Top 100 and some not so good films
Movies seen at the end of 2005.
Originally written: December 2005
Must Love Dogs
In Her Shoes
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
The Constant Gardener
Following up last year's 100 best books as voted by its viewers, the ABC has conducted a favorite film poll among its viewers. We were all allowed to vote for just one film and the results were compiled so that a top 100 films were arrived at. The resultant list is heavily biased towards recent movies and towards Anglophone films. There is also a strong leaning towards the light and humorous as against the heavy and meaningful. Of the top 10, which were the subject of the 90-minute program aired on 4 December, there were only a couple with which you could strongly disagree: most notably the over-rated Amelie, a nice enough movie but not top ten material, and Fight Club, which demonstrates that fooling people all the time is not that difficult. What was really interesting was how high some cult favorites finished, compared with movies that were very popular at the time. So, no Titanic or Ben Hur but high places for Blade Runner, Donnie Darko and The Princess Bride. The skew to recent movies saw Serenity, for example, placed in the top forty but Citizen Kane not in until 92. Among Australian films, The Castle placed highest (24) but Gallipoli was 78 and Newsfront didn't make the list. There were in total 15 SF movies and 12 further that were fantasy. There were but 7 mysteries, which is a bit of a shock, as was the relegation of The Godfather, which tops the IMDb poll to No. 30. Unlike the equivalent books list, there were very few kids' movies on the list and no Harry Potter. And no Jane Austen!
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What there was included the quirky (Amelie at 2, Donnie Darko (5), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (15), Withnail and I (28) and Brazil (37) being examples) and the deserved late bloomers (Shawshank Redemption (4), The Princess Bride (8), Blues Brothers (27) and The Big Lebowski (44) stand out), as well as the genuine examples that vox poluli and vox dei are two different animals: Fight Club (10), The Matrix (23), Life if Beautiful (29), Kill Bill (71) and Mulholland Drive (95) among many others.
While there's one Hitchcock (Rear Window at 68), there's no Kurosawa, Ford, Sturges, Almodovar or Disney and many other examples of a failure to recognise the history of cinema commenced before 1990. Where are The Seven Samurai, North by Northwest, Stagecoach (or The Quiet Man or The Searchers), Sullivan's Travels, Matador, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves not to mention The Philadelphia Story or His Girl Friday or The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep?
Smart people; dumb moves
There's not much doubt about the formula of the Hollywood romantic comedy: it starts with the 'meet cute', proceeds through the difficulties and misunderstandings that lead to confusion and separation, until everything works out well in the end. In other words, girl meets boy, girls loses boy, girl and boy end up together. Normally as cliched as a western or a post-Tarantino crime melodrama. And about as funny. So when a good version of the genre emerges, it's worth noting with some joy. Must Love Dogs is well above average for the breed. Its protagonists are mature, apparently intelligent and appealing; there is a reasonably witty script; some interesting secondary characters; and some real humor. But, given all that, it remains a romcom, with all the problems that that entails. Perhaps it even exacerbates some: the formula requires a series of misunderstandings and false steps that dog (sorry about that) development of the romance. In the case of apparently intelligent adults, such as the ones here, the genre requirement may make them seem less than they are. Diane Lane and John Cusack are the leads. Each has just come off disastrous long-term relationships and neither is looking for another connection. She has a large, interfering family of sisters and brothers-in-law; he has a best friend. Each is thrown into the Internet dating pond against their own wishes. And they meet cute, with dogs, which quickly disappear from the movie. Cusack's characters always seem to come across as intelligent, Jake is no exception, and Lane is very sympathetic as Sarah, so the least effective part of the movie is the series of complications that serve to keep them apart for most of the time. There is another man, the nearly ubiquitous Dermot Mulroney, who is interested in her; and Sarah thinks there is another woman in Jake's life. So they like each other but it doesn't quite work. This is supplemented by some fun largely revolving around her family: her recently widowed father (Christopher Plummer) is keeping a string of widows interested and her sisters (Elizabeth Perkins and Ali Hillis) are constantly involving themselves in her life. Another sub-plot revolves around one of dad's widows, played by Stockard Channing: an older woman addicted to Internet dating, where she maintains a multiplicity of personalities. Her character is quite the most outre of those in the film; in fact, she seems to be in a different film, a far more scatty one than the strongly realistic version of romcom that the rest of the characters inhabit. Written and directed by television sitcom graduate, Gary David Goldberg, Must Love Dogs moves towards the inevitable mutual discovery of their love by the leads with little or no suspense. Then again, no-one went to the theatre in Ancient Greece to learn something new about their gods and heroes, they went to see how the playwright could construct an involving drama out of a known story and traditional theatrical elements. You go to romantic comedy films for similar reasons. How diverting are the characters and how entertaining are their travails? In Must Love Dogs, the material is more than good enough to maintain interest; it is not just another kid's movie specialising in fart jokes. If you missed it at the movies, it's worth catching on DVD.
