Boarding Gate (2008)
Boarding Gate is an Olivier Assayas picture; which probably means that it’s some sort of experimentation of genre and pretty girl. Watching the picture, I wondered what Assayas would have done with that icon of all icons: Marilyn Monroe. Assayas has a view, and curiosity of, the opposite sex that’s part school-boy-giddy-titter and part legitimate, searching, empathy. Assayas, at his best (Clean, Late August, Early September), pares away the layers of preoccupation that tend to greet both his beautiful women and his genres to reveal something spare and honest. If you want your hand held, re-watch The Visitor.
Boarding Gate is, like demonlover, an Assayas cover of the erotic thriller. demonlover was a failure that mistook elusion and redundancy for mystery. Boarding Gate has a similar frustrating reluctance to capitalize on the dirty pleasures of the genre; working for and against itself in alternating shifts. Assayas apparently doesn’t quite grasp that a little conventionality, particularly in the third act-would actually heighten the exhilaratingly free form passages that have preceded it. Boarding Gate is a more successful picture than demonlover, but it still feels like an intelligent filmmaker’s over-considered parlor game. Self-shame can mar any picture, but it’s least welcome in something that should be quick, juicy, lurid-bad for you.
Assayas is actually looking to mate the erotic thriller with a more grounded portrait of an attractive, adventurous-at-her-own-peril woman who seeks to define herself apart from the men in her life, bosses and lovers, who have a habit of being one and the same. If we wish to be cute, the picture could be said to be Clean crossed with demonlover, and, for about an hour, Assayas succeeds. The first half of the picture is a chamber play, a two character one-act where a woman confronts one of her simultaneous boss/ex-lovers over past hurts that clearly still pack quite a bit of heat for both of them. The casting intentionally sounds more Showtime than Assayas: Asia Argento, that snarling, self-consciously weird object of male lust turned on its head, and Michael Madsen, the shoulda had a stronger career phantom of Robert Mitchum.
Both actors bring a B-movie survivor baggage to their roles that’s surprising and a little poignant. Assayas coaxes out the vulnerability that lurks behind tough guy and femme fatale archetypes; recognizing that, nowadays at least, every tough guy began as a kid watching other tough guys on TV. Madsen’s familiar rasp sounds nearly undead here, and it signals a lost inner pain that the actor manages, miraculously, to steer away from pretension. Madsen’s Miles is a vague businessman, a drinker of bourbon, and a wearer of stylishly disheveled shirts that represent a reformed badass’s impression of “respectability”. He lets Sandra (Argento) cuff him up as he laughs uncontrollably, tickled by his continued failure to be surprised.
Argento, full bosomed, lithe, with the familiar tattoos (that have always too consciously announced her bad girl credentials), is an ideal woman for Assayas interpretation. Hitchcock once said (something along the lines of) that Monroe was too obvious, too eager to please, to be a sex symbol of interest to him. There was no contradiction between appearance and desire, no subtext. That’s a problem for many of our sirens these days, including Scarlett Johansson (oh, how one wishes Kate Winslet had taken Match Point) and especially Angelina Jolie and Argento. These women have no inner, no private elusive thing that baits the audience. Self-consciousness and self-congratulation are a no-no for the true movie Goddesses. Assayas, that constant tinkerer of surfaces, recognizes this in Argento and acknowledges that fun-drug-killer-girl thing as facade. This is the most interesting Asia Argento performance that I’ve seen (slim competition) because there’s more to Argento here than that confident body-the confidence is turned in on itself and redefined as vulnerable mystery. Asia plays with that vicious-kitty voice of hers, slipping in shades of doubt and contempt, and she’s fascinating (or closer than usual to it), particularly when sparring with the increasingly self-cocooned Miles.
The first hour between Miles and Sandra is slow, druggy, and hypnotic. Sandra gets herself in trouble near the half-way mark, and one expects and hopes that the forebode of the first half will slide into something unhinged and violent, something that purges Sandra of her doubt and pain while seamlessly giving us our genre jollies. That never happens, but it’s not for lack of trying. Assayas isn’t elitist exactly; it’s that he just doesn’t appear to have the authentic instinct to go for the throat. His best pictures show a cleansing compassion, and that has a habit of being in direct conflict with the sort of thriller he’s attempting here. He likes Sandra too much. I liked Sandra too, to an extent, which is why some real danger would’ve actually felt dangerous, a rarity these days. Assayas fails to dramatize a second half that, on paper, sounds promising. Sandra gets herself into yet another love triangle (including a vivid Kelly Lin) but Boarding Gate never drives it through with any force. The kidnappings and shootings lack bite, revealing Assayas to be in territory every bit as alien as his heroes.
Boarding Gate still has an imperfect pull, and it rouses itself to a wonderful open ending that alludes to possible hope (again recalling Clean). I love the globe-trotting, multiple language inclusiveness of Assayas’ pictures; they point, effortlessly, toward an in-it-together, all-fucked-on-the-same-page humanity that a Haggis or a Visitor seems unable to comprehend. Boarding Gate is a character study disguised as an erotic thriller that should’ve been a real McCoy on both counts; it’s a picture as confused as its protagonists, but you gravitate toward it-and wonder what this not quite successful experiment might yield next time.
