2008 Toronto Film Festival - Part 4

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2008)

Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz)

One of my few largely random choices this year, this is a broodingly exotic drama about a couple (Emmanuelle Beart and Rufus Sewell) who lost their son in the 2004 tsunami; still in Thailand, the wife becomes convinced the boy is alive, over the Burmese border. She convinces her husband they should pay a shady character to get them there, and from then on the film reminded me increasingly of Apocalypse Now, although with a very different heart of darkness. Their journey is a deliberately murky mélange of menace, spirituality, spectacular (but not overly dwelled-on) landscapes, swirling river mist, and escalating ill fortune and madness. It’s quite fascinating, although many of the elements seem questionable: the set-up appears rather rushed, the ending fanciful (if impactful), many of the details contrived. Du Welz doesn’t always seem in full control of his apparatus – an early scene in the night of the city feels as if he mounted the camera on the head of a frantic goat and just accepted whatever jumble of images resulted. The beautiful Beart (I said the choice was largely random) is enormously compelling, even if, again, her character’s psychology never completely convinces.

Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski)

Skolimowski was a key figure of the 60’s through the early 80’s – bursting with radical energy out of his native Poland and becoming an exotic wanderer of a kind you seldom see now. His best-known film may be the compelling Deep End, which still turns up on the Scream cable channel occasionally; you might also remember Moonlighting, with Jeremy Irons as a Polish labourer stranded in London. His last work, Ferdyduke, was by most accounts a hodgepodge, and Skolimowski has not directed in the seventeen years since then (he turned up as an actor in Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, playing Naomi Watts’ hot-blooded uncle). The new film takes him right back to his roots, to the most unprepossessing Polish locations and characters possible. The protagonist is a sad middle-aged lump of a man, recently out of jail for a rape he didn’t commit, who develops an attachment to a woman living in an adjacent block of nurses’ quarters; at first he spies on her through binoculars, then starts to sneak into her room at night (having fortified her sugar supply with ground-up sleeping pills). It has a wonderfully creepy opening, slyly misleading us about the meaning of certain events, and establishing a feeling of grey, unadorned (but very specifically visualized) dread that persists through much of the film. To digress for a second, I always tend to think of Skolimowski and Roman Polanski as being on the same general page, and I recently rewatched Polanski’s late-90’s thriller The Ninth Gate – where Johnny Depp tracks down the long-buried secret of communing with Satan. I enjoyed the fluidity of it in a way, but I couldn’t stop thinking that Polanski must feel a sense of loss within himself, at how the precise intimations of pain and evil in his best earlier work blanded out into mere glossy artifice. The Pianist subsequently took him somewhat back in the right direction, but he’s a rich international figure now – it’s plainly too late. Skolimowski by contrast, never as feted or scrutinized even at his peak, could yet experience a true artistic revitalization. Four Nights with Anna isn’t quite that – for all its intrigue and impeccable handling (and, almost in the margins, its concise portrait of the continuing limitations and lingering authoritarianism in the post-Communist East), it’s ultimately just too minor I think. But this is one of my favourite things about movies, when the old guys show who’s still in charge.

Adam Resurrected (Paul Schrader)

For some reason, I end up mentioning Schrader in this space more than almost any other director – the arc of his career (writing Taxi Driver; directing movies from American Gigolo to Affliction) and his personal travails (born into strict religious fundamentalism; all kinds of obsessions and addictions since then) fascinates me, even though the impact of his films on me is hit and miss. The new film is in the higher echelon of his work, although it’s also easy to criticize. Jeff Goldblum plays a Jewish entertainer who survives the death camp by mimicking a dog for the depraved camp commander (Willem Dafoe) and playing the violin as the victims (even his own wife and daughter) march to the gas chamber. In the 50’s he’s in Israel, frequently institutionalized at a facility in the middle of the desert, where he comes across a boy who imagines himself a dog; this allows Adam a symbolic opportunity to redeem himself, by leading the youth out of his madness. That basic set-up seems forced and unconvincing, but the film contains a lot of grim inventiveness, and Goldblum is as charismatic and inventive as he’s ever been. On the other hand, it’s not clear that Schrader ever fully worked out his attitude on the material – his handling of the material in the camps seems particularly wan, and the ending strikes an odd note. I don’t think the movie will stand as much more than a curio, but it takes on more resonance if viewed as the latest in Schrader’s many portrayals of obsessed, extreme individuals.
 

Appaloosa (Ed Harris)

Harris’ second film as director (the first was Pollock) is a mostly conventional Western, benefiting from the relative rarity of even conventional Westerns nowadays, and from a few unusual angles on the material. Harris and Viggo Mortensen play two wandering “peacekeepers” engaged to bring order to a small town terrorized by the local bigshot (Jeremy Irons) and his gang. The twists and turns conjure up echoes of virtually every movie ever made in the genre, although only intermittently to the film’s advantage. Harris doesn’t bring much visual distinction to the exercise (compared to Leone); the atmosphere is thin and rather antiseptic (compared to Peckinpah); the occasional humour is shallow and repetitive (compared to Hawks). Most interesting is the arc of the character played by Renee Zellweger - a widow who draws Harris’ affections. She takes on substantially more layering than we expect, and then the movie doesn’t extract the usual price from her either, which sets up an unusual, quite ambiguous ending. It’s good entertainment overall, although a very typical festival choice – no one will ever again be as enthusiastic about it as they were, sight unseen, that glitzy night on the red carpet.

And overall…

Many say it was a lesser festival this year, but my little piece of it (confined this year to just one or two films every day) worked out as well as I could possibly have hoped for. I’ll especially look forward to seeing Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Story again, but I was very consistently stimulated and stretched, and barely ever bored. So no complaints from me!

2008 Toronto Film Festival - Part 3

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2008)

24 City (Jia Zhang-ke)

Jia is one of the most interesting filmmakers to watch right now, partly because he’s hooked in to one of the world’s most fascinating subjects – China’s continuing modernization and the effect upon its inhabitants. His greatest expression of the theme was in The World a few years ago: since then he’s taken a more incremental approach, exploring with documentary and semi-documentary techniques. 24 City continues this project, focusing on a long-standing Chengdu factory now being demolished, to be replaced by a modern commercial/residential complex, and interviewing a cross-section of those affected (some of them real; others played by actress, notably by Joan Chen who achieved fame in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor). The recurring theme is the place, or even the plausibility, of individual desires and dreams and aspirations, set against a social and industrial momentum that will marginalize, if not crush, all but the strongest/most fortunate (I was lucky enough to go to China a few years ago – mostly to Beijing and Hong Kong but also a little off the beaten track – and I’ve never felt so fully how one might simply get swallowed up). So whereas the relatively fortunate can dwell on a memory of breaking up with a girlfriend, and remembering how she resembled the heroine of a particular TV show; for others, the testimony is much grimmer, testifying to a lifelong battle for self-actualization, if not for basic human rights. Jia ventilates his film with often-ironic snatches of popular song, poetry, and asides, and overall it’s a compelling social document. My only reservation (as it was with his last film Still Life, which built a not entirely dissimilar project around the dislocation of the Three Gorges dam project) is that Jia is so talented that I can’t help feeling we’re missing out on potentially more ambitious and even more resonant works.

