DUPLICITY (2009)
Following in the recent tradition of comedies by the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh and anyone named Anderson, writer-director Tony Gilroy’s new film features hyper-verbal characters saying very clever things, acting very badly and eliciting humor from the fact that they’re so alien to the real world.
I’ve grown tired of these so-called sophisticated comedies that go to great efforts to make you admire, piece by piece, the complex puzzle being constructed and the wry, unemotional bantering, yet offer little in the way of laughs. The audience I saw the film with didn’t laugh more than two or three times; I’ll bet many left the theater not realizing they’d just seen a comedy.
Putting categories aside, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, as Claire and Ray, a pair of cynical spies who join forces, romantically and professionally, are fun to watch as they attempt to make off with the top-secret new product apparently being developed by the firm they’re spying on. It takes awhile for the relationship between the couple to become clear and you’re never quite sure who’s playing for which side or if they’re just pretending to as Gilroy keeps flashing back to previous rendezvous between the globe-trotting couple.
If at points the film seems like another sequel to “Ocean’s Eleven,” it probably explains why the director cast Owen rather than George Clooney (the star of his superb 2007 film “Michael Clayton”). It’s a better film than any of the “Ocean’s,” but, at points, it shares the pretentious smugness that counters the fun of the Soderbergh franchise.
The acting in the movie is first rate across the board, with Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, as cartoonish corporate rivals bent on embarrassing each other, stealing every scene they’re in. While Roberts and Owen display believable chemistry, their performances often feel forced because, in fact, their characters aren’t behaving naturally. They’re as much actors as Roberts and Owen are in real life; they even have scripts for some of their duplicitous exchanges. Yes, it’s all about role playing and how it permeates life, I was just hoping for a few more laughs along the way.
WAY DOWN EAST (1920) and J’ACCUSE (1919)
D.W. Griffith and Abel Gance, the directors of these silent epics, did more than any other filmmakers to advance the art of cinema before the advent of sound. Griffith, best known for his groundbreaking but unapologetic racist Civil War picture “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and the more forward-thinking history lesson Intolerance” (1916), made over 400 silents between 1908 and 1929. During that time he codified the principals of filmmaking, including camera placement and movement, the use of close-ups, techniques of editing and lighting and styles of acting. Among his contributions was his role in establishing Lillian Gish as the pre-eminent screen performer of the era.
Gish, the star of “Way Down East,” brought subtlety and nuance to screen acting during a time when exaggerated expressions and overwrought pantomime were the norm. She gives another heartbreaking performance as Anna, an innocent country girl tricked by playboy Lennox (future director Lowell Sherman) into believing they are husband and wife. She’s abandoned once she becomes pregnant and finds herself an outcast, eventually discovering true love with a land owner’s humble son (Richard Barthelmess). It’s not one of Griffith’s better films---the grade school moralizing and melodramatic clichés must have seemed shopworn even in 1920. The film pales in comparison to his two previous productions starring Gish, “Hearts of the World” (1918) and “Broken Blossoms” (1919).
But the climatic scene of “Way Down East,” shot on an ice-filled river with Barthelmess leaping from ice chunk to ice chunk to save Gish’s Anna from the waterfalls ahead, is one of the great action sequences in film history. It’s not easy wading through two hours and 25 minutes to get to that remarkable set piece, but watching Gish’s sublime acting makes one forget the ridiculous storyline.
Parisian Gance became famous when his masterpiece “Napoleon” (1927) was reconstructed to its original length by film restorer extraordinaire Kevin Brownlow and its showing at Radio City Music Hall became the film event of 1981. The 92-year-old Gance died just weeks after attending the New York premiere. The film, with its extensive use of multiple images and ahead-of-its-time camera movement, is an artistic marvel and a fascinating study of the legendary general.
“J’accuse” is just as compelling, offering some of the most intense war footage you’re likely to see in a fictional film along with an emotionally complex story of two very different men in love with the same woman. Gance shot much of the battlefield scenes during real World War I warfare, returning to the frontlines after nearly dying at a poison gas factory. I can’t imagine what a powerful experience it must have been for audiences seeing this film just months after the war ended.
Edith (Maryse Dauvray) is married to the brutish Francois (Séverin-Mars), but continues to be drawn to Jean (Romould Joubé), a sensitive poet who lives nearby with his mother. (It’s never explained how she ended up marrying this man she doesn’t seem to care for.) When the men end up in the same platoon on the frontline, they come to understand one another’s love for Edith, which becomes magnified when she’s captured by German troops.
Both a doomed love triangle and a poignant cry for humanity in the midst of one of the bloodiest wars in history, “J’accuse” shows men broken---mentally, morally and physically---by the experience of warfare and challenges its 1919 audiences to explain why good men had to die. The film is filled with conflicted images of death and destruction and pastoral scenes of the beauty of France and concludes with a mystical sequence in which of dead soldiers rise up to confront loved ones left behind. It’s a boldly directed, superbly acted anti-war statement that remains an extraordinary film experience 90 years after its making.
Restored by a company called Flicker Alley and released on DVD last year (and then premiered on TCM), “J’accuse” makes one appreciate the daring artistic expression possible during the silent era that all but disappeared with the coming of sound.
It turns out that these two great filmmakers met: At a New York screening of “J’accuse,” Griffith expressed his admiration for the film to Gance, who had just returned from a visit to Hollywood.
THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD (2009)
As much as the idea of a film about a once famous entertainer reduced to playing one-night stands in small Midwest towns appeals to me, this slight comedy can’t quite pull it off.
John Malkovich finds just the right balance of demanding egotist and hardworking trooper in depicting mentalist Buck Howard, who never tires of telling people he appeared on the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” 61 times. Now he travels from one civic auditorium to another repeating his act that features hypnotism, slight of hand, a few sentimental songs and, his grand finale, finding his night’s pay that has been hidden on an audience member. Even his ridiculous handshake is pretty funny.