★★★
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The tangible relief of again seeing a modern action-fantasy through a master filmmaker’s eyes carries us through a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Master shots! A sense of rhythm and pace! Punches that sound like shotgun blasts! The Wilhelm scream! I had forgotten how starved I was for a true escapist picture that feels apart from reality, that isn’t (or doesn’t fancy itself) an auteurist superhero film or a cynical commercial for toys that turn into other toys or whatever other nonsense litters our screens. The title sequence of Crystal Skull is witty and beautiful, and hints at a touch of knowing, sad humor. The object that the Paramount logo always famously fades into is, this time, a groundhog burrow, which promptly gets mowed over by a speeding roadster as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” plays in place of the familiar John Williams score. It’s the 1950s, twenty years since Indy rode off into the sunset with his father and friends, things have changed, and these first few moments establish that with something resembling grace.
Or graceful, at least, when compared to the desperate, depressing, miscalculated picture that follows. I could delay the inevitable for a few more passages (and did, in the first draft) celebrating Spielberg’s past and present gifts: his peerless, musical sense of play and action and reaction; his organic, nearly supernatural instinct for pure cinema storytelling, his uncanny (see how I struggle to continually produce words for Spielberg’s craft that imply “above normal human capacity”) ability to set-up and pay-off beats in hushed seconds without the slightest hint of strain, but you know all of that already. I could celebrate and/or mourn Harrison Ford, one of the greatest movie stars of all time, a warm, funny, idealized superman Humphrey Bogart for the next generation who lost his way after The Fugitive, but you already know that too. You want to know how good the new Indy Jones movie is, or, if you’ve already seen it, you want to know if it’s okay to feel let down after pretending to like it for a few hours. I’m giving you permission, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the worst Jones movie by far, that’s easy, but this new picture is also the worst Steven Spielberg movie.
There are bits here and there that remind you of Spielberg’s brilliance, that imply a possible struggle within the filmmaker to give a shit about a genre he’s long left behind (we really, in retrospect, should have known that already, after the chilly-scary deconstruction of the genre in the more effective than its generally admitted to be nightmare picture A.I.) but they are few and far between. Crystal Skull does have one legitimately inspired moment that has Jones stumbling into a suburb that happens to be something else entirely. This brief scene conjures that fear of the breakdown of the commonplace that Spielberg can portray so well when in his groove, and it establishes the time and place of the picture effectively, but the rest is a wash. Even the title sequence becomes icky after seeing the entire picture, portraying not sadness and knowing and regret, but contempt (there’s another creepy, tasteless joke in this vein-involving a statue of Marcus Brody, who must have shit Spielberg’s bed after Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Crystal Skull is lazy and misguided and lifeless throughout, with only the occasionally vigorous action sequence (or inspired camera beat) to pull it out of the muck. I would like to be able to say that the script, by David Koepp, the mad libs of hack screenwriters, (with an obvious Lucas influence-this is dead exposition as only that man can deliver), is his usual impersonal, connect the dots mish-mash, except it lacks even his pedestrian ability to connect the dots. The exposition in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the moments that explain to us the nature of the Ark of the Covenant are giddy, moody, but, most importantly, they project not the tedium of reading cue cards (until we can get to the next bit of labored physicality) but a sense of awe.
Ford also appears to be as bored as he’s been for the last several films, having failed to “come back” here as some would have you believe, but Spielberg, like Robert Zemeckis in What Lies Beneath, is canny enough to work around the current Ford persona. Jones’ lack of heartbeat here is moving and thematically apt, he’s been beat down by one too many obscure artifacts, lost one too many important to him. Crystal Skull, aping Last Crusade, is also a family reunion picture, only with Ford now in the Sean Connery role. That is a ripe, original idea for exploration, but that would, again, interfere with Lucas’ inhuman obsession with expositional bric-a-brac.
We should also acknowledge that Spielberg probably hasn’t totally, fearlessly, dived into his own head since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (maybe A.I. too, for both better and worse). The recent Spielberg pictures have much to recommend them, particularly Munich (one of the best films of 2005), War of the Worlds and Minority Report, but they are also uneven and self-conscious, too eager to please, and feed into Spielberg’s desire to be an “important” as well as successful filmmaker. What else could Steven Spielberg possibly have left to prove? In an interview for Minority Report Spielberg said he felt he’d earned the right to make a picture for himself, and I agree, but he appears to say that without actually knowing it. How long can Temple of Doom’s myopic reception be permitted to punish Spielberg, and us? Temple of Doom is imperfect, with an especially mean, juvenile sense of humor (though Crystal Skull makes that humor look positively Lubitschian by comparison) but it’s an exciting, original action picture, one of the most visually assured ever made, with an emotional transition in its hero that subtly holds together (and comments on) the physical beats that run through the picture like a locomotive, but that’s often unacknowledged.
So, lest anyone get offended, we got Last Crusade, which is dull but saved by Sean Connery and Ford’s byplay, and now Crystal Skull, which is dull but saved by nothing. Shia LaBeouf, more watchable than anyone could possibly expect in Transformers last year, again gives his part as much as anyone could given what he’s been handed to work with. LeBeouf and Ford have authentic chemistry, and it could have possibly salvaged a bit of Crystal Skull, but the script continues to strangle them, perhaps like one of those snakes Indy fears so much (and that gets a tip of the cap here that’s embarrassing).
The reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) is the film’s low point though: a crushing, dispiriting letdown that’s about nothing more than cynically “giving the fans what they want.” Allen and Ford look desperate and uncomfortable, two vaudevillians determined to appease the drunken fans so they can shuffle out the side-stage exit. The heat between Allen and Ford has gone, and once again, that, in itself, could have been something had it been acknowledged, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is in the business of self-delusion and unoriginality.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a failure, but it’s an undeniably interesting failure that’s poignant unintentionally and, sometimes, in spite of itself. The character of Indiana Jones is too rich, despite the filmmakers’ indifference, for the film not to occasionally carry a whiff of something greater and older. The sight of Indiana Jones, now grandfatherly in appearance, teaching classes in a building where he was once the subject of feverish underage admiration, is unavoidably moving. The sight of Jones snatching his hat, that beloved symbol of irrepressible adventure, from the younger generation is too loaded with movie love, no matter how hard the fanatical Lucas may try to deny us conventional emotional satisfaction. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an embarrassment, but it is, in a strange way, also life affirming. It will take more than the biggest disappointment of the year to tarnish a character that has given us years of pleasure and has very undeniably earned his rest. Spielberg, probably the greatest living pure filmmaker, has certainly earned the legacy he’s apparently terrified of pissing away. Here’s hoping Spielberg one day discovers the inner peace he half-heartedly blesses his hero with here, and again becomes the filmmaker he always has been and can always be.
★★
Speed Racer (2008)
Speed Racer, Larry and Andy Wachowski’s (The Matrix) newest exercise in fuck tha police, fight the power faux-outrage, is another of those pictures, like the new Star Wars movies, or Sin City, or (the God awful) 300, that places actors in settings that have been totally or almost totally rendered by computers. The prior pictures worked to varying degrees (Sin City being the best) but could never conquer the hesitation that you were watching something that was never actually there; unavoidably dulling the excitement, immediacy and, you know, human feeling in the process. These pictures, despite a (sometimes) visual originality and invention, ultimately feel like that steak that gets re-configured through the transporter in the David Cronenberg Fly: they don’t taste right, they don’t understand the flesh.
Speed Racer turns that disconnection on its head, creating a world so gloriously, obviously, flamboyantly deranged in its artifice that it causes the picture to do an emotional loop de loop; achieving something that is a. accidentally, b. subversively, or c. hypocritically poignant. I’m voting b and c. Speed Racer is a legitimate accomplishment: a hallucinatory children’s picture that has an un-paralleled empathy with that sugar freaking, Saturday morning cartoon binging mind state. But, Speed Racer is also unfortunately, (shades of The Matrix) an attack on the multiple forms of suffocating distraction that persist in modern American life that also (and here’s the rub) happens to provide more forms of suffocating distraction than any recent film I can recall.
Speed Racer at times literally, exhilaratingly, loses control; particularly in flashbacks to Speed’s (Emile Hirsch) childhood that zone out in a blitz of imagination approximating aesthetic overload that immediately cues us in to at least three or four different movements of heartbreak, disappointment and resentment. The Wachowskis, never visually modest, have an especially nifty trick (of which they’re a bit too enamored) of transitioning with an in-camera wipe that gives us the feeling of watching every plot strand, every character, at exactly the same time (an artful version of channel surfing). I normally don’t give a whit what happens to the characters in these types of pictures, but the Wachowskis somehow nearly play this excess of technique to their emotional advantage. The technique chokes the life out of the picture, but this choking of life is, at least partly, the point (an old race is, tellingly, shown with real cars). This world, this candy-colored anime play-land, isn’t passed off as “movie magic”, its Hell, a kiddie friendly Matrix, a place of commercial enslavement that Speed and family must fight with purity and gusto.
The Wachowskis, it must be said, have also become significantly smoother in weaving their anti-big brother tirades (Warners? Who produces their movies?) into their action. The latter Matrix films were (possibly) a little underrated, but their insistence in continually halting the action for self-righteous, half-baked, college text-book sociology fortune cookies was maddening and self-deceiving. Speed Racer works out its self-hatred and conflict through the action, which explodes onto the racetrack and out of the screen in giddy, poetic bursts of disorientation. The people who have complained of the brothers’ withholding crucial spatial information are missing the point. We aren’t supposed to be on the racetrack; we’re in the characters heads, which happen to be on the race track. The lack of visual context and clarity IS the suspense, we, for once, truly feel the speed.
There’s something else undeniably creepy and insidious going on in Speed Racer though. The picture preaches the usual Luke Skywalker (the final race echoes the first Star Wars film’s climax) follow your own beat sermon, but we can’t help but feel that, by buying into this, we are just buying into exactly what the real life consumerist bad guys (represented here by Roger Allam, effectively channeling Tim Curry) would have us buy into. Speed Racer, like all of the Wachowkis’ work (V for Vendetta being the most offensive) is ultimately audience pandering entertainment, decrying consumerist depersonalization while continuing to pioneer consumerist depersonalization.
Speed Racer brings to mind the one brilliant implication of The Matrix Reloaded, that Neo, our hero, was just another pawn of the Matrix, another program designed to foster a sense of false rebellion in a society that doesn’t want to do anymore than pay lip service to such ideas. The Russian nesting dolls of corruption are a true (and very real) Matrix of our society, as well as the one that the Wachowskis’ films have continually hammered against. But what are these talented filmmakers actually offering us beyond un-challenging self-delusion? Speed Racer’s admirers have called it revolutionary. But what, exactly, is the aim of the film’s supposed revolution? To paraphrase another Jeff Goldblum movie, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. By all means see Speed Racer, it works, it’s exciting, and it has a conflict of interest that may mark it as the most interesting big picture of the summer, but its time we hold the Wachowskis to more than visual button-pushing. They may know the path, but they’ve yet to walk it.
