Films Seen - March 2001
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
GINGER SNAPS (66) (dir., John Fawcett) Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Mimi Rogers, Kris Lemche [Lots of blood, lots of semi-coded metaphors (the title alone can be taken four different ways) ; my kind of movie. Probably works best when you don't know where it's going (vague spoilers follow), developing in unexpected ways for better and for worse : starts in HEAVENLY CREATURES vein with a touch of HEATHERS, moves through "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" into all-out monster movie - which is exciting but also something of a betrayal, reducing the complex meanings of the early scenes. Kicks off with the misfit heroine resisting adolescence, specifically the "normal" next stage, the onset of menstruation (her body mutating into a woman's), which is why it makes perfect sense that she should resist her sister's mutation into something quite different (but analogous) ; by the end, however, she's the one standing up for normality, apparently forgetting her old admonitions ("Don't go average on me"), while the sister's mutation, initially ambivalent, has become out-and-out evil. "Doing drugs with guys - something's definitely wrong with you," chides our heroine early on, which is rather witty on our moral relativism when it comes to puberty - some 'bad' things become acceptable, part of growing up ("This is a very exciting, confusing time for your sister," chirps Rogers as the ever-chipper Mom) ; the ending needed more of that wit, maybe an indication that our heroine too will be joining the Dark Side before too long - they should probably have used the Lemche character as a kind of counterpoint, representing 'good' adolescence (as it is, we leave the heroine without any options : she's destroyed what she was and what she might become ; very strange). Messages are muddled, maybe even reactionary - yet it's probably the most sheerly enjoyable B-movie since FREEWAY, full of dark humour (on burying a bimbo classmate : "Shallow grave ... oh well, seems appropriate"), razor-sharp dialogue, skilful genre shocks and a brooding, oppressive feel for the confusion of being a teen. Best gag : Mom is about to discover the corpse in the icebox, and must be distracted fast - even at the price of a long and tedious mother-to-daughter 'chat'. "Mom!" yells our quick-thinking heroine. "Uh ... What do guys want?".]
WEST BEIRUT (64) (dir., Ziad Doueiri) Rami Doueiri, Mohammad Chamas, Rola Al Amin [I was actually in Beirut (though very young, and only for a year or so) exactly when this film is set, which may be why I appreciated the absence of sensationalism : it seems entirely proper that, though Death is everywhere (someone mentions 100,000 killed by the time the film is over), it's almost never onscreen, nor does it impinge directly on the lives of the young protagonists, who are only too happy to run wild - though the film also one-ups the HOPE AND GLORY view of War as glorious adventure, making clear that 'freedom' from the rules also brings a constant uncertainty, ending as a war of attrition that leaves people insecure and angst-ridden (the ending is remarkably inconclusive, though it's great that our hero doesn't get the spurious 'closure' endemic to the coming-of-age / I-was-never-the-same-after-that-summer movie, losing neither a loved one nor - apparently - his virginity). Clearly a labour of love, not to mention a family affair (another Doueiri is First AD), touching all the bases as if preparing a lecture on the civil war - the responsibility of the French colonial power (who "created" the problem), the naive response of 60s radicals and nationalists (who thought it merely a continuation of their "revolutions" in Algeria and elsewhere), the way the Lebanese became international pariahs, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a result of polarisation. Some of it does feel a little like being in school ; most of it, however, feels like being in a school playground, full of silly pranks and youthful high spirits - lots of yelling and carrying on (young Chamas is hilariously combustible), underlying tenderness and affection, watching rockets from the roof at night, bike rides through the ruined city, even a trip to a brothel (though of course the brothel is made to symbolise the idyllic hedonism of Beirut before the war). Does peter out a little, but it's loads of fun - why this wasn't a major arthouse smash is something of a mystery ; maybe Miramax has its uses after all...]
