The Vault: Quick Shots
Ronin (USA, 1998, John Frankenheimer) AKA Le Samourai
John Frankenheimer was a great director in the 60s—Manchurian Candidate and Seconds are two of my very fave films from that decade, and in his best pictures, Frankenheimer’s world is a shady one, full of dark, duplicitous and dangerous people. His best work of this era was also shot in glorious black and white, which not only tossed us back to the films noir that informed his best work, but also helped accentuate the sense of not-quite-rightness in this other world. While Ronin is certainly not in the same league as the aforementioned works, it has enough double-dealing and visual punch to overcome some of the blandness of the genre conventions it occasionally resorts to (I lost track of the number of surprises and coincidences foisted on us). And while DeNiro is not exactly making us forget Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta, he isn’t sleepwalking through the film either, unlike most of his recent efforts. Oh, and yeah, like every critic in the world has noted: Great car chase. Not Bullitt or French Connection great, but perhaps To Live and Die in L.A. great nonetheless. The supporting cast is pretty strong (nice to see Jean Reno again), but the ever-luscious Natascha McElhorne is rather unconvincing as a terrorist operative. I know he made other films after Ronin, but I prefer to think of Frankenheimer as going out, well, if not exactly on top, at least on a high note with the slightly insubstantial but stylistically sophisticated song in a minor key that is Ronin.
Score: 77/100
Josie and the Pussycats (USA, 2001, Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont) Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill
Okay, how did this one slip past me? This is a pretty funny bit of post-modernist wink-wink nudge-nudge self-mockery, and certainly more convincing in that regard that Jack Black’s Rock n Roll High School. The film has some decent bubble-gum punk tunes on the soundtrack and charming performances by the lead trio (my fave? Tara Reid, who is a great ditz. I laughed out loud pretty much every time she was on screen) and a self-referential irreverence that gleefully attacks pop culture by using members of pop culture. Little surprise that Parker Posey is a fine villain, just a shame we don’t see more of her. Partners Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont (take each of their first names, and you’ve got yerself another pop music/culture reference. Coincidence?) helm this, and don’t do much to distinguish themselves with the camera—I can’t think of one funny unscripted moment—but neither do they get in the way of the wackier elements of this satire. Ultimately, very thin stuff—the whole subliminal messaging thang was just a bit too cornball, and the girls rapid rise to fame a bit too absurd for words--but there was just enough tongue to fill my cheek.
Score: 70/100
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Reservoir Dogs (USA, 1992, Quentin Tarantino) AKA The Killing Fields
"Am I the only professional here?"
--Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi)
We all remember the scene. Here we are, more than a decade removed from the film’s release, and I suspect that, if asked, most people who’ve seen the film only once would cite this as the one scene they remember. It’s the one that appears dead centre of the film, temporally speaking, which I suppose adds some ironic commentary to Tarantino’s choice of song at the moment (Stuck in the Middle With You). But when a straight-blade wielding Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde) begins to soft shoe across the warehouse floor and karaoke to the sounds of K-Billy Radio with a twisted smirk on his face, the knot that’s been in your stomach from the moment the opening credits end and a writhing, howling and blood-splattered Tim Roth jumps out at you from the screen, that terrible dead weight in your belly that’s been festering and bubbling takes on new dimensions and gravity as it seizes hold of all your vital organs, taking hostage of your senses and daring you to keep your attention focused on the images before you.
A murderous sociopath is left to his own devices to torture information out of a cop. He’s got a gun, a straight-edged razor, some matches and a gallon of gasoline, and Tarantino’s going to make you watch him in action. Now remember this: Reservoir Dogs is Tarantino’s directorial debut. What you’re being forced to watch—in many ways, you in the audience are strapped to your seat in the same way that this poor cop is--the kind of scene that not only makes or breaks a film, it could very well make or break a burgeoning filmmaker’s career. As one cop remarks to another as they watch fellow undercover cop Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) climb into a car with the jewel heist conspirators, putting on screen this kinda of potentially offensive, off-puttingly sadistic, seat-squirming, stomach-turning shit takes "balls the size of Gibraltar."
