Nobody Knows Anything

I took a week off, so what’s it to ya? One cinema visit in the last fortnight, marked with a *. You will note that this post’s title is accurately quoted from the film and not in its frequently misquoted form: “No time for love, Dr Jones”. It’s the little things.

V for Vendetta (2006)

Any film that ends with the destruction of the Houses of Parliament can’t be all bad, can it? It’s pretty ironic that Alan Moore embarked on his big I don’t want anything more to do with the movies snit with this film, which is a more accurate representation of his work than the two previous film adaptations, From Hell (2001) (which I didn’t think was too awful even though it’s not what Moore wrote and Eddie Campbell drew) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) (which has made it onto my list of films I refuse to see ever). What’s interesting is that Moore co-owns the copyright on the two turkeys (or one turkey and one half-baked goose from my point of view) but as part of the deal to publish and complete V for Vendetta with DC Comics back in 1988, he and David Lloyd surrendered their copyright and V for Vendetta was essentially published as work for hire, which means DC Comics could basically have done what they like with it. Enter the Wachowski Brothers who have enough respect for Moore’s work that they’re not going to mess with it too much, and V the film contains whole chunks taken almost verbatim from the original comic. But, more’s the pity, that wasn’t good enough for Alan Moore…

Persepolis (2007) *

Marjane Satrapi’s solution to the nobody’s going to mess with my comic book dilemma was to co-write and co-direct herself the animated version of her two original, autobiographical graphic novels. Satrapi draws on the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in relating the history of the Iranian revolution of 1979 through its impact on both herself and her own family. I think what Persepolis is really about is the Iran that doesn’t exist anymore, and may in fact have never existed, but an Iran that could be, perhaps, one day, if the mullahs can be banished and the country returned to the people who suffer there today. Because however bad life was under the Shah, and it wasn’t great, life has become far more irritating under the prescriptions of the religious figures and Sharia law that now dominates everyday life in Iran. What Satrapi makes abundantly clear is that Iran is now a totalitarian state, dominated by Orwellian doublespeak and doublethink; it’s anti-woman, anti-freedom, anti-life and pro-ignorance. Yet the spirit of the people who’ve remained endures and the banning of decadent Western cultural influences only makes their acquisition that more desirable. The one ironic result of the idiotic regime that now dominates Iran is that Persepolis is going to be the must-have DVD in Tehran this year, and there’ll be as big a market for it as there was for the forbidden Iron Maiden tapes that Satrapi cottoned onto back in the 1980s. Because at least Iron Maiden were alive in a country morbidly obsessed with suppressing life.

Apollo 13 (1995)

One of the least enticing results of the invention of the internet is that all those losers who don’t believe man landed on the moon now have somewhere to gather to display their ignorance. This kind of non-thinking is right up there with holocaust denial or believing that 9/11 was actually a controlled demolition instigated by the White House (when all the evidence to the contrary indicates that this White House isn’t even capable of a shabby cover-up of the smallest screw-up, never mind one of the most pivotal moments of recent history). I guess there will always be idiots who can’t cope with the reality of what’s in front of them and have to seek out fantasy and bullshit with which to fill their empty lives. It’s all very sad. Apollo 13 would fit right in with the milder end of these cranks, because, hey, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise never set foot on the moon, so how do we know anyone else did? This mythological nonsense dishonours one of the few shining achievements of the 20th Century and all of the men and women who’ve laid their lives on the line to push it forward, to whit the entire space programme that has transformed all of our lives irrevocably in ways it is impossible for us to measure, but ridiculously easy for stupid twats to disavow.

The Paper (1994)

Ron Howard directed films before The Paper (I’ve even seen some of them), but none of them are as good. The Paper is where Howard really caught my attention as a filmmaker, and of course, with his follow-up, Apollo 13, announced his arrival with authority. Before The Paper, his films try too hard to be all things to all people; after The Paper, his films are content to be true to themselves. The rise in quality is palpable. There is one exception, however, and that would be How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), which I like to pretend Ron Howard did not direct; it’s another one of those films I will never see.

Ellie Parker (2005)

What was Naomi Watts’ life like before Mulholland Dr. (2001) broke and made her a star? Somewhat like Ellie Parker’s perhaps, certainly the endless rounds of useless auditions and humiliating callbacks for essentially worthless pieces of crap, none of which contain decent roles for women but instead trade on the most obvious cliches and archetypes. The first 20 minutes or so of this film, shot, written and directed on video by one of Watts’ co-stars in the original Mulholland Dr. pilot, Scott Coffey, were filmed in 1999, with the rest being filled in over the years in which Watts rose to fortune and glory, while her fictional counterpart probably gives the whole Hollywood thing up and vanishes into obscurity. Watts is so good an actress in this film that it really is an utter mystery that no one could see it until David Lynch did. How many more Ellie Parkers are there out there, drowning in soaps and bad dialogue, just waiting for the right break or slice of luck that will showcase their talents and pitch them into the big leagues? Quite probably, a lot. Kinda frightening, isn’t it?