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)

Assayas has recently seemed preoccupied by the intersection of tech and trashiness in the confusing new world; Demonlover and Boarding Gate had a perfect feel for contemporary turbocharged alienation, but left many people feeling merely, well, alienated. The new film is superficially far removed from there – one of those typically French creations (with Juliette Binoche yet!) built around family get-togethers and conflicts. In this case, the matriarch – who’s largely dedicated her later life to preserving the memory of her uncle, a famous painter – dies, and her children must decide what to do with the house and its contents (and by extension with the heritage and worldview they represent). Two of the siblings work outside France in the new global economy; the third lives in Paris and has written a book questioning whether the economy – as usually discussed – even exists. Not hard to guess whose views prevail, and there lies the thematic link to the other recent films. Put that way, the film sounds fairly straightforward – take for example the use of a modern telephone (not even an iphone!) as a symbol of too much progress. But it’s very skillfully handled (Assayas is a master coordinator of overlapping movement, and the house and its artifacts are wonderfully conceived), and I found it quite gracefully moving overall. Assayas is no doubt a pragmatist, but the film’s sense of loss is palpable and convincing – whether directed at furniture removed from context and function into a stark museum where visitors merely snooze by on the way to the jazzier stuff, or even at the way that transgression and misdemeanor aren’t as poetically alluring as they used to be. The cast is uniformly ideal.

It Might Get Loud (Davis Guggenheim)

Guggenheim’s follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth is an all-too-convenient contrivance – he brings together three generations of rock electric guitar mastery, to see how loud it gets (answer – not as much as you might think or hope). The participants are old pro Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, U2’s famously obsessive stickler The Edge, and Jack White from The White Stripes, who most prizes atmosphere and authenticity. The actual encounter makes up relatively little of the film though, and what there is of it is pretty lifeless – the rest is separately shot footage and archival retrospectives of the three. It’s all entertaining of course, but it doesn’t feel like a very logical or necessary movie, and it doesn’t even do that good a job of showcasing the music. An Inconvenient Truth was obviously acclaimed more for the inherent worthiness of its content than for any cinematic skill – likewise, Guggenheim doesn’t bring much to the table here…indeed I’m not sure he fully realizes what’s on the table.
 

Nuit de Chien (Werner Schroeter)

Schroeter has been cited as a major art-house name for decades now, and his new film made the festival’s Masters section, but I don’t know when anyone might actually get a chance to see his work. The profile on the Senses of Cinema website says that ambiguity is “a constant trait of his films (allowing) for a degree of openness that tends either to engage or frustrate viewers depending on their tastes...his work is a testament to the very possibility of the coexistence of both celebration and parody, of both 'high' and 'low.'” His latest, the first in six years, is set in an unnamed European city undergoing major political breakdown. A high-ranking soldier returns in the middle of all this, in search of the woman he loves; along the way he brushes up against the various military and secret police factional leaders, skirmishing and plotting for control, all of which is seemingly hopeless anyway in the shadow of a pending invading force. There’s no sign of what caused the breakdown, and throughout the city little pockets of activity – usually involving hostesses, seedy bars, or surprisingly tenacious cab drivers – continue in hardy isolation. Schroeter’s approach is stark – not exactly realistic, there’s a knowing air of baroque melodrama to much of it – and of course, given the subject matter, there’s a pervasive resignation (the opening and closing epigram, intoning that “death will come when it will come,” seems to warn against our investing ourselves in the film’s apparent narrative). Given his reputation though, it works better as a semi-conventional yarn than I expected (indeed, perhaps both celebrating and parodying the broad social breakdown genre). Being totally new to his work (and maybe even if I wasn’t), it’s hard to determine what more complex strategies might lie below the film’s surface, and I do find myself wondering whether it’s viable just to dip into this one presumably late work, without any prior grounding. But maybe the use in one scene of Orson Welles’ voice from his classic War of the Worlds hoax is a tip-off not to take it too seriously. The festival program calls the film an “extraordinary gift,” but doesn’t offer much of a hint of what the specific nature of the gift might be.

2008 Toronto Film Festival - Part 2

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2008)

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)

Leigh has had a long and prestigious career but there’s a definite lack of consensus on what it amounts to. Is he an insightful chronicler of some deep truth about ordinary people, or a quirky grump off on his own peculiar ledge? I’m not sure myself, but I think he’s achieved his best work – with Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake – when focused on a particular historical or social purpose; at other times (as with All or Nothing) the films often seem to drift. The new movie, back in the present day, is built around the kind of relentlessly cheerful character who’s popped up in the margins of some of his previous films – 30-year-old Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a nursery school teacher who goes through life with a quip for every occasion and an almost pathological inability not to look at the bright side. Leigh is very good of course with the banter of the English masses (at times the movie just carries you along in a string of giggles), and although there’s little overt political content here, the film slowly lets in more of society’s dark and drab sides. In particular there’s Poppy’s tightly wound driving instructor, who simply can’t handle her, and there’s a great one-off scene with a homeless man who lurches between operatic incoherence and sharp lucidity (although Leigh has created scenes like this before too). Ultimately, there’s not much more to all this than the observation of Poppy’s best friend that “It’s hard being a grown-up,” which I suppose might broadly be what virtually every great film is about. But Poppy is a distinctive enough creation that she comes to seem almost radical. Ultimately I don’t think the film will change anyone’s opinions about Leigh, but I was firmly on board for the whole thing.

Achilles and the Tortoise (Takeshi Kitano)

Actor-director Kitano’s career has been illustrious enough to get him to the festival’s “Masters” section - he won the top price at the Venice Festival for Hana-Bi and his Zatoichi won the TIFF people’s choice award in 2003. There’s a grab-bag aspect to his work, but he’s achieved some beauty and plenty of deadpan diversion. With his last few films he’s shaken off his tough-guy origins, but at the cost of too much self-absorption. The new one is a nice little movie, straining for significance (the title metaphor doesn’t count for much) built around the intriguing concept of a dedicated life long artist who has lots of basic skill and imagination but lacks the je ne sais quoi that separates the notables from the also-rans. It takes us from his bourgeois childhood, ending in catastrophic bust, through art-school hi-jinks and an adulthood of stoic disappointments, pumped up throughout by the dazzling parade of his unwanted creations. Kitano’s expressionless block of a presence is perfectly suited to embodying the character’s older years. Throw in the recurring motif of death (but always with the sheen of art) and it makes for an engaging creation, although it’s tempting to take the easy criticism and to say that the film, like its protagonist, is more facile and resourceful than actually meaningful. This could of course be a clever fusion of form and content, a structure of bluffs and double bluffs, except that Kitano’s recent work suggests that, nah, this is actually as good as he could do.

Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino)

Sorrentino’s film probably isn’t ideally suited for those who, like me, have only a vague knowledge of post-war Italian politics (as in, it’s really dysfunctional, and a lot of people got blown up) – even the opening explanatory screen-scroll is barely penetrable. So this is a film where you have to go with the big picture, but then that’s all confusing too. Artfully so of course, for isn’t the false promise of simplicity and clarity in politics one of the great damaging illusions of our times? (cue Sarah Palin metaphor). The subject is Giulio Andreotti, who was several times Italian prime minister, maintained (as depicted here) a complex web of connections while remaining personally repressed and inscrutable, and was eventually indicted for complicity in Mafia crimes. “You’re either the most cunning criminal in the country,” says an acquaintance, “or the most persecuted man in Italy.” It’s likely that the film’s Andreotti – a man we see rip a page out of a mystery novel because he doesn’t want to know the killer – couldn’t tell you himself. The film has a silky menace that evokes the dark texture of the Godfather films (an obvious reference point in various ways); it also incorporates hints of Sergio Leone and others, although Sorrentino is much more actively experimental and out to dazzle with technique (which he frequently does, although again, not always comprehensibly). For outsiders (and no doubt largely for insiders), the murkiness about what Andreotti actually achieved (beyond a broad reference to his contribution to steering through the Cold War) makes it hard to assess his place on the moral spectrum. Still, it’s not a small achievement to make a movie that’s so compelling while yet leaving you feeling so grievously under-resourced.
 

Les plages d’Agnes (Agnes Varda)

Varda is over 80 now and has been making films for over 50 years, most recently a series of filmic essays often drawing on her own prodigiously creative existence. The latest is notionally based on the importance of various beaches in her life, but this is merely the starting point for another remarkably graceful reverie on family, friends, memory, love, loss, art and, always, cinema. She’s a compulsive recycler (one of her best-loved films The Gleaners and I took off from this trait) – I’ve now seen some of this footage (such as Jim Morrison visiting the set of Donkey Skin) three or four times in various places, and her work knowingly draws (detractors, although I’m not sure there are many of them, would say coasts) on her audience’s affection for her. The film certainly rewards it though, never more than when she once again pays tribute to her late husband Jacques Demy (who made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), who she clearly still misses keenly after 18 years and discusses here more frankly in some ways than I’ve seen before. Varda’s resources are stunning – she visits people she shot as children in her first film La Pointe Courte; displays her extra-cinematic work from 50’s photos of China to recent art installations; dresses up as a giant potato; throws in some full-frontal nudity; talks (allegedly anyway) to fellow documentarian Chris Marker, who’s hiding behind a giant cartoon cat with a disguised voice; builds herself a makeshift beach in the middle of her Paris neighbourhood…all connected so subtly and fluidly that almost immediately afterwards you struggle to recall how she could possibly have done it.

2008 Toronto Film Festival - Part 1

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2008)

35 Rhums (Claire Denis)

Denis’ films appear regularly at the festival but are rather hard to see otherwise. Her best-known may be the 1999 Beau Travail, a dream-like memory of the French Foreign Legion. I saw it twice but still found it hard to penetrate. Since then I’ve only seen Trouble Every Day, a horror movie of sorts – overflowing with fascinating, superficially contradictory elements, but very easy to lose one’s bearings in (when I saw it, many people simply walked out). This is to say that Denis’ films are not easy. 35 Rhums seems much more accommodating on the surface – a gentle portrayal of a black single father and his daughter, and some of the people in their vicinity. The title refers to the father’s notion (which he may have invented himself) that notable life-changing occasions need to be marked by 35 shots of rum; a practice that on the face of it could only result in obliterating the very memory being celebrated. This device symbolizes the film’s broader balancing between life-changing events and others which – although inherently transient - may carry as much spiritual weight at least at the time and perhaps even (given the vagaries of personality) permanently. Take for example the scene where one character, realizing that his 17-year-old (and apparently fondly regarded) cat has died during the night, throws it and its toys in the trash and almost immediately announces his intention to take a job overseas, given his sudden absence of ties. The film incorporates some wonderful invention and observation of character – overall, grappling with Denis’ complexity is as pleasurable and immediately rewarding here as I’ve ever known it to be.

Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman)

Folman’s film is in the animated genre of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, films that essentially paint on top of real life, in the hope perhaps of attaining something more vivid, heightened and meaningful than “mere” photographic representation (reportedly it’s a mixture of “flash animation, traditional hand-drawn technique, and computer-enhanced 3-D modeling”). It’s an investigation in memory, carried out at a 20-year distance by a former Israeli soldier (the director himself) who’s lost most of his recall of what he did, and tries to reconstruct it by interviewing past colleagues and others. After such a period, of course, recovered memory might be indistinguishable from retroactive invention, and for a while it seems the film may be more interesting in structure and style than historical illumination. But the closing sequences – focusing on a 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians – compellingly wash away that impression (as the program book notes though, there’s little or no explicit political content). Just as memory and history intertwine, it’s intriguing how the use of animation both confuses and heightens the sense of what’s being represented here. There are a couple of references to people going through momentous events as if in a film – to keep their emotional distance – and Folman exploits that concept quite slyly here. There’s a lot of humour and artful audience-tweaking in the mix too, but when it switches to live action for the final few shots, any sense of protective distance falls away. It’s a good film, although it feels more like one of cinema’s numerous one-shot wonders than the start of a major career for its director.

Un conte de Noel (Arnaud Desplechin)

Desplechin’s Kings and Queen is one of my favorite films of recent years – an amazing tumble of characters and ideas and allusions, with a hugely sophisticated sense of behavioural complexity. I later went back and watched the director’s earlier Esther Kahn, a very strange but perhaps waywardly brilliant English-language piece about a turn-of-the-century actress. I would love to see Desplechin’s other films, but I don’t think anything else is readily available for now. The new film is almost as enthralling as Kings and Queen. Like 35 rhums, the raw elements are deceptively familiar – one of those grand family dramas in which old resentments, passions, secrets and so on play themselves out over Christmas. The most immediate crisis is the mother’s leukemia, for which she must find a bone marrow donor within the family (she’s played by Catherine Deneuve; the fine cast also includes Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos), and yet in the film’s scheme, almost as significant is the doubling with her first-born child, who died decades earlier at the age of 6. The sense is that this threw off the family’s equilibrium forever, leaving it in constant scramble to make sense of itself, and the film orchestrates a dizzying, often knowingly theatrical, but precisely conceived tapestry of highs and lows. This being a French film, there’s an immense pragmatism to many of the attitudes (watching it in the immediate wake of the week of Sarah Palin just makes you think again how little sense of possibility so many Americans have, for all their land-of-the-free rhetoric). Who among us, comes the question near the end, can take life and its experiences seriously, and the film might be viewed as a multi-faceted reverie on attaining a bearable lightness of being (to lift a concept Desplechin, in one of the interviews on the Kings and Queen DVD, applied to that film’s protagonist). Overall, this is a very fine film.
 

