Nobody Knows Anything

Three cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

WALL•E (2008) *

In which Pixar continues to pull away from DreamWorks Animation, proving that its focus on story, character and originality is a far more successful strategy than DreamWorks’ focus on celebrity voices and pop culture references. Pixar may not be at the Studio Ghibli level yet, but it’s definitely getting closer, and it has still to produce a single film that can be fairly described with the words average or mediocre or poor. It’s also good to see a film with an environmental message that doesn’t try to beat you over the head with it. It may be okay to make a film about a man standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation saying it’s all going to hell, but it’s much better to achieve the same result with cute (and frankly, not so cute) robots, a cockroach and the last surviving humans. Oh, and really, really good visual jokes, delivered at a furious pace.

Mamma Mia! (2008) *

The jukebox musical is a much derided beast, and rightly so. Appealing to the kind of popular music fan who only buys one record a year, and that record is a Christmas-released greatest hits compilation of some pop act they remember listening to twenty years earlier, the jukebox musical assembles an endless stream of songs, either from one act or from one genre of music, strings them together with a musical book so utterly stupid (We Will Rock You) or so utterly light (Mamma Mia!) that the end result has no substance whatsoever. The jukebox musical has proved that there are some song catalogues that cannot be mined for frothiness (Bob Dylan’s, for one), and it has proved to be enormously popular with the aforementioned popular music fans, the great unwashed masses of people who don’t really listen to music anymore, but don’t mind a lot of songs by Queen or Abba or Madness being packaged up and presented to them to singalong to in a theatrical context. Dismissed by critics, but embraced by the public, the jukebox musical is only too willing to show once more that the public has no taste. And having said all that, Mamma Mia! the movie was utterly irresistible and I enjoyed it enormously. So I have no taste either, and am just like the public. Rats! Centred as it is on the ups and downs of romantic relationships, Abba’s song catalogue makes a better fit redefined in a musical form than, say, the songs of Bob Dylan, which draw upon a greater range of subject matter that resists compilation into a flowing show. Mamma Mia! doesn’t really have a plot, though it does seem eerily like a Shakespearean comedy, and it doesn’t really have characters, just corny stereotypes. What it does have is Abba’s songs performed by Meryl Streep (who maybe puts too much into The Winner Takes It All) and Pierce Brosnan (who can’t really sing but isn’t going to let that stop him) et al, and perma-sunny locations in Greece, partly recreated at Pinewood. It’s candy floss cinema, and in this case, that’s not so bad.

Hairspray (1988)

In which John Waters, possibly feeling the effects of the Reagan era more than most filmmakers, rather than continue to subvert mainstream cinema from the outside, attempts to subvert it from the inside. Packed to the seams with great dialogue (”My diet pill’s wearing off”, “Our skin is white but are souls are black”, etc) and possibly even greater music (handpicked dance classics from the days before the Beatles), all Hairspray does in the subversion stakes is put a fat girl who can dance in the lead. These days, this wouldn’t feel at all out of place (or would it?), but this was twenty years ago, and no film director in America was casting large women as leads, they could be the lead’s best friend, but that was about it. And somehow this led Waters to Ricki Lake in her first movie, and Divine in his last.

the devil wears prada (2006)

I watched the first episode of Sex and the City (1998-2004), and swiftly decided that it wasn’t for me. The piece was packed with the kind of poor writing, sloppy generalisations and lazy stereotypes that characterise so-called think pieces in women’s magazines, and I couldn’t believe someone thought this would be a good idea for a TV series. Sex and the City may have got more interesting, but it did so without my support. And so to this movie, inhaling heavily from the Sex and the City vibe, based on Lauren Weisberger’s chick lit novel about her experiences as the new Emily for Vogue’s notorious editor in chief, Anna Wintour (and I’m not using the word allegedly here). The commentary track spends an inordinate amount of time detailing the designer outfits everyone is wearing with, appropriately enough for Americans, no sense of the irony involved in doing so. Having dipped in and out of publishing myself, it was nice to see that a lot of the details are spot on: everyone uses Macs, there’s “the book”, a kind of portable flatplan that’s the Bible for every issue, and Meryl Streep’s disdainful attitude and throwaway putdowns (this might seem over the top but these people are really out there, and publishing seems to attract them like moths to a flame).

