#63: Southland Tales (2006) October 11, 2008
Posted by badblokebob in : Comedy, Drama, Thriller, Fantasy, Sci-fi, 2000s, 2 stars, 2008, Mystery, films about films , add a comment2006 | Richard Kelly | 139 mins | DVD | 15 / R
- confusing mess? or profound experience?
I won’t go into my full “how I discovered Donnie Darko” spiel [save that for whenever I finally watch the Director’s Cut!], but ever since I saw Richard Kelly’s first writing/directing effort way back on its original UK release I’ve been waiting eagerly for his second film. It’s a testament to the negativity of the reviews it received — and, perhaps, the influence of reviews in general — that I skipped Southland Tales at the cinema, left it five months after release before getting it on DVD… and even then it was only a rental. [something about “I will be buying it” or “I won’t be buying it”, or “But will I be buying it?” and answer at the end (definitely the latter if i want to say “it’s rubbish, but i’ll buy it anyway”-kinda-thing)]
At some point, Kelly split his story into six parts and, in a Star Wars-like move, the film was to be Parts 4-6, while the first three would be told in accompanying graphic novels. “The film will work fine without reading them,” he said (I paraphrase here), “but reading them will lead to a deeper experience.” Southland Tales: The Movie begins with a long recap of events from these books, going so far as to include images from their art. “Oops”?
You have to wonder, if you switched “Directed by Richard Kelly” for, say, “Directed by David Lynch”, would the critics’ reviews have suddenly jumped up a star or two? [some of it is certainly very Lynchian in feel — not a normal film with bemusing aspects, like Donnie Darko, but an all-out muddled weird-fest]
** raises the question, should you ever have to go further (e.g. reading companion books, comics, websites, etc) to understand a film? Yes and no. If it’s consciously part of a wider ‘experience’, labelled and marketed as such, then why not? But if it’s sold as a film in its own right — or, at least, potentially in its own right (as this was) — then it should really work that way too.
i thought, with respect to the film’s crazy half-constructed mess of half-ideas, i’d copy&paste my notes rather than a normal review. so at least that’s one answer at the end for you. except this bit wound up in the middle
when it was originally conceived, it was set a couple of years in the future; now, it’s just set ‘now’; and soon, of course, it will be set in a fictional past — the copyright year on the film is 2005; it’s credited as 2006 on IMDb (which is when it turned up at Cannes); it was finally released in 2007; and it’s set in 2008
I really wanted to like Southland Tales, in spite of the critical mauling it received, and because I loved Donnie Darko and actually enjoyed Domino too (which Kelly wrote). Maybe — maybe — with time to invest in reading the prequel graphic novels, and exploring whatever official sites or crazy fan theories may be out there on the web, I could get more from this film. Personally, I don’t have that kind of time to invest right now, but I might give it a shot sometime. Until then, it will just remain a largely disappointing mess.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405336/faq
this is the way the review ends, not with a bang but with a whimper
2/5
#62: Agatha (1979) October 8, 2008
Posted by badblokebob in : Drama, 3 stars, 1970s, British films, 2008, true stories, Mystery , add a comment1979 | Michael Apted | 100 mins | TV | PG / PG
There are no giant wasps in sight as Vanessa Redgrave’s Agatha Christie goes missing for eleven days in December 1926, and Dustin Hoffman’s journalist tries to track her down. While the frame of the story is true, the reasons behind Christie’s disappearance, and what occurred during it, aren’t known — which makes it fertile ground for speculation. Sadly, a fantastical plot about jewel thieves and shapeshifting aliens is much more exciting than the down-to-earth mystery we’re offered here.
It’s easy to see the attraction of Christie’s disappearance — it’s a real-life mystery about arguably the greatest mystery author ever, with enough unusual events surrounding it to make it extra suspicious and a long enough gap for something significant to have happened. But while the idea is initially exciting, when it comes to retelling it there isn’t a great deal there — the facts of her disappearance are just the ‘before & after’, amounting to little more than an abandoned car, an assumed name and some amnesia. Unless one invents something to fill those missing days, there’s little to tell (she went to a hotel and forgot what happened, essentially) — so, of course, this film fills in the gap. With a murder mystery, naturally. Sort of, anyway.
