Films Seen - March 2000

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

THE BEACH (30) (dir., Danny Boyle) Leonardo Di Caprio, Virginie Ledoyen, Robert Carlyle, Tilda Swinton [Problem : Eden (as the film finally concedes) is a state of mind rather than a place, hence unfilmable in literal terms (how excited can we get about pretty landscapes?). Related problem : Eden, as presented here, is basically a beach resort populated by didactic neo-hippies, only there's no water-sports and you have to catch your own fish - a place, in short, to send any sane person doggy-paddling back to "civilisation". It might still have worked had Boyle been able to suggest a meditative mood, but he just pours on the flashy-staccato, party-all-the-time style of TRAINSPOTTING - pointless cross-cutting (between a shark attack and hero's description of same), a zoom-out soaring larkishly up into the clouds, a lively burst of videogame visuals ; by the time we get to the interlude away from the commune, back among the flesh-pots, where our now-empowered hero sees the emptiness behind the city's hustle and bustle (except that it looks and feels indistinguishable from the hustle and bustle he's left behind), you never saw a more insensitive director. Interesting for some early digs at the backpacker lifestyle and the ironies of Western travellers in the Third World (Thai girls massaging flabby Western legs ; watching APOCALYPSE NOW! - the ultimate Western guilt-trip - dubbed on TV in a Bangkok hotel room), and of course for signalling the bankruptcy of the whole high-energy, wilfully shallow New British Cinema. Maybe they can now move on at last...]

THE GREEN MILE (44) (dir., Frank Darabont) Tom Hanks, David Morse, Michael Clarke Duncan, Barry Pepper ["I've been infected with life!" laments Hanks at the end of this turgid opus ; "That's my punishment!". Enough said, surely. Three-hours-plus of lumbering faux-religiosity, in which every scene deals with exactly one (1) point of plot or characterisation and pounds solidly and deliberately till that point is made ; it doesn't drag exactly, it's never boring, but that's just because everything is paced to the same metronomic rhythm (some may conceivably find it hypnotic - and AMPAS was presumably in a trance when it nominated it for Best Picture). For all the talk of a Return To Storytelling, very little actually happens : I saw the twists coming a good half-hour before they did, which is very rare for me (because I'm usually too caught up in what's happening to worry about what's likely to happen). Presumably trying to be "old-fashioned", hence the shift from Jerry Springer to Fred Astaire in an early scene - but Old Hollywood didn't banish shades of grey from its characters or enunciate like a maiden-aunt remedial-teacher, as I recall. Excellent work from Morse, nice support from Pepper and Dabbs Greer ; surprising and unsurprising turns by Sam Rockwell and Harry Dean Stanton, respectively.]

