October 2008, Part II: 10 Mini Reviews
October 26, 2008
The last ten films I've seen.
Burn After Reading ('08): The Coen brothers follow their Oscar winning “No Country For Old Men” with what can best be described as an occasionally incomprehensible, over-plotted mishmash of espionage satire and vanity derived slapstick, with a roster of talented actors doing their best to elevate the hit-or-miss comedy to unrealistic heights. The plot, condensed greatly, follows Frances McDormand as a body conscious gym employee who stumbles across a memoir template by a disgruntled CIA agent (John Malkovich); using the scathing material as blackmail bait, she and fellow gym boob Brad Pitt look to blackmail the agent for funds high enough to compensate her extensive plastic surgery bills. Add into this George Clooney as a dim treasury agent sleeping with McDormand (and Malkovich's wife, Tilda Swinton), J.K. Simmons as a blasé government head frustrated by the incompetence of his people (and ostensibly, the overreaching plot), and Russian spies who find the blackmail material less than enthralling, and you've got a terrific cast criss-crossing plots, phone-calls, beds, and murders with dizzying regularity. This isn't the first time the brothers have followed a masterpiece with an over-stuffed, densely plotted comedy, though unlike “The Big Lebowski”, which followed “Fargo” with an entertainingly bizarre kidnapping/murder plot and bowling themed musical numbers, “Burn After Reading” uses its premise as a government spy satire for little more than a treatise on adultery, legacy, and body image, and though the actors are uniformly good, the outcome is wildly mixed.
Speedy ('28): Harold Lloyd's final silent film is notable today for its time capsule photography of New York City in 1927, including Harold's famous trip to Coney Island, where hidden cameras were needed to camouflage the superstar from potential mobs, and a stop at the old Yankee Stadium to watch Babe Ruth swat one of his then record 60 '27 home runs. The story is nominal – Harold tries to save an old man's horse and trolley cab from modernizing capitalists – but the execution is classic Lloyd, including a lengthy chase climax that's so realistic an accident beneath the Brooklyn Bridge was used in the final cut for authenticity. If Lloyd's heroic defending of the old ways isn't quaint enough, sharpening the sweetness factor is an adorable stray dog that latches onto Lloyd and Ann Christy during the famed Coney Island sequence, further displaying Lloyd's fondness for comedy via animals (see the kitten in “The Freshman”, the turkey in “Hot Water”, and the monkey in “The Kid Brother”). Following a string of masterworks, “Speedy” comes off as old fashioned and routine, but when the routine is as charming, exciting, and funny as this, there's no comparison, and though Lloyd would never again find this kind of success in sound, the string of films leading to the end of the silent era will be forever indispensable.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall ('08): Jason Segel is the latest in the line of unexpected romantic leads for producer Judd Apatow, dudes who, despite emotional slobishness and anti-social tendencies, seem to get bombshells like Catherine Keener, Katherine Heigl, and Kristen Bell, but the kick here, both playing to and against that unrealistic stereotype, our man is dumped by his looker in the film's first scene, crushed beyond all hope, sent to Hawaii on a trip of healing and self discovery that serves for a refreshing and gorgeous backdrop. Of course on that trip he meets and falls for hotel hostess Mila Kunis, who is just as adorable and impossibly beautiful as the rest of the Apatow girls, but by then we're ready to give into the fantasy thanks to Segel's hilarious heartbreak, the roster of characters that appear to help him recover (among them, Bill Hader, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, and Jack McBrayer), and the wonderful rivalry between Segel and Bell's new beau, scene stealer Russell Brand as straight-edge sex god Aldous Snow. Given the film's mix of relationship psychoanalysis, sweet romantic comedy, and dirty talk (courtesy most memorably by Brand), this fits perfectly alongside “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” in the Apatow canon of slightly unrealistic scenarios that play out in a heightened realistic fashion, where a puppet opera about Dracula is as plausible, and laugh out loud funny, as one guy's physical and emotional torment over losing the love of his life. If the film weren't good enough, the two-disc DVD has a wealth of funny deleted material, a 30-minute making of featurette, and as much Russell Brand ad-libbing as you can take, which given the strength of the performance and material, is a lot.
