Caught and Released: The Wrong Movie

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2007)

The perpetual question – why can’t mainstream movies be better? How could I find myself in a weekend when, having already exhausted the possibilities of every award hopeful in sight (except for Miss Potter, which I wouldn’t see even under threat of having Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle shoved up my rear end), the choice was this: Catch and Release, Epic Movie, Blood and Chocolate and Smokin’ Aces? Well, that’s a bit of a false set-up of course. For one thing, Stomp the Yard and Arthur and the Invisibles were still playing from previous weeks. More damagingly to my own credibility, since I’m subscribed to every movie channel in sight, have hundreds of DVD’s I never get enough time to watch, and am not exactly a million miles away from some of Toronto’s finest rental venues, there’s no rational reason why I wouldn’t have stayed at home and watched something absolutely transcendent. Jeez, I would even have been better off watching Every Which Way but Loose again. Or The Nutty Professor. The Eddie Murphy version.

Walking to the Scotiabank

But you know, I just like going to the movies. I like doing the walk, say to the Paramount, about fifteen minutes distance from where I live, and listening to my ipod there and back (this time it happened to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which I never thought I liked that much, but everything sounds better on the ipod walking to or from a movie) getting my snack (I must confess I’ve taken to smuggling stuff in lately, usually from Starbucks) and settling down and following the whole routine. The previous day my wife and I had been to the Ansel Adams/Alfred Eisenstaedt exhibit at the AGO (great stuff but hey AGO guys, maybe letting a thousand people into two smallish rooms all at the same time isn’t really consistent with any known theory of how to facilitate aesthetic appreciation) and then over to Kensington Market for the first time in years. So that was a real solid “Best of the City” kind of day. And then there I was on Sunday, with the demands of my new job not having kicked in yet, and with my wife working, and nothing else on the agenda…how would I possibly not go to a movie?

Anyway, I chose Catch and Release. The reasons for this include a writer-director of modest pedigree (Susannah Grant, who wrote Erin Brockovich), two thumbs up on Ebert And Roeper (albeit for highly suspect sounding reasons), and most of all that if I’m going to trawl the bottom of the barrel I’d generally rather indulge my chick side than my guy one (although there have been many exceptions to this statement). So there I was at the Paramount, which by the way isn’t called the Paramount any more, but rather the Scotiabank Theatre, following a big naming rights deal of some kind. The premise I believe is that when the monied middle-class of the future comes to see Harry Potter or Hostel Two at the Scotiabank Theatre, it’ll subliminally attribute its cinematic pleasure not just to the wonders of the Hollywood machine, but also in part to the venerable sponsoring institution, which will consequently wrap up customer loyalty for life. I said that rather sarcastically, because that’s my chosen tone for this week I guess, but obviously these guys know more about value creation than I do, so I’ll assume they’re on to something. Insofar as the branding stuck in my own mind during the film, it was via the vague sense of being locked inside an ATM machine.

Catch and Release

Catch and Release stars Jennifer Garner as Gray (I don’t get these names either) whose fiancée is killed on the eve of their wedding, and is thus thrown into grief and turmoil. She has the support of her always present male friends (director Kevin Smith plays one of them) and the unwelcome dynamic of another buddy she never liked (Timothy Olyphant), who’s sleazy enough to have sex at the funeral with one of the caterers. And then, as she puts the dead man’s affairs in order, she starts to find things out – such as a million dollar bank balance she never heard about before, and then an apparent four year old son, from a liaison with a masseuse (Juliette Lewis).

The guest critic on Ebert and Roeper made much of the film’s affection for its characters, and indeed there’s a general affability to events here. Lewis for example turns out not to be the gold-digger one initially suspects, but rather a well-meaning if mixed-up woman trying to survive the hard knocks. A shame that her characterization makes no sense whatsoever. Niceness, as Dick Cheney might say, may be a personal virtue, but is not a basis for sound examination of modern living. Neither, indeed, is Garner a basis for much of anything – her quirky beauty here mostly seems merely pinched and washed out.
 

The underlying notion is of adversity casting aside illusions and allowing a more mature renewal. The film doesn’t quite come out and say the fiancée’s death was the best thing that could have happened to these people, but that’s the conclusion you have to draw – that his golden boy attributes kept everyone in arrested development for years. If the movie really grappled with that, it might have an appealing nasty streak, but given the affability I mentioned, it merely circles its themes like an exhausted vulture, consistently telling us about pain rather than showing it. It’s suggested that Garner’s excessive prim and proper ways drove her fiancée into the haven of Lewis’ arms, but nothing we see on screen provides a basis for assessing this. The Smith character actually attempts suicide, or at least a “cry for help,” although up to that point his main interest in the departed seemed to be in conniving to loot the now-unwanted wedding gifts. I suppose the earlier behaviour is meant to be just displacing his grief, but since Smith is about as graceful an actor as he is a director, the character is merely a blob of incoherent activity.    

 

Watch TV next time!

The combination of female director and female star always provokes hope of a more progressive approach to familiar material, although God knows how that hope survives so much evidence to the contrary. Suffice to say that although at the end Garner makes a big brave decision of sorts, this merely involves her driving hundreds of miles to deliver herself into the arms of the man she’s decided she wants. Even a couple of hours after the film ended I’d forgotten what her career was meant to be (the film’s modest fidelity to economic plausibility is one of its minor virtues, although it’s yet another concoction where no one’s job seems to detract too much from having time to hang out), and her character never expresses an interesting thought in two hours, so I guess it’s not much of a loss. Overall, Catch and Release is just a big glossy blank space. Like I said, Hollywood perpetually tests one’s allegiance to the magic of the movie going experience. Next time, I swear, I’m staying home with Bresson.

June movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2006)

Richard E. Grant (from Withnail and I) makes his directorial debut with Wah-Wah, based on his own experiences growing up in Swaziland in the run up to independence in the early 1970’s. Gabriel Byrne plays the boy’s Jekyll and Hyde like father (the difference being the drink), Miranda Richardson his mother, and Emily Watson his stepmother after the first marriage falls into bitter oblivion. The film is pleasant and affectionate, but its basic reason for existing is a bit thin. The value of the project would seem to be in what it might have to say about the effect of colonialism on Africa, but the movie barely sets foot outside its toodle-pip British enclave (the title is Watson’s disparaging label for all the mannered baby talk), filling its time with largely familiar family dynamics. You feel happy for Grant that he got to make what resembles a dream project, filled with genial if conventional performances, but I doubt it’ll do that much for anyone else.

A Prairie Home Companion

Since Robert Altman is now 81, there’s always the possibility that each film he makes may be his last, and he keeps delivering sublime endnotes – the much underrated Cookie’s Fortune and Dr. T And The Women, Gosford Park, and now perhaps best of all, A Prairie Home Companion. I’ve never heard Garrison Keillor’s radio show, and can only imagine what resonance the film might hold for fans, but even taken in isolation it’s immensely rich and satisfying. The premise is that Keillor’s radio show is broadcast live every Saturday evening from a Minnesota theatre before a live audience, and it’s the last night – the developers are moving in. Meryl Streep (who is quite wonderful), Lily Tomlin and Woody Harrelson (who will make you chuckle more than you should at a series of dumb dirty jokes) are among the musical performers. Moving between on- and back-stage, Altman’s camera is in constant elegant motion, showcasing his undiminished powers of composition and coordination: it’s simply a beautifully executed work.

