Films Seen - April 2004
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (53) (dir., Vadim Perelman) Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly, Ron Eldard, Shohreh Aghdashloo [Overall impressive, but a tricky one to parse. Often seems to be equating its two antagonists - Connelly's reduced to washing up in a public restroom, just as Kingsley previously was forced to; sex scenes between the two couples are intercut - but still runs on their antagonism, and offers no special reason to conclude they're 'the same'. The titular house seems to be a symbol (of some sort) for patriarchy - Connelly identifies it with her Dad, pointedly sexist paterfamilias Kingsley takes charge of it, and failed father Eldard seeks to reclaim it as a kind of redemption - but in fact the final message seems to be closer to FARGO's "And for what? For a little bit of money" ("I want only my son!" yells a chastened Kingsley in the hospital), nor does patriarchy have a lot to do with it, so why e.g. is Kingsley's oppression emphasised by placing his wife's "As you wish" next to Eldard's domestic-violence story? Characters seem naturalistic but in fact are very stylised, from Connelly's schizophrenic change of tone where the house is concerned (esp. with her lawyer) to the Iranian family talking like refugees from a 50s Hollywood historical ("Today God has kissed our eyes..."); Perelman directs in the slow-burn style of (say) THE RETURN, with stretched-out phrases left hanging in James Horner's score and single striking shots - a glorious sunset, or the moon behind clouds - often used to separate scenes, yet in fact the plot (and even what the characters are thinking) isn't especially opaque or mysterious. My theory: it's all preparation for the final 20 minutes, which are borderline-ridiculous unless the film convinces us that (a) these Iranians are exotic, alien creatures, prone to react in bizarre ways (I'm afraid it does feed into the Western paranoia about Middle Easterners, esp. the unconscious association with suicide bombers) and (b) something tragic and immense is going to happen in this story, as implied retrospectively by the solemn style. I was unconvinced, and did find it borderline-ridiculous - but it's obviously well-made, and looks pretty good in a fog-shrouded way. Typical touch: Portent of Things To Come as the kid comes in bleeding from a skating accident; "Don't get blood on the floor..."]
SECRET WINDOW (42) (dir., David Koepp) Johnny Depp, John Turturro, Maria Bello [Very little to say, really: intriguing first half in MISERY vein - famous author, nutjob hick, work-related trouble - increasingly lame second half. Probably would've guessed the twist even if I hadn't known there was a twist coming - the action is just too irrational (killing the dog for no reason at all, making such a fuss over the magazine when any normal person could Google its entire table of contents in two minutes flat), not to mention how depressingly familiar that twist has become in recent years; FIGHT CLUB has a lot to answer for in my opinion. Depp offers some consolation, as well as a reminder that "Cahiers" once called him "the best comic actor in America" (June 2000, for those keeping score): muttering about the cushions on his couch, waving away smoke as he walks, suddenly swatting at an invisible fly, or just lurching around with the unruliest mop of hair in many a moon, he remains the most impenitently eccentric leading man in Hollywood.]
