from Boing Boing
|
2/7/07
Horror remix of When Harry Met Sally
This recut trailer for When Harry Met Sally does an admirable job of reimagining the rom-com as a creepy horror film. It's the music that makes it. 
1/11/07
... The bad news is that it makes you grow a huge scary skeleton tail ...
Fitness
When It’s O.K. to Run Hurt
12/20/06
A Man for All Seasons
He was a hard gainer and a sore loser,
A personal trainer and a distant boozer.
He liked his fruit forward and his coffee black.
“Fresh Air,” too, but not Click and Clack.-A.C.K.
Quick takes on some books ...
‘Heat.’ New Yorker writer/editor Bill Buford’s fabulously fun, charming, harrowing description of working in Mario Batali’s restaurant kitchen and for various pasta and butcher maestros and divas in
‘Redemption.’ I loved Frederick Turner’s first novel, ‘1929,’ a historical narrative about boozy jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke and the
Quick takes on some films and videos ...
‘Art School Confidential.’ Tries to be hip, but its hip is displaced. Becomes raunchy, predictable, caricatured, and morally suspect instead.
‘Bobby.’ Ambitious and noble effort falls short. Some great names in the cast, but most of them doing weirdly stiff and uninspired work. Docu clips of Bobby Kennedy are most compelling segments.
‘Casino Royale.’ Everything good you’ve heard is true. Bond is back. Faithful to Fleming. Revives the franchise. Daniel Craig’s perfect for the role. Eva Green is fabulous—can simper like a hurt schoolgirl, dazzle in couture outfits by the gaming tables, and bust chops when it counts. Director Martin Campbell’s grounded visuals and savvy pacing are perfect.
'City of
‘Click.’ Funny premise—a harried Adam Sandler, as architect and family man, gets hold of a truly universal remote from Christopher Walken at the Way Beyond department of Bed, Bath & Beyond. But it only lives up to a third of its potential.
'Derailed.' For a thriller that self-consciously calls attention, in the beginning, to plot twists, 'Derailed' is awfully predictable. Still, Clive Owen, Jennifer Anniston, and Vincent Cassel as a major baddie all turn in impressive performances, and Mikael Håfström's direction is stylish and gripping. Not for the squeamish.
'Failure to Launch.' A semi-clever premise for a romantic comedy undone by mixing in ostensibly wacky and gross-out comic elements. The film, like its characters, seems hopelessly self-involved and lives up to its title. The quirky grown-goth-girl performance of Zooey Deschanel, as Sarah Jessica Parker's sidekick, is the most fun, original element.
'Fantastic Four.' A fun franchise starter about the Marvel-ous freaks. They're too busy giving each other a hard time to save the planet much, but surely they'll have their chance.
'Firewall.' A headache-inducing thriller with a smart premise but uninspired execution. And can we please stop using children's fatal allergies as bald plot devices?
'Four Minutes.' 2005 ESPN feature pic on Roger Bannister's breaking the four-minute mile is absorbing. But why the heck did they turn his Austrian coach Franz Stampfl into Christopher Plummer as partially paralyzed British war vet, for goodness sake? That's just weird, especially given how careful they were about other period details.
'Get Carter.' 1971 Michael Caine pic doesn't stand up well to time. His aplomb and the cool score don't make up for the gawky plotting or exploitative violence.
‘Infernal Affairs’ (the Hong Kon 2004 original). I read in some iffy zine called Rokovoko that it was supposed to be superior to the Scorcese remake. I beg to differ.
'Little Children.' An ambitious and well acted, but overwrought and often hamfisted hand-wringer about infidelity, narcissism, childish expectations, and infantile compulsions in the suburbs. Annoying narration and overall approach go for ironic, but hit unappealingly smarmy instead.
'Little Miss Sunshine.' OK, so it's contrived and reeks of screenwriter-scrapbook caricatures. But it also made me literally laugh until I cried for the first time since I don't remember when, and I for one can't ask more of a comedy than that.
‘The Long Goodbye.’ Altman’s death and the fawning obits inspiredme to rent this. It reminded me that with the exception of ‘The Company,’ I don’t like Altman, who I always found to be sort of self-indulgent and half-baked, though I know that makes me a philistine, and yes, I recognize how often his techniques are now used—I just like them used in other people’s films better. So sue me.
'Lord of War.' Nicholas Cage is a Ukranian-American arms dealer in Andrew Niccol's ham-fisted but absorbing tour of the death-merchant trade in Eastern Europe and
‘Lucky Number Slevin.’ Stylish neo-Tarantino violence that’s very clever except that it makes no sense whatsoever.
