Films Seen - September 2000

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

FINAL DESTINATION (57) (dir., James Wong) Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith [Brutally callous, as only a film can be that trusts its target audience not to notice : "I've never dealt with Death before," admits one of the (teenage) heroes, and that's probably the best viewpoint from which to appreciate its view of the big D as a puzzle to be solved - "Death's design", etc - or exam to be aced, nothing too traumatic (not that the guy with the scythe and black cape was any more 'real', but then neither did THE SEVENTH SEAL show his handiwork so graphically). The devil-may-care attitude, ranging from indifferent to mildly bummed, gets annoying (personal note : I saw it after spending half the day with a good friend whose mother had just died), but watching it with the right kind of audience is still a great experience : the premise grips, shocks are milked for every ounce of sadistic glee, the exploding plane seen but not heard in a corner of the frame (just before the blast shatters every window in the house) is a great image, and the rats-in-a-trap epilogue is perfectly nasty (personal note #2 : I saw it just after ME, MYSELF AND IRENE, so perhaps I was inordinately grateful for a film that hit its marks so cleanly) ; one bit - what we'll call the Stevie-Wonder-drives-a-bus moment - rivals DEEP BLUE SEA in the Out-of-Nowhere Shocks Dept., though it falls apart if you think about it, which is typical of the film as a whole. Heartless, snarky and surprisingly effective ; name-checking master-of-suggestion Val Lewton (among others) was a bit cheeky, though...]

ME, MYSELF AND IRENE (37) (dir., Peter and Bobby Farrelly) Jim Carrey, Renée Zellweger, Robert Forster, Chris Cooper [Sounds heretical, but I really don't think Carrey and the Farrellys belong together. His is a brash, shiny persona, above all a self-centred one (he's seldom brought out the best in his co-stars) ; he always comes across as an over-achiever, bursting with confidence, his occasional genius being the way he can suggest emotional screwed-upness beneath the confidence : you might say he offers himself unstintingly, warts and all - but he never seems very interested in what everyone else is offering. They, on the other hand, are genuine, generous populists, not just pandering to the mass-audience but sharing happily in its (lack of) taste, loving the detritus of everyday American life, all the tacky things people see and say and do - a country song about highway patrolmen, a hotel called the "Chuck E. Cheese Lodge and Miniature Golf Resort", a pair of sweethearts wearing T-shirts emblazoned with each other's photos, the Rhode Island State Troopers serving "the biggest little state in the Union". Their films thrive on a laid-back sense of free-for-all, mixing extremes of raunch and sweetness, which is why they need someone charming and basically reactive at the centre (Cameron Diaz in MARY, Woody Harrelson with a grungier kind of charm in KINGPIN), holding it all together : Carrey doesn't fill the gaps that way, and the result is a laboured, discordant film that never gets off the ground, its ingredients never really blending - there are long dead stretches where it's being 'sweet', like Irene and Charlie talking about his sons ("You seem like a really good Dad, Charlie"), then suddenly an 'outrageous' gag about dildos or masturbation. It's all about giving people what they want, viz. naughty gags in a basically safe, feelgood context (F & F even thank their extras in the closing credits - that's how much they love the 'little people') - yet the film's disjointedness allows too much time to ponder how mixed its messages are, and how 'giving people what they want' can amount to affirming their prejudices in the guise of political incorrectness. Is it, for example, being humourless to see the much-abused yet indestructible animals (cow here, dog in MARY) as a rebuke to softies who worry about that kind of thing in real life, just as Hank pokes fun at an albino but is still his friend, or the three black kids talk in fluent motherfucka but are actually geniuses - is there a call to denial here, urging us not to worry overmuch about hurting / stereotyping others 'cause it doesn't really do them any harm (like the robust 'common sense' attitude of people who beat their kids because "I was beaten as a kid, and I turned out fine")? What does it mean when intelligent black kids talk in jive, anyway - is it 'don't judge a book by its cover', or is it simply 'you can make blacks as clever as you like, they'll still behave like they came in off the street'? Worst of all - would I still care about such things if the film was funnier? Probably not. Some good moments here and there, but it's mostly a drag ; cow's quite funny, though...]

