Films Seen - June & July 2007
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA (48) (dir., Gabor Csupo) Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Robert Patrick, Zooey Deschanel The music is beyond bland and the clean bright look tends to crush creativity, but there's not much point dissing Walden Media; they hit all the right buttons - TV bad, Imagination good, bullies bad, carefree kids running through meadows good - deal soberly in the kind of inspirational metaphor that gets children thinking, and even practise national healing by putting the flighty liberal family side-by-side with the down-to-earth church-going family (critics will say the former are gratuitously punished for being unbelievers, but critics are troublemakers and should be ignored). It's restrained, sensitive, and kids apparently love it, or maybe they're just saying so to please their parents. Is it a surprise that Zooey proves just as adept playing a sweet hippyish music teacher as she does with her usual misfits and snarksters? Nah, not really.
FRACTURE (68) (dir., Gregory Hoblit) Ryan Gosling, Anthony Hopkins, David Strathairn More fun than just about any fun thing you care to mention (beach volleyball? not as much fun!). Which is not to say it's good necessarily, merely that Hopkins proves an expert needler and shit-stirrer, synthesizes malice and deference as if mind-melding Hannibal Lecter and Stevens the butler, wears the gleeful expression of a man who's about to smack his lips as he once did re: fava beans and a nice Chianti, even - swear to God - flares his nostrils at one point like a thoroughbred or a lion scenting blood, while Gosling pops jellybeans, speaks with a Southern drawl (Hopkins favours an avuncular brogue), drifts in and out of affected boyishness and fills dead space with languid hand-on-heart gestures or scrunching up his face as if sampling a lemon. The nominal subtext - that upwardly-mobile Gosling secretly longs to be like Hopkins, hence the bit about English-vs.-Italian interior design - kind of gets lost in their actorly game of can-you-top-this, and Hoblit or his DP do some weird things like giving Gosling hot yellow light and Hopkins normal flesh-tones in their head-to-head confrontations to suggest ... what, exactly? No idea. Still loads of fun.
GEORGIA RULE (31) (dir., Garry Marshall) Lindsay Lohan, Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman, Dermot Mulroney ON GOLDEN POND revisited, with Jane as Henry ("Go fuck yourself!" she growls, easily one-upping the old man's "Bullshit!") and Felicity Huffman as Jane, at least till it mutates into a queasy-making mix of the cutesy - as in small-town eccentrics and stupid pet tricks - and the sordid, as in alcoholic mothers, nympho daughters and an excruciatingly over-detailed child-abuse strand that threatens to take over the movie. Perversely appropriate for Lohan in her tricky not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman phase - and the mind-boggling scene where stern-faced Fonda tries to wash her mouth out with soap after she gets in a fight with a 12-year-old boy, juxtaposed with mucho tasteless jokes about the boy having gotten an erection during the tussle, isn't just symptomatic of the film's clashing tones but also the confused values in our hipped-up yet infantilised culture. Adults treated as children, children as adults.
OCEAN'S THIRTEEN (55) (dir., Steven Soderbergh) George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Matt Damon Lively, handsome, amusing - and exactly the opposite of what an OCEAN'S film should be. Lots and lots of plot, like a problem to be solved with elbow-grease and mathematical formulae (it's not even especially implausible), when of course the point was always laid-back style and breeziness, a gang of thieves that was also a gang of movie stars with their private argot and privileged airs and graces. This one huffs and puffs, dwarfing its stars' good-sport sangfroid and rib-nudging in-jokes - when George advises Brad to settle down and "have lots of kids" it's obviously a dig at Angelina's manic broodiness - with its frantic plot-piling, and it seems so relieved when its many strands finally coalesce that it just peters out (we needed a shot of Pacino looking battered and bruised, maybe he could even do a silent scream like in GODFATHER PART III); Sinatra and fireworks doesn't have the surprising magic of "Clair de Lune" round the fountain, though Pitt looks amazing early on, in a snazzy white suit against the eye-popping blue of a Vegas dawn. Also, how come the gang get called "analog players in a digital world" just a couple of weeks after Bruce Willis got called "a Timex watch in a digital age" and TRANSFORMERS worked (at least partly) as a cautionary tale of mutating high technology? Is there a Luddite sect masterminding Hollywood's summer movies?
