Nobody Knows Anything

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *, and both of them were doozies. There may be some swearing at the expense of the noble film bookers of the cinema chains of the British Isles, who receive a firm telling-off for some There Will Be Blood related ineptitude.

Beowulf (2007) *

For the record, this was a screening of the film in 3D at the Imax in Birmingham. The majority of people reading this will never have read anything in Old English, never mind Beowulf, perhaps the most famous of ancient OE texts. Well, I have wrestled with Old English, but found the barrier of the language was getting in the way of any literary appreciation of the story, so I never took it any further than the first year of my three year English degree course. So that’s where Beowulf comes from, as filtered through the imaginations of writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, both perfect choices for the job as far as I’m concerned – I started reading The Sandman in single issues around the time of #15 and I have a lot of time for Avary, especially after The Rules of Attraction (2002). Made using the same elaborate motion capture process as The Polar Express (2004) and Monster House (2006), but now both more refined and more complicated (there are more dots on the actors in their blue suits, there are more mocap cameras, the space in which they can act is larger), the film looks incredible, more real than real, yet at the same time more fake than fake. The rationale for doing it this way is really quite simple: the story requires the characters to do things that real actors could not do, and to even attempt to get real actors close to what would be required in those scenes would be so expensive as to make the film unfilmable. Much better to fake it and know that you’re going to be not just fixing it but making the film in post production. There are also a ton of amusing 3D effects, more than a few of which are designed to dump a load of blood in your face, so thanks for that. And it has the best yet CGI dragon, better than the dragons in Reign of Fire (2002) – and they were pretty damn good dragons.

There Will Be Blood (2007) *

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2nd and 3rd films announced themselves with such authority after the low key start of his 1st that great things came to be expected of him, a situation he dealt with amusingly by engaging Adam Sandler to be in his 4th film, just to piss off film critics I expect. However, PTA’s problem was this: though lauded by critics, his films (with the possible exception of Boogie Nights (1997)) have not set the box office alight, and this, the 5th film, was as difficult to finance as all of the others have been. Thankfully, it was more than worth the effort. It more than reconfirms that Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the best actors on the planet and that his Robert De Niro in the 1970s attitude of taking gaps in between parts and waiting for the juicy stuff is absolutely the right one. I don’t have the words to describe how extraordinary his performance is, but I’m convinced there are a lot of actors out there who’ve watched this film who are a) realising that someone has raised the game for everybody else and b) filling in his name on their Oscar ballots. These days, the quality of film reviewing has declined so far that the word masterpiece is strewn about like so much confetti and attached to movies written by people who couldn’t even spell masterpiece without a spell checker. But that’s what this film is. A masterpiece. Go see it.

If you can find it that is, since the cunts who run cinema bookings in this country appear not to have booked enough prints of it to go around, when they’re perfectly content to book multiple copies of fucking shit like Rambo (2008) because it’s got that punch drunk old has been attached to it. Fuck you, cinema bookers, and the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. Ahem.

The Black Dahlia (2006)

Second viewings of films are funny things. It took me at least three screenings of The Matrix Reloaded (2003) before I realised that it was a good film after all, when I was able to have absorbed the plot and enough of the Architect’s dialogue to work out just what the film’s intentions were, or at least the intentions as they appeared to me. And once you know a film is good, you tend not to revise that opinion unless you see the film 20 years later and realise you were mistaken. That may happen with the two Matrix sequels, but at the moment I’m confident enough in their brilliance to assert that they can’t be released on Blu-Ray soon enough.

Now the first cinema screening of The Black Dahlia was unsatisfactory, and not because I was sat next to someone crunching popcorn or slurping a giant Coke or using their mobile. I’m a big James Ellroy fan, and have even briefly met the man twice. But there was an awful lot of plot in James Ellroy’s original and brilliant novel, and although screenwriter Josh Friedman did a man’s job of reducing the amount of plot for the film, there was still an awful lot of plot in Brian De Palma’s finished film to get past before you can start seeing whether or not the film works as a whole. Things that pop out, like Hilary Swank’s curious English accent, or the ages of the protagonists (some people thought Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson too young for their parts) tend to magnify in that situation.

So it is with some relief that I can report that these first screening impressions were mistaken. Once the plot complications have been sorted out in your head, the strengths of the performances and the camerawork and the production design and the costumes and the music and the direction start to come to the fore. Brian De Palma has made a decidedly old school film with a lot of longish takes and sweeping camerawork and not that much editing, as well as a couple of Untouchables (1987) style set pieces and some disconcerting switches in tone. The second screening of The Black Dahlia reveals that the film hangs together a lot better than it did first time around.

And that’s not always the case. The second screening can end with you asking yourself: so why did I buy this on DVD? It doesn’t work. Oh dear.

One cinema visit this week marked with a *. The week was marked by the passing of two great directors, to whom I paid tribute in my own way.

