The Trite Album

A terrible idea, terribly executed: Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical Across the Universe is a long and winding road that leads absolutely nowhere. At once solemn and absurd, it captures almost none of the energy or the appeal of the Beatles’ music, despite a soundtrack jammed with more than 30 Beatles tunes cherry-picked from across their entire career, from early twist-and-shouters like “Hold Me Tight” to chart-toppers like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Because” to acid-tinged experiments like “A Day in the Life” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”

And in between the musical numbers, we get characters with names like Jude, Prudence, Sadie, Lucy, Jo-Jo, Maxwell and Dr. Robert, dozens of too-cute-by-half references to other Beatles songs: a paymaster at the Liverpool docks says he imagined he’d be doing something different when he was 64; one character makes her entrance through the bathroom window; and Maxwell can even be spotted in one scene wielding what I believe is some kind of metallic hammer. It’s ridiculous—you wonder why Taymor stopped there and didn’t show someone putting an onion in a drinking glass, or bragging that their coffee table is made of Norwegian wood, or introducing the other characters to their good friends Bob La-di and Bob La-da.

But Taymor and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais (who also wrote The Commitments) aren’t intent on just squeezing as many Beatles tunes into this movie as they can—they want to encapsulate as many iconic cultural and historical moments from the ’60s as possible too. So we get hippies, race riots, protests in the streets, soldiers sent off to Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King—so much ’60s stuff that it takes about 10 underdeveloped characters to experience it all. We visit the camp of a guru who’s kind of like Timothy Leary. We meet a singer who kind of looks like Janis Joplin who forms a band with a guy who kind of looks like Jimi Hendrix, and who fall in love, break up and reunite for reasons that kind of look like bullshit.

What’s frustrating is that Taymor doesn’t appear interested in commenting on any of this stuff—simply filming it and stuffing it into a montage sequences seems to be enough for her. It’s a Supermarket Sweep approach to the ’60s—just run down the aisles and sweep as many items as you can into your shopping cart.

Across the Universe doesn’t even work on the simplest level as a musical. Part of the problem is simply that these songs, great as many of them are, were not conceived as “show tunes”—they weren’t conceived in order to move a plot forward or to give us unexpected insight into a fictional character. And so, Across the Universe has a way of stopping dead in its tracks whenever the characters begin singing—it always feels like Taymor is finding excuses to fit in another song instead of letting the musical moments grow organically out of the dramatic situation.

Worse, there’s not a single memorable vocal performance of a Beatles song in this entire movie (except for a brief cameo from Joe Cocker during “Come Together”). Evan Rachel Wood has an innocently girlish presence as Lucy and Jim Sturgess is cute, in a McCartneyesque sort of way, as Jude, but they both have thin, not terribly expressive singing voices that turn tender ballads like “Girl” and “Something” and “If I Fell” into low-energy dirges.

Taymor seems to have little faith in the ability of her cast to entertain an audience on their own—except for “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and a few moments in “I Want You” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” there’s almost no dancing in this thing, and practically no opportunities for the actors to plant their feet and just perform the damn songs. It’s the simplest, most direct pleasure you can give an audience in a musical, but instead, every song is treated as an opportunity for Taymor to dazzle us with her “vision”—with montages and crazy set design and wild costumes. But Taymor’s ideas are almost all awful: the “Mr. Kite” number, starring a visibly uncomfortable Eddie Izzard and a team of half-heartedly choreographed dancers in giant “Blue Meanie” costumes, is particularly embarrassing, especially coming from a director renowned for her stage wizardry.

Overlong, underscripted, and decadently literal-minded, Across the Universe may be the worst thing to happen to the Beatles since Yoko.

Simon Says

As a belated (and admittedly lazy) entry in the Luis Bunuel Blog-a-Thon, I present to you The New Pornographers' utterly fabulous video for their song "The Laws Have Changed"—likely the only video in rock history to be inspired by Simon of the Desert.

Morgan Recital

The moment Morgan Freeman appeared onscreen in the first scene of Feast of Love, I said to myself, “If he starts narrating, I’m gonna scream.” And sure enough, not ten seconds later, Freeman’s voiceover started—he was saying something about how the Greek gods invented love in order to keep themselves from being bored, and then, after love was invented, they invented laughter just so they could cope with it.”

Well, there’s a lot of love onscreen in Feast of Love—seven different couples, by my count. There’s not a huge amount of laughter, although I did enjoy the scene where Greg Kinnear, whose wife has just left him for another woman, is so desperate for companionship that he sneaks into his sister’s house and kidnaps her dog. And once Freeman’s narration lets up, there’s so much love and laughter—not to mention a lot of pretty actresses who director Robert Benton was able to talk into taking their clothes off—that I was definitely never bored.

