Films Seen - March 2005

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT (69) (dir., Jean-Pierre Jeunet) Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Ticky Holgado, Jean-Pierre Darroussin ["Cyprus Mail" to the rescue! I'd only add that the all-star cast is (for once) an asset, emphasising the scope of its world - there are no bit players, every part is meaningful (I even recognised Rufus in his two-second cameo). Also - speaking of WW1 - everyone should read Robert Graves' "Goodbye To All That". Thank you.]

A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD (55) (dir., Michael Mayer) Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Robin Wright Penn, Sissy Spacek [True Confession: I watched some of this on fast-forward, so I may not be qualified to comment. Then again, the only reason I watched at all was because I had to for work (it played theatres after coming out on video), and it looked so unpromising I planned to just skim through enough to write a vague capsule - yet I ended up watching from beginning to end, drawn in by its odd kind of magic. Not 'good' exactly but nakedly sensitive in a way you don't see very often, not packaged and irony-proofed à la GARDEN STATE nor employed knowingly à la TARNATION, but romantic in the lame, maudlin way of stoned adolescent poetry: two boys slow-dancing on a rooftop (the film is big on slow-dancing), people speaking with emotion of "this big beautiful noisy world" or talking rubbish while they're high on acid - "I can see tomorrow from here!" - only of course it isn't rubbish but a New Way of Seeing, music as a force for hormonal longing (the film flaunts its soundtrack, from Laura Nyro to Leonard Cohen), all of it bathed in a woozy, all-is-Love open-mindedness. Farrell overdoes the soft-spoken innocent - his eyebrows arch upwards in permanent Empathy Mode - and his adult self doesn't seem to match his more reckless teenage self, but he mostly succeeds in an unfamiliar role - and the film (perhaps inadvertently) catches something of the hemmed-in narcissism of 'bohemian' lives that Bertolucci never quite managed in THE DREAMERS, another film based around a trio of two young men and a young woman. Obviously is what it is - a paean to the Unconventional Family, a gay fantasy of defeating / overpowering heterosexual love on its own territory, and a bit of juvenilia from the guy who wrote THE HOURS - but stripped of that film's pretensions the clumsy emotional sincerity is almost touching. Not quite, but ... almost.]

LADDER 49 (27) (dir., Jay Russell) Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Jacinda Barrett, Robert Patrick [Aren't firemen brave? "I think it's amazing what you guys do - going into burning buildings when everyone else is running out". Must be hard on their families, though! "I don't want you getting hurt anymore, Dad". Aren't they afraid? "We're not afraid, because we do it to save people". It's the flat style that really kills it - not that we need shaky judder-cam necessarily, but some sense of rhythm and some sense of detail (a shot of the hose under pressure, spitting water from every join, works more vividly than any number of neutral wide-shots of rooms in flames and people yelling "Over here!") - and surely an 'old-fashioned tribute' doesn't have to skirt the awkward questions so superficially. One scene has our hero rescuing a young girl at great personal risk - he almost dies - only to find when he carries her out that it's too late, she's gone - a fitting symbol for his doubts about his job, and whether it's worth the hassle. But the girl is revived on the third try ("We've got a pulse!") and our hero wins a medal and the girl turns up herself to pin the medal on his chest, and the crowd rises in a standing ovation. I mean come on.] 

HITCH (53) (dir., Andy Tennant) Will Smith, Eva Mendes, Kevin James, Amber Valletta [A modestly fun, modestly sophisticated comedy trapped inside a bloated Larger Statement. Long before they showed "You had me at 'hello'" from JERRY MAGUIRE - even before the firm of accountants ("O'Brien, Thompson and Kincaid") turned out to have the same name as the lawyers in THE FORTUNE COOKIE, directed of course by Crowe fave Billy Wilder - I'd guessed it was trying to be a MAGUIRE for the 00s, looking at a world of relationships (incl. such phenomena as speed-dating) where "falling in love is so goddam hard", hence no doubt the 2-hour running time and bifurcated plotting (or trifurcated if you count the heroine's needy friend, bedded by a man who turns out to be a pig). Slacker and less substantial than JERRY but the main hurdle is our hero, both Smith (who gives a very smug performance) and his character : the actor's youthful cockiness seems to have hardened with age into the beady, take-charge vigour of the control freak (one can imagine him going through scripts with a fine toothcomb, scribbling comments like 'What motive?' or 'Makes him look weak' in the margins), and the film protects this "date doctor" at every turn - a smoothie who can pick up women in bars with the greatest of ease yet also a mature romantic who knows the difference between love and sex; a tough guy who beats up an arrogant yuppie without breaking sweat, yet also a sensitive soul with pain in his eyes - there's actually a close-up of Smith doing 'pain in his eyes' - when a friend talks of the love and trust he shares with his wife; even his and Mendes' allegedly disastrous first date is kind of sweet, mostly a matter of slapstick disasters. Hard to care much about a film that never makes its hero look bad, never forces him into a corner - "You had me at 'hello'" was touching because it showed Love burning through the red tape of romantic entanglements, the ploys and gambits and smooth talk (all the stuff that follows "Hello") that's really anguished desperation; there's no desperation here. Amusing nonetheless, and Eva Mendes obviously is the new Jennifer Lopez; they even bulge in the same places.]