Writer-director Sean McGinly, whose previous credits are mostly B-action movies, modeled the character after the Amazing Kreskin, a regular on TV talk shows in the 1970s and ‘80s.
We see Buck’s life on the road through the eyes of his newly recruited manager Troy, blandly played by Colin Hanks. His father (played by the actor’s real-life dad Tom---who has two amusing scenes) wants him to be a lawyer, while Troy wants to be a writer, yet somehow he ends up with the thankless job of catering to the whims of the flamboyant Buck Howard.
The problem is that you don’t care about Troy’s conflicts, even when it involves a cute publicist, played by Emily Blunt, in part because the role is just one cliché after another. Also Hanks is, at best, a sitcom actor and, at age 31, a bit old for the role.
The shabby side of show business has always been rich with ideas for great stories as seen in such films as “The Entertainer” (1960) with Laurence Olivier and Woody Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984). But “The Great Buck Howard,” despite a memorable performance by Malkovich, doesn’t offer much in the way of either drama or comedy about the ways entertainers fight to hold on to a little piece of their glory days.
THE MAGNIFICENT YANKEE (1950)
and A SONG TO REMEMBER (1945)
I’ve been catching up with past Oscar nominations I’ve never seen, which requires watching some pretty forgettable films.
Louis Calhern, a longtime character actor, best know for his roles in “The Asphalt Junge” (1950), “Executive Suite” (1954) and the title (though supporting) role in “Julius Caesar” (1953), had a rare lead role as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Magnificent Yankee.” Calhern had played the role to much acclaim and popularity on Broadway, which helps explain his Oscar nomination for the film version.
Calhern’s Holmes is a perpetually good-spirited, humble man, devoted to his wife (Ann Harding) and doting over a series of clerks. The film spends as much time on a nervous clerk revealing to Holmes that he’s to be married as it does on any of the legendary jurist’s legal decisions. The picture falls under the Hollywood tradition of rendering important figures as sunny, good-hearted pillars of society, meant to reassure the masses that our government/justice system is in safe hands. Calhern’s characterization would have been better suited for a screwball comedy.
“A Song to Remember” has more substance, but the best actor nomination for Cornel Wilde is hard to understand. As Frédéric Chopin, the great 19th Century Polish composer who becomes the toast of Paris, he’s reserved and bland, far less interesting than his devoted teacher (an especially hammy Paul Muni) and his friend and fellow composer Franz Liszt (Stephen Bekassy).
What’s interesting about the film is the depiction of Chopin’s bizarre relationship with Georg Sands (Merle Oberon), the cross-dressing novelist who convinces him to follow her philosophy that an artist should live only for himself. She forces him to abandon his mentor, discontinue performing live and disavowing his support of the peasants struggle in Poland. A better actor could have made this Chopin a fascinating character. It’s the rare movie from the ‘40s that portrays a man (especially a famous, talented one) giving up his ideals for a woman he isn’t married to and for that director Charles Vidor and writers Sidney Buchman and Ernst Marischka deserve credit.
Wilde lost the 1945 best actor competition to Ray Milland’s performance as an alcoholic in “The Lost Weekend,” while Calhern was topped by another performance transferred from the stage, José Ferrer in “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
WICKED, WICKED (1973)
When filmmakers try something new, I believe they deserve a little slack. So I usually go out of my way to give films that dare to be different the benefit of the doubt. But there’s no doubt about this murder mystery filmed in “Duo-Vision”: It’s a laughable disaster.
This badly directed and amateurishly acted picture utilizes a split screen for nearly the entire one hour and 35 minute running time, the brain child of veteran director Richard L. Bare, best known for his “So You Want to Be” movie shorts of the ‘40s and ‘50s and as a TV director of many shows including “Green Acres.”
Unfortunately, the effect ends up making the lumbering, silly plot even less interesting, with the “second screen” rarely offering anything that adds much to the story. If anything, it just doubles the dullness.
When two female guests at a luxury hotel (the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego) disappear, the house detective (David Bailey), a disgraced ex-cop, is convinced they were murdered and attempts to trap the killer. The bait he uses is his ex-wife (Tiffany Bolling) who happens to be singing (displaying a voice that’s a cross between Cher’s and Bill Murray’s) in the hotel’s lounge during the crime spree.
While the detective walks the halls of the hotel looking for the murderer, the other side of the screen shows the killer in another part of the hotel, hiding or preparing for another killing. The device completely nullifies any tension usually created by editing. Even worse is when Bare uses the other screen to show a flashback as the character describes the memory on the other side of the screen. And when Bare doesn’t have anything to fill the second screen he shows a woman playing the organ music written for the silent version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Multiple screens can be effective when used in moderation (the previously mentioned “Napoleon,” “Woodstock” or the current TV show “24”), but for an entire movie, this effect sucks any energy or pretense of art right out of the picture.
The acting is generally awful and Bare’s script isn’t as interesting as any episode of “Mannix” or “Ironside.” In Bare’s autobiography, “Confessions of a Hollywood Director,” he reports that MGM executive Danny Melnick, after reading the script, asked, “You don’t expect a major studio like MGM to release this pile of [manure], do you?” He was right, but the studio financed it anyway. Bare blames its box-office failure on the lack of advertising budget. Right.
“Wicked Wicked” is painfully bad (and not even in a campy, Ed Wood way) and deserves a spot on any list of the worst movies of all time.
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA (2008)
The experiences of black army units on the battlefield during World War II must have produced hundreds of stories of heroism and heartbreak. Yet this Spike Lee film about a group of these men, known as Buffalo Soldiers, does little more than mirror the clichés from hundreds of “white” WWII movies in a story that grows less interesting as more and more subplots are added in.
At the center of the film are four soldiers, the only survivors of a confrontation with the German army who take shelter in a small Italian town. One of these soldiers, Sam (Omar Benson Miller), the big dumb, cuddly one, has saved a young Italian boy left on his own and they become inseparable. And among the Italians who help them is Renata (Valentina Cervi), an attractive young woman who enjoys the attention she receives from Bishop (Michael Ealy), the group’s egotistical playboy and Stamps (Derek Luke), the even-tempered reliable leader. Hector (Laz Alonso) mostly plays peacemaker for his bickering fellow soldiers.