The film also features an angel who stalks the fringes of the show, played by Virginia Madsen. This is the film’s most criticized aspect, and indeed initially seems more than a little contrived. But with the arrival of Tommy Lee Jones (as the theatre owner, roughly representing the devil) the film’s cosmic aspirations take shape, and it becomes persuasive as an evocation of the spiritual stakes inherent in art. The theatre encompasses all of life – the characters spill out stories about their histories (perhaps true, perhaps not, but all related with conviction), a veteran performer dies backstage, Streep passes on the torch to her daughter (played by Lindsay Lohan). But Altman is realistic too: there’s no magical redemption here, and the characters’ status in the film’s epilogue is quite uncertain. Altman’s compositions make much use of mirrors, so that the images often have a potential probing intensity, but always leavened by the recurring grace and delight. Writers have questioned over the years what all of Altman’s virtuosity actually amounts to, but surely this can be laid aside now: he is just terrific at being old. This may not be the year’s best release (my own favourites so far are Cache, The New World, Gabrielle and The Proposition) but it’s probably the one I just plain loved watching the most.

Live and Become

On that subject, the summer’s big movies have mostly seemed to me even less interesting than usual (in fact I went all through June without being attracted to a single one of them, until Superman Returns at the very end – and more about that soon), but the limited releases have been just terrific. Another fine film, which hung out at Bayview for weeks on end, is Live and Become (Va, vis et deviens), directed by Radu Mihaileanu, about the growth to adulthood of a young Ethiopian boy who’s evacuated to Israel in the 1980’s under a false identity, leaving his mother behind in a refugee camp. It’s most interesting, and feels most closely observed, in the early stretches, showing the boy’s difficult integration; as it goes on, it becomes increasingly episodic (he’s on a kibbutz, then in Paris, then in combat, etc.) and even a little hackneyed at times. The filmmaking, in most respects, is merely conventional, and the analysis of Israel is not particularly piercing. But this is a truly stirring, moving case history, and I can’t imagine it not holding your attention.

Michael Cuesta got some attention a few years ago for L.I.E., a film of risky moral material (a middle-aged pedophile, presented straightforwardly and with some tolerance) that established a distinct and somewhat eerie sense of its Long Island setting. Cuesta now returns with Twelve and Holding, revolving around three young kids – the twin brother of one is killed, another tries to pull back from the brink of obesity, and another experiences her sexual awakening. Cuesta is obviously skillful and sensitive, and the film is well crafted, but it’s also increasingly melodramatic, pushing each of its plot strands to extreme if not grotesque lengths. The film remains grounded though – events that in other films would emanate operatic tragedy always seem here like symptoms of the reticent turbulence of kids stumbling for their place in the world. But for all its interest, there aren’t many moments in Twelve and Holding that fail to evoke other, overall more impactful treatments of such life passages.

The King

I was surprised though how James Marsh’s The King gripped me. Early on, a young man called Elvis gets out of the Navy and presents himself to a righteous pastor as his son by a long-ago liaison; the pastor acknowledges the fact, but wants nothing to do with him. Elvis hangs round the neighborhood, living in a fleabag motel, and slowly starts to insinuate himself into the pastor’s family, through his naïve teenage daughter. It’s a nasty tale, although so meticulously handled that this may not dawn on you for a while; the nuanced portrait of fundamentalism really held my attention and intermittently made me think I was watching a film as good as Junebug. Gael Garcia Bernal is perfectly ambiguous as Elvis, William Hurt is fascinating as the pastor, and the film expertly withholds some shocks you expect while hitting you with a few you don’t. I suspect some may read this and think me a sucker, but Marsh made me a willing one.

Andy Garcia directed and stars in The Lost City, a would-be epic about the disintegration of a well-to-do Havana family as Castro comes to power. It’s moderately interesting, but very familiar and very slow moving; numerous scenes recall in particular the Godfather movies, not at all to the advantage of Garcia’s film. Bill Murray hangs around the film’s edges, cracking jokes; he’s so badly integrated with everything else that it seems almost like wayward genius. Almost.

 

All about Uma

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2006)

A few weeks ago I wrote about some films that, rationally or not, I just didn’t want to see, and by the way I didn’t see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 either. But I wasn’t out on much of a limb with any of that stuff. So let me go now in the opposite direction and concede a movie that I went to see for specifically questionable reasons. The movie is My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and the reason is Uma Thurman.

My Favourite Actress

For a while I thought Parker Posey might be my favourite actress, but Superman Returns marked a definitive end to that idea. There is also the transcendent Emmanuelle Beart, but for the purposes of today’s article we’re staying out of the art house. Anyway, it occurs to me I may not have faced up to my real feelings on the matter, because on scrutinizing Uma’s filmography I find that I’ve seen every one of her films back to Kiss Daddy Goodnight in 1988 (and I must get round to renting that one too). It’s not a bad list overall, but still, that’s pretty incriminating evidence.

To a great extent, Uma’s appeal may simply be stipulated. As David Thomson wrote about Angie Dickinson, his own favourite actress: “One thousand words of analysis (wouldn’t) carry more weight than a well-chosen still.”  But I happen to think she’s a more vibrant and resourceful actress than she’s generally given credit for. She doesn’t have enormous range, but with time she’s learned how to convey considerable sincerity and emotional shading, while retaining her otherworldly coolness and avoiding histrionics.

She is only 36, but has been a celebrity for nearly 20 years. In that time she’s racked up an impressive roster of iconic moments: the dance scene with Travolta in Pulp Fiction, the yellow jump-suited swordplay in Kill Bill, her entire startling presence in Dangerous Liaisons, and – inadvertently – as the joint object of David Letterman’s “Uma Oprah” Oscar gambit. Lately, there have been signs of slippage. Her role in Paycheck was utterly without reward, and although Be Cool gave us her opening sunbathing scene, it was all too trashy to be as gratifying as God must have meant it to be.

Her performance as the dumb Swedish secretary in The Producers was simply the worst acting she’s ever done. I was actually happy about that though, taking it as proof that she’s too smart for such nonsense. She was very nuanced and occasionally touching in Prime, and maybe her middle career will be predominantly in light comedy. According to the Internet Movie Database though, her next role will be in a film called In Bloom, with the outline: “A woman survivor’s guilt from a Columbine-like event twenty years ago causes her present-day idyllic life to fall apart.” Sounds intriguing, and it’s directed by Vadim Perelman, who made the exacting House of Sand and Fog, so maybe – who knows – this will be her Monster or Monster’s Ball. (2014 update – it wasn’t).

