Sad but True News
There are limits to the sacrifices that I'll make for Art. Like going to see Meet the Fockers, for instance. I didn't fancy the first one, so this was always going to go down like a turd on an escalator for me. On the other hand, Nick liked Meet the Parents, so I asked him what he thought. It sounded like he was rather disappointed. So I've no hesitation in giving this a
shit rating.
Mind you, it wouldn't be the first
shit sequel ever made, and it certainly won't be the last. Even Shakespeare ballsed it right up with King Henry IV part 2. He was going to write a third part, too, but maybe he dreamt of Richard Pryor in Superman III and laid down his quill. But what really scares me is that in its first five weeks on release, in America alone, Meet the Fockers had taken 247.24 million dollars.
A quarter of a billion bucks. Fock me. Imagine how much it would have made if it was good! It might be a cynical join-the-dots exercise, but it's a cynical join the dots exercise that's just netted someone
a quarter of a billion dollars. I would sleep with Patrick Moore for that kind of money.
You see, we're the ones who are to blame for movies like this,
we go out and watch any old braindead trash, so
they keep on making it. Mind you, I can't talk, I'll go and see Ocean's Twelve unless it reeks.
Orson Kart
Seeing as I was talking about Shatner's Citizen Kane the other day, I thought I'd better say a few words about Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, viz, Citizen Kane.
Well, it's not very good, is it?
The photography is stunning, and Young Welles does well. But it goes on for much too long and it doesn't sustain the story, or the viewer's interest. Sets with ceilings were big news in 1941, but it gets carried away with how wonderful and new all this is. I'd love to be wrong, but this movie is
shit. It's a shame to think that with all that promise and optimism, all that belief in the power of art, that one of the last things that Welles did was the voice of Unicron in the Transfomers movie.
If you want a fantastic Orson Welles film, may I recommend A Touch of Evil (
good)? If Citizen Kane is the work of a young man who thinks he's a genius, Touch of Evil is the voice of someone who knows that's not enough. Orson Welles is hideous. Marlene Dietrich is in it, and Charlton Heston plays a Mexican, as Tim Burton points out in Ed Wood. Bleak and wonderful, and the famous tracking shot is still incredible. Yeah, there's a long tracking shot in The Player, and there's another in Point Break where Keanu Reeves goes into the FBI office. Impressive, but ultimately just choreography. What's amazing about the tracking shot in Touch of Evil is that you are praying for the camera to cut away, and it won't.
Incidentally, I thought Lost in Translation was
good, but can you imagine how much better it would have been with Late Period Fat Welles playing the Bill Murray role?
Pointless Media Speculation
If normal rules were anything to go by, then Ocean's Twelve should be shit. It's a sequel to a remake; that puts it in the same category as Three Men and a Little Lady (
shit) a film so
shit that not even Nimoy would direct it (even after he played Galvatron in the Transformers Movie). And Ocean's Twelve is more than two hours long - maybe I said so before here, but the optimal time to sit through
shit has been proved to be 90 minutes.
On the other hand, Ocean's Eleven (
good) made a virtue of being pointless, so Ocean's Twelve could manage the same trick. I just pray for one thing: that Steven Soderberg doesn't decide to make Solaris II - The Catatonics. That would be more than I could take.
Solaris (the remake) is
good by the way. The original is
shit. Sorry, I did try to like it.
Shatner's Bassoon
I was reading the Observer Music Bit on the train yesterday, and inside, to my consternation, popular Electro-twiddle band Lemon Jelly were interviewing Shatner. Or maybe it was the other way round. I was so excited I almost pulled the passenger communication device. And then, I read that on Lemon Jelly's upcoming album ('64 - '95), there will be a track featuring Shatner. It was all I could do to maintain my sanity. Apparently Shatner met Lemon Jelly when he was recording his Has Been album, and they got along famously.
You might think I am sad for liking Shatner but liking him is like liking olives, I recommend it. The good thing about Shatner is that he sincerely believes he's Leonardo Da Vinci, watch Star Trek V (Shatner's Citizen Kane) and you will see what I mean.
Love & Sex
Undistinguished Famke Janssen movie from 2000.
