Films Seen - November 2005
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
Thessaloniki Film Festival
7 VIRGINS (52) (dir., Alberto Rodriguez) Juan Jose Ballesta, Jesus Carroza, Vicente Romero [Hurtles along all the way to a 400 BLOWS final freeze-frame - but Antoine Doinel's troubles were a lot less extreme (and glamorous) than this Spanish adolescent's, fighting and fucking his way through a weekend's leave from the reformatory, stealing wallets, doing a bit of breaking-and-entering and beating a man half to death during all-out gang warfare. All this is presented as youthful high spirits, hero and his pals horsing around at the pool and chatting about DIE HARD with many a cabron and maricon when they're not being a menace to society; the kid himself is clean-cut - he looks like Arno Frisch in BENNY'S VIDEO - has a winning smile and loves his grandma. The result is like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN without the acrid aftertaste, though Rodriguez tries for pathos when the boys shake their heads at the working stiffs around them ("What a chump!") and swear it'll never happen to them. Pretty slick, and bursting with energy, but it's just pandering really.]
MUTUAL APPRECIATION (63) (dir., Andrew Bujalski) Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski [...or The One Where Everybody's Less Dysfunctional. Bujalski's tongue-tied "Mitchell" in FUNNY HA HA could've been a Solondz character but the people here are budding Woody Allens (our protagonist also has a touch of the young Dustin Hoffman), somewhat neurotic but mostly articulate; the earlier film seemed to have uncovered a new American sub-species but this one's more familiar, if also funkier and more finely-crafted. Scenes accumulate organically, the concert leading to the extended sojourn at Producer Guy's house then stumbling to the party with the three girls in wigs, catching the feel of those drunken nights that lurch and morph haphazardly; I can see why Cassavetes gets cited (at least he did at the Festival) but the rage is totally missing - if anything Bujalski's universe is self-consciously polite, discreet, almost stunted; there's kissing but nothing really sexual, weed but no hard drugs, bad relationships but no toxic ones (disentangling oneself, as with the groupie reporter, is surprisingly painless). It's a fine line between suggesting these people never grew up and inadvertently setting the film in a version of high-school, just as there's a difference between merely noting the characters' deep-down sadness - clearly our hero isn't going to make it in music, is eventually going to buckle down and become like his oh-so-"supportive" middle-class Dad - and actually making that sadness immanent in the movie. Bujalski is honest, open, literally warts-and-all (showing us his "ass mole" edges close to exhibitionism); when a character's told there's no brown sugar for baking a cake and replies, "It's okay, we'll just double up on white sugar", it sounds like something overheard in real life; when our hero talks of the horror of being 'promising' - the only way is down; the more things you try, the more you're potentially a failure - he may be speaking for a whole generation, coddled from childhood (at least in the West), raised on self-esteem in a Youth-worshipping culture and secretly wondering if this is as good as it gets, if Life is just a slow gentle decline into uncoolness. But a film with this title needs to have a lot of irony about its characters - and instead it ends in a group-hug. That's not right.]
TSOTSI (32) (dir., Gavin Hood) Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto, Kenneth Nkosi ["Sometimes innocence can triumph over rage" reads the poster, calling to mind Edelstein's priceless faux-tagline for "Moby Dick": "Sometimes you get the whale. And sometimes the whale gets you". The whale - or ghost of WHALE RIDER - certainly gets you in this pious South African "One Man and a Baby", damping down the melodrama to add a veneer of ugly realism even though what's going to happen is blindingly obvious from the early flashback when gangster thug reveals himself as nothing but a Frightened Little Boy (tm); he also wears a white shirt at the climax, with a heavenly choir behind him, just in case you missed he's being redeemed. Exotically grim township setting, and enough bad black men to give the Western audience a tingle; call it soft, it'll keek yor fukkin' head in monn.]
THREE TIMES (66) (dir., Hou Hsiao-Hsien) Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Mei Fang [Hou's official line seems to be that his films since SHANGHAI are united by concern for the plight of women (quote in the Festival newspaper: "[in my three most recent films] I wanted to show the changes that can happen to a woman") and "Positif" makes a brave stab at reading this as a film about the egotism of men and the suffering of women - but I'm not convinced, if only because the three men behave so differently (the first worships the woman, the second inadvertently hurts her and is sorry that he does, only the third seems to be exploiting her). Looks like Hou's flailing about, doing an Ozu tribute here, a triptych there - but maybe it's really a film about himself, and his own place in Time. 1966 is a "Time for Love", a time of greens and blues - the baize of the pool-table and the blue of the sea - pastel colours and slow sensual camera moves, but also the time of Hou's own adolescence, hence the nostalgia and the wondrous moment when you realise (Wong Kar-wai be damned!) this is not going to be about doomed love but in fact the bliss of a Perfect Moment. 1911 - browns and whites - is a "Time for Freedom" (Taiwan's from Japan, Shu Qi's from the brothel), but also a time rooted in History, its Silent austerity reflecting its remoteness: no-one craves freedom anymore. 2005 - neon-lit and multi-coloured - is a time of endless freedom (songs exhort the celebration of individuality) and a "Time for Youth" - but Youth is damaged both morally and physically and the subtitle, for middle-aged Hou, seems to carry an unspoken rider: "...but not for Me". Poignantly personal, esp. the first Time when the boy's letter thanks her for the happiest days of his life - but it's really a middle-aged man's note of thanks for a distant night, a game of pool, a song on the radio. Pedantic note: "Rain and Tears" is actually from 1968.]
