2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Four

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2007)

This is the fourth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog)

Herzog has been making documentaries for nearly forty years now, and in some ways this one involves fairly conventional subject matter by his often extreme standards: a visit to the McMurdo Station base in Antarctica, where he checks out the daily life and undergoes some expeditionary side trips. Herzog doesn’t take the screen this time round, but he’s highly present as narrator and off-screen interviewer, throwing in plenty of his quirky self - he refers to McMurdo’s accommodating “abominations such as…yoga classes” and fills his interviews with off-kilter queries such as whether insanity exists among penguins. Herzog seems to be pessimistic about mankind’s long-term chances, and yet is dismissive about “tree huggers”: always a wacky theorist at best, he remains a celebrant of pioneers and iconoclasts, whether it be scientists who spend their days on the lip of an active volcano (which harks back to Herzog’s classic La Soufriere) or a lone penguin determinedly heading away from its family, toward the mountains and certain death – maybe insane, but certainly admirable in Herzog’s eyes. The title refers not only to the geographic location but also to the sense that mankind’s first outpost on an alien world might look something like this; the beautiful underwater photography also resembles science fiction at times.

Useless (Jia Zhang-Ke)

The young director Jia has already hit a major high point with The World, a piercing examination of alienation within modern China. In the few years since then, he’s worked in a more minimalist vein, including a couple of documentaries. The latest of these, Useless, conveys the sense of a stream of consciousness, almost as if Jia started filming in one fairly randomly chosen place and then followed wherever the connections took him. Fashion is the primary linkage, from a rural factory to a high-concept Paris fashion show, to poor tailors squeezing out a living on mending threadbare garments. The title “Useless” is the translation of the latest line by the designer Ma Ke, who while seeming sincere and pleasant, nevertheless lives in astonishing splendour compared to virtually everyone else in the film, spouting various airy aphorisms that suggest she’s lost touch. The title also carries easy resonance beyond that of course. It’s almost impossible to make a documentary about contemporary China that’s anything other than fascinating, and Jia provides some fascinating parallels and contrasts while withholding any overt interpretation (there’s no voice over and only a few explanatory captions). It’s very worthwhile viewing but I don’t think this is his most valuable vein: hopefully the next film will again evidence greater ambition and personal investment.

Chronicle d’un ete (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin)

A festival sidebar devoted to Quebec director Michel Brault provided my first chance to see this famous 1961 cinema verite milestone (on which Brault acted as one of the cinematographers). It attracted a very sparse audience, suggesting again that the festival’s great success in galvanizing the mainstream for ten days doesn’t necessarily serve as the rising tide to lift the cinematic appetite as a whole. The film is a great time capsule, at times seeming more naïve than profound now, but yielding numerous fascinating moments. Starting off by interviewing random passers-by on their degree of happiness, it evolves into a more probing examination of working class lives and then into broader vignettes of the 1960 summer. The Algerian war looms large, and it’s an age when even a relatively young woman could have a concentration camp ID tattooed on her arm, but we also take in St. Tropez vacations and amateur rock-climbing attempts. The film comments throughout on its own making, including an epilogue in which the main participants debate what we’ve just seen, differing markedly on the degree to which some of them were “acting” rather than simply being. For all the talk of truth, manipulation (in the sense of directorial choice, influence, juxtaposition, etc.) is inevitably prominent throughout, but the earnestness is still engaging. It’s a shame that something like the Documentary Channel, in between seemingly endless close-up examinations of the porn industry, can’t make historic material like this more readily available.

And here are two more I caught up with in their current commercial release.

