Just read on Hollywood Elsewhere that Jules Dassin, the director of the incomparable Rififi has passed away today at the age of 96. This clearly isn’t a tragedy. Dassin lived many years and managed during some of those years to make films that many will always cherish. You should see them if you haven’t (and I’ve missed a number of them) but be sure to start with Rififi, which is every bit as good as you’ve heard. Many call it the best heist movie ever made, but that’s being too specific, it’s one of the best movies, period. Also be sure to check his Brute Force and Night and the City, starring the also recently deceased Richard Widmark.
The Bank Job (2008)
The Bank Job more or less does the job; particularly during the first half, which plays like a smuttier, more politically charged Rififi. The film has an appealing, cynical texture of just another thing for the dollar erotic manipulation. For the opening fifty minutes or so, one can be forgiven for mistakenly feeling that director Roger Donaldson and screenwriters Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement have cooked up something as entertaining as Donaldson’s best film, No Way Out.
The film, possibly by necessity, peters out in the middle though, splintering and becoming more and more convoluted at a time when the story should be landing its vicious punch lines, ultimately lacking the fatalistic bloody charge of the great heist pictures. Stir that with an obvious lack of originality and you’ve got a firm, no real problem “not bad” picture, though it tells you something about its impact that I’m struggling now, just a few days after seeing it, to remember how the damn thing ends.
The plot’s bouncing back and forth from one wronged party to another structure (like a less annoying Guy Ritchie movie) may tempt you to spend the remaining running time pondering why the film’s stars, Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows, haven’t made a larger impact on the Hollywood movie. They both have the inarguable stuff, lending The Bank Job a juice that it doesn’t have the common sense to really run with. Statham has been appearing in disreputable little genre pictures for some time, and it tells you something about his appeal that I’ve seen most all of them. Statham has that impossible to fake no bullshit I was probably a bouncer before getting into acting as a lark authority of a true old school star bad ass, imbuing even the dumbest of situations and dialogue with a wonderful grit and resignation. I wouldn’t suggest watching the dreadful London, even for him, but Statham’s presence occasionally allows you to forget that picture’s banality and unpleasantness.
I’m sorry to admit that I did largely forget about Burrows since catching her in Deep Blue Sea (I missed her Figgis pictures), though I remember her resurfacing last year in Reign Over Me and lending a thankless male masturbatory fantasy a palpable vulnerable danger, we feel as if director Mike Binder is cutting away from a decent erotic thriller in favor of yet another one of Adam Sandler’s attempts to prove that he can play the castrated frat boy just as well as the psychotic one. That movie is awful; one of the more irritating I caught last year, but Burrows’ impression is lasting. And, if I may be allowed one male indulgence, she is incredibly, nearly supernaturally, beautiful. One would rob a bank, a yacht, perhaps even the White House, to curry favor with this woman.
It would also be unfortunate to forget David Suchet’s performance as a porn king, one of the more dangerous people the titular heist pisses off, though it’s a mark of the film’s disappointing lack of focus that the extent of his rampage is unclear. One may accuse me of being intolerant of ambiguity, but occasionally cluttered filmmaking has to be called cluttered filmmaking. The Bank Job is a decent night at the movies, but that’s kinda the problem, decent should be the last word to occur to one when describing a heist film.
★★★
Posted on March 31st, 2008 in Reviews, Crime, 2008 | 8 Comments
Thieves Like Us (1974)
Last Tuesday a new bells and wells anniversary edition of Bonnie and Clyde was released, and while I bought it with little thought, I’m afraid I haven’t gotten the opportunity to watch it yet. I probably wouldn’t have tackled it anyway, chances are if you’re interested enough in movies to read my humble blog, then you know Arthur Penn’s justifiably legendary masterpiece. Perhaps you also know Robert Altman’s similarly themed picture, Thieves Like Us, too, but the odds of you not are at least a bit greater.
This week was the first time I had seen Thieves Like Us and, having seen most of Altman’s films, you’d think I’d cease to be surprised by the very particular mojo that that American master was able to work in any given project. Altman’s intuitiveness, his humanity, and his versatility are all beyond reproach; the man excelled in virtually every genre, with the possible exception of the horror film, though a case can be made for the underrated The Gingerbread Man as almost belonging to that genre. Gingerbread Man is certainly the only Grisham movie with any real tang, with Francis Coppola’s appealing, leisurely The Rainmaker coming in second.
But I digress. Thieves Like Us is, in broad terms, Altman’s outlaw thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Edward Anderson, which also inspired the Nicholas Ray picture They Live By Night, which I have not yet seen. The film’s set-up is traditional to the genre: it’s Mississippi in the 1930s, and three criminals Chicamaw (John Schuck), T-Dub (Bert Remsen) and Bowie (Keith Carradine) escape prison and go on the lam, robbing banks and getting famous in the process. As with much of Altman’s work, the scenario is only a framework, and appears to be of little actual interest to the director. Thieves Like Us is a day dream of tangible, dialed down, lived in little nuggets, a story of the life the idealized criminal lives in between the idealized portions.
