robert carlyle film festival: the world is not enough

*SPOILER ALERT*

I only watch Bond films if I have a very good reason to do it. I never liked Sean Connery in the role (way too smarmy and self-satisfied). Roger Moore was less arrogant, unsmirkingly underplayed everything, and so demanded less of my attention, which I very much appreciated.

Because you don't watch Bond films for Bond, do you? At least I don't. It's always for the villains and their incomparable sidekicks. I watched one once (not a very good one, I think) for Michael Gothard in the evil right-hand-man role. I watched Casino Royale for Mads Mikkelsen, and all I really remember is the tear of blood. When I was a kid there were a couple featuring the "Jaws" sidekick, one with a great Carly Simon theme song, and those felt like the epitome of Bondiness. In the end, though, I think nothing will ever surpass Live and Let Die, with its wildly contagious Paul McCartney theme song and its immortal Trio of Malevolence played by Yaphet Kotto, Julius Harris and Geoffrey Holder.

The World Is Not Enough I ventured into the cinema to watch because of Robert Carlyle, and found it vaguely disappointing, it being my first Bond film in many years. I watched it again last night and was better pleased. Directed by that able craftsman Michael Apted, it moves along easily through the necessary Bond-ish wackiness to its inevitable, all's-well-with-the-world-and-007-gets-laid denouement. The discrepancy which made this an unsatisfying experience for me in the theatre was, I think, that the villains were not sufficiently cartoonish. Pierce Brosnan as Bond is appropriately superficial, as is his Russian cohort (Robbie Coltrane). This year's Bond Girl (Denise Richards as a valley-girl nuclear physicist in short shorts and tight t-shirts) is risibly cartoonish. The villains, on the other hand, are tragic.

Sophie Marceau is the heartrendingly beautiful Electra King, the ultra-wealthy survivor of a terrorist kidnapping, a plight she escaped not through outside rescue attempts but by her own terrible efforts. Now, some years later, her father is assassinated and the family oil-pipeline is threatened by the same terrorist.

Carlyle plays the malefactor, a man who has taken a bullet in the head which is moving slowly through his brain, guiding him inexorably towards his premature death, and, as it goes, removing his abilities to connect with the external world. His sense of touch is gone. He feels no pain, and is therefore monstrously strong. He is, at the same time, wretchedly in love with his old hostage, and although he cannot smell her hair or feel her skin, his heart breaks for her. She, on the opposite side, owns a heart so thick with scar-tissue that she only knows how to give herself as a manipulative tactic, and can feel no tender emotion for anyone. Together, this team of unfeeling villains is so well-conjured as to make the cartoon-characters around them seem trivial and, frankly, difficult to bear.

This role, Renard, is a great triumph for Carlyle. He has transformed himself in subtle ways, both physically and vocally, and the depth of feeling communicated in his eyes is fascinating, whether he's caressing his beloved or the super-weapon which will end his life and bring about the dreams of his beloved. It's a case in which a fine performance outshines its vehicle, making the vehicle itself seem too shoddy a frame to hold it.

And there's a wonderful, old-fashioned, very Bondy theme song by Garbage.

outlander: no love inside the icehouse

What kind of an incompetent asshole takes a sure thing like a movie about aliens vs. Vikings and comes up with dreck? I thought there was no way I was going to dislike this film; the Vikings alone give it all manner of leeway in my book. Throw in good actors (Ron Perlman, Sophia Myles, John Hurt, Jim Caviezel, also Jack Huston, an up-and-comer from, yes, Those Royal Hustons) and a dragon-like alien attacker, it's got the genre-crossing that makes my knees weak, it ought to have been a cake-walk, really, easy money, a sure thing. Any halfway decent effort and I'd have been eating from the palm of his hand.

"He" being Howard McCain, the fellow who wrote and directed this. The fellow at whose besmirched doorstep this mangy, halt and lame buck stops.

Man. I'm so tired of the way movies look these days. The same teal and orange palette. The washed-out lighting. The fight-scenes too fast to reveal any detail, designed only to smear across the top of it and communicate a vague sense of violence, rather than a real occurrence made out of real particulars. I hate the way the movies sound now, with the overweening, perpetual bombast-musik and the fist-and-weapon blows turned up to volume 12 to emphasize that it's all a fake, don't worry folks, don't have to take it seriously.

I'm so tired of the hackneyed scripts, the shallow moralizing, the cheap sentiment. Tired of incredible plot-turns, of story which grows not up from the world in which it's set and the people among whom it's set, but imposed from without by commercial demands. More shock here! Another explosion there! So the monsters were destroyed by fire before? Not anymore! Suddenly they can resist it. Will we tell you why? We will not! We are not interested in facts, only in effects!

