Film for the Soul

A New Venture

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:26:00 +0000

The King is dead. Long live the king.

Film for the Soul may be gone but a new venture awaits.

I hope to see all of you that made Film for the Soul such a wonderful place to be at my new blog, By Kubrick's Beard, some time soon.

Thank you

The End. Bye Bye Film for the Soul

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:32:00 +0000

Let's face it, this happened months ago.

I've tried, I've failed. Film for the Soul is no more, I can't bring myself to work on the blog I loved so much.

Counting Down the Zeroes, probably, takes most the blame. The project was ambitious, a runaway success and wide-spread throughout the film blog community however, what I didn't relish though was the amount of editing, arranging, designing and managing involved, the time I spent on contributors articles meant I no longer had any input in my own blog.

Film for the Soul ceased to be my baby.

I'm still damn proud of that project though, and until a couple of months back, I still believed that I could complete it. After some deep soul searching, I realised I was dreading going back to it and my, futile, attempts to start blogging again were half-arsed to say the least, it just wasn't my blog anymore. Maybe it was meant to be this way.

I will miss this place terribly, I made great friends here; you know who you are out there and I just want to say thank you, thank you so much for what you've meant to me. What you amazing people didn't know was that Film for the Soul helped me through a really black moment in my life. I started the blog back in March 2008 when I was unemployed, without hope and admist a deep depression that had taken hold of me for the past 18 months.

Film for the Soul was part of my recovery; a major part in fact, to just have the facility to feel engaged, creative and a part of something I cared about made the world of difference to me. I never expected it to be anything other than a place to write stuff down but, and I'm sure all fellow bloggers will understand this, it means so, so much more than that. Film for the Soul boosted my confidence, self-esteem, self-worth and gave me a purpose, whatever the reasons that led me to those awful dark days Film for the Soul was the torch, lighting the way to a better way of looking at the world.

Meeting like minded people, discovering so much more to the world of cinema and writing. That's all it took. This is what Film for the Soul and you have meant to me, you have no idea what you've done for me. My life is my own again.

I will miss you all. I hope; I'm pretty sure, I will return one day but not here. Never here. This is it my friends. Adios. And thanks for all the fish.

Your friend
Ric Burke (aka) Ibetolis

Che Part 2: Guerilla - Review

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:46:00 +0000

(Steven Soderbergh, 2008)

It seems fitting that my first review, back in the saddle as it were, happens to be the concluding part to my last review on this blog. Che Part 1 - The Argentine, left me alienated and frustrated and in my own words:

‘(whilst) there is so much to admire here; the depth of information about the revolution, the film maker's determination, stunning cinematography and Soderbergh's absolute, resolute, stubbornness to pander and his anti-audience stance. It takes a certain arrogance and belief to make a film like this, purposely taking your audience somewhere new, even if the results are as patchy, it should still be applauded. Despite my problems with Che: Part One, I look forward to the concluding part, mostly in hope that it will clear up the agonising and frustrating estrangement I felt with the first chapter.’

This seems like the perfect point to reflect on that review and to take stock on how two fragments of a whole can affect the individual when watched in separate chapters. Due to that general feeling 'The Argentine' left me rather empty and unwilling to conclude the epic, but finally I got around to the second part, if a good six months later, and it’s more to my pity that I waited for so long, as Part Two: Guerilla, turned out to be one of the most satisfying films of the year. I only wish that I had watched the films back to back, as I'm convinced that this review would have been completely different.

Whereas 'The Argentine' covers the makings of ‘the man, the myth’ aspect, the origins of his ideology and the beginnings of the revolution, Guerilla takes on the subsequent fame, notoriety and belief that surround the icon some seven years later, his dogmatic turns as a politician in Cuba, his swift resignation and fatefully his calling back in the wilderness of guerrilla warfare. Whereas one would expect the tone to be darker than the first part, to which it is by some degree, the subsequent pace at which this happens wears down the viewer and finally brings the viewer to Che, to feel his pain, to feel the claustrophobia, the relentless pain in his chest, it’s as if Soderbergh has held us at length for so long for us only to run into his arms when invited. Which, admittedly, happens only once and boy, is it ever fleeting.

So, it’s to Bolivia, where Che meets his fate, that the second film ultimately turns to and Che’s infinite patience, methodical approach and strategist skills are brought to breaking point. With no backing from the Bolivian communists, little food, bewildered peasants and a relentless hopelessness invading the entire film, Che continues regardless, stoic and resolute to the end. Del Toro is masterful here, his Che becomes more man than myth before the film finishes and despite bedraggled, losing his composure, injured and defeated he’s still able to hold the icon aloft, feeding us the legend without giving anything away.

It’s in the film making also that this resolute trope shines through, throughout 'The Argentine' we moved between dual narratives which grounded the man and his story, Guerilla pointedly refuses this method by throwing us deep into a losing battle, dragging us through the mud as it were. We sit around the fire with Che and his men, waiting for back-up, talking through plans, going through mind numbing repetitive training schedules, knowing the inevitable is around the corner. Those luscious greens and deep reds of the first film make way for shades of grey, murky colours seep into too each other to give a palate of drudge. The camera throws us into the heart of this drudgery with handheld shots and the score by Alberto Igelesias, becomes bleaker, less coherent and those orchestral flourishes from the first part are no more.

Strikingly individual to the very end, Soderbergh has fashioned a beautiful looking take on the bio-pic; four and a half hours is a damn long time to spend with any one man without knowing him that much, yet I believe Soderbergh just about gives us enough to make it worth while. A real slow burner, a patient set up with little resolution which makes the whole enterprise uncompromising and unique; there's no tub-thumping, polemic dogma or Hollywood navel gazing here. Che still remains mysterious, unobtainable and alien even at the film's end, Soderbergh has dared make a bio-pic without the baggage and, once again, the man should be applauded.

Now, That's How You Open a Movie #13

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Tue, 11 May 2010 22:07:00 +0000

Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)

Fresh from having their heads ceremoniously shaved, another 'conditioning' ritual awaits the fresh 'marine grunts', in the guise of a verbal tirade, at once so vile yet magnificent, lifted out of the highly imaginative book of obscenities and put downs, in the shape of the steely framed, mad eyed drill Sergent, Hartman.

As one eye-rolling nasty line follows another, Kubrick neatly shoves the psychological and physical re-shaping of the young men down our throat; nothing exists but the Marine Corp, nothing but it's ideals, it's methods and it's beliefs.