As with most outlaw pictures, Thieves Like Us revels in a certain conflict of sympathy. We’re lured into rooting for Chicamaw and Co., despite the fact that Chicamaw is a remorseless killer, and that the other two have no real problem going along with it so long as it continues to pad their pockets. Many of these films have a more innocent criminal, perhaps the male embodiment of the hooker with the heart of gold cliché, and in this film that responsibility falls to Carradine.
Keith Carradine is an unusual presence of largely 1970s American films that I’m sad to see gone, he’s a rare specimen: a man of star charisma and fascination blessed with a character actor’s lack of baggage. As memorable as Carradine has been in many pictures, many of them by Altman, I find it nearly impossible to associate those parts with whichever part I’m watching him in at the moment. It’s insane and impressive to think that this is the same man who would play a callow, self-absorbed heartbreaker in Altman’s Nashville the following year, or that this is the same man who appears in the most terrifying scene of Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller a few years before, or that this is the man who would duel Harvey Keitel a few years after all of these.
Carradine has an eerie malleable child-like sensuality: it can be creepy and manipulative one moment, authentically naive the next; and that serves his Bowie well. Bowie is one of the more convincing criminal naïfs I’ve seen in a crime picture: he feels less like a device to divide our sympathy and more like the kind of authentic contradiction that can confuse and break a man, and that contradiction powers the poetic final few images of Thieves Like Us.
The entire picture is poetic though, this is one of the most sensual pictures Altman has ever made, and that is saying something. Thieves Like Us captures that hazy daydream of Southern summer that children who grew up in that part of America probably find themselves fantasizing about from time to time. The film, as I mentioned earlier, is about fantasy, idealization, but it also finds the day to day surreality that many viewers will be able to recognize as being in sync with their own lives. This consistent ability to merge the stylized with the day to day might be the key to Altman’s genius, and the very thing I spent many, many paragraphs laboring over in my Short Cuts review last week.
Because the plot doesn’t matter, it’s the little episodes of loneliness, love, and connection that people will hold from Thieves Like Us, the connective tissue fading into distant memory. Bowie’s lonely night under the bridge, using a dog as a blanket, will linger, just as how quickly he pretends to disregard that dog when it wanders away will linger. The men drawing straws to decide the getaway driver when they’ve already decided the getaway driver will linger. T-Dub’s vaguely incestuous, strangely innocent love for the sister of his brother’s wife will linger. The drunken pretend heist with children as extras will linger.
And Shelly Duvall will linger, this is perhaps, next to The Shining and Popeye, her strongest work, and most certainly her fullest collaboration with Altman. Her elusive thin vulnerable flaky quality compliments Carradine wonderfully, and when they exchange that Altmanish shorthand movie dialogue they appear to be sharing our deepest movie dreams of instant understanding and attraction. When they kiss and make love for the first time as a radio broadcast of Romeo and Juliet plays in the background (the radio is a constant wry comment of the overstatement of most grand on the run movies) you feel, in a way that romantic films rarely get across, the odd perfection of their union. Carradine and Duvall lend the picture its broken heart, which in turn imbues that painterly Altman atmosphere with meaning.
The film doesn’t have the raw genre force of a Bonnie and Clyde (though Chicamaw has his moments) nor is it meant to. This is the picture for people who watched Bonnie and Clyde, or Gun Crazy, and wanted more of the scenes between the lovers in the motels, wondering what they wonder. This is a picture for curious people who want just a little bit more from a familiar genre. Thieves Like Us is, in short, a picture for the Robert Altman fan.
★★★★
Posted on March 29th, 2008 in Reviews, Crime, 1974 | 4 Comments
Confessions of a Superhero (2007)
My only exposure to Confessions of a Superhero prior to watching it were a few glimpses of a few stills that showed a very tortured looking individual laying on a couch that may have been in a shrink’s office. Perhaps I should note that he was laying on a couch in a shrink’s office dressed as Superman, laying there, sprawled out, as if his costume were the most natural thing in the world, the only topic in fact, that wasn’t under consideration as he unburdened himself to an imaginary counselor. From this image I assumed Confessions of a Superhero to be a lark, probably mildly condescending, at best a not as good King of Kong.
I’m happy to admit that I’m mistaken; the inner torture that that image implies is respected and taken at face value. Confessions of a Superhero takes a subject that invites mockery and instead examines it with an empathy that ultimately becomes quite poignant. The film concerns superheroes for hire, people who populate the landmarks of Hollywood Blvd. dressed as iconic stars and movie characters, taking pictures for tips that are to carry them until they are, against considerable odds, “discovered” by a filmmaker. That they nurture this hope dressed as the most famous of the famous must be extra bittersweet, closer than ever to the life they are meant to be denied.
