Nobody Knows Anything

Just one cinema release, marked with a *. Roll on, Hellboy 2, I’ll be able to see it on DVD from America sooner than it appears in UK cinemas.

Out of Time (2003)

There’s a second (or maybe it’s the third) tier of American film directors who can be relied upon to helm solid character pieces or decent genre work, the kind of films that are too good not to release in theatres, but a long way from being straight to DVD fodder. Discovering these directors is a little more tricky than being, say, a Tim Burton film, since the nature and scale of their productions means the promotional budget gets scaled down appropriately (worst case scenario: there is no marketing budget). Carl Franklin is one of those directors, and Out of Time is eminently solid genre fare with one absolute standout fight sequence that starts in a hotel room that really caught my attention (as it will catch yours, should you catch this film). Carl Franklin is not going to let you down if you want to see a real movie like they used to make them. And he’s not alone.

The Prestige (2006)

I want to see this again. Immediately. Even after it told me I was going to be sideswiped going in (the film is about magic and magicians after all), it still caught me out with the kind of twist that only seems obvious in retrospect. Almost casually thrown away between the two batbusters, this is Christopher Nolan reminding everyone that he’s the same director who made Memento (2000), and his mastery of non-linear storytelling that retains its clarity remains intact.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) *

Hmm, yes, it was a bit of a let-down after the build-up, and it was more like a good TV episode than something that demanded to be told as a movie. Duchovny and especially Gillian Anderson remain very watchable, but Chris Carter et al really don’t seem to have quite worked out the climax of the A-plot and seemed at times rather more interested in the subplots of the narrative than the main event. The one thing the original X-Files movie had which this one doesn’t was size and ambition. And the final Easter egg for the fans in the credits may tell you that the filmmakers know this as well.

Planet Terror (2007)

Well, it took a year but I’ve finally had my Grindhouse (2007) experience (sort of). Although we know why Rodriguez and Tarantino did this (actually to deliver on the promise of grindhouse trailers instead of shortchanging the audience in true exploitation style), I remain ambivalent about the end results. There’s something very misguided about spending an awful lot of money to reproduce (sort of) the effects that were achieved back in the 1970s with chump change and a lot of audience goodwill (and sometimes not even that - some grindhouse films are so ineffably awful that even Tarantino can’t bring himself to champion them - maybe). The most celebrated moment in Planet Terror is the missing reel jump in which all sorts of mayhem happens. Oh, and Machete: there were times I was thinking I’d much rather have watched that movie.

Death Proof (2007)

There’s an awful lot of talk, then a really good stunt, then there’s an awful lot of talk, and a really good chase. And someone somewhere should start an online petition to remind Tarantino that he really isn’t a very good actor, and his cameos should be smaller rather than larger. Anyone for the 6th film from Quentin Tarantino? Me, I’m waiting for his 8 and a half.

Three cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

WALL•E (2008) *

In which Pixar continues to pull away from DreamWorks Animation, proving that its focus on story, character and originality is a far more successful strategy than DreamWorks’ focus on celebrity voices and pop culture references. Pixar may not be at the Studio Ghibli level yet, but it’s definitely getting closer, and it has still to produce a single film that can be fairly described with the words average or mediocre or poor. It’s also good to see a film with an environmental message that doesn’t try to beat you over the head with it. It may be okay to make a film about a man standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation saying it’s all going to hell, but it’s much better to achieve the same result with cute (and frankly, not so cute) robots, a cockroach and the last surviving humans. Oh, and really, really good visual jokes, delivered at a furious pace.

Mamma Mia! (2008) *

The jukebox musical is a much derided beast, and rightly so. Appealing to the kind of popular music fan who only buys one record a year, and that record is a Christmas-released greatest hits compilation of some pop act they remember listening to twenty years earlier, the jukebox musical assembles an endless stream of songs, either from one act or from one genre of music, strings them together with a musical book so utterly stupid (We Will Rock You) or so utterly light (Mamma Mia!) that the end result has no substance whatsoever. The jukebox musical has proved that there are some song catalogues that cannot be mined for frothiness (Bob Dylan’s, for one), and it has proved to be enormously popular with the aforementioned popular music fans, the great unwashed masses of people who don’t really listen to music anymore, but don’t mind a lot of songs by Queen or Abba or Madness being packaged up and presented to them to singalong to in a theatrical context. Dismissed by critics, but embraced by the public, the jukebox musical is only too willing to show once more that the public has no taste. And having said all that, Mamma Mia! the movie was utterly irresistible and I enjoyed it enormously. So I have no taste either, and am just like the public. Rats! Centred as it is on the ups and downs of romantic relationships, Abba’s song catalogue makes a better fit redefined in a musical form than, say, the songs of Bob Dylan, which draw upon a greater range of subject matter that resists compilation into a flowing show. Mamma Mia! doesn’t really have a plot, though it does seem eerily like a Shakespearean comedy, and it doesn’t really have characters, just corny stereotypes. What it does have is Abba’s songs performed by Meryl Streep (who maybe puts too much into The Winner Takes It All) and Pierce Brosnan (who can’t really sing but isn’t going to let that stop him) et al, and perma-sunny locations in Greece, partly recreated at Pinewood. It’s candy floss cinema, and in this case, that’s not so bad.