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis)

Haggis’ somber drama, an amalgam of detective story and sorrowful war requiem, is a way better picture than his Oscar-winning Crash, which I found almost unwatchable. It also relies too much on coincidence and contrivance: for instance, Tommy Lee Jones, playing amateur detective, is almost always a step ahead of the cops on the case. But that helps here to illuminate the overall theme of eroding American values, particularly in its most cherished institutions. Jones plays a retired military man who’s probably never questioned the code in his whole life; one of his two sons died in uniform, and the other has now disappeared, just days after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq: military and civilian police fight over jurisdiction, with neither side seemingly caring. It’s carefully worked out, and although the film has struck some as being rather plodding, I found the desolate tone – perfectly refracted through Jones – quite moving. It’s good on the heartland culture too, precisely deploying drinks and cigarettes and strip joints (and Bibles and Support our Troops signs), and it dares to suggest that the strategic blunder of Iraq might have engendered a near-pathology in the troops. A truly great film would have explored that idea at least a little more directly. The denouement comes in a bit of a rush, and the final scene (messing with the Stars and Stripes, no less) is a return to heavy-handed symbolism, but it’s an interesting piece overall. 
 

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  (Andrew Dominik)

That train-length title tells you the project here: to take a well-established, often-mythologized historical event, and scrutinize it with an objectivity that eschews normal suspense; as such the film runs over two and a half hours, and is often deliberately dour. Brad Pitt is interestingly ambiguous, if as usual a bit too recessive, as Jesse, with Casey Affleck doing pretty well with Robert Ford’s arc from naïve hero-worship to spooked self-preservation. But Dominik doesn’t fill this ambitious framework with anything like enough substance – there’s not a strand, not a ghost of an idea here, that hasn’t been done better before. Of course that’s true of most modern movies – it’s a mature art form, what can you expect? – but Dominik’s apparent pretensions to stand astride the genre invite these comparisons to come flooding in, causing the film to virtually implode.

2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Three

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)

This is the third of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

La fille coupee en deux (Claude Chabrol)

Chabrol is probably the least intellectually esteemed of the three French New Wave veterans who brought films to this year’s festival, having spent much of his efforts (and he’s been amazingly prolific) on melodramatic material of somewhat uncertain thematic value. Inevitably, the precision that marked classics like Le Boucher has eased off now, to be replaced by a sense of relative effortlessness that might yield either grace or fuzziness (based, it sometimes seems, on little more than how the wind blows). The new film is another unwieldy concoction, with Ludivine Sagnier as a TV weather girl who has an affair with an esteemed, much older author, while being pursued by the more age-appropriate but unstable heir to a chemical fortune (played, bizarrely ripely, by Benoit Magimel). The film mostly bumps along, with a confusing sense of time and psychology; some of its more interesting avenues are barely explored, whereas much of the plot turns on some “depraved” actions presented here with a rather doddery-seeming discretion. None of it is dull, but it again carries a sense of near-randomness, with the different tones and structures never coalescing. It just doesn’t feel as if Chabrol tried very hard to think his way into these people and situations, which leads here to overall hollowness, rather than masterly transcendence.

Les amours d’Astree et de Celadon (Eric Rohmer)

87-year old Rohmer has said this may be his last film, and if so he may have chosen an almost perfect parting note. Adapted from a 17^th century novel and set who knows when, this is a simple tale of love lost and regained between two shepherds, apparently shot in extremely modest circumstances, and for a little while it seems perhaps too flighty for this great director. But we soon see how this might all along have been the blueprint for almost all his wonderful comedies and proverbs, turning on another moral dilemma which gives rise to delicious plot complications. The film involves some suspension of disbelief, or at least the ability to think oneself into a different frame of reference. But since the opening titles gently caution us that this has been shot in an alternate location because the true setting is now inadequately preserved, we’re clearly compelled to bring our contemporary sensibility to the table. The closing sequences are some of Rohmer’s most unrestrained celebrations of love, not to mention being unusually erotic for him. Overall, if it’s not as complex or completely fulfilling as his very best work, there’s no doubt that Rohmer’s vision for the film, and for its place in his wonderful career, has been completely achieved.

