Looks like it's going to be one of those "oh, bother, I shan't be doing any proper writing" nights. In the meantime, this week's column: a rundown of some great, slightly unconventional movies for the 4th of July.
Thứ Năm, 4 tháng 7, 2013
Thứ Tư, 3 tháng 7, 2013
LA MISÈRE DE 1995
I do not bring this up because I imagine that you're desperately interested in the minutiae of my autobiography, but as a way of explaining that I walked into Les misérables with quite a lot more anticipatory baggage than most films - more than it would possibly seem to deserve, for certain. And that's even after the intervening years have set me in front of a scant handful of Lelouch films, but most especially his 1966 A Man and a Woman, one of the most insubstantial movies ever broadly regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema. I am pleased to report back across the gulf of time to my younger self that Les misérables is the better film of the two (my younger self would thereupon be damned confused, as he wouldn't hear about A Man and a Woman for several years yet), though not quite a truly great work, not even close to being the best French movie titled Les misérables, and not at all the film that I've had it in my head for many years that it was, which was a more or less straight adaptation of the book set during World War II. It's something a great deal less straightforward, and in some ways more interesting: a story set primarily during that war (though it begins in 1899) with a protagonist whose life keeps echoing that of Jean Valjean, the main character of Hugo's kaleidoscopic work, to such a degree that he sometimes even imagines himself as Valjean in scenes adapting key moments from the novel, though these surely don't add up to more than 20 minutes, out of nearly three hours.
They're three hours used very well, at that, so this is very much the skeleton of the plot, hardly even a synopsis: that Valjean-analogue is Henri Fortin (Jean-Paul Belmondo), whose father was railroaded into prison on circumstantial evidence, having been found at the foot of his dead employer moments after that man committed suicide. Fortin's mother had to resort to prostitution to keep herself and the boy alive, and it's not until many years later that the boy, grown up to be a professional boxer, moving company owner, and sometime criminal, hears enough of the Hugo novel to see hints of his childhood in the tragic tale of Fantine, the decent woman driven to misery to support her daughter Cosette (I swear this is the skeleton: that's gotten us more than 30 minutes into the film already).
When WWII comes, Fortin crosses paths with Jewish lawyer André Ziman (Michel Boujenah), attempting to flee Paris with his gentile wife, the ballerina Elisa (Alessandra Martines), and their daughter Salomé (Salomé Lelouch, the director's daughter), and arrive in the safety of Switzerland. It's Ziman who introduces the illiterate Fortin to the great novel that will forever after change the big lout's fortunes; he henceforth desires to create goodness in the world, and it's for that reason that he helps to hide Salomé, as the Zimans are split by the war and sent into two uncomfortable situations: Elisa forced to act as entertainer for Nazi troops, André (with a wounded, useless leg) sent into hiding in the basement of the farmer Thénardier (Philippe Léotard) and his wife (Annie Girardot, who won her second César for her work).
There's so much that's going well here that it's almost embarrassing to start by pointing out the one thing that mostly doesn't, but it's a big deal: the Les misérables connection is frankly, not that well-used. On paper, I see exactly where Lelouch was going with this: the basic notion of a man struggling to be as good to his fellow man as possible during one of the blackest periods of human history entirely because he was inspired by the example of a great, morally uplifting book is incredibly appealing, and Les misérables is about as worthy candidate to be that book as I can imagine (and even moreso in a French Resistance drama, for the book and Hugo are important in France to a degree that we simply don't have an analogue for in America). But Lelouch never quite manages to find the right tone to adopt towards his material: one the one hand, he assumes that the audience is entirely familiar with the content of the book (which is fair), name-dropping characters like Marius and Javert with only minute explanation of who they are and why they matter; hell, even Valjean barely merits a description of what he actually does, and he's the reference point around which the entire film revolves. The flipside is that the film, having thus identified its ideal viewer as somebody who can do the work to unpack the references, proceeds to make all of them as simplified and over-explained as possible; having put a scene in that anybody whose familiarity with the source material is no great than "saw the musical one time" would still be able to identify as a narrative reference, Lelouch never fails to have one character mention, a bit later, "This reminds me of Les misérables", and proceed to explain in unnecessary detail what the metaphor is. I suppose I could sum all of this up by saying that the film assumes we've read the book, but it also assumes that we are very stupid.
(That being said, the use of two filmed adaptations of the book - the one from 1934 and from, I believe, 1913 - are generally more effectively used; subtle enough to be clever, overt enough to be useful).
The good news is that most of the rest of the film works very, very well, though the Lelouch whose romantic dramas hinge on flattening out emotion into an easily-digestible, pictorially fuzzy shape is in evidence in some of the scenes that shouldn't be nearly as glowing and classy-looking as they are; this is a film about the Holocaust and the occupation of France, after all, and you need to think long and hard about how to shoot e.g. the harrowing scene of Jews being led to their death by a traitorous guide, shot by a platoon of Nazis on a frozen lake, something Lelouch does with far too much reliance on gorgeously impressionistic night photography. A truly great filmmaker might have been able to sell this as irony, but for Lelouch and cinematographer Philippe Pavans de Ceccatty, it's just the way you shoot a beautiful frozen lake at night.
