Nobody Knows Anything

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.

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Quentin Tarantino’s original script for this movie was published in the Faber script frenzy that followed the lengthy delay in awarding Reservoir Dogs (1991) a video certificate in the early 1990s. It was designed to be shot by Tarantino himself possibly in 16mm on an even lower budget than his eventual debut. Tarantino’s script has only one location: the jail cell where Mickey gives his interview to Wayne Gale, though a lot of the interaction with the camera crew that made it through to Stone’s finished film first turns up in Tarantino’s version of the screenplay. There was never any attempt to depict Mickey and Mallory’s killing spree, no indication of the continual changes in film stock, all of what could be fairly described as the intense postmodernism and breaking of the fourth wall that goes on in the first half of the film, there was no direct indictment of the media, all of the stuff that continues to make the film compelling 13 years later in other words, when real life has upped the ante on celebrity culture to an extent unforeseeable back in 1994. The whole famous for being infamous thing has got a whole lot worse since then, to the extent that celebrities are now being deliberately manufactured for no other reason than to celebrate their celebrity in celebrity magazines, and not because these people have any talent or skill, or are likely to acquire any talent or skill in the future, or ever possessed any talent or skill in the past. What Natural Born Killers looks like now is a dire warning from the heart of the Tabloid Decade, when murderers became more famous than their victims through their presentation, celebration and glorification in the media. Natural Born Killers does likewise, both having its cake and eating it, glorifying its two killers while at the same time showing how the media plays as big a part in creating their notoreity as they do themselves. And Mickey and Mallory are meant to be fictional. Chantelle and Preston, Jordan and Peter, Cheryl and Ashley, Victoria and David: are these couples any more real than their fictional counterparts? Are their lives any more worth chronicling in unending detail? Is there really an insatiable appetite for this material, or will there come a line that shouldn’t be crossed, that is then crossed anyway? As there was when Heat magazine thought it was a jolly good laugh to circulate a badge making fun of Jordan’s handicapped son? There will be more of this, it will only get worse, our non-culture will continue to feed on these non-celebrities with their non-lives, non-liposuction, non-breast implants, non-breast reductions, non-weight loss, non-weight gain, until someone somewhere takes the kind of decisive legal action that will end it all forever because a celebrity magazine has taken it over the edge. That day is coming, and it cannot come soon enough. Either that, or Britney Spears, hounded by paparazzi and stalkers and users and abusers, will turn into Mickey and Mallory Knox and the whole house of cards will topple down in flames.

I don’t watch television, and this is why.

Three cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

World Trade Center (2006)

There’s a certain amount of reverence and respect accorded this film by American reviewers, whereas British reviewers have been keener to point out the film’s apparent shortcomings. There’s also a certain amount of surprise expressed by reviewers that this isn’t some crazy wacked-out conspiracy flick along the lines of the notoriously poor and ill-considered online documentary Loose Change. For someone like myself, who’s been following Stone’s films since the brilliant Salvador (1985), Stone overcomes the principal problem of inertia at the drama’s heart (two men pinned down under the rubble of the South Tower) through sheer filmmaking technique; 20 years ago, Stone used a similar methodology to bring Eric Bogosian’s one man show Talk Radio (1988) to the screen. And yes, Craig Armstrong’s music may be a touch too melancholy, the character of Dave Karnes seems a little too convenient, but, and it’s a big but, as the excellent documentaries on Disc 2 make all too clear, these events really happened, the reality was much worse than anything that could be depicted on film, and was it worth making this film just to give a taste of what it was like to be in the worst place in the world on September 11th 2001? Yes, it was. The highest compliment I can pay this film is that it is exactly as good as the Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 (2002).

No Country for Old Men (2007) *

I don’t personally think the Coen brothers have suffered a loss of form since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). I even liked The Ladykillers (2004) because I thought it was about time we had a comedy with some proper swearing in it. There is no denying though that this entirely unironic return to the dark Western noir world of Blood Simple (1983) is on an entirely different level of filmmaking. There are immaculately constructed suspense sequences that rank with the best of Hitchcock. There is a thoroughly unnerving turn from Javier Bardem as a black-clad psychopath and a neat appearance as a working class Texan housewife by the Scottish Kelly Macdonald. There are probably going to be awards as well.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) *

This film combines three of my favourite cinemagoing tropes in one: the dark vision of Tim Burton, musicals, and excessive gore. There are any number of over the top throat slashings in this film, all perfectly executed, and all different from one another. The posters for Planet of the Apes (2001) promised that Tim Burton dark vision thing, and instead, in what must have been Conceptual Mistake #1 on that project, Burton elected to shoot the entire movie in bright sunlight with no darkness. Big mistake. No such chances have been taken here: Fleet Street looks like a suburb of hell, grime, filth and smoke are everywhere and the phrase sepulchral gloom comes irresistibly to mind. Add in a pitch perfect Londoner’s accent from Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as the Goth Queen of the pie shops (a close relative of Fight Club’s (1999) Marla Singer) and some tremendous music and lyrics from Stephen Sondheim and you have an entire package of bloody excess well worth surrendering to.

