Films Seen - November 2003
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
KILL BILL (73) [first half: 85 (third viewing: 77), second half: 68 (third viewing: 62)] (dir., Quentin Tarantino) Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Sonny Chiba
Notes on first half: [N.B. I refuse to be party to the most outrageous marketing scam in recent memory, and intend to treat this as one movie unless Vol. 2 turns out to be radically different - though it'll hopefully be slightly different, since the revenge-by-numbers shtick is starting to wear out its welcome even at 100 minutes. Let it be said at once, though, what a strange hypnotic thing it is, marking Tarantino as the true heir to Kubrick not just in his lengthy gestation periods between films (the Bride's four-year coma is also QT's own) but in the penchant for geometric camera moves - esp. the steely straight-line Steadicam - set off by the messiness of music, just as iconic acting alternates with extravagant displays of emotion (the Bride's hatred is positively operatic). Makes such a point of being set in a 'movie world' with gleeful movie violence (opening line: "Do you find me sadistic?") it seems a bit inane to wonder about its morality, but it's worth noting the Bride represents pain absorbed more than dished out - as Bill and others note, she's indestructible, battered but unbowed - and the film takes revenge as the way of the world (see the Bride's parting line to Vernita's little girl), neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And it's worth noting Tarantino plays the whole thing on such a level of abstraction, making everything so stark and precise (the one scene I don't much like is the fight with the Crazy 88 - after the womano-a-womano with GoGo - where the screen just seems full of random movement), one responds to form as much as content, the change from major (full-on kung-fu action) to minor (post-modern joshery), the irresistible movie-ness divorced from conventional tension (O-Ren's death deliberately spoiled - already crossed off the list - before it happens). And it's worth noting that he always knows how to tweak a confrontation ("Silly rabbit"), and could probably be a great comedy writer if he wanted - or maybe he already is - and always seems to know exactly what he's doing (hopefully including this whole Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 claptrap). It's a crying shame he didn't get obsessed with Bergman and Antonioni rather than Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba, back in that long-ago misspent cinephile youth - but maybe he's got it all out of his system now...] [Third viewing, July 2013: Ten years on, I'm more impatient with the ultra-violence and mostly uninterested in the revenge plot - but this is a musical, every scene a dazzling production number, fully justifying both QT's claim that violence = dance and Godardian insistence that blood = red (switching the Crazy 88 fight to b&w, so it suddenly looks like the lopped-off limbs are gushing water, is a brilliantly audacious demonstration of his (a)morality). Crazy 88 still the only scene that outstays its welcome, which reflects the precision of the rest of it (a precision now lost in the self-indulgence of DJANGO UNCHAINED); the cliffhanger ending had me giggling out loud, and wishing QT had died in a freak accident - or at least had his financing withdrawn - thus wiping out the annoying disappointment of Vol. 2.]
Notes on second half: [Tarantino shows his cards - and separates those truly on his wavelength from the rest of us, who merely (it turns out) exulted in the super-stylish tease that was Vol. 1. Rating for the whole is provisional - and likely to go up, since cutting it in two deprives it of its trump card, the way it shifts gears in the middle forcing you to make a leap and commit to its world; Vol. 1 seems in retrospect like a miraculous juggling act, taking on the raw operatic power of the Bride's lust for vengeance while also contriving to suggest it's all a game, not as important - or, more accurately, only as important - as a cool split-screen effect or audacious movie reference. This one's more earnest, some will say more 'personal' - though I'd like to think the half-in-half-out moviemaniac is the real Tarantino - but also more ponderous, with heavy in-jokes ("As you know, I'm quite keen on comic books...") and long arid stretches of talk: for all his rep as a master of dialogue, QT's always been stronger on rhythm and Attitude than actual witty lines - Vincent and Mia's hypnotic banter in PULP FICTION is all about the back-and-forth and pregnant pauses, the repartee itself quite banal. Old-school fighting gets contrasted with aestheticised action here - a fight under "beautiful moonlight" - and that's also the film's tendency, away from the beautiful moonlight of O-Ren's demise to a more literal approach, more explanation (all that talk) and of course an old-fashioned message: the Bride's femininity - specifically Motherhood - takes the place of God or Redemption or whatever it was Sam Jackson found at the end of PULP FICTION, turning her back into "Mommy" from the bereft, exploited killer who's more man than woman (a can of Mace is cited as the best weapon against her); in the end she can only kill Bill by winning his heart - and making it explode - as women have been doing to men since Time immemorial, and certainly long before feminism. Still enjoyable (if overlong), but now that the cards are on the table Tarantino's hand is revealed as thin and conservative, and he stands accused of taking it all Far Too Seriously - the kung fu masters and melancholy killers, and secret weapons and alter egos and all the rest of that comic-book stuff. Speaking of which: Clark Kent wasn't supposed to be an average person, surely - not Superman's mirror on humanity but an anti-Superman, largely dismissed as a weakling (no?). Also: it's pronounced 'coup de grâce', as in 'grass', not 'coup de gra'. Was that supposed to be an obscure joke or something?...] [Third viewing, March 2017: Now that the excitement has subsided, Tarantino's self-indulgence is hard to take; there's barely 25 minutes' worth of material here, inflated to nearly two and a half hours. File him alongside Judd Apatow and the rise of long-form TV as strange evidence of people's preference for Art that wastes time, even as their lives become ever busier. The celebrated dialogue, too, often feels hollow - it's mostly his confidence in lingering over banal banter, as though every line were a jewel, that impresses - though the rank sentimentality of the final section ("Mommy") doesn't feel wrong, somehow.]
Thessaloniki Film Festival:
SHE'S ONE OF US (49) (dir., Siegrid Alnoy) Sasha Andrès, Carlo Brandt, Catherine Mouchet, Eric Caravaca [Cunningly directed - or over-directed - but very pretentious, as I should've guessed when Ms. Alnoy introduced it by quoting a hefty chunk of Ibsen; opening epigram quotes Dostoyevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" - "I have seen the Truth...", pointedly echoed by a later line when a character claims "The truth is in wine, for me" - but I've no idea what it all adds up to beyond a portrait of a sociopath, an ambitious but disturbed woman who never quite grew up, overdoes everything to compensate for her ineptitude with people and collapses violently at first sign of crisis. Truly striking and offbeat in its style, using shallow focus, unreal-looking visuals and suggestive sound design - whole scenes underlain with a low hum, like a ringing in the far distance - to evoke alienation, but the extended weirdness ends up seeming arch and inscrutable. Fans of the Bruno Dumont, Push-the-Audience-to-Its-Limit school are unlikely to mind, and at least it's got a sense of humour: who'd have thought this (of all films) would contain the most hilarious duo of cops-on-the-case since BARTON FINK...]
AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON (26) (dir., Samira Makhmalbaf) Agheleh Rezaie, Abdolgani Yousefrazi, Razi Mohebi ["I don't like politics," says someone (a poet, no less); "All I care about is real life". Makhmalbaf thinks the two are inseparable - which is true - but also thinks the latter can be expressed through the former, when it's actually vice versa. What we see is apparently neo-realist, but Afghans telling other Afghans that women were oppressed under the Taliban, or asking a UN soldier about Jacques Chirac's policies, or declaiming everything in the same expressionless monotone doesn't seem much like 'real life' (10 seconds of a crying baby steal the show ; at least she's natural). Shapeless and possibly exploitative - exploiting the region's news value, if nothing else - though I didn't take detailed notes because my pen ran out. I should've followed.]
SINCE OTAR LEFT (46) (dir., Julie Bertucceli) Esther Gorintin, Nino Khomassouridze, Dinara Droukarova [Sensitive-but-blah festival fodder with plot elements - an unpleasant reality denied - in common with UNDERGROUND and GOODBYE LENIN (must be an Eastern European thing, tying in with the Great Communist Lie); strong ending makes up for rather bland narrative, though I guess much depends on how you view Gorintin as the indomitable old lady, amusingly naive - "Stalin was a great man" - yet dignified, cute yet tough-as-nails. Finally found her quite touching (ditto Droukarova as the mousy granddaughter, laughing in the rain on her first night in Paris); ominously close to annoying, though.]