In the centre of it all is the performance from Lee Ermey (Hartman), the former drill Sergent commands the whole scene, his presence is both terrifying and electric, you truly believe he would die for his 'beloved' Marine Corp. without a moments pause.

Enjoy the profanity.

Why not check out the Opening Scene series? Go on, you know you want to.

The Other 10 : 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:19:00 +0000

As I've been out of the blogsphere for some months I thought I would get back in the saddle by listing this years alternative top 10; to those films that I finally got around to watching in the year 2009, as last years was such a joy to put together.

Film for the Soul was borne out of frustration in March 2008, mostly at myself for never taking the time and care to watch the films I had always meant to see but found excuses to avoid them and to learn more about a subject I claimed to love. With that simple mission statement I've been subjected and encountered a world of film I never knew was so rich and vibrant, so strikingly brilliant and intense.

What follows may gob-smack some; as in 'What? You mean he's only got around to watching that!' but enthrall others, hopefully leading to some of you finally getting around to watching those films 'you've always meant to watch'.

So, in no particular order...

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)

Bogdanovich vision of a 1950's small Texan town, swallowed up by the world beyond and littered with lonely souls, the lost, the disaffected and dreams unfulfilled, plays out like the last dance waiting for the music to fade out. Lugubrious, haunting and mesmerising.

The General (Clyde Bruckman/Buster Keaton, 1926)

I can say I've finally met 'stone-face' and I think it's love. Thrown into a world of chaos, anarchy and death defying stunts, Buster remains passive, calm and collected throughout; a genius of understatement, when all around him during the silent era went bigger, Keaton's sombre look of ambivalence sleighs me every time.

The Red Shoes (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

Nothing prepared me for the surreal mastery of the ballet scene itself, without doubt a masterpiece and another film of brilliance from Powell & Pressburger.

Bande A' Part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

A man so ahead of the curve he invented it; cinematically clever, dripping in pop culture references, sardonic and identifiably Godard.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Simply beyond mere cinema to transcend the medium and climb into your brain, hatch then assault you with a world so bombastic in vision and sound, in ideas and imagination, in scope and refinement, that it will leave you dumb-founded, jaw agap, staring at the blank screen long after the credits have rolled.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)

So achingly beautiful, subtle and unravels at such a slight pace, that the last 30 minutes are spent in a misty eyed glaze. "If only you could've recognized what was always yours, could've found what was never lost". Stefan Brand, you bastard.

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

Ozu's portrait of familial relations is so agonisingly human, so subtle and complete, one wonders how a film over 55 years old and made in Japan transcends time and culture with such ease and verve. Beautiful. So, so beautiful.

Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1970)

Eerie, off-kilter, disturbing and marked by a series of silences so profound, Chabrol's intense thriller points to something far deeper than 'a killer on the loose' narrative will have you believe. Strangely moving.

The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

At times both vile and magnificent, beautiful and ugly, John Wayne saunters with a rage, a hatred so deep, so intense it burns all those around him, whilst John Ford paints a beautiful canvas for him to hate in. Complex, beguiling and magnificent.

Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

Full of snappy one-liners, oozing in the kind of deep noir cool that filters through the best of the genre and with Mitchem in the kind of form where you don't know whether to hug him or to hit him, Out of the Past is the sort of film you should watch whenever you're despondent about movies. Sheer class.

Counting Down The Zeroes..in limbo?

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:19:00 +0000

Well it's been awhile hasn't it?

It's was rather rude of me, to say the least, to up and leave whilst in the middle of the wonderful Counting Down the Zeroes project. I made valiant attempts to keep it afloat but life, you know, sometimes gets in the way.

It's been a turbulent but amazing 7 months away from this world; of blogging, of online camaraderie, the exchanging of wonderful ideas, news, reviews and gossip about a subject we all care deeply about, but it was a break I desperately needed and I hope I haven't lost any of the good friends I made of the past two years since I began Film for the Soul.

Back to the matter in hand. Counting Down the Zeroes was, to put it mildly, a slog. What I thought would be a mild distraction, a titillating project, turned into a behemoth, much larger and more beautiful than I could ever have imagined. The enthusiasm, sacrifice, hard work, dedication and ambition that every contributor put into the project blew me away, I could never imagine that what started out as a chat between myself and another blogger (since you ask, Tony Dayoub from the essential Cinema Viewfinder) could become anything other than a silly idea which would attract half a dozen friends at the best. Over a 100 different writers and 150 plus posts later we still weren't through 2004! Those stats are impossible to ignore and believe me, I don't plan on ignoring them any longer.

I made some promises to a few people around October that I intend to keep, one to Mr Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark fame, who has never given up on me in all the time away, thank you for that Sam. Also to Rick Olson (Coosa Creek Cinema) and Chuck Williamson (Out 1) who's articles I have sat on since I fled, sorry fellas, I still have the said pieces and, with your permission, I would still love to post them to wrap up year 2004.

So that's where we are. The question remains, where do we go now? 2005 is the obvious answer but all I want to know is, are you with me?

Rumours of my Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:22:00 +0000

It feels good to be back.
It's been too long.
What have I missed?

More later. Explanations. Apologies. But most importantly, film goodness and lots of it.

TTFN

Counting Down The Zeroes: Update

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:13:00 +0000

Some of you may have seen Sam Juliano's humbling piece at Wonders in the Dark and wondered whether it is indeed true that Counting Down The Zeroes is at an end.

Well....it isn't. Thanks to some fine kicking of the butt from Mr Juliano, his finely measured piece has inspired me to think again about my odyssey of a project. The years 2000 to 2004 have been a blast, with over 150 posts to date - with still a few to publish, sorry about the delay guys but I had a sort of mini-confidence crisis - from up to 100 different writers! That's nothing short of spectacular given the time constraint. We should all be very proud.

However, my initial self imposed tight deadline seems foolhardy to say the least, this is a trait of mine, for some reason I can't seem to get motivated without a stupefyingly daft and unreasonable goal - if, in future, I start bleating on about what seems to be a ridiculous time schedule, please pull me up on it. So with that in mind I've decided to become far more relaxed about the whole project, starting with a break from the enterprise.

