Satiago, via Yemen
Movies seen autumn 2012.
Originally written: June 2012
Salmon Fishing in Yemen
The Way
Men in Black 3
Dave
The success around the world of The Avengers is startling. It reached a billion dollars in gross within three weeks. Just four weeks in and at $1.25 billion, it's number 4 in total world-wide gross and should have passed the eighth Harry Potter by the time you read this. Just why this movie has touched off such attendance is open to question. Apart from the Iron Man movies most of the films featuring the other Avenger characters (Thor, Captain America, Hulk) have not done well, but put them all together and it's a bonanza for Marvel (and for the distributors, Disney). I haven't seen it yet - still a little jaundiced on comic book movies - but I am looking forward to Ridley Scott's Prometheus, which looks fabulous.
CM
is the Featured Attractions Review and Criticism section.
Also in
CM
Alphabetical archive of movies reviewed
also in
Movies
Opening Credits
Critical Mess - Reviews
From the Director's Chair - Essays
Lists
Take me home and spawn me
Every so often an actor way past their use-by date gets a meaty role and relishes it. Kristin Scott-Thomas has been waiting since Four Weddings for another decent part and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen provides it. Here she gets to play a female Alastair Campbell, a spin-doctor at Number Ten who'll do anything to make her PM look good. In this case the McGuffin is conveyed in the title - one of those prototypical British titles that no American film would wear. A sheikh who is an enthusiastic salmon fisher decides he wants a salmon run in his arid country and is prepared to spend the millions involved. Emily Blunt works for the PR firm he hires to get the thing moving and Ewan McGregor is the boffin who knows all there is to know about salmon (and fishing) but bugger all about the real world. He is roped in to the hopeless quest because Patricia, the spin-doctor, sees it as a PR coup, and the rules of the rom-com take over after that. The leads (add Amr Waked as the quirky sheikh) are all very good and the script, by Simon Beaufoy, manages to keep the disparate elements well combined. While most of the others are engaged in the semi-serious stuff of building dams, and seeding salmon, and in the even more serious business of falling in love, Scott-Thomas is in the comedy business, stealing every scene she is in with effortless grace. Her over-the-top manipulator charges through the plot with nary a concern for the wreckage left behind, but in an unselfish-conscious and hilarious way. Unfortunately, Lasse Hallstrom's direction is a little stodgy with regard to the other players. Sympathetic enough, they don't come to life in the same way. Emily Blunt is creating quite a career out of her earnest young women. This one is more vulnerable than, say, her Devil Wears Prada character and the finale asks her to take a strange left turn. Ewan McGregor is good enough to make us understand the switch. The end result is an entertaining enough movie, with a weird premise and some peculiar developments, but it could have been so much better with a more British director - perhaps one of the Ealing veterans.
Martin's on Jimmy's Road
The Way is a great little movie written and directed by Emilio Estevez and starring his father, Martin Sheen. It is set almost completely on the pilgrims' road from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. Despite my upbringing as a Jew and my lack of faith or any Catholic belief, I have been interested in this journey for decades, largely as a result of some close study of mediæval pilgrimages during the completion of my degree and the start (but non-completion) of a Master of Letters at UNE. A study of pilgrimage, particularly the walk to Santiago, was at the centre of my putative thesis. In Estevez' film, Thomas Avery a 60-something eye doctor from California undertakes the pilgrimage following the tragic death of his semi-estranged son. Although the film has the makings of the maudlin, the script manages to avoid the worst excesses and inserts enough humor, and some interesting characters, to lighten the load. Avery, despite his best endeavors, ends up being accompanied by three other pilgrims, a fat Dutchman, a self-obsessed Canadian, and an Irish travel writer. Each is on the Road for his or her own reasons, but all four discover enough to make the journey worthwhile, for the viewer as well as themselves. There are several scenes, in places we've been to, that are particularly good and bring back fond memories, including a visit to Burgos and inside Santiago's cathedral, with its giant censer. The final scenes on the Galician coast (the region from which Estevez' grandfather came) manage to work when perhaps they shouldn't. Sheen is a great actor and he is complemented well here by James Nesbitt (fresh from his turn as the humanist surgeon Monroe) as the Irishman. The music, original and songs used, work well. Estevez is a director who is worth looking out for, and The Way a good adult film in a season of kids' crap.
Third time's the harm
Goldfinger tells James Bond, "My friends in Chicago have a saying: the first time is chance; the second time is coincidence; the third time is enemy action". So it is somewhat with the Men in Black series. Men in Black 3 comes out more than a decade after the first sequel and you wonder whether a twentieth century phenomenon has any place in contemporary cinema. The same tropes re-appear: cool Agent J, surly Agent K, a nasty alien antagonist, several comic aliens in the background and a few visual gags at the expense of current pop idols (Lady Gaga gets the Michael Jackson treatment this time round). The success of the original was in the casting of the opposites, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, as the bantering buddies. The failure of the second lay in keeping Jones off-stage for too long. The problem with the third is that Jones disappears for a large chunk of the film and, while Josh Brolin does a good Tommy Lee imitation (as the younger K), it is clear that he was never Al Gore's roommate. The McGuffin is that the villainous alien, Boris the Animal, goes back in time to kill K, and J has to follow him and prevent that happening. And the 1969 scenes are at the time of the Apollo 11 launch. While it moves well enough, the film is handicapped by the lack of an adequate balance for Will Smith's frenetic performance. And there are too many action sequences and not enough comedy dialog. Even the cameo aliens don't get enough funny business to keep us entertained, although I have to give top marks to Rick Baker for the inventive variety of prosthetic ETs that populate the background here. Additionally, the first fifteen minutes seems much longer - the film starts on the wrong tone, with Boris' escape from captivity, and delays the entrance of our heroes for too long. With those criticisms noted, the film works far better than the dire MiB2 although not quite as well as the original. It works best when it recognises the basic Joe Bob sequel test: a good sequel, Joe Bob Briggs argues, should be essentially the same movie. Leaving aside the substitution of Brolin for Jones, this is pretty much the same movie as the first. Just not quite as good.
Choosing a president on film
Dave (1993) is tangentially about the election of the president, but more about having fun with the post-Watergate perception that the whole system is corrupt. This Canadian movie (the auteur is Ivan Reitman so that's close enough) posits a corrupt and philandering president who suffers a massive stroke causing his staff to recruit a presidential impersonator to take his place whilst they manipulate events towards the impeachment of the VP and his replacement by one of them. Kevin Kline gets to play the nasty president and the shlemiel who takes his place. Given that this is essentially a rom-com, Dave (the substitute) not only falls for the alienated First Lady (Sigourney Weaver) but turns out to be a better president than the professional politician. The movie is populated by a series of great supporting characters: Charles Grodin as Dave's friend the accountant, Frank Langella as the particular malevolent chief of staff, and Ben Kingsley as the clueless VP. Some of the best bits come from politicians and political commentators playing themselves (I particularly liked a very brief spot from Oliver Stone, pushing a conspiracy theory). It doesn't do is tell us much about presidential elections or the real world of presidential politics; it lives in some fantasyland where a right-wing president seems to be able to get away with anything. On second thoughts maybe Reitman was just being strangely clairvoyant. This is a good movie and perhaps the funniest and sweetest presidential story on film.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]