CASA DE LOS BABYS (54) (dir., John Sayles) Marcia Gay Harden, Daryl Hannah, Susan Lynch, Lili Taylor, Mary Steenburgen, Maggie Gyllenhaal [What kind of director is John Sayles? The kind who'll jump through hoops to make it clear a Third World street-kid will eventually read a book that's fallen into his hands, maybe even start a new life as a result - he keeps coming back to the street-kid, now he's fingering the book thoughtfully, now he's trying to sell it and not being able to - yet won't actually show us the crucial moment (because we never know for sure, Life is complex, etc etc). The kind of director who'll shoot lengthy monologues in a single take, out of Respect to the actress and her craft - even though a cutaway might actually improve the scene, and even though his actresses are clearly floundering (Lynch's Ode to A Future Child is bad enough but Gyllenhaal's phone conversation is even worse, going through every actressy bite-of-the-lip, tight smile and shake of the head). The kind of director - or writer - who feels he has to give every point of view - the US women waiting for their babies but also the locals, the locals' anti-imperialist nephews, the hotel maids, the teenage mothers who supply the babies, even the street-kids (who have nothing to do with the story, but represent the babies Left Behind) - and will have one side mangling English if the other's mangling Spanish, to show he's not out to make fun of anyone. Then again he also writes sharp dialogue when he can forget about being 'fair', and does things - like the fatalistic ending - that mark him out as a true independent, and supplies novelistic attention to detail and smart, true-to-life little bits, like when Taylor says "proselytize" and Lynch mutters, "So that's how you say that". Crude then subtle, and always well-meaning; it's good that Sayles exists, but more as a concept than an actual filmmaker.]
THE MAGIC GLOVES (63) (dir., Martin Rejtman) Gabriel Fernandez Capello, Valeria Bertuccelli, Fabian Arenillas [Very funny, though it doesn't really go anywhere. Same problem as Rejtman's (also impressive) SILVIA PRIETO - it's just overlong, with diminishing returns - but the first hour or so gets into that rare groove where everything that happens seems hilarious for no reason, whether it's a pine cone dropping on a sad-looking woman on a park bench, a dog with a ribbon on its collar or a large group of people (all Sagittarians) going on a brisk morning walk. Depressive comedy in the Kaurismaki mould, though a lot more verbal (Woody Allen comes to mind), playing on obsessive behaviour and how silly people look when they take themselves too seriously - many of the jokes involve a fast-talking person played off a withdrawn person, e.g. a record producer called "Piranha" versus our sad-sack hero with the grey woollen sweater and deflated expression. Deft, economical style, 'quirky' touches played so deadpan they just seem natural; harder than it looks.]
RECONSTRUCTION (54) (dir., Christoffer Boe) Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Maria Bonnevie, Krister Henriksson [Rating may go up if someone can convince me it all fits brilliantly, as opposed to being thrown together for effect. Puts its meta-game, post-modern cards on the table from the start, but the "Twilight Zone"-ish twist still packs a punch when it arrives (memo to Mike: you may want to suspend your two-reel-walkout rule for this one); also, I suppose, SWIMMING POOL-ish, though it still doesn't quite make sense, unless I missed something (why does Aimee suddenly change in the restaurant? why should his kiss with Simone make her walk out of the bar?), and it sags under the weight of Boe's filters and double exposures and fast-motion city shots and satellite photos showing where the characters are in relation to each other. "It is all film," intones the V.O. "It is all a construction. But even so, it hurts". Maybe - but Schubert and Beethoven get most of the credit for that.]
MUD (17) (dir., Dervis Zaim) Mustafa Ugurlu, Yelda Reynaud, Bulent Emin Yarar [Deadly, symbol-laden allegory - a mute soldier standing in for the Turkish Cypriot people (who have no voice), titular mud being the weight of the past that must be embraced and excavated, and so on and so forth. Brave as a Statement, didactic as a movie, totally unconvincing as a narrative - the kind of film where an obviously unwell soldier with two weeks left to serve gets sent to a dangerous border post (instead of being allowed to serve out his time in hospital or barracks, as in any sane world) because the script requires him to get shot. Mr. Zaim would no doubt say such banal plausibility doesn't matter in the face of his allegorical ambitions; it matters. Year's silliest phone conversation: "Hi Ali. I was just storing your sperm".]