Over the next week or so (see, relaxed) I will post the remaining posts for 2004 which includes Rick Olson of Coosa Creek Cinema with his take on 'The LadyKillers', Chuck Williamson's, of Out 1, piece on 'Tony Takitani ' and Britt Parrott of Perhapses reviews David O'Russell's 'I Heart Huckabees'. After that it's a couple of months rest from the whole thing, until the new year, by which time the project will be housed at Counting Down The Zeroes. On it's resurrection, the project will take on a new form and will run like an interactive blog-a-thon but more on that later.

With that I want to say thank you to all of you that have taken part these past couple of months, it's been an unexpected delight, I've made so many new friends, contacts and been introduced to a whole host of extraordinary blogs and writers. The project is what it is simply because of your involvement.

As for me, I'm just looking forward to getting back to writing - I've done diddly squat since the conception of CDtZ's all those months back - and I can't wait to get started.

The Year 2004: Finding Neverland (Marc Forster)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Joseph Belanger of the brilliant Black Sheep Reviews takes on Marc Forster's follow up to the highly successful 'Monster's Ball' with the bio-pic, 'Finding Neverland', about English playwright James Matthew Barrie, otherwise known as the scribe who created Peter Pan with yet another great submission to Counting Down The Zeroes.

I’m a sensitive guy but I don’t cry very often. Usually, the only time I find myself crying is at the movies. For me, crying is a beautiful release and when I’m watching a movie and it comes over me, I always let it out. I figure if the hard parts of my life don’t bring me to tears, then I’d better let them out whenever the opportunity presents itself, even if I’m not completely sure what it is about the image on the screen that is moving me so deeply. When I first saw FINDING NEVERLAND, it was a matinee showing. There weren’t too many people in the theatre and that suited me just fine. This way, I got to sob profusely while still maintaining some sense of privacy. When the film was released to own, I brought it home and, to my surprise, cried just as much as I did the first time I saw it. When I watched it again recently to prepare for this piece, I was concerned, at first, that it wasn’t as good as I remembered it in my mind. But then, before I could get across the room to get my box of tissues, I was weeping once again.

Based on Allan Knee’s play, “The Man Who Was Peter Pan”, FINDING NEVERLAND is something of a tear-jerker that seems deliberately designed for boys. This is Peter Pan after all and what man cannot identify with the age old tale about not wanting to ever grow up? Certainly not this one anyway. That said, I don’t think this is what gets me crying each time; that would be too simple an explanation. No, it is something inherent in the story itself that speaks directly to this boy’s heart. FINDING NEVERLAND is a story about feeling inspiration and fostering your imagination. Without either of these, Neverland could never be found. James Barrie (Johnny Depp) is the author of “Peter Pan” and the film gives us the chance to see the very real components that would become one of the most timeless children’s classics in history. As a writer, especially one who struggles to find the words from time to time, seeing that they can come from everything transpiring right in front of me was truly freeing.

Historically, Barrie met the Llewelyn Davies family in London’s Kensington Gardens in 1897. In the film, it unfolds exactly the same way, only the man of the family, Arthur, has already passed away and, of the family’s five young boys, only four make the film for fear of overcrowding. The mother, Sylvia (Kate Winslet), is simply enjoying her time in the park with her boys when Barrie suddenly becomes a central figure in the boys’ game. From that moment on, he never stops playing with them. It isn’t quite so joyous for all the boys, what with their father recently passed. No, young Peter (played by Freddie Highmore in the role that turned him into a child star) finds himself facing adult realities that are far too harsh for him to process, let alone preserve his innocence. Barrie steps in as a father figure but the healing does not begin so simply. Barrie must remind the boys that their imaginations can take them anywhere they want to go, any time they want to go there. As he unleashes the power of his imagination in hopes of rekindling theirs, he finds something completely unexpected – Peter Pan.

The Year 2004: Dodgeball : A True Underdog Story (Rawson Marshall Thurber)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Once again the Reel Whore of ''Reel Whore' joins Counting Down The Zeroes, having recently celebrated his two year blog anniversary with a gorgeous makeover, to take aim at one of the year's more outright absurd and comedic films. Doddgeball: A True Underdog Story became the must see comedy of the year gaining mostly favourable reviews from the critics, as well as storming the box office, and resurrecting a sport which has given the Reel Whore a whole new lease of life.

The summer of 2004 was one of those fortuitous moments when the fantasy of the movies and my routine reality crossed paths. Having recently seen Dodgeball in theaters, my girlfriend and I were walking around quoting lines incessantly. One day, a flyer at our apartment announced a dodgeball game convening at the tennis courts. A resident with a handful of those hard rubber balls, inked with stylish Spongebob and Spider-Man artwork, beckoned us to join in the fun. This weekly stress relief evolved into joining our city league, and five years later, we still find ourselves enjoying this 'child's game.' Those who know dodgeball know it's not for the weak of heart...

Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn, Starsky & Hutch), owner of Average Joe's Gymnasium, has learned that his gym is near the brink of foreclosure; partly due to his laid-back business tactics, but mostly due to his rival, White Goodman (Ben Stiller, Zoolander). The narcissistic Goodman wants Joe's shutdown so he can add extra parking for the members of his corporate Adonis factory, Globo Gym. With little time, La Fleur and with his rag-tag band of employees and clients do the only thing possible to generate the needed cash: enter the American Dodgeball Association of America International Dodgeball Championship in Las Vegas. The Joes' quest and their pathetic dodgeball skills catch the attention of seven-time all-star dodgeball champion Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn, Men in Black) who offers his expertise to help defeat Goodman's Purple Cobras team, win the $50,000 and save their gym.

I hold writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber in high regard mainly because he, like me, believes Ghostbusters to be the best comedy ever made. Prior to Dodgeball, Thurber directed the Terry Tate, Office Linebacker commercials for Reebok. After shopping his script around, Ben Stiller's Red Hour Films picked it up, and with Thurber attached to direct, the fun began. In the commentary, Thurber mentions an old adage that "90% of directing is casting." In this instance, I couldn't agree more.

I've never been a huge fan of Stiller, but I have to give him props for White Goodman. Goodman is a grade-A Ass (with two capital A's) and Stiller makes you want to put a fist right above his handlebar mustache. Vaughn, on the other hand, has always been a personal favorite; I find his dry sarcasm hilarious. Although these fellas are funny, the film meanders along the first twenty minutes while introducing the supporting cast.

