose a few bizarre tableaux along the way (a guy restrained by a super-sized rubber-band, a girl at a piano with her fingers held in place by wires like the victim of a giant arachnid). Park goes after his favorite theme of ensnarement, how people are driven to act by forces beyond their control; the room becomes a microcosm of Park's world, one where people become each other's puppet-masters, fueled by class anger, envy, the thirst for retribution. After the feast of Oldboy, Cut feels like lukewarm left-overs.
And speaking of leftovers, that's about all that remains by the time we get to the third segment, Takashi Miike's Box, some tripe about an ex-circus performer (the delicately beautiful Kyoko Hasegawa) beset by ghosts from her past, some horrible guilt about murdering her sister, circus imagery made slightly more interesting by its Japanese flavor but still feeling like Jodorowski on sedatives thanks to Miike's deliberate pacing, his utter indifference to story, sense, audience patience. The guy who gave us the chick drowning in a kiddie pool filled with her own excrement, the chick who fell in love with a guy's penis so much she kept it with her after he was dead, and the dude who slashed his own cheeks so he could open his mouth wider and swallow people's heads whole might've been expected to provide the piece de resistance, but offers instead the dud finale. Maybe it's the old story of the showy actor who underplays to get attention; Miike has such a reputation for outrageousness that he figured the only cool thing would be to play against type, not splash blood all over the place, show people torturing each other in outlandish ways, have main characters sprout weapons in place of their appendages in lieu of a proper ending. Three...Extremes, as one might have predicted, is uneven, only spottily satisfying as a shock-cinema experience.
House of Bamboo
(1955)
Fuller Does Japan
4 March 2006
House of Bamboo may look like a standard B crime-picture, but in amongst the noirish trappings, the somewhat forlornly straight-forward plot, the workmanlike performances, there lurks one of the few genuine portraits of post-War Japanese life ever attempted by an American filmmaker. The director, Sam Fuller, is clearly in love with Japan; his fascination with Japanese culture, art, daily ritual, suffuses House of Bamboo so completely that one almost forgets, at times, what it's supposed to be about. Its story - an undercover army cop infiltrates a group of ex-soldiers running a robbery ring in a rebuilding Tokyo - seems little more than a pretext, an excuse for Sam Fuller to indulge his Japanophilia, his fetish. But Fuller, always the pro, at least pays some attention to his story between excursions onto the Japanese street in search of background detail, local color, bits of peripheral business, and manages despite his preoccupations to deliver a satisfyingly vigorous, if slightly routine-seeming, exercise in crime melodrama.
Fuller, schooled as a journalist, had mastered the art of hard-hitting, well-paced, detail-oriented storytelling, and House of Bamboo is one of his stronger, more tightly-structured works. It's set in Japan in the years just after the war, a time when there is still a strong American military, and criminal, presence in Tokyo. Eddie Spannier (Robert Stack) has just arrived in Tokyo from the U.S., intending to hook up with his old army buddy Webber (Biff Elliot); he learns to his dismay, however, that Webber has been killed by hoodlums, leaving him twisting in the wind. Some casual thuggery at a pachinko parlor brings Spannier to the attention of Tokyo's resident American crime-boss, Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan); after screening Spannier, Dawson decides to invite the ballsy newcomer into the gang. Spannier, we soon discover, is actually an undercover army cop (he never knew Webber, isn't named Spannier) trying to track down the perpetrators of a recent train robbery which left a soldier dead. As part of his cover, Spannier recruits the dead man Webber's ex-girlfriend, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi, merely adequate), a Japanese woman, who poses as his "kimono girl."
Fuller's staging is remarkable from the first moments of the story; the train-heist is carried off with terrific economy and skill, a memorable three-tiered image of the train poised atop an overpass with Mt. Fuji looming in the background (the "real" Japan hovering over the new, American-infested one), punctuated by two grimly matter-of-fact images of the dead soldier's shoes sticking up from the snow. In Tokyo Fuller goes into Pickup on South Street mode, cluttered waterfronts, a sense of teeming life all around the action, if not the sweaty intimacy and sense of menace he brought to his Widmark-starred masterpiece. No one had a better sense of a location than Fuller, who jammed more side detail, more realistic human activity into a few frames of his under-estimated Western classic Forty Guns than exists in all of Fred Zinnemann's hopelessly limp, over-praised High Noon. A perusal of House of Bamboo uncovers such nuggets as the scene where Spannier, played by the disheveled, mainly inexpressive Robert Stack (he wears his trenchcoat like a bathrobe), happens upon a Noh theater rehearsal going on atop a roof, and a later moment where a quaint Japanese fan-dance suddenly morphs into a raucous jitterbug, the dancers ripping off their traditional attire to reveal the '50s get-ups underneath. These scenes are, of course, more than just bits of color; Fuller penetrates the surface of his melodrama by suggesting all sorts of simmering tensions, the sense of American culture bleeding into Japan, changing it maybe not for the better. This material makes up the real, underlying film, the incongruity of traditional Japanese costumes, architectural forms, performance styles finding their way into what would seem to be a standard Hollywood cops-and-robbers exercise, and the larger cultural struggle this would seem to embody. Only the scene where Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster happen upon the court of the Emperor of Mexico in Aldrich's Vera Cruz tops for aesthetic disjointedness the scene of an apparently half-wasted Stack in his comically shabby hood-just-off-the-boat get-up stumbling upon the garishly dressed and made-up Noh performers, and nearly being knocked off his feet by one of them.
It's amazing the way Fuller uses the camera, not just the fact that he conceives brilliant shots, but that he always knows how and when to use them. He has an almost Griffith-like instinct for the big moment, the expressive image: for instance; the scene where Webber lies dying on a gurney, Fuller shooting the entire thing from a wide, high angle, then slowly coming in when the interrogating officer shows him a picture of his girlfriend, at which point Fuller cuts to a devastating P.O.V., the photograph coming poignantly into focus. Another shot shows his playfulness: a Japanese guy sits at a desk, the camera pulls back, we see that the desk is actually poised atop a balcony over a frantic room where Robert Stack is being prodded by the Tokyo cops. The best moment is less acrobatic but far funnier: Spannier is trying to shake down a pachinko boss, he gets attacked from behind and thrown through a paper wall into an office where his mark, the crime-boss Sandy (played by Robert Ryan with a psychotic pleasantness, that strangely tender note in his voice contrasting his completely deranged behavior), sits balanced on a chair, waiting to greet him. There's always this touch of eccentricity in Fuller, this out-of-leftfield quality, which is what distinguishes his work from that of more predictable, generally better-publicized, unforgivably more-highly-regarded directors (Zinnemann, Kazan, Robson, et al).
Fuller, schooled as a journalist, had mastered the art of hard-hitting, well-paced, detail-oriented storytelling, and House of Bamboo is one of his stronger, more tightly-structured works. It's set in Japan in the years just after the war, a time when there is still a strong American military, and criminal, presence in Tokyo. Eddie Spannier (Robert Stack) has just arrived in Tokyo from the U.S., intending to hook up with his old army buddy Webber (Biff Elliot); he learns to his dismay, however, that Webber has been killed by hoodlums, leaving him twisting in the wind. Some casual thuggery at a pachinko parlor brings Spannier to the attention of Tokyo's resident American crime-boss, Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan); after screening Spannier, Dawson decides to invite the ballsy newcomer into the gang. Spannier, we soon discover, is actually an undercover army cop (he never knew Webber, isn't named Spannier) trying to track down the perpetrators of a recent train robbery which left a soldier dead. As part of his cover, Spannier recruits the dead man Webber's ex-girlfriend, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi, merely adequate), a Japanese woman, who poses as his "kimono girl."
Fuller's staging is remarkable from the first moments of the story; the train-heist is carried off with terrific economy and skill, a memorable three-tiered image of the train poised atop an overpass with Mt. Fuji looming in the background (the "real" Japan hovering over the new, American-infested one), punctuated by two grimly matter-of-fact images of the dead soldier's shoes sticking up from the snow. In Tokyo Fuller goes into Pickup on South Street mode, cluttered waterfronts, a sense of teeming life all around the action, if not the sweaty intimacy and sense of menace he brought to his Widmark-starred masterpiece. No one had a better sense of a location than Fuller, who jammed more side detail, more realistic human activity into a few frames of his under-estimated Western classic Forty Guns than exists in all of Fred Zinnemann's hopelessly limp, over-praised High Noon. A perusal of House of Bamboo uncovers such nuggets as the scene where Spannier, played by the disheveled, mainly inexpressive Robert Stack (he wears his trenchcoat like a bathrobe), happens upon a Noh theater rehearsal going on atop a roof, and a later moment where a quaint Japanese fan-dance suddenly morphs into a raucous jitterbug, the dancers ripping off their traditional attire to reveal the '50s get-ups underneath. These scenes are, of course, more than just bits of color; Fuller penetrates the surface of his melodrama by suggesting all sorts of simmering tensions, the sense of American culture bleeding into Japan, changing it maybe not for the better. This material makes up the real, underlying film, the incongruity of traditional Japanese costumes, architectural forms, performance styles finding their way into what would seem to be a standard Hollywood cops-and-robbers exercise, and the larger cultural struggle this would seem to embody. Only the scene where Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster happen upon the court of the Emperor of Mexico in Aldrich's Vera Cruz tops for aesthetic disjointedness the scene of an apparently half-wasted Stack in his comically shabby hood-just-off-the-boat get-up stumbling upon the garishly dressed and made-up Noh performers, and nearly being knocked off his feet by one of them.
It's amazing the way Fuller uses the camera, not just the fact that he conceives brilliant shots, but that he always knows how and when to use them. He has an almost Griffith-like instinct for the big moment, the expressive image: for instance; the scene where Webber lies dying on a gurney, Fuller shooting the entire thing from a wide, high angle, then slowly coming in when the interrogating officer shows him a picture of his girlfriend, at which point Fuller cuts to a devastating P.O.V., the photograph coming poignantly into focus. Another shot shows his playfulness: a Japanese guy sits at a desk, the camera pulls back, we see that the desk is actually poised atop a balcony over a frantic room where Robert Stack is being prodded by the Tokyo cops. The best moment is less acrobatic but far funnier: Spannier is trying to shake down a pachinko boss, he gets attacked from behind and thrown through a paper wall into an office where his mark, the crime-boss Sandy (played by Robert Ryan with a psychotic pleasantness, that strangely tender note in his voice contrasting his completely deranged behavior), sits balanced on a chair, waiting to greet him. There's always this touch of eccentricity in Fuller, this out-of-leftfield quality, which is what distinguishes his work from that of more predictable, generally better-publicized, unforgivably more-highly-regarded directors (Zinnemann, Kazan, Robson, et al).
Red Eye
(2005)
The Red-Eye to Thrills and Chills (Yuk, Yuk, Yuk)
9 February 2006
Red Eye is a completely preposterous film, but at least it doesn't let on. Wes Craven, the man who pounded the last nail into the coffin of the slasher genre with his self-referential, sarcastic Scream movies, has returned cheerfully to the arena of the straight thriller, and demonstrates that, even in this era of winking knowingness, it's possible to unspool a hopelessly implausible, silly yarn in an honest way, to put across a load of hooey without feeling the need to let the audience in on the "joke". Red Eye is another variation on that tried-and-true movie formula of the imperiled woman discovering her survivalist onions. Cute, plucky Rachel McAdams plays Lisa, a hotel concierge, who's on her way home to Miami after attending her grandmother's funeral in Texas. While waiting for her delayed flight to finally take off, Lisa meets the vaguely creepy Rippner (Cillian Murphy), who buys her a drink at a Tex-Mex place at the airport and talks her up a bit, never letting on that he's actually an international assassin hired to kill a controversial U.S. Senator, and that his convoluted plan requires Lisa to pull strings at her hotel and get the Senator put in a different room. This all comes to light later on when the two are seated together on the plane; Rippner lets Lisa know that her father will have something nasty done to him should she fail to co-operate with the evil plan, and that he wouldn't appreciate any attempt on her part to weasel out of the affair. This is an ungainly set-up to be sure, but Craven has developed considerable chops since his days as a rank exploitation man, and handles it all pretty smoothly. Craven understands that the essence of suspense is character; the more we identify with the lead, the more we'll be drawn into the story, and the more effective the suspense routines will be. He's lucky, then, to be blessed with Rachel McAdams, who is instantaneously engaging, and gives off no movie-star vibes or anything else that might get in the way of our rooting for her. What makes Lisa so likable is her proficiency; we know right off the bat that this is no one to be trifled with, that even a heartless manipulator like Rippner is going to have his hands full. Some may take issue with the idea that a simple hotel concierge could engage in a successful battle of wits with a guy who makes a living carrying out highly sophisticated assassination plots and other nefarious deeds, but I say why not? Lisa is clearly used to thinking on her feet, handling complicated logistics, and dealing with people who may or may not be psychotic (she works at a swanky hotel after all). The movie works because it doesn't expect you to take all this very seriously; it's not a hard-sell movie, all jacked up on stylistic steroids, but a goofy thrill-ride where half the fun is in recognizing how improbable the whole thing is. A lot of today's young, hot-shot directors could take a lesson in how to lighten up and enjoy oneself from Craven, who not only knows every trick in the book, but knows how to whip them out without stumbling all over himself.
Crash
(I) (2004)
I'm Not Okay, You're Not Okay
9 February 2006
In Paul Haggis's Crash, people are neither good nor evil, but merely stressed-out. The film is a morality play for the era of Dr. Phil; the characters are placed in morally dicey situations by their inability to develop coping skills. In one scene, a racially insensitive cop, played by Matt Dillon (good to know he's still breathing), gets a little too hands-on with the wife (Thandie Newton) of a TV director (Terrence Howard) he's pulled over; his failure to control his impulses at this juncture has something to do with his frustration over his father's illness, and the way he's treated by the secretary at his HMO (the secretary is black, and so are the director and his wife). But this doesn't necessarily make Dillon a bad guy. In a later scene, Dillon rescues Newton from a burning car despite the danger to his own life. Duality of man anyone?
Haggis' point is only-too-obvious: most people are neither good nor bad by nature, but are the product of their circumstances, and are therefore capable of great heroism as well as great ugliness. Dillon takes advantage of Newton because the opportunity presents itself, because being a cop has made him arrogant, because his outrage at being mistreated by a black woman makes him feel justified in taking out his anger at another black woman (such is the essence of racism). But when he climbs inside the crashed car and finds Newton there, a completely different, self-sacrificing impulse overtakes him. At no other time during Crash does the film become so thematically crystalline. We're all in this together, Paul Haggis is saying, whether we want to admit it or not. It makes no difference that we tend to snipe at each other, to be overcome by racial paranoia, to assert ourselves out of a sense of authority or privilege, or just plain everyday pissiness.
The film makes a huge point of humanity's interconnectedness; the plot is essentially a series of unlikely, but thematically necessary, coincidences and chance encounters. Terrence Howard, having been made to feel vulnerable, unmanly and, what's worse, unblack by his wife's mistreatment, is driven to confront a pair of car-jackers, the eminently black Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, the very same wise-cracking thugs who previously jacked a car belonging to D.A. Brendan Fraser and his frantic wife Sandra Bullock, the latter of whom hires a locksmith, Michael Pena, to install new locks in the house, etc., The result of these narrative acrobatics is a film that can often seem blurry in the short-term, but has a focus, a sense of purpose that asserts itself in the long-run. There are undeveloped characters all over the place, situations that seem like they could be interesting but go nowhere, performances that have no chance to acquire shading, yet the movie rises above these shortcomings. Director Paul Haggis has woven his situations together fluidly, and achieved a sometimes electrifying sense of urgency. The pieces may sometimes seem irrelevant by themselves, but they all fit into the mosaic, and contribute to the sense of building meaning.
That being said, there's still a nagging sense of smallness to the proceedings. Maybe it's just the way the movie is structured; despite Haggis's proficiency, his ability to weave the different threads together, the movie can't quite get past feeling like highlights from a mini-series. Crash is like something that played on HBO once, and they cut it into pieces and stitched them together into a movie. One wishes the story had more room to breathe. What would happen if we got to know more about characters like Fraser's D.A., or Bullock's harried wife-of-the-D.A., or Don Cheadle's police detective? Each character plays their role in the larger drama, but something is lost by the lack of elaboration. Vital material seems missing from Crash, which is why, for all its thematic gravity, its hum, it ends up feeling like an exercise in clever plot mechanics and not an organic piece of storytelling. It's not a morality play in the way a Dardenne Brothers film is; it doesn't achieve the sense of uplift that Rosetta does, or La Promesse. It doesn't have the rawness of a Ken Loach portrayal of small people crushed by forces beyond their control. It's a commercial morality play (even if it's technically an indie). It's plot-heavy, and we're a little overly aware of the stars (it's hard to look at Sandra Bullock and not think, "Somebody's fishing for indie cred."). None of this makes the movie bad; in fact, it's pretty good. But it's good in a certain limiting way, a way that doesn't allow tendrils of meaning to branch off from the central conceit, that doesn't encourage a real sense of complexity. It feels like a big-time movie, and has some real dramatic high-points, but it's a little bit of a smoke and mirrors job. There's something to Crash, just not as much as there could've been.
Haggis' point is only-too-obvious: most people are neither good nor bad by nature, but are the product of their circumstances, and are therefore capable of great heroism as well as great ugliness. Dillon takes advantage of Newton because the opportunity presents itself, because being a cop has made him arrogant, because his outrage at being mistreated by a black woman makes him feel justified in taking out his anger at another black woman (such is the essence of racism). But when he climbs inside the crashed car and finds Newton there, a completely different, self-sacrificing impulse overtakes him. At no other time during Crash does the film become so thematically crystalline. We're all in this together, Paul Haggis is saying, whether we want to admit it or not. It makes no difference that we tend to snipe at each other, to be overcome by racial paranoia, to assert ourselves out of a sense of authority or privilege, or just plain everyday pissiness.
