Oscars , Julia and Cate
Movies from seen early in 2004, and the annual Oscar rant.
Originally written: April 2004
2004 Oscars
Mona Lisa Smile
The Missing
Paycheck
The Ruling Class
The Stunt Man
Freaky Friday
Wit
Shanghai Knights
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
A Mighty Wind
State of Play
As usual in the post-Oscar, pre-summer respite, the standard of film appearing at the cineplex has been fairly ordinary. As for the Oscars ceremony, it was a fairly ordinary show itself. Not that there was much wrong with Billy Crystal's performance, including a good opening film pastiche which integrated Crystal into a number of scenes from nominated films. Perhaps the opening songs parodies weren't up to past examples but they were OK. After that it was downhill pretty quickly, without even the usual highlights of over-the-top acceptance speeches. Renee Zellwegger and Charlize Theron did their best but weren't quite up to the Paltrow/Fields standard. The best speech came yet again from an overweight winner of the documentary category - Errol Morris using the occasion to make some anti-war remarks, more subtly than Mike Moore (who good-naturedly submitted himself to some parody in the starting pastiche). The nadir was Jim Carrey's introduction to Blake Edwards' special Oscar, itself a fairly ordinary decision: to award a a life achievement gong to a run-of-the-mill director (The Pink Panther, Victor/Victoria and SOB excepted). Even the frocks were not up-to-scratch this year. Almost everyone was dressed in some sort of good taste, even the winner of the Best Costume award. Where are the Bjorks and Lara Flynn Boyles of yesteryear? The Return of the King clean-sweep was predictable, even when it did not extend to the acting categories. For it to win Best Song, when not even nominated for Cinematography, is indicative of what happens when the sweep is on. Of the awards where they got it wrong, I would have preferred to see Peter Weir win Best Director (and did anyone else notice that the show's director kept focussing in on Peter Weir, not Peter Jackson, when New Zealand was mentioned?) and still think that Sean Penn's performance was not up to snuff. He's an actor I find little sympathy with. Bill Murray or Johnny Depp would have been a better choice. Theron's win indicates that the category continues to be dominated by pretty girls rather than actresses per se while Zellwegger's award is a victory for American-centricity over talent. Tim Robbins was a deserved award for a great performance, although a victory for Ken Watanabe would have been equally worthy. In the end though the ceremony was dominated by the year's best film and the other worthy nominees, including Lost in Translation and Master and Commander, were honored in the right categories, writing and cinematography respectively. Finally a cheer for the two Aussie-battler winners: the master, Russell Boyd, who has finally been recognised for his camerawork, and the animated Adam Elliott, who took the night's ritual - thanks to the spouse for support - to come out on multinational television. An OK ceremony for an OK year but not much to get excited about.
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Mona Lisa Smile, set in Wellesley College in the 1950s, is something more than just a female Dead Poets Society, as the cynical 'high concept' summary would have it. It turns out to be something more than a Julia Roberts vehicle as well. Julia plays a west coast art professor hired into the swank New England women-only college as their new teacher. There she meets an incredibly conservative establishment in a very conservative era and a phalanx of eager young college students determined to test her mettle. There has been much criticism of the image painted of the 1950s college, with assertions that the sort of deportment classes depicted were not part of the curriculum at the time. Undoubtedly true. But the film uses such devices to underline a different truth: that for all its pretensions to academic excellence, the students graduating from the college were destined more for marriage to the political, legal and business elite, than to be part of the elite themselves. Women who wanted such accomplishments were, in John Irving's phrase, 'sexually suspect'. The best part of MLS is the ensemble of younger women who play the students. While Kirsten Dunst has established something of a reputation in mainstream movies, the success of actors like Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ginnifer Goodwin has been in smaller films or supporting roles. Each shows something here in parts that could have been just ciphers. Particularly Gyllenhaal's Giselle, the most sexually active of the girls, and Goodwin's Constance, the lovelorn kid, stand out. Dunst has a harder time with Betty, the class bitch, determined to be a good wife to her upwardly mobile husband. Emerging from the ministrations of a domineering mother, Betty grows up more than any of her contemporaries. Stiles provides an interesting contrast: teetering on the edge of independence, under Robert's influence, she considers the possibility of law school. Meanwhile Roberts herself does what she can with weaker material, a suspect lover from the Italian department, and a couple of female room-mates - one an independent nurse (an effective Juliet Stevenson in a real cameo) and the other personifying the establishment position (Marcia Gay Harden in another of her fine acting jobs). Mike Newell does a fair job with the direction, given the material, and the film is highlighted by a good, popular song soundtrack, perhaps its best feature other than the emergence of the young actors. This is not as bad as some reviews have suggested, nor is it top class material. But it is a good enough film that presages the rise of some interesting young actors. In that sense, I suppose, it has something in common with Dead Poets Society.