Shit, but still better than anything on the telly.
In this film, Famke Janssen goes out with a selection of men: those who are self-evident assholes, men who consider themselves to be assholes, and men whose assholeness is intuitively obvious to even the casual observer. Then she moans, a lot, when they behave like assholes. It's not like she doesn't deserve it, she's cruel and unsympathetic. Patrick Bateman would
totally be able to chat her up. You know she's going to end up with the head asshole because he's the one with his name on the DVD box.
There are a couple of redeeming features. Famke Janssen looks like she goes down the gym three hours every day, Bateman could discuss sit-ups with her. And for Jon Favreau's dialogue,
mirabile dictu, it seems that they employed a script-writer. They borrowed some lines from Clerks, but at least they know to crib from a funny movie. So I actually laughed a couple of times when I was watching this, which was a lot more than I was expecting. But, for instance, Favreau's character is an artist, so you would expect him to have some visual sensibility, yet he wears the most hideous shirts since Capn Bob's in Cape Fear.
Better than staring at the wall in a miasma of loneliness. But still
shit.
2046
I wasn't going to go and see this movie, but I saw the trailer and it looked stunning. Unfortunately the film is about as meaningful as the trailer, but at much greater length. Tony Leung seems to be turning into the Asian David Niven, with his wee moustache and his endlessly frustrated love affairs. It's all very throw-away and pretentious, and more than a little reminiscent of Barbarella. And just because Barbarella is great fun, and invented Duran Duran, it doesn't mean to say it's not
shit.
There are some sequences in 2046 which are effective and moving, but for most of the time I was trying to work out when the film was going to end. It also reminded me of Visconti's Death in Venice (
shit), as you sit there willing Dirk Bogarde to cop it so you can get out of the cinema. And while 2046 has some distinguished photography, some shots do seem to have been lifted from mid-90s Athena posters. Not good. The future bits are well-designed, but there aren't too many of those.
If Wong Kar Wei hired a script-writer to go with his boat-load of graphic designers, this might have received a good rating, but sadly it's not, it's
shit.
Here is a very sad story
When I was at university, my best friend told me a very sad story indeed. Let's call him James Jelly, for the sake of a cheap laugh. When James was a kid in the 70s, his dad got a building contract in Rhodesia, and the whole family moved out there for a few years. He had this one story about being on a bus, hearing some bangs, thinking it was a motorbike, but finding out later from the big holes in the bus that someone had been shooting at it. Apart from that, life went on pretty smoothly for Jelly Jnr.
One day one of his friends had a birthday party. They hired a movie projector, and everyone sat around watching this new film called Star Wars. Can you imagine? It must have been the best birthday party ever.
Everyone remembers where they first saw Star Wars. I went to the Dominion on Tottenham Court Road to see it, I remember the big cut-outs of Darth Vader, and I remember being confused by light sabres. I mean, how did they stop the light at the end of the sabre, how come it didn't just go on forever?
So, a little while later, James has been pestering Mr Jelly for a birthday party just like that one. This was still the late 70's, James wasn't to know that Empire Strikes Back wouldn't come out for another couple of years. But his dad rents a film, and James gets all his friends round. His mum makes popcorn, they turn down the dimmer switch, all you can hear is the sound of the reel flicking round. And then the titles come up: Star Trek, The Motion Picture.
James reckoned that was the worst 136 minutes of his entire life. None of his friends spoke to him for weeks, and he knew, deep down inside, that he deserved it, for making them sit through such remorseless
shit.
Incidentally, I found out something extremely disturbing after watching Million Dollar Baby. Clint isn't just older than my Dad, he's older than
Shatner. Shatner had the grace to concentrate on doing Pulp covers, so I hope Clint watches and learns.
TV Listings
TV listings have strange rules. For instance, here is what the Guardian Guide says about Memphis Belle, which is on this Thursday on Five should you be interested in wasting 2 hours of your life:
"Old-fashioned second world war story with a familiar plot: the American crew of a B-17 bomber run into trouble in their final mission and face a dangerous lame-duck flight back to base in East Anglia. Matthew Modine as the pilot leads a fine cast including Eric Stoltz, Sean Astin, Harry Connick Jr and John Lithgow."
