Archive for November, 2008

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

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James Bond has survived a number of ridiculous-in-retrospect signs of the times over the years, and now he must trump pop psychology – the pretentious director’s shortcut around the inherent amorality of the action film. The action film has gotten smarter and more hypocritical. We could laugh off much of Clint Eastwood’s old output or, later on, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, but the action picture has now acquired a self defense mechanism – a “conscience”; we can now excuse our men for killing everyone in site because the pace occasionally slows and we occasionally see them looking out a window or over a drink or pouting in the pillow of a beautiful woman and because the violence is nastier, with a stylishly absent lack of style. Better, cleverer, directors have gotten hold of pulp conventions and made them more insidious for people who can’t admit to enjoying the conventions more honestly. Early in the year, I gave Stallone’s junky Rambo a mild pass because I found the honest blood-lust nearly quaint, the amateurishness a breath of air.

James Bond’s ruthlessness was more honest when his directors didn’t labor so hard to demystify and excuse his ruthlessness. Connery was vaguely psychopathic in the role, but there was, intentionally or not, a satiric undercurrent in his performance. Connery was reveling in the ultimate male and sending it up slightly in turn – this is why the performance, early on, is so legendary. Connery wasn’t the found object some critics claim him to be, he was a more intuitive actor – he knew what had to be done for audiences to accept Bond so readily – there had to be a just barely audible laugh track – or else the character would have been too vicious or too ludicrous.

The Bond producers don’t, despite their hype, understand how good of a Bond they have these days in Daniel Craig – he’s as playful as Connery and far more subtle. Craig’s two performances as James Bond are, taken on their own, the best James Bond picture we’ve seen, but the filmmakers don’t trust the performance – they have to clarify and rationalize him, they have to give him little contrivances to excuse him for us. They have to “humanize” him. Craig’s done that already, he’s made Bond ambiguous again, animal, with a hint of little man’s syndrome. Bond has brought a raw physicality out in Craig that was only otherwise present in Munich. Craig is a wonderfully contained, clipped actor – he makes walking exciting, revealing, passionate, scary. Craig’s a Bond with a love of consumption that’s yet to find its vindictive outlet in “the finer things of life”. Craig’s Bond discovers killing in the opening minutes of his opening outing, Casino Royale, and so killing is still novel to him, he hasn’t acquired Connery’s transference yet; killing is not yet hidden in innuendo. That was why Casino Royale was so exciting, particularly the ending, because we were promised, despite two acts too many and some too florid, too self-conscious romanticism and some flaws that seem to exist for their own sake (we can’t make this too good…), the making of a legend, the making of a consumed consumptive, a just about madman whom we all want to be. Craig transcended (and transcends) self-help mommy-doesn’t-love-me tripe; he could, with better material and some nurturing and understanding, be the Bond; capable of a legitimately ironic iconic man’s man performance that actually, in its purity and confidence, deconstructs the man’s man in a way that the filmmakers facilely prevent themselves from doing.

Besides Craig, Quantum of Solace is little. The picture is just the sort of impersonal thing that I figured director Marc Forster would deliver. Bond films are almost exclusively handled by not huge personalities behind the camera, but they, at their best, are at least trusted to unassuming pros with a sense of composition and how to keep things going. Bond’s been at this awhile, I’ve given up on an auteur taking him on, and maybe I’m even ok with that. We’ve all heard the Quentin Tarantino stories, but do we really a need a Bond that’s also a name-check of everything Tarantino was watching at the time he discovered the double-o? If that’s personality, I think I’ll keep my Bond impersonal thank you very much. But Marc Forster is the worst kind of impersonal that’s, sadly, acceptable in these cinema times – he’s a plastic-insta-personality, a wannabe auteur, so far, incapable of anything other than the hollow clicks that pass as a McIndie these days. Forster has “range”, which in his case means he appropriates a different set of self-important clichés with every picture he makes, which include Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger than Fiction. Forster is the kind of director who says he wants to “examine” Bond, which means he wants to peel the inexplicable away in favor of something blunt and “liberal” and “human” and boring. There is one surprise in Forster’s handling of Quantum of Solace – a little man’s syndrome entirely removed from the subtext Craig brings to the role – an eagerness to compete with the pumped up action calisthenics currently in. But Forster doesn’t have any more feeling for these scenes than he does anything else – the action of Quantum is labored and forgettable.

