my cinematic a to zed: w - z

the Winslow Boy: (1999. dir: David Mamet) This is the least Mametish of any Mamet thing you'll ever see. It's based on the old Terrence Rattigan chestnut, enormously popular on the mid-20th century British stage and now long out of fashion, long on stiff-upper-lip Brit-talk and pretty much devoid of action. It's a courtroom drama that never walks into the courtroom; we hear about the proceedings secondhand. The younger son of an Edwardian family is expelled from a naval academy for allegedly stealing a postal order, and his family puts everything at stake -- wealth, health, reputation, the older sister's engagement -- to clear his name.

The oddness of pairing Mamet with this starchy old chamberpiece works amazingly well, as each entity finds its flaws negated by the virtues of the other. Mamet's usual tiresome quirks, for instance, -- the half-sentences and barked profanities, the masculine insecurities sublimated into cons, heists and powerplays, the cold and twistily-layered thriller plots, -- are none of them applicable here; rather, he submerges himself with an uncharacteristically slow grace into the world of the story, and with grand results. Likewise, intolerant of sop, he ruthlessly wrings every last bit of sentiment from the piece, inspiring wonderfully stripped down performances from his actors in the process. They talk in his favorite clipped, Mamet-speak staccatos, a tactic which works against the mawkish grain of the story to reinvent the piece into something new and strange and wholly sublime.






X-Files, Season Three, Ep.53, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose": (1995. dir: David Nutter) Alright, I don't have an "X" movie, so I'm using my favorite X-Files episode instead. This is the one with Peter Boyle as a life insurance salesman who has the unpleasant ability to see exactly how a person will die. It's got melancholy, it's got funny, it's got poetry and supernatural, it's got the late Peter Boyle in one of his great performances.




The Year of Living Dangerously: (1982. dir: Peter Weir) Gorgeous and phantasmagoric evocation of Sukarno's Jakarta in the early 1960s. To see it in the theatre is like taking a very sensuous drug trip, and even my dingy old pan-and-scan copy works some magic. It's more than that, though, with complex characters (and the setting, too) vividly explored, affording us glimpses of secret depths without presuming to show too much. This was Weir's first step toward Hollywood and a sort of climactic culmination after the building poetry of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Last Wave, and Gallipoli. After this, there would be glimpses of greatness but nothing near as good until 2003's Master and Commander. Linda Hunt won an Oscar for Billy Kwan, the strange, noble and a little bit creepy photographer with pretensions to puppet-mastery over the lives of his friends, and Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson are both at the top of their respective games. The story feels so rich and layered that after I first saw it I sought out the book by Christopher Koch to find out more, and decided that this is one of those rare films that outstrides its source material. Now, reading the rave reviews on Amazon, I wonder if I should have a second look.





Zidane, un Portrait du 21e Siecle: (2006. dir: Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno) A movie like a hallucinogen. On April 23, 2005, Real Madrid plays Villarreal at the Bernabeu, Madrid's home stadium. Instead of watching the match, we watch Zenadine Zidane, the tonsured gallic midfielder, up close and from distance. He is miked and at various times we hear his breathing, or the satisfying thump of his boot when he connects, or crowd sounds, or only the hypnotic overlay of heart-slowing music by Mogwai. A few things come clear about football when you're watching a single player; one is that it is very like war, involving long periods of vigilant inactivity followed hard upon by bursts of sudden violence. Another is the centrality of bodily fluids to the player's experience: spitting and wiping the face clear of sweat and snot take up a crazy amount of time. The mikes in Zidane's boots emphasize his endearing habit of dragging his feet during abeyant moments, and the occasional subtitle sharing quotations from interviews emphasizes his mystical side. And he is mystical, --equal parts mystic and warrior, barbarian and nobleman, I'd say, but maybe I'm prejudiced. He is larger than life, and it is as easy to romanticize as it is to demonize him.