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

What stood out for me this time was the terrific dialogue courtesy of screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, although I have no idea why I was moved to rewatch the Indiana Jones trilogy at this time. It’s a mystery. The dialogue is witty, subtly adult in nature and eminently quotable. It certainly doesn’t seem the result of marketing decisions, which sadly can’t be said of…

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

…where the thinking appears to have been: Well, this Indiana Jones thing appeals primarly to kids, so we’ll put a lot of kids in the sequel, and then combine kids with black magic and human sacrifice to make it a for all the family smash. Oops. The inclusion of a kid sidekick normally spells death for a franchise (Exhibit A: Batman Forever (1995) introduces Chris O’Donnell as Robin) so Lucasfilm were damn lucky to be able to go on and make…

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

There is only one reason why this film wasn’t called what it could have been: Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail, can you guess what it is? Of the three films, this is actually my favourite; it’s the most fun, it has Sean Connery and Spielberg has a further decade of filmmaking brilliance behind him, which allows him to hit every grace note in the script with style and elan. It’s probably also one of the first examples of screenwriters being induced to give the actors something to get their teeth into (in this case, the father/son dynamic between Henry and Indiana) which in actuality has almost nothing to do with the principal attractions of the film to the moviegoing public: thrills, spills, stunts, it’s the third Indy film, we’ve got to check this out. Both Jurassic Park (1993) and Twister (1996) employ a similar dynamic. No one goes to see these films to watch dinosaur attacks teach Sam Neill’s character to reconsider his views on fatherhood or to watch tornadoes save Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt’s marriage; nevertheless these are still employed as actor-attracting employment devices. Again, the reason Jurassic Park was a hit was the dinosaurs, and the reason Twister was a hit was the tornadoes. But these aren’t what attracted the actors to the projects in all likelihood; it was these other elements, which in terms of box office appeal, are of almost no interest whatsoever.

This post does not support the use of illegal pharmaceuticals and frowns sternly in your direction if you have ever done so. Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

Tell No One (2006)

Why can’t more bestselling authors be like Harlan Coben? Not allowing Hollywood to ruin his novel, but giving a young, relatively untried French director a chance to deliver his novel to the screen adapted to Paris, spoken in French and pretty much unscathed proved to be a very smart idea indeed. Starting small (a man receives an email from his 8 year dead wife and complications ensue) and then delving into the kind of typically fiendish, labyrinthine plot so beloved of modern thriller writers, Tell No One derives a lot of its strength from the solid performances of its mostly unknown outside of France cast. There is a tremendous freshness derived from combining American overdrive pacing with Gallic character and atmosphere.

Iron Man (2008) *

Well it was great obviously, but $100 million opening weekend great? Definitely not. The film has all the entertaining, anti-establishment fun it can have with a disaffected millionaire arms dealer playboy as its central character, and Robert Downey Jr brings his best game and is well served by a smart script, as is Gwyneth Paltrow who makes an awful lot out of what is normally the thankless role of PA to the male lead. What the film leaves unresolved is the classic dilemma of the superhero that has haunted comics ever since Alan Moore’s reinvention of Marvelman in the 1980’s. The superhero is all-powerful by definition and can end war, remove poverty and create a superhero utopia with no problems of any kind (though it might not be the greatest place for humans to live). In a fantasy world you can resolve a problem like Iraq by sending in Iron Man to destroy all the weapons; in the real world you can’t. It’s election year in the States, and the country is looking for a hero; neither John McCain nor Barack Obama are heroes capable of leaping tall buildings at a single bound, and the collective yearning for a hero embodied in that opening weekend will not be fulfilled in November.

Speed Racer (2008) *

For the record, this was a screening of the film at the Imax. Well it was great obviously, but among the great miscalculations that surround the film are these: there may well be a Speed Racer cult in America, but it’s a really, really small cult (the whole Speed Racer thing didn’t even happen in the UK, we got Battle of the Planets instead, and that was pretty rotten); casting a monkey in a movie spells only one thing and that thing is “kids movie” and kids don’t want to see kids movies, they want to see Iron Man; the Wachowskis have built their reputation by making films for adults and this heartening urge to lighten up and do one for their families is all very well, but I predict that the next movie from them will be R-rated as all get out; there is a reason why Speed Racer has been kicking around for two decades trying to get made as a film and that is the source material has zero weight or substance or meaning - if the Wachowskis really wanted to make a live-action anime (as if The Matrix (1999) isn’t halfway there already), why didn’t they choose something better? Anything better. But having said all that, I liked Speed Racer a lot more than Iron Man. It was no less predictable than Iron Man but way more interesting to watch. The opening race sequence in particular is a triumph of narrative storytelling, setting up the basic premise by cutting between three different time periods, sometimes “cutting” between them in the same shot. And it has Christina Ricci looking gorgeous. And it has John Goodman beating up ninjas. Yes, ninjas! Any film with ninjas is all right as far as I’m concerned.

