Films Seen - April 2003
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
THE RECRUIT (37) (dir., Roger Donaldson) Colin Farrell, Al Pacino, Bridget Moynahan [Plays its cards too early, or perhaps unsubtly : it's so hammered home that "Nothing is what it seems" - and not enough happens to distract from that - the entire second hour becomes something of an endurance test, since it's clear the thing is some sort of set-up and it only remains to wait patiently (or not so patiently) for the punchline. Moynahan's glossy performance doesn't help (no way could this placid mannequin be the evil genius claimed), nor does her lack of chemistry with Farrell, nor does Pacino in expansive DEVIL'S ADVOCATE mode - he's too invulnerable, too obviously the omniscient puppetmaster - nor does the absence of outlandish detail that might invest us in the goings-on (THE GAME moved in similar paranoia-infested waters, but became so fiendishly complicated one inevitably thought 'It can't be a set-up' ; here, Farrell mostly does some laughably obvious shadowing, gets in a chase and accesses stuff on a computer). Had me fidgeting long before the end, forced to seek comfort in the incidentals : (a) post-9/11 rehabilitation of the CIA, no longer spooks or "fat old white guys" but warriors of virtue ("We believe in Good and Evil - and choose Good") with a seriously cool training program that'll teach you how to "kill with a variety of weapons" ; (b) Thomas Friedman's "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Resolution" from "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" - "No two countries with a McDonald's have gone to war against each other since each got its McDonald's" - hastily revised after the war in Kosovo, now restored in a modified version : "No country with a McDonald's has ever attacked the United States". Actually, I think you'll find no country without a McDonald's has, either...]
THE CORE (68) (dir., Jon Amiel) Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, Tcheky Karyo, D.J. Qualls [Guess I should be careful with this one, having once been burned (if that's the word) on THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE, and maybe even QUEEN OF HEARTS : seems like every few years Jon Amiel makes a warm, goofy movie I respond to more (perhaps) than it objectively deserves (then again he did also make the execrable COPYCAT). Works in the opposite way to most sci-fi action flicks - your JURASSIC PARKs and INDEPENDENCE DAYs - which typically start off grim and portentous, burnishing their heroes' emotional lives (dark secrets, personal problems), only for those lives to recede and become indistinct amid the spectacle, collapsing into one-liners and snarky irony. This, on the other hand, is played light-heartedly, not in the usual po-mo self-awareness but in the joshing, cheeky way of old-time adventures like JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH - clutch of eccentric scientists heading to the core of the Earth in a ship called Virgil, made of a secret material called "Unobtainium" - then steps up a gear when push comes to shove, playing its emotional trump-cards late in the game (as indeed it should) ; it's what ARMAGEDDON might've been if the spirit of Owen Wilson and Steve Buscemi had been allowed free rein instead of being relegated to comic relief - and if we'd been asked to care about them rather than the one-dimensional Bruce Willis (why do films always want us to identify with the boring po-faced people?). Eckhart does the hero as absent-minded professor / bohemian cut-up - then, startlingly, plays the scene where a member of the team gets killed as full-throttle drama, the kind of raw emotion seldom seen in a popcorn movie ; Tucci preens and schemes magnificently as a self-centred Dr.-Smith-from-"Lost-In-Space" type (what with this and MAID IN MANHATTAN, he's suddenly at the top of his game as a comic character actor), then steps up with a flourish for his moment of self-sacrifice, with a sideways nod to DR. STRANGELOVE. The whole thing is human-scaled, which is why it works : when pigeons fall out of the sky early on (don't ask), Amiel stages it through the eyes of a sappy little kid who's initially heartbroken to see one dead birdie (and progressively more terrified as they start raining down in their hundreds) ; the team are forever bickering, each with his little schtick, and a meeting with the top brass is prefaced by a fun throwaway as klutzy Eckhart tries to tie a tie with mad scientist Lindo offering suggestions. Joyous, loveable, even kind of touching ; killjoys may wonder how the ship manages to get back to the surface without its lasers, or how deep-sea pressure doesn't crush our heroes when they step out to fix the hull - but does it really matter when D.J. Qualls (as the world's greatest hacker) is promising to save the planet in exchange for a steady supply of "Xena" tapes and Hot Pockets? Didn't think so.]