There is one scene that suggests an ideal merging of past and present Bond. James, on the trail of a suspect who has something to do with the killing of his lover from Casino Royale, discovers a cloaked conversation amongst the world’s powerful in an opera house – where a more vast than we expected organization, QUANTUM, is revealed. This moment is the only time the film plays, deftly, with more than one tone; and it’s the only time that Bond’s machismo is satirized with a light touch. We watch this moment and we discover that the filmmakers have thrown Bond into a far deeper pool than we suspected. The scene has the scary us-against-the-entire-world conformity of a Body Snatchers picture and it suggests that nothing can outshoot or out-punch money. The ironically contrasting the beauty of opera with the evil of man bit has been done before, but it stands out, intentionally, ideally, from the other horseplay we’ve half-slept through up until this point. Forster and co-writers Paul Haggis and Robert Wade and Neal Purvis have, for a few moments, found the horror and the silliness of being a super-human macho man – they, for a moment, recognize a legitimate terror, that Bond is just fantasy, that none of it means anything to people who know how to play ball.

Posted in 2008, Action, Reviews | 4 Comments »

Get Smart and Kung-Fu Panda (2008)

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

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Most big summer movies are so willfully, overbearingly impersonal that any hint of chemistry at all is sadly noteworthy. Get Smart is a lazy, thrown-together movie but Anne Hathaway and her unexpectedly appealing give-and-take with a loose, funnier than usual Steve Carell lends the laziness the illusion of lackadaisical wit. You don’t walk out of the picture resenting the explosions because the director, Peter Segal, isn’t enough of a filmmaker to build those scenes up, they blow away, and leave you with just Hathaway and Carell, who suggest legitimate possibility as some sort of romantic-screwball team. Get Smart has the savvy to allow Carell an unexpected equality to Hathaway that could possibly strike her gorgeous super-spy as novel. She’s the promise of glamour and sex, of adventure and all the things we resent or envy cheerleaders and actresses for implying and withholding. Carell is the nerd as ironic hero – he’s as misplaced in this movie world as this Hathaway would be in most of our worlds. Carell’s everyday commonality makes him exotic too – to the bad guys and to Hathaway – his solutions baffle their glorified expectations and rules of play. Carell, devoid of outlandishness, must find another way.

It helps that Carell, playing a spy in a not-quite franchise, is a more convincing everyman here than in his more self-conscious roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Dan and Real Life. Carell plays broad, that’s unavoidable, but he allows his Maxwell little asides of melancholy that add up. While Carell’s neediness was irritating in some of his other pictures, it’s surprising and refreshing in a film we have no expectations of. It’s also a credit to the picture’s (barely existent) script that Carell’s brainy, interior nature isn’t mocked or emasculated in the typically jock blood-junky Hollywood action fashion. There’s a wee suggestion of empathy. You like him. And you understand why Hathaway, who’s given a bizarre plastic surgery story to explain her age difference from Carell, would like him as well. Carell sells that cliché of the average guy so clueless he doesn’t know he’s totally out of his dream girl’s league – he treats her like a comrade, a buddy, a princess in camouflage shorts, and he walks away with her.

Get Smart also plays into Hathaway’s strength, that slightness that I had, last week, suggested was a liability. Hathaway is a good sport, her slightness humanizes her beauty and her charm – her charm isn’t dictatorial, like Julia Roberts or Halle Berry. Hathaway is capable of occupying a scene that isn’t devoted to everything that’s gloriously, ineffably her. Hathaway took it too far in The Devil Wears Prada, she was a bore and was upstaged by Emily Blunt, but in Get Smart, a considerably weaker film than Prada, she’s allowed a part so undeniably silly that she just goes with it, without congratulating herself for her sportsmanship. When Julia walked away with Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, I took it as I would the ending of a particularly ghoulish horror picture – an unsettling promise of misery to come. When Hathaway and Carell walked away, I almost started the film over again – they’re a cute couple. Is a good director up to capitalizing on this promise? Probably not, our big directors these days seem to be incapable of escapist fare without obvious 9/11 parables to justify their working in the mainstream sector. Self-loathing in artists has never been so boring. We’ll never get another Thin Man, unless it’s a remake of The Thin Man that doesn’t remotely resemble The Thin Man.

The trend of front-loading animated films with celebrity voices of varying degrees of success is irritating and occasionally racist, but the animated film also sometimes provides the opportunity for an up-tight or stuck actor to rediscover himself. (Tom Hanks’ best work in the last many years is Toy Story and Toy Story 2.) Kung-Fu Panda, possibly the most purely pleasurable action film of the year, stars Jack Black’s voice as Po, a roly-poly panda stuck working for his father in a noodle shop, while dreaming of acceptance into an elite team of ninja animals led by Dustin Hoffman as a little creature I couldn’t quite identify. Hoffman, who’s made a late inning career of warm, funny and relaxed performances in movies that suck, is allowed a vehicle here that gets on his stoned legend’s wavelength. Kung-Fu Panda doesn’t hustle you – it doesn’t run you over with its energy or its importance – it’s a kung-fu animal blowout for children, the hilariously straight-forward title more than appropriate.

