Eternal Summer (2006, Leste Chen)
This lovely Taiwanese film pleasantly brought to mind memories of being 12 and not quite understanding why I was so drawn to that gorgeous Cowboy Junkies video for "Miles from Our Home," with the Asian boy who timidly wraps his arms around his friend as they speed around on a motorcycle. Like that mini-masterpiece, "Eternal Summer" follows two boys: the sensitive, unspeakably pretty Jonathan and the athletic Shane, who are put together at a young age so that the former can help the latter become a better student (they realize they make a good pair when their grades on an exam -- 67% and 33% -- make a perfect score). As teenagers, their friendship is beautifully detailed in the way Jonathan, despite his feelings to the contrary, pulls away from Shane, who doesn't understand why his best friend is becoming so sullen and inward. The film is fluidly directed, in narrative (occasionally giving itself over to emotion) and visual beauty, with bluish tints and careful compositions. About the only flaw is in the ending, when the music and earnestness of the dialogue becomes too much. But for the most part I was caught off guard by the maturity of the filmmaking.
Un Deux Trois Soleil (1993, Bertrand Blier)
My first foray into the films of Bertrand Blier, and if this film is any indication he must be one of the craziest directors around. The film is incredibly surreal and yet so without any kind of visual trickery, just a fragmented, peculiar way of telling a story about a girl, her lovers, and her parents -- they're portrayed at different stages of life by the same actors, without makeup, and it's often unclear what is literally happening to them and what is a remembrance. The film employs situations where characters talk to each other in one room that occupies both the present and the past, with both characters in different times. Many of the scenes are so downright inscrutable that I felt the film was like an exercise in Dadaist anarchy, albeit with painful childhood memories buried underneath.
The surreal scenes that make up the movie are abruptly integrated into the story, which plays cleanly and openly. (A large black woman revives a dead child who rests on her breasts; a homeowner befriends a boy burglar, who with wide eyes, ears that stick out, and a comically pronounced overbite resembles Nosferatu.) Some of the scenes in the film are simply funny in a quiet way, like how Marcello Mastroianni, as the girl's alcoholic father, keeps finding more and more street children trailing behind him, believing him to be their father. (There's another bold, funny diversion when Mastroianni can't find his apartment -- because teenagers have stolen the numbers and letters off the apartment block.)
The Forgotten (2004, Joseph Ruben)
Unfortunately "The Forgotten" eventually amounts to a run-of-the-mill Hollywood mystery, complete with a supernatural showdown in an abandoned factory. It's unfortunate because the first 20 minutes or so of are genuinely interesting, about a mother who has memories of a child that never existed. (As a symptom of a mother dealing with a miscarriage this could make for very rewarding and challenging material.) Then it shifts into a thriller where government officials and unmarked vehicles prowl around, and even then it's a serviceable throwaway. But when it gets to its third act, it's just the third section of increasing worseness -- it loses whatever skill or interest it's developed, proving further that Hollywood movies, particularly those made by for-hire directors, are incapable of finding a decent conclusion. That awful ending, with strange close-ups and odd angles, seems like it was directed by someone else entirely, since the interesting first section and the enjoyable second section aren't badly directed at all, and the use of music is effectively unsettling. The biggest shame may be in letting down a handful of fine actors: Gary Sinise, Dominic West, Alfre Woodward, even if Julianne Moore, wonderful that she is, manages to seep in some feeling here and there.
W (2008, Oliver Stone)
The comic tone of "W" may be necessary for audiences to be able to stomach a film about George W. Bush so soon, but that palatable tone is also what keeps the film from having the weight of Stone's other two presidential biographies, "JFK" and "Nixon." The all-star cast, as we've come to expect in Stone's films, rely on their combination of physical similarity and weightiness to come across as believable, and Josh Brolin, Richard Dreyfuss, and Toby Hughes are all quite fine in their roles. (Hughes, to me, seemed more interesting than the real Karl Rove.) Jeffrey Wright is an awfully fine actor, but his version of Colin Powell doesn't hit quite the right tone. But he's nowhere near as woefully out of it as Thandie Newton'sCondoleezza Rice, who drifts in and out of the movie muttering lines like she's crashing an SNL political parody.
Veronica Guerin (2003, Joel Schumacher)
For people who knew Veronica Guerin -- those readers of the Sunday Tribune -- the film of the same title should serve as a fine memorial of the woman, and the film works best on that level of a tribute to a folk hero. The film occasionally has some good, naturalistic interplay between Cate Blanchett and the ubiquitous Ciarin Hinds, and both actors are fine enough that their scenes together have feeling attached. (For an actress who can often seem gimmicky and technical, Blanchett, even with her prop Princess Diana haircut, plays her character openly.) While the movie documents the death of a journalist, and serves as a film example of the sad fact that many journalists are killed doing their jobs, it doesn't work much as a serious artwork on what it means to be human (aside from clichés like "I don't want to, I need to") or as good sociology or journalism that looks into why things happen the way they do. (For a death that came as a result of drug trafficking, there is relatively little in-depth questioning of the drug trade, and how her death might have been avoided; just politically-correct mourning and the banishment of drug dealers.) At best, it's a tribute. Then again, I imagine most people would have trouble not caring when a woman gets murdered by thugs.