Hairspray (1988)

In which John Waters, possibly feeling the effects of the Reagan era more than most filmmakers, rather than continue to subvert mainstream cinema from the outside, attempts to subvert it from the inside. Packed to the seams with great dialogue (”My diet pill’s wearing off”, “Our skin is white but are souls are black”, etc) and possibly even greater music (handpicked dance classics from the days before the Beatles), all Hairspray does in the subversion stakes is put a fat girl who can dance in the lead. These days, this wouldn’t feel at all out of place (or would it?), but this was twenty years ago, and no film director in America was casting large women as leads, they could be the lead’s best friend, but that was about it. And somehow this led Waters to Ricki Lake in her first movie, and Divine in his last.

the devil wears prada (2006)

I watched the first episode of Sex and the City (1998-2004), and swiftly decided that it wasn’t for me. The piece was packed with the kind of poor writing, sloppy generalisations and lazy stereotypes that characterise so-called think pieces in women’s magazines, and I couldn’t believe someone thought this would be a good idea for a TV series. Sex and the City may have got more interesting, but it did so without my support. And so to this movie, inhaling heavily from the Sex and the City vibe, based on Lauren Weisberger’s chick lit novel about her experiences as the new Emily for Vogue’s notorious editor in chief, Anna Wintour (and I’m not using the word allegedly here). The commentary track spends an inordinate amount of time detailing the designer outfits everyone is wearing with, appropriately enough for Americans, no sense of the irony involved in doing so. Having dipped in and out of publishing myself, it was nice to see that a lot of the details are spot on: everyone uses Macs, there’s “the book”, a kind of portable flatplan that’s the Bible for every issue, and Meryl Streep’s disdainful attitude and throwaway putdowns (this might seem over the top but these people are really out there, and publishing seems to attract them like moths to a flame).

The Dark Knight (2008) *

For the record, this was a sold out screening at the IMAX Birmingham, and it was every bit as great as everybody said it would be. It’s one thing to see this film in a conventional cinema, but it’s quite another to see it on a screen forty feet high with the majority of the action sequences actually filmed in IMAX filling the screen. Considering that this is only a comic book movie, the plotting is dense and complicated, and I have the feeling this won’t be the only time I see it. And if you can’t get to see a screening of this film in the IMAX format and you already like the film, you really owe it to yourself to make an effort to try. It’ll be worth it. As for the film itself, having devoted a whole chunk of running time in Batman Begins (2005) to the hero’s origin story, Christopher Nolan feels able to hit the ground running on this one as did Sam Raimi with Spider-Man 2 (2004). Continuing the Mob motif in Gotham from the first one (which I’m reasonably sure is a lift from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween), Nolan relies on Heath Ledger to up the intensity even further with his turn as the Joker, and I tell you, it’s like someone gave Ledger a copy of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and Ledger did his utmost to bring the Joker in that book to the screen. The majority of the cast return from Batman Begins as well, with Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes as The Girl. And I’m not saying anything more.

No cinema visits this week, something which is very much set to change next week.

Batman Begins (2005)

In which Christopher Nolan appears to have been an inspired choice as director after many others had tried and failed, including Darren Aronofsky. The key to a comic book movie is taking it seriously on its own terms; this doesn’t mean your approach has to be humourless, but you have to believe in the world of your protagonist and their situation. As soon as you approach a comic book movie as a camp lark - as Joel Schumacher did when he took over from Tim Burton in 1995 – you’ve already lost. Seeing the film again after some time, it becomes even more impressive. What’s particularly good is Nolan’s instinctive mistrust of CGI and desire to film as much of the movie “for real” as he possibly could. In collaboration with David S Goyer on the script, Nolan also infuses the film with a pretty tricky structure, and his casting choices are spot on. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are great value, it becomes more difficult with every role to remember that Christian Bale got his break as Jim in Empire of the Sun (1987), but even Katie Holmes almost has a decent part to work with when the deadly role of “the girl” in a Batman movie has been so greatly overshadowed by Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. Apparently, Halle Berry has also played Catwoman (2004), but I wouldn’t know, because I will never see that film. Here’s to The Dark Knight (2008) at the IMAX next week.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

