Heaven (2002)

Here's another film that seems to have fallen through the floorboards and might well have perished there if it didn't have a rather strange combination of appealing elements.  Not quite a europudding despite being directed by German Tom Tykwer and being based on a screenplay by the late, great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, it stars Australian Cate Blanchett playing an Englishwoman in Rome against American Giovanni Ribisi playing an Italian, and the bulk of the dialogue is in Italian from a largely Italian cast.  Very weird.  She has attempted to blow up a drug lord responsible for the death of her husband and some students, but manages instead to kill four innocent bystanders including two children.  When arrested she insists on her right to testify in English, and Ribisi (who looks young enough to be her son) acts as her interpreter, falls in love with her, and engineers her escape.  Pitched somewhere between an arthouse exercise and a full-blown Hollywood thriller, the film suffers from this dual personality, yet still manages to hold one's attention despite its many illogicalities.  By the end, one wonders just why it was ever made, but if this was any criterion, the vast majority of movies would probably never see the light of day!

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

After the icky feeling of watching "Derailed" and a couple of other recent movies, I have calmed my soul with a surefire cure -- a gem from director John Ford.  This one is very definitely one of his "little" films and not really part of his Western genre, but it stars Henry Fonda with whom he shot a number of memorable films.  Fonda does indeed become the young Abraham Lincoln to the extent that the actor no longer looked like the Henry Fonda of the '30s, but a believable replica of the young president-to-be.  The tale covers his early days in Illinois when he was struggling to establish himself as a lawyer and takes the murder trial of two young homesteaders as its point of departure.  Despite evidence to the contrary, we never doubt for a minute that Fonda/Lincoln will succeed in getting them acquitted which he does brilliantly in his laidback, homespun manner.  His opponent in the courtroom is little Donald Meek -- one of those recognizable faces of the period who always gave the viewer his moneyworth -- playing a bumptious political lackey.  While not featuring the many mainstays of Ford's repertory company, other than the omnipresent Ward Bond, this film forms a definite part of the Ford canon in its evocative use of music and in its celebration of all things American.  A definite feel-good movie and just what the doctor ordered.

Derailed (2005)

What an absolutely hateful film -- a nasty story and a cheat with too many twists.  Happily-married Clive Owen meets happily-married Jennifer Aniston on a train when he has no money for the fare.  Their friendship blossoms and they reluctantly begin a physical affair in a seedy hotel; however before the relationship is consummated, violent crim Vincent Cassel bursts into the room, badly beating Owen and violently raping Aniston.  She dissuades him from reporting the incident to the police on the grounds that it would break up her marriage and cause her to lose her daughter, so Owen becomes the target for Cassel's increasingly large blackmail demands and his physical cruelty and threats.  Fearing for his wife and child (for whom the couple have been saving money for an expensive medical procedure), Owen caves in.  That is the gist of the tale, but far from the whole story which continues to get nastier and more outlandish.  Apart from the fact that Cassel makes a believable sadist (we have seen this before), I just couldn't buy the so-called chemistry between the other two leads.  Owen is an able actor, but not one that I look forward to watching and Aniston is limited in moving past her comedy roots, so all in all viewing this movie was a dispiriting experience.

Some catch-up on recent titles

I'm still trying to get my act together and have amongst others watched two recent films which were suprisingly grabbing and satisfying:

Transamerica (2005):  I expected this one to be worthwhile since I knew that Felicity Huffman in the lead had garnered a best actress Oscar nomination and an amazing job she did too.  She plays a male trans-sexual days away from his final operation when she is forced to go to New York to bail out the son he/she never knew existed (the result of a one-night stand many years ago).  In full female kit she presents herself as a social worker, successfully initially maintaining a strange but very definite female persona.  Huffman is so good in the part that one believes that the actor in question is really a somewhat effeminate man.  When the son comes to realise that his companion on their cross-country journey is not a "real" woman and when he ultimately learns that she is the father he never knew, it is more than he can take in.  However the film is ultimately about the bonds of family and acceptance and the tentative ending is therefore a totally believable one.

Two for the Money (2005):  I wasn't expecting any great shakes from this one, but found it completely watchable.  Al Pacino in his frenetic, over-the-top mode plays a betting broker who recruits Matthew McConaughey, an injured football player who is unlikely ever to return to the professional game, but who has a good record of predicting results for a local premium phone-in line.  Pacino sees him as the son he never had and his potential successor and is chuffed as can be when McConaughey's increasingly accurate predictions are netting a fortune.  However as the young man loses touch with his own personality, his predictions become increasingly erratic and Pacino stakes everything on his finding himself again.  I have never warmed particularly to McConaughey, but he did a good job here and I even wanted things to right themselves for the foul-mouthed Pacino.  Many people reckon him to be the best actor of his generation, over both DeNiro and Hoffman, but he is too often larger than life, too out of control.  Here that overplaying definitely worked to the film's advantage.

