Nobody Knows Anything

Trust Steve Martin to open a bad film and then turn up at the Oscars and deliver the best line of the night. Funny and original at the Oscars, unfunny and unoriginal in The Pink Panther 2 (2009). Absolutely exasperating. I only managed to see one film this week, but did manage to stay up late (as usual) and watch the Oscars live.

Heat (1995)

It’s now feeling a lot more like checking in with an old friend, the time spent watching Heat again. Last time, if memory serves, I went on about the women in this outwardly macho movie, but this time I thought I’d focus a little attention on Elliot Goldenthal’s brilliant score, which slides in and around the copious amounts of songs and other instrumental pieces that all combine to set the mood and pace of an effortless two and three quarter hours. The score does this by not containing hummable tunes but by reaching for intense atmospheres and quiet cacophonies, letting the break out songs hit the emotional high spots. It doesn’t particularly make any sense that the fabled Al Pacino/Robert De Niro meet in the restaurant is preceded by a non-chase on a LA freeway to the tune of Moby’s cover of Joy Division’s New Dawn Fades, or maybe it makes perfect sense, as the prelude to the main event, and De Niro’s quiet dominance of the scene frustrating Pacino’s attempts to one-up him at the acting table. Some films fade from view, some are never properly honoured on their first release (Heat was nominated for precisely zero Oscars, which looks really odd when you see what was released in 1995 and won in 1996 - it was the year of Braveheart and the talking pig movie), and some, like Heat, only become more of what they were when you first saw them every subsequent time you watch them: a masterpiece.

The Oscars (2009)

As if to spite me for my bitching about Claudia Winkleman in 2007, those callous bastards at Sky served up a double treat this time. Not only was the Wink back, oozing insincerity from her every pore, but who was the first to join her on the couch? None other than Gok Wan. It’s difficult to criticise someone for being who they are, but I found that both Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn made more positive contributions to the unending quest for gay and lesbian equal rights through their acceptance speeches than did a camp bloke wearing too much makeup sat on a sofa being slightly bitchy about this year’s crop of Oscar gowns. I’ve seen the whole Gok Wan thing before, it’s got very old by now, and I am not captivated. Back to the show, which was almost entertaining. Hugh Jackman did a sterling job, especially with his opening number, and an awful lot of the flab has been pruned from the show. If only they could get rid of those endless montages and allow the original songs to be performed properly, and not glued together Moulin Rouge (2001) style, then you’ve got a winning formula that could work even better next year. The Oscars has only ever needed to be about the awards themselves, which hasn’t stopped the show over the years lapsing into lengthy and boring digressions (such as the not infrequent parades of former winners who are still alive, everybody!). This year, there were very few surprises except in the best foreign film category, won by a Japanese film about a cellist who works in a mortuary that wasn’t directed by Takashi Miike though it sounds like it could have been, and, of course, in the Best Actor category, where Sean Penn unsportingly triumphed and deprived us of another fabulous, expletive-strewn speech from Mickey Rourke. The shame! Time and all those awards still haven’t changed my mind about Slumdog Millionaire (2008); I still don’t think it’s all that brilliant, though the inevitable Blu-ray viewing a few months down the line may change my mind. As I enjoyed the music a lot more than I enjoyed the film, I was very happy that AH Rahman won for his score and his songs. As for the show’s major innovation, inviting five former winners of each acting award to present the Oscar to this year’s winner, we’ll see whether it survives the cut next year, because although it got a bit gooey, especially with the women, both Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr showed a few sparks of the fun it could be too.

I’ve successfully managed not to see any films all week, such is the way of things, but fortunately this week does sees the inauspicious release of The Pink Panther 2 (2009), so I’ve got something to write about, even if it is a film I have not seen, and will never see, at any time now, or for the rest of my life. But since I have been so rudely assailed by Pink Panther 2 advertising at every turn to and from work for the past month, I feel justified in having a go at the movie, even though there is another part of me that will not speak ill of a film (or indeed any piece of art) which I have not experienced for myself.

