Films Seen - May 2005
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
HOSTAGE (49) (dir., Florent Siri) Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollak, Ben Foster [For a mad moment I thought this was going to be the first-ever thriller with a central twist hinging on the difference between the 1943 and 1978 'versions' of HEAVEN CAN WAIT - which would clearly be the Coolest Thing Ever, film-geekery-wise - but alas. Not a lot to say, otherwise: Siri shoots handsomely in shades of brown and ochre, with a couple of imaginative touches - a cop is shot, and as she swivels round we get a quick POV shot of what she sees just before she collapses (nothing special, just hills and trees, but it's oddly poignant) - sensitive baldie Bruce tears up not once but twice, and the main twist raises more questions than it answers - notably 'What do these people want Brucie to do, exactly?' (it's not like they need him in the first place, and they yell at him when he tries to intervene, so what exactly is the point of having him there?). Clearly, Hollywood hacks thought a simple hostage situation wasn't sexy enough and had to be tarted up; then they ran out of ideas halfway through and filled the void with sex and sadism, Greasy-Haired Thug turning psycho and pawing the teenage-girl hostage, spreading her legs and blowing smoke in her face. Silly and meretricious, but it turns out a film can be both a symptom of total creative bankruptcy and good trashy fun; opening credits recall SIN CITY - and, not coincidentally, are the best thing in the movie.]
MIN FEVGEIS [Don't Go] (8) (dir., Alexandros Pantazoudis) Constantinos Aspiotis, Marina Hadjioannou, Vasiliki Nikiforidou [No need to be cruel; a self-conscious 'youth' picture about college students at an all-night dorm party, made by early-twentysomethings for 2500 Euros (about $3000) with "semi-professional means" according to a rather apologetic opening caption, this is simply inept, made by people who might do good work in the future but at the moment have no idea what they're doing. Characters are clichés - the wisecracking gay boy, the soulful artist type, the Victim Girl used and abused by a nasty boyfriend ("I'm pregnant!" she cries as he's about to walk away, and he turns with a sneer and the music swells melodramatically) - dialogue is flat, visual tricks jejune (jazzed up with freeze-frames and fast-motion), while the muddy skin tones and flared-out light are exactly why people should check the fine print when shooting on DV. Barely released even in the Greek-speaking world - wouldn't be released at all, if not for the involvement of a well-known actor as exec producer - so it's better just to ignore it, except perhaps as a sign of the baleful influence of TV reality-shows on young filmmakers (the premise recalls "Big Brother" and "The Real World", while the just-do-it attitude echoes the misplaced self-confidence of contestants on "Pop Idol") - and perhaps as a talisman, to be held aloft forbiddingly the next time someone gushes about the Digital Revolution.]
ATTACK OF THE GIANT MOUSAKA (56) (dir., Panos Koutras) Yiannis Aggelakis, Christos Mantakas, Themis Bazaka [Super-kitschy monster spoof, as per the title - aliens zap a piece of mousaka, causing it to grow to gigantic proportions and terrorise Athens; ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN is cited, but it's more like ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES - unexpectedly turning into more. Early on the sensibility is frothy and unabashedly gay - the hero(ine) is a huge transvestite, à la Divine - but sharp media satire takes over as TV pundits start to analyse the mousaka ("I believe it's acting out of desperation"), astrologers probe its personality and foreign TV channels offer background on the story ("The main ingredients of this Greek delicacy are aubergines and béchamel," notes a dour Russian newscaster); most surprisingly, Koutras' tone - already harsher-than-expected with the nightmarish shots of the mousaka's victims splayed out on the street - turns apocalyptic (and crypto-political) as martial law is declared, the streets are forcibly emptied and citizens ordered to stay home where the idiot-box flashes messages like "Watch TV Constantly" and "Don't Commit Suicide"; by the time we get to a montage of people doing just that - one with his head in the oven, another electrocuting himself in the bathtub - it's clear we're not in John Waters Land anymore. Acrid fun, and props for the (Greek) TV presenter who looks just like Doris Day.]
TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (45) (dir., Trey Parker) Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Kristen Miller [Seemed like a good idea at the time. A Bruckheimer action spoof (and comment on the Current Climate) done with puppets certainly gets filed among the Damnedest Things Ever, but the result shows what happens when a pair of devastating drive-by satirists try for extended parody. The charm (and genius) of previous Parker-Stones had a lot to do with their sketchiness - crummy animation in SOUTH PARK, bad production values in ORGAZMO - but the m.o. here makes it damaging rather than subversive that the script isn't really much like a Bruckheimer movie, and even that the various celebrities spoofed don't much resemble their real-life selves; their ultra-violent deaths, meanwhile - the kind of left-field touch that might once have won points for gleeful tastelessness - come off badly in the film's political context, prompting the thought that wars (like revolutions) tend to degenerate as they go on, turning into a hunt for the most and least patriotic, saving their keenest hatred not for the Enemy Without but the Traitors Within. Mostly it's just dull, lots of talky exposition with a tin ear and not many jokes, least of all political ones; seems to be all over the place till you realise the spiel about dicks, pussies and assholes isn't (just) a crude joke but in fact an accurate picture of the Parker-Stone political worldview - the only problem is they seem to think they're dicks, whereas in fact they're assholes. Sharp digs at the Ugly-American school of foreign policy, nonetheless - bulls in a china shop, firebombing the Louvre and totalling the Pyramids in the name of Freedom - and of course Kim Jong-Il as an angry diminutive Bond villain, singing "I'm So Ronery".]
REVENGE OF THE SITH (68) (dir., George Lucas) Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Ian McDiarmid [Now it can be told: George Lucas' ludicrous behaviour over the past decade - including the lightweight MENACE and CLONES and risibly misguided 'improvements' to the STAR WARS Special Edition (which it's still not too late to reverse, by the way) - was the behaviour of a deeply frustrated man, who'd foolishly promised the world an opening trilogy when in fact what he had in mind wasn't much more than a single longish movie (the corruption of Anakin, to which Parts I and II might've been appended as short flashbacks), and was now slogging through material he had little interest in and wasn't gifted enough to fake, padding them out contractual-obligation-style while impatiently waiting to make the film he actually cared about - namely, this one. Even the opening action finds Lucas energised, with much swooping around and leaping out the way of descending elevators in the nick of time, and the whole thing's packed with imaginative touches, from the buzz-droids' black innards to the ships anchored like mushrooms down the vertical sides of a gaping canyon to the beautiful extreme-wide-shot catching a glimpse of a duel atop a high tower, the arcs of light-sabers tiny as two fireflies in the night; the screen seems full of fragments - distant stars, bits of spaceships - and the light-show is visually splendid, with red-hot magma rivers and "Titanic"-like behemoths shooting fire at each other high above a grid of twinkling city lights - though the skin tones have that awful DV pallor and yes, the dialogue is still atrocious ("You won't get away this time, Dooku" is typical, but my favourite is Yoda's "If into the security recordings you go, only pain you may find"; it takes a really bad writer not to notice the techie-geek ungainliness of that "security recordings"). Not much emotional heft - and the Force is a pretty cold philosophy, based on letting go of "everything you fear to lose" - but the final section moves up a gear, from the destruction of the Jedi (a set-piece of surprising grandeur) and unexpected real-life parallels (warmonger leader, recumbent Senate, Democracy unresistingly turned into Empire), especially when it starts hitting familiar notes from the first STAR WARS, the births of Luke and Leia intercut with the 'birth' of Darth Vader. Against all possible odds - 'cause I'm so not a fanboy - I was moved at the end, when Tattooine appeared and baby Luke was handed to his Aunt Beru, reminding me of a long-forgotten, not even all that memorable evening in Dubai in 1977 - a crowded theatre off the Sharjah Road, the souk in the background, a 6.30 show with my friend Constantinos and his parents - when I first ... but what does it matter?]
BRIDE & PREJUDICE (47) (dir., Gurinder Chadha) Aishwarya Rai, Martin Henderson, Nadira Babbar [Chadha does have a talent for feelgood fluff, uncompromised by too-obvious manufacture or contrivance; at best - e.g. in the early scenes, with people bursting into song and passers-by doing somersaults in the foreground - this feels genuinely happy, a film with a sunny disposition and not a thing on its mind. That remains true - despite token talk of Indian pride and Western prejudice - but it outstays its welcome, esp. because the Bollywood pretensions are half-baked: songs are closer to a Disney musical, India remains throughout an exotic tourist-destination place (Chadha can't resist the quaint national customs and cows in the streets) and there are gross misjudgments, like making the mother look stupid by giving the game away in front of guests (the whole point of a Mrs. Bennet character is that she works behind the scenes, taking cover behind social niceties; she'd never embarrass herself like that). The only real Bollywood feature is the way it's overstuffed with action, romance, etc, only without the 3-hour running-time so even that feels rushed and superficial. And why bring poor Jane Austen into it?]
