Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week, but at least I’m actually writing these things on a Sunday, rather than a Monday or a Tuesday.

Sunshine (2007)

I’m caught between this first viewing of the film in which you familiarise yourself with the plot, the events, the story and the characters, and the second viewing that this film demands, which I haven’t yet had, when I feel a little more aware after viewing the extras as to whether or not the whole premise of the film isn’t just really stupid. The sun will die on us in this planetary system, but not for billions of years, and since essentially the sun already is a huge bomb, it doesn’t make any sense to reignite it (if you could even do that) with another much smaller, man-made bomb a mere fifty years in the future. The film may be as scientifically silly as the heavily criticised premise of The Core (2003), another film I haven’t seen. However, the characters are interesting, something quite clever is being done with the breakdown in gravitational and temporal rules the closer you get to the sun, and it looks great. The CG effects are both tremendous and more than a little trippy. So there are a lot of plusses; I just didn’t like the film as much as I liked Solaris (2002).

28 days later… (2002)

As I’m clearly on a Danny Boyle kick, I thought it was about time to watch an earlier film, which infamously invented the “fast zombie” that was also heavily criticised in the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004). Made on a low budget with a lot of the film shot on DV, the film is more interesting in its first half hour than later on when it all starts to become more generic and uninteresting. There’s also an absolutely terrible plot point about halfway in which the characters have to traverse a tunnel underneath the Thames unnecessarily when we’ve already been clearly shown that they could just drive over Westminster Bridge. Oops. In a lot of ways, George A Romero is right to criticise the fast zombie motif; a rotting corpse brought to life is not going to retain muscle tone or speed or bodily coherence. 28 days later… just about gets away with it since it doesn’t flat out come and say that the plague victims in the film are zombie zombies.

The Kingdom (2007)

There’s also quite a bit of papering over the cracks in this film, in which a lot of overly familiar action film motifs (the buddy cops who initially don’t get on then bond together to solve the case, the evil master criminal lurking in the background, etc) have been successfully buried by the film’s terrific, original setting and hell for leather, you-are-there, handheld camerawork, copied I think wholesale from Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass’ work on the Bourne trilogy, and influenced more than a little by Michael Mann’s own directorial work (Mann served as co-producer on this film). Even the slightly patronising arrogance with which the Americans discover most of the leads in the investigation of a bombing in a Saudi Arabian compound is subtly undermined in the film’s exceptional all-action third act, when it is made crystal clear to them that their presence in this country has not necessarily been to everyone’s benefit. Quite the opposite. There are enough refreshing notes of terse ambiguity left in the script to make one look out for what director Peter Berg did next. Unfortunately, that was Hancock (2008), a film I haven’t seen because I could see all too clearly exactly how much it had been compromised for a family audience just from a few viewings of the trailer. A drunk, useless superhero is a terrific premise for a movie, and it still is, because by all accounts, Hancock is not the film that delivered on that premise.

Miami Vice (2006)

For the record, this was the Unrated Director’s Cut. The first shock was that the film doesn’t begin in media res as it did theatrically, but with an enormously expensive-looking powerboat race off the coast of Miami. On his commentary track, Mann makes mention that this isn’t really a Director’s Cut since the theatrical version was his cut as well; he does mention that this is a revision of the film two months after release, in which Mann may have been influenced by the reviews that found the film too confusing, which is a nonsense since the film only requires that you give it your full attention rather than checking your brain in at the ticket office. It takes an admirable amount of guts to produce a genuine reimagining of a 20 year old premise from a TV series rather than reenacting the TV series as an empty ironic object full of blokes in Armani suits with the sleeves rolled up. If that’s what the initial audience for this film expected, more fool them. Michael Mann is a much better filmmaker than that, and here he proves it again.

No cinema releases this week. I’ve taken a week off since I went to Memorabilia at the NEC last weekend and I’ve been catching up with various database and scanning related duties that coincide with the mass influx of 30 titles into my DVD collection. So, over the last fortnight, I’ve watched three films on DVD, which start with…

Any Given Sunday (1999)

There is something deeply satisfying about a sports movie that signs up to all the clichés with such joyous abandon and commits to them with such élan. So, going into this movie about American Football from director Oliver Stone, one of the things you know, without ever even having to have seen one frame of the film, is that it will all come down to a crucial play with five seconds left on the clock. And so it does, so you’re not disappointed. A sports movie has a duty to service these clichés, and Any Given Sunday is no exception. It also finds Stone in the short-lived entertainment portion of his career in the wake of the high seriousness of Nixon (1995) (though some may argue it’s continued with Alexander (2004)). It’s no surprise that Stone portrays a football game as warlike conflict, and he brings a brutality to the sporting arena that gets lost when you see American Football on TV. Or saw it in the 1980s on Channel Four during its brief period of UK popularity.

