Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week.

The Man with Two Brains (1983)

If I have a soft spot for Woody Allen’s earlier, funnier work (and I do, hell, I think we all do), then I REALLY have a soft spot for Steve Martin’s earlier, funnier work. Steve Martin’s career started going downhill for me when he started taking not especially comedic parts in more mainstream movies than the low budget masterpieces he made alongside Carl Reiner. Parenthood (1989) pretty much marks the beginning of the end and Martin has only every now and then been willing to demonstrate the comedy chops that brought him respect in the first place. For every Bowfinger (1999), there’s been five pieces of execrable garbage like Sgt. Bilko (1996), the kind of unforgiveable mistake that makes one hope Martin isn’t a Buddhist since he’s going to be paying for that one on the old karmic wheel for all eternity if he is. Brains comes from the earlier, funnier period of Martin’s film career, and is, if anything, even funnier today than it was in 1983.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

As is this, which is a screening inspired by my current reading of Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years. One of the reasons the film works is the authenticity of the medieval background, although even here there are differences of opinion. For instance, every cast member and extra has had their teeth blackened and yellowed in tribute to the years before dentistry, but they were also the years before sugar, and there is evidence that a lot of people in this period had perfectly good teeth. Whatever, the medieval background feels right and is taken seriously by the filmmakers, and this allows them to take nothing else seriously at all. It’s interesting to note that John Cleese, despite his great comedy brain, felt that all this emphasis on shit and discomfort and knitted chainmail was getting in the way of the comedy, when in fact these were precisely the details that made the comedy work.

Titanic (1997)

So here we are ten years later and despite all the absolute works of genius that have been released in the interim, this wretched and despised hulk of schmaltz and bad screenwriting sits irritatingly atop the all time box office charts in the majority of countries around the world, sneering at all the Lord of the Ringses and Star Warses that have followed in its wake and been unable to top it for all around audience appeal. Has any recent film been so despised by men of a certain age, and male media people, and male posters on the internet? Here is a film that is sneered at, regarded with contempt and dismissed as an aberration, as if making a film that appealed to me and men like me not afraid to let the film in, young women, women in general and people over fifty all around the world were some kind of gross sin. As someone who saw Titanic FOUR TIMES in the cinema when it was released in the UK in 1998 and has loved it ever since, I am annoyed by this male hate. Titanic is not a film without flaws, nor is it a work of great art, but it spoke to people worldwide, and in the kind of cinema attendance numbers not seen since Gone with the Wind (1939). David M Lubin has written a rather excellent BFI Modern Classic on the film that does a much better job of defending the film than I have here, and he’s as aware of the film’s shortcomings as anyone is. For me, the film only really ups gears when the iceberg hits around 90 minutes in, and becomes the No.1 blockbuster in its second half that it certainly didn’t promise to be in the first, which is still mired in hokey irony, the Picasso incident, and too many references to the unsinkable ship that rather inevitably attracted the satirists of The Onion: World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg, Titanic Representation Of Man’s Hubris Sinks In North Atlantic and 1,500 Dead In Symbolic Tragedy. And yet as I cringe through Titanic’s opening, I’m reminded that Aliens (1986) works in exactly the same way, where, for almost an hour, an unbearably tense atmosphere of fear and suspense is worked up. Titanic takes the time it needs to establish the world it’s going to tear apart later.

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.