Lee introduces the story with a more contemporary sequence in which one of the soldiers (which one isn’t revealed until the end) now a postal worker, shoots and kills an elderly Italian man buying stamps. In a jailhouse interview, the old solider remembers the events that led him to commit murder.
While the film does a solid job of depicting the battlefield and the uneasy alliance between the soldiers and the Italians who shelter them, it takes on too much when a Nazi massacre, a group of Italian partisan fighters, a turncoat German soldier and an Italian traitor are thrown in.
At one point, Lee brings the plot to a complete stop by flashing back to a sequence set during the soldiers’ stateside training and their encounter with a racist diner owner. This might have been an excellent 90-minute film, but instead it’s a tiresome 2 hour and 40 minute would-be epic.
Luke and Ealy both give standout performance and Matteo Sciabordi is appealing as the Italian boy, but most of the Italian and German characters are just a collection of clichés.
Lee’s career, once so promising, remains stuck in neutral. While he rarely makes bad films (2006’s “Inside Man” was a solid heist picture), his recent work hasn’t come close to the intense energy and original perspective he brought to American cinema with “Do the Right Thing” (1989), “Malcolm X” (1992) and “Crooklyn” (1994). At age 52, I don’t know if he can recapture the edge he once commanded; his next two projects seem more of the same: a sequel to “Inside Man” and a documentary on Michael Jordan.
STARSTRUCK (1982) and PROOF (1992)
From the late 1970s until the early ‘90s, the Australian cinema produced many of the era’s freshest films and finest performances.
Starting with George Miller’s “Mad Max” (1979), Gillian Armstrong’s “My Brilliant Career” (1980) and Bruce Bereford’s “Breaker Morant” (1980) to Jane Campion’s “The Piano” (1993) and Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” (1994), movies from Australia and its neighbor New Zealand were making directors and actors from that part of the world the new darlings of movie critics.
It didn’t last. Hollywood absorbed the best from Down Under and their home-grown cinema declined in importance (Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy being the exception). But for a time there seemed to be no end to fascinating movies from that part of the world.
Among the lesser-known gems from that period are “Starstuck” and “Proof.”
“Starstruck,” a quirky punk musical, written by Stephen MacLean and directed by Gillian Armstrong, features a spunky, spirited performance by 20-year-old Jo Kennedy, who since then has mostly worked in Australian television. She did win a best actress award at the 1985 Berlin Film Festival for her work in the film “Wrong World.”
Her Jackie is determined to be a pop singer, encouraged by her younger cousin Angus (Ross O’Donovan), who fashions himself as a music promoter and songwriter. This easily could have turned into a cliché filled, coming-of-age tale but all the characters---especially Jackie’s crazy, tavern-owning family---are written as if they’re part of a serious drama while the songs actually sound as if they might be written by novices.
Armstrong captures the chaotic energy of punk in the concert scenes and offers a theme ahead of its time: that nearly anyone, with the right amount of publicity, can become a pop star.
The director made her American debut two years later with “Mrs. Soffel,” starring Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson, but has gone back and forth between Australia and the U.S. since. In the last 10 years, she’s made just two features, “Charlotte Gray” (2001), a World War II thriller with Cate Blanchette, and last year’s “Death Defying Acts” about Harry Houdini (starring Guy Pierce).
While “Starstuck” was among the early works of the “Australian New Wave,” “Proof” came out at the end of this period. The feature directing debut of screenwriter Jocelyn Moorhouse, this drama is a deceptively simple character study of an angry, anti-social blind man (Hugo Weaving of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy) who befriends an outgoing dishwasher (a very thin Russell Crowe). At first, Martin just wants his new friend to describe the snapshots he takes, but quickly they bond over a wild night at the drive-in.
Their sincere friendship is complicated by Martin’s jealous, disturbed housekeeper (Genevieve Picot) who is determined to have Martin all to herself and Martin’s constant fear of being taken advantage of. These are three vivid, well-written and acted characters of the type that rarely show up in American movies.
Since that film, Moorhouse has made just two films, both in the U.S. and both forgettable: “How to Make an American Quilt” (1995) and “A Thousand Acres” (1997).
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
February 2009
TOO FAR TO GO (1979, TV)
Since the title of this blog is “Thoughts on Film,” I haven’t spent much space discussing the works of novelists. Yet I feel compelled to weigh in on John Updike, who died January 27 at age 76.
For reasons that are difficult to pinpoint, he’s the writer I’ve most admired and whose works I’ve most enjoyed since I began reading serous fiction in high school. Updike isn’t Joyce or Faulkner or Hemingway, and even among his contemporaries he probably falls in behind Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, yet he created characters who, more often than those other writers, spoke to me about the world I live in. His men (most notably Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom), who often come from or live in small Pennsylvania towns, struggle to find their place in the society, amidst unsettling relations with women and discontent with their chosen profession.
What I admired about Updike, in addition to his acrobatic sentences and seemingly unlimited insight into the human soul, was his old-fashioned, blue-collar approach to his art. This workaholic not only cranked out a novel every year or two for nearly a half of century, but he never stopped penning short stories and book reviews for the New Yorker. I’ve spent my entire adult life just trying to keep up with Updike’s oeuvre---he always stayed a novel or short story collection ahead of me.
Hollywood has not been kind to Updike. The 1970 film of his breakthrough novel “Rabbit, Run,” starring James Caan as Rabbit, is an unwatchable mess missing any of the poetic energy of Updike’s novel. “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984) comes closer to approximating the source material, but it’s far from Updike’s best work; it reads as if it was written with a movie (though probably not the overblown version that was made) in mind. No doubt the next Updike to hit the big screen will be the sequel “The Widows of Eastwick,” published last year.
