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Robin-55
Reviews
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
What Kind of Men are They?
It seems the Coens have made this movie in response to their critics concern about meaning. It is an established fact (beyond doubt) that the Coens are some of the most brilliant, innovative, daring film-makers currently at work. But while their flair for story, character and cinematic je ne sais quoi is impeachable, many critics and fans alike come away thinking, 'sure, but what the hell did it all mean?'
Is it possible that the Coens are making monkeys out of us? What exactly are these stories, so overflowing with cryptic imagery, about??
The duck tattoo in 'Raising Arizona'? The hat in 'Miller's Crossing'? The box in 'Barton Fink'? The blind prophet of 'Oh Brother'? What does it all mean? Close analsis off the films only proves futile. It is as though the Brothers are giving us beautiful jigsaw puzzle pieces and laughing as we try to fit the irreconcilable pieces together.
'The Man Who Wasn't There' goes some way to finally exploding this running joke. It deals, up front and specifically, with meaning, or rather our inability to create meaning from the confusion surrounding us.
Tony Shaloub's lawyer character has a long speech about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. He says (twice) that to look at something closely in search of meaning is a waste of time, that the more you look, the less sense things make.
This is as close as we have ever come to the heart of the Coens' movies. Don't look too close, they are saying, because if you scratch the surface you will fall through the tear. Don't strain your brain. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, relish the enigma, and for Chrissake don't ask any difficult questions.
Which, in my opinion, is a bit of a cop-out. What are movies for? What are artists for? To ask questions? Maybe. To give answers? I would prefer to think so.
'The Man Who Wasn't There' is a brilliant film, because the Coens have exercised their usual meticulous control over camera, script and performances. Their trademark humour is there in abundance, as are the grotesques and dislocations we have come to love.
But as for answers, 'The Man Who Wasn't There' falls horribly short. It is a riddle with no solution, a childish trick, an illusion, 'full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing'.
The Coens are laughing harder than ever and would laugh even harder if they read this. Their references to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle are a very clever touch, and are a clear attempt to excuse their failings. But failings they are, and they prevent a brilliant film from ever becoming great.
The Coens are in danger of drifting into the kind of wilful obtuseness that distinguishes David Lynch's worst excesses. The fact that they seem content to do so is a sad and sorry admission that they have no answers
Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999)
Brightened My Whole Day
I have been a bit of a sly fan of Matthew Bright since I saw accidentally saw 'Freeway' on video a few years back. Having subsequently caught up with much of his other work (including the deliriously bad taste 'Revenant'), I am a convert.
Confessions of a Trickbaby shows Bright to be a real auteur in the vein of Russ Meyer or John Waters. Billed as 'Freeway II', 'Confessions' is not so much a sequel as an extended riff on the same themes and obsessions, the same set of grim jokes, the same giggling desire to explore the darker side of teenage sexuality. This time out, Bright's throws in lesbianism, stabbings, shootings, a little girl eating a chicken, aerosol abuse, endless vomiting, old-fashioned vibrators that plug into the wall, an endless list of shattered taboos. Clearly this is not for all tastes.
But Bright's mordant humor and the uniformly excellent and committed performances show this to be a labour of love, rather than simple exploitation. You can almost hear him chuckling from behind the camera, holding his breath and whispering, 'I can't believe I'm getting away with it'.
At the screening I went to, Bright spoke before the film, pointing at the screen and intoning nasally, 'This is my paawwn'. Carry on.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Ruggero Deodato's Young Nephews??
Good movie, well-written, well-executed. The acting of the three principals was totally convincing and the film very economically established their individual personalities and the relationships between them. In total, the film was 100% believable. So far so good.
Fundamentally, however, it is little more than a sanitized retread of Ruggero Deodato's 1979 exploitation classic 'Cannibal Holocaust'. Deodato's film is gory and dubious as hell. Especially hard to stomach are its scenes of real animal slaughter as its team of beleagured documentarians find food where they can in the dense tropical jungle.
But the plot of Deodato's film develops thus: an expedition into the jungle finds the remains of a group of missing documentary film-makers. The remaining three-quarters of the film consists of their unedited rushes, replete with scratches, lab marks etc. Shots are out-of-focus, without sound or damaged. All these elements are shamelessly plagarised by the makers of 'Blair Witch'.
Likewise, Deodato's actors do all the camera work using two cameras in much the same way as the 'Blair Witch' teens. The use of alternating video and 16mm is 'Blair Witch's single technical innovation.
Blah blah blah, I could go on. The point is that I feel that the 'Blair Witch' boys owe a significant debt of gratitude to Deodato, who was himself no monkey, having worked as Roberto Rosselini's assistant for many years and worked his way up the neo-realist ladder. His career peaked with the brilliant and highly original 'Cannibal Holocaust'.
I am sure the same will finally be said of the makers of the brilliant, highly unoriginal 'Blair Witch Project'.
On the other hand, God bless them for kicking the ass of 'The Haunting'.
Wild Wild West (1999)
Wild Wild Waste of My Time
This was a significant disappointment from Sonnenfeld who seems to have been steadily improving as a director since his underwhelming Addams Family debut (there are those of us who rather wish he'd remained a director of photography).
I can't quite imagine how this wrong-headed mostrosity got off the ground although I can imagine the studio light being stuck on green where Will Smith is concerned. But this? This? Who ever thought that this was a good idea for a summer movie? There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with it like at the most basic level, the idea is rotten, like the first conception of the project was rooted in some bizarre temporary insanity, the conclusion perhaps that Will Smith is all a movie needs to be a smash.