A PERFECT COUPLE (39) (dir., Nobuhiro Suwa) Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Bruno Todeschini [Master-shot style creates visual obstacles in this tale of a divorcing couple, reflecting the strains in the relationship - first shot views them through the windows of a car, second has them half-blocked by a wall; at one point the fixed camera stares at a closed door for minutes on end - but I don't think it's right for this story. Heroine seems to regret the decision, having second thoughts about the couple's separation - at one point she's beguiled by a Rodin statue described as Purgatorial (i.e. neither Heaven nor Hell), tinged with a sense of in-between - but if it's in-betweenness Suwa's after, the roil of conflicting emotions, then the style deadens the impact; operating as it does from a fixed point, master-shot stillness seems to impose decision on the characters, the grim finality of a larger perspective (that's why it works so well in Hou-type sagas about the passage of Time). He's also chosen the wrong actors for roiling emotion - Bruni-Tedeschi has a pendulous Reubens quality but her bovine face doesn't lend itself to quicksilver changes, while Todeschini (after this and SON FRERE) rivals Laurent Lucas and Stéphane Freiss for the title of Dullest French Actor. Plot dissipates in random encounters by the halfway point, and if there's a point I missed it. Nice filmmaking (qua filmmaking), though.]
FUNNY HA HA (66) (dir., Andrew Bujalski) Kate Dollenmayer, Christian Rudder, Myles Paige, Andrew Bujalski [So um, yeah, I dunno, I saw, um, I saw this movie and it seemed, I dunno, really sweet ... Sorry, that sounds so - ... I'm sorry, I didn't mean sweet like pejorative or, um, trying to be patronising or anything like that. Sorry. Sorry if I came across, y'know. I'm sorry ... I meant sweet like tender, um, alive to, um, awkward, I dunno, moments. Encounters. Like when they kiss with the engineering guy and he's like I'm sorry, you're really great and all, and she's all, um, looking down and, y'know. Like I mean, trying to be open but also, I dunno, insecure. People wanting to be, yearning, people yearning to be loved, all the tentative, I dunno, tentative process of reaching out, drawing back. Afraid of getting hurt. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound like a jerk there. I'm sorry. It's a good movie, just the way people speak seemed a little ... um, affected? I dunno. But, y'know, maybe that's how people speak, like, I dunno, in that age group. In that context. So it's like Rohmer for Generation Emo. Or, I dunno, Linklater - the space between people. Or maybe the point is it's stylised, like Whit Stillman's self-conscious New Yorkers. 'Cause the point is, I mean, they can't commit. Unless they're drunk. Like with the tattoo, when she goes in to get the tattoo. Y'know? So, I dunno, maybe that's why they talk like that. Um. I dunno.]
CITY OF THE SUN (47) (dir., Martin Sulik) Oldrich Navratil, Ivan Martinka, Lubos Kostelny [Actually a Czech-Slovak co-production so the credits are in both tongues, which is silly since it's obviously the same language with minor variations in spelling (I say hraji, you say hraju...). Not that it matters, since the whole ex-Czechoslovakia has a weird sensibility as far as I'm concerned - a peasant harshness that's oddly off-putting when applied (as it often is) to bittersweet comedy. As in WILD BEES, the damaged and eccentric are dismissed as freaks - in that case the Michael Jackson fan, in this one the nerdy needy mommy's-boy mocked for un-manly behaviour and kitschy taste in fittings (a plastic moose-head that sings "Born to be wild") - and the FULL MONTY setting seethes with machismo in a way that's admittedly uncompromising (heroes are allowed to go too far, even become unlikeable) but seems misjudged, or perhaps un-judged; when e.g. one of our heroes lashes out at the teacher who complains about his clearly troubled teenage son, Sulik seems to have no opinion on whether the man is irresponsible, in denial, or whether 'his' way of doing things (confronting the boy at home with lines like "I'll make a man of you or kill you trying") is likely to get results. Instead we get zooms galore, a brawl overlaid with jolly music, distressing story-lines side by side with cutesy ones, and a carefree final shot with everyone jumping on trampolines. Seems a bit callous, but maybe I'm just too much of a wimp for the Eastern European gallows humour.]
GABRIELLE (68) (second viewing: 72) (dir., Patrice Chéreau) Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory, Claudia Coli [Is Chéreau a theatrical director of actors, or just a very poor one? The panoply of tics in SON FRERE and INTIMACY seemed to suggest the latter, but when you've got actors of the calibre of Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert twitching their eyes like Inspector Dreyfus on a bad day, it can only be because they've been told to. The director's fevered sensibility actually works well here: there's a bit when the husband reads the fateful letter while holding a decanter of brandy, and I told myself I was going to dock it points if he dropped the decanter - but in fact he drops it so dramatically, and the moment becomes so immense, it seems to blow the cobwebs right out of the period-drama mustiness. It's really the husband's tale (it helps that Pascal Greggory is among the two or three most compulsive actors in the world today), but the title is apt because Gabrielle straddles the film like an impregnable presence, a fortress her husband wrongly presumes to control (loving her "as a collector loves the most prized item in his collection"); "Emotion is revolting!" he cries around the time he finds himself succumbing to it, his presumptions crumbling. She's neither a victim nor a proto-feminist, but in fact a romantic so fierce she's long since despaired of the world ever giving her what she craves (she warns the servants not to try and sympathise, not to enter her life: "I won't like you more for it"), making one last misguided attempt before giving up; he's neither cruel nor repressive but a rational man in full control of his life, prizing his wife's grace and beauty, willing even to forgive her lapses (though of course he's Disappointed), totally mistaking the tone of her contempt - he thinks it's a businesslike disdain to match his own, when in fact she's insane with grief. On one level he's a cuckold falling apart for banal reasons - because his friends know of his cuckoldry, because the Other Man is so unworthy - but he also falls apart because control has shifted, and the reason it's shifted is because Gabrielle isn't really of this world anymore. Sags in the second half, and maybe it's cruder than it should be, but Chéreau alternates between b&w and lurid colours - a bottle-green gloved hand - and fires it up with onscreen captions like Tony Scott; the very last one (divulging what it says would be a spoiler) haunted me for days.] [Second viewing, September 2009: Liked it more, and I think I wronged it by suggesting it's some kind of purple camp-fest (I'd forgotten how thrillingly it pulses and simmers). Haven't read the novella but I'm guessing it's a faithful adaptation because it plays like Conrad, tending towards the turgid but constantly redeemed by piercingly insightful moments - in this case about the impossibility of creating Love when Love isn't there. Also liked the performances this time (though they are a bit Great Actor-ish), and one thing's for sure: what with this and TIME REGAINED, no-one can eat dinner as expressively as Pascal Greggory.]