The film concerns four of these would be celebrities: The Hulk (Joseph McQueen) who took a bus to L.A. and immediately found himself camping in the mountains to evade the Rodney King riots; Superman (Christopher Dennis), who claims he’s the son of actress Sandy Dennis despite her family’s denial; Wonder Woman (Jennifer Gerht) perhaps the most clichéd of the bunch, a prom Queen from a small town in Tennessee with silver screen dreams; and, perhaps most interesting, Batman (Maxwell Allen), a troubled man with a mild George Clooney resemblance who may or may not have a criminal past more fitting a noir than a superhero movie.
We’re immediately struck, particularly with Batman and Superman, who appear to have a friendship, by how closely these people resemble their alter egos. Dennis is the most obsessive and, oddly, the most functional of the bunch, seemingly inheriting his character’s ceaseless optimism. He has a small apartment that serves as little more than a shrine to the Man of Steel, especially Christopher Reeve’s incarnation, who he does undoubtedly resemble. Though Margot Kidder isn’t lying when she says that it wouldn’t hurt some of these Supermen to go to the gym a few times a week, Dennis looks like Superman from the neck up and a Superman pencil from the neck down. Dennis has a longtime girlfriend who’s studying to be psychologist, and she’s the first to acknowledge the irony of their coupling.
Allen does indeed look a bit like George Clooney, or at least the kind of rough and tumble Clooney that could appear in a Frank Stallone film. Allen has a charisma, admittedly driven by possible insanity, that exudes a certain fascination, confessing to past murders as if they were unpaid parking tickets. Like Batman, Allen has anger issues, and doesn’t handle fans who forget to tip for his services very well. People like Batman are a threat to this street profession, as well as eventual ironic savior.
Wonder Woman is nursing a broken heart, having married someone she met a few weeks prior who shockingly turns out not to know her very well. Like many people who marry for thrill or novelty, the man appears to find Wonder Woman a lot more exciting on the street than in his home, and a certain bitterness and remoteness sets in. Wonder Woman suffers at home and through auditions, on the constant search for that safe feeling of understanding that eluded her in Tennessee and continues to elude her in L.A.
As moving as all of these people are, I found the Hulk’s impression to be the most lasting. McQueen describes the riots, his past homelessness and his promising gig in a Justin Lin film with an equal careful optimism. McQueen appears to be both the least and most guarded of the bunch: his huge angry costume seemingly mocking his open, vulnerable face.
I wonder how much the director, Mathew Ogens, shaped the material that he spent two years shooting here. All of the people, after hardship, don’t so much face a happy ending as a promising one, or at least promising enough to live to dress up another day. I hope the optimistic tides are legitimate and have lasted. It’s a mark of Ogens work that one leaves Confessions of a Superhero wondering such things. As absurd as these super-people can appear to be, we ultimately admire their courage.
★★★
Posted on March 27th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Documentary | 10 Comments
Southland Tales (2007)
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is largely every bit as tedious as you’ve probably heard. The film is so self-absorbed, so convoluted, so indulgent, so insecure yet self-congratulatory in the same measure, so stubbornly unwavering in its determination to name check seemingly every writer that Kelly has ever read, that you just want to wash your hands of the damn thing. The dialogue is arch and self-aware; the intentional and unintentional awfulness impossible to discern. Yet, fleeting passages of Southland Tales have a haunting power, and there’s an originality to Kelly’s ambition. Kelly has crafted a bloated future shock thriller where everyone essentially battles for control of the internet as the world crumbles around them.
There’s a certain skewed brilliance to the notion, and the film’s infuriating delivery of that notion is occasionally on the money. The vague story of Southland Tales has been shattered and filtered through a seemingly endless current of distraction: internet, music videos, talk shows, drugs, sci-fi, bad cop shows, etc. Seemingly every actor that appears in the film is a wrestler, or TV show or Saturday Night Live veteran (I think at this point SNL and regular TV can safely count as separate institutions) and that’s not accidental, everything about life has been reduced to the trivial, the convoluted, and the overwrought in Southland Tales; society is suffocating under the weight of the countless meaningless methods of supposedly delivering truth, meaning or stimulation. At its best Southland Tales captures the fuck it despair of the new generation, and for that alone, shouldn’t be ignored. The film may be, in its own surly, contrary way, an Iraq film we could actually use.
Admittedly, it would be a teenager’s Iraq protest film, a self-involved, self-glorifying rebel yell that really serves no purpose other than to make a little noise. But what noise Kelly makes when his ideas sporadically take hold! I love the Miranda Richardson character, the wife (I think, whenever I describe plot in this post, always insert the qualifier, I think) of a political wannabe who seems to be capable of watching the majority of the movie from a fortified media room somewhere in Los Angeles, though it’s a sign of Kelly’s misplaced confidence that she doesn’t occasionally change the channel. I love the little nuggets of broad, manic cynicism that occupy the fringes of the film; such as the Hustler sponsorship of the military or an advertisement that boasts, to my knowledge, the first doggy style coupling between two oversized SUVs to be featured in all of American film.