ANA AND THE OTHERS (70) (dir., Celina Murga) Camila Toker, Ignacio Uslenghi, Juan Cruz Dia La Barba [Rohmer-like, as others have noted; also recalls the style of e.g. Hong Sang-Soo, limpid yet crisp, with a curiosity about the world - chance encounters, other people's stories. Might've been among the best films of the year if it built to something with a little more bite; final section is a bit too cosy (Cute Kid Alert!), though the ending - leaving Ana as her commitment to "pure love" is about to be tested, and perhaps humanised - is exactly right. Hugely enjoyable, with Ms. Toker a most appealing heroine in Genevieve Bujold mould; I'll take a frame of its natural-light, sea-and-sky beauty over any two hours of Wong Kar-Wei.]
RED THURSDAY (33) (dir., Christos Siopachas) Paschalis Tsarouchas, Clare Day, Sergei Vinogradov, Patrick Myles [Cypriot-made drama in Greek, Russian and English, seen for work and because I know one of the actors. Quite well-made, actually - looks great, moves very smoothly - but it's really silly, a heavy-breathing melodrama set in archetypal rural Cyprus with olive trees and roaming herds of goats everywhere. People burst into song for no reason at all. An old man eating lunch has a heart attack and keels over. An old woman falls to her knees and screeches at God. A shepherd gets a long speech on how great it is to be a shepherd. Dodgy Russians stagger around, saying things like "Why are you staring at me like a chicken, you fucking Cypriot?". There is gratuitous nudity. A dying man cries out, "Why has it all gone dark?". There are speeches on what seems to be the main theme, capricious Life (Luck? Fate?) putting us in one situation when it could so easily be another. The title is explained: "Red Thursday doesn't exist in the calendar. It's sort of a dream". At least it isn't boring.]
RAJA (74) (dir., Jacques Doillon) Pascal Greggory, Najat Benssalem, Hassan Khissal [Power-games, from the opening credits - a children's game, a forfeit, "What'll we do with her?" - to the couple in bed (she makes him wear a condom, tries to control the situation; he turns her on her back and pumps frantically, then declares it can never work between them); above all, of course, in the courtship, where her weapon is youth and his weapon is money - except that money makes things sordid, so she'll always have the advantage. Hero begs half-seriously for a life without lust (like the old women in his kitchen), or at least for lust without the complications - but of course it gets complicated, in the familiar way of fragmentary two-handers like INTIMACY except that this is so much less showy and more subtle, and possibly the best-acted film of the year. Greggory (a Mickey Rourke reborn as tragic hero) has the decadent ease of a man-of-the-world yet the wild, yearning look of an obsessive - playing his cards with increasing desperation, first assuming he can win Raja with the mere trappings of power (little gifts, a swimsuit, a bottle of wine), then with his power to hire and fire, then with his power to control her life (trying to arrange her marriage to another man, trying to harness his love by expressing it through someone else), and nothing works and he sinks further and further; "At least she hasn't destroyed me," he tells the old crones with a last vestige of pride, which is true, for only he can destroy himself - and promptly does (yet he could've had her all along, if all he wanted was to buy her body). Quite superb in detailing the ebb and flow of feelings in a world ruled by money, very shrewd in the scenes where people haggle - the 'aunt' trying to bring her own daughter into the bargain, the brother trying to strong-arm our hero but only confusing him because he's speaking another language, "something between you" meaning money owed (miscommunication is a constant theme) - finally very moving in its cool arc of self-destruction. Moroccan scenes seem a little strident, esp. when Raja's being a Life Force and head-butting her boyfriend, and the plot maybe sags - but that's the point, the messiness of any relationship where both are vying for control. Last six words of that sentence being of course quite superfluous.]