My Super Ex-Girlfriend

In the meantime, she made My Super Ex-Girlfriend, which is fundamentally only marginally worthy of her, if at all, and in fact is only marginally worthy of co-stars Luke Wilson and Anna Faris, which sounds like the kick-off to a one-star review. But given the above, I enjoyed the movie a lot. Uma plays a neurotic New York singleton who, in the manner of Clark Kent, has a secret identity – she’s the majestic “G-Girl”, who periodically swoops in to save city-dwellers from mortal peril. For reasons that remain mysterious, she hooks up with architect Wilson (who’s actually in love with co-worker Faris, but can’t bring himself to admit it), but the relationship fizzles when she proves just too nutty for him. He dumps her, and she goes crazy, propelling his car into orbit around the earth, hurling a live shark into his bedroom (yep!)  and worse.

Ivan Reitman directed it, returning to the gimmicky territory of his biggest hit, Ghostbusters. There’s nothing at all distinctive about Reitman’s work here – the movie looks borderline cheesy, but in the circumstances that’s a logical strategy. The more disappointing aspect to me was the scripting. The writer is Don Payne, who wrote numerous Simpsons episodes, and he gives it some scattered funny lines and good concepts (the aforementioned shark), but it’s relentlessly shallow. At some point – through whatever chain of association – I thought about Billy Wilder, and the layerings that Wilder and his collaborators habitually brought to their set-ups and dialogue. I also mused on what the movie would be like with young Jack Lemmon or Walter Matthau, rather than Wilson, playing the guy, but that was just too depressing.

As an aside, why is it that every second mainstream comedy (gross-out teen stuff aside) now relies on some out-of-body premise, involving dreams or ghosts or altered realities? One of the trailers preceding My Super Ex-Girlfriend was about Will Ferrell finding out that he’s a character in a book that’s being written by Emma Thompson (there’s the pairing I’ve been dreaming of…); Woody Allen’s Scoop, with Ian McShane as a ghost, opened the following week. And the exceptions – The Break-Up, You, Me and Dupree and so forth – rely heavily on a single saleable gimmick. Doesn’t anyone want to make solid human stories with an ironic or mordant sensibility? Where are the old Woody Allen, or Paul Mazursky, or the Hal Ashby of Shampoo? Even a film like James L. Brooks’ Spanglish, which was certainly no great shakes, gets better in my mind as time goes on, just for trying to work in that apparently old-fashioned mode.

Eyes of a Man

On another issue - many years ago there was a critics’ poll of the ten best films about women and I remember one respondent – I think it was Molly Haskell – responding that there were none, since even films with strong women perpetuated the message that a woman’s only fulfillment is in the eyes of a man. Maybe, she said, A Touch of Class was the only halfway great film for women. Well, I don’t remember that movie well enough to comment. But this came back to me when I was watching My Super Ex-Girlfriend, because it’s more than a little disappointing that a female superhero must be such a bag of off-putting hang-ups, and that these all seem to come down to her Bridget Jones-like status. Now, I didn’t see Halle Berry’s Catwoman or Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, so maybe those helped balance out the ledger a bit, but if so, no one noticed. If you’ll allow me to engage in some analytical dizziness here, Reitman’s film actually slights its protagonist three times in the title alone: “My” and “Girlfriend” both emphasize the male point of view, and “Ex-“ establishes her as a cast-off. But at least you’ve got the “Super” in there.
 

And with Uma Thurman in the role, she sure is. I think I have been as honest here as I need to be, and I can’t say it didn’t feel good. But it’s out of my system now. Don’t expect to see me in this mode again for at least five years.

Blurred achievement

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2006)

Martin Scorsese is perhaps America’s best director, and certainly its most disappointing. I’m glad he had a commercial and critical success with The Departed, because I guess I’m just the kind of guy who likes to think of great filmmakers being well treated in their advancing years. And I was completely entertained by the film, from start to finish. But is it worthy of a man who might be America’s best director? The answer is plainly no, obviously no. Obvious to everyone, that is, except the many worthy and perceptive writers who see this as one of the year’s best films, and as Scorsese’s best film since (at least) Casino, which I find a bit like saying that George W. Bush is the best president since Gerald Ford.

America’s Best Director

I’ve written my “why can’t Scorsese be better” article several times now, and I didn’t mean to get into it again, but it’s just too damn hard to avoid. I did recently write a rapturous article on my favourite of his films, The King of Comedy, which I’m saving for a rainy day. That film continues to occupy my mind from time to time, because I think it’s the most challenging psychological study he’s ever produced, it’s the most truly mysterious of his works, and the one that best connects to contemporary issues of more than trivial importance. Others of his work score highly in at least one or two of those three categories. But it’s a bit depressing, when you look over Scorsese’s body of work, to realize how little you’ve actually learned from it. You have lots of memories – great scenes, great lines, great bits of acting – but it’s all fragments.

It’s strange, because it’s not as if he doesn’t have a refined sensibility. For example, his recent documentary on Italian cinema was a captivating, eloquent, detailed homage to the films of De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti, and others. I actually changed my long-held opinion of several directors solely because of Scorsese’s explanations of them. Mind you, if memory serves, too much of his analysis may have centered on individual scenes and flourishes. It would be trite and, well, just not true to say that Scorsese can’t orchestrate an entire film, and yet his work seems consistently marked by a loss of energy or focus in the closing stretch. The beginnings are good because beginnings are about impact, about raising questions and possibilities, but you have to assess the greatest of filmmakers by where they ultimately take us, and the arrival points of Scorsese’s films are generally arbitrary, murky or otherwise unsatisfying. This certainly applies, for instance, to Gangs of New York and The Aviator (although most people were simply grateful that the films did, eventually, end).

Emotional Response

The Departed doesn’t actually flag in the late stages, which is quite something given its two and a half hour length and astonishingly sustained pace. It’s as engrossing a thriller as I’ve seen for a long while. Based quite closely on the Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs (which in itself seems like a sign of incomplete ambition), the film is set among cops and gangsters in present-day Boston (although, once we get past a flavourful prologue, it’s so devoid of local colour and real people, so immersed in its concentrated conflicts and intrigues, that it might as well be set on the moon). Leonardo DiCaprio plays a cop who’s gone deep undercover within crime lord Jack Nicholson’s organization. Matt Damon is a cop who’s actually a mole for Nicholson. Vera Farmiga plays a psychiatrist who sleeps with both men. You can see how things could get complicated, but the film is actually a relative model of clear, economical exposition.

Scorsese claims the following theme for the film: “Good and bad become very blurred. That is something I know I'm attracted to. It's a world where morality doesn't exist, good doesn't exist, so you can't even sin any more as there's nothing to sin against. There's no redemption of any kind."

"There were a lot of big names getting involved, a lot of different schedules to marry, a lot of pitfalls we could have fallen into. And yet I stayed with the film," he says. "Because I guess there's an anger, for want of a better word, about the state of affairs. An anger that hopefully doesn't eat at yourself but a desire to express what I feel about post-September 11 despair. My emotional response is this movie. It became clearer and clearer as we did it, more frightening. It came from a very strong state of conviction about the emotional, psychological state that I am in now about the world and about the way our leaders are behaving."