To be honest, I found it a tad confusing for the most part. While the initial setup is well handled, showing what drives Christie to run away (consciously or not) and the beginning of the police search, it begins to flounder once the plot slides into its fully fictional phase. Hoffman’s journalist, who had been hoping to interview Christie, manages to stumble across her at the hotel, where he pretends not to know who she is, while she… has health treatments… It’s only at the conclusion, when Christie’s plan begins to come together, that one realises there was a plan at all. It’s a shame the revelation comes so late because it’s actually not that bad a plot, and makes for quite a neat and almost plausible (providing you can accept Christie as a potential murderess (sort of)) explanation for everything.
The performances do nothing to raise the film. Redgrave is lumbered with little to do, mostly wandering around looking dazed. Her performance is decent but the material she has is lacking. Hoffman, on the other hand, is just flat, while Timothy Dalton’s sneering Colonel Christie sadly barely features. On a more technical level, the police investigation subplot is disappointingly forgotten halfway through, and everything is shot with too little light. Sometimes the latter is effective, such as during a train journey where occasional flashes of light illuminate Christie’s uncomfortably blank face, but at other times it merely obscures events. (It’s possible this is just the print, of course.)
Christie’s disappearance remains a fascinating mystery, though in all likelihood the true causes were either very internal or mental health related — not the easiest thing to depict in a movie, especially when your audience is likely expecting a thriller. Agatha has a game stab at weaving an interesting tale into the gaps in the facts, but by the end I was wondering if a straightforward biopic mightn’t have been a better idea.
#61: Road to Singapore (1940) October 5, 2008
Posted by badblokebob in : Comedy, Musical, Romance, 3 stars, 1940s, 2008 , 1 comment so far1940 | Victor Schertzinger | 85 mins | VHS | U
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby star as a pair of young(ish) playboy sailors who run away from responsibility and family expectations in this comedy that launched the perennially popular Road to… series, which would spawn six sequels over the next 22 years.
Rather than a “comedy”, Road to Singapore might best be described as a “variety film” — it offers a mix of comedy, excitement, romance and song, a selection of entertainment that is more often provided by a few hours of TV these days. While it’s predominately light-hearted, the overall air is still more serious than that of the one other Road to… film I’ve seen, Road to Morocco: the plot seems to have been the film’s starting point, rather than an afterthought to connect the appropriate set pieces, and a couple of fight scenes are not wholly comedic in their choreography.
Unfortunately, in spite of this, there’s nothing here that’s as memorable as in Morocco. Bob and Bing are a great double act, undoubtedly carrying the film, but while it starts well enough it loses it as it goes on — even at a brief 85 minutes, it begins to drag early in the second half. It’s also worth noting that much of it is incredibly dated now, peppered with things like blacked-up natives (and our heroes blacking up to fit in) and the “good little housewife” routine. This is more an observation than a criticism — it’s very much a film of it’s time.
It might also be worth noting that, while I found …Singapore reasonably entertaining, the friend I was watching with — who has enjoyed several other entries in the series, but had yet to see this — found it lacking. The score, however, is solely my own.
#60: The Wizard of Oz (1939) September 28, 2008
Posted by badblokebob in : Musical, Fantasy, adaptations, 4 stars, 1930s, 2008 , add a comment1939 | Victor Fleming | 98 mins | DVD | U / G
The Wizard of Oz is one of those films whose reputation unavoidably precedes it. Considering it’s nearly 70 years old now, that’s a reputation long in the making.
