Films Seen - December 1999

(Pre-'96 movies not included)

10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (45) (dir., Gil Junger) Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt [Why do they make these things so bland (something to do with the Backstreet Boys-isation of teen culture?)? Starts off smart and funny, ends up horribly white-bread and by-the-numbers : the shrew's all but tamed within 45 minutes, then it's all plastic emotions and instantly-resolved crises en route to a big night at the prom (as so often with American teen-flicks, the deification of high-school conventions sits oddly with the underlying conviction that the geeks shall inherit the earth). Not sure what Madness and the Thompson Twins are doing on the soundtrack, and Shakespeare seems even more irrelevant, though he's briefly celebrated as a proto-rapper and dead white guy who "knows his shit". Not a great choice as my final film of '99, but it does contain an Important Question for the new millennium : "I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed - but can you ever just be whelmed?". Hmmm...]

BESIEGED (58) (dir., Bernardo Bertolucci) Thandie Newton, David Thewlis [Third World suspicion won over by First World civility - sensitive (European) artist proves to embittered (African) girl that not all authority figures have to be evil dictators, as they are in her own primitive land. All a bit suspect, not to say patronising, but meticulously made - Bertolucci's camera prowls and peeks, craning forward for a better look, as he jump-cuts, over-cranks, overlaps near-identical versions of the same shot to create unspoken sexual tension. Cinematically, it's a film that has everything - except perhaps mystery : compared with something like BEAU TRAVAIL, its wordless games with pace and rhythm seem a little obvious, its symbolic use of music (ethnic vs. classical, with jazz as a sort of mutually-acceptable halfway house) all too schematic. "I do not understand you!" cries Newton. "I do not understand this music!". Spell it out, why don't you?...]

AN IDEAL HUSBAND (54) (dir., Oliver Parker) Rupert Everett, Jeremy Northam, Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore ["Lord Goring, you are talking quite seriously," admonishes Blanchett, obviously alive to the spirit of Oscar Wilde ; Everett apologises, but the film does not - indeed, most of its high points are dramatic rather than comedic, the House of Lords sequence (not in the play) and the cast sinking their teeth into some surprisingly heartfelt speeches (Blanchett does especially well with Lady Chiltern's ode to her Ideal(ised) Husband : "The world seemed finer to me because you were in it"). Diverting corset-and-buttonhole fare, but it doesn't feel particularly Wildeian, even (and especially) when it brings on the playful piano scherzo for the final sequence ; the various references to the author - a card-player named Bunbury, the semi-explicit linkage of scandal-ridden Northam with Wilde himself - seem, in this context, more presumptuous than clever.]

TARZAN (60) (dir., Kevin Lima / Chris Buck) With the voices of Tony Goldwyn, Minnie Driver, Nigel Hawthorne, Glenn Close [Haven't seen one of these with its natural constituency for ages (only caught Press screenings of MULAN and HERCULES) : don't think it made a lot of difference, beyond a small proportion of the audience doing gorilla imitations on the way out, confirming the cross-generational appeal of these annual Disneys. That said, this is probably the weakest I've seen since THE LION KING, apeing (sorry) that film's mix of the simpering and grating - the latter via a tiresomely raucous hero's-friend, the former in Phil Collins' godawful songs, showcasing both his MOR sensibility and literal-minded way with words ("Paradise untouched by Ma-a-an," he croons over a shot of the jungle). Action scenes excellent, if a bit over-extended ; Minnie Driver is the most charming Jane in the annals of Jane-dom ; the deliberate move to a cruder, more comic-book drawing style (Tarzan's massive chin, the apes' square features) is interesting, though I missed the flowing lines of MULAN ; emotional stakes surprisingly high, but perhaps over-ambitious : the film strives for intensity in Tarzan's feeling of not belonging, but it doesn't really have the equipment to flesh that feeling out beyond platitude-level. And he is only a cartoon character, after all.]