The Girl from Monaco (Anne Fontaine)

I’ve written here in the past that Fontaine seems capable of major work – her last film Nouvelle Chance was completely delightful and gracefully meaningful. But she’s another director with very little exposure beyond the film festival. Her new work – selected as a festival gala - might have a shot at greater exposure, although ironically it’s certainly the least interesting of those I’ve seen. A doughy, emotionally rather repressed criminal lawyer, in Monaco for a big trial, falls for a dizzy TV weather girl who rapidly messes up his head; and by the way, his taciturn bodyguard is her former lover. The movie is fun to watch but never seems even remotely plausible; it’s one of those films the flimsiness of which gets you mulling on issues such as how the guy manages to prepare for and perform in court every day when he’s spending entire nights dancing and boozing and making whoopee. Louise Bourgoin, as the danger woman (in a part reportedly drawing on her own French TV presence), is diverting, but hardly groundbreaking – the notion of female directors redeeming characters who might appear merely slutty in coarser hands has been well covered now. And although the ending is much darker than you’d ever see in a Hollywood treatment of this material, it’s also pretty arbitrary. On the whole, after the banquet of Denis’ and Desplechin’s films, this is like snacking on a cookie.

January movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2006)

Terrence Malick’s The New World will probably end up as one of my favourite releases of 2006. His telling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas is simply ravishing, and it’s utterly surprising and bracing for virtually every single minute. It’s not just that Malick rejects the usual norms of narrative and editing – it’s as if he’s never known them, and intuitively replaces mainstream conventions with a sense of intense romanticism that spans time and space and inner and outer states. So a single cut might as easily link two months as the instant that connects two glances; the tumblings in one’s head might be as vivid as what is spoken; the logic of an emotional contrast might supercede any interest in explaining how A turned into B. This makes the movie difficult at times, but overall it provides you the consistent thrill of submitting to a simply breathtaking sensibility. I don’t know about its historical accuracy, but it certainly feels anthropologically fascinating as well. Apparently the DVD version will be around 45 minutes longer – it instantly looms as a necessary future purchase.

Looking for Comedy

Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World lives in that strange Brooks territory – it feels as if he deliberately held the movie back from being all that funny, salting it with an inscrutable dose of the knowingly sub-standard and obvious, while letting in just enough of the good stuff that we know it’s a ploy. Since he’s essentially playing himself here – as a comedian sent on a governmental mission to find out what makes the Muslims laugh - and has lots of material about “his” comedy going down like a lead balloon, there’s undoubtedly some level of meta-commentary to all this, which provides undemanding pleasure. The film’s more serious ambitions, if it really has any (it’s hard to tell) don’t amount to very much at all, and it completely peters out at the end – it plays very much as if a final act was hacked off. I enjoyed it well enough, but it’s definitely one of Brooks’ weaker efforts, and especially disappointing for how there’s the smell of pampered middle age about that weakness.

The controversial film Karla finally received a meager release, by which time all the hand wringing had pretty much petered out. It’s not much of a movie, lacking any distinctive perspective on the material – something that makes its very existence seem, indeed, tawdry and exploitative. On the other hand, it has a peculiar sense of decorum that means that much is implied more than shown, although this sometimes seems more a reflection of a TV movie sensibility than of anything you could call taste. It’s not much fun to watch, and as many have pointed out, would not likely have been worthy of a cinema release at all under normal circumstances.

Woody’s Reinvention

Woody Allen reinvents himself so startlingly in Match Point that it’s easy to overrate the end result. Far from Manhattan or easy laughs, the film is a highly precise, coolly-handled fable of deceit among the British upper classes, with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as the poor boy who marries his way into vast money, and Scarlet Johansson as the struggling actress who tempts him. It’s completely engrossing scene by scene, and Allen’s feel for the milieu is remarkable, even if the attitudes and much of the underlying concepts are somewhat antiquated. The tone falters here and there, and the meditations on chance and destiny are mostly superficial: for all his achievement here, the picture justifies Allen’s angst about not being Fellini or Bergman – his sensibility and instincts just aren’t that complex. Still, I agree with the consensus that it’s his best picture in quite a while, and it’s also the movie to date that best justifies Johansson’s burgeoning iconic status.

Imagine Me and You is a British trifle about a young woman who, while walking down the aisle with her long-time boyfriend, locks eyes with another woman, and instantly falls for her. The film aspires to a Four Weddings and a Funeral-kind of tone, falling way short (it sparks literally no laughs), and it could hardly be more predictable. The inherent timeless appeal of pretty young people in nice settings, and the absence of shrillness or preachiness, carries it along well enough, but it’s hardly necessary. And for all the basic receptiveness to same-sex relationship, the other woman is still presented in an inherently predatory light, and the movie pointedly chooses to end on an image of heterosexual rather than gay fulfillment.

Lajos Koltai’s Fateless is a chilling evocation of one Hungarian boy’s experience in the concentration camps. The film has been called overly familiar, but given the subject matter it’s difficult to disparage even a straightforward work of commemoration. And besides, Fateless does become distinctive and intriguing in its thoughts on how the extreme indoctrination of the camps becomes an alternate reality and, ultimately, even a grotesque alternative happiness: such evil as this renders all moral judgments, all sense of personal identity, utterly distorted.

Computer Blunder

Richard Loncraine’s Firewall has Harrison Ford as a bank officer and tech expert who is forced to embezzle a hundred million dollars from his own bank, by a group of ruthless hi-tech thugs holding his family at gunpoint (a premise which reminded me most immediately of Peter Yates’ The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, although I expect my memory might as easily have gone in at least a hundred different directions). It’s difficult not to admire the conceptual prowess of such genre entries – of course it’s implausible, but the use of ipods and GPS-fitted dog collars and camera phones and suchlike has real narrative panache. Unfortunately, the approach to character, theme, and other matters is much more cursory, rendering this yet another bewilderingly underachieving mainstream film.  Director Loncraine (Richard III) could certainly have done better than this, and although Ford is still an effective centre for this kind of thing, there’s no question he’s slowing down.

The very best film of the month was the re-release after thirty years of Michelangelo Antonioni’s long-absent The Passenger, which played for several weeks at the Carlton after a few showings at the Cinematheque. It comes out on DVD in March, and I’ll write about it later in the year. Oh, and I’d also written an entire article around Eli Roth’s Hostel and James Ivory’s The White Countess. For the first time in seven years of writing in this space, I blundered with my computer files and accidentally erased it (no chance of hi-tech bank hacking from this direction!). I just didn’t have the heart to write any of that stuff out again. But I basically liked them both.