She also walks dogs
Curtis Hanson has emerged as an interesting director. Since LA Confidential, one of the best of the recent crime dramas, his breakthrough film, he has made the comically tragic Wonder Boys and Eminem's musical biopic 8 Mile, each top drawer within their genre. All three are excellent movies. So it is interesting to see him move into rather strange territory with a 'chick flick'. In Her Shoes is reasonably pure chick flick: concerning two sisters, who cannot live with each other and cannot survive apart, and their recently discovered grandmother. Ironically it has much more to do with dogs than the eponymously canine movie above: Diaz dognaps one and Collette gives up her day job part way through, finding dogs more intelligent and sympathetic than the lawyers with whom she'd been working. It less than totally successful as an example of the chick flick breed for at least one reason: the emotionally wrenching moment at the climax was expressed, not in the screenwriter's words, but in the words of a quoted poem, this time e e cummings (the capital-letter-challenged mid-century american poet). The other main reason for its less than total success arises from the casting of Cameron Diaz in the central role and the obsessive camera shots of her increasingly gurning-quality face. Diaz plays the 'dumb' sister, constantly surviving on her wits, and therefore constantly in strife. When she is evicted by her wicked stepmother, she moves in with her older, smarter sister, Toni Collette, the corporate lawyer. Collette's character is interesting and deserves the central part in a movie, but here is too often sidelined by Hanson's concentration on the blond bimbette. Plot devices too complex to worry about, including the fact that the sisters share the same shoe size and at least one lover too many, lead to Diaz' eviction, her discovery of the lost grandmother (their late mother's mother) and her moving to Florida to bludge off her recently found relative. Shirley MacLaine is grandma and, together with the posse of aging thespians who share her aged accommodation, she delivers an acting lesson or two to Diaz. These scenes, alternating with Collette's finding happiness with an unexpected partner (well, unexpected only in the sense that anyone who has never seen a chick flick or read a romance novel would not expect it), are among the best in the movie and there's probably another good discrete movie about a grasping bimbette moving in with the old folks and learning her life lessons. If the scenes between Diaz and McLaine and co are played mainly for humor, the emotions are evinced through the introduction, as a patient in the home in which Diaz starts to work, of a dying English teacher who uses poetry (Elizabeth Bishop being the one featured first) to help 'cure' Cam's dyslexia. The movie's climax naturally brings the three leads together, solves Collette's romance problems and resolves Diaz' dumbness and criminal tendencies. And is, of course, as over the top as could be hoped for, with a wedding, a reunion and a comeuppance or two. It is a shame that with such good actors as Collette and MacLaine and the best of the old ladies, Francine Beers, the camera lingers so long on Cameron Diaz, because hers is the most cliched character and the least interesting performance. The actress, who was so attractive in her early movies, has been wasting away as a result of whatever she has inflicted on herself to obtain the overly thin body that seems de rigeur in Hollywood (except for 'character' actors like Toni Collette). The results can be seen in her face where the chipmunk cheeks and the collapsing jawline make her a natural for the next gurning championships. In Her Shoes has all the elements for a great movie about family but the ersatz emotion of the ending and the weakness of the central character derogate from any chance for greatness. Still it's worth watching for Toni Collette, who is again great in a support role, and for Shirley MacLaine, an actress who knows how to deliver a put-down. I just wish that writer Susannah Grant could have found her own words.