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (69) (dir., Len Wiseman) Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q Here's the "Cyprus Mail" review, fifth and sixth 'graphs being obviously the most important; written together with TRANSFORMERS, which is why I chose this particular angle. I just wish I could've found space to mention how awesome Timothy Olyphant is. He is indeed quite awesome.
THE LIVES OF OTHERS (53) (dir., Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck Here's the "Cyprus Mail" review, done together with OCEAN'S THIRTEEN which explains the baffling way it opens (well, it would if you read the whole article). Not much more to say, except jesus was 2006 a bad year for European cinema - though I also blame the pundits, who way overrated this and VOLVER and ignored e.g. RIGHT OF THE WEAKEST. Also, is it cosmic justice or cosmic joke when an artist (Ulrich Muhe) dies just after achieving fame and fortune (or lives just long enough to achieve fame and fortune, depending how you look at it), see also Massimo Troisi, that RENT dude, Steve Gordon of ARTHUR fame and so forth? Discuss, etc.
HOSTEL: PART II (73) (dir., Eli Roth) Lauren German, Roger Bart, Bijou Phillips, Heather Matarazzo This "Cyprus Mail" piece doesn't quite encompass my feelings for this much-maligned movie, but it'll do. Basically, (a) the film works as genre justification, its viewers being in a similar position to the businessmen who get their kicks doing (or watching) the otherwise forbidden, i.e. torture-porn slakes the universal impulse to violence; (b) the film works as political statement, positing violence - quite convincingly - as a natural extension of inequality (which already involves an element of humiliation; violence is just the physical reflection of that); (c) the film works as a movie, both exciting on a formal level - I'm convinced Tarantino helped out; no-one goes from CABIN FEVER to this in four years - and very knowing about itself, pointedly delaying the violence, using the much-ridiculed "war in Slovakia" from HOSTEL as an in-joke, etc. Ripe for re-evaluation, once the horror craze subsides and people start to view it out of context.
THE DEAD GIRL (58) (dir., Karen Moncrieff) Brittany Murphy, Marcia Gay Harden, Kerry Washington, Toni Collette Time (perhaps) to move beyond the 'realism' of American indies, the pallid insistence on small-scale that demands respect - because it's Not Hollywood - but leaves me with no clear memory of films I supposedly like, like LONESOME JIM or SHERRYBABY (whatever happened to the teeming jostling 'ordinary life' in 70s movies like MELVIN AND HOWARD or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS?). We open with slide-guitar and birds screeching in a desert - 'regional' - landscape, then the dead girl is discovered and the camera lingers on each detail of the corpse - a necklace, a tattoo, flies buzzing round - which is when the thought may occur (as it did during BLUE CAR) that people are now making movies who in times past would simply have written short stories; fortunately in this case Moncrieff recognises her strengths/limitations, making precisely that - a quintet of short stories that bounce off each other and keep the film going. The tone is sombre and variations are played on Sisterhood (even if it's only helping a little girl against her bullying brother at the supermarket), though of course serial-killers don't really roam the byways of Middle America, and God-fearing matrons aren't really so shrill, wallflower daughters so dejected, abused teenage runaways so consistently foul-mouthed; or are they? Is indie 'realism' a patina of respectable restraint slapped over soapy or contrived elements, or is it melancholy truth about American life fleshed out with a little melodrama? One thing's for sure: that shot of slanted night-light shrouding the police station when the woman thinks about reporting her husband in Story #3 is remarkably beautiful.
