Films Seen - September 2003
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
MONDAYS IN THE SUN (52) (dir., Fernando Leon de Aranoa) Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, Jose Angel Egido [If this were American, it might start a revolution - but it's European, and we've seen a few too many of these tales of working-class pride and solidarity in the face of hardship and a wintry economic climate. Lacks the biting, politicised humour of a Ken Loach, or the local colour of Guédiguian, or the spilling-over urgency of ROSETTA or the male strippers of THE FULL MONTY (though that's probably the one it's closest to), substitutes instead a kind of downbeat soulfulness and a style so simple it's a big deal when we get a jump-cut in a drunken monologue. Huge props for Bardem, bearish and dignified, suggesting banked violence just in the way he carries himself - like a Spanish Oliver Reed with extra ideology - but the points about inertia and emasculation are pretty thin stuff, and the sad-sack travails (watching half a football match from a building site behind the stadium, stealing a wreath from a rich man's coffin when someone dies) get repetitive. Sample dialogue: "The question is not if we believe in God. The question is if God believes in us."]
BRUCE ALMIGHTY (35) (dir., Tom Shadyac) Jim Carrey, Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman, Philip Baker Hall [A reader writes: "Dear Theo, First of all can I say how much I enjoy your rapier wit and keen critical nous, it's true I have fucked up on occasion like with the mosquito and herpes but I think you've turned out pretty well in My opinion. This is God, by the way, we're all big fans up here, I just wanted to vent a little on a picture called BRUCE ALMIGHTY which I caught recently in my Infinite Wisdom. This is the picture where I give Jim Carrey all My powers and go on holiday, it is also a picture about Jim Carrey coming to terms with the fact that making people laugh - "to lower and debase myself for the amusement of total strangers" - is a great gift and nothing to be ashamed of, which I have to say made Me want to smite him down or something ; don't you hate when movie stars try to play auteur and bring their personal Issues into their movies, tell it to your shrink for My sake. Someone even calls it (i.e. Jim's sense of humour) evidence of "divine spark" which I'm sorry, you don't see Me being all spastic and pulling monkeys out of people's butts. Actually you don't see Me at all, so never mind. Anyhow, this is another of those pop-culture hits where I'm all cuddly and anthropomorphic, like when George Burns played Me in OH GOD and that Joan Whatshername sang "What if God was one of us" (yea but I will smite her down one of these days), though in fact I'm totally a jerk in this movie, making Jim Carrey the centre of the world so he can learn a lesson about not being selfish and What Really Matters in Life while everything else goes to hell and Japanese are dying in tsunamis and whatnot ; in fact this is really a creepy solipsistic kind of movie, I almost thought about making it a flop but you can't impede free will like Morgan Freeman says. One thing I liked though was the way I weasel out of everything at the end, giving Jim all this crap about 'Look within' and the real miracle is a single mother taking her kids to soccer practice and so on. This is a neat idea, especially when I say, "You need a miracle? Be the miracle!", this is certainly going to make My life a whole lot easier from now on. Be the miracle, Theo! Keep up the good work. Yours, G."]
SHANGHAI KNIGHTS (39) (dir., David Dobkin) Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Wong Fann, Donnie Yen [SHANGHAI NOON was a probably unrepeatable happy accident but this is just uninspired and lazy, even the outtakes at the end obviously phony; still fun to see Jackie use whatever comes to hand - a vase, a ladder, an umbrella, a ship's life-preserver - as a weapon in creative ways, but he gets nothing to do and they even slather old-time slapsticky music over his revolving-door fight (a later tribute to SINGIN' IN THE RAIN is similarly ruined by a too-hefty dose of "Singin' in the Rain"); Wilson's character also much reduced, alternating between cowardly and randy - are they trying to turn him into Bob Hope? - with only maybe one glimpse of his surfer-Zen persona (when he tells the villain, "Whoa, whoa. What's with the personal attacks?"). So thin it has to rely on 60s pop songs, incongruous movie references - "You're gonna need a bigger gun" - and a raft of cheerful anachronisms; so thin, in fact, that I soon stopped trying to laugh and started pondering unnecessary questions. Has Owen Wilson ever explained how he got that nose? Is it ever okay to call a Queen "Your Highness" - as they do here - or does it have to be "Your Majesty"? Would a 19th-century London street urchin really say "Cool..."?]
THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS (72) (second viewing: 70) (dir., Alan Rudolph) Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary, Robin Tunney [Maybe need to see this again, given that my main problem was the uneasy mix of realistic and fantastical - which then gets triumphantly pulled together in the extended family-'flu sequence, so it probably wouldn't be so bothersome on second viewing (Denis Leary might still seem too much of a jerk for proper balance, though, and yeah I guess it may be somewhat conservative in equating a desire to rock the marital boat with the rants of a belligerent loon). A fantasia on marriage, funny-sad in the way you often get in novels but seldom in movies: decay (e.g. of a marriage) is part of Nature but we plug away regardless, taking refuge in the tiny details - massaging a wife's feet when she wakes up with cramp in the middle of the night, trying to hold a conversation while telling two kids to stop fighting and a third to eat her vegetables. Not a lot to say, really, except I smiled wryly when Scott (magnificent) suddenly becomes aware of his wife's body in the midst of a mundane moment - sexual attraction taken for granted, bubbling up fleetingly like an old familiar song on the radio - and felt bad when he deliberately tries to poison his marriage in frustration at his own inaction, and obscurely happy when the little girl finally opens her arms to her mommy at the end, darkness (temporarily?) lifting and a natural order of things re-asserting itself. Line that no-one under the age of 25 can possibly grasp the ineffable beauty of: "Remember when a year seemed like a long time?"...] [Second viewing, April 2008: Uneasy mix of realistic and fantastical still a problem, and I'd forgotten how broad and slapsticky some of the fantasy interludes are. Last half-hour is superb, though, and you have to give Rudolph and Scott credit for taking risks with what could've been a sober (and boring) indie drama. Also: most convincing 3-year-old in movie history? I think so.]
CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (85) (second viewing: 87) (dir., Andrew Jarecki) [Completing a trifecta of great American documentaries about miscarriages of justice - see also THIN BLUE LINE and PARADISE LOST - though, as in those films, the case itself is actually the least of it: makes it clear in the first 45 minutes that the charges against the Friedmans were trumped-up, at the very least (though Arnold Friedman himself was obviously a pedophile), and moves off into deeper waters - a family messily imploding, everyone seeing the same events in different ways, and the elusive nature of Truth and Memory (the latter represented by the family videos, a fixed point in a case that revolved so much around false memories). Indelibly sad as a tale of a marriage that should never have been - yet it all looked so perfect - adding layers all the time: seems to reach the ORDINARY PEOPLE-ish conclusion that Mom was the villain, but look again and she's suddenly a victim, an outsider in her own family, alienated from the "gang" of men (if she didn't stand by her husband, she explains, it's because she was trying to be honest, not malicious - yet she may indeed have destroyed the family, in semi-conscious revenge for the family destroying her); raises the spectre of Denial only to dismiss such easy answers - blind faith, it points out, is a kind of love (David is clearly deluded about many things - incl. his parents' sex life - but his fiery devotion is genuine), just as the video tapes themselves are a kind of Denial that nonetheless transmutes the ordeal into Art, part of the artistic vein shared by Arnold and his eldest son, a hidden life (Arnito Rey!) just like his other, darker secrets. You can never know anyone, "yet that doesn't mean the father I knew wasn't real"; everything constantly shifts - even the figure of the lawyer, usually a late-appearing white knight in this kind of movie, who may have just made up that story about Arnold abusing Jesse (did he also, we realise with a start, make up the earlier, shocking anecdote he tells about their prison interview?) - ending with a film that's like walking in quicksand, every firm foothold suddenly collapsing. Finds a truth many times more complex than the tabloid exposé it resembles, partly because it has as its single unambiguous fact the videos - the inner life of the family, irony being that it's true because it doesn't matter if it's true - like a rock amid the shifting sands (notably painful moment: the brothers horsing around for the video camera after the guilty verdict, doing their standard reality-avoidance technique, and being misinterpreted as a lack of remorse); "This is private, so you really shouldn't be watching this," says David, but only in laying themselves wide open - "I feel like I'm being dissected" - can the Friedmans be redeemed. Most moving - and upsetting - film of the year.]
CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE (71) (dir., McG) Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, Demi Moore, Bernie Mac [Should a good joke be told twice? Yes when the second time is even more delirious and longueur-free, working in a kind of stream-of-consciousness blending of a short attention span, endless pop-culture references and the most eclectic soundtrack in ages, not to mention sheer try-anything audacity: two minutes takes us from a cameo by Bruce Willis, promptly shot dead in a complicated in-joke - because the film's much-ballyhooed co-star is his ex-wife - straight to MC Hammer and "Can't Touch This" on TV, pulling back to a (literally) tight shot of Cameron Diaz' behind as she wiggles to the song giving way to out-of-nowhere entrance of the other two Angels, who join her in impromptu dance number (then back to the plot). Completely self-conscious, not just in the obvious ways - talk of a sequel being better than the original, a burst of "Flashdance (What A Feeling)" when the Angels disguise themselves as steel-welders - but also in the three stars being hyper-aware of their own sexuality and the awesome ludicrousness of being karate-kicking action heroines while also being girly-girls who worry about relationships and dote on their daddies (incl. invisible daddy Charlie), and McG very aware of the grammar he's flouting by e.g. coming back to a conversation 15 minutes after leaving it, as if nothing had happened (a joke, but still). Starts a little awkward, finishes badly (with a too-broad love-in, amassing all the characters as if for a curtain-call), still pretty exhilarating for an hour in the middle there. Most meta moment: the CAPE FEAR spoof that's actually spoofing CAPE FEAR spoofs. Runner-up: the Olsen twins.]
LEGALLY BLONDE 2 (45) (dir., Charles Herman-Wurmfeld) Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, Sally Field, Regina King [All hail Reese Witherspoon, doing for "Oh" what the Mob did for "Fuhgedaboutit": there's the basic, bright-eyed "Oh!" - like the first syllable of "Omigod!" - when she's calling someone or about to squeal with joy (which is often); there's a rare "Oh" of surprise, as when her Chihuahua starts making out with a Rottweiler; and there's an "Oh..." of disappointment, the smile temporarily extinguished, when people are mean or the real world intrudes on her better, sparklier one - but only for a moment, for the Elle persona is irrepressible, marked by optimism and generosity (she gives money to a homeless man others ignore; she shares credit with the other aides after a triumph, even though they did nothing to help her). This actually works better than the first LEGALLY BLONDE, more straightforwardly a cartoon - Elle an island of pink in a sea of grey suits - Reese abstracting the character from any reality to the realm of Gidget (can it be coincidence that the Chihuahua's played by a mutt named Moondoggie? not to mention Sally Field as the mentor-turned-nemesis) and MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON; unfortunately it's really silly, not in a good way - i.e. stuff like the interns' dance number, or the squealing bimbo 'sisters', or the "Million Dog March" did nothing for my sense of humour - and a little pointless since the plot gets resolved either through good luck or only-in-the-movies speeches (at least MR. SMITH had the smarts to show James Stewart couldn't have made it without the System). All in all, not too enjoyable; all hail Reese, however, with the breezy, boundless confidence and crisp way with a line like "Good morning, fellow public servants! (adorable giggle) It's my first day". Year's strangest cameo: James Urbaniak as the "weird key swallower".]
TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES (64) (dir., Jonathan Mostow) Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken [Obviously a footnote to a great franchise, but there's clever touches here: the early stages played with zero explanation, off the mystified Danes who wonders why all these futuristic-looking types are shooting guns and chasing each other, though of course we know (the plot is identical to T2); Arnie's self-mockery, talking to the hand and otherwise playing up the Terminator's literal-minded lack of humour ("Drop dead, asshole!" "Am unable to comply"); making his opponent a foxy Terminatrix; a car-chase of magnificently wanton destruction, featuring a fire engine, various police cars, an out-of-control crane laying waste to a city street and a stunt where Arnie deliberately drives a car under the body of a truck, ripping off the entire top half and knocking off the Terminatrix, who’s clinging to the roof; genre conventions generally snapping-to with familiar but pleasing efficiency (maybe it's just that I saw it straight after HULK, and appreciated the absence of hot air); an ending that's genuinely, surprisingly affecting for fans of the series, though it does slightly make a mockery of the film's endorsement of free will - even a cyborg gets to shape its own destiny - over determinism. Guess philosophical consistency kind of took a back seat to the lucrative (if remote) possibility of a "Terminator 4"...]