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II (48) (dir., John Woo) Tom Cruise, Dougray Scott, Thandie Newton, Ving Rhames ["That simple, huh?" muses Rhames when our hero hazards a guess as to the root of the mayhem ; "Why not?" replies the Cruiseter - but it's not quite that simple trying to figure out what this flimsy sequel thought it was doing. Much of it seems to be trying for Bond-style suavity - British accents, a scene at the racetrack, a line about "taking a thief to catch a thief" ; the music isn't what you might expect, sounding at various points like it might launch into either the Dave Matthews Band or Dire Straits' "Private Investigations" ; and Woo tries - at least for a while - to infuse the whole thing with a swooning romanticism. Yet it never gels, comes off tired and tentative, as secondhand as his trademark slo-mo and fluttering pigeons ; "Mind if I'm on top?" smirks Nyah to Ethan at their first real contact, inadvertently bundled together in a narrow space, and you long for the elegant zing of the similar scene in OUT OF SIGHT. Only when it does get simpler, reducing Newton from self-assured to pathetic and irrelevant ("You OK?" asks Cruise ; "I am now," she sighs, sinking into his arms), and turning into a meat-and-potatoes action flick does it even begin to come together : the more-bang-for-your-buck second half boasts undeniable highlights, though the final fight feels like three martial-arts moves strung together ad nauseam, and at least one of our hero's ruses is absurd (unless we're supposed to believe he carries prosthetic masks for all occasions in his back-pocket). Is there an invasive-technology subtext in the characters spying on each other and wearing each other's identities, not to mention the basic premise of Science over-reaching itself? Who knows, in this mess? In a word, underwhelming.]

BOILER ROOM (56) (dir., Ben Younger) Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt [Fast-talking fun with a beer-party vibe and occasional music-video visuals, falling to pieces in the final stretch. Making the (excellent) point that a lust for money is implanted everywhere you turn in our society doesn't quite finesse its own relish in watching our heroes rake it in, or barely-concealed envy for their Porsche-friendly lifestyle, any more than admitting its debt to GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS makes that debt any less painfully apparent : Affleck does Alec Baldwin well enough, but there's a reason why Mamet limited the character to one scene - and why he didn't bother including any saintly working-class girlfriends or I'm-sorry-no- I'm-sorry father-son reconciliations, nor did he break the sense of claustrophobia to show the suckered client's life falling apart (not a terrible idea, but the scenes feel oddly irrelevant to the rest of it). Enjoyable nonetheless, mostly because these people do intermittently sound like they could "sell bubblegum to the lockjaw ward at Bellevue" ; but you get the feeling Younger's probably better at pitching his screenplays than actually writing them.]

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE (35) (dir., Jasmin Dizdar) Nicholas Farrell, Charlotte Coleman, Edin Dzandzanovic [Why is this so annoying? Isn't it lively and sometimes funny, doesn't it boast a more complex outlook on ex-Yugoslavia than, e.g., WELCOME TO SARAJEVO? Maybe it's the strain of self-loathing running through it, the way it seems to downgrade its Bosnia-related (but London-set) stories because hey, how can these people's problems possibly compare with the real horrors Out There ("people don't give a shit about what's going on out there," declares someone, inviting us to shake our heads sadly)? Everyone's a caricature but the too-broad humour never bites, and dries up respectfully when we get to the war-zone scenes (though they actually contain the film's best joke, Griffin the junkie proffering his heroin-stash as anaesthetic). The intent may be blithe, fizzy comedy (gotta hate that sub-Kusturica party music) with a serious edge, but it comes across as reductive, even dismissive - who cares about these generically thuggish football hooligans and stodgily dysfunctional middle-class families, and "Telegraph"-reading Tory twits with their daughters named Portia? Certainly packs a lot in, from asylum-seekers to Internet porn, but it's hard to be clever when you're lying prostrate at the altar of Western-liberal guilt : "This is London Transport - we don't behave like that," admonishes the conductor, separating a Serb and Croat fighting on a bus ; "You don't understand - he burned my village," they reply. Possible parallels between Britain and ex-Yugoslavia - both multicultural, with a rabidly nationalist minority - pale beside the emphasis on contrasts.]