By no means do such scenes dominate, though. Most of the film is effectively staged to highlight the relationship between the poverty and class injustice that Hugo meant by "misery" with the war-wracked sense of universal hopelessness and suffering that Lelouch calls by the same word in the 1930s and '40s. If it's a bit too tastefully done to grind our faces in the daily misery of life in occupied France, the rainbow of despairing looks found on the faces of all the different cast members certainly puts over the idea that even in the absence of visible mass executions right in the middle of town every day, the constant awareness of death made the notion of carefree living unimaginable even for a very small child in those days. Better yet, the film manages to effectively play that out in the dramatisation of the scars which lingered in France after the end of the war; partially in the horrifying and melodramatic, but well-earned twist to André's story, partially in the way that Belmondo, who gives not just the best performance of this film but one of the best I have personally seen from his long and admirable career, never allows himself to look comfortable or more than temporarily happy, until the film's very last scene.
It is not, probably, worthy of the years of sight-unseen devotion I've given to it, suffering as it does from a certain strain of prestige-aware filmmaking that France tends to suffer from more than other European countries: a little too handsome, a little too conservative about putting its emotions out at the fore. But the content is simply too rousing, and the actors too eager to devour their roles and bring out the life and truth of WWII France, to end up as sanitary and safe as it feels like it could easily have done. The film is elegant in ways that you'd neither expect nor, maybe, prefer, but it is also tremendously full and rich, its depiction of the war years too complete and involving to ever write the film off as "nice" cinema. It's methodical about what it's doing and uncommonly intellectual about its approach to unlocking its narrative, and if I can't in fairness call it more than a good solid movie, it is damn good, and damn solid, and it mostly pays excellent tribute to the real life fighters and the novel that it so clearly admires.
BEST SHOT: AMERICAN GRAFFITI
The summer hiatus of Hit Me with Your Best Shot at The Film Experience has ended, and our goodly host Nathaniel picked one of the all-time great summer movies to bring the series back: George Lucas's 1973 nostalgiathon American Graffiti. This is not, maybe, the most singularly convenient time to start gushing about a film that I have always loved rather more than it's perhaps fashionable to do, but it's a real triumph of a certain strain of independent filmmaking: a better example of doing more with less you'll rarely find, and both the cinematography and sound design (especially the sound design) are as legitimately creative and complex and even revolutionary as anything else going on in American cinema in the amazingly fecund first half of the 1970s. Hard to think of Lucas as truly clever filmmaker, after three Star Wars prequels went deeper and deeper into soulless "more is more" effects-driven nonsense, but American Graffiti, anyway, is a great movie by a talented, hungry kid, and I persist in regarding it as his masterpiece, all respect due to the first Star Wars for all the things it accomplished.
The film is about a lot of things, all of them clustered around the idea of being a teenager: its arc rather gently moves from celebrating the culture of being 18 in 1962 (and guess what bearded, plaid-wearing filmmaker was 18 in '62?) to quietly sobering up and realising that you're not going to be 18 forever, punctuating the film with an impressively bloodless reminder that the Vietnam War (which, in '73 was still very present in everybody's mind) was about to come along and demolish the breezy innocence of the protagonists' lives. That is, anyway, the angle on the film I decided to focus on (there are multiple angles you could pick: the sexual lives of teenagers, the American love of cars, even the way it celebrates music, though that last one would be hard to fit into this game).
So I quickly ended up torn between two shots, at either end of that arc: the one I didn't pick was the very first shot of the Cruising, the line of cars full of teens just driving up and down, listening to music, introduced in a very simple pan to the left married to crane shot up that sweeps the line of cars and all the unbridled teenage energy the represent into our line of sight with an iconic potency worthy of the man who'd later change the way that movies work because of how well he framed the opening shot of a Star Destroyer.
As I said, though, that's what I didn't go with. For my actual pick for Best Shot of American Graffiti, I went allllll the way to the other side (so, Spoilers, I guess), to a shot that reverse this in almost every way but one: it too involves a right-to-left pan, though I didn't include that part. It's of a stopped car, not a moving one; the people involved are facing away from us; and instead of being at the very beginning of night, it's at the first light of morning.
The two teens, Terry the Toad (Charles Martin Smith) and John Milner (Paul Le Mat) are talking about the race Milner just won by default; he's angry and depressed, while Terry is bubbling over trying to convince him that everything is all right, but this comes off as very silly and trivial and not entirely convincing, given how much at odds it is with all of the emotional journeys that have just wrapped up. Terry is repeating his belief in a normal, "way things are", but the whole movie has been about dismantling that kind of certainty, and the metaphor of dawn (which is surely not being used very subtly anywhere in this scene) is simply underlining that this is a time for new things and forward movement. And that forward movement isn't, to a great degree, going to involve the old Terry or old John who (spoilers again) will both be dead within three years.
On the level of pure image, this is straight-up Western iconography: the silhouettes of men staring at the sun across a wide expanse of plain, their trusty steed by their side (for as I'm hardly the first to point out, the car and the horse are descended from each other, as far as their position within a kind of American masculinity). And almost every time that it appears in a Western - think the last shot of The Searchers - it's implying a bittersweet sense of passing away. That's exactly the feeling of this moment at the end of American Graffiti: the night is over, the day is beginning, and the time for being a child for whom cruising, sex, and music are the be-all and end-all of life has ended. This beautiful but also detached and melancholy frame is, to me, the perfect embodiment of that feeling.