The biggest problem with this is that, coming to it for the first time as an adult, one knows just about everything that’s going to happen. There are still some gaps to fill for the uninitiated — it takes a surprisingly long time to get to Oz, and a surprisingly quick time from there to the Wizard — but it mostly feels oddly disconcerting: it’s such a well-known tale, even to those of us who hadn’t seen it, that having it played out in full, complete with bits one didn’t know about, is strange. That’s not really anything to do with the film, of course, just my personal impression.
My other observations amount to little more than “the second half is surprisingly light on musical numbers” and “the transition from sepia to full colour is still highly effective and glorious to watch” — as the (very interesting) restoration featurette on the DVD details, it literally looks better now than it ever has before. Beyond that, I had the sense that the film would exert a greater sense of wonder over the very young. That’s appropriate enough, but it means that, coming to it a tad later in life, it’s not a film I’m ever likely to really love.
#59: Cathy Come Home (1966) September 23, 2008
Posted by badblokebob in : Documentary, Drama, 5 stars, 1960s, British films, 2008 , 3 comments1966 | Ken Loach | 77 mins | DVD | PG
Technically a one-off TV drama from the BBC’s Wednesday Play strand, Cathy Come Home more than deserves consideration as a film in its own right, due to it being an early work of director Ken Loach, the fact that it’s shot largely on film using relatively experimental storytelling techniques, and also considering the huge social impact it had.
The piece tells the story of Cathy, a young woman who leaves behind a comfortable life for the excitement of the big city. There she falls in love with Reg, who she marries and has children with. But, through a series of incidents and accidents — most of them no fault of their own — Cathy, Reg and the children wind up without a house, and then gradually slide down the scale toward homelessness. In this respect the film can remind us of a facet of the ‘good old days’ that is often overlooked when our collective memory of the ’60s is made up of James Bond, the Beatles, and programmes like Mad Men. The drama also had a big impact at the time: 12 million watched, it boosted the newly-formed charity Shelter, led to debates in parliament, and, eventually, changes to the law.
Loach structures the film cleverly: Cathy and Reg’s slide into poverty is all too believable, while at the same time allowing the viewer to see a cross section of the homeless experience. He employs a documentary style throughout, so effectively that it still fools some into believing the whole piece is factual. In fact there’s a mix of interviews with those really suffering such situations, and performed scenes that are shot and cut disjointedly, as if they were observed rather than written. While some of the performances give the game away, they’re never poor enough to really detract. The downside of this style is that the storyline isn’t always clear. I’m still not sure if it was Cathy’s children that died in the caravan fire or someone else’s, just one among a few such examples. While ambiguity is no bad thing — the cruelly unresolved ending being a case in point — it sometimes just seems like a hole in the narrative. However, these moments are relatively minor, and certainly don’t dint the film’s impact.
Cathy Come Home is a powerful piece of work; an undoubted television classic that (bar a few technically-incongruous studio scenes shot on video) wouldn’t look out of place on a big screen. As an important and timely history lesson, a challenge to prejudices that some of us may hold, and a reminder of how close most of us are to such a fate — especially right now — it remains essential viewing. Sadly, I suspect it always will.
#58: Texas Across the River (1966) September 20, 2008
Posted by badblokebob in : Comedy, Western, 4 stars, 1960s, 2008 , 1 comment so far1966 | Michael Gordon | 101 mins | DVD | PG
Texas Across the River hardly seems to be a well-remembered film — the only DVD edition available (as far as I can tell) is a legally-produced DVD-R, clearly in the wrong aspect ration, purchasable here. (At the time of publishing the site is down, but I’ll give the link in case it ever returns.) I only come to see it because a friend happened to have a VHS as a child, enjoyed it back then, and managed to track down that DVD.
And actually, it’s a fairly entertaining film. Little more than a comedic Western runaround, it sees Alain Delon — as a Spanish nobleman — trying to get to Texas to escape the Cavalry (led by Jim Phelps himself, Peter Graves) and marry his betrothed. On the way he enlists the help of Dean Martin and his Indian sidekick. Hilarity ensues! OK, so it’s probably funnier if you watch it before your age hits double figures, but it still has enough entertaining moments and decent gags that its complete expungement from almost anyone’s consciousness seems unwarranted.