IN AMERICA (68) (dir., Jim Sheridan) Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton, Emma Bolger, Sarah Bolger, Djimon Hounsou [Moment when I thought about going 70+ on this fervent, surprising drama: when the end caption read "Dedicated to the memory of Frankie Sheridan", and I was moved, thinking the film - about an immigrant family haunted by a dead son named Frankie - was Jim's own story, that he'd lost a son himself and was trying to exorcise the memory. Moment when I knew I wouldn't: when I found out 'Frankie' was in fact his brother, who died when they were kids - though he must've known people would get the wrong idea, giving the film an undeserved kick. Not that it needs it, being already a strange powerful beast - a tale of immigrant woes clearly rooted in truth (scenes have the imprint of family lore, much-recalled at family gatherings: the Air-Conditioning Story, the E.T.-Doll Story), flaunting the "We're the people" speech from THE GRAPES OF WRATH, finding triumphantly natural moments like the girls bugging Daddy while he's trying to work, yet collapsing early on into subjective over objective ("I'll fast-forward through this bit," says the little girl whose memory the whole thing might be) and moving up a gear into something much more sketchy and supernatural, a child's world of ghosts and spirits, wishes coming true and the power of make-believe. Not a question - as some assume - of Imagination winning out over Reality necessarily, but more a thickening and broadening of Reality itself, the Mike Leigh mix of tragic and comic in the same sentence, life as a roil of contradictory emotions: best cut in the film may be from the girl in V.O. announcing that spring has arrived, to a time-lapse shot of a flower unfolding, straight to a hospital and sudden crisis as she informs us the baby was born prematurely - the through-line is there, thematically (the baby too wants to bloom, like the flower) but emotional colour turns on a dime, as it does throughout (the girls are forever happy-then-sad, laughter dying on the lips); builds to a scene of pure transcendence with the aforementioned baby, its life miraculously saved, holding on to Mom and Dad - tiny hands clutching a meaty finger on each side - blinking at the world it's managed to scrabble into as the man who may have given his life for him (how? who can say?) sinks away on a hospital bed. Sheridan appears to be one of Nature's embellishers, a garrulous liar and storyteller - "Seems like everyone in New York was an actor," he has the girl say, and surely includes himself in the equation - inventing, exaggerating, sometimes stealing outright ("Desperado" sung in a child's treble is a Langley Schools Music Project effect), which is a problem when he deals in History (IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER) but not so much when his subject is the richness of Life as refracted through Memory and his own life - too dramatic to be wholly true, too compelling for that to matter. He works in crude materials - mysticism, illness, the cute things kiddies say ("Jose, can you see...") - to create contrast and emotional Expressionism. Up there with RESPIRO in the 2003 Quicksilver Mood-Swings Stakes; why does Samantha Morton always look like an alien scientist or psychotic nun, though?]
CYPHER (70) (dir., Vincenzo Natali) Jeremy Northam, Lucy Liu, Nigel Bennett [Oh, this mania for flashy mindfuck twists! Wonderfully neat and stylish B-movie, except when the characters are doing the equivalent of taking off a latex mask to reveal they're really Arthur, the mild-mannered janitor (or Keyser Soze, the well-known evil mastermind); it goes against the spirit of the rest of it, which is also (of course) about shifting Identity but deals in a kind of quiet, throbbing paranoia - bare compositions and a pale grey light for the early scenes, then a world of outlandish conspiracies with every detail more delectably incredible than the last : phone numbers hidden in Job 13:17 (take the first letters of each word), mysterious nightmares and little red pills that can make them go away, a brainwashing session requiring a machine with tiny pincers (they swing out like mechanical fingers) designed to click on a subject's eyelids and prevent them from closing, the better to absorb the propaganda being fed - all of it spoken in the veiled diffident tone ("crepuscular," to quote Chris Darke in "Film Comment") of progress reports and strategy meetings. Apparently innocuous business seminars with a hidden dark side echo the old ladies' garden club in MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, and this might've worked (even) better with some political dimension, even in the fanciful Philip K. Dick way - corporate espionage is kind of lame as a Hidden Agenda - but most of it is just hugely enjoyable, taking the MATRIX-style cyber-thriller back to the compact, home-made feel of those 80s semi-satires (PARENTS, SOCIETY) where suburbia turned out to conceal secret monsters, not to mention the Hitchcockian drama of rather square hero (more Roger Thornhill than Neo) trying to keep up with ever more exotic revelations; even the less-effective second half has the vertiginous shot of the elevator shaft and that nifty staircase that materialises as you walk down it. Could that be a touch of the Ronald Reagans in the thin reedy voice Northam uses for our geeky drone of a hero?...]
THE CAT IN THE HAT (38) (dir., Bo Welch) Mike Myers, Spencer Breslin, Dakota Fanning, Alec Baldwin [Ready? 1-2-3-4...
In a magical land called the Land of the Kidpic
Lived a boy named Horace Napoleon McMidnick.
Now Horace was studious, and top of his class,
And a nerd, and a wimp, and a pain in the ass,
But he loved Dr. Seuss so his mother (named Pat)
Took him down to the movie of CAT IN THE HAT.