Miami Vice (2006)

Jaime Foxx’s first starring role in Any Given Sunday prompted a call to check this out again, not that I really need any excuse to watch a Michael Mann film, since I regard the man as nothing short of a filmmaking genius. Shot at night in available light with high definition video, the film breaks ground photographically in a way few others have even come close to so far. That it in very few ways bears any resemblance to the 80s TV show that is its foundation is yet another testament to Mann’s desire to break new ground rather than produce some sad nostalgia fest in which a lot of aging losers in designer stubble and suits with rolled up sleeves drive around Miami in expensive cars to the tunes of Jan Hammer and Phil Collins. And if that means it didn’t do that well at the box office and lies in wait for adult film lovers to rediscover on DVD, then so be it.

The Mist (2007)

For the record, this was the version of the film on Disc 2 of the collector’s edition DVD in glorious black and white. And damned if Darabont isn’t absolutely right in his introduction to this slightly indulgent version of the film; black and white does give the film the feel of a low budget 60s horror film from the lineage of Night of the Living Dead (1968). As a longtime Stephen King reader (but not his Number One fan, that’s a little Misery (1987) humour for y’all), I discovered The Mist early on its first publication in Kirby McCauley’s 1980 horror anthology, Dark Forces, five years before it officially joined the King canon in his 1985 collection, Skeleton Crew. Maybe because it’s a second cousin of a lot of things, including James Herbert’s 1975 novel, The Fog, and any number of low budget B-movies from American cinema history, filtered through King’s intense pop culture imagination and squirted out the other end, there’s something genuinely haunting and mythic about King’s story, in which Lovecraftian beasties from another dimension are let loose upon the world as both a Lord of the Flies style analysis of societal breakdown and a dire warning against scientific progress very much along the lines of Them! (1954) or The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). And if there’s an even bigger fan of the story than me, then it’s Frank Darabont, who read it in 1980 with as much excitement as I did, but has actually been able to bring it to the screen utterly uncompromised, red, raw, and dripping, like a horror movie ought to be. Indeed, compared to the anemic nonsense shat out by major studios in the last few years in the name of PG-13 rated horror, this is the real thing, character based, gross when it needs to be, and deeply unsettling from first frame to last, especially last. The only thing The Weinstein Company now needs to sort out is a UK release, because I really don’t think that it’s right for me to see this film on DVD before I’ve had the chance to see it in a UK cinema, but there you go, that’s closing the theatrical window for you. The first film I happened to see this way was Hellboy (2005), and here we are again.

No cinema visits this week.

Miami Vice (2006)

People seem quite shocked that this is a real movie instead of a campy recreation of bad 80s fashion. But it’s exactly typical of Michael Mann to try for something new instead of rehashing the past, even though elements of the plot have been taken from certain episodes of the original TV series. The film is also audience unfriendly in that it starts in media res (like a number of other Mann films) and leaves it up to the audience to work out what’s going on. Plot points aren’t telegraphed with giant billboards. This was a summer movie for adults, and the little kids’ll just have to play catch up.

Hot Fuzz (2007)

Shamefacedly, I missed this at the cinema, but I did catch it on the day of release on DVD. If this film were any funnier, you could bottle it and inject it into comedy writers around the country and they’d be able to start writing proper sitcoms again instead of the garbage they currently think will do. This, Ben Elton, is how you write a funny comedy about the police. Packed with gags and laugh out loud moments in the first half, it gets even better in the last half hour when it turns into a pisstake of every action movie ever made. Love the Tony Scott tributes.

Thief (1981)

What Michael Mann is really up to is revealed by a viewing of his first proper cinema film, the unloved Thief from 1981. Mann has decided to focus on one subject, the relationship between the cop and the criminal, and all other subjects are regarded as unnecessary. They are to be discarded as callously as James Caan discards Tuesday Weld and his child when his relationship with the local mob boss goes downhill, just like he feared it would. Tuesday Weld plays the first of Mann’s damaged, underwritten female heroines, but because Mann’s focus is the cop and the criminal, that’s just the way it’s going to be. Colin Farrell may regret leaving Gong Li riding off on a boat at the end of Miami Vice, but a man’s gotta do what a Mann’s gotta do.