AMEN (60) (dir., Costa-Gavras) Ulrich Tukur, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ulrich Muhe [Thoroughly absorbing, but you do have to keep a lid on the potential gaping hole in its centre - viz. the assumption that Pope Pius XII's (more) dynamic intervention could somehow have prevented the Holocaust, via a nebulous domino-effect of shaming the Allies into bombing raids which would in turn have (presumably) stopped the horrors. At a time when millions of protesters can't even stop a wholly gratuitous war in Iraq, it seems unlikely any outside intervention could've forced the Allies to look beyond their own immediate interests, esp. with so many other fronts to fight : easy to sympathise with the US Ambassador who explains to Kassovitz how saving Jews would slow down the war effort and reacts sharply to his accusation that not enough is being done ("May I remind you that our sons are dying on battlefields to save the free world?") - though all credit to Gavras for including that exchange in the first place, setting out the situation in sharp, intelligible scenes. He's as quixotic as his heroes - not a million miles from Tukur's naiveté in believing Germans would "rise up" if they only knew about the death camps - an old-style idealist (and Leftist) fascinated by the cut and thrust of politics, all the high-level powwows and behind-the-scenes intrigues (a typical shot is of people in imposing, high-ceilinged official buildings, dwarfed by the trappings of power) ; somewhat ironic - given its maker's wishful thinking - that the film itself is most compellingly about self-delusion, the moral ambiguity of "men who have learned to subdue their conscience" - the educated SS scientists who proved their superiority (in their own minds) by telling Hitler-jokes in private yet did nothing to frustrate his plans, the German people living in a cocoon of denial, the bookish Pope who fought the Nazis with subtle semantics (telling a flunky to inform the German Ambassador of "Our anger and Our sorrow" then pausing to amend it to "Our sorrow and Our anger") and presumably convinced himself he'd done his duty. There are cheap shots, and it bogs down structurally - once our heroes have tried to sway the powers-that-be and been rebuffed, all the film can do is have them try again and be rebuffed again - but generally better than I'd feared, maybe even better than Gavras intended. Looks like propaganda is a young man's game : once you're pushing 70, you can't help but see the bigger picture.]
THE MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS (43) (dir., George Hickenlooper) Andy Garcia, Mick Jagger, Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams, James Coburn [What exactly is the point of this movie? Idealistic writer, strapped for cash, is forced into a job with an escort service - which is already pretty unconvincing since he makes no effort to act charming and spends most of each 'assignment' looking sulky about having to Betray his Principles (meanwhile his doting wife happily accepts that he has to go out all the time on late-night meetings with publishers), except that plotline soon peters out in any case, swallowed up by the main plot which has him acting as ghost-writer to a famous author. Idea is he doesn't realise ghost-writing is just another form of prostitution - except he obviously does realise it, telling his wife in no uncertain terms how much he hates what he's doing, so where does that leave us? Tortuous logic could perhaps bail them out - e.g. when he claims to hate the ghost-writing he's really channelling his feelings about the infidelity, not realising he's a whore in either case - but it's hard to muster up much energy for that kind of casuistry with scenes as lame as our hero's expert analysis of the flaws in author Coburn's opus (the problem is it's set in ancient Rome, apparently - readers can't identify with those ancient Romans ; wonder what he makes of Gore Vidal?), or the bit where Mrs. Hero turns out to be herself a client of the escort service (presumably a one-off, but still pretty clumsy), or the dire, saccharine ending. Best perhaps to follow the advice of our hero's philistine publisher - "No-one wants to waste their time looking for deeper meanings" - and enjoy the fringe compensations : hell-raising Coburn, poignantly near the end of his life (a glimpse of arthritis-ravaged hands is very sad) ; ten seconds of the great Tracey Walter as a belligerent bartender ; Mick Jagger, a coiled snake in a suit.]
