Nobody Knows Anything

Very pure this week. Two cinema visits marked with a * and a movie on Blu-ray marked with a †.

Australia (2008) *

Since David Lean died, it’s become very difficult for filmmakers to do epic and sweeping quite like Lean did in the latter half of his film career. This hasn’t stopped filmmakers reaching for the epic, but Baz Luhrmann has become merely the latest to make the attempt and not succeed in any convincing way. Whereas the intensive self-reflexivity of Moulin Rouge (2001) worked so well in the context of the Red Curtain Trilogy and the baroque pastiche of any number of pop songs and films both present and past, when stapled onto the epic the end result of such intense movie referencing is unsatisfactory. Australia is Baz Luhrmann’s first disappointment. The film’s major problem is that it is so transparently built on the bones of so many other, better movies (Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Red River (1948), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Crocodile Dundee (1986) to name but the ones I spotted) and fails to do anything very much interesting with this source material. For the first time, the utter predictability of the plot damages Luhrmann’s film more than it helps it. And it does go on for at least 40 minutes too long, and somehow has had the post-Pearl Harbor bombing of Darwin glued onto it.

Che Part One (2008) *

In direct contrast, where I didn’t know anything about the bombing of Darwin and didn’t much care when the CGI Zeroes bombed it to bits, I’m pretty much ignorant of the history of Castro’s Cuban revolution as well, but I found Steven Soderbergh’s treatment of the subject absolutely fascinating. And to think I was eagerly looking forward to Australia and viewed the prospect of seeing Che Part One as something of a chore. D’oh! In contrast to Australia’s linear approach, Che Part One has a fairly typical chopped up Soderbergh feel to it, detailing Che’s sojourn in New York in 1964 and contrasting it with his endless, asthmatic hill climbing and commitment to armed rebellion in the hills of Cuba in 1957-58. It’s also filmed fairly flat, with a great number of static setups combined with edgy handheld camera for the majority of the violence. Benicio Del Toro buries himself in the role with his characteristic uber-Method technique, and the film carefully delineates why a Marxist revolution found the support of the people of Cuba at the time, though I think it’s probably fair to say that almost every Cuban has had more than second thoughts about the ultimate wisdom of letting Castro in every year since then. Roll on Part Two is what I say. This film comes thoroughly recommended.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) †

What Blu-ray can offer is demonstrated by the opening Three Wise Men scene in which every detail of their costuming is visible in clearly delineated detail. What Blu-ray brings to the party is texture. What I found striking about seeing Star Wars (1977) on its re-release in 1997 was that the adobe walls of Ben Kenobi’s habitat had a grain and a texture that years of video viewings of the film at lower resolution had softened out. All the evidence of the used future that George Lucas had spent so much time and effort imposing upon the production design had more or less disappeared from popular consciousness because VHS doesn’t do detail, grain and smears at all well. Life of Brian continues to be funny as hell, an accurate representation of the historical reality of Biblical Judea, and a vital contrast to the po-faced nonsense, lack of context and gore of The Passion of the Christ (2004).

No cinema visits this week. We seem to be in the three month pit of despair that American film distribution enters when January begins and the studios dump all the crap they couldn’t release before Christmas into theatres. It reaches us in the UK about two months later. So thanks for that. At least we have a summer filled with sequels to keep us happy. The last time there was a summer filled with sequels was 2003, when such dogs as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle were unleashed on a carefully test-marketed public who had sworn blind they wanted to see more Angels. Except the public lied. What people really wanted to see was Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. My prediction for 2007: the real breakout hit of this summer will be a non-sequel that no one was expecting. Why? Read title of blog.

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

There’s very little new I can bring to this one, except that if it isn’t one of Terry Gilliam’s favourite films I would be completely shocked. Why can’t more artists make films like this? Made in conditions so impossible it only appears to have become a finished product through the sheer will of its driving, creative force: Jean Cocteau. For a scene in which they needed unpatched sheets hanging up to dry, they could only find four, and then four more when it became clear that four wasn’t enough. Why couldn’t they find unpatched sheets? This film began production while the Second World War was still underway. Martin Scorsese has said of Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) that having been told to go out to die for our country during WWII, the Archers were now telling us, the war now over, to go out and die for art. Jean Cocteau says the same.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Christopher Frayling mentions in his commentary on La Belle et la Bête that Disney make no mention whatsoever of Jean Cocteau in the credits to their animated version of the same French fairy tale. Which is a real shame because whole scenes have been, shall we say, homaged in the most direct way possible. This is the 2nd film in Disney’s post-Little Mermaid, pre-Pixar “Imperial” period, in which they could do no wrong, and audiences flocked to the films. The key figure in the success was Howard Ashman, who contributed as much on a story level as he did with his brilliant, witty lyrics. This is a film where everything works for me and I find myself going all misty at key points; when the emotional manipulation is this good, I really don’t care.

Moulin Rouge (2001)

This was my film of the year for 2001, and it has, if anything, only got better with the passage of time. It didn’t appear to do much for Hollywood composers though. It was shut out of the original score category, presumably because so much of the music comes from pre-existing songs. No one seems to have realised what an exacting proposition it was to a) piece all these songs together in the first place and b) write original linking material to tie them together into a unified place. I guess Moulin Rouge had to go first so Chicago (2002) could win all the Oscars.

One from the Heart (1982)

And so to one of my very favourite films. This, like Moulin Rouge, was an original musical created entirely in the studio that takes a highly unusual approach to the score. Where Moulin Rouge is collage, One from the Heart has original Tom Waits songs sung by Waits himself with Crystal Gayle forming point and counterpoint to the onscreen activities of its principal lovers: Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr. There’s no better moment in cinema than the scene towards the end of the film where Frederic Forrest unexpectedly breaks into an out of tune rendition of “You Are My Sunshine” in an attempt to win Teri Garr back. You’re just going to have to see the film to discover why.

Form and Content

I discovered quite early on that I prefer form in film to content. I’ve met people, real actual people, who’ve said, to my face, that they’re real big Steven Seagal fans, or people who’ve said they just can’t stand that Tom Cruise. These are content people. People who like westerns and don’t care if it’s the worst western ever made; as long as it’s got a man on a horse with a gun, a saloon, a tart with a heart, and a gunfight, they’re in hog heaven. I prefer form, I appreciate style, I follow directors. Brian De Palma is probably my favourite director and of all his films, Blow Out (1981) is probably my favourite and his best.

So this is a tip for people who want to watch good films: find a director you like and watch all of their other films. I guarantee you will see more good films than you would if you followed a particular actor. Imagine the dreck you’d have to sit through if you were a Cameron Diaz fan, or even worse, Jennifer Aniston. As for me, I think Cameron and Jennifer are great in the movies, because I’ve only ever seen them in films made by directors I like. This may seem like a trifling distinction, but believe me, it’s not.

For the next week or two (or three): Tony Scott.