What's peculiar about this is that they neglect to mention one particularly important piece of information, namely that the film is really
shit. Or how about this (also on Five, although you may have missed it):
"The Avengers: A sadly flat Hollywood version of the stylish TV series, though there are things to enjoy."
No. There is nothing to enjoy about this film. It almost makes you call into question the essential moral competency of humanity. It's about as fun as all the bad bits of taking drugs. I'm not going to rate it because calling it
shit would be a charity, frankly.
So who writes these listings, the Dalai Lama? Is TV really so bollocks that Memphis Belle is noteworthy event, possibly worth comemorating with a souvenir plate from the Franklin Mint? Well is it? Is it? IS IT?
Jude Law in Good Movie Stunner
Well, I'm not going to say that Team America isn't a
good movie, it's very entertaining, but it's coarse, stupid, and ugly. You can't help but warm to qualities like that.
On the other hand, The Aviator is the complete opposite, it's a beautiful movie. Yes, Jude Law is in it, but only for about 20 seconds, and he's covered up by a moustache as well. OK OK OK I will give him this one.
Many people think good art should be understated, or naturalistic. But this is clearly a load of bollocks. The Aviator is a fantastic film, it's expansive, over-the-top and wonderful. Right from the beginning, even the colour-balance has been tweaked to give the soft blues and apricots of hand-tinted film; by the time it gets into the forties, it's all over-saturated technicolour. You can see where the money went as well, it looks ridiculously opulent. I am sure some bits of it must have been done with computers, but I have no idea what bits they are.
What of Leo as a leading man then? He's fine, he isn't really irritating at all, you don't want to flick his ears. Kate Blanchett does a weird Audrey Hepburn impersonation, and it has the real Alec Baldwin in it as well, which is odd when you've watched his puppet entertaining Kim Il-Jong the night before.
I liked this film a lot, it is
good. If you don't like it, fuck you, maybe you don't like cinema.
I went to see it in the Barbican cinema. You get Pearl and Dean adverts, and it's like being in a proper theatre. Importantly, the seats are very comfortable. Nice people work there as well. And on a Monday it only costs £4.50. This cinema is
good.
Team America
Cartman does the voice of Kim Il-Jong. Sheer genius. This film is
good.
Million Dollar Baby
I was well up for watching this film, I thought it sounded interesting. There's not much that can be done with a boxing movie, normally it all boils down to whether they win the big fight at the end of the film. Movies about women boxers aren't a novelty either, there was that Girlfight film (
good) that came out a while ago, but that was nothing much more than a competent rehearsing of the same old lines.
Million Dollar Baby promised something else, it promised a twist. Well, the twist is, is that it turns into a
shit TV-movie half-way through. And Morgan Freeman is cast purely so he can provide a voice-over, a device which becomes downright bizarre at the end.
The boxing scenes were like you would expect, i.e. they look like boxing to someone who knows nothing about boxing. What was more peculiar is that the drama scenes also seem to have been written by someone who knows nothing about humans.
The story is taken from a collection of stories (Rope Burns) by a man who luxuriates in the name of F X Toole. Toole does a good job with the short story format because he writes about boxing well, and he's got a good turn of phrase with the third-person narration. Neither of these strengths translate to the cinema at all, but his weaknesses in structure and characterisation do. For instance, the last line of the story 'Million $$$ Baby' in Rope Burns is this: "With his shoes in his hand but without his soul, he moved silently down the rear stairs and was gone, his eyes as dry as a burning leaf". And at the end of the film, Morgan Freeman suggests that the cure for all a man's problems is a slice of home-made lemon pie. Yes. Really. That's really what it says. This film is
shit and how anyone could mistake it for something good is beyond me.
Honey, I rebranded the kids
Sometimes when people write about films they make up a lot of new words. Like hyperkinetic. I think this means Loud and Confusing, but in a fashionable new tin. That Three Kings movie (
good) was hyperkinetic, but that's OK, it's a war movie.