THE INTERPRETER (58) (dir., Sydney Pollack) Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Yvan Attal ["She is the UN," says someone of our heroine - a UN interpreter - and so she is, her job being to find harmony between different languages (hence different nations), acting as a conduit for communication. She has much in common with Secret Service guy Sean Penn - they're both in mourning, for parents and wife respectively - yet they find it hard to communicate; she cites an African (fictional) word to describe their relationship, used for people who are stuck on opposite sides of a river, and the film finds a visual equivalent when they talk to each other from facing windows on opposite sides of a street; you might say they're speaking different languages - at least till the UN Way intervenes, like a good interpreter (!), showing them a way of dealing with their pain. (Cue breakthrough, or at least happyish ending.) Earlier on, another African custom is cited, a victim's family given a choice between revenge and forgiveness, encouraged to take the latter - "Vengeance is a lazy form of grief" - which of course is exactly what the UN are doing in places like Rwanda and Cambodia, asking people to take reconciliation over revenge; the climax forces Kidman to choose between killing and talking, and of course she chooses the UN Way - bringing the perpetrator face-to-face with his crimes, honouring the dead by naming them, and leaving punishment to the proper authorities. Like KINGDOM OF HEAVEN this is a plea for supra-national rules and moderation in all things - smartly woven into the protagonists' quasi-romance - clearly inspired by liberal Hollywood's distaste for the path America is taking. Subtext aside, a grown-up thriller with one masterfully-handled suspense sequence (it involves a bus; you'll know it when you see it), a fair bit of welcome ambivalence about its heroine, and a little too much creak and contrivance to be wholly satisfying; it tries for a corridors-of-power feel - a chess game is significantly glimpsed at one point - but the edge isn't sharp enough, and the Message is finally as bland as the James Newton Howard score. Then again, so's the UN.]
LAYER CAKE (53) (dir., Matthew Vaughn) Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Kenneth Cranham, Michael Gambon [Does Vaughn understand how much his hierarchical crim-world recalls the tone and values of the old English class system? You'd think he does when Gambon explains the concept of the "layer cake", but it doesn't feel like a self-aware joke when e.g. Craig as the middle-class drug dealer is being all worldly and New Britain-ish - assuring us that, needless to say, drugs will be legalised before too long - while a bunch of coarse low-class yobbos are preparing to screw up his life (and set the convoluted plot in motion). There's a snobbery there, just as there's a different kind of snobbery in having the worst act of violence happen for absolutely no reason (it's explained, but only later), the ultimate gratuitous-violence rush - and if you find it shocking you're obviously a wimp (that's where the snobbery comes in) - unlike its Guy Ritchie models/antecedents where, for all their faults, everyone is equally off their nut. Lively crowd-pleasing stuff with some undeniable Good Laughs, though the more you think about it the more dispiriting it gets. Vaughn's favourite trick are shots that morph into other shots via computer trickery - as in any PR firm's presentation to the shareholders - and though he likes to show off his taste in music, it's not always used too judiciously; sticking "Gimme Shelter" - the ultimate mood-song - over a glossy random assignation between two people who barely know each other makes as much sense as getting Charlize Theron to read bingo numbers at the local charity bazaar.]
THE JACKET (60) (dir., John Maybury) Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh [Time-Travel Nitpick I'll never quite get used to: How can History exist unless it plays out once, independent of the Time-traveller's distortions? If you go back in Time and kill your mother you then disappear in the future (according to the rules of science fiction), so how could you exist to go back in the first place - but in fact that's okay, because Time has already played out once (it just gets re-played in a different way); if, on the other hand - as happens here - you go to the future and learn that X took place because of your actions in the past, and only then come back and initiate those actions so X can take place - which you'd never have known about if you hadn't Time-travelled - it makes no sense, since History (in this case the time between present and future) could never have existed if not for the Time-travel, or could only exist in a different way making X - hence your knowledge of X - impossible, etc etc. Of course it doesn't matter, since Time-travel is itself impossible (sorry, younger readers), but it matters insofar as this stylish drama is finally just an empty mindfuck, and it matters insofar as top-tier talent - starry cast, fine-Art maven Maybury, DP Peter Deming, composer Brian Eno - lends itself to a rather hollow piece. Riveting to watch, made in an in-your-face style laden with tricks and all-purpose aggression - memories expressed as jagged cuts and vertiginous zooms into an image of a retina, ECUs of people's mouths and a general emphasis on confrontation (note e.g. the scene in the future with Leigh, adding gratuitous friction between the characters and cut in staccato one-shots) - helped by Brody's rag-doll demeanour and the way he always looks on the verge of tears (even Keira is kind of expressive, though for a long time I thought she was Natalie Portman on a bad day); less than meets the eye, however, and the ending is just unconvincing - and unconvincingly happy, despite all the weirdness. Altruism recurs as a motif (helping a catatonic boy, or a stranger at Christmas), and I just assumed the whole thing was building to a major self-sacrifice, but apparently not. Unlike JACOB'S LADDER and MEMENTO, there's nothing too discomfiting here.]