The film makes a huge point of humanity's interconnectedness; the plot is essentially a series of unlikely, but thematically necessary, coincidences and chance encounters. Terrence Howard, having been made to feel vulnerable, unmanly and, what's worse, unblack by his wife's mistreatment, is driven to confront a pair of car-jackers, the eminently black Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, the very same wise-cracking thugs who previously jacked a car belonging to D.A. Brendan Fraser and his frantic wife Sandra Bullock, the latter of whom hires a locksmith, Michael Pena, to install new locks in the house, etc., The result of these narrative acrobatics is a film that can often seem blurry in the short-term, but has a focus, a sense of purpose that asserts itself in the long-run. There are undeveloped characters all over the place, situations that seem like they could be interesting but go nowhere, performances that have no chance to acquire shading, yet the movie rises above these shortcomings. Director Paul Haggis has woven his situations together fluidly, and achieved a sometimes electrifying sense of urgency. The pieces may sometimes seem irrelevant by themselves, but they all fit into the mosaic, and contribute to the sense of building meaning.
That being said, there's still a nagging sense of smallness to the proceedings. Maybe it's just the way the movie is structured; despite Haggis's proficiency, his ability to weave the different threads together, the movie can't quite get past feeling like highlights from a mini-series. Crash is like something that played on HBO once, and they cut it into pieces and stitched them together into a movie. One wishes the story had more room to breathe. What would happen if we got to know more about characters like Fraser's D.A., or Bullock's harried wife-of-the-D.A., or Don Cheadle's police detective? Each character plays their role in the larger drama, but something is lost by the lack of elaboration. Vital material seems missing from Crash, which is why, for all its thematic gravity, its hum, it ends up feeling like an exercise in clever plot mechanics and not an organic piece of storytelling. It's not a morality play in the way a Dardenne Brothers film is; it doesn't achieve the sense of uplift that Rosetta does, or La Promesse. It doesn't have the rawness of a Ken Loach portrayal of small people crushed by forces beyond their control. It's a commercial morality play (even if it's technically an indie). It's plot-heavy, and we're a little overly aware of the stars (it's hard to look at Sandra Bullock and not think, "Somebody's fishing for indie cred."). None of this makes the movie bad; in fact, it's pretty good. But it's good in a certain limiting way, a way that doesn't allow tendrils of meaning to branch off from the central conceit, that doesn't encourage a real sense of complexity. It feels like a big-time movie, and has some real dramatic high-points, but it's a little bit of a smoke and mirrors job. There's something to Crash, just not as much as there could've been.
Serenity
(2005)
Whedon's Spunky Space Western
2 February 2006
Serenity, as dorkhead movies go, is actually not half-bad. It's infinitely less insulting than the misogynistic Sin City, and has more humor and gusto than one of George Lucas's two-dimensional, tedious Star Wars re-treads. Writer/director Joss Whedon creates a fleshed-out sci-fi world, but doesn't pound us over the head with esoterica the way Lucas does (no galactic parliament meetings). Maybe, to truly appreciate Serenity, it helps to be conversant with Whedon's cult TV series Firefly, which the film is a continuation of, but even those who aren't initiates can follow what's happening, and can tune-in to the feeling of rich personal history that emanates from the characters. There's no substitute for having lived with a group of characters over a period of time. Whedon really seems to KNOW these people, and because he knows them, it's easy for him to make us feel like we know them, even if we've never watched the show. Whedon has a comfort level with his material that allows him to eschew a lot of boring exposition; he doesn't feel the need to slow things down with back-story, but has the confidence to plunge head-long into his plot.
Serenity is the name of a space-ship, a Millennium Falcon-type interstellar jalopy captained by a grizzled Han Solo-sort named Mal (Nathan Fillion), and crewed by a rag-tag band of former rebels (the story takes place after a failed revolution against The Alliance, the tyrannical organization responsible for overseeing human activity in the galaxy; the crew of Serenity are ex-Confederates turned outlaws). Life aboard the ramshackle vessel has become complicated by the presence of a young doctor, Simon (Sean Maher) and his sister River (Summer Glau), whom Simon has rescued from the clutches of The Alliance, and who is being pursued by a mysterious agent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) (the movie has a busy first few minutes). River may appear to be just another dour, gothy babe, but in fact she's a psychic, and not only that, but has been programmed by The Alliance for use as a weapon, and is still susceptible to the odd bit of subliminal triggering, which unleashes her inner-Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer. The drama also involves a group of outer-space psychos called The Rievers, who lurk in a mysterious nether-region, and are responsible for atrocities including but not limited to cannibalism, rape and decorating their spaceships with skulls.
All right, so maybe it's hard to keep a straight face while describing this tomfoolery, but still, one has to acknowledge Whedon's thoroughness in realizing his ideas, his commitment. Unlike Lucas, who seems content to coast on past success, viewing his films primarily as opportunities for marketing tie-ins, Whedon seems to care about telling a good story. Whedon has obviously been influenced by Lucas, but to his credit, has not followed the master's example so completely as to become a smug, lazy-minded dweeb himself. Lucas is a cynic, a commercial-minded opportunist who ransacked everything from King Arthur to Kurosawa in cobbling together his Star Wars mythos, then proceeded to rip himself off. Whedon is snarky but not cynical, and when he steals he does so lovingly. His movie is equal parts space opera and horse opera; the characters may zip around in Star Trek vehicles, but they talk, dress and act like they've been using the TV show Deadwood as a behavioral and fashion model. One character expresses her sexual frustration thusly: "It's been a year since I had anything 'twixt my legs that didn't run on batteries." The dialogue is full of similar quasi-archaic turns of phrase laced with colorful profanity, and though it doesn't reach the vulgar-eloquent level of David Milch's HBO masterpiece, it is a relief from the dry techno-speak and dopey mysticism of the Lucas movies (and the retarded philosophizing of the latter Matrix works). It may seem a tad obvious, merging Western and sci-fi traditions this way (haven't sci-fi writers and movie-makers been doing it forever?), but Whedon handles his idea as if it were new and clever, and infuses his movie with enough affection for the conventions of both forms that we feel we're being treated to something fun, and aren't just being sold a lot of second-hand routines.
The conception may be clever, and cleverly handled, but the movie is limited by the talent involved in it. It's based on a cable TV show, and features many of the cast-members of the original series, people who aren't necessarily possessed of movie-sized personalities. Mal may be the new Han Solo, but the actor who plays him, Nathan Fillion, is in no danger of becoming the next Harrison Ford (or Viggo Mortensen for that matter). There are no break-out stars in this cast, not Summer Glau who plays River the outer space Buffy (Whedon seems hung-up on the idea of the tortured young woman reluctantly succumbing to her destiny as a karate-kicking adversary to the forces of evil), not Morena Baccarin who plays the beautiful Inara, and certainly not Adam "I'm Not One of THOSE Baldwins, OK?" Baldwin as the gung-ho Jayne Cobb. And Joss Whedon is not going to be joining the ranks of moviedom's top directors anytime soon either. Whedon is at best competent; his images are murky and rather ugly-looking and his fight scenes are nothing special, but he does keep things moving, not crisply, but moving. He's a decent writer of the pack-rat variety, the type who has accumulated a lot of pop-culture crap in his attic, and knows how to put bits of it together into something halfway original, but who knows if he'll ever develop a really unique voice, will ever transcend his influences and make something that matters (the way Robert Towne did on Chinatown). Whedon is able to spin a pretty good yarn, but there's not a whole lot of depth to his work, and his conceptions would no doubt start looking pretty tottery were one to bother gazing at them long and hard enough. Look passingly at Serenity and it holds together.
Serenity is the name of a space-ship, a Millennium Falcon-type interstellar jalopy captained by a grizzled Han Solo-sort named Mal (Nathan Fillion), and crewed by a rag-tag band of former rebels (the story takes place after a failed revolution against The Alliance, the tyrannical organization responsible for overseeing human activity in the galaxy; the crew of Serenity are ex-Confederates turned outlaws). Life aboard the ramshackle vessel has become complicated by the presence of a young doctor, Simon (Sean Maher) and his sister River (Summer Glau), whom Simon has rescued from the clutches of The Alliance, and who is being pursued by a mysterious agent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) (the movie has a busy first few minutes). River may appear to be just another dour, gothy babe, but in fact she's a psychic, and not only that, but has been programmed by The Alliance for use as a weapon, and is still susceptible to the odd bit of subliminal triggering, which unleashes her inner-Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer. The drama also involves a group of outer-space psychos called The Rievers, who lurk in a mysterious nether-region, and are responsible for atrocities including but not limited to cannibalism, rape and decorating their spaceships with skulls.
All right, so maybe it's hard to keep a straight face while describing this tomfoolery, but still, one has to acknowledge Whedon's thoroughness in realizing his ideas, his commitment. Unlike Lucas, who seems content to coast on past success, viewing his films primarily as opportunities for marketing tie-ins, Whedon seems to care about telling a good story. Whedon has obviously been influenced by Lucas, but to his credit, has not followed the master's example so completely as to become a smug, lazy-minded dweeb himself. Lucas is a cynic, a commercial-minded opportunist who ransacked everything from King Arthur to Kurosawa in cobbling together his Star Wars mythos, then proceeded to rip himself off. Whedon is snarky but not cynical, and when he steals he does so lovingly. His movie is equal parts space opera and horse opera; the characters may zip around in Star Trek vehicles, but they talk, dress and act like they've been using the TV show Deadwood as a behavioral and fashion model. One character expresses her sexual frustration thusly: "It's been a year since I had anything 'twixt my legs that didn't run on batteries." The dialogue is full of similar quasi-archaic turns of phrase laced with colorful profanity, and though it doesn't reach the vulgar-eloquent level of David Milch's HBO masterpiece, it is a relief from the dry techno-speak and dopey mysticism of the Lucas movies (and the retarded philosophizing of the latter Matrix works). It may seem a tad obvious, merging Western and sci-fi traditions this way (haven't sci-fi writers and movie-makers been doing it forever?), but Whedon handles his idea as if it were new and clever, and infuses his movie with enough affection for the conventions of both forms that we feel we're being treated to something fun, and aren't just being sold a lot of second-hand routines.
The conception may be clever, and cleverly handled, but the movie is limited by the talent involved in it. It's based on a cable TV show, and features many of the cast-members of the original series, people who aren't necessarily possessed of movie-sized personalities. Mal may be the new Han Solo, but the actor who plays him, Nathan Fillion, is in no danger of becoming the next Harrison Ford (or Viggo Mortensen for that matter). There are no break-out stars in this cast, not Summer Glau who plays River the outer space Buffy (Whedon seems hung-up on the idea of the tortured young woman reluctantly succumbing to her destiny as a karate-kicking adversary to the forces of evil), not Morena Baccarin who plays the beautiful Inara, and certainly not Adam "I'm Not One of THOSE Baldwins, OK?" Baldwin as the gung-ho Jayne Cobb. And Joss Whedon is not going to be joining the ranks of moviedom's top directors anytime soon either. Whedon is at best competent; his images are murky and rather ugly-looking and his fight scenes are nothing special, but he does keep things moving, not crisply, but moving. He's a decent writer of the pack-rat variety, the type who has accumulated a lot of pop-culture crap in his attic, and knows how to put bits of it together into something halfway original, but who knows if he'll ever develop a really unique voice, will ever transcend his influences and make something that matters (the way Robert Towne did on Chinatown). Whedon is able to spin a pretty good yarn, but there's not a whole lot of depth to his work, and his conceptions would no doubt start looking pretty tottery were one to bother gazing at them long and hard enough. Look passingly at Serenity and it holds together.
The Matrix Reloaded
(2003)
The Wachowskis Go Off Their Rocker
31 January 2006
In the summer of '99 the Wachowski Brothers' sci-fi thriller The Matrix was the cool, sleek, sexy antidote to the dopey dinosaurism of George Lucas' Phantom Menace. Now the Wachowskis themselves have become George Lucas. The Matrix Reloaded, the further adventures of Neo, Morpheus and Trinity, is the Wachowskis laying claim to Lucas' throne by abandoning the hip, funny flair they showed in the first Matrix in favor of quasi-mythic hot-air. The film is three action scenes surrounded by some of the most show-killing, ear-abusing dialogue passages in the history of movies. When did the Wachowskis come to the conclusion that what summer movie audiences wanted was cliff-notes Camus? Did they think that by repeating the word "causality" over and over they could trick us into seeing their mumbo-jumbo about fate vs. free-will as anything but Philosophy 101 jive? This is what happens when hacks start taking themselves seriously. We sit down expecting kung-fu fights, cyber-rebel attitudes, iconic images of Laurence Fishburne in a black raincoat and Carrie-Anne Moss in a cat-woman outfit, but what do we get instead? A bad French actor rambling on for hours like Sartre if Sartre had had the IQ of a toenail clipping.
This is too bad, because one wants to enjoy the movie. Keanu Reeves is an actor who, despite his inadequacies, has the kind of good-humored, dogged way about him that melts cynicism, except you'd never know it by his joyless, immobile performance here. In Reloaded his character, Neo, has advanced beyond Jedi-apprentice status to full-Jedi, and like Luke Skywalker, power has made Neo a bore. He flies through the sprawling Matrix-city like Superman as dressed by Gaultier; he has portentous dreams about his lover Trinity dying; he fights a thousand Hugo Weavings without once losing his shades. This should be a hoot but isn't. Even during the epic battle with the army of Smith-clones, a slapstick CGI bonanza, the film seems labored and over-serious. The Wachowskis seem to be feeling the pressure of expectations. They want to elevate their story to Dune/Lord of the Rings status, to out-Lucas Lucas, and in doing so totally eliminate the semi-comic, subversive undertones that made the first Matrix amusing. They've become stiffs. The images of Reeves, Fishburne and Moss looking dour and pale - futuristic warriors as ticked-off photophobes - are no longer funny, they're just big and dead, and the whole plot about the fate of Zion and rescuing the keymaster (maybe they should've called Pete Venkman and Egon Spengler in on that one) seems like an act of desperation.
The Wachowskis still know how to orchestrate an action scene, but it's a measure of their failure as storytellers that you think of the action in terms of orchestration instead of just enjoying the thrills. The film provides oodles of material for connoisseurs of wire-work, CGI and slow-mo car-crashes; unfortunately it also satisfies those who relish bad dialogue and listless acting. The single-worst scene must be Fishburne's Paul Atreides speech in front of the assembled population of Zion and the subsequent orgy. The Wachowskis are grabbing for respect here from the kind of people who think fiction starts with Tolkein and ends with Herbert. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films must've intimidated the Wachowskis; they must have thought they had to go for more of an epic and leave behind the rebel-hacker material that supplied the heart of the first Matrix. The sort of silly, pseudo-profound idea that can lend a bit of weight to a sci-fi story has become the purpose of The Matrix Reloaded; the Wachowskis have turned themselves into preachers of some kind of clueless gospel. And only a couple of world-class twerps would make us sit through such a tedious lecture of a movie only to stick us with a cliffhanger. To be continued? Who cares?
This is too bad, because one wants to enjoy the movie. Keanu Reeves is an actor who, despite his inadequacies, has the kind of good-humored, dogged way about him that melts cynicism, except you'd never know it by his joyless, immobile performance here. In Reloaded his character, Neo, has advanced beyond Jedi-apprentice status to full-Jedi, and like Luke Skywalker, power has made Neo a bore. He flies through the sprawling Matrix-city like Superman as dressed by Gaultier; he has portentous dreams about his lover Trinity dying; he fights a thousand Hugo Weavings without once losing his shades. This should be a hoot but isn't. Even during the epic battle with the army of Smith-clones, a slapstick CGI bonanza, the film seems labored and over-serious. The Wachowskis seem to be feeling the pressure of expectations. They want to elevate their story to Dune/Lord of the Rings status, to out-Lucas Lucas, and in doing so totally eliminate the semi-comic, subversive undertones that made the first Matrix amusing. They've become stiffs. The images of Reeves, Fishburne and Moss looking dour and pale - futuristic warriors as ticked-off photophobes - are no longer funny, they're just big and dead, and the whole plot about the fate of Zion and rescuing the keymaster (maybe they should've called Pete Venkman and Egon Spengler in on that one) seems like an act of desperation.
The Wachowskis still know how to orchestrate an action scene, but it's a measure of their failure as storytellers that you think of the action in terms of orchestration instead of just enjoying the thrills. The film provides oodles of material for connoisseurs of wire-work, CGI and slow-mo car-crashes; unfortunately it also satisfies those who relish bad dialogue and listless acting. The single-worst scene must be Fishburne's Paul Atreides speech in front of the assembled population of Zion and the subsequent orgy. The Wachowskis are grabbing for respect here from the kind of people who think fiction starts with Tolkein and ends with Herbert. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films must've intimidated the Wachowskis; they must have thought they had to go for more of an epic and leave behind the rebel-hacker material that supplied the heart of the first Matrix. The sort of silly, pseudo-profound idea that can lend a bit of weight to a sci-fi story has become the purpose of The Matrix Reloaded; the Wachowskis have turned themselves into preachers of some kind of clueless gospel. And only a couple of world-class twerps would make us sit through such a tedious lecture of a movie only to stick us with a cliffhanger. To be continued? Who cares?
28 Days Later
(2002)
Aahooo! Zombies of London...
31 January 2006
28 Days Later is a post-apocalyptic horror movie whose excitements fail to outweigh its disappointments. Director Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting fame, has endeavored to bring the schlocky zombie-movie routines of George Romero up-to-date by pumping them full of extreme-cinema steroids; the result is a tottery fusion of Romero and Gaspar Noe, a gory splatter-movie adorned with the trappings of a visceral Euro-art-film.
The intriguing set-up involves a bicycle-courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy), who awakes from a coma to find the whole of London apparently abandoned. What Jim doesn't know is that the country has been overrun by a strange infection unleashed from a laboratory, and that most of the people have been turned into raving, bloodthirsty maniacs. The story then becomes a familiar survivors vs. zombies scenario: Jim meets a pair of toughies named Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris), who've learned to kill the homicidal Infecteds with Molotov cocktails, and to subsist on candy and soda. After Mark is bitten by a zombie and mercifully macheted, Jim and Selena encounter a father-and-daughter named Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns), who have a crank-up radio and a gassed-up taxi, and convince Jim and Selena to accompany them to Manchester, where there may or may not be a military base.