The audience laughed, and chuckled and giggled
But horrible Horace just ruggled and wriggled
And spoiled all the fun in the vast multiplex,
Hating the look and the special effects.
"What a scam!" said the kid; "Bet they do it with wires!"
Then of course came the titular Cat (Mike Myers).
"Oh for Chrissake!" yelled Horace. "My patience has limits!
No wonder the thing is just 81 minutes.
It's a swizz, it's a train-wreck - this ain't Dr. Seuss,
Just random one-liners and Beatles abuse,
And 'Czechoslovakia', and faux-Nathan Lane,
And breaking the fourth wall again and again,
And 'canine-American', and TV Taiwan,
And mild little bits of gratuitous fun.
I mean it's not bad but it takes more than that
To make a splendiferous CAT IN THE HAT".
Then Horace was harassed, so Pat took him home
To their housey old house with the big domey dome.
And said, "What's your problem, you snotty-nosed punk?
What do you care if a kidpic is junk?
It's not rocket science - he's the Cat in the Hat.
He's crude yet post-modern
With brand recognition
And across-the-board numbers
And Cartoon Network snark.
He's a big-money franchise. That's that."
I WENT DOWN (67) (dir., Paddy Breathnach) Peter McDonald, Brendan Gleeson, Tony Doyle [Low-key, shaggy-dog crime comedy of the kind that usually turns into a road movie (as indeed it does) where the journey's more important than the destination. Typical that the title cites Plato but makes a joke of it, taken from the utterly banal opening lines of "The Republic" ("I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon, son of Ariston") - but also doubles back on itself and becomes more than a joke because it is in fact a philosophical film about ethics, viz. the ethics of letting a villain get snuffed out by a bigger villain even though he swears he's done nothing wrong (and even though the bigger villain is your boss). Definite sense of character beneath the comic violence, with Gleeson adding his poignant touch of sad-sack to a loose-cannon rogue, though the arch intertitles, listing what's to come like old-fashioned chapter headings ("A shoot-out, and a chase with more shooting ... A dirty deal and then a cleaner one"), may be a bit too knowing. Climax tends to the prosaic - armed stand-offs, buried treasure - but it's probably deliberate, building towards closure just as the title finally admits its other, sexual meaning in the last few seconds; that, too, is part of the joke.]
ZATOICHI (62) (dir., Takeshi Kitano) Takeshi Kitano, Tadanobu Asano, Yui Natsukawa [Never seen the originals, but the muted colours - lots of brown and olive-green - and deliberate pace give this an old-fashioned feel, helped by gently swaying camera (a repeated shot is a slow pendulum-like pan back and forth over a two-shot, favouring A then B then A again) and of course Kitano's diffident hero, adding blindness to his usual lack of facial expression and mobility: at this rate he should soon be playing the Yakuza Stump, a limbless torso able to eviscerate opponents with lightning flashes of a samurai sword held between its teeth. As ever, the structuring mechanism is contrasts: the girl who's really a boy (or is it boy who's really a girl?), the ruthless killer given a deliberately sympathetic back-story - slaughtering people to raise money for his sick wife - the callous sadism (lots of shots of people cowering just before they get sliced up) vs. equally gratuitous comedy (tap-dancing peasants and the like) - and of course the way the aforementioned old-fashioned feel bumps up against Kitano's excesses, from the usual fountains of blood to a man in a diaper rushing around with a spear. Gambling motif is oddly appropriate, for you never know what you're going to get here, unless of course you're Kitano (who always wins); on the other hand, it's hard to know how to value this kind of thing, taking personal filmmaking to its cul-de-sac - it's so personal it doesn't even feel the need to have a voice or consistent worldview, just becomes a list of personal whims and caprices and whatever else Kitano wants to throw in (a massacre, a double entendre). Still more fun than anything else he's done, to this non-fanboy.]
