Double Feature

Bong Joon-Ho’s latest film, Mother, begins with a lovely medium shot of the title character dancing a strange dance by herself in an empty field. Given what follows, I was grateful to him for allowing the character a reprieve right up front. The writer/director was also behind Memories of Murder and The Host, and all three films pull off a neat trick: the characters are a constant surprise but do not derail the story. See all three. They are among the best movies of the past decade.

I used to find the private lives and public misdeeds of artists fascinating. Then, I grew up. A lot of the writers, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admired were miserable jerks who ruined the lives of people around them. Who cares? I can still enjoy the work. The private lives and public misdeeds of people with genuine power, on the other hand, are far more pertinent to the quality of innumerable lives, and fairer game. To get to the point: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is fantastic, and if you stay away, the loss is yours.

***

Double Feature: Unfilmable Edition

Once the clues have begun to accumulate, and you understand that a novel’s narrator is unreliable, you have to combine your readerly pleasures with other, more writerly duties: You have to pick through the details he offers (“All women find me attractive”) and decide which ones to believe (um, not that one.)

When a film gets made of this type of narrative, though, a genre that’s pretty nimble on the page gets hamstrung in the visual medium, and James Mason or Jeremy Irons wind up cast as Humbert Humbert -- a narrator who, three separate times, tells the reader that he is considered quite handsome; striking, even.

I’ve never believed him, and I never believed Lou Ford, narrator of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, when he insists that the women he beats up enjoy it, but the new film version (which gets the setting and the bit players just right) takes him at his word, and so trips right out of the gate.

**

Patricia Highsmith’s sociopaths are more childlike than Jim Thompson’s, more likely to kill someone and then pretend it didn’t happen, until they’ve convinced themselves it didn’t and move on to other things, if the world will let them, which it won’t.

Given that description, you can guess that her novels depend on a lot of interior monologue, but the recent film of The Cry of the Owl works pretty well without any voiceover narrative. It veers close to a Lifetime Network production at times, but the inherent strangeness of the material, and a good, weird performance by Julia Stiles, keeps it on track. Best of all, nobody pounds Jessica Alba’s face into hamburger.

***

Double Feature: Adaptations

I’m no great fan of voice-over narration, but how else to adapt a novel for the screen if its greatest strengths are ruminative? If you’re Jason Reitman, you add a new character, or two, and have the protagonist hector them with his formerly-interior monologues. In Thank You for Smoking, he conjured up a child to travel with the hero, so the hero could explain the job of a lobbyist to (by extension) us dumb hick moviegoers, and he conjures up another youth to tag after George Clooney in Up in the Air.
In the novel, our hero is in deep denial, and fashions a weirdly-enticing alternate reality out of his business-travel existence as he heads for a breakdown; in the film, Clooney plays a cool guy whose priorities are out of whack. His job is firing people, and the painful scenes of people being terminated from their jobs arrive with the regularity of the murders in a slasher flick, but to what end? So that Clooney and his apprentice can learn some small thing about themselves, yawn. If you don’t want the camera to follow J.K. Simmons when he leaves that office, and stick with him for at least five minutes, if not the remainder of the movie, I don’t know what to tell you. As it stands, Reitman has no idea how to end the movie. I wonder if he knows why he made it.



Watching Edmond, on the other hand, it’s easy to feel that everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it, and why they wanted to. Directed by Stuart Gordon (maker of some of the most entertaining horror films of the past thirty years, and of the recent Zero-Sum World favorite, Stuck) from a script by David Mamet (adapting his own play) and featuring Mamet players Bill Macy, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Joe Mantegna, Edmond is simply the best Mamet on film thus far. More importantly, for readers of this blog, it is a very pure example of the One-Way Ticket to Hell story, bracingly fearless, with as devastating an ending as any film I can remember recommending wholeheartedly to my loved ones! Seek it out! (Currently offered as a Free Movie on Comcast OnDemand in the Detroit area.)

