Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week. Maybe next week. The Lars Von Trier season continues. For nostalgia freaks out there, I watched both Breaking the Waves (1996) last week and The Idiots (1998) this week on video. Yes, actual VHS tapes. Since the image quality of these films isn’t that fantastic anyway, it didn’t really make much difference.

Riget II (1997)

Also following Twin Peaks, the second season of The Kingdom doesn’t match up to the first. There’s an unwillingness to play the horror straight any longer, and the show becomes too wacky for its own good. No wonder nobody was willing to back a third series and complete the story. This also mirrors Twin Peaks, which abandoned viewers in the Black Lodge with the notorious David Lynch directed episode 22 of season 2 (which may be, incidentally, one of the finest hours of television ever made).

The Idiots (1998)
Lars Von Trier likes to operate as a director on a film with a number of self-imposed rules. (This is played out to a greater extent in a film called The Five Obstructions (2003), which I have not yet seen.) The perhaps inevitable result of this series of rules was the Dogme Manifesto in 1995, which should be easy enough to find online if you’re interested. Tartan were nice enough to reprint it in full inside my copy of the VHS. The Dogme Manifesto generated an enormous amount of publicity and actually inspired a number of filmmakers worldwide to take up the gauntlet and give it a go. The first Dogme movie was Festen (1998) and The Idiots was the second. The Manifesto appeared just as CGI was on its first big upswing in the wake of Jurassic Park (1993), and the Manifesto called for a back to basics approach to filmmaking which cast aside all trickery and artificiality. Which is ironic because of course The Idiots is a highly tricksy and artifical movie, for all its claims to a lack of artifice. The film itself is at once both clumsy and obvious and fascinating and intense. Pretending to be retarded to highlight the hypocrisy of suburban bourgeois existence seems way too much like an idiotic adolescent prank (which may be the point). Cloaking your film in documentary realism (including interviews with the cast conducted in character by the director himself) doesn’t hide the very old-fashioned feel of the subject. There’s something very 60s about the commune set up by the idiots, and something very 70s about the way it all falls apart at the end.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

I don’t think you can trust a film buff who doesn’t like musicals. There’s singing, there’s dancing, there’s the two together in endless combinations, there’s music, there’s song, it’s all good. Musicals themselves however, at least in the West (nothing can stop Bollywood), hit something of a crisis point at the end of the 1960s. Chasing the success of The Sound of Music (1965), all of the major Hollywood studios embarked on a series of costly musicals, all of which tanked at the box office. For some years, even though musical was a dirty word, this didn’t stop musicals being made, and the more interesting ones all come from a similar place. They transform into self-reflexive meta-musicals; they are musicals about the possibility or not of making a musical in the modern world; they are films like All That Jazz (1979), One from the Heart (1982) and even Chicago (2002). Dancer in the Dark fits squarely in this tradition. Not only does it have the characters preparing an amateur stage production of The Sound of Music, it has a clip from 42nd Street (1933), and all of the musical numbers are filmed with 100 video cameras (an imposed Lars Von Trier rule, though he admits in the making of that he really needed 1000). The plot is one of blatant manipulation, and I guess it’s inevitable that this manipulation was also used by Von Trier to get Björk and the rest of the cast to the places they needed to reach. This was particularly hard on Björk, who’d only acted in music videos before this film and was accustomed to being in total creative control of all that she did.

Cold Mountain (2003)

I hated The English Patient (1996). It was a film that should have made you want to run off to the desert and have a mad, passionate affair with a mysterious stranger. Instead, you couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema. I’ve always felt that Anthony Minghella works much better in the crime genre. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) fitted him perfectly, a delightful throwback to the three episodes of Inspector Morse he wrote in the 1980s. It was with some trepidation then that I went to see Cold Mountain, which is a pretty good movie (I certainly liked it enough to buy it on DVD) and in any other year it might have won more than one Oscar. But the 2004 Oscar ceremony was the year of the hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) was a better film than anything else released in 2003.

No cinema visits this week and not many DVDs either. My excuse is that the first one is five hours long. It is, of course…

Riget (1994)

Also known as The Kingdom. And also known as Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, although as a longstanding Stephen King fan, I’ve spurned this American remake as I would spurn a rabid dog. In the wake of Europa (1991), Lars Von Triers’ self-conscious attempt to create a masterpiece, he decided instead to work on a supernatural TV series set in a soap opera style hospital and abandon excessive technique. Out went storyboards, back projection and actors as robots and in came hand held cameras, rapid fire jump cut editing and actors given the space to deliver actual performances. What to say about all of this is that the “realistic” aesthetic that results is as much of a construction as that which had been achieved with all the pre-planning. But the end result is the real thing: a crazy story that swerves sharply between seriously creepy horror and totally zany grossout comedy. Each helps to ground the other instead of cancelling each other out. What makes the comedy work is that the horror is played absolutely straight, and what makes the horror work is that the comedy teeters right on the edge of tastelessness and then goes gleefully over it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl, indeed.

