Summer Break 2005

Brief and disposable comments on new films seen July-August 2005.

COMRADES, ALMOST A LOVE STORY (74) (dir., Peter Chan) Maggie Cheung, Leon Lai, Yeung Kung Yue [Plays a little politics, if I'm not mistaken, made a year before Hong Kong's handover from Britain to China and eager to smooth the transition (or just ingratiate itself with the new masters): hero and heroine are mainland-Chinese in Hong Kong, learn to embrace their Chinese-ness (English lessons turn out to be unhelpful, and are exposed as a scam anyway), and it's their Chinese-ness that finally comes to the rescue, contriving a happy ending via a pop singer whom (we're told) only mainlanders like (though they sometimes don't admit it because they're ashamed of being seen as mainlanders, which the film presumably disapproves of - after all, it's quick to point out that all of Hong Kong were originally mainlanders). None of which really has much to do with what's magical about it, which is the opportunity to gaze at Maggie Cheung's anxious button face register various kinds of distress, longing and romantic yearning. Leon Lai also grows into his role - he's annoying at first, overdoing the dopey country-bumpkin mannerisms - and the plot steadily expands, after a lightweight-seeming start, into grand romantic-fatalist melodrama, sublimating the past via symbols - a bracelet, a bicycle, even McDonalds - deployed to poignant effect. True love founders more than once - the Other Man and Woman are no pushovers - the ending packs a punch and the coda, hinting of Higher Forces (implicitly contrasted with Maggie's very Hong Kong money-worship), is the cherry on the cake.]

KAD PORASTEM BICU KENGUR (54) (dir., Radivoje Andric) Sergei Trifunovic, Marija Karan, Nebojsa Glogovac [Reasons to Be (Relatively) Cheerful for the State of World Cinema, Part 1128b: a likeable slacker comedy from Yugoslavia - financed by local banks and small businesses, meant for domestic consumption but playing pretty well in translation (certainly no worse, for a European, than a US equivalent like FRIDAY; now if we can only break down those pesky distribution barriers), esp. if you like sex and football, not necessarily in that order. Moves between three strands, an insecure guy's big date with a model (done with comical V.O. and he-said-she-said touches), two potheads sitting on a roof pouring beer into their navels and exchanging stoned aphorisms, and - the best strand - a group of football fans watching a game between Man. Utd. and a lowly English team whose goalie is transplanted local boy Kengur, or Kangaroo (the title means "When I Grow Up, I Want to be a Kangaroo"). Runs out of steam in the final stretch, introducing a lame UFO sub-plot, and it's mostly sitcom humour anyway, but it's very engaging and ethnically-flavoured enough to be distinctive: remnants of the war - a presumably Bosnian kebab vendor who complains "I lost my bloody country" - hints of gangsterism, hints of Serbia's post-war isolation and sense of being Other (much is made of Kangaroo's links to the old country, even though he's moved to the promised land of the EU). Serbs do apparently feel a bit left out; they also go to church, sometimes greet women by kissing their hands, and share a sense of working-class neighbourhood, hence the FRIDAY comparison though this is warmer. Middle-aged "uncles" rule the roost, young men wonder "Is anything ever going to happen?", little kids make a nuisance of themselves on the fringes.] 

THE CORPORATION (49) (dir., Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar) [Classic example of a Film Everyone Needs to See, even as it begs a thousand questions and preaches to the converted. "They don't believe in anything," marvels Michael Moore of corporations, acting like he's found the fatal flaw in capitalism, and of course, this being a film made by ideologues, no-one entertains the notion that non-ideology - being motivated only by money - may actually be corporations' greatest strength, making them potentially more accountable to citizen-consumers than e.g. the government (who only need to ingratiate themselves with voters once every few years) or the amorphous concept of "the people" being pushed by the movie (it's unfortunate that it ends with Moore calling on viewers to put the world back into "our hands", seeing as he's probably the last person in whose hands I'd want the world to be); all that's needed are educated consumers who'll ensure the cost of dereliction for companies is greater than the cost of compliance, which is why the film is invaluable despite all its flaws - it's worth buying the DVD just for the list of useful websites over the closing credits. In itself, a thin conceit that exhausts its central gimmick - if a corporation is indeed a legal "person", what kind of person is it? - around the halfway mark and turns into a rambling unfocused screed, piling on the horror stories (the patenting of genes, evils of child-targeted adverts, privatisation of water in Bolivia) without much rigour. Is there really a "cancer epidemic" affecting 50% of all men? Is it enough to show unhappy workers to make the case against sweatshops - shouldn't one also deal with the counter-argument that they'd be even worse off without corporate jobs? Isn't it glib and meaningless, given disparities in wealth, to say something like 'This shoe costs $100 but the workers only get paid 5 cents'? (Yes.) Is it enough to assume corporate property will be abused and exploited - isn't the profit motive, while it may indeed be irrelevant to "morality", actually quite conducive to conservation? (I'm thinking e.g. of the info in a recent "Economist" that the forest fires raging through Portugal have been exacerbated by small landowners failing to clear underbrush, unlike land owned by big companies where fires seldom break out.) Doesn't really carry out the debate but it does spark discussion, which is probably all a film can do; also cinematically lively, with use of old movie clips - slightly tendentious, equating capitalism with naive 50s attitudes, but still fun - and striking shots like the endless pull-back down an endless library corridor. Bottom line? Stay off the milk if you know what's good for you.]    