Some of this is genuinely creepy. The initial images of the deserted London streets, shot on DV and digitally altered to remove traffic and other signs of human habitation, are eerie and bleak, evoking the end of the world as envisaged by Lars Von Trier. If Boyle didn't insist on going for the jugular with almost every shot, the movie might be a classic. The problem is that there isn't any real suspense, because Boyle doesn't allow the suspense to build. It's hard to become involved in the plight of the characters when the director is constantly trying to dazzle you with jump-cuts, and loud music, and bursts of violence that would be punctuative if the rest of the film weren't at the same manic pitch already. The story, weak to begin with, completely disintegrates in the second half. The survivors are taken by soldiers to a secluded manor surrounded by mines and floodlights, and anyone who's seen a George Romero movie immediately suspects that the soldiers are up to no good.
It's amazing how fast a stylish, high-intensity movie can become a deadly bore. The actors, some of whom seem fairly talented, are given no chance by Boyle to assert their personalities, so the film becomes a nearly-dehumanized exercise in technique. And even more disappointing are the zombies; Boyle can think of nothing more creative for them to do than hiss like bad-movie vampires and vomit blood. Romero at least always bothered to give some of his lurching undead funny little bits of personality, and used them for satiric jabs. Boyle may be more accomplished visually than Romero, but he's nowhere near Romero's class when it comes to old-fashioned schlock-meistering.
The intriguing set-up involves a bicycle-courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy), who awakes from a coma to find the whole of London apparently abandoned. What Jim doesn't know is that the country has been overrun by a strange infection unleashed from a laboratory, and that most of the people have been turned into raving, bloodthirsty maniacs. The story then becomes a familiar survivors vs. zombies scenario: Jim meets a pair of toughies named Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris), who've learned to kill the homicidal Infecteds with Molotov cocktails, and to subsist on candy and soda. After Mark is bitten by a zombie and mercifully macheted, Jim and Selena encounter a father-and-daughter named Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns), who have a crank-up radio and a gassed-up taxi, and convince Jim and Selena to accompany them to Manchester, where there may or may not be a military base.
Some of this is genuinely creepy. The initial images of the deserted London streets, shot on DV and digitally altered to remove traffic and other signs of human habitation, are eerie and bleak, evoking the end of the world as envisaged by Lars Von Trier. If Boyle didn't insist on going for the jugular with almost every shot, the movie might be a classic. The problem is that there isn't any real suspense, because Boyle doesn't allow the suspense to build. It's hard to become involved in the plight of the characters when the director is constantly trying to dazzle you with jump-cuts, and loud music, and bursts of violence that would be punctuative if the rest of the film weren't at the same manic pitch already. The story, weak to begin with, completely disintegrates in the second half. The survivors are taken by soldiers to a secluded manor surrounded by mines and floodlights, and anyone who's seen a George Romero movie immediately suspects that the soldiers are up to no good.
It's amazing how fast a stylish, high-intensity movie can become a deadly bore. The actors, some of whom seem fairly talented, are given no chance by Boyle to assert their personalities, so the film becomes a nearly-dehumanized exercise in technique. And even more disappointing are the zombies; Boyle can think of nothing more creative for them to do than hiss like bad-movie vampires and vomit blood. Romero at least always bothered to give some of his lurching undead funny little bits of personality, and used them for satiric jabs. Boyle may be more accomplished visually than Romero, but he's nowhere near Romero's class when it comes to old-fashioned schlock-meistering.
Adaptation.
(2002)
Another Jonze/Kaufman House of Mirrors
31 January 2006
The Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman opus Adaptation begins with a reference to the previous Jonze/Kaufman opus Being John Malkovich: We're on the set of BJM, and there's Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) looking lost and miserable, and there's John Cusack acting like Charlie isn't alive, and Catherine Keener not giving Charlie the time of day, and John Malkovich himself saying something pithy and Malkovichian. What we're meant to think, of course, is how hip it is to start a movie with a reference to your last movie; and later when we're introduced to Kaufman's creative woes we're meant to think how Felliniesque it is to write a script about yourself writing a script (at least Fellini waited until his eighth-and-a-half film to descend completely into self-reference and -reverence). And still later, when Kaufman openly admits being narcissistic and self-indulgent, we're supposed to give him points for honesty, as if this pre-emptive apology excused him from being narcissistic and self-indulgent. Pardon me if I seem less-than-impressed.
I wasn't impressed by Being John Malkovich either; it struck me as affected and aimless, a stunt propped up by dashes of sincerity. I appreciated the movie's dry sense of humor, and Catherine Keener's devastating portrayal of a sarcastic super-witch, but I thought there was too much knowing self-effacement in the way Kaufman and Jonze deconstructed the modern male (i.e. themselves). The self-deprecation is even more pungent in Adaptation; Nicolas Cage's Charlie Kaufman is an overweight, balding forty-year-old who sweats profusely in the presence of women, and Kaufman the writer misses few opportunities to humiliate Kaufman the character, to complain about what miserable wretches both are. Furthering the solipsistic agenda, Kaufman includes the fictional character of his brother Donald, also played by Cage, who is Charlie's diametric opposite, a self-assured ladies'-man with a sense of humor about himself. Donald begins working on his own screenplay, and to Charlie's dismay shows a proficiency for the kind of commercial writing Charlie himself pretends to despise but is actually envious of. This gives Kaufman an excuse to lecture us; Donald becomes the means by which he criticizes the small-mindedness of Hollywood producers, agents, etc., His portrayal of Donald is affectionate though, and he can't bring himself to take a real artistic stand. Charlie Kaufman, the wishy-washy genius.
Kaufman and Jonze are fascinated with the absurdity of being a man; in BJM they eviscerated John Cusack's character, portrayed Malkovich as a sex-crazed egomaniac, and concluded that the only solution for Catherine Keener and Cameron Diaz was to become lesbians. In Adaptation they try branching out a little by including a female character who's as screwed-up as the men. Her name is Sue Orlean, the New Yorker writer whose book Charlie is torturing himself trying to adapt, and she's played by Meryl Streep as a dissatisfied intellectual taken in by the charms of the dirt-bag professional flower-thief who's the subject of her best-selling tome. Charlie falls in love with Sue through her book, and Sue leaves her ineffectual husband for Laroche the flower-man who shows her the secret to happiness (hint: you snort it). The story-within-a-story structure is pleasingly unique for awhile, but it quickly becomes apparent that Charlie Kaufman has no idea how to satisfactorily resolve his loopy, house-of-mirrors narrative. Kaufman is great at setting up weird situations but terrible at following through on them. The novelty of BJM wore off about an hour in, and the novelty of Adaptation lasts only slightly longer. What makes Adaptation a little more successful is Nicolas Cage's engaging portrayal of Charlie and Donald Kaufman, the yin-and-yang screenwriters.
It's been so long since Cage had a role that was of interest to anyone but his accountants that one could be forgiven for forgetting how terrific he can be. Cage plays Charlie Kaufman as a lovable screw-up, a brainy nice-guy who's defeated by his complete lack of belief in himself. Charlie has principles but doesn't have the nerve to stand up for them, and he's unassertive around women which leads to loneliness. Cage gives Charlie the quality of an awkward teenager; he keeps embarrassing himself, miscalculating, holding back at the wrong moments. Charlie is a grown-up gawky adolescent; and Donald is a grown-up adolescent Don Juan. Cage plays Donald and Charlie fairly close together, but gives Donald looser body-language and a less discombobulated way of expressing himself. The combination of brotherly affection and competitiveness is well-developed by the writing, and Cage does an uncanny job delineating both sides of the relationship. He accomplishes the same thing Malkovich accomplished in BJM - he takes a stunt and makes it into something.
I've barely said a word about Spike Jonze, Meryl Streep or Chris Cooper, the last of whom won a gold statue of some kind for playing the dentally-challenged orchid-man Laroche. This is a terrible oversight in the case of Cooper, who is entertaining and deserves a purple heart for having his front teeth removed. As for Streep I have little to say; I still can't find a trace of personality in her acting, and I found her portrayal of Sue Orlean mannered and slightly off-key (the real Sue Orlean is probably flattered to have been played by Meryl Streep, but given the cold, unpleasant quality Streep projects, I'm not sure she should be). And on the subject of Spike Jonze I find myself almost equally stumped for words. Jonze has impeccable camera technique, but he seems too willing to sink into the woodwork. There's something introverted about his directing; he lacks the boldness of a real cinematic artist, and this is why his movies seem so concept-driven. Jonze and Kaufman are sneaky-smart hype-artists more than filmmakers; they've succeeded in constructing a wall of myth around themselves by pulling stunts like putting real people into their movies, or co-crediting their scripts to non-existent siblings. Adaptation has a lot going on in it and around it, but doesn't add up to very much at all.
I wasn't impressed by Being John Malkovich either; it struck me as affected and aimless, a stunt propped up by dashes of sincerity. I appreciated the movie's dry sense of humor, and Catherine Keener's devastating portrayal of a sarcastic super-witch, but I thought there was too much knowing self-effacement in the way Kaufman and Jonze deconstructed the modern male (i.e. themselves). The self-deprecation is even more pungent in Adaptation; Nicolas Cage's Charlie Kaufman is an overweight, balding forty-year-old who sweats profusely in the presence of women, and Kaufman the writer misses few opportunities to humiliate Kaufman the character, to complain about what miserable wretches both are. Furthering the solipsistic agenda, Kaufman includes the fictional character of his brother Donald, also played by Cage, who is Charlie's diametric opposite, a self-assured ladies'-man with a sense of humor about himself. Donald begins working on his own screenplay, and to Charlie's dismay shows a proficiency for the kind of commercial writing Charlie himself pretends to despise but is actually envious of. This gives Kaufman an excuse to lecture us; Donald becomes the means by which he criticizes the small-mindedness of Hollywood producers, agents, etc., His portrayal of Donald is affectionate though, and he can't bring himself to take a real artistic stand. Charlie Kaufman, the wishy-washy genius.
Kaufman and Jonze are fascinated with the absurdity of being a man; in BJM they eviscerated John Cusack's character, portrayed Malkovich as a sex-crazed egomaniac, and concluded that the only solution for Catherine Keener and Cameron Diaz was to become lesbians. In Adaptation they try branching out a little by including a female character who's as screwed-up as the men. Her name is Sue Orlean, the New Yorker writer whose book Charlie is torturing himself trying to adapt, and she's played by Meryl Streep as a dissatisfied intellectual taken in by the charms of the dirt-bag professional flower-thief who's the subject of her best-selling tome. Charlie falls in love with Sue through her book, and Sue leaves her ineffectual husband for Laroche the flower-man who shows her the secret to happiness (hint: you snort it). The story-within-a-story structure is pleasingly unique for awhile, but it quickly becomes apparent that Charlie Kaufman has no idea how to satisfactorily resolve his loopy, house-of-mirrors narrative. Kaufman is great at setting up weird situations but terrible at following through on them. The novelty of BJM wore off about an hour in, and the novelty of Adaptation lasts only slightly longer. What makes Adaptation a little more successful is Nicolas Cage's engaging portrayal of Charlie and Donald Kaufman, the yin-and-yang screenwriters.
It's been so long since Cage had a role that was of interest to anyone but his accountants that one could be forgiven for forgetting how terrific he can be. Cage plays Charlie Kaufman as a lovable screw-up, a brainy nice-guy who's defeated by his complete lack of belief in himself. Charlie has principles but doesn't have the nerve to stand up for them, and he's unassertive around women which leads to loneliness. Cage gives Charlie the quality of an awkward teenager; he keeps embarrassing himself, miscalculating, holding back at the wrong moments. Charlie is a grown-up gawky adolescent; and Donald is a grown-up adolescent Don Juan. Cage plays Donald and Charlie fairly close together, but gives Donald looser body-language and a less discombobulated way of expressing himself. The combination of brotherly affection and competitiveness is well-developed by the writing, and Cage does an uncanny job delineating both sides of the relationship. He accomplishes the same thing Malkovich accomplished in BJM - he takes a stunt and makes it into something.
I've barely said a word about Spike Jonze, Meryl Streep or Chris Cooper, the last of whom won a gold statue of some kind for playing the dentally-challenged orchid-man Laroche. This is a terrible oversight in the case of Cooper, who is entertaining and deserves a purple heart for having his front teeth removed. As for Streep I have little to say; I still can't find a trace of personality in her acting, and I found her portrayal of Sue Orlean mannered and slightly off-key (the real Sue Orlean is probably flattered to have been played by Meryl Streep, but given the cold, unpleasant quality Streep projects, I'm not sure she should be). And on the subject of Spike Jonze I find myself almost equally stumped for words. Jonze has impeccable camera technique, but he seems too willing to sink into the woodwork. There's something introverted about his directing; he lacks the boldness of a real cinematic artist, and this is why his movies seem so concept-driven. Jonze and Kaufman are sneaky-smart hype-artists more than filmmakers; they've succeeded in constructing a wall of myth around themselves by pulling stunts like putting real people into their movies, or co-crediting their scripts to non-existent siblings. Adaptation has a lot going on in it and around it, but doesn't add up to very much at all.
Monster
(2003)
Aileen Wuornos, Misunderstood Homicidal Looney
31 January 2006
Monster, the life-story of murderous highway prostitute Aileen Wuornos, is the most disarming, sweet-natured movie about homicide you're ever going to see. The real Wuornos must've been the most abrasive, unpleasant person on the face of the earth, but in the hands of Patty Jenkins and Charlize Theron she's transformed into someone almost lovable, a sympathetic misfit who lets her dreams of prosperity carry her away. The naiveté of this conception is striking, and is the reason for the film's success as a personality piece.
What, anyway, would be the point of re-hashing all the tired Lecterian psycho-nonsense about serial killers? Most screenwriters fancy themselves experts on criminal pathology, but not Miss Patty, who views Wuornos' life not in psych 101 terms, but as an example of the warping of the American fabric. In the hands of Charlize Theron, an actress with a remarkable capacity for projecting toughness and vulnerability at the same time, Wuornos becomes a feminist anti-heroine, a Thelma or Louise with the gloves off. Wuornos kills because society has screwed her out of the good-life, and because the johns who become her victims are mostly rats.
It's astonishing how much crap the movie gets away with, and the credit goes largely to Charlize, who projects the radiance of a fallen angel through all her prosthetic make-up. The physical transformation is only the beginning of the performance; the ugly, life-battered surface of Wuornos is merely the shell of a soft, sensitive, gooey creature. Charlize has more than make-up, dirty hair and thirty pounds of evenly-distributed weight going for her; she digs down into her soul, as they might say on Inside the Actors' Studio, and dredges up a whole lifetime's worth of pain and disappointment, capturing the hard-bitten defensiveness of a sad little waif grown into a furiously insecure wretch.
The word "pathos" is unavoidable when describing a scene like the one where Wuornos, decked-out in a suit donated to Goodwill by David Byrne, tries to get a job at a law-firm, and lashes out at the smug jerk who rejects her for such trifling things as having no education or experience. This stuff works because Theron's freakishness is so convincing, and because she plays the anger on the verge of caricature. It's a performance that lives on the edge of being over-the-top, but stays heroically true to the sympathetic-naive-sociological conception. It's a hell of a thing, the way Theron pushes herself deeper and deeper into craziness, and never makes a fool of herself.
Patty Jenkins has a legitimate feel for the tackiness of everyday reality (Solondz used Air Supply in Happiness and it was mocking; Jenkins uses Steve Perry and it's exhilarating). She sees Wuornos as both perpetrator and victim, and sets her ugly existence against the general ugliness of modern life. She gets from Christina Ricci a capable complimentary performance built mainly out of looking directly at things with alien-lost-on-a-distant-planet eyes. Whatever else the movie is, it's a story about two lonely weirdos finding each other, a kind of odd-ball tragic love-story with overtones of social commentary. It's heartfelt liberal claptrap, a gutsier piece of feminist myth-making than the hypey Thelma and Louise, and a more compelling argument for mercy than the didactic Dead Man Walking.
What, anyway, would be the point of re-hashing all the tired Lecterian psycho-nonsense about serial killers? Most screenwriters fancy themselves experts on criminal pathology, but not Miss Patty, who views Wuornos' life not in psych 101 terms, but as an example of the warping of the American fabric. In the hands of Charlize Theron, an actress with a remarkable capacity for projecting toughness and vulnerability at the same time, Wuornos becomes a feminist anti-heroine, a Thelma or Louise with the gloves off. Wuornos kills because society has screwed her out of the good-life, and because the johns who become her victims are mostly rats.
It's astonishing how much crap the movie gets away with, and the credit goes largely to Charlize, who projects the radiance of a fallen angel through all her prosthetic make-up. The physical transformation is only the beginning of the performance; the ugly, life-battered surface of Wuornos is merely the shell of a soft, sensitive, gooey creature. Charlize has more than make-up, dirty hair and thirty pounds of evenly-distributed weight going for her; she digs down into her soul, as they might say on Inside the Actors' Studio, and dredges up a whole lifetime's worth of pain and disappointment, capturing the hard-bitten defensiveness of a sad little waif grown into a furiously insecure wretch.
The word "pathos" is unavoidable when describing a scene like the one where Wuornos, decked-out in a suit donated to Goodwill by David Byrne, tries to get a job at a law-firm, and lashes out at the smug jerk who rejects her for such trifling things as having no education or experience. This stuff works because Theron's freakishness is so convincing, and because she plays the anger on the verge of caricature. It's a performance that lives on the edge of being over-the-top, but stays heroically true to the sympathetic-naive-sociological conception. It's a hell of a thing, the way Theron pushes herself deeper and deeper into craziness, and never makes a fool of herself.
Patty Jenkins has a legitimate feel for the tackiness of everyday reality (Solondz used Air Supply in Happiness and it was mocking; Jenkins uses Steve Perry and it's exhilarating). She sees Wuornos as both perpetrator and victim, and sets her ugly existence against the general ugliness of modern life. She gets from Christina Ricci a capable complimentary performance built mainly out of looking directly at things with alien-lost-on-a-distant-planet eyes. Whatever else the movie is, it's a story about two lonely weirdos finding each other, a kind of odd-ball tragic love-story with overtones of social commentary. It's heartfelt liberal claptrap, a gutsier piece of feminist myth-making than the hypey Thelma and Louise, and a more compelling argument for mercy than the didactic Dead Man Walking.
