Pumpkin State

Beau Travail
Not wishing to be the kind of contrary bugger who advocates red wine one day and beer the next, I suppose you have to accept that sometimes circumstance will cloud your view of a movie. The best flick in the world may pass you by if you are in some terrible funk about your girlfriend dumping you. In that situation I advise going home and listening to your most depressing records; its a special kind of film which will allow you to sulk for two hours solid (they do exist though). Equally I have a dilemma. I like films, I like arthouse movies, I liked L'Humanite which frankly was about as slow and ponderous as a French movie can be without being that frame for frame extended 24 showing of Psycho. L'Humanite was two and a half hours long and was uneventful. In comparison Beau Travail is one and a half hours long, has some beautiful cinematography and is based on a classic of literature (Billy Budd if you want to know). And its possibly the dullest film I have seen for two years. Duller than Clockwatchers. Even duller than Mission To Mars. That dull.
Of course this has caused inner consternation, since I readily accept that this film will probably rock up in most critics top ten lists this year. It was lauded, loved - but was it really liked? I hate to be the kid pointing at the naked emperor, but director Claire Denis's apparently daring impressionism made very little impression on me. There is much to talk about the visual presentation of the film, the themes which may be contained in the piece. But those themes are rendered intractable by the cold, stand-offish production - happy to drag out scenes and concentrate on drawing meaning from the most meaningless of inactions.
Beau Travail, as mentioned above, re-runs the story of Billy Budd - albeit in the context of a modern day French Foreign Legion unit stationed in Djibouti. An interesting subject to explore, the historic Foreign Legion is well represented in films (from Beau Geste to Carry On Follow That Camel) but that the Legion still exists and attracts soldiers is certainly intriguing. This is ignored for a kind of silent masculinity, which is channelled into balletic drill routines. These are beautifully choreographed, but it is unclear what Denis is trying to say beyond teasing dance out of a thoroughly masculine activity.
Our narrator is telling the tale in flashback from a hotel in Marseilles. The tale he tells would in nearly any other film take about fifteen minutes to tell. Into the troop comes a near perfect soldier. Our narrator, the group captain, is immediately jealous of him. There are suggestions of sexual jealousy, that there may have been something between our captain and general which is ended by this usurper. This is never really convincing though, Denis relies too much on long drawn out tense moments of questionable power. In the end our captain provokes the soldier into subordination, and leaves him in the desert to die. And certainly these desert shots are made to look beautiful. By now we are an hour into the film and finally something has happened. More than a number of heads in the cinema were nodded by this point. Of course the tale is a classic, and the passions stirred ought to be enough to string the film along - but truth be told it really isn't. Denis has little to say about the place of the Foreign Legion in Djibouti, and the little we see of African's is in very odd club scenes which permeate the film. They come along often enough, and are loud enough to wake up the audience, but as a device to make a film watchable its at best suspect.
There is no denying the beauty of some of the cinematography of Beau Travail, and these are images of Africa we rarely see. But Denis's attempt to explore aspects of masculinity - what Billy Budd is all about after all - is fatally flawed by the simplicity of her take on the story and the pace. The idea that these actions stem merely from jealousy is difficult to grasp from the lead characters' actions, all we get is long aching looks at the camera - whilst we watch back with aching behinds. However the most bizarre aspect of the film is Denis's metaphor for suicide. We return to the club and see our narrator, togged up like John Travolta, dancing like a five year old to the Rhythm Of The Night. It might be a metaphor for how embarrassment is death, but this is just a laughable coda to a thoroughly uninspiring experience.
Maybe it was me. Let's be charitable, maybe I just did not understand how this film was supposed to tap a certain ultra-masculinity. Instead it tapped the fact that I was quite sleepy. Pretty pictures are great for adverts, or photography - but striking cinematography is just not enough. I need narrative, and narrative developed at least to the degree where I am not supposed to take it on trust that something is actually a meaningful look. The final score at the end of this review is what I really thought of the movie; perhaps the joke is on me, and its the grade I should receive for this review. You be the judge, but don't say you weren't warned. (2)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: Carry On Follow That Camel hits Wildstyle, and then is sloooowed down, all the jokes are taken out and you fall into a deep, deep sleep.

Being John Malkovitch
How far can you stretch an idea? This question rose by itself at the first of four screenings of the "best" music videos ever at the NFT. Chris Cunningham (director of dark Aphex Twin videos which you rarely get to see with them being kind of dark and unsuitable for any kind of television really) suggested that the Jamiroquai "Virtual Insanity" video was a perfect example of a one idea video. Jay moonwalks around a room where the furniture moves. Now this left him in a quandary to describe the Robert Palmer "Addicted To Love" video (he eventually settled on calling it a teenage wankfest) but rose the original question. How far can you stretch an idea?
A lot of movies are based on one idea. These have garnered the name concept movies, and are often big
blockbusters - as the best way to stretch an idea is to throw lots of money at it. Certainly from the outset you could well be forgiven for thinking that Being John Malkovitch is also a concept movie, albeit one with a more than left-field concept. What if you found a way of getting into someone else's head? Or, to be more precise, what if you found a little tunnel behind a filling cabinet on the seven and a half floor of a tower block which took you into John Malkovitch's head and after fifteen minutes dumped by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.
You know when I said a lot of movies are based on one idea, I did not mean Being John Malkovitch. I was talking more about Top Gun.
Being John Malkovitch, much like Fight Club last year, is a film full of ideas. Also, like Fight Club, it is not content with grabbing its big idea and squeezing it for all it is worth. Instead, in the gaps between ideas, it flirts with more ideas. The sentence above contained some of its best, what may be a throwaway gag about the seven and a half floor here becomes a clever linking device - miring the film in its own world without it being too fantastic. BJM deals with fantasy, but is rooted with internal consistency as well as a real connection with the outside. Much of this is due to the direction. Spike Jonze (who was the best thing in Three Kings) who has decided on an almost drab real world look. Set in offices and dingy basement apartments, and dressing most of its stars badly - Jonze does his best to turn his fantasy into our world. Darker infact.
BJM is very dark, whilst always remaining funny. The film uses its premise to build a plot which has the bizarre love triangle that New Order were almost definitely referring to (probably too bizarre), and the upshot is a tragedy of almost Greek classicism. A perfectly sculpted plot, which still leaves the audience with room for suspense - often just to work out what will happen next. Jonze creates this world, but of course the real debt should go to the writer, and in a film as odd as this the producers for getting this delight made in the first place.
So where to start, and where to finish. I've mentioned before (with regards to Pushing Tin) that I will go watch John Cusack in anything. Here he is surprisingly restrained, initially odd I thought but yet again it fits the character perfectly. Cameron Diaz fulfils much of her promise here in a shock wig that her smart choice of roles up to now have suggested. No-one picks more interesting films to be in than her, which I suppose is as good a way at really learning your acting craft. Christine Keener as the third point of the love triangle is the best on screen bitch since Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction. And all this is counting without John Malkovitch, playing a slightly vain John Malkovitch playing himself slightly possessed, then wholly possessed by John Cusack. It is a role of considerable self mocking, whilst retaining and regaining more dignity than much of his other serious work could ever garner him.
Being John Malkovitch is a joy. It touches upon question about soul, consciousness and personal identity, but only lightly. It allows the audience that one later whilst entertaining non-stop with romps through John Malkovitch's sub-conscious and some truly high class puppeteering. A surprisingly small film, considering its cast and pedigree, it packs a lot into its hour and a half and leaves you creepily wanting more. A true original, and hopefully yet another suggestion that Hollywood is going the idea route in this new century. You certainly cannot continue to watch film in 2000 without seeing it. (10)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: Deconstructing Harry hits Fight Club hits The Player hits Terry Gilliam for advice and goes its merry way on its tod. Ah, bung The Player in there too, with The Last Seduction and a touch of Basic Instinct - oh and Ace Ventura - Pet Detective. You would probably have to bung Ingmar Bergman in there too. A real car wreck to get close