Certainly one can concede that Scorsese achieved this ambition (although only people who think that everything is now about post 9/11 will particularly detect that theme here). But I think it tells you a lot about his artistic ceiling. One: We’re not actually living in a world where morality doesn’t exist, where there’s no concept of sin, no redemption. Concepts of relative morality and virtue structure both the personal and political of our lives (and those of our leaders) every day. Positing their absence is a crazy extrapolation of the corruption Scorsese detects in the post 9/11 environment, and it leads to a hollow movie, because if there’s no morality, there’s probably no meaningful psychology either.

Raging Like Bulls

Two: Scorsese’s “emotional response” to these conditions is an inherently second-rate way of speaking to these matters. It’s largely because the world is being run through emotional responses, extrapolations and abstractions that we’re in such a mess. It’s time, I believe, to be explicit. Oliver Stone dodged the ball with World Trade Center, and Paul Greengrass in United 93 merely turned in a self-described “Rorschach test” of a movie in which you can see anything you want. It is actually possible, although one almost starts to doubt it, for great filmmaking to be political. But Scorsese has always demonstrated a certain intellectual timidity in putting himself on the line.
 

Three: the big names, the different schedules, the pitfalls. When he says that, he reminds me of Jerry Langford in The King of Comedy justifying his failure to listen to Rupert Pupkin’s audition tape. Scorsese loves making movies, of course, and he makes movies you can’t help but love watching. The strange thing about The King of Comedy is that it’s flatter, plainer and less obviously proficient than any of his other films, but it’s also one of the few times when he broke through. Maybe the real theme that links Scorsese’s recent work, from the absent morality of The Departed through the trapped Howard Hughes in The Aviator through the wretched, hermetic conflicts of Gangs of New York and back, is a sense of charismatic, even swaggering individuals overpowered by their physical and figurative environments, drowning in self-delusion, raging like bulls without realizing the limits of the pasture. It’s fascinating, but as an expression of the director’s limits rather than his strengths.

My dilemma

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2006)

I’ve loved movies for as long as I can remember, but of course no love affair is static. Sometimes it’s feverish, then it cools off, then stabilizes, then flames up again. My records tell me that at times I’ve hardly watched anything at all for weeks on end, although I can’t remember those periods now (I wish I knew what I was doing instead). When I lived in Bermuda for a few years, in the pre DVD age, I didn’t have access to enough to keep me going, and ended up watching tons of video rental stuff of the kind that’s never made my cut since (for a while I was very well acquainted with the work of Jennifer Rubin). Then I came here and discovered the Cinematheque Ontario, and for a while crammed in as many visits there as I could – scooping up established classics and curios alike. But now circumstances have changed and I can seldom go there anymore. So I concentrate on new movies, supplemented at home mostly by my own DVD’s, which is getting to be a good collection certainly in quality if not in quantity (my wife would dispute the quantity inadequacy too).

New Challenge

When I started writing this column, I usually devoted every week to a single film, just because that seemed like the thing to do. More recently, I’ve evolved toward writing shorter reviews of every film I see and stringing together four or five of those per week, which suits me because most movies don’t naturally generate much more than 200 or 300 words of reaction in my mind. Sometimes that’s a reflection of the movie, sometimes of my own limitations. Because let’s face it, this is my hobby, and a wonderful way to exercise myself while providing some small help to a greater cause, but it’s not a job. Having to generate 800 words on Happy Feet, regardless of what you thought of it, would be work. And like all paid gigs, it would generate other compromises – one reads constant accounts or allegations of established film critics being booted out for being insufficiently well-disposed toward mainstream releases, or for other mismatches between writer and publication.

I have been blessed not to have to live with any of this, and I hope to continue here for as long as I’m allowed to. But now a new challenge looms. I’m changing jobs, starting on January 2, and although I don’t know for sure, I’m expecting it to be quite a bit more demanding (I did get a pay raise after all, thanks for asking, so I figure no one gets something for nothing). My guess is that I’m looking at the trifecta – later hours, weekends, and greater intensity in the office so I’ll have less energy the rest of the time. I’m not worried about any of it. I’m ready to let new challenges occupy the bulk of my attention. My main concern actually is our dog, but if the worst comes to the worst we can get a dog walker (I would view that as a major admission of failure after getting by for eight and a half years without one, but life moves on, and the dog moves so slowly now that it would be a divinely easy gig for the walker).

Deja vu

But then there’s this column. What if I can only get to one movie a week – probably unlikely it’ll usually be that stretched, but possible? Then I’ll have no choice but to write about that one movie (sometimes, you may have noticed, I do mix it up by writing about older films – for example I have articles on The King of Comedy, Cat People and Nicolas Roeg that I’ve written and put aside for a perhaps now-pending rainy day – but I can’t do that all the time). So I’ll have to get my head back into that space of…I don’t want to call it padding exactly, but let’s say of treating single films in a more expansive manner.

For example, yesterday I saw Tony Scott’s Déjà vu (a movie by the way that probably would never make the cut in a schedule where I could only see one or two or maybe even three films a week). Under my current approach, I’d dash off a cursory sense of the plot (cop tries to foil dastardly terrorist deed by means of a time travel device), I’d acknowledge the structure’s intricate cleverness as well as its basic familiarity, while noting (for maybe the fiftieth time) that it’s a continuing shame how such creativity and resources are invested with so little attention to thematic and emotional value. Toss in a few other random comments and I’m probably done at 150 words tops. Not even ten per cent of what I need to fill the whole space. So expect to see a revival of the following techniques:

Expanded plot summary In the above, I expand on “terrorist deed,” “time travel device;” I mention the girl (you knew there was a girl right?), and the crazed killer; maybe I even bring in the murdered partner. That’s good for 300 words minimum.

Subjective fluff about the actors I doubt many film reviewers spend as little time on this aspect of things as I do. I have my likes and dislikes like anyone else, but since most people I talk to barely seem able to talk about movies as anything other than a scaffolding for their lead performers, I’ve grown to dislike talking about them at all, except when the actors are at the very centre of my reaction. Well, forget that. You think I can’t go the distance on Denzel Washington with the best of them (want to hear my observations on how he looks with his shirt off?), on the declining Val Kilmer, on the beautiful Paula Patton? 400 words easily.

Harping on incidentals Déjà vu is about time travel, so you know it’s full of bogus science and implausibilities. They do a pretty good job of it, but you still get one of those narrative loops virtually unavoidable in the genre – if he went back in time and did this, then that would never have happened, meaning he would never have gone back in time, meaning that would have happened after all, meaning etc etc. This kind of thing has to be good for 200 words.

References to other movies Scanning other reviews of Déjà vu, I see people mentioning Timecop, 12 Monkeys, not to mention every other movie that the director and cast have ever appeared in. If I thought about it I could probably come up with dozens more. Not to overdo it, it’s at least a solid 150 words.

Sheer digression, about my life, the world in general, or who knows what This technique was good for about 700 words this week. Why would it be any different from here on? 
 

