| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 10/11/2006 : 15:13:52
Tis the run-up or count-down to the winter festivities, and as usual I'll be spending many days in darkened cinemas to cram in all the films for the early spring voting. Just saw The Devil Wears Prada - and whoever thinks that's a chick flick is flicking the wrong chickens imho  That Streep can bring so much humanity to this pretentious drek only testifies to her acting genius. At one point Tucci tells Hathaway she's whining ... that's what the film felt like to me: ONE BIG white whine!
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Rest of the sked for the w/e:
Just off to see Children of Men
Tomorrow at 10AM Little Miss Sunshine,
Friday it's World Trade Center
Monday The Departed followed by The Queen
I'll report back -- if anyone's interested   -- with various edits to this post. Feel free to chip in/disagree/back me up/whatever 
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Children of Men betrays its literary roots, but -- whatever your politics - should be seen if only to remind ourselves of the metaphorical tightrope we're all walking. Cuar�n reaches directorial heights but all too sporadically, and needs to study Ridley Scott just a bit more closely. Moore, as always, is superb; both Owen and Caine had moments that brought real tears. Ashitey's suitably sassy as well as vulnerable, and if you were a fan of Ejiofor in Kinky Boots, you probably won't even recognise him.
Update tomorrow.
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Little Miss Sunshine re-affirms one's faith in American cinema. Without a single dollop of schmaltz it reaches deep and produces a work of intelligence and warmth, revealing some cogent cultural truths along the road. All the acting - ensemble as it is - is terrific, each performer being as generous to the rest as each creates multi-dimensioned characters.
[I think she likes it!]
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Friday's report: World Trade Centerhad me, lost me, got me back again ... the fact that I left the screening feeling moved and a bit drained, as well as ambivalent about what we know went on in the aftermath, is a tribute to Stone's directorial confidence. He's truly learned to simplify, clutch the essence of the thing, without making any scene a reducto ad absurdum -- he gets to the core of every scene, whether it's the iconic power of an image, a summation of the complexity of a relationship, or the sheer atmosphere in capturing a moment of intimacy in the face of the epic. More, I think, than any of his previous films he's non-judgmental, though clearly strongly affected by what happened, not only on that obscene and fateful day, but also by the ongoing tale of the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. I realise it's due to my own cynicism as an ex-New Yorker that the film both touched me profoundly and, in certain scenes, alienated me. But I suspect the latter was also in part due to the near awe with which Stone depicted the two heros. And there were stretches of the film where I resented being so aware of what great set-ups he introduced, what cunning editing, what phenomenal performances [particularly by Maria Bello], what masterly lighting and camerawork, what superbly integrated sound -- but perhaps that almost Brechtian effect is inevitable in the context of a drama based so completely on a real story which was shared by the whole world. I dare say a film about the tsunami would produce a similar effect. And I'd never call this film a docu-drama - Stone truly has walked that line and come out on the side of a feature. It's difficult as a viewer to separate the film from the event itself - but it's certainly well worth seeing from whatever perspective.
More on Monday.
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The Departed - well, even Scorsese at his worst is better than most directors at their best. And this is FAR from his worst; in fact may even be one of his best! All his films, this one included, are backed by impeccable technical achievements, particularly editing and the integration of sound. The acting here is never less than good, and in the case of Nicholson quite masterly. Anyone who thinks he's just being Nicholson isn't looking hard enough - it's one of his most careful characterizations. Sheen, Baldwin, and Wahlberg are excellent, filling each moment with truth. Vera Farmiga is appealing and able to reveal the conflicts of her character's tiny failures. Damon and DiCaprio, while certainly not bad, have neither one quite managed to forget they're stars. And even though they are the film's dual fulcrum, it's Scorsese who's the real hero of this film.
What elevates this one above his brilliant albeit more straight-forward mob tales like GoodFellas and Casino is the way he handles the intricacy of duplicity, the way he refuses to sanitize not only any inherent violence but all the implied webs that implicate us all. And he does it without preaching and, perhaps most importantly for a mainstream film, without sacrificing a well-constructed story. One of the elements which reveals superb cinema direction is the way socially complex stories are made available without being made simplistic. Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible is a prime exemplar, as is the work of Abel Gance, Powell and Pressberger, and Renoir's La Grande Illusion, Kurosawa's Ran and Kagemusha in particular. Hollywood all too rarely allows these cinematic opportunities, but Sayles has managed it, Kubrick, Coppola, even Peckinpah at their best, David Lynch and the Coen Brothers, among others. But Scorsese epitomizes it, and The Departed works on every level. This is no mere expose of police corruption a la Serpico, or the effects of double-dealing a la Donnie Brasco; it's far from a typical mob-flick nor does it ever glorify or romanticize violence, yet never flinches from it to make the point. Think of the title and what rich territory it implies; the film delves into every nook and cranny, from the price paid for small personal betrayals to the relentless elimination of life in a society which pretends to value it yet day by day cheapens it. Perhaps this will be the year that the Academy will have the grace to award this man the honor he's deserved for so long.
The Queen - Frears has never been an innovative director, but he's always been an honest one. And he's always had an instinct - honed from his BBC-TV training - for reaching beneath the surface of those mistunderstood in society, those outsiders who flirt with the establishment and are either consumed by it or meet it on their own terms. No one will/can ever know what goes on in the mind of a monarch, someone who from birth has ingested a unique world view. There have been witty and intelligent attempts to understand, viz Alan Bennet's several forays: The Madness of King George and A Question of Attribution to name but two. The Queen may lack the wit, but allows us a glimpse, if not into a woman's soul, then into the dynamic relationship between The State and Politics - clearly not the same thing. It's an examination, and a very cogent one, of the difference between perception and reality and how the former is constructed for the public. And in the particulars of this story - Diana and Queen Elizabeth - asks who the Queen was/is/is supposed to be. Not a great film, but certainly worth seeing if only for Mirren's remarkable achievement and some stunning camerawork.