SYLVIA (55) (dir., Christine Jeffs) Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Amira Casar [Does a difficult thing moderately well, but I knew even as I watched it that I wouldn't want to see it again. Finding the right balance with a figure as charged and iconic as Sylvia Plath - a "coolness ... with no hint of anger or hysteria, or an appeal to sympathy," as someone says approvingly of her own work - is tricky stuff but the film brings it off, mostly by not tipping its hand, painting her as a normal, pleasant girl with a rogue self-destructive streak. Paltrow's natural glamour is an asset in this case, cooling down the premonitions of dark things to come - Sylvia obsessively repeating Ted's name over and over, or biting him in the midst of their first kiss - while feeding the film's romantic sensibility (embracing on a beach with waves crashing, sharing secrets while lying in bed together with the camera so close you can see every pore of skin on her face); the film's big problem - though in fact deliberate strategy - is to focus so much on the relationship with Hughes, barely exploring promising avenues like Sylvia's fiercely ambitious nature (there's a good bit where she pursues a critic at her book launch, but even that gets turned into a comment on her and Ted) or bourgeois values at the heart of her neurosis. Could've been a bit sharper on the self-delusion of undergraduates talking of Poetry as a weapon and the Poet as a shaman, or the adolescent competition to see who can recite poems as fast as possible, and could've taken more of a cue from Sylvia finding refuge in cake-baking - the ultimate 60s-housewife activity - when she couldn't write (Hughes, on the other hand, is a natural poet); as it is, the first half has a certain tension - happy couple vs. dark future - but when Sylvia's left on her own we don't really know her all that well, having only seen her in relation to her man, and it winds down into a tedious game of waiting for that rogue self-destructive streak to take over ("All I want is blackness", etc etc). Has its moments, though also a risible scene with the couple on a rowboat, as they suddenly discover the tide's dragging them out: "I can't turn around," says panic-stricken Hughes. "People drown like this!" - prompting Gwyneth to give him a moist look and start reciting verse, musing on the vagaries of her life so far ("I was always happy until I was nine..."). You're about to drown, you stupid fucking white poet.]
NORTHFORK (57) (dir., Michael Polish) James Woods, Nick Nolte, Mark Polish, Daryl Hannah, Duel Farnes [Totally storyboarded, totally film school - but why deny that it looks pretty cool? Lots of spectacular sky-and-prairie shots, but my favourite is one of the simplest - Woods in the front seat of his car with a young couple in the back (himself and wife in years gone by, presumably), cleverly lit so they're bathed in a warm orange glow while he looks grey and ashen. Doesn't make a lot of sense thematically - beyond the obvious, death-in-the-name-of-progress of heartland America, symbolised by old-time small towns - with lots of undifferentiated God-talk and the strong suggestion that most of what we see is the dream of a dying little boy (who may or may not be an angel), but thematic sense doesn't seem to have been an issue anyway. Based on Polish comments in interviews - e.g. including an ark in the narrative because people like films to have a 'narrative arc' - and the emphasis on puns and "Alice in Wonderland" humour (visitor to a house, observing the faded 'WELCOME' mat on the doorstep: "It appears they've worn out their welcome"), the idea was a waggish surreal comedy based on echoes and reflections between plot strands - a son without a mother rhymed with a mother in search of a son - rather than any kind of film 'about' anything. Might appear I'm cutting it way too much slack - maybe because it's such a bona fide indie, maybe because it looks pretty cool - but it does settle into a highly enjoyable stretch in the middle, cross-cutting between fedora-clad Woods using theology to try and convince a family to abandon their home and the extended negotiations between the boy-angel and a Mad Hatter party with names like Cod and Cup Of Tea; any culture that claims CITIZEN KANE as its crown jewel should be able to find room in its heart for a film - even a silly film - made for love of the game.]