(Subsequent update – The new job sucked and only lasted a couple of years. The column continued much as before for seven more years!)

Best of 2006

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2006)

This is a really great list – the best in years I think. Apologies to any masterpieces released in late December. Happy holidays (and rent the DVDs)!

In no particular order:

The New World (Terrence Malick)

Malick’s first film since The Thin Red Line was a 2005 release for Oscar purposes but opened here on January 20 of this year. His telling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas is simply ravishing, and 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 cuts across time and space and inner and outer states. This makes the movie difficult at times, and there are plenty of moments when the prospect of becoming a chocolate box cover seems tangible, but overall the film 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.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones)

This is a remarkable directorial debut for the 60-year-old icon, as assured as, and quite a bit more distinctive than, Clint Eastwood’s best late films. Jones plays an aging South Texas farmhand setting out to deliver his dead Mexican friend to his hometown. It has the overall arc of a great eccentric Western, true to the evocative power of the landscape and the stoic, taciturn hero, but bursting with oddities – character quirks, strange incidents and parallels, the sheer inexplicable. Most compelling is the way that Jones keeps the lid very tight on his own character, and yet in the end the power of his will and vision – although beyond our understanding – seems to transform the film’s physical and psychological elements alike: it’s one of those endings that simultaneously makes little sense, and yet as much as anyone should possibly need.

The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)

After a long absence, Antonioni’s 1975 masterpiece resurfaced for some Cinematheque screenings and then at the Carlton. It’s famous for its enigmatic qualities, but I was equally as taken by its specificity and deliberation; it’s a thriller and a dream and an eloquent meditation on cinema. You never see anything nowadays forged with such calm intellectual confidence.

Cache (Michael Haneke)

Haneke’s film, about a family that receives a series of mysterious videos, was almost incalculably more satisfying than most other releases this year. It can be viewed as a satisfying, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller, but at the same time that it caters to our taste for narrative momentum, it rigorously deconstructs and critiques that very desire. Ultimately it’s a serious inquisition into the morality of cinematic pleasure – a project that could have been somewhat academic, but seems to me in this case almost transcendentally gripping.

Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Taiwanese director Hou’s film is made up of three episodes, each starring the same two actors, set at different points in the twentieth century. It’s full of parallels and echoes, and is exquisitely constructed and manufactured; the overall trajectory of each story is clear, but each retains considerable mystery; each forms a mini social critique of the times. After this and his last film Cafe Lumiere, it seems possible that Hou is stripping down his film’s complexities and becoming more purely a humanist, albeit a very specifically Taiwanese one, and this should surely cause his audience and popular stature to increase, although to the extent that this ultimately renders him more conventional, there is something to regret in the evolution too.

Gabrielle (Patrice Cheareau)

Patrice Cheareau may quietly be making a case for himself as one of the world’s best directors, and Gabrielle, about the impact on an arid bourgeois marriage of the wife’s brief affair, is a major addition to that dossier. It depicts an age where marriage is as much a social as a private affair, a matter of contract and convention rather than of love, and the positions of the two main characters grow increasingly complex. It’s also distinctly brutal - the movie reminded me of Scorsese’s description of his Age of Innocence as his most violent film. Cheareau’s approach is masterfully analytical.

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)

81-year-old Altman keeps delivering one superb possible career endnote after another, and this may be the best of all. That’s what I wrote when I started drafting this article in mid-November, and then he went and died on us. Set around a live radio broadcast based on Garrison Keillor’s real-life radio show, it’s immensely rich, with Altman’s camera in constant elegant motion, showcasing his undiminished powers of composition and coordination. It’s also a wonderful, but realistic, evocation of the spiritual stakes inherent in art. Of all the fine films listed here, it’s probably the one I just plain loved watching the most.

The Proposition (John Hillcoat)

Hillcoat’s film is set in 1880’s Australia but otherwise resembles a classic Western – a story of revenge and murder in a faltering civilization, thick with blood and flies and heat and suffering. It’s thrillingly and exactingly specific about its time and place while tapping all the pleasures of the genre, with a resonant underlying theme about the making of a civilization. By its nature it holds you at a horrified distance, entailing I expect that it will be a film that’s intensely admired more than loved, but I don’t see how its particular project could have been much better executed.

The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry)

Gondry’s extremely personal film about a young Mexican man living in Paris, who habitually confuses the boundaries between dream and reality, is an utter delight. It’s the kind of film that’s so packed with invention and non-linear creativity that you wonder how any human mind ever arrived at it, but it never feels like a mere jaunt, partly because the complex romantic relationship at its centre is so scintillatingly conceived. Gondry’s last film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had greater scope perhaps, but this is the one where he really got to me.
 

Little Children (Todd Field)

Field’s second film (after his much admired debut, In the Bedroom, which I was a bit lukewarm about) displays dazzling overall skill and intelligence. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson play suburban stay at home caregivers, both in rather arid marriages, who connect at the swimming pool and start an affair. Meanwhile, the community obsesses about the presence of a freed sex offender, back at home with his frail but strong-willed mother. The film is quiet, immensely nuanced, with a prevailing tone of bewildered trauma; sometimes it’s satiric, sometimes outright scary, including many magnificent individual scenes and a wealth of surprising detail, all filtered through a perfect cast. It’s most daring in suggesting the spectrum that links the child molester to the merely unsettled male, creating huge ambiguity about real motivations and virtues.

May movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2006)

Here are some things I enjoyed about Mission: Impossible III. The pre-credits sequence, plunging us right into a traumatic high-point, as if afraid there was some possibility of bored walk-outs within the first minute; the high-class casting, with the likes of Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup and (especially) Philip Seymour Hoffman; (for a different reason) the female trio of Michelle Monaghan, Keri Russell and Maggie Q, all delectable; the fact that the main motivator for the action – referred to as a “rabbit’s foot” is never identified (Hitchcock MacGuffin style); the set-pieces in Berlin and the Vatican and Shanghai; the fact that Monaghan has to save Tom Cruise’s ass at a crucial point; the (by today’s standards) high degree of narrative coherence; the relative lack of irony and digression, all sublimated to sheer momentum; Cruise’s kinetic, mega-focused immersion in events. Now, some of those are things that in other movies I might as equally criticize, or at least consider inconsequential. Which means I don’t have much basis for taking issue with critics who find MI3 utterly shallow and uninteresting (unforgivable gibberish, the British Guardian called it), although I do find the continued shots at Cruise rather tiresome (maybe this would be another opportune time to acknowledge that I also defended Gigli). The movie definitely works best if you regard it as a series of filigrees, skillfully grafted on an inherently rather mundane chassis. But I bet you won’t be bored.

Art School Confidential

Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential sends up one of the easiest targets on the shooting range – the pretensions of a New York art college and its environs. Max Minghella plays the naïve freshman, surrounded by weirdos, and talent has nothing to do with the pecking order; meanwhile, a strangler stalks the students at night. The movie has plenty of chuckles (it’s not really aiming for belly laughs), and at least one interesting and subtle characterization, from John Malkovich as a teacher stuck with rationalizing his own failure. It doesn’t have much overriding purpose though – by the end of it, no one has any remaining credibility, and the idea of aesthetic virtue or integrity is out the window, leaving a rather deadening effect. Zwigoff’s deadpan style is apt in a way, and yet a more analytical sensibility might have found some real profundities in here. Art is still capable of profundity, isn’t it?