The film is set among a loose community of friends and lovers in Portland, Oregon. Kinnear is Bradley, the owner of the local coffee shop, a nice, cheerful guy with spectacularly bad judgment when it comes to women: after the lesbian wife, he begins dating a real estate agent (Radha Mitchell), not realizing that she’s embroiled in a deeply toxic affair with a married man filled with even more self-loathing than she is. Two of Bradley’s employees are also in love: Oscar (Toby Hemingway) is a former heroin addict trying to scrape together enough cash to move away from his mean sonuvabitch of a dad (Fred Ward), and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), who wants to help him so badly that she’s even willing to make a sex tape with him and sell it over the internet. She’s even the one who suggests the idea! And Freeman is the wise, gentlemanly figure who all the characters turn to for advice—at the end of the day, he goes him to his wife Esther (Jane Alexander), tells her all about it, and if he’s seen anyone fall in love, he has a ritual where he pours two glasses of wine so they can celebrate.

I know: awwww. But if a lot of the characters in Feast of Love seem a little too good-hearted to be true, Benton and screenwriter Allison Burnett (adapting a novel by Charles Baxter) make sure that enough bad things keep happening to them to keep the film from getting too cloying. Kinnear’s heart gets broken repeatedly, another character dies, and even Freeman turns out to be quietly carrying around so much pain over the death of his son that he hasn’t been able to set foot in his classroom and face all those young faces for more than a year. It’s an Oregon movie: even on the sunny days, it’s always threatening to rain.

Benton has collaborated several times over the last decade with the novelist Richard Russo, and Feast of Love shares many virtues with Russo’s books—a wry, low-key sense of humour, a generous tolerance for people’s flaws, a sense that we’re not so much watching a plot unfold as we are simply hanging out in a neighbourhood for a little while and going people-watching. Sure, the stuff with Oscar and Chloe is pretty risible, but you feel like Benton genuinely likes these characters, and that he's rooting for them to find a way through their unhappiness. If there’s anything wrong with the film, it’s that it’s maybe a little too mild, a little too gentle—Benton tends to only hint at the story’s darker or gloomier aspects and leave it at that.

But I guess that’s what happens when you let Morgan Freeman narrate your movie. Those familiar, comforting cadences emanating from the theatre speakers do have a way of chasing the shadows from the room, don’t they?

Elah Be Praised

The title of Paul Haggis’ new film In the Valley of Elah refers to the battleground that Goliath once terrorized before he was felled by David’s slingshot. It’s not exactly clear what the tale of David and Goliath means in the context of the film, though. When Tommy Lee Jones tells it as a bedtime story to the young son of single mom Charlize Theron, it seems to be a parable for facing your fear: you can’t defeat a monster, Jones says, unless you meet it in the open and look it in the eye. But since the film takes place against the backdrop of the war in Iraq, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Haggis is making a larger political point—that perhaps in this conflict, the U.S. is the arrogant seemingly undefeatable Goliath, brought low when they should have scored an easy victory.

I don’t get how the two metaphors are supposed to fit together—which may be the first time a Paul Haggis movie didn’t make it crushingly obvious what it wants you to think at every given moment. Elah has not been made with what you’d call a light touch—Mark Isham’s dirgelike score and Roger Deakins’ deliberately washed-out cinematography are always there to remind you of the film’s seriousness of purpose—but for the most part, Haggis simply lets his story, and the effortless gravitas of Jones’ creased face, speak for itself.

The film, smartly, is structured not as a polemic on the war, but as a murder mystery. Jones is Hank Deerfield, a retired military policeman investigating the death of his son Mike, whose dismembered body was found in the New Mexico desert a few days after returning from Iraq. Doggedly following leads, noticing clues and connections that the local cops are too lazy to follow up on, Deerfield eventually must face the uncomfortable truth that Mike came back from combat a different person—that Iraq changed him (and by extension the United States) into a monster.

Haggis’ script is plotted fairly conventionally, complete with a red herring suspect who pops up at the end of the second act and handy witnesses who come forward with helpful information at exactly the moment Deerfield reaches a dead end. (The subplot about Mike’s heat-damaged PDA is a particularly obvious contrivance—the overworked techie Deerfield hires to repair it can only e-mail him the decorrupted video files one by one, and of course each new piece of the jigsaw puzzle falls in place just when Haggis needs it to.)