Wee Willie Winkie ('37): Even dedicated John Ford buffs still find it hard to believe that one of his best films of the '30's was a star vehicle for Shirley Temple, but Ford and his craftsmen (producer Darryl F. Zanuck, cinematographer Arthur Miller, composer Alfred Newman) handle Rudyard Kipling's imperialist India-set story with such care that the cutesy theatrics of Temple and her bob of curls simply blend into the package. Temple plays the daughter of June Lang, a widow who moves across the globe to live with her husband's father, a British Colonel (C. Aubrey Smith) in occupied India, but when the Colonel acts standoffish to the little girl, she finds friendships with the soldiers, including romantic lead Michael Whalen (the film's stiffest character, next to Lang, his love interest), and blustery Sgt. Victor McLaglen, as well as chief villain Cesar Romero, providing the stereotypic Indian to the Queen's charging Cowboys. Many of Ford's later western themes show up here, including the standoff between a bullish Army Colonel and a petulant foreign enemy (“Fort Apache” comes to mind, also starring Shirley Temple, in a much different, subjugated teenager role), but the attraction remains Ford's handling of the Temple cliches (song and dance, aw shucks naturalism, those impossible curls), and how in one heart wrenching death scene, a rendition “Auld Lang Syne” literally transforms the moppet from novelty to respectability. Coming somewhere between independent masterpieces like “The Informer” and “Stagecoach” it's easy to write off this film as one of Ford's studio enforced “A” projects, but nowhere does the filmmaking suggest that the master wasn't on top of his game, and having pals like McLaglen, Jack Pennick, and Arthur C. Miller around on unfamiliar territory was a boost, to be sure.
Le Doulos ('62): Jean-Pierre Melville doesn’t so much pay homage to the American gangster with this shadowy gem starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Reggiani, but reinvent him with his own brand of existential trappings and the usual display of trust and mistrust amongst hardboiled men. The title refers to the underworld slang for the “rat”, and Melville gives us everything we need to almost decipher if Belmondo has indeed informed on Reggiani and his plans to caper a businessman’s safe, but being the consummate stylist, Melville cares more about the atmosphere and look of his gangsters than he does about our perceptions of the characters, which makes the twist and careful expository flashback at the end all the more necessary, and baffling. Whether or not one character may have tipped off a friend in the detective squad is beyond the point, we’re to assume that in this world of guns, trench coats, fedoras, underdeveloped molls, and double and triple crosses, friendship is worth as much as the loot behind the next unguarded safe door, who you step on and over to get at it is just another notch in the ethical degradation of the melting pot. The substance of Melville’s style is a mixture of film noir shadows, Americanized wardrobe, characters with suspect morals, and a fluidity of montage, which is so perfectly realized and invisible than when it all but stops, during an unbroken 8-minute Belmondo interrogation scene, it’s so flawless we hardly notice.
Offside ('06): Using a similar style that served him well for “The Circle”, “Crimson Gold” and “The Mirror”, Jafar Panahi examines the treatment of women in modern Iran with acute neo-realist detail, following various adventurous young women as they sneak into a men’s only national soccer stadium, only to get corralled by officers their own age who have a hard time keeping the girls still. Panahi’s criticism doesn’t lie with the hired guards who corral the girls into a pen while keeping one interested eye on the important World Cup qualifier playing beyond the barrier, they’re little more than students and farmers serving mandatory military duty for an aggressive, totalitarian government, ignorant to the progressive, modern thinking of the nation’s youth culture. Instead of focusing on the economic imbalance of Tehran and the injustices of a third world mentality, a trait that rendered “Crimson Gold” almost too realistic for its own good, the director is more concerned with the interactions between the male guards and the outspoken, dedicated detained women, who all share a love for the sport and sympathize with each other’s situation, but can’t quite cross gender stereotypes and government imposed regulations to make progress without fearing reprisal. This is a special film by a talented director who isn’t afraid to confront the backwards policies of his government but in a way that, though purposefully realistic with long takes and hand held cameras, remains engaging, funny, and entertaining.
Scarface ('32): Ben Hecht's thinly veiled take on Al Capone, given authenticity and bite from years as a Chicago newspaperman, is one of the most damning critiques of society ever put on screen, and thanks to an over-the-top performance by Paul Muni, and highly symbolic direction from master-in-the-making Howard Hawks, it may be the best criminal underworld film of all time. Muni is Tony Camonte, a violent psychopath who rises to the top of his South Side gang after murdering his boss, setting his sights on top dog Boris Karloff and the North Side bootleggers, but a brash cockiness and happy trigger finger is no match for his ultimate downfall, rabid jealously over the sexual escapes of his beloved sister, Ann Dvorak. Taken in context with its early '30's predecessors, “Little Caesar” and “The Public Enemy”, Muni's Camonte is the most mentally disturbed, spitting out broken English through a grotesque smirk; that his downfall comes because of an incestuous infatuation with his sister (as opposed to Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney's blind ambition to power), murdering her fiancée (George Raft), his best friend, in cold blood, speaks to the depravity of the character and what his world has made him. Hawks' most overt symbolism, the recurring “X” theme every time a character is about to be assassinated, is obvious but visually striking, as is the stunning opener, Tony's killing of his boss in shadows, with the camera traveling back and forth on the studio stage in a nearly five-minute unbroken shot, extremely rare for early sound cinema. So controversial in its day that producer Howard Hughes had to release the film without production code approval, and much to Will Hays and Joseph Breen's consternation, the film was a tremendous success, and remains an uncompromising American classic of psychopathic violent behavior and deranged capitalist determinism.