The film is about a lot of things, all of them clustered around the idea of being a teenager: its arc rather gently moves from celebrating the culture of being 18 in 1962 (and guess what bearded, plaid-wearing filmmaker was 18 in '62?) to quietly sobering up and realising that you're not going to be 18 forever, punctuating the film with an impressively bloodless reminder that the Vietnam War (which, in '73 was still very present in everybody's mind) was about to come along and demolish the breezy innocence of the protagonists' lives. That is, anyway, the angle on the film I decided to focus on (there are multiple angles you could pick: the sexual lives of teenagers, the American love of cars, even the way it celebrates music, though that last one would be hard to fit into this game).
So I quickly ended up torn between two shots, at either end of that arc: the one I didn't pick was the very first shot of the Cruising, the line of cars full of teens just driving up and down, listening to music, introduced in a very simple pan to the left married to crane shot up that sweeps the line of cars and all the unbridled teenage energy the represent into our line of sight with an iconic potency worthy of the man who'd later change the way that movies work because of how well he framed the opening shot of a Star Destroyer.
On the level of pure image, this is straight-up Western iconography: the silhouettes of men staring at the sun across a wide expanse of plain, their trusty steed by their side (for as I'm hardly the first to point out, the car and the horse are descended from each other, as far as their position within a kind of American masculinity). And almost every time that it appears in a Western - think the last shot of The Searchers - it's implying a bittersweet sense of passing away. That's exactly the feeling of this moment at the end of American Graffiti: the night is over, the day is beginning, and the time for being a child for whom cruising, sex, and music are the be-all and end-all of life has ended. This beautiful but also detached and melancholy frame is, to me, the perfect embodiment of that feeling.
TALENTED LADIES
The monthly list at The Film Experience this time around was a lot of fun to think about, but somewhat depressing in execution: the women most in need of an honorary Oscar. Depressing not because the list isn't a sold consensus - it very much is - but because merely working on the longlist made it unpleasantly clear that there aren't nearly as many below-the-line women given the opportunity to build themselves an impressive career. The top 11 is dominated by actresses not because they're the most visible and we're lazy, but because there are so few other candidates.
And part of that was the list's eligibility rules (editor Sarah Flack and cinematographer Ellen Kuras are, unfortunately, under 55 years old, while editors Dede Allen and Sally Menke both died in 2010, but all four were people I'd have dearly loved to include), but still, it's as solid a wake-up call as you could need: there need to be more women in the movie industry.
Here, then, is my top 10
1. Liv Ullmann (actress, director, writer) [#1 on the TFE list]
2. Agnès Varda (director, writer) [on the TFE list]
3. Kathleen Kennedy (producer) [on the TFE list]
4. Gena Rowlands (actress) [on the TFE list]
5. Claire Denis (director, writer)
6. Doris Day (actress) [on the TFE list]
7. Setsuko Hara (actress)
8. Catherine Deneuve (actress) [on the TFE list]
9. Chantal Akerman (director, writer)
10. Elaine May (writer, director, actress)
And part of that was the list's eligibility rules (editor Sarah Flack and cinematographer Ellen Kuras are, unfortunately, under 55 years old, while editors Dede Allen and Sally Menke both died in 2010, but all four were people I'd have dearly loved to include), but still, it's as solid a wake-up call as you could need: there need to be more women in the movie industry.
Here, then, is my top 10
1. Liv Ullmann (actress, director, writer) [#1 on the TFE list]
2. Agnès Varda (director, writer) [on the TFE list]
3. Kathleen Kennedy (producer) [on the TFE list]
4. Gena Rowlands (actress) [on the TFE list]
5. Claire Denis (director, writer)
6. Doris Day (actress) [on the TFE list]
7. Setsuko Hara (actress)
8. Catherine Deneuve (actress) [on the TFE list]
9. Chantal Akerman (director, writer)
10. Elaine May (writer, director, actress)
Thứ Ba, 2 tháng 7, 2013
OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN
Unlike so many '90s films, though, the form that WHD takes is not exactly "Die Hard in an X", with X referring in this case to the White House; it was this exact tack taken by this spring's Olympus Has Fallen, a cheaply-made rushed knock-off of WHD that, as it turns out, is almost precisely at the same quality level as the movie it was copying, though for different reasons. No, Emmerich's film turns out to be, well, Emmerich's film: a big, BIG riff on the '70s disaster formula with plot beats and character details that happen almost exactly the same way that they happened in ID4, or Godzilla, or even the 2000s '90s move The Day After Tomorrow.
So, for example, we have divorcée John Cale (Channing Tatum), whose 11-year-old daughter Emily (Joey King, a child actress I am beginning to admire very much) can barely stand him, owing to his non-stop fuckupitude and tendency to miss important events and expect his far-more-tolerant-than-she-needs-to-be ex-wife (Rachelle Lefevre) to bail him out. Cale is also working right now as the chauffeur for Speaker Raphelson (Richard Jenkins) of the House of Representatives, but trying his mightiest to get into the Secret Service, and as the film begins, he's finally managed to sweet-talk Jenna (Jackie Geary), a high-level staff member under the Vice President (Michael Murphy) into setting him up with an interview. Who should prove to be the interview, though, but Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), high-ranking agent and apparently a former girlfriend, or even more likely a former one-night-stand, who regards Cale's unimpressive resume and personal history of never finishing anything he starts as exactly the wrong qualifications to bodyguard for the president. Now, in a traditional '90s Disaster-Structure Action Film, Cale would probably be at least two different people, but that's what makes this a contemporary gloss, or whatever.
