Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week marked with a *. It would seem that at last the post-Oscars movie drought is over and the summer tentpole madness can begin.

Batman (1989)

I’ve gone back and forth on this film ever since its first release when I thought it was a piece of overhyped garbage. Looked at again all these years later accompanied by Warner Bros’ first ever DTS track, has it improved any? I still don’t think the script is up to much, Jack Nicholson’s one liners are deeply inane, the much hyped giant Gotham City street set, built semi-permanently in Britain to service a host of sequels and then scrapped once Batman Returns (1992) - which I really like - was filmed in Hollywood, doesn’t look as good as the much smaller one Ridley Scott built for Blade Runner (1982), there’s a giant unacknowledged debt to the 40s retro look of Brazil (1985), the pre-CGI effects look more than a little quaint and not so hot, and the climax of the film at Gotham Cathedral looks like it was made up on the set by the cast and crew, because it was. So Batman is currently in the file marked not that great for me. I liked it more ten years ago. Hey ho.

In Bruges (2007) *

I was concerned that this would be a playwright’s attempt to better the opening 15 minutes of Pulp Fiction (1994) and he wouldn’t be up to the job. Thankfully, Martin McDonagh takes the subject matter of two hit men sentenced to a vacation in Bruges into a whole bunch of different and more interesting areas, in which he’s helped enormously by a trio of vastly talented actors (Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes and Colin Farrell), a game cast of supporting players and Herculean amounts of swearing, so much so that the title of the film probably was In Fucking Bruges, but they decided in the end not to go with that one. The big surprise of the film is Colin Farrell, who actually delivers an actual performance once he’s got some proper dialogue and character beats to get his teeth into. Farrell is so good in this film that you wonder whether it was a total waste of his time to have gone off to Hollywood in the first place and that he should perhaps have concentrated on theatre and cracking parts in British films as good as this one.

One cinema visit, marked with a *. Contains one use of strong language, Shine a Light style.

Good Night, And Good Luck. (2005)

David Strathairn turns up as Estes Kefauver in The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) (see last week) organising a searing Senate investigation into the deadly effects of pornography and comic books on juvenile delinquency. At presumably around the same time, Strathairn had also been cast by George Clooney on the other side of the prosecutorial fence as legendary journalist of the old school, Edward R Murrow. Strathairn belongs to that unique group of second-string supporting players that exists in Hollywood to gladden the hearts of too-frequent cinema-goers like myself. Strathairn’s presence in a film, like that of say Dan Hedaya or Jeffrey DeMunn, once spotted in the opening credits, in an odd kind of way automatically steps the film up a notch in quality; the movie doesn’t just revolve around the big star, the supporting players have been properly cast as well. Strathairn occasionally plays lead roles in movies, as he does here, but he’s not Tom Cruise style leading man material, he’s an exceptional character actor, and he makes Murrow and Murrow’s contempt for McCarthyism and the witch hunt mentality it created burn off the screen.

Shine a Light (2007) *

I don’t even like The Rolling Stones that much, but I still got a kick out of this film. To me, the Stones were always a singles band (and what singles), who never really assembled a coherent album statement in the manner of the Beatles, and who have effectively been creatively dead for 25 years: their last decent recording was Undercover of the Night, and that was in 1983. And yet curiously the Rolling Stones have stayed pretty much together (some members having been shed along the way) and not stopped touring, perhaps turning into the blues band they really wanted to be in the first place. It’s probably just as well for all the other directors of live concert films that Martin Scorsese only directs one of these concert films every 30 years or so, since he has raised the bar once again as he did with The Last Waltz (1978). For example, the opening sequence of documentary material, probably through the timing of ever shorter cuts, creates a rising sense of excitement exactly the same as standing in a concert hall waiting for the show to begin, then ups the ante on it again, so that when the band hit the stage with Jumping Jack Flash, you feel like you’re in the presence of something really exciting, even though you’re not! What’s particularly great is the sense of communication between the band members on stage, especially Keith Richards’ self-deprecating grin after he’s slightly fucked up the opening riff of Start Me Up, and also Scorsese’s manipulation of the sound mixing desk so as the camera focuses on Ron Wood, we hear exactly what he’s playing. The film doesn’t have the end of an era gravitas of The Last Waltz, what Shine a Light is about is what happened to the band that carried on playing long after it was formerly proper for them to have retired. The new ground the Stones are breaking is discovering how old can you be and still be able to rock and roll? On this exhausting evidence, some time yet…

Sympathy for the Devil (1968)

For the record, this was the producer’s cut of Jean-Luc Godard’s film, the one where Sympathy for the Devil is played in its completed form at the end; apparently it was always Godard’s intention to deny this pleasure to the film’s intended audience, whoever the hell that was. Coming from the high Marxism period of Godard’s career, this now looks as absurdly quaint as Georgy Girl (1966) or Barbarella (1968). The film has essentially two streams: the Rolling Stones recording one of their most notorious songs (which evolves in an utterly fascinating manner from a slow blues stomp into the adrenaline rush, tribal percussion and woo-woos of the finished piece), and various humourless revolutionaries carrying out acts of defiance against The Man: a girl graffitoes left wing slogans on buildings and cars; a phalanx of Black Power revolutionaries brandish guns in a scrapyard and “shoot” white female victims in sacrificial dresses. There are voiceover readings from a non-existent Russian political pornography novel, and lots more time capsule stuff. I’ve always thought that the essential message of the film was that The Rolling Stones and the revolutionary groups are engaged in the same practice at different ends of the scale: that of protest.