It’s also a kung-fu animal blowout with Jack Black’s most restrained performance. Sticking Black in a little room with a microphone has allowed him to cool his jets and riff on the self-loathing that propels him, that revelation of tenderness that marks School of Rock as a career high point. Maybe Black’s finally gaining a sense of control over himself: he was also restrained in his lack of restraint for Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder this year. Black is normally a physical-verbal tornado, a parody of acting out as compensation for fill in the blank; but, as Po, Black allows us to come to him – he drops the meta – he isn’t a sad, lonely man satirizing how sad, lonely men try to transcend themselves with volume – he’s, as a panda, pared down, relaxed. You can feel Black exhaling – and he lends Po a surprisingly fragile voice, a voice with a beauty normally reserved for those ironically forceful covers that can frequently be heard over the end credits of his films. I almost never buy this self-actualization through ass-kicking stuff, but the ending, a duel between Po and a surprisingly menacing baddie voiced by Ian McShane (he doesn’t dial his viciousness down for the kids) is a feel great moment – a fat boy’s dream of super-heroism. Kung-Fu Panda is a children’s action film that respects children, that embodies what children sometimes dream of as their action figures collide in the grass.

Posted in 2008, Action, Comedy, Reviews | 12 Comments »

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

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In Rachel Getting Married, director Jonathan Demme’s compassion shines through in a way that even good directors’ films rarely do; in this sense, the picture more recently recalls Shoot the Moon, Away from Her, other Demme, and, currently, little. Everything here contributes to a miserable-wonderful-electric state of being. Demme’s misguided Charade remake, The Truth About Charlie, used the French New Wave as an experiment and a fashion statement, but in Rachel Getting Married the visual devices have a point – an urgency. The camera is desperate, searching, we feel life eluding the characters, the good times half-forgotten and giving way to the bad before they’ve been properly savored. The picture explodes in bursts of energy and music; it doubles (layers) in the way Kael wrote of Something Wild doubling. This new Demme picture merges the ideal qualities of a young and old filmmaker – a younger filmmaker’s curiosity and need to get it all out with an older filmmaker’s consideration and humanity. Rachel Getting Married is the film you find yourself fantasizing about as you watch your fiftieth coming of age romantic roundelay – an honorable formula picture – a picture that uses formula not out of cynicism or laziness, but as a springboard for something less tangible – an emotional blow-out, an instinctive trance-out, a bliss that closer resembles a beloved pop album.

Demme employs something currently vogue again: the hand-held, slightly over-exposed, constantly in motion camera, and takes it further than most filmmakers seem willing. Many current filmmakers, particularly the ones huddled under the annoying “mumblecore” umbrella, use a self-conscious diet vérité style as license to deny us poetry. Under the guise of “realism” many of these filmmakers pass non-films off as films (not a new trend), and wait for their friends and others embarrassed of the conventional pleasures of the medium to applaud them (they’re applauding their own willingness to deny themselves pleasure). Demme still gives us poetry, in the pauses and the interludes, in the in-jokes and the speeches, in the bursts of patter that tell us little in the words, but a lot in the delivery, and in the music that never ceases. Demme trusts you to find his poetry – a trick of a lamp, a woman standing over a pool, a gaze from a swing, that others would base their entire films around. Rachel Getting Married has many painful-squishy moments (admittedly too many – a few are too trumped for tears), but we don’t come away from it feeling mauled as we do with many other critically acclaimed pictures released this time of year. Demme isn’t interested in bleak chic – his obsession with the every day click-clicks of life won’t allow for it.

The buzz of the surface craft of the film has a poignancy, and relevance, beyond its own sake, though that would be enough. The editing is an extension of character in Rachel Getting Married – a fragile recognition of its hero’s manic self-loathing. Kym (Anne Hathaway), a possibly reformed drinker and drugger, is so busy defending herself to herself in front of others that she misses the beauty of everything we’re admiring. We’re in Kym’s head from the start. We share her panic, her self-fulfilling fear of drowning in embarrassment and inferiority. Jenny Lumet’s flawed, pat script has brought the great Demme from the 1980s back to fictional films – this picture is undeniably a fantasy, but it’s the fantasy of family life that Kym, and many others, feels is always just around the corner, or behind the cabinet – eluding her, and them. Rachel Getting Married represents a kind of utopia, an idealized vision of two families, one self-absorbed and troubled, the other still and talented and sage and idealized (they’re commanding, but shallow – deliberate symbols, sometimes to the point of irritation) – uniting in flourishes of energy and tolerance. It could be trite and insulting, it possibly should be, but Demme is too drunk on the momentum of the possibilities of interaction – the picture has the effect of dominos tumbling.