This percolates: the film ends up talking an alarmingly long time to ramp up the action, in fact, and the opening sequences where we get to know the characters are all deeply tedious and stretched-out (though it's better than the utterly atrocious parody of human behavior and geopolitical illiteracy that open Olympus Has Fallen) - also a feature of the '90s action film, though probably not one being copied on purpose - feel like they're never going to end when we finally get to the point that a group of rabid militants led by ex-CIA operative Stenz (Jason Clarke), raging against the president for a whole host of reasons, execute a complicated plot to take over the White House. Cale and Emily happen to be on a White House tour at that exact time, and circumstances play out such that the Secret Service agent-in-charge Martin Walker (James Woods) loses track of his charge, and it falls solely to the isolated Cale to protect President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) through the violence and mayhem that play out through the rest of a very bad day, as it turns out that this was all ultimately driven by the ire of the military-industrial complex over the president's attempt to bring about peace in the Middle East by removing all U.S. forces from the region.
Which is the next '90s element fallen into place: White House Down is emphatically proud to be a liberal message movie (though one where the President can brightly point out that removing troops is just for theater, because all the actual killing is and will continue to be done by drones, and this is not perceived as a problem), with the villains all being explicitly tied to right-wing ideologies. It used to be very much the case that real-world domestic politics informed popcorn movies, and not even that long ago; all sorts of movies in all sorts of genres used to openly align themselves with (usually) Democratic or (much less often) Republican concerns, though mostly at a superficial level. The last decade and change have witnessed the two-party divide in the U.S. turning unusually bitter, while an explosion in the world cinema market has made it desirable for every halfway expensive movie to play for all audiences of all countries, and both of these have tended to suck the real-world politics out of every major film; but along come Emmerich and Vanderbilt, cheerfully sliming Republicans while making their obvious Barack Obama analogue an all-around terrific guy, whose deeply-held pacifism doesn't keep him from being an action hero.
None of which has a damn thing to do with the film's quality, though certainly, the fact that a movie about how the bad guys resist the peace process should be so free and easy with piling on the violent but sanitary deaths of a shitload of extras is an irony totally lost on the filmmakers, and you needn't have any more knowledge of realpolitik than you can glean from a glance of the front page of the New York Times to understand why the actions of, basically, every character but Cale make absolutely no damn sense (especially the two "real" villains above Stenz.
The problem with White House Down, you see, is not one of plausibility, ideology, or political messiness: it's that the film is contrived and dumb, the action lead-footed and CGI-addicted in all the very worst ways (it plainly cost more than Olympus, but that comes at the price of being bloated and having logy action). The last characteristically '90s touch in Vanderbilt's screenplay is the howlingly bad dialogue, which veers between crappy exposition (though in one delightful moment, a character tersely cuts off another for saying something they both already know) and grueling quips, that plod off the actors' tongues as if nobody involved had ever actually encountered humor, though several of them had at least heard about it (for Tatum, after a year of successes as a light-touch pseudocomic actor, this is particularly disappointing, and prove if it was needed that he should be prevented from making action movies.
Worse still, it's boring, taking too much time out to establish a geopolitical worldview that makes no sense and doesn't lend any credence to the action; while that action itself is dully pedestrian, with one of the cutting-edge sparkle of Independence Day (which is name-dropped) or the flat-out fucking weirdness of 2012. Lesser action movies built around more heinously unconvincing characters are released every single summer, but White House Down is still a big slab of tedium in its own right, and its chief merit as an action film in 2013 is that it has been cut according to a much more sedate rhythm than most of them. In terms of being in the leastways exhilarating, though, nothing of the sort. It's just braying and tepid and the promise that it was going to be a fun buddy action picture falls apart on the particularly empty-headed performances of Tatum and Foxx, draining the last trace of humanity from a movie that had very little to spare in the first place. And so it's all just so many noisy moments stitched together indifferently, with only the general raucousness of the picture clueing us in that any of this is meant to be entertaining.
4/10
BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: PROTECTING THE PRESIDENT
Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Roland Emmerich's latest "violating the White House" picture, White House Down hinges on a wannabe Secret Service agent protecting the President. Men of his profession are rarer than other breeds of supercop in the movies, but not totally unknown.
Broadly speaking, there are two phases to Clint Eastwood's career as an actor (as differentiated from his career as a director, which is far more complex and interesting): the ones where he was a tough-guy action hero, and the ones where he was a worn-out old man painfully aware that he was no longer a tough-guy action hero; the macho films, that is, and the subversion of the macho films. There's really only one film where these two faces of Clint overlap, 1993's In the Line of Fire, in which the 62-year-old actor, playing a character at least a few years younger (in fact, Eastwood initially refused to sign up for the movie on those exact grounds), is still able to run and jump and shoot guns with the best of them, but is plagued with the doubts and aching memories of an old man. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, it was the last Eastwood performance given for any director other than himself for almost two full decades, until 2012's Trouble with the Curve rather oddly put him back in the game; The film was made by Wolfgang Petersen, a German director who knew from mixing action with psychological investigation of men in distress. His was the legendary Das Boot, a film incontestably greater and more intellectually rich than our present subject, though ItLoF is probably the most rewarding of Petersen's American films; it was not his first, but it did kick off a solid decade of him crafting better-than-average action pictures with just enough character depth that it's not embarrassing to watch them.