Here the rest of the week's sked:
Tomorrow: Stick It and Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Beginning
Wednesday: Click and The History Boys
Thurs: Hoodwinked and The Guardian
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Tuesday
Stick It - There are some actors who can be relied on to make even a reading of the telephone directory into entertainment. Jeff Bridges, imho, is one of those actors [and, EM, when it come to HOT, Ed Norton ain't a patch on Jeff!] But I digress. Nor am I suggesting that writer/director Jessica Bendinger's script is as devoid of structure and characterization as a phonebook. But this energetic razzle-dazzle treatment of competitive gymnastics - reminiscent as it is of her screenplay of Bring it On - is only truly elevated in every scene featuring Bridges as trainer Vic. He avoids all the rah-rah coach cliches and invests every moment with the whole of his character - a bit of a joke, a bit of a has-been - he's self-aware of his failings but confident enough to know how to get his team of young women to reach for their stars [though he's not above taking their parents' cash with promises of greatness he knows will never be fulfilled.] Into his life comes trouble in the form of talented fuck-up Haley [former model Missy Peregrym in a spirited feature debut - tiny cameo in Catwoman not withstanding]. Bendinger shows her music vid roots, especially in the funky opening and later on with some of the synchronized routines straight out of Busby Berekely or those swimming-pool numbers in the old Esther Williams flicks. Her writing was honed on tv shows like Sex and The City, and she clearly knows this funky gym world. What she's not quite mastered is the consequences of relationships, and how to structure a story so it doesn't just drift off like her final big long pull-out shot. But the question remains: why isn't Bridges being offered whatever the Hollywood equivalent is of Hamlet, instead of this innocuous cotton candy date-flick?
Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Beginning - You know when a comic has a catch-phrase and after a while - even if s/he's the most talented comic around - all an audience needs to hear is the catchphrase to guffaw with appreciation? But in the end, it just ain't that funny anymore! Well, that's what it's like with TCSM ... yep, it drips from the get-go, the tippy-toe music gathers volume, the sparse dialogue when it does emerge ain't really worth waiting for, the acting is passable considering the characters are painted-by-numbers, the sequence of scene-for-scene is pretty arbitrary, and probably the most effective onscreen element is the admittedly predictable production design. And all for what? Well, the TCSM equivalent of the catchphrase - poor misunderstood Tommy Hewitt supplying unconventional supper for the family. South African director Liebesman could possibly have drawn on the real-life horrors which became commonplace for decades in his home country to influence this film and maybe that might have lifted this to the heights of the genre, but all it is in essence is another promo for the franchise.
I'm expecting better fare tomorrow. Let's see!
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Wednesday
Click
There are acquired tastes in life such as sushi, hang-gliding, and the color khaki. But some stuff you either love or hate at first sight and nothing will ever change your mind. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. For me that thing is Adam Sandler and I'm afraid it's a hate-affair all the way. I can't take him seriously when he's begging for it. I don't find his puerile crass humor the least bit funny -- and I'm a BIG fan of the puerile and crass -- when it's witty. I just never believe him. And he's never OTT enough for me. As compared to, say, Jim Carrey. So there was nothing going into Click that predisposed me to like it. And, sure enough, actually watching the film did nothing but confirm my prejudices. Anyone who understands the language of film can predict the "conceit" of the plot - so watching it play out holds no surprise. The [excuse the expression] characters are anything but. And I hope Christopher Walken, Sean Astin, Julie Kavnar, and Henry Winkler got big fat checks, because what else might have induced them to appear in this idiocy is beyond me. But the most frustrating thing is that - albeit not original - the actual premise of the thing might have intriguing possibilities: guy discovers a universal remote that actually controls the universe. But Sandler schmaltzes it up because he can't bear not to be liked, so instead of a magical story it bogs itself into the mire of sit-com mundanity. But hey - if seeing Sandler fart bigtime into the face of David Hasselhoff floats your boat - this is just the pic for you!
The History Boys
Except for director Nicholas Hytner, this has almost everything going for it. Some of the best British acting you'll see all year - in particular from Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour, but nearly everyone else is also quite wonderful. The dialogue, as you'd expect from Alan Bennett [film is from his successful stage play] is first-rate: witty, genuinely moving without being manipulative, and, dammit, actually ABOUT something. The characters have been crafted with affection, understanding, wit and humanity. Plus I'm retrospectively jealous of how sassy the boys are, how very wise beyond their years, how unafraid to challenge authority -- coming as I do from a society that only pretended to encourage individual thought.
The film hasn't quite lost its theatrical ballast and keeps getting tugged back to earth when it should be cinematically soaring. But that's primarily due to Hytner. I'll concede he romped appropriately with that other Bennett triumph The Madness of King George, but here he's fallen into the same trap that held him back with The Crucible. Ploddy, ploddy, ploddy. Uninspired, predictible camera placement; far too reliant on arbitrary cutting - like bad tv sometimes - and the tendency to keep playing it safe, doing the obvious. Which, for a film that examines the very essence of playing it safe and flying too close to the sun, is a BIG mistake. I suspect he was using a tried and tested stage director's dictat: don't let the production get in the way of a great script. But cinema ain't a writer's medium, it's collaborative. So if the director abnegates responsibility it actually diminishes the script. Which is a shame, because this could have been a great film. But it's certainly worth seeing for everybody else's contribution.
Tomorrow comes Hoodwinked and The Guardian. Hmmm...
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Thursday
Hoodwinked wants to be good, it really, really does. It wants you to adore those big-eyed cgi rip-offs of everything from anime to The Incredibles. It wants you to tap to the tunes, it wants you to chuckle at the jokelets, it wants you to be quick enough to see fleeting visual ref's like the quartet of birdies on a branch dressed like the Village People, and it especially wants you to cuddle up and hug those actors whose voices nealy fool you. Anne Hathaway as a Janeane Garofolo clone, Glenn Close putting on the granny, James Belushi all big and dumb. Well, forest-alert! I got news for the Edwards clan who contrived it - not only did I not like it, but none of the kids in the cinema were engaged for one tiny-tot minute. Blah!
Back this evening for The Guardian. Stay tuned.