SCOOBY DOO 2: MONSTERS UNLEASHED (26) (dir., Raja Gosnell) Freddie Prinze Jr, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Linda Cardellini, Seth Green [Actually a little better than the first one, being not a coarse travesty of something not worth doing in the first place but just a standard kids' picture. Approximately 80% padding - exposition, running around, stuff like Scooby and Shaggy piling up chairs etc to block a door, unaware that the monster is behind them; 4.75% knowing or post-modern humour, jokes about celebrity culture or gentle prodding of the fourth wall (Shaggy: "Let's split up and search for clues"; Fred (dismayed): "He stole my thing that I say!"); 2.168% Girl Power, with Daphne and Velma kicking a monster in the "round tables" when Fred proves useless; and the rest devoted - absurdly - to a be-yourself Message, with a bad guy admitting (re: elaborate disguises as ghouls and monsters) that "We needed people to believe we were different than we were", Velma pretending to be hot in a misguided effort to snag her man, and Alicia Silverstone as an investigative journalist saying "My job is to unmask people", unmask you see, we all wear masks in Life just like those villains, why can't we just embrace our Specialness, etc. Bring back the farting and burping in my opinion.]
TORQUE (60) (dir., Joseph Kahn) Martin Henderson, Ice Cube, Monet Mazur [Starts where BIKER BOYZ ended - out in the desert, studded with two cars and a symbolic tortoise ("Cars suck!"). Bikes rule, though our hero doesn't Stand For anything in particular - his T-shirt reads "Ramones", his jacket "Carpe Diem" - and the film has no agenda beyond snazzy image-making. Camera might be racing behind a bullet, whipping down the road towards a house in the distance, looking down at a grove of palm trees, even looking up from below the train tracks, image divided into slats; Kahn uses people decoratively - Ice Cube first appears reflected in a knife-blade - ditto windmills, dust, showers of sparks, heat-glare, bubbles (bubbles?) and the brown-filtered desert shrubs and gorges. Seems pretty clear, what with this and the second CHARLIE'S ANGELS, that the action-movie crowd don't much care for japes that look like commercials, feel like an epileptic fit and fill the gaps with irony and snark - and who can blame them? But it's still a buzz watching a montage of female bottoms, leather seats and soapy water (why? why not!), or courting abstraction in the action scenes as the image grows sketchy and indecipherable (cut too fast, out of focus) and everything is shapes, or trying to find better-known equivalents for the straight-to-video stars (Monet Mazur looks like a younger, skankier Rene Russo; Henderson is more Lorenzo Lamas, with the furrowed brow of Luke Wilson). Possible best line: "Looks like you're the one riding bitch".]
OPEN RANGE (66) (dir., Kevin Costner) Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner, Annette Bening, Diego Luna, Michael Gambon ["Beautiful country," mutters someone, and it is, oh god yes: rich dark-green pastures with purplish-blue mountains in the distance (the West looks lush, almost tropical); crystalline light with dust-motes and insects floating lazily; big skies, filling with Significant storm clouds as things start going wrong (the entire middle act takes place in the mother of all rainstorms); stately horses standing majestic in a shallow lake, or a church-spire in the distance as our hero rides away. Not just pretty pictures either: landscape changes with the story, the land itself expressing what our heroes stand for - the loss of richness and the reining-in of freedom, the Frontier Spirit where men are judged by their actions, not their words (which tend to be few and far between) and "some things gnaw at a man worse than dyin'", being told what to do or losing the right to wander free, even as the loss is grudgingly accepted as an inevitable by-product of 'civilisation'. Actually a little bit of a disappointment - some might say a rip-off, so accustomed are we to a tang of revisionism in our Westerns - getting increasingly conventional in its last 20 minutes, with an execrable ballad over the end credits; even the gunfight (extended, and clearly meant to be definitive) doesn't make the leap into tragedy, or even ambiguity, opting instead for highly satisfying action climax. Kind of disconcerting that there's no twist, i.e. that the film actually believes in its Real Men who deal in Trust and Respect and talk of feelings as if they were some rare disease ("You okay?" "Just got some old feelings comin' up") - but sincerity is first cousin to integrity, this kind of cornball existentialism has its own charm (see also THE ROOKIE), Costner and especially Duvall have a great watchful presence, and it hardly seems fair to penalise it for not being more jaded. The reformed gunman who's forced back into killing and wins the day was a more affecting figure in UNFORGIVEN - where he also lost his soul. But I guess different times call for different heroes.]