★★★
Redbelt (2008)
You can be forgiven for finding the idea of Redbelt enticing. The notion of filmmaker-playwright David Mamet (a master of a distinct mood of simmering inner macho heat, greed and cruelty) tackling the corrupt world of pay-per-view sports is a promising one. Hell, the notion of Mamet stepping into the action arena at all is cause for an optimistic raise of the eyebrow. Mamet, at his best (it’s admittedly been awhile) spins electric dialogue of peerless musical fuck you aggression that has a redemptive, unexpected grace of timing and structure: haikus of the damned, the innocent and everyone in between. The chance that Mamet might find a syntax equivalent to that of his verbal wizardry seems especially great in the action genre, can’t miss really; both, at their best, relying on the spinning of poetry from aggression.
Redbelt is blessed with the usual Mamet cast: a mixture of the expected (Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon) and the purposefully, ironically out of place (Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer) but the picture, such as it is, rests on the inspired, could’ve been iconic if the picture was up to him casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ejiofor is playing a movie staple: a principled, centered, humble hero, in this case a jiu-jitsu instructor, who finds himself tempted by vice and compromise following a series of unlikely coincidences and encounters. Ejiofor is minimal and commanding, conjuring the fantasy of a divorced from temptation good guy without looking prudish, no small feat; Mamet apparently getting off, for once, on creating a character of unquestioned, un-ironic purity.
The Mamet fan will be on guard earlier than the casual viewer, we know that a coincidence isn’t merely a coincidence, right? Mamet pictures, particularly the Mamet pictures that firmly reside in the man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, trust no one genre, are a little like feature length versions of that chilling scene that occurs late in the third act of The Game, (which could’ve been a horror riff on early Mamet anyway) when the Michael Douglas character discovers every person he casually encountered throughout the picture eating dinner together in a cafeteria. Everyone is normally in on it, nothing is chance. A panic stricken woman accidentally shooting Ejiofor’s window out, for example, immediately sets the Mamet fan’s truth sensors swirling.
The picture hums and flows in a way that Mamet fans will recognize and probably treasure, for an hour or so anyway. Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna fire mannered Mamet dialogue in a manner only they can. Tim Allen makes a bid for career redemption with a part that ultimately, like much of the movie, proves to be beside the point. Alice Braga is sexy as a woman who immediately arouses suspicion for being a woman in a David Mamet movie. Emily Mortimer continues to make neediness somehow attractive. David Paymer plays (effectively) the same part he’s essentially played his entire career. Mamet’s action, which some have had problems with, is actually the element of the picture that is underrated, coming in clipped, succinct, whizzy bursts that do actually manage to effectively mirror Mamet’s verbal rhythms. It’s the dialogue itself that falters.
I’m treading water. Redbelt is competent, never particularly boring, but it doesn’t ever amount to anything, it’s a jack in the box picture, winding, winding, winding, except the jack never pops out of the box. All of one’s hopes for a Mamet sports film (either a serious examination or a thrilling, brutal B movie or something in between) are dashed in the service of a picture that simply blows away, neither good nor bad. Redbelt is Mamet’s House of Cards, the punch-line being that it’s not worth the effort.
★★½
Iron Man (2008)
The human element of a superhero film, particularly the human element of the initial entry in a prospective series (the “origin story”), usually represents the vegetables we have to rid our plate of before getting to the dessert. We watch our normally flat heroes go through the usual paces that sometimes wouldn’t look too out of place in Dawson’s Creek (or whatever the youth show de jour may be), all in the hope that the filmmaker, when he finally gets to why we’re all packed in the theatre to begin with, will wow us with a grand bit of what have you, or, if we’re really lucky, a sublime note of visual poetry.
Iron Man, oddly, and to a certain extent, blessedly, has the opposite problem; for about an hour, the picture, chronicling the normally tedious details of how our everyman becomes a superman, is alive and just a little eccentric; for awhile, the lead, Robert Downey, Jr., walks away with the picture in just the manner the trailer implied. Downey infects Iron Man’s wavelength, its editing even, and lends the picture an aura of drunk, self-loathing, screwball tea-time debauchery that feels practically revelatory for such a normally rigid, spontaneity-free genre. Downey’s Tony Stark, rich, handsome, confident, charismatic, intelligent, isn’t some softie with canned pathos; he’s a superman before being interfered with in a divine manner. The film’s initial wit lies in its reversal of our expectations of the usual mythos. Stark, to become a hero, must inherit a weakness, a humanity that brings him back to the realm of other humans, as opposed to a strength that shoots him up and above all others. Tony Stark couldn’t be a more fitting creation for our turn up the Ipod as the world goes to Hell times; Stark, to find his heart, must first nearly have it blown out of his chest.