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Although I hate to be the first to speak ill of the dead, Bergman’s reputation as a filmmaker has plummeted in recent years, especially in comparison with someone like Andrei Tarkovsky, who’s remained an inspiration 20 years after his own death. Bergman’s films seem to belong to another age when existentialism was all the rage and religious disquiet and bleak Scandinavian suicidal depression and terminal illness and death were proper subjects for serious filmmakers. The silence in The Silence (1963) is God’s silence. Very deep. I thought it would be nice to dig out one of his films from my DVD collection to watch as a kind of tribute before I realised that I don’t own any. I like Persona (1966), but I just haven’t got around to buying it yet.

Attack of the Clones (2002)

Of the three infamous Star Wars prequels, I like this the most. I did get to see this digitally projected, and it looked fabulous. To me, this is what the essence of Star Wars is all about: solid B-movie heroics, pulpy adventure cliches, stupid jokes, and all done on an A-list budget. Sad Star Wars geeks from my generation who were all 10 when they first saw Star Wars (1977) in the cinema and think George Lucas has betrayed their childhood seemed to have expected the prequels to be the equivalent of the New Testement. Star Wars was only a movie, and not a very good one at that. Expecting it to contain the meaning of life is idiocy of the highest order.

Sexy Beast (2000)

Mysteriously, it’s taken me seven years to get around to watching this, and it was beyond great. Entire cast explodes, as they say, especially Sir Ben Kingsley, who can and has spent the succeeding years popping up in a variety of dreadful genre flicks in the sure and certain knowledge that he will be forgiven by critics because he acted the role of Don Logan in Sexy Beast.

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)

If there was anything funnier in 2004 than Ben Stiller saying “freaky naughty” with a 70s porn star moustache, then I’d like to see it. Because I don’t particularly believe in research, I like to think that there really is a world series of dodgeball on ESPN 8, also known as The Ocho.

Shrek the Third (2007) *

I don’t know what’s the matter with people. Maybe this won’t seem as good when I watch it again on DVD, but I liked this one more than I liked Shrek 2 (2004). The first Shrek (2001) was so good that I wasn’t very keen on the idea of a 2nd film; I very much felt it had all been done. So in theory a 3rd one should have been even more redundant, except it wasn’t. Roll on the fourth, I say.

Blowup (1966) [Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)]

Unable to mark the passing of Bergman with a DVD watching style tribute, I was able to do so when the news came a couple of days later of the death of Antonioni. As anyone remotely familiar with arthouse cinema knows, Antonioni had been in poor health for a number of years. But back in 1966, he was one of the icons, and Blowup is an extraordinarily rich film, to which I am not going to do justice here. Not only can you write a book about Blowup, people have. Not only is it a thriller, not only does it capture the zeitgeist of the 60s, not only does it have a young working class photographer as its hero, not only does it have Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar, not only does it have Jane Birkin’s pubic hair, but it’s a film about film in a postmodern sense, a film about the more you look, the more you see, and about political and emotional commitment as well. Although Thomas (David Hemmings, who hung around with Terence Donovan and David Bailey to research the role) doesn’t find out the truth about the murder (if there was a murder), he does start to interact with other people instead of just photographing them in a voyeuristic way (as indicated by his fetching of an imaginary tennis ball at the end of the film). The film both has and hasn’t dated. The surface has changed but the depths remain. It is the work of a director at the height of his powers. And I think Zabriskie Point (1970) is a work of genius as well and we could really do with it on DVD, hint, hint.

Blow Out (1981)

Famously, Brian De Palma’s film is a conflation of both Blowup (1966) and The Conversation (1974), as well as a film informed by the slasher genre success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) and the political cynicism of Watergate and the Carter administration. And it has one of John Travolta’s best onscreen performances, wondrous cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond, a nicely sleazy turn from Dennis Franz, and Nancy Allen, who is as cute as a button and was Mrs Brian De Palma at the time. This film rotates at the top of Quentin Tarantino’s all time best movies list as well. When the film came out in 1981, it failed at the box office because Ronald Reagan had just been elected and the film’s dark tone was entirely out of keeping with the public mood of the time. Nevertheless, it is another one of those films that fits into the category “last great films of the 70s” along with Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Raging Bull (1980) - in some ways, it may be better than either of those two. And it’s certainly as fully realised a film as its prestigious antecedent, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *. There’s a particularly irritating trade ad in the cinemas at the moment promising that 2007 will be THE ULTIMATE SUMMER OF CINEMA. I’ve had a dislike of the use of the word ULTIMATE in marketing hype ever since, I think, Empire film magazine started using it to describe a coming attractions article as THE ULTIMATE GUIDE to some films coming out soon. If you actually look ULTIMATE up in a dictionary, you’ll find that describing the summer of 2007 as THE ULTIMATE SUMMER OF CINEMA means there ain’t gonna be any more summers of cinema because this is the last one and the best one. Which is not true. Describing something that is not ULTIMATE as if it were ULTIMATE is actually something else: BULLSHIT.

