Chicks Versus CHUDs

Tomorrow is Halloween, which means it's time to take the gloves off in this week's "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio and recommend something truly frightening: namely, Neil Marshall's subterranean scarefest The Descent. It's enough to put you off spelunking for life! And it'll make you think twice about doing any nighttime blood-swimming either.

Click and enjoy!

Moviegoer Diary: Cockfighter, Crimes of Passion

COCKFIGHTER

Plot In A Nutshell
Monte Hellman’s 1974 “sports” movie about an obsessive cockfighter (Warren Oates) who has made a vow never to speak again until he’s won the “cockfighter of the year” medal — and who alienates many lovers and family members in his quest to do so.

Thoughts
Back in the early ’90s, when Black Lizard was putting out expensive new trade paperback editions of classic hardboiled crime novels from the ’50s and ’60s, my big discovery — bigger even than Jim Thompson, whose novels got most of the attention in the series — was Charles Willeford.

Willeford is probably best known these days for the book Miami Blues, which got turned into a terrific, twisted movie in 1990 starring Alec Baldwin, Fred Ward, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. That’s a terrific novel, but everything I’ve read of Willeford’s has been just as good — Sideswipe is a clever mystery also featuring Hoke Moseley, the character Fred Ward plays in Miami Blues; The Burnt Orange Heresy is a sharp little satire of the art world; The Woman Chaser is an absolutely sensational sociopathic character study that’s as good as anything Jim Thompson ever wrote, and which was made into a movie in 1999 starring Patrick Warburton that I’m absolutely dying to see, even though it's apparently unavailable in any format.

I read Cockfighter about 15 years ago, under unbelievably uncomfortable conditions. I had lined up to get a space in the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival, which is an absolutely enormous annual theatre event, the largest of its kind in North America. The race to get a space in the Fringe is extremely competitive — there are approximately three times more applicants than the Fringe has room for — and nowadays they assign the spaces via a lottery. But back then, the only way to get in (the festival is unjuried) was to line up, and things got to the point where people would start lining up more than three days in advance. Outdoors. In Edmonton, Alberta. In January.

I was camped out there too with nothing but a sleeping bag and copy of Cockfighter to keep me warm. Hell, it kept my mind off the dangerous numbness encroaching upon my feet.

But I didn’t realize that a movie version of Cockfighter — with a screenplay by Willeford himself — even existed until a few years ago. That was around the same time that I finally became aware of the greatness of Warren Oates after watching Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Two Lane Blacktop in quick succession, and I’ve been meaning to track down a copy of Cockfighter ever since.

The film is mildly disappointing, but only because I’d built it up in my head as the greatest movie ever made. (Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton playing rival cockfighters? How could that not be awesome?)

Frank Mansfield, the cockfighter whose hotheadedness constantly keeps him from achieving greatness, is a great role for Oates on paper, but I couldn’t help but feel there’s something missing in his performance. Maybe it’s just that Frank’s self-enforced muteness feels like too much of a writerly conceit, or maybe it’s the way the role forces Oates into more of a reactive mode when he’s much better yakking away and pushing scenes forward. Still, he’s never less than convincing as a guy who’s spent his entire life around chickens — that’s really him there in the pit, rushing in to help separate the two fighters whenever one of them digs its spur too deep into its opponent. (I’d be curious to know how these scenes were staged; they look gruesomely realistic. What’s the SPCA’s stance on this movie?)

Director Monte Hellman gives the film a vivid, documentary-like sense of place. I love the sense you get of how even this disreputable, under-the-radar “sport” still clings to the trappings of legitimacy —the cockfighters in the climactic championship tournament all wear their best suits into the pit, even if they’re white and will surely be ruined if they get blood on them, and even if they don’t own any dress shoes and have to wear sneakers instead. (An incredibly young Ed Begley Jr. — Ed Begley Jr.! — turns up as one of Oates’ opponents, a gangly, towheaded yokel in a pair of overalls who tearfully attacks Oates when Oates’ chicken kills his prize rooster.)

As I recall, Willeford’s book does a better job of conveying the relationship between the trainer and his chickens, the intimate knowledge of their cocks’ strengths and weaknesses, and the pain they feel when they inevitably get killed — not to mention plenty of fascinating details about the cockfighting underworld. But Cockfighter is a pretty tangy, gamy film all the same — enough to make you wish that cockfighting movies were an actual genre, much like boxing flicks. Wouldn’t Million Dollar Baby have been so much better if the Hilary Swank part had been played by a battlewise Whitehackle?

RATING: 4/5

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CRIMES OF PASSION

Plot In A Nutshell
Ken Russell’s loony 1984 erotic thriller starring Kathleen Turner as a sportswear designer who leads a secret life as a hooker named “China Blue,” John Laughlin who sees her as a tantalizing alternative to his frigid wife, and Anthony Perkins as a crazed, dildo-wielding priest who can’t decide whether to “save” China Blue or kill her.

Thoughts
Man oh man, where to start with this one? Maybe with the observation that one of the nice things about “reviewing” movies more than 20 years after they came out is that you can find yourself recommending films that you would have felt obligated to give a big thumbs-down to if you were writing about them as, say, a critic at a daily paper.

Take Crimes of Passion, for instance, which is by all objective standards a terrible movie: overheated, pretentious, ridiculously plotted, full of performances that are either wooden (whatever happened to you, John Laughlin?) or hilariously overwrought (God bless you, Anthony Perkins).

But I can’t deny that I was totally entertained by it, and not just in a condescending, so-bad-it’s-good way. Underneath all the campy dialogue (my favourite: Kathleen Turner saying, “I never forget a face... especially if I’ve sat on it!”), Ken Russell is wrestling with some genuinely interesting themes — there’s a bedroom conversation between Laughlin and his wife (Annie Potts), where he tries to explain that he wants her to feel sexually fulfilled too, that’s unlike any husband-and-wife scene I can think of in recent American movies. And Turner’s deliberately artificial performance is kind of fascinating, too — a succession of sex-doll pantomimes that nevertheless hint at the real woman hiding underneath the mask.

Don’t get me wrong: the movie is completely ridiculous. (Hey, I just thought of another great Kathleen Turner line: when she dresses up as a stewardess for Laughlin and delivers a mock pre-flight speech that concludes, “Remember: even though we may run out of Pan-Am coffee, we’ll never run out of T.W.A. tea!”) But as it thrashes ridiculously around under its neon lights on its purple satin sheets, it winds up in places that saner movies never dare to go. I wonder if Kathleen Turner is proud of this film — it’s so tawdry and she has to do so many embarrassing things in it (her first scene shows her wearing a sash and sceptre and delivering a Miss America acceptance speech while a client eats her out), but it’s also kind of a great role. She gets to be funny, sexy, vulnerable, powerful... and she looks pretty amazing in that blonde China Blue wig and that baby-blue satin dress. I’ve been looking at Turner’s IMDb page and she hasn’t had a role to compare with it in years (unless you count the title role in Monster House).

Stray Observation #1: There’s a great time-capsule moment in an early scene where Potts complains to Laughlin about how she wishes he made more money — she enviously mentions a friend whose husband bought her one of those newfangled VCR machines. It only cost him $1,000!

Stray Observation #2: Was Stanley Kubrick influenced by Crimes of Passion when he made Eyes Wide Shut? The final lines of the two movies are very similar.

Stray Observation #3: Judging from this Siskel & Ebert clip, Crimes of Passion came out the same week as Brian De Palma’s Body Double. It was a golden age for erotic thrillers!



RATING: oh, let's be generous and say 3/5

The Musicgoer: Parts & Labor's Receivers

PARTS & LABOR
Receivers
(Jagjaguwar)
**** (out of 5)

Lyrics are not the strength of Brooklyn noise-rockers Parts & Labor; the eight tracks on their new disc Receivers are peppered with muddled, eye-crossing images (“Our lungs will slowly speak the slightest sound,” they say on “Wedding in a Wasteland” — why lungs? Why “slowly”?) syntactical gibberish (“Do they know their procreation self-exterminates their ways?” they ask on “Little Ones”), and fancy words that they seem too unfamiliar with to use properly (as in the moment on “Solemn Show World” where they mispronounce “detritus”).

The anal-retentive killjoy copy editor in me was all set to dock them some points, but then I gave the album opener “Satellites” another listen, all seven glorious minutes of it, and somehow the combination of inventive, anthemic melodies, the towering wall of guitars, keyboards, and tight vocal harmonies, and the final varnish of random static seemed too thrilling to be spoiled by a few pretentious mixed metaphors. This is music that fills every corner of the room, played by musicians who sound as if they’re at least seven feet tall. When you’re that big, pretension probably comes naturally to you.

Let's Cut To The Chase

I wrote about Tell No One in a short "Moviegoer Diary" entry earlier this summer, but now that the film is finally arriving in Edmonton theatres this weekend (I originally saw it on DVD), I was forced to come up with a longer, better-written assessment of the film for my review in SEE Magazine. I was always a little unhappy with the tossed-off quality of that original mini-review, and hopefully I can rectify the situation somewhat with the expanded version that follows...

* * * * *

Tell No One is a thriller, and about halfway through, there’s a chase scene. So what else is new, right? Except this chase scene is so good, so immediate, so unusually plausible and creates such a convincing sense that its protagonist is actually in real physical danger that I’m prepared to recommend the entire film on the basis of this 10-minute sequence alone.

Here’s what leads up to that chase. Eight years ago, French pediatrician Alex Beck (François Cluzet, who’s perhaps best known in North America for playing the young French jazz fan who befriends Dexter Gordon in Round Midnight) was the prime suspect in the murder of his wife Margot. They were enjoying a late-night swim when an unseen assailant knocked out Alex and killed Margot. Something about the incident never quite added up for the cops — who dragged Alex’s unconscious body onto a raft? And why? — and even today, with the case still unsolved, they regard Alex with suspicion.

So naturally, when two new bodies are found in the same place where Margot was killed, the cops once again start sniffing around Alex. They even find some incriminating evidence in his home. And when they come by his hospital to arrest him, he does what any good hero of a Hitchcockian thriller would do: he bolts.