I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and musing about the (depending on your viewpoint) perhaps frighteningly ascendant China, but here’s one point for the West at least – we can crow over the sad decline of formerly admired filmmaker Chen Kaige (best known for Farewell My Concubine). With The Promise, he tries to make the same transition as his countryman Zhang Yimou did with Hero and House of Flying Daggers, to lose himself in a big-budget digital-heavy martial-arts romance. It’s a substantial failure, weak and derivative in every respect, but the saddest thing about it is the relative lack of technical facility – compared to what we’re used to, the standard of the effects is often rather crummy, and Chen’s handling of it is all over the place. His world, it seems, is flat lining.

Akeelah and the Bee

Roger Ebert thinks that Akeelah and the Bee is one of the year’s best films so far. I find this a rather sad statement, for what it implies about the influential Ebert’s dwindling expectations for cinema. Not that this mellow drama (co-produced by Starbucks) – about a young black girl from a rough LA neighbourhood, who goes all the way at the National Spelling Bee – isn’t sublimely effective. I thought the current Broadway musical, The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, had thought up every possible spelling bee plot twist, but this movie has a few more, along with a nice conception of how Akeelah’s quest reinvigorates the community (even the local drug dealer puts in coaching time). It’s all enjoyable, but also patently antiseptic and clichéd, and you might hate yourself for succumbing to it. You know too, it’s dumb to pay that much for coffee. 

Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon is another of those weird contemporary artifacts where almost unimaginable amounts of money and logistical genius are applied on a lifeless framework, for an almost bewildering end result. The film’s opening shot, circling the circumference of the vast cruise ship while twice picking up lead actor Josh Lucas on the jogging track, immediately informs us both of the film’s virtuosity, and of the vacuous underlying scheme. As in the 1972 original, the ship of course goes belly-up, and a small band of passengers breaks off from the others to seek their way to the surface, as the water level slowly pursues them, fires break out, machinery plummets, and their number slowly dwindles. It’s a pretty concise movie by blockbuster standards, little more than an hour and a half, which shows you how it has little to offer beyond discharging the basic blueprint. Bland casting hardly helps – although it would admittedly have been difficult to match the original line-up (Hackman, Borgnine, Shelley Winters, etc.). All in all, an inevitable flop.

Down in the Valley

In Down in the Valley, Edward Norton plays a disturbed young man who casts himself as a modern-day cowboy – this in suburban L.A. He hooks up with disaffected teen Evan Rachel Wood, instantly attracting the suspicion of her father (and, in the movie’s scheme, local sheriff) David Morse. The film has a genuinely shocking scene around halfway through, but that’s also the point where its initial low-key appeal yields to contrivance and gunplay; the movie’s use of Western archetypes actually makes Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking look subtle. The main point of interest is Norton, channeling De Niro at times (practicing his poses in front of a mirror) and doing an aw shucks routine at others – the actor has always seemed basically unassuming, but when you think about his career you realize he’s increasingly incapable of playing a normal person, and his performance here starts to seem disconcertingly egotistical.
 

I didn’t much like Chan-wook Park’s Old Boy, despite its Tarantino-approved prize at Cannes, and his latest Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (this is the title on the screen – in the ads, it’s just called Lady Vengeance, eschewing the sympathy angle) starts off in much the same vein. A woman is released from prison after thirteen years, instantly adopts a hard-boiled veneer and goes in search of revenge on the guy who really did the crime. She catches him and hauls him off to a remote location, and then suddenly the movie switches into a more sociological take on the virtue and validity of revenge, while also taking on increasing undertones of ethereal sentimentality (if it went on for ten minutes longer, you almost suspect you’d be watching something like Amelie). It’s very gripping overall, and the portrayal of the woman is ultimately fuller than I would have imagined possible. So there’s more to Park than I thought, although I couldn’t really tell you what exactly that is.

A final batch of fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2005)

Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now follows the course of two Palestinian suicide bombers. The pair initially seem like aimless layabouts who sign up for their fate primarily for lack of an alternative, gullibly swallowing their recruiters’ claims for the paradise that awaits them in the afterlife. The mission quickly goes wrong, and as they run around seeking to regroup, the film constructs the situation more fully – on the one hand, they are merely pawns of a wasteful cycle of violence, in which each side fuels the retaliation of the other; on the other hand, the situation of the West Bank natives is so dire – a life imprisonment in which (as they see it) the occupiers are perpetually effective in painting themselves as victims – that the ultimate sacrifice is the only tenable course, personally and politically. The film often seems too linear and forced, and is certainly too reliant on theatrical monologues to make its point, but it can’t help but carry significant political and anthropological weight.

Last Year’s Rent

Chris Columbus’ filming of the long-running Broadway musical Rent may be a partly useful reference point for future generations; you know, in the same way we’re all so glad they filmed Mame. As a contemporary viewing experience, it’s sadly negligible. I only saw the musical in its Toronto production, which seemed to me raucous and barely coherent, although I’ve enjoyed listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway original. The music comes across well enough in the movie (with only a couple of exceptions, it retains the Broadway cast), but everything around it seems either weird or irrelevant. As many critics have pointed out, the material seems dated if not embalmed, and Columbus’ saccharine treatment of such issues as AIDS and drug taking contributes to the sense of a disembodied fantasy; there’s no tangible sense here of a real time or place. However effective the actors may have been on stage, they’re mostly bland on the screen, and mostly too old (it has the feeling of watching the tenth season of something like Friends, but deprived of the previous nine seasons’ easing effect).

The structure is bizarre, with a first half that dawdles its way around an ungainly plot involving a controversial performance art show, and a second half that’s so abbreviated and choppy that a major character develops full-blown AIDS, is hospitalized and dies all in the space of one song. And the choreography is mostly stilted or cluttered. Columbus seems to enjoy the actors, and there’s something vaguely admirable about his fidelity to the original concept, but it’s not as admirable as it is nutty. I’d guess that someone previously unfamiliar with the material would find this film merely bewildering.

High Anxiety

Harold Ramis’ The Ice Harvest is a low-key, claustrophobic movie set on Christmas Eve, as John Cusack, having stolen over two million dollars from the mob, wanders around Wichita Falls, Kansas, dodging potential hit men, anguishing about the trustworthiness of his partner in crime (Billy Bob Thornton) and plotting escape with his primary object of desire (Connie Nielsen). The backdrop is crammed with strippers and lowlifes, and Cusack is oddly compelling as someone who revels in these indicia of masculinity without ever really feeling at one with them; the theme of challenged potency is reinforced by a long interlude with Oliver Platt as his best friend (who’s married, devastatingly unhappily, to Cusack’s ex-wife), oozing drunken neediness all over the screen. The set-up belongs to film noir, with all the double-crossings and ambiguities and angst, and while it’s rather too flat to be a compelling thriller, it’s oddly affecting as a weird, displaced reflection on middle-aged male anxiety. Director Ramis usually works in a much more ingratiating vein, but I hope he continues down this icier road.