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (55) (dir., David Yates) Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton We're going to be relying quite a bit on the "Cyprus Mail" reviews as I try to sort out this accumulated backlog. This one's actually okay, though obv. ignore the first-paragraph references to what we (the "Cyprus Mail") usually do around this time of year. The only thing I didn't include was the way the franchise is now feeding off audience goodwill from the previous instalments - see e.g. the recitation of Harry's exploits when he starts teaching his Magic class, or of course the flashbacks at the climax - which is a problem if (like me) you find previous instalments so unmemorable that it takes a while to recall who everyone is at the start of each new chapter. Oh well. To quote the title of the piece: "It's Not You, Harry..."
COMEDY OF POWER (70) (dir., Claude Chabrol) Isabelle Huppert, Francois Berleand, Patrick Bruel Everyone cheers when a captain of industry is laid low (check out the latest Conrad Black headlines); everyone clucks self-righteously when the charge is corruption - except Chabrol, who's been doing political intrigue since NADA and knows that's often the way business is done, with a nudge and a wink. "What do I lack?" asks Huppert as the tireless investigator, and maybe it's compassion (she gets on best with her cynical nephew), or maybe it's a life - she practically lives in the office, and keeps a bottle of Scotch in the fridge at home for pick-me-up swigs during long working nights - or maybe it's nothing at all, being cleaner, smarter and more noble than the rotten system she refuses to acknowledge ("The hell with them," she shrugs at the end, washing her hands of the whole sordid mess). "Only God can judge," she's informed, prompting the question "What is God?" - and maybe She's something like our heroine, which is also why she's impossible to live with. Power doesn't corrupt her, which is both admirable and a little inhuman (the French title is "ivresse", or intoxication of power; there's always something freaky about a teetotaller), and Chabrol's low-key style observes the antagonists, Huppert vs. the rather buffoonish boys' club - they give her a female assistant, confident the two women will end up scratching each other's eyes out - refusing to align himself with either. He's among the most sophisticated men making movies today, albeit not among the greatest movie stylists - though we do get the shot of Huppert and husband in bed, lit so their faces (and only their faces) are obscured in blackness. But maybe that was Eduardo Serra.
THE BOSS OF IT ALL (66) (dir., Lars Von Trier) Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Iben Hjejle Hard to argue with the reading that the random compositions are Von Trier's playful way (he's the Boss of It All, auteurially speaking) of renouncing his responsibility, just like the bosses in his film - but then how to explain e.g. the incompetent jump-cuts (more like missing frames than jump-cuts) or even Von Trier's own eccentric interpolations, declaring the film a "harmless" comedy and so forth? Maybe he's such a control-freak he can't even play down his role without calling attention to it, as if trying to create a new auteur - another, less expert Von Trier - he can ascribe the film to. Good to see him back in comedy, however, the irrationally angry Icelandic dude railing against the Danes very reminiscent of the Swedish doctor in THE KINGDOM just like the ultimate mistrust and mockery of all authority, from bosses (a sham, a construct) to the actor's self-important 'technique' ("What's that?" "My remote look") speaks to Von Trier the cynical jester, thumbing his nose at all ideologies - both reactionaries and well-meaning liberals - in the Grace Trilogy. Then there's the employee whose weather reports presage murderous rages, or the elephant that appears while our heroes are trying to recall the proper simile for good memory - and of course Gambini, writer of "The Hanged Cat" and "A Town Without Chimneys"...
THE ITALIAN (59) (dir., Andrei Kravchuk) Kolya Spiridonov, Denis Moiseenko, Maria Kuznetsova Seems like every Russian movie nowadays can be taken as harsh-yet-patriotic metaphor for Russia Today - but this one really can, with the titular kid refusing to abandon Mother [sic] Russia for a better life in the West (the deal arranged by a decadent go-between with a penchant for flashing dollars), preferring to stay and look for his mother instead; meanwhile, his world is an orphanage run as a semi-benevolent dictatorship (check) by a brutal yet popular thug (check) with a gangster-capitalist bent (check) due to the corruption and/or inefficiency of local authorities (check). The tone is Dickensian humanism, from the teeming orphanage itself to the various people met along the way - though they're also The People, emblems of the Russian "Narod", ending on the old orphanage guy who's unimpressed by money ("The country's going downhill," he opines), another bit of national subtext. Plotting teeters on the brink of perfunctory kidpic but the images are superb, and it ends up gripping in the way of all gritty road movies with small, determined protagonists.
