Here is my bow, and here is my arrow

We Need to Talk About Kevin  

Angelika Film Center, March 03, 2012

Movie #11 for 2012

Mothers and sons, eh?

TILDA SWINTON (I am Love, Orlando; pictured) was a big draw card for me to see a film based on a book I wasn’t interested in reading.  I’d happily watch her drying dishes for two hours and call it art.  I was also interested to see how successful the adaptation of the book was.    Adaptations, especially of capital-l Literary fiction, are often difficult beasts.  It’s tough to capture the ‘it’ that made the book so beloved or, even, interesting.  Writer/director LYNNE RAMSAY (Morvern Callar) does her best with material she is clearly very much taken with, but - at least for someone who hasn’t read the book - there is so very much missing in the film.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is kind of an art-house version of The Good Son.  Kevin (EZRA MILLER, City Island) is a difficult child who grows into a cruel teen who bolts the doors on his school gym and kills lots of his class-mates.  It’s no spoiler to tell you that here, the film does not leave you in suspense. 

The film starts well, with unconventional framing, dutch angles, a creepy soundtrack, and a chopped up narrative creating discomfort and confusion.  The cream is Swinton’s inscrutable performance.  But Ramsey’s cinematic tricks either get less clever or more familiar across the running time and their impact is greatly lessened by about the one-third mark.

Because of the progress of the film - telling snippets of the now, the then and the earlier-than-that - the climatic, horrifying event in the gym is neither shocking nor better understood.  Ramsay seems aware that that any attempt to explain Kevin’s act is inadequate, so avoids explanation.  This, interestingly, also turns out to be inadequate. 

Thank goodness, then, that there is Swinton and a surprisingly effecting coda to keep me from seeing only the gaps in the adaptation.

Gettin out of there

Pariah  

Sunshine, February 29, 2012

Movie #10 for 2012

Mothers and daughters, eh?

Alike (ADEPERO ODUYE, pictured) is smart and creative and young and queer.  Her mum (KIM WAYANS) doesn’t yet know about the gay bit, but is overbearing and freaking out that Alike doesn’t dress girly enough.  In the course of the film Alike journeys from queerly curious to gay.  Alike’s mum journeys from controlling to sociopathic.

Alike is the centre of the film’s narrative as Oduye’s performance (vulnerable, open and compelling) is the centre of the film.  The story is worthy and is not told badly by writer/director DEE REES, but there is little here to surprise.

Vrrrrrrrrrrrrom!

Senna   

Landmark Sunshine, August 23, 2011

Movie #63 for 2011

Ayrton Senna was a Brazilian Formula One driver who won the world championship three times and who is widely considered to be one of the best drivers ever.  At 34, he was killed in a crash on the track of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.  Apart from another death on the same track two days prior, deaths in Formula One are almost entirely unheard of - there hadn’t been one for a generation, and there hasn’t been one since.

Senna is an emotional documentary, rather than an analytical one.  I’m starting to understand that even a very good emotional documentary - like this one - is never going to be as satisfying to me as one with a little analytical insight.

The choices of interview subjects is quite revealing for the intent and nature of the documentary - contemporary interview subjects seem to be his sister and the doctor who treated him at the crash site and maybe a couple commentators and sport historians.  There are no people from inside the F1 world telling their version of events - especially of the pivotal and much publicized rivalry between Senna and McLaren team-mate Alain Prost (which the documentary paints as entirely Prost's doing).  For an analytical documentary it would be a glaring omission: without context - how do F1 racing teams usually work? did either racer get along with team-mates in other pairings? - there isn’t much to provoke thought.

All narration is voiceover (which confuses the archival and contemporary interviews all up) and there is not a single talking head to be seen, it’s all archival footage of Senna looking soulful and charming.  Senna is retconned as the talented but victimized hero of this tragedy-piece, rather than a human character in an interesting story.   

The reporting is one sided, uneven and lacks very much by way of context.  With a little bit of analysis, the film would have been so much more illuminating and engaging, but Senna’s death would not have been any less tragic.  There is little reflection on what it means now, fifteen years after the fact and whether it still resonates.  Al little analysis would have gone a long way.

For all that, though, it is still a good film - the wealth of archival footage turns up some episodes that are absolute corkers and revealing of the egos that abound in professional competitive sport.  And the racing scenes are genuinely thrilling.  Color me surprised.