ZERO DAY (68) (dir., Ben Coccio) Calvin Robertson, Andre Keuck, Christopher Coccio [Is it 'convincing'? Meaning what - that we come face-to-face with psychosis, catch a glimpse of the Skull Beneath the Skin that would prompt two normal-looking boys to go Columbine? Maybe not, in that case - but it does something more interesting, which is to give an honest account of two characters, then an honest account of their crime, and leave us to make the links (and imaginative leap) in between. "Zero Day" becomes such a natural part of the boys' video-diary existence - they might be speaking of Exam Week, or their next birthdays - its precise moral contours grow increasingly hazy, which of course is how such a thing would work (if they spent their days obsessing over it, psychotically detailing all the people they planned to kill, sooner or later one feels the enormity of what they were planning would become apparent, and start to intimidate them); while Van Sant in ELEPHANT coyly named all the usual villains (neo-Nazism, videogames, etc) before shrugging his we-can-never-know shrug (with a touch of aloofness, as if to say 'an Artist doesn't judge'), this glances over them without fuss - a stray swastika here, a tinge of homoeroticism there - as if to put them in their rightful place, on the fringes of a landscape marked Banality of Evil; if anything's to blame it's probably standard teenage stuff like the blinding solipsism that comes with self-consciousness - hence the video diary - and an underdeveloped moral sense, the touch-paper lit by a dangerous friendship and common fascination with things going boom. Goofy details stick in the mind - "Dude, camouflage really works!" - acting as a humanising influence, ditto the quasi-doc trappings of having actors play characters with their own first names, and their parents played by their own real-life parents (one recalls the little brother's made-up word - clearly a family in-joke - or the quirky German dad with his emotional reserve and gruff sense of humour). Remember how exotic it seemed when Kiarostami did that stuff 15 years ago?...]
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (39) (dir., Ridley Scott) Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Marton Csokas, Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons [Exquisite boredom, a thing of snow flurries, mystical wailings and the Dolbyfied clatter of hooves, with the dullest of characters and the most irrelevantly sanguine of sensibilities; turns out the Crusades weren't so bad, an enlightened time spoiled only by those religious nuts saying things like "There must be war. God wills it!" (I mean come on; holy wars are so 11th-century). Guess it deserves a few brownie points for inter-faith fence-mending - it's so funny how Hollywood keeps using these historical blockbusters to comment on the War on Terror and thinks it's being all subtle - not to mention brave existentialist agnosticism ("Your soul is in your keeping") and a Crusader saying "To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to Heaven", just like an Islamist suicide bomber (this is repeated, in case we weren't paying attention), but it's hard to care when it's all just so dull. Battle scenes are edited for maximum muddle, I still don't know how those damn siege-towers toppled over - I may have tuned out momentarily - and I'm not sure why the mob applauds our hero so wildly when he's just surrendered the city to the Muslims either; Eva Green gets one cryptic line ("As long as I have your Knights, you have your Queen") and is next seen skulking unhappily in her bedroom, her character-arc presumably to be restored on DVD; Bloom is a disaster, but does get a hilarious moment when upbraided by a priest for knighting the proles. "Who do you think you are? You think you can alter the world? You think turning men into Knights makes them better fighters?" Music swells then stops dramatically, as Orlando turns round to offer a killer riposte: "Yes".]
BE COOL (37) (dir., F. Gary Gray) John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Harvey Keitel, The Rock, Cedric the Entertainer [There's an essay begging to be written about Treasure-Box Movies - the film-as-a-party sensibility where a solid through-line gives way to a loose collection of Cool Stuff, stretching from Altman and Jaglom (and before them Godard and Fellini, and before them Renoir and Guitry) to many of the coolest recent movies including IRMA VEP, Tarantino and both Andersons, esp. PTA. This could serve as the cautionary epilogue to said essay, stretching the party vibe as far as it'll go only to confirm what was obvious anyway, that a party's not much fun when everyone's mind is on other things, and they're all too drunk on privilege and self-regard to be coherent, let alone likeable. Feels like a joke without the actual joke, and soon degenerates into a check-list of mildly diverting snark-nuggets and inside baseball: Harvey Keitel fielding phone calls from "Marty" and "Robert"; Steven Tyler showing up to say "I'm not one of those singers who show up in movies"; Travolta opening proceedings with a spiel on how much sequels suck (a double in-joke, also recalling his SWORDFISH spiel), then later getting up to dance like a performing seal waddling onstage to juggle a ball on its nose - the whole thing absurdly over-milked, with wilfully irrelevant cutaways to a blissed-out pianist (the wacky details, also including a wobbly toupee and uncomfortable cushions, are a constant source of amusement). You could find substance if you had to - something about white people trying to act black and vice versa - but really pretty bad (The Rock excepted), and the joke about a quavering voice and exaggerated diva mannerisms being mistaken for great singing in our post-"Pop Idol" age is, I'm afraid, not a joke at all. Possible best line: "Ariel Sharon".]