It may sound like I’m pouring it on, but Iron Man isn’t too shy with its redemptive theme, the picture is a 1950s atomic paranoia fantasy (the villain even gets to proclaim that “no one’s gonna stand in my way”), crossed with an 1980s gee whiz kids film (Explorers perhaps) multiplied by a healthy dose of the current trend of smothering, impersonal action pictures. Iron Man, tellingly, details the development of the suit with more grace than the development of Stark’s conscience, which snaps on (like one of those lights we spoke of earlier in the week) abruptly at just the right moment, muting Stark’s personality in the process. The picture was directed by the gifted Jon Favreau, the actor who debuted as filmmaker with the small, human, very underrated Made, followed it with the overrated Elf, and then followed that with the also underrated Zathura, a gentle picture that had a memorably surreal storybook beauty about it, informed by a surprisingly convincing current of familial resentment and pain.
Favreau’s pictures are generous and lacking in ego, just the sort of thing the big summer movie business needs. Favreau, working with Downey, tries his best to shake things up in Iron Man, but, after a first hour that pumps us up for an anarchic, funny, reverent but not too reverent superhero picture, perhaps the MASH of the 200 million dollar product placement Happy Meal movies, he can’t help but succumb to the grinding repetition of the requirements of the genre. Favreau’s big robot beats aren’t lacking in awe (Favreau, even at his most audience conscious, is mercifully incapable of Michael Bay’s pornographic impersonality) but the scenes steal and distract from Favreau’s strengths; just as he and Downey convince you that Stark is worth giving a damn about, he goes and turns into a Transformer.
Iron Man has moments though, moments that take it beyond many of the pictures in the genre, and occasionally remind you why you truck out every year with your junk food and brave the lines and the heat for the newest “big thing.” The first action scene in the picture, when Iron Man is still scraps and must escape a cave in Afghanistan, is logical, personal, terrifying, and, for once in one of these pictures, has a bit of context. Iron Man, bent, leaking, screwed up, a walking discarded junk heap of the dead, personifies Stark’s bruised entitlement and startling naiveté. This metal creature is, at first, a haunting creation: he wastes the insurgents with a flame thrower and, for a few minutes, pumps the picture with melancholy, vengeance and relevance.
Two scenes involving Tony’s damaged heart also momentarily imbue the picture with something close to feeling. The first is a figurative love scene between Stark and his long suffering assistant Pepper Potts (a very beautiful, poignant Gwyneth Paltrow), the second is just the opposite: a moment of grand, closed door, pop betrayal that dissolves the minute we cut back to the big bad metal monsters. No robot could be scarier than the bizarre, unlikely sight of Jeff Bridges appearing as a poisonous surrogate father figure, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers and special effects wizards from trying. Iron Man must, of course, have an evil antagonist, a twin sprung from the same well of dubious creation, and so he does, resulting in a fat, kind of goofy looking thing that could be said to be a joke on the Republican “more is better” philosophy but probably isn’t. In 1978, people were assured that they’d believe a man could fly, but would it hurt nowadays for us to be asked believe something besides, or at least in addition to, that? Iron Man needs less iron and more man.
★★★
His Kind of Woman (1951)
His Kind of Woman is one of those old-school nonsense pictures that Hollywood no longer seems capable of producing without an accompanying shot of self-congratulation; every light little thing now comes packaged with a twinkle in the stars’ eye to assure everyone that they know they’re above it and most assuredly don’t MEAN it, which diminishes the fun by half (an exact figure). That was my issue with the later Steven Soderbergh Danny Ocean pictures, Soderbergh’s fear of being mistaken for a mere entertainer was palpable, and led to the assumption that an incoherent trifle would be less of an offense to the Great Filmmakers’ Code of Conduct than an enjoyable one.
I’m not as far off track as it may appear, His Kind of Woman is, like the Danny Ocean movies (either past or present), an excuse to transport several stars and character actors to a beautiful setting and stage a series of flirtations, near death escapes and exchanges of sideways movie-star banter, all under the flimsiest pretense of some larger story, which, in this case, has something to do with a deported gangster’s efforts to get back into the States and enjoy his illegally gotten gains. The gangster sets up an on again/off again gambler, Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum, who should’ve just been called Robert Mitchum from picture to picture, no writer could invent a name more apt for that man) to take the fall so he can make off with Milner’s identity and get back on U.S. soil. That’s the plot, and it doesn’t kick in for real until about the ninetieth minute. Milner’s in the dark for the majority of the picture, knowing only that he’s to take a fat paycheck and hang out and absorb the pleasures of the island until someone steers him in the right, or any, direction. There has to be self-satire in there somewhere.
His Kind of Woman, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Richard Fleischer (credited to John Farrow, though Fleischer evidently re-shot most of it) also boasts Vincent Price in a generous, charismatic, humorously unconvincing turn as a famous actor; Charles McGraw (memorable in Fleischer’s significantly tighter The Narrow Margin) as a baddie ; Jane Russell’s breasts as the chief love interest, Tim Holt as a supposedly drunk, late night bearer of exposition, and, why not?, Raymond Burr as the gangster pulling the strings.
The film rests on Mitchum’s no, I really, truly, don’t give a shit charisma (Otto Preminger exploited that apathy to effective, perverse extremes in the Hughes produced Angel Face) as well as the other stars’ game for anything spirit. The picture is never thrilling, rarely truly funny (though it has a few lines that snap) but everything taken together has an unruly appeal that is intensely pleasurable to experience and look back upon later. Films where stars are clearly having fun aren’t always fun themselves, but this is an exception. The chief appeal of His Kind of Woman lies in its determination to follow its characters’ whims with no regard to the constraints and requirements of the genre, allowing for human little moments of tenderness, cleverness, and sensuality. This picture has conviction in something more important, in this case, than story: a lolly-gagging, roundabout, distinctly Hollywood utopia of movie stars screwing around. This is a truly escapist picture, and you won’t find yourself whispering that word under your breath as if you’re in confession: the film wears it proud, and so should you.