Protocols of Zion is a documentary by Marc Levin, who’s best known for Slam, rooted in his astonishment at Jewish conspiracy myths that circulated in the wake of 9/11. Levin quickly sources much of this in the ongoing Internet-driven popularity of a 19^th-century screed, and goes on from there to a ramshackle survey of contemporary anti-Semitism, relying rather too much on the blatherings of people he meets in the street and various fringe characters (he also brings his aging father along with him most of time, to no particular end). He also spends much time circling around Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, although never nails (sorry) that wretched work as effectively as he should. Overall, as an agitator Levin is no Michael Moore, and as an analyst he’s far below the level of (for example) Eugene Jarecki’s masterful analysis of the military-industrial complex Why we Fight (which I saw at the film festival and is due on PBS soon). The film’s overall thinness is a real shame, for it’s obviously well intended, and the resurgence of anti-Semitism is one of the most depressing signs of mankind’s pervasive neurotic cowardice. 

Syriana

From there it’s a natural segue to Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana is an admirably ambitious journey across the spectrum of the oil business, from Washington to Beirut. It blends almost too many plotlines to count, and I can’t imagine anyone not missing some of the narrative points at a first viewing. Most prominent in the mix are George Clooney as a CIA agent and Matt Damon as an industry analyst; the film gradually coalesces on the power struggle in an oil-rich Middle Eastern country (in which the US blatantly, almost gleefully, meddles) and on the corporate-office machinations surrounding an industry takeover. For all its difficulties, it’s a fascinating film, although Gaghan (who won an Oscar for writing Traffic) seems at this point more of a strategist than an artist, and the movie – predominantly even-toned – lacks the muscularity that someone like Michael Mann might have brought to it.
 

This isn’t entirely inappropriate though, for the film’s general sobriety bolsters its despairing undertone. One of the last lines spoken in the film, left on tape by a suicide bomber, is that “The next world is the true life,” and the film renders it tempting to hope this is so, for the world of Syriana is barely worth saving. American institutions appear particularly corrupt and venal here (“Corruption is our protection,” says one power player), with idealism and justice depicted as mere tools of corporate power, and all foreign engagement as a cynical sham in the grip of (here it is again) the military-industrial complex. Personal relationships are equally untrustworthy, and all that’s good appears merely transient. I have no particular issue with any of this, but the film lacks the subtlety or overall eloquence to convince as advocacy; taken purely on its own terms, it could almost be dismissed as a paranoid fantasy born from too much time in the research library. Gaghan might not be completely unhappy with that assessment though, if the implication is that the film is a spur to further self-education and action.

Even more fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2005)

I loved George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, a highly disciplined account of how CBS News took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s. The impeccably controlled David Straithairn is mesmerizing as Murrow, and as I listened to his various on-air monologues (presumably delivered largely if not entirely verbatim) I was astounded at the attention to language, at the confident assumption of a certain literary sensibility on the audience’s part. Of course, one might focus instead on the elitism underlying those times – no doubt television is in some sense more accessible and “democratic” now; and Clooney goes out of his way to show the limitations of the times (in particular through a couple of co-workers who must cover up the fact that they’re married). But on the whole, despite his film’s stripped down air – it focuses almost entirely on work processes (flawlessly fusing new and found footage), runs only an hour and a half and seldom moves outside the newsroom or a few other bland interiors – it’s distinctly romantic and even subtly mystic. Murrow’s customary sign-off, which contributes the film’s title, sums up its mood  - taut, but inherently (in the very suggestion of an immediate need for good luck) dark (even the title’s punctuation, with an unusual but very deliberate period inserted on screen after “Luck,” seems meaningful). Clooney’s handling is generally masterly, full of good decisions. Some have pointed out inaccuracies in the film…good night and good luck to them I guess.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’, starring 50 Cent and based on his own violent life story, plays like a rough amalgamation of 8 Mile, Hustle and Flow and whatever gangsta drug movie you care to name, and adds nothing new to the recipe. Fiddy is a dull central presence, and the intriguing cultural experiment of having such a project be directed by My Left Foot’s Jim Sheridan doesn’t pay off.

I've only read one of the Harry Potter books – Chamber of Secrets – and that was in French, as an exercise (it took me ages). I found it over-extended and messy, and these structural problems far outweighed its appeal to the imagination. I acknowledge though that this weakness may acquire undue weight when one labours over the book for months, rather than devouring it in a delighted rush (as per the images that news shows lazily and panderingly provide on each new J K Rowling release date). And of course, maybe it’s better in English. Still, I have remained immune. And while I’ve enjoyed all the films to some extent (counter to general opinion, my favourite remains the first, simply for the pleasure of discovery), I cannot see that the series is achieving much from a cinematic point of view. The latest, Goblet of Fire, has been widely regarded as the best, in part for its greater intensity and control of mood; and for the expanded emotional nuances allowed by the lead actors’ aging. This is fair enough, but it’s so limited; the conception of the characters remains extremely superficial, and in any event they’re swamped by the general mechanics of the film (among the many esteemed supporting actors, Brendan Gleeson is the only one allowed to make much impression).

The plot, involving a wizard contest manipulated by the evil Lord Vordemort, seems ungainly here, reliant on all sorts of arbitrariness and “rules” that the film – needing to answer to few externally-imposed constraints – sets down as it sees fit; maybe in the book it all has more context, but the skeleton looks pretty unsophisticated in a movie’s more compressed surroundings. It ends on a generalized feeling of foreboding, but on its own terms it’s primarily mystifying. New director Mike Newell maintains the mood well, but a lot of it has a businesslike kind of feeling - how much room for personal expression can there be within such a vast preestablished infrastructure?  Goblet of Fire has many engaging scenes – both of high drama and of intimate fumbling – and I cannot see myself abandoning the series now, but I think I am being driven there more by the canny positioning of the films as “events” than by their accumulated pay-off to date.

More film festival movies I caught up with later.

Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Bee Season is a new-age hodgepodge set around an eleven year old spelling prodigy gliding to the national championships, and the unfulfilled family around her; the movie has an alluring shimmer to it, but its triangulation of spelling mystique, Kabala, Hinduism and psychological trauma is utterly unconvincing. Its conception of the father, played by Richard Gere, as a subtle tyrant doesn’t work either. I was reminded of Robert Altman’s Dr. T and the Women, a much underrated film that allowed Gere his customary charm while still leaving no doubt about his underlying complacency and perniciousness; nothing about Bee Season exhibits such intuitive assurance.