And so begins the chase scene. Seriously, you’ve got to check it out. It’s exciting because, even though Alex is in good shape and a speedy runner, he’s no action hero. He’s a guy in his work clothes fleeing the police in a blind, clumsy panic, with no thought in his head except putting some distance between himself and the cops chasing him. Never once in the entire sequence do you spot the telltale hand of a stunt choreographer devising nifty little “gags” along the way, not even when Alex finally ditches his pursuers by crossing a busy highway, gingerly making his way from lane to lane as the cars whizz past him at terrifying speeds. No CGI, no tricky editing, no bullshit outbursts of parkour; you genuinely feel like Cluzet is inches away from getting clipped by a rear view mirror at any second. My hat goes off to Cluzet, Canet, editor Hervé de Luze, and what must have been a small squadron of highly trained drivers.

That sense of matter-of-fact realism extends throughout the rest of the film as well. It’s kind of startling to see a movie in which the director doesn’t amplify the sound of punches. There’s one scene, for instance, in which a woman gets brutally beaten — we don’t see her face, but the dull, smacking sounds of fists hitting her flesh seem even more gruesome because they’re so prosaic.

I just wish the actual stuff in the movie — you know, the plot, the needlessly confusing plot — weren't so ho-hum. The first half of Tell No One is filled with tantalizing mysteries — including a series of videos that someone is e-mailing to Alex that seem to suggest that Margot isn’t dead after all — but the second half is given over to long expository speeches explaining what was really going on the whole time... and what was really going on is a lot duller than you’d think.

But the mechanics of movie plots have a way of quickly fading from your memory, while glorious sequences have a way of staying there forever. Tell No One feels like a mild disappointment as you walk out of the theatre, but five years from now, you’ll still be savouring the recollection of that foot chase across the crowded highway. And your pulse will pound just a little bit harder.

Mike Leigh, Anti-Miserabilist

Well, this was a thrill: I got to interview Mike Leigh last week about his new film Happy-Go-Lucky. It was a thrill for many reasons, the main ones being that there are few directors who I respect more than Leigh and I think Happy-Go-Lucky is one of his very best film; and that Leigh turned out to be a great interviewee — thoughtful, articulate, and prickly in the best way. Here's the Q&A article I wrote up from the interview for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton. You can read my review of the film in the post below this one.

* * * * *

A Mike Leigh movie called Happy-Go-Lucky? Isn’t that an oxymoron — like a Tim Burton movie called Sunny Days and Rainbows or a David Lynch movie called The Man With the Linear Plot?

For nearly 40 years, Mike Leigh has earned a reputation — a reputation whose truth he would dispute, but we’ll get to that later — for making movies that present a singularly bleak vision of London working-class life. Indeed, the title of his feature debut, 1971’s Bleak Moments, could have applied to any number of later films in his oeuvre, from 1993’s slice-of-life character study Naked to 1996’s melodrama Secrets and Lies to 2004’s abortion drama Vera Drake.

But to simply write Leigh off as an unrelieved gloom merchant would require ignoring the abundant humour that he weaves through all of his films. Okay, maybe not Vera Drake — boy, was that ever a downer — but certainly there’s plenty to laugh at in David Thewlis’ pitch-black witticisms in Naked, in Brenda Blethyn’s endearingly gauche attempts to reunite with the now-grown child she gave up for adoption in Secrets and Lies, in Timothy Spall’s stomach-turning notion of gourmet food in Life Is Sweet, and in the dozens of sardonically observed performances and unpredictable human interactions that form the texture of every scene Leigh's ever filmed.

Still, Happy-Go-Lucky is unique in Leigh’s filmography in that it centres around a character — the always-cheerful Poppy Cross (Sally Hawkins) who actually enjoys life, whose characteristic expression is a smile instead of a pinched frown. Like all of Leigh’s films, Happy-Go-Lucky was made without a script; instead, the characters and the dialogue were developed during an intensive, months-long improvisational period. Leigh has always been cagey in interviews about exactly what this process entails and how he goes about transforming these exercises into a film, but by all accounts it’s a demanding undertaking — the actors are forbidden to take on any other acting assignments while it’s going on; they aren’t allowed to know anything that happens in any scenes that don’t involve them; and they’re expected to develop detailed backstories for their characters, no matter how minor the part.

It all sounds a little excessive, but there’s no denying the quality of the results: it’s hard to think of another director working today whose films are of as consistently high quality as Mike Leigh, and Happy-Go-Lucky is one of his very best. I spoke with Leigh last week by telephone.

Q: If someone were to say that Happy-Go-Lucky is more “upbeat” or “positive” than a typical Mike Leigh film, to what extent would that be a misreading of the movie, or of your previous work?

Mike Leigh: Well, it would be a misreading. All of my films deal with the joy and the pain of living: warmth and passion and love and always there right alongside the painful underside of life. And those things are all there in Happy-Go-Lucky as well! And I would also say that every time I make a film, it’s quite different from all the others. Naked was quite different from High Hopes and Life Is Sweet, Secrets and Lies was different from Naked, and Topsy-Turvy [Leigh’s film about the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado] was as different from all of those as anything could be! Each film has its own agenda and its own spirit. With Happy-Go-Lucky, I wanted to make what I call an “anti-miserabilist” film — a film about someone who’s naturally positive.

Q: Was that the starting point for this film? Your whole process is very mysterious and shrouded in secrecy.

ML: And so it will continue to be! But suffice it to say that it is a complex and elaborate investigation that goes on to arrive at these films. I started, really, with an idea of the spirit or the feeling of the thing, and that was allied to the decision to make a film with Sally Hawkins, who was in my two previous films and who I got to know very well and who is immensely talented. That sort of kickstarted the whole project.

Q: One of the fascinating things about her characterization of Poppy is that the happiness that she embodies is not a happiness that relies on ignoring the world around her. In fact, she’s an almost unusually perceptive person.

ML: Yes. There was a not very bright review in one of the American papers the other day that said she “never grew up,” which is a deeply stupid thing to say, because she’s very perceptive and grown-up and aware and serious and committed and nurturing. But she’s also got an ebullient sense of humour and a healthy sense of anarchy and a great sense of fun.

Q: She works as a teacher, but it seems important to note that she’s also a student — she takes driving lessons, she takes flamenco lessons. Could you talk a little about that aspect of her character?

ML: Well, the whole theme of teaching and learning is something that’s always preoccupied me — as a schoolchild, as a student, as a teacher myself, and not least as a parent. But it’s not just about teaching and learning, is it? It’s about an approach to life; Poppy’s a good teacher not least because her antennae are up, her eyes and ears are open.

Q: I don’t know if this is a reaction you anticipated, but there’s always the risk with a character who’s so upbeat that some viewers are just going to find her simply annoying.

ML: That reaction has come up, but it’s one I find simply mystifying and certainly depressing. I fail to see how anyone could do anything at the end of film but love her. It seems to me that she is an extremely positive and warm and attractive personality, and it seems cynical in the extreme to feel that there must be something wrong with her, or she must be hiding something, or be in denial of something. Poppy’s not some kind of fantastical or phantasmagorical creation, either; there are plenty of people in the world who really are positive, who roll up their sleeves, look at life in the eye, and don’t let life get on top of them or lose their sense of proportion or their sense of humour.

Q: Is there anything that could happen to Poppy, do you think, that would be so awful or so tragic that it would cause her to lose her positive attitude?

ML: Sure! Sure! She could be involved in a serious accident and become brain-damaged or lose her limbs or something. She’s not a fantasy invention. But I also know people who’s had that sort of thing happen to them and who remain indomitable. I think it would take a hell of a lot for Poppy to be defeated by it.

Q: Tell me about working with Sally Hawkins. Are there certain types of roles that you like to give her? Do you see her in a certain way that’s different from other directors?

ML: Well, the short answer to that question is that there’s nothing she can’t do. And she has indeed done all sorts of other characters in films with other directors — if you look at her in Layer Cake and the television adaptation she did of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, she really spans the spectrum there. Working with Sally Hawkins is an endlessly delightful, rich, stimulating, fun, hard-working, pleasant, funny experience. She’s great.

Q: “Hard-working” seems like the key adjective there. Everything I’ve read suggests that you really do require a tremendous level of commitment from your actors.

ML: Oh yes. It’s no breeze working for me. You can’t just phone it in. Sally was working on the film for nine months. It was a hard slog.

Q: This may sound like a sappy question, but did you learn anything about yourself from working on this film? I know that I came out of it thinking I could learn something from Poppy’s approach to life, and I was wondering if there was something therapeutic about spending so much time with her.

ML: I guess so. That’s a difficult one. By definition, I learn from everything I work on. I will say that the film doesn’t mean anything until it gets in front of audiences. And for the last four or five weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of question-and-answer sessions with audiences, and that’s a process that helps you learn about your work and how you’re doing as an artist. I define and discover what I’ve been doing as I answer their questions, so I suppose you could say I’m learning about myself in that respect. But I can’t say that as a result of this film, I’m now a completely reformed person.

Q: Is there any kind of political message in the film?

ML: Well, certainly, all my films are implicitly and inherently political, and this one is no exception. By my nature, I look at how we live our lives and all my films are rooted in the real world, etc., etc. However, I hope I’ve never made a film where you come out with a very clear single political message. I want people to come away from them with discussions to have and ideas to argue about. Happy-Go-Lucky is about how we deal with life. If you look at Scott, the driving instructor, and his undigested, ill-conceived, reactionary, racist, homophobic views of the world and you pitch those against Poppy’s spirit and her commitment to different values, you’re looking at the tension between left and right, really, aren’t you?

Q: Do you have any plans in place for your next film? Will the next one be completely miserable and depressing?