‘The Matador.’ Pierce Brosnan as an alcoholic, bisexual international assassin on the skids who befriends Greg Kinnear. It’s likeably unlikeable and will make you squirm and think.
'Nine Lives.' Tangentially related slices of nine women's lives in
'Red Eye.' Smartly plotted nail-biter with an intelligently endearing Rachel McAdams and crisply creepy Cilllian Murphy.
'Stealth.' A sci-fi-tinged actioner wedding 'Top Gun' with HAL from '2001.' Video-game-like movie argues that war shouldn't be fought like a video game. Go figure. Loopy plot but impressive effects.
‘Stranger Than Fiction.’ Great meta-narrative fun.
‘
'The Beat That My Heart Skipped.' An intriguing but melodramatic and rarely convincing French picture about a gangster longing to recapture his youthful dream of becoming a concert pianist.
'The Breakup.' Break what up? Nothing ever has or will come together in this dreary comedy with no chemistry and no laughs. I hope Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn simply exhausted their passion off screen, because their on-screen energy seems shorted out before they even go a-courtin'. It's also sad to see Judy Davis and Vincent D'Onofrio wilting misdirectedly in their silly minor roles.
'The Departed.' Scorsese's fast-paced, gripping, but implausible and not totally coherent version of the Japanese film Infernal Affairs, about cop moles in the Boston mob and vice versa.
'The Family Stone.' Sarah Jessica Parker plays a refreshingly un-Carrie-esque uptight fiancee to Dermot Mulroney, who's also grown into a quietly nuanced actor since his 'Best Friend's Wedding' days. Yes, it's manipulatively woven, but with a professional confidence and a great supporting cast that will make you forgive it.
‘The
‘The Sentinel.’ A Secret Service thriller with neat death-threat and hate-mail montage effects, but a snoozey plot and phoned in performance from Michael Douglas.
'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.' How it can be corny and dated but also heartbreaking and fresh, I'm not sure. But it is, and yes, I love the absurdly repetitive score, though I couldn't knock it out of my skull for days.
'The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.' 1993 docu is a skillful appreciation course in her gorgeous work and hideously opportunistic personality, but one place fascism sometimes makes sense is in the editing room, and this pic could have used some cutting. Behind the scenes bits capturing her micromanaging the documentary about her (big suprise there) and chatting with her old cameramen about the good ol' Reich days are very telling. But the coy guise of neutrality belies what we see--an unrepentant Nazi--and we see way too much of her.
'The World's Fastest Indian.' A charming, quirky geriatric extreme-sport film based on the true story of a New Zealander in the '60s intent on getting to Utah to set a speed record for his vintage motorcycle. Anthony Hopkins's most appealing and natural performance in some time.
'Under the Tuscan Sun.' Treacly but scenic story of an American divorcee pulling her life back together in
'Wondrous Oblivion.' Paul Morrison's moving 2003 film about Jewish and Jamaican immigrant families become neighbors in postwar
-A.C.K.
11/1/06
FILM: Commitment Problems
The BridesmaidYou're single, at a wedding, and the magic of romance and fate is in the air, and you spot someone—say, the bridesmaid—and there's something about her and you seem to catch her eye too. During the reception, everyone's a little tipsy, dancing badly, things are winding down, you've got some work to do, you're heading out. You see her sitting alone, looking bored. What the heck, you figure, why not offer her a ride? At worst, you can dish about the wedding. At best, maybe that spark you felt will flame into something more.
But wouldn't you know it? I can get myself home, thanks, she says dismissively. She has kind of a snobby reputation, and now you decide it's probably accurate. A pretty cold fish. You go home. You start up the laptop. You go over some accounts.
And then she shows up at your door. Beautiful. Wet. She couldn't get a taxi and walked there in the rain. You're stunned but try to play it cool. You get her some dry things to change into. But instead, after toweling off, she takes you in her arms and kisses you passionately.
"This is incredible," you say.
And so says Philippe Tardieu (Benoît Magimel), dumbfounded at his amazing good fortune after their love-making. Not at all, counters the young woman, Stéphanie Bellange (Laura Smet), who calls herself Senta after a character in The Flying Dutchman. "You're the one I was waiting for. You're my destiny." Later, when she brings him to her basement apartment in a grand but decrepit home, she says, "Welcome to my realm."
She might as well be speaking for The Bridesmaid's legendary director and co-scripter, Claude Chabrol. For we've been drawn into his realm as surely as Philippe's been lured into Senta's in this understated chiller about obsessive love, taking cues from Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train but translating them into the contemporary setting of a petit-bourgeois family in a small French town.