Justin Long (Jeepers Creepers) plays Justin, the stumbling teen who's training at Joe's for his school's upcoming cheerleader tryouts. At this point in his career, Long was fairly unknown aside from his role on TV's Ed and the painful Jeepers Creepers franchise. Dodgeball displayed his comedic talent to a larger audience, which has since opened up opportunities galore.

Stephen Root (Office Space) plays the gym-rat, know-it-all. In a part obviously written as an homage to Rick Moranis's Louis Tully of Ghostbusters, Root dutifully stares through thick lenses while spouting factoids pertaining to every conversation's topic. Root's Gordon is the driving force behind the dodgeball competition, thanks to his subscription to Obscure Sports Quarterly. Like most roles he plays, Root is the comedic anchor; so good at what he does that you know if he's starring, you can laugh at at least one character.

Prior to Dodgeball, Alan Tudyk (Wonder Boys) was known primarily as Wash from TV's short-lived series Firefly. Here Tudyk dabbles in comic absurdity as Steve the Pirate. That's right, he's an average joe (pun intended) who dresses, talks and firmly believes he's a pirate. Peter, who lets people be who they are, goes along with his delusion. It's not a huge part for Tudyk, but let's face it, we all secretly wish more movies had pirates.

Another relative unknown at the time, Joel Moore (Grandma's Boy) plays Joe's attendant Owen. Though now he gets to star in Katy Perry videos and under-the-radar B-movies as the cool cat, here he's a uber-geeky nerdmeister with no chance of ever finding love. That is, until Globo Gym's ringer, Fran, enters the scene. Though Missi Pyle (Soul Plane) ranked on Maxim's '100 Sexiest Women' list in 2004, you wouldn't know it seeing her unibrow and crooked teeth. The scene where she's revealed still makes me cringe.

Fran's not the only love interest. Peter and White both have their sights on the bank's lawyer Kate, played by Christine Taylor (The Wedding Singer). Knowing she's Stiller's wife makes the scenes where she seems mortified by White's advances all the more funny. Kate isn't just a sex doll to be tugged to and fro by our main characters; she unleashes a ferocity on the court that makes the rest of the Joes look exactly like the little girly men they are.

Even with all this great and soon-to-be-great talent, Dodgeball leaves you feeling something's missing. Rip Torn's Patches O'Houlihan is that element. His bizarre anecdotes and brutal training tactics raise the hilarity one-hundred fold. I watched nearly doubled-over with laughter as he pelts Justin, Gordon and any slow-moving target with wrenches. He's vulgar, dirty and just plain bizarre even when he's trying to mentor the ambiguous Peter in the five d's of dodgeball; dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.

Veteran character actor Gary Cole (The Gift) plays lead announcer Cotton McKnight alongside Pepper Brooks (Jason Bateman, The Sweetest Thing). Cole is always a reliable straight man, but Bateman breaks away from his usually stoic delivery for an over-the-top portrayal that he will be called upon to do in many future roles. There are still a few cameos from some legendary television personalities to mention, but I should leave some surprises.

The story doesn't hold too many surprises in terms of execution and resolution. The shock comes mainly from watching grown people get repeatedly smacked in the face by large rubber balls (and the occasional wrench). If you're easy to offend, the vulgar language stings the ears about as bad as a red rubber ball to the temple. The real joy is in watching the characters sell every minute of this ridiculous story. Without this stellar cast, Thurber's hilarious script may have fallen flat on its face. I, like Thurber, have to thank Ben Stiller for taking a chance on a little script no one thought could make it.

The Year 2004: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Stephen Hopkins)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:34:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back Joel (MovieMan0283) creator of the quite brilliant and eponymous The Dancing Image, which in the past month has just celebrated it's one year anniversary. For the year 2004, Joel is taking on the HBO produced 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers', screened in competition at Cannes and winner of the 'Best Motion Picture made for Television' at the Golden Globes.

The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zeroes

(This review discusses spoilers, including the fact that Peter Sellers dies.)

A man stands alone in the lightly falling snow, his eyes wide open, his body immobile. Inside a Swiss chateau, another man looks out the window, sees his friend half-hidden in the flurry. The man in the chateau walks outside, speechless with astonishment, and circles the man in the snow, frozen as an ice sculpture (though he betrays his humanity, and a complicity with us, in one brief moment: shifting his eyes back and forth while the other man walks behind him and is out of view). Finally the circling man (who is dressed in designer ski gear replete with dark shades, the apparel of a rich tourist) just shakes his head in disbelief. The man in the snow – clad in a drab overcoat and fedora – still has not moved an inch or acknowledged the other man’s presence (except for that brief, and unseen eye-shift). So the well-dressed man finally does the only thing he can think to do: he kisses the snow man on the forehead and walks back inside.

The tourist is Hollywood director Blake Edwards (John Lithgow). The man in the snow is Peter Sellers (Geoffrey Rush). This is the closest the film comes to showing us the death which its title promises; as Edwards returns to the chateau the camera swoops up, leaving Sellers stationary in the snow, and over softly poignant music, a tasteful text rolls over the image. It informs us that Sellers died soon after, that he left a fortune to his fourth wife (whom he had intended to divorce and disinherit), and that the only affect in his wallet at the time of death was a photo of his first wife. Then we fade to black and the credits begin to roll. But just after the cast list scrolls out of view, we pull back and the image becomes flattened, as if observed on a monitor.

And indeed, it is on a monitor, watched by a man sitting in a canvas-backed chair, with his name emblazoned across its back. The name, along with the man? “Peter Sellers.” Sellers is not dressed in out-of-this-world-and-historical-moment trenchcoat and fedora, but a snazzy suit, his trademark black frames capping a self-satisfied, utterly at-ease visage. He turns towards the camera, shakes his head and sighs, speechless. The movie was good; he enjoyed it, and there’s not much more to say. So he stands up and walks off as the soundtrack blasts the Kinks’ “Well Respected Man." In mere moments, with a few deft maneuvers, the tone has become arch, comical, playful. Sellers strolls smugly across a movie set, exits onto the street outside and yanks open his trailer door. As he starts to ascend the steps, his movement is arrested by a sudden turn as he sees “us” behind him and holds up his hand, shaking his head once again. “Can’t come in here,” he informs us benevolently, but condescendingly. Then he shuts the door in our face, and there’s that name again, etched onto the trailer door. Roll credits, for real this time.