Cloverfield (2007) *

I must clearly not be as tuned in as I thought I was, because all of the alleged internet buzz around this film passed me completely by. Existing really as a sharp reprimand to the dreadful American remake of Godzilla (1998), the creators of this film are quite clearly saying, no, you fools, THIS is how you make a monster movie. Although the conceit of continuous filming in the face of any number of imminent and certain deaths does stretch credulity a little, for the most part this is an unnerving success that very satisfactorily leaves an awful lot unexplained. And it’s about damn time there was a mainstream popcorn movie that let the audience have a chance to fill in some of the gaps for themselves.

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

Oh if only Tartan had released it in 3-D so Udo Kier could be dangling chunks of liver in your living room. Filmed in Italy at Cinecittà just before Blood for Dracula (1973), this is a film both inspired and uninspired, both grotesque and irritating. Udo Kier’s endless barking gets on your nerves early, and he’s got a lot of exclaiming still to do as Baron Frankenstein, obsessed as he is with creating a new master race, obsessed as he is with noses, obsessed as he is with molesting the internal organs of a female zombie (Dalila Di Lazzaro) while impotently humping her, having already had sex with his sexually voracious sister (Monique Van Vooren), which has produced two young children who will carry on his work after his death, his liver impaled on a ten foot pole and dangling in your living room, in 3-D, if Tartan had released it that way. And so on. And so on. The BBFC’s continued attempts to cut this film over the decades look particularly childish now the film’s available uncut. There was a continuing lack of appreciation of the film’s absurdist tone over a period of thirty years; the film’s gore isn’t pleasant, but it isn’t realistic either, and it’s successfully drowned out by all of the amateurish performances and intentionally bad dialogue.

I don’t watch TV. I’ve almost completely abandoned it as an entertainment medium. Instead, I’m all about the DVD. And the cinema. And surround sound. There will be DTS references, oh yes, there will. The only thing I’m going to do here is basically list every film I watch this calendar year and offer something like a things I’ve learned from watching them, probably in brief. Or other comments, which may or may not relate. I’m also going to do my level best not to edit my comments excessively, so this is pretty much straight from my head to cyberspace. Since I’ve already been too lazy to start this in January, I’m going to start with everything I watched in January.

Since the cinema visits will be rarer than the DVDs, I’ll put a * next to the cinema visits.
The Incredibles (2004)
Because I was in need of cheering up.

Ran (1985)
And having been cheered up, I needed to feel a little more miserable again. This was the Criterion Collection’s release of Ran, which has pretty much rendered all other releases redundant. I first saw Ran 20 years ago in a cinema, in all probability at the Aston Triangle, and remembered two things: it took a fair old time to get going, and that the villainness met with a fairly spectacular end. These things remained true, but what’s even more true is that the film ends by dumping you in a big black hole and saying, well there we all are, what do you think about that? Another thing: Chris Marker’s excellent making of documentary, AK, included on disc 2, underlines something very important: it was all done for real. Kurosawa had a giant castle set built on Mount Fuji, which he then attacked with real extras on real soldiers, and then burnt to the ground in real time, placing his leading man in real danger (since the poor guy has to stagger out of a burning castle down very steep steps covered in vision obscuring makeup all the time pretending that he’s completely insane).

The Doors (1991)
I love this film. I think people who don’t are people who don’t love cinema. A slightly older academic friend of mine once told me that this is what the sixties were really like; even though the film is wildly inaccurate about a whole bunch of things, it gets the tone of the period absolutely spot on.

Hannibal (2001)
Possibly because I’d just read Hannibal Rising. I think people are right: it was a lot better when we didn’t know why Hannibal Lecter had become the way he was. Anthony Hopkins is still too camp for me, but I have a lot of time for Julianne Moore, and she is great in this.

Apocalypto (2006) *
Is it just me or should this have been a widescreen movie? I could’ve sworn the trailer was widescreen. Anyway, this was a big step up from The Passion of the Christ; at least Mel Gibson’s used all those pieces of silver to do something interesting. The reason this film was shot on digital cameras is that in a jungle there’s not enough light at ground level to register an image on film without bringing in an enormous array of lighting equipment, which would negate the reason for filming in the jungle in the first place. The film may have a whole bunch of problems (its purported historical and ethnological accuracy among them) but it worked for me.

Lady and the Tramp (1955)
I needed a break from human sacrifice and brutality and this was perfect. The 2.55:1 frame seems a strange choice for a film that largely takes place in houses and alleyways but it leads to some fantastic compositions. And the animation is gorgeous: people who think that 3D CGI is the future of animation really need to check out the sequence in this film where the owners try and lock Lady in the dining room on her first night in the house. And the raindrops in Bambi; Bambi has lots of great character animation in it, but the animation of nature is breathtaking.