It's Philippe's sister Sophie's wedding where he meets Senta, after a leisurely first act in which Philippe, Sophie, and their younger sister, Patricia, are introduced by their single hairdresser mom Christine (the radiant Aurore Clément) to her new beau, Gérard. He turns out to be a lout, and the whole episode only emphasizes Philippe's role as man of the house. His job at a home-improvement contracting company weighs on him too. But he bears up well, except for a weird obsession with a family garden statue of Flora, and an overall tension that telegraphs that his cork's in a little tight.
Then Senta gets under his skin. At first, he's tolerantly amused by her dramatic side. She's an actress who poses for erotic photos to make a little money on the side. She can't take a joke or a criticism or sometimes even a question. She tells some pretty hard-to-swallow tales about her childhood—mom died in giving birth to her, dad hit the road, she was raised in this weird mansion by a stepmom who teaches tango lessons on the ground floor. Yeah, right. Senta tells him about hanging out in Morocco for a couple years smoking hash, working at a strip joint in New York, her stage and film roles. (In an amusing bit, she talks about how her scene with John Malkovich in a film was cut because he said she made him nervous. How odd do you have to be to weird out John Malkovich?)
Philippe takes her apparently overactive imagination in stride. So he chalks it up to bad taste when she suggests that they both murder someone to prove their specialness and mutual devotion. And he assumes they're both playing the same deadpan game when he takes credit for the slaying of a man she thinks is the bum who's been living in a cardboard box outside her home.
Ah, but you're in Chabrol country, right? So never assume. The only thing worse than a woman making up tall tales is one who isn't even when those stories sound too peculiar for this world. And the only thing worse than a lover with a commitment problem is one who has no problem committing to just about anything.
All this plays out devilishly and deliciously. Its suspense is in its ordinariness, the way wickedness embeds itself in the routine worries of the day to day, the way that life's unexpected gothic escapes from the mundane soon become that from which we would escape.
Magimel and Smet have just the right toxically fevered chemistry between them. Both are beautiful and weird in believable ways. And the relative dullness of family and work obligations makes their headlong jump into a hypnotic fervor all the more quietly gripping and plausible.
In feeling too much but also never enough part of this world, we are—all of us—always the bridesmaid and never the bride. The alternative, Chabrol suggests here—the chance to be a principal in our own dramas—is irresistible and very dangerous. For we never know just what genre we're entering.
Sure, it could be romance. Then again, it could be horror.
-A.C.K.
PHOTO: Magimel and Smet as Philippe and Senta
10/30/06
FILM: 'Scissors' Doesn't Cut It
If Little Miss Sunshine put the fun back into dysfunctional, as one tagline would have it, the film version of Augusten Burroughs's memoir, Running With Scissors, restores dysfunctionality's funk.
Director Ryan Murphy effectively stuffs us down the rabbit hole of a semi-intellectual and quasi-criminal out-of-control 1970s suburban counterculture, but, despite generally sufficient acting, the story and characterizations are too sketchy to carry the emotional oomph that they should.
Augusten (Joseph Cross) is the son of an alcoholic father, Norman (Alec Baldwin), and a narcissistic, hysterical, and occasionally psychotic poet mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), who chronically and nonchalantly allows him to skip school. Deirdre comes under the influence of a nefarious psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), who overdrugs and, it's hinted, takes sexual advantage of her, while encouraging her to drive away her husband. Finch takes control of both her finances and her son. Thus Augusten becomes stranded in the Finches' castle of chaos, a horribly unkempt mansion at constant risk of IRS confiscation. Augusten's unwholesome companions there include not just the eccentrically lordly Finch himself, but his almost catatonically depressed wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), his God- and father-worshipping older daughter Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his younger daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood), whose idea of entertaining a young visitor is to strap him into gear for electric shock therapy.
Augusten stays loosely in his cherished mother's orbit, even as she essentially disowns him and takes on lesbian lovers. And though his early interactions with Natalie prickle with a sexual charge, he determines that he's gay and gets involved with another pseudo-son of Dr. Finch's, the truly disturbed though intermittently tender Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes). As his mother spirals more clinically out of control, and Finch proves an ever-more-reckless father substitute, Augusten realizes that to survive, much less to realize his dreams of becoming a cosmetologist and maybe a writer, he has to escape.