Brokeback Mountain
(2005)
Two Cowboys Plus One Mountain Equals...
31 January 2006
Brokeback Mountain is the extended communion of two strange, lonely, misfit souls. They meet outside a trailer in the dusty town of Signal, Wyoming circa 1962, both there looking for work; Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), a taciturn ranch-hand whose family was wiped out in a car-wreck, and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a faintly eccentric failed rodeo-rider. The gruff sheep-rancher Geary (Randy Quaid) gives them a job tending his flock over the summer; they head to the lonely heights of Brokeback Mountain to live with the wolves, the bears, the sudden hail-storms. Their shared solitude brings them closer than most men. Soon the job ends though, and it's back to their other lives: Ennis weds mousy Alma (Michelle Williams), fathers a couple of girls, discovers that married life ain't all it's cracked up to be; meanwhile Jack drifts back to Texas, tries the rodeo again and flops, meets a pretty young rider named Laureen (Anne Hathaway) whose father is a combine-salesman, marries her, settles into a life of semi-luxury. Neither man can get their summer together on Brokeback out of their minds. They meet for "fishing trips"; through the years they suffer their individual tribulations, seeking solace in each other's company, on the peaceful mountainside. United by inexpressible loneliness they drift through life, connected to no one really but each other, bound by their memory of that one summer, that unrecoverable bliss.
Ang Lee has fashioned a classic piece of Hollywood storytelling, and infused it with enough quiet, rustic poetry to distract one from the essential inconsequentiality of the characters. Lee has worked with life-sized characters before, in the Ice Storm, which dealt with a melancholy not unlike that which suffuses Brokeback Mountain, the sense of lives going nowhere, of yearnings impossible to express; here he trains his lens on a pair of nobodies whose only remarkable feature is their peculiar attachment to each other, and to the profound experience they once shared (that summer on Brokeback may have been the only time either of them ever really felt alive, at peace with themselves). The story amounts to a juxtaposition, the harmonious tranquility of Brokeback against the turmoil, confusion and unhappiness of domestic life. Lee never quite solves the problem of making this work; the mountain scenes have a spirituality to them that comes across more vividly than the banality of the characters' everyday lives. The characters feel at home up in the mountains, where the only threat is from nature, and the movie does too; they're much more uncertain at home, with their wives, their children, and the movie too seems awkward in these scenes, almost silly (a scene where Jack spars with his father-in-law at Thanksgiving dinner strikes a false note, and so do most of Ennis's scenes with Alma, where Michelle Williams comes across not long-suffering but merely petulant and immature). The movie seems to relax when it gets outside, seems to find its rhythm, but the necessity of condensing twenty years of living into a little over two hours forces on Lee a pace he doesn't seem comfortable with. The elegant construction of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been replaced by the choppy, time-skimming structure of the Larry McMurtry/Diana Ossana script, an expansion of an Annie Proulx short-story. The danger with this kind of story is that scenes which need to play on will feel truncated, that relationships will seem not fully fleshed-out, and this is exactly what happens to Brokeback Mountain. We get lots of Ennis and Jack together, especially in the first act, but little of Ennis and Alma beyond quarreling, and almost none of Jack and Laureen, who after meeting, marrying and having a kid barely share two words. There's a sense here of too much material being jammed into too small a space; the story might've resonated better had the different relationships gotten the same attention as the mountain scenes, or had they been excised altogether. The structure is limp, classical in the worst way, and only by an act of directorial will on Ang Lee's part does the whole shambling thing hold itself together.
Lee seems the perfect director to adapt Annie Proulx, whose stories often deal with misfit characters trying to find themselves; Lee has a handle on the turmoil wrought by frustrated passions (The Ice Storm is full of it), and a sense of wistfulness that can be quite haunting. He's also good at eliciting nuanced performances: in Brokeback he makes an actor out of pretty-boy Heath Ledger, who's good at talking through his teeth, and he makes fair use of Jake Gyllenhaal's natural weirdness, his oddly concave features, his suggestions of perversity. There's discretion to Lee's work, which is comforting given the nature of this story (an indiscreet director could've really butchered this, made it into some lame political statement). Lee brings a casualness to expansive material, a lack of epic pretense. Brokeback is no small-scale story masquerading as a neo-Western, no probing psychological piece, no treatise on behalf of certain groups. It's a solid, if unremarkable, piece of Hollywood storytelling, touching if not quite stirring, compelling if not quite memorable.
Ang Lee has fashioned a classic piece of Hollywood storytelling, and infused it with enough quiet, rustic poetry to distract one from the essential inconsequentiality of the characters. Lee has worked with life-sized characters before, in the Ice Storm, which dealt with a melancholy not unlike that which suffuses Brokeback Mountain, the sense of lives going nowhere, of yearnings impossible to express; here he trains his lens on a pair of nobodies whose only remarkable feature is their peculiar attachment to each other, and to the profound experience they once shared (that summer on Brokeback may have been the only time either of them ever really felt alive, at peace with themselves). The story amounts to a juxtaposition, the harmonious tranquility of Brokeback against the turmoil, confusion and unhappiness of domestic life. Lee never quite solves the problem of making this work; the mountain scenes have a spirituality to them that comes across more vividly than the banality of the characters' everyday lives. The characters feel at home up in the mountains, where the only threat is from nature, and the movie does too; they're much more uncertain at home, with their wives, their children, and the movie too seems awkward in these scenes, almost silly (a scene where Jack spars with his father-in-law at Thanksgiving dinner strikes a false note, and so do most of Ennis's scenes with Alma, where Michelle Williams comes across not long-suffering but merely petulant and immature). The movie seems to relax when it gets outside, seems to find its rhythm, but the necessity of condensing twenty years of living into a little over two hours forces on Lee a pace he doesn't seem comfortable with. The elegant construction of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been replaced by the choppy, time-skimming structure of the Larry McMurtry/Diana Ossana script, an expansion of an Annie Proulx short-story. The danger with this kind of story is that scenes which need to play on will feel truncated, that relationships will seem not fully fleshed-out, and this is exactly what happens to Brokeback Mountain. We get lots of Ennis and Jack together, especially in the first act, but little of Ennis and Alma beyond quarreling, and almost none of Jack and Laureen, who after meeting, marrying and having a kid barely share two words. There's a sense here of too much material being jammed into too small a space; the story might've resonated better had the different relationships gotten the same attention as the mountain scenes, or had they been excised altogether. The structure is limp, classical in the worst way, and only by an act of directorial will on Ang Lee's part does the whole shambling thing hold itself together.
Lee seems the perfect director to adapt Annie Proulx, whose stories often deal with misfit characters trying to find themselves; Lee has a handle on the turmoil wrought by frustrated passions (The Ice Storm is full of it), and a sense of wistfulness that can be quite haunting. He's also good at eliciting nuanced performances: in Brokeback he makes an actor out of pretty-boy Heath Ledger, who's good at talking through his teeth, and he makes fair use of Jake Gyllenhaal's natural weirdness, his oddly concave features, his suggestions of perversity. There's discretion to Lee's work, which is comforting given the nature of this story (an indiscreet director could've really butchered this, made it into some lame political statement). Lee brings a casualness to expansive material, a lack of epic pretense. Brokeback is no small-scale story masquerading as a neo-Western, no probing psychological piece, no treatise on behalf of certain groups. It's a solid, if unremarkable, piece of Hollywood storytelling, touching if not quite stirring, compelling if not quite memorable.
Grace From Gracelessness
29 January 2006
The Beat That My Heart Skipped has the pulse of a major film, a certain energy that pulls you in, makes you interested in what it's doing. Its director, Jacques Audiard, gives one the impression that his is a big-league talent; there's a hum to his images that recalls Inarritu, without quite the same manic intensity, and for a brief moment or two puts one in mind of Scorsese, particularly GoodFellas (an early bar-fight scene recalls the dreamy, fixed-in-time feeling of some of Scorsese's violence). His lead actor, Romain Duris, has something of the young De Niro's quality of pent-up violence and greasy charm, but leavened by a more intellectual, less visceral Europeanness. Like Scorsese and De Niro in Taxi Driver, Audiard and Duris conspire to create a memorable study of a low-life seeking to emerge from the slime, though this time the low-life is armed with talent and confidence, and seems maybe capable of turning his dire situation around.
The low-life, Thomas Seyr, is a real-estate broker who's involved in all sorts of shady business deals; he and his slimy partners, Fabrice (Jonathan Zaccai) and Sami (Gilles Cohen), spend much of their time chasing squatters out of the buildings they've procured (planting rats in their room is a favorite tactic), and trying to work their way around government housing regulations (when a group of homeless come to take up residence in one of their tenements they hurriedly smash everything, rendering the rooms uninhabitable; the script seems to be taking advantage of certain sore social issues here). Thomas, a button-man who happens to sometimes work in an office, was born to this kind of work; his father, Robert (the marvelous Niels Arestrup), is also involved in less-than-legitimate enterprise, and sometimes calls upon Thomas to take care of unpleasant business (like beating people up who refuse to pay). Thomas, however, has an unexpected artistic side; his deceased mother was a concert pianist, and one day while driving around the city he encounters her old manager, Fox (Sandy Whitelaw), who encourages him to return to his study of the piano, which he has nearly given up. This awakens in Thomas some latent ambition, a desire to escape his sleazy circumstances; he re-commits himself to his art, which leads him to the door of a recent Chinese immigrant, Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham), who tutors him, somewhat awkwardly as she speaks no French and he no Chinese. Thomas's less-than-honest life has saddled him with numerous obligations however, ones it will be difficult to leave behind.
The movie's theme is a familiar one: the impossibility of entirely escaping one's past, especially when one is still actively engaged in living the life that has caused one to have a shady past in the first place. Rather than deal with this in some abstract way, Audiard tackles the theme organically; we see what a bundle of unspent nervous energy Thomas is, and realize how his essential personality, his craziness, is the thing that really keeps him from being a pianist instead of a thug. This is not a story of fate being for or against anyone; it's not some cosmic force that keeps Thomas from leaving behind his old life but his own nature, and that of the people around him, especially his father, who is fundamentally a coward and needs Thomas to take care of things for him. Thomas's artistic endeavors are hindered by his inability to focus himself; he can't sit still for a second, and when he plays, the frustration drives him to hammer the keys like he should be able to beat a tune out of the instrument the same way he beats money out of people who owe. His personality is all jagged edges, and what he needs is to smooth them out, to reign in his impulses, his anger. This makes his introduction to Miao Lin all the more fortunate, for she has the patience of a saint, the quiet firmness needed to help tame his immature nature, to bring his fires under control. Romain Duris gives a live-wire performance as Thomas, something reminiscent of the Mean Streets De Niro, and that other great seventies sleaze-ball actor Warren Oates. He's basically an overgrown kid; he seems like his system is always pumped full of sugar (or maybe something stronger), and he has no inhibitions whatsoever which makes him a kick to be around, yet there's something doomed about him, the quality of a ticking time-bomb. Thomas might be a fun guy and a loyal friend (his loyalty is one of his failings), but you just know that sooner or later life is going to blow up in his face.
Audiard and writing partner Tonino Benacquista have smoothly transplanted the plot of James Toback's '70s cult item Fingers (which starred Harvey Keitel), and tweaked it to make it work in modern-day France. The pair seem to have an affinity for rough-edged-but-lovable characters coming under the influence of tender-but-firm women; their earlier film, Read My Lips, dealt with a similar situation, but was more straightforwardly a thriller, and didn't seem as refined either narratively or thematically as The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Audiard is a fantastically assured director, able to infuse a scene with energy without resorting to empty stylistics, and able to elicit dynamic performances that never edge into showiness. Audiard has a feel for the natural energies his actors give off; he taps into Duris's nervous charm, the nagging inadequacy of Niels Arestrup as Thomas's nuisance of a father, the radiant stillness of Linh Dan Pham as Miao Lin. This is one director who makes good movie-making seem easy, rather than making it seem hard on purpose so people will appreciate it more. Add Audiard to the list of modern directors whose next film is a must-see
The low-life, Thomas Seyr, is a real-estate broker who's involved in all sorts of shady business deals; he and his slimy partners, Fabrice (Jonathan Zaccai) and Sami (Gilles Cohen), spend much of their time chasing squatters out of the buildings they've procured (planting rats in their room is a favorite tactic), and trying to work their way around government housing regulations (when a group of homeless come to take up residence in one of their tenements they hurriedly smash everything, rendering the rooms uninhabitable; the script seems to be taking advantage of certain sore social issues here). Thomas, a button-man who happens to sometimes work in an office, was born to this kind of work; his father, Robert (the marvelous Niels Arestrup), is also involved in less-than-legitimate enterprise, and sometimes calls upon Thomas to take care of unpleasant business (like beating people up who refuse to pay). Thomas, however, has an unexpected artistic side; his deceased mother was a concert pianist, and one day while driving around the city he encounters her old manager, Fox (Sandy Whitelaw), who encourages him to return to his study of the piano, which he has nearly given up. This awakens in Thomas some latent ambition, a desire to escape his sleazy circumstances; he re-commits himself to his art, which leads him to the door of a recent Chinese immigrant, Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham), who tutors him, somewhat awkwardly as she speaks no French and he no Chinese. Thomas's less-than-honest life has saddled him with numerous obligations however, ones it will be difficult to leave behind.
The movie's theme is a familiar one: the impossibility of entirely escaping one's past, especially when one is still actively engaged in living the life that has caused one to have a shady past in the first place. Rather than deal with this in some abstract way, Audiard tackles the theme organically; we see what a bundle of unspent nervous energy Thomas is, and realize how his essential personality, his craziness, is the thing that really keeps him from being a pianist instead of a thug. This is not a story of fate being for or against anyone; it's not some cosmic force that keeps Thomas from leaving behind his old life but his own nature, and that of the people around him, especially his father, who is fundamentally a coward and needs Thomas to take care of things for him. Thomas's artistic endeavors are hindered by his inability to focus himself; he can't sit still for a second, and when he plays, the frustration drives him to hammer the keys like he should be able to beat a tune out of the instrument the same way he beats money out of people who owe. His personality is all jagged edges, and what he needs is to smooth them out, to reign in his impulses, his anger. This makes his introduction to Miao Lin all the more fortunate, for she has the patience of a saint, the quiet firmness needed to help tame his immature nature, to bring his fires under control. Romain Duris gives a live-wire performance as Thomas, something reminiscent of the Mean Streets De Niro, and that other great seventies sleaze-ball actor Warren Oates. He's basically an overgrown kid; he seems like his system is always pumped full of sugar (or maybe something stronger), and he has no inhibitions whatsoever which makes him a kick to be around, yet there's something doomed about him, the quality of a ticking time-bomb. Thomas might be a fun guy and a loyal friend (his loyalty is one of his failings), but you just know that sooner or later life is going to blow up in his face.
Audiard and writing partner Tonino Benacquista have smoothly transplanted the plot of James Toback's '70s cult item Fingers (which starred Harvey Keitel), and tweaked it to make it work in modern-day France. The pair seem to have an affinity for rough-edged-but-lovable characters coming under the influence of tender-but-firm women; their earlier film, Read My Lips, dealt with a similar situation, but was more straightforwardly a thriller, and didn't seem as refined either narratively or thematically as The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Audiard is a fantastically assured director, able to infuse a scene with energy without resorting to empty stylistics, and able to elicit dynamic performances that never edge into showiness. Audiard has a feel for the natural energies his actors give off; he taps into Duris's nervous charm, the nagging inadequacy of Niels Arestrup as Thomas's nuisance of a father, the radiant stillness of Linh Dan Pham as Miao Lin. This is one director who makes good movie-making seem easy, rather than making it seem hard on purpose so people will appreciate it more. Add Audiard to the list of modern directors whose next film is a must-see
Parineeta
(2005)
Pretty But Tame Bollywood Hokum
25 January 2006
A new restraint may be creeping into Bollywood, if movies like Parineeta are any indication. This may be good news for those who think it's high time the Indian film industry "grew-up," but for anyone who likes the pretty soap opera fluff Bollywood has been churning out for decades, who finds it a reasonable substitute for real Hollywood melodrama, which of course no longer exists, this may not be a welcome development. Some may laugh at perfectly-timed, punctuative thunder-claps (always going off at particularly dramatic moments in the story), might think them quaint, but those who appreciate a good overwrought extravaganza, filled with silly devices, absurdly convenient turns-of-plot and hammy histrionics, can only be disheartened at this apparent rejection of classic form in favor of a more modern, less over-the-top approach.
Of course "restraint" is a relative term; Parineeta may be less hysterical, less willing to aim for the melodramatic moon than Bollywood movies have traditionally been, but it still has its cornball charms. The plot, culled from a famed novel by Saratchandra Chatterjee, is classic Bollywood: Shekhar (Saif Ali Khan) and Lolita (Vidya Balan) have been sweethearts since childhood, he living with his wealthy parents and she with her adoptive middle-class family next door. A dark cloud hangs over their budding romance in the form of a family debt; Lolita's adoptive father Gurucharan (Achyut Potdar) owes Shekhar's father, ruthless business-man Nabin Roy (Sabyasachi Chakravarthy), money, and if the debt isn't paid Gurucharan's lavish ancestral home will be taken away and turned into a hotel. Help arrives in the form of Girish Babu (Sanjay Dutt), a wealthy relative of a family friend, who agrees to pay the debt, presumably in return for Lolita's hand in marriage; this inflames Shekhar's jealousies, pushing him closer to the woman, Gayatri (Aishwarya Rai look-alike Diya Mirza), chosen for him by his family over the undesirable Lolita. It's the kind of situation that would easily resolve itself if the characters just slowed down and thought about things, but of course, in Bollywood, rash over-reaction is the order of the day. There's nothing more predictable than this kind of melodramatic plot, and of course that is the entire point. One doesn't watch Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner hoping that, for once, Wile E. WON'T fall off the cliff; one EXPECTS him to fall off the cliff, WANTS him to fall off the cliff. And one watches a film like Parineeta wanting, indeed expecting, more-or-less the same thing, people flying over figurative cliffs in the name of love, pride and family honor.
