more things i've been watching: july 2010

Salt: (2010. dir: Phillip Noyce)
SPOILER ALERT
We all know there are two reasons to see summer blockbusters: either you're a 12-year-old boy or you have no air conditioning. Had this come out in the more reasonable month of April I never would have ventured out; that understood, it turns out to be far more enjoyable than I ever imagined. Had there been a man in the lead as initially planned, it'd have been a rehash of myriad things of old. With Jolie soaking up and dealing out the damage, it's intriguing. It turns out there's something oddly gratifying about watching a gorgeous, psychopathic woman (are all action heroes psychopaths these days? I suspect they are. Remember in the old West when you knew the good guy because he would never shoot a guy in the back? Huh. Bunch of wusses) peeling open a ferocious can of whoop-ass on a good portion of the male population. I HATE the Bourne Method of editing fight scenes (such fast cuts and dubious angles that one is forced to take it on faith that there's an actual fight in progress); in this context, however, when you have an eighty-pound woman taking on whole rooms full of armed and trained 200-lb gorillas, not seeing too much is a boon and helps you to take it all with the necessary load of, well, salt.

The thing this movie did right was to let us just far enough into the heroine's head that we know she truly loves her husband; further than that, it keeps us guessing. Jolie's got that great, stoical ice-face and she knows very well how to use it, when to emote and when to hold back. She gets the crap kicked out of her by the Koreans, the Russians AND the Americans, but she REEKS of toughness, takes it all as part of the job and gives out better than she gets. I love her line deliveries. I love it when she's got trapped by the Feds against a car, guns pointed at her from all sides, men encroaching, shouts that she should drop to the ground, and she says with a perfect blend of aplomb and stubborn petulance, "I didn't do anything wrong," and rolls into one of those perfect action-movie escapes that are just barely possible enough that even though nobody you or I have ever met could ever do it, we'll buy it now and then onscreen because we've gladly accepted our load of, well, salt.

There are absurd plot points, but not too many laws of physics get broken (as in, say, the Dark Knight movies), and the stunts look unrehearsed, by which I mean that when she's jumping from one moving truck to another it doesn't look easy, and, although I have no personal experience from which to draw, I'm fair certain it wouldn't be. The final scene is badly written (poor Chiwetel Ejiofor has taken on a thankless role; at least he's one of the few who doesn't get his ass kicked) and afterwards when the screen flashed to black and credits I was outraged. I felt like I'd only seen half a film. My boyfriend pointed out that it'd been two hours, and she'd killed all the bad guys and saved the world, and what else did I want? I guess that speaks well for it, the fact that I was ready to sit through another two hours, and speaks badly against it that it lacked the satisfactory denouement which would have sent me back into the heat of the day with a cathartic sense of time well spent.



the Charge of the Light Brigade: (1936. dir: Michael Curtiz) Ultimately unsuccessful but enjoyable historical/patriotic hash with some nice visuals (an Indian soiree communicated through exotic shadows against a wall, David Niven avoiding the moonlight to crawl out of a fortress unseen) and an easy, loping pace punctuated by exciting battles. But what it comes down to is this: Olivia de Havilland spurns the love of Errol Flynn for some milquetoast boy. And who can countenance such nonsense?



Sanjuro: (1962. dir: Akira Kurosawa) The great thing about having deprived oneself of the classics in one's youth is the chance to see them for the first time as an adult. The stream flowing with camellias! The night that Sanjuro kills a whole roomful of guards alone, like Old Boy in the parking garage basement. Toshiro Mifune is huge! Bigger than life. The humor! The characters! That last, awesome showdown: the silence. The stillness. The proximity. The sudden geyser of blood! Just awesome. Five stars; no qualms. Completely enjoyable in every respect.



Black Book: (2006.dir: Paul Verhoeven) Graceless and inadequate string of absurd coincidences and overt melodrama in Nazi-occupied Holland. It all LOOKS great, and Carice van Houten is very good as the Jewish flirt who uses smarts and looks to play both sides, resistance and invaders. In a bid to surprise us about who the bad guy is (well, the OTHER bad guy, besides all the SS), Verhoeven stretches his plot into incredible and, more importantly, unsatisfying shapes.