This is the most cynical and contrived form of film-making, the packaging of elements to excite a broad demographic, the synergistic Burger King tie-ins, music videos etc for maximum market coverage. But what is centrally lacking here is the movie itself. It is a dismal spiritless mess, devoid of any chemistry between its leading characters, an entirely unnecessary female character (Salma Hayek in an awesomely thankless part) and an utterly rubbishy villain (Kenneth Branaugh not nearly as funny as he seems to think he is).
Of course the actors cannot be blamed. They are only actors for Christ's sake. What really counts in a deal like this is the script and Wild Wild West simply did not appear to have one. The plot was utterly incidental, a routine and tiresome paper chase across the old west to find a bad guy with a ridiculous bad guy world domination plan. This would be fine if the movie dispensed with plot and left Smith and Kline centre stage with a huge quantity of electrifying witty banter, but it doesn't. Instead they are given swathes of plot-related dialogue as though we were actually supposed to be interested. In the whole film, I don't think I saw one decent line of dialogue, not a single solitary spark of wit. No clever wordplay, nothing in fact that could justifiably be called comedy writing. Not even any of Will Smith's patented verbal clowning. Just talk and pulling silly faces.
An embarrassment for everybody concerned, especially Kline who really aught to know better by now. The only person who comes out of this with dignity intact is director of photography Michael Ballhaus, who makes the desert look like a surrealist painting, as though John Ford and Rene Magritte had conceived a child in a crazy threesome with Alexandro Jodorowsky.
Otherwise, I want my money back. I feel cheated. I want to see something enchanting that makes me fall in love with movies all over again, not this sorry self indulgence. Worse even than Star Wars.
The Matrix (1999)
Real deal sci-fi.
This is a ludicrous film. Loud, brash and generally bombastic at every turn. Fortunately, it knows this and wears these features on its sleeve. It is knowing and ironic and has its tongue firmly in its cheek. The ideas, which will no doubt be hailed as 'startlingly original', are all stolen from Philip K. Dick, but at least its stealing from the best. It is basically familiar territory, territory mined by Dark City only a few years back. The Matrix, however, is an immeasurably superior film, simply by virtue of the fact that it does not take itself seriously. At times, the characters play their ludicrous lines so deadpan, it achieves a bizarre spooflike quality. Fishburne's performance, in particular, is splendidly arch as he delivers lines like 'Welcome to the desert of the real' with a misplaced Shakespearean grandeur.
The effects are also ground-breaking and mostly effective. The use of slo-mo to eroticize the violence is reminiscent of Woo or even Peckinpah but with the use of clever CGI, Matrix achieves the feel of ballistic science. The shootouts do not revel in the familiar 'operatic grandeur' that has been a staple since Bonnie and Clyde. Rather, they play like FBI reconstructions of shootouts. We see the paths that bullets take, the positions of spent shell casings. It is shamelessly fetishistic and utterly irrelevant to the film's central idea but spectacular and exciting nonetheless.
I hate virtually everything. Dark City was a nauseating waste of my time. Everything released over the last three summers has seemed despicably lazy film making. Godzilla, Armageddon...these films are offensive cynical money pits without a single grain of wit, a single interesting idea to tie the whole rotten mess together. Therefore, I fully anticipated hating the Matrix with equal vigor. As it was, I was pleasantly surprised. While I would make no claims that it was in any way a classic, it certainly appeared to have been put together with a great deal of love and humour and these attributes go a long way. It was overlong and unnecessarily portentous at times but these are minor quibbles when one is being bombarded by such a wealth of outrageous imagery and ideas. What other film could link Dick, Christ, Alice in Wonderland, Monty Python, Woo, Jackie Chan, and still find time to make Keanu Reeves look good?
Starship Troopers (1997)
Elaborate Nazi Joke
The central characters are supposed to be flat and meaningless. Their motivations are intentionally one-dimensional. They are intended to seem like a bunch of war-mongering jocks. The reason for this is because they are the National Socialists of the future.
These blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan beauties live in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Could they by chance be the descendants of the Nazis who all moved to S. America after WWII?
And all that talk about how to become 'a citizen', how only by conforming and becoming an idealized military warrior can a person win acceptance in society? Everybody else is an undesirable, a social outcast? Familiar.....?
If this all sounds a bit far-fetched, then just check out the costumes. Doogie Houser beginning as the school nerd and ending up goose-stepping around in full Gestapo regalia, peak cap and long black leather coat? Hold on.....
And that incredible ending. The 'happy' ending is the realisation that our heroes have induced fear in an alien species. How twisted is that?
Basically, Starship Troopers was a widely misunderstood film. Shot down in flames for being dumb and too loud, it was criticised for being exactly what it so expertly mocked. The irony was lost on the public at large (no surprise) and Verhoeven's outrageous deadpanning completely overlooked. It is a film that seems dumb at first because the characters are so dumb, but on closer inspection reveals itself to be a sophisticated satire on conformity, patriotism and the cult of the hero.
Even if you hated this movie, go back and check it again. Just don't watch it as a sci-fi film or a war film. Watch it as a jet-black comedy and it will please you much more.
Plus.....I've never seen carnage like that before. Yeeeeehhhhaaaaaaaa! Death from Above! DEATH FROM ABBBBOOOOOVVVVE!!!!!
Miracle Mile (1988)
Super Grim Dream Logic
I found this to be one of the most compelling and original thrillers to come out of the States for many years. Its premise is quite brilliant, its pace is frenetic and its development believable. The bummer of an ending, in particular, has a strange dreamlike quality which subtly allows us to feel the grim absurdity of what we have been watching.
The performances are very strong as the movie forces its central characters to develop from Capra-esque romantics to panicking survivalists in an hour and a half. In short, this is a small gem, tight and exciting. Unfortunately, it appears to have fallen through a worm hole and gotten lost on its way to the success it deserved.
This one is definitely worth tracking down. It's a powerful modern horror film that will stay with you long after the credits have rolled.