The elements are all there - the romance between people from different classes, the misunderstandings leading to crazed, self-destructive acts, the family loyalties in whose name one's desires must be set aside - but the heat isn't turned all the way up, the movie never achieves the level of hysteria one has become accustomed to. Director Pradeep Sarkar remains faithful to the conventions of Indian melodrama while demonstrating a certain unwillingness to cut things all the way loose. The problem with Parineeta is that we halfway believe what we're seeing; the movie veers a little too close to actual psychological realism for it to work as a full-on musical soap opera in the great Bollywood tradition. There's nothing more toxic to melodrama than naturalism; what killed the Hollywood soap opera wasn't changing audience tastes but changing directorial and acting ones, and the same thing may be happening in India now. When Hollywood threw off the old-fashioned theatricality and started striving for "honesty" and "truth," that was when the classic dramatic forms, which had sustained the industry from the days of Griffith on through Sirk, started falling by the wayside. You can't buy melodrama if the actors playing it aren't willing to stretch toward caricature, and if the directors staging it aren't willing to let it all hang out. The new directors, like Sarkar, seem to be hedging their bets; they want to play to the galleries, but may have begun thinking that the old Bollywood forms are out-moded, that what once made for great spectacle is now corny, and that the only way to protect themselves is by holding back. Bollywood directors, and young actors like Saif Ali Khan, may be ready for more realistic, daring material, but the stories they're getting are the same old fluff, and the only choice they have is to compromise, to play the game the same way it's always been played but without the same gusto, the same commitment. The result is something that looks like Bollywood and sometimes feels like Bollywood, but just seems watered-down.
There are things to enjoy about Parineeta even if it doesn't live up to the usual Bollywood standard. There's a marvelous performance by the understatedly commanding Sanjay Dutt as Girish, the classic good guy stuck in an uncomfortable position (the guy the girl should love but doesn't). There's a fabulous musical number set in a 1960s nightclub featuring the sultry Rekha (it's the only memorable number in the movie; Sarkar also seems less-than-enthused about musical staging, which seems almost sacrilegious). There's the assurance of Saif Ali Khan as the romantic lead, the musician Shekhar, and there's the moist-eyed beauty of Vidya Balan as Lolita the orphan girl. One wishes it all came together better, was pushed through with a little more force, a little more enthusiasm. Parineeta is accomplished but tame.
Of course "restraint" is a relative term; Parineeta may be less hysterical, less willing to aim for the melodramatic moon than Bollywood movies have traditionally been, but it still has its cornball charms. The plot, culled from a famed novel by Saratchandra Chatterjee, is classic Bollywood: Shekhar (Saif Ali Khan) and Lolita (Vidya Balan) have been sweethearts since childhood, he living with his wealthy parents and she with her adoptive middle-class family next door. A dark cloud hangs over their budding romance in the form of a family debt; Lolita's adoptive father Gurucharan (Achyut Potdar) owes Shekhar's father, ruthless business-man Nabin Roy (Sabyasachi Chakravarthy), money, and if the debt isn't paid Gurucharan's lavish ancestral home will be taken away and turned into a hotel. Help arrives in the form of Girish Babu (Sanjay Dutt), a wealthy relative of a family friend, who agrees to pay the debt, presumably in return for Lolita's hand in marriage; this inflames Shekhar's jealousies, pushing him closer to the woman, Gayatri (Aishwarya Rai look-alike Diya Mirza), chosen for him by his family over the undesirable Lolita. It's the kind of situation that would easily resolve itself if the characters just slowed down and thought about things, but of course, in Bollywood, rash over-reaction is the order of the day. There's nothing more predictable than this kind of melodramatic plot, and of course that is the entire point. One doesn't watch Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner hoping that, for once, Wile E. WON'T fall off the cliff; one EXPECTS him to fall off the cliff, WANTS him to fall off the cliff. And one watches a film like Parineeta wanting, indeed expecting, more-or-less the same thing, people flying over figurative cliffs in the name of love, pride and family honor.
The elements are all there - the romance between people from different classes, the misunderstandings leading to crazed, self-destructive acts, the family loyalties in whose name one's desires must be set aside - but the heat isn't turned all the way up, the movie never achieves the level of hysteria one has become accustomed to. Director Pradeep Sarkar remains faithful to the conventions of Indian melodrama while demonstrating a certain unwillingness to cut things all the way loose. The problem with Parineeta is that we halfway believe what we're seeing; the movie veers a little too close to actual psychological realism for it to work as a full-on musical soap opera in the great Bollywood tradition. There's nothing more toxic to melodrama than naturalism; what killed the Hollywood soap opera wasn't changing audience tastes but changing directorial and acting ones, and the same thing may be happening in India now. When Hollywood threw off the old-fashioned theatricality and started striving for "honesty" and "truth," that was when the classic dramatic forms, which had sustained the industry from the days of Griffith on through Sirk, started falling by the wayside. You can't buy melodrama if the actors playing it aren't willing to stretch toward caricature, and if the directors staging it aren't willing to let it all hang out. The new directors, like Sarkar, seem to be hedging their bets; they want to play to the galleries, but may have begun thinking that the old Bollywood forms are out-moded, that what once made for great spectacle is now corny, and that the only way to protect themselves is by holding back. Bollywood directors, and young actors like Saif Ali Khan, may be ready for more realistic, daring material, but the stories they're getting are the same old fluff, and the only choice they have is to compromise, to play the game the same way it's always been played but without the same gusto, the same commitment. The result is something that looks like Bollywood and sometimes feels like Bollywood, but just seems watered-down.
There are things to enjoy about Parineeta even if it doesn't live up to the usual Bollywood standard. There's a marvelous performance by the understatedly commanding Sanjay Dutt as Girish, the classic good guy stuck in an uncomfortable position (the guy the girl should love but doesn't). There's a fabulous musical number set in a 1960s nightclub featuring the sultry Rekha (it's the only memorable number in the movie; Sarkar also seems less-than-enthused about musical staging, which seems almost sacrilegious). There's the assurance of Saif Ali Khan as the romantic lead, the musician Shekhar, and there's the moist-eyed beauty of Vidya Balan as Lolita the orphan girl. One wishes it all came together better, was pushed through with a little more force, a little more enthusiasm. Parineeta is accomplished but tame.
Look at Me
(2004)
A Well-Balanced Comedy of Character (and the Occasional Lack Thereof)
21 January 2006
Agnes Jaoui's Look at Me is an almost perfectly-pitched comic character study, a nimble, amusing and thoughtful portrait of flawed people and their unlikely relationships. The principals form their attachments through a combination of accident and ambition: Lolita (Marilou Berry), the daughter of famous writer Etienne Cassard (Jean-Pierre Bacri), seeks the aid of an overworked music teacher, Sylvia (Agnes Jaoui), in rehearsing her chorale group for an up-coming performance. Sylvia has no interest in helping Lolita, whom she considers a bit of a pest, until realizing who Lolita's father is; wishing to meet the famous Cassard, who might be able to help her struggling-writer husband Pierre's (Laurent Grevill) career, Sylvia agrees to coach the ensemble. Cassard, taken with Sylvia and Pierre, helps the fledgling author; a rave article appears in a big newspaper, and Pierre is on his way to fame and fortune. Things come to a head, however, during one of those beloved French weekends in the country (where would French cinema be without weekends in the country): Cassard demonstrates himself to be a jerk by dressing-down his young, attractive wife Karine (Virginie Desarnauts) in front of everyone; Lolita realizes that her boyfriend Mathieu (Julien Baumgartner) is only interested in her because she's the daughter of the famous Cassard; Sylvia realizes what a jerk SHE is for trying to use poor Lolita, etc., The central character, Lolita, has the misfortune of being the off-spring of a famous man; she seems doomed always to exist in his shadow, to fail in every effort to gain attention for herself (to get someone to look at her). She's overweight, and chatters incessantly, and puts inordinate pressure on herself, but Agnes Jaoui has not conceived her as a poor, downtrodden victim; instead Jaoui has made her as self-absorbed as her father, as desperate for validation, creating a dynamic between them that feels wholly convincing, the friction that always exists between family members who are more alike than they would care to admit. The other important relationship is that of Sylvia to Pierre; Sylvia seems a woman of integrity, despite her rather shameless use of Lolita to gain entrée into Cassard's circle, but Pierre, after years of struggle, seems all-too-willing to toss his principles out the window in the name of success (he appears on a ridiculous talk-show, confetti raining on his head and half-naked girls grinding in his face; Sylvia can only sit on the sofa and stare in astonishment at what her husband has gotten himself into). Jaoui's intent is to delineate these characters precisely, to sketch as minutely as possible their motives, to map out their inter-relationships. And she achieves this, without apparent detriment to the narrative which moves briskly and confidently, and with the aid of several excellent performers. Marilou Berry is both sunny and gloomy as Lolita; she has her moments of self-doubt, almost of depression, but is too fundamentally driven, too stubborn, to allow her disappointments to stop her. Her father, Cassard, is played by Jean-Pierre Bacri as a man who has bought into his own hype so completely that he's forgotten he was ever anyone other than the eminent personage he's become (he's forgotten what it was like to be young and insecure like Lolita, and behaves thoughtlessly toward her). As Sylvia, Agnes Jaoui finds a sort of middle-ground between Lolita's self-doubt and Cassard's arrogance; and as her confused husband Pierre, Laurent Grevill projects the right kind of blandness alongside the dynamic Cassard, whom he idolizes but doesn't measure up to (Cassard may be a creep, but he wouldn't be caught dead on a dumb TV show). Jaoui orchestrates the comedy proficiently, eliciting performances that strike a nice balance between comic mannerism and naturalistic credibility (Bacri is especially strong, playing Cassard with an array of tellingly affected gestures while maintaining an undertone of quiet befuddlement). The one word that sums up the movie is "balance": balance between comic intention and essential believability, bitterness and reconciliation, ambition and empathy, intimacy and discretion.
An Eccentric View of Relationship Anxiety
17 January 2006
Me and You and Everyone We Know is one of those movies, like Ghost World or Garden State, that seeks to view everyday life through a gently warped prism. The characters are presented as ordinary people, but the point-of-view is faintly twisted, and the feeling we get is of weird spiritual undercurrents flowing beneath the deceptively plain, work-a-day exterior, of small things taking on a larger, vaguely mysterious significance.
The principals are a pair of hopeless lonely-hearts: Richard (John Hawkes), a shoe-salesman who has recently separated from his wife, and Christine (Miranda July), a goof-ball visual artist who makes her living driving old people around town (she only seems to have one client though, a nice old fellow named Michael). It could be a match made in heaven, but first they have to break out of their own particular malaises. Writer/director Miranda July views her characters as people hovering on the precipice of some major life-change, who just need a little nudge to go howling over the edge. Christine, the artist, is certainly ready for an adjustment of circumstances; she tries submitting her nutty audio-visual art-works, little one-woman plays about the difficulties of romance she video-tapes, to a local museum, and busies herself in the meantime worming her way none-too-delicately into Richard's life (she stakes out the shoe-store, then brazenly climbs into his car). The problem is that Richard, still traumatized at being separated, is not quite ready to accept her. Desperate for acknowledgment from his ineffectual wife Pam and inattentive kids Robby and Peter, Richard douses his own hand with lighter fluid and sets it on fire. The damaged hand thereafter becomes a metaphor for Richard's wounded heart, which is just waiting for the bandages to be removed.
The movie has the quality of something that's been lived with for a long time; you get the feeling that Miranda July has been thinking about these characters and situations for years, and has honed her ideas to a fine edge. The result is a certain narrative and thematic confidence: the story builds logically, almost systematically, and the themes seem to spring from the situations without July having to worry them to life. This outward self-assurance is contrasted by the nervousness that suffuses the film, the sense of modern life as a perilous proposition. The film's essential character is best embodied by Christine, who is simultaneously bold and self-doubting. July plays her as a sweet, thoughtful kook whose aspirations force her to overcome her guardedness, her fear of screwing up. This is doubtless autobiographical, but July deserves credit for not lingering in typical self-absorbed indie fashion on her own hang-ups, and for at least attempting to branch out into more ambitious, all-encompassing thematic territory. Though the film revolves mainly around Richard and Christine, it's really an ensemble piece (me and you and EVERYONE we know). July peers into the lives of her characters and discovers an assortment of quirks, proclivities and obsessions (the funniest instance: a young girl named Sylvie who eschews normal pre-pubescent fascinations in favor of filling a hope-chest with appliances). Some of what July uncovers is a tad on the dark side (the exchanges between Richard's little son Robby and an anonymous chat-room sleaze are uncomfortable yet hilarious, and the punch-line is priceless), but she doesn't go for particularly dark shadings. The tone she achieves is a fragile one, nothing like the mocking heaviness of Todd Solondz, another director who seeks to view real life through a distorting lens. The difference is in the level of distortion; Solondz wants freakishness, where July is content with gentle eccentricity.
That gentle eccentricity is the movie's long-suit; it's a soft-sell picture, none of your high-toned pontification, and none of your cheap melodrama dressed up with indie earnestness. There are times when its quirky, faintly ironic sense of humor falls flat (the scene where Christine worries inordinately over the fate of a goldfish happens before we realize where the movie's coming from, and just seems stupid), and its dialogue is sometimes trite, but July is so sure of where she wants to take it that it eventually collects itself, and the early sense of scattered energy dissipates. It might be a bit too cute, too neat in the way things resolve, but it has such a singular personality, such a unique sense of what it feels like to live in the modern world, that it overcomes its not inconsiderable faults, and leaves a definite impression.
The principals are a pair of hopeless lonely-hearts: Richard (John Hawkes), a shoe-salesman who has recently separated from his wife, and Christine (Miranda July), a goof-ball visual artist who makes her living driving old people around town (she only seems to have one client though, a nice old fellow named Michael). It could be a match made in heaven, but first they have to break out of their own particular malaises. Writer/director Miranda July views her characters as people hovering on the precipice of some major life-change, who just need a little nudge to go howling over the edge. Christine, the artist, is certainly ready for an adjustment of circumstances; she tries submitting her nutty audio-visual art-works, little one-woman plays about the difficulties of romance she video-tapes, to a local museum, and busies herself in the meantime worming her way none-too-delicately into Richard's life (she stakes out the shoe-store, then brazenly climbs into his car). The problem is that Richard, still traumatized at being separated, is not quite ready to accept her. Desperate for acknowledgment from his ineffectual wife Pam and inattentive kids Robby and Peter, Richard douses his own hand with lighter fluid and sets it on fire. The damaged hand thereafter becomes a metaphor for Richard's wounded heart, which is just waiting for the bandages to be removed.
The movie has the quality of something that's been lived with for a long time; you get the feeling that Miranda July has been thinking about these characters and situations for years, and has honed her ideas to a fine edge. The result is a certain narrative and thematic confidence: the story builds logically, almost systematically, and the themes seem to spring from the situations without July having to worry them to life. This outward self-assurance is contrasted by the nervousness that suffuses the film, the sense of modern life as a perilous proposition. The film's essential character is best embodied by Christine, who is simultaneously bold and self-doubting. July plays her as a sweet, thoughtful kook whose aspirations force her to overcome her guardedness, her fear of screwing up. This is doubtless autobiographical, but July deserves credit for not lingering in typical self-absorbed indie fashion on her own hang-ups, and for at least attempting to branch out into more ambitious, all-encompassing thematic territory. Though the film revolves mainly around Richard and Christine, it's really an ensemble piece (me and you and EVERYONE we know). July peers into the lives of her characters and discovers an assortment of quirks, proclivities and obsessions (the funniest instance: a young girl named Sylvie who eschews normal pre-pubescent fascinations in favor of filling a hope-chest with appliances). Some of what July uncovers is a tad on the dark side (the exchanges between Richard's little son Robby and an anonymous chat-room sleaze are uncomfortable yet hilarious, and the punch-line is priceless), but she doesn't go for particularly dark shadings. The tone she achieves is a fragile one, nothing like the mocking heaviness of Todd Solondz, another director who seeks to view real life through a distorting lens. The difference is in the level of distortion; Solondz wants freakishness, where July is content with gentle eccentricity.
That gentle eccentricity is the movie's long-suit; it's a soft-sell picture, none of your high-toned pontification, and none of your cheap melodrama dressed up with indie earnestness. There are times when its quirky, faintly ironic sense of humor falls flat (the scene where Christine worries inordinately over the fate of a goldfish happens before we realize where the movie's coming from, and just seems stupid), and its dialogue is sometimes trite, but July is so sure of where she wants to take it that it eventually collects itself, and the early sense of scattered energy dissipates. It might be a bit too cute, too neat in the way things resolve, but it has such a singular personality, such a unique sense of what it feels like to live in the modern world, that it overcomes its not inconsiderable faults, and leaves a definite impression.
Ma mère
(2004)
Huppert Hopeless, Honore Clueless, Viewer Listless
12 January 2006
Christophe Honore's Ma Mere is bad in so many different ways that it's hard to know where to begin. Should one turn one's attention first to the meandering, shapeless script, the tone-deaf direction or the grating, off-key, at times humiliating performances? Perhaps we should start with the movie's sole recognizable performer, the great Isabelle Huppert. We should begin by asking why a performer of Ms. Huppert's stature would allow herself to become involved in a project such as this. Assuming Ms. Huppert is possessed of at least some taste regarding the material she considers (not a stretch given the number of good movies she's been in), one has to wonder what she might've seen in Mr. Honore's conception that convinced her to get mixed up with him in the first place. Did some kind of snow-job take place? Did Honore hoodwink Huppert into starring in his movie? Or is there something in this kind of allegedly dark, controversial material that simply appeals to Ms. Huppert, so strongly that she saw only the opportunity to add another daring, attention-grabbing performance to her already thick resume, and missed the fact that the director has nothing really to say, and is only interested in being transgressive in that particular art-house way that involves being deadly serious about the kind of material your average pornographer would consider nothing spectacular?