The Rapture (1991)

With that said, let us cast our minds back 16 years to a film very few people have ever seen, but which has nonetheless been issued on DVD with a DTS soundtrack. The premise of the film is very simple. What if all that mindless guff about the Rapture that fundamentalist American Christians claim to believe in were actually true? What if they’ve got it right, and their nonsensical beliefs are the one true religion, and they’ll all be saved, transformed into light and transported to heaven? And all the rest of us, the, if you like, infidels, well, we’ll all be consigned to the fiery pit of Hell. And what would you do if you believed all this stuff and there was a voice in your head telling you to commit an atrocity if you wanted to be saved? What would you do? That’s what this film’s about.

Dogma (1999)

Spookily, Kevin Smith takes a slightly similar line 8 years later in this notorious religious comedy. The notion is that the Catholic doctrine of plenary indulgence (you can look it up) provides a loophole that could bring about the end of the world (though I guess you have to believe in this stuff first for it to work) (and even then…). I find it amusing that American Christians responded to The Passion of the Christ (2004), even though the endless spilling of blood would have looked more at home in a low budget horror movie gorefest, and came across as profoundly unrealistic (although I guess that was Mel Gibson’s point about the suffering of His Lord). But those same American Christians (though to be fair the protest was centred around a fairly small, fringe group), took umbrage at a film with a shit monster and lots of dick jokes.

Safe (1995)

Ooh, global warming, that’s pretty scary, right? Well, here’s a film that’s a lot more uncomfortable than Al Gore’s Keynote presentation. There really is something out there called environmental illness, and people really do have their immune systems rebel against them. And the spooky, insidious way that Todd Haynes has directed his film starts to make everything a suspect: the gasoline from passing cars, household cleaning products, and the new black couch. Julianne Moore’s descent into ill health is genuinely disturbing in a way that many horror films aren’t; Wes Craven called this the best horror film of the year.

Prince of Darkness (1987)

As a premise, the first part of John Carpenter’s two picture deal with Alive Films is pretty silly. There’s this low budget, green swirly effect in a big jar that’s going to bring about the day of judgment, and a team of university research assistants have 24 hours to stop it. But, and this is a big but, this film is all about how the silly premise has been executed, and it’s been executed very well. Composing the musical score for his films has always been very important for Carpenter, and here he produces one of his best: dark, intense and atmospheric. The music raises the game for the whole film and makes it work. Without it, it’d would just be another forgotten low budget programmer.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

For the record, this was the theatrical version of the film. Despite all the heavy detailing and grungy aspect to it, there is something of the Boys’ Own guide to the Crusades about this film. And Orlando Bloom has not just one but two occasions when he has to deliver a big speech to a huge crowd, and all I could think of was the Sermon on the Mount in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). You know, blessed are the cheesemakers. Still, as a Ridley Scott film, it remains a great watch, and I’m looking forward to the director’s cut.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

Which is why I’m not an entrepreneur or a salesman, since I don’t have a desperate, hollow emptiness at the heart of my soul, and a compulsion to lie to perfect strangers in order to sell them things they don’t want, don’t need, can’t afford, and which may not even exist in the first place. It’s fascinating that David Mamet can make poetry out of a small group of guys all telling each other to go fuck themselves, but that’s what he does, and that’s what this is. A valediction to the American salesman in the tradition of Arthur Miller.

Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) *

Reviewers everywhere have declared this to be a return to form after the supposed debacle of Ocean’s Twelve (2004). Well, I liked Ocean’s Twelve, perhaps because I’m more aware of the kind of European filmmaking styles Soderbergh was experimenting with, and I liked this third installment just fine as well. There is, as William Goldman has noted, something just marvellous about these movies that assemble a team to do an unlikely task against impossible odds with numerous obstacles along the way. Reason and logic fly out the window, and you just sit in your seat and marvel. Three’s probably enough though.

Lucky You (2007) *

Curtis Hanson’s follow up to In Her Shoes (2005) is a slightly bloated father-son story with a romantic comedy lightly glued on top, set against the start of the World Series of Poker phenomenon that drives so many internet search engine pop-up ads these days. It’s a good 20 minutes too long, and telegraphs its plot points in advance, but it does have a lot of cool poker stuff and a decent cameo from Robert Downey Jr (and has everyone noted how better an actor Robert Downey Jr is now he’s off the drugs?).

Mission Impossible (1996)

This along with Die Hard (1988) is my action movie of choice when I want a no-think evening in front of the telly instead of a dark and brooding movie about the Apocalypse. Essentially three long action set pieces strung together into one movie, nevertheless when done with this level of brio and confidence by master craftsman (and my favourite director) Brian De Palma, it’s never dull. Funny, isn’t it, that even though you know a movie like this by heart, it remains a fascinating watch as you try to work out just how he does it.