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Reviews
The Art of War (2000)
Rubbish!
Save yourselves the pain of renting or watching this load of steaming excretion. I hugely enjoyed Christian Duguay's "The Assignment", which inspired me to rent this, hoping it might be as good. After suffering the limp repartee, stupid plot, and mandatory number of action film dialogue cliches, I turned it off during the gratuitous torture of Snipes' female offsider, which really stinks. Sole compensation for viewing is the bright lights and colors of the cinematography.
The Play on One: A Master of the Marionettes (1989)
Bitter, biting, bloody good
This intense little BBC character thriller treads territory largely familiar from films like "Under Suspicion" and others, except that it's small, sharp, modest, and far better. Kenneth Cranham, long a horror movie favorite with his sensual lips and sanguine brow, here plays Teddy, a man who carefully sublimates his energies into being a master salesman, who prides himself as being, as the hoary story he likes to tell explains it, the 'master of marionettes', the man in control. Underneath his fast-talking, in-control veneer however lives a man with a buried past and buried furies that may or may not have boiled to the surface when a young man is viciously attacked with a chisel; everyone sees Teddy trying to save his life, but was he possibly the man who assaulted him? Why would he do it? Inspector Tennyson thinks he knows why, and determines to grind Teddy down into confession.
Jack's Back (1988)
Jack's Bad
This pretty insipid horror film let's you know you're in trouble pretty quickly with bad '80s pop playing over the opening credits - wow, now there's a way to suggest coming menace - and continues to purvey its absurd plot featuring obviously telegraphed, stupid twists that Brian de Palma or Dario Argento might have made something foolishly entertaining, but which Rowdy Herrington essays with all the inspiration of an infomercial. It's ridiculous to see Spader play identical twins, one of whom is a medical student and the other, who has no physical differences whatsoever in his matchstick frame, who's supposed to have been a member of a tough gang, been through the army and prison, and in the course of the film beats up a guy twice his size. The only redeeming feature is indeed in the net being drawn around the wayside hero in trying to clear his brother and avoid arrest himself, so you kind of wanted him to win out, but basically when finished I felt I had wasted a chunk of my life.
Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)
Magic Realism meets Chuck Jones
Well, "Amelie" at least allows me to forget "Alien Resurrection".
I'm a huge Jeunet fan, or to be more precise, a Jeunet/Caro fan. City of Lost Children and Delicatessen are two of my favorite films from the last ten years in which they were probably the most visually inventive and influential directors around. Films like "The Matrix" stole gratuitously from their visual aesthetic. Those films were nutty sci-fi/comedy/adventures where Amelie rests in more commonplace ground (albeit `Magic Realist'). It bears an almost too-close resemblance to the genre represented by "You've Got Mail", except Jenuet's filmmaking is far more vibrant and the laughs more genuine than in such spit-polished mainstream fare. There was also an honest and buried melancholy in Amelie which I stayed with. Of course there were plenty of bits that plastered a dumb smile on your face.
In "Delicatessan" and "City of Lost Children" there was in several sections of helter-skelter action, almost impossible to follow in the first viewing. In `City', there was one brilliant comic/cosmic moment where the girl's teardrop set off a chain of ludicrously logical actions that resulted in saving her life. Another scene in it had one where a group of child thieves retrieved a key in a door with a ridiculously complicated scheme. Much of "Amelie" is an extension in spirit of those two sequences from "City"; mad chains of association like Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng used to essay in. Jeunet had been toying with such connections-of-fate right through those first two films, and here he took them to hyperbolic lengths (still preferable to the excruciatingly self-conscious "Run Lola Run").
In the insane breadth of modern life, Jeunet senses, there are grand chains of causality. Mathieu Kassovitz's Nino is a passive observer of one such chain, searching for his favored traces (the torn-up photos) in his attempts to make out something of its shape. He collects and studies these totems that tease him with practically unsolvable questions, like the identity of the mystery man, and gets an emotional kick out of this monument to chance and isolation.
Amelie, on the other hand, seeks to be a whole chain in herself; invisibly she tried to alter lives and manipulate events. She wants to be a glorious mystery. The price she willingly pays for this is self-erasure. Where Nino, dumped into reality by childhood brutality, has reduced himself to an observant speck in the urban cosmos, Amelie, the lonely sprite, having brought herself up in a fantasy universe, naturally expresses herself through interventions that make her something resembling a meddling Greek goddess or Fury. The drama of the piece then is in seeing Amelie try to re-integrate herself with reality (in love with Nino) without too much pain. Only Amelie can fulfill Nino's quest because she plays with omnipotence. But it costs her much, too, as much as it fulfills her; she sees her plans occasionally wobble, fail, and become tragic (like the romance she sets up only to see it slide into destructive, repetitive behavior). It's an almost theological question - is this what God goes through six billion times a day? But it's clear what Jeunet's thesis is; his filmmaking is equivalent to Amelie's dreaming and subsequent actions, they're both weavers of intoxicating magic.
