Movies: January 2007 Archives
Certainly Tony Scott’s best movie since Enemy of the State, and probably since the Tarantino-scripted True Romance (or maybe Crimson Tide?), Deja Vu is a surprisingly engaging story of voyeurism, obsession, and a very odd complication in an unusual romantic relationship. Denzel Washington stars as an ATF agent investigating the aftermath of a bombed ferry in post-Katrina New Orleans. The job becomes personal after the body of a beautiful woman, badly burned and coated with explosive residue, washes ashore, and as Washington becomes consumed with her case.
The brutally violent 1986 B-movie The Hitcher starred Rutger Hauer as a murderous roadside psychopath and C. Thomas Howell as the young motorist who gets caught up in a bloody cat-and-mouse game leading him to increasingly dark places. It earned an overnight reputation for its screenwriter, a Pittsburgh-born 25-year-old named Eric Red, whose story was blunt but fiendishly disturbing.
Patrick Marber shovels pages of voiceover into Judi Dench's lap and somehow she makes them sound brilliant and scabrous. Trouble sets in when the schoolmarmish Barbara (Dench) first goes to dine with the free-spirited Sheba (Cate Blanchett), as director Richard Eyre (Stage Beauty) aligns the performances in such an awkward clash of personalities that it's hard to imagine any kind of friendship would bloom, even the twisted, one-sided one seen here. The reliable ice queen Blanchett can't come up with a schoolboy-shagging character that makes any sense and the cascading score by Philip Glass ratchets up the sense of lurid melodrama far beyond what's supported in the story. (I actually thought to myself, “Somebody better get a knife in the back before this thing is over.”) Eyre doesn't contribute a lot in the way of cinematic style beyond putting Chris Menges behind the camera and letting him do his thing, and the character relationships generally feel arbitrary. The climax arrives so quickly that I was still waiting for the final act to begin when the film’s obvious coda hit the screen. And yet there is something compelling about the proceedings -- judging from the gales of tittering laughter originating from the last few rows of my press screening, this could have an exceptionally long shelf life as a camp classic, something I don't think the filmmakers were striving for. C+
Tom Tykwer is not a favorite -- I liked Run Lola Run well enough on a single viewing, but watching it a second time was an exercise in diminishing returns, and I had little use for The Princess and the Warrior. So I had written this project off long ago, despite the fact that the novel by Patrick Süskind is among my very favorite books. What a surprise, then, in the opening reel. The Dogville flashbacks inspired by the (re)use of John Hurt as a sardonic narrator were a little disorienting, but what was up on screen was a rich and putrid vision of 18th Century France, resplendent in colorful detail and redolent with the kind of grunge you'd expect to see slathered across the set dressing in a Monty Python movie. You could almost — yes — smell it.
Thai director Wisit Sasanatieng revisited the cinema of his youth in Tears of the Black Tiger, a dizzy mash-up of postmodern genre picture and detached melodrama. The genre in this case is the western, which he tackles in full-on Sergio Leone style, including iconic shoot-outs, flamboyant stylization and a faux-Morricone score. There are signals throughout that we’re not meant to take much of this seriously. One of the villains has a pencil-thin mustache that appears to have been cut from construction paper and glued crookedly onto his face. (I felt like the filmmaker was sitting in the chair next to me, gently nudging me in my gut with his elbow every so often to make sure I knew he was making fun.)
From the opening scenes, it’s clear that Venus intends a bracing unsentimentality in its depiction of aging geezers on the London thespian scene. Peter O’Toole’s Maurice isn’t one of those stock characters, like the Lovable Codger or the Misanthropic Coot, that we know from sweet Britflicks about aging gracefully in a life begun at 70. He’s elegant and feeble and inappropriately randy. He speaks and smiles with a long-practiced elegance of performance. He navigates his surroundings with confidence, but also with the sense that the world has started to move a little out of focus. And he walks like it hurts. This film even smells like old people.
Easy to watch and hard to shake, Children of Men is an action-adventure film/socio-political nightmare. The fuel that makes the engine run is a dystopian conceit about human infertility on a sudden, species-wide scale — and the violence and despair that ensues. The opening sequence depicts a terrorist bombing of a coffee shop, followed by a woman wandering out of the smoking rubble carrying her severed arm, just before the title card appears on screen.