ML: If I was clear about what I was going to do next, I wouldn’t discuss it with anybody — least of all you! [Laughs.] At the moment, the battle is to get money for another film, and that’s quite a serious battle. The current economic climate doesn’t make backers any more keen to part with money for movies — especially movies where the filmmaker won’t discuss casting or what it’s about or anything else.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

The heroine of Mike Leigh’s damn-near-perfect new film Happy-Go-Lucky is named Pauline Cross, but she’s the kind of woman who encourages everyone to call her “Poppy.” She’s also the kind of woman who takes trampoline lessons after work, and when she throws out her back, she’s the kind of woman who laughs helplessly all the way through her appointment with her chiropractor. “I can’t help it!” she says, only half-apologetically, to the doctor as he manipulates her spine. “It makes me laugh!” She’s the kind of woman who finds even pain hilarious.

Here’s a list of things that Poppy isn’t. She isn’t an overgrown child — while her ebullient personality makes her well-suited to her career as a primary school teacher, she’s very good at her job and when she sees one of her students being bullied, she’s smart enough to realize that the bully is the one who needs the social worker to talk to him. She has a healthy social life — she goes out dancing and drinking with her friends every weekend, and has a great, fun relationship with her boyfriend, who seems exactly on her wavelength.

And most importantly, she’s not someone whose relentless optimism depends on her shutting out the rest of the world or ignoring the unhappier aspects of life. In fact, Poppy may be the most perceptive person in the entire movie, the most receptive to new experiences, and the most willing to approach unhappy people on their own terms. In one breathtaking sequence, Poppy meets a mentally disturbed homeless man (Stanley Townsend) and even though he can only communicate in half-mumbled gibberish, she establishes a brief moment of connection (or at least empathy) with him before he wanders off again into the darkness.

That may sound like a sentimental idea for a scene, and Poppy may sound like an unbearable idea for a character, but this being a film by Mike Leigh, every moment, even character —no matter how fleetingly glimpsed — is grounded in reality. There’s a real sense of danger in Poppy’s encounter with that tramp, and there’s a real sense of hard-won bravery to Poppy’s ability to find joy in every moment of her life. Leigh tests Poppy’s optimism again and again throughout the film, and by the final scene, chattering merrily away as she rows down the Thames with her flatmate Zoe, her happiness seems not delusional or irritating but triumphant and even inspiring.

This performance is a triumph as well for Sally Hawkins, who also appeared in Leigh’s previous two films, Vera Drake and All or Nothing, and who is utterly, utterly winning as Poppy. I can certainly imagine some moviegoers finding Poppy a major annoyance, but I’m not sure I’d want to be friends with them. I never once caught Hawkins mugging for the camera or consciously wooing the audience, encouraging us to find her lovable, and yet she’s effortlessly lovable all the same, a sprite in bright lace stockings and worn-out high-heeled boots. You get the sense that Poppy couldn’t turn off her bubbly personality even if she wanted to. The constant stream of wisecracks and giggles aren’t an act; they come as naturally to her as the beating of her heart.

Hawkins isn’t the only actor doing excellent work here — Karina Fernandez is terrific as a flamenco teacher, and Eddie Marsan is absolutely tremendous as Poppy’s foil, a martinet driving instructor whose worldview is so clouded by bitterness and anger it’s a wonder he can even see out the windshield — but she’s its guiding spirit, and the screen seems to shine a little brighter whenever she’s on camera. Mike Leigh’s characters have always all felt real enough to walk right off the screen and into your life; Poppy is the first one I wish would actually do so.

Moviegoer Diary: Bright Lights, Big City; Transsiberian

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

Plot In A Nutshell
James Bridges’ 1988 film version of Jay McInerney’s quintessential ’80s novel, about Jamie Conway (Michael J. Fox), a young fact-checker at a New Yorker-like magazine who resorts to long nights of drinking, clubbing, and coke-sniffing to salve the pain of his failed marriage and his mother’s death.

Thoughts
The things Jay McInerney likes about this movie (which he wrote the screenplay for) and the things I like about it appear to be completely different. McInerney, it turns out, thinks the movie’s strength is its symbolism. On the DVD commentary and the extra features, he takes pride in pointing out how the final scene, in which Michael J. Fox, having made a vow to fix his ruined life, trades his sunglasses for a loaf of bread is a “communion metaphor.” And as if we couldn’t pick up on it for ourselves, he explains how the “coma baby,” whose story Fox follows throughout the film in the pages of the New York Post, is supposed to represent Fox’s character — that’s why, in the ill-advised dream sequence in which Fox converses with the coma baby, the baby speaks with Fox’s voice.

Myself, I like the film for its time capsule qualities. As someone who works at a weekly newspaper, the behind-the-scenes details of life at The New Yorker, especially in the days before the internet, are richly fascinating. How did they do it without computers? It’s beyond comprehension to me. I also loved the shot of Fox at home in his apartment sitting down to write a short story on a gigantic IBM Selectric typewriter, or of Kiefer Sutherland, playing Fox’s hard-partying ad-executive frenemy Tad Allagash, actually examining a slide. A slide! Holding it up to the light and everything! And yet, because it was shot by Gordon Willis and designed by Santo Loquasto (two of Woody Allen’s favourite collaborators), the film itself doesn’t look dated — the colours don’t have that gaudy brightness that characterized so many “pop” movies from the ’80s.

The music is a little dated, but pleasantly so. When Fox shows up drunk at a fashion show where his ex-wife is one of the models, there’s a great song playing underneath — it’s called “Ice Cream Days,” it’s by someone named Jennifer Hall, and it’s one of those great ’80s ballads, full of synths and artificial drums, with a similarly yearning, heartbroken quality as Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love.” I was very vexed to discover that this song has apparently vanished off the face of the earth — if anyone can supply me with an MP3, I’d be forever grateful.

The movie also has a great cast, and while I was a little dismissive of McInerney earlier, it bears mentioning that he gives all of the actors (except for Swoosie Kurtz) terrific material. Frances Sternhagen takes what could have been a two-dimensional character — Fox’s schoolmarmish boss in the fact-checking department — and conveys some genuine sadness at having to fire him. Dianne Wiest plays Fox’s dying mother in flashbacks, William Hickey plays a creepy Central Park coke dealer who also tries selling Fox a ferret (could Hickey have been the inspiration for David Letterman’s “Wanna buy a monkey?” character in Cabin Boy?), and the awesome-but-uncredited Jason Robards has two great scenes as a deeply sozzled veteran writer who rambles on to anyone who’ll listen about being friends with Bunny Wilson and Theodore Dreiser.

That said, as a Canadian, my greatest affection for this movie is seeing Michael J. Fox and Kiefer Sutherland both looking so young, two nice Canadian boys wandering lost through the nighttime streets of Manhattan. And yet somehow you know they’ll get home okay.

RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *
TRANSSIBERIAN

Plot In A Nutshell
Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer play a husband and wife traveling by train from Beijing to Moscow, and who run afoul of a Russian cop (Ben Kingsley) after unwittingly befriending a pair of drug smugglers in Brad Anderson’s 2008 thriller.

Thoughts
All of Brad Anderson’s films (which include everything from the indie romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland to the horror film Session 9 to the grim psychological thriller The Machinist) seem generally well-regarded, but does he have any actual fans? Is there a Brad Anderson cult out there of any size at all? It's just not fair, dammit!

Even though Transsiberian is an above-average thriller with some well-rounded characters, a nice sense of place, and a decently worked-out screenplay, it’s not likely to raise Anderson’s profile any. It’s “better than you’d expect” without being particularly distinctive. I see from his IMDb page that Anderson has already directed episodes of The Shield, The Wire, and Fear Itself, and cable TV seems like a natural home for a director like him. I’d love to see him become one of those anonymous but highly paid “cable auteurs” like Alan Taylor, Allen Coulter, Daniel Attias, Rodrigo Garcia, Alan Poul, Ed Bianchi, John Patterson, Timothy Van Patten, Daniel Minahan, and Steve Shill. I like Transsiberian, but I liked his Shield episodes a whole lot more.

RATING: 3.5/5

The Spookiest Furniture Material Known To Man!

As Halloween draws closer, my "Hidden Gems" CBC Radio segments get spookier and spookier. This week, I recommend the original 1973 version of The Wicker Man... and wind up sort of recommending the hilarious 2006 remake with Nicolas Cage as well. How'd it get burned, blog readers? How'd it get burned? HOW'D IT GET BURNED?!?!?

Seth And Silent Bob Make A Porno Comedy

Kevin Smith’s movies may not have a lot of artistry — to update an old review of Chasing Amy, he’s now directed eight feature films without ever losing his amateur status — but they do have tremendous faith in art. The most appealing aspect of Smith’s career has always been the way this overweight minimum-wage slave from New Jersey, without any Hollywood connections, managed to film his way out of poverty and obscurity on the strength of nothing but gumption, self-confidence, and a tremendous flair for dick jokes.

It’s tempting, then, to look at Smith’s latest comedy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, as a kind of disguised autobiography. Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are two lifelong platonic friends sharing a shabby apartment in snowbound Minnesota. They’re behind on their electricity bill and even further behind on their rent, and they have no idea where to get enough money in time to keep their landlord from kicking them out onto the street. But when a surreptitious cellphone video of Miri in her “granny panties” becomes a surprise YouTube hit, Zack has a brainstorm: make a quickie porn video, sell it over the internet, and eliminate their debt in one fell (albeit very moist and sticky) swoop. It’s an extreme strategy, but as a business model, it’s a lot more practical than Clerks ever was — as Zack notes, the sales from their old high school classmates alone will probably push them into the profit zone.

Does a comedy need to be plausible in order to be funny? Not necessarily, but in the case of Zack and Miri, it sure doesn’t help matters that almost every element of the plot rings false. Or at least it did to me: for instance, I never believed that Zack and Miri could have lived together and gone out to bars together this long without once hooking up — or apparently even considering the idea. The entire script turns on about the urgency with which Zack and Miri need to make money, but the timeline is never clear — how many days or weeks do Zack and Miri have to come up with the rent money? It seems as though, even if their porn movie is a success, there’s no way the money would arrive in time. The supporting characters — especially the one played by Craig Robinson (Darryl, the warehouse guy from The Office) — are completely incoherent. These are the kinds of things that don’t bother you if a movie’s working, but which you can’t help dwelling on when it’s not.

