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.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

I’m not just a Douglas Adams fan, I have completely absorbed everything the man wrote into my DNA to such an extent that when I try to write funny, all I see is his influence. It thus goes without saying that I am the kind of Hitchhiker’s fan who thinks the original radio series did it best, and all the subsequent attempts to cross Hitchhiker’s into other media (including towels) have been distractions that kept Douglas Adams from writing something new (though this may have been the intent; Adams himself has written about his extensive attacks of writer’s block [writing about writer’s block may have been his way of trying to break the block]). So does it need to be a movie as well after it’s been everything else? At least an Englishman directed the film and kept it in touch with the original. And the film has so many good bits in it that they paper over the cracks of the bits that aren’t so hot. And if you don’t start to tear up at the first strains of Journey of the Sorcerer (about 20 minutes in), well then you were never really a Hitchhiker’s fan in the first place.

Tideland (2005)

People are idiots. Visit the imdb and read the morons commenting on this film. After the disaster that was The Brothers Grimm (2005), this was billed as a return to form for Terry Gilliam, and so it is. This is a film of such startling brilliance and originality that it was clearly doomed to failure at the box office and later rediscovery as a cult classic 10 or 15 years down the line. My advice would be to beat the rush and start reclaiming the film now. You’ll be able to look back in 2015 and say things like, “Oh, you’ve only just realised Tideland was one of the great films of the last decade now, I’ve been into it for years.” Children are not victims. You are not stupid. If you’re tired of blockbusters, this is one place to start. It’s a film on the edge, where film ought to be.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) *

Without giving away anything of the ending, I find it terribly intriguing that all of the millions of moolah this franchise (ugh!) has been generating at the box office has enabled the filmmakers to resolve their trilogy in two ways: with an ending that’s really downbeat only if you think about it, and which leaves the way open for more pirate movies in the years to come (which may or may not be a good idea). Yes, it’s too long, and yes, there’s both too much plot and not enough, but it’s never dull and it’s frequently very funny.

Zodiac (2007) *

It’s a privilege to watch a filmmaker at the height of his powers, and David Fincher is fast becoming a challenger to the unelected post of North America’s greatest living film director (currently held by David Cronenberg; that’s who Martin Scorsese thinks should have the job). Zodiac isn’t just as good as you think it might be, it’s way better than that. Dense, complicated and thoroughly unnerving, it’s inspired a number of no-think articles about how the directors that came of age in 1999 haven’t been quite so able to connect with audiences recently. The truth is that it’s the audience that’s behind, and it’s up to the audience to catch up with the directors. Don’t wait for the DVD on this one, get thee to a cinema post haste.

Dirty Harry (1971)

In a simpler age, the real life Zodiac killer inspired this ripped from the headlines thriller that so offends Inspector David Toschi when he goes to see it in Zodiac (2007) that he walks out of the screening. It’s noticeable that 36 years later David Fincher was pretty much unable to capture the kind of views that are casually thrown into the background of the many sequences in Dirty Harry that take place on rooftops; San Francisco has changed that much. Instead, Zodiac seems more claustrophobic, but that works for the film. Most of Dirty Harry takes place outdoors. It deliberately sensationalises a lot of things the real Zodiac killer said he would do, but never did, such as targeting children on a school bus. And of course this film has a resolution that the real case did not. It did strike me that Dirty Harry is even more of a western than it may have looked in 1971, a genre where a man can solve his problems with his gun instead of his brain.

Heat (1995)

Heat looked and felt like a masterpiece in 1995, and it’s only got better over the years. One of the ways you can watch the film is to concentrate on its female characters and watch as their lives are ruined by the obsessiveness that drives the men on both sides of the law. All of the things the film was famous for 12 years ago (Pacino and De Niro act in the same scene! a cop and a criminal have so much in common! etc) are all of the things that don’t seem quite so interesting today as opposed to the human cost of the events that unfold. I’m starting to think that my favourite character in the film is the one played by Dennis Haysbert, the ex-con whose first job on parole is a shitty one flipping burgers in a restaurant run by a petty tyrant who steals a quarter of his take home pay, a situation which is not happily resolved when De Niro’s crew come up one short for their bank heist.