The Guardian
You'd have thought after Waterworld Costner would have had enough of water. But here he is, and guess what? He's up to his neck in the stuff; hell it's way over his head. Lots and lots of water. Water in pools, and big BIG water in the sea. And, because this is Alaska, you KNOW what temperature that water is going to be. And you KNOW you're not about to go bouncing into it like some Venice beach bunny. This is serious water. This is water for serious people like the Coast Guard. Can you hear the bg music swelling with the waves? Can you feel the pride of the new recruits who will learn to buddy up and sacrifice self to save others. Can you glimpse those sidebar stories of marriages gone wrong, and brand-new love, and learning to be a man? Actually, the bits of this film that dealt with the process of turning brash lads into heroes of the sea are fascinating, and I kept wishing it was a documentary. Because every time the script got above itself and pretentiously tried to follow a narrative, to impose cliched drama on what is quite dramatic enough thank you very much -- well, then it lost me, only serving to make me hyper aware of the shortcomings. How screenplays like this get green-lighted has little to do with concepts of quality. There's no structure whatsoever. Vignettes substitute for story-telling and seem to be dropped in whenever someone decided they couldn't take one more frame of quasi-reality training and/or rescue. The effect is like inserting pages of a love comic into a dense training manual. The emotional reality makes Mary Poppins look like Macbeth. Actors, some of whom are perfectly capable and hardworking, have as much chance at characterization as they do of transforming into tulips. And the endings ... note the plural. Do you want to ask me about the endings? I counted about five of them, one zipping along after another. Some were tying up loose end-ings. Some were happy ever after endings. One was a this will make you cry ending [wanna bet?] And then there was the wipe away the tears because we're telling you not just a story but including you in the birth of a legend ending. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin -- he's all wet! |
| 15 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Airbolt |
Posted - 01/06/2007 : 01:13:22
quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
Flags of Our Fathers
It's platatudinous to note that war is complex - in its causes, execution, its aftermath; and that the majority of war movies are based on a reductionist premise which may either glorify or castigate military action.
The best war films, though, allow you to draw your own conclusions in the face of an honest portrayal. Michael Cacoyannis - in his film of Euripides play Iphigenia - shares one of the most powerful evocations of what it means to be a soldier, Olivier explores Shakespeare's universal truths about military sacrifice in Henry V, and, in Ran, Kurosawa is fascinated by the brutal and dangerous beauty of battle as armies represent the egos of individual men. More modern films have recognized the unique power in the story of the two world wars of the last century as a basis to explore the issue in a variety of forms, from the starkness of Abel Gance's silent triumph J'Accuse to Renoir's masterly La Grande Illusion to Lewis Milestone's moving version of the Remarque novel All Quiet on the Western Front, from Dalton Trumbo's depiction of his award-winning novel Johnny Got His Gun about the madness caused by war to Godard's satirical Les Carabiniers, Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, or Mike Nichol's Catch-22. Films like Coming Home and Apocalypse Now reached out to the Vietnam war in similar ways.
These stories do far more than document this battle or that, far more than serve as a vehicle for amazing special effects. They help us understand the realpolitik of the decisions by an elite and their lasting effects on individuals and nations.
Clint Eastwood's beautifully realized Flags of Our Fathers, is sure to join those lauded ranks. The first part of his war analysis deals with the meaning beneath the symbolic gesture of the raising of a US flag atop a mountain outpost in an obscure Pacific island, a meaning which spread from its almost insignificant location outward to the allied war-weary world, and how that meaning was ultimately a manufactured thing. We're promised the second part of the story from the Japanese perspective later in the new year.
Eastwood's film examines the concept of heroism in minute detail: the various guises it takes, who is deemed worthy, how it's manipulated to other ends. This chapter, reflecting in its filmic form the complexities of war itself, isn't portrayed in a linear narrative. First we're a bit overwhelmed by the intense busy-ness of how to finally bring about an end to an interminable conflict, already declared over in Europe, having strayed to the East, to places as alien to most Americans called up to fight as another planet. What Eastwood does in this meticulous opening section is to introduce us to war as a character; we hardly get to meet the men who will be the focus of the more personal story, the men who were immortalized in the iconic image of raising the American flag on foreign soil, a symbol if not of victory than one of hope. And only then, when we've been immersed in the filth of war, the exhaustion of fighting, the barely bearable enforced commaraderie, only then does Eastwood allow us to see beneath the symbols to the realpolitik, the masterminding of strategy ... not military strategy but the tactics of raising money to keep the obscene war machine ticking over. Along the way Eastwood shines an incisive light on the effects of these grand schemes on individual men, and it's a light that illuminates every sad crevice, not one that blinds with false power or sentiment.
Considering recent revelations about real costings in Iraq, Eastwood's film is certainly timely. He tells the story through three strands simultaneously, and it's a tribute to the skill of his former Million Dollar Baby collaborator, screenwriter Paul Haggis as well as his own evolved directorial control that we're able to stay with this layered tale, affording it the gravitas it deserves and the rich vein of humanity it demands.
It is amazing how visceral an experience cinema can now deliver. The Landing at Iwo Jima was realistic enough to be almost a historical document. Constantly switching points of view from the Japanese Defenders to a Corsair Pilot to a Battleship then to the Marines. The almost monochrome colours perfectly fitted the moonscape of the Battlefeld. Never comfortable , the Viewer never knows what will happen next.
Then we are whisked away to the Bond Rallies at which the Fusillades are fireworks and the heroes are expected to repeat their actions on a papier-mache hill in a football stadium. That Clint Eastwood can point our the sour taste that it leaves in the mouth without negating the very real heroism is a sign of his touch.
The men who raised the flag are acutely embarrased to be told they are heroes but ( at least initially ) are honest enough to be relieved that they are not on the front line. However , as we see in yet another time shift ( to the present ) the front line never leaves them.
Somehow the film mananges to affirm the courage of men forced to go beyond what the viewer can imagine , while at the same time exposes the cynical compromises made on the Home Front.
I look forward to the companion piece on the Japanese part of the Battle. |
| ChocolateLady |
Posted - 01/02/2007 : 07:46:07
Hold on, hold on, HOLD ON!!! This is a REMAKE of the Australian movie, Dating the Enemy!
It was cute, that movie - but nothing special, really.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 01/01/2007 : 13:34:20
It's a Boy Girl Thing
Not exactly bad enough to be expirational - as in I'd rather die than see yet another body-swap flick - it's not exactly the inspirational message movie I suspect lurks beneath the suspension of disbelief, i.e. learning life lessons about being in touch with our masculine or feminine sides.
I can't tell you if that was the hook for the glitzy couple of Elton John and David Furnish to get involved as Executive Producer and Producer of this ordinary little teen rom-com, or at what stage they were brought in to the picture. But whatever their contribution - which may or may not have involved convincing rock woman Sharon Osbourne to play, unconvincingly, the mother of the lead boy - they haven't managed to elevate this derivative cream-puff of a film. There are many intriguing things the film might have explored about gender identity, and it might have had a very different appeal. But the filmmakers have gone for a teen-ticket, and apparently teens aren't able to appreciate more complex arguments than male=football, female=poetry.
