Nobody Knows Anything

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.

No cinema visits this week.

Vanilla Sky (2001)

In which Tom Cruise continues to prove that he’s an actor not just a movie star, and the consequences of success are examined at some length. This film also tests the limits of what a mainstream audience will take when it comes to different levels of reality. And it doesn’t have any kung fu, wire work or bullet time to distract an audience from the angst of its central character and the memorably nasty sequence in which someone is killed.

The Matrix (1999)

For the record, I watched the original R1 DVD rather than the one in the box set. What you notice the most is that the ending of the third film is set up very early in the first. “You’re my own personal saviour.” Indeed. The film is proof positive that a grabbag of influences can work and will flow together to form a cohesive whole. The more that’s layered into the film, the better it becomes.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

The two sequels to The Matrix are brilliant, but not necessarily in the way that The Matrix was brilliant. For a start, there is no attempt whatsoever to bring anyone up to speed with what is going on. If you didn’t see the first film, whole chunks of the sequels won’t make any sense at all. There is no attempt to re-explain the divisions between the real world and the world of The Matrix. The sequels are also really abstract. They are more about the stranger behaviour of programs in a computer system than they are about regular human emotions. And yet it is the regular human emotions within the computer system that are causing all the mayhem. What the Wachowskis have done is they’ve managed to con Warner Brothers into funding a two part $300 million art movie with philosophical digressions as intense as those in an Ingmar Bergman movie combined with ass kicking on an absurdist scale.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Because, amusingly, what the sequels boil down to in the end is two guys in a hole in the ground hitting each other. It’s the WWF on a cosmic scale. These things aren’t called burly brawls as a matter of convenience, the Wachowskis really mean it. Among the things that the Wachowskis must be fans of is Alan Moore’s run on Miracleman. I don’t know if they’ve ever come out and admitted it, but the final confrontation between Neo and Agent Smith at the end of Revolutions is awfully similar to that of Mike Moran and Johnny Bates in Miracleman #15. And they must also be familiar with the marriage of heaven and hell at the end of Swamp Thing #50 and the cosmic endings of Japanese anime. This is why Revolutions doesn’t end with a tubthumping victory, but with a highly unamerican concept in 2003: peace. There is a sense, particularly in the battle for the dock, that this is a film that goes too far and gives you too much to look at. On the contrary, I wish more films were as ambitious.

eXistenZ (1999)

The Matrix wasn’t the only mindjob of a movie released in 1999, there was also David Cronenberg’s first original script for a number of years. Somehow, Cronenberg’s films have remained away from this blog all year, possibly because I was saving them up for a full career runthrough at some stage. eXistenZ pulls a wonderful trick on its audience that is impossible to discuss without spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Suffice it to say that it matches the exposition of The Matrix for its ability to mess with your head.