Where the Truth Lies (2005)
I don’t know how convinced I was by this. I think the film needed a more intriguing premise than demonstrating just how cute Alison Lohman is.
Evil Aliens (2005)
This makes an interesting companion piece to The Descent (see below), which also directly references a whole bunch of scenes in other films, but is a far superior work because cast and crew take the central premise seriously, and they’re not afraid to scare. Unfortunately, Jake West takes nothing seriously, and his film and his cast suffer badly as a result. If you as a filmmaker don’t believe in your premise, neither will anyone else. This is just a diversion from real filmmaking. Fun but a shame. Just because you can rip people’s spines out doesn’t mean you should.

The Conformist (1970)
Wow. It’s been an awful long time since I watched this, and it’s only improved with time.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
And so this is Robert Altman’s last film. The imaginary death of an imaginary radio show with warm humour, country songs, and Lindsay Lohan. This film was shot digitally.

The Fifth Element (1997)
The best moment in this film: Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich have boarded a spaceship that will take them to a far off planet to retrieve magical stones they need to save the universe. But first, the spaceship must be refuelled. Cut to a location beneath the ship. Cue reggae music. Cue rastas and working stiffs who look like they’re smoking something. One guy bangs on a hatch, pulls out an empty fuel cell, picks up a full cell glowing bright green (it’s radioactive), and slams it home. They guys head off for lunch. End of scene. If this film had been made in Hollywood, this scene would never have made it past the first script development meeting because it does absolutely nothing to push the story forward, it doesn’t involve any of the leads, and it is in essence pointless. Except that the point is that it’s an integral part of the world of the film and the film would be poorer without it.

Novecento (1976)
I watched this five hour plus film in one day. Not something I would particularly recommend. I am now convinced that a communist revolution from the grass roots of peasant farmers is the only way to stop the ruling oligarchy of fascists and child murderers from destroying all that is great about our country. And that Dominique Sanda is one of the most beautiful women ever to have been photographed. See The Conformist above.
The Descent (2005)
See Evil Aliens above.

Babel (2006) *
I’m not sure how convinced I was by this movie. The connections between the four stories were, it has to be said, awfully slight and really more of a contrivance than such a film so convinced of its own importance really has any business getting involved in. The actors were all terrific though, as was the score. I just don’t know if the movie has anything to say. And it’s all rather put in perspective by Short Cuts (see below).

Contact (1997)
I love this film, and I’m not ashamed to admit it in a public forum. Hey, Contact haters, get with the programme.

Seven Samurai (1954)
The Criterion Collection hit another home run. The extras on this disc occupied me for another month. That Kurosawa, he was really good, you know.
Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
I remember this as fairly uneven when I saw it in the cinema, but it seemed much better in a home environment, particularly when you can pause and go back and check out the sheer weight of injokes and action going on even in the deep background.

Tommy (1975)
I love Ken Russell, and Tommy is Ken at the height of his powers. The surround sound is overwhelming, and it’s quite a surprise to discover that this film is one of the innovators in the technology that led to the 5.1 home cinema systems of today. Critics at the time complained that the film was too loud; they were unaware that this was one of the first films where the sound was just right.
Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
Which has to be followed by:

Ocean’s Twelve (2004)
Roland Barthes wrote a book called Le plaisir du texte, and this is just an example of that.

The Usual Suspects (1995)
Still holds up. Still makes other crime thrillers look ordinary and underplotted by comparison.

The Color of Money (1986)
I think what I like more than the performances (and everyone here is at the top of their game) is Richard Price’s crackling dialogue which never fails to cut to the point of every single scene.

Mean Girls (2004)
I must be insane but this film gets better every time I see it. We pray for you, Lindsay, we pray for you.

Short Cuts (1993)
This film is embarrassingly good. Alejandro González Iñárritu should be locked in a room for a month with Robert Altman’s entire back catalogue, and not let out until he’s repented of his foolish ways and vowed to become a better filmmaker. The Criterion Collection really spoil us with this one: the film newly remixed in 5.1, Luck Trust & Ketchup a terrific 90 minute making of documentary, and all the Raymond Carver short stories and poems that inspired the film in a newly published version of an out of print book.

Gosford Park (2001)
A film that rewards you for paying attention. Dense and packed with backstory and incident, it’s a film that inherently criticises the society and world it’s depicting at the same time as it recreates it in all its forensic detail.

Zwartboek (2006) *
In an interesting development, this film was projected digitally, and looked absolutely fantastic. It retained the clarity, depth and grain of film projection, but will of course never be subject to scratches, flaws or fading.

Soldaat van Oranje (1977)
So I had to check out Paul Verhoeven’s earlier WWII epic again as well.

Starship Troopers (1997)
And I really love Starship Troopers: “Rico, you kill bugs good!”

Dreamgirls (2006) *
Every bit as good as promised. People who don’t like musicals are clinically dead. There’s just no hope for them.

Wild Things (1998)
Sex crimes. Oh yes.

De Vierde Man (1983)
Perhaps not the best film to watch in the afternoon.