NOWHERE IN AFRICA (64) (dir., Caroline Link) Juliane Kohler, Merab Ninidze, Lea Kurka, Sidede Onyulo [One of those pleasant surprises that make filmgoing worthwhile - not because it starts as one thing and subverts itself in cool ways (that's too easy) but because it sticks to its conventional schema, and does it so well it reminds you why it became a convention in the first place. Some things are just wrong : a voice-over often explains what we've already seen and the score barely lets up in the first 20 minutes, though at least it throbs along with a tying-things-together urgency, like the scores Richard Robbins used to write for Merchant-Ivory. Film as a whole has a lot of Ivory's (much underrated) mix of reserve and nimbleness - never lingering on Big Moments (the kiss at the window, the final handshake), skipping from scene to scene - as well as his scrupulous fair-mindedness: the wise native servant is balanced by corrupt or sullen ones, the school's casual racism (Jewish children told to step out of line so the others can recite the Lord's Prayer) doesn't prevent it from being a beneficial place, and when Link does do something flashy, like the barrage of cuts when the couple are reunited in a loving embrace, it's because that couple are going to spend the next two hours bickering and growing apart. Emphasis throughout is on psychology over travelogue - what does being on a remote African farm actually mean? it means going nuts over having to read the same books over and over - family dynamics (there's no single identification figure) over racial/political enlightenment, and the details have the ring of autobiography, which of course is what it is: easy to believe that young Regina tossed playing cards over the side of a truck like a trail of breadcrumbs for her friends to follow, or thought she heard a lion on her first night on the farm, and on being told it was just a monkey said "Maybe the lion's pretending to be a monkey". Climactic swarm of locusts echoes (deliberately?) THE GOOD EARTH and it works more or less in that vein, the Old Hollywood drama that's square but made with care; does for Oscar-bait what LIZZIE McGUIRE does for the teen romance. Line They Should've Cut: "What I've learned here is how valuable differences are".]
HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (41) (dir., Rob Zombie) Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, Karen Black, Michael J. Pollard [Cuisinart Art, in which Mr. Zombie throws in every horror-movie artefact he ever thrilled to - from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (plus pointless 70s setting) to the Universal horrors of the 30s and 40s, late-night-TV Creature Features with campy hosts, "famous crazies" like Ed Gein and Albert Fish, early-80s slasher flicks and more; style is equally undiscriminating, taking in assorted filters, negative-film, random inserts and even fisheye-lens images combined with split-screen (you don't see that very often). You know we've reached some sort of critical mass in the video generation's coming-of-age when ultra-violent gore and "The Munsters" can be featured side-by-side, viewed with the same impartial pleasure (movies as consumer objects? or just a level playing field?), but in fact the film leaves little residue, because the characters are so thin and the jokes so disposably flippant. The NATURAL BORN KILLERS of trashy-but-fun carnival attractions; or do I repeat myself?...]
SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST (71) (dir., Kirby Dick) [Turns out the 'Life' isn't actually that interesting, mostly because - shameful but true - Flanagan is too strong (i.e. invulnerable) a figure; it's entirely admirable that a man with a terrible disease has managed to come to terms with it - albeit through unorthodox means, rather diluted in the censored DVD version I saw (3 minutes missing incl. most of the jaw-dropper talking points, globe up the rectum and whatnot) - but it makes for overly virtuous viewing to see him gallows-humour and performance-Art the illness to the ground, over and over again (stage act, "video coffin", S+M sessions organised by an "urge to document", even a campfire song at a summer camp for cystic-fibrosis kids). Seemed a touch monotonous at the one-hour mark but the 'Death' makes it work, final scenes unexpectedly moving and painful as this remarkable man finally succumbs, like a great tree starting to topple ("I don't believe this!" he says, with the irritation of a natural-born CEO finding a mistake in the end-of-year accounts). Dick alternates between respectful anonymity and splashes of style though the main theme is solidly in place from the opening montage, going from pain to a pie in the face; discussion of what makes Bob tick - combination of imposing his will over his recalcitrant body and unabashed "touching" as a riposte to Catholic guilt and the God who got him into this mess in the first place - not as intriguing as denial techniques, relationship between sadist and masochist as a way of staving off reality (to the extent that she still wants him to "submit" even when he's obviously dying) and humour as (literally) a life saver. Romantic S+M pun: "I was immediately struck by this woman..."]