YOU BET YOUR LIFE (59) (dir., Antonin Svoboda) Georg Friedrich, Birgit Minichmayr, Gerti Drassi [A mad film with zero rigour, freewheeling energy and a premise that initially seems to be wasted, till you realise it's just been incorporated into the film itself. Hero lives his life according to the roll of a die - and the movie gets increasingly random, at first invisibly, its propulsive rhythm merely the beat of a man with nothing left to lose, then more pointedly (fun and games in the hotel, with the looseness of a 60s Godard), finally explicitly with variations played on the same scene according to what the die might decide. Gets better and better as it goes along, with a cheeky ending and full-on performances - esp. from Brigit Minichmayr, a pouty square-faced slattern with voluptuous lips, a mass of brown curly hair and a truly evil laugh. She may be the most irresistible bit of bad news since Sacha Horler in PRAISE.]
THE HOURS GO BY (42) (dir., Ines de Oliveira Cezar) Roxana Berco, Guillermo Arengo, Agustin Ignacio Alcoba [An exercise, but not a very rewarding one. Drab little family - their 5-year-old being the only spark of life - spend a day doing not very much, mostly on a deserted beach that does evoke a certain abandoned atmosphere; the Hours Go By though there's one thing we can never know for sure, which is how much time we have left. Style falters fatally between the limpid and oppressive (the rhythm is the former, shadowy images the latter) and the director unwisely opts to trick it out with the compressed-visuals effect Sokurov used in MOTHER AND SON. Enervating.]
IN YOUR HANDS (46) (dir., Annette K. Olesen) Ann Eleonora Jorgensen, Trine Dyrholm, Lars Ranthe [Dogme or no Dogme, this is very much an anti-BREAKING THE WAVES, holding out the promise of a mystical dimension only to squelch it firmly in the ending. To be honest, I don't get it. The central character - a woman priest - seems ridiculously secular (I know it's Scandinavia, but still), seemingly unable to turn to God even in the kind of crisis situation when most people do so instinctively - one person I spoke to after the screening actually thought it must be secretly reactionary, showing the uselessness of trendy touchy-feely priests ("'Preach'. I don't like that word!") - yet she's not shown as having a crisis of faith; indeed, she's praised as an excellent priest. The ending only makes sense if it's ambiguous, if the healer has in fact saved the baby through her death (in the same way that she 'created' it as redemption for killing her own), but there's no indication that Olesen intends ambiguity. Puzzling in its meanings, drab and unexciting qua movie: structure is sloppy, leaving the romance hanging at its most critical point (when we know the illicit couple have been rumbled), and there's no Dogme jerkiness, just a flat non-style. Could be TV, really.]
THE GREAT ECSTASY OF ROBERT CARMICHAEL (53) (dir., Thomas Clay) Danny Dyer, Lesley Manville, Dan Spencer [Very STRAW DOGS-ish - city couple in small-but-seething village, wife a rather bubble-headed blonde, climax a home invasion by local thugs, controversial rape also in the mix - but I interviewed Clay later [link hopefully to come] and he said STRAW DOGS wasn't consciously on his mind while making the movie; then again he also disavowed, or at least played down, the film's most obvious metaphor, paralleling the occupation of the family home with the occupation of Iraq (pointedly glimpsed on TV more than once) and exploding, just as the final act of sadism reaches its climax - literally at the instant when something unspeakable happens - into a montage of war footage going back to Winston Churchill. According to Clay he's not equating war with random sadism - in fact (he said) he's not talking about war per se but Society's institutionalised destruction of the human spirit, buttressed by wealth-gaps and media distortions - but e.g. the movies mentioned when the characters take a film class are specifically war movies ("That was horrible," says one girl of COME AND SEE), and that final montage is of bombs, not housing estates. It makes a difference because the metaphor - i.e. if he is equating war with random sadism - feels naive, in the overwrought way of student politics, spoiling a film with some nice pebbly images, one virtuoso eight-minute shot and a neat structure shifting from character to character, though inexperience shows in some of the dialogue (e.g. for the rich married couple) and some of the acting; the (presumably non-pro) actress playing Ben's mother seems to punctuate every damn line with a flutter of her left arm. Robert Carmichael himself, a sensitive Sadean with a self-destructive streak, is either convincingly enigmatic or the most naive element of all.]
