Moviegoer Diary: Coward, Barker, Leonard, O'Connor, Hammett, And More

I’m seein’ ’em much faster than I can write about ’em this week, and so in order to uphold the commitment I’ve imposed upon myself to write at least something about every movie I watch, here’s a “lightning round” blog post with brief reactions to half a dozen flicks I caught either at home or at the theatre this weekend.


EASY VIRTUE
Watchable, albeit excessively jaunty film version of Noël Coward’s play about a bunch of stuffy British aristocrats whose monocles pop when they meet the glamourous, scandalously modern American woman who has married into their family. Jessica Biel is a counterintuitive casting choice to play the bride; she certainly looks smashing with a head of platinum blonde hair and filling out the period costumes, and she gets the audience on her side the moment she steps onscreen, but I don’t know if she suggests the painful experiences lurking below her character’s glittering façade. (It also took me a while to register the fact that she’s supposed to be notably older than her husband; she has a coltish quality that makes her seem younger than her years.) Kristin Scott Thomas’ many fans will probably describe her performance as “delicious,” but I think she overdoes it. Director Stephan Elliott tricks the film out with a lot of anachronistic music and unnecessary camera tricks — there’s a lot of shots with characters’ reflections showing up on billiard balls, spoons, and telescope lenses. Like other comedies set in this era — e.g., Mrs. Henderson Presents, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day — there’s way too much peppy jazz music tootling away on the soundtrack. Still, the whole thing turned out surprisingly well, considering neither the director nor the star have a natural feel for the material.
RATING: 3/5


THE HANGOVER
This comedy about a group of friends trying to piece together the events of the previous night’s out-of-control Las Vegas bachelor party is funny, but not quite as funny as I’d hoped. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that’s it’s not quite as wild as I’d hoped — when we find out what actually transpired during that crazy night, the revelations are pretty mild (especially the whereabouts of the missing groom) and don’t seem to carry any serious repercussions for any of the characters, who improbably manage to come out of the whole experience some $80,000 ahead.... minus whatever it costs to repair their suite at the hotel. Maybe I was spoiled by the advertising, which not only gave away so many of the funniest gags and biggest surprises (including the Mike Tyson cameo), but which made The Hangover out to be nothing short of “the craziest fucking movie ever,” which it most assuredly is not. It’s more like a feature-length version of a really crass Super Bowl commercial. If only the movie as a whole had more of the energy and the anarchic comic spirit of the montage that plays out beside the closing credits!
RATING: 3/5


THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN
After The Hangover, here’s my second Bradley Cooper vehicle in a row — what are the odds? This horror movie, based on a Clive Barker story, starts out very effectively, with Cooper playing a photographer who stumbles across some very odd late-night doings in the New York subway system. The culprit is the hulking, silent, very menacing but quite impeccably tailored Vinnie Jones, a butcher who likes to sneak up behind unsuspecting subway passengers, clobber them with a stainless steel meat tenderizer, hang their corpses on hooks right there in the train car, and transport them to the meatpacking factory where he works to be disposed of. Director Ryûhei Kitamura (who’s best known for the tongue-in-cheek action film Versus) gives the scenes in the subway stations an arresting look, all blue and grey chrome with splashes of red, and I like the way he has Vinnie Jones come into the frame, often keeping him blurry even when he’s standing right behind his victim. But the story doesn’t make one goddamn bit of sense, and Kitamura starts going too far with the CGI in the killing scenes.
RATING: 2.5/5


KILLSHOT
Long-delayed Elmore Leonard adaptation directed by Shakespeare in Love’s John Madden, plagued by poor scores from screening audiences, forced to undergo studio-mandated edits. It’s not bad, but it feels rushed and unfocussed — and I suspect that even if the deleted scenes were put back in, it would still come across the same way. Married couple Thomas Jane and Diane Lane foil an attempt by Mickey Rourke and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to rob a realtor’s office, and tentatively rekindle their relationship when they’re forced to enter the witness protection program. Not a bad premise, but it doesn’t mesh well with the subplot about Rourke’s half-breed hitman-for-hire character wrestling with his personal demons. Gordon-Levitt, as Rourke’s trigger-happy fuck-up of a partner, gives a performance that might be a hoot in a different movie, but which seems all wrong tonally for this one. Rosario Dawson is completely miscast as Gordon-Levitt’s simple, shy, Elvis-loving girlfriend — why do directors keep casting this vibrant, gorgeous woman as a helpless wallflower? Best part of the movie is Klaus Badelt’s unusual, guitar-based score, which envelopes the whole story in a mood of sickening dread.
RATING: 2.5/5


WISE BLOOD
At the risk of looking stupid, I have to admit that I’ve never really “gotten” Flannery O’Connor. Maybe I’m not steeped enough in Catholic lore, or maybe I live too many miles north of Georgia, but I’ve never been able to get on that woman’s wavelength — I never know where to laugh, I never quite understand why any of the character do anything they do, and I usually come away from her stories with a lot of memorably strange images, but perplexed as to what message they spell out when I put them all together. That was the reaction I had to John Huston’s 1979 comedy/drama, to this date the only major Hollywood film based on O’Connor’s work. It’s great to see Brad Dourif — who I’ve enjoyed in everything from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Child’s Play to Deadwood — getting a substantial lead role, and here he delivers his lines with a barely suppressed rage that is compelling even if his character’s motivations remain murky. Ned Beatty, William Hickey, and Harry Dean Stanton are a lot of fun as three different preachers, all of them running various scams, and there’s a memorable scene were Amy Wright, as Stanton’s nympho daughter, tries to seduce Dourif in the woods on a bed of dry leaves. (“Ain’t my feet white?” she purrs, peeling off her tights, bits of leaves and twigs clinging to her clothes and hair.) But the overall film, like the nature of God, remains a riddle to me.
RATING: 3/5


HAMMETT
Like Killshot, this 1982 curiosity — it’s credited to Wim Wenders, but supposedly as much as 70 per cent of it was shot by Francis Ford Coppola — was plagued by reshoots and creative conflicts, but this time, the film that finally resulted from all that strife is an underrated gem. It was certainly the highlight of my movie-watching weekend, a moody noir homage, with sumptuous production design by Dean Tavoularis, an intoxicating score by John Barry, and a surprisingly appealing lead performance by Coppola favourite Frederic Forrest as writer Dashiell Hammett, roped into a missing-person investigation by an old buddy from his Pinkerton days (Peter Boyle). Hammett wasn’t the first film about a famous mystery writer solving a real-life case — The Seven Per Cent Solution comes to mind — but reviewers at the time seemed put off by the postmodern conceit. Nowadays, the idea of using real-life figures as fictional characters is commonplace, and Hammett can be enjoyed purely as an atmospheric detective yarn, albeit one more in the style of Raymond Chandler than Dashiell Hammett — and where many of the twists are pretty easy to spot. Jack Nance has a rare non-David Lynch role as a wormy pornographer, and Elisha Cook Jr. plays a cabbie (and a former Wobbly) who drives Hammett around town, armed with a gun so big it looks like it belongs in Navarone. He made Hammett nearly 40 years after playing Wilmer the gunsel in The Maltese Falcon, and he looks as boyish as ever.
RATING: 4/5