I also admire the brazen pointlessness of the film’s narrative. At least two principle characters have amnesia, and both of them (remember, I think) have doubles who somehow crossed the space time continuum to blah, blah, blah, a similar conceit was actually handled with more finesse in the seventy minute Futurama movie but we’ll forgive it that. I love the Rock and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s screenplay (which, far as I can tell, is the screenplay to Southland Tales itself, retitled The Power) and the way the Rock goes about trying to describe his convoluted scenario that he’s clearly rehearsed, right down to how many decimal points go into a figure that really has nothing to do with the story. Sarah Michelle Gellar even repeats that figure under her breath along with him, possibly aroused at the thought of co-writing a sci-fi action film with the Rock.
But, as women have a habit of doing in paranoid men’s sci-fi fantasies; Gellar’s actually trying to set up the poor Rock, who’s essentially playing himself. The Rock is married to a relative of an important politician that several groups hope to discredit, all so they can resume control USIDENT, which basically controls the internet. That one needs a visa to drive across a state line seems to be of concern to no one. That gas has basically run out, replaced by something that punches holes in that space-time thingy, also seems to be the cause of little worry. News of the currently raging third World War is little more than filler for the Spike Channel. Perhaps everyone is too busy watching Gellar’s TV show, which addresses such pressing issues of the moment as crime, poverty and teen horniness.
It’s as blunt and alienating as it sounds, Kelly has footage of Kiss Me Deadly playing in the back of a scene, but it’s really Repo Man, another sci-fi descendent of that classic noir, that he should be name checking. Then again, Southland Tales really has all of the name checking that it, or I, can stand. Kelly, perhaps realizing to a certain extent how people were going to take this, has loaded the film with an impenetrable, indefensible tangent of double speak that appears to be almost entirely lifted from the prose of past writers he admires, especially Philip K. Dick, all serving no other apparent purpose than to prove that Kelly, whether you hate the movie or not, is at least well read.
Southland Tales is probably the disaster that the director of Donnie Darko needed to make. I was around Darko’s target age when that film was released, and was initially quite taken with Kelly’s mix of Twilight Zone and self-pity; but time and getting older have not been kind to that debut picture. I don’t dislike Donnie Darko, but it’s a clunky, unconvincing movie that I never really feel the need to revisit. Southland Tales is even more distractingly full of itself, but perhaps it’s the embarrassment that Kelly needed to ground his promising talent. Southland Tales, ultimately, is more of a wannabe statement than an actual statement, but it has a bit of the crazed fervor that powers the great movies as well as the follies, and it’s for that that I can’t quite bring myself to hate it. The movies need more missteps like it, if for no other reason than I can only devote so many words to Big Momma’s House.
★★
Posted on March 25th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Sci-Fi | 13 Comments
Funny Games (1998)
It’s a bit too flattering to the film to be enraged by Funny Games, the original Michael Haneke picture that’s inspired the shot for shot remake (also by Haneke) that is currently playing in theatres. Funny Games is a horror movie re-staged as an elitist, post-modern wank; think Straw Dogs by way of Godard, only stripped of the profundity of either, and you’ve got the general idea. People complain that the film is hypocritical and a bit of a cheat (and it is hypocritical) but the real problem is that it fails even by its own ambitions.
The film isn’t a cheat, as many have said. Haneke may claim to hate the exploitive, violent, largely American thrillers that are the source of his ire here, but he clearly gets off on them. The first hour of Funny Games is legitimately tense; Haneke, like any crank contemptuous of his audience, excels at the sort of audience manipulation that he supposedly resents, playing the quiet suburban dread against his viewers in a way that recalls early Polanski.
A family of three (Ulrich Mühe, Susanne Lothar, Stefan Clapczynski, all effective) drive toward their vacation home in a series of opening bird’s eye view shots that clearly recall The Shining and eventually stop at their neighbors to confirm that a golf date the next day is still on. The neighbors are strange, but tell the family that tomorrow is indeed still a go. The wife asks the husband who those two boys in the white were. The husband seems to remember one of the neighbor’s brothers having a boy in business school.
As the family unpacks, one of the young men knocks on the door and asks the wife if he could trouble her for a few eggs, the neighbors are making something. This conversation over the eggs, and its intangible slip from the banal to the terrifying (I had to re-watch it), is the one truly brilliant scene in the film. But the brilliance highlights the film’s schizophrenia: Funny Games claims to punish us for our jollies while really just giving us the jollies with a chase of self-delusion; embodied by such second-rate tricks as fourth wall shattering commentary and, most famously, a blunt, Brechtian switcheroo near the end of the film.