PAY IT FORWARD (32) (dir., Mimi Leder) Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, Haley Joel Osment, Jay Mohr [Was there a point in the shooting of this film when its stars - smart, experienced people, by all accounts - suddenly realised they'd signed on for a turkey? I suspect there was : you can sense it in Spacey's faintly embarrassed introspection (he seems to be dissociating himself from the role even as he plays it), or the deeply unimaginative way Hunt handles the speech where her character finally acknowledges her alcoholism ("I have a problem"), just as if she were still stuck doing made-for-TV movies (which of course she is, in a way) ; only Osment seems to believe in what he's doing, and he acts his little heart out, which improves the film but is also part of the problem - you'd have to be 11 years old to take this crap seriously. Takes place entirely in a world borne of tabloids and "The Oprah Winfrey Show", a hysterically artificial world where everything is lurid - everywhere you look there are junkies, gangstas, abusive boyfriends, homeless people, drunkards, knife-toting schoolkids (even the final twist happens in histrionic, torn-from-the-headlines fashion) - yet none of these people have any life of their own, just pose stereotypically mouthing the lines we'd expect them to mouth : they give the impression of having been dressed up for a 'Come As Your Favourite Urban Scourge' Halloween party. Was it the one-dimensional gangsta talking of "dat cosmic Aristotle shit" that did it for me? Was it Hunt - as a supposedly hard-bitten, trash-talking single mother - slapping her kid during an argument then gasping in abject horror with an oh-my-god-what-have-I-done expression, while he stares at her disbelievingly for about 20 seconds of anguished close-ups ("In all my life," she sobs later, "I could never be as sorry as I am for what I did to you")? Was it the pointlessly fragmented structure, flash-forwarding to Mohr's intrepid journo slowly finding out all the stuff we already know (talk about dramatically dead)? Or the non-tension of Hunt rushing frantically to meet her date at the restaurant ("he won't respect you if you're late") when she could just call him up and explain the situation? Or Spacey's self-loathing cripple using big words in casual conversation (because "words are all I have") but mysteriously starting to talk normally once his character has been established and the plot gets underway? Maybe not abysmal, but it offers no way in : nothing works or convinces, and the film just sort of dies as you watch it. Leder goes down with the ship, but deserves extra brickbats for making so little of the Las Vegas location, briefly glimpsed as an incredible setting - neon nightlife flanked by cheap tracts of housing in a vast, lunar desert. Maybe she just felt it wasn't worth the effort...]
CECIL B. DEMENTED (25) (dir., John Waters) Melanie Griffith, Stephen Dorff, Alicia Witt [Jesus, is this ever lame - like a Leslie Nielsen comedy for the indie crowd, all cruddy visuals and creaky jokes about Pat Nixon and PATCH ADAMS. The 'rebel' posturing makes you cringe ("Hey, hey, MPAA! How many movies did you censor today?") and the misplaced aggression gets tedious fast, not to mention how flat everything looks : I know Waters' lack of technique is the joke, but it's kind of gone beyond a joke. Can't really argue with the cheerleading for "outlaw cinema", but can you still be an outlaw if you praise the "atoor" theory and can't even spell "Herschell Gordon Lewis"? Or does that make you even more of an outlaw?...]
BOUNCE (48) (dir., Don Roos) Ben Affleck, Gwyneth Paltrow, Joe Morton, Caroline Aaron [Looks like Roos is a fan of the old-fashioned weepie - but his talents lie elsewhere (in brittle, bitchy comedy), and he doesn't follow through in any case. There's a fascinating 20 minutes or so when this high-concept drama seems to have manoeuvred itself into a position where telling the heroine the truth - Affleck's character coming clean about himself - would actually be crueller than continuing to deceive her : for a while it even looks like it might become a masculine equivalent to 30s dramas of self-sacrifice like THE OLD MAID or STELLA DALLAS, where a mother stayed silent (though it broke her heart to do so) for the sake of her daughter's happiness. Needless to say, it doesn't happen (those films come from a more repressed age, after all), but what really hurts is the clumsy, contrived way in which the truth emerges, featuring the laziest kind of only-in-the-movies coincidence (topped by the laziest kind of only-in-the-movies courtroom testimony) - a reminder that this was never all that great to begin with, a relentlessly plastic movie you kind of tolerate because it seems to be heading somewhere interesting. Once it doesn't, the litany of sitcom-cute becomes impossible to ignore : a heroine so 'loveably' klutzy she can't even answer the phone without getting in a tizzy ("This is her - I mean, this is she"), light-hearted banter about smoking cigarettes in order to get off the nicotine gum (chuckle), a precocious 8-year-old ("Hey, you got 'Where's Waldo'?" "(exasperated) I'm eight!"), a mixed-up Rottweiler named Buddy, a heroine's friend who says things like "Guys screw up, it's in the manual - right after 'love your grill' and 'leave socks on the floor' ". Well-intentioned, and the stars try hard - but it's only really notable for the rare glimpses of Roos in OPPOSITE OF SEX mode (skewering the saccharine corporate 'tribute' to the crash victims, e.g.) and as a rueful game of might-have-been. And maybe I'm insensitive, but is feeling crippled by guilt and embarking on a desperate quest for redemption really the natural reaction when you realise you just gave up your seat on a doomed airplane at the last minute - or is it more like throwing a party and running through the streets shouting "Hooray! I'm alive!"?...]