Smith comes up with a few nice details (e.g., the boom mic that’s actually a repurposed hockey stick), and the scene where Zack and Miri realize how much they love each other right in the middle of filming their first sex scene together is nicely handled. But his script contains way too many lazy, hacky gags that really need to be retired from movie comedies altogether: the “bad audition” montage; the “cast members busting out silly dance moves” montage; the “accidental internet stardom” plot device; the use of a lovers’ miscommunication to manufacture an artificial crisis as the movie enters its home stretch. That last cliché is particularly infuriating — it’s as if Smith has no idea what to do with these two characters once they’ve actually slept together, and so, in a panic, comes up with a screenwriting contrivance that will keep them apart for the rest of the movie.

With its mixture of explicit sexual humour (including a spectacularly disgusting gag that illustrates the importance of choosing a safe camera position when you’re filming an anal scene) and heartwarming romance, Zack and Miri is very much in line with the recent run of Judd Apatow comedies like Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But even by Apatow standards, the tone of Zack and Miri is wildly inconsistent — even as the plot is utterly predictable. What was it that Maude Lebowski said about Logjammin’, the porn movie in The Big Lebowski? “The story is ludicrous. You can imagine where it goes from here.”

The Musicgoer: Lucinda Williams' Little Honey

LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Little Honey
(Lost Highway)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

Not even the fact that two of the 13 songs have “Tears” in the title can hide the fact that Little Honey is one of the most upbeat records Lucinda Williams has ever recorded — and the rip-roaring opening track “Real Love” sounds all the more striking coming after the wallow in misery that was last year’s West. Why, Williams even covers an AC/DC song on this one (a slightly awkward version of “It’s a Long Way to the Top”)!

Not that the album doesn’t have its poignant moments — the ballad “If Wishes Were Horses” suits Williams’ bruised-and-battered voice to a T, and there’s a nearly nine-minute track called “Rarity” on which Williams begs a too-pure-for-this-world rock singer not to be seduced by the record industry. But I got the biggest kick out of hearing Williams whoop it up on a shameless track like “Honey Bee,” singing about getting her lover’s “sweetness” all up in her air and his “honey” all over her tummy. I’m not sure about this, but I think she might be singing about semen.

Moviegoer Diary: Sex and the City, Snow Angels

SEX AND THE CITY

Plot In A Nutshell
Big-screen continuation of the HBO series about the never-ending romantic travails of New York writer Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her three cosmo-sipping friends.

Thoughts
I’ve caught the occasional episode of the Sex and the City TV series, but the bulk of my exposure to it came one summer when my sister Kate was living with me and was renting a bunch of the DVDs from past seasons. I think it’s probably fair to say she was a fan of the show without taking it too seriously, and I kind of got into the show too — although watching the episode in which Kim Cattrall’s Samantha debated what to about her new boyfriend’s “weird-tasting spunk” with my kid sister on the couch was a pretty mortifying experience. (My sister was teaching English at a New England prep school at the time, and according to her, her female students couldn’t get enough of Sex and the City. I hope I don’t sound too parochial or paternalistic when I say it saddens me a little to think of 14- and 15-year-old girls having their sexual imaginations shaped by Candace Bushnell.)

Anyhow, I never watched the show regularly again, and so I never developed the kind of stake in these characters that I probably would have needed for the Sex and the City movie to mean anything to me. I’m still really unclear on what the whole push-pull-push-pull deal is with Mr. Big, and what meaning this guy has for Carrie.

And it didn’t help any that the first 30-45 minutes of this movie are as terrible as they are. I think I pretty much checked out of this film emotionally when I realized that the film had only been going on for half an hour and already we’d had two montages of Carrie trying on clothes.

Sarah Jessica Parker’s facile narration had always been an irritant on the TV episodes — I’ve never been clear on whether the character is supposed to be a good writer or a terrible one — but writer/director Michael Patrick King relies on voiceover to a truly embarrassing degree in this movie. I do not understand why audiences don’t get more annoyed by movies like this one, that act as though they can’t be trusted to pick up on the most elementary plot point on their own. There’s a scene midway through the film that’s a prime offender: Carrie and her friends are on vacation in Mexico — she’s depressed after Big has jilted her at the altar, and she asks Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is she’ll ever laugh again. “You will,” Miranda assures her, “when something is really funny.” Sure enough, a few scenes later, uptight Charlotte (Kristin Davis) accidentally gets a mouthful of Mexican water in the shower and winds up pooping her pants in front of her friends. Everyone finds this hilarious, and the camera lingers on Carrie as she enjoys her first good laugh in days — whereupon her voice pops up on the soundtrack to underline the meaning of the moment by saying, “Miranda was right! I did laugh again... when something was really funny.” (Parker's "uncontrollable" bout of laughter looks completely fake, by the way.)

I didn’t laugh much at Sex and the City. I couldn't even fake it. Honestly, I was mostly just mortified by it — at its blind worship of consumer objects, at the insulting glorified-servant role King created for Jennifer Hudson, at the near-total absence of sex in a movie called Sex and the City, at the way King barely seems to notice how shrill and unappealing these four characters are. (The most soulful performances in the film are from the men — I especially liked David Eigenberg’s marblemouthed line deliveries as Miranda’s downtrodden husband Steve and the underused Evan Handler as Charlotte’s adoring husband Harry.)

It’s not really fair to penalize a glossy New York fantasy like Sex and the City for being out of touch, but it’s amazing how the current world economic crisis has made this ultra-materialistic, designer label-fixated movie seem dated already, less than five months after it appeared in theatres. I wonder: will the people who liked the film feel any differently about it when they pop in the DVD and watch it again? Or will they even be able to afford the DVD in the first place?

RATING: 1.5/5

* * * * *

SNOW ANGELS

Plot In A Nutshell
David Gordon Green’s ensemble drama about troubled marriages in a wintry small town, focusing on an estranged couple (Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale) who are still working through the tragedies of the past when a fresh tragedy befalls them, and a pair of teenaged classmates (Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby) who are slowly falling in love.

Thoughts
One of the things I like best about David Gordon Green’s movies is how naturally they flow, and how it’s so pleasant just hanging out with his characters and wandering with them as they explore their surroundings that you’re barely aware a plot is even unfolding at the same time.

And so, I was surprised by how actively I resisted the final third of Snow Angels — Sam Rockwell is such an appealing actor, and his character (despite clearly being a hopeless fuckup) is making such sincere attempts to get his life back on track, that it’s almost unbearable to watch the appalling, unforgivable things he does in his last few scenes.

It’s also a wee bit unconvincing. This kind of heavy, violent melodrama doesn't come easily to Green — stories where things, you know, actually happen just aren't his forte — although he does what he can to make it his own. (The shot of Rockwell washing Beckinsale’s feet, her toenails painted turquoise, in a cast-iron roasting pan is one of those crazy poetic/mundane images that only David Gordon Green would come up with.) And the movie has been so sad and depressing already that this final plot turn just feels like too much to expect a reasonable audience to put up with.

Still, the scenes showing the shy courtship between Angarano and Thirlby are very sweet — I particularly like the way Thirlby writes “HEY YOU” on the back of Angarano’s hand with a purple felt-tip pen and then explains to him that she’s going to add an exclamation point too. (I’ve got to say, though, that those geeky hornrim glasses that Thirlby wears throughout the movie are a bit much — as if she weren’t the perfect art-nerd high school dreamgirl already.)

It’s also great seeing Griffin Dunne turn up in a few scenes — he’s excellent as Angarano’s divorced dad, who can’t stop himself from sniffing around the old homestead whenever he’s feeling lonely, unaware of how much his son resents him. I liked seeing Amy Sedaris in a more dramatic role than the ones she usually gets, and I’m always overjoyed to see Nicky Katt onscreen — here, he plays Sedaris’ husband, who’s having an affair with Kate Beckinsale, and he cuts a surprisingly sexy figure lying on a motel bed wearing nothing but a pair of leopardskin briefs and a trucker’s mustache. Why isn’t this guy getting more work?

I’m not as big a fan of Sam Rockwell as a lot of critics, but he’s very good here in a difficult role, much better than he was in Choke or Joshua. A lot of people seem to think he’s a star in the making, but unless he lucks out and lands a string of Robert Downey Jr.-style breakthrough roles, I think he might have a tough time of it — there’s something inherently small-time about his persona. He plays scraggly little losers, and there just aren’t a lot of lead roles in $100 million summer blockbusters for scraggly little losers.

RATING: 3.5/5

Stuck On The Radio With You

My "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio this week is devoted to Stuck, the homeless-guy-in-windshield B-picture I reviewed on this blog earlier this week. Click here to give it a listen. And for God's sake, watch the road when you're driving!

All My Little Words

Turns out, this blog looks a whole lot prettier after it's been processed by wordle.net. I also had no idea I used the world "like" as often as Wordle says I do.

The Musicgoer: Lambchop's OH (ohio)

LAMBCHOP
OH (ohio)
(Merge)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

There are few singing voices in pop music whose company I enjoy more than Lambchop singer/songwriter Kurt Wagner. Sometimes it’s buried so deep in the mix that I can barely make out the lyrics, but his inimitable, laid-back vocal style — which I’d describe as “countrypolitan Sprechstimme” if it weren’t for the fact that doing so would make me sound like a total douche — has such a warm, conversational sense of phrasing that even after 10 albums is as relaxing as a warm bath.

Understanding the words has never been the point with Lambchop anyhow; Wagner’s cryptic lyrics are best savoured in small doses, in phrases that rise to the surface, resonate briefly, and then sink back into the depths, like the letters in a bowl of alphabet soup. On OH (ohio), the songs that connected with me were the rueful “Slipped Dissolved and Loosed,” the amusingly laconic call to action “Please Rise,” and especially “A Hold of You,” a soulful song addressed to a woman who seems fated to remain perpetually out of reach. Maybe Wagner will get closer to her on the next album.

Moviegoer Diary: Stuck; Vernon, Florida

STUCK

Plot In A Nutshell
Stuart Gordon’s thriller about a nurse (Mena Suvari) who runs into a homeless man (Stephen Rea) with her car, drives him with him stuck in her windshield, and then, fearful of getting the law involved, simply leaves him like that in her garage, slowly dying.