The Matrix (1999)

Yeah I checked out The Matrix again just to see if it was still fabulous. Guess what? It was.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. More next week.

Innocence (2004)

A seven year old girl appears barely dressed inside a coffin in a room in a school building in the middle of some woods surrounded by a wall. There are five other buildings in the grounds, each occupied by five girls between the ages of 7 and 12. When the seven year old is discovered by the other girls, the first thing they do is clothe her, the second thing they do is exchange coloured ribbons in their hair which mark their ages. It is understood that the oldest of them will one day leave the grounds of the school, but it is not known what will happen to them. In the meantime, they will receive lessons in dance, biology and obedience from teachers who seem emotionally wounded and be waited upon by old women who barely speak to them. They will be isolated from their pasts and their families and encouraged to stay on the lit paths in the woods and not stray off into the forest. As with the majority of oddball, confrontational, foreign films I encounter, this started with an article in Sight and Sound some years ago, which I read and made a mental note that it sounded interesting and I should look out for it. Years go by, and HMV knock it down to £7. Perfect. As a longtime collaborator with Gaspar Noé, it should come as no surprise that Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s film is at the same time shocking and yet not shocking. Repurposing the notorious schoolgirl imagery of David Hamilton et al, Hadzihalilovic creates a world of exterior beauty and subterranean threat; the revelation of what the oldest girls get up to at night is deeply disturbing, but is not filmed that way. It is possible that how much innocence there is left in the viewer will be more of a factor in how you perceive this film than how uncompromising Hadzihalilovic is in the presentation of her imagery. The film’s ending may be hopeful, but that’s not how I read it. But I could be wrong. Make up your own mind.

The Oxford Murders (2007) *

There’s a category of movie known as the Europudding. To be explicit, this is a film produced entirely with European money from a variety of European sources from any number of European countries and funding bodies within those countries. Each one of those funding sources expects to have some national content within the final film; back in the 1960s this was the reason why German actors turned up in Italian Spaghetti westerns filmed in Spain for no other readily apparent reason than that an Italian-German-Spanish co-production required it to be the case. Since there can be any number of fingers in the pie, it will not surprise you to learn that the chances of a decent end result start to recede into the distance even more than they do with your average American blockbuster. The typical Europudding is a disaster like Charlotte Gray (2001), a UK-Australian-German co-production whose central premise of a woman joining the French Resistance in World War II France was somewhat undermined by unrealistically filming everything in English with the intention of reaching a wider audience, which wisely stayed away from it in droves, helping to bring down an earlier incarnation of Film Four in the process. The Oxford Murders isn’t that bad, but suffers from being an adaptation of an Argentinian novel filmed by a Spanish director set very much in England. There are any number of creaks around the edges, such as an airport scene very clearly filmed in a building interior a long way from a real airport with a single cheap-looking sign on a wall indicating the departure gate of Union Airlines, that well known British brand. The book has a fascinating premise that has only been adequately executed. It may be bold to present a film with any number of lengthy philosophical discussions on the nature of reality and hope to succeed with a mass audience, or it may be stupid. Points for trying though.

Control (2007)

A somewhat more successful co-production is the first film from photographer and video director Anton Corbijn, which focuses on the brief but influential and depressing life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division. It is not the first time this story has been told, nor will it be the last, since the early rock death movie is almost a genre on its own: think of The Doors (1991) or Last Days (2005). The template is always the same: a young, charismatic figure achieves (or in the case of Curtis was on the cusp of achieving) international fame, sales and money in the world of rock, but is then almost immediately destroyed by indulgence in drink, drugs, sex and/or bad relationships, often with a mysterious, poorly diagnosed and badly treated medical condition stirred into the mix (Cobain’s stomach ailment, Curtis’s epilepsy). Death swiftly follows, normally in controversial circumstances that result in any number of outrageous conspiracy theories (though not, I think, in Curtis’s case). After their death, the artist commonly becomes more revered than they ever were in their lifetime (see Nick Drake) and the biopic beckons. Anton Corbijn brings both a satisfying intimacy and a fascinating distance to the story of Ian Curtis. Corbijn came to England to photograph Joy Division in 1979, and relies on Deborah Curtis’s biography of Curtis, Touching from a Distance, to fill in the gaps. What has become most apparent about Ian Curtis over the years is how absolutely normal and down to earth he was, how very Northern and unreconstructed he was as a man (he liked a drink, he liked a swear, he thought a woman’s place was in the home), how very extraordinary he was as an artist (the other band members recall how Ian would sometimes pick up on a riff they played during rehearsal and say, no take that and use it, that can be a song, and then fit his already written lyrics to it; Touching from a Distance includes all Ian’s lyrics and the poetry of them will always remain potent, insightful and chilling). Photographed in gorgeous, widescreen black and white, the camera mostly stands back from the action, studying it almost forensically, and the end, when it comes, has the same inevitability as the vocal of Dead Souls.