“Too Far to Go” collects the stories he wrote about Richard and Joan Maple and their crumbling marriage over a 20-year period. Made for television---it was later released theatrically in 1983----it’s a fractured tale that occasionally captures the depth of Updike’s writing and his unmatched ability to burrow into the complex and often irrational ways a marriage works and the ways it falls apart.
Michael Moriarty, as the husband, seems out of his depth in portraying this adulterer who can’t let go of his wife (exceptionally played by Blythe Danner). Moriarty also has trouble maintaining his New England accent and listening to it go in and out becomes a distraction.
The movie really comes together emotionally when the couple finally tells their children they’re separating and the pair faces the inevitable end to their marriage. Updike’s prose, TV veteran Fielder Cook’s direction and the actors all merge beautifully in the final 20 minutes.
I’m hopeful that Updike’s death will inspire producers to take another look at his extensive library. A second attempt to put Rabbit’s story (this time including all four books) on film, or as a cable miniseries, could turn out to be something great. “Memories of the Ford Administration” (about President James Buchanan), “Villages” and “Terrorist,” just to name a few recent novels, all possess plots that could work on film.
As a movie fan, I’d love to see more of this great American writer on the screen, even knowing that it would take a miracle for a director and writer to capture the magic Updike created in his astonishing detailed descriptions of people and their view of the world. As well as anyone, he chronicled the seismic social changes of the last half of the 20th Century----surely that could be mined for a few interesting movies.
Michiko Kakutani, the esteemed book critic of the New York Times, put it best in her appreciation of Updike written the day of his death:
“Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike….was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters……In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave ‘the mundane its beautiful due,’ as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision.”
TWO LOVERS (2009)
It’s unusual for a movie released during January or February to be anything beyond a broad comedy (“Paul Blart: Mall Cop”) or a cheap horror flick (“Friday the 13th”), so it’s a bit of a shock to come upon a thoughtful and superbly acted adult love story.
Not that anyone is going to see this fine James Gray-directed movie. If it wasn’t bad enough that it was dumped into theaters now (also competing with all the Oscar-nominated films), the movie’s star Joaquin Phoenix came off as a mixture of Howard Hughes and Marlon Brando in his bizarre appearance on David Letterman to “promote” the film, which he clearly hadn’t seen. The weirdness of the moment was memorialized when Ben Stiller parodied him during the Academy Awards show.
But that should be beside the point: Phoenix gives a beautifully nuanced and intense performance as Leonard, the troubled, aimless son of Russian Jewish immigrants (played by Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov) living in Brighton Beach, New York. Gray, whose best film, “Little Odessa” (1994), was also set in this neighborhood, had previously directed Phoenix in the underrated “The Yards” (2000) and the less interesting “We Own the Night” (2007). He’s the rare American writer-director who invests more in his characters than in spectacle and seems truly interested in understanding the decisions people make that forever alter their lives. He co-wrote “Two Lovers” with Ric Menello.
Two women come into this depressed man’s life at the same time: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the sensible and safe daughter of the man who’s buying out the family dry cleaning business and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a charming but confused and self-obsessed beauty involved with a rich, married lawyer.
While Sandra is clearly the kind of dependable, mothering woman Leonard needs, he’s entranced by the unstable and unreliable Michelle----who lives in the same apartment building, allowing them to see one another from their windows. But he’s fighting a losing battle as she views him as more of a “brother” she can consult with about her affair.
Gray and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay emphasize the dark, almost antique feeling of Leonard’s parents’ apartment and the suffocating atmosphere this man-child desperately needs to escape. Unlike in most American movie, these characters are clearly products of their environment.
Phoenix’s performance is one of his best: he takes the sullen, brooding side of his Johnny Cash portrayal, while dropping the swagger and confidence from that role. If this really is his final screen role (not that anyone buys that), he has gone out in style.
Paltrow has played this type before (“Running With Scissors,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”) but never with the raw emotional intensity and deep-seated sadness she displays as Michelle. Rossellini, Moshonov and Shaw give beautifully detailed performances in smaller roles as does Elias Koteas as Michelle’s slick lover.
“Two Lovers,” if 2008 is any indicator, should end up as one of this year’s best films, once again proving that the worst evaluators of movies are the executives running the studios. Not only did they think so little of the film that they didn’t even hold it for spring, but they also allowed the cable channel Flix to air it the same week it opened in theaters. For the good of this excellent film, they should have used their influence to keep Phoenix away from talk shows.
MAN ON WIRE (2008)
In 1974, a very determined aerialist and a handful of cohorts pulled off one of the most spectacular stunt in recent history. After sneaking up, with their equipment, to the roof of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, Frenchman Philippe Petit and his team attached a cable between the towers, including support wires, over 1300 feet above the New York sidewalk. At dawn, Petit proceeded to walk back and forth on the wire, performing until police convinced him to give himself up.
Petit’s fifteen minutes of fame is the subject of this fascinating yet irritating Oscar-winning documentary by James Marsh. As compelling as the event and this single-minded, arrogant man are, the filmmaker lost me at points by not letting the tale unfold chronologically. Through interviews, some archival footage and way too many dramatizations, the director jumps from discussions of transferring equipment up the Twin Towers to plans for other, earlier high-wire walks. The interviews are overlapping and repetitive and the recreations of scenes from Petit’s life are just dumb. Someone needs to explain to documentarians (Errol Morris was the guy who popularized it) that recreating a scene with actors is what they do in fiction films and has no business in a documentary. But I guess if the Academy voters weren’t bothered, what do I know.
I would have enjoyed “Man on Wire” much more if it has been told more as a news report and less as a tribute to Petit’s accomplishment. The idea that it was necessary to dramatize Petit having sex with a groupie he picked up soon after his Twin Towers walk really made me wonder what the filmmakers thought this documentary was all about.
GOMORRAH (2008)
While this unrelenting Italian crime film holds nothing back in depicting the out-of-control violence that pervades life in and around Naples, it lacks the basic exposition needed to make sense of it all.