A few in-flight movies

Whatever other faults they may have as an airline, there is no disputing the fact that Virgin have the best entertainment system in the air, with a choice of dozens of movies from which to choose.  Since I seldom make a point of going out of my way to view the latest blockbusters, I could easily have chosen more films to watch from their selection than time allowed or that I was sufficiently awake enough to comprehend.  Mind you, as I've said before, seeing films formatted for a tiny screen is hardly the best viewing experience, but at least it gives me a taste for those that I might want to see again in better conditions.

First up was "A Prairie Home Companion" which I've reviewed below.  I was so taken with that one that I immediately purchased the DVD and have in fact watched it again on my return.  The only other one that I really look forward to seeing again is "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (2006).  I probably missed great chunks of this one, but since I found the first film in the series a delightful romp and since like many others I am a big Johnny Depp fan, I look forward to watching this one in its entirety soon.  Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom leave me indifferent, but Bill Nighy with his tentacled beard was good fun and much of the action was both amusing and inventive.  The critics may have hated it, but there is good reason that it made as much money as it has.

Borat... (2006):  Now this is a film that I may well see again, but not necessarily through choice.  I have read so many reviews claiming that it is the funniest film ever and that one can not avoid breaking up with laughter.  Not!  It is what I would call the comedy of embarrassment and while I may have grinned slightly a few times, I squirmed more frequently as Sacha Baron Cohen did his shtick and showed up the naivete of his clueless victims.  It is all very cleverly done, but it's not my idea of funny by any means.

New Police Story (2004): I watched this one since I have always been a keen Jackie Chan fan and this is his most recent actually made in Hong Kong, where he is still a very big deal.  As always he was very watchable and it is obvious that he was attempting to broaden his acting chops now that he is well into his fifties.  He plays a police superintendent who goes off the rails after his entireteam is slaughtered and who then must pull himself together to bring the baddies to justice.  It was all very professionally put together, but the script was something between weak and feeble and it just wasn't as much fun as Jackie's best action spectaculars.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

Physically I'm back, but mentally I am still on some distant plateau, especially since I have popped over to Belgium before dealing with my transatlantic jetlag.  So I'm way behind in keeping things up to date.  I will probably write about the dubious pleasures of in-flight movies on the next entry or two, but first wanted to get down a few reactions to Robert Altman's last movie.

Those of you who have been paying close attention -- which of course means all of you -- will recall that Altman was one of my movie gods and that I mourned his passing a few months back.  His last film seems to me an appropriate swansong and in fact one could probably write an interesting thesis on the last movies of aging master directors, Kurosawa's "Madadayo" and Huston's "The Dead" spring to mind.  Without perhaps realising it, all of these are contemplations on mortality -- exuberant celebrations of life, with the underlying understanding that all things pass.  Unfortunately!  This film takes its title from Garrison Keillor's weekly radio show from St. Paul, Minnesota, where the acts and the homespun philosophy seem to exist in a time warp of their own.

Altman has always been best known for his high-powered ensemble casts and this movie is no exception.  As singing duos, we have Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin plus Woody Harrelson paired with John C. Reilly.  In addition there are Keillor himself, Kevin  Klein, Tommy Lee Jones, Lindsay Lohan, and Virginia Madsen playing a mysterious woman who may well be the Angel of Death.  Add to this mix some lesser-known but familiar faces plus the actual musicians and sound-effects men from the show. The old-time music is wonderfully performed and Meryl Streep gives an absolutely knock-out performance as half of a sister team (and Tomlin is no slouch either); having found her hard to take in the past, she is really beginning to grow on me (I guess I'm getting soft around the edges).  Harrelson and Reilly add a leavening of corny but amusing humour and even Lohan gave a more than game singing performance.

I wish I still had my new Altman movies to look forward to, but this was a good a one as any to add to his memorial viewings.