GIRL ON THE BRIDGE (52) (dir., Patrice Leconte) Daniel Auteuil, Vanessa Paradis, Demetre Georgalas [Knife-throwing as sex ; knife-throwing as making your own luck / taking charge of your destiny ; knife-throwing as performing miracles by the power of concentration. Never trust a film that throws out different metaphors for the same thing - especially when it throws each one about a thousand times, hoping it'll stick. Not much to say, really : pleasant enough, very Leconte, often quite funny, low on inspiration, giving up on structure in the final third ; why did this film win Césars and end up on the National Board of Review's foreign-language Five? Ms. Paradis is quite lovely, and any actress would kill for an opening scene like this one (probably the high-point of the whole movie) ; I was going to make a joke about her and Johnny Depp's cheekbones, but I see where Mike D'Angelo has already made it. Ah well...]
VERTICAL LIMIT (39) (dir., Martin Campbell) Chris O'Donnell, Robin Tunney, Bill Paxton, Scott Glenn [Crackerjack action movie - mixing CLIFFHANGER-style mountain peril with the irresistible WAGES OF FEAR set-up where people have to carry loads of nitro around, primed to explode at the slightest misstep - buried beneath layers of Hollywood bloat and self-importance. Is there any reason why a straightforward tale of mountain rescue must be made to say something 'relevant' about the despoiling of the Himalayas and corruption of the noble art of mountain-climbing? Is there any reason why it must be turned into a tale of filial guilt and redemption, our hero tormented by his part in his father's death, finally reconciled with his estranged sister (cue tearful, I-won't-let-you-die conversation, stopping the film dead just when it's heading to a climax)? Did we really need the superficial glance at the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir, or the talk about religious faith in the face of Death? Great landscapes, couple of good action scenes, fatal over-reaching and incoherence - the leap into the void (from one side of a cliff to another) is a hair-raising stunt, but it comes out of nowhere and leads to nothing. A missed opportunity, though it could never have been truly great with Mr. O'Donnell as its action hero ; the moment where he indicates rage by crossing his arms huffily, as if he's found someone sitting in his favourite chair, is one for the time-capsule.]
DARK DAYS (64) (dir., Marc Singer) [Bit of a tough call, this one. Nothing's more obscene (or exploitative) than documentaries playing up the suffering of those on the fringes of society, preying on the guilt of the middle-class liberal audience ; but can said suffering also be played down? Made by the fringe-dwellers themselves (homeless folk living in the tunnels under New York City), this is both fascinating and sensually pleasing - DJ Shadow soundtrack over elegantly grainy b & w - yet also comes across as an exercise in building self-esteem more than anything : the characters question even the concept of homelessness, speak of themselves in white-collar terms ("Gonna get paid today," chuckles one, on his way to scavenge through the city rubbish bins in search of stuff to sell), yell at each other for leaving cups unwashed, just like any suburban couple. The fact that cups have to be washed as a matter of life and death - rats are everywhere - isn't glossed over exactly, but it's hard to focus on amid the sitcom-style bickering over whether the cup in question originally came from McDonald's ("What you talkin' about, there ain't no cups like that at McDonald's!" "Yeah, that's because you took the last one!"). In a sense, it makes the film all the more fascinating - the way people crave (and impose) normality in the most extreme situations ("You'd be surprised what the human mind and body can adjust to") - but there's also a hint of performing for the camera, and more than a hint of authorial intervention : we hear a lot about crackheads, but only one person seems clearly out of it, and he's only glimpsed in the background in between the 'positive' messages (a closing caption informs us that he - or someone by that name - died during filming, but we're not shown that either). No-one's asking for ghoulish sensationalism, but a whitewash isn't very helpful either ; impossible to say, but it all seems a bit too clean. He'll miss the place in some ways, muses one of the squatters as they finally move into government housing ; "got some good memories too". Which are the bad ones?]