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (42) (dir., Jean-Francois Richet) Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello, Brian Dennehy, Gabriel Byrne [Maybe now they'll stop with the reductive 70s remakes, though in fact this has the opposite (more surprising) problem to DAWN OF THE DEAD: that stripped down a multi-layered satire to a blam-blam action movie, whereas this takes an already stripped-down action movie and unaccountably tries to blur its lines, giving everyone their reasons. Sounds great in theory but the effect, like the effect of giving everyone a recognisable quirk - the gruff old cop who's about to retire; the deranged prisoner who talks about himself in the third person - is to make conventional what was once stark and eerie; hardly any tension in the siege when we keep cutting away to no-longer-faceless baddie Byrne explaining his strategy and saying "We have no choice", and though Fishburne claws back some dignity after the MATRIX debacle we really didn't need to see him bonding with puppy-eyed hero Ethan Hawke. The theme - right from the opening scene - seems to be What It Means to be a cop (a priest talks revealingly of choices and consequences), where the line is drawn that separates cop and criminal: men are defined by their choices - a cop who chooses graft money is no longer a cop; Hawke "no longer thinks of himself as a cop" because of a tragic choice he made during a drug bust - all of which is properly Hawksian (and of course ASSAULT was based on RIO BRAVO), but it seems perverse to pick this particular material - with its overriding choice of life-or-death, Us-versus-Them - for that particular theme. Props for trying to make something softer, more melancholy (see also lovely grey shots of Detroit in the snow), but it's just not very effective. Hard-boiled dialogue unconvincing despite / because of wall-to-wall profanity, and it's funny how shrinks have come full circle in the movies - back to comic relief like they used to be in the 30s after being transformed into beacons of omniscience in the 50s and 60s.]  

TIRANA YEAR ZERO (47) (dir., Fatmir Koci) Nevin Mecaj, Ermela Teli, Lars Rudolph [A very Balkan movie, from the Kusturica-style accordion-and-clarinet roving band that makes a brief appearance to the robust - not to say hostile - attitude to foreign intervention. Indeed, its major asset is that - unlike, say, Samira Makhmalbaf's pictures of Third World life, unabashedly offered up for Western delectation and (dis)approval - it makes it clear meddling foreigners are unwelcome, and Albania still has its pride even though nothing works and everyone's looking to emigrate (the Rossellini reference isn't really accurate). The outside world is mostly represented by tales of Albanians doing badly - someone's sister is a hooker in Milan; someone's brother is in jail in Switzerland - a cretinous German tourist (Lars 'Not Steve Zahn' Rudolph, of WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES fame) buying up Hoxha-era bunkers when he's not complaining of what pigs Albanians are, and a foolish French journalist who sunbathes topless and laughs at our hero's frantic admonitions to cover up; our hero refuses to leave - "What's Albania ever done for you?" he's asked; "I don't ask for anything," he replies - and the camera slowly takes in the worn, battered landscapes as if to say 'my country, right or wrong'. Not a lot to talk about beyond the semi-explicit nationalism - not much plot and not much point, though the everyday detail (power cuts, donkeys in the street, cramped trains that run out of fuel forcing the passengers to get out and walk) is intriguing, and presumably accurate; old village women in traditional black turn out to be the wisest, most secure characters, which says it all really.]

FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (43) (dir., John Moore) Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi, Tyrese Gibson, Miranda Otto [A series of manufactured crises, including (but not limited to): a plane crash; a sandstorm; an electrical storm; a tribe of belligerent nomads who prove themselves deadly then stay in the background for the rest of the movie, tactfully waiting for the climax to make their re-entrance (you'd think they'd attack while the plane was still being readied, but you never know with these primitive peoples). Moore gets some flashy mileage out of the desert visuals and tense situations - silhouettes, trip-hop and grey dusky light for the encounter with the tribesmen - but hasn't the patience to show e.g. what the joining of the plane's wings involves, beyond making clear it's very tricky and they only have one chance to get it right (not to worry, though, because when they have to get it right on the first attempt, they do; only when they have five attempts to do something - as with firing up the plane's engines at the climax - will they get it right on the fifth attempt). Quaid's character flirts with some intriguing ideas - the destroyer (of jobs) who becomes a creator (of the plane); the man of inaction ("Do nothing") who becomes a man of action - but they fizzle as tamely as the (initially) ball-busting heroine, though he does get to deliver a classic Inspirational Speech: "We're not garbage! We're people! With families, and lives to live!"; meanwhile, Ribisi looks like an Obersturmfuhrer and sounds like Jerry Lewis. Not boring, but certainly predictable and low on character(s); in other news, the degradation of "Hey Ya" from exhilarating breath of fresh air to feelgood anthemic audio-wallpaper continues apace.] 

THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE (55) (dir., Stephen Hillenburg) with the voices of Tom Kenny, Clancy Brown, Bill Fagerbakke [Not really feeling the anarchy others seem to see here, though I'm obviously delighted that the children of the world are getting such smart, good-natured entertainments. Too many things - spunky princess, dimwit sidekick, villain's zombie hordes, even the recourse to fourth-wall-breaking - come across as Saturday-morning staples, and making fun of Disneyfied Big Speeches (the message? "Be Yourself"!) or David Hasselhoff's career is a mug's game; SpongeBob himself is absorbing enough - get it? sponge, absorbing, get it? - and I really can't see what those wacky fundamentalists are on about with the pro-gay secret messages (they're on much firmer ground with SHARK TALE). Lest We Forget: a RAISING ARIZONA reference and a "Real Boy" ending.]

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (43) (dir., Peter Berg) Billy Bob Thornton, Lucas Black, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez ["There's not much difference between winning and losing," says Thornton as the football coach, which is true enough - losing gets the same frantic cuts and vivid montages, just different music (rueful instead of gung-ho). Exciting to watch, at least for a while, but I knew something was missing in the coin-toss scene (the team's Championship hopes hanging on a coin landing heads or tails) when I thought for a moment Billy Bob had tried to cheat and been found out (he calls heads but it's really tails), going against his beliefs and throwing away his good name in the manner of (say) Mr. McAllister in ELECTION because of all the pressure to win; in fact it's nothing of the sort - the coin I thought was Thornton's actually belongs to one of his opponents, who accidentally mis-calls, allowing BBT's team to go on to the Final - the film becomes a straightforward rah-rah sports movie, and its sledgehammer emphasis on the town's football-mania turns out to be a red herring (nothing much would change story-wise if the town were indifferent - it just adds to the pressure-cooker atmosphere). Gets more blah - not to mention morally simplistic - as it goes along, though it's uncanny how Lucas Black always rings true even in the midst of flash and bombast; add some points to the rating - though not all that many, maybe 5 - if you actually know the first thing about American football.] 

ANATOMY OF HELL (53) (dir., Catherine Breillat) Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi [No idea why they made 'The Man' gay in this one - beyond the spectacle of porn legend Rocco Siffredi delivering lines like "The elastic resistance of a boy's anus doesn't lie" - or why Breillat included the LOVELY & AMAZING-style conceit of The Man asked to comment honestly and objectively on The Woman's body, esp. since both of those become irrelevant before it's half-over. Works as a fairly hilarious radical-feminist allegory of the 'All men are rapists' school, wherein everyone pretends the female form is the most disgusting thing on earth (the oozing skin, we're told; the lumpiness, the deceptive softness), only to emerge that the male impulse to violence - "A girl is a man's sickness"; "The fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality" - is actually a product of fear of women, patriarchal morality being men's attempt to "break the spell". Not much else beyond the Victim-into-Goddess bait-and-switch, really - but the bodies certainly make an impression, Casar's pale and still as sculpted marble, Siffredi's defined (and deformed) by the freakishly large penis; genital organs get a raw deal generally, the penis bloodied, the vagina getting lipstick smeared on its lips and various objects (including a garden rake) shoved into it when it's not being compared to "a just-hatched bird, still wet from the egg". So wacky it's kind of fun, though overlong even at 80 minutes; Breillat's increased productivity in recent years is starting to look like the desperate hustling of a trendy provocateur, trying to spin out her 15 minutes.] 

SINGING BEHIND SCREENS (61) (dir., Ermanno Olmi) Bud Spencer, Jun Ichikawa, Sally Ming Zeo Ni [Beautiful but a bit of an academic exercise (and yes, a little boring): nostalgia for a romantic ideal, the "honest outlawry" of pirates (and, by extension, films about pirates), given a layer of ritual and detachment - as implied by the title - in being narrated by Spencer, an old beloved action star in his twilight years, as well as the fact that almost all the cast are Chinese actors speaking Italian. Alternates between a stage and the open sea, gradually 'opening up' like Olivier's HENRY V - the whole thing is implicitly a dream, taking place in the mind of a scholarly, bespectacled youth (an Olmi innocent, like the heroes of IL POSTO and LONG LIVE THE LADY!) - and alternates too between the operatic and gently humorous, unafraid to push against absurdity: a pirate doffs his hat solemnly to reveal a massive frizz of hair; a scream in the background morphs into a keening note of music while, in the foreground, a soldier does kung-fu moves and makes a face at the camera. Poetic and lovely to look at, filled with delectable shots of water and boats - but, having seen IL POSTO just before, it's painful that Olmi needs to create such elaborate post-modern constructs for his wondrous sensibility when he used to deal with reality so directly and easily. Line I'll Be Using To Impress Chicks: "If you have two pennies, use one to buy bread. Then, with the other, buy hyacinths - for your soul..."]