Benning's getting a lot of ink for her performance here, but it's spotty. Her craziness is convincing, in a methody way, but her ball-busting wife and lit-bitch poetry-group scenes are a little over the top. Cox approaches his work gamely enough, but the role of Finch is badly written. We don't get to know enough about him to understand the power he has over people. Nor do we quite get what makes him tick. While money's apparently a factor (we learn that he's a skilled extortionist as well as a quack), and while the pills seem to flow freely, it's not clear that Finch himself ever takes those pills or whether this kind of seedy greed supersedes or merely enables what he thinks of as his work. Authority might be his intoxicant, but even that doesn't quite square since he uses that authority in such a haphazard manner. A scene in which he attributes divine significance to the form of his latest turd suggests some real (religious) psychosis, shared by Hope, but that's not explored to any satisfying and believable degree either.
I was more impressed by Fiennes, whose sad, wild eyes understatedly convey his struggle to control his violence and hallucinations; by Clayburgh, who gives us quick glimpses of the once hopeful, now psychically battered woman within the unwashed shell of a wife and mother; and by Baldwin, whose quiet tension bespeaks the proverbial wits' end.
Joseph Cross is sweetly appealing as Augusten, particularly in his scenes with Natalie and Agnes. But the character remains something of a cipher and a nest of contradictions. A momma's boy whose momma is an indisputable nightmare, he's intellectually curious but unschooled, street-smart but seemingly unaware of the dangers Neil poses for him, calculating but also prey to the swamp of eccentrics and sinister intentions surrounding him. He warns us at the beginning of the film that it doesn't matter where he starts his story because no one will believe it anyway. But we do believe it—we just don't quite get it. How can he be so worldly and clueless at the same time?
One answer might be because he's a child overwhelmed by several forms of awful excess during a head-spinning decade. Filling in a hundred blanks ourselves, perhaps with reference to the source memoir, that might be a conclusion we could firm up. And it's the explanation implied in Murphy's direction, which symbolizes that excess and bewilderment by slow-mo montages set to spaced-out '70s top-40 songs. Those convey a sort of passive, anything-goes mood, but they're no substitute for characterization, and without characterization the film narrative, on its own terms, doesn't cohere.
-A.C.K.
PHOTO: Cross and Annette Bening as Augusten and Deirdre
10/26/06
DANCE: An Impressive Premiere
Elizabeth Gaither and Jonathan Jordan
in "In the Upper Room"
The Washington Ballet
Eisenhower Theater, The Kennedy Center
"In the Night," "oui, non," "In the Upper Room"
Through Oct. 29
By Alexander C. Kafka
A thrilled audience said an unmistakable "oui" to the Washington Ballet's world premiere Wednesday night of artistic director Septime Webre's "oui, non." The clever cabaret odyssey featured not only the talents of the company in great form, but also those of the acclaimed singer-actress Karen Akers, who, as a particularly poised on-stage chanteuse, was a vital part of both the work's visual and musical composition.
In Elizabeth Peyton's evocative set design, upper stage right Akers and her exceptional accompanists—pianist Don Rebic and bassist Jon Nazdin—stirringly rendered eight French cabaret standards associated with the likes of Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. Opposite them, stage left, is the young, inquisitive, pale face and arms of a reclining young man, painted by Holly Highfill in a sort of Parisian poster style on the backdrop. Depending on the song, the scrim and Clifton Taylor's delicate lighting reveal or re-conceal the rest of the painted young man's body, his red shirt melding with the shade of Aker's elegant strapless gown. Subtle drips of paint on the backdrop image are echoed in the traces of red on the dancers off-white costumes, designed by Vandal.
With the dancers' makeup-paled faces, the effect is at once lovely and slightly foreboding. It is as though they've emerged from the world of the painted young man. The pallid tones, and the faint blood suggestion of the reds mix memorably into the musical palette of romance hard-won, volatile, fleeting, and wistfully recalled. The echo is of tenuous ties, fleeting eras, and mortality.
And just what do we make of this young man in the background anyway, gazing at us almost testingly? Is he voyeur? Are the dancers figures of his imagination? Of his dreams? Might we even take the leap and interpret him as the alter ego of Webre himself?
In couples, trios, or small groups, the dancers treated graciously Webre's seasoned blend of ballet and jazz, which ranges from almost raucously spirited in "Sympathique," in which Brianne Bland is lofted and tossed boyantly and gamely about by Jason Hartley, Jonathan Jordan, and Jared Nelson; to quasi-acrobatic in the "Padam, Padam" trio of those same three men; to the intensely intimate "Ne Me Quitte Pas," exquisitely partnered by Nelson and Elizabeth Gaither. In a smart, sensitive, and strangely apt touch, four dancer couples don't dance at all but simply cluster around Akers, now center stage, for her typically refined but quite straightforward contralto rendering of Brel's "La Chanson Des Vieuxs Amants." It's as if, in the painted poster world of the boite du nuit, word is deed is movement is music, all part and parcel of this peculiar parlor of cuddles and quibbles, ardor, coquetry, and tristesse.
