Change Your Image
hypersquared
Reviews
Star Spangled to Death (2004)
Making the case for humanity in a time of powerful stupidity (and stupid power)
On the list of films that will almost certainly be seen by the tiniest portion of those who should see it, Ken Jacobs' nearly seven-hour, kaleidoscopic magnum opus may be tops. An exhaustive, sprawling history of America -- mainly from the Industrial Revolution on -- in the form of found footage and recordings, as seen through the eyes of those on the margins (i.e. intellectuals, socialists, artists), it is perhaps the most compelling case imaginable that we, as a race, are simply doomed to forever suffer for our worst impulses. Or at least until we annihilate ourselves.
Sounds like fun, right? In many respects, it is. Jacobs takes archival footage that illustrates America's most appallingly racist and imperialist worldviews, as assigned to us via the popular culture -- a Nelson Rockefeller campaign film, an Al Jolson blackface musical, a patronizing educational film about "conscience", etc -- and inter-cuts them with footage he shot and abandoned in the late 1950s, a series of avant-garde living theater pieces, in which fellow filmmaker Jack Smith cavorts in ecstatic lunacy on the streets of New York, upsetting the torpor of 1950s life, delighting children, drawing the bewilderment of adults (and the consternation of cops).
Less fun is the portrait of Jacobs' other friend, the "born loser" Jerry Sims, whose formidable intelligence and cultural awareness cannot help his complete inability to function in modern society. He begs his (poor) friends for money. He smells bad. He is so overcome by the injustice of the world that he can barely dress himself. Jack's exuberance lifts the first half of the film while Jerry's despondency dominates the second, so that by the end we're forced to ask ourselves how we confront our monumentally f**ked up world: are we Jack (The Spirit Not of Life But of Living) or are we Jerry (Suffering)?
Jacobs seems attracted to Jack but to find Jerry's condition inevitable. The first is the truest state of who we are as human souls, the second is the only true possible effect of a world governed by capitalism. Throughout, Jacobs provides hundreds of on-screen texts, some of it his own writing and some that of others. As a leftist, Jacobs makes Michael Moore seem positively mainstream by comparison, but his arguments are more philosophical than Moore's, and even more persuasive. Many of the texts are presented on only one frame of the film, so that on a DVD you're forced to stop the player, back up and read. (In a film screening, of course, they would just go by in a blink). This approach demands interaction and engagement on the part of the viewer. As it is in society, if you want to get at these truths, you have to go get them. No one's going to make it easy for you, and the truth is that the power structure we have is actually going to make it as difficult as possible for any of us to know anything. Jacobs has left as his life's work an epic testimony that could, if enough people just took the time and made that effort, contribute to a more peaceful world, but I think he knows that probably won't happen.
Zui hao de shi guang (2005)
A quietly evocative triptych of space and tempo.
This was my first Hou Hsiao-hsien picture, and I feel like I've been missing out on quite a lot, seeing as he's been doing this for about a quarter century. Not that I'm experiencing the kind of panic and regret that I might if I'd only just discovered Godard or Jarmusch. Three Times is simply the kind of movie I gravitate to, and I'm hoping it points the way to a trove of similar pleasures, even if it isn't quite a masterpiece on its own.
As I'm sure others around here have written, Three Times is literally about three different times, as in eras: 1911, 1966, and 2005, and each of the forty-minute featurettes in this triptych is defined by a separate thematic quality: the 1960s, naturally, by love; the end of Dynastic rule by freedom; and contemporary China by youth. All of them, however, involve love on some level, or, at the very least, sex. Each chapter centers on a man and a woman (played by Chang Chen and Shu Qi in each case) caught up in some variation of romantic or erotic involvement that reflects the three themes.
What I love about Hou's approach is that each of these forty-minute pieces tells no more "story" than an average Hollywood film would chew up and spit out in its first four or five minutes. In "A Time for Love" (the 1960s chapter) little more "happens" than a young soldier returning from military leave to find that the girl he's been writing to has moved to another town, so he tracks her down and they spend a few hours together. The other stories cover similarly scant territory while Hou allows his camera and the nearly constant presence of popular music to evoke the tempo and space of his characters' lives. Hou and his writer Chu T'ien-wen find worlds of behavior to explore and time worth spending in scenes that most writers would consider the merely necessary business of establishing a premise and getting their characters into position.
If the movie doesn't exactly reach ecstatic heights, it isn't for lack of Hou's ability to fulfill his own purpose, but merely because his purpose contains almost no emotional arc, either for his characters or for his audience, and it isn't loaded up with the kind of ornate, spiritual metaphor that similarly deliberate films by, say, Bergman and Tarkovsky are. Hou doesn't seem interested (at least here) in either God or people, per se, but rather our cognitive relationship to the passage of time and the subtle but profound effect of small decisions on the course of our own histories.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
Shameful to the extreme
I went to a party last night -- Seventies themed -- where the big event was a DVD showing of the embarrassing Robert Stigwood production of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (in honor of both the recent passing of Billy Preston, and Paul McCartney's notable 64th birthday today). I hadn't seen the movie since it came out, when I was about eleven and, at the time, I liked it. Even though I was a huge Beatles fan (I knew most of their songs by heart at that age) it had never occurred to me that this movie was anything but a fitting tribute.
Later, in retrospect, I could reflect on it and realize that it was probably a terrible movie. Certainly, at some point, I understood that the very idea of having these mostly dreadful artists performing the Beatles' best songs in some trumped up narrative was simply a kind of heresy. Yet, the fact remained that I had never had these feelings while actually watching the movie.
Until last night, when I learned one should never, ever trust their eleven year old self to properly judge anything.
Let me tell you that there is bad. There is awful. And then there is "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band," the movie. For jaw-in-your-lap appalling, this movie is right down there with the Eighties classic "The Apple," but the fact that Sgt. Pepper had resources -- money, well-known performers (I can't bring myself to say "stars"), and licensed access to the greatest catalog of popular songs ever -- makes the depths of its failings all that more profound.
First I'll tell what I saw, then I'll tell you what I thought.
I saw:
The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton being directed in a style that (I think) was intended to emulate the body language of silent film comedy. (Other than George Burns' narration, the movie has no spoken dialogue. Presumably, this was to cover for the inability of any of the performers to act. The great blunder of course, is that silent comedy acting is still acting, and no one involved here can do it).
Dentally-challenged Peter Frampton and appeal-challenged Sandy Farina gazing at each other, presented as the film's central romantic purpose. (P.S. Where the eff did Sandy Farina come from and where the eff did she go?)
George Burns doddering around on stiff, ninety year old legs, croaking the lyrics to "Fixing a Hole."
"Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds" transformed into a production number mounted on a pair of billboards (with stages) over the Sunset Strip. A third-rate Pointer Sisters knockoff called Stargard played a group called the Diamonds (presumably their leader was Lucy) and performed on one billboard while the Bee Gees and Frampton gaped from the other with all the lust they could simulate. (Given that about 90 pounds of glitter were used in an attempt to obscure the distinctly unattractive qualities of each of the Stargard gals, the lads faked it the best they could). Every now and then during this number, we'd cut to an extreme close- up of the tears welling in Sandy Farina's eyes as she stared from the street below. Oh, yeah, she was feelin' it.
And those are just the start. And now, here's what I thought:
What was going through their heads? I mean, every one of them -- performers, producers, director, cinematographer, editor, grips -- what were they thinking? The only sensible response to any aspect of this debacle, at any stage of the production, would have been: "Holy mother of God. We are making something monumentally awful, and not only that, we're taking the music of the Beatles down with us. This movie is going to exist in some form forever. We will not be able to hide from history. One hundred years from now they'll still know that we did this, and my name will still be on it."
It's worth noting that in some cultures, to this day, people kill themselves when they know they have committed far less shameful acts than these people did.
Bubble (2005)
Despite non-actors, a fascinating movie
Saw this last night and I really liked it. It soaked in my brain overnight and this morning I really, really like it. If for nothing other than being one of the few American attempts at existential cinema in our times, it's worth calling attention to. There's just so much going on in it. It's essentially political, but it achieves its politics entirely through the personal. It's also a squashing of the traditional, multi-suspect murder mystery into what is probably the more common scenario: who did it is not only pretty obvious from the get-go, but it won't take a crack team of forensic scientists and brilliant interrogation techniques to prove it.
My only reservation upon first viewing was that the actors, not being, well... actors, robbed the movie of an emotional dimension that I felt it needed, especially given Soderbergh's highly stylized approach to the visuals (as usual, his cinematographer alter ego, "Peter Andrews," lights the scenes beautifully). I've been ambivalent on this question before. I know some who can't stand Gus Van Sant's occasional use of non-actors but it's never really bothered me in his case.
Central to this film, I thought, was that these are people whose lives provide them with almost nothing interesting to talk about, and as a result they've either lost the ability to communicate or they never had it. The drearily mundane dialogue reflects this, and it was mostly when the characters were speaking that I wished some subtle layer of emotional expression could come across to make up for what the characters simply don't know how to say, the kind of layering that only gifted actors can impart. So yeah, it was missing that.
But interestingly, in reflecting on Bubble nearly 12 hours later, I'm bothered less by all that. I'll say this: I don't think Soderbergh could have found more perfect faces for his story on any three professional actors. Questions of acting aside, his casting reflects the weary, depressed reality of a factory town -- without mocking that reality -- better than any Hollywood film I've seen (and I'm including the films of John Sayles in that estimation).
Lastly, Robert Pollard's bright, acoustic guitar score was an interesting choice. It was a distinct contrast to the mostly gloomy lives of the characters, but its utter simplicity was on the money.
The GoodTimesKid (2005)
Finally, a Movie of Comic Understatement
In the spirit of the indie heyday, when names like Alex Cox, Stephen Frears, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch were the currency of cinema's promise, comes Azazel Jacobs, hopefully the new bearer of the long-smoldering punk cinema torch. The GoodTimesKid is a wonderfully observant and comical character study made with nothing but pocket change and a love of movies. In fact, this is obviously not just a labor of love but of friendship: Jacobs stars in the film with his co-writer and former classmate, Gerardo Naranjo, as well as his producer and real-life girlfriend Sara Diaz.
I'll refrain from saying too much about the movie's plot, not because there really is much of a plot but what small revelations the script does have in store would be that much nicer to discover in the theater. (Let's hope it makes to theaters!) Suffice to say that Naranjo's character receives a summons indicating that he had enlisted in the Army (truth is, he hadn't) and that the time to report for duty has come. He goes down to the enlistment office to explain the mistake and he winds up following another recruit home. That would be Jacob's character, an angry and disheveled journalist, who seems to be joining the Army only because he's given up on every other aspect of his life, especially his girlfriend, played by Diaz.
Naranjo, in a near-silent performance that, I swear to God, is downright Chaplin-esquire, makes friends with Diaz, the irony being that he knows that her boyfriend is busing off to join the military in the morning, and she doesn't. Jacobs isn't the strongest actor in the world but he certainly looks the part and exonerates himself well. Diaz is nothing but a delight, a young Shelly Duvall in Converse hi-tops, and she owns outright the movie's funniest scene, in which she dances a jig in an effort to pull Naranjo out of his chronic stupor.
There are all kinds of things that real people in real life might say to each other, and ways that they would behave, which the characters in The GoodTimesKid never do, but this is one of those movies which doesn't need literalism to feel authentic. Much like in Godard's romantic comedies (Masculin, Féminin comes to mind) the feelings are real and the inspired silliness only elevates it further.
Voksne mennesker (2005)
The rare, crowd-pleasing art flick
I never did get around to seeing Dagur Kári's first film, Nói albínói, but now that I've seen his second, I'll make it a priority. Dark Horse (as it was called at AFI Fest in Los Angeles) is a very funny, stylish, and genuinely touching comedy in the vein of Jim Jarmusch's early films, albeit livelier and less adamantly cerebral.
Daniel (Jakob Cedergren) is a graffiti artist who probably embodies the term loser more fully than anyone you have ever met. He's broke, lazy, irresponsible and dorky. This is a comedy, though, and appropriately, Daniel is a lovable loser. Morfar (Nicolas Bro) is Daniel's only apparent friend, an overweight dude who works in a sleep clinic and maintains aspirations of becoming a soccer referee.
The story gets underway when these two guys visit a bakery and the beautiful woman behind the counter (Tilly Scott Pederson) spontaneously declares her love for Morfar, who is so taken aback by her expression that he runs away. Immediately after, Daniel discovers that this chick is tripping on psychedelic mushrooms, casting some doubt on her romantic declaration, and he aids her in getting home. So begins a loser's love triangle which by the end of the film has very gracefully become about something else: the possibility of elusive, fundamental personal change, both for the better and for the worse.
Every member of this cast, down to the most peripheral supporting role, is terrific. The two leading men, in particular, are understated and yet deeply human. Kári's sense of the visual and the aural (he clearly cares a lot about sound) is very hip but always elegant. He shoots quirky angles in high contrast back-and-white, but every shot is about something; even his flourishes have purpose.
Most importantly, the script by Kári and his co-writer, Rune Schjøtt, gracefully treads that very risky territory between the offbeat and the naturalistic. His characters move through their lives whimsically and even the narrative structure seems vaguely improvised, yet there is a graceful evolution to the unfolding of events that, by the end, gives the classic sense of inevitability that we associate with the best film writing.
(It speaks volumes, I think, that the English subtitles were sometimes impossible to read because of the stark white areas in the frame, and yet I never felt that I missed a beat).
I don't see a U.S. release date indicated on the IMDb, but I can't imagine that Dark Horse (or whatever they're going to call it) won't ultimately find a distributor. This is that rare breed of crowd-pleasing art flick that any half-astute specialty studio should be fighting over.
