Even if the marketing hadn’t trumpeted the dramatic return of burnt-out Hollywood high-concept screenwriter Shane Black, it’d be painfully obvious Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a movie crafted specifically for the audience he practically created with his Lethal Weapon quadrilogy.
The all-over-the-place plot leaves a few threads dangling (What happened to the whole Michelle Monaghan femme fatale setup? Was it too obvious to be anything other than a red herring?), but that’s not really what matters; the movie is exactly what what Hollywood execs and critics alike mean when they use the belabored cliche “a ride that you either get on or you don’t.”
F for Fake is Orson Welles’ last completed movie: part documentary, part essay, part practical joke. Welles portrays himself much as one might imagine him: a robust raconteur settled in for the long haul at a good restaurant, surrounded by educable pretty young things, eating and telling tall tales with great relish.
A few disconnected thoughts on J.J. Abrams‘ Mission: Impossible III:
I rue the day Terminator 2 (aka “T2“) came out and was a big hit; now every pre-ordained blockbuster comes abbreviated: ID4, LXG, AVP, X2, X3, and now of course M:I:III.
Like most summer action blockbusters, M:I:III is at first enjoyably preposterous but quickly becomes exhausting. Although the plot is incredibly complex, it has no throughline to thread it all together; it’s a series of sequences.
M:I:III is capped off with a truly terrible song by Kanye West. Of course it’s hard to top the version by U2’s rhythm section, but the producers could have covered themselves by picking somebody with a little more edge.
Like Michael Jackson, it’s now almost impossible to watch Tom Cruise perform without his public persona coloring everything. On the other hand, he’s nothing if not intense, so perhaps that works in his favor here.
For all the negative buzz regarding V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore’s total disavowal of James McTeigue’s adaptation, I was surprised to find that the film kept far closer to the book than I expected. Closer, in fact, than the two other travesties of Moore’s comics, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s better than both, if by itself still not very good.
It’s impossible for me to imagine how I would have reacted had I not read the book several times, but I suspect I would have had very mixed feelings either way. When it comes to movies based on comics, it’s the prerogative of every fan to obsess over “what they changed.” So let me point out a few changes I feel illustrate how the filmmakers either misunderstood or deliberately warped some key themes that make the book what it is.
“The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.”
First, the dystopian state of Great Britain as seen in the film is in a far less desperate state than in the book. The book opens with Evey at the absolute end of hope, her parents dead and herself alone, blacklisted and unable to survive. She makes a misguided and pathetic attempt to prostitute herself, runs afoul of the corrupt police, and is “saved” (in more ways than one) by V. Her susceptibility to V’s seduction is much more plausible if she herself is already a victim of the state. In the film, as played by Natalie Portman, she’s a rather happy person with a regular job, and her encounter with V is motivated by a redundant invented character called Deitrich. Every theme Deitrich represents is already covered by the character Valerie (which is, incidentally, lifted almost unaltered from the book).
But perhaps the biggest deviation is the very nature of the fascist state Great Britain has become. In the book, it’s something that just happens; a form of order that arises out of the chaos following a nuclear world war. In the film, the great societal disruption is a conspiracy machinated by a cabal of shadowy old white men, who then step in and profit from the reconstruction. Of course, the filmmakers are obviously reaching for an analogy to the Bush Administration, Carlyle Group, Halliburton, etc. While that may make the story of the film relevant to today, it obscures a more powerful point of the book: it’s far more scary when fascism arises out of the common consent of the people, as it did with Nazi Germany.
As Bubble‘s loos into the lives of factory workers in an economically depressed town turns into a noir (as Steven Soderbergh himself notes on the commentary track), I caught a whiff of class anthropology. That said, I understand Soderbergh’s point that critics’ charges of exploitation are condescending; the non-actors are intelligent human beings who wholly knew what they were getting into.
With this project, Soderbergh is tackling several unknowns at once: high-definition video, the feasibility of simultaneous release, and the storytelling device of drawing on the real-life experiences of non-actors. How does one tell if an experiment is a success when there are so many variables?
Richard Curtis and David Yates’ The Girl in the Café, a BBC movie aired in the US on HBO, was incredibly cute, and my heartstrings were indeed pulled, but I couldn’t shake the sense the love story was mere dressing for the real purpose of the film: explicating the issue of extreme poverty to help warm the public up for Live 8. Of course, I feel heartless for criticizing this aspect of it.
Plus, the age difference between Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald was so vast that — forget about their characters’ conflict over whether to battle or defer to stubborn politicians — it’s an issue unto itself. But if possible to overlook that, it’s a perfectly charming and lovely movie.
Reykjavik should hereby pass an ordinance decreeing its name shall heretoforth be spoken only in Macdonald’s Scottish accent.
For most of it, I thought for sure Shaun of the Dead was a four-starrer, but it lost its way at some point. I’m not sure exactly of the transition point, but I felt that the tone had changed too drastically by the time the characters were trapped in the pub (in other words, I had stopped laughing).
Until that point, I was totally loving it, particularly a newscaster’s description of the zombies as “shambolic.” It became a bit nasty and grim (sons blowing their undead mum’s brains out), and then veered back to whimsy at the end. But all that said, it’s remarkable that despite all the humor, satire, and melodrama, it’s still an honest-to-goodness zombie movie.
Did you spot the virtually wordless cameo by Arthur De- I mean, Martin Freeman?
And now to raise the gander of another friend. Sorry, Kevin, but I’m still not much of an Alex Cox fan. I can’t say that Sid & Nancy, his look into the lives of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, spoke to me.
But no doubt, Gary Oldman is superb (the degree to which he disappears into roles is actually a bit scary – did anybody besides me not even recognize him in Hannibal and The Contender until the end credits rolled?). And some of the dialogue is choice:
“What’s happened to Jonny?”
“Johnny got beat up by fascists.”
Maybe like Kurt & Courtney, my Punk Appreciation Deficiency Syndrome colored my response the film.
11’09″01 – September 11 is a portmanteau film comprised of shorts inspired by or in reaction to the September 11 attacks, made by directors from nearly every continent.
At first, I thought for sure I would be giving this one more than three stars, but the quality of the short films takes a steep dive after the first two. The first in particular, by Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf, is excellent. It opens on an entire Afghanistan village emptying their well in order to manufacture bricks to build shelters for when the US will bomb them. A female schoolteacher rounds up all the children and attempts to explain to them what happened in New York, and why the Americans are about to kill them. Step one: try to illustrate the concept of a skyscraper.
The short from Egypt is quite bad, and almost laughable (dig the ghost of a buff American Marine killed in Beruit, walking out of the ocean, soaking wet and topless). And unfortunately, Sean Penn‘s contribution was over-edited into oblivion. But a late high point is Ken Loach’s documentary about the US-instigated overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected government on… wait for it… September 11, 1973!
And a bit of trivia: Mira Nair’s short was written by an old roommate I had back in film school.