No cinema visits this week. If we’re very lucky, I may make it to the cinema next week as a new Scorsese movie has arrived in the middle of the current drought, even if it is just a Rolling Stones concert movie.

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

In Cameron Crowe’s excellent series of interviews with Billy Wilder, Wilder remains completely indifferent on the subject of widescreen cinematography. He just didn’t care. It is extremely odd to see what is basically a filmed play contained within the most extreme of aspect ratios at 2.55:1, especially when there is only one person onscreen for great lengths of the running time. Marilyn Monroe appears essentially “playing herself” (whatever that was) as the archetypal embodiment of mainstream Hollywood 1950s femininity, blonde, overly made up, harmless (emotionally damaged, needy, desperate, addicted to booze and drugs). And in the 1950s, mainstream America had Marilyn, and Doris Day, and Jayne Mansfield, and at a stretch, Mamie Van Doren. And the rest of the country had…

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

One of those roles that any actress worth her salt would kill for, and Gretchen Mol, infamously hyped with a gratuitous Vanity Fair cover some years earlier, finally proved herself as a real talent with her wonderfully game performance in a film that both reveals the essential harmlessness of extreme fetish pornography (though not to the BBFC, who rather ridiculously gave the film an 18 certificate) as well as provides more evidence, if evidence were needed, of the ludicrous hypocrisy of American culture in the 1950s. Bettie Page regarded even the most absurd of bondage photoshoots as nothing more than innocent playacting, and Mol puts over the impossible to fake joie de vivre aura of Page’s photographic poses with an equal measure of shamelessness. Page prospered in the years just before Playboy changed all of the rules; she was a very American pioneer, striking out into new territory and claiming it as her own.

No cinema releases this week. I’ve taken a week off since I went to Memorabilia at the NEC last weekend and I’ve been catching up with various database and scanning related duties that coincide with the mass influx of 30 titles into my DVD collection. So, over the last fortnight, I’ve watched three films on DVD, which start with…

Any Given Sunday (1999)

There is something deeply satisfying about a sports movie that signs up to all the clichés with such joyous abandon and commits to them with such élan. So, going into this movie about American Football from director Oliver Stone, one of the things you know, without ever even having to have seen one frame of the film, is that it will all come down to a crucial play with five seconds left on the clock. And so it does, so you’re not disappointed. A sports movie has a duty to service these clichés, and Any Given Sunday is no exception. It also finds Stone in the short-lived entertainment portion of his career in the wake of the high seriousness of Nixon (1995) (though some may argue it’s continued with Alexander (2004)). It’s no surprise that Stone portrays a football game as warlike conflict, and he brings a brutality to the sporting arena that gets lost when you see American Football on TV. Or saw it in the 1980s on Channel Four during its brief period of UK popularity.

Miami Vice (2006)

Jaime Foxx’s first starring role in Any Given Sunday prompted a call to check this out again, not that I really need any excuse to watch a Michael Mann film, since I regard the man as nothing short of a filmmaking genius. Shot at night in available light with high definition video, the film breaks ground photographically in a way few others have even come close to so far. That it in very few ways bears any resemblance to the 80s TV show that is its foundation is yet another testament to Mann’s desire to break new ground rather than produce some sad nostalgia fest in which a lot of aging losers in designer stubble and suits with rolled up sleeves drive around Miami in expensive cars to the tunes of Jan Hammer and Phil Collins. And if that means it didn’t do that well at the box office and lies in wait for adult film lovers to rediscover on DVD, then so be it.

The Mist (2007)

For the record, this was the version of the film on Disc 2 of the collector’s edition DVD in glorious black and white. And damned if Darabont isn’t absolutely right in his introduction to this slightly indulgent version of the film; black and white does give the film the feel of a low budget 60s horror film from the lineage of Night of the Living Dead (1968). As a longtime Stephen King reader (but not his Number One fan, that’s a little Misery (1987) humour for y’all), I discovered The Mist early on its first publication in Kirby McCauley’s 1980 horror anthology, Dark Forces, five years before it officially joined the King canon in his 1985 collection, Skeleton Crew. Maybe because it’s a second cousin of a lot of things, including James Herbert’s 1975 novel, The Fog, and any number of low budget B-movies from American cinema history, filtered through King’s intense pop culture imagination and squirted out the other end, there’s something genuinely haunting and mythic about King’s story, in which Lovecraftian beasties from another dimension are let loose upon the world as both a Lord of the Flies style analysis of societal breakdown and a dire warning against scientific progress very much along the lines of Them! (1954) or The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). And if there’s an even bigger fan of the story than me, then it’s Frank Darabont, who read it in 1980 with as much excitement as I did, but has actually been able to bring it to the screen utterly uncompromised, red, raw, and dripping, like a horror movie ought to be. Indeed, compared to the anemic nonsense shat out by major studios in the last few years in the name of PG-13 rated horror, this is the real thing, character based, gross when it needs to be, and deeply unsettling from first frame to last, especially last. The only thing The Weinstein Company now needs to sort out is a UK release, because I really don’t think that it’s right for me to see this film on DVD before I’ve had the chance to see it in a UK cinema, but there you go, that’s closing the theatrical window for you. The first film I happened to see this way was Hellboy (2005), and here we are again.