POLICE BEAT (51) (dir., Robinson Devor) Pape Sidy Niang, Anna Oxygen, Eric Breedlove [Hard to talk about this, on account of it was shown on truly grotty projected video. Feels amateurish, also suffers from an inconclusive puzzle structure and wall-to-wall score (mostly tinny piano) - yet a certain atmosphere finally breaks through in the tale of a lonely, homesick African-immigrant cop in Seattle, out of step (esp. morally) with the society he's policing. An odd project for Devor, but I guess he wanted the work after five years; all cases taken from real-life Seattle police files, notes a final caption, but I guess it's no big deal to look through the files and cherry-pick all mentions of weirdos, freaks and various desultory encounters. "You look guilty of something"; "Oh man, the only thing I'm guilty of is pimping an ugly prostitute..."]
THE FORSAKEN LAND (48) (dir., Vimukthi Jayasundara) Mahendra Perera, Kaushalya Fernando, Nilupuli Jayawardena ["We live like frogs in a well," says someone, and that seems to be the crux of it - in a land ravaged by war, people are reduced to living like animals. Though of course the real crux are forsaken images of rural Sri Lanka, often unearthly in their symmetries and strongly evocative (of Man's inhumanity), once you adjust to the rhythm; the kind of film where the camera stays on landscapes after the actors have left the frame. Unintentional Humour Dept.: heroine says she plans to move on because she's heard they're "recruiting teachers in remote areas". What, and leave the big-city lights?...
IRON ISLAND (66) (dir., Mohammad Rasoulof) Ali Nasirian, Hossein Farzi-Zadeh, Neda Pakdaman [Official authority figures are rare in Iranian movies - cf. unofficial ones, like Kiarostami's film directors in remote villages - for obvious reasons; much less potentially troublesome to leave the authorities out of it and concentrate on ordinary people. With that in mind, a rather superb allegory, with the Captain of the titular ship clearly standing in for state authority - specifically a State that purports to be benevolent (taking in the lame, the orphaned, the crippled), purports to believe in the value of education, but turns out to have serious shortcomings: he's corrupt (operating a green-card scam), bans TV and satellite, resorts to torture as punishment and deterrent - a great scene - and is firmly in denial about the fact that the ship is slowly sinking. Sound familiar? (Yet the film walks a tightrope with aplomb, never coming out with any firm statement that might be deemed subversive by Ahmadinejad and Co.) In itself, solid rather than spectacular, with humanist emphasis on eccentric foibles and people's faces in the visuals - but the ending moves up a gear, going from the Captain still peddling his grand vision (now on dry land) to a quiet, compassionate little boy gazing at the beauty of the sea, a hope for the future. As in CRIMSON GOLD, the spirit of the Revolution remains as an ideal, glimpsed behind corruption and pettiness.]
ADAM & PAUL (64) (dir., Lenny Abrahamson) Mark O'Halloran, Tom Murphy, Louise Lewis [One-note, but very funny. Stoner comedy with Laurel and Hardy stylings - the short one (Adam? Paul?) has a Stan Laurel quality, esp. the helpless lift of arms and stream of crushed "Sorry"s - and, I guess, a Beckett vibe (it's Irish, after all). A&P first seen waking up in a field, where the tall one (Paul? Adam?) exclaims "Some fucker's glued me to this thing!", and spends the rest of the film with torn-off bits of mattress still glued to his anorak; they later reach a housing estate - "How the fuck did we end up out here?" - where the film revels in white-trash chavs living in misery and telling their kids to "fuck off and play for a while" (it's ridiculously foul-mouthed); later still there's a stolen TV, a recalcitrant carton of milk and an angry Bulgarian. Cleverly plotted, though e.g. the encounter with the retard is a bit too obviously placed to balance the poignant interlude with mother and baby, lest we think the boys are going soft. Worldview is reductive - I don't like this blithe acceptance that a whole substratum of society is amoral and brain-dead and oh well, it's a laugh innit - but I guess the tabloid awfulness is a joke in itself.]
LOLA + BILIDIKID (43) (dir., Kutlug Ataman) Gandi Mukli, Baki Davrak, Erdal Yildiz [The AMERICAN BEAUTY of German gay-hustler movies (it has the same twist, with homophobe turning murderous closet-case), dealing entirely in caricature: the bigoted brother, the young neo-Nazis - "Ready for your first hunt, little wolf?" - the upper-class old lady fussing over her poodle ("Frau Schmidt"), with the drag-queens as reassuringly camp comic relief. It even has the same message, a be-yourself bromide with Repression held up as the ultimate villain - the gay man who's ashamed of his 'abnormal' urges and fools himself with the fiction that his lover is 'really' a woman. Very slick, with a notably smooth chase scene, laugh-lines in all the right places (the old woman finally apologises to her son's rough-trade lover, then adds "You can take my bags in now") and a feelgood coda to take the sting off the melodrama - but it never feels honest, and even the Message seems compromised by the dangerous edge grafted onto gay life (sordid bathroom encounters, two men kissing in a flash of lightning); maybe it wants to be a little 'abnormal' after all.]