In this match, he has one superb run up the wing and cross in for the equaliser, a fantastic play involving mad footwork through a bramble of defenders. When you are the famous Zidane, every time you gain possession you also get a thundering posse of foes galloping around you, and up close like this it genuinely feels like there's a threat of physical violence in it. Really the point scored is his; someone else did the easy part of heading it in. In the aftermath of the goal his apartness becomes apparent; during the whole of the match he seems only truly to connect with Roberto Carlos, with whom at one point he shares a joke we do not hear, and David Beckham, who seems genuinely fond of him. There is a lovely, soft-spoken moment after an unfair penalty has been given away in which Zidane murmurs to the ref, "You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed," almost avuncularly, without heat or vitriol. The vitriol comes later, in the second half, during which he sees more action than the first, and suddenly, from seemingly nowhere, he is engaged in a fierce physical altercation with an opponent for which they are both red-carded from the pitch. It seems a fitting end for a film which will no doubt survive as the most enduring record of his legacy, since we all know him not just as a great player but also as The Fellow Who Headbutted That Annoying Italian Man During The World Cup. I'm sorry. Are my prejudices showing again?

what i've been watching: february

Paranoid Park: (2007. dir: Gus Van Sant) I have a memory of driving to the first Lollapalooza festival with my boyfriend and his college roommate, who was from Bellingham. When he found out I was from Portland he said, "How could you ever leave?" and launched into a deleriously romantic love-speech about a place he'd never been but planned to live as soon as he could manage it. The Portland in his head bore small resemblance to the city I knew because he'd learned it from Van Sant films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, and so was a sort of paradise for the youthful, unkempt and disenfranchised. And now it probably is that, and Van Sant probably had a lot to do with it.

Paranoid Park unites this Punkerliebe thread with another running through the director's work: the Gerry / Elephant / Last Days use of a true-life tragedy through which he enters the psychological states of those involved. He launched into these low-budget psyche-forays on the heels of Good Will Hunting, Psycho, and Finding Forrester, by which time I was good and ready to write him off as useless and done. For all the strangeness and flaws of this later "Death" trilogy, it was a brave and soul-saving direction to take. Last Days in particular I found electrifying, the only convincing portrait of a suicide I've ever seen.

This one is humbler, with the feel of a short story padded into novella length. It also feels like Van Sant's paean to the beauty of skatepunk culture, reminiscent in its slow-paced lyricism of those old Bruce Weber canticles to glorious masculinity Let's Get Lost and Broken Noses. He uses all non-actors, none of whom feel comfortable in front of the camera, but it will no doubt strengthen the appeal to the youthful disenfranchised to whom he is addressing the piece. The brilliant experimenting he's been doing with ambient sound is here but seems randomly placed, like filler, whereas in Gerry it heightened the sense of danger and the terrible smallness of a human before nature, and in Last Days it served as an unequivocal portal into the head of the suicide.

In short, it's not the most interesting thing he's done, but it will exert an unending pull on a particular demographic, taking its permanent place on the shelf next to Dogtown and Z-Boys and Tony Hawks games, the shelf with the Rebel Skates stickers plastered over it.





The Visitors: (2003. dir: Richard Franklin) >SPOILER ALERT< Australian outing in which Radha Mitchell is attempting a round-the-world solo in a boat with just a cat, an increasingly distant relationship by radio with her fiance, and her own hallucinations to keep her company. It's a great idea, following the intricate entanglement of hallucination and reality of an isolate at sea, but it comes to nothing. All she does is work out the inner demons with mum and da, both recently deceased, and decide to chuck the cheating, patronizing man who's holding her back. Ho hum. The best things about it are the camerawork and the cat, who speaks with a palpably supercilious British sneer.





Australia: (2008. dir: Baz Luhrmann) Yeah, we saw it. We saw it in the theatre. We saw it THE VERY NEXT NIGHT after seeing Synecdoche, New York, and that's a double feature that'll curl your damn toes.

It's not just dreadful, Australia, it's three damn hours' worth of dreadful. Shameless. Shameless. Its very shamelessness is what keeps you from throwing your rotten produce at the screen... that and Luhrmann's obvious deep heart-love of the project. He loves it! He does. You can feel it. Like Miss Amelia's inexplicable love for Cousin Lymon in the Ballad of the Sad Cafe. I read somewhere, and I wish to God I could remember where because a truer thing has never been said about ANY film EVER, how Australia the Movie runs at the audience with arms flung wide yelling love me! love me! Even as we were walking home from the theatre I could feel it tugging at our coats. Is there anything else I can do for you? steamy romance? Jackman wet and half-naked? adorable kid whose mother tragically dies saving his life? wartime separating lovers? shine your shoes? scrub your lintels? how about a fourth hour of unrelenting sentimentality, sweeping music, doctored landscapes and heartstring-tugging?

