If you men only knew…
No cinema visits this week.
Avalon (2000)
This film may be too much of a secret. A lot of barriers have been placed in front of it to stop it appearing too commercial or mainstream. All of the dialogue is in Polish, all of the post-production was completed in Japan. It’s a beguiling mystery, a mannered reflection on the nature of games and reality, life as a game, the kind of film Andrei Tarkovsky might have made if he’d lived longer, lightened up a little, and bought a PlayStation. The director Mamoru Oshii is probably an unfamiliar name, but he’s the guy Jim Cameron and the Wachowski brothers look to for inspiration because they treasure his point of view.
Corpse Bride (2005)
The stop motion is almost too exquisite. The whole thing is a visual fest of design and innovation. Filmed alongside Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), this is as pure as Tim Burton gets, a dark sensibility smuggled into a children’s film.
Tarzan (1999)
Disney seemed to have got the whole animation thing completely worked out here. The heavy duty implementation of the Deep Canvas software had allowed their 2D painters to paint backgrounds in 3D, and animators have always been able to move their characters through 3D space. It has catchy songs from Phil Collins in Peter Gabriel mode, a fantastic vocal performance from Minnie Driver that alone is worth the price of admission, and a Tarzan who actually seems to have been raised by apes, rather than selected to play the role because he won a muscle building contest. Yet, in a few short years, Disney would be firing animators and switching to CGI, having dropped the ball completely and seen Pixar pick it up and run with it, scoring touchdown after touchdown. You know, there is a reason they call these films animated classics, and it isn’t just empty marketing hyperbole.
The Apartment (1960)
When was the last time a Hollywood actor played as weak and passive as Jack Lemmon does in this Billy Wilder film? As the story proceeds, you find yourself willing him to finally take a stand, admit his love for Miss Kubelik, and tell his boss to take his job and shove it. Billy Wilder, knowing this is what we want, knowing this is what Lubitsch would do, denies us this for as long as he can.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
The majority of Americans who’ve seen this film have not of course seen exactly what Stanley Kubrick wanted them to see, which is pretty ironic given the film’s title. During the party scene at the mansion, a number of CGI figures were superimposed over some of the more, shall we say, athletic performances. This, as Roger Ebert and others have pointed out, is a desecration of Stanley Kubrick’s work, memory, and reputation. The film runs two and a half hours and could probably have benefited from the removal of a good twenty minutes or so. The pace would then be not quite as glacial as it is. But Kubrick died and it was not to be. A lot of people concentrate on how good Nicole Kidman is in this film (and it’s damned difficult to take your eyes off her; back to the title again) but I think Tom Cruise actually delivers as well, it’s some of his best work on film. Arthur Schnitzler’s original novel Traumnovelle appeared in the 1920s alongside the work of his Viennese compatriot, Sigmund Freud, though their views on sexuality are quite different. In fact, this film has more in common with Fight Club (1999) than might first appear. It too is playing with fantasy and reality. After all, how much of what happens to Bill Harford on his night on the town is a male fantasy? How much has he been pushed into imagining/living these situations by his reaction to his wife’s female fantasy? The female fantasy that could have so easily ruined all of their lives if enacted in reality, just as the male fantasy threatens to do.
The Proposition (2005)
It’s taken him twenty years but director John Hillcoat has finally made a good film, and it’s an Australian Western. Discovering a pretty much untapped resource is a film director’s dream, and here Hillcoat has brought to life a forgotten episode in Australia’s history. Of course, it had been deliberately forgotten. Although Nick Cave’s script is fiction, a lot of the darkest deeds contained in his screenplay are, as they say, based on true events. The Wild West in America was a fairly out there place, but the real Wild West in Australia was every bit as crazy as a Spaghetti Western like Django (1966) or the films of Sergio Corbucci.