But I have to admit that Haggis handles these scenes very skillfully—the details of the case are imaginative yet realistic, the texture of life in this small southwestern army town is convincingly evoked, the internal logic of the mystery holds up, and Jones gives a compelling central performance as a man whose military stoicism is his greatest strength, as well as his greatest flaw. Jones is never less than watchable in this movie, even when he’s doing nothing more than making his bed or using the edge of a table to put a crease in his pants or just having his morning shave.

Of course, Haggis then has to go and show Jones cutting himself—and then having his blood drop onto the official letter notifying him of his son’s death. There’s also a recurring image of an upside-down American flag that I didn’t buy for a second. But I suppose Haggis felt he had to throw in at least a couple of those hammer-to-the-head touches. After all, what director wants to disappoint their fans?

Dropping the Boll

“Really? Worst film you ever saw? Well, my next one will be better!” —Johnny Depp as Edward D. Wood Jr. in Ed Wood

In the four short years since the release of House of the Dead, his first film to get wide distribution in North America, German filmmaker Uwe Boll has gained a reputation as the 21st-century Ed Wood—a man who couldn’t direct a good movie if you held a gun to his head (and there are legions of internet film critics out there who’d love to pull the trigger). It’s a label that Boll vehemently rejects: “Ed Wood died poor and had no success!” he once told an interviewer from Wired. Boll, on the other hand, puts together project after project at a pace worthy of his late countryman Rainer Werner Fassbinder—he has six films coming out in the next 18 months alone. The biggest star Ed Wood ever signed was a decrepit, drug-addicted Bela Lugosi, whereas Boll was able to nab Sir Ben Kingsley for a plum supporting role in BloodRayne as Kagan, the king of the vampires. He’s never had a box-office smash, but Boll’s films do well enough on DVD to make him a comfortable living.

But he can’t be happy about the fact that his name is synonymous not with "savvy producer" but "godawful director." He can’t be thrilled to know that, even working in a genre (videogame adaptations) that has produced arguably zero good movies, his work immediately stood out as being particularly incoherent, with especially bad acting, unusually awkward staging and notably terrible dialogue. It must bother him to see four of his films (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and Seed) in the Internet Movie Database’s “Bottom 100” chart of the worst-rated movies of all time. And it’s got to piss a person off when someone buys the www.uweboll.com domain name and uses it to post a short message begging him to quit directing. Right?

“You cannot survive what happened to me without having an ironical sense of humour,” says Boll, who will be hosting a Q&A session called An Evening With Uwe Boll this week at the Edmonton Film Festival. “I know some directors who get depressed after getting only one thumb up from Roeper and Ebert. If you see what happened to me, with thousands of people signing petitions to get me to stop making movies—you’ve got to take it with a sense of humour.”

Boll does seem willing to laugh at himself—in Postal, one of the films he’s bringing with him to the EIFF, he makes a cameo appearance as himself, confessing blithely that he finances his films with Nazi gold and then dying after taking a bullet to his crotch. On the other hand, he doesn’t shy away from writing combative, angry letters to critics who’ve panned his films. He even challenged five of them to each go 10 rounds with him in the boxing ring—the event, dubbed Raging Boll, would be filmed and included as a special feature on the Postal DVD. Boll, a former amateur boxer, beat the snot out of them, and seemed to relish doing so.

I don’t think Boll has any illusions about the quality of his videogame films—he’s just sick of being a target. “Look at movies like Elektra or Ultraviolet,” he says. “Those movies are also not good. But the reviews didn’t get personal. They didn’t say, ‘I hope this is the final nail in his coffin.’ A lot of BloodRayne reviews don’t even say who’s in the movie or what the story is—they just said, ‘Here’s the next piece of shit from Uwe Boll’ and didn’t give the reader any idea what BloodRayne is even about.” Boll stops short of calling it a conspiracy, but he does accuse the IMDb of allowing people to vote on his movies long before they’ve even been screened—in other words, deliberately encouraging people to pile on and keep trashing his films, sight unseen.

Actually, it’s kind of amazing Boll is willing to give any interviews at all. “It’s kind of tiring,” he admits, “to answer the same questions about bad reviews and the boxing match over and over again, especially if you have three movies coming out.”

