Maybe now is the time to write something about the first two films seen at this year's London Film Festival. I shall start with "Glory to the Filmmaker!" (2007) from ppp favourite Takeshi Kitano. Unfortunately this was a major disappointment. It's his first feature-length offering since the very peculiar "Takeshis" which I saw at the festival two years ago and which could only really appeal to his die-hard fans. This one was more of the same, only more self-indulgent and I hope it does not mark the end of a brilliant career. In the previous movie, he played himself and a doppelganger to send up his career; in this one his alter-ego is a blow-up doll in his image and neither of them betray any emotion. The gist of the film is that while it may be time for him to try some new genres, the pastiche movies he envisions range here from bad to awful, with only the very occasional laugh. I shall keep my fingers crossed for his film-making future, since previously anything he turned his hand to had a great deal to offer as great entertainment and imaginative cinema.
Now to the above movie from director David Cronenberg which was the kick-off film and probably one of his most commercial. In a way this is something of a pity, since one of the things that differentiated Cronenberg was the quirkiness of his subject matter and his approach. Despite the exoticism of having a film about the Russian Mafia in London, this movie was about as mainstream as any thoughtful modern film and despite its technical virtues, something of a potboiler. After their brilliant cooperation on "A History of Violence", I somehow expected something more from the director's second film outing with Viggo Mortensen; however while the actor is very able in his role as a gofer for Armin Mueller-Stahl's big boss, something just did not quite click. I understand that Mortensen researched the role in some depth to play this very violent lead, but I came away feeling both exhausted and empty.
Maybe the idea of having a Danish-American, a German, and a Frenchman (Vincent Cassel as Stahl's psychotic son) playing three hard Russians just didn't really work. Throw an Australian, Naomi Watts as a hospital midwife, into the mix and one was left with something of a dog's dinner accent-wise. None of this is to say that I didn't like the film at all or that I didn't think it was a worthy effort from Cronenberg. What I am trying to get across is that I was hoping for so much more.
2 comments:
I liked a lot of Cronenberg's early offerings. Then he started taking himself too serious and he never managed to reproduce his early delights.
http://journals.aol.co.uk/acoward15/andy-the-bastard
How can you complain about accents when you are so endeared to the films of the
30s and 40s when accents were hardly ever in evidence in the leading roles (It
could be said that Meryl Streep has a lot to answer for!) in addition to which there
is probably more variation of accent within Russia than there is within the USA. I
enjoyed the film without being convinced of either the story or the motivation of the main characters: treat the whole thing as a rather violent thriller and it works.
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