I've seen it defended as a Tribute To Old Films, to which I reply that the road to the deepest circles of hell is paved with lame-assed rationalizations, and this movie is probably forced viewing on that particular trip, now that I think about it. Nicole Kidman, bless her heart, throws herself headlong into a truly terrible role. The first half is like the worst parts of old studio comedies without any of the good stuff: the strong actress forced into a buffoonish stereotype, plenty of charmless banter, the vulgar but lovably masculine lower-class stud ready to take his rightful place as boss of her while claiming he wants nothing but independence, the adorable and clever orphan teaching her the ways of maternal love. Then, when you think you're free, the movie starts OVER again as an amalgam of the Sundowners and Pearl Harbor, and I'm not certain, but I think it never did end. I think it's still going. Maybe I'm still sitting in that theatre, and this is all a psychotic break, a futile dream of escape like in "Occurence at Owl Creek".

On the other hand, if this film is so bad, why is it conjuring up echoes from literature I admire? In its favor, and I say this with halting speech punctuated by long, Pinter-y pauses, when I was six, this would have been my favorite movie. I'd have rolled with its audacious manipulation without resentment, revelled in the airbrushed beauty of the outback and the truly jaw-dropping glamor of its stars, fallen madly in love with that little boy, laughed, cried, and my poor, saintlike mother would have had to take me to see it over and over.

If you're over seven, though, give it a miss. Or anyway, take along your compost.

dollhouse: the runner stumbles

It's not that Joss Whedon has lost his talent, --we know that from last year's humble but effervescent Dr Horrible's Sing-along Blog, which was funny, strange, vibrant, and pretty much unlike anything else the world has seen. Filmed in six days on a budget of five bucks and a case of beer, its world felt cohesive, and its characters, although comic book figures, were fully engaging, with subtle asides, virtuous flaws and flawed virtues. Its twists were unexpected and its lines funny. Who could not love that baddest of all supervillains, Bad Horse, the Equestrian of Crime?

Dollhouse, on the other hand, that long-anticipated return of Joss to the slightly-bigger-but-still-small screen, has little or nothing to recommend it so far. The inner halls of the actual Dollhouse bear a vague and unimaginative resemblance to Angel's Wolfram & Hart Building, and the exterior scenes might be shot on the set of any of a hundred cop/forensics/whatever shows. These halls are filled with non-characters and vague half-characters, none of which had a funny or insightful line in the first ep. Some big breakout seems to be in the works for Amy Acker's Dr. Saunders, but it'd better hurry and break out or we'll be outta there before it manifests sufficiently to catch our interest.

One of Whedon's many supernatural talents has always been for taking very limited actors and playing to their strengths to the extent that his characters emerge full-force almost in spite of the performer. With some notable exceptions, much of the casts of Buffy and Angel fit this description, and those were both exceptionally good shows for most of their runs. Eliza Dushku, possibly one of the most beautiful women in the world, shone as the badassed tomboy supervixen psycho vampire-slayer Faith in Buffy because it played exactly to her strengths and gave her room to stretch. Echo, her Dollhouse non-character, does exactly the opposite. No chameleon is Eliza, who depends on a change of hairstyle and the addition of glasses and asthma to indicate an entire personality change in this shape-shifting world of highly-protected superdolls who get their minds wiped after every job and start each day with a new personality tailor-made for each new mission. She holds her own just enough that if she had brilliant lines to speak I'd have no complaints about her performance. Now is your cue, Joss, to bring on the brilliance, or at least some sign of life.

The wonder is why Whedon is working for Fox again, the evil supertyrant who mangled and cancelled the magnificent Firefly. Until further evidence is introduced, I'll assume that it's Fox who's wringing the life out of Dollhouse to conform the show to its renowned fascist agenda, or else I'll have to figure that Joss just isn't very interested in the whole venture. I'm sticking with the show for a month, and hoping to eat these words on a platter later on.

my cinematic a to zed: u - v

>SPOILER ALERT<

Unfaithful: (2002. dir: Adrian Lyne) Adrian Lyne is nothing if not controversial. Often accused of misogyny (in some cases, a cringe-inducingly difficult thing to deny), I prefer to think he is less interested in denigrating women than in digging around in that fascinating mulch of our darkest passions and watching the dreadful consequences that grow from the fertile grounds of our obsessions.

A friend of mine whose opinions I hold in high regard dismisses this film on the moral ground that it presents the guilt of a woman's infidelity as a crime equal to or greater than the murder committed by her husband. But if you think of it as a French film (which seems fair, since it's based on Claude Chabrol's 1969 La Femme Infidele), the question alters. Those crazy Francais have always said (on film, at least) that passion is passion, whether its manifestation is sex or murder. I'm not saying a concern with ethics has no place in film-making, but a very well-made film gets an out-of-jail-free card to examine human situations from a place transcending moral questions. This is one such well-made film, with an extraordinarily strong internal cohesion intrinsic in its story, and I'm willing to let Lyne go where he likes because his journey really does serve the telling of it.