Fair enough, especially since the two Boll movies that’ll be screening at EIFF suggest he has greater ambitions than doing crappy videogame adaptations. Heart of America, which he made just before House of the Dark, is a serious ensemble drama set on the morning of a Columbine-like school shooting—it’s like Uwe Boll’s version of Elephant. (It should be noted that the only adult who dies in the film is a creative writing teacher who delights in criticizing his students' stories—a prophetic touch?) And Postal is a wild, deliberately offensive Team America-style 9/11 satire that begins with two terrorist pilots arguing in the cockpit over how many virgins they’ll each receive after they crash into the World Trade Center and ends with secret allies George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden holding hands and skipping through a meadow while nuclear missiles rain down upon America.

“It’s important from time to time to take the hammer out of your pocket and really hit it hard,” Boll says about the film’s outrageous content. “Otherwise nobody gets upset. I want people to get upset about it. Even if the mass media think it goes too far, I think people are ready for it.” (They might not be ready for Dave Foley’s full-frontal nude scene, but that’s another issue.)

With Postal and Heart of America, Boll starts to resemble not the new Ed Wood, but a bizarro, Teutonic version of Michael Moore: Heart of America is his Bowling for Columbine, Postal is his Fahrenheit 9/11. He’s even preparing a new film called simply United States of America, about a retiree falling through the social safety net which he says shares the same themes as Sicko.

I ask Boll if these are the films he wants to be remembered by—if they could be said to constitute his legacy. “No,” he replies. “I just enjoy making movies. Sometimes they turn out good, sometimes they turn out bad. I like directors like John Ford, who made 100 movies in his career and who said sometimes you get lucky and make an unbelievably good movie and sometimes you have a piece of shit. It comes how it comes. It’s all about enjoying the process.”

You heard him: 100 Uwe Boll movies. IMDb, watch out!

My Chemical Romance

For no good reason, except to help make up for my lack of fresh posts over the last month, here's my all-time favourite music video: Michel Gondry's characteristically playful and mind-bending clip for The Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be." Enjoy!

Who Watches the Watchers?

What is she thinking? What thoughts are going through the mind of Jackie (Kate Dickie), the central character in Red Road? Pushing 40, with a drab, limp hairdo and a careworn face, but still with a body thin and taut enough to turn heads if she puts her mind to it, she hides herself away at her job, staring at TV screens, monitoring the feeds from various closed-circuit cameras keeping watch over a glum Glasgow neighbourhood. She occasionally allows herself a faint smile at the man who walks his ailing bulldog at the same time every night, or pinches her mouth when she spots a mugging victim and has to call the ambulance, but what is she really thinking?

Why does she meet a married man every couple of weeks for a squalid fuck in the front seat of his van? What happened to the husband and child she makes occasional cryptic references to? Why is she so startled the first time she spots Clyde (Tony Curran) on one of her screens? And why does she begin following him everywhere—not just from behind her security cameras, but in real life, into cafés, into bars, into his building... and eventually into his bedroom?

The answers are slow in coming, but Red Road is no less absorbing because of that. This is the feature debut of Andrea Arnold, a Scottish filmmaker who won an Oscar in 2005 for her gritty short film Wasp. It’s part of yet another experimental film project from Lars von Trier, who seems to believe that nothing frees a director’s creativity more than tying their hands. This one goes by the umbrella title “The Advance Party”—three directors were told to make three separate films, but using the same nine prefabricated characters, all played by the same nine actors.

But despite the film’s somewhat contrived origins, it nevertheless feels like a completely organic character study. I don’t think there’s a single line of expository dialogue in Arnold’s script—we just watch Jackie (the way she watches the figures on her security monitors) as she goes about her business, and only gradually do we come to understand her true relationship to Clyde, and her true mission for following him around so doggedly. At the same time, Arnold leaves some fundamental questions about Jackie tantalizingly unanswered: the closer Jackie gets to him, the more precarious the balance becomes in Kate Dickie’s performance between revulsion and sexual attraction, right up to a frank but exceptionally well-staged climactic sex scene between Jackie and Clyde.

Seldom has the hard, lonely shabbiness of big-city life been captured as heartbreakingly as it has here: Clyde lives in a world of peeling wallpaper, cracked upholstery, vomited-in elevators. (One of his friends doesn’t even bother using a bowl to feed her dog; she just scoops the gunk out of the can and plops it directly onto the kitchen floor.) It’s a world where the grey skies make even the green spaces outdoors look as forbidding as a military bunker. You can practically feel the knife-edge cold of the wind whipping around the corners of all the buildings. And yet the cinematography by Robbie Ryan is bathed in warm colours, rich yellows and blues and browns—a signal to the audience, I think, that he and Arnold aren’t repulsed by these sights and that they don’t want the audience to be either. It’s one of best-looking shot-on-digital films I’ve ever seen, with rich textures and little of the washed-out grain that turned a lot of moviegoers off Miami Vice and Inland Empire.