I went in to Funny Games with the mind to like it. I admit that I’m a bit of a contrarian at heart, if everyone hates a film I probably want to get something out of it. But Haneke’s tricks nurture the tension rather than subvert it. The first time one of the killers addresses us, with a wink as the wife discovers her unfortunate dog, is unsettling in a conventional thriller way, and doesn’t work as disruption or satire. The film’s ending has the same problem; it doesn’t work because it IS authentically cathartic. I’ve read Haneke’s interviews and he would appear to be an intelligent man, but does he honestly find his bad guys emerge victorious only to torture another family ending subversive? One can find a variation of this ending in any less hip to hate slasher film.
A few months ago I watched a similarly themed horror picture that unnerved me, and succeeded in shaming me for my appreciation of disreputable, gory pictures. That film was The Girl Next Door, a direct to DVD release that didn’t get a tenth of the new Funny Games’ ink because it was made by Gregory Wilson, an unknown filmmaker who is unfashionable to love or hate. That film dared the audience to actually consider the moral ramifications of the sort of blood lust that they normally clap for, Funny Games is just a self-hating, confused example of the usual usual, with none of the lasting power of Girl, much less Repulsion, or Knife in the Water or the original The Vanishing. The problem with the Brecht approach is that you can’t change most audience members (particular the audience Haneke’s targeting here) by appealing to their minds, it’s emotions that save the day in the film game. Haneke could have at least probably succeeded in his aim if he had the courage of his convictions. He shouldn’t have bothered to the end the film at all, cutting us off mid-sentence, no catharsis, no ending, nothing to
★★½
Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Reviews, Horror, 1998 | 14 Comments
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
As a moderate in the Paul Haggis is brilliant/awful debate (Crash is a watchable white liberal guilt cartoon, no more, no less), I feel I should point out a scene that occurs early on in In the Valley of Elah that perfectly encapsulates why his detractors resent the acclaim. The film’s opening is appealingly curt: Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) wakes to a telephone call informing him that his son, whom he didn’t even know had returned from Iraq, has been missing for a few days, and has a few days more until he’s considered AWOL. Hank, in even fewer words than you’d expect from a Jones character, catches his wife (Susan Sarandon) up, and is just as quickly out the door to see what the hell is going on. He may have snuck in a cup of coffee, I don’t remember.
The opening is sparse and mysterious, and, as always, Jones’ minimalist brilliance supplies notes that no dialogue could artfully convey. But that, of course, doesn’t stop Haggis from trying. Hank looks his truck over and pulls into an auto store and asks for something. The auto-man finds the part in question, rings it up and hands it to Hank. Hank asks the auto-man if he’s sure this part will work. The auto-man responds to the affirmative, adding something to the effect of “Sometimes you have to trust someone other than yourself, Hank.”
FALSE! Maybe I’m getting to be a bit of a crank about these sorts of things, but this is exactly the sort of audience insulting, made for TV exposition that drives Haggis’ critics nuts. We don’t need it, Jones’ performance has already clued us in to his tight-assedness, and, just in case it hasn’t, his wife soon throws it back in Hank’s face anyway, in an argument that occurs when they discover that their son has actually been murdered not far from the base. We don’t need to be told twice, we don’t, really, need to be told once, but Sarandon’s accusation at least rings true, old resentment bubbling up at a time of major duress. And before we leave this point behind, let’s face something else; it’s not unreasonable to question an auto-man, that’s just common-fucking-sense.
The rest of In the Valley of Elah is just as you’d expect from a film that features three Oscar Winners in front of the camera and one behind: painless, obvious, and relatively forgettable. Haggis has learned a few tricks since Crash, the dialogue is less self-conscious, and the film plays against our expectations of the standard murder-mystery procedural in a few canny ways. The revelation of the murderer makes sense, too much sense really, so much sense in fact that its a bit of an admirable anti-climax: Hank goes stomping for answers and the answers, as they most likely actually would, turn out to mean pretty much jack-shit. For once, Haggis is making a point with action. The film is slow, humorless and thinks its way too good for you, but it gets better as it moves along, and it is worth seeing once for Jones’ performance. Jones again proves that he’s one of our sharpest under players; imbuing even the clumsiest of scenes with grace and truth.
I think it may be time to introduce the notion that Paul Haggis may be the M. Night Shyamalan of social-conscience pictures. They both have that contrived cross your Ts, dot your Is method of revisiting a supposedly minor (but obviously major) early scene in a film to reaffirm a final point. Crash most certainly qualifies; that boy’s life being spared by the blanks only to be mistaken by the child as an invincibility cloak is a payoff that could very literally grace one of Shyamalan’s fantasies. Haggis and Shyamalan are both also very clearly entertainers who are letting a grander desire to be “important” stifle their creative energy. And they both, whether people wish to admit it or not, still have potential. As the platitude too banal even for their films goes: only time will tell.