The Dark Knight (2008) *

For the record, this was a sold out screening at the IMAX Birmingham, and it was every bit as great as everybody said it would be. It’s one thing to see this film in a conventional cinema, but it’s quite another to see it on a screen forty feet high with the majority of the action sequences actually filmed in IMAX filling the screen. Considering that this is only a comic book movie, the plotting is dense and complicated, and I have the feeling this won’t be the only time I see it. And if you can’t get to see a screening of this film in the IMAX format and you already like the film, you really owe it to yourself to make an effort to try. It’ll be worth it. As for the film itself, having devoted a whole chunk of running time in Batman Begins (2005) to the hero’s origin story, Christopher Nolan feels able to hit the ground running on this one as did Sam Raimi with Spider-Man 2 (2004). Continuing the Mob motif in Gotham from the first one (which I’m reasonably sure is a lift from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween), Nolan relies on Heath Ledger to up the intensity even further with his turn as the Joker, and I tell you, it’s like someone gave Ledger a copy of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and Ledger did his utmost to bring the Joker in that book to the screen. The majority of the cast return from Batman Begins as well, with Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes as The Girl. And I’m not saying anything more.

No cinema visits this week, something which is very much set to change next week.

Batman Begins (2005)

In which Christopher Nolan appears to have been an inspired choice as director after many others had tried and failed, including Darren Aronofsky. The key to a comic book movie is taking it seriously on its own terms; this doesn’t mean your approach has to be humourless, but you have to believe in the world of your protagonist and their situation. As soon as you approach a comic book movie as a camp lark - as Joel Schumacher did when he took over from Tim Burton in 1995 – you’ve already lost. Seeing the film again after some time, it becomes even more impressive. What’s particularly good is Nolan’s instinctive mistrust of CGI and desire to film as much of the movie “for real” as he possibly could. In collaboration with David S Goyer on the script, Nolan also infuses the film with a pretty tricky structure, and his casting choices are spot on. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are great value, it becomes more difficult with every role to remember that Christian Bale got his break as Jim in Empire of the Sun (1987), but even Katie Holmes almost has a decent part to work with when the deadly role of “the girl” in a Batman movie has been so greatly overshadowed by Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. Apparently, Halle Berry has also played Catwoman (2004), but I wouldn’t know, because I will never see that film. Here’s to The Dark Knight (2008) at the IMAX next week.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

My Region 1 DVD has a discrete 6.1 DTS Japanese soundtrack which is awfully spare (I guess the reason would be expense), but this only adds to the film’s intense melancholy and isolation. It’s taken me some years to warm to this film but now I really like it. I think the principle reason is that for an 80 minute film, it’s incredibly dense with information and plot exposition (if not necessarily with plot), and you have to get past both that and the subtitles to start approaching the core of the film’s ideas about artificial intelligence, cyborgs and the philosophical differences and similarities between human life and machine life. The subtitles are essential, because, when the choice is available to me, I will never watch a film produced in a foreign language dubbed into English, regardless of how many name actors have been bussed in to perform the English dub. In the cinema, you sometimes don’t have any choice. When I saw Persepolis (2007) recently, it was the English language version of the original French soundtrack. But I guarantee that when I see Persepolis again on DVD later this year and the French soundtrack is on the disc, that’s what I’ll select to accompany the video. You lose so much of the nuances of the acting and the inflections of the actor’s voices in an English dub. There are a very few exceptions to this: Jodie Foster’s French is good enough for her to insist on dubbing her own voice in French, but for the most part, you’re stuck with what you get, and it’s jobbing actors being paid by the word to overdub, as at the beginning of Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). If this is another Almodóvar film, pedants can correct me. It’s been a long time since Women on the Verge underwhelmed me.