CALLAS FOREVER (37) (dir., Franco Zeffirelli) Fanny Ardant, Jeremy Irons, Joan Plowright, Jay Rodan ["Oh god, you're not one of those ghastly Callas queens, are you?" asks Jeremy Irons (with ponytail). I'm not - but I know someone who is. Franco "close personal friend" Zeffirelli wipes away a tear as Fanny Ardant ("Fanny Ardant is dressed by CHANEL") recreates it all, the joys and tantrums and glorious perfectionist artistry. All fairly watchable in a SUNSET BOULEVARD kind of way, the ageing diva holed up in her luxury apartment listening to her old recordings, fondling old photos of Onassis ("Mrs. Kennedy! She never understood him!"), finally lured back into the world where plump matrons turn to stare in the street with awed cries of "Callas!" ; but it's a measure of how locked the film is into its own showbiz world that it barely acknowledges the rather awkward fact that Callas' attempted comeback - filming the middle-aged Maria for the nascent video market as she mimes to the voice of the young Maria - is a rip-off, no matter how wonderfully it may energise her and make her feel better. 'Details!' cry Zeffirelli and Co. ; 'Who cares about the little people? Young or old, she is still Callas! Callas!'. Also including a potted version of "Carmen", professional beefcake Jay Rodan (ten bucks says Zeff learned about him from his good pal Bertolucci after THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE) and the usual showbiz self-dramatisation ; "It's like the last act of one of her damned operas," says Jeremy Irons, glaring darkly in the direction of Fanny Ardant. Fanny Ardant is dressed by CHANEL.]
THE GREY ZONE (73) (dir., Tim Blake Nelson) Harvey Keitel, Allan Corduner, David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, David Chandler [Looks like TV (low-contrast, very even lighting, four-square compositions, steady pace), sounds like a play (which it originally was), and Keitel's Nazi-swine is as distracting as his on-and-off brogue in U-571 (the man can't do accents ; somebody should tell him this). Otherwise most excellent, reclaiming the cliché-strewn carcass of the Holocaust drama to create something strong and sinewy, above all in its implacable matter-of-factness : some will say it doesn't 'capture the horror' of the death camps, presumably because the actors aren't beaten-down and emaciated and actually talk instead of gazing at the world with big passive eyes, but in fact it captures something more horrible than mere suffering - the human impulse, or survival instinct, to enfold suffering in daily routine, feeling the need to 'normalise' and of course incidentally legitimising it. The film takes place in the later stages of atrocity, never trying to work up indignation, everyone long since shifted into problem-solving rather than emotional mode (isn't that the mind-boggling thing about the Holocaust, that it was performed with such efficiency?). "Our situation here is, to say the least, unique," muses a German thoughtfully and the prisoners respond in kind, treating certain death as another variable to be navigated : moral outrage - Jews aiding and conniving in the extermination of other Jews - isn't forgotten but throbs beneath the surface like a dull ache, just like we all try to do the right thing (eat better, read more, listen to our friends' problems) in between doing whatever it takes to get through the day. Nelson imbues the setting with a deeply convincing normality, the crematoria just big houses with smoke churning out of their chimneys, lawn-sprinklers sloshing in the yard (a great touch) as the latest "cargo" shuffles towards extinction ; Jews and Nazis are locked in a mortal Death-embrace - and they know it, skating round each other like an old married couple (we're only fighting this war to prevent future wars, taunts Keitel ; "That's your position," replies Corduner, refusing to take the bait) ; their only hope is the end of the war, and everything stops as both sides listen to the sound of an air-raid far in the distance, Redemption as elusive as the promise of divine Grace. Not so much a reconstruction of the camps - everyone acts natural, Buscemi does Buscemi, dialogue studded with incongruous Americanisms - as a meditation on what it meant (not necessarily what it felt like) to be there, as intelligent and grimly detached as Nelson's EYE OF GOD and extremely well-acted. What kind of world is it where THE PIANIST wins awards and this gets shunted to the sidelines? One that likes to wallow in tragedy instead of trying to understand it, possibly.]