Cold Mountain (2003)
Tasteful and Dispassionate
"Cold Mountain" certainly lives up to its name. It is a monumental film with almost no hint of a beating heart. To call it cerebral, as The Hollywood Reporter did, is to put a kind spin on the utter lack of passion in the storytelling and the performances, and also suggests a heady element that maybe I just missed.
From the first frames of the picture, the level of professionalism from Anthony Minghella's frequently enlisted team of craftspeople -- John Seale, Dante Ferretti, Walter Murch, Gabriel Yared, and others - is undeniable. They certainly have their act down. (At one point in the movie, I kept myself entertained by counting the impending Oscar nominations, and that game went on for some time). The film is elegant, even pristine, and so very tasteful. Within minutes, though, it's also clear that it is to be a film in which every character speaks like an aspiring poet, regardless of their level of education or their wits. The story, which the film makers purport to be about man's eternal failure to respect natural law, gives itself a cramp trying to be literate. Yet in the final outcome, it has managed neither authenticity nor poetry nor philosophy, leaving me to wonder what all the florid dialogue was in service of.
The picture nearly chokes on its pedigree. Minghella stuffed the cast with Oscar-credentialed actors (both past winners like Nicole Kidman and nominees like Jude Law) and others, like Donald Sutherland, whose very presence seems intended to maintain an air of prestige. The lot of them seemed as bored as I did with the script's simplistic philosophizing (is Law's character really dodging bullets and trudging through swamps so he can find some hermit woman who'll enlighten him that he's just part of the circle of life?). As a result no one in the cast, with only a few exceptions in the bit parts, ever manages to transcend who we know them to be. Kidman is Kidman throughout. Law is Law. Sutherland is Sutherland. Zellweger is, to a lesser degree, Zellweger, but she's also the movie's only consistent comic relief so she's spared the worst of the effect.
Kidman and Law, for their parts, look like they're asleep for most of the picture. The passion, the ennui, and the despair they both supposedly suffer is talked about, inferred, and presumably understood on the part of the audience, but I'll be damned if you can find a trace of it on their faces. Kidman especially is never given her due as the actor of incredible spunk that we know her to be. I know she could have played Ada's overwhelming fear of death - her loved one's as well as her own. If she can carry off a prosthetic nose, surely she could have let her skin take a weathering from all the hunger and hard labor her character endures. Someone decided to not let it happen that way, rather that she should remain the radiant movie star throughout, and it was a catastrophic choice, undermining the depiction of rugged endurance that the movie so desperately needs.
Renee Zellweger hams it up like a pro, and if the rest of the cast had looked a touch more alert, she might not have seemed so completely over-the-top at times. Still, she gets to say stuff like, "You can get three feet up a bull's ass just listening to what sweethearts whisper to each other," and she hits the proverbial ball out of the park every time she does. It's a showboat of a role, but in the absence of anything else really happening, her levity was really quite welcome. And yeah, she's probably got the Oscar in the bag.
Natalie Portman, whom I was shocked to find I did not recognize, is featured in the movie's only genuinely touching sequence. Her advantage was to land the role that is the least heavy-handed in the writing, and she rises gracefully to every nuance the page offers her. As a widowed mother caring for her sick baby in a cold house, she subtly negotiates an arrangement with Law's war deserter that both satisfies her unfathomable loneliness and respects his spoken-for heart. After twice succumbing to the rigor mortis of the "Star Wars" pictures, her re-emergence as a natural, warm-hearted actress is the greatest gift that "Cold Mountain" offers.
Also, the veterans Kathy Baker, as Kidman's kindly neighbor, and the great Ray Winstone as a deserter in at least two senses, are also spot-on: never forced, always real, bringing welcome doses of gravitas to every scene they're in.
The greatest disappointment for me in "Cold Mountain" is that it's the first Minghella film to paint strictly by the numbers. Everything of his I've ever seen has taken the form of a well-known model and then upset it with something wholly unexpected, but this latest holds not a single surprise. "Truly Madly Deeply" took the same premise as "Ghost," and then played against every known rule by first suggesting that the ghost may be a creation of the widow's neuroses, and then delivering as its message that love is not eternal, but that death demands that the living get on with their lives. "The Talented Mr. Ripley," though messy and somewhat ungainly, was a mesmerizing balance of travelogue and psychological thriller.
"The English Patient" is most similar to "Cold Mountain" in its intent, an epic romance playing equally to the head and to the heart, but it was one that actually deserved the "cerebral" descriptor and also brought hard-earned tears to my eyes. "The English Patient" made me feel the cleaving knife of choosing love over country. It hurt to watch Fiennes endure his choice in that film. No such sense of pain gets through in "Cold Mountain."
Kôfuku no kane (2002)
Caught somewhere between pretentious and amusing
After a screening of this picture at the AFI Fest, a man from the audience stood up and implored the rest of us to post reviews here on the IMDb. I'm not sure that my comments are what he was hoping for, but here they are:
In the opening scene, a Japanese man walks away from his former place of employment, a just-closed factory, and without speaking a word for two days, witnesses at least two suicides, rescues a baby from a burning building, is charged with and then cleared of murder, wins the lottery, loses the money, sees a ghost, and has at least two or three other amazing and improbable encounters. And I don't really know what to say about it.
I'm usually not stumped like this, but I really don't know if I kind of liked it, or if I absolutely hated it. I can't tell if it was silly and pretentious, or ironic and vaguely amusing. It was going for a minimalist absurdism. That's clear, but I rarely managed more than a kind of snort for a laugh. Visually, the movie was elegant, but not exactly imaginative. There was a lot of Jarmusch and Beckett going on, but I'm not sure I can tell what Sabu himself brought to the party.
The ending, oddly, feels like the movie's saving grace, but even that, when all is said and done -- and please excuse the spoilers -- is basically an inversion of that old junior-high Super-8 filmmaker's scenario: "it was all a dream." In 8th grade, the standard premise was, a bunch of weird s**t happens to the hero and then the hero wakes up. In Sabuland, a bunch of weird s**t happens, and the hero goes home and tells his wife all about it. I should have been p****d off that the whole movie had been setting me up for this kind of one-off joke, but it was actually such a relief after the insufferably mannered ninety minutes which preceded it, that I upgraded my audience ballot rating from "fair" to "good."
Independent Lens: American Made (2003)
Genuinely funny and authentic.
"American Made," a comedy (with dramatic touches) about an American Sikh family whose Jeep Grand Cherokee breaks down on the way to the Grand Canyon. The father, a patriot and an optimist, is incredulous when his son points out that people aren't pulling over to help them because of his turban. I usually find films with these kinds of themes to be heavy-handed and earnest, but this one was genuinely funny, with very good actors, and not sanctimonious in the slightest.