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (23) (dir., Stephen Hopkins) Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron, Emily Watson, John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci [Don't want to dwell on this too much (it feels dirty, like handling something you find by the side of the road), but there is a half-decent idea buried behind it - a life of Peter Sellers in the style of a 60s comedy, with campy asides (the soundtrack exploding into "Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing" at his first glimpse of Sophia Loren), irreverent silliness like the infamous 'toilet scene' and assorted celebs deliberately played as broad caricature. Doesn't work, partly because it's hard to say where pastiche-idiocy ends and real idiocy begins - the Greatest Hits montage running through the 50s roles could be a gag, but clichés like the low-angle shots for Sellers' tantrums, or a monitor flatlining when his Dad dies, are all Hopkins' own - but mostly because it's so superficial and uninteresting, pushing the familiar line on Sellers as a hollow man, recycling his "There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed" quote, dutifully explaining the importance of BEING THERE to his personality. May well be accurate but there seems little point deconstructing the life only to fill the void with reductive pop-psychology - at best you can get a non-movie about a non-person, at worst a trite biopic dressed in stylistic sophistry - and there's so much that's cheap and annoying along the way, from his first reaction to the Pink Panther ("Sounds like a strip-joint for poofs") to the tiresome emphasis on how he was nasty to his kids then tried to (over-)compensate with extravagant gestures (one assumes the kids must've been involved in the project, hence the weird closing-credits sideswipe at fourth wife Lynne Frederick, whom we never even see in the movie). True confession: I was so bored I watched bits of the second half on fast-forward, so I may have missed some connective tissue - but I could've sworn they showed Sellers' Clouseau comeback as having come in PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN, whereas of course it came in RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER a year earlier. Did I just imagine that?]  

MADAGASCAR (36) (dir., Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath) with the voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen [Triumph of the tame, the insular, the glossy, the disengaged - everything that's made kids' movies such a wasteland in the past few years, above all in DreamWorks' own cartoons with their incestuous in-jokes and media-savvy tone (and total absence of engagement with the target audience's lives, beyond catch-all Messages about beauty being skin-deep, everyone special in their own way, etc). Showbiz animals - an 'entertainer' lion, a neurotic giraffe out of a Noo Yawk sitcom - having given up freedom for a bubble-life of luxurious indolence and detachment (the film is suprisingly pro-zoos), are forced to confront the real world, setting up a slice of potential DreamWorks self-scrutiny, maybe even a mea culpa. Instead, "the wild" makes everyone crazy, Nature is shown as a gory horror movie, the only congenial creatures are the even more showbiz-minded lemurs, and the Message - obviously meeting the approval of today's absurdly over-protective parents - couldn't be clearer: Don't leave the house, kids! It's a jungle out there - don't even think about exploring, just live your pampered lives in a pop-culture bubble with your Xbox and iPod and a million and one other expensive gadgets (most of them sold by the people who made this movie, or one of their subsidiaries). Funny in spots, but really quite offensive when you think about it; the visuals are blah and the references, for such a media-friendly movie (SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER? PLANET OF THE APES?? CHARIOTS OF FIRE???), are bewildering.] 