Helpy helpers

The Help  

City Cinema Village East, August 16, 2011

Movie #62 for 2011

Aibileen (VIOLA DAVIS, Doubt) is a black woman in Mississippi in the 1960s.   It’s not pretty.  She’s spent her life raising white children for society mothers and is nearing retirement bitter for it.  Skeeter (EMMA STONE, Crazy, Stupid, Love., pictured, left, with Davis) is different from the rest of her raised-rich-and-married-rich social set in that she finished her degree and has returned to Jackson unmarried, and determined to be a writer. She starts with a cleaning tips column for the local paper, getting advise from Aibileen, but soon becomes invested in collecting the stories of hitherto voiceless Aibillen and her fiery friend Minnie (OCTAVIA SPENCER) about their varying-degrees-of-evil bosses.

While Stone and Spencer (who I best remember as the girl who signs Peter Parker up to his wrestling match in Spider-Man) give excellent support, the film belongs to Davis who, as ever, steals it.

The film - and the book is was adapted from - eschews complexity for the feel-good and falls back onto some unhelpful stereotypes in lieu of building characters.  BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD (The Lady in the Water, Hereafter) plays the villain as best she can, but she is written without any complexity at all.  Nor is the ditzy but big-hearted “trailer trash” wife of a local society fellow played by JESSICA CHASTAIN (Tree of Life).  Nor, really, any of them.

The film is entirely about women.  Fathers, husbands and suitors are entirely peripheral in terms of both story and cinematography.  (Although CHRIS LOWELL, “Veronica Mars”, manages to pull something together out of not much material as Skeeter’s love interest.)  The absence of men has the interesting effect of shrinking the world of the film.  It’s only ever hinted at that the white women are themselves victims of a broader context of oppression by men.  In this tight, closed world, the white women are all-powerful and are either cluelessly naïve or just plain bitchy.

The material goes straight for heartstrings without attempting to engage anything else, like, say, the brain, on its way.  What a shame.

Not really crazy. Possibly a little stupid.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.  

AMC Lowes Gramercy Park, July 29, 2011

Movie #50 for 2011

Like most women with a uterus of a certain disposition, I need to watch romantic comedies once a month. Which is where Crazy, Stupid, Love. comes in.  My uterus and I were deceived, however, and Crazy, Stupid, Love. is not really a romantic comedy at all.

The cast of Crazy, Stupid, Love. intrigued me - two powerhouse dramatic actors (RYAN GOSLING, Blue Valentine and JULIANNE MOORE*, The Kids Are All Right) in a romantic comedy?  Alongside broad comedy old-hats like STEVE CARELL and EMMA STONE (Easy A)?  Well, I guess.  But I forgot that Carell also does a good line in sympathetically pathetic, and that Stone is, well, great.  Directed by GLENN FICARRA and JOHN REQUA (both co-write and directed I Love You, Phillip Morris), the comedy script of Crazy, Stupid, Love. is played almost entirely as a straight drama with quiet earnestness and dull heartbreak prevailing over slapstick.  And for the most part it’s very effective.

Carell and Moore play Cal and Emily, a long-married couple who are now sad, tired and separated.  Trying to fight off loneliness, Cal begins to visit a local bar where super-stud Jacob (Gosling) takes pity on him and gives him a makeover.  As Cal’s lady-killing starts to take off, Jacob’s stalls when he falls for Hannah (Stone).  In among this, Emily half-heartedly dates David (KEVIN BACON), the co-worker she cheated on Cal with; Cal and Emily’s son Robbie (JONAH BOBO, Zathura: A Space Adventure) is stubbornly trying to woo his sister’s babysitter Jessica (pouty-lipped, stick-thin ANALIEGH TIPTON); and Jessica is infatuated with Cal.  It’s more of a love tangle than a triangle.

Like the underrated 2009 film City Island, there is a large, dramatic, ridiculous and incredibly funny climax where every character’s grievances are aired at once, but the rest of the film is so melancholy that it is a strange blip on an otherwise quietly dramatic radar.   And, although there is the required Grand Romantic Gesture, the ending remains ambiguous.  Hardly the standard romantic comedy formula.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. is a strange mix of elements that amount to a brave attempt at something a little different.  Many of my co-audience found it unsatisfying (I’m extrapolating from their overheard comments afterwards, of course), but it worked just fine for me and my uterus.