High and Low ('63): Following the two popular samurai comedies “Yojimbo” and “Sanjuro”, Akira Kurosawa and stars Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai head in a different direction with this taught police procedural (“Heaven and Hell” in the original Japanese title, adapted from the American novel “King's Ransom” by Ed McBain), about a shoe executive (Mifune) who becomes the target of an extortionist kidnapper who demands 30 million or the son of a chauffeur will be murdered. The hitch, the price is so enormous that it will all but ruin the wealthy exec, who had plans of a takeover with the money, but is it worth the price of an innocent child? Nakadai is the chief investigator who painstakingly tracks the clues after a money drop off on a speeding train, an exciting bit of aggressive multi-camera film-making that splits the film in two, following an hour long chamber drama that never leaves Mifune's mansion, to the concluding tour of Yokohama and the sweltering slums, nightclubs, and drug alleys the kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamakazi) haunts. Filmed in masterfully controlled long takes by two of the director's best cameramen, Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saito, and then seamlessly edited by Kurosawa into two distinct styles, corresponding to the two sections (A-B montage during the “heaven” chamber drama, surreal angles and documentary procedural during the Yokohama “hell” conclusion), the film fits perfectly into Kurosawa's early '60's domination of wide-screen composition and cutting sans master shot, which would reach its peak two years later with the jidai-geki “Red Beard”. In Kurosawa's canon “High and Low” best compares with the 1949 drama “Stray Dog”, which also critiques Japanese social structure within a police search, but where “Stray Dog” used the immediate post-war reconstruction and black market for a target, here Kurosawa sets his political sights on big business, kidnapping laws, and the obvious disparity between those who make the rules and those who toil in the muck unwilling to accept them, which makes this a film, rare in Kurosawa's cinema, without obvious heroes.
Max Payne ('08): I normally don't pay to see movies adapted from video games, generally I won't even use a free screening pass for them, but I was actually looking forward to this Mark Wahlberg vehicle, thanks almost entirely to a well made trailer that played to the film's dark visual strengths. The trailer did its job, got me in the theater, but unfortunately it betrayed the actual “vision” of the film, which is an incomprehensible mess about a detective (Wahlberg, giving the usual one note Wahlberg performance) who, while obsessing over the murder of his wife and child, uncovers a plot by a pharmaceutical giant to drug soldiers to make them feel invincible, the side effect, I think, being death by Valkyrie. Director John Moore, coming off two unnecessary remakes (“Flight of the Phoenix”, “The Omen”), is positively giddy with his murky style, which sometimes utilizes super slo-mo to pinpoint the trajectory of a single bullet, and focuses more on expressionistic lighting than in maintaining any comprehension in his plot (the performances are another thing altogether), so by the end, when Max is set for his ultimate revenge, we don't even know why he just killed the dude in the previous scene, or why Mila Kunis has a Russian accent one scene and a flawless American next. I can't say I haven't been duped by promising trailers in the past, and won't be again in the future, but this was pretty disappointing, renewing my lukewarm appreciation for Wahlberg and his choice of obvious paycheck projects, “The Departed” and a recent SNL cameo notwithstanding.
Les Carabiniers ('63): Godard continues his early career revisions of Hollywood genres with this intentionally baffling anti-war comedy, about two moronic peasants who join the King's army during wartime when promised power and wealth. Godard and Raoul Coutard film their disturbing satire on grainy, washed out film stock, so scenes of documentary war B-roll mix perfectly with the staged action of the plot, creating a cheap look that critics initially took as amateurish, but if you know Godard it's little more than a ploy to make the film as uncomfortable for a viewer as possible. It works wonders, not only is the film a devastating portrait of the stupidity of imperialism and war, as seen through countless shots of droning planes, executions, and firebombs, but the level of performance of the cast of unknowns, mixed with scenes that seem to never end, despite Godard's insistence on jump cutting to nowhere, create an altogether unsettling experience. When the farmers return from war with their “treasures”,their girlfriends are baffled to find it's nothing but a gigantic suitcase full of postcards, paraded out one after another in an endless montage of card slapping, suggesting that art, beauty, consumerism, natural wonders, and capitalism are nothing but paper facades when men kill each other for ideological sport. I've seen this film numerous times and can honestly say that I find it more fascinating every time I see it, despite the restlessness I feel during one rambling sequence after another; it's a testament to Godard's brilliance that by making a film that virtually no one can enjoy, his expression of dissent is as pure as cinema gets.
By Adam Suraf