PLAYING BY HEART (23) (dir., Willard Carroll) Angelina Jolie, Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Dennis Quaid, Ryan Phillippe, Gillian Anderson, Madeleine Stowe [Don't mean to sound immature, but isn't this a really boring movie (and an offensive one, when it tries to bring death and illness to its own glib level)? Ciphers talking relationships, witlessly, in a low-rent version of SHORT CUTS ; most of the characters come from the media, as do most of the jokes - stuff like a parking-lot with sections named after rock stars ("Where are you parked?" "I'm on the Artist Formerly Known As Prince level"). A good cast struggles valiantly, but the lines have all the grace of one-legged chickens. Rowlands to Connery, after he's given away the ending of the movie she's watching : "Why don't you just go find a theatre where CITIZEN KANE is playing and yell out 'Rosebud is a sled'!" ; a one-liner whose entire middle third is superfluous.]

DICK (51) (dir., Andrew Fleming) Kirsten Dunst, Michelle Williams, Dan Hedaya, Dave Foley [Distaff Beavis and Butthead in the White House ("He looks like he's wearing blush," they squeal vis-a-vis George Washington, giggle singly-then-together B & B-style). Home-made space cookies bringing a smile and a song to the lips of Leonid Brezhnev (and saving the world from nuclear catastrophe). Farting, burping and, yes, dick jokes. Watergate references, half-buried, scattered like Easter eggs. Woodward to Bernstein : "You smell like cabbage!". ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN compositions cheekily reconstructed. Bright pastel colours in every shot, standing in for the 70s. "Excitable" probably the most accurate one-word description, carried away with the high spirits and nutty-sophisticated detail till you forget what drew you in in the first place, and your happy grin of anticipation starts to freeze on your face. Equal parts funny and tiresome, though it obviously means a good deal less to non-Americans.]

AUTUMN TALE (76) (dir., Eric Rohmer) Marie Riviere, Béatrice Romand, Alain Libolt, Alexia Portal [Like his heroine, a wine-maker who doesn't mind letting the weeds grow in between her vines (you can find good salad herbs among the thickets), Rohmer knows the value of mess, at least when there's a deliberate intelligence behind it - and he knows how it shapes relationships as well, which is why the many complications aren't resolved just by plot-wheels clicking into place but by characters actually making sense of their emotions. It deflates things a little - you expect the forces of coincidence and deus ex machina to create the ending, as in any good farce - but the truth is he uses the mechanics of farce the way De Oliveira uses literary adaptation or Antonioni used the quest-type thriller, as a window to the heart ; this is both among his lightest and most satisfying movies, wispily unforced yet quietly assured. "Just take it as a lark," says Riviere, "it'll work better that way" ; actually, it works fine just the way it is.]

FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL (81) (dir., Errol Morris) [What can you say against this marvellous meditation-cum-personal-essay? Maybe that one of its four stories (the topiary gardener) seems slightly irrelevant most of the time - but it sounds its own rueful note so beautifully, and crucially, in the closing minutes (adding the one inescapable fact of life, the past making way for the future) it couldn't possibly have been dispensed with. Maybe that it gets a bit repetitive, talking heads interspersed with found footage - but it ranges over such a wealth of subjects, so rich and heady in its implications. It's about work first of all, the way even a mundane job contains "worlds to explore" - and by extension about the creative impulse that allows for such exploration, raising work to the level of Art. It's about the thought that such creativity is what makes us human - and the counter-thought that we are, in fact, merely a different kind of animal, nothing more exalted (there's no exaltation in Nature : "You're either prey, or the enemy, or else you're ignored"). It's about the way Art, even (especially?) bad, cheesy Art - movies, circuses, animal exhibits - sparks our dreams, and gives shape to our unspoken obsession with the Other. It's about, most movingly, the elusive something that underlies all our lives - maybe an empathy, maybe a consciousness of being human, certainly something (as the robot-expert puts it) that "if you analyse it too much, it becomes meaningless". It's a film suffused with wonder, and a film I longed to see again the moment it was over. Magical and mind-expanding.]