CLAIRE DOLAN (60) (dir., Lodge Kerrigan) Katrin Cartlidge, Vincent D'Onofrio, Colm Meaney [Something's going on here, but what? Fans of Kerrigan's CLEAN, SHAVEN know the feeling (Cartlidge, with her drawn, vulpine features, might be the female equivalent of Peter Greene in that film), and know also that he deals in splintered images - part-reflecting them in shards of mirror, cutting them off in abrupt editing style - and emotional landscapes of nameless unease. The atmosphere isn't actually a million miles from what David Mamet does - uninflected line-readings backed by a spare, vaguely menacing score - but Mamet turns opacity into a game (things are never as they seem) whereas Kerrigan's credo is you can never really know the truth about anyone. Meaney's character claims to know what Claire's really like, but he's wrong of course ; we don't know either, any more than we can see into the dark-glass buildings (framed as abstract patterns) behind the opening credits - though money is clearly important (she lives by it, finally refuses it when she declares her independence ; D'Onofrio's character dismisses it, gives it away freely) and sexual alienation is a constant (is there an echo of REPULSION in the beauty-parlour scenes?). Kerrigan's virtue (and problem) is he writes only with his camera, but at least you know it's no accident that Claire is always alone in the frame (till she meets D'Onofrio, then it's all two-shots). Those unwilling / unable to appreciate such stuff don't stand a chance here ; for the others, an austere, coherent piece, boring and thrilling in roughly equal measure.]

MEN WITH GUNS (56) (dir., John Sayles) Federico Luppi, Damian Delgado, Dan Rivera Gonzalez [Pretty much as expected, only nobody mentioned Slawomir Idziak was the DP, nor did I expect it to be so powerful, despite the one-sided politics - partly no doubt because Mr. Idziak's burnished colours and trademark deep-orange filter create a hothouse world-within-the-world where normal rules don't apply, making the film an effective journey into Third World hellishness. It might be even more effective if the Luppi character didn't behave like such a moron (denial is one thing, but the man acts like he's lived his life in a plastic bubble : "These are ... human beings!" he gasps when the inevitable streetwise kid, a.k.a. Expository Device, leads him to the dumping-ground for atrocity victims), and if it weren't so clearly made by concerned liberal outsiders waxing indignant over the Chardonnay (even the production company's called "Anarchists' Convention" ; betcha they're not really anarchists, though). Very much a writer's film, for better and worse - Sayles repeats lines in different contexts (e.g. Luppi's line about his "legacy") to ironic effect, and the various parts all feel connected by common themes, but there's also painful contrivances like the ignorant American tourists ("Ask him why they don't have fajitas here") and the whole thing seems a little pat, ironies all too clearly laid out (our hero taught his students to fight ignorance, but he was the ignorant one all along ; his "educated" students were tortured in a schoolhouse, "graduating" to the dumping-ground ; and so on). Works while you're watching it though, and some bits (like the priest's story) are hard to shake ; not entirely sure why it keeps being repeated that "people love drama", as if to justify something, unless the film somehow thinks it's doing a sensationalist Oliver Stone number on its subject (it isn't) ; Sayles the director uninspired, fond of devices like the camera panning across a map as characters go from A to B, but at least he doesn't get in the way.]

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (55) (dir., William Friedkin) Samuel L. Jackson, Tommy Lee Jones, Guy Pearce, Bruce Greenwood [The spirit of RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY flickers through this absorbing (if alarming) drama, except the superannuated duo in this case aren't men of honour in a venal world but men of battle ("warriors," as the film puts it) in a world run by cowardly pen-pushers. Those who see no difference between the two are obviously its natural audience, and it is fascinating in a number of ways : for the defensive tone of its old-style militarist patriotism (the kind that declares commanding soldiers to be "the greatest honour an American can have"), clearly feeling itself out of place in today's world, for its take on warfare in the age of Kosovo (where the only territory Western nations fight over is the moral high ground), above all for the fact that it's not actually about modern warfare at all but a film about Vietnam, belatedly trying to justify the horrors committed there. It intrudes both explicitly - in the jungle-set prologue and the short scene at the Vietnam War Memorial - and implicitly, when Jackson says "if I'm guilty of this, then I'm guilty of everything I've done in combat for the past 30 years", or when he's accosted by protesters waving signs reading "Baby Killer" and confronts them, refusing to be cowed (co-writer James Webb served in 'Nam, and you feel he's spent years fantasising about a scene like this) ; and it also underlies the film's bizarre strategy, emphasising the suffering caused by Jackson's actions - bloodied corpses, a crippled little girl - even as it's apparently justifying them (message : don't be swayed by what you might see on the evening news - horrible things are often necessary and admirable in the heat of battle). Awkward to think about, but at least it's about something (and its forthright hawkishness is preferable to the equivocations of e.g. THE PATRIOT) ; edgy and prickly as courtroom drama, and the stars make convincingly hard-ass, hard-drinking types, sorting out their problems with a massive fist-fight. Non-US audiences know the premise is unlikely - any protest, however "peaceful", outside a US Embassy would be swarming with local cops cosying up to the superpower - but can put that down to America's famous paranoia about the outside world.]