Accountants in the Movies: the Next Big Thing

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2005)

Today I come out of the closet and make to you this confession – I am not the man I seem to be. Well, I already have to correct myself, for I have no idea how these weekly columns make me seem. I’ve never received any marriage proposals from it, to cite just one possible benchmark. But anyway, the point is that the column doesn’t actually take me a week to write, and doesn’t finance the life to which I’ve become accustomed. Or even the life to which my dog has become accustomed. So I work in the securities industry. And as if that wasn’t already enough of a blow to my credibility, I’m an accountant – I have a CA. I hasten to add that my job doesn’t actually involve much accounting; I’ve evolved beyond that. But nevertheless, by my admitting this much, the damage is done. And I only ask that if you’re already thinking my modest credibility is gone, and that this is the end of the relationship, then remember it’s all for the homeless.

You Can Do Better

Some people in the office know I write these columns and they know about my interest in movies generally, so I regularly get asked for questions and opinions. I don’t really like it – the conversations usually pivot on pretty low-grade films, and I’d rather keep the two worlds separate anyway. A couple of years ago someone suggested it might be good to have an article in our in-house newsletter about movies that carry a message about accounting and securities oversight, and this was handed on to me. I had no enthusiasm for the task at all, and sent back a deliberately lame two-line email saying: “I guess there are some movies about financial shenanigans that could be stretched into a broader message of sorts. They include Trading Places, Rollover ...more generally things like Midnight Run and The Untouchables.”

I got a response saying: “Come on Jack - you're a fringe film critic --I know you can do better than this -- Wasn't Too Beautiful for You with Gerard Depardieu about insider trading -- or was that another French movie of about the same vintage about a man and his secretary?  How about Diary of a Young Stock Broker with that guy who always played stockbrokers as dweebs? How about Born Yesterday --corporate governance?  How about Face in the Crowd - ok it's really about the corrupt confluence of business and politics, but it's one of the best movies ever made.”

This was already way too much time than I wanted to spend on the subject, so I ignored it and fortunately it went away. But recently I wrote an extended article on Rollover (see the current issue of CineAction) and in the course of that was thinking a little more about cinema’s avoidance of financial matters. And then I received an issue of a magazine called The Bottom Line, an accounting journal. It’s pretty dry stuff even for accountants, but I guess they’re jazzing it up because it contained a supplement called The Accounting Life, with a cover promising (and I am not making this up): “Interior Design, Casual Clothing, Cool Gadgets, Accounting Stars, Health, Etiquette, Wine.” (Somehow they forgot the great sex). And inside I found nirvana – a two-page article on accountants in the cinema.

Spectrum of Human Experience

Mark Wolfe wrote it, and did a great job on it. He points out that whereas every second movie seems to prominently feature an attorney in one way or another, the accountant seems like a more shadowy presence (along with most of the other “normal” jobs that people have). But, he says, “I was surprised at the range of films that took advantage of characters portraying accountants…What I have found is that accountants roles represent the broad spectrum of human experience. They are mob bookkeepers, con-artists, insane schemers, devious murderers, crooks, mild-mannered lovers, shy intellectuals, average Joes – and excessive geeks.”

Man, that really is the broad spectrum of human experience. Sadly, the spectrum seems to become particularly packed at the more depressing end. Wolfe’s article singles out 24 movies, from which I offer the following extracts: “duplicitous accountant” (The Main Event), “bumbling adulterer and accountant” (Hannah and her Sisters), “scheming accountants” (Small Time Crooks), “nutty accountant” (The Producers), “inept accountant” (Rocky V), “perfidious accountant” (The Addams Family). Oh, and “accountant…who is left to frequent a strip club” (Exotica).

In a number of others, the accountant is barely a character in the film at all, but merely a tool or device. This covers the accountant in Gloria “who gets whacked at the beginning of the film,” the accountant in Confidence on whom Edward Burns pulls a fast one, thus pulling in the accountant’s boss Dustin Hoffman, and most poignantly, from The Road To Perdition, a “poor, timid soul…inadvertently killed by a stray bullet during a gunfight in a hotel room.”

That leaves ten or so in which the accountant is a notable player and in which his profession as an accountant is at least somewhat significant to the shaping of his character. I would say his or her, but the only female in the bunch is Jennifer Connelly in The Hot Spot (who knew? – this by the way substantially misrepresents the profession, which is fast moving toward equality). Among the highlights – Charles Martin Smith in The Untouchables, Ben Kingsley in Schindler’s List, Charles Grodin in Midnight Run and in Dave. And perhaps preeminently, Johnny Depp in Dead Man, the rare accountant whose calling leads him into somewhere resonant and mystical (Depp also played an accountant in Nick Of Time, thus establishing himself perhaps as the unacknowledged cinematic standard bearer for the profession).

True Essence of Accounting

For completeness, other movies cited are The Apartment (although at the risk of sounding elitist, the Jack Lemmon character was not so much a true accountant but an “accounting clerk”). Bowfinger, Ghostbusters, The Royal Tenenbaums, D.O.A., Heaven Can Wait. Which is not a bad list overall. And at least it yielded one Oscar winner (Michael Caine in Hannah).

But since I’ve now dragged myself out of the closet, I guess I can’t make myself sound any geekier if I admit that none of these get at the true essence of being an accountant, which (at least the way I like to think I do it) is much more creative, strategic and varied than those outside the profession realize. And none of them get at the role accountants play in maintaining our capital markets, in safeguarding our economic destinies. There are so many great untold accounting stories out there.

But I’m not going to be the one telling them...

February movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2007)

The German film The Lives of Others, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and is a most worthy entry in Germany’s continuing dissection of its taxing past century. In 1984 East Germany (five years before the demise of the Wall and then the country) a stiff-necked Stasi (secret police) officer is given a surveillance assignment, to uncover the suspected subversive activities of a notable playwright and his girlfriend, an esteemed actress. The officer has little personal life or inspiration beyond occasionally hiring a whore, and he is strangely moved by the interaction of his two subjects. At the same time, he becomes attuned to the moral and ethical corruption of the system within which he’s spent his life, including the basically sordid motives behind the investigation. Eventually his spying starts to bear fruit, but instead of taking this back to his superiors, he fabricates bland reports. The complications that follow make for a fascinating narrative, loaded with significant moral and political weight.

The Lives of Others

The film depicts a ruling system that’s totally lost its ideological bearings, serving only to crush or warp everyone within it. At the start the playwright appears relatively content, subject to being allowed some minimum room for personal expression and some basic human tolerance; it’s only the excesses of the state, particularly in hounding a colleague of his to suicide, that radicalizes him. Likewise, the officer’s unquestioning loyalty starts to erode only when his superiors flaunt their pragmatism too blatantly. But the film is also I think about the power of art in a totalitarian state, for it’s clear that the officer – initially a strenuous Philistine – becomes infatuated with his subjects’ ability to connect, and comes to perceive his actions partly as his own aesthetic creation, played out with real lives and consequences instead of on a stage.