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (74) (dir., Trey Parker) with the voices of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman [Millennial angst hastens thoughts of posterity : how will future generations look back on the late 90s? As a time when the (over-)protection of children - idealised as picture-perfect little angels by a society with less and less time to actually spend with them - reached unprecedented levels of hysteria, even drowning out freedom of speech? As a time when Saddam Hussein (or Fidel Castro, or Slobodan Milosevic) was demonised by cynical governments as a kind of all-purpose bogeyman, justifying years of pointless sanctions that hurt only innocent people? As a time of entrenched hypocrisies, touchy-feely patter (help the homeless, help the handicapped) side-by-side with compassion-fatigue and a gung-ho 'patriotism'? As a time when tragedy wasn't worth a damn unless it happened to a celebrity? Anyone who's thought at all about this stuff will find more truth in this patchy, blissfully funny, foul-mouthed (yet strangely innocent) satire than any number of streamlined message movies. Anyone who hasn't still gets a dozen infectious toe-tappers you can hum and giggle to days later, plus a spot-on Disney parody (complete with simulated crane-shot into the character as he bursts into song) ; not to mention a midget in a bikini top, a Bill Gates cameo and the sound of a dying giraffe...]

THE CASTLE (22) (dir., Rob Stich) Michael Caton, Anne Tenney, Stephen Curry, Charles (Bud) Tingwell [What's the deal here, anyway? A massive hit in its native Australia, respectfully received elsewhere - and impossibly flimsy, an Ealing comedy in MURIEL'S WEDDING clothing that can only be explained as nostalgia for a certain kind of straight-talking, resolutely un-intellectual, salt-of-the-earth Australian type, Crocodile Dundee gone petit bourgeois (though the film, in a no doubt unintended irony, identifies its heroes with the New Australia of immigrants and Aborigine rights, pitting them against the old Anglo Establishment). They're a loving, none-too-bright family - as in FORREST GUMP or DUMB AND DUMBER we accept and revel in the characters' stupidity, a.k.a. their Own Special Way of looking at the world - the kind who pile in front of the TV to watch "Funniest Home Videos", who look on hairdressing school as a "college education" and wonder how they got their land so cheap when it's so conveniently located right next to the airport, their story told with a kind of nursery-school artlessness ("Dad reckoned we were the luckiest family in the world," says the voice-over ; cut to Dad saying, "I reckon we're the luckiest family in the world"). I knew from the start it wasn't my kind of movie, but the flimsiness took me by surprise, the lazy, predictable plotting and one-dimensional obviousness of it all ; can you really play Argent's "Hold Your Head Up" - with a straight face - at a low point for our hero and hope to get away with it?]

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (39) (dir., Michael Apted) Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards, Robbie Coltrane [Bond is back. He sips women and beds champagne, gets a small arsenal of bullets shot at him (they all miss), executes a swan-dive with a dislocated shoulder, makes awful puns, goes through any number of lengthy action scenes in a film so bloated even the pre-credits sequence lasts 15 minutes ; the action doesn't always advance the plot, and when it does (as in what we'll call Robbie's Last Stand) it's liable to seem cheesy and ungainly. My mind wandered, to be honest - I couldn't help thinking of The Dude when M says "This will not stand", and I kept flashing on Wayne and Garth whenever the villain's name was mentioned ("In France he would be called 'le Renard'..."). Bit of a slog, really ; note the sparklingly witty cameo by that excellent newspaper the "Cyprus Mail" though. And no, we didn't get a penny for it...]

OCTOBER SKY (63) (dir., Joe Johnston) Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, Laura Dern [Maw, Paw won' lemme build a space-rockit ... Much better than that, fortunately, though it still milks the rural Americana angle and it's riddled with hokiness and banality - heavy-handed exposition, one-thing-after-another plotting, cornball ending, Mark Isham's 'inspirational' score, wall-to-wall 50s soundtrack in the first half (you know something's wrong when even a scene in a machine-shop has "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" wafting over it). Yet something shines through, esp. in the father-son scenes - Gyllenhaal the wide-eyed dreamy kid, Cooper (magnificent) the working man, not remotely evil but narrow-minded, unable to see beyond his job and his little world (unable to see how like him his confusing son is). He's the 50s salaryman, possessed of every decent quality but imagination - he's so proud when his son 'grows up', as he sees it, by going down the mine, so surprised when his wife says she'll leave him unless he helps the boy (leave him? over this nonsense?) : it taps into something beautiful, a yearning for the youthful dreamy energy we don't actually lose, merely lose sight of, re-direct, letting it burrow in the earth instead of soaring into the stratosphere. It's a rare experience (for me) to be so moved by a film that I drop my guard, let it have its clichés and dubious manipulations (even a terminal illness, fer Chrissakes!), trusting that the characters are strong enough, and the film respectful enough, to forestall embarrassment. They are, and they do.]