This ending tells us everything we need to know about the movie, namely that perhaps we should not take it too seriously. The film is a mixture of the satirical, the sincere (though we can never be sure how sincere), and the sociopathic. In this it certainly reflects its subject, the notoriously prickly yet brilliant British comedian who could swing from belligerent tirades to goofy pratfalls to inscrutable eccentricity with astonishing ease. I can’t speak for the veracity of all its anecdotes, but the film works on multiple levels, among which the biographical is only one.

Indeed, the movie is best taken as a subversive artifact of the Zeroes, a decade in which styles and surfaces ascended to unforeseen stages of development and self-consciousness, all while suspicions lingered that there wasn’t much “there” there. The Life & Death of Peter Sellers is subversive on several levels: firstly, its hard-to-read protagonist makes hash of the usual biopic conventions (is he selfish, mentally ill, is it all an act, is he suffering inside, or is he just spoiled rotten?). One certainly can’t sympathize with Sellers and yet at times his brash, carefree narcissism can be refreshing; it’s what we secretly look for in our movie heroes, even when we demand they get their moral comeuppance (which, by the way, Sellers does, many times over). It’s hard for the screenplay to rationalize his erratic behavior with the usual biographical contrivances, though a bit too much Freudian credence is given to the overbearing Mum (Miriam Margolyes), whom Sellers calls “Peg” throughout, even as they're cuddling in bed - after his first wife leaves him, natch. (If the theory is a bit pat, it does help matters that mommy dearest is a humorously nasty piece of work herself. As her son suffers a massive heart attack, she solemnly watches the television coverage before flipping to the same news on another station and remarking with a satisfied smirk, “Both channels.”)

More obviously but perhaps also more ambitiously, the film subverts a conventional narrative approach, which is especially entrenched in the hidebound biopic genre. That said, the first phase of Sellers’ career, from lovable Goon Show loon to British Academy Award-winning actor, is presented in standard-issue clichés. There’s the snippet of the radio act (which is not especially funny in rapidly cut and shot glimpses), a bit of background (changing diapers in a London flat) and motivation (Peg tells him to bite the hands that feed him so that those above him will admire the sharpness of his teeth), failure quickly overcome with ingenious success (turned down for an audition, Sellers returns disguised as an old man and gets the part), and of course the montage to quickly inform us of all we’re missing (Sellers plays a ukulele over not-very-convincing black-and-white “home movie” footage). So far, so familiar.

But then, watching Sellers’ award reception on the tube with his parents, we get a surprise. The quiet father, constantly berated by his wife, turns to the camera and begins to address the viewer. What’s more, the actor playing the elder Sellers is no longer Peter Vaughan, but Geoffrey Rush himself, or rather Peter Sellers putting himself into the “old man’s shoes.” What he tells us is not so important – banal bromides about how Peg spoiled the boy - he always had to have the last cookie “even if it was on someone else’s plate” (cue the Sophia Loren plotline, in which Sellers convinces himself that she wants to have an affair with him - she doesn't, and he settles for her stand-in, though he's already broken up his marriage in anticipation). No, what’s most important is that the old man is Peter Sellers in makeup, that he is talking directly to the camera, and that he walks out of his cozy little room onto a movie set, where crewmembers bustle about. In other words, it’s the Brechtian gesture of the thing.

The device will be resumed throughout the film, often when we least expect it. At one point, Sellers shows up as his wife (played normally by Emily Watson, who does bemused wonders with the usually thankless type of role). The character asks to re-record Mrs. Sellers' “dialogue” – in an ADR studio, he/she then dubs a romantic rapprochement over the fed-up breakup that actually occurred. Later, in drag again as his mother, he gets up off the hospital bed and walks through several flats into a funeral home. Celebrating her son’s insensitivity for ignoring her deathbed pleas (“My boy’s a star”), Peter-as-Peg climbs into her coffin and we return to “reality” where a devastated Peter kisses the cold corpse’s lips. Commentary on the DVD informs us that these monologues were intended to show Sellers’ often self-serving conception of how other saw and perhaps justified his actions. However, they also show his immense narcissism, the way he sees other people in his life merely as different versions of himself.

Indeed, the opening credits, to the tune of Tom Jones’ “What’s New, Pussycat?” display a bevy of animated Peters – some old, some young, some male, some female (some even animal), yet all with the subtly hooked nose and thick black glasses. Before that, in a bookending device which will be echoed in the aforementioned conclusion, we see Peter Sellers enter a dark soundstage, bow before offscreen (imaginary?) applause and turn on the monitor, on which the rest of the film unfolds.The movie is full of such winking, fleet-footed gestures: after the fairly conventional “early years” (appropriate for the early Sellers’ self-effacing normality, not to mention pre-Swingin' Britain's postwar blues), the comedian’s life is shown as a Felliniesque carnival, full of fantasies, movie tributes, and virtual non sequitur effects, such as when our hero visits a car dealership and the various vehicles are transformed into purring sex kittens. When Sellers spots future wife (played by a charming if goofy-accented Charlize Theron) Britt Eklund’s name in a newspaper, the letters “B” and “E” pop out in animated throbs. (This is actually payoff to a gag involving Sellers' greedy psychic, played with corrupt impeccability by Stephen Fry). When the couple cavort on their first romantic excursion, they skip through ridiculously soft-focus fields in over-the-top slo-mo and fast-motion, all skillfully executed with sharp editing and expert music selection. The late sixties are presented as a cartoonish haze of pot smoke, animated butterflies, yellow subma - er, spacecrafts, and even a garishly made-up Peg-cum-human light show, doused in psychedelic front-projection. Later, when Sellers grows frustrated with his self-serving and drug-indulging lifestyle, he embraces silence and comes to embody the inner peace of Chance the Gardener from Being There. But this new-found austerity - this too is but a gimmick. Life & Death's loyalty is to style first and foremost, so traditional notions of suspended belief are thrown out the window. Thus freed, the movie projects a funhouse of film pastiches (The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Being There itself), trendy devices, hip music montages, and clever trickery.