GARPASTUM (61) (dir., Alexei Guerman, Jr) Evgeny Pronin, Danila Kozlovsky, Dmitry Vladimirov [Very particular heaviness here, something to do with the sepia images, or the camera's habit of lingering on melancholy supporting characters while the two young heroes wander in the background, or a quote from Pascal - "You can only lean against something that has resistance" - or distinctive scenes like the boy's first encounter with the beautiful society-girl who asks him to strip, then slaps his face, then hugs him and says "You're just so young, and I'm an old granny", all in quick succession; or maybe it's just unexpected to find a period piece (WW1, looming in the background throughout) with a plot about soccer-loving youths, including lengthy, hypnotic-yet-desultory scenes of soccer matches. Guerman falls down on the easy stuff - the plot collapses in the second half - but aces all the difficult things that mark a director as personal and a little peculiar. Never saw THE LAST TRAIN, but I really want to now.]
GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE (75) (dir., Hou Hsiao-Hsien) Jack Kao, Vicky Wei, Ming Lei [Who is Chen Huai-en? A DP who's only worked with Hou according to the IMDb, and was surely part-responsible for his visual breakthrough in GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN and this staggeringly beautiful movie (though he also lensed the drab DAUGHTER OF THE NILE). Pools-of-light effects and visual mischief - what seems to be a red filter turns out to be a POV through trendy red sunglasses, underlining the fact that the camera has no opinion beyond observing the characters; strictly speaking it's wholly naturalistic, yet the look allows Hou to move beyond 80s realism to the sketchier moments he's trying to illustrate. One of the great hanging-out movies (the vibe is almost Altmanesque), full of hypnotic long takes - hero and handyman comparing tattoos with a kid running around in the background; arriving at a party, with music drowning out various toasts and introductions; watching 'Flat Head' eat on the roof al fresco then wandering away, with no particular target, looking at the city and down at the train tracks where two old ladies are about to get on a train. Hou clearly thinks the youngsters are wasting their youth (a featured song says as much) but the film is non-judgmental, part of the open-ended modernism that seemed to flourish in the late 90s. A work of art; but where's Chen Huai-en these days?]
CINDERELLA MAN (55) (dir., Ron Howard) Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Paddy Considine [How is this shameless? Let me count the ways. Half the film grinds our hero down into the dust - no job, no food, no credit, forced to go on the breadline ("Never thought I'd see you here, Jim") and humiliate himself by begging for money - so the second half can see him rally, pull himself up by the bootstraps and fight his way into the history books. It's a male weepie: "Use your fork," he tells his kid even when there's barely any food - because they still have their dignity - and later relinquishes his own food with a smile and a joke when the kid says she's hungry. He stands for America, down but not out, refusing to be bowed; stands for The People against the fat-cats of the boxing Establishment; stands for family values against a swaggering playboy with a bimbo on each arm; stands for good old-fashioned graft, which is "working our way through this" as opposed to unions and workers' rights - and it's surely gratuitous to contrast him with his rather shiftless friend who wants to organise, and gets what he deserves for his lefty subversive ideas (when did films get so flagrantly Republican?). He also stands for something else, the working-class notion that boxing, like life, is about absorbing punishment, thereby giving the advantage to working-class boys who've been toughened by life on the streets - which is fine, except that Howard gives him hokey flashbacks where he thinks of his kids at crucial points in the fight, drawing strength from the fact that he has to win for their sake; poverty is cheapened, turned into a gimmick, a magic potion to be swigged when things get hairy. Really seems wrong to be downgrading something so spectacular - the Crowe/Giamatti byplay is almost on a par with Crowe/Bettany in MASTER AND COMMANDER, and the final fight is among the most stirring set-pieces in years; the level of big-budget expertise is staggering - when I'd probably be giving a pass to the same thing done as a Warners boxing drama of the 30s; but the Warners drama would certainly finesse many of the things Howard treats so earnestly, would probably sport a lighter touch, and would sure as hell not last 144 minutes. Stirring or not, it's built on sand. Extra demerits for Zellweger's pinched, maudlin Mrs. Braddock, doing shockingly little with the part beyond stolid support when times are hard, grim reproof as the inevitable Wife that Worries, and flappy-armed joy at the final triumph (even if she'd burst into tears it might at least be memorable): "You are the champion of my heart, James J. Braddock..."]
THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (48) (dir., Scott Derrickson) Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott, Jennifer Carpenter [Mind-boggling. A priest stands trial after the failed exorcism of a girl now dead; "medical treatment" might've saved her, contends the prosecution, but "religious treatment" killed her. Unlike THE EXORCIST, which aimed at dispassionate - hence 'scientific' - study of demonic possession, the camps are now polarised and Science is presented as the enemy of Religion, clearly tying in with the creationism vs. evolution fuss (and a broader spiritual/rational dichotomy, as when one side reads "a sign" into what the other regards as mere coincidence), though also with the huge success of THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST - and this clearly stems from a similarly masochistic template of salvation through pain and suffering: Emily agrees to her torment, consciously becoming a martyr so people will Believe in the spiritual realm ("Evil is Proof of God", as they say in THE AMITYVILLE HORROR). Might've been more palatable had it come clean about its agenda but instead it claims (dishonestly) to be balanced, following religious explication of Emily's symptoms with a medical one and vice versa - except the religious version comes to us in vivid flashbacks, with howling demons and melting crucifixes, whereas all we see of Science is men in suits talking dryly about epilepsy. Had it really wanted to pit the two sides against each other it should've had the whole film take place in the courtroom - instead it's the definition of tabloid sensationalism, giving one side the kind of visceral impact that totally tips the scales; after we've seen poor Emily speak in tongues, her face contorted in demonic rage, can we really credit the prosecutor's 'logical' explanation that she probably learned Aramaic in her Bible classes? (Even the judge thinks he's an asshole by that point.) No surprise when it drops the facade and spooky things start happening to defence lawyer Laura Linney, validating the priest's warnings of Dark Forces out to get her - and at least it's enjoyable hokum, skilfully made and very well photographed (Tom Stern brings it MILLION DOLLAR BABY's sober underexposed look, plus at least one instantly-memorable shot as Emily walks in a hallucinatory landscape flanked by vertical bars of orange light, like fluorescent silos). Kind of fascinating, just like PASSION, in its glimpse of a fierce fundamentalist culture, inevitably ending in religious awakening for this affirmed agnostic and amoral career woman ("You cashed in your conscience at the door," sneers thin-lipped boss Colm Feore when she talks of doing the Right Thing), leaving the film - and us - with a properly ominous epitaph: "Work Out Your Own Salvation with Fear and Trembling". Probably wouldn't be so dispassionately fascinated if I actually lived in the US, though.]
