October/November 2007: 20 Mini Reviews
November 7, 2007
The last twenty films I’ve seen.
Eastern Promises (’07): Canadian master David Cronenberg follows up his best film to date, 2005’s “A History of Violence”, with another graphic tale of family, violence, and loyalty, as Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel star as polar opposite thugs in London’s underground Russian mafia, helmed by Armin Mueller-Stahl’s aging don. Naomi Watts co-stars as a nurse who, through the diary of a mobster’s dead pregnant mistress, learns of the devastating cruelty put upon young immigrant girls sold into prostitution, and she’s fine as usual, but the film belongs to Mortensen, if not for the already legendary Turkish bath fight scene, which sates Cronenberg’s blood fetish, than for a sympathetic intensity that brings depth to a generally roughish role. This film was released too early in the awards season to probably warrant major nominations, but lets hope that doesn’t matter, it’s one of the best of the year, and confirms Cronenberg is on a major creative hot streak.
Ae Fond Kiss… (’04): Ken Loach brings his usual socio-realist bent to this provocative romantic drama, about an affair between an Irish Catholic school teacher and a Pakistani deejay, and all the familial and social ramifications that follow. Loach gives no easy answers, presenting both sides of the racial divide with equal sympathy and scorn, leaving us to decide what is right; love, religion, or deep-rooted family ties. Loach’s films are usually talky and heavy on the politics, and this is no exception, but the inclusion of some rather frank sex scenes makes it that much more refreshing.
Pride and Prejudice (’05): I’ve seen so many Jane Austen adaptations that sometimes they begin to blend in my memory, but rarely have I seen one that looks as stunningly rich, with a cast so perfectly suited to the famous material, than this adaptation from first time director Joe Wright, who instantly makes a name for himself with his gorgeous long takes and sweeping Stedi-cam shots. Sometimes it feels that the locations and the camerawork are so beautiful that it overwhelms the story, about the poor but proud Bennett family trying to marry off their eldest daughters to respectable candidates, but with a cast featuring Donald Sutherland as the loving Mr. Bennett, Brenda Blethyn as the harried Mrs. Bennett, and a radiant Keira Knightley as the heroine Elizabeth Bennett, you’ve got the best of both worlds; a beloved piece of literature that looks and feels as fresh as it did in 1813, and 1940, and 1995, and forever into eternity.
Women in the Dunes (’64): Eiji Okada, five years after “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, once again stars in a one-of-a-kind international art house sensation, this time as an entomologist kidnapped and forced to live in a sandpit with a lonely widow, in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s painstakingly aesthetic adaptation of Kobo Abe’s surreal novel. There’s an eroticism to the affair between Okada and Kyoko Kishida, covered in endless sand, hot and sticky, but Teshigahara and Abe’s study is less about sex and more about entrapment, both physical and psychological; an avant-garde modernist take on Sisyphus and his cursed boulder, transformed into endless waves of shifting, breathing sand.
Year of the Dog (’07): Anyone who has ever lost a cherished pet can sympathize with Molly Shannon in this comedy about a lonely woman and the death of her dog, but at that, anyone who has had their fill of precious independent comedies with little aesthetic qualifications and needlessly quirky characters, will quickly bypass that early sympathy for a kind of innocuous indifference. It’s good to see Shannon utilized less for her usual chaotic acrobatics, stemming still from her days on “Saturday Night Live”, and more for her actual acting talents, but her supporting players are too varied, and once we get over the initial sadness of the dog’s sudden death, it’s pretty much a pedestrian affair.
Away from Her (’07): File this one under “Who Knew”, young Canadian actress Sarah Polley writes and directs a perfectly composed elegy of ageing and marriage, with Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a couple suffering the progressively aggressive early stages of Alzheimer’s. Adapted from a short story by Alice Munro, Polley’s sensitive direction realistically portraits the struggles of watching a loved one slowly lose their mind, and the inevitable, painful decision of choosing full time nursing home care, where the separation from a longtime spouse is heartbreaking and awkward. Pinsent and Christie are a marvel as the separated couple, whose married life is explored not so much in flashbacks but in suggestions, and Polley, for all her youth, must have been paying attention to her directors, like Atom Egoyan and Michael Winterbottom, during her years growing up on screen.
Stranger than Paradise (’84): A landmark of independent cinema by the hipster king, Jim Jarmusch, following three drifters as they bound around New York, Cleveland, and Florida with little money, little prospects, and a radio filled with one improv classic by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Shot in black and white and composed entirely of short and long single takes, Jarmusch’s film isn’t so much a profound study of people trapped in a void, but a study of humanity as directly effected by it’s surroundings, with the poverty of a New York slum, the bitter cold of a Cleveland winter, and the strange kitsch of a Miami suburb playing as much a part in the story as does Jarmusch’s three memorable character actors, John Lurie, Eszter Balint, and Richard Edson, and that haunting Hawkins number. Recently released and restored for the first time on DVD by the Criterion Collection.