Double Feature

The ad campaign for Body of Lies made it look like a technothriller, but it’s not. The failure of technology to deliver on its promises in the War on Terror is one of the movie’s themes: “They’ve figured out they’re fighting an enemy from the future,” as a character nicely puts it. The interrogation methods of the CIA are treated glancingly as well --just enough to leave a chill --and the interagency rivalries, and then the story quickly gets down to the real business of espionage: the care and feeding of cat’s paws. This is a good one.

Blindness is a zombie story without the zombies. If you’ve ever doubted the need for zombies, for the distance they allow, watch this film. It is slightly easier to take than Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke.

Double Feature: Degenerate Gamblers

I could not stand Matthew Broderick when he was young; after Election, I’m cheered whenever he waddles onto the screen. Since bulking up and slowing down, he’s become ridiculously smooth and low-key, a great comic actor. His boyish face, changing slowly from one bland expression to the next, makes for a perfect mask for the degenerate gambler he plays in Finding Amanda. There are some comedy set pieces in the film, but that’s when the film is least funny (with the exception of Steve Coogan’s first scene). The real laughs are kind of painful, but it’s funny nevertheless to watch the matter-of-fact way Broderick lies to everyone. When he develops an interest in his runaway niece Brittany Snow, a twenty-year old prostitute, it is also seems natural that there’s nothing sexual about it: Being interested in anyone is a new experience for him. The small-group swing and light tone is a perfect mask for a lonely and cutting little movie. Lose the scenes with the wacky dealer and the funny pimp and you’d have a minor gem.

In Cassandra’s Dream, the indispensible Tom Wilkinson has a small role which haunts the entire film, much as he did in Michael Clayton. Here, it’s the moment of rage his character allows himself (directed at Colin Ferrell; the audience sympathizes) that stays in the mind, and keeps the movie from drifting away. It’s noir, all right, but held at a distance, with pretty surfaces and a soundtrack by Phillip Glass and characters theatrically declaiming what’s eating them, and Woody Allen just doesn’t have the stomach for this high-style low-life stuff the way David Mamet does. Oh, listen, it’s better than I’m making it sound. Recommended.

Double Feature

The Bedroom Window has the kind of premise that’s hard to resist: Our naïve hero tries to do good by telling a lie, and quickly finds himself on the Road to Hell. I saw this in a theater 21 years ago (?!) and thought it was like an American version of one of Truffaut’s Hitchcock homages –- an impression obviously fostered by the presence of Isabelle Huppert, but supported by the film itself and by a second viewing on DVD this week. As with Truffaut, the movie goes limp somewhere after the halfway mark, even though the story remains involving. It would be easy to blame this failure on the star, Steve Guttenberg, unless you have happened to see him in the movie Diner and thus realize that he gets a Lifetime Pass. No, it’s his character –- he’s an Architect, which in movies means Underwritten –- that lets some of the tension dribble away. Director Curtis Hanson, who would go on to adapt and direct the sublime L.A. Confidential, doesn’t fix the character into the story the way that Hitchcock or DePalma or David Lynch did in films with similar premises. Even when the guy is sitting up all night in an alley, staking out a killer’s house, there’s no sense of what’s driving him; when, late in the film, he tells Elizabeth McGovern that he has a “crush” on Huppert, it sounds about right -– and completely wrong. It’s just a lark? Don’t tell that to the villain! (It’s a master stroke by Hanson that the villain has only one line in the movie. He makes the most of it. You laugh, realizing -- “Hey! He spoke!” -- and then your blood runs cold.)

The much-lauded second-person voiceover narration in Blast of Silence left me feeling churlish. The style is so hardboiled you could crack a floor tile with it, and it has more than a touch of Nietzche -– the Nietzche who so impresses undergraduates. That aside, the film’s a gem, a terrific specimen of the lonely-stunted-life-of-the-contract killer sub-genre. You could draw a straight line from Blast of Silence through The Prone Gunman through Grosse Point Blank to Who Is Conrad Hirst? and come out with a pretty good essay. I’ll expect it on my desk next week.

Burn After Reading

A lot of movies huff and puff to feel up to the minute; Burn After Reading, with great stealth, makes it look easy.