★★½
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Drama | 12 Comments
Short Cuts (1993)
I remember watching Short Cuts for the first time in 1994 or whenever the picture was available on video, as the idea of seeing this film in the theatre would’ve been unthinkable in the area I grew up in. I had just discovered the film’s director, Robert Altman, the year before with his The Player, which I adored. At the time I’m sure I didn’t quite grasp all of The Player, I was twelve, but the film had (and still has) a heady sexual danger, as well as a cynicism, that greatly appealed to me. Come to think of it, reading the critics’ reactions to The Player’s opening shot may have, in fact, been my introduction to the notion of a tracking shot.
But I digress, I eventually rented the Short Cuts video at the store my family frequented and, three hours and change later, proclaimed the film to be “pretentious” and a “disappointment”. Yeah, I was that arrogant. As brilliant as The Player still is, it has a tangible thriller spine that a twelve year old can latch onto. Short Cuts, of course, does not. I labeled Short Cuts pretentious, but that was an insecure twelve year old wannabe academic’s way of saying that he found it boring. I re-watched the picture a few years later in college, with several more Altman films under my belt, and recognized that I was, indeed, an idiot, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.
And now, having bought the film’s essential Criterion DVD a few months ago, and finding myself under the weather and with sufficient time to appropriately digest, I re-watched Short Cuts again. The film, like many of Altman’s films, is a force; which is ironic because that word is misleading to Altman’s approach. Short Cuts, like Nashville or even the final moments of The Player, sneaks up on you with seemingly banal details that slowly accumulate to become something quite tragic or significant. It’s this accumulation, this emotional disruption as conveyed by fleeting understatement, that has people sometimes calling Altman naturalistic in approach.
Just as others have written, Short Cuts isn’t a naturalistic film though; the coincidences, the intersections, even the characters’ occupations, are unusual and stylized. Raymond Carver’s stories, which served as the inspiration for the script by Frank Barhydt and Altman, were usually spare, isolated sketches of casual despair. Altman has taken those sketches into his confident old hands and criss-crossed them into a big, bursting, seemingly free-form soap opera.
And it’s the soap opera that lends Short Cuts the somewhat conventional spine that eluded me as a child; that frees Altman to stage individual moments of potent truth telling, or at least the potent truth telling of movies. As skillfully as Altman underplays, and as subtly and gracefully as he weaves characters’ agendas and neuroses into casual conversation, Short Cuts is still truthful only in a way that fans of movies or literature wish life to be. Real life, of course, is even more mysterious, not to mention considerably less interesting (assuming something can be more mysterious and less interesting at the same time), than the largely elusive happiness of Short Cuts. We all have resentments, insecurities and family squabbles, but we rarely live lives as cathartic as the characters that populate many of Altman’s films. As devastating as many of the moments of Short Cuts are, those characters are still lucky: they have Robert Altman and Raymond Carver as chroniclers handy to imbue their lives with meaning, or at least a fascinating lack of meaning.
The film is set in Los Angeles present day, opening with a series of extended, spontaneous God’s eye traveling shots that instantly establish the film’s loose, spanning perspective. We are to spend a few long days in the lives of twenty or so different characters, some of which are related, some of which aren’t, some of which turn out to be related in ways of which only we, as the audience, are allowed to understand.
There is a TV man and his wife (Bruce Davison and Andie McDowell) whose child is hit by a car but appears to be ok, for now. There is a baker (Lyle Lovette) who is compelled to exact a very misplaced revenge. There is a wife (Madeline Stowe) who entertains herself with her policeman husband’s feeble lies designed to mask his infidelity. There are friends (Robert Downey, Jr. and Chris Penn) with bubbling sexist resentments. There are fisherman (Fred Ward, Huey Lewis, and Buck Henry) who find something inappropriate but continue to fish anyway. There is another couple (Julianne Moore and Mathew Modine) who are haunted by a past infidelity only to drown it in an inexplicable all night party with people they barely know. And, perhaps my favorite, there’s a couple (Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin) who know they’re no damn good for one another or probably period, but decide to go down with one another anyway. Somewhere in there I also forgot the tale of a jazz singer (Annie Ross) and her daughter (Lori Singer) a seemingly casual story of familial miscommunication that ends in heartbreak. Not to mention the TV man’s father, embodied with perfect self-delusional sleaze by Jack Lemmon, who actually has my favorite moment in the film: a defeated, cowardly, painfully long exit that brings to mind Joseph Cotton’s bitter final walk in Citizen Kane.
Notice I didn’t bother to look up the various names that the script assigns the various actors. Not really necessary. These characters are archetypes; a certain malaise nurturing lifestyle is the real character of Altman’s film. And I’m stalling, writing myself in circles, erasing one largely useless passage of summary or redundant critique after another.
