Films Seen - December 2001

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

GOSFORD PARK (74) (dir., Robert Altman) Kelly Macdonald, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Kristin Scott Thomas, Helen Mirren, Clive Owen, Alan Bates, Ryan Phillippe, Jeremy Northam, Stephen Fry [Has Altman the rebel turned reactionary, glossing over awkward facts and bestowing approval on an oppressive, undemocratic system of masters and servants? I say no - though the light, amused tone and lack of obvious villains (except perhaps the murder victim) may have egalitarians baying for blood. Starting off with perhaps the most striking bit of capricious tyranny - Smith insisting that the car be stopped so her maid can stand in the rain helping her unscrew the top of her thermos-flask - the film seems to address the problem at the outset, gradually shifting to show a much more symbiotic relationship, servants following the masters' lives like a soap-opera, maid consoling mistress after a fight with her husband, mistress pumping maid for all the latest scuttlebutt (the servants seem much more upset by the murder, and Fry's buffoonish Inspector reveals his cluelessness when he says he doesn't want to interview the staff, only those who had a "real connection" to the victim). Acting is a major motif - in Northam saying he makes his living by impersonating bluebloods, in the social decorum turning out to mask a mass of secrets, in the representatives (and echoes) of Old Hollywood - but it's not imposed from without : this is a world where you really are your social role, which is what Phillippe's professional actor (and ignorant American) can't understand - and what the audience slowly comes to realise, making for a film that grows in stature, like a Polaroid coming into focus (esp. when it drops the smirky nudge-nudge references to vegetarians and old Hitchcock titles). At its best in the constant shuffling of people, really - there's an exhilarating point about half an hour in (mileage may vary) when the barrage of characters starts to make sense, and you start connecting names to faces and back-stories ; gets a bit mechanical after the murder streamlines everything and 'plot' kicks in, fortunately rallying to a powerful and moving climax, but nothing really matches the sense of emerging relationships, or graceful choreography of exits and entrances, or the realisation that a swear-word can still be shocking in the right context, or such delicious moments as old battleaxe Smith (having more fun than in anything since CALIFORNIA SUITE) tackling breakfast with a schoolgirlish "Yummy!". Light and airy, then surprisingly poignant then all the more charming for its emotional heft, like a silly old love-letter that can still make you cry. Shrewd, gossipy, highly enjoyable.]

L.I.E. (54) (dir., Michael Cuesta) Paul Franklin Dano, Brian Cox, Billy Kay, Bruce Altman [A balancing act (hence the opening shot) : young hero's sexuality in the balance, caught between straight and gay (or perhaps between being gay and actually admitting it), caught between child and adult - obviously an innocent yet pointedly sexualised (by the film-makers) long before he meets the man who lusts after him - not to mention the constant tension of wondering just how far the film will go. Might be nice - perhaps even accurate - to discern another kind of balance, story existing in a limbo between the 'real' world and tabloid domain of suburban incest and two-headed babies (and, yes, monstrous child-molesters), which would also explain the frequent lapses into absurd excess - burglary with speeded-up cartoon effects, a minor character keeling over dead in a restaurant conversation for no reason at all, an FBI bust played as slapstick comedy. The idea is presumably a kind of magic realism, going beyond literal interpretation - anything can happen - and incidentally relativising Cox's avuncular pedophile, no more (or less) outrageous than what's around him (obviously relevant that he's part of the Establishment, palling around with cops and teachers ; it's certainly a brave film, in a NAMBLA-approved kind of way) ; unfortunately it's not very well handled, tone changing suddenly and arbitrarily, style pretentiously flashy - surely the cross-cutting between the two boys rifling through each other's homes isn't meant as a flowery metaphor for sex? - whole thing coming off half-baked and kind of ludicrous. Not what you'd expect, nonetheless.]