Ocularist (2003)
Style meets subject with sharp acuity
"Ocularist" is an odd little movie about an odd little profession. It's a roughly five- ten minute documentary set to an ambient techno score, about a man who makes prosthetic eyes for victims of accidents. It's highly stylized work using a stark color palette, blown-out backgrounds, repetitious cuts, and cuts to black to underscore not only the theme of vision, but also the doctor's balancing act between art and science. The details are fascinating -- we watch as a teenager has a mold taken of his eye socket, and as the ocularist builds, paints, and shapes the final product -- and the filmmaking is both energetic and observant. A perfect marriage of style and subject.
Hae anseon (2002)
Dreadful
My attenton was captured by this description in the AFI Fest literature: "Director Kim Ki-Duk mixes a rough personal drama with a tense socio-critical allegory. The controversy surrounding the consequences of dividing the Korean peninsula is highlighted by surreal elements that drive home the insanity of a highly charged political atmosphere." Now there's a movie I want to see!
***MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW***
What it turned out to be is an ultra-violent melodrama by a director whose emotional development seems to have arrested at fifteen years of age. His premise isn't necessarily simple, but his handling of it is simplistic at best. The action centers around the shooting of a young man who crosses into the barricaded territory between North and South Korea to get it on with his girlfriend. The girlfriend and the soldier who did the shooting both go insane in a pair of the most superficial performances you're ever likely to see. No one involved here seems to have the slightest insight into what mental illness actually looks like.
Similarly, Kim's attempt to castigate the violent impulses of the military mindset (the literature makes the point that he's a former soldier himself) is played out in a seemingly endless chain of poorly staged melees between soldiers and civilians, soldiers and soldiers, maybe even civilians and civilians, but I can't remember because the movie at some point just became a big mush of stomping feet and flying fists. And oh yeah, there's that abortion scene, where, wouldn't you know it... the army surgeon doesn't have any anesthetic! Someone get me out of here...
Too sappy to be realist, too lacking in any style to succeed as metaphor, the film makes not one satisfying gesture in its interminable 95 minutes. I hope this'll be the worst film I see at the festival, and I have to say, chances are good.
Der alte Affe Angst (2003)
A great, human film.
You know you're in for a ride with this picture from the opening moments. Roehler drops us smack in the middle of a blowout argument between a young couple whose sex life is on the skids. The fight is at that fever pitch where the woman is crying almost convulsively, and where each of them is beginning to lose their grip on saying sensible things and are on the verge of cheap shots and unhelpful attempts at humor. The scene is tangible and familiar to anyone who's ever grappled with a fraying relationship, and, with a shocking abruptness, we're immediately in the reality of Robert and Marie.
For 95 minutes that reality never wanes, and in fact expands to involve Robert's deathly ill father and Marie's previous attempts at suicide. There are a lot of movies about messed-up middle class couples. What makes "Angst" special is that, as messed-up as they are, Robert and Marie's reality is not uniformly bleak. There are moments of delirious joy between them, and we have to take them at their word that these are moments that only occur when they are with each other. And like any of us, they have to figure out if they can live with the devil's bargain: take the joy, and deal with the enormous fears that come with it.
Marie Baeumer's a complex and deeply honest performance. She has what Martin Scorsese calls the ability to wage full wars on her face (although he was talking about classic, male movie stars when he said it). Her slightest expression shows the depth of both her affection and her contempt for Robert. For his part, Andre Hennicke plays Robert brilliantly. He's as panicked over his own impulsive behavior as he is lovestruck for Marie.
In the Q&A at the AFI Fest, Roehler described his shooting process as being more theatrical than cinematic, which would go some length in explaining how he got such fantastic work from his actors, but he doesn't give himself enough credit. He has a magnificent cinematic sense, one that had me thinking of Kieslowski and Tarkovsky throughout (and not just because of a blatant reference to "Solaris"). It is one of the most psychologically intelligent films I've seen in a good long time, but it's also just a damn good movie.
One which, by the way does not have an American distributor, which is a goddamned crime! Of course, the suits are probably terrified by the level of nudity, both male and female, in the picture, and a few very graphic sexual moments. There's no question it's an NC-17 picture, but it would also get killer reviews and do serious art house business. The fact that a film like this has any trouble at all finding distribution in this country is all the evidence needed to indicate how culturally ass-backwards we have become.
Nicotina (2003)
Fun but pretty inconsequential
Hugo Rodriguez' "Nicotina" is a fun picture, but it is enough to say that it is a Mexican version of Guy Ritchie's English heist flicks, albeit less so. Less violent, less convoluted, less hilarious. And yet, still violent and convoluted and
hilarious enough. So there it is. Diego Luna's in it, and ain't nobody doesn't think he's cute. Rodriguez uses funky wipes as scene transitions, punched up by
goofy sound effects, there's a scene where a bitchy barber's wife cuts open a guy's belly to get at some diamonds. And there's that smoking theme --
everybody's quitting, trying to quit, in denial about quitting, can't afford the smokes, can't find any lighter fluid, something. It's a motif and it's a metaphor, though perhaps not the deepest one ever (you never what's gonna kill ya!). It makes for a catchy title, though.
Lan se da men (2002)
Simple, elegant, beautiful.
Upon seeing it at the AFI Fest, Yee Chin-yen's "Blue Gate Crossing" instantly became one of my favorite pictures of 2003.
The premise is very simple, and yet it is one of those about which the less is said, the better. Simply put, it examines the effect on two girls, best friends in high school, when one has a crush from afar on a boy, and the other actually starts talking to him. The writing is delicate, the performances completely natural and real. Even the look of the movie -- echoing Wong Kar-Wai's elegantly composed, florescent-lit romances -- is stylish without being over-stylized. The narrative is never forced, and yet the ground covered encompasses the awkwardness of a first kiss, the vagaries of sexual orientation, the safety of fantasy over reality, and the nature of friendship -- both the kinds that just happen and those that come about because they've been earned. Finally, the last minute of this movie made a mess of me, I haven't gushed so hard since "Whale Rider."
Io non ho paura (2003)
A rare mix of the artful and the commercial
Gabriele Salvatore's "Io Non Ho Paura (I'm Not Scared)" is Italy's official entrant for this year's Foreign Language Oscar and, not surprisingly, a Miramax pickup. I say "not surprisingly" because Miramax is as savvy as they get and the picture has obvious potential to be a big hit, very likely one to break out of the usual foreign film niche and do some good mainstream business, depending on the rating. (The translation resulted in enough f*cks in the subtitles to get the film an R, but if it gets it, it'll probably be the first R-rated film I'd take my kids to.)
***SPOILERS BEGIN ***
Shot with the film language of a straight thriller, the film takes place in the 1970s when kidnappings of rich children were the trendy crime in Italy, presumably seen as an equalizer for the country's impoverished working classes. This story examines one such case from the perspective of a boy, Michele, who literally unearths the victim of such a scheme. The two boys develop a friendship, but Michele realizes he's fairly helpless to assist the prisoner because he discovers that not only his parents, but his whole rural village, are in on it.