HULK (45) (dir., Ang Lee) Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Nick Nolte, Sam Elliott [You can just picture all these super-smart people - Schamus and Lee and the rest - going "Now, what would be a cinematic way to illustrate split personality?" Of course - split-screen! And: "How can we suggest straight away that our hero is emotionally repressed, and keeps the world at a distance?" Here's a thought: have him wear a helmet the first time we see him! And: "How do we show - you know, visually - that Hulk is a kind of freedom, liberating all the inner rage?" Got it - make the whole thing gloomy and claustrophobic except the climax, which is set in bright sunlight and has Hulk leaping athletically through space! Shouldn't really grumble, and I guess it's a good thing (isn't it?) that a comic-book action hero gets approached in such elevated terms - a logical next step from the emphasis on character and respect for the comix-geek fanbase in SPIDER-MAN and X2 - but not only can you see the joins, the story itself falls short of its monumental build-up (Hulk's appearance delayed by an hour, preceded by frenzied montage of just-about-everything). Even with the Id (slightly) complicated by glimpses of vulnerability, the emotions here are no more sophisticated than they were in such obvious antecedents as KING KONG (dare one mention THE MASK, another green hero?), the battle with the dogs echoing Kong's skirmish with the dinosaurs in that film, ditto the iconic use of a closed door separating Us and It and image of a damsel-in-distress being cradled: the beast is Rage, fuelled by testosterone (in fact he behaves like a penis, bigger and angrier when aroused, literally deflating once the crisis is over) - except Lee's conceits get in the way, looking for meanings that aren't there and ending up hollow and pretentious. Don't know what Nick Nolte thought he was doing in his final scene with Bana, with the mad tics and crying to the heavens and whatnot, but no way was this a good idea...]
THIRTEEN (13) (dir., Catherine Hardwicke) Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed, Holly Hunter, Jeremy Sisto [Cheap gag in the rating? Maybe so - i.e. maybe it could've gone to 20 or something - but why do any favours for a film that annoyed me so consistently? Irresponsible glorification of teenage angst, starting with girl asking her friend to hit her as hard as she can in desperate attempt at sensation ("I can't feel anything") - kids today, so jaded, so benumbed - ending with the same girl letting out a cry of rage and pain; in between comes glossy descent into "a rock & roll hell of her own creation" (Owen Gleiberman), done with maximum music-video flash - backlit fountains where our heroine frolics, tilted camera when fights with brother, prurient-yet-'ironic' zoom in close on the lesbo kiss - and maximum hysteria, nice girl turning into cheating lying foul-mouthed tongue-and-navel-piercing hellion (and all because she fell in with the wrong crowd...). Guaranteed to alarm gullible parents and/but excite gullible teens with a fantasy both glamorous and sad, in the Princess Di celebrity manner (poor girl even cuts herself, in a poignant reminder that bad behaviour won't bring you happiness); those of us in neither camp may wonder what her problem is, seeing as she gets no restrictions, a life on the edge and the world's most understanding mother to catch her when she falls (Hunter's character makes you want to shake her but at least it's great that she holds on to her love-and-kindness philosophy to the bitter end - Hardwicke doesn't make the mistake Lukas Moodysson made, in a different context, in TOGETHER). Mostly despicable, also starring some of the world's worst teenage poetry; "That's really heavy"...]
Toronto International Film Festival (45 movies seen)
SPELLBOUND (70) (dir., Jeffrey Blitz) [A nifty entertainment, and the lack of ambition others denigrate was actually a strength for me: doesn't try too much or get in the way of its subject, the absolutely functional structure - profile of each kid, followed by the spelling bee itself - pointedly refraining from editorial comment. It is manipulative, of course, sometimes blatantly, not above the easy laugh or cheap surprise - e.g. when it cross-cuts one of the girls thinking about a word with her mother saying "We came this close to victory", making you think she's going to miss the word when in fact she doesn't - and manipulative in the broader sense too, cutting-and-pasting to give each kid (probably spurious) 'personality'. Yet the subject is beyond even the canniest documentarian, creating its own unequivocal stories - and tension - because the spellers are judged so directly (and sadistically, to this non-American): impossible not to feel a certain pity for the ghetto girl who's simply unable to cope with the pressure, or cringe as ADD poster-boy Harry takes so long agonising over a word the moderator tells him to hurry up. Transparently enjoyable, a little movie that could. Comments on the American Dream - spelling bees as badge of assimilation, a way for children of immigrants to excel, incidentally exorcising their parents' lingering fear of this strange new language - are a bonus more than anything.]