IRIS (42) (dir., Richard Eyre) Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville [What can you say about a famous writer-philosopher who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved skinny-dipping, literary quotes - and me? Made with love, I suppose, but it's a maudlin kind of love, forever cutting back from the sad decrepitude of its heroine in senility to the days when she looked like Kate Winslet and said dazzling things like "Trust the body" and "Nothing matters except loving what is Good". Cheap shots, basically - going from the Alzheimer's-ridden Iris singing tunelessly as she wanders round the house at night to a raucously youthful pub singalong 50 years before, while the script keeps explaining how important words have always been to her ('cause she can't talk anymore, isn't it sad) and a wall-to-wall score underlines everything in shades of string. Scene for scene, exceptionally well-acted ; but the whole thing reeks.]

THE PRINCESS DIARIES (54) (dir., Garry Marshall) Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews, Hector Elizondo, Heather Matarazzo [Return of the Hollywood convention - familiar from office movies where the President of the company always turns out to be a mensch - wherein the top people are on the same side as the little people, with those in between as the only real villains (maybe something to do with the American Dream and upwardly-mobile nature of American society, though also rather weird in a country where everyone claims to be middle-class) ; you expect the tension to come from the heroine's new life vs. her old life - royal grandma Andrews vs. bohemian-artist mother - but that's actually a red herring, the real enemies turning out to be the clique of 'beautiful people' at her high-school (teen equivalents of middle-management, being powerful but not all-powerful). Speaking of beauty, the film's ideas on the subject are fairly pernicious, draining the heroine of all personality as part of her makeover - most jaw-dropping moment of the year may be when she emerges looking plastic and mannequin-like and you realise she's supposed to be 'pretty' now ("Better! Much better!" claims Andrews) - plus of course it's a shame they didn't use the San Francisco setting for cheap "queen" jokes. Ms. Hathaway is just plain charming, however - scaling Deanna Durbin heights as she makes faces in the mirror or tosses off lines like "You mean it's a wango?" - and Hector Elizondo a model of effortless comic authority. Even by Hector Elizondo standards...]

JOY RIDE (44) (dir., John Dahl) Paul Walker, Steve Zahn, Leelee Sobieski, Jessica Bowman [Hollywood Thriller Overplays Hand (Yet Again). Could be just the memory of creepy suspensers like ROAD GAMES (never seen DUEL), but it does seem to fall apart pretty outrageously after a terrific set-up (the motel scene is as nerve-jangling as everyone says it is), making its psycho unaccountably omniscient with a Freddy Krueger line in dry wisecracks and old rock'n roll ballads on the soundtrack like in SEA OF LOVE - much more hackneyed and less interesting than the small-time, lonely-sounding voice he started out as. Looks like the script mutated as they went along, with at least one strand - the incipient love triangle - that goes nowhere and the kidnapped girl bearing all the hallmarks of a last-minute contrivance (probably some dumb exec sending a memo about 'motivation') ; by the end, with not one but two kidnapped girls and our heroes knocking frantically on motel-room doors because Rusty Nail has summoned them ("Do not be one minute late!") but somehow forgotten to tell them where he's staying, it's just become idiotic. The final twist joins the one in PLANET OF THE APES in a rarefied realm of beyond-implausible ; all you can do is slump in your seat and go "What the fuck?".]

THE LAST CASTLE (36) (dir., Rod Lurie) Robert Redford, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Delroy Lindo [Standing on the shoulders of older and better films - and not even that much better in my opinion : never really went for the charismatic-rebel prison drama, though Sean Connery gave it some animal energy in THE HILL - unlike Redford, whose blankly 'iconic' performance adds nothing to the cardboard goings-on. The whole concept is rancid, full of gung-ho garbage exalting militarism and being a Soldier as the greatest thing on earth, with battle as the crucible where bonds are forged and men are made (the warden, we're repeatedly told, has no combat experience) : Lurie's obviously one of those men who never quite grew out of playing war, a political junkie interested less in the prosaic cut-and-thrust of party politics (wonder if he made this as a counterweight to the Republican-bashing in THE CONTENDER?) than in the 'big picture', strategies and battles of wills. You can tell because he uses chess as a metaphor (seemingly unaware it's become a cliché), just as he paints his two antagonists in thick, lazy brush-strokes - Redford heaving rocks as punishment, looking up defiantly with the sweat coursing down his face, Gandolfini's evil warden gazing down at the prison yard with classical music playing in the background, saying stuff like "You see how easy it is to manipulate men" ; trouble is, he can't see the trees for the forest, so caught up in grand visions and potent symbols (taking the other side's flag, e.g.) he loses sight of basic absurdities like the prisoners having somehow amassed an elaborate arsenal - even built catapults! - for the big action climax without being spotted (and with only about 15 screen minutes since their plan was first outlined). Tired film-making, sophomoric gamesmanship, offensive jingoism ; throwing in the Westmoreland quote about "hearts and minds" - the political-junkie equivalent of a WIZARD OF OZ reference - doesn't cut it.]