There were some minor rough edges to the ensemble work, as in "Mon Dieu," but, mon dieu, it was nothing to get worked up about and I'd much prefer those rough edges to sacrificing even an ounce of the great gusto with which the dancers approached this challenging and richly textured choreography. Other companies will line up, I suspect, for permission to use this work. And they should. They will regret rien.
Lovers are also the focus of "In the Night," Jerome Robbins' elegant 1970 consideration—to Chopin Nocturnes here superbly performed by Scott Dettra—of the variations and evolutions of romance. We meet three couples, who dance before a starry backdrop. Let us call them, in order of appearance, the Orbits (Gaither and Nelson), who circle each other in sweet, somewhat agitated desire; the more stately Parallels (Erin Mahoney-Du and Runqiao Du), who move that way, often literally and figuratively in step; and the quite tense Centrifugals (Sona Kharatian and Luis Torres), who seem to have a stormier relationship of partings and reunitings, mismeasurings, belittlings, and embellishings. In dapper suits and dresses of browns, rusts, blacks, and grays, the three couples eventually encounter each other and mingle a bit, and it's a revelatory few moments because it's only upon that interaction that they seem to comprehend their coupleness and retreat into their separate intimacies with a new maturity and calm. In all, a cultured, thoughtful, and insightful work, delivered here with fine pace, grace, and emotional conveyance.
Topping off this extraordinary evening was Twyla Tharp's demanding 1986 work "In the Upper Room," the title drawn (I learned from Suzanne Carbonneau's helpful program notes) from Tharp's feeling, on hearing a Mahalia Jackson gospel song, that it seemed "to climb so high it pushed through the roof" like "an empty attic, a place of last resort, where one takes one's treasures and puts them up for very special public view."
The nine-section work is set to a wonderful score by Philip Glass. (I know we called it, controversially, minimalism back then, but now that pop radio consists of former boy- and girl- group members huskily talking dirty to their drum boxes, this music sounds positively lush.) The striking Santo Loquasto-designed set actually is minimalistic, except that it's buffered in a constant and quite thick fog-machine cloud from which the dancers emerge, and into which they disappear, with quick and quiet dispatch. They are costumed in striped suits that simultaneously hint at prison, Vaudeville, and a pajama party. But as Jennifer Tipton's recreated lighting becomes gradually brighter and more distinctly beamed—almost in the style of a Renaissance heavens-and-earth painting—the black and white stripes give way to at first spots, then patches, then whole outfits of bright pink and salmon shades.
The choreography's speed; its idiomatic mix of ballet, modern, circus, majorette, and lindy type movements; the dancers' somewhat manic, jubilant, and other-worldly energies; and the accompanying music, light, and costume colors have a profound and cumulative intoxicating effect. To me, the dancers appear to be some slightly other species freed from whatever prison, immaturity, false maturity, overwork, or other exploitation they've just fled from. Footed in assorted sneakers and ballet slippers, coming and going in a relentless and complicated scheme of shifts, groupings, and movement tropes, it's as if they'd taken Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Barnum & Bailey, and the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders hostage, given them too many espressos, and locked them in a gymnasium until they created a dance they could all sign off on.
The company became these creatures in great spirits and great form, capping with athletic confidence an evening that was, from start to finish, a genuine treat.
10/25/06
FILM: King and Queen
The Queen
Whitaker as Amin,
and Mirren as Elisabeth II
By Steve Vineberg
As Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker gives one of the most immense performances I’ve ever seen. Everything about him, from his frame to his belly laugh and the way his emotions erupt across the broad map of his face, seems larger than life.