HOT FUZZ (50) (dir., Edgar Wright) Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton Kind of ironic that the (villainous) townspeople constantly claim the various murders are accidents, since nothing is ever accidental here - the whole movie throbs with set-ups and pay-offs, from a (seemingly) stray line of dialogue about catching swans to a (seemingly) casual mention of "the greater good". This is obviously appropriate for a nominal satire of over-plotted Hollywood blockbusters, except it isn't actually satirising Hollywood over-plotting - just as it isn't actually a spoof of bloated cop actioners like the oft-mentioned BAD BOYS II, closer to slasher movie and/or Hammer horror (stuff like THE WITCHES, dark goings-on in a village setting) (*) plus bits of Agatha Christie whodunit and even Sergio Leone. In the end it's all over the place, and Wright's constant flash-cuts, match-ups and whip-pans get oppressive like they did in SHAUN OF THE DEAD; lots of clever jokes, so the whole overcooked thing may work better on second viewing.
(*): Some critics are saying this is the point, that we keep hearing about American genres but the hero ends up being trapped in a British genre - the rural horror of STRAW DOGS, WICKER MAN, etc - finally bringing "the wholesomely unreflective American armed response to the English village green to blast away its petty xenophobic conspiracies," to quote Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It's a clever reading which hadn't occurred to me, though it also sounds a lot like the Hollywood-knows-best cultural cringe of stuff like NOTTING HILL - plus of course the rural-horror genre isn't exclusively British, and e.g. the murders themselves are done in splatter-movie style which is neither one thing nor the other. Still, anything that begins to make sense of the film's incoherence is okay by me.
BLACK SNAKE MOAN (43) (dir., Craig Brewer) Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake If this were a debut, it might be easier to dwell on the good stuff - stylistic verve, and some strong performance moments (most irresistible: skanky Ricci with her eyes bulging wide, asking "You some kind of pervert?") - but after HUSTLE & FLOW it's hard to avoid thoughts of inauthenticity, not to say opportunism. Brewer uses the blues exactly like he used hip-hop in that movie - as a badge of cool and get-out-of-jail card for white boys, a shortcut to a suffering underclass and cover for an ultimately trite tale of bonding, compromise and 'damaged' people (folks who sang the blues didn't 'work through' their emotional hang-ups; that's why they sang the blues). Worst of all, he uses the sleazy exploitation trappings in the same way, for instant cachet - which is sad, because the unspeakable (nymphos and sadists and a bit of domestic bondage) used to be the rumbling of a real, repressed America breaking into the glossy movie universe, whereas it's now been co-opted into fancy packaging for the latest 'regional' widget (tag-line: "Everything is hotter down south"). Deep South Trademark No. 2,187: shot looking down from the ceiling, through the blades of a whirring fan.
LONDON TO BRIGHTON (70) (dir., Paul Andrew Williams) Lorraine Stanley, Johnny Harris, Georgia Groome Violent British crime drama, meaning the characters alternate between "What's yer fuckin' problem, ya fuckin' cunt?" and "D'you like a cup of tea?". In the end a very simple story, put across with style and (more importantly) conviction - even the 'shock' twist at the climax is grounded in psychology, smartly timed so the relevant information is divulged just before the action itself (bonus points for complicating the stock figure of the silky-smooth crime boss). Much of it recalls MONA LISA - though the "tall thin tart" is now a tired old tart, shifted to the Bob Hoskins role - including the emphasis on childhood innocence and hints of class struggle; "I love this flat," muses the unfortunate pimp, a small businessman looking to better himself, but the moneyed haute-bourgeois (who asks "How can you live like this?", his face contorted in contempt) finally reminds him of his place. Well, I did say it was British.