Fourth wall comes down
I cannot be the only one that remembers with fondness the early series of Moonlighting, that daffy television detective series of the 1980s, which featured fast and witty dialog, and treated the conventions of detective films and film noir with disdain, frequently knowingly acknowledging the nature of the fiction they were creating. Given that films sets are usually built with only three walls visible (two sides and the rear), this technique of engaging directly with the audience is sometimes called 'knocking down the fourth wall'. Writer/director Shane Black has fun with the fourth wall in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and that, combined with his reliance on sharp dialog and the subject matter of the film, brought back memories of Moonlighting and David and Maddie's schtick. Black's movie plays around with the formulae of classic hard-boiled detective fiction, such as Chandler and Hammett. In fact it uses as its source material one of Brett Halliday's Mike Shayne novels, and supplements that with chapter titles that are Chandler book titles. The narrator, and central character is Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr), a petty thief who, in escaping from the law, stumbles into an audition and soon finds himself whisked off to Hollywood to try out for the lead in an upcoming detective film. At a party there he meets Perry (Val Kilmer), a gay PI who is meant to show him the ropes, and Harmony (Michelle Monaghan), his home-town crush who's been trying to make it as an actor. There is a complicated plot into which these three stumble, involving two separate cases that are, inevitably, the same case, all tied to a series of stories based around a fictional detective. The fun here does not derive from the solving of the complex plot. That's just the McGuffin. It's about the journe ot the destination. Black, whose earlier scripts include the original Lethal Weapon movie, has emerged from a writing hiatus far more sophisticated in his approach. This is best illustrated by the fun he has with the conventions of detective fiction. Harry supplies the narration, and it is both self-referential and quirky. He takes the audience into his confidence, pointing out, for example, that a seemingly irrelevant early scene will have its pay-off in the finale. He stops the film in mid-stride to amplify or correct earlier information, non-verbally winking at the audience, knowing that they know the artifice at work as well as he. The elements in this movie mesh amazingly well. While it is, in many ways, an aficionado's movie, playing on the audience's familiarity with the cliches of the genre, and the tiredness with which most are employed in contemporary films, it is a movie that anyone can enjoy. The leads are engaging, particularly Downey, whose easy charm has been underutilised, perhaps as a result of his frequent brushes with drug laws, and Kilmer, who demonstrates again (as he did in Heat) that he is best used in a supporting role. The technical aspects of the movie are also worth comment, particularly the music by John Ottman and the opening credit sequence, which is reminiscent of the best of Saul Bass's stuff from the fifties and sixties. The title, by the way, is derived from the summary of the essential elements of mystery films as perceived by critic Pauline Kael, who said that a detective only needed his gun and his girl: "kiss kiss, bang bang" was her precis of the essential film plot. A truly enjoyable romp.
Kenya make a difference?
It's hard enough for cold warriors now that the Cold War is over; and many spies have been made redundant by the declaration of peace. In any case, for most of these people the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has provided fertile new ground for their trades, whether behind the old Iron Curtain or on our side of it. Having briefly considered the plight of the politicians and agents who relied on the certainties of bilateral antagonism, now think on the fate of those writers whose livelihood was derived from the complexities of the espionage arrangements endemic to the second half of the twentieth century. John Le Carre, for example. What is he to do in the post-Soviet world without the KGB to provide George Smiley with a challenge or two? The answer, according to the evidence from the film adaptation of his The Constant Gardner, is to villainise the rapacious sociopathic corporation operating in the third world, in this case western pharmaceutical companies experimenting with African kiddies to perfect a TB medicine. That's the McGuffin, and it doesn't spoil anything in the plot to disclose it. Nor to note that the film starts with the death of the female protagonist. She doesn't even last as long as Janet Leigh did in Psycho. But she does continue to appear through the movie in a series of flashbacks, as her widowed husband uncovers the events that led to her death. He is the eponymous character, Justin, and is played with some deliberation, and some subtlety, it has to be said, by the normally very annoying Ralph Fiennes. His day job is in the British High Commission in Kenya, and gardening is his avocation, his way of hiding from the world. Rachel Weisz plays Tessa, an heiress and an activist, who seems ill-matched with Justin despite the obvious passion of their relationship. It is she who uncovers the dirty work at the Kenyan crossroads that leads to her death, and that of her ally, a local doctor. In coming to terms with her death, Justin finds a trail leading back to his own colleagues in the FO, particularly his associate Sandy (Danny Huston showing that he is yet another third-generation player in the Huston clan) and their superior, Sir Bernard (Bill Nighy, not quite pulling off the banality of evil). Jeffrey Caine's screenplay captures the anger and despair that underlie Le Carre's post-Cold War plot and the actors, including Hubert Kounde as the Kenyan doctor, are very good indeed. Particularly this is a triumph for Weisz, an actress who has been looking for the right part to show just how talented she is. She infuses Tessa with the emotions required and communicates the frustrations her character feels as she comes up against the exploitation of the third world by the uncaring capitalist companies headquartered far away, whose only thoughts are the bottom line. Fiennes is more centred as the apparently phlegmatic Justin, whose passions are aroused by Tessa, first in meeting her and later in confronting her death. Where she met her antagonists head on, he insinuates and works the margins, leading to a climax that is not only logical but a reflection of his character, as established by the story. A Brazilian director, Fernando Meirelles, is in charge here and this may be the only minor weakness in the movie. His use of hand-held cameras, and his love of the wide shot, derogate at times from the intimacy of the action. The cinematography in the movie is at times breath-taking. Some of the establishing scenes in Kenya, and the use of color, are so good that I thought an Australian must be behind the camera. But, perhaps, it needed more close-ups. And the plot is a little too black-and-white: can we believe the absolute villainy of the corporation? The evidence of Bhopal and of a number of recent drug cases show that the such evil is possible, if not always credible. But these are minor faults in the scheme of things. This is one of the movies of the year: a thriller combined with a love story, and an indictment of social evils. Highly recommended.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]