I lost it at the movies
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.