That's really all the drama there was and it was a might thin for the film's length (about twenty minutes too long), but there were very solid, affecting emotional strands in the work; often it was like a meditation of forms of alienation and sorrow, lump-in-the-throat worthy, and it surprises me when people comment that it's all so lightweight. I was glad Jeunet didn't try to wrap everything up neat. The scene where the couple have love-starved sex in the toilet causing the café to shudder was nearly up there with the bedspring scene from "Delicatessan" (to which there was a neat reference also in the film). Indeed, was a genuinely laugh-out-loud comedy, the first I've seen in - I don't know how long. However, some of its comic bits, funny as they were (like the gnome in the international photos), seemed, well, second-hand. Much of the film was an almost mechanical process of watching Amelie set up her plans. There was a dizzying flow of information offset by what was actually a very simple little yarn of lovelorn not-quite-losers in the big city. Like Amelie herself, it was ostentatiously modest. Despite the superficial modernity, the film like "City" and "Delicatessen" was set in some weird netherworld between now and 1950 (a more innocent act really than all those French Socialist newspapers claimed) with a shimmering vision of a surviving cozy Paris full of cozy Gallic types, looking for the good heart even in the grindingly staid bourgeoisie (like Amelie's parents) that are usually the complete anathema to French artists.
I agree with the general proposition that this film was about twenty minutes too long. I felt the weight mostly in the middle; I was thinking "Come along Mr Jeunet, tighten the pace a touch." All those speed-cinema tricks do not actually make for a fast film. Jeunet's films always have a love of eccentric humanity but gosh darn it I miss those apocalyptic landscapes and the harder edge Marc Caro used to give. Plenty of Edible French Chic here but not so much nouveau cuisine as a fine chocolate liqueur. Not, thankfully, a complete souflee.
Crime + Punishment in Suburbia (2000)
Dostoevsky Diminished
> This (very) loose rendition of Dostoyevsky's novel is at least smart enough not to forget the basic moral dimensions of the book - but they are present only basically. Dostoevsky's complex, nightmarish theological wrestlings are more or less summed up as `So, like, you believe in Jesus, like.' I start with my main beef because the film is strong, weak, confused, and intriguing. It continues the genre initiated by Freeway and continued by Cruel Intentions (contemporary teen drama based in/contrasted with classical literature and myth), but moves beyond them. The narrator is an authentically whacko seer, Vincent (Vincent Kartheiser), part angel, part demon, a living example of Dostoyevsky's most painful but genuine thesis that genuine morality comes from those who have sinned, people who understand the breadth of human capacities for good and evil. The `Raskolnikov' figure is not an arrogant genius but teenage girl Roseanne, whose life at the start is fairly normal, mixing equal parts anxiety at home (parents hate each-other) and working for popularity at school (she's a cheerleader who dates football player Jimmy), embarking on an unconcerned hedonism condoned by modern suburban existence. Her stepfather (Michael Ironside) is either a stroke or a psychotic fit waiting happen, stewing in deep frustration as his wife (Ellen Barkin) withdraws from him into an affair with cool, romantic barkeeper Eric (Jeffrey Wright, in an oddly small role), resulting in Ironside assaulting the couple in the local yogurt barn. As home life disintegrates, Roseanne's social position is rocked. Earlier seen trying to anchor the seething emotions of her parents, Rosanne is left in the middle of an escalating marital war with her social embarrassment acute. Things spiral into the lower depths when a drunken Ironside rapes Roseanne, precipitating her breakdown at school and then her planning with Jimmy to murder her stepfather.
Obviously Roseanne isn't really an equivalent of Raskolnikov; if you can say she exists in a Godless fashion it's just in the generally unacknowledged manner of modern life and not because of a conscious intellectual challenge, and her murder is fuelled by personal, even justifiable animus; this situation is taken from the sort of occasional psychotic excesses of suburban life we hear about on the news now and then, or see for ourselves. Fair enough; Dostoyevksy and other 19th century writers liked basing their stories upon real crimes and incidents that would be both authentic starting points and also accorded to themes that the writers were interested in.
So although the movie more or less skips around updating Raskolnikov as a character, it does lead into the novel's development. Vincent takes the place of Raskolnikov's prostitute lover as the informing presence of redemption. Although introduced tattooing the apparently nihilistic emblem `Por Nada' on his arm, Vincent actually has a weird form of Christianity that balances his overt perversity (he likes following and photographing Roseanne at all hours), and becomes, as he predicted, a figure to lean on for Roseanne; she is despite herself steadily drawn towards his lurking, warped philosophical self. As Barkin has been arrested and put on trial for Ironside's murder, Roseanne is faced with either confessing or letting her mother go to prison or possibly be executed. Anyone who knows how the book goes knows where it is going (for those who don't, don't read on), as Vincent, who has photographed Roseanne committing the murder, refuses to hand her in, instead subtly encouraging her to confess. She eventually does so, suffering a period of imprisonment where she takes over the narration, glad she isn't noticed anymore. Vincent is the only person who comes to visit her and eventually when she is released, and they ride off together on his motorcycle, evoking for me Allen Ginsberg's `Angleheaded Hipsters'.
The problem the film encounters is in updating Dostoyevksy's moral dilemmas. The story makes the incidents too personal; it's very much easier for Roseanne's gnawing guilt to be inspired by her mother's imprisonment as opposed to the poor unfortunate Raskolnikov's killing is blamed on, just as her murder is less problematic. Also, Vincent's Christianity isn't as strongly affiliated with a love of humanity as Dostoyevsky's, although it is implied that Vincent's way can accept people no matter how damaged because they are all born of the same imperfection. These things said, the film is always edgy, tough, and entertaining, particularly stylish in the pep rally filmed to resemble a form of black mass.