STARTUP.COM (62) (dir., Chris Hegedus / Jehane Noujaim) [Temptation to mock dot-com hubris generally resisted (our knowledge of imminent meltdown acts as dramatic motor, giving everything an added poignancy) : heroes generally seen in a fair light, shown in vulnerable moments - lurching out of bed, failing to clinch a deal - as well as Masters of the Universe, comments solicited from both sides (Kaleil's breakup with Dora being an exception). Megalomania kept in check by the film's unremitting rhythm, skipping briskly throughout in short, jagged scenes, never giving its heroes the rope they'd undoubtedly have used to hang themselves (cf. Errol Morris' deceptively passive camera in MR. DEATH) ; slightly disappointing for that same reason, more valuable historical document than psychological examination - one would've liked to know, e.g., how Kaleil and Tom were seen in high-school, and what they talked about when they got together for hours on end at one or other of their houses. Their friendship is undoubtedly what drives the film, a startling, deep-rooted thing ("You're one of the most amazing people I've ever known") finding a happy ending against the odds - but it's also pretty mind-boggling to hear vast sums of money used as touchstones, stripped of their meaning (we hear the words - $17 million, $60 million - but they just seem to hang there), or to realise how young the millionaires are, caught on the brink between college and business ("This sucks so bad," sighs Kaleil when the Market crashes). Required viewing at business schools, if only as a primer on the corporate culture that lies ahead : don't think I could ever work in a place with an "enthusiasm chant" every morning...]

THE GOLDEN BOWL (63) (dir., James Ivory) Uma Thurman, Jeremy Northam, Nick Nolte, Kate Beckinsale [What are the odds on Ivory being the current director most radically re-appraised by future generations of cinephiles? (Aren't Merchant-Ivory as despised now the hipsters have inherited the earth as the likes of Boetticher and Sirk were in the days of Bosley Crowther?) Simply put - and perhaps excepting the unfortunate biopics phase of the mid-90s - these films are far too subtle and intelligent to be dismissed as 'polite' period drama, greatest subtlety of this one being perhaps the way the titular bowl (beautiful but flawed) acts not only as a symbol for the Northam-Beckinsale marriage (a point that gets belaboured slightly) but also as reflection of the characters' true selves, turning the apparent symmetry of two married couples pairing off (leaving father and daughter on one hand, illicit lovers on the other) into an assymetrical structure of three characters ranged against the fourth : Thurman is the only one who sees neither the flaw in the bowl nor its significance, making her (not Beckinsale) the true "innocent" who needs to be protected. She's also, not at all coincidentally, the only character untouched by money - being poor as opposed to impoverished - hence unfamiliar with the violence it brings in its wake : the film's true theme is the abiding ruthlessness that comes with wealth and property, and the echoes between America's capitalist kings and their aristocratic European forebears, latching onto Art and culture as a kind of salve - part guilt, part noblesse oblige - for having grown rich on the backs of ordinary people (viz. the labourers in Nolte's steelworks). Ivory gets the lavish visuals (of course) and a fair bit of cinematic craft - cutting almost imperceptibly to an ominous low-angle shot in an early scene as Thurman asks "And your fiancée?" - but also films like an anthropologist, attentive to Victorian manners (e.g. the photographer's courtliness as he gives instructions to his 'betters') or the details of weekend fun-and-games at a country house, playing like kids and singing songs with titles like "I'm Such A Silly When The Moon Comes Out" (he also nails something rarely seen in movies, viz. how strange America must have seemed to an early-20th-century European, with its wide streets and fevered New World bustle). Scorsese's AGE OF INNOCENCE brio is missing, of course, and the story kind of sputters out ; still wipes the floor with most 'fashionable' fare.]