Best In Show
The mock documentary - mockumentary if you will - is a very difficult art to master. After all, your audience will almost definitely know that the film is a parody, which means the verisimilitude that the documentary form allows you is almost instantly negated. The appeal of a documentary however is the very fact that these are real people we are watching. It allows for the lack of strict marrative drive and a looser construction. Which in its own way allows the mockumentary film-maker the leeway to go into slightly surreal areas, but also far too many temptations to completely undermine the initial premise.
The form works best for satire of course, but as Christopher Guest shows in Best In Show - it is best for gentle satire. Like This Is Spinal Tap (which he co-wrote and starred in) the fundamental premise is already ridiculous. Grown people breeding and dressing dogs to be judged. Therefore this is the very aspect of the film which is underplayed - it is the framework, the linking device but is not strictly a source of explicit comedy in itself. Whilst there would be great temptation in really going to town on ridiculous poodle stylings there is no need. This is a slyly observed character piece based around the five main dogs.
The film appears to be semi-improvised - as if Guest gave his actors the detailed character sketches, the framework of the film and let them get on with it. This adds to the documentary style, perhaps at the expense of some slightly more polished humour. So we have the slightly mis-matched couple (nerd and class bike to be exact), the catalogue neurotic couple, the gay couple and the rich previous winners. Add to this Guest as a fishing bloodhound owner who almost steals his own movie with the kind of inspired straight faced lunatic babbling that made Nigel Tufnell so funny in Spinal Tap (here we have a long discussion on nuts). Nearly all of the couples are amusing on paper, yet the film never works them too hard to bring out their idiosyncracies. Instead they flit in and out of the story - bringing the odd laughs as they come.
Best In Show certainly is not a laugh a minute movie. But when the humour comes it is layered, and will hit diferent people in different ways. There are at least twenty good jokes for everyone though, building when the actual dog show starts and the fatuous comments of the presenters. It does take a while to actually get to the dog show, and whilst the detours along the way are amusing - they do make the film feel a bit loose. However since this is a character piece as soon as we get to the actual dog show a plot of sorts does finally kick in to make us through the final half hour. Who will win the show?
Christopher Guest is the current master of the mockumentary, and he appears to be aware of the key which the few other people who attempt the style often miss. As long as you characters behave in a believable manner you can give them the most ludicrous back story and it can be told. However your audience must like your leads. So the film cannot afford to be cruel to them. This may appear to be a problem with satire - but instead you use your leads as a view into a ridiculous world. So on paper the framing device is normal, the characters abnormal - but in viewing the opposite comes out. In the end you do feel close to these characters, your view on the type of people who show dogs may not have changed, but you know they are people.
Best In Show is not the funniest film released in the last year or so, but it does deliver quite consistently. The cast judge their characters well, and Guest has created a broad enough sweep to keep an audience interested and still look into the world he is satirising. If there is a flaw in the film it may be that it is a little bit too fond of its characters, and the world it is looking at is possibly a bit too much of an easy target. With a general lack of documentaries on the big screen (or at least ones which are filmed this well) the style is an odd one to parody too - but in the end the film stands or falls on whether it makes you laugh or not. It does, so it stands. (7)
IF THIS FILM WAS A CAR CRASH: Obviously This Is Spinal Tap, with less obviously Lassie. Sorry, that was obvious too. How about Drop Dead Gorgeous then for the beauty pageant crossover?

Best Laid Plans
To steal a line from John here, "I don't trust films named after the lesser known half of sayings". To back up this example he proffered me "Absolute Power" (as in corrupts absolutely - and the less than average Clint Eastwood master cat burglar versus President pot-boiler. Which distracts me into wondering about exactly how many master cat burglars there are banging around in the world. There are always films about them. Entrapment's out soon and that's got not one but two). So anyway, John feared that (the) "Best Laid Plans" (of mice and men gang aft awry), would suffer from this syndrome. Well, he should not have worried. Whilst it shares with Absolute Power the fact that it is a potboiling thriller, it has an awful lot more going for it.
May 1999 has yet to throw me a bad film. If I had to rank them, Best Laid Plans would probably come out worst, because unlike Orphans or eXistenZ, it offers us nothing new. What it does offer us though is a little touch of small town noir, the like of which we haven't seen since Red Rock West or perhaps Palookaville. I'm a sucker for small town noir (aka stn), and every now and then I need to see a film which has an unrestrainedly convoluted plot. Best Laid Plans gives me both, wrapped up in a shrewdly written and well acted package. I couldn't help but love it.
The basic plot involves that old staple of the heist gone wrong, our nice guy hero entangled with all sorts of nasty characters and finding his salvation in an old friend who he tries to scam. It really isn't worth telling you much more, and rest assured the requisite amount of trust, double crossing and people not being what they seem pop up. The main reason I won't tell you too much plot is that it threw me. The film starts in the middle, and then goes back to the beginning after a good quarter of an hour. Most of the narrative reviews I've read (and man, are the newspaper reviews round here depressingly narrative), tell the story chronologically, starting after this quarter of an hour hike in time. When I started watching I was pleasantly confused about who was scamming who, since I knew that a scam
would happen. Its almost as good as seeing a film fresh (which I've got to say I'm getting less and less likely to do).
This feeling of freshness permeates the whole film. The problem with double crossing, twisty turny plots is that they tend to turn the audience in plot detectives. We sit there trying to work out who is double crossing who. This soon detracts from the actually watching of the film, and often forces the director to make a protagonist act somewhat out of character. Here nothing is out of character, partially because we are first informed of our characters at the very point when they are being duplicitous. Its a clever move, allowing us to accept what may have otherwise been forced. Also, the start point giving us the three main characters all locked in conflict is a handy piece of sleight, when the film does come to its twist. I won't spoil it, but lets just say unusually I was broadsided by the twist here.
The main reason I went to see Best Laid Plans was for Reese Witherspoon. I liked her in Pleasantville, where I thought she really gave a lot of depth to a pretty cardboard character. She does the same here, toying with us, yet being the moral centre of a morally ambivalent film. The other performances are fine too, Alessandro Nivaro does the "stuck in small town forever" despair well. The direction is okay, the British director occasionally falling into Ridley Scott cinematography cliches, but the whole thing is paced well. The only jarring thing is the last minute, and the crash of the end titles song, which upsets what is otherwise rather a nice mood. But luckily this does not spoil what had already been built up, and you do leave feeling you've watched a undiscovered gem. (The soundtrack in general is very good, and well used - especially the Cowboy Junkies and Gomez tracks).
Best Laid Plans is a good little thriller which suffers a touch from just being a good little thriller. It may pretend to have grander motives, to teach us even about the nature of friendship and trust. But in the end it keeps you guessing, is exciting, violent without being bloody (it is graphically the least violent film I have seen in a long time leaving an awful lot to the imagination). Good story, well told. Its not a crime. But to get back to John's thesis, I suppose generally he was right. After all, isn't there that well known phrase "Godzilla" (is a shit movie). (7)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: That really slow car in Palookaville probably smashing into Linda Fiorentino from The Last Seduction all rolling up in Red Rock West General Hospital needing attention on their split lip.