THE BACKYARD (66) (dir., Paul Hough) [Full of bad ideas, from the grandmother acting as (clumsy) audience-surrogate in the opening fight to narrator pointlessly intruding at random intervals; yet the subject's irresistible - backyard wrestlers, doing each other grievous injury in a combination JACKASS-style initiation test and dramatisation of their puny lives - and besides there's the fascinating possibility that the bad ideas are in fact deliberate nods to the way wrestling works, just like the Retarded Butcher's [sic] mother weeping and wailing as he fights, warning parents in the audience not to let their kids get into wrestling, or the brothers living off "the loneliest road in America" enacting scenes of domestic violence in their fights then explaining the 'plot' is based on their own childhoods - truth or posturing? Hard to say but maybe it's somewhere in between, i.e. the fights acting as a conduit for inchoate emotions, pumped up to resemble 'familiar' tabloid tropes (abuse for what may be just an absent father; violence for what may be just frustration; Great and Terrible Pain for what may be just the sadness of a dead-end life in the middle of nowhere) so they can be dealt with; what the film does really well is throw us in at the deep end, so that - influenced no doubt by subconscious fear and loathing of freaky redneck types in remote rural places - we take the fighters at face value (I certainly did, and marvelled at how relatively slight their injuries seemed after being set alight and rolled in barbed-wire fences), then slowly show how each fight is a different kind of showbiz, reflecting the fighters who decide how to play and how far to go ("See how they created this whole thing with their minds," says proud Mom, truer than she knows), as hardcore as they want to be. "He's making a choice for the first time," says Scar's mother, and it's true, even if the choice is to hurt himself needlessly (it has something in common with SICK - the other half of my Masochist Documentary double bill - though of course that film hits much harder emotionally). Bonus points for incidental glimpses into armpit-of-the-world teen culture - "It's like going downtown gay-bashing"; "Them being scared is like me saying I want to be black: it just isn't true" - and the English kids with their diffident Wallace and Gromit quality, even as they're slashing their foreheads with razor blades to make them bleed. Freaks.]
BUNGEE JUMPING OF THEIR OWN (65) (dir., Kim Dae-seung) Lee Byung-hun, Lee Eun-joo, Yeo Hyeon-soo [In the grand tradition of ... not very much really, though often reminiscent of PRELUDE TO A KISS from a few years back, another (apparently) schmaltzy love story that ends up going in a (very) bizarre direction. Wouldn't be fair to say more, except to note that even the schmaltz is quite bearable, esp. the couple's first time in a motel - fumbling responses to the clerk, bumping into each other in the small room, finally sabotaged by a bad case of hiccups - much of it played off cynical friends and smart bits of business (girl takes his arm romantically, causing him only to spill his coffee); bungee jumping as outlandish, Buddhism-meets-"X-Games" metaphor for re-birth also pretty neat - you think you're dead, only to get pulled back in again - but it's not really a film to mine for meanings, more a singular mix of romantic charm and how-far-will-they-go weirdness. Can't quite decide if Lee Byung-hun's performance is very good or very bad, but it's scary how a goofy laugh and dorky haircut can shave years off a person.]
THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS (48) (dir., Andy & Larry Wachowski) Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, Harry Lennix, Jada Pinkett Smith [Lots of pretty lights, but maybe this six-month gap between MATRIXes wasn't such a good idea: maybe I wasn't paying attention, or maybe the torrent of orotund talk dulled my senses - will these people ever shut up? - but the fine points of RELOADED seemed to have evaporated by the time I got to this third instalment (why does Morpheus tell Niobe "I'm sorry"? what exactly was the deal with The Architect and "the ones before me"?). Not that it matters much, given how the whole Moebius-strip twistery of the second part (and especially the first part) turns out to be a red herring - what began as epistemology-minded cyber-allegory ends as square-cut and easily-digestible as a STAR WARS sequel, with Zion under attack and Neo racing against time to save the city (as others have noted, the series was doomed the moment it shifted its attention from the slippery Matrix to boring old Zion); people still talk of Choice and Duality occasionally - Smith as the anti-Neo, etc - but it's just wallpaper, a familiar trademark like mentions of the Force in STAR WARS. "What the Wachowskis have done is deliberately paint their hero into a corner," I wrote re: RELOADED, neatly trapping him between two competing control-systems (the Prophecy and the Matrix), but their solution is simply to ignore his plight and go for action - an insultingly simple conclusion. Lots of cool stuff nonetheless - notably the mega-battle for Zion - though nothing as conceptually interesting as the fight with the hundred Smiths, and always with a gulf between promise and execution, masses of portentous build-up ("It ends tonight!") leading only to shoot-outs and karate kicks. In other news, Trinity gets a seemingly endless death scene, Monica Bellucci's breasts struggle (and almost win) against the thin fabric of her dress, and an Indian character says "Goodness, I apologise". Harry Lennix is the new Laurence Fishburne in my opinion.]
ALL THE REAL GIRLS (42) (dir., David Gordon Green) Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Shea Whigham [Green may yet make a masterpiece - he's so distinctive, and so intrigued by people and their rhythms when they're just hanging out - but the GEORGE WASHINGTON sensibility travels badly outside that film's magical-realist universe, mostly recommendable to greeting-card enthusiasts and those who think of haikus as tiny pearls of wisdom. The style is stylised, closest perhaps to Wes Anderson in that sense of painstakingly contrived offbeat - you can almost hear him saying, "Okay let's have two guys in identical jackets by the fire in the foreground here, and then Paul you stand in the back of the frame there, and you've got your pants down and you're peeing" - and especially the sense of pervasive infantilisation used as a kind of shield, characters sheltered by a fey, childlike detachment: it's Peter Pan-ish, like the buddy who "never grew up", basically insecure, seeking reassurance in tender moments and little china animals; it embraces all kinds of mediocrity - "bad poetry", bad dancing, bad trombone-playing, lame dogs, coming last in a car race - with an abject sincerity, dabbles (like GEORGE WASHINGTON) in a giggly strain of toilet humour (not vulgar but twee, in the vein of those joke poems about 'bottom burps') and essentially is sexless, insofar as sex gets encased in a layer of love / poetry / whatever, which is soulmates and hanging out and pulling-down-pants games and saying "amazing things" like "Sometimes I pretend I've only got 10 seconds to live" or "I had a dream that you grew a garden on a trampoline". The worst part is that Green - unlike Wes Anderson - believes in the Big Speech, and directs his actors to quiver with emotion while telling their Significant stories, meaning there's phony movie sincerity beneath the cutesy, quasi-ironic artificiality; the actors go down with the ship, though Schneider in any case seems wrong as a serial asshole (he's dreamy and distracted, like Martin Donovan in the Hal Hartley films), and the slightly sharper post-breakup scenes are scuppered by lines like "Are you saying we should just forget about each other? That's the saddest thing in the whole world". Note the many references to people being (or not being) "happy", this is on account of being happy is the bestest thing in the whole world (but sometimes we are sad, and that is bad). Spare us.]
LAUREL CANYON (57) (dir., Lisa Cholodenko) Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Alessandro Nivola [Cholodenko takes the HIGH ART dynamic - refined, fresh-faced, intellectual young woman becomes increasingly besotted with / enamoured of counter-cultural, elegantly wasted older woman - and expands it in intriguing ways, mostly to do with control vs. "honesty". McDormand's irresponsible mother is made sympathetic by uptight son Bale's belligerent mistrust, but then we realise they're actually very similar - both concerned with "the right thing to do", both trying (in different ways) to help the "hopeless", losers and lost souls, both honest according to their lights (Bale's self-control isn't a sham, nor does he give in to easy temptation); Beckinsale's character (the one closest to HIGH ART) is in fact the least developed, her journey - loosened up by smoking pot and reading "Spin" - verging on the facile, but the film is good at juxtaposing various different kinds of energy, edgy vs. loose, cutting from a psycho ward to a swimming-pool party. Fizzles out I guess, and some of the small parts are caricatures (clueless WASP parents, venal record-industry exec barking out orders while on the treadmill in her office), but there's nowhere much you can go with this kind of thing - open ending with the promise of some future resolution is par for the course - and the first hour at least is absorbingly rich and varied. Special prize for Most Screwed-Up Casting, with American Nivola playing British, two Brits playing American and another trying for Israeli. Are we globalised yet?]