Broken Flowers (’05): One of Jim Jarmusch’s quintessentially episodic road trips, following a post middle age lothario on a quest to find the woman who may or may not have had his son twenty years earlier. The results are a mixed bag, as each encounter reveals either bitterness or nostalgia for a forgotten love, but as the puzzled Don Juan, Bill Murray follows “Lost in Translation” with another deadpan, pseudo-serious performance of much vulnerability and regret.
Coffee and Cigarettes (’03): A series of short conversations filmed over the years by Jim Jarmusch in stark black and white, this jumbled piece of eleven short films has about as many hits as misses, which means it’s only a marginal success. The best, a dead on Hollywood satire between Steven Coogan and Alfred Molina, or Cate Blanchett playing both a famous star and her jaded cousin (another perfect Hollywood moment), or the hilarious and awkward play between Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, are witty, ironic bits of modernist conversation, but the worst, a bizarre sci-fi bit between Jack and Meg White, or Bill Murray with members of the Wu Tang Clan, run afoul because of their weirdness, and lack of irony.
Michael Clayton (’07): Writer/director Tony Gilroy’s corporate thriller, about a big league law “fixer” who questions the ethics of his firm, and his job, when a friend goes nuts and ruins a multi-million dollar case, is the best of its kind since “The Insider”, and like Michael Mann’s tobacco-themed masterwork, it keeps its answers and judgments tightly controlled, all the way to the increasingly tense final moments. As the titular anti-hero, George Clooney proves yet again that he’s capable of anchoring an intense drama without the suave goofiness of his ‘Oceans’ films, and as the mentally unbalanced center of the controversy, Tom Wilkinson gives the performance of his career. Gilroy announces himself as a major talent with this directorial debut, one that should warrant multiple Oscar nominations, and is currently one of the five best films I’ve seen all year.
Robocop (’87): Peter Weller is the post-modern Iron Man in director Paul Verhoeven’s best American film, about a futuristic Detroit where a faceless corporation runs the police, and their solution for crime is a robot humanoid with a big gun. Science Fiction and bitterly dark corporate satire blend perfectly, along with first-rate action and some admittedly cheese dialogue, to create a cyberpunk B movie that went on to become a postmodernist landmark. 20 years later, Weller’s sympathetic performance as the trapped soul in the robot suit, and Verhoeven’s manic vision of an urban wasteland, still holds up as well as “The Terminator” and other ‘80’s films of its kind.
The War (’07): Ken Burns covers WWII the only way Ken Burns knows how, with hours and hours of painfully emotional interviews, endless reels of stock documentary footage, beautifully utilized still photography, and a knack for storytelling that puts a personal face on the most sweeping war in modern history. Using four American towns as his backdrop, Burns and his partner Lynn Novick tell the general, and well known, story of WWII from beginning to end, utilizing living participants, and the letters of some who didn’t survive, to create a 15 hour masterpiece that doesn’t just rehash for us such legendary subjects as the Bataan Death March, the Japanese American internment camps, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Holocaust, but digs deep into their psychological effect on the soldiers, and civilians who lived through them. Both devastatingly emotional and epic in scope, Burns can’t cover everything about this greatest of all wars, but what’s there is stunning to behold, and a fine tribute to everyone who lived, and the millions who died, over 60 years ago; the greatest generation indeed.
White Light, Black Rain (’07): Memorable documentary featuring modern day survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, telling in vivid detail of the initial impact, their radiation scarring, and the way Japanese society virtually shunned survivors in the years following the blast. The atomic bombings were an effective way for the Americans to end the war without having to actually invade Japan, but it was a brutal measure, and as we see from these series of personal interviews, the toll is still being felt, and will likely never stop.
Into the Wild (’07): A labor of love for Sean Penn, who directs and adapts Jon Krakauer’s famous non-fiction book into a film about personal freedom, the astonishing beauty of the natural world, and the lonely regret of a boy in way over his head. Emil Hirsch shares equal billing with Penn’s wondrous nature photography as Christopher McCandless, a recent college graduate who shucks off capitalism and responsibility to travel the country as a tramp, hiking with hippies, paddling the Colorado River, sleeping in homeless shelters, on his way to Alaska to live a life off the grid, if only it were that easy. Penn tells the story in two time frames, in Alaska, leading up to McCandless’ death, and pre-Alaska, dealing with his one-man journey, where he meets up with the likes of Catharine Keener, Vince Vaughn, and Hal Holbrook, in the films most moving segment, and his complicated upper class home life, where his parents’ constant bickering may have been a hinder in his plans to drop out of society. At nearly two and a half hours the film spends too much time mythologizing McCandless and not enough on what actually made him want to disappear, but we get the ultimate picture, and by the time he wastes away to nothing in his abandoned Alaska magic bus, the tragedy (and triumph) is lost on no one.