Breaking the Waves (1996)

In which Lars Von Trier becomes the great filmmaker he was always intent on talking himself up to be. This is an astonishing achievement, and it has lost none of its power 11 years later. Utililising the same hand held jump cut madness that informed Riget (1994) (though hinting at self-consciousness with a series of chapter break interludes set to 70s rock classics), Von Trier captures an emotional reality from his performers that is almost too painful to bear. There is a sense that as an audience we are intruding on private moments in private lives that were never meant to have been filmed and never should have been. And yet there they are. How must it feel to be Emily Watson, 28 years old, in your first film, knowing that you will perhaps never find a role as unique as this in the rest of your acting career? How must it feel to be Lars Von Trier, to find that you’ve achieved by learning to direct actors what you could never have achieved by focusing on storyboards, camera technique and lighting an entire film with sodium vapour lamps intended to light Scottish motorways? Von Trier finds his centre as a filmmaker, Emily Watson is nominated for an Oscar, and the future looks very bright indeed. Breaking the Waves is one of the most extraordinary films ever made, a breathtaking, inadvertent masterpiece of the highest order. If you haven’t seen it, put it at #1 on your 1001 films to watch before you die list. You don’t want to miss this one.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

Hostel Part II (2007) *

Nerds with too much time on their hands really seem to have it in for Eli Roth, a mouthy American with a gift for self-promotion and actual filmmaking talent. For my part, it’s about damn time someone a) expressed a desire to make proper R-rated horror movies with nudity and gore and b) showed that he knew how to do it. Although I’ve previously ranted about horror sequels here, at least this one has been made by someone who shares some of my views, oddly enough. Part II presents more of what was good about the original Hostel (2005) in triple portions with all the trimmings. Roth is aware enough of the genre and the extent to which women have been abused in it to play some extremely sly games with audience expectation. The first death is so baroque it no longer exists in reality, the second death happens off-camera, and Roth uses the tried and tested “Final Girl” formula in a new and disturbing way, informing his audience of pasty male youths that they should watch what words they use around women, since some of them may not take it very well.

Die Hard 4.0 (2007) *

One can only assume that Live Free or Die Hard, the onscreen American title, has been borrowed by something else at this time. Kim Newman, in the latest issue of Sight & Sound, has, rather unsportingly, pointed out all of the things that are wrong with this film, and he is entirely correct about all of them. However, as long as things exploded and Bruce Willis hit people, I had no complaints. The McClane/fighter jet interface was absurd, but no more absurd than anything in Die Hard 2 (1990).

Die Hard (1988)

I needed me some more McClane, so I dialled up the original for some legendary hijinks. Die Hard just gets better every time I watch it. Away from its original reception in 1988, it becomes apparent just how supremely well crafted it is, how perfectly cast, how flambuoyantly filmed, how incisively edited, and how brilliantly directed. I’ve gone on here before about how great John McTiernan is as an action director, but one example will suffice. When McClane makes it up to the roof to radio for help (”terrorists” have taken over a building), the leader sends three of his minions to get him. McTiernan films this on a real roof with a camera laid on a track that swings through 180º to show very clearly how two of the terrorists are driving McClane into a trap where the third one is waiting. McTiernan does all this in one dynamic shot, an object lesson in proper action filmmaking that today’s over-edited, all-CGI bad boys could do with learning.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

One wasn’t enough so I checked out the third film as well, to which Samuel A Jackson brings his A-game. It lacks the claustrophobia of the first film, unsurprisingly, and ups the ante on the threat level, as does Die Hard 4.0 (2007). One thing: for some reason unknown to me (namely that they’re a bunch of bastards), Buena Vista Home Entertainment, or Disney, insisted this film be released in the UK in 1995 with a 15 certificate, and to meet this, the film was cut by themselves in consultation with the BBFC. And you would think, 12 years down the line and several Die Hard box sets later, that this would have been reversed at some stage, and the proper uncut 18 certificate version of the film would have been released in the UK. But this hasn’t happened. Obviously, I own the uncut Region 1 version of this film.