In other words, the film moves; the editing is deft, the transitions effective if a bit trite, and flourishes goose the movie through set piece after set piece. And if it sometimes seems glib, well, that’s largely the point - not only because it echoes Sellers' own short-sighted self-centeredness. Which brings us to the movie’s third, probably unintentional, and yet most intriguing, subversion: Life & Death's narcissistic, shallow, skilled, and self-indulgent hero not only suits the style of the film, but also the dominant aesthetic of our very own decade. No other epoch has ever been as stylistically sophisticated as the Zeroes on all levels– moving light years beyond the cheesy 80s and drab 90s, movies, television, and advertisements shook off all traces of the functional and fused self-consciousness, playfulness, and technological sophistication, bringing design into the twenty-first century with a vengeance. The Life & Death of Peter Sellers represents all these trends: not only did it appear on HBO (the “happening” place to be in this past decade) and not only does it hearken back to the 60s (whose Pop consciousness, shaggy hair, and mid-decade musical and fashion tastes made a comeback in the 00s). The film is also saturated in the style-first, breezy fluidity that characterized Zeroes media. Thus we have a perfect fitting not only of subject and form, but also of zeitgeist.

True, seen from today’s vantage point, the film’s flourishes are no longer quite as effective. The CGI seems overdone, rendering many backgrounds quite cheesy, the bright lighting is too bright and lends the film’s look an unrefined pallor, and as television commercials, TV shows, and films have followed pace and completely consumed the video-age magic tricks which in Life & Death were at least nominally cutting-edge, the movie’s style does not impress the way it did just a few years ago. This is a pity, since the movie's subversive power lies in part on its very fluidity and assuredness. Still, what remains is the film’s unabashed chutzpah in foregrounding its narcissism and shallowness. Latter-day pop culture may have outstripped Life & Death’s surface dazzle, but there is an unacknowledged unease in ever-more-sophisticated media aesthetics. The facility of the technical mastery, coupled with a desire for fantasy and devotion to lifestyles and fashions of the urban rich, breeds a smug vapidity and soullessness in the cultural trendsetters. It becomes harder and harder to recognize the vast possibilities of art and, yes, entertainment, when the surface sheen hardens into a lacquer.

Which is to say, in less cryptic terms, that all ships are sailing towards the idea of how things are presented, rather than what is presented. [On the blog Little Worlds, we have been discussing these trends in relation to Julie & Julia with, I’m afraid, a bit more precision. Let me quote myself to get the point across: “I don't have a problem with escapist fantasies - just wish they could be told with a more realistic texture, instead of this flat ad-aesthetic look (fast cuts, close lens, surface-flashy but bottom-line-generic set design). But of course that would probably subvert the escapist element too much. Still, someone like Spielberg used to be able to situate fantasies in a real world setting - think of all the throwaway domestic details and humorous conversations in E.T. and Close Encounters. I think it could still be done, if mainstream filmmaking wasn't so intellectually lazy (and it's also tiresome how all adults are shown to have the emotional and intellectual maturity of high school students, but that's another point).”]

The triumph of The Life & Death of Peter Sellers is that it recognizes its own dead soul, indeed takes it as its subject, and does not let itself off the hook. One of the most noticeable “indie” trends of the decade (simultaneous with “indie” ceasing to mean actually “independent,” but rather a collection of pre-packaged quirky signifiers) is a move towards earnestness. The dominant tone of the decade has been arch irony, but it’s been guilty irony, as if the ghosts of 9/11 and Iraq were peering out of the rubble to challenge our superficiality. Yet the over-compensating New Sincerity (to borrow one of Erich Kuersten’s favorite terms) so often rings false, because it is coupled with a floridly stylistic preciousness, which Wes Anderson could pull off (at least with Owen Wilson, in his early films) but no one else seems able to nail. Occasionally Life & Death seems to be hitting this false note as well, and these are its weakest moments. It is far stronger when it allows Sellers’ narcissism to seize control of the film and make the viewer complicit in his sociopathic negation of all which interrupts his shallow pursuit of the good life.

Yet when Sellers closes the door on us in the finale, to the tune of the jaunty Kinks, he’s subverting not only the movie’s previous, and seemingly sincere, poignant conclusion (a welcome subversion, despite the Swiss finale’s admitted effectiveness) nor the film’s final attempt at narrative believability. He is also effacing the very conceit of the movie and of biopics in general: that a person can be unveiled for us onscreen (the best biopic ever, unsurprisingly also a work of fiction, both humors and shatters this convention with its elusive “Rosebud”). And with this gesture, Sellers and the filmmakers also, quite subtly, bellow out one last clarion call for humanism: there is an offscreen after all, and all the glib fireworks and magic tricks have not been the substance, but rather the articles of concealment. “Can’t come in here,” Sellers tells us before closing the door.

At least he’s honest about it.

The Year 2004: Closer (Mike Nichols)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Patrick Marber's acclaimed stage drama about the interactions of four people was given a reverent screen adaptation by Mike Nichols, a director and producer akin to adapting celebrated stage works, in the year 2004. Tommy Salami of the brilliant Pluck You, Too!, in another great submission for Counting Down The Zeroes, takes on this highly successful film, dubbed as a complete success when it stormed the box-office and found favour with critics, and witnesses Mike Nichols best film since The Graduate.

"Have you ever seen a human heart? It's like a fist wrapped in blood!" Love can be a brutal weapon. A fist wrapped in blood. Never has that been more evident than in 2004's Closer, directed by Mike Nichols of The Graduate fame, based on the play by Patrick Marber. It is a four person play of two men and two women, couples which will seduce, toy with, and betray each other and the only true heart will be the one who's never told the truth about themselves.

We begin when a young American woman named Alice, played by Natalie Portman, is hit by a taxi in London; she looks left instead of right. An office worker named Dan- Jude Law- helps get her back on her feet, and when she opens her eyes she says, "Hello stranger," and we note the instant chemistry. He takes her to the hospital; they hit it off. He writes obituaries for a newspaper, but wants to be a novelist. She's an intriguing young beauty, disarming, he tells her; she becomes his muse, and a year later is publishing a book inspired by her life as a stripper. We learn this when he goes to photographer Anna (Julia Roberts) to get his mug shot for the dust jacket.