THE DISH (46) (dir., Rob Sitch) Sam Neill, Kevin Harrington, Tom Long, Patrick Warburton, Roy Billing ["Man on the moon or no man on the moon, we've still got to eat!". Quite right too. Apollo 11 - first manned lunar mission - seen by a bonzer bunch of blokes and sheilas in the kind of cosy small town where people are pretty down-to-earth about these things ("I wouldn't let my Don go to the moon," they aver) and everyone's got their little eccentricities, e.g. there's a kid who's obsessed with things military so he goes around saluting everyone, quirky stuff like that. Period detail? No worries, mate - bung a few late-60s hits on the soundtrack, Thunderclap Newman and whatnot. Crises? Yeah, a couple, nothing major - things go wrong for about 10 minutes, soon put right again. Not as grating as Sitch's previous THE CASTLE, all rather sweet (if undernourished), probably more than that for Australians - affirming they're as good as anyone, esp. since it's set in the days of 'cultural cringe' when they still had "God Save The Queen" as the national anthem. Kind of bland nonetheless, though Neill is award-worthy ; when did he become such a quietly truthful presence?...]

SHALLOW HAL (65) (63 - second viewing) (dir., Bobby and Peter Farrelly) Jack Black, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jason Alexander, Joe Viterelli [Strange seeing two Farrelly flicks in a couple of days [see below] ; definitely some finger-wagging going on, which you wouldn't expect given their disreputable rep, but I guess satire is didactic (or at least normative) by its very nature, and the lessons being taught - 'live healthy' in OSMOSIS JONES, 'don't judge people by appearance' here - are just common sense really. More importantly, this secular sermon may be the most emotionally painful movie I've seen this year (in the sense of feeling so bad for the characters I almost fast-forwarded at one point), hence among the most affecting for the way it alchemises pain into happiness ; accusations of bad taste and fattie-mockery aren't entirely insane - the heroine's true (i.e. corpulent) body is treated like the prowling Beast in a monster movie, ominously glimpsed and suggested in anticipation of its terrifying appearance - but that's only because most of the film assumes a 'shallow' perspective, based on the disjunction between what the world thinks and what our hero sees (like WHAT WOMEN WANT in reverse, since he actually has less information than the people around him). The message may seem kind of condescending - 'be nice to fat people, because they look like Gwyneth Paltrow on the inside' - but in fact the film works the other way, downgrading Gwyneth Paltrow-ism by making Hal oblivious to what's going on, putting the audience by definition 'above' his worldview ; the message thus becomes simply 'Trust your feelings' (both for Hal and ourselves), making the film an equivalent to those love stories where the hero(ine) discovers his / her beloved has a terrible secret in their past, with the wrenching added twist that she thought he knew it all along. Might've made a Sirk or Mizoguchi melodrama (or Thomas Hardy novel) yet it's wrapped up in Black's brash, combustible persona and determinedly ironic detail like a self-help guru playing himself, not to mention the uncomfortable 'freakshow factor' : the result (as in FREAKS itself) is to explode notions of normality and give the feelings unlikely resonance - Hal's love becomes a symbol of Acceptance, weirder and grander than "just the way you are" Bridget Jones-isms. Props to Black's invaluable edge (he's the kind of asshole who would dump the love of his life for stupid macho reasons), Viterelli's bittersweet portrait of a man at once gentle, ruthless and self-loathing (making him an Irishman fits the no-preconceptions theme, of course) and Edison Lighthouse over the beguiling climax (wonder if they named the heroine Rosemary just for that) ; anyone who asks why Hal's gift apparently extends only to strangers - seeing friends and neighbours much as he did before - is just being a spoilsport...]