What Pink Panther 2 puts into sharp relief is the decline in quality of Steve Martin’s contributions to modern cinema. It is really depressing to note that a man, who made any number of successful role picks from The Jerk (1979) to L.A. Story (1991), has ended up a shadow of his former self, redoing roles in Sgt Bilko (1996) and The Pink Panther (2006) that Phil Silvers and Peter Sellers had set in stone, never to be bettered. I haven’t seen these remakes, but a lot of people have, and they do not have good things to say about them. In this case, I will let the imdb ratings speak for me, and both films are unable to muster much more than 5 out of 10s.

It is a cliché to speak of a comedian’s earlier, funnier work, and complain that it all went downhill when they started to take themselves too seriously, but it’s as true of Woody Allen as it’s true of Steve Martin. Fortunately, Woody Allen was so aware of the issue himself that he made an entire, rather fabulous film about it called Stardust Memories (1980), though he still can be found in interviews bemoaning the fact that he knows he’ll never be as great a filmmaker as Ingmar Bergman, to which, rather inevitably, I and a million others would say that Ingmar Bergman couldn’t make a film as funny as, to pick but one, Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and that perhaps Allen should take a leaf from Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and realise that entertaining people and making them laugh is as high a calling as depressing them with angst-ridden dramas about shitty marriages, cancer and the silence of God.

As an actor in cinema, Steve Martin hasn’t done anything really great since The Spanish Prisoner (1997), and that was a long, long 12 years ago. He was okay in Bowfinger (1999) and Bringing Down the House (2003) and more than a bit out there, but not necessarily in a good way, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), but with the possible exception of Shopgirl (2005) (which I haven’t seen also), that’s more or less been it. During this period, Martin has been more successful as a novelist than as a Hollywood player. I despair at the Steve Martin that Steve Martin has become because I remember just how great he was in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and All of Me (1984), and in fact I don’t just despair, I really miss that guy, and I don’t think I’m ever going to see him again.

And that isn’t just depressing, I think it’s a fucking disgrace. Steve Martin could still be good; he just chooses not to be. Maybe I shouldn’t take it personally, but I do and find Martin’s commitment to bad movie after bad movie exasperating. So, if you want to see Steve Martin make some more poor films, go and see The Pink Panther 2 this week, and maybe he’ll piss away his career making an endless succession of pointless sequels, just like Peter Sellers did, but maybe, just maybe, if everyone voted with their feet and avoided this movie like the plague, it might spur Martin out of sheer desperation to create another L.A. Story (1991) for us.

I’ll finish with a different note about the decline of the great and good. Nobody has much of a kind word to say about John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001), a redo of a rehash of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Rio Bravo (1959), in which Carpenter repeats and rips off himself and Howard Hawks in equal measure, gives the film an unnecessarily complicated flashback structure and some underdeveloped ideas about a ruling matriarchy on Mars.

And yet when I saw Ghosts of Mars for the first time at the Birmingham Film Festival back in 2001, it was still heads above a lot (if not all!) of the films I saw at the Festival because although it wasn’t great, it was still entertaining on its own terms, it was still slickly made with just the right amount of audience-pleasing, enjoyable elements to raise it above other more serious, more dopey films that had not been made with a sufficient amount of craft (I remember one film in particular from this festival which I will not name here which actually had poorly-recorded production sound; Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) did not have this problem, and that had been made for a tenth of this low budget feature’s budget; there really is no excuse for inadequate sound recording).

In short, there may still be hope for John Carpenter, even if the great years may be behind him. For Steve Martin, at this moment in time, I have no hope at all.

So, it was impossible for me to post last weekend because I was right in the middle of a six cinema film weekend (and I haven’t done one of those for a long time), and I find films nearly always need a bit of distance before you can approach them with critical comments, especially new films. So, the cinema visits are marked with a * and the two Blu-ray viewings this fortnight is marked with a †.