Now Kill Me, Cate
Cate Blanchett is called upon the play a major role in a western in The Missing. The film itself is a derivative of The Searchers, John Ford's classic mid-1950s film about an obsessed man's search for a girl kidnapped by dastardly Indians. In the prototype John Wayne was the obsessed one and Jeffrey Hunter his sidekick. A young Natalie Wood was the girl they were chasing. In the contemporary version, Blanchett and her estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones) are the pair chasing her kidnapped daughter, also played by a Wood, Evan Rachel Wood in this case. The roles don't quite correspond: it's too simplistic to say whether Blanchett or Jones has the Wayne role. And, in any case, they are accompanied by her other daughter, Dot, in a major plot change. Also, Ron Howard, the director, has placed far more emphasis on the fate of the kidnapped girls and their captors than Ford, who was concerned almost exclusively with the Wayne character, ever cared to. The result is a convincing chase film, with a few interesting supernatural overtones. Blanchett and Jones create honest, believable and sympathetic characters and the screenwriter, Ken Kaufman (another of Charlie's brothers?), has used the cliches of the chase western to his advantage. There are the needful deaths, the confrontations and the bumps along the road that one would expect. Howard has created a film that is notable more for its conviction and reality than for its flamboyance. He is a good journeyman director with the occasional touch of brilliance (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) and here has the material and the personnel to work with. This won't appear in anyone's ten best of the year but will satisfy most viewers.
Forget about it, Ben
When it comes to the big Bens, Ben Affleck is superior to Ben Stiller. But only just. While his mate Matt Damon jumps from good picture to hit, and even Affleck's younger brother, Casey, gets the occasional effective role, as in Ocean's Eleven, Ben is stuck in a sort of movie Groundhog Day, going from excruciating flops like Gigli to painfully ordinary Sf fare like this movie. Based on an excellent PKDick concept, Paycheck posits the idea of memory erasure as an insurance for those hiring Affleck's reverse engineer (not "reserve engineer" as one review calls him). Firms take him on for a couple of months; he works out how some competitors device works and comes up with a patentable alternative. Since his memory of the employment is wiped out, he cannot sell the same idea to another employer. Then he is hired for a three-year contract by shady Aaron Eckhart, who also employs, in a different capacity, Uma Thurman. Three years later he discovers that he has signed away his income from the job and all he has is an envelope with 20 miscellaneous items, all apparently worthless. The story is how the items save him and he works out why he signed away his fee. And how he learns to love Uma. The problem is that the film is not as good as the set-up. Ben mails his performance in and Uma looks like the latest diet (or plastic surgery) has damaged her even more than was apparent in Kill Bill 1. Nonetheless, she is the best thing in the movie. Dick seems to be the Sf author de jour. Blade Runner and Minority Report show that good movies can be made from his books and non-Sf people seem, for some inexplicable reason, to like Total Recall. But Paycheck isn't in the same league. The good ideas are subsumed in a John Woo-fest of mindless violence, car-chases and poor dialog. Poor Ben - although things may look up for him now that Jen has departed.
Worth re-viewing
We recently bought two classic Peter O'Toole DVDs, just to remind us of the supreme injustice of the Oscars: despite seven nominations, he was never named Best Actor. He certainly deserved to be so named for Lawrence of Arabia and A Lion in Winter. Two other performances that were right up there were as the mad-as-a-hatter aristocrat, Jack, Fourteenth Earl of Gurney, in Peter Medak's The Ruling Class and the dictatorial director Eli Cross in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man. I hadn't seen the former in many moons but reviewing confirmed my opinion that this is one of great, loony British films of the sixties with brilliant performances from O'Toole and Arthur Lowe, interspersed with musical numbers and a red-hot go at the English upper class.
The Stunt Man is even better and may be the best "neglected classic" of recent times. A fugitive runs onto a Californian film set run by O'Toole's Cross. He's making an anti-war statement and recruits the fugitive as his new stunt man. The film looks at the interplay between Cross and his actors as they intersect different levels of reality and meta-reality. O'Toole anchors the movie in which both the viewer and the eponymous character are constantly trying to work out whether the director will kill his performer, if the script demands it. Eli Cross may be O'Toole's best creation and best performance. Unfortunately it seems to have spelled curtains for Richard Rush who has directed only one movie in the two decades since The Stunt Man's delayed release. His doco about the difficulties in making and releasing the film, which accompanies the film on the DVD, is not in the same league as the original film - a maudlin and self-congratulatory piece of messy film-making.
Other DVDs
The remake of Freaky Friday re-invents the body-switch movie with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan having great fun as the mother and daughter forced into each other's bodies until they resolve their differences. Curtis has great fun as the mother with a playful daughter running her body and the writers have invented a number of interesting scenarios for the leads and the remake manages to improve upon the original. An enjoyable romp, worth a squizz.
In Wit, Emma Thompson plays a Donne scholar dying of cancer who allows herself to be a test subject for a radical chemical therapy in the hope of beating the cancer. The film appears to be based on a stage-play, but is expanded out to include flashbacks and confrontations with the doctors and the nursing staff. For a made-for-TV movie, this has some interesting cast and crew choices. The adaptation was written by Thompson herself - as she did with Sense and Sensibility - and directed by Mike Nichols. The main medical researcher, the ultimate in observer, uninvolved with his patient, is played by Christopher Lloyd, best known for outre comedy roles. Audra MacDonald, a stage musical star, plays the sympathetic nurse. Harold Pinter is Thompson's father, seen in flashbacks, and Eileen Atkins her mentor. But at the centre is Vivian Bearing, the professor who has isolated herself within the discipline of metaphysical English poetry. Words are her weapons: singularly ineffective ones in dealing with an aggressive cancer but of more assistance in dealing with the hospital and coming to grips with her mortality. Donne's austere poetry is used to counterpoint Vivian's contemplations and underlying it all is the quote from his most famous sermon: "No man is an island ..." This is a fascinating use of film to do something more than feature slam-bang action and spend a fortune on special effects. It's a well-written, well-acted smaller movie that rewards viewing.