OSMOSIS JONES (56) (dir., Bobby and Peter Farrelly) Bill Murray, Chris Elliott, plus the voices of Chris Rock, David Hyde Pierce, Laurence Fishburne [Ohhh, those Farrellys ... Bodily-function jokes obviously make sense in a film set within the human body, but why such gratuitous glee? I keep trying to recall all the cop clichés wittily transposed to the new setting, and clever detail about pedestrian crossings reading "Flow / Don't Flow", or a cell mentioning that he and the girlfriend are "going down to the kidneys to see the Stones" over the weekend, or Osmosis being warned to back off or "you might find yourself in our next nosebleed", or the shuttle service to the Bladder (for those planning to travel), or the door labelled "Subconscious : Authorized Cells Only", or lines like "Funny - he doesn't look 'flu-ish" - but all I can think of are exploding zits and vomit gags and partly-masticated food. Maybe it's subversive, sneaking in a health-food-Nazi admonition to look after your body, cut down on the junk food etc, with the gross-out stuff as a Trojan Horse ; or maybe it's just immature and annoying. Useful anatomical primer, though - I'd forgotten why we have snot, to be honest - not to mention funny ; even the TITANIC reference kind of works.]

BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (54) (dir., Christophe Gans) Samuel Le Bihan, Vincent Cassel, Emilie Dequenne, Mark Dacascos, Jérémie Rénier, Monica Bellucci [Incoherent on a more exalted level, e.g. why is the framing device set during the Great Terror - a black hole of shame and corruption for Enlightenment ideas, used for evil ends - if the film itself takes the side of the philosophes against religious zealots? Incoherent on the basic level too, e.g. how can the hero assemble a small army at the baddies' headquarters without being spotted (esp. given he had to plough through ranks of watchmen when he tried to break in by himself a few days earlier)? Entertaining for its broad mix of elements, taking in JAWS-style monster-hunting (we even see the creature grab its victims from below and drag them down, just like Bruce the shark - and of course the authorities lean on our hero to close the case as soon as possible), frocks-and-dulcimers period movie a la Merchant Ivory, martial-arts fights, Rousseau's theory of the 'noble savage', morbid detail like a serial-killer movie (rotting corpses being examined, etc) plus the kind of skulduggery - hooded cults, secret societies, a mysterious book at the centre of it all - one might find in Umberto Eco or Arturo Perez-Reverte novels ; as with CRIMSON RIVERS, the expansiveness is its own reward, though Gans shoots in an airless, over-busy style, forever fidgeting and cross-cutting and throwing in montages (wow, you mean I can dissolve as well as cut? I like this toy!). Stirs to life whenever M. Cassel appears, looking thin-lipped and sardonic ; falls apart whenever the monster appears, looking like a moulting triceratops.]

HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE (62) (dir., Chris Columbus) Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane [So this is it, huh. A staggering phenomenon, both because every two-bit kiddie book and TV show has always been precisely this kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy about 'ordinary' youngsters finding special powers, magic wardrobes etc (in fact, didn't "The Worst Witch" cover this exact same ground?), and because you'd never expect our determinedly democratic age to embrace something so elitist, not to say Victorian. Occasional black faces and cries of "Wicked!" aside, it plays astonishingly like "Tom Brown's Schooldays", down to our sensible hero given a more extrovert best friend (Harry = Tom, Ron = East), uniforms and 'houses' all present and correct, pupils defined according to family, and of course Quidditch standing in for rugby ; all of which is actually quite charming, in an old-fashioned way - it's just curious that a mass audience would be drawn to this stuff (or maybe it isn't). Surprisingly likeable, at least for one who hasn't read the book(s), with stray bits of Roald Dahl, "Gormenghast" and Dungeons & Dragons - not to mention a twist out of PRIMAL FEAR - plus a nice line in veddy British understatement ("Thanks," says a talking snake ; "Anytime," replies Harry) ; but the visuals are stolid - mucho shots of little boys looking awed, nothing particularly awesome - the tinkly music is laid on with a trowel and the plot simply doesn't build to a satisfying climax. Cute, nonetheless.]