Alice is a girl, and Anna is a woman, confident, statuesque. Dan is immediately captured by her as she clicks away with her Leica. A fellow artist; an established one, as opposed to aspiring young Dan. He kisses her, but she rebuffs him, once she knows he's in a relationship. He persists, interrupted when Alice comes upstairs to use "the loo"- her affectation of Britishisms is an amusing conceit- and Anna asks to take her picture alone, recognizing her natural beauty. She's heard their flirtations, and Anna takes a photo of her sadness that eventually ends up at her photo exhibition later. Alice decides not to tell Dan what she overheard, but he never forgets Anna. If you have any doubts as to Ms. Portman's acting abilities, I suggest you see this film. She exudes a wisdom belying her age, and we know Alice knows more than her years imply, whether through instinct or experience. Jude Law's Dan is a little less mysterious; he's the artist who idealizes love, and would rather be the one doing the desiring in a relationship. He's also a bit of a prankster. One night he's in an internet chat room (looks like AOL Instant Messenger) pretending to be a woman, teasing a doctor who's up late on his shift, named Larry (Clive Owen). They have a hilarious cybersex exchange, and Dan plays a cruel trick that backfires on him: he masquerades as Anna, and tells him to meet him at the London Aquarium.

Larry is the gruff opposite of neat, pretty Dan; Clive Owen wears a perpetual five o'clock shadow, paired with his bushy eyebrows, knobby knuckles and slightly hunched posture make him seem like he crawled out of a Cro-Magnon cave and into a doctor's white coat. He's a man ruled by animal appetites, but he's sharp enough to know how to turn a prank into Cupid's arrow. His befuddlement and honest apologies after his vulgar come-ons to Anna endear him to her, and they become a couple. We meet them again at Anna's exhibition, where a huge photo of Alice's crying face fills a wall. While Dan and Anna meet to discuss their work, Larry recognizes Alice from her photo and asks her what she thinks. "It's a lie. It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully, and... all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful 'cause that's what they wanna see. But the people in the photos are sad, and alone... But the pictures make the world seem beautiful, so... the exhibition is reassuring which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie."

Oddly enough, you'd think Larry and Alice would hit it off immediately for they're both cynics. At one point he calls himself "a clinical observer of the human carnival," and he's the source of the opening quote about the human heart. He holds no illusions, but is not made of stone. "You don't know the first thing about love, because you don't understand compromise." And the compromise he'll make to get what he wants, and to get revenge, is the bloody heart of this story. For while he and Alice are chatting, Dan and Anna are as well. Once Anna and Dan are together, Alice and Larry are torn apart. Alice disappears into her own past, but Larry refuses to give up on Anna. When she asks him for a divorce, as an observer of the "human carnival," he accuses her of doing this because she doesn't think she deserves to be happy. I'm not a big fan of Julia Roberts, but here she is quite brilliant; Anna is a carefully built façade of strength hiding internalized self-loathing from abuse in previous relationships. "Did you get dressed because you thought I was going to hit you?" "I've been hit before." "Not by me!" Patrick Marber's screenplay based on his own play has such depths written between the lines. She wears weakness as a shield, using her past to deflect judgement for her actions. And Larry admits an infidelity with a prostitute just before her own announcement, because he senses it coming. Does he do it to get the first punch in, or because he knows she's leaving him for another man, and wants to dwarf his own indiscretion alongside hers?

Like the more recent Doubt, Closer is crafted to initiate discussion. Is Larry's infidelity somehow less criminal because he doesn't cheat with his heart? It's the stereotypical male excuse. Larry is a self-described "caveman," and we notice that his weakness is sexual, while Dan "falls in love" when he cheats. After the break-ups, Larry finds Alice working in a strip club, as he tries to clobber the pain away with sex. Wearing a pink wig, little else, and using the name Janie Jones from the Clash song, he tries to reconnect with her. She's steeled herself against her loss better than he has, despite her breakdown to Dan. The movie is perhaps most famous for this scene, not only for Ms. Portman's state of undress, but for the brutally frank dialogue. She prowls around him in the private room like a pink tigress, as he stuffs pound notes into her garter, not asking her to reveal her body, but "something true." Her response: “Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off—but it’s better if you do.”

It's a line from film noir, and the irony is that she's most truthful here with Larry than with anyone else. He begs her to sleep with him, feigning pain and playing into her desire to be desired; but we'll learn, he is also marking his territory, and setting up his cruel revenge on Dan "for deceiving me so exquisitely." Because Anna needs to see him, to finalize their divorce. And as an astute observer of the human carnival, Larry knows how to get her back. He plays to her pity, and to his own caveman image: "You'd be my whore. And in return I will pay you with your liberty." Leaving his mark on her, knowing that she'll tell Dan, who won't be able to accept it. In a line used in the trailer but not the film, he says, "You women don't understand the territory, because you are the territory."

Clive Owen's portrayal of Larry is perfect, and he resembles Paul Newman in the role. A bit of Hud, surely. In the play, he had the role of the younger man Dan, versus Ciarán Hinds as the older, wiser man. Here he claims to understand love because he accepts compromise, but his idea of love is proprietary. Does he want Anna back because he loves her, because he knows he can hold her together when she's weak, or because she was taken from him? Dan says, "You love her like a dog loves its owner," but perhaps he loves her like a dog loves a bone. And while Larry says he's forgiven her, and that "without forgiveness we're savages," we know what he's done to Dan, and get the feeling Anna will be paying for her infidelities for the rest of her life. I'd always sided with Larry in early viewings, but the better I get to know him, the more I see him as a darker shade of gray than I did originally. But he does appeal to even young Dan, who apes some of his words when he goes back to Alice.

In the end, Dan is left with nothing except the revelation of his lover's secret, and Alice is again crossing the street to Damien Rice's "The Blower's Daughter," which tells of infatuation and loathing, only hinting at what went goes on in between; the film is similar, skipping a year between scenes, giving us only the crucial moments that send these relationships spinning off on a new axis. The moments they meet, the moments that set them into crumbling. In the background is always music from Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, which also dealt with couples swapping partners. Here it sets a bittersweet mood, as Nichols works angles and close-ups, and his D.P. Stephen Goldblatt- more famous for action films, but also for the inventive Joe vs. the Volcano- maps the geography of the four human faces with incredible detail. Patrick Marber would also go on to adapt the excellent Notes on a Scandal, and director Mike Nichols easily makes his best movie since Mrs. Robinson flashed some thigh. Clive Owen and Natalie Portman would be nominated for Oscars, and win Golden Globes. It would be shoved aside by Million Dollar Baby of all things, but I think in the years to come, this will be better remembered.

The Year 2004: Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back J.D from the superb Radiator Heaven, and not only for yet another excellent submission but as team member, who will be on hand for the ever expanding project from now on. This time round however, J.D has taken on one of the more critically acclaimed comic adaptations of recent memory with Guillermo del Toro's vivid adaptation of the celebrated comic book series Hellboy.