The Lives of Others is a film of drab grays, communicating the failure of the Socialist promise in every miserable frame. The trajectory of the officer, particularly as we follow the next ten years of his life in the film’s epilogue, has an almost Chaplin-like pathos to it at times. The film is too much an artistic creation to be completely convincing I think – there’s a considerable compression of events, and at times Henckel von Donnersmarck’s masterly control comes at the cost of a sense of spontaneity (although as I said, that’s part of the point). But these aren’t particularly significant caveats. Some people have said it’s the best film about surveillance since The Conversation, and although that may be true, I barely thought about that aspect of it at the time, perhaps because the bugging and snooping is so clearly a mere symptom of a society where all claim of meaningful self-determination has long been extinguished. As for the Oscar stakes, I think Pan’s Labyrinth would have been the better winner, for the greater breadth of its vision, but The Lives of Others is certainly one of the more deserving victors of the last twenty years.

Hannibal Rising

Hannibal Rising is the fourth film about the charismatically intellectual cannibal introduced in Manhunter and catapulted into legend by The Silence of the Lambs, this time going way back to his formative years in WW2 Lithuania. Hannibal is a nice little boy, living in the bosom of his family, and very protective of his little sister, which sets him up for psychological turmoil when he witnesses her being eaten by a bunch of scuzzy militia (led by my old schoolmate Rhys Ifans). Hannibal grows up in an orphanage, eventually hooking up with his aunt by marriage, played by Gong Li, weirdly out of place in such tacky material, but no less fascinating for that. He goes to medical school and then of course embarks on the quest to track the scumbags down one by one, along the way becoming more depraved at every turn.

As others have pointed out, there’s something very wrongheaded about trying to devise a quasi-respectable, psychologically motivated background for a character who so inherently epitomizes high-end pulp fiction, and the film’s painterly aspects just compound this nonsense. The movie’s biggest act of cannibalism is in taking director Peter Webber, so promising at the helm of Girl with a Pearl Earring, and corralling him into this; it’s well enough put together, and surprisingly (pointlessly) restrained at times, but never has zero potential of transcending extreme wretchedness. Hannibal is played by Gaspard Ulliel, who’s allowed to embarrass himself with shallow, grimacing work.

Factory Girl

Factory Girl is another visit to the (apparently) endlessly fascinating milieu of Andy Warhol and the Factory, this one focusing on Edie Sedgwick who was his golden girl for a few years before they drifted apart, precipitating her decline into drugs and premature death. Sienna Miller plays Edie, and she’s quite good on the downslide, but never conveys what made Edie seem quite so special in the first place. This is largely the fault of a vague, rushed narrative that lacks much period flavour, depth or continuity. Try to imagine how such a movie might look – the big close-ups of Edie talking to the camera (via her therapist), the highs of activity captured in snappy musical montages, the traumatic drugged-out scenes, the embarrassing public flame-outs, it’s all here, exactly as you’re visualizing it right now.

Guy Pearce plays Warhol, and he’s pretty good, but the film doesn’t seem interested in more than the same old Warhol mannerisms and affectations (maybe it’s because I saw the very good David Cronenberg-curated exhibition at the AGO last year that this all seemed particularly shallow and pointless). And then Hayden Christensen plays a version of Bob Dylan, which is just an utter waste of celluloid. As directed by George Hickenlooper, the film feels pretty pleased with itself, but I can’t think of one good reason to see it.

The Russian film The Italian belongs comfortably in the long tradition of films that depict childhood innocence and resourcefulness in strained or violent circumstances. The setting here is a miserable modern-day orphanage, from which the prize children are sold off to wealthy foreign couples; one boy is designated for Italy, but instead becomes preoccupied with finding his birth mother, and takes off on an unlikely quest. The film is a sobering depiction of a coarse, often violent environment, in many ways on the verge of breakdown, although the focus on the boy prevents it from getting too heavy. The happy ending is unconvincing but not grating in the circumstances, because the underlying point seems to be about the need to transcend these sad truths, and to do that within Russia’s own confines rather than through soul destroying transactions with the rest of the world.

My movie

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2004)

An obvious question came up again the other day: why wouldn’t my interest in cinema translate into a desire to make my own movies? Over the years I’ve sometimes thought of buying a camera; at least once I came this close to doing it. This was in the pre-DV days when one would have needed a projector, a constant supply of film, and God knows what else. As an aside, it’s rather beguiling how stories of shoestring filmmaking - for example Mario van Peebles’ recent Baadaaaaas – emphasize the simple challenge of obtaining enough film (the celluloid itself) to make the movie. Maybe I’m idealizing it, but it seems to me that such sensitivity for the scarcity of the basic raw material couldn’t help but inspire better work. That may be my ascetic side talking though.

Anyway, I’ve never taken the step, for a combination of reasons. Basically, I haven’t felt a compelling need to do it. There’s nothing inherently problematic about being happy as a committed spectator/commentator, unless you get neurotic about the “those who can’t do, teach” thing. There’s not much appeal to dabbling with home movies, and I don’t see myself hustling around raising money to make my breakthrough masterpiece, so what’s the point?

Mechanics of Filmmaking

An even greater problem might be the fear – it could even be a conviction – that I wouldn’t be any good at it. I completely believe whoever it was that said that making a bad film is just about the hardest thing you could ever imagine, and that making a good one is just a bit harder. I always feel a little guilty – truly I do – when I throw out lofty criticisms (say, like calling De-Lovely’s Irwin Winkler a “chronically inadequate director” the other week); that’s how easily Billy Wilder’s “Close but no cigar” line becomes something like “Close, so here’s a kick in the ass.” But as Michael Cimino said, somewhere in the middle of running up a record budget overage on Heaven’s Gate, if you don’t get it right what’s the point? Anyway, I’m not the most meticulous or patient of craftsmen, so there’s no particular reason to think I’d have any natural talent in this area.

Yet another problem – I actually think that if I had the mechanics of filmmaking too much in mind, even as an amateur, it would detract from my enjoyment of watching movies. This is how it works for me with writing fiction – because I also have occasional ambitions in that area, I have almost no desire to read anyone else’s (unless, oddly, it’s in French, where that problem doesn’t apply). I can envisage myself dwelling too much on how this or that wasn’t quite right. I do that now in the normal course of movie watching, but the observations come and go more loosely than they might if I kept analogizing to my own amateur efforts.