★★★
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
Death Proof: Extended and Unrated (2007)
This post assumes you’ve seen Death Proof. Plot is discussed.
You’ll note that the phrasing found on the box of the Death Proof DVD never once uses the often irresponsibly applied words “director’s cut” to sell the film. Death Proof, which originally appeared as Quentin Tarantino’s 85 minute half of the double- feature/experiment Grindhouse, has been lengthened by about twenty minutes, and the changes, while largely subtle, have significantly improved the picture. If this isn’t Tarantino’s preferred cut of the film, then it damn well should be.
But I’m not going to use Death Proof’s alterations as an excuse to revise my opinion of the film, truthfully, my view was probably subject to revision anyway. I enjoyed Grindhouse in the theatre, but faithful readers will remember that I found Death Proof to be a hedging of bets: bad-boy, have your post-modern cake and eat it too posturing that was too chicken shit to simply commit to the disreputable genre at hand.
Many applauded Tarantino’s newest narrative gambit, which essentially divided the film into two long acts, but I found that to be perverse in a way that wasn’t exhilarating at all: two prolonged, banal acts of exposition (typically found in slasher films) for the price of one. At the time of Grindhouse, I believed that the bravest thing that Tarantino could’ve done was to simply give us what he’d promised us: a damn horror movie. A slasher film with Kurt Russell directed by Quentin Tarantino should be more fun than 80 odd minutes of (with a few exceptions) boring actresses trading various not up too par bon mots. As his detractors have said, the famed Tarantino dialogue was beginning to sound an awful lot like the wannabes.
I missed the point.
Death Proof is a savage battle of the sexes horror comedy as well as a surprisingly sensual past versus present shocker. Tarantino has made the most erotic horror picture in immediate memory. The film takes the sexist resentment that lurks under most slasher pictures and throws it back in our faces. Upon original viewing, I found the first group of girls (Sydney Poitier, Jordon Ladd, Vanessa Ferlito) to be intolerably self-absorbed and shallow. Their girl-girl confidence was clearly a put-on, and ripe for the intervention of the big bad wolf of the piece, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell). The brilliance of the first half is that (admit it) you’re nearly rooting for Russell’s Stuntman. But we should ask ourselves guys, why do we hate this first set of girls? Because they’ve adopted the cavalier fuck first ask questions never attitude that is normally reserved for men in the movies. And look for the savagery that clearly lurks in the emasculated men on the sidelines, watch as the Eli Roth character talks of pouring a few more shots “down these bitches’ throats.”
While the film may put us in the odd position of vaguely rooting for Mike at first (at least until Tarantino pulls the rug out in a murder scene of tone shattering cruelty), Death Proof isn’t perverse wish-fulfillment, it’s a farce of female objectification, the exact sort that typically occurs in filmmakers, fanboys or other delayed adolescents. Watch how Tarantino’s camera soaks in Poiter’s fleshy derriere or her long limbs in the rain illuminated by her billboard in the background, or watch the way Rose McGowan (in the best performance other than Russell’s to be found here) leans into Mike’s car and nearly purrs. This is the dance between the girls and the geek, the haves and the have-nots, just as much as De Palma’s Carrie. It’s a testament to Tarantino’s fluency with the genre that he’s managed to stage a film in which both the haves and the have-nots win.
And what about Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike? My only regret with the part is that it isn’t larger; I was always, even when I had issues with the film, enthusiastic about this performance. Russell is a tough guy, but he’s always been a tough guy of seemingly boundless comic wit and invention. The key may be his voice; it’s softer than you expect: poignant even, it doesn’t jive with his rough around the edges good looks. Kurt Russell manages to personify John Wayne, the Prom King, and the sardonic best friend who never actually gets the girl simultaneously. Tarantino, a clear fan, has written a part in Stuntman Mike that manages to capitalize on ALL of that. I love how Mike, even when he’s got the charm turned on, can’t help but let out the barely contained rage that drives him to do what he does. Watch how the girls always get his name wrong, and watch how each correction is just a little closer to sounding like the kind of guy who would splatter someone on the highway just for the fun of it.
If Tarantino’s dialogue has gone soft and indulgent in recent years (and it has, starting with Kill Bill Vol. 2) then his eye as a director has become disciplined and more impressive in each subsequent picture. I love the rough-hewn vibrant heat that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction give off, but they, visually, are stagier affairs. Jackie Brown (possibly my favorite Tarantino film) maintains the grit, but the camera work is more fluid and beautiful (the film has my favorite murder sequence in the Tarantino canon so far: Jackson’s killing of Chris Tucker, framed in an elegant long shot that’s showy but essential to character: we, in one shot, get Jackson’s casual, animal immorality). Kill Bill Vol. 1, a genre defining masterpiece, and Kill Bill Vol. 2, fascinating but uneven, took Tarantino even further visually and revealed him to be a crack action director in the bargain.
This brings us back to Death Proof, which sees Tarantino, as a pure visual artist, at the height of his powers. I’ve read the Death Proof screenplay and, on paper, it’s, well, it’s a colossal disappointment, particularly when you consider the past characters that Tarantino has created. On the screen though, Tarantino’s aim becomes clearer (what we’ve already discussed about sexism, blah, blah) and the once tiresome dialogue and awkward performances punctuate a growing, masterfully sustained tension of sexually charged dread. The opening fifty minutes of Death Proof prove, beyond any doubt, that Tarantino can own the horror genre any day he damn well pleases.