Truthfully, I don’t know why Short Cuts is so good, so lastingly amazing, but it is. I watched the film from start to finish a few days ago, and then ate dinner and started the damn thing again, and that is something I rarely do these days in my effort to see every notable current and classic film that I’ve yet to see. The film is a warm embrace that only a cynic could stage with such convincing, humane conviction. Altman’s distrust of platitudes ultimately renders him their greatest salesman. I usually don’t believe the disparate characters linked through a natural upheaval device, but the earthquake that finally unites the oddballs of Short Cuts is wrenching, and perfectly of a piece tonally with the Carver source material. I particularly love Waits’ and Tomlin’s reactions: drinking, they embrace “the big one” that will send them out of this world together, the earthquake stops, and they just as instantly resume the private party that’s just lost its possible major significance to just another day.
★★★★
Posted on March 21st, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, 1993 | 4 Comments
Doomsday (2008)
Who famously wrote that a good writer has to know when to kill their darlings? William Goldman? Someone earlier? Whom ever it was, they clearly aren’t running the studios or mentoring the last few generations of filmmakers, who seem to be obsessively intent on stuffing every film they’ve ever loved into whatever their current film may be, common sense be damned. Neil Marshall, director of the canny no-budgeter Dog Soldiers, and the lean, masterful horror picture The Descent, has fallen prey to this sort of indulgence with his third film, Doomsday. Maybe it was the success of The Descent that tempted Marshall to go haywire, to live up his Carpenter fueled fantasies while he could. Regardless, Doomsday, while not as bad as you’ve probably heard, is needlessly not very good either.
Needless because Doomsday’s opening act works, and promises a tight, confident, violent, urban thriller that the film ultimately isn’t interested in delivering. Say what you will of Doomsday, and I’m sure the few people who bother to see it will say quite a bit, but Marshall inarguably does good Escape from New York. The obligatory end of the world scenario that fuels the picture’s opening minutes is claustrophobic and frightening, and Marshall knows the genre well enough to know that major details will only punch holes in our already flimsy suspension of disbelief. A deadly flesh-eating disease has sprung up on Scotland, and England, in a desperate effort to contain the organism, walls up the country, guns down escapees, throws away the key, and attempts to pretend that nothing ever happened. Thirty some years later, the disease surfaces on the other side of the wall and, what do you know, the English government is suddenly acknowledging that a certain percentage of the Scottish population has lived, which, of course, implies a cure. Cue anti-hero Maj. Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra).
And for about another twenty-five minutes, the picture works. Marshall has a high time ripping off Aliens (Dog Soldiers was a thinly veiled Aliens clone too) in an intense, prolonged gang battle that greets Sinclair and company upon arrival in the diseased land, as well as just about every other 1980s cult action movie you can imagine. Marshall stages all of this with a refreshing conviction, no film school above it all tricks here, but Doomsday wears itself out, climaxing midway with a gruesome execution show that plays like a seamier, more convincing version of A.I.’s flesh fair sequence and never recovering from there. The film soon takes a desperate turn towards Arthurian legend (you read that right) and you’re left wondering what the Hell could have possibly been on Marshall’s mind. I’m guessing Knightriders.
I could forgive Marshall’s over-eagerness, but Doomsday is, sadly, anti-climactic even by its own rules. As he proved in The Descent, Marshall has a flair for close hand to hand combat, but action scenes of a larger scale are still a bit beyond him, they build and then piffle away. The bikers and the knights are also, disappointingly, never allowed to occupy the same film at the same time; the big, absurd, anachronistic battle of our dreams is thwarted. I still can’t bring myself to hate Doomsday though, it’s a folly, but it’s a folly with personality. Marshall’s gotten this out of his system, now it’s time to see what he can really do.
★★½
Posted on March 19th, 2008 in Reviews, Action, 2008 | 6 Comments
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
If there’s a disappointment to be found in the first two acts of Intolerable Cruelty, the Coen Brothers’ most misunderstood picture, it’s that the filmmakers chose so staid a subject to satirize as the divorce proceeding. That was old hat in the times of Sturges and Lubitsch, what about what those legends didn’t have? Reality television, diet fads, political correctness, tabloid worship, computers that serve as willful cocoon, etc, etc. Ethan and Joel Coen have a mastery of words that rivals the great writers of the 1930s and 1940s, but, as in The Hudsucker Proxy, they’re too preoccupied here with commenting on what has come before. The Coens can do the wax museum tour like no one in the business, but why settle for that when there’s so much else that remains to be properly lacerated?
For its ambitions though, Intolerable Cruelty is successful and considerably underrated. The film sets its tone, an anarchic mix of the swift and the intentionally leaden, in the opening minutes. Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush, destined to work with the Coens), a successful daytime soap producer, returns home and, after a bit of back and forth, discovers that his wife has just finished boffing the Pool Man. Hint #1: the pool man is an old friend of the wife’s. Hint #2, Donovan doesn’t have a pool. The pool man apologizes to Donovan for “porking” his wife, while the wife sticks Donovan in the ass with his Emmy and flees the scene, knocking into Donovan’s car on the way out which, in turn, causes the sound system to resume playing the Simon and Garfunkle song that opens the film.