DEAD OR ALIVE (63) (dir., Takashi Miike) Riki Takeuchi, Sho Aikawa, Renji Ishibashi [Might've been a 70+ had it all come together, but it just slips his grasp ; still the most ambitious Miike I've seen, trying - in between two insanely enjoyable bookends - for Melville (or Kitano)-like worldview with cops and robbers in the various throes of existential crises. "So many ways of living life," sighs a yakuza, watching college students saunter by, and the future - a hope or possibility of change - tugs at the murderous present, in the eyes of a 5-year-old boy or fleeting mention of a 5-year plan : one thug claims he's going to be a god in 5 years, being already in the process of absorbing "electricity from deep space", and the film doesn't necessarily disbelieve him. Miike agrees that "only the strong find their place in the world" (though prefers not to comment on the follow-up question : "What about the weak? Don't they have a right to live?") and doesn't judge his characters for doing whatever it takes - all he really seems to hate is hypocrisy, whether the closet sexist of AUDITION or in-denial father of VISITOR Q - shooting much of the violent action in detached wide-shots as if to emphasise its "place in the world", part of a larger whole. Everyone's hoping for redemption, looking for meaning in their life (the cop through his sick daughter, the gangster through his college-educated kid brother), the death of hope leading directly to the OTT apocalyptic finale ; vivid close-ups clash against the wide-shots, echoing the cop who tells our hero to aim for "balance", stunning images come and go (a man, strapped to a wheel, disappears into blurry abstraction as it turns faster and faster ; old friends meet on a watery swamp-like plain, pockmarked with graves ; a young man stands, mortally wounded, and his face literally darkens as the chill hand of Death etc etc). Loses its way in the final quarter (approximately from the party-gone-wrong), and I must admit I was slightly bored as the various threads refused to coalesce ; less than the sum of its parts, but the first 15 minutes - a nonsense maelstrom of cops, strippers, noodles, drugs and blood - and final mano a mano conflagration are ... amazing.]
JOHNNY ENGLISH (31) (dir., Peter Howitt) Rowan Atkinson, Natalie Imbruglia, John Malkovich [A kids' movie in grown-up clothes, not so much bad (though it's bad as well) as astonishingly primitive. "You are now entering the most secure location in Britain," brags Johnny, and a bomb immediately explodes in the background, one of about five jokes that get repeated over and over in different variations (others including : Johnny shows off some arcane knowledge - "the shaman throat-warblers of Guatemala" - which turns out to be complete rubbish ; Johnny gets rescued by his long-suffering assistant, whom he then berates ; Johnny makes a reference to bottoms). Wan imitation of "Blackadder" with a weirdly dated sense of humour, as if made by folks who heard some jokes once but haven't actually tried them out in about a decade - gags revolve around Abba songs, the Queen of England's corgis and an inability to use chopsticks in an Oriental restaurant - though nothing's quite so baffling as the fact that this James Bond spoof was scripted by a team best-known for writing the two most recent 007 movies ; should BLAZING SADDLES have been written by someone with experience in Westerns?]
THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE (46) (dir., Jonathan Demme) Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins [Still can't believe they had the crust to put CHARADE on the flipside of the DVD, but maybe they figured remake and original were sufficiently different to avoid direct comparison (which is fair enough) - unless of course Demme wants to show he's working in the 'true' style of the 60s as opposed to Donen's Hollywood gloss (which is not). Leaving aside how much - if at all - Nouvelle Vague (messy, unpredictable) style fits this sly sub-Hitchcock material, I'm not sure it fits Demme's genial, gemütlich, endlessly tolerant persona either : takes more than jump-cuts, endlessly-circling camera and the presence of Karina, Aznavour and the Hotel Langlois to get the New Wave vibe - there's also a certain (how do you describe it?) youthful arrogance, more-or-less echoed in the sudden rhythmic cuts in the last scene of THE GOOD THIEF or even the throwaway glamour of OCEAN'S ELEVEN (to cite two recent films with a similar m.o.), something playful yet aggressive in its wish to impress ; this one just feels lazy, going for a shaggy-dog story with tension at a minimum - even tipping its hand about Bartholomew's presence in the scene where Lola gets killed - and gregarious Demme-like ending where nobody's a villain (albeit spoiled by gratuitously nasty post-credits joke, as if added by the rogue mischievous Demme of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS). Hard to say why it didn't click for me, since I usually respond to looseness, but maybe it's that looseness is a catalyst, even (per the Nouvelle Vague) a revolutionary tool, whereas here it just seems the easy way out, an occasion to mix up the soundtrack more or less at random (Arab to Latin to Charles Aznavour) and turn the race for the stamps into a full-blown action sequence. Newton is impish but a bit of a lightweight, little-girl-ish in some of her movements (thought it was meant as a statement against old-style refinement that she chokes on her cigarette, as if to warn against expecting that kind of finishing-school poise, but she does in fact get to smoke later so wtf?), Wahlberg merely inexpressive - and of course some comparison with CHARADE is inevitable. Is it just familiarity that makes the addition of "Absolutely" in "You know what's wrong with you? ... Absolutely nothing!" seem less effective than the original, or is it the memory of Hepburn at her most bewitching as she gives it a beat then melts into a purred, breathy "Nnnnothing"?...]