To be fair the film does have some decent elements, not least the two leads, both from television, though he scored as Felicity Huffman's son in Transamerica, and she runs her own fashion label. Samaire Armstrong and Kevin Zegers play next-door chalk-and-cheese neighbours who swap bodies when an Aztec statue overhears them arguing and casts a spell. Now you know try as I might I just cannot find any Aztec legend which involves that kind of magic. But I'd have been willing to go along with the conceit, even though it actually disrespects a once-great South American culture ... if only the script had been more original and had the body-swapping resulted in some greater consequence than these characters offer.
So here are some questions at random among many, and you can make your own mind up how the film deals with them:
Do opposites attract?
Can a wannabe Yale lit major learn how to score a touchdown in a matter of days?
Conversely can a hot rap-loving jock learn to ace the college interview in the same amount of time?
Why would a social climbing, high-culture family live next door to Mr and Mrs Waynetta Slob and their Slob teen progeny?
Did you answer: Yes, Yes, Yes, and The film doesn't deal with it at all?
Congratulations! Clearly that Aztec statue likes you.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 01/01/2007 : 13:30:26
Night at the Museum
Ever since Paul Wegener directed and starred as The Golem, his 1915 masterpiece based on a Hebrew legend of an evil clay statue coming to life, the cinema has been fascinated with animated inanimate objects. And some of the results through the decades have been remarkable, not merely for their increasingly astounding special effects, but because they've incorporated the central idea into stories which help us better understand the world and our own imaginations, and because they've done so with the blueprint of screenplays which are profound, witty or both.
Night at the Museum uses the basic concept, here set in NYC's Museum of Natural History [whose interior was actually recreated in a studio], where the exhibits come to life at night, which certainly complicates life for Larry, the new night guard. His life's already pretty tangled, being a divorced father of a kid whose respect he craves even as he dances from one loser survival scheme to another. How this basically decent guy manages to gain control of a totally mad situation and become a hero in more than his son's eyes is pretty much the plot.
If the filmmakers hoped the movie might join its seminal predecessors of the genre it's disappointed not only the public, but the quite considerable talent involved from Chris Columbus as one of the [many] producers, Ben Stiller in the lead, supported by a wonderfully feisty Mickey Rooney, a scheming Dick Van Dyke, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, and Ricky Gervais among others, and, yes, some amazing special effects. But the script, while not entirely horrible, is pretty blah and predictable as daybreak, the dialogue is plodding, and the characters are all missing the charm gene. The big Mcguffin comes way out of left field and never really earns its keep.
But most of all the brick of blame has to crash through the picture window of Shawn Levy [he who ruined the remakes of both The Pink Panther and Cheaper by the Dozen.] He doesn't so much direct scenes as cover them, muddying chaotic incidents without either clarifying them or maximizing them. And to waste opportunities to provide much-needed comedy with actors so ready to deliver is really movie-crime. The best you can say for it is that - after an over-long set-up - the exhibits are lively enough to provide some action scenes that hold your interest.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/30/2006 : 12:12:00
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer [very slight spoilers]
Whether this film will continue to divide people in the cinematic future as it does in its first release only time will tell. It does seem to be a love it or hate it experience - though I must admit the audience during my screening was universally and in vain suppressing giggles throughout. Even the critics who've praised this overblown pretentious adaptation of Patrick S�skind's 20-year-old best selling novel comment on its risible ending. Others note that over the years the likes of Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, and Scorsese decided the book was unfilmable. I'm with them; in a novel the writer can create both character and atmosphere by exploring thoughts and emotions which either support or contrast with the action. Filmic equivalents are limited to voice over or sub-titles. In his beautifully shot film Tom Tykwer relies heavily on voice-over [provided in the English-language version by velvet-voice himself John Hurt], but instead of revealing anything about the bizarre motivations of the protagonist, it acts as the kind of patronizing narrative that only reports what we can see for ourselves onscreen. Thanks to some remarkable production design Tykwer certainly does present one of the most cogent depcitions of the ambience of 18th century France.
The title informs us this is the story of a murderer, but the title lies. For we get no closer to his story than might be contained in a newspaper article: he was born in hideously poor circumstances in Paris, was sent to an orphanage then sold into a kind of slave labour. Along the way he discovers an extraordinary ability to detect smells. In fact, he's a kind of idiot savant, defective as a sociopath or an autistic in terms of human empathy, but with a remarkable physical ability. Just to put things in perspective, a human's 40 million olfactory receptor neurons are replaced about every 40 days by the activity of neural stem cells along the nasal lining. Depending on the breed, a dog's sense of smell is hundreds of thousands, even millions of times stronger. We're asked to believe that Jean Baptiste Grenouille has the nasal prowess of a dog - his name, by the way, actually means frog in French, and some frogs indeed have a highly developed sense of smell considering their primitive brain structure.
So we have an emotionally retarded obsessed waif, played in relentless monochromatic tones by Ben Whishaw. His portrayal must have been a directorial choice, since the actor's stage Hamlet won great praise. Here he presents a confused portrait, and instead of engendering either our sympathy for his brutal life or our vitriol at his coldly brutal actions, he's just a figure walking through the landscape as we hop from one scene to another.
What do we expect from a murder story? Well, they're either in the whodunit genre, which this clearly isn't since we're told from the outset that Grenouille is guilty. Alternatively we might get a whydunit ... which this could easily have been, but isn't. Or, as in the Hannibal Lector films, we follow with fascination mixed with revulsion the cunning of the murderer, and sometimes are allowed a peek into his mind; it's a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-go-I approach. If that's the track that Tykwer was hoping for his film's fallen over the cliff, and that's down to structure and rhythm. We get a film where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing and another thing. But there's no real logical progression, though plenty of plot holes. Actors of the stature of Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman fight vainly to supply some degree of the characterization lacking in the script. As to involving us in any relationship Grenouille might have had either with his abusers, his friends, or his victims, we're never given a chance to engage with any of them. Instead, we're told things, and have to take them on faith.