ARLINGTON ROAD (58) (dir., Mark Pellington) Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack, Hope Davis [Hesitate to bad-mouth this one, seeing as the final twist / sting in the tail opens up so many provocative new areas (even if trying to re-view the whole film in a new light hits plausibility snags fairly quickly). Most of it actually plays pretty stale, though, running through the familiar surely-he's-paranoid-but-what-if-he-isn't plotting (Davis in the thankless Voice-Of-Reason role) before seguing into nightmarish horror movie, tilting the camera, taking every shock moment (Cusack's phone-booth appearance is memorable) and adding ethereal la-la-la effects to the discovery of the Vital Clue at the old man's house : not unreasonable, given the ending, building an impression of Bridges losing control, swayed by events and his own hysteria - it just feels hollow (esp. in conjunction with the rather tedious first hour), like Pellington's frantically trying to juice up tired material. Oh, and what about that old man? Isn't he a worrisome loose end in the villain's plans? Or was he part of the game all along? Guess it all depends how paranoid you allow yourself to get...]

PLUNKETT AND MACLEANE (46) (dir., Jake Scott) Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Liv Tyler [Jake's certainly got the genes - or at least he can do the flashy images - but his stars have no chemistry and his narrative falls apart halfway through ; and maybe he needs to grow up a little too, though the film's relish for grotesque 18th-century detail (maggots on putrefying corpses and the like) has its appeal. At its best when it period-mixes, effete aristos spouting cockney slang ("Geezer!" "Nicely!") or a ballroom-ful of dancing couples overlaid with a jazz-blues soundtrack, evoking the surreal dislocations of Greenaway or Neil Jordan circa COMPANY OF WOLVES ; at its worst when it tries to coast on threadbare "Cool Britannia" factor. Another piece of combustible junk for the British Film Renaissance bonfire ; has its moments, though.]

LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS (65) (dir., Guy Ritchie) Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Vinnie Jones ["Verve", I believe, is the word here : juvenile and repetitive but immensely satisfying, expertly shuffling several strands and memorably sketching more than a dozen characters. The fun is visual, going for a flashy-but-well-judged barrage of freeze-frames and montages (not to mention a shoot-out built up to the strains of "Zorba's Dance") ; verbal, with plenty of fast talk and amusing nuggets of rhyming slang (talkative characters are advised to "shut your Chevy Chase", which seems ineffably right somehow) ; and structural, with plot twists stacked up and confidently moved about like pieces on a chess-board. What's most surprising, despite the incessant (and rather tiresome) laddishness, is its cosy tone - everyone knows each other, and apparently random details (like the guy on fire) turn out to be related to the rest of it ; an inadvertent comment on British parochialism?...]

RUNAWAY BRIDE (49) (dir., Garry Marshall) Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Joan Cusack, Hector Elizondo [Crushingly predictable - not just in terms of knowing (of course) how it's all going to turn out, but also in terms of the film signalling how it's planning to achieve its happy ending : we know from the opening scene that the heroine's running from commitment because she still hasn't found what she's looking for (if only because it plays "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" over a shot of her running), and the eggs metaphor - she doesn't know how she likes her eggs, ergo is lost, hasn't "found herself" - makes the final pay-off pretty much a formality. Within those limits, and despite a baffling obsession with animals and children (esp. twins), surprisingly painless - it's good to see Roberts being a comedienne again instead of the tailor's dummy labelled "Movie Star" she was reduced to in NOTTING HILL, and Gere's always at his least obnoxious playing slightly obnoxious characters (plus I admit I laughed at the morning radio-show hosted by one Corey Fleming, entitled "Wake Up With Flem"). Much better than PRETTY WOMAN, with the important proviso that I hated PRETTY WOMAN. Do you realise that I spent the entire movie thinking Elias Koteas was playing the Other Man, though? How embarrassing...]