The Element of Crime (1984)

Naturally enough after all of those explosions, I longed for a little more meat, and I may have got it if I’d been able to see what was going on. Amusingly, on one of the commentaries, there’s some joshing about this along the lines of didn’t anyone on the set know how to read a light meter? This was Lars Von Trier’s first film, made when he was only a couple of years out of film school, where the courses seemed to have consisted of Blade Runner (1982), the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and a lot of other arthouse films of the 1980s. Von Trier has the glacial pace of late 70s/early 80s art films down pat, and he shrouds the onscreen musings in an extremely penumbral gloom cast by shooting everything with sodium vapor lighting as used in Scotland to light motorways. I am not making this up.

Epidemic (1987)

Made as a bet for one million Danish kroner (which is a lot less than it sounds), Von Trier’s second film chronicles both the scriptwriting phase of the film itself in grainy monochrome 16mm and includes brief snippets from the film that’s being written in nicer 35mm black and white. The conceit of the film is that Von Trier and Niels Vørsel write the plague of their film into existence in reality through the act of writing itself. It’s a lot less interesting than it sounds, though one amusing passage, thrown in because it seemed like a good idea at the time, tells of Vørsel’s attempts to write a novel about Atlantic City by getting female teenage penpals who lived there to write to him about it.

Europa (1991)

At least this resembles a proper film with actors, a script and cinematography where you can see what’s going on. Von Trier, however, is still in his art film, self-indulgent phase, so the backgrounds have been filmed first, and the actors are filmed separately later in an overcomplicated mix of rear and front projection, all intended to conform to the 800 shots of the storyboard. Although Von Trier claimed this was intended as a masterpiece (he says things like this, primarily, I think, to annoy people), he himself realised that the superabundance of filmmaking technique was a dead end, and he threw it all away when he moved onto The Kingdom (1994), where nothing looked beautiful, the performances of the actors move to the fore, and Von Trier starts himself on the road to the breakthrough international success of Breaking the Waves (1996).

No cinema visits this week again, and I’ve been doing “other things”, so the post is a bit sparse this week.

King Kong (2005)

For the record, this was the extended version of a film that many thought was too long to begin with. Presumably, The Lovely Bones (2008) will be four hours long with an interval in the style of La Belle Noiseuse (1991). It’s taken some viewings for me to get to grips with this new version of Kong, but every time I watch it, I like it more than I did the previous time I watched it. The first time in the cinema I have to say it left me rather cold, but I’m warming to it. The extras on the extended DVD really serve to highlight the extent of the film as an achievement, since at any given time, about 90% of what’s on screen isn’t even real. There’s something mysterious and primal about the Kong story that’s entirely inexplicable.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

Lots of people think that Barton Fink (1991) is the height of the Coen brothers’ work in cinema, but I’m inclined to go for this one, a film that has been perfectly realised on so many levels. It is impeccably cast, funny as hell (”based on The Odyssey by Homer” no less is just the first of the gags - it’s funny because it’s true), beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins and then regraded in its entirety in the telecine bay (the first film to do what has now become standard practice - even Clerks II (2006) had a digital intermediate), and has an outstanding score of traditional American folk music. It proved a tough act to follow.

DVD: My Life In Hell

Early on in the DVD purchasing game, I started to realise that the discs I was buying in Britain weren’t necessarily the best discs available. Reading reviews of Region 1 discs online started to alert me to the fact that large entertainment conglomerates were short changing us here in the UK to save a few bucks (as ever). Discs stacked to the gills with extras in America would be released in the UK as movie only discs with a trailer if you were lucky. This led me to my first region free player, successfully hacked with a specially purchased remote. This also led me to the realisation that, if I wanted to replace my VHS movie collection with shiny DVDs (and I did), I would have to consider each and every DVD purchase I made, and run something resembling the following criteria against all of them, one by one:

In what country has the film been released on DVD? Are all the extras from other Regions on the Region 2 disc? Has the DVD been enhanced for widescreen TVs? Does it contain the original audio? Has it been properly transferred? Does it have DTS? Has the film been cut by the BBFC? Have the extras been cut by the BBFC? If it has been cut, am I bothered by the cut or not? Has the film been cut by the MPAA? Has the film been cut in the country that’s releasing the best DVD? Is the film being presented in the original aspect ratio? Or is there an extremely good reason why it isn’t being presented in the original aspect ratio? If the film is being released at 1.33:1, is it a full frame transfer (which you can zoom into so that’s okay) or is it a pan and scan transfer (which is by comparison totally fucked)?