Based on the daring nonfiction book by journalist Roberto Saviano (who now lives under threat of death from the mobs he wrote about), “Gomorrah” puts you smack in the middle of gang wars, drug dealing, corrupt businesses and pointless killings, while it focuses on baby-faced teenagers adapting to the criminal lifestyle. The picture, directed by Matteo Garrone, is most compelling when following Ciro (Ciro Petrone) and Marco (Marco Macor), young friends who idolize Tony Montana from “Scarface”---but more closely resemble Johnny Boy from “Mean Streets”----and believe they can play by their own rules. If the film had been spent more time on Ciro and Marco and how they grew to be so cynical and ruthless, it could have been something special.
But Carrone and Saviano have bigger fish to fry, hoping to show the ways the crime organization (known as the Camorra) controls all aspects of society through a series of interconnected and often confusing episodes of murder and intimidation. A major segment of the story is given to a mobster/businessman operating a toxic disposal business. I never had a grasp on what was going on or why this character, and a young man he brings into the fold, was worth so much screen time.
While superbly acted----Salvatore Cantalupo is especially memorable as a successful high-end dressmaker who foolishly tries to make some money on the side---too many of the character drift in and out of the film before you learn much about them other than that they’re doing very bad things.
I longed for a few establishing scenes in which law enforcement officials or even someone playing the book’s author offer an overview of how the Camorra gained their all-encompassing power and to what extent they use it.
But if all the parts don’t add up to what they should, “Gomorrah” still packs a devastating punch and is a sad critique of an uncontained criminal state.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008)
This strange amalgamation of documentary interviews, dream-like flashbacks and rudimentary animation was among the most critically acclaimed films of 2008 and the favorite for the foreign-film Oscar (though it ultimately lost to the Japanese entry “Departures,” a film that has yet to be released in the U.S.).
The voices on this film remember bloody and bizarre events that occurred during the Israeli-Palestinian war in the early 1980s, as Israeli Ari Folman, the film’s director and narrator (thought we see him as an animated character), tracks down others he served with in the conflict in hopes of jogging his memory about what he saw and did in battle. It all leads up to what happened during the horrific massacre of Palestinian families by Lebanese Christians as their Israeli allies maintained the perimeter of the Beirut refugee camps.
As powerful and compelling as what these men have to say, it’s a film, not a talk show. The visuals consist of what looks like grade-school drawings of people, cut out and placed against equally simplistic backgrounds. In a story less gruesome or serious, this presentation might have worked fine, but, for me, it totally undercut the depiction of the horrors of a war and the mass murder of civilians. It reminded me of “South Park,” where every horrific act is played for laughs and characters are easily put back together. Seeing a paper cutout do terrible acts or being brutally murdered doesn’t have the same impact as seeing an actor re-enact the same event.
I’m not arguing that animation can’t be utilized to present serious subjects, but it didn’t work for me in “Waltz With Bashir,” in part because the visuals are so static and uninteresting. As much as there is to admire about the message and ambitions of this anti-war film, I left the theater regretting that this important story wasn’t told with the emotional impact actors could have brought to it. As a documentary, animated or not, it relies (as I criticized “Man on Wire” for) too much on reenactments. All this mingling----fiction, documentary, animation----is very clever but not very enlightening.
THE BANK JOB (2008)
For pure entertainment, you can’t top a well-plotted bank heist movie. This British robbery tale, a fictionalized story based on a set of bizarre, real-life events from 1971, did little business when it opened in theaters, hampered by its lack of a name cast. I’m guessing the film will find the audience it deserves on DVD, because it turns out to be among the better releases of 2008.
Jason Statham stars as Terry Leather, a tough guy eking out a living in his car repair business, recruited to pull off the robbery by an old flame, Martine Love (Saffron Burrows). He enlists a gang of small-time crooks and Martine lays out the plan: tunnel into a bank’s vault room containing the security boxes and plunder them for money and jewelry.
What the robbers don’t know is that she’s acting in the service of a British intelligent agency, which hopes to recover embarrassing photos of Princess Margaret being used by a drug-dealing, pseudo revolutionary to avoid prosecution. And that’s just the beginning of the political intrigue and double- dealing, which also includes police corruption, a ruthless strip-club owner, a brothel for the rich and famous and competing spy agencies.
Veteran New Zealand filmmaker Roger Donaldson, who became an A-list director in the 1980s after hits “No Way Out” (1987) and “Cocktail” (1988), keeps this complicated plot from becoming muddled and finds just the right balance of story and character. After resurrecting the New Zealand film industry with his 1981 movie “Smash Palace,” Donaldson directed the underrated remake “The Bounty” (1984) with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins and the Sissy Spacek vehicle “Marie” (1985). After his box-office hits, he drifted off course and didn’t make another worthwhile film until 2000’s “Thirteen Days,” a chronicle of President Kennedy’s dealing with the Cuban missile crisis. “The Bank Job” easily ranks among his best films.
What makes “The Bank Job” a step up from the typical crime flick is the way the script, by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, invests in the characters, especially the relationship between Terry, his wife and Martine. Statham, star of the “Transporter” film series, shows he’s more than just an action figure, convincing as both a no-nonsense, determined criminal and a sensitive husband and father. The striking Burrows has made a career in independent films, most memorably as the title character in Mike Figgis’ version of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie.” Here she’s the linchpin of the film, playing both sides of the law and lying to everyone.
Among the supporting cast, be sure not to miss the non-speaking performance by the bank vault guard.