I'm tired of lazy imitation. I'm a big fan of the homage, and I'm a big fan of remaking a thing that you love in a way that is personal to your own vision. This is not that. There's enough Lord of the Rings in here to keep reminding you how lazy and uncreative these filmmakers are (the alien has a fire-tail extraordinarily reminiscent of the Balrog's whip, for instance, and there's a character named Boromir, for God's sake, and that's just the tip of the Peter-Jackson-wannabe-iceberg), but there is no love inside this particular icehouse. Just a scrambling for money, a scrambling for easy success, and I'm tired of it.

If you want Vikings (and why wouldn't you?), watch Valhalla Rising or the 13th Warrior. Or even the Antoine Fuqua King Arthur, which is heavily flawed, but has on the plus-side Mads Mikkelsen as Tristram and Stellan Skarsgard in a wonderful performance as a Viking warlord, and an awesome full-bore battle atop the tentative ice of a frozen river.

last night's double feature: in the cut and footsteps in the dark

In the Cut (2003. dir: Jane Campion) gets short shrift not for what it is, but for what it's not, which is Typical Meg Ryan Vehicle. Rather, it's a dark, somber, intelligent, and, above all, fearless film. Although directed by the astounding Campion, it might fit well into the ouevre of the less successful, less brilliant but still interesting Sally Potter. I've never given a Sally Potter film more than two stars on Netflix, but I always watch them once, and there are things from the Tango Lesson and Yes which stay strongly with me. In the Cut fits in as a darker third to these because it, too, is obsessed with telling truths (as opposed to spinning dreams) about feminine sexuality, using as its catalyst a smart, introspective woman's sexual fixation on a swarthy, ultra-macho guy. Meg Ryan, playing (possibly fatally to her career) against type, makes Franny into a fully credible portrait of a poet and teacher who has pulled away from the vicious traps of a love-life in the real world and replaced it with a rampant dream-life, only to be led back out of her temporary safety by the dark allure of a cop investigating a string of brutal murders, played by Mark Ruffalo with his usual courage and avoidance of bullshit.

Campion doesn't shrink from hard questions, or from showing us the terrible flaws cut and branded into the personalities of her two heroines, both the stronger, more self-contained Franny and her beloved half-sister, Pauline, played with all her vulnerability hanging out in that wonderful, vanity-less way by Jennifer Jason-Leigh. Both of these women are real, simultaneously damaged and strong in ways that women don't get to be in movies, not and remain the heroine. It's hard to watch sometimes, and certainly anyone looking for the dream-spinning which made Meg Ryan Movies into cash-cow-chick-flicks (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You Got Mail are all practically unwatchable in retrospect, movies stencilled from the thinnest sheet of cutesy and pasted together with spit and sugar-icing) is going to get sick to her stomach, never making it past the first third of the film.

A woman with a stronger palate, though, will find much substance as a reward for sticking with it. Even throwaway lines reveal ugly societal aspects of our commonplace attitudes towards sexuality in women. After handcuffed sex, the Ruffalo character (Malloy) tells her to find the key fast, he's "starting to feel like a chick." When Franny interrupts a string of faggot references to ask if all cops are homophobic, Malloy's partner asks in his most damning tone, "Are you one of those feminists?" I wish I could remember more; the script is packed with them.

Campion couldn't have cast any of the roles better. Both Nick Damici and Kevin Bacon are note-perfect, the former as Malloy's partner and the latter as a damaged one-night stand who cannot leave Franny alone and who totes around the sorriest-looking dog you'll ever see. There's a fantasy sequence that Campion uses to good effect, Franny's vision of the marriage-myth her mother used to live by: a story she told and re-told about the moment she met her future husband, and the manner in which he asked her to marry him. It's all distortion, and Franny knows it, but she still returns to it as you would to comfort food, even though she knows that her mother's life was ruined by the man. The insanity of longing for marriage and physical closeness with men even at the expense of happiness, health, and stability, a longing often installed like a central pillar in a woman's psyche from childhood, is examined in the most brutal, uncringing light, and the psychic punishments suffered by these women are mirrored in the dismemberments of the killer's victims, all given a diamond ring to wear before they are murdered.



Footsteps in the Dark (1941. dir: Lloyd Bacon) is a piece of cotton candy. Errol Flynn made it the same year he made his Custer film, and whereas he's the only reason to watch it, there are other, better ones to watch him in instead. It's a fluff-piece about a rich but happily-married dilletante who lives with his wife in her mother's mansion and enjoys a secret life as the author of scandalous mystery novels, and it's a role that someone other than Flynn really ought to have played. If Jimmy Stewart or William Powell assured us that he lied to his wife about his secret life because his love for her was so true and strong, we'd believe it. When Flynn says it, his innate rakishness makes a mockery of the words and implies something altogether seedier than the writing of mystery novels.