The sad result is that we feel nothing, either for the victims of the murders who've never become real people for us, nor for Grenouille himself. We don't care that he's caught, and in the absurd resolution of what are meant to be his last moments, we cannot possibly accept the premise either of his effect on people or his own demise. Apparently this ending has been described as magical realism. In the words of some very amusing British holiday pantomime characters: Oh no it isn't! Go see this if you really must, but I advise holding your nose.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/29/2006 : 11:33:37
Apocalypto
As I watched this film - superbly photographed by the great Dean Semler - I kept thinking about those epics detailing the decline of the Roman Empire, a victim of its own greed and decadence. But the Mayan Empire which flourished long before, whose civilization pioneered scientific concepts we still use today, which literally carved beauty from the most inhospitable settings - that was not essentially an imperialistic society during its thousands of years as a great nation. Scholars of every discipline are still unsure exactly what combination of events caused the Mayans' gradual decline from its origins about 8000 BC to the straggling pockets of survival by about 1000 AD.
Gibson's film, though, isn't really concerned with the why, and has attracted much criticism for its inaccuracies. There are primarily two ways to 'read' Gibson's latest epic: either as an anachronistic glimpse into the final decline of a great people, or as a jolly good adventure romp that just happens to be set in Central America during the early 16th century. Let's try for a moment to set aside what we know of Gibson's private life and concentrate on his work as a director.
Whichever version of the film you choose to examine, there is no doubt that he has a sophisticated control of producing big-screen images. Though there's no one shot here as effective as the mist-covered forest in The Passion of the Christ, Gibson truly brings to life the jungle settings contrasted so brutally with the Mayan cityscape. He creates such a believable atmosphere and fills it with such exciting action sequences that we hardly have time to question what the film is really about nor why he might have been drawn to the material in the first place. As with his previous films, the setting is distanced from contemporary life, and like the Passion film provides only sub-titled dialogue. The effect is one of double alienation, particularly with this story, which is hardly told in any modern genre: we're in the strangest of worlds, unable to speak the language, unfamiliar with the details of the culture. So it is up to the filmmakers to throw us every lifeline they can to find the commonality between our society and theirs. Gibson's choice is a reducto ad absurdum, a dismissal of all cultural nuance, resorting to only the most basic human behaviour. This is a choice which frees him from the confines of a real story. What we get is an opening of tribal harmony, a survival hunt dependent on teamwork and allowing the men to tease each other, glimpses into a simple family life of marital tenderness. All fine as far as it goes, but we don't really learn enough about anyone to sustain us through the rest of the action. It's all broad brushstroke stuff. Gibson gives us a hint of trouble to come with the arrival of a sorry-looking neighbouring tribe seeking permission to cross the territory; this is soon followed by an unprovoked attack by a vicious group of men who storm through the village, killing, burning, looting, raping, and capturing prisoners to take to the city. Our focus is on one of the villagers called Jaguar Paw [played - as are most of the speaking cast by North American native tribespeople - by Rudy Youngblood]. He's left his pregnant wife and young son down a dried-up well and promised to return for them. The rest of the film follows his enforced transport to the city as a slave and potential sacrifice, his perilous escape, nearly farcical in the amount of obstacles before his return to fulfil his promise to rescue his plucky wife, who's managed to give birth and save her children from drowning in the deluge that's filled the well.
It's spectacular, all right, but none of it is particularly moving. It's like one of those natural history museum dioramas - we're interested while we're in front of it but it's so far removed that we take nothing with us when we leave.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/28/2006 : 15:01:36
Flags of Our Fathers
It's platatudinous to note that war is complex - in its causes, execution, its aftermath; and that the majority of war movies are based on a reductionist premise which may either glorify or castigate military action.
The best war films, though, allow you to draw your own conclusions in the face of an honest portrayal. Michael Cacoyannis - in his film of Euripides play Iphigenia - shares one of the most powerful evocations of what it means to be a soldier, Olivier explores Shakespeare's universal truths about military sacrifice in Henry V, and, in Ran, Kurosawa is fascinated by the brutal and dangerous beauty of battle as armies represent the egos of individual men. More modern films have recognized the unique power in the story of the two world wars of the last century as a basis to explore the issue in a variety of forms, from the starkness of Abel Gance's silent triumph J'Accuse to Renoir's masterly La Grande Illusion to Lewis Milestone's moving version of the Remarque novel All Quiet on the Western Front, from Dalton Trumbo's depiction of his award-winning novel Johnny Got His Gun about the madness caused by war to Godard's satirical Les Carabiniers, Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, or Mike Nichol's Catch-22. Films like Coming Home and Apocalypse Now reached out to the Vietnam war in similar ways.
These stories do far more than document this battle or that, far more than serve as a vehicle for amazing special effects. They help us understand the realpolitik of the decisions by an elite and their lasting effects on individuals and nations.
Clint Eastwood's beautifully realized Flags of Our Fathers, is sure to join those lauded ranks. The first part of his war analysis deals with the meaning beneath the symbolic gesture of the raising of a US flag atop a mountain outpost in an obscure Pacific island, a meaning which spread from its almost insignificant location outward to the allied war-weary world, and how that meaning was ultimately a manufactured thing. We're promised the second part of the story from the Japanese perspective later in the new year.
Eastwood's film examines the concept of heroism in minute detail: the various guises it takes, who is deemed worthy, how it's manipulated to other ends. This chapter, reflecting in its filmic form the complexities of war itself, isn't portrayed in a linear narrative. First we're a bit overwhelmed by the intense busy-ness of how to finally bring about an end to an interminable conflict, already declared over in Europe, having strayed to the East, to places as alien to most Americans called up to fight as another planet. What Eastwood does in this meticulous opening section is to introduce us to war as a character; we hardly get to meet the men who will be the focus of the more personal story, the men who were immortalized in the iconic image of raising the American flag on foreign soil, a symbol if not of victory than one of hope. And only then, when we've been immersed in the filth of war, the exhaustion of fighting, the barely bearable enforced commaraderie, only then does Eastwood allow us to see beneath the symbols to the realpolitik, the masterminding of strategy ... not military strategy but the tactics of raising money to keep the obscene war machine ticking over. Along the way Eastwood shines an incisive light on the effects of these grand schemes on individual men, and it's a light that illuminates every sad crevice, not one that blinds with false power or sentiment.
Considering recent revelations about real costings in Iraq, Eastwood's film is certainly timely. He tells the story through three strands simultaneously, and it's a tribute to the skill of his former Million Dollar Baby collaborator, screenwriter Paul Haggis as well as his own evolved directorial control that we're able to stay with this layered tale, affording it the gravitas it deserves and the rich vein of humanity it demands.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/25/2006 : 15:52:25
Wah-Wah
Very much less than a sum of its parts, Wah-Wah centers on a late 1960s coming of age tale set in a British Empire outpost of East Africa which is soon to disappear like the raging red sun sinking behind the hills of the extended last shot. It's all based on debut writer/director Richard E Grant's own boyhood, growing up in the kind of dysfunctional family so exquisitely portrayed in White Mischief.