SWIMMING POOL (60) (dir., François Ozon) Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier, Charles Dance [See Charlotte Rampling's face register subtle gradations of thought - pleasure, surprise, wariness - during a simple phone call. (See her breasts, and piggishly muse that she's holding up quite well, for an older broad.) See Ludivine Sagnier - the kinky sophisticate's Leelee Sobieski - in full Wild Child mode, smiling wickedly or else lolling back with the luxurious grin of a contented cat, flashing hurt eyes or collapsing in a little-girl pout. (See her swimming naked, lying prone on the bedclothes or flouncing around in her little cotton shorts, and recall the fringe benefits of arthouse filmgoing.) See François Ozon deliver a masterclass in unhurried elegance, lining up his shots with deceptive ease - conjuring offbeat moves and foreground/background compositions seemingly out of nowhere - amusing himself with frames-within-the-frame (all those doorways) and that joke shot, repeated with variations, of a pan across a woman's body and up to the man standing over her. (Even those quick shots in a Tube train at the start seem so full, and somehow French.) See it all go to waste as the script remains half-baked, plot desultory and the final twist insufficient (if intriguing). Not much there; lots of fun, though.]
RESPIRO (68) (dir., Emanuele Crialese) Valeria Golino, Francesco Casisa, Vincenzo Amato, Filippo Pucilo [Quite insane, and amazing; superficially in MALENA (or LA TERRA TREMA) mould but village life is a whirl of eccentric mood swings here, and the harsh working-class vibe may echo miserablist drama of the NIL BY MOUTH variety - machismo, endemic violence, victimised women - but the tone is far more amused and chaotic. Mopeds, tiny pickup trucks and gangs of boys roam the rocky landscape, backed by the screech of gulls and greenish-blue of the sea; stern oppression - violent censure after a woman takes her top off on a deserted beach - followed by unexpected sensuality and a lawless approach to life; a boy plays the macho with his flighty mother then melts childishly as she says "You're so strong"; his father beats him almost casually, without anger, rages at his wife yet obviously finds her irresistible; relationships mutate at a moment's notice, everything is fluid - you think you're watching a gritty tale of unhappy families then everyone goes out on the passegiata and it's suddenly a sweet look at teenage courtship rituals. Impressionistic, leapfrogging narrative - note how the killing of the dogs (for instance) is reduced to a couple of vivid images - with a slippery texture, almost self-parody at times (gesticulating Italians and so forth) yet too unpredictable to slip into banality; AMARCORD presumably an influence, yet this is more mysterious because you're never quite sure how Crialese feels about it all. Alas, the final quarter loses the fluidity, settling down to mere plot, and the final shot doesn't quite have the dreamlike power intended (it's just a bunch of people standing in a pool, really); misses 70+ by a whisker, never really threatens greatness anyway; still among the year's most beguiling movies.]
FULLTIME KILLER (64) (dir., Johnny To / Wai Ka-Fai) Andy Lau, Takashi Sorimachi, Kelly Lin [A film so meta it even supplies its own commentary, in the shape of a movie-loving hitman who describes an action flick he saw (actually DESPERADO) as "not the best movie, but I like the style" and later says he likes action flicks as long as "they're not boring and have fresh ideas". Not the best movie (though it's pretty good) but I like the style, and it's not boring and has fresh ideas - from bursts of classical music to a thrill-seeking camera that swoops through thickets of bytes and cables to illustrate an e-mail being sent or burrows underground through a coffin to have a look at the corpse, right down to the gleeful self-referentiality itself: a videogame-like climax is prefaced with the comment that it's going to be just like a videogame (it also includes a seriously deranged shoot-out standing on mountains of crates, with fireworks going off all around), and there's even a cop writing a book about it all, seeking to make sense and give it closure like a hapless director (or viewer). 21st-century Hong Kong filmmakers see the whole continent as their playground, flitting from HK to Korea, Japan, Singapore, and also know their Hollywood - their POINT BREAK and THE SHINING - and make a point of letting us know they know; can full East-West synergy be far behind?]