Thoughts
I’ve never been able to resist a gimmicky thriller. I think I got hooked on this stuff as a kid, when I discovered The Twilight Zone. I was especially fascinated by those episodes where the technical challenge of writing the episode was as important as the characters or the final twist — I loved the concept of a story that was told without dialogue, or where you never got to see the face of the main character until the final shot, or where the whole episode was about six people, all of them in weird costumes, who wake up at the bottom of a tall well, and then have to figure out who they are and how they got there. (Turns out they’re dolls at the bottom of a donation bin!)

I’m still addicted to this stuff, which greatly appeals to the Aspergerish part of my personality. I don’t think I ever expect movies like Phone Booth or The Lady in the Lake or Time Code to be especially good; I just can’t wait to see how the screenwriter sustains the gimmick over the course of a feature film. That’s the reason I keep going to see all those silly POV horror movies like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, and why I watched [REC] and Quarantine — which are essentially identical movies! — within a few days of each other.

It’s also why I was looking forward to Stuck — how was Stuart Gordon going to wring out an entire movie’s worth of suspense out of Stephen Rea trying to wriggle free from a windshield? (Stephen King is really good at these locked-room premises, by the way. As a teenager, I remember loving those short stories of his, like the one where a guy would be forced by a crazy rich dude to walk once around a building on the ledge, hundreds of stories off the ground... or the one where a doctor gets shipwrecked on a desert island and starts amputating parts of his own body and eating them in order to survive.)

Turns out, Gordon does a pretty efficient job of it — although the scene where Suvari’s neighbours discover him only to decide not to call the authorities because they’re illegal aliens and can’t risk exposure is a little aggravating. The final showdown between Rea and Suvari is pretty entertaining too — partly because it’s so satisfying to see Suvari punished for her callous behaviour, and partly because of the way Gordon concocts a reasonably believable B-movie scenario whereby a gravely injured man with no weapons could still defeat not just a healthy younger woman but her beefy boyfriend too. I was rooting not just for Rea but for the script — “Hooray! You pulled off the third act! Good for you!”

RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

VERNON, FLORIDA

Plot In A Nutshell
Errol Morris’ 1982 documentary about the loquacious residents of a small town in Florida.

Thoughts
And why did I watch Vernon, Florida? Because it was short — not even an hour — and it seemed like a quick way to add another notch to my moviewatching rifle.

But as anyone who’s seen this mysterious little movie can tell you, you could watch it over and over again — 10 times, 25, 100 — and still feel like there were more hidden connections to uncover, and more pieces of accidental folk wisdom to ponder. A camera is like a gun, says one of Morris’ interviewees; if you point it at something, you might get what you’re shooting at, but then again, you might not. And that certainly seems true of this film, which Morris apparently intended as the story of a bunch of people who cut off their limbs as part of an insurance scam (his original title: Nub City), only to rework it into Vernon, Florida when his intended subjects threatened his life. (Even though they were missing arms and legs, apparently Morris felt they could still inflict some damage on him.)

I’d love to see some of that Nub City footage, but it’s hard to imagine that film could be any more funny and poetic than Vernon, Florida. Boy, do I wish Morris would fire Philip Glass, leave the studio, drop that portentous, meticulously art-directed style he’s favoured ever since The Thin Blue Line (and which reached its nadir, in my opinion, with Standard Operating Procedure), and get back to movies like this one, where it feels like Morris is letting his subjects dictate the tone and style of the final film.

And yet, at the same time, the film feels like nothing more than a statement of Morris’ personal filmmaking philosophy. Wait long enough, the film seems to be saying — whether you’re a hunter in the trees, a policeman idling in a car, or just an old-timer wasting time on a bench — and the very thing you’re looking for will soon arrive. Some people, and I have a feeling Morris might even be one of them, call that God.



RATING: 5/5

"I Think Steroids Are As American As Apple Pie"

My latest "Hidden Gem" DVD recommendation segment for CBC Radio has been posted online, so if you want to hear me discuss about Christopher Bell's steroid documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster (and to do some cheesy comedy at the top of the segment besides), here's the place to click. Ah, steroids... a subject that, as the photo of me on the CBC website makes clear, I know absolutely nothing about.

Viral Video

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but there’s a moment in the Spanish horror movie [REC] (which recently screened at the Edmonton Film Festival) that made me scream out loud. I’m embarrassed because it’s such a cheap scare: a TV reporter and her cameraman are trapped in the top floor of an apartment building, and they think something might be crawling around above their heads in the attic. So the cameraman sticks his camera through the trapdoor and starts slowly panning around the darkened, cluttered room, the light from his camera providing the only illumination. Around he pans, slowly... slowly... slowly.. slowly... and then... BOOGA-BOOGA! A creepy mutant with sharp teeth jumps into the frame!

The same sequence takes place in Quarantine, a nearly shot-for-shot American remake of [REC], and damned if it didn’t make me jump all over again. Now, you don’t have to be any kind of genius filmmaker to scare an audience by essentially jumping out of the closet at them, but it does take a certain amount of low directorial cunning to string a bunch of those moments together in an effectively audience-rattling way. Neither [REC] nor Quarantine have any goal in mind beyond scaring the audience senseless — the monsters aren’t metaphors for any unconscious terrors, there are no political points being made about governments depriving citizens of their civil rights. These two movies are scare machines, pure and simple. But there’s a place at the multiplex for a well-constructed scare machine, and [REC] (and, to a lesser extent, Quarantine) got the audiences I was with worked up into a state of giddy, babbling excitement the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long time.

The setup is fairly clever: a cute TV reporter (Jennifer Carpenter, Michael C. Hall’s foul-mouthed sister Deb on Dexter), is hanging out overnight at a fire department, collecting footage for a show about after-dark workers. After killing a few hours lightly flirting with the firefighters, the truck is summoned to an apartment building where an old woman is having some kind of medical emergency. It seems like a routine call, until the old woman leaps on one of the firemen and rips his throat out. And when the men try to get the injured man to a hospital, they find they can’t leave the building — the authorities have barricaded them inside. It soon emerges that a strain of super-rabies has broken out in the building, and the government would rather let the inhabitants die off than risk the disease getting loose in the general population.

It’s your standard siege movie — lots of arguments about who’s in charge, lots of people ineffectually barricading doors and windows, order gradually giving way to chaos as more and more people get infected. But, as with Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, the fact that we’re experiencing everything through the limited perspective of a shaky, handheld video camera gives the whole thing a wild, spontaneous energy that you wouldn’t find in a more traditionally shot version of the same story. (You also wouldn’t get that gory scene where the camera guy uses his camera to bash a rabid zombie’s skull in. It feels like the moment that this whole “POV horror” subgenre has been building towards.)

Sure, Quarantine contains a lot of overly convenient plot turns and a few unlikely feats of derring-do (especially considering how the characters are running around in an unfamiliar building at night with the power off), but it’s paced so quickly that you hardly have time to care.

Which version is scarier? I’d give a slight edge to [REC], but maybe that’s just because I saw it first and so it seemed fresher. Quarantine makes its plot points with more clarity than [REC], but [REC]’s lead actress is more appealing. On the other hand, unlike [REC], Quarantine actually seems to understand that a video camera can’t rewind and record at the same time.

Dubya, Dubya, Toil And Trouble

When Oliver Stone announced his plan to make a biopic about George W. Bush, no one knew what to expect. Would it be a comedy, full of cheap jabs at Bush’s supposed intellectual shortcomings and his malaprop-filled responses to reporters’ questions? Would it be a savage indictment of Bush’s disastrous presidency — the war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Hurricane Katrina, yellowcake, Valerie Plame, on and on and on? Would it focus on Dubya’s unlikely marriage to Laura Bush and turn into a cockeyed love story? Or would it be one of Oliver Stone’s trademark everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pop-culture phantasmagorias, like Natural Born Killers, full of dream sequences, flashy editing, and reckless tone shifts?

As it turns out, none of those descriptions is entirely accurate. I sat down shortly after the screening with Michael Hingston, who is one of the writers I work with at SEE Magazine in Edmonton, Alberta to compare reactions.

* * * * *

Paul: What were your expectations of this film going in?

Michael: I guess the only impression I had of W. was that it was making an artistic point, naturally, but that Oliver Stone also had a larger political agenda at work, seeing as there’s an election in the U.S. next month. I was expecting it to be quite vitriolic, but also something like Religulous, in that it wasn’t really meant to change anyone’s mind who hasn’t already decided.



Paul: For me, the thing that really got me excited about this film was the trailer, which uses the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.” It’s cut really sharply and the lyrics — “You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’” — just seem perfectly apt. So I was really looking forward to Stone returning to his JFK/Nixon mode, where he’s taking these iconic images from recent American history and weaving in these invented behind-the-scenes moments and putting it all together in this feverish, pulpy, slash-and-burn way. So I think we were both surprised a little by how subdued and linear this movie turned out to be.

Michael: Yeah, it’s really more of a character study. The film’s real thesis is that there’s an Oedipal complex at play in Bush’s psyche that dominates everything he does. He spends his whole life trying to escape the shadow of his family and make something of himself, but always in this semi-deluded, semi-sincere way. There are moments where you really root for Bush — when he walks off this oil rig job early in the film, you think, “Yeah, that job looks terrible!” But of course, there are also many, many places where you just see him missing the point.

Paul: The popular caricature of George Bush Sr. is as this weedy little Ivy League priss, so it’s a little startling to see how to Bush Jr., he’s this looming, terrifying presence. And it’s fascinating how Bush tries so hard to rebel against his father and yet is perpetually drawn to these father figures, from Karl Rove to Dick Cheney to the preacher Earl Hunt, who tell him what to do and how to be a man. If there’s anything that makes me sympathize with Bush in this film, it’s that “lost little boy” quality he has.

Michael: He’s also very charismatic. At one point, Stone has Rove tell Bush that line about how America votes for the candidate they want to have a beer with, and Josh Brolin’s performance really lets you see how true that would be for Bush on a personal level.

Paul: Which is a good segue into talking about the performances. There are a lot of political impersonations in this movie, and they are surprisingly not distracting.