* I know Julianne Moore has done romantic comedy in the past, but by and large they’re so awful I’d prefer to forget them.

Beneficial Friendships

Friend With Benefits  

AMC Lowes Gramercy Park, July 29, 2011

Movie #49 for 2011

I was never a fan of Justin Timberlake’s music - although that was probably more the genre than him specifically.  But, what with his Buzby Berkley-ish number to The Killer’s “All the things I’ve done” being the only interesting thing in the excruciating Southland Tales and then his awesomeness as Sean Parker in The Social Network, I now, decades after everyone else, kind of see the point.

In Friends With Benefits, Timberlake plays Dylan, a graphic designer headhunted by Jamie (MILA JUNIS, Black Swan) from LA to NYC for a job at GQ.  They are both workaholics in the aftermath of bad breakups (she with ANDY SAMBERG, “Saturday Night Live” and he with EMMA STONE, Crazy, Stupid, Love.) and decide that they should be able to sleep together without emotional attachment.  Everyone already knows where it’s going to end up, but Timberlake and Kunis sell it with good chemistry (but I think either of them would have good chemistry with a lamp post).

The thing I liked least about the film is how snidely meta it is.  At one point, Jamie and Dylan watch a really shitty romantic comedy.  It is called “I love you, I love New York”, is set in LA masquerading not at all convincingly as New York and hams, oh I’m sorry, I mean stars JASON SEGEL and RASHIDA JONES.  Dylan and Jamie slag off the movie - quite rightly so, it’s terrible - listing all the tropes that they despise from use of music to the climactic Grand Romantic Gesture.  But then Friends With Benefits proceeds down the exact same path.  It bugged me that co-writer and director WILL GLUCK (Easy A) was lowering expectations for the film - drawing parallels with really shitty romantic comedies and making one slightly better - rather than setting out to make a film comparable to the decent ones. 

The thing I like best about it - apart from bit parts from the ever awesome PATRICIA CLARKSON as Jamie’s mum and RICHARD JENKINS as Dylan’s dad - was that at no point did a macho friend of Dylan’s say of his just-sex arrangement “Dude, you’re living the dream”.  I fucking hate that line.

All of the above.

The Tree of Life  

Sunshine Landmark, July 9, 2011

Movie #42 for 2011

Usually I’ll give a middle star ranking to a film that I feel myeh about - I neither love it nor hate it so the middle sounds about right.  Tree of Life, though, I both love and hate equally fiercely, so ends up in the same place for completely different reasons.

Terrence Malick (who is more a film creator than he is a writer/director) has made an abstract visual poem that is as unconventional as it is ambitious.  I like that about it - good for it - but it’s also not that easy to watch.

We get slices of narrative - Jack is a sullen, angry young man in 50’s Texas with a sensitive, nurturing mother (JESSICA CHASTAIN, The Debt), a frustrated, bullying father (BRAD PITT) and two younger brothers.  As a grown up (played by SEAN PENN) he continues to struggle with his father.  The universe carries on, indifferent and majestic, and dinosaurs, apparently, have feelings.  All with that trademark Malick breathy, poetical, pretentious voice-over.

  

It has echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, nature documentaries, “Walking with Dinosaurs”, and that sequence from Adaptation that Charlie Kaufman dictates to himself about the creation of the universe and his own birth (which he then derides himself for being ridiculous, but then includes in the film anyway). 

Some aspects of the film are subtle and moving while others are crashingly obvious and condescending, which is an uncomfortable mix.

As a writer Malick is bold - his themes are nothing less than the interconnectedness of all things and the meaning of life - but he’s a bold director too.  Color and texture are palpable and rarely is the camera still, adding a restlessness and an urgency to things that would otherwise be sorely lacking.

Beautiful?  Yes, but also crushingly pretentious.

Blackest Day, Brightest Night.

Green Lantern 

Regal Cinema Centre, July 6, 2011

Movie #41 for 2011

Much to the dismay of my BFF, I have a little thing for RYAN REYNOLDS (pictured).  I think it’s from watching “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” when I was seventeen.  That shit’s formative.  So I was always going to see Reynolds in a superhero movie, even if I knew nothing about the Green Lantern.