THE INSIDER (69) (dir., Michael Mann) Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, Christopher Plummer, Diane Venora [Didn't think I'd like this one much, being fed up to the back teeth with anti-smoking propaganda (back off, do-gooders!) ; fortunately Mann seems to feel the same way, excepting a single squirm-inducing scene gratuitously outlining the cigarette companies' nefarious practices, rather dubiously equating their legal liability with General Motors' liability for a defective car (just the opposite, surely?). Otherwise it's less Message Movie than psychological thriller, dealing in alienation and paranoia, expressed visually in Mann's shallow-focus compositions (separating the various elements of the image from each other) and dramatically in Crowe's crushed, introverted performance, eloquent just in the way he walks across his front lawn. And of course it's also another instalment in Mann's obsession with obsession, looking at men who treat their work as a vocation, do it well as a badge of honour, even if it means the destruction of their closest relationships - awkward, emotionally stunted, unable to be open with each other except, sometimes, through the mediating influence of technology (in HEAT, cop and robber gazed into each other's souls through surveillance cameras ; here, Crowe and Pacino have prickly, antagonistic meetings but can finally admit their mutual respect - over the telephone). You might call it the ultimate in geek chic, a hi-tech hymn to the joys of emotional autism, only that ignores how deeply pleasurable it is to watch : the mix of bruised, sinister images and a spare, electronic score crackles with tension and Mann's touch is so deft, so meticulous - he knows exactly when to hold back, when to burst out (having the tension broken through a minor character - Bruce McGill's utterly unexpected, hugely satisfying courtroom tirade - is a touch of genius). Yet there's also an aloofness about him - you might say he respects the characters too much for the old hard-sell : his films tend to work best (HEAT the obvious example) when there's no single identification-point, when he's like a god looking down on various strands reacting with each other. When this stays on the tug-of-war between Crowe and Pacino, competing products of the same mindset - journalist and "man of science", seekers after Truth who refuse to "censor" themselves - it's as riveting and hypnotic as any film in years ; when it leaves Crowe behind and turns into One Man's Battle for journalistic integrity, focus and momentum seem to dissipate. There doesn't seem to be enough at stake (the story would've emerged, and Big Tobacco countered with a smear campaign, irrespective of the "60 Minutes" decision), and Pacino's grandstanding isn't very interesting in itself ; what's mesmerising is to see it played off Crowe's tormented stillness, with a master film-maker using framing, camera movement and editing rhythms to express the contrast. Two final points from a non-American perspective : (i) as someone who doesn't know Mike Wallace from a hole in the ground, I thought he came out of it quite well, and have no idea what the fuss is about ; (ii) is Michael Gambon's Southern accent the least convincing ever put on film?]

JOE THE KING (57) (dir., Frank Whaley) Noah Fleiss, Val Kilmer, Karen Black, John Leguizamo, Ethan Hawke [Aww, poor little feller ... Teachers mock him, everyone neglects him, drunken Dad threatens to "knock your fuckin' head off" ; money's scarce, nothing in the fridge, he survives on scraps picked off dirty plates in the greasy-spoon where he slaves away after school ; "Ever wish you could just - disappear off the face of the earth?" asks his brother, and he nods sadly ; all he ever wanted was a bit of love, poor mite ... Bit of a sob-story, obviously, and a bit too 'gritty' also, piling on the street-smart, foul-mouthed kids till it feels like a live-action "South Park" without the laughs ; yet it's obviously, patently sincere, and it seems somehow callous to dismiss that. You can sense it in the detail, in its pent-up anger and contempt for easy solutions (having a sympathetic guidance counsellor who ends up doing more harm than good is a nice touch ; having him played by Ethan Hawke is truly sardonic), you sense it in the way minor characters aren't thrown away, everyone gets a personality (I liked the brief sketch of the rather fey music teacher - "Go get your sticks, Mr. Forgetful!" - equal parts mean and comical) ; Joe's world is a place of small cruelties - not so much abused as disdained, degraded - which is why his small kindness at the end is disproportionately touching. Crude in many ways, but its plain-spokenness (and stylistic plainness) has its own cathartic dignity ; plus, I don't know - I felt kinda sorry for the poor little bastard...]