*** SPOILERS END ***
I never saw "Mediterraneo," Salvatore's Oscar-winning film from a few years back, but now I feel I need to. This is high-grade populist filmmaking, with strong performances from both adults and children, and thoughtfully directed at every step. The tall grassy fields of Southern Italy reminded me of the crops in "Days of Heaven," but whereas that film was shot entirely at golden hour (just before dusk), "I'm Not Scared" is shot mostly at midday, the sun hot and nearly blinding, making the night scenes and those in the prisoner's hole severely, deathly black.
After I'm Not Scared comes out next April, I wouldn't be surprised to see Salvatore being drafted by the studios like Ang Lee. He has the same kind of rare gift to make artful, commercial pictures.
Tom Hits His Head (2003)
Hilarious and cathartic
In Tom Hits His Head, well, Tom hits his head. And the insanity that follows is what the director, Tom, insists is an autobiographical account of a six-month bout with panic attacks. The movie is hilarious, escalating from simple depression to blackouts to binge spending to an encounter with Satan in the bathroom. One can imagine that it was a lot less amusing when it was really happening, which makes a great case for independent film as a means of cathartic therapy. After the screening, the director joked that he had gotten tired of people asking him how he's been doing since his accident, so now he just hands them a tape.
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
If not a great movie, still a very important one
As per expectation, Errol Morris' "The Fog of War" is a fascinating movie about a fascinating man. Morris is the indisputable master of the talking head movie. Nobody gives interview like he does, and there aren't many contemporary figures who are as choice a subject, nor many who would fit so perfectly into Morris' distinctive body of work, as Robert S. McNamara.
Since his first movie, the bizarre and just plain awesome "Gates of Heaven," Morris has concerned himself almost exclusively with the human race's complicated relationship with death. From every angle -- spiritual, criminal, intellectual, political -- he has gotten his subjects to spill what goes on in their heads and their souls when confronted with the troublesome question of mortality. In this light, former Secretary of Defense McNamara is as juicy a subject for Morris as one can imagine, not just for his deep involvement in the business of killing, but for the awesome capacity of his mind and his articulate presentation of what happens in it.
Nothing that is said in "The Fog of War" is likely to calm either the conservatives who he tends to rankle by revisiting and rethinking wartime mistakes they'd rather let lie, nor the most fanatically dovish liberals who still think he should hang for what the Vietnam War did to our country and to theirs. McNamara's reflections are, however, uncommonly acute. At eighty-five years old, there appears not to be one cell in his brain firing at less than one hundred percent.
He seems to remember every thought he ever had, every action he ever took, and his reasons for doing so. Moreover, his constant reassessment of them is defined by a kind of moral frankness most of us should envy and aspire to.
Morris, thankfully, does not make the mistake of simplifying either McNamara the man or his now-famous second thoughts. McNamara has not become a pacifist, and while one can imagine Morris' temptation to wave the regrets of the Vietnam War's main architect like a banner for the left, he knows the more compelling film is the more honest one. McNamara maintains that there will be no wars that will end all wars; and that there are times when one must "do evil to minimize evil." However, he is also very clear on some things which have striking relevance in the immediate. "We are the most powerful nation in the world," he says (and I'm paraphrasing), "and that kind of power should never be applied unilaterally. If we cannot gain agreement with our allies of similar values, then we need to rethink our reasoning."
Though maybe not on a par with "Gates of Heaven" for sheer cinematic grace, "The Fog of War" is a film that needs to be seen by important people, and now. It is as urgent today as "The Thin Blue Line," which ultimately freed a wrongly convicted man from death row, was upon its release. The greatest difference between McNamara and our current policymakers is not that they are for war and he is against it, but that to them the moral equations are all very simple, and he knows better.
Les triplettes de Belleville (2003)
Strange and Wonderful
There were ten or twelve in our party, including my family, and at least four animators and their girlfriends. Finding seats for a group our size was a
challenge, even though we got there early, and even though they had moved
the screening into the largest theater at the AFI Fest. It was Sylvain Chomet's "The Triplets of Belleville," and everybody wants to see this flick.
As they damn well should. "The Triplets of Belleville" is a great, weird movie. It tells its strange, kidnapping story almost entirely without dialogue, and even though some of the words are presented in English, the humor is all French,
soaked through. Most in my party audibly giggled when a scene featured a
poster for "M. Hulot's Holiday" hanging in the background. The spirit of Jaques Tati is fully alive in "Triplets," although in darker, more surreal, occasionally more vulgar surroundings than Hulot ever hung in. The movie is not overly shy about nudity, or non-functioning toilets, or violent death, or even less Disney- esque elements, such as old people. Damn if this movie isn't populated by a
bunch of seniors, who are not only eccentric and cranky, with saggy flesh and age spots, but they're also the story's heroes! And if my kids, who laughed and laughed for the whole 80 minutes, are any indication, it would never occur to a child that an animated movie without a fresh-faced princess or a talking animal for a hero was missing something.
My only complaint with the picture is a brief, seafaring sequence in the middle in which the animators, for some terrible reason, decided to use digital animation for the water rather than the hand-drawn work that makes the rest of the movie so rich. The pixely sheen of the waves made the scene stick out like a
compound fracture, and it just didn't seem at all necessary.
Still, it is the animated film of this year, hands-down. Whether it wins the Oscar will depend on how beholden the animation committee feels to step in line with all the hoo-ha over the limp, overrated "Finding Nemo." The fact that they gave the award last year to the great "Spirited Away" indicates that they know the difference between quality and hype, so there is more than a little hope. Also, nominations for Best Song and Best Score would be not be out of line, although the score may be just a touch too quirky for the Music Branch. They like a lot of strings, those people.
In the Cut (2003)
A deeply effective sexual exploration - quintessentially Campion
There's a theory about the evolution of the very earliest living cells which imagines that sexual activity came about as an accidental variation on predatory activity. The theory goes that one cell, while trying to consume another for its nutrients instead wound up fusing half of its genetic material with the same from its prey, producing a third cell. The first case of sexual intercourse, a bungled murder.
To this day, the parity of sex and violence is one of the most troublesome paradoxes in our societies and in our psyches. Yet there it is, whether appearing only metaphorical, as with images of penetration; or more visceral: the impulse to bite during sex, or of some, to act out full sado-masochistic scenarios. We rightly recoil with horror from the dreadful reality of rape, and yet so many women are drawn to bad boys, finding the dark potential for violence in a man an incomparable aphrodisiac.
`In the Cut' takes place entirely in the dark fissure between lust and murderousness. It's no surprise that it's the work of Jane Campion, who seems exclusively fascinated by what makes women yearn and burn, and while it doesn't have the formal elegance of `The Piano' or the ruthless character interplay of `Holy Smoke,' it is a sensual experience (and a sensory one) like none other on display.
The movie lies close to you and, like Aesop's Satyr, breathes hot and cold breath on your face at the same time. Even when the scenes are frigid -- body parts drained of blood, a frozen lake the internal heat of the characters is palpable. The deep colors in Dion Beebe's photography, like those in `Holy Smoke,' come off of some otherworldly pallet. The focus ripples like heat distortion at the edges, keeping the outer world vague, and our attention on the characters' immediate realities.