THE PAINTED VEIL (58) (dir., John Curran) Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Toby Jones, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg Remember in JEZEBEL when spoiled selfish belle Bette Davis redeemed herself by taking care of the yellow-fever victims? Same kind of deal - and same kind of vintage, having previously been made with Garbo in the 30s, though Garbo was surely too much of a class act to play spoiled and selfish so convincingly (Watts is a fleshier, saucier actress with a touch of the greedy starlet, or maybe it's just her MULHOLLAND DR. associations). Opens superbly, cutting through the fusty period trappings with some very brisk editing - the scene where the family discuss Edward Norton is so bouncy it pops off the screen - then launching the main plot with vindictive, not to say sadistic behaviour, a real shocker in this kind of context; most of the middle section is a slow process of role-reversal, sympathy shifting gradually from one spouse to another - but then it goes soft after they're reconciled, going for conventional heroism, a new water source for the cholera-stricken village, etc., and the coda (taken, I assume, from Maugham) is disappointingly feeble. Gently downhill all the way, though only from intriguingly twisted to predictably benign and conservative. Racial attitudes also presumably taken from Maugham, but Chinese viewers looking at the characters - from the childlike bodyguard who becomes our heroine's lapdog to the wise-sidekick colonel who shines only once, after Norton gives him permission - have a right to feel slightly miffed.
SEANCE (44) (dir., Kiyoshi Kurosawa) Koji Yakusho, Jun Fubuki, Tsuyoshi Kusanagi Kurosawa, before he started using amorphous malaise to disguise (or replace) half-assed plotting. The amorphous malaise is here as well (he clearly has a knack for it), people framed through windows or backed by the low unsettling hum of machinery, but a plot does emerge and it's pretty half-assed - a riff on SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON, only the medium isn't a fake and her ambition (wanting to use the kid as a springboard to celebrity) seems frankly out of character, given her timid nature in the first act (if anything, she seems to be afraid of her powers, wishing they'd go away). Then it segues into ghost story, which is offbeat and faintly ridiculous with the child-ghost constantly appearing - open a door, there she is! pull a shirt off the clothesline, there she is! - and keeps hinting at deeper meanings which mostly remain obscure. Seems to be a case of the ghost as a manifestation of the couple's hidden side (incl. their pernicious ambition), their inner turmoil and of course their guilt, which would explain the doppelganger theme as well as the healer who cleanses the family home and answers "Does Hell exist?" with "It does if you believe in it, but not if you don't", making clear it's all in the mind; he also tells our hero "Don't be afraid to be ordinary", and maybe that's what the film comes down to - a banal cautionary tale about wanting too much. No wonder Mr. K. turned to obfuscation.
TRANSFORMERS (56) (dir., Michael Bay) Shia LaBoeuf, Megan Fox, Jon Voight, John Turturro Proof of Michael Bay's ultimate Evil - which is odd, because it's also among his most entertaining movies. The first 90 minutes, maybe more, are great fun - it doubtless helps that I never watched the 80s cartoon - cross-cutting between Shia LaBoeuf's romantic troubles and a burgeoning national-security crisis (with a pause for monster-movie in the deserts of Qatar); the former somehow leads to a scene where Shia's well-meaning folks try to find suitable euphemisms for his self-abuse - while he listens, increasingly mortified - the latter to a 'typical' Michael Bay action climax that undoes most of the film's good work, being half an hour long and utterly incoherent; there's no spatial sense, you never know where people are going or where they are in relation to each other, and almost every shot requires a subconscious effort to get your bearings (maybe that's what people find exhilarating - esp. perhaps kids and teens, because they're still unsettled in the world and spend a lot of time getting their bearings in new situations anyway - but I soon found it exhausting). The whole film may be seen as two different movies laid side-by-side, the first one standing in direct succession to the affable, sketchy suburban vibe of 80s boy-and-alien pics like E.T. and GREMLINS - a Mogwai is fleetingly glimpsed on the back of a truck - not to mention living-car movies like CHRISTINE and the HERBIEs, the second one representing the scrambled, fragmented, deliberately excessive meta-narrative of 90s culture (the age of sampling, DJ culture, post-TOP GUN action and thousands of TV channels). I know which one I prefer, and it's the one where Shia bickers with multi-coloured 40-foot robots ("What, you couldn't wait 5 minutes?") while they hide behind the house to avoid being spotted by his parents - not to mention John Turturro hamming it up as a government agent. Speaking of which, here's the state of play four years into the Iraq War (as reflected in one of the year's biggest summer movies): troops are heroes, politicians suck, President is a barely-there buffoon.