Most of the actors who have given memorable portrayals of real-life personalities in recent years (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Geoffrey Rush as Peter Sellers, and others) have taken an intimate approach, building their characters psychologically, but this movie isn’t especially interested in Amin’s background and Whitaker doesn’t pause to take us through his motivation. He understands Amin as a man of enormous appetites and feelings, a figure dominating a canvas. The canvas, of course, is
The man who gave himself, among other titles, “His Excellency for Life” and “Lord of the All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea” is a role for an actor of majestic expressiveness, and that describes Whitaker. He should have become a movie star nearly 20 years ago, when Clint Eastwood cast him as Charlie Parker in Bird, but it was a terrible movie and though he was on screen for mostly all of its nearly three-hour running time, the role was oddly underwritten. But the character performances he gave in some of the smaller films that followed A Rage in
Whitaker’s Amin is at the heart of the movie, but he’s not its protagonist. That’s Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), the Scottish medical-school graduate with an adventurous spirit who winds up in Uganda because he closes his eyes and spins a globe, vowing to travel wherever his finger points. Garrigan lands a job at a rural clinic, working with a British doctor (Adam Kotz) and his attractive wife Sarah (Gillian Anderson, luminous in a brief role), and arriving just as Amin is taking over the country. Young, romantic, and impatient, with more than a little bravado of his own, and very much a product of his insurrectionary time, Nicholas is entranced by Amin’s charisma and taken in by his grass-roots appeal. He admires him for his stated aim to raise the standard of living for Ugandans, and for his disdain for the British, who are, in Nicholas’s mind, a race of stuffy, constipated, racist bureaucrats. He convinces Sarah—whom he’s been attempting to court in her husband’s temporary absence—to go out to see Amin address the locals in their area, and cheers along with them. (Sarah is more circumspect.) When Amin’s car hits a cow on the road on his way back to
The movie, which was adapted by Jeremy Brock, Peter Morgan, and Joe Penhall from Giles Foden’s novel, is a loss-of-innocence story, and through its first act it’s just about perfect. The director, Kevin McDonald, takes his time settling in; he lets the vivid, overheated colors of the landscape seep into your skin (the marvelous cinematography is by Anthony Dod Mantle) while the pace of life in the African countryside takes hold. He and McAvoy (who played the faun, Mr. Tumnus, in last year’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) get Nicholas’s youthful impetuousness, his sexual energy, his leftist zeal; you see exactly how he’s taken in by Amin’s comradely warmth, his robust humor, his generosity, his trust, and his insistence on treating Nicholas, almost immediately, as a confidant. (And he’s certainly not pure enough to resist the thrill of being in the constant company of a celebrity, and one who doesn’t mind throwing such gifts his way as a sexy new car.)
The movie is so wonderful at first that when it goes bad you experience the drop-off as an almost physical disappointment. That happens around the time Nicholas realizes that the man he’s put his faith in is killing off hundreds of perceived enemies—and, in that Macbeth-like way of tyrants, sooner or later he sees almost everyone as an enemy. As Garrigan becomes implicated in Amin’s paranoia and violence, the script becomes melodramatic, shifting from event to event so quickly it feels truncated. Meanwhile McDonald abandons his wide, inclusive visual style for a lot of close-ups and fast, jagged editing, and dispatches his leisurely storytelling for hype. The movie becomes lurid, garish. When Nicholas falls into a romance with one of Amin’s wives, Kay (the superb Kerry Washington), McDonald shoots their love scene with a distracted feverishness; he forgets to depict its sensuality and to underscore the lovers' feelings.
What holds it together is Forest Whitaker—the way he drenches himself in Amin's every emotional color, letting it soak the air around him, yet moving from one to the other with terrifying rapidity and completeness. Even though it’s impossible to watch a dramatization of Amin’s rule now without a consciousness of what a bloody dictator he was—and even though the pierce of Whitaker’s gaze when Garrigan seizes his gun is enough to make a viewer wary (you think, God, testosterone can blind a young man)—you can’t help being as amused as Nicholas by his earthy humor and as mesmerized by the warm immediacy of his presence. It takes a long time for Nicholas to believe fully that he’s in the employ of a monster, and by the time he does he finds that Amin’s fatherly affection has enclosed him like a vise. And then when he turns on Nicholas, the force of his fury feels like an earthquake. It’s truly a great performance.
________________
Peter Morgan gets the sole writing credit on The Queen, which Stephen Frears directed, but unlike The Last King of Scotland it contains scarcely a false note.
This movie, which focuses on the royal family of
In the early scenes,
But the filmmakers linger with the
This bit of information makes us smile—not only because of its incongruousness but also because we can just see it. And I think this identification of
Helen Mirren’s brash, earthy Queen Elizabeth I in the HBO movie earlier this year lacked nuance, though the problem was probably mostly in the script’s conception of the character. By contrast, she gives a delicately layered performance as Elizabeth II that ranks with the most brilliant work she’s ever done. She manages to play a woman who staunchly keeps her own counsel, but provides just enough of a window into the queen's feelings to allow us to comprehend her behavior. That is, she illuminates a mystery without solving it. Mirren makes us feel the dilemma of a ruler who suddenly finds that because the restrained behavior she models is no longer resonant with her people, her continued adherence to it diverges, as she never thought it would, from a carefully inculcated, lifelong commitment to serving that people. (To her astonishment, her subjects have no reticence about crying in front of the camera as they talk about why they idolized Diana.)