Hellboy (2004)

It seems an even longer time since Sony Pictures was mishandling the UK release of this film so badly I was able to see it on Region 1 DVD two months before it turned up in UK cinemas (see also The Mist (2007) this year). Very poor. Thankfully, the Hellboy franchise has been moved over to Universal Pictures, and they are at least savvy enough to be giving the sequel a worldwide release on the back of Del Toro’s acclaim for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Back in the original, Ron Perlman is indelible as the big red guy, and wrings every last bit of humour and pathos out of a script that wittily plays Hellboy as a working class stiff rather than a denizen of the pit. For the record, this was the Director’s Cut of Hellboy that only runs about 15-20 minutes longer than the theatrical release. As is typical of Director’s Cuts initiated by the director rather than a studio offering a needless double dip, those 15-20 minutes are pretty much all solid gold character moments that should have been left in the film in the first place, and not artificially trimmed out to squeeze in another showing in US cinemas. The theatrical release was good without those moments, but the director’s cut is much better with them.

No cinema visits this week. It’s almost like I’ve stopped watching movies for two months, but what’s really happened is that June was Euro 2008 and the first half of July has turned into database work involving all nine series of The X-Files, which HMV had very generously made available in its sale for £75. Result.

The X-Files (1998)

For the record, this was the movie, not any episodes from the TV series. One of the mysteries around the film is why it isn’t called The X-Files: Fight the Future, because this is a) a way better title than just The X-Files, and b) the title is spoken on screen by not just one but two characters at entirely separate moments. Baffling.

I’ve steadfastly resisted getting involved in X-Files boxsets over the years. I remained untempted by VHS sets (and am now jolly glad I did), and stayed away during the initial release on DVD. I was more of a casual X-Files watcher than a true fan who had to watch every episode. So there are a whole bunch of episodes towards the beginning and the end that I haven’t seen at all. Back in the days before DVD, when TV programmes were at the mercy of the schedulers, Sky kept The X-Files pretty much as exclusive as they could, and when it finally turned up on the BBC, they would move it round the schedules and cut things from it and all sorts of craziness.

It would appear that the DVD box set has now become the best way to watch serial television with reasonably finite beginnings and ends. I remember trying to watch the first series of Russell Davies’ revamp of Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston and it was tremendously difficult trying to organise my life around a television programme after 98% of my viewing had become movies on DVD. I found it irritating. I wanted to watch Doctor Who when I wanted to watch it, and not necessarily when the schedulers wanted to. And so the BBC’s iPlayer. And so the slow, painful death of network television around the world. The spooky thing is that I don’t think enough people who actually work in TV realise that they are presiding over its demise, or at the very least the demise of TV as we now know it.

I don’t know how incomprehensible the movie might have been if you hadn’t been a slightly more than casual viewer of the TV show, since I was that slightly more than casual viewer. The one thing I remember being impressed by was how naturally great Gillian Anderson and to a lesser extent David Duchovny looked on the big screen, and how much more effectively a larger canvas coped with the onscreen darkness and gloom that is so much part of the show, and why I’m so glad I never bothered with X-Files TV sets on VHS, where the gloom can’t have worked at such low resolution.

Two movies this week, both cinema visits marked with a *.

Wanted (2008) *

Tossed away amid the morass of summer blockbusters, this return to the old school of 18 rated action movies will probably find an even wider audience with its release in the aftermarket, though it has done pretty well for itself as it stands, but not well enough, let us hope, for there to be sequels. Adapted from Mark Millar and JG Jones’ comic book (of which as a longtime, disillusioned comic book fan I have somehow managed to remain entirely ignorant), this film easily matches the enjoyable absurdity of Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) or any other favourite, balls to the wall action film of your choosing. Assembled with what I can only imagine to be bucketfulls of the original comic’s dry Scottish wit (which starts with the witty casting of James McAvoy as an action hero), it freely pilfers from The Matrix (1999) amongst others, but reassembles the elements with such crowd-pleasing surety that it manages to be at the same time wholly derivative but totally enjoyable. It’s critic proof, they say.

When I was finding my feet in filmgoing back in the day, I would look to critics I read and watched and try out films they recommended, and if their recommendation chimed with my enjoyment of the film, I would continue to value their opinions. I started rather obviously with Barry Norman, and always found him to be a pretty reasonable guide to good films worth seeing, especially if they were offbeat. But Norman had one problem, at least as far as I was concerned: he didn’t like horror films at all, and was unable to discriminate good horror from bad horror. So sitting in our local library reading the Monthly Film Bulletin and lurking in the Andromeda Bookshop in Brum somehow led me to Kim Newman, a man who lives to choose between good horror and bad horror, and who filled Norman’s horror gap nicely.