VALKYRIE (2008)
Most movie trailers do exactly what they’re supposed to do: make the film look better than it is. The trailer for “Valkyrie” did the opposite. Seeing clips of Tom Cruise wearing an eye patch and a Nazi uniform convinced me the film was nothing but an ill-conceived star vehicle. In fact, this is a cracker-jack of a war espionage picture and Cruise, in spite of that pretentious eye patch, brings his “Mission: Impossible” intensity and focus to his role of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, a real-life Nazi commander who led a team of military and civilian conspirators plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
It’s 1943 and despite constant bad news from the front, Hitler and his inner circle continue to wage war as if they’re on the verge of victory. The conspirators believe that once the Fuhrer is out of the way, Germany can negotiate a peace with the Allies and end the war. Yet a failed attempt has left the group splintered and without a plan. That’s when Stauffenberg, well known for his criticisms of military commanders, takes over, recruited after losing his eye and hand in battle.
Entrusted with a position that allows him access to Hitler, Stauffenberg constructs an intricate but plausible plot to end the Third Reich.
Bryan Singer (“The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men”) directs the film with military precision, turning dusty history into an exciting, tense thriller guided by soldiers who know failure will mean their deaths. One could question the decision to let the actors speak English (sans German accent) as if it’s German, but once established it works.
Among the fine collection of British actors playing the conspirators are Kenneth Branagh (who oddly disappears halfway through the film), Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp and Eddie Izzard. Cruise fits right in with this group, providing the movie star charisma that makes you believe, despite the historical facts, that this plot may actually succeed.
WAR, INC. (2008)
Satire is a tricky business and when it fails, it’s not pretty. This John Cusack guided movie is about as subtle as a mortar attack, and about as entertaining.
Cusack (who also co-wrote and produced the film) stars as a futuristic (I think) hit man, sent by the former vice president of the United States (Dan Aykroyd) to kill an Arab sheik. Cusack poses as the organizer of a trade show in the Iraqi-like country of Turaqistan, now essentially run by Tamerlane, a Blackwater-like company that the U.S. has outsourced the war to. OK, I get it. After the set-up, it’s an endurance test as Cusack struggles with his conscious as he placates a sexed-up pop diva (Hilary Duff) and romances a cynical (shocking!) television reporter (Marisa Tomei) who just wants to get out of the green zone and see the “real” war.
“War, Inc.,” directed by Joshua Seftel, has some amusing takes on imbedded reporters, the commercialization of occupation and the utter lack of accountability “war company” employees face. But overall, the film just piles it on too thick (including a homage to “Dr. Strangelove,” its clear inspiration), unloading two dozen clips of bullets when a couple of well-placed shots would have been more effective.
Since the title of this blog is “Thoughts on Film,” I haven’t spent much space discussing the works of novelists. Yet I feel compelled to weigh in on John Updike, who died January 27 at age 76.
For reasons that are difficult to pinpoint, he’s the writer I’ve most admired and whose works I’ve most enjoyed since I began reading serous fiction in high school. Updike isn’t Joyce or Faulkner or Hemingway, and even among his contemporaries he probably falls in behind Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, yet he created characters who, more often than those other writers, spoke to me about the world I live in. His men (most notably Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom), who often come from or live in small Pennsylvania towns, struggle to find their place in the society, amidst unsettling relations with women and discontent with their chosen profession.
What I admired about Updike, in addition to his acrobatic sentences and seemingly unlimited insight into the human soul, was his old-fashioned, blue-collar approach to his art. This workaholic not only cranked out a novel every year or two for nearly a half of century, but he never stopped penning short stories and book reviews for the New Yorker. I’ve spent my entire adult life just trying to keep up with Updike’s oeuvre---he always stayed a novel or short story collection ahead of me.
Hollywood has not been kind to Updike. The 1970 film of his breakthrough novel “Rabbit, Run,” starring James Caan as Rabbit, is an unwatchable mess missing any of the poetic energy of Updike’s novel. “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984) comes closer to approximating the source material, but it’s far from Updike’s best work; it reads as if it was written with a movie (though probably not the overblown version that was made) in mind. No doubt the next Updike to hit the big screen will be the sequel “The Widows of Eastwick,” published last year.
“Too Far to Go” collects the stories he wrote about Richard and Joan Maple and their crumbling marriage over a 20-year period. Made for television---it was later released theatrically in 1983----it’s a fractured tale that occasionally captures the depth of Updike’s writing and his unmatched ability to burrow into the complex and often irrational ways a marriage works and the ways it falls apart.
Michael Moriarty, as the husband, seems out of his depth in portraying this adulterer who can’t let go of his wife (exceptionally played by Blythe Danner). Moriarty also has trouble maintaining his New England accent and listening to it go in and out becomes a distraction.
The movie really comes together emotionally when the couple finally tells their children they’re separating and the pair faces the inevitable end to their marriage. Updike’s prose, TV veteran Fielder Cook’s direction and the actors all merge beautifully in the final 20 minutes.
I’m hopeful that Updike’s death will inspire producers to take another look at his extensive library. A second attempt to put Rabbit’s story (this time including all four books) on film, or as a cable miniseries, could turn out to be something great. “Memories of the Ford Administration” (about President James Buchanan), “Villages” and “Terrorist,” just to name a few recent novels, all possess plots that could work on film.
As a movie fan, I’d love to see more of this great American writer on the screen, even knowing that it would take a miracle for a director and writer to capture the magic Updike created in his astonishing detailed descriptions of people and their view of the world. As well as anyone, he chronicled the seismic social changes of the last half of the 20th Century----surely that could be mined for a few interesting movies.
Michiko Kakutani, the esteemed book critic of the New York Times, put it best in her appreciation of Updike written the day of his death:
“Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike….was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters……In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave ‘the mundane its beautiful due,’ as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision.”
TWO LOVERS (2009)
It’s unusual for a movie released during January or February to be anything beyond a broad comedy (“Paul Blart: Mall Cop”) or a cheap horror flick (“Friday the 13th”), so it’s a bit of a shock to come upon a thoughtful and superbly acted adult love story.
Not that anyone is going to see this fine James Gray-directed movie. If it wasn’t bad enough that it was dumped into theaters now (also competing with all the Oscar-nominated films), the movie’s star Joaquin Phoenix came off as a mixture of Howard Hughes and Marlon Brando in his bizarre appearance on David Letterman to “promote” the film, which he clearly hadn’t seen. The weirdness of the moment was memorialized when Ben Stiller parodied him during the Academy Awards show.