DISTURBIA (66) (dir., D.J. Caruso) Shia LaBoeuf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer Don't mess with my cellphone, that's a "violation of privacy", says our young hero - which is funny because he spends most of the movie spying on the neighbours with binoculars, but also, more subtly, because cellphones (flagships of the new home technology) have so eroded any concept of privacy, whether it's being 'available' at one's most intimate moments or being forced to listen in on other people's conversations; that's why REAR WINDOW carries an extra charge in today's hi-tech world, because we're all interconnected not just in a high humanistic sense but also in the nuts-and-bolts sense of shared information, social networking, multi-player games and online videos (the film's final word(s) are "YouTube"). Of course REAR WINDOW saved its big conceptual shock - the villain looking straight into camera, implicating the viewer as voyeur - for the climax whereas this throws it away halfway through, so it can up the ante into cat-and-mouse thriller and finally (unfortunately) slasher movie; the second half is well-made but unambitious, and the most intriguing strand - that the kid, forced into boredom when they take away his digital distractions, starts becoming interested in the world around him - isn't really pursued. The first half is irresistible, right from the pre-credits sequence - bone-crunching car crash followed by slow fade-to-black from Shia LaBoeuf's horror-stricken face, then the title appearing in shimmery white letters - and, with its glimpses of domestic teenage detritus (posters, screen-savers, Xboxes, energy drinks), may turn out to be as much of a time-capsule in 20 years as e.g. WARGAMES is today.
LA VIE EN ROSE (64) (dir., Olivier Dahan) Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Pascal Greggory, Gerard Depardieu The model - as befits a life of the "Little Sparrow" - seems to be BIRD, and it lacks that film's grace but it's still a powerhouse biopic, not just really well put-together (Marcel's boxing match is a textbook example of a scene that builds tension purely by technique, without any plot justification; I was on the edge of my seat and I still don't know why, except of course in giving their relationship a dark undercurrent) but also quite canny in its use of the Big Voice, the scourge of 00s music (see "Pop Idol" and its various permutations): clearly, Piaf was a Big Voice, but when she finds stardom - during the concert when she first becomes "Edith Piaf" - Dahan cuts out the voice altogether, making her both more (viz. a diva) and less than before; that's when she moves into another register - no more a girl of the streets but a star, with her tantrums and morphine addictions - till at the end, her body wrecked and ruined, she's just a voice again (that's why the end is so touching, because the Big Voice is reduced to a small consolation, her last line of defence against the world). Things become jumbled and dreamlike, vital information omitted, the steady biopic rhythm giving way to all-out emotion; the film becomes kaleidoscopic, Piaf herself ever more grotesque, life and theatre become indistinguishable (literally so when she staggers through the house after her lover's death and suddenly finds herself onstage). I spent much of it making mental notes to praise it for not including "Je ne regrette rien" (except sung at the piano by someone else), then of course it's saved for the final curtain - but when it arrives with full orchestral score, anguished close-ups and assorted flashbacks, it's still overwhelming.
LONELY HEARTS (47) (dir., Todd Robinson) John Travolta, Jared Leto, Salma Hayek, James Gandolfini, Scott Caan May be underrating it a tad, because the surface is quite entertaining - wisecracking cops (Scott Caan rocks), very snappy pace, loads of period detail - but surface is all there is. The cops crack wise, everyone gets a couple of character traits - Travolta is closed-off and also haunted by his dead wife's memory; Leto's a silk-smooth hustler, as fake as his hair; Hayek's a hot tamale with flashing eyes (cf. Shirley Stoler in HONEYMOON KILLERS, and of course the real Martha Beck) - and the narrative proceeds in simplified, connect-the-dots fashion; evidence of murder turns up immediately after Gandolfini tells our hero, "It's all in your head; there's no evidence of murder", while one scene finds the cops describing what the killers must be feeling - "He wants his life back", etc - which is then immediately illustrated in the next scene. I don't know who Dagmara Dominczyk is, but she joins the long-list of Actors Who Might Do Something Great One Day.
