Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

Lilo & Stitch (2002)

In the wake of all of the extras I saw last week, I had to watch the film again, and it continues to hold up. It stars Tia Carrere as the voice of Nani, and she turns up in…

Rising Sun (1993)

The launch of a new format provides some subtle clues to what the film companies regard as their major potential sellers. 20th Century Fox launched widescreen VHS with Die Hard, Alien and the original Star Wars trilogy, and this film, which turned up on DVD three years after the format launch, is one of Fox’s first back catalogue releases on Blu-ray. Clearly, there must be some kind of audience out there waiting to snap it up in high definition. This isn’t a cult audience eagerly awaiting the arrival of Donnie Darko (2001); this isn’t an audience that’s set up websites to discuss the fascinating topic of precisely how many minutes of screen time take place in cars driving between buildings during both night and day so Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes can fill us in on the plot and provide what passes for character development in the Michael Crichton universe (this isn’t a diss; I like Michael Crichton’s work a lot). Rising Sun must have been a solid, consistent seller on DVD over the last 8 years for it to reach the head of the high definition queue. Yet as a movie, it’s only solid rather than spectacular, a chance for Philip Kaufman to assure executives made nervous by the NC-17-rated Henry & June (1990) that he’s still a commercial filmmaker. It’s one he made for them, rather than for himself.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) *

So where does that leave Guillermo Del Toro’s highly touted and eagerly awaited (especially by me) sequel to 2004’s original? Del Toro has received extensive critical approval for the films he’s made in Spanish - Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - whereas his films in English have for the most part been more financially successful but subject to a fair number of sniffy reviews. Even though, for someone like myself who’s seen all of them, they have mostly been constructed from terribly similar personal obsessions - clockwork, insects, surrealism, and so on - and in a weird kind of way have fed off each other and enabled each individual project to come to fruition. Hellboy II only started to seem like a bankable idea again (Hollywood watchers will note that this sequel has been produced - maybe uniquely - by an entirely different corporation) after the critical praise dealt out to Pan’s Labyrinth, and the original Hellboy only fell into place after Blade II (2002) was a major hit. Del Toro has made the sequel more him and less Mignola, when what made the original work so well were all the quirky Mignola-style character notes that were especially emphasised in the Extended Cut of the original. So the sequel looks fabulous, every dollar of the budget is on the screen, and yet it’s nowhere near as interesting. It has a straightforward narrative, more old school Dr Who-style running around in tunnels, and an action beat (read: fight scene) every 10 minutes. The emotional heft of the story has been lost, which in the wake of the strong impact of Pan’s Labyrinth, is especially disappointing. All we can hope is that Del Toro will rediscover his mojo with The Hobbit films, and there won’t be quite so much running around in tunnels, except perhaps under the Misty Mountains. And in Smaug’s cave (I think Smaug lives in a cave, right?). Oh.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Maybe Del Toro should take a leaf out of the Coens’ book, and never make a film for them, meaning the studios, although there was Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004), and they’re better than you think, cause, y’know, it’s the Coen brothers. I’m still learning to like the Lebowski, but I’m getting there. It is really unusual for a major studio release, though, and you can see why this film has become a cult and Rising Sun hasn’t.

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.