The story, such as it is, is ostensibly a murder mystery. Frannie (Meg Ryan) and her half sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), are potential witnesses in a serial killing being investigated by Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo). The sisters are late thirties, longing for husbands, and settling, respectively, for masturbation and sleeping with a married doctor. The cop is a bit of a mook, but with that comes a directness and animalism that Frannie can't entirely turn away from. Ruffalo plays him as the same kind of undereducated but acutely perceptive attraction that Campion has employed Harvey Keitel for in the past. Ruffalo's batting a thousand lately, and this is among his best work.
Ultimately, the movie is pointless as a whodunit. The culprit and his motives turn out to be entirely peripheral to the central action, which is about Frannie (and Campion) exploring the psychological territory where sexual apprehension borders on fear, and where the fear legitimately becomes about more than just sex.
With the aid of a beautifully understated performance from Meg Ryan (who does not for a moment appear to be trying to leave a previous image behind she just does it), Campion and writer Susanna Moore create a portrait of a woman's conflicting impulses when drawn to someone who is very possible no good for her, a portrait that likely mirrors to some degree experiences we've all had.
Lost in Translation (2003)
Sofia Coppola's perfectly tuned ode to second thoughts (with minor spoilers)
There is a lot of hype these days for `Lost In Translation,' all of which it more than lives up to, but hype itself is dangerous. I'm hesitant to give any more breath to those flames because this is not the kind of film which will answer heightened expectations well, especially if those expectations have been conditioned by the kind of picture we usually see coming out of Hollywood, even those films that are thought of as prestige pictures or art films. So if you haven't seen the film yet, I recommend you forget anything you might have read or heard already, and skip reading this. Go see it, and expect nothing but a graceful depiction of that least sensational of topics: second thoughts.
Contrary to the comedic zeitgeist of our times, `Lost In Translation' is a quiet film. It takes its time about everything. There isn't a damn thing quirky about it; in fact, while it is very funny at times, it's a bit morose overall. And while no movie with Bill Murray will ever be entirely devoid of irony, the kind of winking at the audience that too often now displaces genuine reflections of character is kept to its perfect minimum. Despite the circles director Sofia Coppola runs in, the film is much closer in spirit to Eric Rohmer than to Spike Jonez or Wes Anderson, and as much as I enjoy what Spike and his kind do, I can't imagine a more welcome change in the weather about now.
It is also important not to expect too much here in the way of a story, or at least a plot. The set-up in Coppola's script is man-meets-girl, man-and-girl-flirt, man-and-girl-say-goodbye. It really doesn't get any more complicated than that, but as in real life (which `Lost In Translation' does and does not resemble in fine balance), those deceptively simple circumstances are planted with the worst kind of emotional traps, especially when the man and the girl are both married to others, and it's Sofia the Director who details that precarious landscape in uncanny relief.
More than anything else you might have read about what this picture means for its participants, more than a coming-out for Scarlett Johansson, more than the best shot Bill Murray has ever had for an Oscar, it indicates that Coppola has got it as a director. She knows how she wants us to feel at every moment, and uses her particular tools of choice - namely photography, music, and especially performance - to get us there.
Mostly what she wants us to feel is the tantalizing presence of `the what-if,' the attraction that an older man and a younger woman can hold for one another when they each find themselves fresh out of compelling interest in their own relationships. It's a theme torn from the pages of the oldest books in the world, so old you might think there'd be no life left in the premise at all, but it is in the subtle ways that Coppola achieves this tension that makes `Lost In Translation' unusual.
Holed up in the same Tokyo hotel, Bob (Murray) and Charlotte (Johansson) hover and drift around each other in increasingly tighter orbits, first by chance, and then by design, but until it becomes inevitable, they never make the kind of contact that their heightening attraction would demand. Instead, Coppola tells their story in the negative spaces, playing out their interaction as a finely modulated series of long and awkward silences, like musical pauses in a score where the notes tend to be the kind of banalities that anyone who's ever flirted in real life will recognize as authentic. All the while, Bob and Charlotte barely touch. The one bit of erotic contact that they allow each other at all is all the more remarkable for its minimalism, and while the moment may or may not have been inspired by `Claire's Knee,' it does call to mind Rohmer's masterpiece in its delicacy and the weight of its melancholy.
In a pop culture that idolizes excess, Coppola is gifted with restraint. Although she does lace the whole picture with a pleasing kind of levity (the punk-pop karaoke scene especially), there are no bouncy, swirling montages of the two illicit companions having the time of their lives; no near-miss scenarios wherein they almost get caught; no mawkish rows with their significant others to make clear how horrible things are at home, justifying their dalliance. In fact, Coppola is fine with suggesting that an attraction like this might reasonably take place between two people who are in relationships that are not grossly abusive, or just plain wrong from the get-go, but are merely in respective lulls.
By the time the end comes, we've come to feel there can't be a satisfying conclusion to this affair. Charlotte, and especially Bob, are simply too pragmatic and won't give in to the whimsy of their attraction. There will be no race to catch her at the airport, no promises to leave anyone's spouse, because they and we know that would be bogus and frankly wrong. Yet, just when we are resigned to leave these two in a state of despondency, Coppola pays off the whole experience with the subtlest of moves: an embrace, and a close exchange of words that we cannot hear and don't need to. By suppressing Bob and Charlotte's intimacy throughout the picture, this brief and elegant moment feels nearly orgasmic on the screen, and it's the kind of gesture a mediocre director could never have conceived, much less made to work.
Collaborating with director of photography Lance Acord, and her brother Roman, who directed the second unit, she's given the film a look that directly mimics her own still photography. Soft focus and muted colors dominate, except when she turns the camera on the bright lights of the Rappongi at night. Bright daylight is never allowed to intrude in this melancholic, interior world. Shoegazer extraordinaire Kevin Shields (formerly of My Bloody Valentine) was engaged to bring the equivalent sonic traits to the film's music.
Lastly, it is almost impossible to not think of the film as surprisingly candid, given the similarities between Charlotte and Sofia herself. Even physically, the comparison is there: Johansson is a more voluptuous version of the petite Sofia, but they share a wry, pouty face and a soft-spokenness that subtly draws one closer. More tellingly, Charlotte's fascinations are closely aligned to Sofia's. She dabbled in photography, and keeps an elaborate scrap book of drawings and writings much like the girls in Coppola's first film The Virgin Suicides. Charlotte's new husband, a rock photographer played by Giovanni Ribisi, is a dead ringer for Jonze, the real-life Mr. Sofia Coppola.