In this regard, I think of Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Italian cinema (I haven’t seen his Personal Journey through American Cinema), containing wonderful commentaries on ten or fifteen films in particular. I recently rewatched Luchino Visconti’s Senso – a film that occupied no particular place in my mind – in the light of Scorsese’s observations, and found it utterly transformed. Scorsese is also famous for incorporating references to a myriad of films into his own work, apparently without diluting his own sensibility – but then he’s Martin Scorsese. I’m not sure I could as easily switch between practitioner and connoisseur.

More on Before Sunset

Despite all that, I’m currently thinking more than I have for a while about taking the plunge. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, which I wrote about last week as a near-exemplar of a certain kind of cinematic purity, may have been a key contributor to this mindset. Linklater’s film is mostly just two people talking, but for much of the time it makes you wonder why you’d ever want anything else from a movie – and described in terms of the raw elements, it’s something that anyone could do. Of course, it’s also true that in terms of the raw elements, anyone could sit down and write a novel to rival Philip Roth.

But because Linklater’s film is so deceptively simple, it focuses you on the mechanics of the filmmaking process in a way that more ostensibly complex productions might not. At one point, we see Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy from the front, walking along, and a runner comes up behind them. Hawke glances over his shoulder as the runner approaches. Then there’s a cut so that the camera’s now behind them, and we see the runner come by and run off ahead. It seemed to me that the timing was a little off; that he took too long to appear in the second shot, given his apparent proximity in the first. I’m sure they considered it painstakingly, so it might just be me, and it was only a matter of milliseconds, but it took me outside the film for a while.

But this only served to make me reflect on how seldom that happens, and I actually appreciated the fact that the illusion, the immersion that pulls you dreamily along, had been temporarily suspended; all the better to weigh the miracle of it occurring at all. Watching Before Sunset, I thought on occasion of directors like Ozu and Bresson and Dreyer – directors who happily forego some of cinema’s flashier possibilities, because they realize that those possibilities are merely ones of cinema, not of life. Once my mind goes there, I can’t think of anything more thrilling than engaging with that process for myself. Just on the most basic level of organizing shots, of experimenting with montage and juxtapositions, it seems irresistible,

Short Films

Of course, I’d be better off starting off with short films, rather than trying to launch into a Pickpocket or Ordet. I’ve been watching a lot of short films this year on DVD – Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and a collection of Roman Polanski’s early student works. I’ve written about the Brakhage films here before – they’re brilliant, but not the project I have in mind (they’re also, even more clearly than many other works, specifically products of film, not of digital technology). Deren’s allusive Meshes of the Afternoon suggests some directions, but maybe that territory’s been fully occupied already. Polanski’s films are astonishingly accomplished, already recognizable as his own. In all these cases, the works’ brevity facilitates an appreciation of their great craft. The possible directions are endless.

And then there’s the possibility of documentary, or of essay films like Chris Marker. The very fact that I can consider all these possibilities probably tells you a lot about where this is likely to go – unfocused dabbling, collapsing in inertia. But even more than the road to hell, the road to bad cinema is surely paved with good intentions.

Serious stories

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2009)

I didn’t like the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men even half as much as the consensus view. The Coens’ assurance showed in choice after choice no other director would make, but much of the film seemed to me either sleazy or affected. After which I wrote here: “I’ve been in this place with the Coens before. I’ve seen all the movies, but I’m not sure I’ve seen any of them more than once (maybe Fargo, but I don’t think the repeat investment paid off) and I’m straining to cite one truly interesting or provocative thing I ever learned from any of them. I guess maybe I learned a bit about how people talk in Minnesota, so that’s something.”

Burn after Reading

That’s what I wrote last time, and it’s true enough, but maybe I should be a little more temperate and underline the fact that I’ve seen all the movies; I’m sure that to have skipped any of them would have seemed like a dereliction of a cinemaniac’s duty. Their work has a creative zest that puts most other directors to shame, and given their productivity and variety, they surely know how lucky they are (even if they only grudgingly acknowledge it in Oscar acceptance speeches). But I always feel distanced from their films, as you might from someone who has the fullest social calendar around, but goes home to a bare and lonely apartment. Maybe I’m just getting older, but I find myself more appreciative of the hedgehog directors who really know what they know, even if that’s a smaller and much more repetitive knowledge, and even if you strain to vaguely evoke what it actually consists of (I find I especially appreciate them if they’re French). The Coens are the kings of the strutting foxes, masters at stealing chickens, but when are they at peace?

Anyway, their subsequent film, Burn after Reading, was inherently less ambitious than No Country for Old Men, but I actually liked it quite a bit more, as an increasingly intriguing statement on degraded human standards and self-worth, with Washington – perhaps the least clear-headed micro-society in the developed world (see also the recent In the Loop) – providing a coldly resonant setting. The Coens pepper it with subtleties you don’t expect from their lighter projects: for example, it’s frequently unclear whether a particular shot represents someone’s actual point of view, a subtlety that supports a broad theme of surveillance and chronic insecurity, wrapped up by the way the movie tells us rather than shows us how everything ends, and disclaims any knowledge of what lessons we should learn from it. By being both peppy and meaningful, the film only seemed to underline my doubts at its predecessor’s portentousness.

A Serious Man

Their new release, A Serious Man, is perhaps the year’s most divisive (leaving aside Transformers 2, where the divide existed between the critics on one side and the mass public on the other). Ella Taylor in The Village Voice says “the visual impact of all these warty, unappetizing Jews (even the movie's obligatory anti-Semite looks handsome by comparison) carries (the film) into the realm of the truly vicious...I worry…about what ancient anxieties lie behind the endorsement of a movie that dumps on Jews and Judaism with such ferocity.” Armond White in The New York Press, apparently in direct response, says any “critic’s suggestion that a film as lovingly, emotionally precise as A Serious Man typifies Jewish self-hatred is ridiculous.” He says the film “(embraces) ethnic superstition and (critiques) it simultaneously,” finding it “so sharp-witted that every irony makes life vivid rather than despairing.” Picking up on this, Jim Emerson on the Scanners website calls the film “a relentless inquiry into how we think we know what we think we know, and then asks where the knowing (or not knowing) gets us.”

It’s the tale of Gopnik, a mid-western suburban math professor in the late 60’s, Jewish (I guess you got that already), up for tenure, with perhaps no more than conventional anxieties. This rapidly unwinds – his wife leaves him for another man, his finances unravel, his professional ambitions become questionable, and even minor plagues (like the man at the mail-order record company, constantly calling to demand payment for a service   Gopnik didn’t order and doesn’t want) suggest some cosmic turn of fortune. The community’s elders offer little help: one rabbi offers platitudes; the second refuses to see meaning in anything, even his own proffered anecdote about a man with “Help me save me” engraved on the inside of his teeth; the third won’t see him; his lawyer just racks up the bills. The ending may be a confirmation of Gopnik’s fears, or a mockery of them, or may of course mean nothing at all. The latter seems most likely to me, in that the movie seems to mock – albeit not as unkindly as some might have perceived – the very notion of grand institutionalized meaning. Although its focus is on the Jewish community, it’s also a cousin to Mad Men and other examinations of misplaced post-war notions of progress and conformity.