Michael: Agreed. Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell is pretty clearly made out to be the voice of reason in Bush’s cabinet — and whose arguments are completely ignored — and I bought him completely. I bought Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney, I bought Toby Jones as Rove. I thought Elizabeth Banks was great and very lovable as Laura Bush, and I really thought Josh Brolin was excellent as Bush. The only exception is Thandie Newton, who plays Condoleezza Rice — she is just awful. Her Rice is shockingly un-true-to-life, and just unconvincing even as a person.

Paul: What a strange, strange performance that is. You have to wonder what footage of Rice she could possibly have been studying to wind up with this version of Rice that doesn’t sound or act remotely like her — this will sound crazy, but it’s almost like she’s channeling Damon Wayans in Bamboozled.

Michael: There’s no way to segue into this, so I’ll just say it: I couldn’t get over how Stone shows Bush eating absolutely constantly throughout this movie. There’s a scene where he’s having lunch with Cheney, and in every shot, he’s got a mouthful of food or he’s taking a swig from his drink and swishing it all around — he’ll swallow off-camera, and by the time you come back to him, he’s chewing again. It was like something out of a movie by Jan Svankmajer, who’s obsessed with how disgusting it is when people eat.

Paul: I was very fond of the scene set at the cabinet meeting where everyone is realizing just how badly the Iraq war is going, and everyone has a big slice of pecan pie in front of them. The pecan pie is such a nice touch — there’s a great shot of Donald Rumsfeld just stuffing a giant forkful into his face. That scene comes pretty late in the movie, though, and I think we both agree that the film’s final third, which kind of slows down and focuses on the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, is not as effective as the first two thirds, which are more wide-ranging.

Michael: My favourite scene in W. might be the one right near the top where Bush is getting initiated into his fraternity at Yale — the pledges are all kneeling in buckets of ice water and being forced to drink huge amounts of liquor, I’m sure they’ve all been awake for three days, and the overtones of torture are pretty unmistakable.

Paul: Right. But once Stone gets into the Iraq part of the movie, we don’t get as many of those telling little moments of insight — those bits that have obviously been invented for the movie but which match up so perfectly with what we know about Bush’s life and his personality. Instead we get more of a superficial summary of the public story as it appeared in the newspapers.

Michael: That’s certainly one of the movie’s failings: a lot of the time, it felt to me like it was trying too hard to be an encyclopedia of famous Bush moments and malaprops. It’s like Stone had a checklist of these incidents that he felt like he had to cram in — he even shows Bush choking on a pretzel, in a scene that is completely self-contained and adds nothing to the rest of the film.

Paul: At the same time, it really is surprising how easy Stone goes on Bush, considering all the ammunition he had at his disposal. There’s nothing about Abu Ghraib in it, nothing about Bush’s passivity the morning of September 11, nothing about Hurricane Katrina. The old Oliver Stone would have had all these sinister scenes of Cheney conferring with the board of Halliburton. It’s interesting: in JFK and Nixon, Stone presented this world where generals and shadowy corporate interests were the ones who really ran the world, no matter who happened to be sitting in the Oval Office. But in W., it’s completely the opposite; it’s not outside forces pulling Bush’s strings but internal one — his daddy issues.

Michael: I do wonder what the intended effect of this movie was supposed to be as far as the upcoming election is concerned. Is it just to say, “Republicans are bad”? It certainly doesn’t implicate John McCain in any way.

Paul: And it ends on this deliberately inconclusive note, this No Country for Old Men-style non-ending. It doesn’t land that final solar-plexus blow that I was kind of hoping for.

Michael: But I think we’d both still recommend it. Brolin is really great in it, and it’s a fascinating movie for most of its running time. Some of that fascination comes from the mere fact that Bush is still in office —

Paul: Or that scene where Laura Bush is undressing and for a moment you think, “Oh my God, is Oliver Stone actually going to show Laura Bush topless?”

Michael: Exactly! I really don’t know if this movie would be as interesting five years from now. Maybe it’ll only be remembered simply as a rough draft of history and nothing more.

Trench Postcards

As a proud Canadian, I suppose I should feel slighted that even though it was the opening-night film of the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, the most important film festival in North America, Passchendaele, the most expensive Canadian movie ever made, was reviewed by almost none of the international critics and bloggers in attendance, except for the reporters sent by those completists at Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. But having seen Passchendaele, I have to admit: I can understand their lack of interest.

Not that the film is worthless; as Variety likes to say in its reviews, tech credits are superb. The film’s climax, on a muddy, rainfilled battlefield that one character likens to “a bowl of stew,” vividly conveys the day-to-day discomfort of trench warfare, and it was a thrill to see so many actors I know in real life popping up onscreen: David Ley, an instructor at the University of Alberta drama department, plays a priggish Calgary doctor; Brian Dooley, a wonderful teacher, actor, and director, has a small role as the editor of the local Calgary paper; Jim DeFelice, an especially beloved local actor, director, and theatrical elder statesman (who also wrote the screenplay for an iconic Canadian movie from the ’70s, Why Shoot the Teacher?) has a great one-scene role as a crackpot inventor; and I caught a glimpse of Karen Johnson-Diamond, a Calgary comic actor, in a party scene.

It’s just not the kind of movie that excites the imagination of the hardcore critics: it’s a very square, very conventional war melodrama that, except for a few moments of Saving Private Ryan violence and a brief flash of naked breast, could have been made by Universal Studios in 1946, with Franchot Tone playing the heroic Canadian soldier and Deanna Durbin playing the beautiful nurse.

But instead of Franchot Tone, it’s Paul Gross in the lead — American readers of this blog may know Gross from his role as the square-jawed Mountie on TV’s Due South, but up here, he’s been leading a campaign to raise the profile of Canadian films. He’s a big believer in the idea that Canada shouldn’t just turn out small arthouse films; the Canadian box office is dominated nearly completely by Hollywood fare, but Gross has argued that Canadian movies in popular genres could compete with American releases if they had big enough budgets and were supported by publicity campaigns. He tested that theory in 2002 with a curling comedy called Men With Brooms, which grossed a little over $4 million — not bad, by Canadian standards. (And especially considering that it was a comedy about curling.)

Passchendaele is a significantly more ambitious production, and it seems like we’ve been hearing about it here in Canada for a couple of years. It’s very much a passion project for Gross, who wrote and directed it, and who based his character, Michael Dunne, on his own grandfather. And, of course, the battle of Passchendaele is a proud moment in Canadian history — along with Vimy Ridge, it’s one of the big WWI battles where Canada proved its heroism on the international stage.

I don’t doubt the sincerity with which Gross poured himself into this enormous project, but Passchendaele is sort of the Canadian equivalent of Pearl Harbor — it’s not quite as crass as Michael Bay’s war epic, but the characters are just as thin, the romantic dialogue just as sappy (“Would you like to introduce some foreign matter into me?” a doctor’s daughter flirtatiously asks her boyfriend), the plot machinations bringing everyone together on the same battlefield just as contrived. And boy, does Gross really overdo it with the Christ imagery in the final scene.

Will Canadians embrace this picture? There’s certainly an aggressive publicity push going on proclaiming Passchendaele as the film event of the year, and Gross is traveling the country to promote it. But I worry that it might not be enough — everyone I know who’s seen the cliché-filled trailer (“It was a time of innocence... a time of love... a time of war!”) thinks it looks pretty unpromising. Turning Passchendaele into a hit could be an even more daunting battle than the one depicted in the film.

Ridley Riefenstahl?!?

I watched Body of Lies with a good friend, who’s also a prominent political activist and broadcaster here in Edmonton with a particular interest in international affairs and American-perpetrated injustices abroad. He seemed very disappointed with my blithe endorsement of the film, which he felt did an unforgivable job of glossing over the true roots of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world — the film shows a lot of victims of violence, he observed, but none of it committed by Americans. Later on, he went further: when you get right down to it, he said, Body of Lies is collaborating with an American distortion of history. How, he asked, does this act of artistic collaboration on the part of Ridley Scott any different from Leni Riefenstahl?

“Well,” I stammered, “for one thing, Ridley Scott wasn’t commissioned by the American government to make a propaganda film.”

To which my friend shot back, “Well, doesn’t that make it even worse?”

I’m actually kind of worried that I lost a buddy over this movie — just before we parted ways, I told my friend that I really couldn’t understand the argument he was making, and the appalled look on his face at my inability to grasp what a crime against documented historical truth this movie represented is something I will never forget.

The thing is, you can lob a lot of criticisms at Body of Lies — especially the way its attempt to provide an on-the-ground tour of the counterintelligence effort in the War on Terror keeps getting pulled off-track by its (likely studio-mandated) desire to shoehorn in a corny romantic subplot and a steady diet of explosions and car chases — but the idea that it promotes a Riefenstahlian view of American foreign policy seems a little extreme to me.

Indeed, the movie pretty much takes it as a given that any decision that comes out of Washington is by its very nature misguided and doomed only to alienate Muslims further. The film’s real villain isn’t Al-Saleem, the shadowy terrorist leader with a plan to set off bombs in a string of locations across Europe and the U.S.; it’s Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), the pudgy, sedentary CIA official with a certain minivan-driving affability but with a minimal understanding of Muslim culture and a cold-blooded willingness to sacrifice human life as well as the trust of the men he has on the ground. My friend would probably disagree, but the scene where Hoffman casually monitors the deadly business he’s set in motion halfway around the world from the sidelines of his daughter’s soccer game struck me as a pretty sly takedown of Sarah Palin-style “hockey mom” morality.

Hoffman’s most skillful operative is Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio), the rare American agent who speaks Arabic and genuinely seems to appreciate and respect the local culture. For me, this is the first role where DiCaprio seems genuinely convincing as an adult — although it probably helps that in most of his scenes, that boyish face of his is covered with cuts, bruises and scars. After this film and Blood Diamond, DiCaprio is verging on self-parody — how many times can one glamourous movie star turn up in one of the globe’s trouble spots and play the only white person in the world who understands what’s really going on here, dammit!?

