Rants.

That whimsy is difficult to achieve in a movie is obvious, and also a massive, insulting understatement. It’s next to God damn impossible, particularly in our MySpace, four cell phone society. Filmmakers rarely even bother striving for whimsy, making any movie is a enough of an opportunity to show your nuts, much less a film with fairies, goblins, ghosts, etc., much much less a film that involves said creatures chasing after a personified star for varied reasons that aren’t worth recounting. That’s what Stardust is though (no fairies, or goblins I’m afraid, but lots of ghosts and witches) and it works. It’s not a classic, but the film flies, primarily because the love story between Tristan (Charlie Cox) and the star in question (Claire Danes) is believable and surprisingly poignant. Some had a hard time believing that director Matthew Vaughn was following his brutal gangster picture, Layer Cake with this, but that works in an unexpected way. Vaughn doesn’t try too hard, his experience with Cake and the overrated Guy Ritchie pictures has left him hesitant to peddle the sentimentality, and so he doesn’t. And, as a result, you actually believe the world of Stardust.

I also believed the world of Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Tykwer conjures a fascinating eighteenth century Paris of almost laughable, Dickensian rot, and the story itself starts strongly, following a young man (Ben Whishaw, more recently of I’m Not There) and his animalistic sense of smell as he works his way out of a brutal tannery and into the shop of a once revered perfumer (Dustin Hoffman). Whishaw is our lead, but he and Tykwer are so committed to the story’s idea of him as a blunt cipher that the supporting actors are forced to do the heavy lifting. That’s fine while Hoffman is the supporter, but the film shifts halfway through, and takes Whishaw to a small town of supposedly splendid scents that, in his desperation to find a perfume that satisfies his advanced abilities, turns him into some sort of hybrid of Jack the Ripper and Dr. Frankenstein. The supporting actor of this half is Alan Rickman, usually more than able to elevate his material, but here he’s left without too much to do. It’s all Whishaw, Whishaw, Whishaw, and soon you find that you don’t much give a hoot whether he’s caught, finds his perfume, or jumps of a picturesque cliff. In terms of raw, surface craft, this is one of Tykwer’s most impressive pictures, but it’s all in the service of a boring shaggy dog story, with an ending that hints at satire that seems to be just out of reach.

The satire of Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War is front and center. The film is an entry in a genre I rarely care for, the Not that Significant, Self-Absorbed Deviate Learns the Value of Life and Improves It in Some Way and That’s Why We’re Making this Movie genre (I swear, it appears in Wikepedia just like that) but War has a boozy, free floating charm that it never entirely compromises. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script and he’s masterful when he reins in the overwriting and the outrage and simply tells a story (see the underrated The American President or the even more underrated television show Sports Night). Sorkin is in control of his faculties here, perhaps too much control; the film should be even boozier, druggier, angrier and more aggressive. There should be more scenes like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s first, where he tells a superior to fuck off and breaks their window with a wrench. There should be more Philip Seymour Hoffman period. Can we approve some sort of grant that allows him to triple his already prodigious output? Hoffman is to War, what Kathy Bates was to Nichols’ Primary Colors, he’s the showstopper, the scene stealer, the charismatic, unattractive, blunt misfit in a group of stars who lends the picture an element of danger. Hoffman compensates for Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts’ just fine but overly self-congratulatory performances. The film also has a happy ending that’s refreshingly not that happy, and it seems to me to be one of the more convincing pictures about the secret handshake operations of global governing.

Stardust: ★★★

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer: ★★

Charlie Wilson’s War: ★★★

Posted on January 13th, 2008 in 2007, 2006, Rants |

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