SOLARIS (51) (dir., Steven Soderbergh) George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis [Might've added a few points to the rating had I seen this on the big screen, because it sure is a hell of a light-show ; there's no doubting Soderbergh's skill, nor his (and Clooney's) commercial courage, but everything here confirms the impression of a glittering, superficial intelligence, perfectly suited to the cool capering of OCEAN'S ELEVEN (he is - or can be - an exhilarating storyteller, because he's so light and graceful), adding spice to straightforward material like TRAFFIC and KING OF THE HILL but leaching spiritual substance out of this one, leaving only intellectual doodlery - everything is puzzle and paradox, reduced to a smart-aleck Moebius strip. Rheya, our hero's 'wife', admits to being merely a creation of his desire for redemption, so she's obviously not human - yet the knowledge of having been created, a sense of "higher consciousness" as the film puts it, is precisely what does make us human (so which is it?) ; Kelvin wants her to be suicidal, as the original Rheya was (so he can redeem himself), but she's only suicidal because he imagines her that way ; she knows this, knows she isn't real and begs to be put out of her misery - hence she really is suicidal! The Tarkovsky (which I actually like a little less than this remake) was at least honestly pretentious, glacially dwelling on open-ended symbols and images (rippling water, cars going through tunnels) that could mean everything or nothing ; Soderbergh merely spins out the moment, whether Davies' weird locutions or hero first meeting the original Rheya at a party - there's no doubt about what's going on, it just takes longer than it should - and offers mindfuck over meaning, ending on a note of complete relativism (isn't human life itself a construct, just "millions of gestures" we perform over and over?) ; even the look, which impresses, has a touch of the music-video, leaning heavily on non-matching cuts and blue and orange filters ("Peter Andrews" likes to go from one to the other, for maximum garish contrast). Like FULL FRONTAL, doesn't for a moment discount the possibility that Soderbergh will make an out-and-out masterpiece someday - but this isn't it, unless perhaps in college-dorm debates over lines like "There are no answers, only choices". Also starring George Clooney's bare behind, as itself.]
INNOCENCE (44) (dir., Paul Cox) Julia Blake, Charles Tingwell, Terry Norris, Robert Menzies [A certain touching simplicity of feeling - "You know what really matters in life? Love!" - and an old-fashioned quality one might call 'decency', at least if one's the type who likes to say there's no decency left in the world anymore. But it's so prosaic to look at - not austere, just lacking personality - and so absurdly self-congratulatory on its insistence that old people too are sexual beings ("But Mum, you're nearly 70!"), and so unable to deliver on its one good idea, that Love can operate as a sort of Time-machine : it's "like being a teenager again", says our heroine of late-blooming passion, but Cox has his lovers exchange tired bromides about the differences between men and women and speak wise, ruminative lines like "What will happen to us all?" and "Life becomes more real the closer it comes to Death", and even "There are two kinds of death" (the mind and the body, apparently). Death is a presence, which it really shouldn't be unless the film means to comment on its characters - you can either make mortality an issue, cast a shadow over the romance (e.g. with a stark Bressonian style), or go with the rejuvenated lovers and their all-conquering love, as if they really were teenagers again (some might say that's hopelessly romantic - but isn't that the point of this movie?) ; Cox prefers a middle-of-the-road literalism, as if to say he sympathises but we are talking about old people after all, Death merely softened and airbrushed for the sake of the target audience, everything made reassuring. You too can face cancer with composure, make your peace with a lifetime's regrets, finally keel over in euphoria as the church organ plays "Jerusalem" - if you believe in love ; do you believe in love, children? Small-minded, when it needed to be more.]