Along with his baby fat, he’s lost that uncertain look in the corners of his eyes that’s dogged his performances ever since Titanic; in Body of Lies, he’s confident without seeming pleased with himself or arrogant. But he still keeps that boyish quality in reserve — although he’s as devious as any spy (even creating a fake terrorist organization in order to draw Al-Saleem out), he seems genuinely pained in one-on-one encounters to be caught in a lie.

The person he lies to the most is Hani, the head of Jordanian intelligence, who’s played beautifully by Mark Strong, a stylishly clad smoothie whose wary chess-game relationship with Ferris is the best thing in the movie. Strong has a long list of roles behind him in everything from Syriana to Mrs. Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but I’ve never taken notice of him until now — he brings a fascinating, leonine poise to this role, and there’s something touching about his insistence on total honesty from the people he deals with, even in a world where the chief currency is deception. His resemblance to Andy Garcia is kind of uncanny — it’s about the only thing about Body of Lies that my friend and I could agree on.

We Put The "Cannes" In "Canada"!

The Edmonton International Film Festival finished up today. EIFF may not rank anywhere among the world's most important film festivals (and even within Canada, it's not all that significant) — in its effort to sell itself as a "populist" film festival, the schedule tends to get clogged up with a whole lot of third-rate Project Greenlight-style filler — but I did get to see a few interesting titles, some of which will no doubt be coming to Edmonton in the next few weeks and others that will probably never surface here again.

Here are my quick thoughts on eight of the films I caught at EIFF 2008.

AUDIENCE OF ONE

Richard Gazowsky, the well-fed pastor of Voice of Pentecost Church, has a vision: he wants to make the greatest movie of all time, a sci-fi version of the Biblical story of Joseph (entitled Gravity: Shadow of Joseph) that he describes as “Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments.” He has zero filmmaking experience and, indeed, never even saw a movie until he was 40, but God spoke to him, he says, which is more than George Lucas or Cecil B. DeMille can say for themselves.

With his wife and daughter heading up the costume and props department and a German bank providing the budget (could this be the same one that gives Uwe Boll all his money?), Gazowsky and his parishioners head off to Italy for a disastrous five-day shoot, followed by an even more unproductive sojourn at a studio back home in San Francisco. And somewhere along the way, Gazowsky stops looking less like an amusingly deluded dreamer and more like an insane menace. Michael Jacobs’ documentary will have you shaking your head in dismay, and then picking your jaw off the floor in amazement as Gazowsky tells his followers about his new plan to film 47 movies a year, open 27 resorts around the world, and colonize outer space.

RATING: 3.5/5


GOMORRAH

This Italian crime drama, based on a hugely popular nonfiction book about the inner workings of the violent Camorra crime syndicate in Naples, came to Edmonton on a wave of rapturous reviews from Cannes, calling it a new genre classic: The Godfather as directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni. I’d heard it described as being in the vein of The Wire: a crime film whose true subject wasn’t any particular hero or even group of characters, but the vast, complicated, deeply corrupt social system of which crime is an inevitable byproduct. But I don’t think I was prepared for how anti-sensationalist this film is, how free of “colourful” criminal characters or “cinematic” explosions of violence. (The closest director Matteo Garrone comes to a stylish setpiece is the opening scene, in which various mobsters are assassinated in the unnatural blue light of a tanning parlour.)

The film was almost too diffuse and low-key for me — it took me a while to sit up and realize that Garrone wasn’t going to spoon-feed me any explanations as to how the five main plot threads fit together, and that I was going to have to figure it out on my own. I wouldn’t have minded a little more Wire-style humour, either. Honestly, Gomorrah didn’t fully engross me, but now that I know where it’s coming from, I suspect I’d find a second viewing much more rewarding.

RATING: 3.5/5


LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

When 12-year-old Oskar asks Eli, the little girl who’s moved into the apartment next door, how old she is, she replies, “12... more or less.”

Eli, as it slowly becomes clear, is a vampire, and as this involving, low-key horror film from Sweden (based on a popular novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist) unfolds, Eli finds herself torn between her desire for companionship and the animalistic hunger for blood that rages in her veins. Lina Leandersson, who plays Eli, strikes just the right note in her performance—she has a childlike awkwardness to her bearing, but there’s something very old and alien and hungry behind her eyes. She’s not “cute”—she’s got lank, dark hair and a broad nose, and when she feeds on a victim, she doesn’t bother to wipe the blood off her chin.

Director Tomas Alfredson makes excellent use of the Swedish setting and the contrast between the snowy ground and the black nighttime sky, where the only sound is the crunching of snow underfoot. There isn’t a lot of gore on display here or a lot of special effects, but when Alfredson uses them, he uses them well, especially in the final bloodbath, which he films in a single shot, underwater in a swimming pool.

RATING: 4/5


MAN ON WIRE

August 7 ought to be some kind of national holiday. Or if not a holiday, then some annual way of remembering the anniversary of one of the boldest, most beautiful feats of physical daring of the 20th century. August 7, you see, was the day in 1974 when French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, with the aid of a small crew of ragtag assistants and true believers, sneaked into the south tower of the World Trade Center in New York, made contact with confederates on top of the north tower, strung a wire across the 140-foot void between the two structures... and then walked out onto it. He spent 45 minutes out there before surrendering to police.

James Marsh’s spellbinding documentary climaxes with Petit’s walk, and my God, but you’ve never seen anything so moving in your life as the sight of this man balancing so high in the sky, concentrating so hard on the task at hand as to reach practically a state of grace. But Marsh devotes an equal amount of time to the six years of planning that went into “le coup”—and he’s smart enough to let the still-youthful Petit, a born raconteur, handle most of the storytelling. Absolutely magical.

RATING: 5/5


MOMMA’S MAN

The shabby New York loft apartment of Flo and Ken Jacobs — piled to the ceiling with old books, records, film projectors, glasswear, mirrors, artwork, and box after box of childhood bric-à-brac — is a place you could get lost in, and that’s just what thirtysomething Mikey (Matt Boren) hopes to do. Even with his wife and infant daughter waiting for him back home in California, Mikey contrives a series of excuses to extend his stay in his parents’ loft indefinitely — at first he tells his wife that the airline has screwed up his flight, but he soon stops calling her altogether, burrowing into his makeshift bedroom cocoon, reading old comic books and digging out the lyrics to songs he wrote when he was 15.

Momma’s Man has much the same premise as this summer’s arrested-development comedy Step Brothers, but while Momma’s Man contains plenty of comedy (as when Mikey visits an old buddy, a bodybuilder with an irrational fondness for The Indigo Girls), its characters are never “merely” comic, the central situation plumbed for its full melancholy poignancy. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs casts his real-life parents Flo and Ken as Mikey’s parents, and they’re both fantastic — especially Flo, whose watery eyes are overflowing with deep concern for her son’s state of mind, but who can never think of any way to express that concern except to continually ask him if he’d like some cereal, or may a nice cup of coffee.

RATING: 4/5


RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

I really started to worry about Jonathan Demme with The Truth About Charlie — after the solemn trio of The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, and Beloved, here he was, working so hard to recreate the anything-goes breeziness of his earlier comedies like Something Wild and Citizens Band, and none of it was working. Not even Demme, it seems, could convince the world that Thandie Newton was a star.

Convincing us that Anne Hathaway is a heavyweight dramatic actress seems like an equally difficult task, but Demme pulls it off in Rachel Getting Married, his absolutely splendid new drama about a young woman who goes from rehab straight to her sister’s wedding, where her presence puts an unbearable amount of pressure on an already fraught situation.

There’s a lot of pain in this film, but an equal amount of joy: Demme includes several long, long, apparently plot-free sequences showing musicians practising, minor characters giving speeches at the rehearsal dinner, people dancing at the reception, and not since the days of Robert Altman has a movie teemed with this sense of life spilling outside the edges of the frame. Hathaway is excellent, but for me, an even bigger revelation is Bill Irwin, who I’d always (unfairly) dismissed as that Robin Williams crony in the oversized suit, but who is just miraculous here as their anxious father. Every glimpse Demme gives us of his face gave me a thrill — even when the expression he's wearing is heartbreakingly sad.

RATING: 5/5


[REC]

The title stands for “RECORD,” as in the button on a video camera, and this Spanish chiller belongs with movies like The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead and Cloverfield to that new microgenre that some have dubbed “POV horror” — horror movies that purport to consist of “found footage” shot by one of the characters as some creepy event unfolds.

Here, the footage is the work of a cameraman for a fluffy local TV program that’s spending the night at a firehouse. It’s a boring night, until the engine is called to handle an incident at an apartment building — the site, it turns out, of an outbreak of some kind of 28 Days Later zombie disease that turns anyone infected with it into a bloodthirsty monster. Desperate to contain the disease, the authorities seal the firemen in with the cameraman and the young female host of the show, and they keep the film rolling even as the residents all gradually fall victim to the plague.

There’s nothing to [REC] other than scares — there are no climactic character reversals, no allegorical underpinnings to the story, no metaphors being worked out — but it’s a very well-made, swiftly paced scare machine, with a shock near the end that literally made me scream out loud. It was cheap, but I screamed. I don’t know if I’ll be as rattled by Quarantine, the American remake that comes out this week — I’m just surprised that the producers of Quarantine have put what is apparently the final shot of the film into the trailer, which would make this the worst case of trailer spoilery I’m aware of.

RATING: 3.5/5


ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO

The premise — two longtime platonic friends and wage slaves (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) decide to get out from under their mountain of unpaid utility bills by making a low-budget porno movie — sounds like it would be a topic close to writer/director Kevin Smith’s heart. A slightly tubby nerd who finds his true calling making likably amateurish, sexually obsessed movies with his friends? Why, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is practically autobiographical!

Or at least it would be, if Smith’s script didn’t get bogged down in the predictable twists and turns in the relationship between Rogen and Banks... a relationship whose backstory, frankly, doesn’t really even make sense. (Seriously? These two highly compatible, hard-drinking, frequently horny roommates never did it in all the years they’ve known each other?) But little in Zack and Miri makes sense — not the timeline of the two heroes’ money troubles, not Craig Robinson and Jeff Anderson’s incoherently written character, and not the wild oscillations between goopy romance, raunchy dialogue, and grossout visual gags, including a scene where Anderson gets a faceful of... well, I’d hate to spoil it. (The tone of Zack and Miri is schizophrenic even by post-Apatow standards.)