Beautiful Creatures
Such an innocuous word - Creatures. Yet the full spectrum of good and bad films in the nineties had that very word in the title. On the sublimely good side was Peter Jackson’s coming of age, murder fairytale that was Heavenly Creatures. On the other side - the so bad it really is really really bad side - we got the non-sequel to a Fish Called Wanda (in all ways) that was Fierce Creatures. So here we have Brit chick flick, heavily promoted in a notably quiet part of the year as some kind of British Thelma And Louise - Beautiful Creatures. Good creatures or bad?
Bad - I’m afraid. Which is a great pity because - at least on the chick front - there are some good actresses here. Not acting up to their best here admittedly, Rachel Weisz playing a battered bottle blonde ditz, to Susan Lynch’s hard Glasgow ex-junkie. You can see that we are already dealing in stereotypes here, and the plot does not vary from this - from the corrupt copper to the abusive husband. But this is all a bit of escapism black comedy fun right? Once the caperish plot gets underway the stereotypes will serve rather than undermine the film.
The plot. Where to start. The accidental killing of Rachel Weisz husband is fine, quite a funny scene in dark black comedy terms. What follows though, the faked kidnapping and the sheer ineptitude of the police and the family undermines any suggestion that Lynch and Weisz characters are anything but victims who cannot fathom a way out of their situation. To add to this the clunky double entrendres with litter the script for no good reason than to get pulled out as trailer fodder. An unrealistic plot is fine in a film which is spoofing a genre, or having fun with a genre. But this film pokes its toe into gritty realism with its setting, black comedy with its premise and leaves itself no room to convincingly do complicated thriller as well. I have never seen a cinema more disinterested by a supposedly trick double cross.
You always have to be wary when a film dissolves into pointless gunplay and half arsed chase scenes. Such is the case here - the battles may well be going on but it does not hide the identities of all those concerned. Therefore any half decent police force are going to pick up Lynch and Weisz after about ten seconds on the run - especially seeing how much they have relied of coincidence and luck up to this point.
Like The Criminal - another Brit thriller - Beautiful Creatures seems to believe that plotting a thriller is a simple task. Nothing could be further from the truth, and one of the joys of a good thriller is savouring the turns of the plot. Unlike The Criminal however Beautiful Creatures does not even have any of the promised comedy which would at least partially excuse a lousy plot. The film is physically directed quite well, but the script is at least three redrafts away from being anyway approaching quality. Not so much a British Thelma And Louise as a rubbish Thelma And Louise. They don’t even die at the end. (2)
IF THIS FILM WAS A CAR CRASH: Well it sneakily thinks is an amalgam of Thelma And Louise and Trainspotting - perhaps with a touch of Orphans thrown in. It ends up being a Childrens Film Foundation caper with swearing in it.

Beyond The Mat
More documentary action then - and what action. Plummeting twenty feet from cages, being slammed into strands of barbed wire. Beyond The Mat is a wrestling documentary, and we're not talking Romo-Grecian Wrestling here where blokes in leotards grapple for medals in the Olympics for. Nope, this is American Pro-Wrestling, or as they prefer it to be called these days - Sports Entertainment. Our narrator, Barry Blaustein, takes us on a very personal journey into this very personal obsession with us, covering every level of this oddly fascinating subject. And yet...
This is the third feature documentary I have seen this year, fourth if you count Wisconsin Death Trip which I caught on the television the other week, and already my standards have been raised. Wisconsin Death Trip notwithstanding, none of them are all that pretty to look at - relying for much of the time of grainy video footage. Fair enough, the more newsy their subject the more they will have to use the actual stock of the day. Yet The Filth And The Fury used this to its advantage, grainy illustrated the rough and ready subject of its documentary. Also it was playful in its use of imagery, as befitted a documentary directed by a man who intimately knew his subject. One Day In September was much more newsy - and as such wore its cinematic touches with discomfort. The biggest criticism that could be levelled at One Day In September could be that its construction and cut sequences owed too much to MTV style journalism, the need for an apposite soundtrack tune often belittled its quite clear explanation
of what happened. Which brings us to Beyond The Mat, a film whose subject I found fascinating - but whose style disappointed.
This is an explanation of one man's obsession, and while we may not share a love of the antics in the ring - it is interesting to see the men behind the characters. (Very much men, only one female wrestler is interviewed and her segment lasts all of a minute.) Question is though, was the film supposed to explain his obsession, or delve in a journalistic way into the murky background of the sport. It doesn't matter, in either aspect it does not work. Nowhere in the film does our director ever explain the connection he had with the spectacle. And as an in-depth look at the sport it suffers from being to superficial. And to be fair, if you are making a film about wrestling somewhere along the line you have to answer the most obvious question. "Why do you care if you know its fixed?"
Instead we get a number of interviews. All the interviews are revealing in some small way, though this appears to be more due to the self analytical nature of American individuals themselves. There is an excruciating sequence with an old wrestler and his daughter which comes straight out of Oprah. They are crying, the are talking for the first time in years and you are never unaware that this is all for the benefit of the cameras. The runner of the World Wrestling Federation, Vince McMahon, is frighteningly honest about the money making aspect. Yet no-one ever wonders about how healthy the very spectacle is. Buried under all the small vignettes the film presents there is at least one half decent piece of work - but it is hidden under a lot of schmaltz masquerading as journalism. And when you consider this is schmaltz which drips blood, that is some serious schmaltz.
It is difficult to go wrong when your very subject is so interesting. Ruby Wax tackled this subject a while back, and again produced a fascinating yet shallow document. In this case it is almost as if the director does not want to expose the underbelly, in case it really destroys his love of the sport. He only gets this urge when he find he has far to much in common with one of the wrestlers 'Mankind' Mick Foley. Mick has a young family, appears to be the perfect parent and yet his chosen profession involves him being beaten round the head with chairs, The films most powerful moment involved Mick seeing his families reaction to a bout - which visibly shocks him. Its a coup, but its a oddly manipulative coup where yet again the camera is as important as the real reaction.
Beyond The Mat is a fascinating movie, but in spite of itself. The fact that the subject is relatively alien to a British audience, and yet is so intricate and detailed, you cannot help be fascinated by it. That said the lack of depth to this study, and the lingering on irrelevant aspects to the story leaves you wanting a lot more. Perhaps it was never meant as a hard hitting documentary, but as a personal journey its too bitty for us to connect with our narrator. In the end the thing you end up enjoying the most is the footage of the bouts - which goes so way to explaining their appeal but merely over the moments of schmaltz. (5)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: That Ruby Wax episode slammed twenty foot off of a steal cage into some barbed wire wrapped Disney Animal Documentary (the type that used to double Dumbo up with).

Blackboards
I vividly remember when Blackboards suddenly became chalkboards at my school. It happened over one summer, and suddenly the class punishment for speaking out of turn (ie speaking at all) was to go to the front and place your nose on a white dot drawn on the chalkboard. The previous punishment had been identical except it involved a blackboard an a lot less of a bloody nose. The bloody nose came about because the chalkboards were the new fabric type which could be spun around, and given sufficient force break someone’s septum.
The teachers in Blackboards are using the traditional type, big, hard rectangular slabs of dusty blackness. When we meet the band of itinerant teachers at the start of the film they strike a ridiculous pose, much like a bunch of tortoises going across a mountain pass. And like a tortoise they soon use their blackboards for cover. Indeed the blackboards get used for almost everything in this film - as stretchers, shelter and even source material for splints. The one thing they are never used for is teaching. Clever huh?
Actually very clever. The most interesting thing about the new Iranian cinema is that by being oblique and vaguely impressionistic - a vital kind of satire is exuded. Here we have two teachers who desperately wish to teach. Instead they are presented by people who do not want to learn, and yet seem to know a lot more than our teachers. What use to these refugees are numbers and letters when they need to know how to stay alive. Compared to this brutal semi-reality (it is never clear who the refugees are running from except soldiers) our teachers are naïve simpletons - yet they promise learning. An interesting symbol for all sorts of aspects of the Middle East.
It is this aspect of Blackboards which is the most interesting. There are all sorts of meanings you can read into Blackboards. Are the teachers the West, trying to Westernise that which is by its very nature alien. Is it the government, forcing reform into areas which cannot be reformed, or to eradicate Kurdish ways for them to fit in with the countryside. Or is it merely a look at the arrogance of teachers, that there is more that can be learnt from experience than can ever be learnt from books. Certainly it is a simplistic film, with an otherworldly charm (and perhaps some otherworldy scenes - there are some definite death metaphors floating around in there). It is also rather episodic, and after the first fifty minutes this nature does make it drag a touch as the film runs out of the obvious permutations of things to do with its two teachers. All that said though it is a powerful piece of film-making.
I often fear that I am patronising foreign films when I over-praise them (I am often patronising American films by going to see them - and you can’t do anything but patronise British films). I do not have this problem with Blackboards. An art film through and through, it is still very watchable and in places (especially its first half) rather funny. There is a sense of visual humour in the blackboards which is slowly tempered by the darker themes running through the film. These themes are not explicit, nor are the endings, but you do get the feeling you have seen something more than worthwhile. And better than a bloody nose. (8)
IF THIS FILM WAS A CAR CRASH: The Apple (same director) and Clockwise. Well - it has a clueless teacher in it.