In this case, the primary character with depth is Frank Horrigan (Eastwood), a Secret Service agent who used to be the Treasury Department's hottest young Turk when he was John Kennedy's favorite bodyguard, and who has been haunted for three decades by his failure to save that president's life in Dallas, and now spends his lonely days off drinking and playing piano. So, "depth" should be understood as a relative quality, not an absolute one. But as far as stock histories for thriller protagonists go, the "grizzled warrior tormented by his one great failure" archetype is a noble one, though speaking entirely from a matter of taste, I don't know if using the real-life death of JFK as the motivating element in a genre character's backstory is something that the film earns, or even realises that it has to earn.
Frank has, in later years, moved away from president-guarding duty, and when we first meet up with him is busting a counterfeiting ring with his young partner Al D'Andrea (Dylan McDermott). And it is in this pasture that his career would peter out, except that he is pulled into a most villainous plot: there's a madman who has laid bait for the Secret Service, promising to kill the president and looking far more likely to do it than any of the thousand-odd crackpots who make similar threats ever year. And the one piece of evidence he leaves for the T-Men is a photograph of a much younger Frank standing with Kennedy on the very day of the assassination. And this same madman, played by John Malkovich, places a call to Frank that convinces the agent to get back on the President's detail as soon as possible.
There, really, is your movie: a smart but old and out-of-practice Secret Service agent squaring off against a cryptic enemy who knows every last tiny thing about him, and sees this as one big game, a chess match with the life of the President as the stakes. And this is also something that we've seen a lot of, just as much in '93 as in '13, and there is little attempt by ItLoF to dodge every last cliché of the genre it can scrape up, though scenes of techies breathlessly waving on the protagonist to keep the killer talking while they trace his phone weren't quite as ludicrously over-done 20 years ago as they have since become.
While the film has always been understood to be an action picture, one of the more notable things about it is how very little true action there is as most of us understand that phrase. One thoroughly exciting foot chase, one climactic struggle in a precarious elevator, and the rest is almost exclusively procedural elements mixed with a very light patina of psychological struggle - every inch a thriller, but grounded more in brainwork than fighting. This is to the film's clear benefit, not because the psychology being explored is especially probing and incisive - for it very plainly is not - but because the film's cast is generally of exactly the right mettle to give the characters heft and personality that Jeff Maguire's long-in-development script does not possess, and almost certainly could not possess without fiercely imbalancing things. Eastwood, never the most versatile and flexible actor in the best of circumstances, is certainly great within the very particular limitations that he's largely been content to stay within, playing an irascible, weary emblem of American masculinity, and with ItLoF acting explicitly on a treatise of exactly that (the film's themes, when they start to come to the fore, hinge entirely on the feeling of generational loss as post-war optimism turned to modernist dread in the moment that Kennedy died, the foundational myth of the older cohort of Baby Boomers - there's a priceless moment in which Frank angrily derides the romance of Kennedy assassination conspiracies, most recently given oxygen by the two-year-old JFK), Eastwood is about as perfect a vessel as 1993 was going to provide, though he doesn't fit all of the part's specific needs. In particular, Frank's romance with a pretty, younger Secret Service agent, Lilly Raines (Rene Russo, right at the onset of her brief but intense brush with stardom) falters both because of how unpleasantly old Eastwood is compared to Russo, and because the actors have absolutely not the smallest trace of chemistry (it being a curiously persistent trait of Eastwood's acting career that he rarely ever has a real spark with his leading ladies). Given that the Lilly plot is almost explicitly supposed to humanise and ground Frank, compared to his antagonist, this failure to stick the landing hurts the film, though not to distraction.
Anyway for all that Frank is the protagonist and an excellent, if reductive and, by 1993, old-fashioned role for Eastwood, ItLoF triumphs entirely on the strength of its villain. We are endlessly fascinated with killers, and Petersen cedes all of the movie he can spare to Malkovich, whose dazzlingly self-analyzing psychopath is an unmitigated triumph of action-thriller villainy, good enough to break through the genre resistance of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who nominated the actor for an Oscar (as well as the editing by the great Anne V. Coates and, even more surprisingly than Malkovich, Maguire's script), in one of the weirder years for the Best Supporting Actor category on the books. Any consideration of how the movie works has to center on Malkovich; if Eastwood gives the film an anchor, Malkovich single-handedly gives it genuine stakes, doing more to sell the film's arguments about emotional damage and loss of innocence and value than any other single element, and being endlessly creepy at the same time. The movie, as a whole, entertains; it is Malkovich who captivates, and turns a solid procedural into a genuine genre classic.
