Nobody Knows Anything

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.

No cinema visits this week.

Avalon (2000)

This film may be too much of a secret. A lot of barriers have been placed in front of it to stop it appearing too commercial or mainstream. All of the dialogue is in Polish, all of the post-production was completed in Japan. It’s a beguiling mystery, a mannered reflection on the nature of games and reality, life as a game, the kind of film Andrei Tarkovsky might have made if he’d lived longer, lightened up a little, and bought a PlayStation. The director Mamoru Oshii is probably an unfamiliar name, but he’s the guy Jim Cameron and the Wachowski brothers look to for inspiration because they treasure his point of view.

Corpse Bride (2005)

The stop motion is almost too exquisite. The whole thing is a visual fest of design and innovation. Filmed alongside Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), this is as pure as Tim Burton gets, a dark sensibility smuggled into a children’s film.

Tarzan (1999)

Disney seemed to have got the whole animation thing completely worked out here. The heavy duty implementation of the Deep Canvas software had allowed their 2D painters to paint backgrounds in 3D, and animators have always been able to move their characters through 3D space. It has catchy songs from Phil Collins in Peter Gabriel mode, a fantastic vocal performance from Minnie Driver that alone is worth the price of admission, and a Tarzan who actually seems to have been raised by apes, rather than selected to play the role because he won a muscle building contest. Yet, in a few short years, Disney would be firing animators and switching to CGI, having dropped the ball completely and seen Pixar pick it up and run with it, scoring touchdown after touchdown. You know, there is a reason they call these films animated classics, and it isn’t just empty marketing hyperbole.

The Apartment (1960)

When was the last time a Hollywood actor played as weak and passive as Jack Lemmon does in this Billy Wilder film? As the story proceeds, you find yourself willing him to finally take a stand, admit his love for Miss Kubelik, and tell his boss to take his job and shove it. Billy Wilder, knowing this is what we want, knowing this is what Lubitsch would do, denies us this for as long as he can.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

The majority of Americans who’ve seen this film have not of course seen exactly what Stanley Kubrick wanted them to see, which is pretty ironic given the film’s title. During the party scene at the mansion, a number of CGI figures were superimposed over some of the more, shall we say, athletic performances. This, as Roger Ebert and others have pointed out, is a desecration of Stanley Kubrick’s work, memory, and reputation. The film runs two and a half hours and could probably have benefited from the removal of a good twenty minutes or so. The pace would then be not quite as glacial as it is. But Kubrick died and it was not to be. A lot of people concentrate on how good Nicole Kidman is in this film (and it’s damned difficult to take your eyes off her; back to the title again) but I think Tom Cruise actually delivers as well, it’s some of his best work on film. Arthur Schnitzler’s original novel Traumnovelle appeared in the 1920s alongside the work of his Viennese compatriot, Sigmund Freud, though their views on sexuality are quite different. In fact, this film has more in common with Fight Club (1999) than might first appear. It too is playing with fantasy and reality. After all, how much of what happens to Bill Harford on his night on the town is a male fantasy? How much has he been pushed into imagining/living these situations by his reaction to his wife’s female fantasy? The female fantasy that could have so easily ruined all of their lives if enacted in reality, just as the male fantasy threatens to do.

The Proposition (2005)

It’s taken him twenty years but director John Hillcoat has finally made a good film, and it’s an Australian Western. Discovering a pretty much untapped resource is a film director’s dream, and here Hillcoat has brought to life a forgotten episode in Australia’s history. Of course, it had been deliberately forgotten. Although Nick Cave’s script is fiction, a lot of the darkest deeds contained in his screenplay are, as they say, based on true events. The Wild West in America was a fairly out there place, but the real Wild West in Australia was every bit as crazy as a Spaghetti Western like Django (1966) or the films of Sergio Corbucci.