The Blair Witch Project
Rule number one of low budget film-making. Turn your disadvantages into advantages. Take Clerks: Kevin Smith had to film at night, when the convenience store was shut, it was dark and the shutters were closed. He turned this into a plot point, that no-one had the key to the shutters. This also meant that he did not need to worry about lighting levels or anything outside the shop. Now Clerks was a massive success with regards to profits over cost - but it palls in comparison to the mighty Blair Witch Project - made for slightly more but has raked in profits on a par with a summer blockbuster. So is it any good?
Well, yes, it is. As an avant-garde piece of indie film it is very good indeed. As a summer blockbuster you would imagine it would be way over the heads of its audience. This is after all just cobbled together footage allegedly shot by three film students lost in the woods. So its plenty of shaky viewpoint camera work, focus problems and a hell of a lot of noises off. There is no structured plot line, no discernible script and no budget. Just a bunch of twenty-somethings wandering aimlessly, getting lost, getting scared and getting their comeuppance.
So how does it work? From the start we know no-one survives. Can you remember the last horror film you saw where no-one survived. Nobody beat the bad guys, the monster was not vanquished or escaped. This would be seen as a downer by Hollywood, whereas they believe that we want to see good triumphing, the pretty teen surviving. A Hollywood horror movie will have plenty of shock thrills, but nothing but gore and another monster that looks like Geiger's Alien. In Blair Witch, we know our characters are scared, we can see that, but even they are not sure what they are scared of. And there is nothing more frightening than fear itself.
We care about our characters. This is why we do not want to see them die. Maybe the reason we care is because they are fundamentally playing themselves. When they start getting angry with each other, there could be some reality in it. And the merely because the line between reality and film is blurred (this is presented as cold footage made from "what was found"). This is where the realism turns up the creeps, the characters behave like real people, not people in a horror film. They are methodical, they get lost and do logical things. That said - the thing in the woods still gets them. The low budget, we never see it thing in the woods. Whatever it is.
The Blair Witch Project is not that scary. It is however rather disturbing, and does have a lasting effect - primarily because there is no proper resolution. The thing is still in the woods and we still do not know what the thing is. And the final scenes, especially Heather's apology, are rightly very, very moving. It is this which allows it to really get to you. While the shaky camera work, unfocussed shots and amatuer actors swearing a lot (though not as much as the professionals improvising in Final Cut) can drag - and the last quarter of an hour is merely a matter of waiting for the last two to get it - the editing ties the film up to a nicely nasty end. Psychologically nasty that is -which is worth a lot more than a bucket of goo.
The Blair Witch Project is probably most interesting for what it is, how it was marketed and its success rather than its actual content. It is, to all intents and purpose a low budget experimental film which has scored at the box office big time. By building its own mythology, both within the film and in the world at large it has managed to out-hype Hollywood's biggest attempts. That it is timely, when the world really wanted a reinvention of horror, is also a stroke of luck (America wanted horror so much they went to see Deep Blue Sea fer'chrissake). However it is also a film which respects its audiences intelligence, and for some it will be a window on a world of indie films which they would otherwise - like the Blair Witch - not see. (8)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: How about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre without the chainsaws, on radio. That kind of works.

Blow
When you look at some of the most critically appreciated films of the last ten years you’ll notice a few genres pop up more than a few times. One which seems to offer a good return on plot simplicity and the odd gong or two is the biographical narrative, especially when linked to a strong soundtrack and a story encompassing something historically and culturally important. Boogie Nights, Goodfellas, Casino all use this structure successfully to tell not only their own stories but to give an idea of the social history of a few decades. So you would imagine that the story of George Jung, the first major cocaine importer in the States - spanning as it does three decades and more than enough tragedy and excitement would be a perfect fit into this genre. Right?
Director Ted Demme certainly tries to make it fit, down to a turn from Ray Liotta as George Jung’s father. We have the requisite voice over - for once not used from beyond the grave - plus the typically strong soundtrack punctuating the episodic nature of the tale. We follow George from childhood to California, to prison, to Columbia and to (presented) tragedy. And as the poster proudly proclaims, “Based On a True Story”. What the poster does not explain is what the true story is, and what the film has trouble pinning down is the point of the is true story. Jung is presented as an anti-hero but then as he is played by Johnny Depp he was always going to be relatively attractive to a sector of the audience.
Much of the appeal of the film will rest on the appeal of Depp - and here he appears to be sleepwalking almost trying to make Jung not so much dislikable as merely dull. Depp is on a one man mission to chronicle the history of drugs, but unlike his sparky turn in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas we really get no sense of the drugs themselves - beyond the requisite comedy scenes. Blow does turn quite dark, but for reasons which seem oddly removed from the drugs. He might as well be in the banana importing business, and the qualitative difference between selling marijuana and cocaine is never really touched upon. What is worse, the first person narrative effectively pushes the entirety of the blame on to other people (his partner, his wife and most Oprah-esque, his own mother) so as to become untrustworthy and dislocated.
Oddly, for a film with little narrative structure and a personality vacuum at its heart, Blow is quite entertaining. It is overlong and more than arbitrary about what it shows. For instance Jung’s first major arrest is never shown - a bizarre omission. However there are a number of good performances helping to explain Jung - almost all from characters who are in real life dead. Rachel Griffith’s turns in unforgivably harsh performance as Jung’s mother - the source of his psychological ills - despite only being three years older than Depp. Liotta is equally good as the sanctified father - until the ageing make-up is wheeled out anyway. Franke Potente (Run Lola Run) in particular props the first half of the film up when you despair of Depp having no depth at all. Oddly Penelope Cruz - who has second billing - suffers from both being a complete stereotype and an unpleasant one at that. By the time she turns up you realise the film is losing any semblance of shape and is into a self deluding territory which is interesting to watch but undermines any serious aims the film might have had.
Blow would like to see itself in the company of Boogie Nights or Goodfellas, but it falls down on the fundamental problem of its very assumed selling point. While both of those films had carefully constructed narratives which allowed the freedom to also examine their era and the passing of time - Blow is based on a true story. An interesting and unpredictable story but one with no proper narrative drive, or satisfactory ending. To add to that a disingenuous inability to deal too directly with the actual subject of drugs (except in the crassest of ways) and a pretty flat lead performance. Blow is not a bad movie, but it is also nowhere near as good as it thinks it is. Perhaps they would have been better waiting until Jung had died, to tell a more balanced and less sentimental version. (5)
IF THIS FILM WAS A CAR CRASH: Well I bet it was sold to Depp as Goodfellas meets Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Its more Casino hits Reefer Madness.