If You Could Only Cook (1935)

Honestly, I don't dislike every movie that I watch, although I seem to be specialising in fairly negative reviews of late, but a lot of them just don't bear thinking about.  For example yesterday I actually saw five (yes five) films which is a bit much even for me, but the early screwball film named above was the only one to leave me feeling happy.  It's a fairly obscure one but no less jolly for that.  What we have is the very dapper Herbert Marshall (the only leading man of the '30s with one leg -- he lost the other in the War -- not that you would ever know!) playing a very rich and very socially-connected engineer about to marry for convenience meeting the very poor Jean Arthur on a park bench.  Pretending to be as down and out as she -- this was the tail end of the Great Depression -- they decide to pose as a married couple to get a position as a butler and a cook.  That's the whole story, apart from how they end up in a household of crooks and how, of course, they end up together against all odds.  Being just into the Hays era of censorship, there is a ridiculous amount of business concerning the fact that their staff quarters has only one bed, but Marshall is the perfect gentleman if not quite the perfect butler.  And, oh yes, as it happens Arthur is an excellent cook.  Coming in at under seventy minutes, this is the perfect pick-me-up among a sea of dross.

I'm off to New York again soon for one of my bi-annual trips, so there are unlikely to be any new entries between now and my return later in the month.  See you then...

 

The Last Embrace (1979)

Revisiting Hitchcock homage movies is not always the happy experience that can be found with director Brian de Palma.  This Jonathan Demme film (he subsequently made far more interesting ones) is very definitely sub-Hitchcock.  Roy Scheider plays a FBI (or CIA) agent who tries to return to his work after spending some time in a sanitarium occasioned by the murder of his wife on his last job.  He seems completely paranoid and is convinced that someone is trying to kill him -- and someone is, but not his puppetmaster nor his grudgy brother-in-law as we are meant to think.  The first half of the film is largely a collection of red herrings, rather than McGuffins.  The real mystery is about why someone has sent him a death threat written in Hebrew and who is trying to punish the descendents of early 20th Century Jewish whoremasters in New York City.  The unveiling of the real culprit comes as not much of a surprise nor was the denouement at Niagara Falls much of a tour de fource.

Becoming Jane (2007)

Ho hum!  I had all I could do to stay awake during the preview of this "heritage" movie and must admit to dozing off on and off during the very tedious two-hour proceedings.  The rather peculiar premise of this movie is that the authoress Jane Austen could not possibly have written six classic novels before dying at age 41 if she had not experienced a great romance in her youth.  Even more peculiar is the choice of American Anne Hathaway to play Jane.  Now she is quite acceptable in light American fluff but why the hubris of having her play a daughter of the English vicarage is beyond me -- is it just because Renee Zellweger and Gwyneth Paltrow have trod this path previously?  Frankly I did not feel that she was up to the task and her gawky peformance could have been played by any number of actresses.  Nor was I terribly taken with flavour of the month James McAvoy as the object of her frustrated attraction, especially when she could have had that dishy Laurence Fox.  And for once the supporting players, aka "national treasures" Julie Waters and the great Maggie Smith, did not save the day and I was sad to see the late, great Ian Richardson in what must have been his last film performance (wasted here). One can but wonder why anyone thought it might be a good idea to make this movie even if it was lovingly filmed.  As I say, ho hum!

Joint Security Area (2000)

This was one of the first films by Korean director Chan-Wook Park to be shown in the West, but I only came to it after seeing his "vengeance trilogy" movies.  It is probably just as well, since if I had not thought that the later films were something special, I might not have chosen to see this soldier story.  It is not a war film as such (which is just as well from my point of view, since that is my least favourite genre) but it is a story of the war between ideologies and the tragedy that this can create.  Effectively it focuses on the soldiers from both the South Korean and the North Korean armies who patrol the no-man's land of the Joint Security Area between the two countries.  After two North Koreans are found murdered on their side of the border, we and the U.N. inspectors need to solve the mystery of their death.  One of these was a simple soldier whom we have come to know and who together with his shift partner has become friendly with two of their South Korean counterparts.  Against all regulations they socialise and begin to realise that they have much in common as human beings.  They are all at heart still boys but the powers that be have so shaped them that  tragedy inevitably follows.  All four actors were familiar to me from various other Korean films I've seen over the last few years and all of them were successful in convincing me that war and ideological hatred is a true waste of time.  But people never learn, do they?

The Untouchables (1987)

It's the best part of twenty years since I last thought about this film and it didn't rank high in my memory, largely because I could never understand the appeal of the very, very average abilities of Kevin Costner.  As far as I was concerned, he had made one splendid film -- "Field of Dreams" -- and his later epics were little more than self-indulgent messes.  However I thought it worthwhile to have another gander at this movie since it really has so many other factors going for it in its favour which just about compensate for the woodenness of its star. For a start it is a Brian De Palma concoction which means it is flashily put together with quirky visuals and with a heavy dose of gory violence.  This director has always been one to pay homage to other directors, most usually Hitchcock, but he certainly dresses these "steals" in his own style.  I did think that the Odessa Steps pastische (from Potemkin) was probably a bit over the top, but it was amusingly done and cleverly incorporated.