THE TOWN IS QUIET (51) (dir., Robert Guédiguian) Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan [All about the "barriers between people", whether racial or social or emotional - albeit with a glimmer of hope in the echoes between different strands, e.g. the name Ameline recurring both in a comfortably middle-class woman and the fatherless baby of long-suffering Ascaride's junkie daughter. Ascaride herself (looking more than ever like a weary Harpo Marx) is the film's moral centre - loyal, resilient (refusing a doctor's offer of Valium to help her sleep better), brave, romantic - and it probably works better if you find her inspiring rather than a tediously blunt instrument, salt-of-the-earth Endurance to match the noble black martyr who chides his fellow gangstas on their narrow-minded attitudes and the Spalding Gray-like rich guy who wants to change the very fabric of the city and says things like "You can't stop globalisation". The twist is that he used to be a Lefty but lost his beliefs, which is part of the film's larger thrust - the search for something new now that Left and Right are commingled, the old ideological boundaries gone, with Art and music emerging as a possible answer, bringing folks together in the (surprisingly) touching coda ; Guédiguian's approach is holistic, interested in everyone's story (not the least of the rich guy's misdeeds is repeatedly declaring there are "no more stories" in the world), but he has neither the wild imagination of P.T. in MAGNOLIA nor the red-hot style of Winterbottom in WONDERLAND, let alone the subtle eye for detail of Altman in SHORT CUTS. Swings from Satie straight to the bustle of a fish market, from a line of hookers straight to a society party ; no surprise that it spirals into (frankly absurd) melodrama in the final lap, with hate-crimes and mercy-killings and a bar-owner turning out to be a part-time hitman. Concept is more interesting than the characters ; setting - Marseilles, louche and seething - is more interesting than either.]

THE DEEP END (45) (dir., Scott McGehee / David Siegel) Tilda Swinton, Goran Visnjic, Jonathan Tucker, Josh Lucas [Not as deliberately distancing as the directors' previous SUTURE, where the same character was alternately played by a white and a black actor (or the star's previous ORLANDO, where a woman played a man without bothering to change her appearance), but still pretty impassive, visually expressed in featureless, crystalline surfaces of glass and water constantly 'broken' by acts of violence and intrusive sounds (a phone call, a car horn). The point is presumably a parallel for the shattering of our heroine's placid life, but the film is so opaque it's impossible to tell how we're meant to view this, and / or whether we're expected to assume - just because the heroine is a housewife - that "her nest is also a prison" ("Sight & Sound") or "the demands on her are endless, insistent, numbing" ("Film Comment"), none of which is really in the film itself (her life actually seems rather pleasant, with time to go swimming in the pool between errands and one of those nifty houses that apparently clean themselves). Maybe it's a post-feminist thing, where we're expected to pick it up from a couple of subtle signifiers (like the all-purpose repression in Swinton's performance), but it still seems rather academic, esp. when the film is also such a lacklustre thriller - no sense of pressure (the cops barely feature, and the blackmailers' insistence on the money being delivered straight away just seems false and contrived), little sense of Respectability as a fragile shield about to be exposed as a sham (cf. THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW). Whole thing kind of sat there for me ; interesting double-bill with IN THE BEDROOM though, all these grimly resolute parents turning vigilante for the sake of their violated kids, echoing the current hysteria over child-protection (and, e.g., recent pedophile witch-hunts in the UK, everything justified For The Sake Of The Children) ; no wonder everybody hated FREDDY GOT FINGERED...]

TOWN AND COUNTRY (35) (dir., Peter Chelsom) Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Andie MacDowell, Garry Shandling, Goldie Hawn [Not terrible, just a soufflé that refuses to rise (that's the trouble with soufflés, they're no good at all without the fluffiness) : meant as a kind of updated-screwball thing, where the staid, sensible hero (Beatty, looking constipated) gets assaulted by a world full of kooks - girlfriends with tongue-studs, shirtless rebel leaders wandering round the house, Charlton Heston in self-guying mode as a gun-toting paterfamilias bristling at suggestions that he used to be an intimate of Hemingway's ("Is that a homo thing?") - and it's all set in a tony world of eccentric rich types with walk-on plebs (doormen, ladies'-room attendants) for slow-burn reaction shots, and everyone rushes around and talks at cross-purposes and comes together in the same place for the climax, and it all ends with a scene in a judge's chambers (lawyer's office, whatever) - and none of it even begins to work, leaving you cringing for the talented folks caught up in it. Some of it is just stale, like the camera-brandishing Japanese tourists or Beatty milking his Lothario rep the same way he tried to play against his brain-box image for ISHTAR (everyone around him has sex on the brain, while he himself is an innocent) ; some of it is unfortunate, like the daughter's inarticulate Turkish boyfriend (meant as a kind of harmless Mischa Auer character, but coming off uncomfortably close to funny-foreigner mockery) ; some of it is actually amusing, like the blissfully daft costume party with Shandling as Elvis and Warren as a polar bear. No disgrace, just not sharp enough ; ever noticed how people grow more pleasant with middle age but start telling really bad jokes?...]