When, with no alternative, she finally breaks down and makes an appearance with Philip in
She plays her best scene with a stag the queen encounters in the hills of Balmoral. Philip has been taking their grandsons hunting as a way to distract them in their grief, and he’s reported back to her about a towering stag, the most magnificent seen in those parts in years. Then one day, alone and without warning, she comes across it and is profoundly stirred by the spectacle. It’s clear that we’re meant to see the creature as an emblem of Elizabeth—regal, improbable, out of its time—and that she herself recognizes a kinship with it. Later comes a scene that answers this one—hearing that the guest of a local lord has brought the stag down, she goes to see the animal’s body. That echoing scene is probably unnecessary, and the only level on which it works is the symbolic one (which is to say that it doesn’t work at all). But the earlier episode in which she views it alive, implicitly claiming the landscape as its own, is breathtaking.
Perhaps Elizabeth II is not a queen to evoke grandeur, but Mirren unquestionably is.
10/19/06
FILM: Fool's Gold
By Steve VinebergMartin Scorsese’s The Departed runs for two and a half hours but it moves like lightning. The visual style is unusually restrained for Scorsese, but he’s brought all his editing know-how to bear on the William Monahan screenplay, which transcribes the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. That ingenious little movie, which was directed by Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, featured Andy Lau and Tony Leung as secret adversaries—Lau, a cop with a covert connection to the mob and Chan, an undercover cop pretending to be a mobster. In The Departed, which Monahan and Scorsese have relocated to Boston, Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, whom mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) has planted in the police force. And Leonardo DiCaprio is Billy Costigan, whom Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his right-hand man, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), have placed high among Costello’s confidants, his identity unknown to anyone else—including Sullivan’s supervisor, Ellerby (Alec Baldwin), who is seeking to bring down Costello. The Departed is slick and exciting. But it’s dross.
Scorsese stages the picture like a raucous, violent vaudeville show, alternating a handful of big acts. Some focus on the working of Costello’s little empire, where he makes mordant jokes while his wry, ironic lieutenant, Mr. French (Ray Winstone), provides the muscle. When Costigan, fresh from a rigged expulsion from the force and a rigged jail sentence and a brief career peddling dope with his not-too-bright cousin (Kevin Corrigan), is admitted into Costello’s inner circle, his struggle to retain some sense of his own identity—like Johnny Depp’s character in Donnie Brasco and Ken Wahl’s on the TV series Wiseguy—plays against the eruptive, macho exchanges between Nicholson’s Costello and his aides, none of whom—except for French—he trusts entirely.
Every now and then Costello holds clandestine meetings with Colin, whose fealty he won when Colin was a bright schoolboy. Colin has known Costello for long enough—and has risen high enough in the ranks of the police—that he feels brave enough to call him down when he thinks Costello’s being unreasonable. (His trump card, of course, is that he’s been very efficient at keeping Costello out of jail.) Meanwhile Billy, increasingly feeling the squeeze and certain that Costello has his own mole in the force, sneaks his own rendezvous, with Queenan and Dignam.
Then there are the police-precinct sessions where Sullivan, thinking fast to keep Costello in the clear, whips up schemes to bring his opposite number out into the open and challenges the opposition of higher-ups like Dignam, who thinks he’s a callous careerist and doesn’t like him. There are no quiet scenes: Even the tête-à-têtes between Sullivan and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), the police counselor he romances and moves in with, are composed of machine-gun banter. Queenan and Dignam send Billy to see Madolyn professionally, and he gets under her skin. (Their first encounter, which ends with him asking her out for coffee, is so stylized and overheated it doesn’t make much sense.) The plot, like that of Infernal Affairs, is built, of course, on the ironic juxtaposition of the two young men, the protagonist (Billy) and the antagonist (Colin)—both cops with South Boston connections (in Billy’s case, only on his dad’s side; his mother’s people, as Dignam never tires of pointing out, are lace-curtain Irish), both linked to Costello and to Madolyn, both moles engaged in a pursuit of escalating intensity to uncover each other’s identity.