FIGHT CLUB (80) (dir., David Fincher) Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter [What a rush! Also, I suppose, what a stupid ending, but it makes sense thematically (albeit not plausibility-wise), which is at least partly the point : I never bought the final twist in THE GAME, mostly because the Sean Penn character never seemed important enough to warrant it, but here it's all about alienation and retreating into a private, self-enclosed world, and about the troublesome male id buzzing around restlessly on the fringes of a neat corporate culture. Don't really get the people who patronise it ("your jaw is supposed to drop with admiring disbelief at the provocation" - J. Rosenbaum) - it is provocative, surely, utterly ferocious on the touchy-feely culture of self-improvement and "environmentally friendly" furniture and support-groups with names like "Positive Positivity" and "Learning To Soar", and on our over-civilised impulse to fuss and fidget around the reality of human pain (I saw it just a couple of days after a "Time" magazine cover story on colon cancer, for crying out loud!) ; and I definitely don't get the people who say it glorifies violence, given how clear it's made that our hero's new life is in fact a mirror-image of what he's left behind (Fight Club is, explicitly, a kind of support-group, turning into a quasi-corporate franchise with a branch in every major city, just as self-destruction is a mirror-ideology of self-improvement, Project Mayhem contrasts with the city's Project Hope, and the military-style abuse of new recruits contrasts with the emphasis on self-esteem). The film's recurring point is that all ideologies are in fact equally inadequate, because human beings are first and foremost physical creatures - "decaying matter", glops of liposuction fat, body-shaped bars of soap ; our hero orders trendy furniture on the toilet and talks of "grande latte enemas" ; a dying woman wants only to have sex before she goes (needless to say, her request embarrasses everyone in her so-called support-group). This is, in a sense - one of its many, many senses - the anti-AMERICAN BEAUTY, also a tale of an emasculated man recovering his masculinity (both films feature a scene where he blackmails his boss into a golden handshake) but without a trace of self-congratulation, actually poking fun at its hero's 'rebellion' : like Bruce Willis in 12 MONKEYS (another film that might conceivably be taking place entirely within its protagonist's head) he's missing the bigger picture, merely substituting one reality for another, therefore doomed to end up a passive witness, unable to prevent destruction. It's among the new breed of action flick (THE MATRIX, RUN LOLA RUN), inspired by techno, concerned with the plastic nature of reality, juggling ideas with the mad abandon once reserved for shoot-outs and car-chases ; even when it goes off the rails in the second half - and it does go off the rails in the second half - it's fluid and funny, and stunning and exhilarating. And the final shot's an absolute killer.]

THE BONE COLLECTOR (37) (dir., Phillip Noyce) Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, Queen Latifah, Michael Rooker [Ready kids? OK, there's this psycho, and he's such a sick twisted fuck he not only kills his victims, he buries them in a shallow grave with their hands sticking out of the ground! Ewwww!!! Or else he cuts them up good and leaves them tied to a post - still alive, mind you - so the rats can gnaw them to death! That's disgusting!!! Oh, and get this : he also surgically removes slivers of flesh from each victim, skinning them down to the bone! And he cuts off someone's finger and uses it to plant fingerprints all over the crime-scene - just for laughs! Oh, puke! Wait, here's the best part : not one but two Hollywood studios got together and turned this vile sensationalism into a big-budget thriller, skilfully directed by one of the best action practitioners in the biz! Ughhhh!!! And they got one of the finest actors in the world to play the quadriplegic cop who - just like all you armchair sadists out there - deciphers the clues left by the killer surrounded by hi-tech toys in the comfort of his bedroom, turning people's suffering into a cerebral game of wits! And they got a hot new star to play the girl who realises - in a kind of coarser variation on Morgan Freeman in SE7EN - that it's no good being squeamish, and sometimes you've got to take a hacksaw and saw the hands off a freshly-killed corpse because it's an evil world, baby, and you've just got to face it! Oh yeah, and they camouflaged the insensitive macho crap with police-procedural detail and a none-too-subtle chess metaphor! And - and they play Peter Gabriel's terminally sappy "Don't Give Up" over the closing credits! Oh, gross!!!]

HAPPY TOGETHER (66) (dir., Wong Kar-Wai) Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, Chang Chen [Second half of a theoretical gay double-bill (see below), but there's no comparison : no offence to GET REAL, but this is a movie. Wong and Doyle throw in time-lapse, upside-down shots, mid-scene freeze-frames, slight overcranking and it's all absolutely gorgeous - while the concept of wanderers in a strange land fits the film-maker perfectly, emphasising the sense of dislocation behind his fantasy visuals ("Where are you going?" is the question ; "I dunno ... As far as I can go," comes the answer ; style, like travel, for its own sake). The semblance of emotional progression doesn't fit, though, exposing the limitations in Wong's relentlessly luscious style : the protagonists' on-again-off-again relationship crashes from joy to despair, but the images look relentlessly luscious (one character finally returns to Taipei from Argentina, tells us that it feels "like I'm waking up from a dream" - but the images look relentlessly luscious). A film I could happily watch every day for a week ; but I can only assume Wong is having his little joke when he has a character declare that "ears are more important than eyes".]