Valkyrie (2008) *

In which Tom Cruise and several baker’s dozens of British actors conspire to assassinate Adolf Hitler, which, in an interesting redo of the whole Titantic (1997) thing, is something you know going in did not succeed. What’s most startling about the film (apart from how great Tom Cruise is as an actor when he underplays) is the extent to which the plot of 20th July 1944 nearly succeeded and could have brought the War in Europe to an end a year early. Bryan Singer directs with engrossing, immaculate skill from a script co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, and John Ottman edits and composes the doom-laden score, which makes it more than a second cousin to The Usual Suspects (1995).

Revolutionary Road (2008) *

Talking of Titanic (1997), Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are reunited on screen in a very different scenario, a feel-bad story told with mordant humour about a disastrous marriage in the 1950s gone only slightly wrong, that Kate Winslet’s second husband, Sam Mendes, directs. Most engaging when it’s uncomfortable in its scenes of Kate and Leo going at each other hell for leather, as well as bizarre interjections and interventions from a neighbour’s psychotic son, it’s ultimately a film about the dangers of letting dreams of a life you think you could have had distract you from the life you do have, and the dire consequences that can result if you do.

Frost/Nixon (2008) *

Ron Howard does an Oliver Stone thing and films a play so cinematically you wouldn’t know it had ever been a play if you didn’t know that was where it came from in the first place. Both Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Milhous Nixon are ridiculously effective, though there is a certain disingenuous quality to the film’s portrayal of David Frost as an international playboy. Those of us with longer memories recall the trial by television of insurance fraudster Emil Savundra on The Frost Programme in the 1960s and know that Frost could be a heavyweight interviewer if he wanted to. The play speaks, as all plays must, to the age in which they were first performed, and the protagonist of this drama is as much George W Bush as it is Richard Nixon.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008) *

Of all the films I saw this weekend, this is the one that came off worst in my eyes. I went in convinced that it was based on a true story, though where I picked up that impression I have no idea. In fact, it’s based on a novel, which makes the numerous narrative contrivances by which the lead character answers the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? nothing more than novelistic devices, rather than any kind of interesting statement about coincidences and meanings thereof in the real world. I thought Danny Boyle did a terrible job of directing this film, and he clearly loves Dutch angles more than he should do. Every sequence from the leading character’s life is vibrantly overdirected, and then contrasted with the dreadful TV-style coverage on the Millionaire set. I wasn’t convinced, and not even convinced by the end credits Bollywood style dance sequence. Maybe seeing it again as a fictional film may change my mind. And I say this knowing that this film may be about to clean up at both the BAFTAs and the Oscars. And I’m not sure that it deserves to. Though I did think the soundtrack was excellent.

Ratatouille (2007) †

The weekend after my mother died in October 2007 I was going to go with her to see this film, and of course, that is something that did not happen. Mom had seen any number of featurettes about the film on Sky Movies and knew more about it than I did, as I’ve made strenuous efforts since I stopped reading Empire in the mid 1990s not to know anything about a film before I see it. And I just couldn’t bring myself to get to the cinema to see Ratatouille in 2007. I didn’t want to see it alone. Fast forward a year and a half and it turns up on Blu-ray at a price I can’t refuse, and guess what? It’s every bit as good as it should be, if not better than that, and my Mom would have loved it, but she never got to see it. The lesson I’ve tried to draw from this is not to put off to tomorrow what you can do today. And I might even live up to this one day.