HOUSE OF WAX (55) (dir., Jaume Collet-Serra) Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Paris Hilton [I don't think it's so bad really: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE redux - there's even a bad smell in the air - gives way to a more Gothic horror with an evil-sibling motif (WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE gets referenced), sense of stagnant setting trapped in the past (ditto) and such bits of style as a killer reflected in someone's eyeball; gratuitous bits of nastiness like a boot ramming a knife all the way into a dead person's throat (for good measure) give it a Euro-sleaze feel, and the final bogged-down chase through a melting house of wax - or house of melting wax - is something I've never seen before. Incidental Detail 1: What's with all the homophobic banter between the teens ("I ain't kissin' you dude!", etc) - is it Relevant or just a sop to the frat-boy crowd, like Paris Hilton? Incidental Detail 2: So how come heroine waits in the car while her boyfriend goes inside to use "the facilities" and when we next see her it's dark and she's still waiting patiently? Is he well-known for taking massive three-hour dumps or something? Incidental Detail 3: Shaky BLAIR WITCH video-cam footage = biggest horror-movie cliché of the 00s.]          

KIRIKOU AND THE SORCERESS (62) (dir., Michel Ocelot) with the voices of Theo Sebeko, Antoinette Kellermann [Easy, and tempting, to enumerate the ways it's different from Disneys and Pixars - nudity, obviously, a less sanguine view of the world (the villagers are ignorant, and ready to believe every lie about Kirikou; the other kids are mean to him, and ungrateful when he saves their lives), but also more compassion and no real villains. Probably more useful to compare it to Miyazaki, since e.g. the wicked witch turns out to be misunderstood (she's only evil because she's in pain) like the one in SPIRITED AWAY, but the touch is heavier here, and the magic doesn't blossom so organically; the best of it is cute throwaways, like Kirikou's turbo-charged patter as he runs through the jungle, or when he disguises himself as a bird and hops away grumbling "I feel ridiculous" (a Pixar-ish moment of self-awareness). The look is the main attraction, though it's strange how 'native' cultures blend into each other for this stupid fucking white man: the witch reminded me of Kali - an ocean away - and the colours evoke Gauguin in Tahiti. Epilogue, with Kirikou all grown up and the witch transformed into his girlfriend, is rather strange.]

BOOGEYMAN (14) (dir., Stephen T. Kay) Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel, Skye McCole Bartusiak [A cheapo horror about present and past colliding in an old house (a symbol for the hero's troubled mind) sounds intriguing, but it's just another undeveloped idea in this cruddy thriller, and the low budget shows in the sadly muted shock moments. Kay clearly doesn't have the footage, and tries to improvise with manic zooms-in and super-fast cuts to nothing in particular (sample moment: son looks down at his dead mother in her coffin, scary music starts, camera inches closer and you know she's going to leap out, or at least open her eyes - but we just get a quick indecipherable shot of fingers moving, as if resources didn't stretch to a convincing It's Alive moment); you have to wonder if low-budget horror auteurs are afraid to get creative with models and makeup effects in the age of CGI (lest it look 'fake'), wiping out a whole substratum of cheesy midnight-movie arcana. One thing we haven't seen before: a shot of a key going in a lock, done as a side-elevation 'through' the door. The rest is abysmal.]

THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (63) (dir., Garth Jennings) Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel [Neither essential nor a betrayal, with witty animation for the Guide entries and performances very much in the right spirit (even the addition of a love story feels natural, thanks to Zooey's air of loveable startlement). Echoes of Michael Powell - viz. the opening line of A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH - in the Guide's dry explications ("Space is big"), which is to say they both feed on a long tradition of British eccentricity, and it's also funny how it often operates as a STAR WARS shorn of portentous macho bullshit - the cantina scene becomes a bureaucrat's office with assorted space species filling out forms, while a light saber appears in mini-size, its great advantage being that it can toast bread while also slicing it. Special props to Mos Def, perfectly poised and deadpan-zany in the not especially rewarding role of Ford Prefect: "We're going to die! Wait ... (notices red button on the wall) What's this? ... (runs to wall, pushes button, pulls a lever, turns a wheel a couple of times) This - this is nothing. Yeah, we're going to die."]  

FANTASTIC FOUR (56) (dir., Tim Story) Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis [It's a "Cyprus Mail" review to the rescue! All a bit shallow but hey - so's the movie...]