Blue Streak
My first film of the new year, the new decade, the new - you know the form here. The so called second century of cinema was given a relatively low key start for me with the unambitious comedy Blue Steak. Indeed, if Blue Streak is anything to go by (which, to be fair, I'm pretty sure it isn't), they year 2000 will resemble nothing much more than 1985. You see Blue Streak is a 1980's Eddie Murphy Vehicle, perhaps a 1970's Richard Pryor vehicle - the latest of that much maligned genre - the fish out of water comedy.
This time, it is the turn of Martin Lawrence, a comedian who's film career has had only the one peak, the
Simpson/Bruckheimer project Bad Boys. While his co-star in that Will Smith has gone from strengths to Wild Wild West, and become one of the largest stars in the world, Lawrence has never really made it. Blue Streak is certainly the best thing he's done, which is not to say it is altogether that good but at least it is a professionally done comedy thriller.
Many fish out of water comedies rely on far fetched premises, none more than Blue Streak. Lawrence plays a cat burglar - yep another one - who with his double crossing gang rips off a very expensive diamond. Hiding said diamond in a building site, he returns after a short stretch in prison to find the building site had become a police station. Rather than break into the station to retrieve his diamond, or pretend to be an air conditioning engineer to recover his diamond, he instead goes The Hard Way (a la James Woods / Michael J.Fox fish out of water - buddy movie) and pretends to be a cop. After a day of nothing seemingly that impressive, he becomes head of burglary, and after another day ends up embroiled in a complex drugs sting. While the relatively short duration of his masquerade is a plus point in the believability stakes, it also makes the swift rise of this character rather less likely. Nevertheless, the film does rely on one very good idea - that a burglar would make the ideal burglary detective.
Unfortunately, Blue Streak does not make the most of this idea. While there are a couple of moments in the film where Lawrence's inside knowledge forwards the odd case, most of his hunches still rely on fantastic luck to win through. The film allows us three cases, two of which Lawrence solves by being in the right place at the right time, one because he knows the perp. Basically, the film does not make good of its premise. Instead it spends most of its time showcasing Lawrence's comedic persona and talents, and developing the crude and formulaic plot.
I have never seen Lawrence's stand up routines, and he is certainly composed enough to suggest he would be pretty good on stage. But here Lawrence falls into a trap which has been lying there ever since comedians started to become actors. One of the secrets of a good comedian is the creation of a watchable persona, and one way of doing that is having schtick which links material. Steve Martin has his "wild and crazy guy", Jim Carrey does physical slapstick, Eddie Murphy is the aggressive ultra confident, fat talking nonsense type. Lawrence seems to be a mixture of those last two, one part Murphy, one part Carrey clumsy. Fine, but this linking material is only as good as the routine that underpins it, and in general the film versions takes the schtick, without the material. So here we see Lawrence dropping things left right and centre, falling over and so on - which is somewhat out of
character for master cat burglar. The fact that the jokes that are in the script are so poor, and the character based comedy so sign posted leaves you feeling that a lot more could have been done here.
All that said, Blue Streak is a pretty good no brain action comedy. Despite it being a cookie cutter movie of the type Eddie Murphy would have made in the mid-eighties, does not preclude its novelty value. After all, Eddie Murphy does not make films like this any more, and nor does anyone else. That is worth a bob or two of your money, merely for the undemanding way it passes your time. That it is under-developed, badly edited (there is a number of sub plots which have tried to be exorcised from the film, not invisibly) and is formulaic does not stop it being really rather good fun. (6)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: Beverly Hills Cop hits Entrapment, completely destroys it and then rolls into The Hard Way knocking that "I'm a serious actor" look off of James Woods face.

Boiler Room
I've never found boiling things ipso facto dramatic. Sure, with water you get all those little bubbles, followed by the vigorous eruption of bubbles which signifies that the correct temperature has been reached. And certainly there is the potential for scalds. But as a dramatic metaphor I find it rather lazy and very rarely accurate. Which would also sum up many of the films using it as a metaphor (Boiling Point, Hard Boiled). And now we have Boiler Room, a film which quite clearly takes place anywhere but. There is no grease, now sweat and no sign of vigorous bubbling. Boiler Room is a stock market thriller.
The business thriller, like the courtroom drama, is prone to cliché. There is a shorthand involved in both kinds of films which the viewer is used to, to explain the otherwise murky and confusing aspects of the job. From Wall Street through The Insider we soon get to recognise the big business type. The anything for a buck manager, the workers who turn a blind eye to the morality. Therefore, since these clichés are in place it is difficult to see where anything new will come from. Boiler Room certainly does not escape these clichés, but rather uses them to tell a slightly more complex tale, stylishly.
The Boiler Room of the title is the trading room of small stockbroker JT Manley, where fifty or so brokers pitch stocks to unsuspecting schmoes who then risk savings on their stocks. Their hopeless, worthless stocks - which the cynics amongst us know from the start but the film tells us about halfway through. The film uses a classic device to take us through this world, of tying us to a lead character who starts off as a trainee. Giovanni Ribsi plays the college drop out, and illegal casino operator Seth, who in order to impress his father becomes a stockbroker. He becomes a very good one, until a lust for the truth drives him to try and discover what is really going on. And the film is well paced, giving us fifty percent exploration of the day trader lifestyle, fifty percent plot.
This is the debut film by Ben Younger, and whilst its subject matter may not be a cool as other debut's, he certainly manages to instil his relatively by the books plot with plenty of style. My friend Tom was bemoaning, post Ghost Dog, why hip-hop is not used in soundtracks more often. Well here it is, and to devastating effect. Not only does it give the film the pep that the technical plot may otherwise drown out - but it is also used as commentary. Firstly there is the rap metaphor used without about being a player. The Notorious BIG quote, which boils down to - everyone wants to make money and no-one wants to work for it. More importantly it highlights what a white world this all occurs in. Without it, you might suggest that Younger just had not noticed, and was being implicitly racist in himself. But by acknowledging black culture in the soundtrack it becomes clear that the only black face is a secretary for a reason. The racism that exists between Italian American and Jewish workers would be expanded upon if they worked there. Ben Affleck's recruitment expert would not hire them because they would not fit in. He rips into the recruits for having lousy suits, and you know he has already implicitly done it with their lousy skin colour. This does have one slight down side however. With everyone being 24-27, white, in impeccable suits - it can occasionally be difficult to work out who is who.
Younger has impressively turned this film about the horrors of capitalism into a much more subtle commentary on both the profession and the system. We soon learn that the brokers of JT Manley are not the crème of the crop, they are the wannabes. They act how they think they should act. That is why appearance is so important, that is why they have to be seen to be successful. It is also why they never question the morality of what they are doing. Ribsi's Seth however is coming from a slightly different angle. He is seeking for his fathers approval - another urge which is equally destructive - and does not quite fit in. This initially makes it difficult to see how he will become such a success - until you see him in action. Pasty faced, uncomfortable he may be, drifting through the scenes of hyper testosteroned brokers - but sympathetic he is too. Nicely marked by the fact that he is the one singled out by his
girlfriend, and by the FBI.
As an insight in to the profession, and as a satire on business Boiler Room works rather well. It flounders a touch when we get embroiled in the plot - and Youngers attempt to show what Seth's trading has done to one family is a touch mawkish. That said, what redeems the film is the tandem search for mutual respect between Seth ands his father. This also gets almost mawkish, but is just about reigned in by Ribsi. The comparison between stock trading and gambling is equally simplistic - though very well handled and surprisingly powerful. The film does try to do too much - that our hero is the one man they tap to turn states evidence is uncomfortably coincidental to his own investigations. These are minor quibbles however. On what appears to be a low budget, and with a rather unsexy premise - Younger has turned in a very good debut movie.
Boiler Room certainly has many of the flaws of debut movies, and this is a writer director job. There are moments when it feels pitched too far towards the Swingers aesthetic (there is plenty of original slang, and the scene spent watching Wall Street is a little bit too cute). That said, in his two hours he fits an awful lot in. Thematically more complex than the simplistic story would suggest, it benefits from having a great central performance, and manages to firmly weld the corporate into the personal. Whilst I might dislike the title, there is no escaping that Boiler Room has certainly made Younger - in my eyes at least - rather hot. (8)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: Wall Street hits Swingers, with a Wildstyle soundtrack