Rachel Getting Married (2008) *

Jonathan Demme won the Best Director Oscar in 1992 for The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and was able to parlay this success into the Hollywood-does-AIDS movie, Philadelphia (1993), but then it all went horribly wrong. Beloved (1998) was a difficult film that was not much liked. The Truth About Charlie (2002) was not much liked either, mostly because it was a remake of the beloved Hollywood classic Charade (1963). The Manchurian Candidate (2004) was a workmanlike remake of another John Frankenheimer classic from 1962, and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t see it at the cinema, but caught up with it on DVD (though I could be wrong). In short, this might be the first time in 10 years that I’ve seen a Jonathan Demme picture in a cinema, and that seems terribly wrong because I’m a Jonathan Demme fan, and he just hasn’t been able to resume the great run that led up to The Silence of the Lambs. Demme hasn’t been idle; in the 15 years since Philadelphia, he’s also directed any number of documentaries. And so to this film, shot for next to nothing in 21 days, a multiracial, liberal fantasia of marriage for the Barack Obama era, maybe in part patterned on Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), in that harsh reality and too much emotional honesty combine with joyous, musical celebration. Of all the films I saw this weekend, I liked this one the most, even despite having a nosebleed in the dark halfway through it.

Batman Begins (2005) *

And so to the Imax for a double bill of Christopher Nolan madness. Nolan has continued the narrative indy deftness of Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2003) as he’s turned into the go-to guy for Hollywood bigness. Considering that the origin of Batman is one of the most overworked tropes in comics, Nolan brings a startling amount of originality to the project. In many ways though, it’s just a warm-up for the main event.

The Dark Knight (2008) *

That scene where they turn the 18 wheeler truck upside down on a Chicago street? The one that looks like an awfully expensive CGI shot? The filmmakers did it for real for the Imax cameras on a real Chicago street that had to be reinforced for the stunt to be performed; CGI was used to remove wires and mounts, but not to flip the truck. Quite often, screenwriters insert an emotional subtext into the film scripts of big blockbuster prospects to attract actors to the films and give them something to act. Thus, Jurassic Park (1993) is really about Sam Neill learning to embrace the concept of parenthood (and not 54 shots of CGI dinosaurs that everybody went to see the movie to see), and Twister (1997) is about the divorce proceedings of Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton (and not the CGI twisters that everybody went to see the movie to see). And so on, you get the idea. Unusually, both The Dark Knight and Batman Begins have any amount of emotional subtext, and much talk of justice and law and murder, but the difference is that this is what these films are actually about. The Dark Knight in particular is a post-9/11 movie if ever there was one, with a homicidal maniac running berserk on the streets of Gotham, and the only question being, is it acceptable to beat up, torture, or kill this man, because of what he is doing? The Dark Knight does not have answers to these questions, entrenched as it is in its world of symbols and meaning and metaphor, but they’re rich questions, and none of them have found their way into this film by chance.

Art School Confidential (2005)

If making fun of art school pretensions is as easy as satirising the fashion industry, then how come there haven’t been more movies like Pret-a-Porter (1994) and this one? The film is most fun when exposing just how shit bad art can be, and how ready pretentious idiots are to line up to praise it. The film is a lot more subtle than it may have been given credit for, it’s a kind of slow burn, and where it ends up seems more inevitable than it may have been at the start.

Bird (1988)

Bird is dark, really dark. Dark even by Clint Eastwood’s love of darkness and jazz. A film entirely unsuited to VHS that took an age to come to DVD. And an even longer age for me to acquire it. I saw it once, in a cinema, in 1988 (or 1989), and it was so dark that you could see how much light there is even in a darkened cinema. Charlie Parker burned the candle at both ends, and it’s amazing he lived as long as he did.

Female Agents (2008)

Haven’t made it to disc 2 yet, so am unable to verify how accurate the film may (or may not) be. Sadly more workmanlike than inspired, the film arrives on DVD with an appalling title that fatally mistranslates the original French “The Women of the Shadows” into the more prosaic (though accurate) Female Agents.

Be Kind Rewind (2007) †

Michel Gondry continues his series of naive films in celebration of the simple pleasures of his French childhood. This has manifested itself in the Lego music video for The White Stripes, the oversized hands of The Science of Sleep (2006), and now this paean to the age of VHS video rental, though set in modern times.