Reynolds is Hal Jordan, a test fighter pilot who plays by his own rules rather than those of his boss, fellow pilot and would-be-girlfriend Carol Ferris (BLAKE LIVELY, The Town) - or anyone else for that matter.  When an alien crash lands on earth passing a magic ring onto Hal, he becomes a Green Lantern, one of thousands in a league of superheroes who defend the Universe from the yellow forces of fear using the green power of will.  (It’s all delivered with a straight face so as not too seem quite so ridiculous, and since it’s a superhero film, your disbelief should be waaaaay suspended anyway.)  Earth is being threatened by the yellowest of all yellow guys, Parallax, and his getting-yellower-all-the-time devotee Hector (PETER SARSGAARD, Garden State, with a fat suit on his head).  When the other Lanterns - including purple skinned Sinestro (MARK STRONG, Sherlock Holmes) and a fish voiced by GEOFFREY RUSH - won’t help, it’s up to Hal to save the world.

Written by a committee of mostly TV writers and directed by Martin “Edge of Darkness” Campbell, Green Lantern  is being absolutely caned by critics.   Maybe I had suitably lowered expectations, or maybe it’s because I thought the film was hard done by, or maybe it’s the Ryan Reynolds thing, but I enjoyed myself quite a bit.  It’s by no means a great film, but Hal Jordan is a fun character - not too bright and a little goofy - and the cast are really solid (including a very strong actors in the bit parts including TIM ROBBINS, ANGELA BASSETT and TAIKA WATITI, Boy).

Although nowhere nears its potential to be tops, it’s not as bad as the critics say. 

Hiiiiii-YA! again

Kung Fu Panda 2  

Union Square Regal 14, June 23, 2011

Movie #37 for 2011

Po is a kung fu panda.  An evil peacock prince has discovered firepower and will use it to destroy kung fu and take over all of China, unless Po and his kung fu friends can stop him.  But can they do it?  Cannons are impervious to kung fu and something about the peacock brings up memories of Po’s past that wig him out.  What will happen?!  Can the Kung-fu Panda prevail?!  Of course he will, and although there’s no real tension or conflict in the film, it’s still a good ride to take.

The animation and direction handle action, humour and characterization with nice energy.  The voice acting of GARY OLDMAN as the evil peacock is a knock out - he’s channeling Derek Jacobi like his life depends on it - and the rest of the voice cast are solid. 

But there’s little here that wasn’t in the first Kung Fu Panda, and this time there is no sense of surprise at something so delightful - the freedom that animation brings to fight scenes and slapstick comedy are still used well, but in a way that is now familiar.  It’s re-tread, but it’s still decent.

(One thing that I do truly appreciate about the character design is that the female characters are not buxom.  Tigers and vipers are not stacked and, really, neither are super-fit lady kung fu fighters.  It makes a seriously refreshing change.)

Things were better in the old days

Midnight in Paris  

Angelika Film Centre, June 22, 2011

Movie #35 for 2011

Ever get nostalgic for Paris in the 20s?  Gil (OWEN WILSON) does.  Specifically for all the ex-pat American writers partaking of Hemingway’s ‘moveable feast’ of creativity and freedom.  He’s in Paris on holiday from his hack Hollywood screenwriter job with his spoiled, heiress fiancé (RACHAEL McADAMS, Morning Glory, pictured with Wilson) and her parents.  He’s struggling to write his first novel, wants to move to Paris rather than Malibu and is questioning his upcoming marriage - his creative crisis and his life crisis are all wrapped up together.

Then he stumbles into the time he’s so enamored with and meets up with that circle of artists - Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gretrude Stein, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray and many, many more.  Gertrude Stein’s writing tips solve his creative crisis, but his life crisis gets even more complicated when he meets Adriana (MARION COTILLARD, Inception, La Vie en Rose) the beautiful young mistress of several of the artists.

There are touches of real movie-making genius, but they are writer/director WOODY ALLEN’s staple approach - long scenes shot in one take and energetic, realistic conversation.  I also liked the refreshing way that Allen handled the transition from the present to ye olde Paris - there is no CG effects and no swelling violin or tinkling chimes to indicate wonder and amazement, just Owen Wilson’s realistic bewilderment and excitement. 