One can't shake the notion that there's a semi- or quasi- autobiographical element to this film, and that Charlotte's disillusionment with her young marriage reflects Coppola's. The recent news that Spike and Sofia are separated doesn't do much to dispel the idea. It doesn't really matter, of course, except to the degree that it would indicate Coppola's willingness to put herself into her art (her immediate self, at that, considering she was only married four years ago and it takes a good two years to get a movie made, and that's on the fast track). That level of honesty is no small thing, especially when the vanguard these days is obsessed with highly formalized cinematic detachment, and it's a huge bonus to the certainty of her talent.
Cremaster 3 (2002)
Matthew Barney kicks narrative to the curb.
Though Matthew Barney doesn't identify himself as a filmmaker per se -- he's a sculptor by training and practice -- his Cremaster Cycle has me convinced that he has a more expansive vision for the possibility of cinema than any new director since Godard grabbed the audience by the hair and pulled us behind the camera with him.
I think part of Barney's resistance to the filmmaker label is that, like the rest of the world, he's been conditioned to believe that movies are only intended to serve a limited set of purposes, namely to act as filmed imitations of ankle-deep novels or plays; that a literal narrative, propelled throughout by actors talking, is the essential element of any movie. This model has been so deeply embedded in all of our psyches that even when a guy like Barney says "f*&^k all that" and defies every conceivable convention, he still feels as though he's doing something which is only nominally a film, even if it is in fact the opposite: a fully realized motion picture experience.
For those who don't know, The Cremaster Cycle is Barney's dreamlike meditation on ... well, I guess it'd be up to each viewer to decide exactly what the topics are, since the movies deliberately make themselves available for subjective interpretaton. Clearly Barney has creation and death on his mind, as well as ritual, architecture and space, symbolism, gender roles, and a Cronenbergian fascination with anatomy.
The movies are gorgeously photographed in settings that could only have been designed by someone with the eye of a true visual artist. In the first half of "3," Barney reimagines the polished interiors of the Chrysler Building as a temple in which the building itself is paradoxically conceived. The second half, slightly more personal, has Barney's alter ego in garish Celtic dress scaling the interior of a sparse Guggenheim Museum, intersecting at its various levels what are presumably various stages of his own artistic preoccupations -- encounters with dancing girls, punk rock, and fellow modern artist Richard Serra, among others.
In the end, what kind of movie is it? It certainly isn't the kind of movie that'll have Joel Silver sweating bullets over the box-office competition. Nor is it likely that more than three or four Academy members will see it, though nominations for cinematography and art direction would be well-deserved. It sure isn't warm and fuzzy: for my money, it might be a little too designed, too calculated. I always prefer chaotic naturalism over studious control. Friedkin over Hitchcock for me. It *is* the kind of movie that the most innovative mainstream filmmakers will talk about ten and twenty years from now when asked what inspired them. Barney's willingness to work entirely with associative imagery, to spell out absolutely nothing, and to let meaning take its first shape in the viewer's imagination, is the kind of catalyst that gives impressionable young minds the notion they can do something they didn't before think possible.
Identity (2003)
A pitiful, bloody mess of a movie.
This overwrought and half-cooked, screaming cliché of a movie commits unspeakable acts of violence upon the talents of its actors. Look at the names of the fallen! John Cusack! Alfred Molina! Rebecca De Mornay! Ray Liotta! Dear God, someone help them, they're bleeding! Give them a script or a director, or something!
I hadn't been so eager to leave the theater since I saw Gangs of New York. It's already the next morning and I'm still trying to cleanse myself of that godawful movie-going experience. Yiiigghh.
The Hours (2002)
A kick in the gut from the spirit of human potential.
The best place to start in discussing `The Hours,' I think, is to recap the discussion I had with my friend just after the movie. While she agreed with me that it was an excellent film, both in the obvious level of craft on display (the performances, the writing, the design, the score, et al, are uniformly excellent, but more on that later) and in its success at lighting up the grey matter in our skulls, our emotional reactions were polar opposites. She found herself utterly sad and depressed afterward, regarding the three intertwining stories as tales of entrapment; of people in the tragic position of suffering from the very things that might otherwise make them happy. I felt inspired and empowered by the film, finding a great sense of hope in the insights (or more correctly, the one insight) that the various characters come to.
(If you're the kind of person, like I am, who finds the personal revelations of characters to be just as rewarding as any specific plot point or twist, you'd consider much of the following to be spoilers, so consider yourself warned.)
My friend was right that all the primary characters in `The Hours,' the three top-billed women, as well as Ed Harris' Richard, are living out their lives in some kind of pen. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) suffers from clinical depression and a husband who confines her comings and goings out of his own well-intended concern. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) lives the archetypical existence of a bored 1950s housewife according to an ideal dreamed up by her husband and post-War America at large. Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) suffers from chronic nostalgia, and her ex-boyfriend, Richard, from AIDS.
The story follows each of them over the course of a single day in their own era -- Woolf in the 20s, Brown in the 50s, and Vaughn in the present day -- in which they grapple with the realities of their entrapment. Ultimately all of them figure out how to distinguish between the elements of their lives that they cannot change (their circumstances) and the things that they can (their options), and find that once that distinction has been made, they have the most that anyone can ask for: the equipment to participate in their own fate.
What an amazing thing to discover, that no matter how limited our choices become we still have choices to make -- sometimes, brutally tough and even unfair choices -- but that the success of our lives can be measured by how well we make the choices we do have! Even when the most you can decide for yourself are the details of your own death, if you discover how to die on no one else's terms, you have made the most of what it is to be human. And so here is where my friend's and my reactions diverged. I find this revelation beautiful and inspiring, and I left the theater feeling I had been kicked in the gut by the spirit of human potential.
Miles of column inches have already been printed in praise of the work done in `The Hours' by the three lead actresses and their various supporters. There's little I can add to that praise, except that, while Streep and Moore are doing work that is very much in keeping with the kind that we've seen them do before, Kidman as Woolf is a miraculous piece of counter-intuitive casting. This one role comes close to suggesting that Kidman might be capable of anything. Woolf, in Kidman's portrayal, is hushed and tightly enveloped around herself, quietly resentful of her own madness, the depth of which she is more aware of than anyone around her. With the aid of a single bit of prosthetic makeup (about which far more has been discussed than seems necessary), Kidman disappears entirely into the role.
Under Stephen Daldry's direction, the craftsmanship in `The Hours' is stunning at every level. Peter Boyle, the editor, gracefully balances the three narratives and deftly places the visual motifs that connect them. Phillip Glass' score breathes beautifully throughout, introducing a greater degree of melodic interplay than he's been known for in his more rarified art pieces. Seamus Garvey photographs each of the narratives in a distinct palette, letting us never lose track of where we are in time, and still allowing the film to feel cohesive and whole.
If I have one quibble with `The Hours,' it is that the 1950s story is designed and staged according to a set of well-established archetypes of that particular time and place: everyone exists in a kind of Stepford paralysis, baked in painfully sunny weather. Clichés are, of course, rooted in truth. I'd have been happier, though, to see some of the naturalism of the other two stories bleed over into this section as well.