At a technical level, the scene is beautifully shot, edited and paced. For example, the way Tarantino’s camera cuts away just as Mr. Blonde cuts off the cop’s ear, like Scorcese in Taxi Driver when he pans the camera away from Travis on the telephone as he gets dumped by Cybil Shephard, and, in one of the most macabre examples of humour in all of Tarantino’s films, focuses on a hand-scrawled note over a low-hanging doorway that reads "Watch Your Head," is well, fucking brilliant stuff, excuse my French, cuz everyone, absolutely everyone I ever talk to about this movie SWEARS they saw a man’s ear get severed at this moment. But trust me; it doesn’t happen (on screen, anyways.)
More significant to Tarantino’s overall statement, however, is how he forces grotesque close-ups of the cop’s ravaged face on us BEFORE the man gets tortured by Madsen, so we can all see the effect of the beating he’s taken. Like Peckinpah, Tarantino wants us to see that this level of violence has consequences, kids. Perhaps more importantly, he wants us to share in the cop’s terror. Not just because he wants us to piss our pants (though that can never be far from Tarantino’s mind at any time during this scene), but also because he wants to engage our empathic horror. Up to this point in the film, the cop has always been framed in long shots, which naturally emotionally distances us from him, but now, just as the most grotesque things are about to be done to the cop, Tarantino suddenly gives us that man’s terror, full-frame. Only an inhuman (or agenda-driven) viewer would dare argue that Tarantino is glorifying the violence (or desensitizing audiences to it) in view of how he uses the camera here.
Tarantino’s choice of music, already alluded to, is terrific—a semi-obscure song from a one-hit wonder (Steelers Wheel—though, to be fair, Gerry Rafferty did go on to have a solo career of minor distinction)—but not only that, he does something completely unexpected with the music in this scene as well. When he follows Mr. Blonde out of the warehouse and to his car, where he keeps the gasoline (of course), the music stays in the warehouse, and as we step out into the daylight, we hear the ambient sounds of the neighbourhood—the traffic, birds. Suddenly we’re taken out of the perfectly choreographed pressure-cooker, and allowed to breathe some fresh air, gather our senses, so we can think about what has and is about to happen. There’s a real theatricality to the move, like the moment of comic relief that Shakespeare liked to toss into his tragedies to let some of the steam out. He’d then start rebuilding the tension, so that when the pot blew, it went sky high. But t his kind of move doesn’t come without risk, because if you aren’t careful, you risk losing the momentum of the scene, taking the audience out of the moment, loosening that knot you’ve spent the first half of the film building in the audience’s gut.
But when Madsen opens the trunk, and pulls out the canister of gasoline and heads back to the warehouse, is there anybody who could convincingly argue that this scene’s tension hasn’t risen noticeably as a result? When Madsen opens the door just as the drummer pounds the cowbells, you’ve gotta know that the bells are tolling not only for the poor tortured cop, but for everyone of us in the audience who’s sat through this indescribably horrific scene, and now must watch as Mr. Blonde applies the coup de grace. And just as we’re about to wet our panties in anticipation of something absolutely Buddhist-monks-in-Vietnam unthinkable, just as the whole scene promises to explode in a cloud of nihilistic Clockwork Orange-level ultra-violence, who should come to the rescue but Mr. Orange.
The whole thing plays out over some of the most effective three minutes of screen time that I’ve ever experienced in a movie theatre. In fact, even though he’s made more popular films (Pulp Fiction) and even more accomplished ones (Kill Bill), there may be no other scene in Tarantino’s catalogue that reverberates with audiences like this one. It distills down for us the essence of what Tarantino is as a filmmaker. And, as a result, the scene exemplifies for me why Reservoir Dogs remains his most singularly and viscerally effective effort as a director. Perhaps because the film remains so tightly-focused on these characters in their absurdly challenging situation. Perhaps because the movie was filmed on the cheap and on the fly, so there was no time to piss around with different approaches or different takes. Whatever the reason, this is the one QT film that always manages to rope a knot in my stomach and, over the course of the film’s 100 minute running time, keep a firm grip, pulling, twisting, tightening and re-tying it.
Score: 91/100
"Am I the only professional here?"
--Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi)
We all remember the scene. Here we are, more than a decade removed from the film’s release, and I suspect that, if asked, most people who’ve seen the film only once would cite this as the one scene they remember. It’s the one that appears dead centre of the film, temporally speaking, which I suppose adds some ironic commentary to Tarantino’s choice of song at the moment (Stuck in the Middle With You). But when a straight-blade wielding Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde) begins to soft shoe across the warehouse floor and karaoke to the sounds of K-Billy Radio with a twisted smirk on his face, the knot that’s been in your stomach from the moment the opening credits end and a writhing, howling and blood-splattered Tim Roth jumps out at you from the screen, that terrible dead weight in your belly that’s been festering and bubbling takes on new dimensions and gravity as it seizes hold of all your vital organs, taking hostage of your senses and daring you to keep your attention focused on the images before you.
A murderous sociopath is left to his own devices to torture information out of a cop. He’s got a gun, a straight-edged razor, some matches and a gallon of gasoline, and Tarantino’s going to make you watch him in action. Now remember this: Reservoir Dogs is Tarantino’s directorial debut. What you’re being forced to watch—in many ways, you in the audience are strapped to your seat in the same way that this poor cop is--the kind of scene that not only makes or breaks a film, it could very well make or break a burgeoning filmmaker’s career. As one cop remarks to another as they watch fellow undercover cop Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) climb into a car with the jewel heist conspirators, putting on screen this kinda of potentially offensive, off-puttingly sadistic, seat-squirming, stomach-turning shit takes "balls the size of Gibraltar."
At a technical level, the scene is beautifully shot, edited and paced. For example, the way Tarantino’s camera cuts away just as Mr. Blonde cuts off the cop’s ear, like Scorcese in Taxi Driver when he pans the camera away from Travis on the telephone as he gets dumped by Cybil Shephard, and, in one of the most macabre examples of humour in all of Tarantino’s films, focuses on a hand-scrawled note over a low-hanging doorway that reads "Watch Your Head," is well, fucking brilliant stuff, excuse my French, cuz everyone, absolutely everyone I ever talk to about this movie SWEARS they saw a man’s ear get severed at this moment. But trust me; it doesn’t happen (on screen, anyways.)
More significant to Tarantino’s overall statement, however, is how he forces grotesque close-ups of the cop’s ravaged face on us BEFORE the man gets tortured by Madsen, so we can all see the effect of the beating he’s taken. Like Peckinpah, Tarantino wants us to see that this level of violence has consequences, kids. Perhaps more importantly, he wants us to share in the cop’s terror. Not just because he wants us to piss our pants (though that can never be far from Tarantino’s mind at any time during this scene), but also because he wants to engage our empathic horror. Up to this point in the film, the cop has always been framed in long shots, which naturally emotionally distances us from him, but now, just as the most grotesque things are about to be done to the cop, Tarantino suddenly gives us that man’s terror, full-frame. Only an inhuman (or agenda-driven) viewer would dare argue that Tarantino is glorifying the violence (or desensitizing audiences to it) in view of how he uses the camera here.
Tarantino’s choice of music, already alluded to, is terrific—a semi-obscure song from a one-hit wonder (Steelers Wheel—though, to be fair, Gerry Rafferty did go on to have a solo career of minor distinction)—but not only that, he does something completely unexpected with the music in this scene as well. When he follows Mr. Blonde out of the warehouse and to his car, where he keeps the gasoline (of course), the music stays in the warehouse, and as we step out into the daylight, we hear the ambient sounds of the neighbourhood—the traffic, birds. Suddenly we’re taken out of the perfectly choreographed pressure-cooker, and allowed to breathe some fresh air, gather our senses, so we can think about what has and is about to happen. There’s a real theatricality to the move, like the moment of comic relief that Shakespeare liked to toss into his tragedies to let some of the steam out. He’d then start rebuilding the tension, so that when the pot blew, it went sky high. But t his kind of move doesn’t come without risk, because if you aren’t careful, you risk losing the momentum of the scene, taking the audience out of the moment, loosening that knot you’ve spent the first half of the film building in the audience’s gut.