Night Wind

The movie is full of incidental pleasures, not least of all from the acting, and yet when I came out of it, the word that came to my mind was “cartoonish”. Again, every scene’s busy plucking feathers. The previous day, as a random comparison, I’d watched Philippe Garrel’s Night Wind, a sparse drama with only around 1/20^th the action of A Serious Man and about 1/10^th of the dialogue, yet with a persistent sense of existential dread. At the end of it, my thoughts were racing; I felt I’d picked up something truly new and provocative and instructive. I don’t recall whether anyone in the film ever mentions God, but it’s as if the world only had a limited supply of human viability and too many walking shells, and everyone casts around trying to make it reconcile, through sex or drugs or intellectualism or immersion in one’s strenuously iconic despair. The student movement of 1968 – a key defining moment for Garrel – is a constant reference point, perhaps as the last best hope of a meaningful rebooting. It’s an aesthetic creation of course, but beautiful and profound in its desolation.

In large part it’s because Garrel’s lived and suffered and wouldn’t think of making a movie that didn’t draw on that. I suppose the Coens have suffered (the new movie might suggest they didn’t think much of their teenage milieu anyway), but you can’t really feel it even in their tougher-minded works. But then they don’t ever communicate much joy either. Sometimes they seem to know the workings of almost everything, but not the value of it.

Some boring movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2006)

It must be amazing to be Bryan Singer and, from the looks of it, be allowed to make any movie you want to make. Orson Welles said something about a film set being the biggest train set a boy ever had, and something of that delight comes across in Singer’s films. His new one, Superman Returns, even features a train set, part of a vast model landscape in the lair of arch-villain Lex Luthor. And the film itself, resurrecting the Superman franchise after almost twenty years, and with many widely reported false starts in the years since then, is a dream opportunity for a Superman fan. Singer’s approach is highly conscientious, with a plot that picks up where the films left off in the 80’s (he retains John Williams’ original theme), touching base with all the core elements of the mythology and adding a carefully plotted new threat, courtesy of Luthor and some leftover crystals from Superman’s home planet.

Superman Returns

You can hear a “but” coming, and here it is: the movie is as boring as hell. I don’t completely know why – maybe it’s true that Superman doesn’t have the right resonance for current times. He’s basically a square, and his powers are so vast that it’s hard to feel much emotional investment in whether or not he pulls off his various feats. The special effects are mostly great, which may count for a lot on an Oscar judging panel, but doesn’t hit you where it hurts. And then Singer mostly squanders the cast. After The Usual Suspects, the prospect of him directing Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey would have been thrilling…well, don’t ask how it turns out here. And don’t ask either about Superman Returns’ only point of thematic interest – the horrendously pretentious allusions to Jesus Christ (including a beating that sure seemed reminiscent of Passion Of The Christ). What’s the point of meddling with such stuff unless you have a point to make about Jesus, or the nature of faith, or the power of religion, or something.

Anyway, I wanted to like it, and I had a hunch that maybe I would, but instead I just ended up feeling old. But regardless of whether that’s true, Bryan Singer should put away the train set for a while. And make something like A Scanner Darkly, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s book, and a film that’s been anticipated for decades by a small but fervent group. Now the versatile Richard Linklater (Before Sunset, The School of Rock) has delivered it. It’s a twisted tale of drug-induced hallucinations, surveillance and manipulation in the near-future, and Linklater heightens its surreal underbelly through the same technique he used in Waking Life, where real actors (including Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder) are filmed in real settings and then the images are “rotoscoped” to produce an intensely vivid, fluid animation.

The dialogue has an unusual density and the film has an anguished underbelly that serves as a sober contrast to breathier views of the future; overall, Linklater’s versatility and control are astonishing. Ultimately though I didn’t find it a very different viewing experience from many of the recent films that mess with our sense of reality and relationship to the narrative; it’s a hermetic creation that barely even seems to need a viewer. This isn’t inappropriate to the film’s traumatized fabric and the main character’s fractured grasp on reality, but still makes for a movie that will likely be more admired than loved. What I’m saying is, it’s kind of boring too.

Who Killed The Electric Car?

I shot my environmental wad a few weeks ago in writing about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, so I’ll spare you an extended response to Chris Paine’s Who Killed The Electric Car?, which would read much the same way. In the mid-nineties there seemed to be good momentum behind a wholly electric car, in particular GM’s EV-1 model – ten years later, the US car companies have all but quit that line of growth, surrendering the market to Toyota’s Prius. Meanwhile of course, the case for the technology (oil prices, Middle East turmoil, global warming, faltering hydrogen technology) just gets stronger and stronger. The movie tells the story effectively enough, mostly from a sun-baked Californian perspective with the obligatory sprinkling of celebrities, finding enough blame to go around, but also finding enough of the de rigeur room for optimism that America will come together to do the right thing as it always has. Overall, watching the entire film doesn’t add much to what you can glean from the trailer and the reviews. It’s much closer to being boring than I would have guessed.

Two Comedies

Strangers with Candy is based on a Comedy Central series I’ve never seen0, with Amy Sedaris as a long-time jailbird with a depraved history who goes back to high school. Liam Lacey said in the Globe: “Audiences should find the film brilliant or repellent. At the most interesting moments, it’s a bit of both.” Well, I certainly wish that were right. I have no idea what the case for its brilliance might be. It’s negligible as social satire, and barely any more effective as a satire of the high school genre (as if, in any event, that would count for much). It occasionally makes more of a stab in the direction of repellence, faintly evoking John Waters, but stops way short of anything truly biting or transgressive. As a fan of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up film, I kept wishing some of her lines could have been worked into the script. The film does have plenty of striking one-liners, some pleasant cameos, some strikingly surreal set-ups (I liked the gym teacher who subjects the students to a recreation of the Pamplona running of the bulls, with real bulls), and it avoids the flagrant stupidity and carelessness that makes many contemporary comedies painful to watch, but…well…when you come right down to it, I guess you can guess the adjective…
 

It must be amazing to be Kevin Smith, and to be a famous filmmaker with some degree of freedom…and then gradually realize you just don’t have any ideas. Clerks II might as well be called Cry for Help, particularly if you remember Smith stating at the time of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back that he was done with that entire territory. But Jersey Girl was a flop, so here he is, back where he started in 1994. It’s actually rather endearing how the situation of the dead-end protagonists mirrors Smith’s own lack of momentum, and no film of his comes without laughs, even if they all come from rearranging the same ten or twelve words in a different order. Who is he kidding though…this is lame lame stuff. And by casting his own wife as a self-absorbed shrew who’s comprehensively overshadowed by Rosario Dawson (the film’s only engaging presence, just as she was in Rent), he also loses points for lack of gallantry. I bet even he was mostly bored through this one.