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (23) (dir., Andrew Douglas) Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jesse James, Philip Baker Hall [Classic Moment: After more than an hour of bumps in the night, ghostly visions, dead girls hanging from the rafters, violent personality-changes, swarms of flies, a babysitter stretchered out to a waiting ambulance babbling incoherently and the fridge-magnets on the kitchen fridge spontaneously rearranging themselves to read "Katch 'Em And Kill 'Em", Melissa George - she of the toothy smile and twitchy behind - frowns and tells her husband: "I think there's something ... seriously wrong here". Really, you think? No attempt at build-up, the house is obviously Evil and all we can do is wait for the CGI onslaught - though the hapless family relax in the bathtub in between Horrible Things and patiently ask their clearly deranged kids, "I need you to tell me what happened, sweetie" (a very 00s formulation, by the way, but then 70s ambience is non-existent beyond the occasional Alice Cooper poster). Inept as movie, notable only as talking-point, viz. the implication that the family are being punished for not knowing their place (being upwardly-mobile, trying to live beyond their means) coupled with a glimpse of a book called "Evil is Proof of God", using shocks - as in THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE - to bolster a theocratic view of the world. Can it be, after decades when horror films were used as a vehicle for subversive ideas, that they're now being co-opted (at least in the States) as a big stick to scare us into righteousness?]
GOAL! (58) (dir., Danny Cannon) Kuno Becker, Stephen Dillane, Anna Friel, Marcel Iures, Gary Lewis [I'm still (just about) un-jaded enough to feel a little surge of exhilaration at the sight of a youngster trying to follow his dream in the face of impossible odds - which is basically all that happens in this simple-but-stirring football drama (no way will I call it 'soccer', esp. in this context), the first in a planned trilogy and probably the best, if the various indications of what's to come are any guide. Parts 2 and 3 will almost certainly chart our hero's corruption, giving in to the glamour life (there's already a glimpse in the opening shot, as he's shown lounging in a swimming pool only to reveal he's merely cleaning the pool, doesn't own it), venal sports agents - one appears here, promising to get him a Gap ad - and commercialisation of the game in general - all of which is true, but may well seem didactic onscreen. This one, on the other hand, is about the unironic joy of the game, its power to unite people across continents and social classes, and the Magic Moments that can bring a crowd to its feet on a grey day in a muddy stadium - and it's also clever enough to engineer it so our hero's success is due mostly to good fortune and friends coming through for him when he screws up ("People keep pleading your case," smiles Iures as the Arsene Wenger-ish manager), thus keeping him pure in a sacrificial-lamb way as well as setting up the betrayals and disappointments to come. The truism that football games are uncinematic remains true, though Cannon tries - the problem is perhaps that his instinct is to get in close for the fancy footwork whereas the game is about use of space, and better served by overhead shots showing team-shape and passes; the other problem is of course that actors aren't footballers, and vice versa - there are cutesy cameos from the Real Madrid galacticos, too much nostalgic-expat Geordie flavour and far too many 'Yessss!' moments ("Roy of the Rovers" comes to mind) set to pounding music. What can I say? I'm still (just about) goofy enough to feel my heart welling up when the new kid in his first big game runs the length of the pitch, beating a line of defenders, then slots away the ball for a winning goal with barely a minute to go...]
WEDDING CRASHERS (62) (dir., David Dobkin) Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Christopher Walken, Isla Fisher [Still can't believe they came so close and fumbled it so badly - almost, but not quite, fatally. Did no-one in the lengthy, expensive preview process point out that the film basically flatlines from after they leave the house to the (admittedly knockout) climax, which is 45 minutes of Wilson endlessly pining and the script straining to set things up so the grand finale can take place at a wedding? Couldn't the filmmakers take their own advice, as divulged in the scene where McAdams' jokes (in the wedding toast) are flopping so she comes up with True Love bullshit - "the soul's recognition of its counterpoint in another" - and of course her audience laps it up, or is the film setting itself some weird challenge where it'll show us how cretinous it is to fall for that guff, then make us fall for it anyway? Should be reprehensible, but the first hour - a riff on Neil Strauss' "The Game" cross-bred with the screwball comedy of the Rich being Different, plus two stars on top form and a hefty dose of old-fashioned lust - is wildly funny in a way Hollywood seldom delivers, bawdy without infantile, skirting free of sitcom-style primness and teeming with obsessive behaviour; I was laughing from Vince Vaughn's demented disquisition on the "ass-out hug", but stopped laughing for a long painful stretch in the second half. Down to 90 minutes and it could've been a classic.]