But whether he's just too close to the material or it's a mark of his inexperience, the film slips away from Grant despite some truly fine work by his cohorts. We're at the fag-end of white British colonial rule over an indigenous people we get to meet only as deceptively happy servants and menials. Things are done because that's the way they've always been done, and within the family of Harry and Lauren Compton that includes lots of extra-marital sex washed down with gallons of liquor, all not that well hidden from their son Ralph.
The dichotomy of hush-hush [and perfectly normal] human abandon and the repressive restrictions on behavior expected in public and in speech provide a telling frame into which an intelligent and artistically-inclined young boy must flounder to make any sense of his emotions. It's the script that lets the film down, presenting as it does a succession of scenes which don't coalesce into a filmic shape. Narrative paths are introduced and dropped, such as Ralph's first stirrings of teen love/lust with a neighbour's daughter. So we glimpse a wider world, but are kept too relentlessly enclosed in the repetitive tale of the demise of the family.
As you might expect from such a versatile actor as Grant, he coaxes absolutely marvellous performances from the cast, from leads to cameos. Gabriel Byrne in particular as Harry and Emily Watson as his second wife, the funny and adorably brash Ruby, are both magnificent. Nicholas Hoult is more than fine as Ralph, though doesn't even have to compete since the script uses him more as our pair of eyes than his own person. That's one of the weak points of the narrative, and I suspect it was Grant's choice as an antidote to sentimentality. But while he's avoided the latter he's also put a barrier in our way of
latching onto a character we can identify with, instead of forcing us to judge everyone else.
Not only has Grant thoroughly absorbed the geography of his childhood, he's managed to reveal it to us without our becoming overwhelmed by Swaziland's phenomenal beauty. Perhaps when he's given another directorial green light he'll consider having someone else
write the screenplay.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/25/2006 : 15:48:03
Pierrepoint
There's too much television thinking in this stylish realization of the life of one of Britain's last hangmen. The slice-of-life treatment of how an accepted legal practice, though too gruesome for polite discussion, evolves into one of the most potent symbols of social change, is essentially a small tale in narrative terms. There might be more epic ways to deal with the issues, but the quite claustrophobic suppression in this screenplay mitigates against a cinematic telling of the story.
That the film is so watchable despite this flaw is due primarily to Adrian Shergold's meticulous shooting and to the equally careful yet totally believeable and excellent characterizations of Albert Pierrepoint by Timothy Spall, his drab, loyal, and quietly intelligent wife Annie played by Juliet Stevenson, and Eddie Marson as his best friend Jim Corbitt. With Annie he can find the humanity he must leave at home to approach his odious task with detached professionalism, even managing to find pride in a job well done. With his friend, he's Tosh to Jim's Tish, as they provide impromptu entertainment in the pub.
Based on co-writer Bob Mills's longtime obsession with Pierrepoint's life story, we learn that the hangman's growing reputation as the best in England secures him a post war interview with Montgomery
leading to his employment at the Nuremberg trials in Germany. But the main problem with the screenplay is how many times we're told what is essentially the same thing about Pierrepoint, namely the ways he finds to justify his job. So instead of the story progressing to the point where it flips into a dramatic conversion, we become less and less engaged. We get only glimpses of a changing world without feeling how it's really becoming an incursion into an entire way of life.
The intimacy of television can capitalize on the reading-between-the-lines in small gestures, looks, and moments between friends, between strangers, but cinema demands more.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/25/2006 : 15:45:44
Hollywoodland
What might have been an examination of the George Reeves/Superman phenomenon serving as a metaphor for the way Hollywood fantasies hide human truths loses itself completely in Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland. Instead Coulter and screenwriter Paul Bernbaum opt for what they thought would be the stronger story of a schnook of a petty-ante detective investigating the possibility that the television star's suicide was actually murder. Big mistake.
By diverting our focus into ersatz noir territory, ironically we're kept in the dark about more than just the unanswerable question of who killed the superhero. As the private dick Louis Simo, Adrien Brody simply cannot sustain the leading man status he's awarded here. He's miscast as that kind of lead, nor does the script help one little bit. His is a hackneyed tale of divorced loser, possibly ready for a kind of redemption which ultimately eludes him; but it's academic since we never really care about him, either whether he might successfully solve the case or whether he might learn to play a more mature role in the life of his estranged wife and child. As a kind of forced parallel to Reeves's sad life story it's just not in the same ballpark.
Ben Affleck, on the other hand, as Reeves is excellent, as is Diane Lane playing his slightly older paramour Toni Mannix, married to gang-connected MGM VP Eddie - Bob Hoskins finding all the humanity in another dubious character. Half a century after the event, how Superman died just isn't that vital a basis for a plot, especially as there will probably never be the evidence to prove anything one way or another. So you've got a fundamental ambiguity which in itself isn't strong enough even to be used as a central metaphor. What was going on in Hollywood at the time was far from ambiguous, albeit fascinating even today, since it sowed the seeds not only for how the studios' hold on popular culture was slipping, but for the near-total commodification of the arts and the explosion of a celebrity culture.
Reeves definitely played a part in that story, and has an interesting enough life to serve as its central character. By making Simo our point of identification and then abandoning him morally and emasculating him in terms of a solution to the death, we're left with all the gravitas of a tabloid headline. Too bad because this could have been a sparkling gem instead of the tin-plated Cracker-Jack toy it is.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/25/2006 : 15:40:43
Infamous
Writer/director Douglas McGrath, whose screenplay for Bullets Over Broadway proved his grasp of contrasting stereotypical American social worlds with humanity and humor, really lets rip with his treatment taken from George Plimpton's account of Truman Capote's research into what became In Cold Blood.
Because the meat of the film takes place in a world so alien to Capote's own, we're first introduced to him in his natural habitat of exotics. As played by British character actor Toby Jones [son of Freddie Jones, once a stalwart of the UK theatre scene] Capote's queen-y side is loosed in full, constrasting with Philip Seymour Hoffman's more contained performance last year. Jones finds the notes in Capote that made contemporaries compare him with Alexander Pope, both men being tortured, physically arresting, wittily acerbic, and willing to play the fool for attention and acceptance by a set they weren't born into.