Disappointingly, the women characters - the fiancé and the potential girlfriend - are less well drawn than you can usually expect from Allen.  In fact, all of the bit parts are unusually bitsy.  And there are a LOT of bit parts among the creative types.   Allen writes them as imaginative caricatures rather than actual characters.  Standouts are KATHY BATES (Misery) as Gertrude Stein and ADRIAN BRODY (Splice, Predators) as Dali because she plays it so straight and he’s so over the top.

For a film about the inadequacies of nostalgia, it’s actually quite sweetly nostalgic for a time when writers were writers and the creative lifestyle was all-consuming, drink-sodden fun.  For a whimsical look at the great 20^th century writers in Paris, I prefer Jason’s comic The Left Bank Gang (in which Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ezra Pound rob a bank), but Midnight in Paris was fun too.

You’re never to old to blah blah blah

Beginners 

AMC 3^rd avenue, June 8, 2011

Movie #34 for 2011

Beginners proves that falling in love at 38 or 75 is just as intolerably sunshine-colored and soft-focused as when teenagers do it.

Oliver (EWAN McGREGOR, The Ghost Writer) can’t get it together romantically.  His recently widowed father (CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER) has, at 75, begun to live as an openly gay man.  When he gets terminal cancer, Oliver nurses him through, and when he dies, Oliver grieves.  Not long after, he meets ANNA (MELANIE LAURENT, Inglorious Basterds) and embarks on his own romantic awakening.  Vomit.

The film is saved from narrative mediocrity by a stylistic boldness, very good performances (especially Plummer and McGregor, pictured) and a handful of genuinely touching scenes between Oliver and his parents (his mother when he was a boy and his father now he is grown).

Given this, it's interesting that the main narrative focus is elsewhere - on a simplistic love affair between Oliver and Anna (which invites - and then suffers from - comparison to some parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).  The film’s strengths are so peripheral to the core narrative, I wonder that writer/director MIKE MILLS (Thumbsucker) started there in the first, y’know, place.

While the narrative is not ambiguous in any way, interestingly the film does leave space for interpretation and projection.  I thought that Oliver was perfectly comfortable with his father’s new boyfriend, my beloved thought he was homophobic.  We can’t both be right, but I think we’re both not-wrong (Schrodinger’s Cat-style). 

Also: the film is set in LA, but the one short scene in New York was totally filmed a block from my apartment!

And counting

Countdown to Zero 

Cinema Nova, 21/02/2011

Movie #14 for 2011

Countdown to Zero is an issue film in that will be co-catalogued under ‘E’ for earnest and ‘T’ for terrifying.

Once upon a time, nuclear weapon proliferation seemed like a good idea.  Now, not so much.  The technology hasn’t changed since the fifties, so they are getting easier and cheaper to get or build. But they’re still just as devastating.

LUCY WALKER is an incredibly talented documentary film maker, able to pull several layers of story out of a situation - art and poverty in Brazil (Wasteland); or young Amish people emerging into the world (Devil’s Playground).  But her approach to Countdown to Zero is quite different - it’s a much more straightforward (and more heavy-handed) issues film with direct-to-camera interviews with important people (Gorbechov, Jimmy Carter, de Klerk), authors and commentators.  The commentary is one sidedly anti-nuclear weapons, but the message is loud and clear.

While a more subtle story-telling approach would have made a more interesting, and potentially more effective film, I can’t begrudge Walker’s evident passion for the material, to say nothing of it’s inherent weightiness.

Rated O for Oprah. Or possible S for schmaltz (movie #115)

Sarah’s Key 

Cinema Nova, 28/12/2010

Status: Behind by 5 films

Getting into the home stretch now – I can count the number of films I have left to watch this year on one hand… and the number of days I have left to watch them on the other.

Sarah’s Key is a holocaust story with some differences – and a lot of similarities – to other holocaust stories.  KRISTEN SCOTT THOMAS (I’ve Loved You So Long, The English Patient) is an American living in Paris, a features journalist investigating French collusion in 1942 when the gendarmerie rounded up and imprisoned French Jews to be delivered to German work camps.  She becomes deeply affected by the story of a young girl – Sarah Starsynski – with whom she believes she has a connection.  

The two stories are shown in parallel and while the 1942 story is compelling and well done, the contemporary story is over-sentimental, schmaltzy and obvious (despite Kristen Scott Thomas being, as ever, awesome).  It felt like it was based on a novel from Oprah’s book club.  Because it was.