Burn After Reading (2008, Coen brothers)
The clever conceit behind the film is that it's a shaggy dog story that knows it's a shaggy dog story and notes that within the film. But that simple self-awareness isn't enough to make an entertaining movie, and it's not a notion revolutionary enough to make it work simply as a conceit. The narrative is sometimes unclear, the character associations don't weave together complexly like they should. It might serve as a palate-cleanser after the Coen brothers' success with "No Country for Old Men," but it's not a successful movie in and of itself. Talented actors like Tilda Swinton are wasted, and the only real life the movie has comes from John Malkovich railing against morons and J.K. Simmons being flummoxed by what it all means. The long-standing criticism against the Coen brothers is that they look down on their characters. I'm not sure if that's true, but it's certainly true that they purposely write characters who aren't bright, and the laughter is meant to come from watching them act stupidly while the movie holds itself at a distance, in this case with a clever self-awareness that the buffoon characters themselves don't have. There's a big difference between that snottiness and the outrageous, brilliant stupidity of what the Farrelly brothers do. That the Coen brothers are more respected speaks largely to the holier-than-though attitude our culture likes to adopt (the same culture that drinks up a conceit movie as some kind of major achievement).
Animal Factory (2000, Steve Buscemi)
Essentially a slice-of-life prison drama, neither embellished with dramatics nor overdone with seediness or hopelessness. Buscemi gives a lot of time to marginalized actors -- Edward Furlong, Willem Dafoe, Mickey Rourke, John Heard, Tom Arnold, and an early appearance by the singer Antony Hegarty -- and it's mostly a film by actors for those who appreciate them. In many ways (the music, the unobtrusive visuals) it bears similarities to a TV show like "The Wire," although Buscemi's film has more in common with a character study than that show's sociological insights. He gives an essentially honest portrayal of an older convict and a younger one, possibly influenced by John Cheever's "Falconer." Their relationship isn't sexual, but it is soulful, and that's what separates it from being a TV movie. (Although, ironically, TV shows -- the type that Buscemi has directed -- would serve to give the prison story more complexity by virtue of time.)
Croupier (1998, Mike Hodges)
I wouldn't call "Croupier" a noir, but it's close to the French approximations of noir that Jean-Pierre Melville made. Clive Owen isn't as beautiful as Alain Delon, and he doesn't look quite so hip in a hat, but he's trading on similar vibes. Mike Hodges is definitely interested in style, but that doesn't necessarily make it a fraudulent movie since the premise of the movie is style too -- the attitudes, quickness, and steadiness of being a card shark. It's not a gangster movie like "Casino," it's about a man who sort of lives by a code, in his case honesty, in a world where manipulation exists everywhere. Women hover around the picture but Owen's character isn't exactly a womanizer. Hodges is working with atmosphere -- voiceovers that come in between spoken dialogue, ominous music -- and on that level it largely works.
Quantum of Solace (2008, Marc Forster)
Following in the more brutally efficient manner of "Casino Royale," the latest Bond installment is much closer to conventional action pictures, in the way it uses violence as a means to solve problems, as opposed to wit, cunning, or other traits we would associate with being part of a British franchise. It loses the fun and glamour of Bond pictures as being examples of style, but on the other hand it's not laughable or jokey in any respect. The main problem with the film as a film is that its action sequences are edited in such a rapid fashion, and with such little visual coherence, that they become confusing and the opposite of thrilling. For real excitement, it's always more effective to hold back and show larger shots of dangerous action -- car chases where we see both cars, actors doing things without the safety net of editing -- and Marc Forster, who's never made an action picture before, thinks that making the edits fast will make the film more exciting. (People watch the Olympics to see one runner slowly take over another, not to see close-ups of a runner's thigh, followed by a rapid succession of scalloping feet.)
The other, less bothersome flaw is that the World Issues plot seems heavy-handed, and there are discussions about things and references to people that don't always match up, because they're just not significant enough. (The film partly makes use of the political points with a memorable death involving oil.) It's the actors that make the movie, and thankfully it's not all action. Mathieu Amalric makes for a fine, small, restrained villain who resembles a human being. But it's obviously Daniel Craig's show, and he mostly pulls the film off. I didn't necessarily believe he was doing anything he was doing for the reason the film suggested -- vengeance on behalf of his dead friend -- but, in the moment, his performance works, largely because of his graceful movement and his enigmatic, sheltered personality. He's equally at home in a fashion statement scene, wearing a black polo, sunglasses, and white pants, as he is in scenes that require him to leap off buildings and avoid getting smacked with an axe. He's the proper heir to Steve McQueen: believable, rough, and with star quality, but with a modern sense of devilishness, which is only more pronounced by his impossibly blue eyes.
I Shot Andy Warhol (1996, Mary Harron)
No films can approximate the feel of the Warhol era better than his own films and those of Paul Morrissey. Those films have, decades later, retained a mysteriousness, beauty, and complexity that the documents we have now recounting the times fail to live up to. The images are so iconic and the DIY aesthetic so current that modern approximations seem false. As a story of the violent "feminist" who shot Andy Warhol, the film has a reason to exist. And the backdrop of the Warhol factory is given a little credibility thanks to Jared Harris' distant, wounded performance. But the film is also a little too glib and a little bit nasty. Since it's about an attempted murderess, that may be what Mary Harron was going for. But there's a deeper world in Warhol that we could have seen, when instead we've been given the marginalized world of one fringe psychotic.