THE PAGE TURNER (56) (dir., Denis Dercourt) Deborah Francois, Catherine Frot, Pascal Greggory The plot, as presented, is preposterous - even allowing for the comedy value of Evil Autograph Hunter, any fool of a judge can see it's the interruption rather than lack of talent that's making the girl play badly all of a sudden - but that's not necessarily fatal in this kind of irrational revenge tale; it's as though the movie's world bends plausibility to the contours of its perverse protagonist (if you don't believe it, it can only be because you're out to get her). A film of pristine surfaces, from classical piano pieces to Miss Francois' icy beauty (she even moves carefully, as if calculating the volume of air her body will displace before she moves it), the tension being in the wait for the sudden explosion that'll wreck the perfection - a wrong note betraying a nervous pianist, a wrong note betraying our heroine's psychosis. The latter is slightly overdone - when she nearly drowns the little boy, or drives a spike through the foot of the presumptuous man who tries to fondle her, we might be watching Rebecca de Mornay in THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE - but there's also some delicious black-comic understatement, e.g. in suggesting who might've been responsible for that car 'accident' two years before, or leaving the miserable boy on the verge of tendonitis (the camera lingers for a second on his hands painfully stabbing at the piano keys), not to mention homoerotic tension and neat opening-credits juxtaposition of classical music and large bloody chunks of raw meat. Chabrol is obv. the main influence, though details like the boy holding his breath in the pool - uneasy intimations of Death for no reason you can put your finger on - are very Haneke; musical double-bill with THE PIANO TEACHER, anyone?
VENUS (46) (dir., Roger Michell) Peter O'Toole, Jodie Whittaker, Leslie Phillips, Richard Griffiths Shot through with a peculiar kind of showbiz self-loathing, the same rancid masochism that underlies drama-queen heroics and 'suffering for your Art'. It's there in the suggestion that Shakespeare and Kylie Minogue are roughly equivalent, in the implication that theatre needs to come down to the level of 'ordinary people', in the constant emphasis on degradation, in making the heroine so obnoxious - a belligerent, ignorant product of chav culture - the better to punish O'Toole for his inappropriate lust (their relationship shades close to overt S&M when she elbows him in the ribs and calls him "shithead"). The look is deliberately drab, the old actors' behaviour deliberately bad, though only within the film's hypocritical schema - O'Toole does outrageously stupid things like pretending to buy the girl a lovely dress when he knows he's got no money (she's shattered, of course) but not petty, tacky things like e.g. going on and on about his celebrity (he's becomingly modest about that), just like of course no-one really thinks Shakespeare is the same as Kylie Minogue; it's the fake self-deprecation common to both 'luvvie' actors and bourgeois-liberal Brits. It's no surprise - in fact, it's a relief - when the film shows its true maudlin colours in the final stretch, two old men dancing poignantly in a lonely church (shot with dissolves for added poignancy) and the girl coming round in time for the inevitable deathbed scene. O'Toole is eloquently fragile, though Leslie Phillips gives the real performance.
FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER (50) (dir., Tim Story) Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis Guess I'm the exact opposite of the fanboy mentality when it comes to these things: I enjoy irreverence, and the having-fun-with-superpowers aspect - Mister Fantastic's stretchy limbs coming in handy when he has to stick his bag in an overhead locker or pick up a book from the other side of the room, Invisible Woman's ability to create invisible force-fields also proving useful when she has to cover up an unsightly zit before going out - not so much the comic-book action (the climax is forgettable) or even the emotional undertow, though it's a nice irony when the Human Torch, who looks down slightly on the other Three (he's the obnoxious teen in this quasi-family, with The Thing as a kind of eccentric uncle), finds his arrogance pushed to its natural limit when his cells mutate - or whatever - and he's shut out of the family altogether. Basically a kidpic, refusing to treat comics with the awe of the arrested adolescent, and there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion. The state-endorsed-torture scene - "human rights"? what human rights? - seems a bit incongruous in this context, but it's nice to see films for 12-year-olds doing their bit in the Whither America? debate.
WILD HOGS (48) (dir., Walt Becker) Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, Ray Liotta Peter Fonda shows up to evoke the spirit of the 60s (namely, EASY RIDER) but it's actually the spirit of the 80s and early 90s that's being evoked - the time of CITY SLICKERS, Stephen Tobolowsky in sizeable supporting roles, 'jokes' where an Oriental guy breaks out the kung-fu moves and blood-curdling cries in mid-fight (he's an Oriental!), small-town values hymned without irony and gay-panic gags done without self-consciousness, shading over into homophobia in the scenes with the gay cop who comes on to our heroes. You couldn't exactly call it a magical time but its wholehearted embrace of lameness is/was quite relaxing, and the same may be said of this coarsely affable comedy. Macy steals the show as the uber-geek with delusions of biker-dom, crashing into road-signs, getting an Apple tattoo and trying to deal with his fear of women - finally meeting the girl of his dreams, he tries to come up with something witty to say but "all I could think of was black jokes" - though the gags wouldn't be so endearing if they didn't also make you roll your eyes a little. Our heroes are lost in the desert and cast a worried glance at a hungry vulture trundling down the road behind them, I mean come on.
IT'S WINTER (47) (dir., Rafi Pitts) Ali Nicksolat, Mitra Hadjar, Saeed Orkani Actually wonder if this might be a coded gay love story (it's either that or cultural differences, but Mr. Pitts is half-British); our hero certainly acts like he's cruising in the scene where he approaches the young man at the hostel, while his later conversation when he courts the girl he subsequently marries - the one that begins "Why are you following me?" - is so over-the-top in his simpering it's either really bad acting or a man with something to hide (he does everything but fiddle with his collar and scuff at the ground with the toe of his shoe), and of course we see him quite a lot with the young man from the hostel - they become best buddies - and barely at all with the girl, especially after they're married. Maybe it's just that Pitts is better with images than actors, also suggested by some early 'portrait' shots - minor characters in MS, staring mutely into camera - where it's clear (hard to say why, it just was) that they haven't actually been given something to feel, simply told to stand there and let their Humanity shine through. Images are indeed quite nice, with a kind of reticent melancholy, but Jonathan Romney's claim in "Sight & Sound" that the hero's being subtly critiqued seems excessive; flawed or not, he can't help but be sympathetic, when the film offers so little else in the way of lively characters. Unintentional Chuckles Dept.: let's go "have a good time" says hero to his mate - and off they go, checking out paintings in a picture-shop and larking about with a plastic mannequin; a good time in the land of no booze, drugs or women (at least officially). No wonder they make so many movies...
LITTLE RED FLOWERS (51) (dir., Zhang Yuan) Dong Bowen, Ning Yuanyuan, Chen Manyuan Four-year-old kids are cute, etc. Military discipline is cute, etc. Learning to conform and "form good habits" is cute, etc. Kudos to Zhang for making all the moppets perform on cue (the lead moppet is especially priceless), also intriguing as a glimpse of a rarely-glimpsed world, at least in movies - Ichikawa's BEING TWO ISN'T EASY may be another, though I haven't seen it - where toilet-training and learning to dress oneself form a major part of one's universe, and it even takes some half-hearted stabs into psychodrama, exaggerating the world as a four-year-old might view it; mostly, however, it works as an artefact, fascinating only in terms of what different cultures find adorable. Martinet teacher smelling each kid's upturned bottom in turn to find out who committed the cardinal sin of farting in class? Also cute, etc.