He’s behind you! (movie #111)

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale 

Cinema Nova, 08/12/2010

Status: Behind by 2 films

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is absolutely absurd.  But that’s kind of what I want in a film about an age-old, evil Finnish Santa that steals children.

In the Russian mountains near the Finnish border, a millionaire digs up Santa Claus, buried half a kilometre inside the mountain.  Santa’s quite the anti-social, though, and is only interested in eating gingerbread and stealing the children of a nearby Finnish village.  He also slaughters the herd – and livelihood – of the village, so the menfolk (TOMMI KORPELA, JORMA TOMMILA and RAUNO JUVONEN) hatch a plan to capture and sell Santa to recoup their losses.

While the men catch Santa, nine year old Pietari (ONNI TOMMILA) frets.  He is a charmingly wimpy hero – he spends at least half the film with cardboard taped to his bottom after researching lithographs of Santa beating naughty children – but as his friends start to disappear he gets his action hero on.

Although the idea is original, the film stretches it fairly thin.  But the payoff is satisfying and the treatment terrifically straight-faced. And I find it easy to forgive a film that ends in absurdity if that’s exactly where it starts.

Better RED than dead (movie #105)

RED  

Kino Melbourne, 30/11/2010

Status: Behind by 6 films

With a lesser cast, this film would have sucked really, really a lot.  The script is thin, the story ridiculous, the action boringly shoot-em-up (but for a couple of notable exceptions).  It’s far too reliant of the funk soundtrack for energy and the whole thing felt so polished that I couldn’t help but see that there was nothing beneath the shiny, shiny surface.  Thank Frank, then, for the cast. 

BRUCE WILLIS plays Frank Moses, a retired CIA black ops badass who is thrust back into action when a group of non-retired CIA black ops badasses come to kill him.  He’s figuring out the convoluted plot on the run with MORGAN FREEMAN, JOHN MALKOVICH, MARY LOUISE PARKER and HELEN MIRREN with the CIA – REBECCA PIDGEON (from anything DAVID MAMET has ever done) and KARL URBAN (LoTR, Star Trek) – hot on his heels.

Largely stupid and mostly pointless.  But still, oddly, fun.

This just in: American Corporations Screw the Environment (movie #103)

Gasland  

Cinema Nova, 23/11/2010

Status: Behind by 5 and a half films

Josh Fox plays banjo and lives by a creek in the woods in the house his parents built. One day he receives a letter from a multi-national energy company offering him $100,000 to sink wells on his property to tap into the vast natural gas reserve beneath it.  Fox decided to go on tour to visit older natural gas well sites (hundreds of thousands of them) to assess the potential impacts of wells on his land.  What he found was pretty disturbing.  The horribly nasty chemicals used to break apart the rock to release the gas invariably contaminate the ground water.  Maybe not such a big deal when there’s only a bit of water on the property, but Fox’s land is in the New York water catchment and provides water to about 9 million people.  So it’s kind of a big deal.

Gasland started off a bit like a really good This American Life story – I like the way Fox used first person narrative (emphasized by his amateurish photography) to tell a much bigger and more complicated story.  But at the point where a TAL story would pull back to encompass the big picture, the context and the wider implications, Fox focuses in. There is very little sense of the greater story here – why energy companies are pursuing natural gas mining and whether it is actually doing what congress hoped it would (i.e. provide cheaper energy for a lot of people) and whether there are alternative ways to pull it out of the ground – and in the end it felt a little like a “not in my backyard” rant. 

But Fox is extremely likeable and the power of his evidence – the personal stories, the footage of congressional hearings and the little investigative journalism he undertakes - is compelling enough.

Time stands still in Cairo (movie #78)

Cairo Time 

Cinema Nova, 06/09/2010

Status: Behind by 5 films

I adore PATRICIA CLARKSON (Whatever Works, The Station Agent) and ALEXANDER SIDDIG (“Deep Space Nine”, Syriana) is getting foxier and foxier in his advancing years, so I was very, very prepared to swoon over this romantic drama. But writer/director RUBA NADDA has constructed a story where very little happens and it takes it’s time doing so, so the swooning never really eventuated.   