Without him, I frankly don't know how much I'd like the movie. It's solid all-around; Petersen's chief strength in this movie (which is not his chief strength elsewhere, though it's one of the things that distinguished him from other, similar directors at the same time) is mostly a matter of foregrounding character over events, and this gives ItLoF some measure of gravity and respectability, but it doesn't make it the most exciting movie that could be made on this scenario, and the director is unexpectedly restrained in his stylistic gestures, with the only outright showy moment being a series of dissolves that show how the villain disguises himself as more of a natural chameleon than an actor or con artist. Frankly, it's a sedate movie, which sharpens the edge of the few moments of out-and-out action, but it also gives the movie a certain languid pace that it's really not smart and deep enough to earn; 128 minutes is, at any rate, a lot of time to spend with a movie whose conflict is as basic and whose sociological observations are as callow as they are here.
And yet, it works: that is the most important thing, of course. It's nothing timeless, but it's certainly one of the more rugged and enjoyable examples of how early-'90s mainstream cinema worked when it was being made sensibly and effectively, without claiming to be anything special. There's certainly not much to it that's particularly revelatory, but it is thoroughly satisfying in most of the ways that matter. You forget how extraordinarily gratifying this kind of well-mounted entertainment for something like an adult audience could be until you realise just how long it's been since they were making it consistently.
In this case, the primary character with depth is Frank Horrigan (Eastwood), a Secret Service agent who used to be the Treasury Department's hottest young Turk when he was John Kennedy's favorite bodyguard, and who has been haunted for three decades by his failure to save that president's life in Dallas, and now spends his lonely days off drinking and playing piano. So, "depth" should be understood as a relative quality, not an absolute one. But as far as stock histories for thriller protagonists go, the "grizzled warrior tormented by his one great failure" archetype is a noble one, though speaking entirely from a matter of taste, I don't know if using the real-life death of JFK as the motivating element in a genre character's backstory is something that the film earns, or even realises that it has to earn.
Frank has, in later years, moved away from president-guarding duty, and when we first meet up with him is busting a counterfeiting ring with his young partner Al D'Andrea (Dylan McDermott). And it is in this pasture that his career would peter out, except that he is pulled into a most villainous plot: there's a madman who has laid bait for the Secret Service, promising to kill the president and looking far more likely to do it than any of the thousand-odd crackpots who make similar threats ever year. And the one piece of evidence he leaves for the T-Men is a photograph of a much younger Frank standing with Kennedy on the very day of the assassination. And this same madman, played by John Malkovich, places a call to Frank that convinces the agent to get back on the President's detail as soon as possible.
There, really, is your movie: a smart but old and out-of-practice Secret Service agent squaring off against a cryptic enemy who knows every last tiny thing about him, and sees this as one big game, a chess match with the life of the President as the stakes. And this is also something that we've seen a lot of, just as much in '93 as in '13, and there is little attempt by ItLoF to dodge every last cliché of the genre it can scrape up, though scenes of techies breathlessly waving on the protagonist to keep the killer talking while they trace his phone weren't quite as ludicrously over-done 20 years ago as they have since become.
While the film has always been understood to be an action picture, one of the more notable things about it is how very little true action there is as most of us understand that phrase. One thoroughly exciting foot chase, one climactic struggle in a precarious elevator, and the rest is almost exclusively procedural elements mixed with a very light patina of psychological struggle - every inch a thriller, but grounded more in brainwork than fighting. This is to the film's clear benefit, not because the psychology being explored is especially probing and incisive - for it very plainly is not - but because the film's cast is generally of exactly the right mettle to give the characters heft and personality that Jeff Maguire's long-in-development script does not possess, and almost certainly could not possess without fiercely imbalancing things. Eastwood, never the most versatile and flexible actor in the best of circumstances, is certainly great within the very particular limitations that he's largely been content to stay within, playing an irascible, weary emblem of American masculinity, and with ItLoF acting explicitly on a treatise of exactly that (the film's themes, when they start to come to the fore, hinge entirely on the feeling of generational loss as post-war optimism turned to modernist dread in the moment that Kennedy died, the foundational myth of the older cohort of Baby Boomers - there's a priceless moment in which Frank angrily derides the romance of Kennedy assassination conspiracies, most recently given oxygen by the two-year-old JFK), Eastwood is about as perfect a vessel as 1993 was going to provide, though he doesn't fit all of the part's specific needs. In particular, Frank's romance with a pretty, younger Secret Service agent, Lilly Raines (Rene Russo, right at the onset of her brief but intense brush with stardom) falters both because of how unpleasantly old Eastwood is compared to Russo, and because the actors have absolutely not the smallest trace of chemistry (it being a curiously persistent trait of Eastwood's acting career that he rarely ever has a real spark with his leading ladies). Given that the Lilly plot is almost explicitly supposed to humanise and ground Frank, compared to his antagonist, this failure to stick the landing hurts the film, though not to distraction.
Anyway for all that Frank is the protagonist and an excellent, if reductive and, by 1993, old-fashioned role for Eastwood, ItLoF triumphs entirely on the strength of its villain. We are endlessly fascinated with killers, and Petersen cedes all of the movie he can spare to Malkovich, whose dazzlingly self-analyzing psychopath is an unmitigated triumph of action-thriller villainy, good enough to break through the genre resistance of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who nominated the actor for an Oscar (as well as the editing by the great Anne V. Coates and, even more surprisingly than Malkovich, Maguire's script), in one of the weirder years for the Best Supporting Actor category on the books. Any consideration of how the movie works has to center on Malkovich; if Eastwood gives the film an anchor, Malkovich single-handedly gives it genuine stakes, doing more to sell the film's arguments about emotional damage and loss of innocence and value than any other single element, and being endlessly creepy at the same time. The movie, as a whole, entertains; it is Malkovich who captivates, and turns a solid procedural into a genuine genre classic.