THE PATRIOT (47) (dir., Roland Emmerich) Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, Jason Isaacs, Joely Richardson, Tom Wilkinson [Saw this just a day or so after the broadly similar LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (charismatic soldier leads ragtag troops to victory against a regular army), which I felt went a little heavy on the empty spectacle - but it's a mine of ambivalence and complexity next to this simple-minded, intermittently exciting action pic. The theme also recalls UNFORGIVEN (violent man trying to escape his past, afraid that "my sins will return to visit me"), except that our hero happily gives in to his bloodlust even before the halfway mark, and there's no suggestion that he's lost anything by it ("You've done nothing for which you should be ashamed," asserts his sister-in-law, even after he's hacked away frenziedly at a British corpse, emerging wild-eyed and blood-spattered). Most annoying is perhaps the craven way it tries to be 'responsible' about the subject, soberly averring (after it's slaked our thirst for cannonballs shearing people's heads off and the like) that war mustn't slide into barbarity, having its hero order his men not to kill the wounded or those trying to surrender - indulging only in 'acceptable' slaughter, as if he's 'come to terms' with his violent nature (Will Munny and T.E. Lawrence were destroyed by theirs). It's one of many corporate timidities, like the slaves who aren't really slaves on our hero's plantation (but they might as well be slaves, for all the personality they're afforded), or Ledger promising a black man that "a lot of things will change after the War" (blatantly untrue, but a salve to our liberal conscience), or Gibson emoting nobly about the inadequacy of violent revenge ("Why do men think they can justify Death?") before happily plunging a bayonet into the man who killed his sons. As a film, overlong and slackly-developed, veering from portentous militarism (men standing up one by one to answer the call of the Revolution, martial music crashing on the soundtrack) to gross sentimentality every time we turn to our hero's corn-fed kiddies (children seem to have become the new Christianity, excusing any atrocity if it's carried out on their behalf) ; goes to sleep completely in the second half, has to slap itself awake with gratuitous acts of brutality ; nicely photographed though, Caleb Deschanel in dusky-pastoral FLY AWAY HOME mode, and the battle scenes are often quite stirring : film's key image is perhaps the early one of Gibson's young son playing with his toy soldiers, and it works well enough as long as it follows his example. How can Tom Wilkinson always do the same things, yet remain so effortlessly enjoyable?...]

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? (33) (dir., Mike Nichols) Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, Greg Kinnear, John Goodman, Ben Kingsley [So much talent - not just the cast and director but Michael Ballhaus as DP, Carter Burwell on music, Bo Welch designing - to so little purpose : a handful of medium-sized chuckles separated by long painful stretches of trying to spin a movie out of one-joke material. Shandling's character is a big problem - not a character but a one-liner, a reductio ad absurdum of sexist-pig stereotypes (the man who, quite literally, only wants one thing, or perhaps the man who has trouble talking about his feelings - because he doesn't have any) ; he wears out his welcome after about five minutes, leaving the film trying to distract attention away from him via supporting characters and politically-incorrect button-pushing ("Dykes - made popular on television, now they're everywhere," says Kinnear's amusingly odious exec). Only Bening seems curiously energised by the whole sorry enterprise ; maybe she can relate to the tale of a spunky, intelligent chick who winds up marrying a professional sex-machine...]