GUESS WHO (26) (dir., Kevin Rodney Sullivan) Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, Zoe Saldana [Two things I'm really getting sick and tired of when it comes to these sitcom-y Hollywood comedies (see also MONSTER IN LAW). First, the way they try to doll themselves up with as much prurience as the PG-13 envelope can stand, buzzing the audience with nudge-nudge smutty jokes about gay sex and masturbation and "Did he grab you down here?" - except there is no PG-13 rating in Cyprus so these films get rated "Suitable For All" (since, after all, they don't 'show' anything) and I have to watch them with an audience full of bewildered 8-year-olds and their embarrassed parents. Second, the way people behave so unreasonably, and get into misunderstandings when just telling the truth would instantly defuse the situation (they're Idiot Characters, a variation on the Idiot Plot), so that for example Ashton Kutcher's quit his job because his boss made disparaging comments about his black girlfriend (this is like the big climactic revelation, but must be spoiled in order to appreciate the film's cretinous laziness) so why not just tell her that when she comes on all "Why didn't you tell me you'd lost her job?" and "How could you lie to me, we swore we'd never lie to each other", etc - it'll instantly make him look like a hero, and it's certainly a better idea than trying to make light of the situation, telling her not to get upset and/or pouting "What do you want from me anyway?". Contrivance isn't a problem, stupid contrivance just makes everyone feel stupid. Actually there's three things I'm sick and tired of, the third being Ashton Kutcher making moon eyes at the girlfriend and saying how much he wants to be a good father to her unborn babies. I haven't actually seen that before, but I'm still sick and tired of it. Jesus, what a lame movie.]   

INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS (56) (dir., Zak Penn) Werner Herzog, Zak Penn, Gabriel Beristain (as "themselves") [Strange how the rhythms of documentary-speak have become so assimilated now - the pause followed by a rush of words, the quick glance to the side then back to camera, the trailing-off sentence followed by a pared-down summation ("I didn't know why he was so ... It didn't seem right") - like actors learning a foreign accent. The opening half-hour is brilliant mockumentary even by the high standards of the genre, Herzog obviously familiar with his own legend - cooking Peruvian yucca for dinner guests, telling a grungy local "I like your beard" - and Penn obviously familiar with paranoia-fuelled Hollywood euphemisms ("very, very interesting" = completely fucked up); loses its edge as the main conflict becomes apparent - "Zak Penn" is too Hollywood, while "Werner Herzog" strives for authenticity - and then it tries to go all BLAIR WITCH and doesn't work at all, but overall a clever little jape. Sign of the Times: the montage announcing the launch of the film-within-a-film includes fake headlines from both "Variety" and "Ain't it Cool News".]

THE HOLE (61) (dir., Tsai Ming-Liang) Lee Kang-Sheng, Yang Kuei-Mei [Doesn't feel like Tsai working at full stretch (I watched it at the end of a triple-bill with VIVE L'AMOUR and THE RIVER), no doubt because it's commissioned work, an entry in the "2000 Seen By..." TV project. Doesn't really explore the relationship and makes rather broad (for him) visual jokes like the leg dangling through the hole in a corner of the frame as the heroine goes about her business - though the final crying jag is almost as impressive as the one in VIVE, all three films building towards some eruption of intense, repetitive emotion (then comes his three-year break, and the structure changes). Might've done more with the song numbers - I kept thinking 8 WOMEN, four years in the future - mostly shot in purely descriptive wide and medium shots, but I guess he finds the thought of glum, blank-faced Tsai protagonists singing along to Grace Chang funny in itself.] 

THE RIVER (70) (dir., Tsai Ming-Liang) Lee Kang-Sheng, Tien Miao, Lu Hsiao-Ling [A breakthrough for Tsai in terms of style, with his trademark deadpan-funny shots using offscreen space (*) but also a more fevered emotional tone than the cool ellipses of VIVE L'AMOUR - high-angle diagonals looking down on the action, expressionistic lighting esp. in the pivotal scene towards the end (even the quirky humour - like the father holding Lee's head straight on the bike - was apparently meant to be poignant, or so Tsai claims). Not much plot but clearly a stablemate to SAFE, a disease-of-the-week 'horror movie of the soul' with sexual repression being apparently the disease; unlike in SAFE, traditional rather than modern society seems to be at fault - the final shot, light streaming in suggesting hope for the future (though Lee's neck still hurts as he stands on the balcony), also coincides with the defeat of traditional medicine, as if to call for a modern Taiwan with homosexuality out in the open. A difficult film, hard to watch in every sense - incl. literally, at least on video where it often looks murky (true confession: I tried to watch it twice in the late 90s, and fell asleep both times) - but also haunting.]  

(*) Example of a Tsai shot: Father walks down a corridor holding an overflowing bucket of water. Camera looks down the corridor, never moving throughout. He stops at the door to the bathroom and asks his son, "What you doing?". No reply. Pause. Asks him again. No reply. Pause. The son comes out of the bathroom and disappears into a room on the left. The father watches him go, then disappears into the bathroom. Pause, then the loud offscreen splash of the water being dropped in the bathtub. The deadpan style makes the splash hilarious.