101 REYKJAVIK (56) (dir., Baltasar Kormakur) Hilmir Snaer Gudnason, Victoria Abril, Hanna Maria Karlsdottir [Reykjavik - brown-looking place, no trees, no sunlight, "even the ghosts are bored" - doesn't exactly come off as the Paris of the Frozen North here ("Get yourself a life!" the jobless-slacker hero is admonished ; "Well," he shrugs, looking around, "if this is life, I'm not very impressed"), yet Kormakur is happy to call it home and the score is by Damon Albarn, who's repeatedly called it one of his favourite places on the planet ; our hero, similarly, isn't exactly prepossessing - immature, anti-social, somewhat pathetic - yet it's clear the film has a soft spot for him, even as he wastes his evenings down the pub or goes shopping for animal porn ("Iceland's greatest cultural treasures"). He is, he admits, "basically harmless", which is why our sympathy doesn't seem misplaced - a Woody Allen nebbish without the eagerness to please, leading his muffled, ineffectual rebellion against screechy girlfriends, Christmas gatherings, icy climates and a world where a guy can fall in love (out of all possible women) with his Mom's lesbian lover - but the film doesn't troll for sympathy, treating him as one might view a drinking buddy or fellow sports fan, with a kind of absent-minded affection. Too inert to be smug, which is actually its greatest strength ; doesn't force itself, which is why it grows on you. Where can I get one of those couches that turns into a bathtub?...]

THE GLASS HOUSE (33) (dir., Daniel Sackheim) Leelee Sobieski, Stellan Skarsgard, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern, Trevor Morgan [Kind of glad I saw this, actually - reminds me of all those straight-to-video thrillers I used to watch and don't bother with much anymore. Lazy writing pretty much a given - it's the kind of film where an office door is open ju-u-ust enough for our heroine to overhear every word of an important meeting, or crucial documents (the kind that could wreck a villain's entire plan) may be found poking out of their envelopes in the kitchen trash, not even torn up - but much of it doesn't even bother making sense, as when family lawyer Dern tells our Leelee that the only alternative to staying with evil foster parents Lane and Skarsgard is to be a "ward of the state", when both he and we know there's an uncle in Chicago who'd happily take care of her (the film even introduces him in an early scene, only to forget about him). And what's all the business with the battered car she recognises as her parents' in Stellan's garage, when we're later told her folks were driving an entirely different car at the time of their accident (is anyone minding the store here?)? Might perhaps have worked had it gone by the STEPFATHER / PARENTS / NIGHT OF THE HUNTER model, where a 'perfect' facade is a cover for perversity, but the parents here are obviously dysfunctional - she a druggie, he a creep who drives his sports car like a maniac and makes a pass at our underage heroine (another example of makes-no-sense syndrome, given what he wants from her) ; just plain dumb, though the titular house itself is pretty stunning, and at least Wesley Strick (neck-and-neck with Akiva Goldsman for Worst Writer in Hollywood) doesn't also direct, like he did in THE TIE THAT BINDS - though he does seem to think he's writing teenage characters by peppering dialogue with stuff like " 'rents" and "sweet!", and he does write hilariously awful exchanges like our heroine's friends at the movies : "Who's Meryl Streep?" "Oh you know, she's like Katie Holmes for our parents". Why do I suspect Ms. Sobieski will never in her entire career top that wickedly lascivious grin she flashes for a moment in EYES WIDE SHUT?...]

