Brother Tiger
Movies from late 2000 and early 2001
Originally written: February 2001
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Unbreakable
Remember the Titans?
Charlie's Angels
Bring it On
What Women Want
Ang Lee is one of those directors who keeps surprising you with his films. A great Jane Austen adaptation (Sense and Sensibility), the quintessential 1970s American slice of life (Ice Storm), an interesting civil war drame (Ride with the Devil) and now, with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, an almost perfect chop-socky drama. I'm not a great fan of the Chinese action movie but, if you have to see one, this is the one to see.
The film centres around exponents of a sophisticated martial art, some trained by the legitimate masters of the science, and others out of a book stolen from a master. The interesting thing is that three of the four proponents are female. The film is built around a small number of highly stylised fight scenes which range over roof tops, in the western Chinese countryside, in a country inn and through the canopy of a forest. The last is perhaps the most stylised and the most interesting, and appears to have been filmed in situ and not by means of some special effects wizardry.
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Before, after and in between the fights, there is a story (of sorts) about stolen secrets, a special sword and thwarted love. The older couple, Chow Yung Fat and Michelle Yeow, another survivor of the curse of the Bond girl, are very interesting indeed. Zuang Zi Yi, the beautiful young thing who plays the ingenue, is truly lovely. And they can all do the stunts with a passion.
The other remarkable feature of the movie is the music. It is a combination of cello music and Chinese instruments, the former played by Yo Yo Ma. I admit a fascination for, and bias towards, the cello, but this sonic combination adds immeasurably to the drama.
I've been critical in recent times of western movies which rely too much on fight-related stunts, The Matrix and Mission Impossible 2, among others. The difference here is that the fight scenes are integral to the movie and arise out of the action, they are not imposed on the story. Even if you're not a fan of the chop-socky drama, you have to admire a great example of any genre and this is certainly in that category.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
In Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, the eponymous character was a Depression era director of light comedies who went on the road to research a serious indictment of the neglect of the working man. His film was to be called O Brother, Where Art Thou? The use of the same title is one of the many in-jokes in this Coen brothers comedy-adventure. Allegedly loosely based on The Odyssey (featuring, inter alia, a protagonist with the name Ulysses, a wife named Penelope, a blind seer, a Cyclops and a groups of Sirens), this movie replicates the form of Homer's adventure by being a series of unconnected episodes encountered by a hero trying to get home to his wife before she can marry (one of) her suitor(s).
Most of the jokes work, a couple don't, which is pretty typical of the Coens. George Clooney is very good, in full Clark Gable mode, as the brains of the outfit, which consists of three cons on the run from a chain gang. He is joined by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, the latter being very good. They are supplemented by a series of interesting cameos from a variety of performers and an excellent bluegrass soundtrack.
The movie's ad line is "They had a plan, but not a clue". Very true and funny enough.
Unbreakable
M Night Shyamalan made a movie with a very deliberate pace, a series of indelible images and an ending that made sense of all that had come before. He has tried to do the same thing again. This time the plot is based around speculation from comics and Samuel Jackson supplements Bruce Willis. The movie is a good one but, in no sense, a great one, largely because the surprise ending is telegraphed too early and because that ending does not justify what has come before, in the same way that the ending did in Sixth Sense.
Remember the Titans?
Denzel Washington is a very good actor. But, of late, his movies have become awfully preachy and, despite being based on true stories, have erected awful lot of straw men to make their points about racism. In The Hurricane it was the racist cop, who was made to personify the system. In Remember the Titans, there are a number of characters who don't ring true. This movie is about a black coach of the first integrated (forced by bussing) high school football team in Virginia. (The scary thing is that it was not until 1971, 15 years after the Supreme Court ruling on 'separate but equal' education, that this occurred.) As you'd expect he brings the disparate races together, they win football matches and lots of male bonding occurs. Will Patton is also very good as Denzel's assistant and some of the kids do OK. Think of it as an unfunny Wildcats, which deals with racism rather than Goldie's gender.
Charlie's Angels
I like Drew Barrymore and she is OK in this. On the other hand, it looks like someone has been holding Cameron Diaz hostage and refusing her food. She looks gaunt and ill. She needs to be rounded up, together with all those women from David E Kelley television series including Lucy Liu (Cameron Mannheim excepted), and force-fed until they look human again. That aside, the script is silly, the acting over-the-top, and action sequences second-rate, compared with, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the whole thing a waste of time.
Bring it On
This is a cheerleader version of the Rocky movie that I wasted one afternoon on when I needed to get out of the heat and into the air-conditioning. Kirsten Dunst is in fact a very good actress and very good in this. Eliza Dushku (Faith from Buffy) is her off-sider. The movie is better than it should be and shines a light on an interesting (very American) sub-culture and the ending is not quite as Rocky as you'd think.
What Women Want
Apparently Mel Gibson. And this movie. If so, they really are from Venus. Helen Hunt also needs a good feed (see above).
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]