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (55) (59 - second viewing) (65 - third viewing) (dir., Wong Kar-Wei) Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Rebecca Pan [Secrets and lies : a couple lie to their spouses, the spouses lie to the neighbours (and each other), a woman lies for her philandering boss ; the camera prowls amid cramped spaces full of offscreen voices, giving nothing away ; our heroes slip in and out of character, toying with the audience ; their secret - are they lovers? - remains undivulged. How could this not be irresistible? Yet Wong's rhythm remains as cramped as the rooms - not intimate, just frustrating - and the underlying tone somehow comes off precious, even whiny. It's moving and tragic - REMAINS OF THE DAY territory - when people lack the courage to make an emotional commitment yet long to reach out so badly they can't even bear to admit their own cowardice ; it's a lot less weighty (for this viewer, anyway) when people do admit their own cowardice - maybe not explicitly, yet in every frame of this 'memory-piece', from the opening caption onwards - when they pine for each other and the past, know they've messed up by holding back, can't stop replaying the events in their minds (making for 97 minutes of obsessive scratching at an old wound) : it's a fine line between self-reproach and self-pity. Style is usually content with this director, but style and content seem at cross-purposes here : rhythms are abrupt, giving little glimmers of grace (swaying hips to swaying music) then cutting them off before they can flower - yet the film talks of languid, romantic things like regret and nostalgia (compare, e.g. the unrushed, wandering rhythms of AVALON, or even AGE OF INNOCENCE) : it's a film about absence (which the style seems to realise), yet unfolds as if it had actually created a presence we could respond to. I never got into it, partly because I never got a sense of the atmosphere it's so obviously trying to evoke - no sense of a world beyond whispers and secrets. "That era is over, and everything that belongs to that era no longer exists", laments an inter-title ; to which an uncharitable response might be, "How can they tell?".] [More positive on second viewing : seems clear this isn't actually a romantic film, i.e. not about Love but about Time (intermittent shots of clocks give the game away), and about a moment when Time seems to stand still. Powerful feeling of emotional paralysis, the couple trapped in indecision tiill the world finally moves on, releasing them into the torment of What Might Have Been ; not much human dimension is still the problem - the actors move like mannequins, trapped (like their characters) in Wong's gorgeous compositions - but it's more artful than I first thought, rhythms modulated to fit the story. Look forward to third viewing...] [Third viewing, November 2024, so >20 years later! Still not a mega-fan, but quite affected by how the couple keep imagining different scenarios - when they pose as their spouses, most obviously - and are finally blocked by their own imagination, by the high romanticism which the film keeps defaulting to. In imagination, they agree (both of them having the same thoughts, "If there's an extra ticket you could come with me" for instance), in life they get stymied by the imagined power of their love. Also wondering about the reading that the spouses aren't actually having an affair, that too is imagined; the only real evidence is that overheard "Was that your wife?" - but is it overheard by us, or something that sprouts up in Mrs. Chan's head? Interesting.]
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE (65) (dir., E. Elias Merhige) John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Cary Elwes, Eddie Izzard [In a word, toothsome. The show-must-go-on hysteria is its own joke - it might make a good double bill with THE STUNT MAN, films about films feeding on the perversity of 'realism' : the more insane things get, the more they're trumped by the insanity of trying to turn them into a movie. What's magical is the way it elevates film-making to a state of grace - Murnau is a megalomaniac but also innocent and resilient as a child, because literally nothing fazes him (his Art is his shield : the worse things get, the more he's delighted) ; what's hilarious is the way movie lore gets tangled up with Gothic horror, as when Nosferatu asks for the blood of the writer (always expendable in the movie business), or Murnau treats his undead star as just another actor ("Just sit back and let the vampire do all the work," he instructs his female lead during a tricky scene) ; what's problematic is the thin, casual narrative, which never goes beyond a jape and seems happy to be riddled with plot-holes (let alone historical inaccuracies). Still lots of fun, addled fantasy with splendid Mitteleuropean flavour and blithe anything-goes attitude ; even the device that seemed so strained in NURSE BETTY - non-actor assumed to be 'in character' - goes down without a hitch.]