Ne touchez pas la hache (Jacques Rivette)

A mere 80 years old, Rivette’s film by contrast doesn’t feel at all like a wrapping up work (unless one counts the presence of several key past collaborators in supporting roles), but rather like a quite surprising new direction. As concentrated as anything he’s ever done, this is an adaptation of Balzac’s novel The Duchess of Langeais, about what we would nowadays call a distinctly passive-aggressive relationship between the duchess and her military suitor. He obsessively devotes himself to her, winning only minor concessions; when he turns the table and starts to ignore her, she becomes obsessed with regaining his devotion. The film is superbly controlled and well acted by Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu, but I must confess it strikes me as second-tier Rivette. In his best films, which are just about as good as anyone’s, he’s constructed a unique cinematic universe: elegant, literate, mystical, playful. It’s only at the very end, when the officer and his friends set out on a seafaring quest, that Ne touchez pas la hache really works in that classic vein. But as with just about every Rivette movie I’ve ever seen, I suspect it will take multiple viewings to open up all the rewards here.

Before the Devil Knows you’re Dead (Sidney Lumet)

83-year-old Sidney Lumet is perhaps the oldest working American director (you can see there’s a theme to how I make many of my selections – I call it “always buy brand names”). Never recognized as an auteur, Lumet’s best work nevertheless exhibits a terrific fusion of form and content, a great feel for the contemporary pulse, and of course often-brilliant acting. The glory days of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon et al are a while ago now, although his last film Find Me Guilty (which I haven’t yet managed to see) reportedly recaptured some of the old flair for atmospheric logistics. The new film certainly does so in spades. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are brothers (which as imaginative casting goes, works way better than Lumet’s casting of Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman as father and son in Family Business), both suffering major money problems, which they aim to solve by knocking off their parents’ jewelry store. Needless to say, things go wrong, but if some of the plot mechanics are broadly predictable, Lumet’s masterly handling of the steadily darkening tone certainly isn’t. The film does some jumping around in time, which seems obligatory of all thrillers now, but never becomes a prisoner of its structure: the director has a great feeling for the lives and the settings and coaxes several of the actors (Hoffman, and the magnificent Albert Finney as their slowly tuning-in father) to an Oscar-worthy level. Amazing to say, but this might ultimately rank as one of the best of Lumet’s fifty or so pictures.
 

And here’s one I caught up with in its current commercial release

Across the Universe (Julie Taymor)

This is certainly a film of very high imagination and quality of execution, weaving thirty or forty Beatles songs into a narrative about young people in the 60’s, against the backdrop of Vietnam, the draft, and the evolving counterculture; glamorously turbulent America is contrasted with drab industrial Liverpool. Certain sequences are breathtaking in their surreal vision, and Taymor – who ascended to major fame with the stage production of The Lion King – unleashes the entire range of her gifts here. But you may detect a certain stiffness to this praise, and unfortunately the film is hardly as galvanizing as you’d want. Structurally ingenious as the narrative may be, it brings as much fresh insight to its period and characters as The Lion King did to the serious study of African ecosystems. The acting and musicianship are mostly bland, the premise soon gets tired (the lead character is called Jude…the women around him are called Lucy and Sadie and Prudence…eventually you can’t help rolling your eyes), and even Taymor’s virtuosity sometimes seems merely like undisciplined fiddling at the digital keyboard. All you Need is Love, of course, provides the finale. As they say, if a thing’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.

2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Two

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)

This is the second of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)

Akin’s fiery Head-On, about the marriage and love affair (in that order) between two Turkish immigrants in Germany, was one of my favourite films of a few years ago. The new film is not as striking, with an intricate but conventional criss-crossing plot structure and a less hectic pace. A Turkish immigrant in Germany (to date Akin’s filmic universe has remained very close to his personal one) courts a whore and then accidentally kills her; his son, a professor of German, goes to Istanbul to find the woman’s daughter, who’s a political activist, and impulsively decides to relocate there. Meanwhile, the young activist is in Germany, searching for her mother, until she gets deported back home, and the strands pull together (while never quite getting tied up). Akin is great at evoking the flavour of Turkish culture, and this is a fairly rich creation overall, apparently skeptical about the overall prospects for Turkey’s integration into Europe (mordantly summed up by echoing images of coffins being transported between the two countries – the film was completed though before the religious controversies around the recent elections) while nevertheless seeming almost sentimental about the possibility for reconciliation on the personal level. But the overall artistic direction isn’t as striking as the incidental devices. The cast includes the indelible Hanna Schygulla, from so many Fassbinder movies of the 70’s and 80’s, although I have to confess I failed to recognize her for at least twenty minutes.

