5/26/03
Windtalkers [director’s cut] (Woo, 2002)

When Nicolas Cage is good, he’s very good. When he’s not so good, he can threaten to take a whole film down with him. It’s no surprise to see him here, since director John Woo likes to make repeated use of his Hollywood collaborators. But if the ravaging self-doubt that threatens to consume him in Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation makes his best performances indispensable, it stains his characters with the unattractive patina of self-consciousness. It takes more humanity than Cage can muster to make a tragic hero out of a class-A sociopath who snarls at his peers, ignores the woman who loves him, and finally delivers perhaps the most unconvincing "We’re gonna make it out of here" speech in cinema history.

If Cage is dreary, the film he drags down is not so bad. Hokey to a fault, it’s a good thing that hokemaster John Woo was tapped to direct. (I got the sense that John Carpenter — maybe the closest this generation gets to Howard Hawks — also could have made something interesting out of this.) Less interesting than it could have been, the story, which puts Cage’s petulant soldier to work protecting a "codetalker" — one of the Navajo soldiers whose ethnicity was key to an unbroken code used by the U.S. military — engages with some interesting issues about racial attitudes in the 1940s without really nailing them. To a degree, the film suffers from Philadelphia syndrome. Do the two primary Navajo characters have to be so utterly noble and guileless?

Woo handles the script’s lineup of clichés by embracing them, beelining confidently and fearlessly into the heads of his characters with the confidence of a guy who’s been working this shit since Michael Bay was in diapers. Even the schmaltzy harmonica-and-flute duets between Navajo and U.S. marine are shot with a weirdo intensity that makes them effective shorthand. And the battlefield sequences, photographed with minimal CG assist and on a breathtaking scale, comprise an alternately ridiculous (Cage’s troops knock off the Japanese with bayoneted rifles that they wield with the offhand brio of Chow Yun-fat popping off shots from double-packed handguns) and awe-inspiring stuntman’s paradise — one scene depicts soldiers flooding through a valley, explosions all around them, as bombers fly overhead and battleships, barely visible in the distance, bombard the fray from the water. It seems like each percussive shell hit or grenade explosion is accompanied by somebody flying through the air, arms flailing. Lots of men die in this film, but they die with violent panache.

Cinematic merit aside, it’s clear why this was doomed to box-office failure in post 9/11 America — nobody was ready to sit still for a violent war yarn following the character arc of a fatally flawed protagonist who’s morally compromised by his slavish dedication to orders from the military brass. (I watched the recently released DVD "director’s cut," which adds roughly 20 minutes of footage, both on the battlefield and off. I can’t speak to the nature of the newly incorporated footage, but the film never feels overlong, and it doesn’t seem possible to improve the film by cutting anything out of it.)

5/15/03
Catch Me If You Can (Spielberg, 2002)

Parent-child issues — big surprise — are foregrounded in Catch Me If You Can, Steven Spielberg’s intermittently amusing but distended con-artist picture. It clocks in at 141 minutes, which is at least 20 minutes too long for material that never really gels — in this case, tighter would be better, and the running time just makes it feel like bait for the Oscars it never stood a chance of winning. Leonardo DiCaprio is generally fun to watch, and he has at least one shot — when he pops up, like a hedgehog, amidst the machinery of a factory that’s minting money for him — that made me laugh out loud. Christopher Walken has some nice moments and, well, it’s impossible to forget that Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks. (Some people think that’s a good thing.) Depending on how closely you identify with DiCaprio’s charming trickster, you may find something genuinely moving in the juxtaposition of his relationship with the father on his one hand, who helped make him what he is, against his relationship with the father on his other hand, who’s looking to hold him accountable for his misdeeds. But in terms of both story and character, screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (his resume includes the sequels to, gawd, Rush Hour and, choke, Speed, so what the heck is he doing writing a prestige Spielberg movie?) strains really hard at the churn without ever making the butter. A disappointment.

5/14/03
The Matrix Reloaded (The Wachowski Bros., 2003)

See full review.

5/10/03 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ["restored" version] (Leone, 1966/2003)

Supposedly the provenance on this restoration is legit, with the added scenes matching the original Italian-language release of the film. Unfortunately, the present-day Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood were called in to dub their lines for this reissue, which is a little disorienting — Clint is even more gravelly, Eli a little less robust in his booming, snarling monologues. The stand-in for the late Lee Van Cleef, given the formidable task of overdubbing Angel Eyes himself, was actually less jarring to my ears.

But on the whole, I’m mixed on the restored footage. I think I may prefer the more elliptical nature of the American cut, though there’s a lot to recommend here — particularly the extra time Angel Eyes spends in the war zone, which explains his heretofore incongruous appearance at the POW camp later in the film but also made it clear to me for the first time that this is a profoundly anti-war film. Near the end of the film, there’s a montage of shots that ranks among my favorite moments in all of cinema, depicting Eli Wallach sprinting madly among the tombstones, corpses underfoot and gold on his mind, with Ennio Morricone’s score swelling like grand opera on the soundtrack. The lengthier scenes of exposition among the dead and dying intensify the irony and poignancy felt here.

But I also appreciate the more elliptical nature of the American cut, which takes place in an unnamed neverworld of the American west, not the literal "Texas" mentioned here. And an early restored scene, featuring Tuco moping around a cave muttering about how lonely he is, felt a little incongruous. (I expected him to break into song, Rogers-and-Hammerstein style, at any moment.) If these additions are less fascinating than those that accompanied, say, Apocalypse Now Redux, they’re also less destructive; you’d have to go farther than Texas to do significant harm to this picture.

5/6/03 X2 (Singer, 2003)

Love the borderline-subversive opening sequence, a bravura special-effects piece that has a teleporting Nightcrawler kick secret-service ass in the White House, stopping just short of driving a stake through the heart of the president. Generally got a kick out of Hugh Jackman’s gruff posturing as Wolverine and once again dug the teen-angst angles and overt outsider drama. (Finally, a soap opera for freaks and losers!) And the quick shot of Ian McKellen and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, as Magneto and Mystique, sitting in the back of the X-Men’s plane, whispering, pointing and snickering, is the wittiest on-screen imagining of supervillains that I’ve ever seen. It all adds up to less than the sum of its parts — mainly, it seems like a lead-in to a retelling of the legendary Dark Phoenix saga from the X-Men comics, presumably to come in X3. Pretty good summer fun nonetheless, and less utterly enamored of itself than The Matrix Reloaded.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.deep-focus.com/pcgi-bin/MT-2.21/mt-tb.cgi/12

Comments

Post a comment