Advancing to University, I became aware of this woman called Pauline Kael, who was celebrated as the great New Yorker film reviewer of the 1970s and earlier and later, and who published a large number of her collected film reviews as books. So you could sit, when you were supposed to be researching your next essay, in our University library and read great chunks of Kael, and what I learned from her was to be exasperated, because she would write about a film I loved and praise it to the skies and tell you exactly why she thought it was great, and then you turned the page and she would write about another film I loved and decry it as the biggest heap of dogshit to hurl itself against a projection screen. She was utterly inconsistent in her opinions (for my taste at least), and thus irritatingly useless as a source of decent film criticism.

I then went through a phase of ten years of buying Empire magazine and Premiere magazine and the short lived and lamented Neon magazine, and reading a lot of reviews and suffering through all of Empire’s endless fucking ULTIMATE PREVIEWS and ULTIMATE GUIDES and generally being highly informed before I saw a film. Then I dumped all of that, stuck to subscribing to Sight and Sound, and I now prefer to know nothing at all about a film before I go to see it. I prefer to have not even seen the trailer. I don’t even read film reviews in Sight and Sound until after I’ve seen a film for myself and made up my own mind about it. Ignorance is bliss. Which is a line from The Matrix (1999).

However, something has been happening to film criticism in popular newspapers and magazines in the ten years I’ve been able to survive as a human being without consuming a single issue of Empire. What I feared was coming to pass with Empire has indeed come to pass everywhere else, and film reviewing has now become just another part of the publicity machine for the film, where what seems more important is how many stars a film wins in the five star rating system and how many “astounding”, “classic,” “hilarious,” “masterpiece” quotes the hack in question can cram into their 200 words.

There’s a wonderful website I’ve come across at www.hollywoodbitchslap.com where the folks are really, really, deeply pissed at these quote whores, as they tag them, who have displaced proper film reviewers (essentially in America, which is where the bitchslappers are based) and are only too willing to declare the worst piece of Hollywood dreck a masterpiece if someone invites them on the press junket and they get to spend some face time with the assembled talent.

I’ve met almost nobody in the film business. I was once in a room with Stephen Frears, and seen Ken Russell interviewed, and watched Alex Cox and Guy Maddin introduce screenings, and witnessed a rather embarrassing Q&A with John Hillcoat where the big elephant in the room was that the mediocre film we’d just sat through - To Have and to Hold (1996) - wasn’t much cop and both we the audience and he the filmmaker realised this, but we were all too polite and British to tell the guy he’d just wasted four years of his life, or however long it took him to raise the finance to direct something quite so underwhelming.

I’m about as far away from a quote whore as it’s possible to get.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) *

Everybody loves the 1970s and the classic films it produced except contemporary audiences who refuse to have anything much to do with films where you have to keep your brain with you for the screening and not check it in at the box office. Zodiac (2007) is another recent example of a great film that was pretty well ignored.

(As yet another aside, I know that the 70s was also full of disaster movies and yee-haw films with Burt Reynolds in a car which were as popular as hell - these films have dated as badly as Hai Karate and the great smell of Brut; you know the classic films I’m talking about, that great canon of well-respected greatness that runs from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to Raging Bull (1980), or, to my mind, Heaven’s Gate (1980), which may well be greater than Raging Bull because a) almost no one has seen the full four hour version in 70mm like I have and b) Heaven’s Gate is a film that’s a lot harder to love than Raging Bull because Raging Bull is self-evidently great, but Heaven’s Gate you have to work at.)

Like the rest of us, Ben Affleck loves those 70s films too, and his directorial debut, its release very sensibly delayed by a year after the abduction of Madeleine McCann, unfurls at exactly the same kind of languid pace as did Mystic River (2003), no real surprise as the source novelist of both stories is Dennis Lehane, and on the evidence of these two films, a writer whose work I should have been following already.

The film is subtle, exceptionally well-acted, and wholly ambiguous in the best possible way, in that it leaves you with a welcome sense of resolution that is at the same time very disquieting and really rather a long way from any kind of resolution at all. And I’m not saying anything else about that. In the 70s, you didn’t have to.