My Region 1 DVD has a discrete 6.1 DTS Japanese soundtrack which is awfully spare (I guess the reason would be expense), but this only adds to the film’s intense melancholy and isolation. It’s taken me some years to warm to this film but now I really like it. I think the principle reason is that for an 80 minute film, it’s incredibly dense with information and plot exposition (if not necessarily with plot), and you have to get past both that and the subtitles to start approaching the core of the film’s ideas about artificial intelligence, cyborgs and the philosophical differences and similarities between human life and machine life. The subtitles are essential, because, when the choice is available to me, I will never watch a film produced in a foreign language dubbed into English, regardless of how many name actors have been bussed in to perform the English dub. In the cinema, you sometimes don’t have any choice. When I saw Persepolis (2007) recently, it was the English language version of the original French soundtrack. But I guarantee that when I see Persepolis again on DVD later this year and the French soundtrack is on the disc, that’s what I’ll select to accompany the video. You lose so much of the nuances of the acting and the inflections of the actor’s voices in an English dub. There are a very few exceptions to this: Jodie Foster’s French is good enough for her to insist on dubbing her own voice in French, but for the most part, you’re stuck with what you get, and it’s jobbing actors being paid by the word to overdub, as at the beginning of Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). If this is another Almodóvar film, pedants can correct me. It’s been a long time since Women on the Verge underwhelmed me.

Hellboy (2004)

It seems an even longer time since Sony Pictures was mishandling the UK release of this film so badly I was able to see it on Region 1 DVD two months before it turned up in UK cinemas (see also The Mist (2007) this year). Very poor. Thankfully, the Hellboy franchise has been moved over to Universal Pictures, and they are at least savvy enough to be giving the sequel a worldwide release on the back of Del Toro’s acclaim for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Back in the original, Ron Perlman is indelible as the big red guy, and wrings every last bit of humour and pathos out of a script that wittily plays Hellboy as a working class stiff rather than a denizen of the pit. For the record, this was the Director’s Cut of Hellboy that only runs about 15-20 minutes longer than the theatrical release. As is typical of Director’s Cuts initiated by the director rather than a studio offering a needless double dip, those 15-20 minutes are pretty much all solid gold character moments that should have been left in the film in the first place, and not artificially trimmed out to squeeze in another showing in US cinemas. The theatrical release was good without those moments, but the director’s cut is much better with them.

In a first for the blog, I had a very “busy” Sunday and didn’t post. Oh no, it’s all going horribly wrong. No cinema visits this week.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

One of the most frustrating things about growing up in the UK as a film buff in the last thirty years was the gradual discovery that I was unable to watch A Clockwork Orange because Stanley Kubrick didn’t want me to. I have to say that now something resembling the reasons for his withdrawal of the film have come to light (Kubrick feared for the safety of himself and his family), I still believe Kubrick let it go on too long. The perfect time to re-release Clockwork would have been around the time of the release of Full Metal Jacket in 1987, but this didn’t happen. The BBFC as represented by James Ferman made some noises along the lines of Clockwork would have to be cut before it could be reissued. So, thanks for that. I didn’t see Clockwork for the first time until the mid 1990s, when I saw the same bootleg of the Dutch release that everybody else in Britain had been passing around for some years. And then Kubrick died, Clockwork was re-released with a certain amount of haste, and I actually got to see it in a cinema before buying it on DVD twice. But Kubrick had to die first. Bum deal.

Firewall (2006)

Harrison Ford in another thriller for which the word “workmanlike” could have been coined. Unusually for me, I actually watched this movie on Sky and it reminded me why I have such a large DVD collection (see link at right). [In terms of size, my DVD collection is relatively modest, I’ve come across people who own 3,000 DVDs and up so I don’t feel so bad about my 1,375.] Sky apply so much compression to their picture that it feels like watching a movie on VHS, the action’s blurry and all the fine detail has gone. All very unsatisfactory.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Irritatingly for filmmakers, releasing a film is all a matter of timing. When Mallrats (1995) came out in 1995, America wasn’t ready for a R-rated comedy, but that audience was there just a few years later for American Pie (1999) and There’s Something About Mary (1998). The film was released just a little early. Similarly, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within came out and tanked in 2001, but if you re-released it now, it would be like Al Gore’s best friend. The zeitgeist is now ready for an all-CGI movie with an eco-friendly message and sensational eye candy, and instead we get Shrek the Third (2007). Go figure. If you haven’t seen this film, and you’re into computer animation and out there movies, check this one out. It’s like a hippy classic from the 70s made with a big chunk of change.