The eternally enigmatic red-head expends her gifts this time upon the role of Helene, a "free-spirited" woman living in the Canary Islands with her husband, a paralytically repressed fellow identified only as The Father (Phillipe Duclos, comically freakish). The story begins with the arrival of Helene's son Pierre (Louis Garrell, vaguely psychotic) to the island villa; Pierre has just gotten out of boarding school, and seems less-than-enthused about being reunited with his parents, whose relationship is not what you would call warm. A few awkward scenes hence The Father dies (off-screen, the film's sole concession to good taste), leaving Helene and Pierre less-than-aggrieved; in fact they could care less about the expiration of the late, lamented The Father, who was nothing but a gog-eyed, mawkish drag with a study full of porno. Helene, a dedicated hedonist, decides to indoctrinate Pierre, a confused young man caught between his budding desires and his faith, into the ways of carnal pleasure. She introduces him to her friend Rea (Joana Preiss), a naughty girl who makes out with his mother in front of him, and talks without apparent embarrassment about licking out his poop-chute. This proves that Rea is a wild chick. Pierre is smitten by her enough to engage in public intercourse with her, but some deep well of guilt or something causes him to go a little cuckoo after their encounter; he winds up in the desert some place, posing in the sand like a Pasolini character and wailing about God. It's actually sort of fascinating, watching the movie degenerate from normal stupidity into the extraordinary kind. At first it's only annoyingly cryptic, the way the characters never have normal conversations with each other, and seldom behave in a recognizably human manner, then the scene in the back of the car happens, when Rea sticks her finger up Pierre's butt so everyone can smell it, and after that it's a quick descent into mindless pseudo-profundity masquerading as envelope-pushing cinema.
The film earns a spot in the bad-art-film hall-of-fame alongside such high-toned stinkers as Pola X, Skolimowski's The Shout and Peter Weir's unconscionably over-rated Picnic at Hanging Rock. The above-listed films, and Ma Mere, share in common a certain symbolist pretension, the tendency to reach for big philosophical effects at the expense of naturalism, or even basic psychological or behavioral credibility. Ma Mere, to put it simply, fails the smell-test. There isn't a moment in the film that rings true, a character that seems patterned after any human being that ever lived, an idea that doesn't seem hopelessly muddled. Honore has gone at his story, culled from a novel by Georges Bataille, from the top down, not bothering with the emotions, the psychic turmoil at the heart of the characters' inscrutable actions, but going straight for Big Ideas about sex, death, pain, God and all those other juicy things. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock it is a film over-burdened with portent, and one so unconvincing on a basic human level that its higher ambitions fail to resonate, leaving it seeming stilted and hollow. Unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock, Honore's film provides us no imagist thrills, no suspense, nothing to distract us from our nagging boredom at the director's finger-twiddling. Honore has no particular tonal command, no way with images, nothing to rescue him from his own bad ideas. He's hopeless with actors, even managing to make Isabelle Huppert seem clueless. Idea-wise he seems non-committal, unable to decide if hedonism is bad for people, or good for them, if his characters are doomed or merely floundering. His spatial sense is inconsistent; he wants to be edgy and spontaneous at one moment, then wants to be more formal and mannered, and sometimes lapses into a bad impersonation of Pasolini's sun-baked savagery, the sense of huge physical and philosophical spaces. None of it works.
The eternally enigmatic red-head expends her gifts this time upon the role of Helene, a "free-spirited" woman living in the Canary Islands with her husband, a paralytically repressed fellow identified only as The Father (Phillipe Duclos, comically freakish). The story begins with the arrival of Helene's son Pierre (Louis Garrell, vaguely psychotic) to the island villa; Pierre has just gotten out of boarding school, and seems less-than-enthused about being reunited with his parents, whose relationship is not what you would call warm. A few awkward scenes hence The Father dies (off-screen, the film's sole concession to good taste), leaving Helene and Pierre less-than-aggrieved; in fact they could care less about the expiration of the late, lamented The Father, who was nothing but a gog-eyed, mawkish drag with a study full of porno. Helene, a dedicated hedonist, decides to indoctrinate Pierre, a confused young man caught between his budding desires and his faith, into the ways of carnal pleasure. She introduces him to her friend Rea (Joana Preiss), a naughty girl who makes out with his mother in front of him, and talks without apparent embarrassment about licking out his poop-chute. This proves that Rea is a wild chick. Pierre is smitten by her enough to engage in public intercourse with her, but some deep well of guilt or something causes him to go a little cuckoo after their encounter; he winds up in the desert some place, posing in the sand like a Pasolini character and wailing about God. It's actually sort of fascinating, watching the movie degenerate from normal stupidity into the extraordinary kind. At first it's only annoyingly cryptic, the way the characters never have normal conversations with each other, and seldom behave in a recognizably human manner, then the scene in the back of the car happens, when Rea sticks her finger up Pierre's butt so everyone can smell it, and after that it's a quick descent into mindless pseudo-profundity masquerading as envelope-pushing cinema.
The film earns a spot in the bad-art-film hall-of-fame alongside such high-toned stinkers as Pola X, Skolimowski's The Shout and Peter Weir's unconscionably over-rated Picnic at Hanging Rock. The above-listed films, and Ma Mere, share in common a certain symbolist pretension, the tendency to reach for big philosophical effects at the expense of naturalism, or even basic psychological or behavioral credibility. Ma Mere, to put it simply, fails the smell-test. There isn't a moment in the film that rings true, a character that seems patterned after any human being that ever lived, an idea that doesn't seem hopelessly muddled. Honore has gone at his story, culled from a novel by Georges Bataille, from the top down, not bothering with the emotions, the psychic turmoil at the heart of the characters' inscrutable actions, but going straight for Big Ideas about sex, death, pain, God and all those other juicy things. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock it is a film over-burdened with portent, and one so unconvincing on a basic human level that its higher ambitions fail to resonate, leaving it seeming stilted and hollow. Unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock, Honore's film provides us no imagist thrills, no suspense, nothing to distract us from our nagging boredom at the director's finger-twiddling. Honore has no particular tonal command, no way with images, nothing to rescue him from his own bad ideas. He's hopeless with actors, even managing to make Isabelle Huppert seem clueless. Idea-wise he seems non-committal, unable to decide if hedonism is bad for people, or good for them, if his characters are doomed or merely floundering. His spatial sense is inconsistent; he wants to be edgy and spontaneous at one moment, then wants to be more formal and mannered, and sometimes lapses into a bad impersonation of Pasolini's sun-baked savagery, the sense of huge physical and philosophical spaces. None of it works.
The White Diamond
(2004)
Dreamer Herzog's Portrait of a Dreamer
31 December 2005
The dream of flight is the dream of being one with the birds, one with Nature. To break gravity's hold means to escape human limitation, to transcend the banal and achieve a purer, lighter, truer existence. Such is the goal of people like Graham Dorrington, the subject of Werner Herzog's documentary The White Diamond.
Dorrington has been fascinated with flight since he was a boy messing with rockets (and losing a couple fingers in the process). To soar weightless over the earth is for Dorrington literally a dream; he sees himself floating over cities in his sleep. He seeks to realize his dream in a specially designed airship, a pygmy blimp shaped like a giant ball with a conical tail, a flimsy frame gondola dangling below it. Not content with flying the ship over the dull English countryside, Dorrington journeys with it to Guyana, intending to guide it over the unexplored jungle canopy. His quest, which seems only mildly insane (compared to activities detailed in other Werner Herzog films), is lent extra urgency by his guilt over the death of a colleague, the jungle cinematographer Dieter Plage, who crashed a vehicle similar to Dorrington's White Diamond (its name comes from its resemblance to the gem) during an earlier expedition.
Werner Herzog has tackled characters like Dorrington before, in both fiction (Fitzcarraldo) and non-fiction (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) films. What seems to fascinate Herzog is the single-mindedness of these men, their willingness to dare destruction in the name of achieving some goal whose significance is apparent only to them. Herzog relates to these men, because he himself is a man given to folly; the quest of Fitzcarraldo, to bring opera to the Amazon via riverboat, is scarcely less mad, less potentially disastrous, than Herzog's own quest to film the story as realistically as possible (real jungle, real riverboat). Not content to merely record the craziness of others, Herzog seems motivated to join in it. The jungle provides a perfect proving ground for people like Herzog and Dorrington; the everyday world doesn't have the right dimensions, the right sprawling spaces, the right sense of teeming, hostile life, to match these men's expansive visions. Herzog, no longer the mad genius of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (the jungle is no longer a surrealistic hell for Herzog, but a place of spiritual majesty), has honed his craft to a fine edge. He tells his story efficiently, paints his portrait of Dorrington precisely, revealing the guilt beneath his gentle eccentricity. Dorrington is the sort of man who always seems to be looking somewhere else; his mind seems always on the verge of wandering into some kind of reverie. But it's not only his dream of flight that distracts him; he's haunted by his perceived culpability in the death of Dieter, and seems driven by the need for atonement.
Herzog's aim in The White Diamond is to correlate the random, incomprehensible beauty of the jungle with the randomness and mystery of human obsession. The airship experiment is carried out near a giant waterfall called Kaieteur (it's four times higher than Niagara Falls), and in a cave behind the falls roost up to a million swifts, which Herzog films soaring and swirling through the air, and swooping in endless streams into the unexplored void behind the watery curtain of the falls. A climber endeavors to film the cave beyond the falls at one point, but his footage has been left out of the film at the behest of the natives, who believe that to reveal the truth of the cave, which they hold to be filled with mythic monsters, would be to destroy some essential part of their culture. The eternally hidden cave becomes a metaphor for that which is unknowable, not only in Nature but in the human heart, and specifically in men like Dorrington, who, like the swifts as they dance and dart through the air, and plummet into the darkness of their cave, are driven by impulses no one else can understand, an inner-music no one else can hear. There's a whiff of New Age jive to all this, as there is in much of Herzog's work, but what the film may lack in philosophical weight it makes up for in pure imagist excitement. Even working in DV, which doesn't make for the kind of haunting effects film can achieve, Herzog manages to evoke the wonder, the peril, the profound mystery of the jungle. The sky may call to Dorrington, but the jungle has always called to Herzog, and in The White Diamond the two obsessions merge to form something joyous, inscrutable and lurkingly dangerous.
Dorrington has been fascinated with flight since he was a boy messing with rockets (and losing a couple fingers in the process). To soar weightless over the earth is for Dorrington literally a dream; he sees himself floating over cities in his sleep. He seeks to realize his dream in a specially designed airship, a pygmy blimp shaped like a giant ball with a conical tail, a flimsy frame gondola dangling below it. Not content with flying the ship over the dull English countryside, Dorrington journeys with it to Guyana, intending to guide it over the unexplored jungle canopy. His quest, which seems only mildly insane (compared to activities detailed in other Werner Herzog films), is lent extra urgency by his guilt over the death of a colleague, the jungle cinematographer Dieter Plage, who crashed a vehicle similar to Dorrington's White Diamond (its name comes from its resemblance to the gem) during an earlier expedition.
Werner Herzog has tackled characters like Dorrington before, in both fiction (Fitzcarraldo) and non-fiction (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) films. What seems to fascinate Herzog is the single-mindedness of these men, their willingness to dare destruction in the name of achieving some goal whose significance is apparent only to them. Herzog relates to these men, because he himself is a man given to folly; the quest of Fitzcarraldo, to bring opera to the Amazon via riverboat, is scarcely less mad, less potentially disastrous, than Herzog's own quest to film the story as realistically as possible (real jungle, real riverboat). Not content to merely record the craziness of others, Herzog seems motivated to join in it. The jungle provides a perfect proving ground for people like Herzog and Dorrington; the everyday world doesn't have the right dimensions, the right sprawling spaces, the right sense of teeming, hostile life, to match these men's expansive visions. Herzog, no longer the mad genius of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (the jungle is no longer a surrealistic hell for Herzog, but a place of spiritual majesty), has honed his craft to a fine edge. He tells his story efficiently, paints his portrait of Dorrington precisely, revealing the guilt beneath his gentle eccentricity. Dorrington is the sort of man who always seems to be looking somewhere else; his mind seems always on the verge of wandering into some kind of reverie. But it's not only his dream of flight that distracts him; he's haunted by his perceived culpability in the death of Dieter, and seems driven by the need for atonement.
Herzog's aim in The White Diamond is to correlate the random, incomprehensible beauty of the jungle with the randomness and mystery of human obsession. The airship experiment is carried out near a giant waterfall called Kaieteur (it's four times higher than Niagara Falls), and in a cave behind the falls roost up to a million swifts, which Herzog films soaring and swirling through the air, and swooping in endless streams into the unexplored void behind the watery curtain of the falls. A climber endeavors to film the cave beyond the falls at one point, but his footage has been left out of the film at the behest of the natives, who believe that to reveal the truth of the cave, which they hold to be filled with mythic monsters, would be to destroy some essential part of their culture. The eternally hidden cave becomes a metaphor for that which is unknowable, not only in Nature but in the human heart, and specifically in men like Dorrington, who, like the swifts as they dance and dart through the air, and plummet into the darkness of their cave, are driven by impulses no one else can understand, an inner-music no one else can hear. There's a whiff of New Age jive to all this, as there is in much of Herzog's work, but what the film may lack in philosophical weight it makes up for in pure imagist excitement. Even working in DV, which doesn't make for the kind of haunting effects film can achieve, Herzog manages to evoke the wonder, the peril, the profound mystery of the jungle. The sky may call to Dorrington, but the jungle has always called to Herzog, and in The White Diamond the two obsessions merge to form something joyous, inscrutable and lurkingly dangerous.
9 Songs
(2004)
9 Songs in 1 Movie About Not a Heck of a Lot
29 December 2005
Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs has the feel of something that wants to stretch the boundaries of cinema, to shatter conventional notions of form. The film is unabashedly experimental. But it's also unbearably tedious, in a way that movies only are when the director is trying something new that doesn't work. There's nothing more tiresome than a daring formal experiment that falls apart. Winterbottom's film charges headlong into new territory, but quickly proves itself bereft of interest. It offers nothing but form; there are no characters to get behind, no ideas to chew on, no visuals to gape at. It's got a certain energy, and there's lots of sex in it, but the scenes never add up to anything. The formal experimentation leads Winterbottom into a cul-de-sac, and all he can think to do is circle around and around.
The narrative (such as it is) involves a pair of young people, English scientist Matt (Kieran O'Brien) and American student Lisa (Margo Stilley), who spend the movie going to concerts, having somewhat kinky sex and generally acting like hip European film characters (they're comfortable with their clothes off in other words, and snorting coke to them is merely part of normal recreation). Matt describes Lisa as being, "beautiful, egotistical, careless and crazy," and what we see of her would tend to confirm this. She's played by Margo Stilley, who might give Maggie Gyllenhaal a run for her money as everyone's favorite alluring indie-charmer, were it not for the fact that she has no talent whatsoever. Winterbottom has apparently chosen Stilley for her androgynous sensuality, her litheness, and her bedroom eyes; it's hard to figure what else he might've seen in her, or what he would've conceived her character to be had he been the least bit interested in character. Stilley and O'Brien spend their scenes tying each other up in bed, engaging in silly play-acting sex-games, and performing acts upon each other the likes of which one does not normally see outside of hard-core porn. Of course it's not Winterbottom's intent to shock us; Winterbottom is far beyond employing explicit sex merely for its shock-value. The film seeks to be frank about the nature of Matt and Lisa's relationship, which is almost entirely about physical intercourse, with rock music, drugs and inane patter rounding out the top four. One is left to wonder, since Winterbottom is so busy being deliberately enigmatic (he throws in some helicopter shots of an Antarctic wasteland from time-to-time, maybe meaning to evoke the mystery of the universe, maybe because he had the footage sitting around and couldn't think of anything better to do with it), if Matt and Lisa are actually meant to be seen as a pair of shallow twits who can only express themselves sexually, and have no thoughts or feelings of any value otherwise. The performances do little to ameliorate our confusion as to the director's intent. Stilley is lovely and palpably erotic but vapid, and O'Brien just comes off like a generic scruffy Euro-film hero, a refugee from some British gangster movie or a thriller about a murderer with amnesia.
Winterbottom may be sure about what he's doing, but conveys only a weak sense of messing around with form, of trying stuff just for the sake of trying it. The concert footage (the narrative is literally built around nine songs), featuring ultra-cool bands like The Von Bondies, Franz Ferdinand and The Dandy Warhols (ultra-coolness being part of the film's agenda), is spliced into the film seemingly at random, there being no continuity for these scenes to either punctuate or disrupt. The performances are filmed in a rather shoddy way; the cameras are kept pretty far from the stage, and though the songs are generally good (and sound fantastic in 5.1 DTS), you don't get much sense of the personalities of the band members, and feel the footage just blending into the general irrelevance. The film amounts to a repeating cycle: the characters have sex, they go to a concert, we look at some ice, the narrator says something pseudo-profound, the characters have sex, etc., There would be nothing wrong with this had Winterbottom found ways to change up the rhythm, or cause the energy to escalate, but he does neither of these things. He doesn't have more than a couple of tricks up his sleeve, and he quickly uses them up. It's a poor magician who expects us to be intrigued by the same rabbit being pulled time-and-again from the same hat.