One of the side benefits of the script’s origins is also that the supporting characters seem to have unusually rich inner lives. The volatile relationship between Clyde’s friends April and Stevie, or even the quick glimpses we get of that guy and his sickly bulldog, all seem worthy of their own films. I don’t know what the other two directors in the “Advance Party” project have planned, but maybe we’ll get them.

Paul Is Back in Your Court

Sorry for the absence of fresh posts over the last three weeks or so, folks. That 3-Day Novel Contest, combined with a busy month at work, really put me behind schedule. (And all I have to show for it are 80 badly plotted and awkwardly written pages.) But hopefully I will make it all up to you: today, you get reviews of Luc Besson's underrated Angel-A and the Bosnian caper comedy The Hunting Party, along with a thick, juicy interview with David Cronenberg, whose work I have admired for years and who was every bit as smart and personable as I had imagined he would be.

And over the next couple of weeks, you'll also be seeing reviews of films from the Edmonton International Film Festival, which is nowhere near as prestigious an event as the Toronto International Film Festival, but which has a pretty strong lineup for a festival of its size, with a lot of promising-looking small pictures too. Plus, Uwe Boll will be coming to town! Should I challenge him to three rounds? Let me know in the comments section!

"You Don't Really Know Cronenberg, Do You?"

When I tell David Cronenberg that his latest film, a crime picture about Russian gangster called Eastern Promises, seems like one of his least obviously “Cronenbergian” projects, he responds with a sly chuckle.

“Ah,” he says playfully, “but you don’t really know Cronenberg, do you?”

Gee, I sure thought I did. Canadian director, right? Did a couple of experimental films in the late ’60s. Made some cash with a string of low-budget but high-impact horror films—They Came From Within, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners. Got noticed in cult-movie circles for his distinctive fixation on disease and other invasions of the body. Started getting access to bigger budgets and bigger actors—James Woods, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum—and with The Dead Zone and The Fly, even found a way to make films for Hollywood studios without compromising his art. If anything, his stuff was more twisted than ever. Earned a new level of critical respectability with Dead Ringers, guiding Jeremy Irons through a virtuoso performance as identical-twin gynecologists undergoing a mutual personality breakdown. Took two “unfilmable” novels and filmed them—Naked Lunch and Crash. Couldn’t get many critics interested in M. Butterfly, eXistenZ or Spider, but came back in a big way with A History of Violence, probably the best-reviewed film of 2005. Now he’s 64, a lion of international cinema, a former Cannes jury foreman, one of English Canada’s “big three” arthouse filmmakers (along with Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin). Renowned for his intellect, but also capable of doing a hilarious two-episode arc on TV’s Alias playing a scatterbrained, “facon”-munching, vegetarian mad scientist. Yeah—David Cronenberg!

I just never figured him for someone who’d make a potboiler about Russian gangsters.

Eastern Promises stars Naomi Watts as Anna, a midwife at a London hospital trying to track down the family of a young pregnant Russian woman who died in her care while delivering her baby. The trail of clues leads her to The Trans-Siberian Restaurant, where she encounters Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the establishment’s owner, whose grandfatherly demeanour conceals his true identity as one of the city’s most ruthless gang bosses; as well as Nikolai (Viggo Mortenson), one of Semyon’s underlings, to whom Anna feels an uneasy attraction even as she fears his capacity for violence.

Like all of Cronenberg’s films, Eastern Promises has a strange, dark, inexorable pull to it. The sets and dialogue feel stylized and slightly artificial, yet there’s a solidity to them all the same—a result, perhaps, of Cronenberg’s palpable intelligence, his magisterial, classical camera style and his distaste for irony. He takes the material seriously. If it feels like only a minor entry in the Cronenberg canon, it’s because—at least upon a first viewing—it lacks the metaphorically rich subtext of his best work. It doesn’t get under your skin. As scripted by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), it’s just a crime picture. An intelligent, very well-made crime picture featuring an engrossing, quietly charismatic performance by Viggo Mortenson (whose spectacular, stark-naked steamroom fight scene is already the stuff of legend), but still just a crime picture.

Nevertheless, there’s something about the film’s rich atmosphere of leather coats, velvet chairs, heavy food, and lugubrious Russian folk songs that has lingered with me long after seeing it. And there’s a late revelation about the full nature of Nikolai’s motives that makes me want to watch the film all over again, paying even more attention this time to the subtleties of Mortenson’s performance.

I talked to David Cronenberg early in September, before Eastern Promises debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, where it would go on to win the People’s Choice Award. Here’s our conversation.