I won't pretend to being well-read - my familiarity with the source material of Pride & Prejudice comes not from Jane Austen's novel but rather from Gurinder Chadra's recent Bollywoodization of it, Bride and Prejudice, which I now realize was much more faithful than I knew at the time. Chadra's film was a hopeless mess, but actually brought out some of the key points of interest (such as the best friend's marriage to a personally inadequate but economically viable man) more acutely than Joe Wright's new version of the original (albeit more through luck than skill). Wright's film has been criticized as a soft prettification of the novel, and although I'm in no position to judge, that rings true (the Richard Clayderman-like piano on the soundtrack is a key culprit). Still, Keira Knightley is a more gripping central presence here than I thought likely, and the movie delivers - although not at all distinctively - on the central love story; everything else feels short-changed. The pride, a matter of human foibles, is definitely more fully treated than the societally rooted prejudice.
 

James Mangold’s Walk the Line is the story of Johnny Cash, and many of its raw elements echo Taylor Hackford’s Ray, last year’s story of Ray Charles – despite the different musical genres, the two films play to much the same respectful middlebrow audience. Ray is the more cinematically fluid of the two, and it’s certainly more thorough in conveying a sense of the singer’s historical importance. Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning work as Charles is a more dazzling evocation than Joaquin Phoenix’s as Cash, although Phoenix’s more interiorized work slowly grows on you. Walk the Line’s trump card though is in the character of June Carter, who has a long and bumpy professional and personal relationship with Cash before they settle down to their 35-year marriage. Reese Witherspoon plays June, with great movie-stealing vivacity, and the picture is mostly an up and down chronicle of postponed destiny, with great music woven in throughout. It’s very smooth and highly enveloping , but if the gauge is serious history it might almost as well be about Kenny Rogers.

 

December movies, part two

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2005)

Ballets Russes is a documentary about the performing institution that popularized ballet in America from the 30’s to the 50’s, told through some wonderful archival footage and many interviews with the principal dancers (many of whom happily survived at least until recently), including a 2000 reunion. I am not any kind of ballet fan, but the film has great material – behind the scenes clashes, breakups, wartime turmoil, adventures in Hollywood, and so forth, and it’s so engaging that it’s only afterwards that its limitations really occur to you. For example, the old footage is seen (perhaps out of necessity) only in fragments, concentrating far more on providing glimpses of key figures than on illustrating technique, form or overall shape – our sense of the company’s artistry emerges in the telling much more than in the showing. There’s an intriguing social history there, of the popularization of the cultural form, but this too seems secondary to the film’s celebratory purpose and must be constructed in bits and pieces. And the brief anecdote of the company’s first black ballerina, who aroused such hostility in the South (including a backstage Klan visit) that she eventually had to leave the company, only points up the absence of such weight elsewhere in the film. To a certain (likely the larger) section of the audience, all of this will of course not matter at all, and as I say, it didn’t matter that much to me either as I watched it. The personalities are terrific, and if the movie’s techniques are conventional, they’re executed with much grace.

Three…Extremes

Three…Extremes is made up of three squirm-inducing stories directed by Park Chan-wook (Old Boy), Takashi Miike (mainstay of the film festival’s Midnight Madness section) and Fruit Chan. The first, by Chan, is called Dumplings – place your bets for what they’re made of. The second, by Park (a director whose work I’ve yet to warm to, despite the Tarantino-led accolades), is about a film director terrorized by an extra, and Miike’s third is the most dream-like and intriguing, as well as probably the cleverest. Like most compilation movies, the cumulative impact is relatively limited – no matter how well crafted the episodes are, they’re pretty much confined to putting across the premise and then getting off the stage. But variations across all three segments on the themes of self-disgust and macabre family dynamics lend it a broad feeling of coherence, and obviously it’s never dull.

By the way, I watched Ballets Russes and Three…Extremes on the same Sunday afternoon. Isn’t diversity a great thing?

I didn’t much enjoy the stage production of The Producers when I saw it in Toronto a couple of years ago, although many said it was hampered by weak casting of the two leads. There’s no question it felt dead at the centre, although it was difficult to imagine how high the tacky material could ever be elevated. The new film version, directed by Susan Stroman (who was also at the helm for the theatre – this is her first film), confirms all these doubts. Like the film of Rent, the movie suffers from woefully inadequate strategizing on what a meaningful cinematic version might actually consist of, but it’s not as facile as Rent in (to some degree) covering that up with superficial energy and glitz. The early scene where Nathan Lane’s crooked producer meets Matthew Broderick’s buttoned-down accountant and quickly starts to lead him astray is shockingly drab and lifeless (that stuff about the blue blanket is surpassingly lame), plunging the movie right into the hole.

It’s A Flop!

The main casting innovation, Uma Thurman as the Swedish bimbo actress, similarly strikes out – Thurman simply can’t lower herself into this with sufficient conviction (the only mystery is why she felt inclined to try). The less estimable performers do better. Will Ferrell’s genetic predisposition to shtick works fine here, and I must admit to getting my biggest laughs out of Gary Beach (who won a Tony for this) as the outrageously camp director, particularly during the Springtime for Hitler routine, which all these years later remains pretty surefire. But these are slim pickings indeed. My mind wandered to other musicals, not to the likes of Minnelli or Donen (which would be not so much wandering as inter-galactic leaping) but rather – I admit oddly – to Michael Ritchie’s filming of another Broadway mainstay, The Fantasticks. Ritchie’s movie was panned and never properly released, although I caught it once on late night TV. That one’s a choppy and often threadbare film (the Internet movie database has a long list of scenes that were cut from it), but it has some moments of beauty, perhaps all the sweeter for their obviously problematic context. It feels like a movie someone at least cared about making.

Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone is ultimately a little disappointing as only a very good film can be – it’s so very smart and accomplished that you’re frustrated at its failure to be a masterpiece. The elements of that failure are pretty clear. The film is about Christmas at a rambunctious liberal family, where the eldest son (Dermot Mulroney) brings home his girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) for the first time; they’re loose and liberal; she’s neurotic and uptight…a disaster looms. The cast includes Diane Keaton, Claire Danes and Rachel McAdams, all excellent. I haven’t smiled or chuckled as much in any film this year (no laughs out loud though), and the sentiment got to me too. And a dinner scene where Parker puts her foot in her mouth all the way up to her thigh is just about the squirmiest thing I’ve seen all year, including those giant insects in King Kong.

Turbulent Blessings

And yet…even that fine scene seems a little contrived and overwritten, pushing Parker’s ineptitude way beyond the point where someone in her situation would have figured it out and shut it down (or else had someone step in to shut it down for her). The film ultimately succumbs to an extreme desire for tidiness, arranging for several unlikely and under-dramatized character pairings, and tacking on a sentimental one-year-later epilogue. And it doesn’t really have much to say about anything at all, except the same old stuff about the turbulent blessings of family. I thought as a counterpoint of one of my favourite films of the year, Agnes Jaoui’s Comme une image (Look At Me), which was similarly well-constructed and accessible and pleasant and unobtrusive in its style, but which (like Jaoui’s previous film The Taste Of Others) seemed continually philosophical and probing about the interaction of the social and the personal. Even Jaoui’s titles are beautifully resonant in a way that The Family Stone just isn’t. I see that I’ve laid out the film’s faults in much more detail than its virtues, but that’s my own evocation of family for you – always playing up the negative.