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (52) (dir., Rob Cohen) Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez [Who is Vin Diesel? "He's a complicated guy," we're informed. "My brother is like ... gravity," opines Ms. Brewster (watching her wrestle with the line is almost worth the price of admission in itself) ; "Everything gets pulled towards him". "I've worn a few vests," explains the (offscreen) man himself, quoted in "Empire", "I've kicked a few asses, and I don't have much hair". Either way, his baby-faced-killer presence blows away our hero's male-model smirkiness (who is Paul Walker? "He's bee-yootiful!"), adding to a film I should really rate higher except I found almost the entire second half borderline-tedious (anyone else guess the kid was doomed the moment Walker said "What are you doing here - you should be studying at M.I.T. or something"?). Working-class counterpoint to DRIVEN's Eurotrash, gritty where that was grandiloquent, its look suburban and unglamorous, heroes merely mid-level-tough (clearly unable to handle the cops), kids trying to please or placate absent father-figures - Vin has his memories (father burned to death right in front of him), Walker his gruff superiors down at the precinct, even the Chinese gangster is established as the son of a powerful father ; plotting is low-key, almost desultory, with the major twist taking place offscreen, nor is the climax as on-the-nose as you might expect (which is actually a good thing). Strangely diffident in many ways, as if in homage to the cheap hot-rod B-movies it occasionally echoes - in the reference to a house built in the 50s, in wilfully corny bits like the 'race-drivers' grace', in the way the gang all hang around cheering and jeering like a Broadway chorus while hero and anti-hero banter at the end of the first race. Only real difference is a racer limbers up with PlayStation while waiting at the starting-line - and of course the cops now brainstorm over iced cappucinos...]

BREAD AND TULIPS (66) (dir., Silvio Soldini) Licia Maglietta, Bruno Ganz, Giuseppe Battiston [So many 'quirky' comedies cluttering up the place, one of them was bound to hit the mark sooner or later ; squarely in a genre I'm becoming increasingly fond of, the film that seems to be making itself up as it goes along (from the sublime - Kaurismaki - to the likeable thinness of Bodrov Jr.'s SISTERS), ambling towards Nirvana from an opening scene advising us to leave rationality behind, hop on the train of imagination. Characters include a well-spoken (but suicidal) Icelandic expat, an anarchist florist and a chubby plumber with a passion for detective novels, but the joy lies in the just-so details adorning every scene (a conversation punctuated by quick cuts to a little boy munching his way indifferently through a bowl of cereal, finally tipping up the bowl to slurp the milk ; the final tulip falling with a soft thud from a dried-up bouquet as Ganz sits despondent beside it) and Soldini's deadpan, deliberate pacing, emphasising nothing so that after a while everything - the name "Vera Zasulic", our heroine leafing through "Huck Finn" - starts to seem helplessly funny. Everyone's maladroit, a bit of a loser, and of course everyone stumbles into happiness by the end, with bread and tulips and accordion music on the side (note the plot doesn't work at all if you start to wonder why the heroine doesn't have a credit-card). A fairytale, and a charming one - if also chastening, given that Soldini has been making films since 1982 : how many other wonderful directors are out there, working solidly for 20 years without the recognition they deserve?...]

POOTIE TANG (49) (dir., Louis C.K.) Lance Crouther, Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes, Jennifer Coolidge, Robert Vaughn [70 minutes?! What the fuck - that's not even a James Cameron credits sequence! Speaking of credits, the mess of deleted scenes over the closing ones hints at the difficult birth behind this gleefully infantile comedy, with its belt-whipping gags and "dirty" gangsta who hates taking baths more than anything (we've all been there, albeit quite a long time ago). Fourth-wall breakage ("Stop the movie!") and psychedelic AUSTIN POWERS musical interludes are the least of it : patchy but startling, offering a whirlwind tour of black-American culture - jive-talk, R&B, blaxploitation, sexual conservatism, rural-idyll redemption fantasy (life on the mythical "farm", before it all went wrong in the urban ghettos) - in a fractured, madcap style as likely to attempt a talk-show spoof as launch into a rapid-fire montage of urban chaos (drugs, drinking, violence, "people eatin' too much, gettin' fat and sloppy"). Flat, funny, flat again ; fight scenes, corporate-bashing, Chris Rock sending up his own logorrhea. Not much good - these things never are, see also ORGAZMO, IT'S PAT, etc - but it's only 70 minutes after all ; by common consent, one of the damnedest things of the year. Sa-da-tay...]