And that’s just the ones I can remember right now. I was concerned because this seemed like an unnecessary amount of time and effort to devote to such an apparently simple task as VHS replacement, but in the end I realised I had no choice. If you want to replace your old copy of Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) on VHS in the UK, you need to know that the original DVD release from Arrow was an atrocity to be avoided, and that the Universal option was the one to go for. And that the new Special Edition from Metrodome is the best way to replace the Universal one. And unless the Criterion Collection release Last Exit to Brooklyn any time soon, it will remain so.

And so on. For every title. My life in DVD Hell.

No cinema visits this week, though this is set to change in July.

Bad Boys II (2003)

Another sign of the apocalypse. I now own a film directed by Michael Bay on DVD. I must admit my curiosity was peaked by the reverence accorded it in Hot Fuzz (2007), and then it turned up cheap in HMV’s current sale and I can’t resist a bargain. And so? Much as it pains me to admit it, I quite enjoyed it. It was a decent throwback to the gratuitous violence and plentiful swearing action pictures of the 1990s that we all loved so much until some bunch of twats successfully prevented Hollywood from marketing R-rated movies to kids and forced them down the road of PG-13 with everything. I should point out here that the whole point of the R certificate in the first place (no one under 17 admitted without an adult) was precisely so kids could go to see R-rated movies, and everybody was perfectly happy about the arrangement until aforesaid bunch of twats took umbrage.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Also in the HMV sale was the Limited Edition DVD Gift Set of this for £4 (I’m not receiving kickbacks from HMV for plugging them here; in the current climate, they need all the help they can get). I saw it in the cinema and didn’t think it was that great because I thought it possessed absolutely no depth. Once you get past the “with great power comes…” thing, what else is there? Well, there must have been something in the Diet Coke at the cinema because seeing it again on DVD, I liked it a whole lot more, possibly for the soap opera elements than the action sequences.

In Her Shoes (2005)

I find the term “chick flick” really kind of patronising, as if only women were interested in films about characters, emotions and relationships. There was a time when a film like When Harry Met Sally (1989) was known as a “sleeper hit” because 13 year old boys weren’t turning out in droves to see it, and its audience consisted of regular people like you and me, who’d previously been “asleep” when Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) came out to keep the kids happy with the wham bang. The sleeper hit has now, somewhat inevitably, turned into the marketing category of the chick flick, the kind of film girls have to drag their boyfriends kicking and screaming to see. Allegedly.

RV (2006)

One of the best things about a new Barry Sonnenfeld film is the prospect of a new Barry Sonnenfeld DVD commentary. As this generation’s Blake Edwards, the go-to guy when you want a comedy filmed properly on screen, in commentary mode he is the king of the dry delivery. Although there’s nothing new about this film that National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) et al haven’t done before, it does silly and heartwarming with reasonably equal effectiveness. One thing nobody mentions in either the commentary or the featurettes is that this is Sonnenfeld’s first widescreen movie because the shape of the RV dictated that it be so. The movie’s aspect ratio is part of the joke. That is what I call dry.

Underworld: Evolution (2006)

As a horror fan, I’ve been pissed on by filmmakers and studios for decades. For some reason, unknown to me, if one horror film becomes a hit, say Halloween (1978), the producers decide that what horror fans want is another EIGHT sequels that are more or less complete retreads of the original. Whereas what horror fans like me actually want is another original horror film AS GOOD AS Halloween. Why has this message not got through? Unfortunately, there are enough undiscerning idiots claiming to be horror fans around that there is actually an audience for Sleepaway Camp IV (2002) when the original Sleepaway Camp (1983) was a) no fucking good in the first place, b) made 20 years earlier, and c) a ripoff of Friday the 13th (1980) anyway. Although Underworld (2003) had vampires vs werewolves vs big guns vs a ripoff of the look of The Matrix, what it had in its favour was the right tone: it took its world seriously, and this continues in the sequel.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

After a week of popcorn, I felt the need for a little fibre. Fernando Meireilles proves that Cidade de Deus (2002) wasn’t just a flash in the pan, and that a thriller that tells its story out of chronological order is still possible in modern Hollywood, particularly when directed with the deftness and skill on display here. Everybody brought their A-game to this project, from the off-kilter framing of every shot to the performances of the actors to the producers filiming the story in Kenya where it was set, rather than trying to recreate Kenya in, say, Mexico or Canada. The filmmakers were also affected by the poverty in the areas in which they shot some of the film and actually decided to do something about it:

http://www.constantgardenertrust.org/