The value of “intelligence” misjudged, resulting in carnage? Check.
Bureaucrats sitting on their hands, waiting to see how matters of life-and-death play out? Check.
Isolation, paranoia, and self-interest verging on solipsism? All on full display.
An audience that wouldn’t have been certain how to take this stuff eight years ago, erupting into bitter, knowing laughter? Yep.

Recommended.

Double Feature

Played is a British underworld revenge thriller that stars writer/producer Mick Rossi, who looks like a sullen, sleep-deprived Dudley Moore. For long stretches, the movie, which is mostly improvised, looks like it was shot on cell-phone video. Sounds terrible, right? But the movie has narrative drive to burn, and inventive editing that is never merely distracting; any number of real actors (Gabriel Byrne, Val Kilmer, Patrick Bergin, Anthony LaPaglia, Bruno Kirby) popping up to slap our protagonist around; the lovely Patsy Kensit and the always-mysterious Joanne Whalley; a genuine tough guy for a villain (Vinnie Jones); a fine score, and a great sense of story. (I only know that the movie was largely improvised because I watched the extras on the DVD.) If you’re interested in making a movie with no money, this is how you do it; if you’re merely interested in seeing a good crime story, you could do far, far worse.

I’ve started but never finished a couple of Dennis Lehane’s PI novels, but after watching Gone Baby Gone I’ll give them another try. As with Played, narrative drive is the key here: It keeps the material – a missing-child case – from becoming manipulative or maudlin. The performances are all terrific, and the ending tough, with the wrong thing done for the right reasons and the right thing done for (perhaps) the wrong reasons. Couples everywhere, no doubt, start bitter arguments (of substance) as the credits roll.

Double Feature

(Back from vacation)

Early in The Dark Knight, The Joker and his henchmen crash a party in Bruce Wayne’s penthouse, terrorize his guests – Gotham City’s elite. When Batman intervenes, The Joker throws our hero’s girlfriend out the window. Batman dives after her, breaks both their falls with his cape or something: They crash onto the roof of a cab but are apparently unharmed, and his girlfriend says her “I’m-too-old-for-this-shit” line, and………scene.
What’s happening back in the penthouse? What becomes of the rest of the partygoers? (Joker has been killing most everyone he meets.) If the villain and his cohorts simply flee the party at this point…how? Nothing is shown or even mentioned. Somehow, it’s just not important. Reviews are lauding the film’s narrative strengths.

Lack of interest in consequences firmly established, the filmmakers proceed(quickly) to make the battle for Gotham City resemble the War On Terror, but never decide whether they are for or against winning at any cost. In Wanted, the filmmakers set their sights lower – it’s the old high-school-freshman late-night-debate: “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you do it?” – and they still muff the answer.

Double Feature

1) The new film The Strangers must be a remake of the Romanian film Them, which I saw last night. I haven’t seen The Strangers, but it could not improve on the original. One of the most heartening developments at the movies in the last couple years has been a small surge of short, no-frills suspense films that are all suspense. Films like Vacancy and 13 Tzameti establish character, setting and situation handily, and then drop you right in the protagonist’s shoes for an hour of real-time menace. A film like P2…tries but fails to do the same. Them falls into the former camp, and gets extra points for its ending, not easily forgotten.

2) What I tend to forget, on some level, is how crappy movies starring Will Smith or auteured by M. Night Shyamalan invariably are. Why is that?

It was easy to resist Will Smith for years, when his movies were made for children (Men In Black) or for no one (Wild Wild West), but recently he defiled a couple of classic genre novels in a way that made for good-looking trailers. The kind of trailers that make you go to a movie. His new film Hancock has the best-looking Will Smith trailers yet. Bastard.

My weakness for Shyamalan is easier to explain: Like the DePalma of my teenaged years, the man knows where to put the camera. He always manages to put together at least one or two sequences of eerie beauty before the wheels fall off.

Both these guys bring out the degenerate gambler in me. Odds are against Hancock or The Happening being any good, but odds are even worse that I’ll miss either one.