Shanghai Knights doesn't quite break Joe Bob's rule of sequels: they don't make the same movie again but get close enough. Jackie Chan is again Chon Wang (get it, eh?) and Owen Wilson is his American mate, Roy O'Bannon. This time they are chasing a Great Seal rather than a Princess. Again they have a brace of enemies, one Chinese, one occidental. The chase take the boys out of the Wild West and into a London that is somewhere between Dickens and Conan Doyle, bringing in a number of anachronistic elements - so that Charlie Chaplin, Conan Doyle, Jack the Ripper and early automobiles are all on deck in the late 1880s. The best thing about Chan movies has always been the stunts and the fact that he's done his own stunts largely without resort to special effects. That's not the case in this movie. It's a shame to see a good performer undermined by his later films. That's what's happening to Jackie Chan in his occidental phase. Not good enough.
George Clooney has picked an interesting subject for his directorial debut, Chuck Barris' autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Barris is the TV producer responsible for The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, among many others. Yet in his book, he asserted that he had been through most of his career a hitman for the CIA. How do you treat such a claim? In Clooney's case, he takes it at face value, although he undermines it to some extent by playing the espionage elements with much more irony than the better-documented television career. Sam Rockwell does a good job with the diverse elements of the Barris persona and is assisted by Drew Barrymore as the woman who lobs in and out of his life but sticks by him. Clooney, Julia Roberts and Rutger Hauer are parts of the spy world element. In the end the film doesn't quite work because the two elements are never reconciled adequately and because the excesses of the Barris personality occasionally undermine the credibility of Rockwell's performance. This is a pity because there are the germs of a great movie here. It is a near miss.
Christopher Guest, as the fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling prefers to be billed, has been making mockumentaries for a while - when not impersonating six-fingered men. His early collaboration with Michael McKean, Rob Reiner and Harry Shearer, This is Spinal Tap, is still the classic mock rock documentary. Recently, he, McKean and their friends have made further inroads into this little explored by-way of film-making with Waiting for Guffman and Best of Show. A Mighty Wind is the latest example, co-written, like the two previous films, by Guest and Eugene Levy. It posits a reunion concert for three folk music acts of the seventies, a trio, a duo and a reformed ensemble group. The mock seriousness of the discussions, underpinned by the ridiculousness of the sincerity, is what generates the success of the film. That and the songs written especially for the movie by many of its stars. Guest has assembled an ensemble of familiar faces for these exercises, of whom Levy is outstanding as post-traumatic Mitch, trying to reunite with his former partner, Mickey (Catherine O'Hara). Guest, McKean and Shearer are startingly different as aging folkies than they were as high volume rockers and just as funny. Ed Begley Jr provides another highlight as the Swedish-born, Yiddish-speaking PBS producer. This is a good, if brief, movie and another demonstration that good writing can be better than throwing buckets of money at special effects. Certainly this is not the sort of movie that is going to draw huge crowds to the cineplex but it rewards viewing in the best of all ways: it entertains.
On the box
The Brits know how to make a good political drama/mini-series. Whether it's A Very British Coup or The Politician's Wife or Me and Mrs Jones or House of Cards. The recent series, State of Play, demonstrates this yet again, with a commendable level of sophistication and credibility. This time, the producers have not only hooked into the political, but the journalistic world as well. Starting relatively simply with two almost simultaneous, and seemingly unrelated, deaths, one a researcher working for an MP on the rise, the story begins to radiate out as it attaches more and more levels of complexity. The central character, Cal McCaffrey (John Simm), a journalist, is dragged in first by his previous association with the MP. But, as he discovers more about the circumstances of the deaths and the connections with a Parliamentary inquiry into oil, he becomes obsessed with the story - and with the MP's wife. Soon a phalanx of journos are off chasing hounds all over London, involving elements of the police, the oil industry (and their flacks), politicians (and their flacks) and a very dangerous hit-man. The closest thing to a control over all this is Cal's editor, another great performance from the increasingly reliable Bill Nighy. Told in three 100-minute episodes, the plot comes together, increasing in complexity and dragging more characters into the mix. This type of story arc has previously worked well in Prime Suspect and Cracker, a series on which the writer Paul Abbott worked. State of Play works well when it concentrates on the nuts and bolts of journalism, following leads, dealing with sources, offering deals to the police in exchange for information. It works only slightly less well in exploring the minutiae of parliamentary inquiries. I was a little disappointed at the resolution of the central mystery but the journey to that resolution was well-worth the effort. Catch up with this one if you get a chance in repeat.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]