The performances are fine and the setting is beautiful, but it all rang a little too hollow.  It felt a little bit like the story (from an original screenplay) was a poor adaptation of a good novel - lots of things bubbling away and an entire story contained under the surface, but not well adapted to the screen.  Sometimes it felt like Clarkson and Siddig had read the full story and knew far more about the characters than we did but, bizarrely, the direction shies away from any real insight.  There were two-too-many snail-paced walks through the Cairo streets and three-too-few conversations between the would-be lovers. 

I think I’m being kind with my star rating, but I’m nothing if not a big old softy and I can’t bear to give this gentle, hollow-feeling would-be romance anything less. 

The Internet never looked so good (movie #76)

Summer Wars   

Cinema Nova, 05/09/2010

Status: Behind by 5 films

Kenji, a timid but brilliant high school kid, gets a job working for Natsuki, a girl he fancies, to help out at her Granny’s 90^th birthday party.  It’s to be a large family affair at her country home (the ancestral samurai training house).

But the party planning is disrupted when a hostile AI hacker (called Love Machine, fer cryin out loud) breaks into Oz (a cross between the Internet and Second Life on steroids) and begins to wreak havoc with the computerized systems of world.  It’s up to Kenji, Kazuma, a young martial arts champion and the rest of the resourceful family (sailors, paramedics and computer wholesalers) to stop it.

Trying to emulate the aesthetic - and the point - of online life and games in movies is a difficult thing to do.  The scenes set inside Oz are the weakest in Summer Wars and don’t quite come off.  The real strength of the film is in the politics and history of Natsuki’s large and diverse family.  Like so much anime, though, it is really, really good looking.

Watching paint dry (movie #69)

The Waiting City  

Cinema Nova, 20/08/2010

Status: Behind by 7 (and a bit) films

Fiona (RADHA MITCHELL, Surrogates, Phone Booth) and Ben (JOEL EDGERTON, Animal Kingdom, The Square) arrive in India with their paperwork all in order to pick up the baby they have adopted from an orphanage.  The local side of the paperwork isn’t yet finalized though, so they have to wait. And wait they do, slowly, slowly deteriorating into frustration, snipes, suspicions and fights. 

I didn’t mind the slow pace, given that the film was actually about waiting, but an over-long running time was too much to forgive.  An overreliance on Indian mysticism and the kind of travelogue-style discovery of a new place didn’t really work for me, but MITCHELL and EDGERTON live the relationship of their characters - tense and nuanced as it is - and they are compelling to watch.

The film is akin to watching paint dry, but it's atmospheric and beautiful paint.

The cold war, defrosted (movie #61)

Farewell  

Cinema Nova, 10/08/2010

Status: Behind by 13 films

Not sure about you, but when an actor is speaking French (or Russian, or Spanish, or Danish), I find it really hard to tell whether they’re a hack or not. In one scene in Farewell, French actor GUILLAME CANET has a shouting match with WILLEM DEFOE in English and, man, “overact” doesn’t even begin to cover it.  He also speaks French and Russian in the film and seems a MUCH better actor in these scenes.  Perhaps that’s the illusion allowed for by foreign languages, or perhaps he’s just uncomfortable shouting in English?

Anyhoo.  I like espionage thrillers, and I like the old fashioned ones the best - it’s no wonder the Cold War went on so long without electronic documents and email - all this taping and transcribing of conversations, and having to develop film (film!) of photos of secret documents.

In Moscow in 1981 a French civilian engineer (named Pierre, CANET, who has never looked more like Patrick Dempsey) is shanghaied into espionage by a Francophile KGB double agent, (Sergei played by EMIR KUSTURICA) who is looking for a way to operate outside the bugged and triple-bugged CIA.  He passes on incredible information about US state secrets and then paydirt - the list of American operatives who are double agents for the Russians.  A list like that could - and indeed did - break the Cold War stalemate and force a new kind of relationship between the US and Russia.  But at what cost to Pierre and Sergei?

As well as Pierre and Sergei, who develop a compelling personal relationship, the film features American intelligence operatives, President Regan, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, but I found that layer of the story fairly flimsy.

It’s clearly an over-dramatised, over-simplified version of the true story, but it’s interesting nonetheless.  Plus, it’s mostly set in Russia in the 80s so everyone is wearing massive furry hats.  I gotta give props for that.