L’Age des tenebres (Denys Arcand)

Notwithstanding patriotic pride at a Canadian Oscar winner, I can’t say that Arcand’s movies have ever impressed me much. I found The Barbarian Invasions something of a self-important mess, and the famous “adult” dialogue mostly grated on me; he never provides much in the way of interesting style either. An unsurprising follow-up, the new film is about a middle-aged civil servant who’s suffocating beneath a dull job, loveless marriage, indifferent kids, mammoth mortgage, and all the rest of it. He fantasizes constantly about sex and celebrity and power, with Diane Kruger playing the main recurring lust object. The movie is less sprawling than Barbares, more invested in the misery of a single sad sack Everyman, and the script is largely a scrap book of op-ed headlines, along with some unremarkable satire (mainly of the foolish Government of Quebec bureaucracy) and those mostly leaden fantasy scenes, and it doesn’t really end so much as just run out of ideas. And this does definitely not rank high in the pantheon of great films about women. Even so, I actually liked it a bit more than Arcand’s last few films, if only for the perverse reason that defeatism and limited achievement are more tonally matched to the material than his usual flimsy bravado. And the last few scenes do have a faintly touching pastoral quality.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Wayne Wang)

The festival strangely categorized Wang, whose last film was Queen Latifah’s Last Holiday, along with Rivette and Rohmer in this year’s “Masters” category. Maybe it was an over-reaction to Wang’s relatively rare feat of having two new films on display. I caught one of them, about an aging man visiting his daughter in the US for the first time. She’s been there a dozen years, is now divorced and assimilated – in particular to using English as the only medium to fluently express her emotions – and since the two never had much of a relationship to begin with, it’s a largely desolate visit…until a confrontation about both past and present pulls them into at least incrementally better mutual understanding. It’s a modest film for sure, following familiar themes of thwarted communication across cultural and generational chasms – even though it’s only 83 minutes long, it feels repetitive at times. Still, I did find it somewhat touching, although it’s possible I’m a sucker for this subject of language as a wedge, which has some relevance to my own background. It’s hardly the work of a master – it actually feels more like that of a tentative new filmmaker, which I guess may have been exactly Wang’s intention. If this is indeed the start of a new path, it looks more promising than the old one had become.

And here are two festival films I caught up with in their current commercial release

The Brave One (Neil Jordan)

This is the one with Jodie Foster as a New York radio commentator whose fiancée is brutally murdered; frustrated with the ineffectual police investigation, and newly aware of the city’s scary underbelly, she buys an illegal gun and becomes a vigilante. The film has provoked quite a debate, turning on whether it’s an artful comment on vigilantism and on the Death Wish genre, or merely a tarted-up specimen of same with a gender twist. I’m of the latter opinion – this is merely Charles Bronson land with better literary references. If it had any real investigative intent, or a desire to do more than pander to its audience, it would construct a less comprehensive identification with Foster’s character (in the circumstances her performance is too good). It would offer fewer glib one-liners, fewer scumbags virtually tripping over themselves to get blown away, a less comfortable pacing and stylistic approach, and – above all perhaps – an ending that didn’t let everyone involved (not least of all the audience) off the hook so completely. And it wouldn’t have a quasi-romance between villain and cop (Terrence Howard, also too good for the movie) that’s conceived entirely in movie terms. The title (brave!) is just about as manipulative and inappropriate as everything else in the movie.
 

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

This is a fairly logical follow-up to Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, again taking a story of institutionalized brutality erupting into normal lives. The setting this time is London, one of the world’s great thriving melting pots of course, and one in which at least some of the current boom may represent the wages of sin. Naomi Watts plays a nurse who’s drawn into the orbit of the Russian mob while looking for the family of an orphaned baby; Viggo Mortensen (once again excellent) is an ultra-contained chauffeur and clean-up man whose motives are more complex than they seem. If nothing else, Cronenberg seems now like one of the most accomplished of genre directors; every aspect of the film – style, pacing, visceral impact, not least of course in an already notorious bathhouse fight sequence – is quite superb. He’s also masterly at weaving in some black humour without being gauche about it. The subculture depicted could easily seem caricatured or melodramatic – gangster-type swaggering has consumed more screen hours than car chases – but Cronenberg makes it persuasive as an anthropological study. The deft ending is satisfying in narrative terms while leaving a distinct despair about the two solitudes of our real and shadow societies. The only caveat is simply the broad similarity to the previous film – Cronenberg is working at such a high level now that you’re hungry to see what he might bring to a wider range of material.