But when Madsen opens the trunk, and pulls out the canister of gasoline and heads back to the warehouse, is there anybody who could convincingly argue that this scene’s tension hasn’t risen noticeably as a result? When Madsen opens the door just as the drummer pounds the cowbells, you’ve gotta know that the bells are tolling not only for the poor tortured cop, but for everyone of us in the audience who’s sat through this indescribably horrific scene, and now must watch as Mr. Blonde applies the coup de grace. And just as we’re about to wet our panties in anticipation of something absolutely Buddhist-monks-in-Vietnam unthinkable, just as the whole scene promises to explode in a cloud of nihilistic Clockwork Orange-level ultra-violence, who should come to the rescue but Mr. Orange.
The whole thing plays out over some of the most effective three minutes of screen time that I’ve ever experienced in a movie theatre. In fact, even though he’s made more popular films (Pulp Fiction) and even more accomplished ones (Kill Bill), there may be no other scene in Tarantino’s catalogue that reverberates with audiences like this one. It distills down for us the essence of what Tarantino is as a filmmaker. And, as a result, the scene exemplifies for me why Reservoir Dogs remains his most singularly and viscerally effective effort as a director. Perhaps because the film remains so tightly-focused on these characters in their absurdly challenging situation. Perhaps because the movie was filmed on the cheap and on the fly, so there was no time to piss around with different approaches or different takes. Whatever the reason, this is the one QT film that always manages to rope a knot in my stomach and, over the course of the film’s 100 minute running time, keep a firm grip, pulling, twisting, tightening and re-tying it.
Score: 91/100
Monday, March 08, 2004
Just a quick hit today to link up to my Apollo Guide review of Roman Polanski's The Tenant. If he'd inched this thing a coupla degrees sideways, he'd have had a real campy spoof on his hands. As it is, a failed attempt to recreate the creepy mood he did such a fine job of cultivating in other horror classics like Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion. The whole Dressed to Kill psycho thang that Polanski fucks up pretty badly suggests that Alfred Hitchcock is not the only filmmaker to influence the work of Brian dePalma. Good on Mr. DePalma for at least managing to pull it off.
Sunday, March 07, 2004
Down with Love (USA, 2003, Peyton Reed) AKA Love, American Style
Peyton Reed (Bring it On). Is that a great name for a fella making a retro love letter to the early 60s, or what? Down with Love is a campy, vampy 90m special of Love, American Style, with a little Rat Pack and Pillow Talk/Lover Come Back tossed in for good measure. Renee Zellweger plays a Doris Day-type writer named Barbara Novak who pens a best selling book advising women to give up on love, engage in meaningless sex, and focus the rest of their energy building their careers. Ewen MacGregor is Catcher Block, a muy macho journalist hell-bent on exposing Ms. Novak for the sham he’s convinced she is. The resultant battle of the sexes carries the whiff of the Rock Hudson-Doris Day films of the era--hey, in a piece of perfect casting, David Hyde-Pierce even gets to play the Tony Randall part, which makes Randall’s eventual appearance here all the more delicious, if not slightly redundant-- but for some reason the wink-wink self-consciousness of the piece just didn’t quite work with the love story that we’re supposed to be enjoying at the centre of it all. While Zellweger and MacGregor are just fine in their respective roles, and they sure seem to be having a blast with their parts, the more I watched ‘em, the more I wished I was watching their performances in one of their earlier, better films like Jerry Maguire, Trainspotting or Moulin Rouge.
Unfortunately, while the nostalgic nods to the past were sometimes fun, they also helped to remind me of what I disliked about all those films. It’s all artifice, but so little art. Unlike Todd Haynes terrific Far From Heaven, which not only did such a great job of updating the melodramatic mechanisms of Douglas Sirks films but made the point of hinting at the timeless quality of the themes at play, Down With Love seems content to be a set piece for the time capsule. Yes, there is little doubt that Reed captures the look and mood of the genre and the period, as Down with Love looks and sounds fabulous. But to what effect, for what purpose? The plot twists that precipitate the ending were heaped on us so suddenly and inexplicably, that the only way we could buy into them was to see the entire effort as some sort of campy spoof, but I don’t think that’s really what Reed is shooting for. However, simple nostalgia for a period and genre I never much cared for in the first place, and the thin, wan smile that sometimes crept across my face during some of the more playful moments (the use of split screen, a few moments of banter were playful) also seem a thin foundation on which to raise such an edifice. Are we meant to see modern parallels between the "Down with Love" women in this film and the desire of many modern women to "have it all?" That all seems a might bit facile to me; if you haven’t got anything new to say, why spend all this time and energy not to say it? I mean, really now, Peyton, maybe you can tell me what the hell is the point of it all?
