Babel
With Babel Alejandro González Iñárritu has established himself in my eyes as one of the most innovative filmmakers of our times. For Iñárritu and his longtime writing partner, Guillermo Arriaga, life is not a cakewalk. The basic sensibility running through Love is a Bitch, 21 Gramms and now Babel is deep pessimism: at any moment life can turn into a horrible tragedy. Babel tries to flesh out that heartbreak is not the special fate of one country or a people but rather the universal human condition. People are struck by tragedy independent of whether they live in the U.S., Morocco, Japan or Mexico, for example. Iñárritu keeps you on the edge of your seat because you don’t know how much tragedy will unfold before your eyes. The camera travels back and forth between these four countries and Iñárritu surprises you more than once showing you perspectives on everyday life that you have not seen before. The film is heavy, but it is a rewarding experience not to be missed.
The Queen
The trailer for The Queen turned me off, but friends and critics insisted that I watch The Queen. “It is a really great movie,” the said. The first scene already felt much less staged and invented than the dialogue between Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth featured in the trailer. The film is not great. What it has going for itself is a spectacular performance by Helen Mirren. Her performance single-handedly carries the movie forward and manages to plaster over a great deal of its fundamental flaws. The film focuses on the week after Princess Diana’s death and depicts how Tony Blair, just appointed Prime Minister, helps the Queen fix a public relations disaster that was making the Queen widely unpopular. The film portrays the private conversations of the Royal family. But the Royal family almost certainly did not tell the filmmakers what they, did, said and felt during that week. Hence script feels like a wild speculation of what went on in the minds and hearts of the Queen, her husband, the queen mother and Prince Charles. The Tony Blair of movie comes across as little puppy rather than a politician with some gravitas that we know from TV. I think people like the film so much because they enjoy seeing the private life and thoughts of the Queen, even if its is largely invented. Most people seem to be able to believe, unlike me, they are watching what the royals truly think and feel.
Postscript Feb 11, 2007: An interview with the director in Slate confirms that my critique of The Queen was right the money.
Continue ReadingCasino Royale
My teenage self loved James Bond. Part of becoming an adult was letting go of 007. I remember walking out of a movie theatre in the early 1990s, saying to myself. “Bond has lost any resemblance to a real human being. This cartoon-like character is just plain old silly. I am never going to watch a Bond movie again!” Two Bond movies later I was part of a captured audience on a transatlantic flight to London. I had to admit to myself that the new Bond movie in which a German media mogul tried to control the world was pretty good. But until last night I kept my vow not to buy a ticket for a new James Bond movie. The publicity surrounding [i[Casino Royale suggested that the producers tried to change Bond from the cartoon character to someone with real human emotions. As a connoisseur of the first twenty Bond movies, I wanted to see this happening. The new Bond is truly a different Bond. Anyone who has seen Bond in action many times will enjoy seeing Bond transformed into an emotionally believable character. If you have never watched a James Bond movie, it is clearly not a film you must see, but you will take a splendid scenic tour of some of the world’s most beautiful spots. In the new Bond, drama unfolds not alone only through physics- defying high tech stunts but also through dialogues. I suspect that Paul Haggis who wrote the wonderful screenplay to Crash (2004) had a strong hand in successfully humanizing James Bond. The new James Bond, Daniel Craig, delivers a strong performance. It is a real pleasure to watch him enact the humanized James Bond. He uses his eyes very effectively to communicate. I walked out of the theater musing: “What new assignment is James Bond going to get by the producers now that they have turned him into a recognizable human being. Will I be able to resist the temptation to see this for myself?”
The Passion of the Christ
The Passion of the Christ should more appropriately be called Mel Gibson’s Passion for Violence. Anyone who sets out to make a movie about the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life has the artistic responsibility to provide a context of what Jesus was all about. Mel Gibson message is that Jesus died the most brutal violent death that one can imagine, instead of relating what is at the core of Jesus’ teaching, namely the love for every human being. The film has strong anti-Semitic undertones. It portrays the Jewish religious leaders as the most despicable, bloodthirsty people one can imagine instead of typical bureaucrats who are trying to maintain their own positions by getting rid of the new kid on the block, who was challenging their teachings and developing a following. Mel Gibson’s desire to bring out the violence committed against Jesus goes so far that he turns Jesus into a masochistic and suicidal fellow. It is one thing to fight for one’s beliefs, even die for them if necessary. It is another thing to invite unnecessarily one’s torturers to continue their brutal violence so that one ultimately dies. Mel Gibson’s vision of Jesus makes no sense, except from the view of a severely psychological disturbed human being. Gibson’s recent anti-Semitic tirade against police officers who stopped him while driving under the influence of alcohol speaks volumes about the motivations that lay behind this misguided film.