Boiling Point
The beauty of being a bit of a cinema buff in this point of the development of the form - ie 100 years in - is that it is quite possible to have an in depth knowledge of certain areas of it whilst being wholly ignorant of other aspects. Take me, I would consider myself somewhat of an expect on the output of Steve Guttenberg and would feel completely comfortable presenting a major retrospective of his work (it would be entitled - "How Tom Hanks stole my career" because I have thought about these things). Yet the are whole swathes of movies I know nothing about. Japanese cinema rarely blips on to my radar, bar perhaps After Life which I saw a couple of months ago and loved. But my friends Kate and John are big fans of the work of "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, and since the ICA were running a retrospective, I went along. Well, the ICA bar does stay open till one in the morning.
Boiling Point was the first of Kitano's films which gained him an international reputation, and it was the first he wrote and directed himself. It is a detached tale of Japanese gangsters, told through a small story of revenge. It is in many ways a classic revenge tragedy, with a lot of epic grandeur in both its pacing and in its storytelling. It is also very violent, and disconcertingly funny in places. The cinematography is really rather impressive in places, and there is no denying that Kitano has a genuine eye for framing his scenes. That said, there are in my opinion a lot of problems with the film, which cannot be just explained away by it coming from a different culture.
The film unfolds rather slowly, from the opening baseball game which introduces out no-mark lead character. A laconic loser who is lousy at pretty much everything he does, later hits a gangster in retaliation for being insulted at work in a petrol station. This sets up a slowly escalating battle between the local gangsters and the employees of the petrol station, which ends in one of their members getting badly beaten. This ushers in the middle section of the film, where our anti-hero and his own Sancho Panza head off to get some firepower from an out-of-town gangster - playing with presence by Kitano himself. All of this is simply plotted, and minimally scripted. Our hero is a man of very few words, and very few actions. He is the calm centre which sets all this in place, and in the end must solve the problem - in classical tragedy fashion. Despite his lack of action he is never anything but watchable - which is
useful as he just about drags you through the story. Since the story itself is rather slow, something has to get you through.
Boiling Point is full of non-sequiteurs, intentionally so. Kitano understands humour all too well, and uses at least its trappings to devastating effect in places here. However there is only so much humour to be wrung out of vicious beatings, done in ironic style or not. The main humour lies in the stillness of the film, juxtaposed with the odd ideas and images which come out of them. However, with all this violence mixed with humour, ending with tragedy - this leaves the film tonally very confused. It becomes difficult to know what the overall message of the film is, and yet you get the feeling that Kitano wanted there to be one. This is not just meant to be a small, inevitable story - visually it is given the weight and power of a serious piece of work. Yet no thesis comes out.
John suggested to me that the film was not meant to be understood - and he may well have a point. In that case, I am not sure still if it works, because I understand enough of it to make some basic conclusions. The core of nihilism within the film is attributed to our main character does suggest that in a certain situation there are no alternatives. The simplicity of the fundamental plot also has the inevitability of good tragedy, this juxtaposed with the humour at least points to the blackly comic satire on the ridiculousness of modern life. However none of these themes are settled for, and therefore are not developed properly.
Boiling Point is a very interesting film, and I certainly cannot deny that it is shot exceptionally well. I just felt that it was missing something, and relied too much on its own stone-faced hardness rather than develop a proper theme. Whilst there is nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake, tragedies are rarely comfortably entertaining - and that is the case here. Also if you count in the fact that much of the entertainment from the film is derived from quite explicit violence, you end up with some quite problematic conclusions. There is no denying Kitano is a talented actor, writer and director - but Boiling Point leaves a lot to be developed on. (6)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: This may sound odd, but I could not help get the feeling that this was a Scorcese film side-swiped by both Abel Ferrara and Monty Python. But I have been called weird by people.

Bowfinger
Great American Comedians of our day - part two: Steve Martin (we are assuming for the purposes of this particular conceit that Billy Crystal comprises part one, and for more details on why I despise him you may waltz over to the review of Analyze This - but be warned - I am caustic). Unlike with Billy Crystal, I have at my core a liking for Steve Martin. However, like Billy Crystal, he has not been in a good film for a long time. Or at least, he has not been in a good comedy for ages - his turn in Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner was actually rather good. His comedies of late have been about as lame as they get, with the nadir being the utterly pointless, as well as risible Sgt Bilko for which he was lucky the death penalty was not handed out for. Nevertheless, Bowfinger is mooted as a return to form for Martin, and offers us a good juncture to see the state of Steve Martin in 1999 as he also wrote it.
So what does Steve Martin do well? What is the secret of his comedy and therefore, when is he particularly good? Films like The Man With Two Brains, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and even All Of Me offer us the best evidence. Steve Martin's persona is that of the "wild and crazy guy", but it is in these films where the bizarre are taken as the norm. Where gags are more important that plot consistency, this is the territory he occupies best. He is not necessarily a sympathetic character, but he can make the bizarre work, and eminently watchable. He is also a great physical comedian, and his verbal humour is based on being fast talking. Does Bowfinger therefore show Steve Martin at his best?
Well, at times, yes. But it is not wholly successful as a vehicle for his talents because it falls into the trap he has been susceptible to ever since making Roxanne (a far superior version of Cyranno de Bergerac than the Gerard Depardieu take incidentally). Martin attempts to make Bowfinger sympathetic. The film starts with a long, sub Randy Newman country track about "having one last chance" whilst we lovingly look at Martin's ramshackle villa/studio. It does not set us up for an anarchic comedy. And the way Bowfinger is played does not therefore work tonally because we expect something a little bit realistic. Which is a pity because when Steve Martin's more scatological humour comes out it is very funny. The idea of picking up a crew from the Mexican's crossing the border is a bolt from the blue, cut quickly and very funny. The last five minute sequence "Fake Purse Ninja's" is also a tour de force, and shows exactly what could have been done in the rest of the film with an extended piece of rubbish kung fu from Martin and Eddie Murphy.
Which brings us on to the co-stars. Certainly a lot has been made out of Eddie Murphy's role here, and whilst Murphy's career has under gone something of a renaissance recently, he still is not the star he once was. Unfortunately there are a couple of truths we hold about Eddie Murphy films, primary of which is he must play more than one character. Here he plays the slightly deranged big movie star Bowfinger is discretely filming to be in his movie, and also a lookalike stand-in. Murphy's first scene, berating a agent for a script which has 426 incidents of the letter K, and therefore 142 incidences of the KKK in it is a tour de force, but its a sustained pitch that yet again the film cannot match. Again the need to make the characters and action vaguely believable and sympathetic scuppers the film. Indeed Bowfinger has a very impressive cast, Terrence Stamp as the cult leader, Christine Baranski as an old ham, and Heather Graham as a not so naïve wannabe actress. All of whom could have helped
Martin up the tempo, but instead the film plumps for a nice, almost schmaltzy ensemble work.
Bowfinger is film of missed opportunities which is a great pity. When it is good, it is as funny as Martin and Murphy have ever been. Perhaps some of the blame rests with Frank Oz, the director, who is a seasoned director of light comedies but has never really helmed anything sufficiently dark or bizarre to make this right for him. In the end though you have to say the fault lies in Martin's script which is inventive, but only for a some of the time. You feel that if the intensity had been allowed to build, and the three act structure ignored, Bowfinger could have been really rather good. Instead too much time is spent making the story work, and not developing otherwise excellent ideas. Hollywood satires are necessarily narcissistic, but Martin at least aims at some interesting targets - Scientology and the cult of the actor. That he does not hit some of these barn doors leaves you with more of a feeling of loss than anything else. (6)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: The Man With Two Brains and The Player. Simple as that, as messy as that.

