No, that’s cheese, this is all cheese here
No cinema visits this week.
Smokin’ Aces (2007)
Second films can be tricky, they can confirm the promise of the debut and hit one out of the park – a recent example would be Pulp Fiction (1994) – or they can lie there like a horrible mess bleeding to death, promising only that the filmmaker is going to have a really tough time making it to film number three – Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar (2002) might be a good example here, except I really liked Morvern Callar; the problem is that almost nobody else did and her third film has yet to materialise. Joe Carnahan made a mini-splash with the excellent Narc (2002), a tough cop thriller like they used to make ‘em back in the 70s, released through Paramount at the personal instigation of Tom Cruise, which in turn led him to the director slot on Mission: Impossible III (2006) after David Fincher but before JJ Abrams. Creative differences reared their head and it’s taken Carnahan five years to make his second film. And… it isn’t that great. There is a ton, and I mean a ton, of plot and character exposition in the first half hour of the movie, the characters are basically a bunch of colourful lowlife scumbags (and that includes the FBI as well as the Mob guys), and while the violence has been expertly filmed, the movie’s rendered really rather meaningless in that none of it seems to matter, and Carnahan makes a fatal mistake in the plot denouement near the end where the plot’s MacGuffin is inadequately explained. Oops.
La Vie en Rose (2007)
Unlike a lot of recent biopics of musical performers, Olivier Dahan’s film takes a kaleidoscopic approch to Edith Piaf’s extraordinary life. Piaf suffered more heartbreak and disaster in any one year of her life than most of us would be unlucky enough to experience in our entire lifetimes. Accordingly, the film jumps around throughout the chronology of her life without paying attention to one of the deathly methods that can strangle a biopic at birth: introducing characters through clunky exposition along the lines of “Edith, here’s a lonely Frenchman in New York, he’s a boxer called Marcel Cerdan, you may remember he fought Jake LaMotta last year.” In this film, Piaf just meets Cerdan in a diner and we don’t necessarily know who he is. Whereas some may find this a minus, I found it very much a plus. We know how the other method of making a biopic works since we’ve seen it so many times, so why not try something different? If the film reminded me of anything, it reminded me of the films of Nicolas Roeg, and that is never a bad thing. Obviously, I bought the movie in the wake of Marion Cotillard’s Bafta and Oscar for Best Actress, and I have to say that the voters definitely got it right this year: Cotillard, who is yet another in the unending supply of beautiful French actresses, is fantastic in a role the quality of which she may never see again. And there’s the music; about halfway through I worked out where the film was heading at the end, and if you think about it a bit, you can work it out as well, but this didn’t spoil the film for me at all.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Every bit as good as everybody said, and then funnier still. It’s not often that all of the deleted material could have been left in the film, but this film could have happily been 24 minutes longer. Except maybe sketch films should be short; the Pythons found that there would inevitably be a sag in the more sketchy of their films, and that there was almost nothing they could do about it. The only thing missing from the DVD is any information about how they did it, who was real and who wasn’t, and how the lawsuits are doing. The lack of behind the curtains material (and I can understand Baron Cohen’s reasons for not including any) is almost made up for by the sequence in the promotional reel that climaxes in a making the bed scene with Martha Stewart live on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that is almost as good as the naked wrestling.