MEMENTO (84) (dir., Christopher Nolan) Guy Pearce, Joe Pantoliano, Carrie-Anne Moss [Absolutely successful within its limits ; the only question can be what those limits are. Some will call it no more than a mindfuck with a tacked-on twist at the end, yet in fact that final twist ripples back over the rest of it, forcing you to reconsider not just how it plays but what kind of film it is : in transforming its protagonist from passive to active, the agent of his own destruction, it makes him 'one of us' at last - a person with control over his life - hence becomes a comment on all Memory, his as well as ours. Like the games people play to forget their pain in Egoyan films like EXOTICA or CALENDAR (or even in LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL), its theme becomes denial and self-delusion, and the underlying point that Memory is by nature selective : like Leonard, we have no real memory, at least in the sense of being able to remember everything - we have our own mental Polaroids, specific memories of people and things from which we extrapolate attitudes and opinions (often blotting out later memories if they clash or confuse us). All of which merely goes to illustrate that it does offer food for thought, but is almost irrelevant to the experience of watching it - which is giddily pleasurable, and more fluent and seamless than any film in years ; every piece snaps into place so crisply and coherently you just sit back and drink it all in (those who claim it's confusing don't know what they're talking about - films don't get any more clearly signposted than this ; deliberate ambiguity, of course, is another matter). Visually it's not amazing, and a mechanical quality does occasionally seep into the structure - maybe there's just too much plot to get through ; but wasn't that ever the trouble with 'film noir'? I could've sworn the outdoor location where it all comes together echoes the similar location in the original D.O.A. - probably the ultimate existential noir before this one ('dead' hero seeking mystery man whose destruction will give meaning to what remains of his life) ; but maybe I'm remembering it wrong...]
RING (52) (dir., Hideo Nakata) Nanako Matsushima, Miki Nakatani, Hiroyuki Sanada [Did I miss something? This intermittently eerie ghost story - most successful horror film of all time in Japan - goes slack in the middle, its characters curiously unmoved by having less than a week to live, and never really builds on the frissons of the early scenes (esp. a Pino Donaggio-style crashing chord over a shot of a deformed face). Interesting how it moves from SCREAM-style po-mo teenflick - Evil coming through a VCR - to a more traditional tale of kwaidan-style spirits (and incidentally from urban to rural), but it also makes it look like bandwagon-jumping, like it's trolling for the teen audience without following through. And why has the denouement been singled out as especially grim ("scariest part of a scary movie" - Tony Rayns, "Time Out")? Hasn't the heroine found a way to keep evading the curse without anyone actually getting killed? Did I miss something?...]
THE CLAIM (58) (dir., Michael Winterbottom) Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich, Peter Mullan, Sarah Polley, Nastassia Kinski [Another triumph of style over substance for the (too-) prolific Winterbottom : it's infuriating that a man of his talent is willing to commit to half-baked scripts like this (and JUDE, and BUTTERFLY KISS, and WELCOME TO SARAJEVO, and even I WANT YOU). Maybe he's too busy thinking of all the cool cinematic things he can do - a remarkable evocation of a snowbound Western town, in this case, with a couple of breathtaking set-pieces (notably : the saloon lit by candle chandeliers on a snowy night, so packed with people you can almost smell the sweat and tobacco, then the prostitutes' squealy laughter momentarily stilled by Polley's quavering rendition of a melancholy poem from the Old Country). Works fine for an hour or so, though performances are erratic (Mullan magnificent, Kinski poignant, Bentley far too smirky and somehow modern for the period setting) ; then things start happening too quickly, the plot grows diffuse and perfunctory, motivations grow unclear (why don't the railwaymen leave by dawn? why bother with the whole ultimatum business anyway?) and the whole thing just deflates ; by the time the curse-of-gold theme limps on at the end, it seems almost insultingly underdeveloped. Typical scene : an explosion leaves a horse literally on fire, galloping in terror with flames leaping from its flanks - an indelible image ; but we don't even know (or care) how the explosion happened in the first place.]