Boys Don't Cry
There are certain films which, however good they are supposed to be, you do not want to see. Schindler's List - no matter how worthy, no matter how good - did not get me running to the cinema. You know its going to be deep, worthy and lots of people die. A triumph of the human spirit perhaps, but one which may not make for a fun evening out. This is the kind of film Boys Don't Cry is ; in all its publicity the plot is explained to you in detail. Of course it is, this is based on a true story, the facts are out there in the public domain. They are not nice facts though, and while I have utmost sympathy for Brandon Teena, who this film is about, I am not sure if I really want to see a dramatisation of these wholly unpleasant events. Bottom line, I tried to see Boys Don't Cry three times before I was successful, being distracted by pubs and second hand record shops instead.
Not a bad thing under the circumstances. I am wary about dramatisation, because they are notoriously one sided and cannot truly represent reality. One of the main problems is that in the search for verisimilitude, the retelling ignores any analysis. Fine; we accept that Teena Brandon is Brandon Teena, that she has a sexual identity crisis, but we never really get to find out what this truly means to her. Sure, she feels like a boy, but there are no real moments of reflection of what this really means to her. This could be because it never happened, it is by its very nature not documented. Nevertheless, to present a strong picture of who this person is, introspection is as important.
It is not as if the film strives for complete realism at any point. There are the dreamy strip of stop-motion highway lights. The passing of time, the movement of an outside world is hinted of by this rather staid technique. Its well done, and fits nicely with the sub MTV feel to the film (there is a pretty extensive soundtrack), but strips away the realism the rest of it is aiming at (as does a very odd out of body experience in the most powerful scene in the film). That said, the film relies strongly on its two lead performances, from Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena, and Chloe Sevigny as his girlfriend. They also happen to be the two sympathetic characters (and in the case of Sevigny a touch too sympathetic - but then she's still around to sue). Swank plays an effeminate man to be sure, but she is close enough to a boy and plays this with such conviction that she cannot help but convince. The romance between the two of them is touching, that it is a pity that we all know what is going to happen at the end.
It takes its time to happen though, and this is symptomatic of the rest of the film. This is a slight story, and yet its two hours are still too long. The period between the rape and the murder occupies about twenty minutes, which is too much considering its inevitability from what is billed as the climax - the moment of Brandon's discovery. That he continues to hang around these people, these convicted criminals from a redneck town should have made the final outcome clear even to him. That tragedy is brought on to another house makes it even worse. You see, and as much as it pains me to speak ill of the dead, Boys Don't Cry is not just the story of a transgendered person. It is the tale of a transgendered person who is none too bright. A criminal, someone who's ideas of masculinity was to run around with the rough guys, getting into fights. Perhaps this strengthened her claims to being a man, nevertheless there is little in this film which portrays Brandon Teena as ambitious, intelligent or actually that nice a
person - once you fight through the obvious soft soap of a bio-pic.
This is a slight film, aimed a youngish audience who will no doubt take the theme of prejudice and injustice to its heart. That can be no bad thing, the events of Boys Don't Cry are appalling and should be held up to a world in which this kind of thing can still happen. That said, apart from the odd moments of tenderness between Sevigny and Swank, it is a wholly uncomfortable film to watch. It is a train wreck waiting to happen, and as the viewer you watch fifteen to twenty moments when the brakes could have been applied. That marks the film down, as does the use of the title song. I did not think they would, its too upbeat a song. But used it is, but not a version by The Cure. The cover Kimberly Pierce does use suggests that she should not have bothered. But it is a hint of the literal mindset which only just draws Boys Don't Cry out of "movie of the week" territory - that and the two leads. (6)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: Victor/Victoria tootling up on her old Mercedes Benz slamming very, very slowly into The Accused. The results are a tragic waste, which could have been avoided.

Bridget Jones’s Diary
I do not as a rule like films based on books. The point has usually eluded me - you want to read the book get it out the library. This is mainly due to the fact that generally what attracted an audience, and quite possibly the filmmakers, to the book is something inherent in its style, which is also tied up with its bookness. Of course there is the idea that people want to see their favourite books brought to life and are quite happy to devour the same stuff in different mediums - but the general truism is that the films are always worse than the book. That’s a truism I have always agreed with, until in a drunken argument the other night I realised that this was a) a nonsense generalization, and more worryingly b) a fair number of my favourite movies are adaptations of books. Take last year, my favourite film was probably Wonder Boys - a film based on a book.
So okay, maybe there are certain types of books which are easier to adapt. Maybe it is even that cinema is now a more dominant artform than literature so the pacing, narrative and structure of books are now taking their lead from cinema - becoming more cinematic. I think there might be something in that, but maybe it is just that directors are getting better at filleting books to retain the essence without the padding. And of course, talking of padding brings us directly - and finally - to Bridget Jones. Not that fatness is any strict description Renee Zellweger here. Rather she appears to have a couple of cheeks.
Some of my suppositions above just do not work for the Bridget Jones book, let alone the film. A book of a newspaper column, it evolved rather than was written as a straight narrative, and the diary form does not lend itself obviously to the film form. Director Sharon Maguire toys with a couple of diary like conceits (writing on screen, billboard signs) but generally ditches the diary form to offer us more in the way of romantic comedy. And yet retaining much of the plot of the book means this has an odd set of beats, this is not a typical three act romantic comedy. And also for all the insistence within the film that this is a story of one persons search for love - it does an awful lot more than that. Against all odds this is a cosy British film which is actually pretty funny.
The Bridget Jones phenomenon (I think it is safe to call it that) is due to identification. As a heroine Renee Zellweger plays Bridget as scatty, clueless, dependent yet independent and wholly loveable. It is a comic creation different to the one in the book, but one which works in cinema terms awfully well. Not only is it an attractive character it is also identifiable and the film mercilessly presses the button of embarrassment for most of its set piece gags. Forget the accent, forget the English rose nonsense - this is a solidly impressive role, considering that much of the script plops stereotypes and obvious gags for her to bounce off of. Its just as well that she is in every scene - because the film does not really flesh anyone else out that much. That said Hugh Grant is easily at his most attractive playing the kind of bastard you understand women fall for. Suave, ruthless and fantastically charming. It takes what on paper would be a one sided conflict and moves it into the realms of the vaguely believable.
I am not a huge fan of Richard Curtis style movies. They exist in a London which I do not recognise and find a touch patronising. Whilst Bridget Jones’s Diary also exists in this world (she lives above a pub she never goes in) because it is so grounded in Bridget herself it does not jar. Also there are more gags and much more sensitive direction than that you usually get from the jobbing directors doing a Curtis script - also to note that Helen Fielding and Andrew Davies (possible the best book adapter in the business) have a hand in it. Whilst the film is both preposterous and unreal, there seems an odd indomitable charm and spirit with Zellweger’s Jones that makes it rise above most of its flaws.
I rather enjoyed Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the cinema I was in seemed to agree. And whilst Hugh Grant is good - the success of the project is wholly down to three women - which makes a nice gender change in British cinema. Sharon Maguire for some rather surefooted direction (the film is slightly overlong but does not outstay the considerable welcome it builds itself). Renee Zellweger’s meaty take on this most odd of characters - she has done the nigh on impossible and made this role her own. But most importantly, Helen Fielding - she wrote the book of the film after all. (8)
IF THIS FILM WAS A CAR CRASH: A lazy man would say a female High Fidelity. Zzzzzzzz. Hitting Notting Hill?