On the other hand, I Heart Huckabees is another load of hyperkinetic tosh from the same director (David O. Russell (but why the O? I am guessing because of David O Selznick, producer of Gone With the Wind. Or it might be his middle name is Olive)), but this time it's a movie about philosophy. In this instance that is bad. Philosophers hate entertainment and noise. Apparently the only adornment Kant had in his room was a small bust of Rousseau. See. Not even a cassette deck made out of wood. Here is another one. When philosophers use the word existentialism, they mean something to do with the writings of Sartre or Kierkegaard, or people like that. But when film-makers use the same word, it just means
reeeely reeeeely clever. I Heart Huckabees has got Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlinson as a pair of existential detectives. Bad again.
It's got Jude Law in it too, but not just that, it also stars Naomi Watts - the female Jude Law. Yes, both in the same picture, like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, BUT IN REVERSE. I truly took my life in my hands when I went to watch this film, because that radioactive horror might've been enough to melt the faces off cinema-goers, like Edam on a sunbed.
Well, it's not as bad as all that. Even Jude Law isn't as terrible as he normally is. His acting style here consists of over-articulated gurning, which is just what the part needs. And the Mark Wahlberg bits are very funny, they made me want to go out and lift a lot of weights so I could have a neck like him. But it is rather uneven, and despite the supposedly experimental structure, it still conforms to the identikit plot of man has a problem, man gets out of the problem, credits.
If it was 10% better I might've had to sit on the fence about it. But it's not. Sorry everyone, this film is unmistakably
shit.
May the Lord have mercy on me
After about three good movies coming out in all of December, there are about a million films coming out on Friday that look interesting. There is that new Clint Eastwood one, maybe that Closer one (even though it stars Jude Law), and 2046 by Wong Kar Wei. This is the sequel to In the Mood for Love, which was a critically acclaimed piece of
shit, so I might give it a miss. Then there's Team America which could be worth a look, and a new film by Lukas Moodysson. I probably won't go to see the Moodysson one, he sounds as if he's off on a bit of a teen nihilism tangent at the moment. The BBFC says it contains strong sex, sex references, and surgical images. Nice. And neither will I go and see Vanity Fair. It sounds like an exercise in point-missing. Read the book instead, it's an English version of War and Peace, only it's better and one third of the size.
Oh yeah, and Nick went to see The Aviator and he reckons it's good (caution: this is not an official rating), so now I'll definitely have to go and see that. Jeepers.
Today's one word movie is Napoleon Dynamite. I almost didn't get to see this film. I tried to go and see it in Islington, and it was sold out. Then, one day in the Christmas holidays I rolled along to the Odeon Covent Garden cinema, to be greeted by a young man in an advanced state of gormlessness.
- Could I have a ticket for Napoleon Dynamite I say
- That's nine quid he says.
Blimey O'Reilly I think to myself, this film had better be good.
I get the ticket into my hands, but crushing disappoint ensues:
- This is a ticket for I Heart Huckabees. I'm sorry, I don't want to see that, it's got Jude Law in it, I say.
- ? says the thick half of the IQ twins.
- Can I have a ticket for Napoleon Dynamite please? I say
- That starts in two hours, we changed the times, says Gormless.
- Can I have my money back then please? I say.
The answer to this is yes, eventually, after the superviser has just looked at you as if you are proposing a conceptual work of art involving the plumbing in the men's toilets. The Odeon Covent Garden: a
shit cinema.
Erm, oh yeah, there was a point to this story. After these two abortive attempts, I was wondering if Higher Powers did not mean for me to see Napoleon Dynamite. I worried if attempting to see it one more time would show contempt for these Powers. But then I also thought, why would Higher Powers be afraid of a whimsical comedy-drama like Napoleon Dynamite? So I decided to attempt to see it one more time, even if it meant risking the Higher Powers keying my karma.
You can tell from the credit sequence that Napoleon Dynamite is going to be good. It's a cheap film, but this means that they have to rely on imagination and inventiveness. So, for instance, you get credits made out of food, and a llama that is only in two shots. I wanted to see more of the llama but presumably they couldn't afford it. And they have the best bad t-shirts since Thora Birch's Raptor effort in Ghost World.