The Face of Another (’66): The third of four collaborations between novelist Kobo Abe and his friend, film director Hiroshi Teshigahara, is the strangest of the bunch, a modernist tale of identity and personal fraud, shot with enough doubles and symbols to make the most earnest Freudian scholar dizzy with theories. Tatsuya Nakadai plays a businessman whose face is so badly scarred he has to cover it with full bandages, until his doctor makes him a lifelike replica of another human face, to live a double life of reality and pretend. What we get is a film loaded with double meanings and visual suggestions to the Other Self, a doppelganger that only comes out when the alter ego is in danger of losing control.
No Limit (’06): Low budget documentary about a women who ropes her ex-husband into filming her attempts to score big in high stakes Omaha poker tournaments, in the guise of saving her fledgling production company. Her run of cards is particularly frustrating, but the interviews she and her partner get with top notch professionals along the way is impressive and informative. For poker buffs only, and at that, the kind of poker buff that enjoys the pain of others during a bad run, because we all know what it feels like when it’s in our corner.
Beauty and the Beast (’46): Jean Cocteau’s on set diary during the making of this one-of-a-kind masterpiece is undoubtedly one of the greatest portals into the mind of a master artist ever published, and the book befits the work; a highly important film for the immediate post war French film industry, made with a touch of surrealist poetry by a man who hadn’t made a picture, let alone an industry saving feature length narrative, in 15 years. Everything about this wonderful vision works, from the painstaking makeup work done to Jean Marais in portraying the complicated magical Beast, and the lovely Josette Day’s statuesque performance as Belle, to Cocteau’s brilliantly surreal moving statues and candelabras in the Beast’s castle, it’s all simply breathtaking. The Criterion DVD features a television special on the film’s anniversary and restoration, two scholarly commentary tracks, and Philip Glass’ alternate opera soundtrack, just a wealth of features for an all time classic.
Four Short Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (’53 – ’65): The bonus disk included in Criterion’s Teshigahara box set features a documentary on the relationship between the director and Kobo Abe, as well as four of the director’s early short subject films, some of which showcase his penchant for surrealist art and New Waveian editing techniques. “Hokusai” (’53) is about a legendary wood artist of the feudal ages; “Ikebana” (’56) details his father, Sofu Teshigahara, one of Japan’s leading ikebana revolutionaries; “Tokyo 1958” (’58) is pretty much Tokyo in 1958; and “Ako” (’65), the most detailed of the four, is about a teenage girl on the town with her friends after work, shot in black and white with much jump cutting and a mixture of documentary and staged footage, kind of like a Tokyo “400 Blows”. These aren’t the best features of the Teshigahara set, but they show the director’s growth as an editor and storyteller, and lead the way to “Pitfall” and “Woman in the Dunes” in the early ‘60’s.
San Francisco (’36): A year after “Mutiny on the Bounty”, Clark Gable shucked off the heroism of Fletcher Christian for his usual handsome cad, this time playing a saloon owner named Blackie Norton who falls for virginal songbird Jeanette MacDonald, but lets jealousy and a fear of commitment ruin both their lives. That, and the great earthquake of 1906, but in an MGM melodrama of this magnitude, you don’t need the earth to shatter, only Jeanette singing “San Francisco” half a dozen times, and Clark punching his best friend Spencer Tracy (as Father Tim), to create the necessary fireworks. Truth be told, Oscar nominee Tracy is the best thing about this film, MacDonald overdoes it, and Gable does little than a variation on the performance he’d been giving for nearly five years as MGM’s top earner, but the final half hour is a real doozy, and Gable’s comeuppance is well earned.
Triad Election (’07): Johnny To earned some of his best reviews in the west for this highly stylized gangster film, a sequel to his 2005 Hong Kong blockbuster “Election”, treading similar territory about a brutal gang war leading up to the Chairman elections of the famed mafia triad. The plot is incomprehensible, dizzy, and practically impossible to follow, but that doesn’t much matter, To’s visual style is masterful as always, and as the warring candidates, Simon Yam and Louis Koo exude fierce ruthlessness while ordering hit after hit.
by Adam Suraf