LORD OF WAR (48) (dir., Andrew Niccol) Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Bridget Moynahan, Ethan Hawke, Ian Holm [A real tug-of-war going on between Niccol's smarts, his rage, his excellent material, the importance of what he's saying, the various thought-provoking asides (never occurred to me that the end of the Cold War - and looted Soviet arms caches - directly fuelled the self-destruction of Liberia and Sierra Leone a decade later) - but also, on the other hand, his cheap shots, his pocket cynicism, his leaden ironies (the clink of a cash register ringing up a sale as each bullet is fired); one often gets the impression there's a culture of self-loathing in Hollywood, smart people obviously convinced they're making films for stupid audiences, disfiguring their work with crude overstatement as the only way to rouse the popcorn-munchers from their stupor (maybe it's rage at marketing men and the System as a whole, getting channelled towards the audience and implicitly the filmmaker himself for sinking to 'their' level). Battle-lines are drawn early on, arms dealer Cage guilty both of self-delusion - firmly in denial about the consequences of his grim trade, telling himself he's just catering to the natural human impulse to kill: "You call me evil, but I'm a necessary evil" - but also of being an "internationalist", an agent of the new globalised economy (note the opening montage), ideology-free, purely market-driven, selling to whoever will buy; what follows is a romp through the arms-dealer trade, full of tasty anecdotes but also full of self-conscious gallows humour - "Next time I'll sell to the Balkans; when they say they're going to have a war, they mean it!" - and look-at-me details like an O.J. Simpson reference or a dig at the Florida recount, none of it doing more with the hero than what we learned in the first 10 minutes, just letting him dangle while we wait for his inevitable fall. Niccol's the class swot who's done all the research, knows the subject backwards and can't resist showing off, even as it gets in the way of actually answering the question: it seems unlikely that arms dealers at a weapons fair in 1987 would actually be touting land-to-air missiles for use against commercial airliners - except of course that Korean Air jet got downed by a missile a few years before, and Niccol knows and wants us to know he knows; it may even be true, yet it seems typical of what's always been his problem (esp. in SIMONE), a tendency to reduce characters to archetypes and every situation to a torn-from-the-headlines Issue. A thrilling film in all sorts of ways - but it works best on the simplest level, illustrating crime as a business, and worst when it's trying to be trenchant, let alone arty (see e.g. the nightmarish breakdown in Monrovia). Strangest of all: Liberia's President at the time of the war in Sierra Leone can be shown, described as American-educated, made to do things only one Liberian President has done - but apparently can't be named as Charles Taylor. Hollywood's legal departments are even more confusing than its movies.]
DOOM (45) (dir., Andrzej Bartkowiak) Karl Urban, The Rock, Rosamund Pike [80% bad ALIENS rip-off, but something quite exciting happens for about 20 minutes in the middle when it suddenly does a U-turn into anti-militarism and turns - no, really - into a surprisingly overt comment on Iraq: it's monsters vs. Marines with innocent civilians in the crossfire, and just after we learn that the monsters make moral decisions - 'turning' only bad people - the Marines under psycho commander The Rock declare that they don't, refusing to make any distinction between potential monsters and innocent civilians: "Kill 'em all, let God sort them out". If monsters = terrorists - with the sole but important proviso that real-life monsters don't in fact make moral distinctions when it comes to their victims - the implication that a military solution only ends up making us worse than the enemy is unmistakable (and pretty bold, for this genre and this target audience). Also intriguing that the problem is resolved via videogame - once The Rock is gone, traditional authority proving inadequate, the real hero mutates into a super-being and the film too mutates as promised by the title, ALIENS-style battles giving way to a first-person shooter game (i.e. "Doom"); the answer lies (perhaps) in a new generation of globalised gamers, moving beyond the old rules and hierarchies, individualistic rather than militaristic. Before that, pretty dull, though you do get the Bible-thumping Marine who carves a bloody cross into his arm each time he takes the Lord's name in vain, a half-man half-wheelchair crippled in a freak teleporting accident - "He went to one galaxy, his ass went to another" - and nuggets like the following: "10% of the human genome is still unmapped. Some people say it's the blueprint for the soul". Gosh...]
DOMINO (50) (dir., Tony Scott) Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo [Obviously appropriate that a goldfish should be the motif for this half-remarkable half-unwatchable movie, geared for viewers with very short attention spans and 3-second memories; Scott hasn't exactly moved beyond his flashy rapid-fire style, but he's heightened and honed it to a concentrated, near-abstract form that belongs with Oliver Stone circa NATURAL BORN KILLERS, Tsui Hark circa TIME AND TIDE, and Baz Luhrmann circa anything. Parade of images turns into a bombardment, tricked out with flash-frames, filters and the scattered meaningless captions that first became a fixture in MAN ON FIRE; Truth gets roughed up pretty badly, almost so it's no longer recognisable - which is precisely the point, as implied in the cheeky opening ("Based on a True Story. Sort of.") and stubborn opacity of Domino Harvey; she's against vapid "90210 people", breaks the nose of someone who suggests the tough-girl pose is all an act, but what does she want exactly? "To have a little fun," she claims, giving a pointedly banal explanation for why a child of privilege would want to turn bounty-hunter, but the film enlists Tom Jones himself - "That ain't no way to have fun" - to make it clear it doesn't believe her, and even if it does it's not the whole story. Not that we ever get the whole story, but we do get various quirky detours (from Afghanistan to the Sam Kinison Monument) and a crash-course on the absurdity of classification systems - Lateesha's "race-modification program", natch - a veiled admonition not to try slotting Domino in any neat category; Scott gives up early, happy to concede that swells and scuzzballs are siblings under the skin, pushing the Image as the sole reliable credo in a world too degraded to make sense of, too full of self-conscious nihilism, too much in love with the act itself sans explication or justification - like reality-TV or perhaps A.P.A.T.T., All Porn All The Time - though one also wonders if it's really the world's fault (or his) that he can't make sense of it, and maybe he should've tried harder before retreating into flash. Exhausting long before the end, alienating too - though it may be deliberate - but one of those fiascos that approach quixotic nobility because they're so untainted by any attempt to please, except on the level of unmotivated stimulation. "Put your fuckin' weapon down!" yells Keira - but we cut away sharply, as the opening credits sidle in on a bed of thick juicy hip-hop.]
WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (51) (dir., Steve Box & Nick Park) with the voices of Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter [The jokes are there, but the rhythm isn't - and the cosy sensibility gets a little stifling too. Any number of tortuous puns, from Dogwarts University to book titles and newspaper headlines ("Anti-Pesto Fail to Turnip On Time") - there's even a discreet tit joke - but they tend to hit with assembly-line regularity, as reassuring as the quaint English-village vibe built on tradition (the "Great Duck Plague of '53") and a celebration of mundane pleasures. The one alarming facet, Wallace transformed into the titular monster, gets the sting taken out of it by a parallel development where a bunny gets transformed into Wallace, cheery catch-phrases and all - and though of course it makes sense to deflate the horror aspects (a children's comedy shouldn't be THE FLY), there's something middle-of-the-road and just-so-ish about the balance, tamping down the Beast Within like the echt-English virtues of long-suffering Gromit or those sensible villagers calling for "humane" pest control as they look forward to their Giant Vegetable Competition. The film's edgiest pun goes to villain Fiennes, when he sneers that the turnips and pumpkins aren't the only vegetables in the village. It's closer to home than Park and Co. seem to realise.]
OLIVER TWIST (62) (dir., Roman Polanski) Barney Clark, Ben Kingsley, Jamie Foreman, Harry Eden, Edward Hardwicke [Over-familiarity is a problem here - there's Victorian ruffians jostling in the street behind Oliver and Dodger on the first walk to Fagin's, but they might as well be singing "Consider Yourself" - but Polanski's great achievement (and innovation, at least compared to the Lean and Reed versions) is to complicate the plot from a catalogue of Dickensian horrors to a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil, where Good isn't just a passive doe-eyed victim but an equally potent - or at least active - force, hence a moral choice. Key scene may be Oliver's walk to London, where he consecutively meets an unkind, unhelpful person (who drives the boy away) and a kind, helpful one (who takes him in) - but there's also the conscientious judge early on who refuses to apprentice terrified Oliver as a chimney-sweep (cf. cruel, irresponsible Magistrate Fang later on), and of course there's Oliver himself who again and again draws the comment (from Brownlow, Fagin, the undertaker) that there's "something about him" - the power of Innocence - and finally carries out a great act of compassion, not seen in either of the previous versions, when he visits and prays for the delirious Fagin in jail; he's not just a sponge in this version, not just a flaxen-haired blank slate but closer to an angel, coaxing people to reveal their better selves. Maybe Polanski was stung by criticism that THE PIANIST was too much of a victim - but more likely the two films are one in his mind, tales of living in a dark time and having to decide whether to succumb or resist. No arguing with production values, in any case - lamplight and fog, a number of very handsome images - or details like the half-deranged boy pacing in the night in the workhouse, and it's bold of him to play e.g. the long scene when Fagin warns Oliver against talking to the cops in one take, the boy's eloquent face in foreground as he listens to the horror stories (Kingsley's stock Fagin is, alas, not very memorable). Speaking of traumatised kids, a big round of applause for Elvis Polanski - as "Boy With Hoop" - starting life with not one but two names to live down. Abuse?]
DARK WATER (51) (dir., Walter Salles) Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Pete Postlethwaite [In itself, mildly effective; as a case-study in Hollywood remakes, quite fascinating, esp. Hollywood remakes of films that seem on the surface ill-suited to multiplex-isation. The original DARK WATER was a gloomy little chiller that piled up atmosphere all the way to a single climactic shock, then descended to a poignant coda; this one makes a brave but correct decision, realising you have to kill the twist - it's the only way to get some action in the build-up - makes it clear almost from the start what's going on (i.e. that a ghost-child has taken over the heroine's life and daughter) and keeps the tension going with red-herring threats like the young punks, the belligerent handyman and Reilly's slimy and mendacious - and frankly effeminate - estate agent (it also puts far more emphasis on the decrepit awfulness of the house, and I guess it's no surprise the US version should be more indignant about a bad real-estate deal than the Japanese). The result works much better than the original, surrounding the heroine with a hostile world, and the visuals are fancier - sickly browns and yellows, near-fluorescent green for the peeling walls of the house - but it's also cruder and busier, there's the usual silly back-story (turns out the heroine was herself an abandoned child), and the coda is sappy rather than poignant; they've taken a skeletal film and made it respectable, fattened it up and filled it out, but lost that sense of gnawing emptiness that made it (perversely) memorable. Connelly's fine but I'm not sure why the acclaim in some quarters - it's a fairly unsurprising performance; Roth, admittedly in a flashier role, is the real magician, moving from flaky Alan Dershowitz figure to plausible (if not quite endorsed) romantic lead without apparently changing a thing.]