MAID IN MANHATTAN (54) (dir., Wayne Wang) Jennifer Lopez, Ralph Fiennes, Tyler Garcia Posey, Stanley Tucci, Natasha Richardson, Bob Hoskins [Widely reviled but in fact surprisingly worth seeing, less for the high-concept fantasy plot than the pleasing stuff going on around it - which is partly to say no film featuring Tucci, Hoskins and Chris Eigeman can be wholly devoid of merit. High-concept fantasy plot is at least cleanly worked out - meet-cute, romance, exposure, separation, reconciliation - not allowed to dribble on in subsidiary twists à la TWO WEEKS NOTICE, though clearly hijacked by its bossy star who ambitiously decides to use it as a drawing-board for the Latina Experience (doubtless the reason disgruntled writer John Hughes took refuge in a "Story by Edmond Dantes" credit). She is the maid in Manhattan, keen to grab a slice of the American Dream but torn by guilt over such hubris ("Don't be such a Catholic!" chides a pal), having to fight the pernicious credo of 'knowing your place' and not daring to look beyond the ghetto : a maid "strives to be invisible" - just like any ethnic minority, doing the white man's (and woman's) dirty work - but J. Lo is bright and sassy, smart and sensible (her values contrast with her carefree, promiscuous best friend's ; her kid is a politics nut), reads Alice Miller on the subway and tells off an obnoxious sales clerk, finally shakes off the guilt to become a working-class heroine : "It's a dream, and tonight you're living it for all of us!" cry her downtrodden comrades (don't despair, this Jenny From The Block phase has to end someday). All a bit excessive but also surprisingly ambitious, and there's grace-notes in the execution : Wang's a cheerful hack most of the time but it's an inspired touch to push the usual you-go-girl gaggle of fellow maids into all-out make-believe, talking in unison like a Broadway chorus and shimmying out the room in an impromptu dance number, and he also gets a rather lovely moment amid the mush, cutting from NYC-by-night cityscape straight to high-angle CU of J. Lo gazing longingly up into her lover's eyes as Norah Jones (inevitably) kicks in on the soundtrack ; also, Bob Hoskins plays a butler with wondrous gravitas, and gets to deliver the film's message - "What we do does not define us ; what defines us is how well we rise after falling" - with the melancholy mien of the butler in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS. Strange to hear "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" in a movie after its awesome role in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, but I guess they figured there wouldn't be much overlap...]
JACKASS: THE MOVIE (60) (dir., Jeff Tremaine) [I'm with Matt Lotti on this one, though I guess I liked it a bit more than he did (quelle surprise) - which is strange, 'cause there isn't really much to like once you lose the lame candid-camera bits, even lamer old-man-makeup and dressing-up-as-pandas bits, and uninspired scatological and bodily-fluid humour (ah, the "Yellow Snowcone"). That leaves mostly the bits where one young man (No Girls Allowed) tortures himself in outlandish ways with exaggerated cries of pain while other young men stand around laughing and applauding, and they're as bizarre as any Harmony Korine exercise in wilful self-abasement - probably reminded me most of the two brothers 'playfully' beating the crap out of each other in GUMMO - proof if nothing else that adolescents (and arrested adolescents) still seek out initiation tests, following some obscure primal instinct, even in a culture that's outgrown them. Obvious homoerotic overtones, most explicitly acknowledged in the "car up the rectum" - no surprise it's the only stunt fearless Steve-O, he of the "alligator tightrope", refuses to perform - though equally intriguing is the scrupulous insistence on identifying each masochistic fool by name as they try to kill themselves, as if to say the group serves as surrogate family but they only achieve their identity (or manhood) when they go beyond it. Most distressing stunt : easily the paper-cuts, though the sadistic tenderness with which Knoxville and Co. give each other electric shocks via the "Muscle Stimulator" is something to see. Line That Sums The Whole Thing Up : "Kick yourself in the head, Wee Man!". Runner-Up : "Look at the bloodied shitty underpants!".]