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Trainspotting (1995) looks like a kids movie next to this film. It is a descent into hell with no escape for either the characters or the audience. People don’t mind being told that drugs are bad as long as there are a few laughs along the way, but they get really uptight if you attempt to tell them unrelentingly and with no attempts at humour that all forms of addiction are bad, show them the consequences of addiction unflinchingly and more graphically than you think they will, and include things like diet pills, television and caffeine in the mix. Cause they’re all right, aren’t they? What could be wrong with an addiction to QVC, or ITV Play? It’s not going to cause you any harm, is it?

Hey, let’s be careful out there.

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.

One cinema visit this week marked with a *.

Gladiator (2000)

The first time I saw Gladiator I knew how it would end as soon as I saw the scene at the beginning of the film where Commodus is fight training with his men in the woods. It would end in the arena with a fight between him and Maximus. It’s called foreshadowing, and once you become aware of it, you can never become unaware of it. You can only be fooled by it when it’s been done more carefully and concealed as a throwaway line of dialogue or a casually exposed and then dismissed prop. The annoying part is if you removed this short scene, which lasts half a minute at most, would the film be better for it or not? Because when you get to the scene at the end, you’ve spent a couple of hours watching Maximus hack people to death, and the result of the Maximus/Commodus fight should be a foregone conclusion. Do you need to know that Commodus is handy with a sword? Does it make any difference?

Donnie Darko (2001)

A word about film soundtracks. Which is better? Careful choice of exactly the right track, or turning the whole thing over to a music supervisor and saying I want something 80s? What struck me watching Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was that because Universal could afford a giant music budget, the whole film had been bathed in a wash of slushy romantic hits because that would make for a better soundtrack album. In contrast, Donnie Darko has very deliberately chosen songs that are meant to relate to the whole and be part of the meaning of the film. Check out the lyrics to Mad World if you don’t believe me.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

How underrated is John McTiernan? The first time I saw Die Hard I didn’t realise just how artfully it had been constructed, it was Bruce Willis in a vest, excitement on every level, all that. Yet as the vast wave of Die Hards on a Boat, Train, Plane, etc started filling up theatres in the early 90s, the directorial skill of Die Hard started to become more apparent. Think of this: at no time in the film are you in any doubt as to where in the building an event is taking place, and the reason you’re never in any doubt is because you have been carefully and deliberately shown around every location without even knowing that you’ve been taking in this information. This style continues in this film, although this time a lot of it’s been achieved with some unsubtle production design. I have a real weakness for submarine films, and sound designers do too; in 5.1, you’re on the sub.

Basic (2003)

Connie Nielsen is great in Gladiator. On their recommended commentary track on the Extended Edition, Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe spend some time contemplating whether or not Nielsen could be a bigger star than she is. What occurred to me is that she may not want to be. Connie Nielsen is not Reese Witherspoon, I don’t think Nielsen has the drive and ambition to push for superstardom. And on the evidence of Basic, why would she want to? Nielsen is from Denmark, she’s tall, she speaks seven languages, so you can imagine how well this goes over in casting sessions where she is automatically the smartest person in the room. There isn’t a moment in Basic where you don’t believe in her character, she has a Southern accent, and a proper military bearing (McTiernan forced her to wear proper army boots throughout the shoot).

Ali (2001)

Spike Lee would have made a different film, but I don’t know if he would have made a better one. This film is another in Michael Mann’s portraits of lone, driven individuals, which date back to The Jericho Mile and Thief and perhaps reach their apex in Heat. Or perhaps the apex is Ali. All I know is that Muhammad Ali’s decision not to accept the draft is one of the finest deeds a human being has ever done.

When We Were Kings (1996)

Compare and contrast. As good as Will Smith is in Ali, and he is very good indeed, it becomes more intimidating when you see for real the guy he had to play. The unique extras on the R2 release of this DVD are the original TV telecasts of both the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila. Ali and Foreman were big guys, they don’t move with any particular grace, and the Zaire fight is exhausting to watch because you can see the stamina draining from their bodies with every round.

The Good Shepherd (2006) *

How restrained is Matt Damon’s performance? In an early scene, Angelina Jolie is licking his ear with her tongue, and he has to remain unaroused because that’s part of his character. Long but absorbing, maybe Robert De Niro should have directed more in the last 10 years instead of hiring himself out to Rocky & Bullwinkle and the like.

Something Wild (1986)

Who ever loved a yuppie? This was part of the yuppie nightmare series that also included After Hours and Fatal Attraction. Yet it hasn’t aged a bit. Exemplary screenwriting meant that all Jonathan Demme had to do was turn up on set and get things going. And assemble a soundtrack so lengthy it has its own credits sequence.

Donnie Darko (2001)

Oh, I appear to have watched this film twice. First time round was the theatrical release, this time it’s the director’s cut. It’s interesting that now we know what the film’s about, has it become less or more mysterious?