Without him, I frankly don't know how much I'd like the movie. It's solid all-around; Petersen's chief strength in this movie (which is not his chief strength elsewhere, though it's one of the things that distinguished him from other, similar directors at the same time) is mostly a matter of foregrounding character over events, and this gives ItLoF some measure of gravity and respectability, but it doesn't make it the most exciting movie that could be made on this scenario, and the director is unexpectedly restrained in his stylistic gestures, with the only outright showy moment being a series of dissolves that show how the villain disguises himself as more of a natural chameleon than an actor or con artist. Frankly, it's a sedate movie, which sharpens the edge of the few moments of out-and-out action, but it also gives the movie a certain languid pace that it's really not smart and deep enough to earn; 128 minutes is, at any rate, a lot of time to spend with a movie whose conflict is as basic and whose sociological observations are as callow as they are here.
And yet, it works: that is the most important thing, of course. It's nothing timeless, but it's certainly one of the more rugged and enjoyable examples of how early-'90s mainstream cinema worked when it was being made sensibly and effectively, without claiming to be anything special. There's certainly not much to it that's particularly revelatory, but it is thoroughly satisfying in most of the ways that matter. You forget how extraordinarily gratifying this kind of well-mounted entertainment for something like an adult audience could be until you realise just how long it's been since they were making it consistently.
Thứ Hai, 1 tháng 7, 2013
JULY 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW
Summer has hit that magical point where I no longer have any expectations. The confluence of Man of Steel (which I honestly, really expected to be good) and Monsters University (which I expected to be just as bland as it was, though I hoped it would be better) wiped me out, and whatever happens, happens going forward. It doesn't help anything that July's slate of wide releases, broadly speaking, looks on paper to be less interesting than June's, and all told, it's exactly the right time to start being pleasantly surprised. This is what I choose to believe, anyway, because despite all the evidence, I do want to like big dumb fun blockbusters.
3.7.2013
All the logic in the world insists that The Lone Ranger is a can't-win proposition - massively over-budgeted remake of a property noted for its matinee cheesiness, Johnny Depp doing another goddamn stylised cartoon take on a wacky character - but the evidence of Rango tells me that director Gore Verbinski and Depp teaming up on a Western is worth keeping an open mind about, anyway, and the evidence of Pirates of the Caribbean: Whatever the Last One Was Called tells me, even more to the point, that even at their worst, the three Pirates movies that Verbinski helmed still had a real personality and creative spark that the Verbinski-free fourth movie threw into intense relief. There are too many good reasons to expect a bloated, witless monster of indulgence and noise to actually be "excited" for it, but there's always the chance of a fun action-adventure hiding in there.
The big film is plainly shaping up to be Despicable Me 2, though, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Is there really some kind of reservoir of adoration for the first Despicable Me? For what possible reason? And is there even the smallest chance that this story doesn't end up feeling like a strained, desperation move to expand a scenario that didn't have room for it?
Lastly, I don't know why a comedy concert doc is getting a wide release, but Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain is not bothered by my confusion.
12.7.2013
Guillermo del Toro is making a huge-budget movie, they tell me. And that is exciting, for he is an intelligent director about making memorable visuals, and if he gets a proper budget to play with... Morever, del Toro's movie is a love letter to the "giant things destroying cities" genre of Japanese cinema, and as a fan of the form, I am entirely, theoretically on board.
But Christ, could Pacific Rim look any more generic? I get that the ad campaign is deliberately limiting the number of distinct moments it's showcasing (the vibe I get is that the trailer is cut from just one setpiece), but what we've seen thus far has absolutely no flavor.
Also, Grown Ups 2 has been made, in an attempt to restore Adam Sandler's deflating career with a family-safe wacky comedy that I will not hereafter make any reference to, unless it somehow manages to hit #1, and that would be funnier than anything likely to happen in the movie.
Limited releases being something I try not to look forward to, because who knows with release dates, I'm so eager for Fruitvale Station, the belle of this past Sundance, that I can almost smell it.
17.7.2013
DreamWorks Animation's summer offering is the "fast radioactive snail" comedy Turbo. Your guess as to why is as good as mine.
19.7.2013
Nothing I've seen in a movie theater since the first Paranormal Activity has freaked me out as badly as the teaser trailer for The Conjuring, a movie that has been rated for R solely for being too scary. Which is awesome. And James Wan, whose earlier work veered from bad to soul-raping, got on my good side with Insidious, which appears to be working in the same general area as the new film. So when I said that I've been sapped of all enthusiasm for anything, I was only being mostly honest, though the fact that the junk food horror movie is where I'm pinning all my hopes for the month probably doesn't speak well of me, or cinema, or anything.