2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part One

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)

This is the first of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

The Man From London (Bela Tarr)

I’ve seen only one Bela Tarr film, The Werckmeister Harmonies; I especially regret not seeing his seven-hour (OK, it’s a qualified sort of regret) Satantango, most famously championed by Susan Sontag (note – I subsequently rectified this). The new film, which made it through numerous production challenges, is his first since Werckmeister, seven years ago now. Based on a George Simenon story, and a mere two and a quarter hours long (and sadly feeling no shorter), it tells of an ordinary man who witnesses a crime, retrieves a suitcase full of stolen money, and gets drawn into the consequent spiral. In interviews, Tarr expresses a complex set of ambitions for the film – “it deals with the cosmic and the realistic, the divine and the human…” – but I don’t think these are fully realized. His notoriously exacting technique – shooting in pristine black and white, involving very long, deliberately paced, meticulously orchestrated takes – seems rather constricting here, and the story is too generic for the “cosmic” aspects to soar very high. Amid an authentically unhealthy looking cast, the presence of recognizable (and badly dubbed) Tilda Swinton as the protagonist’s wife just seems like a mistake. A couple of very long close ups of a secondary female character might oddly be the film’s most riveting moments, but suggest a latent desire to have taken all this in a different direction entirely. Sadly, you get the feeling that the struggle to make the film may have slightly calcified a great artist’s intuition.

Les chansons d’amour (Christophe Honore)

This is the first film I’ve seen by young French director Honore, and it certainly goes down easily. He seems to be aspiring here to be a modern-day Jacques Demy in presenting the tangled love lives of a few young Parisians, who frequently articulate their feelings by bursting into song. Louis Garrel (who has a real throwback quality about him, sometimes reminding me of Truffaut’s original muse Jean-Pierre Leaud) is the centre – a young professional who travels through superficial bliss, through terrible loss, to a state that’s far less definable but perhaps more sustainable. He’s surrounded by an endlessly shifting network of plausibly needy, uncertain, flawed people, and the movie is a great uncliched hymn to Paris. Honore’s vision and style aren’t as joyously all-encompassing as Demy’s (and the songs aren’t as memorable either) but he certainly takes advantage of contemporary pragmatism while exhibiting a classical good humour and emotional curiosity. The film’s closing line – “Love me less but love me a long time” – is a nice summing up of its underlying sense of neediness, and given where the film begins (a deliriously attractive guy-and-two-girls-in-a-bed set-up), one would never guess the parties to that final exchange, nor its setting.

The Past (Hector Babenco)

This is an unexpectedly intimate work from Argentinean director Babenco, best known for his Hollywood stint that produced Kiss of the Spider Woman and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. It starts with a young married couple undergoing one of the all-time amicable breakdowns, after which he (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) initially falls on his feet more comfortably than she does. But as he goes through a string of break-ups and personal reversals, all somehow linked to the periodic reappearances of his ex-wife, it starts to seem their fates are still linked after all, something that she attributes to his failure to provide adequate closure when he ignored her parting request to help sort through their old photos. At times then it resembles a morality tale; at others it functions as a tribute to feminine patience and fortitude; the pieces are often melodramatic, and yet the protagonist’s reinventions of himself (his transition from overweight crapped-out alcoholic into a sleek personal fitness trainer is particularly startling) almost have the feel of science fiction. It’s certainly interesting, although never really fulfilling. Gael brings a lot to the essentially passive main character, although the actress playing his ex-wife, with far fewer scenes, dominates the film, creating a character who seems capable of lurching at any given moment in any direction, and yet is still true and moving.