So first we get Capote the court jester, flattering the New York beau monde whose toy he has become; he trades 'girly' gossip at fashionable cafes and Park Avenue parties with the likes of powerful trend-setters like Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, socialites Babe Paley, wife of CBS founder, and Slim Keith who acquired a title from her marriage to an Englishman. We also learn of his connections to a more international galaxy of celebrities including the British royal family, and intellectual equals Gore Vidal and childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.
We need early on to absorb such eclectic roots so we can fully appreciate the impact that Capote, landing in their midst as though from outer space, makes on the backwater Kansas town so shocked by the brutal shootings of a local family by two ex-convicts. It's their story and the effect of the killings on the American-dream town which fascinate Capote and will form the core of his book. What happens to him during the months of research, most particularly as a result of his growing intimacy with one of the killers Perry Smith is a revelation much more deeply realized than Dan Futterman's script of Capote last year.
McGrath's film, too, makes more of the wind of shock, acceptance, and change that had begun to blow across the American heartland. This was a seminal time of transition from a collective post-war exhalation that turned a drab world to color in every sense of the word. That Capote instinctively fathomed what import the Kansas murders would have on the cultural life of the nation testifies to his literary genius.
Jones hits all the notes provided by McGrath and he's surrounded by a stunning cast, whether in fleeting glimpses like Juliet Stevenson's Vreeland, or more sustained characterizations from Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, and especially Daniel Craig as Perry. The film constantly imposes alienation devices on the viewer: first with the set-up of Capote's trivial side which serves to make his later soul-damaged revelations even more poignant, and by the flash-forward almost-to-camera interviews with his friends, lover, and social commentators underscoring the Capote we're getting to know and, yes, even love - though perhaps never quite to trust. The Hoffman version of Capote was dominated by his amazing acting job; McGrath's film is dominated by the man himself.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/25/2006 : 15:35:36
Venus
When actors score so brilliantly in a film you really want the setting to justify all their hard work. Peter O'Toole gifts us with his best performance in years as Maurice, an ageing once beautiful actor reduced to playing corpses in tv hospital drama. He's wonderfully supported by the irrepressible Leslie Phillips as Ian his richer best friend, Richard Griffiths as their buddy ever-ready with balm to spread over the troubled waters that roil up between them, and especially by a luminous Vanessa Redgrave as his ex-wife.
Newcomer Jodie Whittaker isn't in their league, but does fine with the part of Ian's niece's daughter, the ultra nubile, intellectually unawakened Jessie, who comes down from the north to look after her relative and possibly snag a job in modelling. Phillips loathes everything she represents, most especially that his own era's passing, but O'Toole befriends her and, impossibly, falls in love with her. The film deals with their strictly platonic relationship, exploring their desires, both unlooked for and demanding.
The film itself isn't terrible, but it meanders like a jazz riff when it should build and explode like a symphony. Not only is O'Toole taller than all around him, he's towering, and he deserves a bigger platform. Movies being movies, however, this is probably the most he'll get at this stage and his age. The whole production has a lingering sniff of television: accurate but ultimately too contained for cinema.
Director Roger Michell particularly seems unable to escape its confines; this is his third collaboration with screenwriter Hanif Kureishi [who scored so powerfully with My Beautiful Laundrette]. Kureishi's dialogue crackles, each character defined by perfectly suited expressions. But the story is small and the near plotless plot doesn't give it room to breathe.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/22/2006 : 15:55:13
The Pursuit of Happyness and Blood Diamond
The Pursuit of Happyness
Could this be Will Smith's Oscar year? Not since Six Degrees of Separation has he chosen a role that explores deeper than his powerful but easy facility for surface comedy. Whether his nuanced portrait of real-life rags-to-riches inspiration Chris Gardner is accurate really isn't relevant since it's the attainment of the American Dream that the film is about. You may or may not believe that the Founding Fathers meant their Declaration of Independence tenet of the Pursuit of Happiness to equate so completely to the Pursuit of Dollars, but neither Gabriele Muccino's film nor Steve Conrad's adaptation of Gardner's book ever questions it.
The narrative dogs the story of how a highly intelligent and super-motivated black man in the San Francisco of the 1980s overcomes relentless odds against his success to become [we're told in a post ending title card] a multi-millionaire. And, though the key relationship is between Chris and his [real life] son Christopher, the kid is treated as a plot device, as indeed is the relationship with the boy's mother who, refusing to go along with yet another of Gardner's schemes, leaves them for New York. There was plenty of screen time to pay more attention to defining these characters more convincingly, especially Linda, though Thandie Newton does her best given the stale crumbs she gets from the script. Instead, the film recounts far too many of the same kind of hurdles that Chris needs to vault, his progress never linear and upward, but more a matter of one step forward, two steps back. And because Gardner's real story was given such wide publicity at the time, it's no surprise that he's going to come out of this a winner. Hell, Hollywood wouldn't be remotely interested if he weren't.
But the choices made have a sniff of not wanting to reveal too much of the true tale lest someone doesn't come out smelling of roses. But that only makes you wonder about the consequences: why, for example, would Linda so willingly abandon her son to the partner she believes is a loser? Was she mentally unstable? A junkie? Did she supplement her menial jobs with something sleazier to bring home the rent money when Chris's schemes came up empty? Also, charming as the lad Christopher is, he appears far too old, not to mention possessed of such sassy confidence, to be in Day Care instead of school. He asks a couple of times whether his mom is coming back, but we never really get an insight into how Linda's abandonment truly affects him. And that's because the action refuses to explore consequences, but endlessly chases practicalities.
This is one of those cinema experiences that you want to be good while you're watching, you want to go along with Smith's infectious good-guy style to the happy ending. And so you do. Then afterward you realize the film's a con, you've still got a list of questions, and you're not quite as satisfied as you thought you were.
Blood Diamond
Set in and around the diamond trade of a conflict-weary Sierra Leone in the 1990s, it's a shame that Edward Zwick's powerful film splits focus so distractingly, especially in the run-up to a holiday which will probably see expensive jewellery nestled innocently under the tree. For that more socially relevant strand of the story leaves no doubt about why a diamond might be so tainted as to deserve its bloody epithet. The pursuit of that narrative stars Benin-born former catwalk model Djimon Hounsou as Solomon, a hard-working dedicated rural family man whose life is ripped apart when he's captured by a band of ruthless rebels to pan for rough diamonds, while his wife is incarcerated in a refugee camp with the two younger children, and his pre-teen son Dia is groomed by the rebels for one of those child armies still rampant in various African countries. When word gets out that Solomon's absconded with a stone as big as a bird's egg, he winds up in jail alongside Danny Archer, a morally-challenged white Zimbabwean mercenary, played with astonishing menace by Leonardo DiCaprio, making a decent stab at the accent.