Signs that the summer is about ready to start winding down: the concurrent release of Red 2, a sequel to a minor hit that surely nobody could have been clamoring for, and R.I.P.D., a supernatural buddy cop comedy that wants so bad to present itself as a Men in Black knock-off with ghosts instead of aliens, with a budget that it likely won't be able to even halfway recoup. And it's directed by the guy who made Red! Oh, circle of life, you do move us all.
26.7.2013
The third and last superhero movie of the summer, The Wolverine, has one clear point in its favor, which is that Hugh Jackman's performance of the title character has managed to remain fresh and enjoyable through some very dodgy movies. The whole thing was a lot more interesting when Darren Aronofsky was attached to direct, and the superhero genre at this point needs something more special than an obvious franchise-polishing cash-in to rejuvenate it, but I imagine it will be enjoyable for what it is. The other wide release, randomly, is The To Do List, which looks needlessly redolent of Easy A, with a less-appealing lead.
In limited release, the new Woody Allen film, Blue Jasmine, starts its roll out. Always exciting to find out whether the Good Woody or the Bad Woody is going to show up for each year's new movie, but it has his most interesting cast (from Cate Blanchett to Sally Hawkins to Louis C.K.) in many years.
31.7.2013
The Smurfs 2 is coming out, because all that's necessary for evil to triumph, is for good people to do nothing.
3.7.2013
All the logic in the world insists that The Lone Ranger is a can't-win proposition - massively over-budgeted remake of a property noted for its matinee cheesiness, Johnny Depp doing another goddamn stylised cartoon take on a wacky character - but the evidence of Rango tells me that director Gore Verbinski and Depp teaming up on a Western is worth keeping an open mind about, anyway, and the evidence of Pirates of the Caribbean: Whatever the Last One Was Called tells me, even more to the point, that even at their worst, the three Pirates movies that Verbinski helmed still had a real personality and creative spark that the Verbinski-free fourth movie threw into intense relief. There are too many good reasons to expect a bloated, witless monster of indulgence and noise to actually be "excited" for it, but there's always the chance of a fun action-adventure hiding in there.
The big film is plainly shaping up to be Despicable Me 2, though, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Is there really some kind of reservoir of adoration for the first Despicable Me? For what possible reason? And is there even the smallest chance that this story doesn't end up feeling like a strained, desperation move to expand a scenario that didn't have room for it?
Lastly, I don't know why a comedy concert doc is getting a wide release, but Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain is not bothered by my confusion.
12.7.2013
Guillermo del Toro is making a huge-budget movie, they tell me. And that is exciting, for he is an intelligent director about making memorable visuals, and if he gets a proper budget to play with... Morever, del Toro's movie is a love letter to the "giant things destroying cities" genre of Japanese cinema, and as a fan of the form, I am entirely, theoretically on board.
But Christ, could Pacific Rim look any more generic? I get that the ad campaign is deliberately limiting the number of distinct moments it's showcasing (the vibe I get is that the trailer is cut from just one setpiece), but what we've seen thus far has absolutely no flavor.
Also, Grown Ups 2 has been made, in an attempt to restore Adam Sandler's deflating career with a family-safe wacky comedy that I will not hereafter make any reference to, unless it somehow manages to hit #1, and that would be funnier than anything likely to happen in the movie.
Limited releases being something I try not to look forward to, because who knows with release dates, I'm so eager for Fruitvale Station, the belle of this past Sundance, that I can almost smell it.
17.7.2013
DreamWorks Animation's summer offering is the "fast radioactive snail" comedy Turbo. Your guess as to why is as good as mine.
19.7.2013
Nothing I've seen in a movie theater since the first Paranormal Activity has freaked me out as badly as the teaser trailer for The Conjuring, a movie that has been rated for R solely for being too scary. Which is awesome. And James Wan, whose earlier work veered from bad to soul-raping, got on my good side with Insidious, which appears to be working in the same general area as the new film. So when I said that I've been sapped of all enthusiasm for anything, I was only being mostly honest, though the fact that the junk food horror movie is where I'm pinning all my hopes for the month probably doesn't speak well of me, or cinema, or anything.
Signs that the summer is about ready to start winding down: the concurrent release of Red 2, a sequel to a minor hit that surely nobody could have been clamoring for, and R.I.P.D., a supernatural buddy cop comedy that wants so bad to present itself as a Men in Black knock-off with ghosts instead of aliens, with a budget that it likely won't be able to even halfway recoup. And it's directed by the guy who made Red! Oh, circle of life, you do move us all.
26.7.2013
The third and last superhero movie of the summer, The Wolverine, has one clear point in its favor, which is that Hugh Jackman's performance of the title character has managed to remain fresh and enjoyable through some very dodgy movies. The whole thing was a lot more interesting when Darren Aronofsky was attached to direct, and the superhero genre at this point needs something more special than an obvious franchise-polishing cash-in to rejuvenate it, but I imagine it will be enjoyable for what it is. The other wide release, randomly, is The To Do List, which looks needlessly redolent of Easy A, with a less-appealing lead.
In limited release, the new Woody Allen film, Blue Jasmine, starts its roll out. Always exciting to find out whether the Good Woody or the Bad Woody is going to show up for each year's new movie, but it has his most interesting cast (from Cate Blanchett to Sally Hawkins to Louis C.K.) in many years.
31.7.2013
The Smurfs 2 is coming out, because all that's necessary for evil to triumph, is for good people to do nothing.
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