The whole thing operates on terrifying principles of nerd logic. These are not comedy nerds. They are scary like radioactivity. It is very entertaining. Go and see it. This film is
good.
Jackie Brown
I saw Jackie Brown on the TV last night. It’s
good - one of those films, like Fargo, you shouldn’t start watching at 11 o’clock, because you know you’re still going to be there when the credits roll at 1 in the morning.
For all the film influences that Tarantino cites, his biggest debt is a literary one, to Elmore Leonard. All of Tarantino’s supposedly trademark dialogue could have been written by Elmore Leonard. But Tarantino does move beyond Elmore Leonard because in Elmore Leonard books, you know who the good guy is and who the bad guy is, and you know the good guy is going to win in the end because he is just so. damn. cool.
It’s surprising that until Get Shorty came out, adaptations of Elmore Leonard had been uniformly shit. Even the Charles Bronson-starring Mr Majestyk (which Tarantino feels he must allude to in practically every film he makes) is
shit. Hilarious, but nevertheless dire. I especially love the bit where the hoods shoot up Charlie B’s melons and he vows to take revenge on them. Touching a man’s melons is a step over the line.
The only problem with Jackie Brown is that Michael Keaton appears to be acting in a different movie to everyone else. As Max Cherry says, he’s a young man having fun being a cop. Well, Michael Keaton seems to think he’s got the leading role in a Unabomber biopic. This is the same character who diggles Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, for God’s sake, what is the world coming too?
Apart from that, everyone is super. Pam Grier is Pam Grier, and Robert Forster is practically in the Bogart league of coolness, which is like being as holy as the Pope. This film is Tarantino at the top of his game, before he went off to start making bullshit dilletante vanity projects.
The book that it’s based on (Rum Punch) is pretty good too.
As for the rest of the Tarantino Directorial Oeuvre:
Reservoir Dogs:
Good
Pulp Fiction:
Good
Jackie Brown:
Good
Kill Bill 1:
Good
Kill Bill 2:
Shit
Oh yeah, I forgot about his contribution to Four Rooms, ("Tales of the Unexpected"). That’s
shit.
Cup of Tea, darling?
Biscuit? Or maybe a nice hot cup of tea?
The BBFC classifies Vera Drake as a 12A, advising of an Abortion Theme. It should also caution that the film contains Strong Scenes of Knitwear Horror, and Excessive Tea Use. There must be at least 150 cups of tea in this movie. Nice warm brews occur with approximately the same frequency as the interjection
fuck you, you fuck in Goodfellas.
Mike Leigh manages to make the 1950s seem extremely grim, and many of the working class characters look like peasants out of Brueghel paintings about the black death. Just as well then that Vera's on the scene, dispensing cups of tea or procuring abortions alike, the smile never fading from her stuttering gnome's face.
A lot has been said about Imelda Staunton's performance in this film, but personally I wasn't too keen on it. Before she gets nicked she's all fake-cheery (lovely drizzle, isn't it, cup of tea?), afterwards she's overtaken by a distress so profound she can hardly bring herself to articulate words. A little bit like Mr White in Reservoir Dogs when he finds out that Mr Orange is really PC Plod. But fortunately the supporting cast are fantastic, especially Vera's husband, Richard Graham. There's an amazing scene in the police station, beautifully shot, where he simply listens to Vera. Well done him.
The film doesn't try to lecture you on what you should be feeling about abortion. I did read an article by a real 50s midwife in the Guardian that said that real back-street abortionists were far shadier characters, more like quack surgeons. With that in mind, it seems disingenuous of Mike Leigh, to mitigate Vera's crime, but accurately depict the punishment.
There is also a lack of moral reflection in Vera's character, which brings to mind that cliche about the banality of evil. According to the 50s midwife, Vera's m.o. was extremely dangerous, and often fatal. So, if she had been maiming and killing her way across the N1 postal district of London, what would her defence have been? I'm sorry your honour, I was too stupid to think about the consequences of my actions, cup of tea? I wonder if that's what Mark Thatcher's going to say when he stands up in an African courtroom: I only thought I was helping little countries out.