Double Feature

First Snow is a really good little movie –- the world’s first lazy-valve thriller. Like The Aura, it’s a quiet film that takes its time setting the mood and giving us a good feel for the characters, their ordinary life and milieu; when the tension begins to ratchet up, you can really feel it. With Guy Pearce (above), William Fichtner, J.K. Simmons (all terrific); Piper Perabo (lovely); and Jackie Burroughs (heartbreaking).

I cannot express how relieved I was to learn that the upcoming Nicolas Cage/Wim Wenders project The Bad Lieutenant is not a remake of the 1992 Harvey Keitel/Abel Ferrara film. I saw Bad Lieutenant in 1992, and I watched it a second time last year, and I look forward (with dread) to watching it again in another fifteen years -- the experience unmarred by memories of some diluted remake. A thing of ugly beauty is a joy forever.

Double Feature

Eastern Promises is a much better movie than A History of Violence, but they both have the same major flaw: Cronenberg builds up a lot of tension and mystery surrounding the identity of the character played by Viggo Mortensen and then, perversely, lets it all leak away in a single, pedestrian scene.

“Jiu Jitsu?” someone asks Chiwetal Ejiofor early in David Mamet’s Redbelt. “Isn’t that where you use a guy’s strength against him?” Not really, our hero replies…but that’s exactly what happens to him for the next ninety minutes. The great Ricky Jay was MIA in Spartan; he’s back here, with a vengeance.

Movie: Michael Clayton (2007)

I couldn’t tell you why the bulk of the story needed to be told in flashback -- and wouldn't it have been a better story if Tom Wilkinson’s character hadn’t been on meds in the first place?

Minor caveats. Michael Clayton is great.

With this film and Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck (and even, I would say, The Peacemaker, and misfires like Intolerable Cruelty and The Good German), George Clooney seems dedicated to making movies that presuppose, in a way that most American movies since the late seventies have not, an intelligent audience of genuine adults.

He's a good guy to have around.

Double Feature

For the first hour and a half of its running time, No Country For Old Men is both extremely stylish and nose-to-the-ground; in the last half hour, the action quickly becomes clear as mud: It’s like the Coens jumped from Blood Simple to Barton Fink, or let David Lynch direct the last half hour of the movie.

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead opens with a couple of scenes that might lead you to believe you’re in for a dirty good time, but don’t be fooled. The heist-gone-bad story defers to the family-gone-bad story, and what follows is unrelentingly grim -- a film to be admired more than enjoyed.

Hard World For Little Things

Rose McGowan really likes Robert Mitchum.

I think Mitchum would’ve really liked McGowan too.

November on Turner Classic Movies is Guest Programmer Month, as I learned last night when I caught Rose McGowan introducing Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” and later “Out of the Past”.

Watch those back-to-back and you’ve been through the wringer, boy - with or without Rose around.

A week from today, the Guest programmer is: James Ellroy!

Check it out here http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=183437&mainArticleId=183435

Movie: The Good German (2006)

Where's Claude Raines when you really need him?

Movie: The Long Good Friday (1979)

London gang boss Bob Hoskins is finalizing a development deal that will make him and his associates wealthy and legit - once they secure some big money from the American Mafia - when he finds himself a target of some bloody acts of revenge.

Hoskins is great playing a guy absolutely dumbfounded to discover that, after a decade of graft-induced peace and prosperity, someone could have the nerve to try and muck up his big deal.

He shakes off his daze once the machetes come out, and rediscovers his inner gangster...but he also finds out that prosperity has left him a step too slow.

(Be forewarned: The synthesizer 'n' saxophone score has not aged well.)

Movie: The Aura (2005)

Art-house noir from Argentina.

An epileptic taxidermist (really) gets a chance to live his fantasy of committing a heist by inserting himself into someone else’s scheme, and of course he doesn’t know the half of what’s really going on.

The proceedings are so hushed that every curse is like a gun going off, and every gunshot like a bomb.

The corners don’t all meet up as they might pretend to in an American product, but this one’ll stay with you.

Recommended.