Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week.

Infernal Affairs (2002)

Odd that it takes Martin Scorsese 50 more minutes in The Departed (2006) to retell the same story that takes a compact 100 minutes in the Hong Kong original.

Infernal Affairs II (2003)

I’ve only very rarely felt terribly sleepy while in the cinema watching a film. The one that really sticks in my memory is my first viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) on its re-release around the time of The Sacrifice (1986). For those who don’t know, Stalker, while obviously a classic and a film I both respect and admire tremendously, is awfully slow in pace and it got the better of me to the extent that I drifted off several times during it. If he ever knew how many cinemagoers he sent off into dreamland, I like to think Tarkovsky would have been pissed off in that doomladen Russian way of his. The one other time I succumbed to some five minute naps was during an all night screening at the Brixton Ritzy, but I think I can be forgiven this one as it was an all night quadruple bill. Incidents since then have mostly revolved around other people falling asleep during movies, particularly old, crusty-looking dudes who may have been using the cinema as a noisy motel for some daylight kip time. I really don’t understand how it’s possible to get any sleep at all with the aggressive 5.1 sound of a Hollywood blockbuster banging away at you. And yet it is. What I’m trying to say here is that I was feeling awfully sleepy throughout this viewing of Infernal Affairs II and this is precisely the kind of film that it’s a really bad idea not to be able to give your full attention to.

No cinema visits this week, but at least I’m actually writing these things on a Sunday, rather than a Monday or a Tuesday.

Sunshine (2007)

I’m caught between this first viewing of the film in which you familiarise yourself with the plot, the events, the story and the characters, and the second viewing that this film demands, which I haven’t yet had, when I feel a little more aware after viewing the extras as to whether or not the whole premise of the film isn’t just really stupid. The sun will die on us in this planetary system, but not for billions of years, and since essentially the sun already is a huge bomb, it doesn’t make any sense to reignite it (if you could even do that) with another much smaller, man-made bomb a mere fifty years in the future. The film may be as scientifically silly as the heavily criticised premise of The Core (2003), another film I haven’t seen. However, the characters are interesting, something quite clever is being done with the breakdown in gravitational and temporal rules the closer you get to the sun, and it looks great. The CG effects are both tremendous and more than a little trippy. So there are a lot of plusses; I just didn’t like the film as much as I liked Solaris (2002).

28 days later… (2002)

As I’m clearly on a Danny Boyle kick, I thought it was about time to watch an earlier film, which infamously invented the “fast zombie” that was also heavily criticised in the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004). Made on a low budget with a lot of the film shot on DV, the film is more interesting in its first half hour than later on when it all starts to become more generic and uninteresting. There’s also an absolutely terrible plot point about halfway in which the characters have to traverse a tunnel underneath the Thames unnecessarily when we’ve already been clearly shown that they could just drive over Westminster Bridge. Oops. In a lot of ways, George A Romero is right to criticise the fast zombie motif; a rotting corpse brought to life is not going to retain muscle tone or speed or bodily coherence. 28 days later… just about gets away with it since it doesn’t flat out come and say that the plague victims in the film are zombie zombies.

The Kingdom (2007)

There’s also quite a bit of papering over the cracks in this film, in which a lot of overly familiar action film motifs (the buddy cops who initially don’t get on then bond together to solve the case, the evil master criminal lurking in the background, etc) have been successfully buried by the film’s terrific, original setting and hell for leather, you-are-there, handheld camerawork, copied I think wholesale from Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass’ work on the Bourne trilogy, and influenced more than a little by Michael Mann’s own directorial work (Mann served as co-producer on this film). Even the slightly patronising arrogance with which the Americans discover most of the leads in the investigation of a bombing in a Saudi Arabian compound is subtly undermined in the film’s exceptional all-action third act, when it is made crystal clear to them that their presence in this country has not necessarily been to everyone’s benefit. Quite the opposite. There are enough refreshing notes of terse ambiguity left in the script to make one look out for what director Peter Berg did next. Unfortunately, that was Hancock (2008), a film I haven’t seen because I could see all too clearly exactly how much it had been compromised for a family audience just from a few viewings of the trailer. A drunk, useless superhero is a terrific premise for a movie, and it still is, because by all accounts, Hancock is not the film that delivered on that premise.

Miami Vice (2006)

For the record, this was the Unrated Director’s Cut. The first shock was that the film doesn’t begin in media res as it did theatrically, but with an enormously expensive-looking powerboat race off the coast of Miami. On his commentary track, Mann makes mention that this isn’t really a Director’s Cut since the theatrical version was his cut as well; he does mention that this is a revision of the film two months after release, in which Mann may have been influenced by the reviews that found the film too confusing, which is a nonsense since the film only requires that you give it your full attention rather than checking your brain in at the ticket office. It takes an admirable amount of guts to produce a genuine reimagining of a 20 year old premise from a TV series rather than reenacting the TV series as an empty ironic object full of blokes in Armani suits with the sleeves rolled up. If that’s what the initial audience for this film expected, more fool them. Michael Mann is a much better filmmaker than that, and here he proves it again.