And then the film releases itself, and Mike walks away the victor, having come whether the ladies were interested in him coming or not. A cop, who fans of the director will recognize as Earl MacGraw (Michael Parks), contemplates going off the grid to prove that Mike intentionally killed those girls even though every bit of evidence indicates to the contrary. In a funny genre wink, MacGraw says fuck it and elects to follow NASCAR as usual.
Of course it doesn’t matter, because Stuntman Mike gets cocky and wanders over into a different genre altogether, a high-octane car-chase movie that doesn’t as readily tolerate him. The girls of this half are a truly empowered, (the girls of the first half were all pretense, these ladies are the real thing) appealing bunch. Zoë Bell may not be an actress, but she’s charming. Rosario Dawson brings timing, and yes, even a bit (just a bit) of pathos to the role, and I’m GUARANTEEING you that the beautiful Mary Elizabeth Winstead was hired because of her resemblance to Meg Tilly circa Psycho II. Tracie Thoms is the super-duper verbal firebrand of the bunch, and while I wish we’d gone in a direction that less resembles Tarantino’s collaborations with Samuel L. Jackson, I’ll live with it, if, for nothing else, because it’s a relief from the MySpace-cell phone chitter-chatter of the prior segment (more of that past/present stuff, Mike’s a pure old school TV, no CGI, no cell phone, no diet man.)
In short, Stuntman Mike’s descension upon these girls feels like a true intrusion, you want his ass to be kicked, and it is kicked, in a prolonged car chase of giddy, explosive, pure cinema joy. The ending of the film was another original problem of mine, I felt that Tarantino should’ve played harder and darker, but, upon re-watching, I actually found this tone more unsettling: the murder of Mike, who’s been reduced to a victim more pathetic than anyone in either half of the film, is treated casually, as a throw away joke even. These young movie freaks are driven to kill at the drop of a hat (though I guess attempted vehicular homicide might rate a tad higher than carelessness with head apparel on the offense-o-meter).
As thrilling as Death Proof can be at its best, I feel now that Tarantino, with this and two Kill Bills has completed his essay on the films he loves so much more than most people (myself included). It’s time to wed the newfound visual gamesmanship with the emotional urgency of the first three films, and to discard the crutch that is the devotion to obscure movies of yesteryear. After the hall-of-mirrors reflexiveness of the last few films, that would be the most shocking thing Tarantino could do: daring someone to give a shit, daring someone to accept something that hasn’t been (however expertly) pre-digested.
★★★½
Rambo (2008)
Of all the killer Movie Gods of the 1980s, Sylvester Stallone was always the most disarmingly poignant. Schwarzenegger’s casting as a robot was all too apt, and Bruce Willis doesn’t count because he’s an authentically great actor who managed to escape the ghetto. I never believed Stallone in kill crazy mode though, he’s too vulnerable and, at times, too funny; funnier than people have ever given him credit for. Oscar is maligned, and I never understood why. Demolition Man is, intentionally, quite funny. Even an unintentional howler like Tango and Cash has moments, primarily due to Stallone’s chemistry with Kurt Russell. Stallone isn’t an actor, but he’s a non-actor in a more personal way than a Schwarzenegger, any evident technique would ruin a Stallone performance. Stallone is a raw nerve: pure, unchanelled, unchecked empathy. Stallone is his characters, and his films, even the ones not called Rocky, are his shot at some sort of self-salvage, his reckoning.
And he’s canny. Rocky Balboa worked, despite some major problems, because the actor was humble and witty enough to make the character a surrogate Stallone again, which we hadn’t seen since Rocky II. Rocky III and Rocky IV were absurd even by the standards of the 1980s, Stallone’s desperate bid to trump the little man’s syndrome that he apparently suffers from, and Rocky V? I don’t know what the hell that was, but I think it was some sort of mutant offspring of both good and bad Rocky movies, Stallone’s attempt to scale back and hunker down, but the results were stillborn. Balboa got the formula right again, and was an unexpected financial and critical success.
Which brings us the inevitable Rambo rebirth a year and some change later, called, logically, unavoidably, Rambo, the various titlings of previous films in the series having become too convoluted to render any another option conceivable. Fourth Blood: Rambo Part III? Rambo IV: First Blood Part IV? All of that nonsense has been abandoned, and for the good. Is the movie itself any good? Or, more appropriately, does it satisfy the standards of the series and the genre? The film isn’t much good, and you can’t shrug off the crumminess of the Rambo movies in the same way that you can some of the Rockys. Rocky was a good-hearted lunk. Rambo is a more irresponsible shoot first, someone else asks questions later kind of guy. I don’t preach for responsibility in the movies, that’s the first and best way to kill their livelihood, but I’ve always thought that the Rambo movies were tasteless; their reliance on real issues and tragedies as shorthand for any dramatic heft tacky.
The old Rambos utilized the Vietnam war; the new Rambo is concerned with the issue in Burma, and Stallone opens his film with, I think, real footage of the atrocities the people are actually suffering over there. My sensors sounded a bit, this in the service of a just another revenge movie? Why? Stallone the director continues to ladle on the mistreatment in the grimy, largely boring opening half. Burmese=disease. Rambo=cure.