Batman Begins (2005)

All you have to do to make a successful comic book movie is to take the original subject matter seriously. This is why Tim Burton’s Batman movies are better than the two Joel Schumacher debacles. And why employing directors like Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan is going to pay off for you in the end. Even if Nolan was only directing this film to raise his profile in Hollywood to put him on the A-list and give him access to the big money, it still wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t turned out a decent product. And Batman Begins is a very decent product. If only all comic book movies could be as good as this. Alas.

Down with Love (2003)

Peyton Reed cut his filmmaking teeth as a behind the scenes video documentarian on the Back to the Future movies, and Bring It On (2000) is one of the great guilty pleasures of our time: a cheerleader movie starring Kirsten Dunst that manages to be not cheesy and really rather cool. Down with Love underperformed at the box office on its original release, which is odd because it’s one of the most fully achieved films of recent times. Stuffed to the gills with snappy dialogue, absurd situations and classy performances, it’s an ironic recreation of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day sex comedies of the 1960s, a recreation of a dozen of them, all in this one movie. The entire cast, as they say, explodes.

Clerks II (2006)

Kevin Smith fans in the UK have been ill-served by film and DVD companies over the years; most of his films that I own have come from Region 1 because the Region 2 offerings, if they even existed, tended to be bare bones releases, and Smith loves his DVD extras, oh yes. I really think Kevin Smith should stop with the self-deprecating bit, making excuses for his own failings as a director (lack of visual style, etc). It’s actually been a pleasure over the last dozen years to see him grow in stature. Kevin Smith is a good filmmaker, he might become a great filmmaker, and I think the best is yet to come from him. The bar has been raised again by this film, funny as hell and full of heart. And it has the donkey scene, which is going to be appalling people for decades. But in a good way.

There’s a very small chance of me ever writing anything negative about any of the films here since I’ve either made a conscious decision to go to the cinema to see them, or I’ve made an equally conscious decision to buy them on DVD and it’s very unusual for me to watch a film without wanting to. This is also a plus because films are a lot harder to praise than they are to pick apart. By the way, The Departed is genius.

One Hour Photo (2002)

For some reason, Robin Williams decided he’d had enough of playing the same part for a decade (you know, the child inside the man) and that it might be a really good idea if he started to demonstrate his range as an actor instead of repeato ditto. Presumably because there was a shortage of stage-trained British actors in Hollywood in 2001, two very different villain parts came his way and he jumped at them. Amusingly, in his audio commentary with Robin Williams, the director Mark Romanek refers to this film as his debut, when it is so not. Mark Romanek’s true debut feature was Static (1985), on which he was co-director with Keith Gordon, probably most famous for playing Brian De Palma as a teenager in Dressed To Kill (1980). Static is really really good, but it’s pretty impossible to find. In the 17 years between these two films, Romanek established himself in the world of music videos (see The Work of Director Mark Romanek in the Directors Label series). Thankfully, his second movie only takes the good parts from the music video genre (intense stylisation) and not the bad (fast cutting, inability to work with actors or direct way out of wet paper bag, eg. McG, Michael Bay et al).

Insomnia (2002)

Among the treats of this film: a good performance from Hilary Swank in a supporting role; Christopher Nolan’s commentary which rearranges (more or less) the whole movie in the order of filming and makes you appreciate just how good Al Pacino’s ability to convey the successive stages of insomnia really is since scenes were filmed wildly out of continuity; Robin Williams as a really nice bad guy.

Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Stop reading this right now and go out and buy this film on DVD and watch it immediately. It will change your life.

Sideways (2004)

Here’s the thing. Why didn’t Virginia Madsen become one of the biggest movie stars in the world? She looked spectacular and she was a great actress, and yet it just didn’t happen for her. It’s almost like she was too beautiful for fame, and somebody picked Demi Moore and her insipid psychobabble instead. There’s an engaging lack of vanity to Madsen’s performance in this film; there’s no attempt to hide her age and it only serves to highlight her beauty. An actual movie for adults by adults starring adults.

Zoolander (2001)

In a world of obsessive celebrity worship and reality television, where we’re now past celebrities famous for being famous into fake celebrities who weren’t famous in the first place, there is only one film that has taken a stance against uneducated morons with perfumes to hock and ghostwritten autobios: Zoolander. It’s the new Spinal Tap. Everybody loves them some Zoolander. It even has Paris Hilton in it.