GET REAL (53) (dir., Simon Shore) Ben Silverstone, Brad Gorton, Charlotte Brittain [Maybe I'm out of date, but a little more vulnerability might've been nice here - the 16-year-old hero is so comfortable with his (homo)sexuality, just kind of waiting for the rest of the sadly bigoted world to catch up, it's hard to get terribly involved in his problems (is it really only 20 years since the clueless British teens of GREGORY'S GIRL?) ; then again, the whole point - as per the title - is that people shouldn't be uncomfortable with teenage homosexuality, hence the many gags indirectly spoofing (and pre-empting) a straight audience's uneasiness about the subject ("Fuck me!" marvels a classmate on being told of our hero's proclivities; "No wait, I don't mean..."). Cleverly done, albeit not without a certain glossiness (a Friday-night party looks like Studio 54) ; certainly makes American teen flicks look mealy-mouthed by comparison. Though it's actually at its best when it doesn't dwell on its controversial subject, riffing on the age-old problems of adolescence - teens with a secret (any secret) unable to confide in their well-meaning parents, knowing they just Wouldn't Understand : "What's your problem, anyway?" says our hero's kindly, exasperated father, and you see the kid's eyes blazing, absolutely longing to burst out with it once and for all ; then the fire subsides and he sighs wearily and he turns away, mumbling "Sorry I've been such a disappointment..."]

STUART LITTLE (52) (dir., Rob Minkoff) Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie and the voices of Michael J. Fox, Nathan Lane, Chazz Palminteri [Marginal winner in the Small White Rodent Transforms Nice Middle-Class Family stakes, though obviously at the other end of the shock-value scale from SITCOM : indeed, saccharine-cutesiness levels are dangerously high, especially when we're looking at the Littles' dinky little house (perched in between two big ol' skyscrapers) or meeting all the various aunts and uncles (their excruciating greeting - "Little high, Little low!" - still has me waking up in a cold sweat). Trades heavily on kids' fondness for the small and cuddly, which I guess is better than trading on their fondness for pratfalls and bodily-fluid humour ; message-mongering (Winning Isn't Everything ; Being Different Is A Good Thing) offset by likeable protagonist, Tom-and-Jerry action plus a host of irresistible comic actors in minor roles. Especially : Steve Zahn voicing a scroungy alley-cat ; Jon Polito as uncouth sweaty cop licking his lips over crime-scene photos ; Taylor Negron as oleaginous male-Barbie salesman expounding on the "many moods of Ben".]

IT ALL STARTS TODAY (69) (dir., Bertrand Tavernier) Philippe Torreton, Maria Pitarresi, Nadia Kaci [Twenty minutes in, I felt I was being held personally responsible for the state of the nation ; and it wasn't even my nation. Fortunately, as our hero puts it, "A story can unfold like a dream. You don't decide when to fall asleep, or when to wake up : you just keep going, carrying on". The fact that nothing's ever quite resolved is what makes this powerful - it is like a dream, hurtling along with a mounting sense of helplessness, its characters unable to do anything except live each moment as it comes, doing the best they can with it. Modern-day France seems to bring out the old grouch in the nearly-60 Tavernier (see also L'APPAT) - there's an acerbic sideswipe at children being named after characters in "The Young And The Restless" (shocking!), and it's made clear that these predominantly young parents are failing their kids ("You have to teach them everything now," laments an older teacher, "even how to talk to people") - yet it's also implicit in the film's worldview that ideological haranguing isn't going to change anything, the old left-wing ethos of commitment to education just a vanished dream in a bureaucratic age ("What d'you want us to do, sing the 'Internationale'?" ask Torreton's colleagues ; "Do you even remember the words?" he replies). Key moment is perhaps the Mayor's comment that "we need to forget 'Germinal' [the film's set in an old mining town] and embrace the market" : Tavernier's point is that Zola's social conscience is exactly what mustn't be forgotten - and, like that great writer, he transcends woolly liberalism by creating work that pulsates with life. The film, Steadicam-shot and briskly edited, grips and stirs even when its contents seem one-sided, or faintly absurd (the putting-on-a-show finale, with its tiny tots in frilly costumes reinforcing Torreton's faltering commitment) ; and, every time it seems poised to sink into the maudlin (the hero's troubled relationship with his own step-son), it rescues itself with a quiet elegance (their understated reconciliation scene). I doubt it could've been done much better ; whether it needed to be done at all is of course an open question.]