But that should be beside the point: Phoenix gives a beautifully nuanced and intense performance as Leonard, the troubled, aimless son of Russian Jewish immigrants (played by Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov) living in Brighton Beach, New York. Gray, whose best film, “Little Odessa” (1994), was also set in this neighborhood, had previously directed Phoenix in the underrated “The Yards” (2000) and the less interesting “We Own the Night” (2007). He’s the rare American writer-director who invests more in his characters than in spectacle and seems truly interested in understanding the decisions people make that forever alter their lives. He co-wrote “Two Lovers” with Ric Menello.
Two women come into this depressed man’s life at the same time: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the sensible and safe daughter of the man who’s buying out the family dry cleaning business and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a charming but confused and self-obsessed beauty involved with a rich, married lawyer.
While Sandra is clearly the kind of dependable, mothering woman Leonard needs, he’s entranced by the unstable and unreliable Michelle----who lives in the same apartment building, allowing them to see one another from their windows. But he’s fighting a losing battle as she views him as more of a “brother” she can consult with about her affair.
Gray and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay emphasize the dark, almost antique feeling of Leonard’s parents’ apartment and the suffocating atmosphere this man-child desperately needs to escape. Unlike in most American movie, these characters are clearly products of their environment.
Phoenix’s performance is one of his best: he takes the sullen, brooding side of his Johnny Cash portrayal, while dropping the swagger and confidence from that role. If this really is his final screen role (not that anyone buys that), he has gone out in style.
Paltrow has played this type before (“Running With Scissors,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”) but never with the raw emotional intensity and deep-seated sadness she displays as Michelle. Rossellini, Moshonov and Shaw give beautifully detailed performances in smaller roles as does Elias Koteas as Michelle’s slick lover.
“Two Lovers,” if 2008 is any indicator, should end up as one of this year’s best films, once again proving that the worst evaluators of movies are the executives running the studios. Not only did they think so little of the film that they didn’t even hold it for spring, but they also allowed the cable channel Flix to air it the same week it opened in theaters. For the good of this excellent film, they should have used their influence to keep Phoenix away from talk shows.
MAN ON WIRE (2008)
In 1974, a very determined aerialist and a handful of cohorts pulled off one of the most spectacular stunt in recent history. After sneaking up, with their equipment, to the roof of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, Frenchman Philippe Petit and his team attached a cable between the towers, including support wires, over 1300 feet above the New York sidewalk. At dawn, Petit proceeded to walk back and forth on the wire, performing until police convinced him to give himself up.
Petit’s fifteen minutes of fame is the subject of this fascinating yet irritating Oscar-winning documentary by James Marsh. As compelling as the event and this single-minded, arrogant man are, the filmmaker lost me at points by not letting the tale unfold chronologically. Through interviews, some archival footage and way too many dramatizations, the director jumps from discussions of transferring equipment up the Twin Towers to plans for other, earlier high-wire walks. The interviews are overlapping and repetitive and the recreations of scenes from Petit’s life are just dumb. Someone needs to explain to documentarians (Errol Morris was the guy who popularized it) that recreating a scene with actors is what they do in fiction films and has no business in a documentary. But I guess if the Academy voters weren’t bothered, what do I know.
I would have enjoyed “Man on Wire” much more if it has been told more as a news report and less as a tribute to Petit’s accomplishment. The idea that it was necessary to dramatize Petit having sex with a groupie he picked up soon after his Twin Towers walk really made me wonder what the filmmakers thought this documentary was all about.
GOMORRAH (2008)
While this unrelenting Italian crime film holds nothing back in depicting the out-of-control violence that pervades life in and around Naples, it lacks the basic exposition needed to make sense of it all.
Based on the daring nonfiction book by journalist Roberto Saviano (who now lives under threat of death from the mobs he wrote about), “Gomorrah” puts you smack in the middle of gang wars, drug dealing, corrupt businesses and pointless killings, while it focuses on baby-faced teenagers adapting to the criminal lifestyle. The picture, directed by Matteo Garrone, is most compelling when following Ciro (Ciro Petrone) and Marco (Marco Macor), young friends who idolize Tony Montana from “Scarface”---but more closely resemble Johnny Boy from “Mean Streets”----and believe they can play by their own rules. If the film had been spent more time on Ciro and Marco and how they grew to be so cynical and ruthless, it could have been something special.
But Carrone and Saviano have bigger fish to fry, hoping to show the ways the crime organization (known as the Camorra) controls all aspects of society through a series of interconnected and often confusing episodes of murder and intimidation. A major segment of the story is given to a mobster/businessman operating a toxic disposal business. I never had a grasp on what was going on or why this character, and a young man he brings into the fold, was worth so much screen time.
While superbly acted----Salvatore Cantalupo is especially memorable as a successful high-end dressmaker who foolishly tries to make some money on the side---too many of the character drift in and out of the film before you learn much about them other than that they’re doing very bad things.
I longed for a few establishing scenes in which law enforcement officials or even someone playing the book’s author offer an overview of how the Camorra gained their all-encompassing power and to what extent they use it.
But if all the parts don’t add up to what they should, “Gomorrah” still packs a devastating punch and is a sad critique of an uncontained criminal state.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008)
This strange amalgamation of documentary interviews, dream-like flashbacks and rudimentary animation was among the most critically acclaimed films of 2008 and the favorite for the foreign-film Oscar (though it ultimately lost to the Japanese entry “Departures,” a film that has yet to be released in the U.S.).
The voices on this film remember bloody and bizarre events that occurred during the Israeli-Palestinian war in the early 1980s, as Israeli Ari Folman, the film’s director and narrator (thought we see him as an animated character), tracks down others he served with in the conflict in hopes of jogging his memory about what he saw and did in battle. It all leads up to what happened during the horrific massacre of Palestinian families by Lebanese Christians as their Israeli allies maintained the perimeter of the Beirut refugee camps.