Q: How did this script come to your attention? It wasn’t a project you initiated, was it?

David Cronenberg: No, I think it had been languishing at BBC Films for some time—I believe Steven Knight wrote it before he wrote Dirty Pretty Things, in fact, but it didn’t get made there for internal reasons. I don’t know why. And eventually a clever agent thought, “Hmmm, this is something that David might be interested in.” And it was.

Q: That surprises me a little, because except for maybe all the business with the Russian gang tattoos, the overlap with your work doesn’t leap out of the script.

DC: Well, that’s always the paradox, because people see my movies and they think they know me from that, but they only know what that movie gives them. There’s a thousand movies I would be interested in making if I could live long enough to do it, and a lot of them would not fit into any pattern. Maybe Spielberg does, but I don’t have the ability to do any project at any time—I can’t say, “Oh, now, in the arc of my career, I will do a musical comedy.” First of all, I don’t even think about the arc of my career—I leave that to others. It’s not creatively very profitable, you know? So when I see something that I’m interested in, I’m just interested in it. I don’t think, “Oh, but people won’t expect this from me.” And I don’t seek out material just to surprise people either. So here, I’m reading the script and I’m thinking, “Oh, this is pretty interesting, very good dialogue, good characters.” I see Nikolai and go, “Wow, Viggo could be great in that, I love working with Viggo.” And I also see that it’s a multicultural movie—in London, you have all these subcultures who have to collaborate with each other in their criminal enterprises, but at the same time they’ve brought their ancient hostilities and rivalries with them from their old countries, and I find that interesting as well and very juicy in terms of drama. You get a lot of textures, a lot of languages, a lot of conflicts.

Q: I guess that’s what I’m thinking about when I say that the film has a different feel from a lot of your other work—it feels like it’s taking place in a modern social reality instead of a fantasy world or the real world as seen through a distorted perspective.

DC: But it is stylized, you see. A ritual induction of someone in a restaurant by a bunch of mob bosses while he stands there in his underwear, showing his tattoos—I doubt that’s ever happened. But you believed it, didn’t you?

Q: You’re right—I did believe it!

DC: Right. Now, a lot of the things that are said in that scene, “I died when I was 15, I’ve lived in the Zone ever since,” renouncing your mother and father—all of those things have been said by actual Russian criminals as part of their understanding of what it means to become a thief. It’s accurate in some ways, but compressed and distilled. There’s as much fantasy in this movie as in any of my movies. You invent characters. It’s as much an act of fantasy for me to create Anna, the midwife, as it is to create the bad guys in Videodrome!

Q: To what extent, then, did you immerse yourself into research into how that world operates?

DC: Well, we did a lot of research. We didn’t try to contact criminals or anything like that, but there’s a lot of information out there. Viggo found these books called Russian Criminal Tattoo, which are really stunning books about the Russian prison subculture, which had a big influence on where the script eventually went—the tattoos figured much more prominently in later versions of it. And I read a book called Violent Entrepreneurs, which was a very dry, sociological study of the origins of Russian gangs, but which was very interesting, because a lot of those gangs came from sports teams who had been training for the Olympics and suddenly with the fall of communism, they had no money. So there you are: you’re a karate master or a boxing master and you’ve got a bunch of colleagues who are very disciplined and no strangers to violence, but no money. So what do you do? You become a gang. It was information that didn’t go directly into the script, but it’s a detail that makes you realize that what you’re watching in Russia now is capitalism in its most raw, basic, virulent form. It’s a sociological experiment going on before your very eyes.

Q: I was very taken with the main set of the film, this opulent restaurant. You’re a director who really seems to think a great deal about the textures of your film and creating settings that reflect the nature of the characters and the underlying themes of the script. Could you tell me a little bit about the design of that restaurant?

DC: Well, it’s a fantasy as well. Anna lives a drab, lower-middle-class life in London, and eats that kind of food and lives in that kind of light and has denied her Russian heritage. And suddenly she finds herself in this world that’s full of colours and exotic foods and textures she’d never see in her normal life. And it awakens an interest in her own Russian past. Knowing that’s the structure, that really controls what the restaurant will be like. I wanted it to be more flamboyant than the description in the script. I wanted it to be a transplanted Russia. For me, it’s all about coming up with physical things—sets, costumes, actors—that can provoke abstract thoughts.

Q: What kind of conversations did you have with Mortenson about this role, which in some ways recalls his character in A History of Violence? Do you tend to talk specifics, or do you talk about more abstract, big-picture stuff?