MARIUS ET JEANNETTE (59) (dir., Robert Guédiguian) Gérard Maylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jacques Boudet, Jean-Pierre Darroussin [Echoes of Pagnol (Marius, Marseilles) and equally warm-hearted, except that it turns warm-heartedness into a political statement - you wonder how much of its affection for the characters is because of who they are, and how much because they're members of the oppressed proletariat (it's even dedicated to "the unknown workers of the world", for crying out loud!). Still a superior, unsentimental tale of beautiful losers, superficially "crippled" by Life but actually full of heart, happy to discover one last chance at happiness ; loves the little things, whether it's obscure local customs (like the Marseillais' disdain for Aix-en-Provence) or the daily stuff of life - sharing a meal, having a gossip, shucking beans, scraping kitchen floors (though we could've done without the classical music occasionally pasted over these unglamorous interludes). M. Boudet looks exactly like David Thewlis in 20 years' time ; assuming he learns French and develops a paunch, of course...]

SLEEPY HOLLOW (65) (dir., Tim Burton) Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon [No improving on cbf's inspired two-word putdown - "Insert Comma" - so I'll go the other way : most of this creepy fairytale is thoroughly eye-popping, foggy light and Gothic splendours unseen since Coppola's DRACULA (the flashback of the Horseman in action on the battlefield - misshapen silhouettes, fiery-orange sky in the background - seems inspired directly by that film's pre-credits sequence). Also, of course, something of a sacred text for Burton-buffs, affirming their man's wide-eyed devotion to magic even at the dawn of a new millennium (the film is set, with a wink at our own millennial panics, in 1799) : Depp's foolish, cowardly Ichabod (love the prissy way he enunciates "Decapitated?") makes "scientific" rationalism central to his worldview - a way of blotting out the memory of his tragic, witchcraft-dabbling mother - which is perfectly in tune with the spirit of the original (where the Horseman turned out to be a hoax) but obviously ridiculous in Burton's supernatural-minded universe. He's our reigning dreamy fabulist, reclaiming spookiness and superstition from the scorn of those who scoff (like Ichabod) that "Truth isn't always appearance" - insisting that magic can indeed be magic, an optical illusion can be Truth just as a fairytale world, depicted in sufficiently potent images, can be as valid as our own. Unfortunately he's also a nasty-minded kid with the gleeful horror-comic sensibility of an Iron Maiden album cover, and it gets in the way a little. The film is, after all, a child's nightmare, flanking Depp (the most ethereal and Peter Pan-ish of actors) with a pre-teen sidekick and child-woman Christina Ricci, then having them all venture into the dark woods like something out of "Hansel And Gretel" : it should've depended on eerie atmosphere and the power of imagined horrors, not this snarky tone spiced with graphic head-choppings - it's too yobbish, too lip-smackingly "gross", too literal : it wrecks the illusion (THE SIXTH SENSE, for all its problems, did it better, I thought). Plus, is it wimpish to suggest that it may all be a bit, um, unpleasant?...]