As powerful and compelling as what these men have to say, it’s a film, not a talk show. The visuals consist of what looks like grade-school drawings of people, cut out and placed against equally simplistic backgrounds. In a story less gruesome or serious, this presentation might have worked fine, but, for me, it totally undercut the depiction of the horrors of a war and the mass murder of civilians. It reminded me of “South Park,” where every horrific act is played for laughs and characters are easily put back together. Seeing a paper cutout do terrible acts or being brutally murdered doesn’t have the same impact as seeing an actor re-enact the same event.
I’m not arguing that animation can’t be utilized to present serious subjects, but it didn’t work for me in “Waltz With Bashir,” in part because the visuals are so static and uninteresting. As much as there is to admire about the message and ambitions of this anti-war film, I left the theater regretting that this important story wasn’t told with the emotional impact actors could have brought to it. As a documentary, animated or not, it relies (as I criticized “Man on Wire” for) too much on reenactments. All this mingling----fiction, documentary, animation----is very clever but not very enlightening.
THE BANK JOB (2008)
For pure entertainment, you can’t top a well-plotted bank heist movie. This British robbery tale, a fictionalized story based on a set of bizarre, real-life events from 1971, did little business when it opened in theaters, hampered by its lack of a name cast. I’m guessing the film will find the audience it deserves on DVD, because it turns out to be among the better releases of 2008.
Jason Statham stars as Terry Leather, a tough guy eking out a living in his car repair business, recruited to pull off the robbery by an old flame, Martine Love (Saffron Burrows). He enlists a gang of small-time crooks and Martine lays out the plan: tunnel into a bank’s vault room containing the security boxes and plunder them for money and jewelry.
What the robbers don’t know is that she’s acting in the service of a British intelligent agency, which hopes to recover embarrassing photos of Princess Margaret being used by a drug-dealing, pseudo revolutionary to avoid prosecution. And that’s just the beginning of the political intrigue and double- dealing, which also includes police corruption, a ruthless strip-club owner, a brothel for the rich and famous and competing spy agencies.
Veteran New Zealand filmmaker Roger Donaldson, who became an A-list director in the 1980s after hits “No Way Out” (1987) and “Cocktail” (1988), keeps this complicated plot from becoming muddled and finds just the right balance of story and character. After resurrecting the New Zealand film industry with his 1981 movie “Smash Palace,” Donaldson directed the underrated remake “The Bounty” (1984) with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins and the Sissy Spacek vehicle “Marie” (1985). After his box-office hits, he drifted off course and didn’t make another worthwhile film until 2000’s “Thirteen Days,” a chronicle of President Kennedy’s dealing with the Cuban missile crisis. “The Bank Job” easily ranks among his best films.
What makes “The Bank Job” a step up from the typical crime flick is the way the script, by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, invests in the characters, especially the relationship between Terry, his wife and Martine. Statham, star of the “Transporter” film series, shows he’s more than just an action figure, convincing as both a no-nonsense, determined criminal and a sensitive husband and father. The striking Burrows has made a career in independent films, most memorably as the title character in Mike Figgis’ version of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie.” Here she’s the linchpin of the film, playing both sides of the law and lying to everyone.
Among the supporting cast, be sure not to miss the non-speaking performance by the bank vault guard.
VALKYRIE (2008)
Most movie trailers do exactly what they’re supposed to do: make the film look better than it is. The trailer for “Valkyrie” did the opposite. Seeing clips of Tom Cruise wearing an eye patch and a Nazi uniform convinced me the film was nothing but an ill-conceived star vehicle. In fact, this is a cracker-jack of a war espionage picture and Cruise, in spite of that pretentious eye patch, brings his “Mission: Impossible” intensity and focus to his role of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, a real-life Nazi commander who led a team of military and civilian conspirators plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
It’s 1943 and despite constant bad news from the front, Hitler and his inner circle continue to wage war as if they’re on the verge of victory. The conspirators believe that once the Fuhrer is out of the way, Germany can negotiate a peace with the Allies and end the war. Yet a failed attempt has left the group splintered and without a plan. That’s when Stauffenberg, well known for his criticisms of military commanders, takes over, recruited after losing his eye and hand in battle.
Entrusted with a position that allows him access to Hitler, Stauffenberg constructs an intricate but plausible plot to end the Third Reich.
Bryan Singer (“The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men”) directs the film with military precision, turning dusty history into an exciting, tense thriller guided by soldiers who know failure will mean their deaths. One could question the decision to let the actors speak English (sans German accent) as if it’s German, but once established it works.
Among the fine collection of British actors playing the conspirators are Kenneth Branagh (who oddly disappears halfway through the film), Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp and Eddie Izzard. Cruise fits right in with this group, providing the movie star charisma that makes you believe, despite the historical facts, that this plot may actually succeed.
WAR, INC. (2008)
Satire is a tricky business and when it fails, it’s not pretty. This John Cusack guided movie is about as subtle as a mortar attack, and about as entertaining.
Cusack (who also co-wrote and produced the film) stars as a futuristic (I think) hit man, sent by the former vice president of the United States (Dan Aykroyd) to kill an Arab sheik. Cusack poses as the organizer of a trade show in the Iraqi-like country of Turaqistan, now essentially run by Tamerlane, a Blackwater-like company that the U.S. has outsourced the war to. OK, I get it. After the set-up, it’s an endurance test as Cusack struggles with his conscious as he placates a sexed-up pop diva (Hilary Duff) and romances a cynical (shocking!) television reporter (Marisa Tomei) who just wants to get out of the green zone and see the “real” war.
“War, Inc.,” directed by Joshua Seftel, has some amusing takes on imbedded reporters, the commercialization of occupation and the utter lack of accountability “war company” employees face. But overall, the film just piles it on too thick (including a homage to “Dr. Strangelove,” its clear inspiration), unloading two dozen clips of bullets when a couple of well-placed shots would have been more effective.
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