The Departed
The Departed is an exceedingly well-craft piece of work. But I left the theatre disappointed because the story feels repetitive and fundamentally wrong. Just as in many of his films, Sorcese suggests that violence for violence’s sake is the general condition in America. With question America is violent. Too violate for my taste. But no society can survive for 200 years in which the average members of society believes it is normal to kill innocent people. Scorcese’s superb film Gangs of New York has perhaps even more bloody scenes than The Departed but the historical narrative arrives at the crucial point that the modern state triumphed over the capricious violence of one member of society of the next. The Departed makes no sense. Scorcese assembles a superb cast whose acting is impeccable. But Jack Nicholson and company cannot compensate the absence of a story worth telling.
Just My Luck
If you have thought deeply about the role of fate in life, Just My Luck is not going to offer you any new insights. If you are looking for a nice little romance movie that you can let your kids watch, this is just the right movie for you. I suspect that kids don’t mind a plot where good and back luck can be turned on and off by a small kiss.
Little Miss Sunshine
For most of its history, the United States has existed in the minds of people from all around the world as the place of freedom and unparalleled economic opportunities. Real as they always were, these opportunities never fell into everyone’s hands in equal amounts. Nonetheless, America has produced millions of success stories that coalesced into the myth of unlimited opportunities. Little Miss Sunshine tells the story of a family that tries hard to participate in this American dream. The father is hatching a plan to make millions through selling self-help books and videos. The daughter is practicing with granddaddy to win a beauty contest for little kids. The teenage son decided to stop talking to anyone, while he is focusing on becoming a fighter jet pilot. In the meantime, Mommy has to work all day to keep the family afloat and bring food to the table while daddy is trying to make his business work. The only problem this American family is that they have no skills to make their dreams come true. In the competitive American world, they appear to be total losers. Not surprisingly the family life is a bit stressful because it is not clear how they will continue making a living. It is much easier to tell (and watch) heroic tales of people who overcome their challenges and succeed. The genius of Little Miss Sunshine is that it can turn the camera onto the lives of a disintegrating family without merely depressing you. It turns out that the parents don’t have the cash at hand to fly with their daughter to children’s beauty pageant to California. Yet when the family decides to make this long trip by car you want to go on the road trip with them and see who they fare in their struggle to make a living in contemporary American society. Except for the ending, the film is brilliant.
Chinatown
While the dialogues in Chinatown are well crafted, the drama of this detective story falls a bit flat after 30 years. Roman Polanski has a penchant for psychological stories, but his art is at a much higher level in The Pianist and Death and the Maiden. If you want a little history lesson of LA without too much history, the film captures well the city’s precarious habitat: it is built in a semi-desert and requires imported water for its sustenance. Water politics are central to this history of the city to this day. Watching the film, I could never shake the feeling that I already knew the mood of the film. With the help of the web learned that The Two Jakes was a sequel to Chinatown. Both films don’t make it my must-see list.
Fitzcarraldo
Growing older has its pleasures. I was bit nervous about renting Fitzcarraldo (1982) with Klaus Kinski in the lead role. I remember seeing Kinski as a teenager in a film depicting a strange riverboat trip. At the time I thought the film was boring and Kinski crazy. In my memory the action took place on the Nile, but after searching for any evidence of the film on the Internet this morning, I am forced to conclude: It was Fitzcarraldo that the teenage me rejected as boring and crazy. The adult me, by contrast, enjoyed every single one of the 158 minutes in which a lovable crazy Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) tries to bring opera to the backwaters of Peru. This film, set at the turn of the 20th century, is not for everyone, especially not teenagers who will find the pace too slow. If you like opera, nature, and people who are a bit crazy in their quest to experience life in its fullest, you will not be disappointed.
Walk the Line
If I had grown up in Nashville listening to country music, it would have been easier to appreciate Walk the Line, a chronicle of the first 30 something years of Johnny Cash’s career. Raised on Rock, Pop and Soul and Classical Music, I could not connect very well with Cash’s music, except for the occasional tune whose lyrics stood out. But even the die-hard country fans were not given the same treat as we fan of Ray Charles could experience last year with the stunningly good Ray. Walk the Line lacked the craftsmanship of Ray that would have given us deeper understanding of artistry behind the music. Whereas Ray was fundamentally about music, Walk the Line is about the amazing love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter that outshines his music. Reese Witherspoon deservedly won the Oscar her performance as June Carter.
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