Intolerable Cruelty demonstrates this sort of play through out, much of the humor is sharp and set at a “what did they just say” lightening pace that rivals the iconic old school comedies, only punctuated with a modern banality, such as Cedric the Entertainer’s continued promise to “nail your ass.” I think it’s this dissonance that frustrated audiences of most camps: the critical elite thought the Coen Brothers had gone crass and mainstream; the mainstream, poised for an effortless Clooney-Zeta-Jones meet cute, didn’t know what the hell they had stumbled into. This also proved a problem for the Coens’ follow-up picture, a remake of The Ladykillers, that, while not as successful as Intolerable Cruelty, does have its merits, including the best Tom Hanks performance since, I don’t know, Turner and Hooch?
This film works similar wonders on Catherine Zeta-Jones. Jones is a talented, charismatic actress, but most movies can’t handle her; she’s too beautiful and otherworldly to convince in the sorts of “ordinary” roles that usually win awards, while the superstar roles, the roles that used to make legends out of the Rita Hayworths and the Lana Turners, don’t really exist anymore. Jones has never been more startlingly beautiful than she is here; she truly lives up to the cliché of a star who glows, radiating that perfect contemptuous sexual movie heat that Hitchcock would have adored. Comedies normally don’t play fair in the battle of sexes, one usually appears to be unquestionably superior to the other, but Jones holds every bit of her own against that considerable Coen regular, George Clooney.
And there are very few stars working today who seem to understand their effect on movies and moviegoers as intimately as Clooney. Tabloids, in their incessant desperation, have successfully stolen the lesser stars’ mystique. Stars spend too much time convincing the world that they too are plagued with the average man’s tedium, while the average man spends much too much time convincing himself that he too is blessed with the average star’s presence (how many Who Wants to Be a Fill in the Blank are there?). The line has blurred, I want my movie stars to be Gods again, and George Clooney continues to fight that good fight. I don’t hear what George Clooney has eaten for breakfast, I don’t hear about George Clooney’s illegitimate step-aliens, the man simply knocks off the occasionally obligatory I’m just a guy doing what I do bit of faux modesty and cleverness while keeping the work up and good.
The key to Clooney, and the reason everyone seems so desperate to call him Cary Grant, is that, like Grant, he’s that rare breed of sexy movie star who feels comfortable looking totally ridiculous. Not many can pull off the suave, broken romantic badass of Out of Sight. Fewer still have the boony Clark Gable burlesque of O Brother, Where Art Thou? in them, and much fewer still can pull off both. Clooney’s work in Intolerable Cruelty presents us both sides of the Clooney equator in one film. Miles Massey is a charming, fast-talking shark, a divorce attorney of course, but he’s also a bit of a romantic bozo, dropping his briefcase at the first sight of Marylin (Jones) and immediately exposing himself to her in the exact same way that he knows her previous fallen men have. Miles is stupid, canny, sharp and, eventually, quite endearing.
Can we please retire the “Coens don’t ever peek from behind their icy wall of intellectual condescension to engage the heart” logline for good please? No Country for Old Men wasn’t the first film to venture into the realms of the human either, all of their films (particularly the marvelous, under seen The Man Who Wasn’t There) are full-blooded and passionate in their own way, usually some sort of existential exploration of our role in life. Intolerable Cruelty is a slighter work, but there are scenes even here that stick, and that’s because, ultimately, the Coens mean the love story between Miles and Marylin. When Miles, heartbroken, turns to Marylin, and says “And all of that last night, meant nothing?”, this isn’t brushed off with a post-modern smirk, its a jarringly honest dramatic beat. People who accuse the Coen Brothers of hiding behind irony are missing the point, the films are really requiems for sincerity; a sincerity that, they clearly believe, has gone extinct.
You may have noticed the phrase “the first two acts” near the beginning of this post. The third act of Intolerable Cruelty is a mild problem. The film whimpers when it should roar, turning into a more traditional Coen brothers picture seemingly for no other reason than exhaustion of ideas, the “let’s take turns hiring a hit man” bit doesn’t feel tonally right. Tonal malleability is a Coen brothers’ trademark, but the experiment doesn’t quite play here, you hope for the brothers to more rigidly follow the screwball framework and trump it by the confidence of execution, not evasion. It’s a testament to the messy, anything goes charm of the picture though that even the not quite right stuff yields something memorable: the huge, sad-eyed Wheezy Joe, who lingers as one of the Coens’ more haunting criminal oddballs (he gets a hell of an exit too). Imagine what Wheezy Joe could do if he found the right film.
★★★