Bringing Out The Dead
In mooching around, trying to decide on a top one hundred films of the nineties (a project littered with folly as I have since discovered) the moot question of Goodfellas came up. Now I am not denying the greatness of this Mafia movie, but I've always had problems with it. Namely, when I first saw it, on video way back in 1991 I had just been on a high of watching a lot of Scorsese films, and Bob De Niro flicks (of course, big cross over there) and while I liked what I saw Scorsese wise, De Niro was starting to bore me. De Niro's performance in Goodfellas frankly bores me, and did for a very long time obscure the rest of what is an exceptional movie.
So, I am back with Scorsese, this time his new film for a new decade, Bringing Out The Dead. No Bob De Niro, I see with pleasure. His replacement, in the "great actor" stakes is Nicholas Cage. Cage is an actor with just two notes, which should not necessarily be seen as a criticism (however the use of the word necessarily in that qualifier does suggest that it is going to be). Cage does manic (Wild At Heart, his action movies) and Cage does pathetic (Leaving Las Vegas). In Bringing Out The Dead, Cage plays a paramedic Frank who is at turns manic and pathetic. Handy huh?
Bringing Out The Dead reunites Scorsese with his Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader, and like Taxi Driver is set very much on the streets of New York. Post Kundun, this is Scorsese's homecoming, and yet again he paints a vivid picture of his city using as many of the undeniable skills he has as a film-maker. Visually the streets Cage patrols come alive, from the whores to the gang members, and whilst in the confines of the ambulance the film has an undeniable verve. Inside the vehicle we have a selection of fine two handed exchanges of black comedy. To help him out, Cage is coupled with John Goodman, Ving Raimes and Tom Sizemore, all playing different cardboard cut-out partners for him. They are all good, and push the black comedy to its limits. Whilst Scorsese relies maybe too much on speeded up film, and another of his well cut killer soundtracks, its still an impressive piece of work. But like Cage's acting, this is a film of two parts, and the second part is outside the ambulance.
Outside we are presented with a man in crisis. A man with very little reason to live, who just ekes out the day. The base story of the film is the redemption of this man through rediscover of his vocation and the love of a woman. Which is a fine plot but it never quite convinces, because the two aspects of the film jar too much. Whilst Schrader has written the film, it is an adaptation of an obviously internal dialogue heavy novel. Voice-overs are clumsy at the best of times, yet Cage's internal thoughts come across as just banal, rather than those of a man on the verge of collapse.
On further reflection, Cage is the central problem with this film, his character just is not likeable enough to engage your interest. Certainly the story of paramedics in New York is interesting, and there are the makings of a very good M*A*S*H style black comedy here (Mother, Love & Jugs anyone?). Instead the central character keeps pulling us away, when we really want to see Raimes' preacher paramedic or Sizemore's psycho. Instead we get shown an oddly touching, but emotionally dead relationship dawning between Cage and Patricia Arquette (Arquette is very good, but you cannot help but feeling that this coupling was meant to be a touch more passionate. Especially considering they are married in real life).
Bringing Out The Dead shows us an updated vision of Scorsese's New York - though only updated as far as the early nineties (an odd choice since the story would work now, and yet there are a number of minor continuity errors made from its setting). It is an interesting story, and certainly has its moments of true cinematic magic, but the Nicholas Cage shaped hole in its centre really harms the film. Scorsese is never anything less than watchable, but in places Bringing Out The Dead appears lazily edited, as if the project no longer interested him. And if it does not interest Scorsese, why on earth should we care? (6)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: M*A*S*H hits Taxi Driver, but created an amalgam of limbs which just aren't as good as its parents.

Bringing Up Baby
Oh - how tempting it is to go off on some form of scatological diatribe regarding cannibalism within youngsters and the eventual vomit which would ensue. How tempting, but I shall not. Instead all you need know is that this was part two of a two part Cary Grant/Howard Hawks Sunday lunchtime bill at the Curzon Soho, and you can read what I thought of His Girl Friday, er, there. Now on to the screwier of the two comedies, possibly the archtypical screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby.
How to define the screwball comedy? Well, fundamentally the screwball comedy makes very little sense and bears very little relation to the way things really happen in the world in which we live in. Here, heiress Susan Vance has a leopard for no properly explained reason. Mild-mannered Professor Huxley gets embroiled in this woman in a manner which just could not really happen. The screwball comedy has pretty much gone out of fashion, with the last decent one being the 1980's Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell vehicle Overboard - but if you need a map on how to do one - Bringing Up Baby will do you nicely.
In a contrast to His Girl Friday, here Cary Grant is manipulated. Playing the mild-mannered, though increasingly annoyed, Huxley he displays a completely different sort of charm. That of the bumbling fool, a man used to being told what to do and used to living in an order world (that of paleontology). Hepburn, as Vance, is much more a free spirit. This is a classic clash of wills, and is played out to the tune of a plot which is more than perfunctory. Since there is no need for anything to truly make sense, the scriptwriters wise opt for stranger and stranger farce, until we get a proper man-eating leopard and plenty of people in prison. None of it seems forced, though all of it is ridiculous.
There is an internal logic to the screwball comedy which is plainly on display here. You need one sane and one mad person. Whilst Hepburn explains that everything happens because she is manipulating Grant to fall in love with her, its quite clear that in reality he would have stomped off some hours before. Yet again Grant shows his ability to mesh with a quick talking female lead. He is very flattering to his female co-stars, and always pitches his performance to their strengths. Here Hepburn is doing her ditzy act, looking stunning at the same time, and yet again the comedy is just fabulous. The obvious ad-libs around the leopard also give the film a freshness, which yet again allows such a dated film to feel utterly modern.
Bringing Up Baby is the film equivalent of PG Wodehouse novel. It does nothing but entertain, it bears no relation to any form of life which really exists but is utterly charming. The screwball comedy may have died out, but there is still life in the ideas, in the fluff. Infact the screwball comedy did not die out, it just became the yuppie nightmare film (see After Hours). But basically, Bringing Up Baby is a good laugh, which is good enough for me. (9)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: After Hours with Born Free. And gags.

But I’m A Cheerleader

Teen actors - I can’t imagine it being a laugh being one. They pretty much split into two groups after all - the pretty and the kooky. The pretty are frighteningly so, I mean I know orthodontistry is prescribed by law in Hollywood but there is something so rigid about those teeth that can cause nightmares. Oddly though this regulation beauty which ends up turning out the Rachel Leigh Cooks, and the Jennifer Love Hewitts of this world - blandly pretty. The other group, not so much a group as a selection of four or five actors are left to fumble around in teen movies as they became famous in other movies, for acting. Christina Ricci avoided this by never doing a teen movie, Anna Paquin is now sniffing around - and Natasha Lyonne - well she does the odd ones.
Lyonne is a good actress, and has a very dry wit. This was showcased best in Everbody Says I Love You, though The Slums Of Beverly Hills also used it - tempered with vunerablity. Of late though, after a criminally underused turn in American Pie, she has been looking for the unusual to keep her going. But I’m a Cheerleader is a teen comedy, a romance but one with much more of a John Walters sensibility than Freddie Prinze Jr. Lyonne plays the titular cheerleader whose parents suspect is a lesbian and pack off to a deprogramming group to make her normal again. Cue satire on gender roles, hetero and homo sexuality and a quite sweet love scene.
But I’m a Cheerleader is not an overly ambitious movie, and is filmed in a rough and ready style much like mid-period John Waters - replete with snarly punk-pop tunes and lack of any real character depth beyond the stereotypes. And this film is full of stereotypes, at the True Directions camp every possible gay stereotype is represented. This can - in retrospect - make the film relatively uncomfortable. At the heart of the movie is a serious issue about prejudice and tolerance for homosexuality, and yet playing heavily with stereotypes is something which actually plays into the hands of bigots. Its a minor problem and certainly not the only problem the film has. Yet the story, script and often inspired set direction pushes the film on with such joie de vivre it would be churlish to say that the film does not entertain.
Oddly one of the weakest aspects of the film is Lyonne herself, as our lead character. She never really convinces as the clean cut cheerleader, it is possible that this is due to my familiarity of her in smart talking outsider roles. To be fair, if you have seen Confessions Of A Trick Baby, you’ll never see Lyonne as a victim - so whilst she plays her scenes with as much wide eyed innocence as she can - she only really comes into her own when she comes out. Also the film does seem rather confused with its own premise, it seems to admit that homosexuality is innate, but then flirts with ideas of becoming and being turned gay which seem to contradict itself. That said the film was never going to be in the vanguard of gay liberation, and seen as a fun piece of slightly more intelligent teen fluff holds up exceptionally well.
Whilst there are problems with But I’m A Cheerleader, it is so short, sharp, sweet and funny that you tend to ignore them until after the film is over. The set and costume design in particular for the True Directions ranch help emphasise the cartoonish nature of the film, which also suggests the cartoonish foolishness of such an institution. That such places do exist is surely the most frightening thing, and that they are run on a relatively similar line (albeit without the PVC boy and girl outfits) is not too far fetched. Its a fun film, it won’t change your life, but it is a good trashy laugh in the meantime. (7)
IF THIS FILM WERE A CAR CRASH: It certainly has the smell of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues hitting Hairspray - though for the life of me I don’t know why.

All articles copyright Peter C.Baran (or authors where stated).
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