Le voyage du ballon rouge (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

Hou has been moving recently from his original project of dramatizing the political and social history of his homeland Taiwan toward a more universally-based immersion in cinematic joy; the new direction may be less rigorous in some ways, but it’s starting to look as if Hou should perhaps be counted as being two of the world’s best directors! The new film is a tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 The Red Balloon (which I’ve actually never seen), and it’s Hou’s first to be made outside Asia. It’s breathtaking under those circumstances that it’s suffused in such easy naturalism. Juliette Binoche (in one of her most colourful, magnetic performances) is an actress and single mother who engages a Chinese film student as a nanny for her young son; scenes of everyday life around their wonderfully cluttered Parisian apartment contrast with vignettes of the red balloon, which may or may not belong to a short film the student is making. There’s little plot and no narrative closure as such, and the pace is serene, articulated through Hou’s usual long takes (which are so much more intoxicating than Bela Tarr’s), but the film swells with possibility and connection. It deconstructs cinematic magic by laying out some digital tricks, but only to remind us (and virtually every character in here is a creator of some kind) how our sense of beauty in art is enhanced rather than dulled by an appreciation for the underlying process. This is easily one of the best films of the last few years.
 

The Walker (Paul Schrader)

In my preview article I cited this as being perhaps my top pick among the festival’s English-language offerings; consequently, it ends up perhaps being the greatest disappointment of the films I saw. On paper it sounded great, bearing some echoes of Schrader’s early success American Gigolo. The (gay) scion of an esteemed political family (Woody Harrelson) now spends his life as an amusing bauble on the arm of Washington’s wealthy older women; but when he’s caught up in a murder investigation, in which he’s protecting a compromised senator’s wife (Kristin Scott-Thomas), it all starts to unravel. Lauren Bacall and Lily Tomlin are in the mix as well, so it’s certainly an interesting cast, and Harrelson’s stylized performance becomes more persuasive as it goes on. The sexual and political themes of Schrader’s best work are certainly implicit in the material, but the handling is dull, and the whole thing becomes increasingly swamped by (often barely penetrable) plot mechanics, yielding only the vaguest and most generic of insights into the devious workings of the machinery of power. I’ve enjoyed Schrader’s work most of all when his famously turbulent psyche has been closest to the surface – his delirious version of Cat People being the prime example – but The Walker is just too drab and conventional to be any fun.

That's entertainment!

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2007)

D J Caruso’s Disturbia is an entertaining thriller about a teenager who’s sentenced to three months’ house arrest for punching a teacher; when his exasperated mother takes away his X-Box and itunes, he’s reduced to spying on the neighbours for kicks. This all goes fine as long as he’s checking out the sexy new neighbour to the left, but what about the creepy guy who lives alone on the right? The premise is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but the film’s nowhere near as rigorous – Hitchcock’s exacting creation of dramatic and thematic space is replaced here by something far more haphazard (for one thing, I could never figure out how the kid could possibly see so clearly into so many adjacent houses). It’s not a bad movie though. Shia Laboeuf is quirkily persuasive in the lead role, voyeurism remains a nearly unbeatable subject for cinema, and events are pretty nicely plotted until the end, when the climax seems under motivated and over the top. It still stays within the bounds of the PG-rating though.

Fracture/Hot Fuzz

Gregory Hoblit’s Fracture is an entertaining suspense thriller, although lacking even as much distinctiveness as Disturbia. Anthony Hopkins (in some scenes displaying a lighter touch than usual; in others succumbing shamelessly to Lecteritis) shoots his wife, confesses to it, and looks like a slam dunk conviction for prosecutor Ryan Gosling (as inherently interesting to watch as always), who’s so confident he barely bothers to prepare. The trial generates shocking revelations and the case falls apart, taking much of Gosling’s life with it. There’s more to come of course. Fracture is a modest creation, just centering really on one neat idea involving the murder weapon; everything else is just padding, but of a very plush, easy on your rear end quality.