DC: Oh God, the transcript is 800 pages long. We talked for six months before we did it. What watch would he wear, what suit would he wear, what would his hair be like? Viggo has a very directorial understanding of movies, but his focus is primarily on his character, where he comes from, his life from birth to page one of the script. And with Nikolai, all of that is very mysterious. We never really know everything about him, and you never know when he’s lying and when he’s not. But believe me, Viggo knew the meaning of every tattoo on his body.

Q: I’ve obviously got to ask you about his big naked fight scene. Do you have to choreograph a fight scene differently when one of the guys is naked? Not in the sense of having to hide his anatomy from the camera, which you obviously don’t, but do people fight differently when they’re naked?

DC: I think not, at least not in this case. Wherever Nikolai learned to fight, you would have to be prepared to do the same things whether you had boots on or slippers on or no clothes at all. Yes, you’re much more vulnerable when you’re naked, and that’s the point of the scene, but the guys who do that kind of fighting—they say you have to forget about what pain you’re going to suffer. You know you’re going to suffer and you can’t worry about it. If a guy’s got a knife, you have to accept you’re going to get cut and you can’t get distracted by that. Otherwise you’re going to die.

Q: The other scene in the movie I remember most vividly, weirdly, is one I haven’t seen any reviewers mention. It’s the scene where that guy sings “Otchi Chornya” to the customers at the restaurant. It has nothing to do with the plot or any of the main characters, and yet it’s really stuck with me. So I guess my question to you is, am I just nuts for singling it out? Or does that scene mean something to you as well?

DC: It means a lot! And I gave it a lot of screen time. It’s the idea of the old Russia. Those beautiful old ladies in the scene—I had no idea they were going to start singing along, or look at the birthday girl with their hands over their hearts. It’s a very emotional scene, I think. The woman in the scene is 100 years old—think of the things she’s seen, she dates back to czarist days. And of course the music encodes so many political and emotional and national ideas. I love that scene. I wanted it to take its time.

Serb Your Enthusiasm

What is it about Richard Gere—in real life the epitome of almost comical Hollywood earnestness, a man who seemingly still doesn’t realize how ridiculous he looked when he interrupted the 1993 Oscar ceremony to urge the viewing public to help end the Chinese occupation of Tibet by sending psychic messages of love to Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping—that makes him such an appealing and convincing charlatan on the big screen?

Maybe we don’t believe any public figures can possibly be pure anymore, and so seeing Gere bamboozle the jury in Chicago or Primal Fear or hoodwink the entire New York publishing industry in The Hoax is like getting an enjoyable confirmation of our worst suspicions—we’re seeing the cynical manipulator we always knew was lurking behind that crinkly-eyed professional Buddhist we saw turning on the charm on all those talk shows.

Or maybe there’s simply something about playing a hustler that frees Gere up as an actor. As Gere has gotten older, a curious thing has happened: whenever he’s called upon to be sincere—as in Intersection or Autumn in New York or First Knight or Bee Season—the results are famously deadly. But ask him to play someone untrustworthy, someone on the make—the rogue cop in Internal Affairs, or Simon Hunt, the washed-up TV newsman he plays in the new black comedy The Hunting Party—he’s usually the most dynamic figure onscreen.

Hunt used to be a star reporter, famed for his daredevil reports from international trouble spots—the more bullets are flying around his head, the better he liked it. But his career hit the skids after a live on-air meltdown, and now he finds himself in postwar Sarajevo, traveling on his own dime and hoping to make enough money selling whatever footage he can grab to newscasts in Peru and Jamaica to cover the cost of the trip (and all the slivovitz he’ll be drinking along the way).

But when he meets up with Duck (Terrence Howard), his former cameraman, now enjoying a cushy network job, he sees a chance for redemption. He claims to have a lead on the whereabouts of a Serbian general nicknamed “The Fox,” the most wanted war criminal in the entire country. Partly out of loyalty to his old friend, and partly unable to resist a scoop this juicy, Duck agrees to tag along—and, with the son of the network vice-president (Jesse Eisenberg from The Squid and the Whale) in tow, off they head into the hills of Celibici, all the while suspecting that Simon’s plan for capturing The Fox and claiming the $5,000,000 bounty on his head is being improvised as they go along.

Gere is much too fit and handsome to be convincing as a broke, burnt-out alcoholic, but it’s still lots of fun to watch him blithely bluff his way through one life-threatening scenario after another. (And he certainly makes up for Terrence Howard, who wanders through the movie with a sweater tied around his waist, giving the most boring performance of his career. The sweater has more screen presence than Howard does.)