BEST LAID PLANS (42) (dir., Mike Barker) Alessandro Nivola, Reese Witherspoon, Josh Brolin [Only saw this for its stars, but it turns out to have been written by Ted Griffin (who did RAVENOUS), making for an interesting double-bill. His trademark seems to be a strong, grab-you-by-the-throat opening, in which an ambiguous figure tells a shocking story that may or may not be true, followed by a gradual slackening and descent into jokiness : certainly, no amount of Dutch angles and candy-coloured style can disguise the fact that we're one step ahead (by definition) throughout the first hour, or that the final twist is spectacularly silly. Otherwise it's another of Reese's Easy Pieces, pleasant enough but hardly a stretch for the Charismatic One ; Nivola, on the other hand, should be moving into Edward Norton parts any day now. Incidental note to Mr. Griffin : having a mean-mutha drug-lord who's 'just a businessman' (he quotes from "Wealth Of Nations" while torturing our hero) went out with, like, NEW JACK CITY.]

RAVENOUS (58) (dir., Antonia Bird) Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeffrey Jones, David Arquette [Gory fun in a memorably rugged setting, "Dances With Cannibals" with black-comic, eating-people-is-okay trimmings (reminded me quite a bit, in terms of tone, of late-80s cult movie PARENTS), tricked out with high-flown language and a surprisingly credible Author's Message (cowardice - a refusal to give in to baser instincts - actually a kind of morality). Trouble is, it's two separate films grafted together, the first - and more powerful - of the two turning out to be something of a red herring (why does he take them to the cave, anyway?), making the result a bit slapdash and unmotivated. Wonderful over-ripeness to it though, genuinely eerie bits ("spooked out" Carlyle scrabbling at the earth!), flashy but terrific bells-and-jingles score by Michael Nyman and Blur's Damon Albarn ; when is the AMPAS music branch going to get its head out of its arse and actually start listening to movies?]

ALICE ET MARTIN (70) (dir., Andre Techiné) Juliette Binoche, Alexis Loret, Mathieu Almaric, Carmen Maura [Alice and Martin together - cool and volatile respectively in your basic tale of 'amour fou' - is actually the least interesting part of this masterfully-made drama, possibly because Techiné's recurring theme is loss rather than togetherness, and the quests of damaged, haunted people to make themselves whole again. As in LES VOLEURS, the melodramatic event round which everything hinges (a robbery there, a parricide in this one) is a shade too familiar to support the swirl of feelings - the film is at its greatest when you can't quite put your finger on the characters' unhappiness, building an atmosphere of yearning restlessness through consummate technique : Techiné's camera is forever stalking the characters, looking for an angle of attack, he cuts on movement, plunging us into the middle of a scene and explaining later, and he has the knack of suddenly transforming mood, leaping across the emotional spectrum (Assayas - who collaborated on the script - does it too). A little boy gets out of bed in the middle of the night, walks groggily to the window, opens the shutter - and is suddenly engulfed by a fairytale sky, thick with falling snowflakes ; we cut from the fugitive Martin rummaging in trash-cans straight to a field of brilliant yellow flowers, from a quiet graveside conversation to the middle of a party and a shimmying conga-line ; a shot of Martin swimming in the sea suddenly becomes a glittering slo-mo fresco of rippling water that's like something out of FALLEN ANGELS. And, through it all, the film shifts focus LES VOLEURS-style, shuffling periods and characters, trying to locate the source of its hero's psychosis ; indeed, depite his air of elegant aloofness and the relative glossiness of his characters (working for a living seems to be an optional extra), there's definitely a Dickensian element to Techiné, in the scope of the narrative and attention paid to supporting characters : note how the opening of SCENE OF THE CRIME explicitly recalled "Great Expectations", just as this one echoes "David Copperfield". Can't help feeling the rating should be higher, but the truth is it doesn't quite add up, needed a stronger centre perhaps ; not a less-than-pleasurable moment in the whole two hours, though.]