Scorsese dashes from one story to the next, with so much kinetic skill in the cutting (supervised by Scorsese’s pet collaborator, the master editor Thelma Schoonmaker) that you may not notice that the scenes he’s positioned next to each other usually don’t match up but only give the illusion of operating in contrast to one another. The way Scorsese creates fireworks with the editing to cover the faulty construction in the script are a showman’s trick, just as the restless, thrusting camera in GoodFellas faked you into thinking the picture was moving forward. (It didn’t—it lacked a dynamic protagonist.) And though Scorsese foregrounds it and dispatches it with speed and volubility, much of the dialogue is pure show-biz.
As a realistic vision of police procedure and the underworld, the movie doesn’t scan—especially the scenes built around Costello and French. Nicholson can’t possibly believe in what he’s doing here; it’s even less grounded in emotional realism than his Batman performance as the Joker. And you can’t believe anyone would sign up to march under this man’s command. Winstone, with his hoarse voice and held-in-check line readings, is almost as theatrical. Watching some of this movie—like Colin’s courtship of Madolyn, where he sweeps her off her feet—you may feel the way I do at a good production of a David Mamet play: pleasurably scammed but scammed nonetheless.
The Departed is a big-budget prestige picture that’s high on finesse and low on substance. Take a gander at Infernal Affairs and you can see the difference almost immediately. The two main characters are equally matched: Chan is a good cop fighting to resist the temptations of mob life while Lau is a crook disguised as a cop who, day by day, feels more acutely the pull of the moral, above-board life. The woman he lives with is trying to write a story but conflicted over whether her hero is a good guy or a bad guy; the man lying next to her in bed is a real-life embodiment of the same dilemma.
The extreme choices Colin Sullivan makes in the last act of The Departed seem motivated entirely by ambition (Dignam sizes him up correctly), whereas Lau’s—though, in plot terms, they’re the same choices—emerge from a moral struggle. Monahan’s idea to eliminate the woman writer and have the police shrink involved with both men is a device that makes the two men seem like alter egos, whereas the way Lau is written in Infernal Affairs really makes them doubles. And though it’s 40 minutes longer than its source, The Departed has no room for the kind of understated, poignant details that knock you out in Infernal Affairs—like the moment when a funeral parade for one of Chan’s supervisors (one of the few men who know his true identity) passes by and Chan, watching from a deserted alley, lifts his hand in private salute. Or the scene where Chan runs into an old girlfriend in the street he hasn’t seen for some years. She has a little girl in hand, and when Chan asks the kid’s age she deducts a year so he won’t know the child is his. (The filmmakers don’t clue us in until after Chan has taken his leave of them: The little girl corrects her mother, who answers with a laugh, “I always forget.”)
The Departed comes closest to some kind of substance in DiCaprio’s nervous, besieged performance, which is as good as Depp’s in Donnie Brasco, and in Sheen’s depiction of a police captain whose dedication to his men meets the ultimate test. Damon is clever and personable, but Mark Wahlberg shows him up, effortlessly, simply by being the thing—a South Boston working-class kid—Damon is working his ass off to impersonate. And maybe it isn’t all that simple: Playing yourself never is, and the truth is that Wahlberg has turned himself into a good young actor in recent years, proving that what he pulled off in Three Kings was no fluke. When Three Kings’ director, David O. Russell, tapped him again for a part in I ♥ Huckabees, Wahlberg was the only member of the celebrity ensemble who managed to maintain the existential-screwball style and still suggest a real human being.
The only shortcoming in his performance in The Departed is beyond his control: his aggressive, spewing character doesn’t make any more sense—at least, he didn’t to me—than one of Mamet’s verbally diarrhetic salesmen or petty crooks. I could buy Dignam’s abuse of Costigan in the early stages of Costigan’s training as an undercover agent (he’s playing bad cop to Queenan’s good cop), even if I secretly kept hoping Costigan would paste him one. But once Billy’s been under for six months and delivering steadily and worried about cracking under the pressure, Dignam’s refusal to lay off him for 30 seconds seemed so counterintuitive (and counterproductive) that I just assumed he kept up the stream of ad hominem insults because Monahan was bent on making their scenes colorful and entertaining.
Well, they are, and so is the movie. But there’s less to it than meets the eye.
Steve Vineberg teaches theater history, dramatic literature, and film at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of three books: High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present (2005), No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade (1992), and Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style (winner of the Joe A. Calloway Prize for Best Book in Drama, 1991). He writes regularly on movies and theater for The Boston Phoenix, The Threepenny Review, The Christian Century and The Perfect Vision, and has also been published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pakn Treger, The Oxford American, Sight and Sound, American Film, Film Quarterly, and other publications.
Photo: DiCaprio, Winstone, and Nicholson in The Departed