Score: 61/100
Peyton Reed (Bring it On). Is that a great name for a fella making a retro love letter to the early 60s, or what? Down with Love is a campy, vampy 90m special of Love, American Style, with a little Rat Pack and Pillow Talk/Lover Come Back tossed in for good measure. Renee Zellweger plays a Doris Day-type writer named Barbara Novak who pens a best selling book advising women to give up on love, engage in meaningless sex, and focus the rest of their energy building their careers. Ewen MacGregor is Catcher Block, a muy macho journalist hell-bent on exposing Ms. Novak for the sham he’s convinced she is. The resultant battle of the sexes carries the whiff of the Rock Hudson-Doris Day films of the era--hey, in a piece of perfect casting, David Hyde-Pierce even gets to play the Tony Randall part, which makes Randall’s eventual appearance here all the more delicious, if not slightly redundant-- but for some reason the wink-wink self-consciousness of the piece just didn’t quite work with the love story that we’re supposed to be enjoying at the centre of it all. While Zellweger and MacGregor are just fine in their respective roles, and they sure seem to be having a blast with their parts, the more I watched ‘em, the more I wished I was watching their performances in one of their earlier, better films like Jerry Maguire, Trainspotting or Moulin Rouge.
Unfortunately, while the nostalgic nods to the past were sometimes fun, they also helped to remind me of what I disliked about all those films. It’s all artifice, but so little art. Unlike Todd Haynes terrific Far From Heaven, which not only did such a great job of updating the melodramatic mechanisms of Douglas Sirks films but made the point of hinting at the timeless quality of the themes at play, Down With Love seems content to be a set piece for the time capsule. Yes, there is little doubt that Reed captures the look and mood of the genre and the period, as Down with Love looks and sounds fabulous. But to what effect, for what purpose? The plot twists that precipitate the ending were heaped on us so suddenly and inexplicably, that the only way we could buy into them was to see the entire effort as some sort of campy spoof, but I don’t think that’s really what Reed is shooting for. However, simple nostalgia for a period and genre I never much cared for in the first place, and the thin, wan smile that sometimes crept across my face during some of the more playful moments (the use of split screen, a few moments of banter were playful) also seem a thin foundation on which to raise such an edifice. Are we meant to see modern parallels between the "Down with Love" women in this film and the desire of many modern women to "have it all?" That all seems a might bit facile to me; if you haven’t got anything new to say, why spend all this time and energy not to say it? I mean, really now, Peyton, maybe you can tell me what the hell is the point of it all?
Score: 61/100
Got yer weekend update right here, ladies and gents. Here's my Apollo Review of My Fair Lady, which I mentioned I had viewed awhile back.
Not much else to report, other than that I spent the day at the pool watching my kids competing in a swim meet. Is there anyplace more womb-like than a pool? The smothering heat, the sweltering humidity, the cacophony of indistinct voices that, no matter how hard you strain, remain incomprehensible. Who says there's no going home?
So anyways, just a little reminder to take the time to take the time. Spend the afternoon napping in the hammock, dangling your fishing rod in a barren pond or reading a trashy novel. You don't always have to be sweating and straining over your interpretation of the latest film by Godard or Sakurov.
Show yer kids what real living is all about; be the best role model you can be!
Not much else to report, other than that I spent the day at the pool watching my kids competing in a swim meet. Is there anyplace more womb-like than a pool? The smothering heat, the sweltering humidity, the cacophony of indistinct voices that, no matter how hard you strain, remain incomprehensible. Who says there's no going home?
So anyways, just a little reminder to take the time to take the time. Spend the afternoon napping in the hammock, dangling your fishing rod in a barren pond or reading a trashy novel. You don't always have to be sweating and straining over your interpretation of the latest film by Godard or Sakurov.
Show yer kids what real living is all about; be the best role model you can be!
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