I don’t expect it’ll ever undergo some miraculous revival (it’s not that good), and perhaps is of primary interest as a curio for fans of Dean Martin, Alain Delon or Mission: Impossible, but it made me laugh — and, as I believe I’ve said before, that’s all I really ask of a comedy.
#57: Flushed Away (2006) September 16, 2008
Posted by badblokebob in : Animation, Comedy, 2000s, 4 stars, Adventure, British films, 2008 , add a comment2006 | David Bowers & Sam Fell | 81 mins | DVD | U / PG
Aardman Animations, the Bristol-based company most famous for Wallace & Gromit and Creature Comforts, branch out into CGI for the first time with this tale of rats trying to save the sewers of London. CGI rats? Yes, thoughts of Ratatouille are inevitable. Can Aardman beat Pixar at their own game? You might be surprised…
The primary reason for comparison here, as mentioned, are the rats. Despite Pixar’s stated intention to redeem rats in the eyes of viewers — to turn them from vermin into lovable little fluffy things, essentially — I felt the same about bloody rodents at the end of Ratatouille as I did at the start. Here, however, they’re Disneyfied (oh the irony) — where Pixar had cartooned versions of the real thing, Aardman have given them a human shape. It’s surely this disjunction from reality that makes them more likable, but it does mean there’s never that distracting “but they’re vermin” impulse. They’re humanisation is helped by the performances of a star-studded cast, including Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet amongst the ratty voices. Ian McKellen is a fabulously dastardly villain, ably supported by a pair of comedy henchman… and Jean Reno as a French frog. Yep, the humour is that British.
One thing Pixar unquestionably still excel at is the actual animation, however. Ratatouille is gorgeous to watch and will take some effort to beat; Flushed Away, on the other hand, doesn’t really come close to Pixar’s earlier efforts, never mind Ratatouille’s artistry. It’s mostly passable, especially once the action migrates to the mini-London in the sewers, but at other times it looks little better than a computer game. The second biggest mistake (I’ll get to the worst in a minute) is opening the film in a pristine up-market house — presumably it was an artistic choice to have it so tidy and clean, but this has the unfortunate side effect of highlighting the animation’s plainness right from the start. Once the story moves underground the level of detail improves, but it takes a little while to get there.
A bigger error was made with the lip-synching, however, and obviously this dogs the film throughout. Aardman consciously designed the characters’ mouth movements to imitate the clay animation the company usually employs (Flushed Away is CG because of the volume of water featured, an element too complex to achieve in stop motion). Instead of invoking that stop motion feel it just looks cheap and underdone — such jerkiness is easily ignored as part of the technique when viewing clay animation, but there’s no need or excuse for it in CGI. Ultimately it looks like the animators were lazy or the rendering has skipped frames, and is frequently distracting.
It’s possible to put the disappointing quality of the animation aside though, because the script’s a good’un. Like the animation it doesn’t really get going til we’re flushed into the sewers, but once there it’s pleasantly witty, full of good one-liners and clever visual gags. The latter includes a good line in intertextuality, with entertaining and easily-noticed references to Finding Nemo, X-Men and others, including numerous nods to Wallace & Gromit. They don’t dominate, but their variety makes for a nice bit of I-spy for both kids and adults of varying degrees of film-buffery.
Despite drawing those inevitable comparisons, Flushed Away is really a very different beast to Ratatouille. Pixar’s effort is, for want of a better word, artistic; Flushed Away is simply a family-orientated slice of adventure-comedy… rather of the kind you might expect Pixar to produce. Aardman’s initial CG effort is not better or worse than ‘the other CG rat flick’, but it is perhaps more like what you — or, at least, kids — would expect. With a starry cast, strong script and good sense of visual comedy, Flushed Away manages to overcome its lower production values to create an above-average piece of entertainment. And that’s, as Wallace would say, cracking.