Vera Drake is a
Good film, but it's not especially entertaining. Don't drive your car to the cinema, because you'll want a couple of pints afterwards. Or a nice cup of tea.
The future LIED to you, Keanu
I am not sure what happens in The Matrix, but it looks like it is set in the future. If this is the case, someone should inform Keanu Reeves (politely yet firmly) that he has a very embarrassing mobile phone. Maybe it was handed down to him by his futuristic Grandad? It only has a 2-colour display, and one of those colours is black. It no doubt has a monophonic ring-tone. And it looks like a banana. Some research on the internet leads me to believe that the phone is something called a Nokia 8110, which is also puzzling. In The Matrix, so far as I can make out, reality is constructed by fiendish robots or somesuch guff. If that is the case, why did they bother constructing Finland, so that Nokia mobile phones could originate from there?
I mean, my phone is loads better than that and I'm not even the Messiah or anything. George is the only person I know with a phone as bad as that.
If that's what Keanu's phone is like, what other secrets is he keeping from us? He probably still uses
roll-on deodorant.
These thoughts came to me as I went along to have a look at new phones that one could get. They are amazing. Probably when I get another phone in a couple of years time it will have a 4.2 mp camera on it with 8x zoom, full video-conferencing functionality with x-ray mode, an MP3 player that's powered using moisture sucked out of the air, a bluetooth dongle to interface with your cybertrainers, a hair strimmer, a device that will enable you to remote-control passing dogs, and the ability to upload small jpegs of Britney Spears into your mind as you sleep.
The Matrix 1, despite its faults, is a
good film. The Matrix 2 is notable mostly because it's generated by computers for computers, apart from the Duran Duran video cunningly spliced into the middle. Therefore it is
shit. The less said about The Matrix 3 the better, oh alright then, it is
shit too.
That Alexander film comes out this weekend. I can reveal to you, on a not-terribly exclusive basis, that it is
shit. Furthermore, it's 175 minutes and 26 seconds long, which would qualify it for a special rating, like
hypershit, or
shit-plex, but that is against the rules.
We'll always have Nuremberg
If you are down the pub and too bored even to play pool, why not discuss which movie is better, Hero or House of Flying Daggers? You could even put a packet of peanuts on it. The answer is that House of Flying Daggers is superior, mainly because it avoids being a hymn to fascism.
In other aspects, Hero competes quite well. Both films try hard to replicate the experience of leafing through copies of Elle Decoration after eating too many cheeky mushrooms, but House of Flying Daggers has better fights and more of Ziyi Zhang. On the other hand, Hero nicks the plot from Kurosawa's Rashomon, which is alright, because House of Flying Daggers steals its story from dodgy episodes of Scooby-Doo.
Unfortunately, the central message of Hero is that a state should be allowed to murder its own citizens, but only so long as it's good for them. Oh yeah, and that imperialism is the best thing since the large chicken doner. It's like watching Casablanca, but with Humphrey Bogart selling Ingrid Bergman to the Nazis at the end. Or another version of The Magdalen Sisters, where the evil nuns use cheap laundry to take over County Wicklow, then Ireland and then
the whole world.
It would be bad enough if Hero came from a country like Sweden. But it doesn't, it comes from China, the country that loves democracy so much that it rolls hundreds of tanks over it.
It's worth watching Hero, but unless you can somehow steal it, by sneaking into the cinema, say, perhaps entering through the fire-exit about 10 minutes after the previous show has finished, I wouldn't bother.
Today's One Word Movie is: Hero (Ying Xiong)
This Movie is:
Shit
One Word Movie
This website hosts the most efficient film reviews that it is possible to have. You won't have to worry about what a three star rating in the FT means. You won't have to try not to read the synopsis at the same time as the review in Sight and Sound anymore. No. On this page all films are summed up in one word, and that word is either
good or
shit. I have arrived at these ratings very carefully, and with the aid of science. You can disagree with them all you like, but that won't change anything.
If you are a computer,
good means 1 and
shit means 0. Thank you and please don't take over the world.
Today's One Word Movie is House of Flying Daggers (Shi Mian Mai Fu).
This film is:
Good
I might talk about some other stuff on here from time to time too.