The Hunting Party was written and directed by Richard Shepard (The Matador), who hopes to do for the Bosnian conflict what Three Kings did for the first Iraq war: tell a funny, shaggy caper story that also makes some hard-hitting points about an international tragedy. He based the script, very loosely, on an Esquire article by Scott K. Anderson about a group of journalists who embarked on a half-serious mission to capture the fugitive Radovan Karadzic, encountering a colourful gallery of mercenaries, UN soldiers and NATO officials along the way.

From the opening title card (“Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true”), Shepard attempts to create a rollicking, you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up vibe—but unfortunately, even the film’s craziest real-life details (including a midget gangster and a killer with a sinister tattoo on his forehead and a haunted stare worthy of Vincent Gallo) feel exactly like the kind of thing a Hollywood screenwriter would make up in order to lend his script some extra “punch.” And the film’s prologue, with its freeze-frames, rock score and detached voiceover narration, gets things off on precisely the wrong foot—Shepard seems more interested in aping GoodFellas than giving us the straight dope on Bosnia.

By the way, only the most ridiculous parts of this review are true. Except the crack about Howard’s sweater—that was just a cheap shot.

There's a New Seraph in Town

Like It’s a Wonderful Life, Luc Besson’s Angel-A begins with a man standing on a bridge, about to commit suicide, only to decide against it when someone else dive in first. And, just like in It’s a Wonderful Life, that other person turns out to be angel sent from heaven to teach the man to appreciate the world around him and persuade him that life really is worth living after all. But unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, the angel in question is not an annoyingly dotty old man with a copy of Tom Sawyer in his pocket—it’s a gorgeous, tall, thin blonde woman in a microscope black dress who doesn’t even bother to close her legs when she sits down. This is why I like Luc Besson much more than Frank Capra.

The supermodel Rie Rasmussen plays “Angela”—she’s approximately nine feet tall, about seven feet of which is leg. The disparity in height between Rasmussen and her co-star Jamel Debbouze, who barely comes up to her shoulders, is the film’s main ongoing source of comedy—Besson frequently even stages scenes with Rasmussen standing on the sidewalk while Debbouze remains below her in the gutter just to put another three inches or so between them. But besides her extraordinarily long-limbed body, there’s nothing remotely ethereal about Rasmussen’s performance. Instead, she gives Angela an appealingly earthy quality—she loves dancing in nightclubs, she never stops smoking, she’s always hungry, she loves having men look at her, and she can knock as many as four street thugs unconscious with a single sweep of her fist. She’s a beautiful, otherwordly ass-kicker, like Milla Jovovich in Besson’s The Fifth Element, but with the wardrobe of Anne Parillaud in Besson’s La Femme Nikita.

Angela hasn’t come to earth to fight, however. No, her true mission is to help a small-time con man named André Moussah get his act together—first by helping him raise enough money to repay his debts (he seems to owe cash to half the criminals in Paris), and then by teaching him to love himself. Literally—there’s even a scene where she gets him to stand in front of a bathroom mirror and tell his reflection “I love you.”

Obviously, this is a movie with a sentimental streak as wide as the Champs-Elysées. But you could say that about just about every film about angels—including the supposedly highbrow arthouse fave Wings of Desire, whose central storyline about an angel who falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist is every bit as sappy as anything in Angel-A. And Besson smartly steals Wings of Desire’s idea of shooting the film in gorgeous high-contrast perfume-ad black-and-white, a tactic that does for Paris what Wings of Desire did for Berlin: make every corner of the city look like a magical landscape that it’s easy to imagine angels visiting all the time. (The cinematographer is the wizardly Thierry Arbogast, who also shot The Professional, The Fifth Element and La Femme Nikita, and who also helped Rasmussen look so ravishing in her memorable small role in Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale.)

And Wings of Desire doesn’t have a single scene anywhere near as stunning as the sequence at the end of Angel-A where André, who has fallen in love with Angela, grabs her around her waist as she finally unfurls her wings and desperately attempts to keep her from flying back to heaven. Or as offbeat as the one where Angela tells the embarrassed André that he is actually more female than male—that he actually looks like her on the inside.

It’s too bad Besson never quite makes the magical leap of convincing you that Angela could fall in love with an ineffectual, easily bullied, unshaven pipsqueak like André. Then again, Besson’s nothing special to look at either, and yet he convinced both Anne Parillaud and Milla Jovovich to marry him in real life. The very thing that makes Angel-A seem like such a fable to us might in fact be its most autobiographical element.