With Kym, Anne Hathaway has been given the part that many self-conscious young starlets attempt every year to varying degrees of success. Hathaway, from The Princess Diaries to Havoc to Brokeback Mountain to The Devil Wears Prada to Rachel Getting Married, clearly wants to be a great actress, perhaps too clearly. Hathaway’s roles strike me more as experiments than calculations, leaps into something she hopes approximates brilliance of effect, but she’s always nice, slight, and too studied. I root for Hathaway, but she never quite pulls it off, and she has an unfortunate tendency to lose scenes to her co-stars. Kym plays into Hathaway’s qualities – the eagerness to please, the not-quite-channeled talent, the delicate, sometimes ghostly beauty, and it’s the surprising parallel between role and star that gives Kym bite. Kym is a scriptwriter’s device, and she has a lousy, needless, skeleton in the closet, but Hathaway’s unexpected empathy sidesteps the stunt. The actress’s palpable, human hunger drives the character’s hungers to places of true need.

Kym is still the role most programmed to elicit a specific reaction. The star of this film is the collective world, the mix of actors, musicians, and family and friends of Demme. Bill Irwin, as Kym and Rachel’s father, has a haunting, hollowed face – a Rosetta’s Stone of domestic tragedies that humanizes his daughters’ manias. Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel is possibly the strongest performance in the movie, she takes you into her teeter-tottering movements of rage, resentment and pity – she establishes the family, fluidly, subtly, as a family of over-thought, recklessly talented nuts. Rachel, the character who, in a lesser movie, would be the asexual, conventional shrew, is the force of Rachel Getting Married –a contradiction – a sexy, intelligent, indulgent woman constantly swept to the side-stage. DeWitt gives the picture’s riskiest moments tonally (particularly a long kitchen confession) the immediacy of theatre – she lends the seemingly matter-of-fact title a heartbreaking subtext: Kym is flamboyantly fucked-up, a glamorous, self-absorbed crash site – Rachel is just getting married.

The casting, from Hathaway, to Irwin, to DeWitt, to Debra Winger, has an imagination and eerie exactitude that reminds one of Altman and good Coppola. We can see Irwin and Winger on DeWitt and Hathaway’s faces, and we see the parents’ ticks blend in the language of their children’s bodies. Demme’s most perverse move is the casting of Winger. Debra Winger, perhaps the most gloriously unguarded, sensual actress in American movies in the 1980s, is straight-jacketed as the requisite passive-aggressive, remote, manipulative phantom here. By denying the sort of curtain call that Demme knows certain movie fans crave of Debra Winger, he puts us right with Kym and Rachel – a hope dashed.

The first two-thirds of Rachel Getting Married is one of the best films of its kind in years and the best Jonathan Demme picture since The Silence of the Lambs. The last third of Rachel Getting Married, in which all proper pretense of script is discarded, is the best Demme picture since Something Wild (still his masterpiece). Demme, as Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold demonstrated, understands how music affects us, how it medicates us, and how it materializes our heartbreak in a way that no other art quite does. It has something to do with the portability of music, it follows us, comments on us, allows us to comment on ourselves, and allows us to move to it and communicate and cleanse ourselves. The third act of Rachel Getting Married is an unusually long, vivid chronicling of the wedding, of characters we’ve met casting themselves head first into the celebration – cajoling and reaching for catharsis. This last act has the warmth and grace of Heart of Gold as well as the wild-wooly tone of Something Wild – we’re watching a physical, cinematic recap of the well-staged but more conventional stuff of the first hour – we’re seeing the characters at their truest and their most rehearsed in equal measure, we’re seeing how people respond to weddings, how they flirt with giving in to the illusion of renewed possibility – that all the clichés of love and life are true. Demme has found a pure current here – undiluted movie empathy.

This may be why people are already trying to discredit the picture, why the backlash has already begun, why people are resting on the picture’s admitted faults as a crutch to avoid the more vulnerable things Rachel Getting Married eventually gets to. How can one hate a picture with this many moments, this much intoxication, this much “much”? People have occasionally laughed at me for championing Demme’s screwball mobster spoof Married to the Mob, which they write off as ridiculous. Moments in Rachel Getting Married are ridiculous too, but the film is beautiful and memorable – a testament to the pursuit of the ridiculous, to what we tell ourselves in the hopes of giving a damn.

Posted in 2008, Drama, Reviews | 6 Comments »