The joys of the film, slim as they are, lie in moments like watching his physical grace as he runs down a staircase, or his joie de vivre when he impersonates a Texan oil-tycoon in order to romance a murder suspect. Ralph Bellamy has a nice role as a babyfaced dentist, and Alan Hale, as always, shows up to play off Flynn in his light-hearted, avuncular way.

the reason i haven't been writing lately

*SPOILER ALERT*

...is that I'm obsessed with Stargate Universe. I've got up to the beginning of season two, which I'll start as soon as I've written this hasty note, and I have two questions. First, do they ever explain how Chloe and Eli and Scott got dialed back onto Destiny after they were stranded in the last galaxy? Surely they do. Surely they must address that at some point. Did I miss it? I have an idea the answer has something to do with the intelligence of the ship itself; Destiny often seems like a quiet goddess subtly directing the lives of those upon her with Dr. Rush as her priest and mouthpiece. I'm still awaiting confirmation, however, and judging from how far afield were my guesses about who killed Rosie Larsen, I may be whole solar systems away from being right about this.

My other question is why do all the sci-fi series I love get cancelled after only one or two seasons? Firefly. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Even my beloved, original Star Trek only got three seasons, although I am the first to admit that I have very little use for that last one ("the Way to Eden", anyone?). OK, granted, I didn't do my part with SGU, only discovering it now, after the axe had fallen. But surely it had a passionate fan-base? It must have done. It's a great show. I have not one word to say against Battlestar Galactica, also a very fine show, but it never grabbed me like this one, even though it covers similar ground (civilians and military stuck together on a ship, unable to return home, having to scramble for their lives). I think I like this one better because Galactica had young people and middle-aged people, but nobody my own age, whereas this one has the likes of Robert Carlyle and Lou Diamond Phillips, and its writing is every bit as adventuresome as the other.

The end of season 1.5 (remember in the old days, when seasons only had whole numbers?) is a crazed-edged cliffhanger. I was cursing like a sailor because I didn't have the next disc already on its way. The Lucian Alliance (who I don't really know anything about, since I've never watched any other Stargate show) have taken over the ship. Colonel Telford and the alliance leader just shot each other and are both apparently down for the count. TJ has been shot and things look bleak, if not for her, at least for her unborn child. Chloe is shot and bleeding out alone in a passageway that has no life support, and Eli is currently running towards a console in order to save the day. Greer and Scott are stuck in spacesuits on the surface of the ship, having made the repair but finding no way back in, since the invaders won't drop the force-field to allow their re-entry, and Dr. Rush has them running back to the other end of the ship towards their only, albeit dubious, chance of ingress. The bad guys have just ordered that civilians and military be separated, implying that they're going to slaughter the military.

The best part is the final shot: Colonel Young (Louis Ferreira), although battered, is standing bravely as his soldiers are herded in around him, ostensibly to be shot. He is very still and the last shot is from the ceiling. He looks up towards it, knowing that if Scott and Greer have not made it back inside by the next time the lights flicker, they will be dead. We have just seen them running clumsily in their gravity boots, then heard Brody, looking down at his console, mutter, "They're not going to make it." Then back to Young, his eyes locked upwards on the lights, ignoring the violent activity around him; he is an island of stillness. Then the lights flicker. Then the credits come up.

It's kind of a cheat, bringing in the Lucian Alliance at this late date. OK, they were the MacGuffin whose initial attack set off the whole series, but we've seen and heard nothing of them since then. Still, cheat or no, that doesn't mean I'm not on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happens. I'm not worried about Chloe; Chloe is teacher's pet; everybody loves Chloe, and she always comes through just fine. (Not my favorite character, Chloe.) But everyone else? Colonel Telford (Phillips) is a goner for sure, but his death warrant was as good as signed the first time he showed up at Mrs. Young's door. It's Hollywood's way of dealing out justice: after much badness, you make a u-turn to the good just in time to sacrifice your life while saving the bulk of the community. Rush (Carlyle), my favorite character, is like a cockroach; he'll make it through any calamity alive. I worry about TJ (Alaina Huffman) and Scott (Brian J. Smith) and especially the sensuous and conflicted Sgt. Greer (Jamil Walker Smith), an extraordinary character. If he goes, I go, and they may as well cancel the series.

Oh. Wait. Crap.