The narrative (such as it is) involves a pair of young people, English scientist Matt (Kieran O'Brien) and American student Lisa (Margo Stilley), who spend the movie going to concerts, having somewhat kinky sex and generally acting like hip European film characters (they're comfortable with their clothes off in other words, and snorting coke to them is merely part of normal recreation). Matt describes Lisa as being, "beautiful, egotistical, careless and crazy," and what we see of her would tend to confirm this. She's played by Margo Stilley, who might give Maggie Gyllenhaal a run for her money as everyone's favorite alluring indie-charmer, were it not for the fact that she has no talent whatsoever. Winterbottom has apparently chosen Stilley for her androgynous sensuality, her litheness, and her bedroom eyes; it's hard to figure what else he might've seen in her, or what he would've conceived her character to be had he been the least bit interested in character. Stilley and O'Brien spend their scenes tying each other up in bed, engaging in silly play-acting sex-games, and performing acts upon each other the likes of which one does not normally see outside of hard-core porn. Of course it's not Winterbottom's intent to shock us; Winterbottom is far beyond employing explicit sex merely for its shock-value. The film seeks to be frank about the nature of Matt and Lisa's relationship, which is almost entirely about physical intercourse, with rock music, drugs and inane patter rounding out the top four. One is left to wonder, since Winterbottom is so busy being deliberately enigmatic (he throws in some helicopter shots of an Antarctic wasteland from time-to-time, maybe meaning to evoke the mystery of the universe, maybe because he had the footage sitting around and couldn't think of anything better to do with it), if Matt and Lisa are actually meant to be seen as a pair of shallow twits who can only express themselves sexually, and have no thoughts or feelings of any value otherwise. The performances do little to ameliorate our confusion as to the director's intent. Stilley is lovely and palpably erotic but vapid, and O'Brien just comes off like a generic scruffy Euro-film hero, a refugee from some British gangster movie or a thriller about a murderer with amnesia.
Winterbottom may be sure about what he's doing, but conveys only a weak sense of messing around with form, of trying stuff just for the sake of trying it. The concert footage (the narrative is literally built around nine songs), featuring ultra-cool bands like The Von Bondies, Franz Ferdinand and The Dandy Warhols (ultra-coolness being part of the film's agenda), is spliced into the film seemingly at random, there being no continuity for these scenes to either punctuate or disrupt. The performances are filmed in a rather shoddy way; the cameras are kept pretty far from the stage, and though the songs are generally good (and sound fantastic in 5.1 DTS), you don't get much sense of the personalities of the band members, and feel the footage just blending into the general irrelevance. The film amounts to a repeating cycle: the characters have sex, they go to a concert, we look at some ice, the narrator says something pseudo-profound, the characters have sex, etc., There would be nothing wrong with this had Winterbottom found ways to change up the rhythm, or cause the energy to escalate, but he does neither of these things. He doesn't have more than a couple of tricks up his sleeve, and he quickly uses them up. It's a poor magician who expects us to be intrigued by the same rabbit being pulled time-and-again from the same hat.
The Island
(2005)
Bay's Island Not Worth Visiting
24 December 2005
There are certain things in this world one can count on: the sun will rise in the East, the swallows will return to Capistrano, Old Faithful will erupt right on schedule, and Michael Bay will ruin any piece of material he gets his hands on, ruin it spectacularly. The latest proof of this iron-clad certainty is The Island, a film whose scenario might have been the stuff of which cautionary sci-fi magic is made, but we'll never know now because Bay has bled every last drop of intelligence out of it, yielding up yet another loud, obnoxious, idiotic disaster.
Could we have expected anything else? Perhaps our hopes are raised for a moment in the early passages of the film: we watch as plucky Ewan McGregor begins to realize something is wrong with his reality, one where identically-clad, creepily cheerful people wander the antiseptic confines of earth's last living colony, a massive complex sealed off from the mysteriously contaminated outside world. Perhaps, for a moment, we think the movie will be serious about rendering this illusory paradise, one where people are protected from harm at the price of their souls; but then we realize that we should've known better, that with Michael Bay at the helm the film's tone will be naggingly silly, that any potential within the scenario, the characters, will be frittered away in the name of cheap thrills, low-brow humor and dorky romance.
McGregor quickly discovers the truth about the complex: that the tenants are not in fact survivors of a plague, but clones engineered to provide body parts for their "sponsors," rich people living in the "real world", who have been conned by the evil corporation (always has to be one of those) into believing their "insurance policies" are merely vegetables being kept in cold-storage, their organs waiting to be "harvested." This revelation naturally doesn't sit well with McGregor who, along with equally plucky companion Scarlett Johansson, flees the underground facility for 2019 Los Angeles, only to be pursued by a shady operative played by Djimon "Don't Call Me Agent Girard; Okay Call Me Agent Girard" Hounsou.
Someone obviously had a clever idea for a sci-fi plot somewhere along the way; and they may even have been smart enough to see the wit in this idea, the allegorical potential of it (Are we not all clones awaiting our turn in paradise? Well are we not?). And Michael Bay may even be smart enough to have seen the same potential - except that Mr. Bay is obviously not capable of the subtlety that would've been required to make something smart and funny and thematically relevant out of the story, and goes the obvious route instead, expending his energies working out car-chases. The problem with Bay, beyond the fact that he's clearly a knucklehead, is that his styling is really not cool anymore, that his movie just seems so damn 1998. Bay is the only person in the world who thinks his trademark low-angle shots of men with guns against soaring skyscrapers are still neat-looking (at least he abstains from the old "slow-motion-shot-of-someone-walking-away-from-an-exploding-vehicle" bit). The '80s/early '90s action films of Ridley Scott, particularly Black Rain, have this datedness to them that is amusing by itself (Michael Douglas's mullet in Black Rain gets belly-laughs), but Bay's datedness has not yet gotten to the point where it's funny. His movie gives off the vibe of something made by someone who hasn't been paying attention to what's been happening action-movie-wise in the last few years, who thinks audiences are still going ga-ga over the same stuff they did back when The Rock was the last word in shoot-em-ups. Didn't Bay see The Matrix? Lord of the Rings? Even Spielberg rolls with the punches, but Bay seems trapped in some time-warp where it will always be the late '90s, and he will always be the action maven of the moment.
Bay strands his movie and his actors in shallow water, leaving them to fend for themselves. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are given the thankless task of playing a pair of dopey over-grown children (the clones are kept at the mental level of grade-school kids, presumably to keep them from rebelling; the guys who run the complex must not know very many grade-school kids) who are just learning about things like kissing and flying motorcycles; the actors are forced to react with wide-eyed wonderment at everything, and their efforts are less than convincing. McGregor seems neutered, and Johansson, despite looking ravishing in every shot, comes across shrill and unengaged. Such half-assed performances result from having a director who cares nothing about nuance, who is unable to mine a scenario for any nuggets of human interest, or wit, or philosophy. There's something of interest hiding inside The Island, a movie about how human beings are more than the sum of their parts, but the man who made it is simply not able to see it, or if he is, doesn't know how to bring it to life on the screen.
Could we have expected anything else? Perhaps our hopes are raised for a moment in the early passages of the film: we watch as plucky Ewan McGregor begins to realize something is wrong with his reality, one where identically-clad, creepily cheerful people wander the antiseptic confines of earth's last living colony, a massive complex sealed off from the mysteriously contaminated outside world. Perhaps, for a moment, we think the movie will be serious about rendering this illusory paradise, one where people are protected from harm at the price of their souls; but then we realize that we should've known better, that with Michael Bay at the helm the film's tone will be naggingly silly, that any potential within the scenario, the characters, will be frittered away in the name of cheap thrills, low-brow humor and dorky romance.
McGregor quickly discovers the truth about the complex: that the tenants are not in fact survivors of a plague, but clones engineered to provide body parts for their "sponsors," rich people living in the "real world", who have been conned by the evil corporation (always has to be one of those) into believing their "insurance policies" are merely vegetables being kept in cold-storage, their organs waiting to be "harvested." This revelation naturally doesn't sit well with McGregor who, along with equally plucky companion Scarlett Johansson, flees the underground facility for 2019 Los Angeles, only to be pursued by a shady operative played by Djimon "Don't Call Me Agent Girard; Okay Call Me Agent Girard" Hounsou.
Someone obviously had a clever idea for a sci-fi plot somewhere along the way; and they may even have been smart enough to see the wit in this idea, the allegorical potential of it (Are we not all clones awaiting our turn in paradise? Well are we not?). And Michael Bay may even be smart enough to have seen the same potential - except that Mr. Bay is obviously not capable of the subtlety that would've been required to make something smart and funny and thematically relevant out of the story, and goes the obvious route instead, expending his energies working out car-chases. The problem with Bay, beyond the fact that he's clearly a knucklehead, is that his styling is really not cool anymore, that his movie just seems so damn 1998. Bay is the only person in the world who thinks his trademark low-angle shots of men with guns against soaring skyscrapers are still neat-looking (at least he abstains from the old "slow-motion-shot-of-someone-walking-away-from-an-exploding-vehicle" bit). The '80s/early '90s action films of Ridley Scott, particularly Black Rain, have this datedness to them that is amusing by itself (Michael Douglas's mullet in Black Rain gets belly-laughs), but Bay's datedness has not yet gotten to the point where it's funny. His movie gives off the vibe of something made by someone who hasn't been paying attention to what's been happening action-movie-wise in the last few years, who thinks audiences are still going ga-ga over the same stuff they did back when The Rock was the last word in shoot-em-ups. Didn't Bay see The Matrix? Lord of the Rings? Even Spielberg rolls with the punches, but Bay seems trapped in some time-warp where it will always be the late '90s, and he will always be the action maven of the moment.
Bay strands his movie and his actors in shallow water, leaving them to fend for themselves. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are given the thankless task of playing a pair of dopey over-grown children (the clones are kept at the mental level of grade-school kids, presumably to keep them from rebelling; the guys who run the complex must not know very many grade-school kids) who are just learning about things like kissing and flying motorcycles; the actors are forced to react with wide-eyed wonderment at everything, and their efforts are less than convincing. McGregor seems neutered, and Johansson, despite looking ravishing in every shot, comes across shrill and unengaged. Such half-assed performances result from having a director who cares nothing about nuance, who is unable to mine a scenario for any nuggets of human interest, or wit, or philosophy. There's something of interest hiding inside The Island, a movie about how human beings are more than the sum of their parts, but the man who made it is simply not able to see it, or if he is, doesn't know how to bring it to life on the screen.
The Nomi Song
(2004)
The Apparent Genius of Klaus Nomi
24 December 2005
Andrew Horn's The Nomi Song makes no bones about it - performance artist Klaus Nomi was a man of genius. The film is an unapologetic celebration of the mystique of Nomi, the weird brilliance of this late '70s/early '80s New York club phenomenon, who had a minor breakthrough after appearing with David Bowie on Saturday Night Live (he sold well in Europe anyway). If you have no idea who Nomi was then you're not alone; his appeal was purely a cultish one. Those who sing his praises in The Nomi Song - people who were doing lots of drugs in the days they're recounting, it must be pointed out - would have us believe that this was a man of such soaring talent, it would only have been a matter of time before he became famous world-wide. The evidence put forth by Horn - old home videos, some snippets from professionally made programs - would seem to suggest something else, however: a man who, in spite of his obvious talent (he was a trained opera singer, a tenor capable of achieving a haunting falsetto), was always too wrapped up in his own strange, stylized persona to ever really connect with the masses.
The Nomi Song is the portrait of a man who reinvented himself, an exhibitionist who discovered an audience by nullifying every hint of his own personality, and presenting himself as a kind of performing robot. The real Klaus Nomi, we're told, was a sweet, gentle soul, a kid from Berlin who came to New York with dreams of being a star and wound up mopping floors; and the few glimpses we get of Nomi off-stage would seem to uphold this. The real Nomi, it appears, was nothing special, outside of the fact that he could sing (it was his misfortune that there wasn't much market for German tenors who could stretch to a falsetto soprano); the fake Klaus, invented by Klaus as a replacement for the one the world didn't much care for, was a man with a painted face who dressed like a gay Ming the Merciless and sang opera-tinged pop songs in New Wave clubs. People who witnessed Nomi's bizarre, Kabuki-like stage-act gush on and on about what an overwhelming experience it was, but what we see of Nomi, though certainly odd and interesting, fails to convey this feeling. Nothing, we're led to believe, could ever capture the true power of Nomi on-stage. What the film offers us is a tantalizing taste of something eyewitnesses swear was practically transcendent; it's like trying to appreciate the greatness of Robert Johnson by listening to some scratchy old records.
Maybe Nomi was what the film insists he was - a great talent who, by the sad fact of his untimely demise not to mention some egregious mis-management, failed to achieve the stature he seemed destined for. I would tend to doubt it, but the movie makes its argument compellingly, and by placing Nomi in the context of his times, the fag-end of the Andy Warhol days and the beginning of the AIDS horror (Nomi died of the disease), conveys a poignant sense of a lost era, a fondly-remembered scene (the eyewitnesses are all middle-aged, conservative-seeming people; it's hard to imagine them decked out in pink hair and Star Trek get-ups). It finally doesn't matter if Nomi really was what The Nomi Song wants us to think he was (his music was simple-minded and mannered); it matters more that he existed, and embodies in people's minds a certain time and place (those who die young always come to represent the age they lived in; James Dean IS the '50s). The Nomi Song is as much a portrait of the world around Nomi as it is of Nomi, and that world, its strangeness, its lingering energy, is the thing worth remembering.
The Nomi Song is the portrait of a man who reinvented himself, an exhibitionist who discovered an audience by nullifying every hint of his own personality, and presenting himself as a kind of performing robot. The real Klaus Nomi, we're told, was a sweet, gentle soul, a kid from Berlin who came to New York with dreams of being a star and wound up mopping floors; and the few glimpses we get of Nomi off-stage would seem to uphold this. The real Nomi, it appears, was nothing special, outside of the fact that he could sing (it was his misfortune that there wasn't much market for German tenors who could stretch to a falsetto soprano); the fake Klaus, invented by Klaus as a replacement for the one the world didn't much care for, was a man with a painted face who dressed like a gay Ming the Merciless and sang opera-tinged pop songs in New Wave clubs. People who witnessed Nomi's bizarre, Kabuki-like stage-act gush on and on about what an overwhelming experience it was, but what we see of Nomi, though certainly odd and interesting, fails to convey this feeling. Nothing, we're led to believe, could ever capture the true power of Nomi on-stage. What the film offers us is a tantalizing taste of something eyewitnesses swear was practically transcendent; it's like trying to appreciate the greatness of Robert Johnson by listening to some scratchy old records.
Maybe Nomi was what the film insists he was - a great talent who, by the sad fact of his untimely demise not to mention some egregious mis-management, failed to achieve the stature he seemed destined for. I would tend to doubt it, but the movie makes its argument compellingly, and by placing Nomi in the context of his times, the fag-end of the Andy Warhol days and the beginning of the AIDS horror (Nomi died of the disease), conveys a poignant sense of a lost era, a fondly-remembered scene (the eyewitnesses are all middle-aged, conservative-seeming people; it's hard to imagine them decked out in pink hair and Star Trek get-ups). It finally doesn't matter if Nomi really was what The Nomi Song wants us to think he was (his music was simple-minded and mannered); it matters more that he existed, and embodies in people's minds a certain time and place (those who die young always come to represent the age they lived in; James Dean IS the '50s). The Nomi Song is as much a portrait of the world around Nomi as it is of Nomi, and that world, its strangeness, its lingering energy, is the thing worth remembering.
King Kong
(2005)
Jackson's Kong: A More-Than-Worthy Successor to a Movie Classic
16 December 2005
King Kong is a tender love-story between a girl and an ape, and by ape I don't mean Tom Sizemore; this simian is a REAL monster, a twenty-five-foot-high gorilla with a foul temper and a thing for blondes. His domain is Skull Island, a mysterious, fog-shrouded netherworld of jutting black-stone cliffs, colossal ruins carved by long-dead madmen and primeval jungle populated by a dizzying assortment of dinosaurs, insects and beings of seemingly alien origin. Kong, the last surviving member of a race of uber-apes, is a lonely soul, with nothing but a lot of giant bats and the bones of his dead companions for company. This all changes when the steamer arrives from far-off Depression-era New York, bringing with it an ambitious but broke filmmaker (Jack Black, miscast), a shanghaied playwright with a dashing streak (Adrien Brody, sleek and confident), and a golden-tressed, down-on-her-luck vaudevillian possessed of remarkably pungent pheromones (Naomi Watts, emotionally committed and radiant).
Director Peter Jackson has re-conceived the Hollywood classic King Kong as a piece of grand romantic hokum, employing his prodigious imagination and staggering cinematic command in making the creaky Kong scenario not only appealing to modern audiences, but exhaustingly thrilling, and quite emotionally satisfying as well. Despite its reputation as a girl-meets-giant-ape love story, the original Kong never had much to do with actual romance; it viewed the ape's thing for the lovely Anne Darrow (portrayed then by B-list star Fay Wray) as a kind of beastly erotic fixation, the monster as a wild-eyed jungle bogeyman whose ultimate vanquishment was less a gut-wrenching tragedy than a triumph of Western technology and pluck over the dark side of nature, the thing sprung from the bosom of the unknown. Audiences may have felt sympathy for Kong, but one gets the sense that this was purely an accident, that directors Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper, and legendary creature-creator Willis O'Brien, never meant Kong to be anything other than a villain, his fascination with the pale, wispy Wray, the embodiment of Caucasian beauty, to be seen as anything less than aberrant. Peter Jackson does not repeat the mistake of the original Kong by expecting the audience not to identify with his big ape; he sets out to create in Kong a sympathetic creature, a noble warrior who has no one else left in the world, who discovers in his human companion someone to stoke his protective instincts, to make him feel like a king again. There's almost nothing erotic about the relationship between Kong and Anne Darrow in this incarnation of the story; instead of trying to lift her dress, Kong cradles Anne against his massive, hairy arm, and in a scene of stupefying romantic daring, takes her for a ride on an ice-skating pond in Central Park (Kong is captured by the sleazy director Carl Denham and shipped to New York as an attraction, and escapes his chains to seek out his lady-love). Jackson, never one for sub-text, has stripped away the nutty sex-appeal of the 1933 Kong and replaced it with a nutty sentimentalism, creating, in unlikely fashion, one of the sweeter, more innocent love fables in recent movie history. His Kong is unbelievably expressive (Andy "Gollum" Serkis is responsible for the basic movements, the gorilla body-language, which is pushed at times in a deliberately human direction) and lovingly rendered via state-of-the-art CGI (you can almost feel the moist, satiny texture of Kong's nose). Kong's scenes with Naomi Watts, whose performance is fantastically energetic, manage the trick of being emotionally credible despite remaining unconscionably silly.