There’s still something to Stallone though, and he has a clunkiness that will haunt you. In his fourth gig as Rambo, Stallone looks worse than Mickey Rourke and that is truly saying something. Stallone seems to be suffering from some sort of EC comics style ironic punishment. You want to be big? You’ll be big! Stallone is as big as a diesel truck here, a wax Frankenstein monster that has finally, totally, retreated into his headspace.
But, like the monster, he’s susceptible to the charms of a pretty woman, and, by about the fifty minute mark, it’s go time. The second half of Rambo demonstrates that Stallone understands this series’ appeal as intimately as he does Rocky. Rambo is pure, primal id, and the second half, really just one long climax, has a garish, bloody, absurd power; with bullets the size of stakes tearing holes in people that the South Park boys would envy.
So, yes, Rambo does, ultimately, work by the standards of the genre, and it does convincingly resurrect the violent, lurid, un-PC MO of the 1980s action movies. I still think it represents Stallone playing counter to his gifts, but my opinion doesn’t trump box office dollars. That’s a boggle for another day.
★★½
Black Book (2007)
Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a beautiful young Jewish woman, is on the run from the Nazis. It’s the Netherlands in the 1940s. She’s, basically by accident, joined a resistance group. By careless chance, a few of the group’s members, her de facto friends, have been captured. It so happens that Stein has met the man in charge of the region’s Gestapo. His name is Muntze (Sebastian Koch) and he’s taken a shine to Rachel, who’s known to him as Ellis de Vries. Like many a conflicted heroine before her, Rachel must infiltrate Muntze’s heart, and bed, in the fleeting hope that her friends can be saved, particularly before even more ruthless Nazi underlings can get to them.
The film is Black Book. The director is the Paul Verhoeven, returning after a long absence. If I recall correctly, the story theory people say that there are, once you boil everything down to its essence, only seven basic stories. I think the confused young woman in peril bedding an enemy superior against her wishes should be added as the eighth. It combines many elements of the other seven, but has any specific story been of more use to a filmmaker? The classic template is Notorious, and Ang Lee just made his best film, Lust, Caution, using the same scenario. Lee laced his Notorious cover with a bit of the obsession of Last Tango in Paris; and finally caught the movie that he seemed to be chasing for at least a decade. I was expecting Verhoeven to get all Basic Instinct on us and unleash a violent story of erotic bedroom gymnastics and purplish dialogue accompanied by even purplier score.
Verhoeven has and hasn’t made that film. Black Book is surprisingly, for him anyway, restrained in the sex and violence department. The story has, dare I say it, brought out the humanitarian in the filmmaker. Maybe it’s van Houten, one of the most startlingly beautiful women I’ve seen in a recent picture. Verhoeven has clearly fallen for his leading lady and that’s not particularly unusual, he falls for all of his leading ladies, but he doesn’t fetishize van Houten. He’s rooting for her, he respects her, and he clearly mourns the more outrageous and cruel things that happen to her over the course of the film. The trademark Verhoeven perversity serves him in a different fashion here; it dries out the potential schmaltz of the Wounded Survivor of a Historical Tragedy movie. Verhoeven is too much of a natural born filmmaker to bog things down in sanctimony. He wants to bare the tits and spill the blood as much as he ever did. But for once he sees the human cost involved in his spectacle. He hasn’t made his best film in Black Book, his masterpiece is still Robocop, but he’s easily made his best since then, a major comeback that erases the memory of the unforgivably boring Hollow Man.
The refreshing trick of Black Book is that it actually doesn’t commit to the story I just described, as over the top as the film can be, logic has more bearing here that you’d expect. The film isn’t a drawn out game of how long will it take Muntze to figure out who Rachel actually is. He’s fingered her (pun fully intended) by the time they’ve made love for the second time. The film doesn’t forget that a man in his position is, you know, probably fairly intelligent. Muntze doesn’t just let every single hot spy into his bed without so much as a question. He holds a gun to her, calls her on a coincidence, and before long, he’s holding her perfectly sculpted breasts again. Welcome to the return of the good Paul Verhoeven movie.
Koch, superb in The Lives of Others, and van Houten are invaluable here. I wrote a few paragraphs ago that van Houten is one of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in the movies. She’s also a sharp, charismatic actress, handling tones that turn on a dime with the ease of a seasoned pro. The most important thing though, is that you like her, root for her, and van Houten seems to sense this, because she doesn’t bend over backwards trying to appeal to your sympathies. van Houten’s performance is brave, commanding and unsentimental. Rachel is a survivor. As simple as that, this is a tough young woman, a warrior who happens to look like something too stunning, too naughty, to even appear in your inner fantasies.
Koch is playing the opposite of his character in Others here. Or is he? Black Book is more ambitious than you initially assume. The film is, first and foremost, melodrama, but the third act is a shockingly convincing anti-war film, evil is among all of us, even the fallen, even the victimized, and things can change on a whim. Nothing new for the war film of course, but Verhoeven handles the theme gently and with ease. No self-congratulatory story killing pontificating here, a major character’s death is handled briskly, matter of factly, and that haunted me more than anything to appear in the many Iraq movies that I largely didn’t see. Verhoeven has refound himself, he’s ALIVE again. The women make him hard again, the violence revs him up again, but, for once, and this is promising, he’s scared of the horrors he unleashes.
★★★½
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