Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

Juno (2007) *

One of the criticisms of this film I’ve come across is that all of the characters seem to speak their dialogue with the same voice, as if all of them have been written by the same person, which is in fact the case. What I find interesting is that I don’t recall this criticism  being directed at, say, Woody Allen, Kevin Smith or James Cameron, all of whom have a distinct authorial voice that comes across in their dialogue. Of course, they’re all men, and the screenwriter of Juno is Diablo Cody, who happens to be a woman. Interesting, eh? What’s most admirable about the film is that it takes its TV Movie of the Week subject matter (downscale underage pregnant teen acts as surrogate for upscale yuppies) and plays absolutely nothing for mawkish sentimentality and concentrates instead on utter realism and big laughs. What’s probably responsible for the film’s success is its positive attitude and unpatronising approach to and contempt for serious issues. In the same way that Richard Linklater was the perfect man to direct The School of Rock (2003) because he had no interest in making a kids movie, so Juno the film has no interest in melodrama and just wants to get on with life.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)

There is a disconnect between the relative plot coherence of the movie and its chaotic production schedule as detailed in an excellent hour long documentary on Disc 2 that is as good as the similar piece on The Phantom Menace (1999) DVD. They started the film without a finished script and could have ended up with a disaster like Alien 3 (1992). And somehow they didn’t.

The Fly (1986)

Dead Man’s Chest is awfully long and probably could have done with at least half an hour of running time trimming from it. In direct contrast, The Fly runs a very lean 96 minutes (or 92 on DVD here in PAL land) with every ounce of excessive fat having been carefully pruned away from it. Throughout the two and three quarter hour documentary on Disc 2, none of the extra footage and unused shots and deleted scenes and strange concepts look like they belong in the movie. The Fly is about as perfect as filmmaking gets, a film where no scene goes to waste, no line of dialogue is without its place or point, and where its haunting emotional wallop will stay with you forever. I’ve probably written this before, but Martin Scorsese, widely reckoned to be the greatest living North American film director, thinks David Cronenberg is a better director than he, Scorsese, will ever be. And The Fly may not even be Cronenberg’s best film, though it is the one time in his career when he had an unashamed popular success and a real opportunity to smuggle a lot of tough ideas into the mainstream.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

The rise of DVD and the success of American television has had an unfortunate side effect. When it comes to widescreen framing for the big screen, directors who’ve worked predominately in television, advertising or music videos simply do not have a clue. JJ Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost, was heavily criticised for his filming of Mission Impossible III (2006) as if it was just another TV show: too many closeups, too many cuts, not the faintest idea that his images would be projected on forty foot wide cinema screens. What a contrast it is to watch Sergio Leone at work, a man with an instinctive feel for composition and shot selection where not a frame is wasted. Leone wasn’t an intellectual or a political filmmaker (except after Leone started to believe his own press), he was an instinctual one, and the effects he achieved reach such a fine pitch of pure visual cinema that it is hard to remember that a lot of the imagery we’ve enjoyed over the last 40 years started here in this low-budget, second-string Italian western.

Eastern Promises (2007) *

In which the Cronenberg project has continued to infect the local multiplex after the success of A History of Violence (2005). There are similar narrative tricks at work in this new film, which a second viewing will highlight. I don’t know whether it’s a result of his Canadian upbringing, but there’s a chilliness of affect Cronenberg brings to his films that’s quite unique. They have an unrelenting quality, a suggestion of inevitability. Things could only turn out the way they turn out because there was no other way they could go. There was an amusing “ban this filth” non-story in The Sunday Times last week, in which quite clearly nobody outside the newspaper had any interest. The simple defence of the violence in this film is this – this is what violence really looks like: nasty, brutal and bloody; utterly unredeeming, utterly unstylised, utterly shocking. Criticising Cronenberg for an honest approach to violence is a dead end, and the so-called Arts Editor who wrote the piece should be sacked for lacking cultural awareness, intelligence, comprehension and film literacy.

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.