It is a minor complaint about a major piece of work. Of the films being discussed as potential Oscar winners, it is by far my favorite for the Best Picture prize, as well as a number of others. An `Hours' sweep would strike a blow, unprecedented in recent memory, for gorgeous and inspiring film making.
Adaptation. (2002)
A bold disappointment
Because Justice, in all her blind wisdom, does occasionally make a surprise appearance at the Academy Awards, there is reason to hope that Chris Cooper will take home this year's Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. What he does in "Adaptation" as John Laroche, the orchid thief, is just amazing. He convinces us that this grimy, toothless, possibly insane naturalist is, as he puts it, the smartest person he knows. If you knew him, he might be the smartest person you knew as well, and the most defiantly passionate. He is a great screen character, a scientist with an artist's heart and a redneck persona, and it seems impossible that anyone but Cooper could play him so well. There are, in fact, a number of very smart people associated with "Adaptation," but insofar as their smarts were put on display for this particular project, Cooper and Laroche are the only ones who come away with much in the way of bragging rights.
Susan Orlean (convincingly played in the movie by Meryl Streep) saw in Laroche's life a story that needed telling, wrote the book, `The Orchid Thief,' and was smart enough to simply be in awe of Laroche and his capacity for obsession. The story that needs to be told is Laroche's, and Orlean gets credit for not being among those who completely bungled that notion.
Charlie Kaufman, the writer and central figure of "Adaptation," and Spike Jonze, its director, are smart men as well. Exhibit A: their previous film, "Being John Malkovich," a hilarious, pop mind-bender of a movie that illuminated the desire lurking in the modern, collective subconscious not just to be famous, but to be someone who is famous already specifically, to be Malkovich in his private moments, brushing his teeth, or getting laid. `Malkovich' is one of the few true classics of our times, so Jonze's and especially Kaufman's complete fumbling of the ball in "Adaptation" is, for my money, the heaviest disappointment of the year.
The premise of the film, as everyone knows by now, is that Kaufman is given the assignment of adapting Orlean's book into a screenplay but, finding himself stymied by the material, instead winds up writing the story of the adaptation itself, creating a movie in which the audience is treated to the story of the movie's own creation. It's a high-wire idea, rich with potential for the kind of cerebral loop-de-loops with which Jonze and Kaufman drew `Malkovich' so brilliantly, but which in this case went almost entirely unfulfilled.
As Kaufman makes clear throughout his own script, in ways that are both articulated by his onscreen persona (played by Nicholas Cage) and evident in the movie's key failures, `The Orchid Thief' is simply too emotional and ephemeral a piece of material for his own particular strengths. At one point, Kaufman begs his agent to let him off the project, and the agent warns him that it would be a disastrous career move. It's probably a fool's game to try and guess which events in `Adaptation' are fabrications and which were taken directly from real life, but it's tempting to believe that this dialogue really happened, because the movie feels most honest when Kaufman admits to not being up to the task.
The problem is, he never did rise to the occasion, and as he tells us point blank in his meta-fictionalized account, he cheated by putting himself into his own screenplay, and then cheated further by fictionalizing even that story, going so far as to invent a twin brother for himself an alter ego whose dim wits and billowy confidence are there to accentuate all of Charlie's neuroses and steadfast principles. Even as I relate these details, they strike me as brilliant ideas. Unfortunately, Kaufman fell victim to an age-old writer's trap: that to have a brilliant idea is the same thing as making the idea work. He did one but not the other. Like a clever college student who didn't do any of the necessary research for an assignment, Kaufman instead wrote a movie of lies and excuses about why he couldn't do the job he was given, and presumably he then hid somewhere, sweating profusely, fingers crossed, hoping we would buy it.
He can stop sweating now, I guess. Critics are mostly wowed. People who I know personally, and whose opinions I highly respect, love the film. Mike Nichols wrote something in the L.A. Times yesterday, which I have yet to read, but which I hear is very enthusiastic. "Adaptation" will certainly find its audience, but I'm afraid I'm not among them.
For the first two thirds of the movie, I was playing along. Even if it wasn't as emotionally involving as I'd have liked, the dialogue was funny, and I was even buying into the meta-premise. For the record, I love meta-fiction, the novels of Salman Rushdie being the best example I can think of.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
However, in the last act, the bottom of the bag gave out and spilled the damned movie all over the street. Kaufman, finally frustrated beyond all hope with the difficult nature of Orleans' material and taunted by the huge success of his fictional twin brother's hack Hollywood screenplay, throws art to the dogs and decides to end his script in the usual, commercial fashion, throwing into the kitchen sink all the old sawhorses he claims to despise: car chases, gunplay, the overcoming of personal obstacles, life lessons. It's a joke with great potential, except for one thing: we already care about the story of the orchid thief, and we don't so much about Kaufman's.
And as if to defy our sincere interest in Laroche and Orlean, whose story he was supposed to be telling, he races all his characters through a gauntlet of cliché (deliberately, I realize) toward his anti-denouement. The problem is, the entire last third does nothing but satisfy that one joke. He apparently thought the conceit itself would serve, and so he drew it as one, broad stroke. Nothing that actually happens in it -- not the drugs, not the guns, not the sex, nor the shattering glass -- plays any role in anyone's story. Once you get the joke, which is shortly after the third act starts, the joke is over, and the movie is robbed of any truly satisfying conclusion. All it does is illustrate that Charlie gave up, and then tried desperately to put a humorous spin on his failure.
Spider (2002)
A gracefully unsettling tale
"Spider" is a fascinating film, but not one to see when you are fighting sleep, which I was the end of a long day at the AFI Film Festival. After the screening just previous, I had wanted only to go home and sleep, but friends encouraged me to stay, so I did. The fact that I did occasionally allow long blinks to get a little longer, sometimes for a minute or so, is not a comment on the film, only on my state at the time. It IS a comment on the film that when it was all over, I felt wholly rewarded for having resisted my initial impulse.
It's 98 minutes are slow and deliberate, but they also form David Cronenberg's most quietly assured work. Patience pays off as we watch Ralph Fiennes, as Spider, arrive at a dreary halfway house for the mentally ill, and begin to obsessively recreate through imagination the childhood events which led to his losing his mind. The story looks into some of the same themes that "A Beautiful Mind" did, but without that picture's reliance on hamfisted theatrics and Hollywood formula.
Fiennes, playing the adult Spider, is not given the opportunity to display a great emotional range in his role, as Spider is defined by an almost constant state of fear, but as Spider's parents, Gabriel Byrne and especially Miranda Richardson are excellent. Byrne alternates between brutishness and tenderness in a way that helps shed some doubt on the quality of Spider's recollections, and Richardson pulls a switcheroo act of her own that a viewer is better off not knowing about beforehand. Equally compelling in a smaller role is Lynn Redgrave as the stern head mistress of the halfway house, and whose domineering presence becomes a key element in the revelations toward the end of the film.
Not only Cronenberg's least overtly horrific film, also his most graceful and perhaps, though only time will tell, his most memorable.