AUTUMN IN NEW YORK (37) (dir., Joan Chen) Richard Gere, Winona Ryder, Elaine Stritch, Anthony LaPaglia [Hollywood keeps remaking LOVE STORY, and it never works (La Julia herself couldn't save DYING YOUNG) ; why do they do it? TITANIC presumably had something to do with it - re-legitimising romantic tragedy - but could the teeny-bopper crowd ever have gone for Richard Gere, looking like your mother's creepy uncle? "You're fabulous," says Winona, but then she also quotes Emily Dickinson and says things like "I can smell the rain" ; "You don't dance, you float," he tells her - but then he also compares one of her hats (she makes hats) to "the line of a woman's hip". Those of a cynical disposition may giggle when Winona rolls her eyes and simpers, or our hero establishes his credentials as a great restaurateur by lifting the lid off a pot, sniffing the contents and pronouncing "Turmeric", or Elaine Stritch hovers on the fringes doing Eccentric Old Broad 101 ("Sorry for the mess, my maid died 14 years ago") ; then again, what do you expect from a film called AUTUMN IN NEW YORK, using the greying skies and falling leaves as a harbinger of Death? Manages at least to be understated and inoffensive - no mean feat, under the circumstances - building to ultra-tasteful sex behind bead curtains and frosted glass. Weirdest aspect : the age difference is briefly acknowledged - but Gere also keeps seeing her mother (whom he loved years before) in his girlfriend, and it's a meeting with his own long-lost daughter that acts as a catalyst for the relationship with Ryder, as if she were the daughter he never had. Can we say 'incestuous subtext'?...]
HANNIBAL (28) (dir., Ridley Scott) Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Ray Liotta [The implicit joke of the book was how Thomas Harris - himself a cultured, sophisticated type - wrote a hero who preyed on coarse, vulgar people, then sold that hero to those same coarse people by enticing them with sensationalist tabloid fodder ; the implicit joke of the film may be the way Scott gets a multiplex audience to sit through something slow and funereal - not unlike the stereotypical 'art-film' - using the promise of gory, disgusting stuff just around the corner to keep them from walking out. I guess it's subversive (or something) but it's also obscene, pandering to our basest instincts - especially since the promise is eventually fulfilled (the film was a hit), climaxing in a gross but undeniably vivid scene (which single-handedly raised the rating by about 10 points). Verhoeven can tweak this stuff so you're aware of your sick, twisted feelings yet somehow proud to have them, but this has all the joy of waiting your turn at a brothel - it's just boring, and it makes you feel dirty ; saying it exposes the audience's bloodlust in the process of feeding it makes about as much sense as saying it makes fun of machismo and anti-intellectualism (featuring a highly cultured hero who "eats the rude"), when in fact it strengthens the audience's suspicion that anyone who knows about books and fine art must be some kind of psycho. Needless to say, its fans defend it as black comedy (Oldman has said it reminds him of Joe Orton), making this the blockbuster equivalent of HAPPINESS - squares will be shocked, those who 'get it' will be delighted, except of course that it offers nothing like the rich parallel universe of Solondz' worldview. Everyone but Hannibal is under-written, and he's been turned into an invincible superhero : if SILENCE OF THE LAMBS showed us Lecter from Clarice's viewpoint, an evil saviour promising her everything (but at what price?), this merely shows us Clarice from Lecter's viewpoint - and, since the character has been made suave and untouchable, his viewpoint isn't especially conflicted or ambivalent : there's not much at stake here, emotionally speaking. Things We're Sick And Tired Of Dept. : Hopkins glowering darkly, apparently under the impression that he's coming off as a major badass (see also INSTINCT) ; films using elaborately unpleasant tortures then explaining that they date from the Middle Ages, as if to say 'don't blame us, blame History' (see also THE CELL). Classical music over sadistic murder scenes can go as well, far as I'm concerned...]