THE ITALIAN JOB (54) (dir., F. Gary Gray) Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Seth Green, Jason Statham [Entertaining, with a burst of excitement halfway through when it unexpectedly turns into a game of stud poker; but setting up a villain - esp. one as double-dyed as Norton - lessens the excitement, because the success of the heist is never in doubt, and the ending is disastrous, undermining all the film stands for: the whole point is it's "never about the money" (tying in with Sutherland telling our hero there are more important things in life than stealing), making a perfect set-up for the ending of the original JOB, where the crooks literally have to choose between money and life - yet the film goes for trite feelgoodery ("It was never about the money", but we bought the sports cars anyway) and a nasty taste in the mouth. Original wasn't that great, but at least it had an element of doubt about the heist and a good central joke about disoriented Brits in a foreign country; this keeps the Minis and junks everything else, though the actors are fun esp. when trading banter and bickering over their nicknames. Plausibility not really an issue in these things, but it should perhaps be noted that (a) two guys with cameras parked in a Restricted Parking zone would probably be asked to leave within five minutes, and (b) driving a car through a subway station is likely to hit a snag at the token booths, long before you ever reach the platform (*). Lesson for viewers planning a major heist after the movie (see also THE SCORE): do not, under any circumstances, let Edward Norton into your gang.]
(*): I am now informed the subway system in LA doesn't actually use tokens (thanks Zach), so apologies, objection withdrawn, etc. Still doesn't make it plausible, though...
WILLARD (32) (dir., Glen Morgan) Crispin Glover, R. Lee Ermey, Laura Elena Harring, Jackie Burroughs [Turns out Crispin Glover's weirdo routine doesn't count for as much as I thought. Couldn't get into the thematics at all - the rats presumably represent his anger, dredged up from the 'basement' of his psyche, which he slowly learns to harness (touching the rats = getting in touch with his feelings), but it seems there's also positive and negative rage ("Socrates" and "Ben"), like good and bad cholesterol - and it looks really off-putting, soupy murk studded with CGI rodents. Attempts at jokey tone - computer mouse gag, "Tora Bora Pest Controlla" - mostly fall flat, though Glover's quasi-autistic mien and undertaker smile provide occasional compensations; generally grotesque and unpleasant, also Exhibit A in the (very strong) case that Hollywood is full of people who love dogs and discriminate against cats. Guess it's no surprise that they value dumb loyalty over independence...]
BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (55) (dir., Justin Lin) Parry Shen, Jason J. Tobin, Roger Fan, John Cho, Karin Anna Cheung ["At least the contradictions juice it up," to quote Gavin Smith in "Film Comment"; which is true, except they're exactly the contradictions you'd expect in this kind of thing - glorifying teenage heroes' junior-gangsterism vs. dwelling on their moral and psychological breakdown - so even the juicing-up can't make it feel very distinctive in the way that e.g. BOTTLE ROCKET did. Mr. Lin has a great deal of style, but it's mostly of the sub-Aronofsky, violence-in-slow-motion-then-fast-motion-in-the-same-shot, 360-degree-pan-set-to-propulsive-score variety, and I kept tripping over half-digested bits like the amoral Nietzchian ringleader ("People like you and me don't need to play by the rules") and sole female character written as fantasy-figure compendium, tough and smart and sweet and vulnerable (she also shoots hoops). Obvious selling-point in the unusual milieu, but even the ethnic-colour riff's been done; can it really be 10 years since AMONGST FRIENDS offered the Jewish-flavoured version of this story?]