This set-up offers the film a choice: to follow the trail of how complicit the west is in fuelling the international trade of sparkling gems in an obscene backing of regional chaos, brutality, and horror. How that very chaos is encouraged by the west, fomented so that very rich people become even richer, even as innocent black people are murdered, raped, have their limbs chopped off, have their children turned into drug addicts and encouraged to fire automatic weapons into villages to underscore a reign of terror. Alternatively, the film's other option is to concentrate on the thriller with romantic overtones. Hollywood being Hollywood, of course it's this narrative that the film pursues. Yes, we get glimpses into that other story, but only as it serves to move the thriller plot along.
Archer's determined to get his hands on the diamond; Solomon's buried it up in the rebel-held hills, and he convinces him to retrieve it in order to reunite his family and buy them out of Africa and into safety. But they need help. There to provide it is Jennifer Connolly as journalist Maggie Bowden, whom Danny meets in passing. Yes, of course, they're chalk and cheese, but yes, of double course, there's the obligatory uRST [unresolved sexual tension], and yes of triple course, it will be Maggie who ties together Danny's spiritual progress toward humanization and Solomon's more material salvation.
The west and rich white men are implicated in the film, but it's difficult to make that the focus for mainstream America, and increasingly for mainstream Europe. The trouble is, the thriller aspects of Blood Diamond don't sustain, despite the interminable length of the film. Still, that doesn't mean you shouldn't see it. The remarkably beautiful setting counterpoints the horrors going on beneath the jungle canopy, and the real story, equally protected by more commercial considerations, is worth being reminded of. Both male leads are excellent; someday someone will give Connolly a role worthy of her undeniable talent.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/22/2006 : 15:52:00
Angela-A
Luc Besson is nothing if not a stylist, and this overlong tale of redemption is as visually arresting as Subway or The Fifth Element with bells on. Or should that be wings, since perhaps the most astounding image throughout the film is the unlikely angel of the title. Besson's always had an unerring eye for a female screen icon, and he's certainly found a winner in Danish multi-lingual catwalk model Rie Rasmussen as the foul-mouthed chain-smoking ball-busting heaven-sent rescuer of the suicidal Algerian deadbeat Andr�. As played by Morrocan Jamel Debbouze, neither he nor his leading lady - towering over him by nearly a foot - is particularly experienced though both acquit themselves well in this contemporary fairy-tale.
Fast-talking Andr� blags his way through a meagre hand-to-mouth existence, substituting any attempt at real relationships with a facility for lies. He fools himself and sometimes others who either abuse him or use him and who only flash a smile when they actually receive the money he constantly owes. When even he can't escape his feelings of self-loathing and self-destruction, he determines to fling himself into the Seine. But before he can sink to watery oblivion he's confronted with Angel-A, and - as acting on some subconscious manifestation of his essential goodness - jumps into the water to rescue her. How she, in fact, helps rescue him provides the film's narrative.
With more than a nod to such disparate film angels as Michael and Bruno Ganz's Damiel in Wim Wenders Wings of Desire, and using narrative techniques developed by the Nouvelle Vague, particularly Godard and Resnais, Besson has no trouble creating a credible underbelly of Paris beneath its glamor. He's helped bigtime by the faultless black and white cinematography of Thierry Arbogast. What he's missing, though, is the kind of intellectual rigor demanded of the story in order to save it from becoming either pretentious or cutesy. He minimizes the latter largely due to the inante charm of Debbouze and the astonishing presence of Rasmussen. But ultimately the film fails truly to engage.
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| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/22/2006 : 15:51:17
Superman Returns
Look! What's that floating up there in the sky accompanied by a celestial chorus? It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... Jesus! Oops, I mean Superman. Yes, after a quick five-year hop to his home planet he's returned. Oh, would that he'd stayed away! For then we might not have had to endure this insufferable Christ in a cape, this only son given by Jor-L to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American way. Well, that latter is how DC Comics ended the motto, though only the first two tenets are quoted in this latest version of the film franchise -- as though omitting mention of the land of Macdonalds and the Neocons could counter the implication that the rest of the world is but a footnote.
Let me ask you something. If you had superpowers which enabled you to travel faster than a speeding bullet, to be alerted to all the injustice in the world at any given moment, to leap tall buildings at a single bound, to rival Atlas in strength and a kitten in sheer goodness ... let's see, what would you choose to do? Stop a traffic accident or bring peace to the Middle East? I know, I know, I should be entering into the spirit of the thing. Believe me, I want to. I really do. I've enjoyed past versions of Superman, and have even appeared in one of them! Other incarnations of the caped crusader have been able to parady the simplistic good versus evil message.
But Brandon Routh flies through a Metropolis that really takes itself seriously, and neither Soupy himself nor director Bryan Singer seems to have heard of post-modern irony, which, let's face it, is the only way this tale will work. Yes, you heard me right ... Bryan Singer. The same director of the very superior Usual Suspects. I'm so disappointed. Not that he chose to revive the DC franchise [and according to IMDB he's prepping the next one as we speak], but because he knuckled under to The Money with this lacklustre goody-goody treatment. Not even Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor is allowed to approach the menace we know he's capable of. What's that you say? He uses a stash of kryptonite to endanger Superman's life? Well, duh! That's original!
Speaking of the story, it's not that it's terrible, it just doesn't take the icon any further. Routh's double performance is exceptionally uninspired; he and Kate Bosworth as Lois have neither chemistry nor charisma. Jimmy Olsen ain't near perky enough, goldarnit! And Frank Langella doesn't even get a chance to be grumpy --- and hey, this is a guy who won prizes as Dracula! Despite some elegant screen compositions by Singer, you never really get a sense of a big city with its inevitable social contrasts, let alone a troubled world. It's as though Our Town got planning permission for some metropolitan chic. There's just no dark side. Nor any urban humor. Instead we get enough unimaginative earnestness, apple-pie philosophy, and Christ-like iconography for a Mel Gibson film. And that just ain't the Superman I know and love.
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