Still, snowbound Pittsburgh is a nicely unglamourous choice of setting, and Justin Long has an amusing cameo as a disconcertingly deep-voiced gay porn star.

RATING: 2.5/5

Moviegoer Diary: Citizen Ruth, Neighbors

CITIZEN RUTH

Plot In A Nutshell
Alexander Payne’s 1996 satire starring Laura Dern as Ruth Stoops, a solvent-huffing unwed mother who becomes a pawn in a battle between a group of anti-abortion activists and a rival pro-choice organization.

Thoughts
I’ve always defended Alexander Payne from the accusations that he looks down on his middle-American characters — the decor in those homes in About Schmidt, for instance, might be a little on the tacky side, but I’ve spent plenty of time in houses that looked exactly like them — but I think I might have been more resistant to his work if I’d seen Citizen Ruth when it originally came out instead of now, a full four years after Sideways.

Or does he deserve credit for creating one of the most despicable main characters of the last 20 years? It’s hard to know how to react to Laura Dern’s Ruth Stoops —she’s not really evil, and I don’t know if she’s even smart enough to be cunning; she’s just completely, selfishly in thrall to her animal greed. There’s a funny bit early in the film where, having talked her brother into giving her some cash, she immediately races off to the nearest hardware store to get a fix. She’s about to buy a can of some kind of paint when she spies a shiny displays of a new brand of patio sealant. And her eyes light up. I love that moment: even a pathetic addict wants to try the latest product on the market.

But then, Payne shows Ruth hurrying behind the store, crouching on the pavement, spraying some of the sealant into a sock, and breathing deep. It’s really a horrifying scene, and the closeup of Ruth’s eyes reaching that blissful, awful state of oblivion is shot pretty brutally. On the other hand, I don’t know what to make of the shot that comes when the scene fades back in: Ruth, unconscious, with a dark stain around her mouth where she inhaled the fumes, like a little kid who’s just eaten a blueberry pie. Is that supposed to be funny? For all I know, huffers really do get those stains around their mouth, but Ruth’s behaviour as a pair of cops haul her off to jail is definitely has a whiff of Reno 911! about it.

I don’t know: maybe it’s just that the whole huffing habit is so pathetic that it’s hard for any movie to get past it. (Even with Philip Seymour Hoffman starring, I don’t know of anyone who got any pleasure out of watching Love Liza, in which he played a lonely gas-huffing widower.)

I guess there’s something admirably rigourous in the way Payne and co-screenwriter Jim Taylor have conceived Ruth as being utterly without conscience — the film’s sharpest scenes are the ones where it becomes obvious that Ruth will make her decision about whether or not to keep her child solely on the basis of which side offers her more money. (Although I do wish Ruth had been written as being just intelligent enough to try to work the bidding war to her advantage; as it is, she’s just a passive bystander.)

Then again — SPOILER ALERT — I suppose she’s clever enough to devise a plan to escape the whole controversy on her own with a satchel of money under her arm. However, Payne’s decision to have her miscarry rather than consciously opting for or against an abortion does seem like a failure of nerve on the script level. I understand how it makes the denouement a whole lot more convenient, but once again, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to react to the ending, with Ruth outfoxing the two enemy camps and sneaking away to freedom with a bundle of money that it will undoubtedly take her only a couple of months to waste.

I don’t feel like celebrating Ruth’s triumph — even factoring in Laura Dern's fearless performance (a harbinger of her scenes as a strung-out streetwalker in Inland Empire), she’s a horrible, venal woman who probably deserves to be in jail. And if Payne is going for a “pox on both their houses” message about the abortion debate... well, I have a hard time going along with that attitude. Surely, in this battle, one house is a lot more deserving of pox than the other.

Maybe this ending, cheap irony and all, was the only way out of this screenplay. It’s like Marge's response the time a confused Lisa asked her, at the end of a Simpsons episode, if this was a happy ending or a sad ending. “It’s an ending!” Marge says. “That’s enough!”



RATING: 2.5/5

* * * * *


NEIGHBORS

Plot In A Nutshell
John Belushi is a straitlaced suburban husband and Dan Aykroyd and Cathy Moriarty are the bizarre, unpredictable neighbors who’ve just moved in next door (and who give Belushi one torturous night) in John G. Avildsen’s 1981 black comedy.

Thoughts
When pay TV came to Canada, my family didn’t spring for the extra dough to the cable company, but I used to love watching the free channel dedicated to advertising the movies playing on the pay channels anyway. The trailer for Neighbors used to play there incessantly, and to this day, the first thing I think of when someone mentions Dan Aykroyd’s name is that moment where he turns to Belushi and says, wearing a hearty grin that’s just artificial enough to seem insane, “So... whaddya say, neighbour?”

Well, more than 25 years later, I’ve finally seen it, and it turns out to be a failed comic experiment, but one that was still worth performing. (Neighbors would be a perfect case study for Nathan Rabin’s “My Year of Flops” feature at The Onion A.V. Club.) I know Rabin is a big admirer of John Belushi, but he’s never been my favourite of the original Saturday Night Live cast — they were showing The Blues Brothers on TV last night, and as with Neighbors, he comes off a poor second to Aykroyd, lacking his co-star’s verbal timing and his physical precision.

Still, it’s interesting in Neighbors to see him playing the uptight accountant who wants nothing more out of life when he comes home from work than a little TV and a couple of frozen waffles. And I like the simplicity of Neighbors’ setup — over the course of a single night, these two interlopers turn Belushi’s world upside-down, but he can never quite decide if they’re merely crazy or truly malevolent.

I feel bad saying that part of the problem with Neighbors is that Aykroyd and Moriarty’s behaviour is annoyingly arbitrary — mostly because in a couple of my own plays I’ve written scenes very much like the ones in Neighbors, where my hero is beset by supporting characters whose only goal seems to be keeping him off-balance. Scene by scene, the movie is full of very funny encounters between the four leads (I haven’t mentioned Kathryn Walker, who plays Belushi’s wife, perhaps the film’s most opaque characters, and whose most high-profile gig since this film was narrating Colonial House and Frontier House on PBS), but as each new scene starts, everyone onscreen (except for Belushi) seems to have acquired a brand-new set of motivations. And by the climax, even Belushi seems to have gone crazy — burning his house down and running off with the neighbors in an act that might be liberating or merely evidence that he’s finally snapped.

Still, I doubt any of the current cast members of Saturday Night Live would ever make a movie like Neighbors. I was struck, watching this film, by how much of the original SNL cast’s comedy was rooted in their blue-collar origins — sitting around with the neighbors, eating spaghetti dinners, playing pool on the table in the basement. Nothing in the current incarnation of SNL, with its cast of media babies, feels remotely autobiographical — it all feels like a spoof of something else that’s been on TV already. Everyone’s comic timing is razor-sharp, though — much more so than Belushi’s. I guess it’s the difference between a comedy machine and a comedy animal. In Neighbors, the animals win. Good for them!



RATING: 3/5

She Loved Wigs, She Loved Whigs

If you’re going to play the lead in an elaborate British costume drama — if you are, for instance, Keira Knightley and you’re starring in The Duchess — there are two main skills that you’re going to have to master.

First, you’re going to have to look really good with your head weighed down beneath an increasingly elaborate series of hats and wigs. Knightley vaults over this hurdle easily: in the scene where her character, the glittering 18th-century aristocrat Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, lends her starpower to a public speech by aspiring politician Charles Gray, she shows up wearing a hat piled high with enough feathers and fur to increase her height by at least 33 per cent, her face framed by luxurious brown curls whose colour sets off her dark blue jacket and skirt and which matches the fur muff, the size of an ottoman, which conceals her hands. The moment Knightley steps onscreen, you can imagine costume designer Michael O’Connor eagerly counting down the days until the Oscar nominations are announced.

Second, you’re going to have to perfect the art of walking rapidly down a palace corridor while barely choking back tears. And again, Knightley has obviously trained well for the role: The Duchess requires her to do roughly three tearful corridor walks, and Knightley deserves high marks for each of them.

Why is Georgiana crying so much? Well, she has the misfortune of being a passionate woman in a sexist, hypocritical era. Her husband (Ralph Fiennes) loses interest in her very early in the marriage — his only interests appear to be his dogs and siring a male hair, while Georgiana has only two legs and persists in giving birth to girls — and transfers his affections to Georgiana’s friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell). Indeed, the Duke is so open about his extramarital relationship with Lady Elizabeth — she even sits with Georgiana and the Duke at the dinner table — that he’s less a man with a mistress than an unofficial bigamist.

But the Duke’s open attitude toward marriage does not extend to his wife; he ruthlessly shuts down Georgiana’s affair with Charles Gray (Dominic Cooper, the young groom from Mamma Mia!) by threatening to bar Georgiana from ever seeing her children again.

Georgiana’s marriage to the Duke was supposedly the inspiration for playwright Richard Sheridan’s comedy School for Scandal — Sheridan is even a minor character in The Duchess — but this film takes a less puckish approach to its subject matter. It’s a solid, straightforward historical drama, with an above-average cast and above-average production values, directed with more polish than flair by Saul Dibb. The jury still appears to be out on Keira Knightley’s acting talent, but she’s been growing on me ever since her performance as Elizabeth Bennet in the marvelous 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice. She’s surprisingly convincing in the sequence where the youthful Georgiana holds her own in witty dinner-party conversation with Whig statesman Charles Fox — it’s not every young actress who has Knightley’s talent for high-style vivacity.

Ralph Fiennes has the opposite talent: he excels at playing men without an ounce of vivaciousness in them. That description certainly applies to the Duke of Devonshire, whose favourite way of expressing himself is a mildly curious grunt. And yet, in some ways, he’s The Duchess’ pivotal character: you can’t be sure if his callous treatment of Georgiana makes him an aberration or if he’s simply a man of his time.