The British Hot Fuzz is an entertaining comedy about a tough London cop who’s transplanted to a sleepy rural village. Initially the lackadaisical attitude of his colleagues and the inconsequentiality of the local transgressions drives him nuts, but then people start to die, and it turns out he’s headed for the biggest shoot-em-up of his life. Explicitly inspired by the likes of Point Break and Bad Boys 2 (and I figure I caught only around 5% of whatever other references are packed in there), the movie is remarkably effective in integrating action movie tropes with a rather touching respect for traditional English values – I can’t think of a similar project so free of cheap shots, and even the dastardly plot has a kind of deranged misplaced sweetness to it. Winking at the audience is also kept to an absolute minimum. It’s as good as, but not massively different from, director Edgar Wright’s earlier movie Shaun of the Dead, but you feel he’s working in his comfort zone, so why complain.

Dog Movie!

Year Of The Dog is an entertaining oddity, and a bit of a surprise – generally advertised as a comedy, it’s surprisingly raw and depressing at times, and then morphs into a (apparently) sincere portrait of how an unfulfilled woman finds her calling in pro-animal activism. Molly Shannon plays Peggy, an office assistant who channels her affection into her little dog Pencil; when he dies of toxic poisoning, she’s devastated, but the chain of events presents the possibility of a more rounded life, accompanied by growing social awareness, all of which gradually strains her equilibrium, if not her sanity.

I was thinking of devoting a whole article to this one, but I would just have ended up rambling about dogs, and I’ve gone that way several times before. Suffice to say that at the moment I can’t think of a movie that devotes as much time to dog ownership without getting overly cute about it (not that Pencil isn’t a very sweet-looking dog). That aside, the film is rather strange, with a deadpan, sometimes even creepy tone, and a rather depressed view of people (among other things, you’ve never seen such a badly dressed bunch in an American movie): its intention is rather hard to gauge at times, but it’s always, well, entertaining. Shannon is a bit of a weak link unfortunately, relying on limited technique and often seeming outclassed by the (real) actors around her, but you forget about it as the film’s wacky suspense takes hold. The director is Mike White, who’s previously written and acted in several films: Year of the Dog is most reminiscent perhaps of the even more peculiar Chuck & Buck (although dog obsession is way healthier than Buck’s fixation on reconnecting with his old friend was).

The French Avenue Montaigne is an entertaining confection set in the Paris theatre district, juggling eight or so primary characters, all at different points in the complex graph of personal/professional satisfaction. The main point, I think, is the potentially stifling underside of high culture: in the thematic climax, an esteemed but dissatisfied concert pianist suddenly stops mid-performance, rips off his white tie and penguin suit, and keeps on going in his undershirt.  But with that mild critique, of course, comes a huge amount of good nature, affection, and scenic views of Paris. The film, directed by Daniele Thompson, is ultimately limited; Agnes Jaoui’s work, for instance, feels superficially similar while ultimately yielding true philosophical and psychological surprises, even near-revelations, which just doesn’t happen here. But if you like French cinema of the kind people mean when they talk about “French cinema,” this is absolutely failsafe.

Back to Disturbia

The Canadian Radiant City is an entertaining treatment of the subject we started with, the dismal underbelly of suburbia. Specifically, we’re in the environs of Calgary, where people live in surroundings that would once have been considered palatial, but at the cost of spending half their lives in the car, barely knowing their neighbours, and evidencing all kinds of neuroses and dissatisfactions. The film focuses on one apparently typical family, while weaving in an assortment of talking heads to make Jane Jacobs-type points (although Jacobs herself isn’t mentioned). For most of its length the film is an interesting but not particularly surprising or original documentary (particularly to us downtown types), and then suddenly there’s a twist that puts a slightly different spin on everything; it could be seen as backpedaling a little, or else as a final kicker that even more establishes the superficiality of what we’ve been studying. Or as something in between.
 

The film makes some interesting points on the future of the suburbs, given their inherent unsuitability for evolving and remaking themselves in the way that downtowns, with their mix of building types and functions, can do. And while they promise space and cleanliness and tranquility, they’re also evil masterpieces of psychological and economic engineering, rendering their inhabitants infrastructure-heavy, obligation-laden and existentially bewildered. In the long run it’s likely neither environmentally or psychologically sustainable. Disturbia indeed!

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!)