Of course Jackson has a bigger agenda than just making a love-story for the ages; he also wants to scare the pants off his audience, and give them a thrill-ride, and show them things they've never seen before. Jackson, moviedom's consummate showman now that Spielberg has gotten all serious, is a believer in giving his customers their money's worth: Kong bestows upon us a vision of a pre-historic fantasy-land so lush in detail, so beautifully-realized, that the mind simply has no chance to drink it all in. Peter Jackson has perhaps a greater command of the means of modern-day action-cinema even than Spielberg, a genius for envisioning fantasy, and carrying out massively complex visual schemes, that frankly makes your head spin. His Skull Island is simply one of the most wondrous worlds ever created on film, and it achieves this stature because Jackson has absolutely no sense of restraint, and is always out to top himself. This is, of course, self-indulgent, but the great thing about self-indulgence is that when you tie it to epic talent you get something memorable. Does Kong go too far? Absolutely. Is there any way to justify its three-and-a-half-hour length? No. Is the sight of a herd of brontosaurs tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle down the side of a mountain something I'd pay for? Any day of the week, brother.
Maybe your bum begins to ache after sitting through almost an hour of set-up and character delineation (a lot of which could've been sheared away without detriment to the narrative), but the movie never really flags in its pace, because Jackson is such a master of visual flow, because he's so adept at fitting the pieces of his over-written story together, and making each little scene seem like it matters in the long-run even if it really doesn't. There's no question that Kong is a folly, a film that expends too much time and energy in almost every regard, that pushes the thrills harder than they need to be, that foists on the audience a love-story so improbable, so hokey, that one almost feels the movie's credibility slipping away - but it never does slip away, and that's the triumph of King Kong, a film that dares to walk a tightrope over the abyss of absurdity, and by a miracle of talent makes it safely to the other side.
Director Peter Jackson has re-conceived the Hollywood classic King Kong as a piece of grand romantic hokum, employing his prodigious imagination and staggering cinematic command in making the creaky Kong scenario not only appealing to modern audiences, but exhaustingly thrilling, and quite emotionally satisfying as well. Despite its reputation as a girl-meets-giant-ape love story, the original Kong never had much to do with actual romance; it viewed the ape's thing for the lovely Anne Darrow (portrayed then by B-list star Fay Wray) as a kind of beastly erotic fixation, the monster as a wild-eyed jungle bogeyman whose ultimate vanquishment was less a gut-wrenching tragedy than a triumph of Western technology and pluck over the dark side of nature, the thing sprung from the bosom of the unknown. Audiences may have felt sympathy for Kong, but one gets the sense that this was purely an accident, that directors Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper, and legendary creature-creator Willis O'Brien, never meant Kong to be anything other than a villain, his fascination with the pale, wispy Wray, the embodiment of Caucasian beauty, to be seen as anything less than aberrant. Peter Jackson does not repeat the mistake of the original Kong by expecting the audience not to identify with his big ape; he sets out to create in Kong a sympathetic creature, a noble warrior who has no one else left in the world, who discovers in his human companion someone to stoke his protective instincts, to make him feel like a king again. There's almost nothing erotic about the relationship between Kong and Anne Darrow in this incarnation of the story; instead of trying to lift her dress, Kong cradles Anne against his massive, hairy arm, and in a scene of stupefying romantic daring, takes her for a ride on an ice-skating pond in Central Park (Kong is captured by the sleazy director Carl Denham and shipped to New York as an attraction, and escapes his chains to seek out his lady-love). Jackson, never one for sub-text, has stripped away the nutty sex-appeal of the 1933 Kong and replaced it with a nutty sentimentalism, creating, in unlikely fashion, one of the sweeter, more innocent love fables in recent movie history. His Kong is unbelievably expressive (Andy "Gollum" Serkis is responsible for the basic movements, the gorilla body-language, which is pushed at times in a deliberately human direction) and lovingly rendered via state-of-the-art CGI (you can almost feel the moist, satiny texture of Kong's nose). Kong's scenes with Naomi Watts, whose performance is fantastically energetic, manage the trick of being emotionally credible despite remaining unconscionably silly.
Of course Jackson has a bigger agenda than just making a love-story for the ages; he also wants to scare the pants off his audience, and give them a thrill-ride, and show them things they've never seen before. Jackson, moviedom's consummate showman now that Spielberg has gotten all serious, is a believer in giving his customers their money's worth: Kong bestows upon us a vision of a pre-historic fantasy-land so lush in detail, so beautifully-realized, that the mind simply has no chance to drink it all in. Peter Jackson has perhaps a greater command of the means of modern-day action-cinema even than Spielberg, a genius for envisioning fantasy, and carrying out massively complex visual schemes, that frankly makes your head spin. His Skull Island is simply one of the most wondrous worlds ever created on film, and it achieves this stature because Jackson has absolutely no sense of restraint, and is always out to top himself. This is, of course, self-indulgent, but the great thing about self-indulgence is that when you tie it to epic talent you get something memorable. Does Kong go too far? Absolutely. Is there any way to justify its three-and-a-half-hour length? No. Is the sight of a herd of brontosaurs tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle down the side of a mountain something I'd pay for? Any day of the week, brother.
Maybe your bum begins to ache after sitting through almost an hour of set-up and character delineation (a lot of which could've been sheared away without detriment to the narrative), but the movie never really flags in its pace, because Jackson is such a master of visual flow, because he's so adept at fitting the pieces of his over-written story together, and making each little scene seem like it matters in the long-run even if it really doesn't. There's no question that Kong is a folly, a film that expends too much time and energy in almost every regard, that pushes the thrills harder than they need to be, that foists on the audience a love-story so improbable, so hokey, that one almost feels the movie's credibility slipping away - but it never does slip away, and that's the triumph of King Kong, a film that dares to walk a tightrope over the abyss of absurdity, and by a miracle of talent makes it safely to the other side.
Gold Diggers of 1933
(1933)
Busby Berkeley (and Some Piffle About the Depression)
10 December 2005
Gold Diggers of 1933 would be an inconsequential movie, and almost surely a forgotten one, were it not for the Busby Berkeley production numbers, which are among the most imaginative, bizarre, giddily entertaining sequences in all musical-comedy history. The film's centerpiece is perhaps the best job of work Berkeley ever did: it begins innocently enough, with Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell singing the bouncy tune "Pettin' in the Park," acting out the song's faintly naughty lyrics in literal enough fashion on a park bench, but it quickly escalates into a swirling, stream-of-consciousness collage involving ice skating cops, and a sudden rainstorm, and the linking device of a mischievous baby (played by Billy Barty, an infant-like midget who appeared in several Berkeley numbers) escaping from his carriage to launch spitballs, and behave in a precociously leering manner toward the bevy of Berkeley beauties, who become soaked by the rainstorm, and flee behind a screen to undress, and re-emerge clad in tin costumes, impervious now to the presumptuous petting of the males, Dick Powell included, who remedies the matter the only way he knows how - by whipping out a can-opener and beginning to peel away reluctant sweetheart Ruby Keeler's armor plating. Freudian connotations aside (and are there loads of them), the sequence is a supreme example of leg-fetishist Berkeley's art, his ability to begin with what appears to be a straight-forwardly staged number then take off free-associatively into a hallucinatory, pattern-obsessed netherworld where the human body becomes little more than an element in a frenzied composition, a petal on a swirling human flower. The sequence, and a later, lesser one involving neon-lit violins and a huge spiraling set, is an eruption of pure creativity in the midst of a film that is otherwise undistinguished. Indeed, the musical sequences, with the exception of the final, anti-climactic, Depression-themed "Forgotten Man" dirge, so out-class the surrounding material that in a way they destroy the movie. But destroy it in a good way, because why would anyone care otherwise about a routine comedy of show-girls on the make?
Well, maybe there are a FEW other reasons to care about Gold Diggers of 1933. There's Aline MacMahon for one, the accomplished character actress, who plays the shameless chiseler Trixie with a cheerful, street-smart crassness that almost overcomes her less-than-stellar lines. There's Joan Blondell, she of the big, batting eyes and killer gams, and there's a little of Ginger Rogers, who's unbelievably adorable in the opening "We're in the Money" sequence, which requires her to sing the lyrics in Pig Latin (try it and see how easy you think it is). There's Warren William doing his poor-man's-John-Barrymore best with the thankless role of J. Lawrence Bradford, a Boston Blue-Blood, who journeys to New York to rescue his younger brother Brad (Dick Powell, adequate if insufferable) from the clutches of sweet star-on-the-rise Polly (Ruby Keeler, smiling). The performers bring class to a project that without them, and Berkeley, would be at best an unconvincing "putting-on-a-show" exercise, a ramshackle step-child of 42nd Street. The comedy is, it's safe to say, sub-par; there's only so much you can squeeze out of such a thin plot as MacMahon misleading William by pretending to be Keeler, and soaking him for everything he's worth while deflecting his attention away from Powell, who's fled his aristocratic life to become a song-writer. There's a certain spinning-in-the-mud quality to a lot of the humor; and frankly the portrayal of what it was like to be show-people in the midst of the Depression is not what you would call smashingly successful, or even very credible. It's unlikely, I imagine, that even down-on-their-luck Broadway producers were hanging around the apartments of out-of-work show-girls as much as the producer does in this film; and it's equally unlikely that a song-writer of Brad's caliber would simply drop out of the sky, and furthermore be capable of starring in the very mega-production he was responsible for scoring...but there I go getting wrapped up in reality again. Don't I realize that where Busby Berkeley is concerned all notions of reality must be tossed out the window? If I'm not going to question the plausibility of musical numbers the like of Berkeley's being carried out within the confines of a normal-sized Broadway theater, as the film expects us to believe they are, then why should I question the credibility of the rest of it? Gold Diggers of 1933 requires above all a suspension of disbelief, not only in part but in total. The film is more than rewarding enough to warrant the effort.
Well, maybe there are a FEW other reasons to care about Gold Diggers of 1933. There's Aline MacMahon for one, the accomplished character actress, who plays the shameless chiseler Trixie with a cheerful, street-smart crassness that almost overcomes her less-than-stellar lines. There's Joan Blondell, she of the big, batting eyes and killer gams, and there's a little of Ginger Rogers, who's unbelievably adorable in the opening "We're in the Money" sequence, which requires her to sing the lyrics in Pig Latin (try it and see how easy you think it is). There's Warren William doing his poor-man's-John-Barrymore best with the thankless role of J. Lawrence Bradford, a Boston Blue-Blood, who journeys to New York to rescue his younger brother Brad (Dick Powell, adequate if insufferable) from the clutches of sweet star-on-the-rise Polly (Ruby Keeler, smiling). The performers bring class to a project that without them, and Berkeley, would be at best an unconvincing "putting-on-a-show" exercise, a ramshackle step-child of 42nd Street. The comedy is, it's safe to say, sub-par; there's only so much you can squeeze out of such a thin plot as MacMahon misleading William by pretending to be Keeler, and soaking him for everything he's worth while deflecting his attention away from Powell, who's fled his aristocratic life to become a song-writer. There's a certain spinning-in-the-mud quality to a lot of the humor; and frankly the portrayal of what it was like to be show-people in the midst of the Depression is not what you would call smashingly successful, or even very credible. It's unlikely, I imagine, that even down-on-their-luck Broadway producers were hanging around the apartments of out-of-work show-girls as much as the producer does in this film; and it's equally unlikely that a song-writer of Brad's caliber would simply drop out of the sky, and furthermore be capable of starring in the very mega-production he was responsible for scoring...but there I go getting wrapped up in reality again. Don't I realize that where Busby Berkeley is concerned all notions of reality must be tossed out the window? If I'm not going to question the plausibility of musical numbers the like of Berkeley's being carried out within the confines of a normal-sized Broadway theater, as the film expects us to believe they are, then why should I question the credibility of the rest of it? Gold Diggers of 1933 requires above all a suspension of disbelief, not only in part but in total. The film is more than rewarding enough to warrant the effort.
Après Vous
(2003)
Breezy French Farce With Slightly Dark Undertones
7 December 2005
Apres Vous is the story of two men, one a hectic headwaiter living in a state of romantic suspension with his girlfriend, the other a depressed individual of indeterminate occupation having a hard time living after dumping his own significant other. Their acquaintanceship begins in a way befitting two characters in a French romantic-comedy: Antoine, the headwaiter, finds himself crossing a deserted park at night, the same park Louis the head-case has chosen as the site for his last moments on earth; discovering Louis dangling from a tree, Antoine aids the unfortunate man, rescuing him from his self-inflicted coup de grace, while managing simultaneously to placate his own girlfriend, Christine, who is waiting with dinner for him at their apartment (ah the wonders of the cell-phone). Inordinately sympathetic toward the depressed Louis' plight, Antoine brings the poor man home. This sets off a chain of events that will draw Antoine ever deeper into Louis' miserable existence, bringing him face-to-face with the woman responsible for breaking Louis' heart, an ethereal florist named Blanche, who has romantic problems of her own, and becomes yet another beneficiary of the increasingly discombobulated Antoine's misguided altruism.
European films are often preoccupied with the strange, co-incidental ways in which people's fates become intertwined, but instead of mining this theme for a sense of existential wonder, like Kieslowski, director Pierre Salvadori goes a more conventional direction, turning in a breezy, somewhat darkly-shaded comedy in the tradition of Woody Allen, where there are enough ideas floating around to keep the viewer's mind engaged, but the tone never becomes really intellectual, and the neuroses rarely become extreme enough to engender the kind of dramatic gravity that might bring down the farce, the romantic escapades, the light-comic esprit. The characters may have serious mental issues, especially Louis who is a candidate for a psycho-ward, but Salvadori never takes them that seriously; he fixes the semi-frivolous tone early in the film, when Antoine comes across Louis hanging from the tree branch, and has to converse with Christine on the phone at the same time he's trying to rescue the strangling man. This scene could be straight out of Woody Allen, and frankly so could a lot of the rest of the movie, like the scene where Antoine takes Louis to his aged grandparents' place to intercept the letter he's sent them, telling them of his imminent suicide; or the sequence where Antoine helps Louis get work as a sommelier at the restaurant, and Louis is completely hapless, clinging to the flustered Antoine's coat-tails while worrying the light fixtures are doing to drop on his head. The trick is all in the handling, in keeping the farce from becoming so broad that it shatters the reality of the characters, but putting it across strongly enough that we're amused by what's happening in a way that isn't too abstract (the scenes are funny, not just the ideas, like in a lot of French "comedy"). Salvadori and his cast prove themselves adept at this brand of comedy, which is silly but not too silly, smart but not too smart, dark but not too dark. Daniel Auteuil, the French De Niro, uses his tender eyes to great effect in playing Antoine, who is much more anxiety-ridden than he's letting on, while Jose Garcia employs a natural, understated sad-sack quality in playing Louis as a whimpering, panic-stricken mess. The object of Antoine and Louis' mutual affection, Blanche, is portrayed by Sandrine Kiberlain (think Gwyneth Paltrow without the haughtiness) as a free-spirit with a weakness for hooking up with the wrong man, whose porcelain skin and tragic eyes prove an irresistible, if off-beat, combination.
Like a lesser Woody Allen film, Apres Vous works well enough without ever reaching critical mass. The plot is perhaps too neatly symmetrical, too schematic to allow real comic or emotional fireworks to go off; or perhaps it's just that Pierre Salvadori is the kind of director who's content to generate only a mild energy, who, like Allen, is happy breezing toward a logical resolution, and doesn't feel the need to press matters very much. Either way, Apres Vous is successful on the terms it sets, which are modest.
European films are often preoccupied with the strange, co-incidental ways in which people's fates become intertwined, but instead of mining this theme for a sense of existential wonder, like Kieslowski, director Pierre Salvadori goes a more conventional direction, turning in a breezy, somewhat darkly-shaded comedy in the tradition of Woody Allen, where there are enough ideas floating around to keep the viewer's mind engaged, but the tone never becomes really intellectual, and the neuroses rarely become extreme enough to engender the kind of dramatic gravity that might bring down the farce, the romantic escapades, the light-comic esprit. The characters may have serious mental issues, especially Louis who is a candidate for a psycho-ward, but Salvadori never takes them that seriously; he fixes the semi-frivolous tone early in the film, when Antoine comes across Louis hanging from the tree branch, and has to converse with Christine on the phone at the same time he's trying to rescue the strangling man. This scene could be straight out of Woody Allen, and frankly so could a lot of the rest of the movie, like the scene where Antoine takes Louis to his aged grandparents' place to intercept the letter he's sent them, telling them of his imminent suicide; or the sequence where Antoine helps Louis get work as a sommelier at the restaurant, and Louis is completely hapless, clinging to the flustered Antoine's coat-tails while worrying the light fixtures are doing to drop on his head. The trick is all in the handling, in keeping the farce from becoming so broad that it shatters the reality of the characters, but putting it across strongly enough that we're amused by what's happening in a way that isn't too abstract (the scenes are funny, not just the ideas, like in a lot of French "comedy"). Salvadori and his cast prove themselves adept at this brand of comedy, which is silly but not too silly, smart but not too smart, dark but not too dark. Daniel Auteuil, the French De Niro, uses his tender eyes to great effect in playing Antoine, who is much more anxiety-ridden than he's letting on, while Jose Garcia employs a natural, understated sad-sack quality in playing Louis as a whimpering, panic-stricken mess. The object of Antoine and Louis' mutual affection, Blanche, is portrayed by Sandrine Kiberlain (think Gwyneth Paltrow without the haughtiness) as a free-spirit with a weakness for hooking up with the wrong man, whose porcelain skin and tragic eyes prove an irresistible, if off-beat, combination.
Like a lesser Woody Allen film, Apres Vous works well enough without ever reaching critical mass. The plot is perhaps too neatly symmetrical, too schematic to allow real comic or emotional fireworks to go off; or perhaps it's just that Pierre Salvadori is the kind of director who's content to generate only a mild energy, who, like Allen, is happy breezing toward a logical resolution, and doesn't feel the need to press matters very much. Either way, Apres Vous is successful on the terms it sets, which are modest.
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