The film has two disparate halves: the beginnings of the affair between the not-so-ironically-named Constance (Diane Lane) and the young bookseller Paul (Olivier Martinez), then the consequences of the meeting between Paul and Constance's husband, Edward (Richard Gere). The story is wonderfully told by way of close-ups and mirroring images (Constance frantically scrubbing away signs of her infidelity in one public lav and her husband later scrubbing frantically away signs of the murder in another; garbage blowing in the windstorm which may be seen as the initiator of the affair and garbage blowing later in the rubbish heap where Edward buries the body; an intimate close-up of the nape of a neck is mirrored in two very different contexts), and edited by Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia) who brings to it an absolutely perfect tempo, with room to breathe but steadily building tension, a tempo which implies from the first shots (the wind picking up, blowing a boat against a dock, knocking over a bicycle) a powerful suggestion of predestination taking a hand. Shakespeare often used a "wild place" -- a forest, an uncultivated moor, Petrucchio's house,-- as liminal ground where everyday laws soften and blur and, for a short while, a carnivalesque misrule of less reasonable gods reigns, breaking up the previous order so a new one will be established in its aftermath. Lyne uses his windstorm in this manner, as a transient fury which touches down for a moment and leaves whole lives disordered in it wake. The story rises relentlessly up from there into its last, whispered exchange, culminating in a truly great final image.

My generation as a whole has a collective soft spot for both Diane Lane and Jodi Foster because we grew up with them. That confessed, you'd have a hard time convincing me Lane didn't deserve an Oscar for this (which Nicole Kidman took home for putting on a fake nose. Behold Hollywood's wafer-thin values: a beautiful woman makes herself ugly, the Academy shudders with horror, thinking it's the bravest act ever, and would gladly give her a Nobel for it if it were able). She avoids all the cliches about the rich, suburban homemaker and remains grounded and likable; her affair, her repentance, and her decision to stand by her husband are clearly chosen and completely believable in context.

It's no secret that I love a director who can tell a story through pictures without drawing attention to himself, and this is a great example. The spoken words are the gorgeous block of marble from which a masterwork is carved. The train scene alone stands as a genius stroke of nonverbal communication: on her way home from her initial assignation, she recalls the encounter with palpable corporeality. The two scenes -- the lovemaking (without question, this movie has the best sex ever filmed) and the reminiscence -- are powerfully interwoven, and it's no surprise to learn that Anne Coates also edited Out of Sight, with its love scene so well-integrated into the continuing story.




and again: >SPOILER ALERT<

the Verdict: (1982. dir: Sidney Lumet) In this Mamet-penned courtroom drama, the halls of justice are ice-cold, gleaming, brilliant, austere, and the verdict goes to the party with the most expensive lawyer. Paul Newman is Frank Galvin, a man at lowest ebb, a broken, alcoholic ambulance-chaser grovelling at funerals for possible work. Given a chance to press a lawsuit on behalf of the family of a healthy woman who lapsed into coma after supposedly minor surgery, he finds his passion again and begins the gruelling and dangerous climb back into self-respect. James Mason plays his powerhouse opponent with easy command, and Charlotte Rampling is perfectly cast as the inscrutable beauty Galvin loves.

Newman's greatest strength lay in his unbreachable likability even when playing the most despicable roles, a quality which allowed him to barge all-out and gangbusters into the dark side without ever alienating an audience. It's a knack few have, and although I can think of actors who'd have been technically better as Galvin, in this very cold and harsh world it's Newman's unfailing warmth that's necessary to make this cringing failure of a man watchable. Galvin's task is Herculean, the suit impossible to win, which makes the unfolding arduous but the pay-off all the sweeter. Lumet and his crew (DP: Andrzej Bartkowiak, ed: Peter Frank) have an easy technical grace and the self-confidence to allow space, which in this context grants a possibility of thawing in this ice-cold world, a single moment in which springtime is conceivable before winter renews its grip. It's also got a marvellous early appearance by Mamet's then-wife Lindsay Crouse, maybe the best thing she ever put on film, husky-voiced and genuine, before she stopped showing us her feelings entirely, which seemed to be around the time of the Mamet-helmed House of Games in 1987.