Other pluses are a pretty sharp Mamet script and a super Morricone score.  On top of this one has Sean Connery in Oscar-winning support as a Chicago-Irish cop (with Connery's usual Scottish inflection) and another favourite of mine, Charles Martin Smith, as part of Costner's team.   When they both were killed, the film lost much of its heart.  I am a little indifferent to Robert de Niro, here playing Al Capone, but he brought a smarmy reality to the role.  Best of all was a juicy part for the very strange-looking Billy Drago (one of my top villains) playing Capone's pet hitman.  So all in all, it was worth putting up with  Costner for the various other attractions on display; maybe Elliot Ness was also a bit of a stick!

 

 

American Dreamz (2006)

Is it possible for a film to be pretty broadly derided yet still provide an entertaining 100-odd minutes?  In this instance, the answer is yes.  Written, produced, and directed by Paul Weitz (half of the brothers' team), the movie's potshots at TV reality talent shows hit a number of amusing targets, helped greatly by a better cast than one might expect.  Hugh Grant is the basically nasty host whom one can't help loving, always looking for a gimmick to find "freaks" for his show to keep up the viewing figures (like pitting a Hassidic Jew against an Arab and inventing a poor white-trash background for aspirant singer Mandy Moore).  I personally found the movie sharply written and observed and even the comic-book Arab villains were presented with some affection.  The real stand-out for me, however, was Dennis Quaid as a dimbo, himbo recently re-elected US President with more than a touch of the Bushes about him.  Throw into the mix Willem Dafoe as the President's puppet-master and Marcia Gay Harden as Quaid's equally challenged wife, plus Chris Klein as Moore's soldier "hero" boyfriend (having been wounded after approximately five minutes in Eye-raq).  Bad taste has its appeal at times -- or maybe one just has to be in the right mood to savour it.

 

Reunion in Vienna (1933) and Girl Crazy (1943)

It's back to my self-created matinees of Golden Oldies to keep me in the mood for continued watching.  Neither of these films fall into the category of unmissable classics, but both have at least one special thing to recommend them.  In the case of "Reunion in Vienna", this is again the very wonderful John Barrymore.  Based on a Robert E. Sherwood play that was probably already dated when the movie was made, he plays a banished Hapsburg prince looking to renew one romantic night with his old flame (and now-married) love, Diana Wynyard.  They do spend the night, but in a very bowdlerized '30s way, whereas the play was probably rather more explicit.  For once certain favourite character actors did not actually add to my enjoyment, since both Henry Travers and May Robson came across a little too strident; but with Barrymore at his most winning, who cares!

As for "Girl Crazy" the whole point of this film is to see the many muscial numbers created for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, both at their young and exuberant best.  Add to that the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and the splendid final production number directed by the inimitable Busby Berkeley, that's quite enough to warrant viewing the movie again and again.  Forget about the story of playboy Rooney being banished to a failing male college in the wild west and how he and Miss Garland combine to save the day; just sit back and enjoy the musical treat.

When Otar Left (2003)

This is yet another film that I'd heard good things about and where I more or less knew the whole story, so big surprises were unlikely.  The Otar of the title is the beloved son of a Georgian (that Georgia as part of old Russia, not the deep South of the USA) matriarch who has been working illegally in Paris for the last few years.  The highlights of her existence, to say nothing of her daughter and grand-daughter who live with her, are his letters (occasionally with a little bit of money) and his phone calls.  When the younger two women receive word of Otar's death in an accident on a building site, they can not bring themselves to break the older woman's heart and create the deception that he is still alive by faking letters from him.  The interplay amongst these three generations of women with their own hang-ups and needs is the nub of the film.  One just knows that the deception will eventually collapse, especially when the old woman sells her precious library to fund a trip to Paris for the three of them, to again see Otar before she dies.  How she discovers the truth and deals with it, protecting her daughter and grand-daughter is the unexpected turn, as is the final leap to freedom by the youngest of the trio.

All three actresses were fine, but particular praise must go to Esther Gorintin who was playing a seventy-something, but was actually ninety when this film was shot.  The stubborness mixed with the resilience of age shone from her every word and movement and made what might have been a very "little" film something somewhat more special.