The success of X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) opened the door for a new wave a comic book adaptations. In the past, studios have played it safe and only green-lighted adaptations of mainstream comic books with large followings. However, this changed with adaptations of independent fare like Ghost World (2000), American Splendor (2003) and with Hellboy (2004). Based on Mike Mignola’s comic book of the same name, it has a dedicated cult following at best so it was a pleasant surprise to see a major studio take a big budget gamble with this title.

October 1944. The Nazis have begun mixing science with black magic in a desperate attempt to regain the advantage in World War II. The seemingly invincible Russian, Rasputin (Karel Roden) has teamed up with the Germans and plans to open a portal to another dimension and bring about an apocalypse. However, Allied troops arrive and disrupt the procedure just in time. In the process, something comes through: a red-skinned demon baby that the soldiers adopt and call Hellboy.

Present day. Rasputin has been resurrected and continues his plans to summon destructive supernatural forces that will result in the end of the world. Hellboy (Ron Perlman) has matured and now works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) in New Jersey — under the guise of a waste management company (just like Tony Soprano). Along with Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), an amphibious humanoid (“the fish guy” as a guard puts it), firestarter Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), and the token “normal guy,” John Myers (Rupert Evans), Hellboy tracks down Rasputin and tries to prevent him from fulfilling his nefarious goals.

Guillermo Del Toro, a die-hard comic book fan and self-described film geek, shoots the action sequences much like he did in Blade II (2002), with crazy camera angles and fantastically choreographed fights. It’s like Del Toro took panels right out Mignola’s comic book and made them move but with the same kind of explosive energy that made Jack Kirby’s art so exciting. Del Toro also has incredible production design at his disposal to create a fully realized world rich in detail and drenched in atmosphere. He is heavily influenced by Italian horror films and not only references Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) but also the saturated primary color scheme of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) to name just a couple of examples.

Del Toro was shooting Mimic (1997) and discovered the Hellboy comic book but never thought that it could be made in Hollywood and if it did they would ruin it. He heard that it was going to be adapted into a film at Universal Pictures and started writing a screenplay in 1997. He met Mignola when they worked together on Blade II which they used as their “rehearsal” for Hellboy. They found out that they read the same comic books and pulp and classic gothic horror novels. With Hellboy, Del Toro wanted to make a self-contained film, “almost a fairy tale, a fable.” His original pitch to executives at Sony-based Revolution Studios was that both The Mask (1994) and Men in Black (1997) were comic books that they were not familiar with and yet went on to become extremely successful films. He told them that the same thing could happen with Hellboy. In April 2002, Del Toro’s film was given the green-light at a budget of $60 million.

Del Toro first saw Ron Perlman in Quest for Fire (1982) and then The Name of the Rose (1986) and was very impressed with his acting, so much so that he ended up casting the actor in his first film Cronos (1994). Del Toro initially wanted him to play Hellboy but Vin Diesel was a rising star at the time and so the director approached him instead for the role. However, with the move from Universal to Revolution, Diesel dropped out of the picture and Perlman was in. Early on, if the actor didn’t work out, Del Toro thought about making Hellboy a mixture of puppet and computer graphics. He talked to James Cameron who warned him that if he went that route he would lose the love story. Del Toro wisely decided to stick with Perlman.

Perlman is perfectly cast as the cigar smoking, two-fisted action hero who eats Baby Ruth candy bars and loves cats. He does a great job of capturing Hellboy’s sarcastic, wise-cracking nature. Perlman gets to utter cool one-liners and looks fantastic in his make-up (thanks to legendary make-up artist Rick Baker). Often, what makes it to the film rarely resembles what was drawn in the comic book. Not the case here — Perlman IS Hellboy. With this role, he firmly established himself as one of the cult film icons of the new millennium (much like Bruce Campbell was in the 1990s). Perlman has got the drop-dead cool action hero shtick down cold. With his hulking, imposing physique, he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger with brains and irony.

Del Toro cast Selma Blair because he always saw a “haunting quality in her eyes and in her look. Sort of a doomed, gothic beauty in her.” He was a fan of The Larry Sanders Show and felt the Jeffrey Tambor had that “smarmy, wannabe bureaucratic presence” that was ideal for Tom Manning. He cast Tambor against type and wanted him to be an “absolute asshole in the beginning, and play it straight.” Del Toro and Mignola created the character of Myers to guide audiences into Hellboy’s world. The director interviewed a lot of young Hollywood actors but many of them were “just too cute and too Calvin Klein beautiful to put in the movie.” He liked Rupert Evans because he had “such an open face, and he had a real innocence about him.” Del Toro saw John Hurt in Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and felt that the actor had “that little air of tragedy about him” that suited Professor Bruttenholm.

Hellboy is one of those rare comic book movies with depth. It takes time to develop its characters and the relationships between them. There is the touching father-son relationship between Hellboy and Bruttenholm and the romantic love triangle between Hellboy, Myers and Liz. While the film has the requisite slam-bang action sequences, it is not dominated by them. The film is not driven by them but rather by the characters and the story. And this is because Del Toro has strong source material to draw from: Mignola’s comic book, in particular “Seed of Destruction,” which chronicles Hellboy’s origins. Both Del Toro and Mignola’s works are steeped in the gothic and horror genres, in particular the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. The author’s influence is all over this movie as Hellboy trades blows with Cthulhu-inspired creatures that would make ol’ Lovecraft proud. While Del Toro’s film didn’t exactly rack up the kind box office numbers the studio was hoping for, it did prove to be quite popular on home video and eventually spawn an even better sequel in 2008.

The Year 2004: Love Song For Bobby Long (Shainee Gabel)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:20:00 +0000

Andrew Kendall of Encore's World of Film & TV takes on 2004's 'underwhelming' Love Song for Bobby Long, based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps, starring John Travolta as a washed up literature professor. Something of a flop at the box-office, despite co-starring the in favour Scarlet Johansson, a Love Song for Bobby Long fared just as poorly with the critics yet Andrew believes it's not all that bad and it's certainly a movie worth your time.

Love Song for Bobby Long can easily be classified as good trash, and that’s for the most part what it’s been called. It performed underwhelming at the box office, mediocre to fair with the critics but… and this is a big but – it’s not a bad movie.

A Love Song for Bobby Long stars John Travolta and Scarlet Johansson. As an actor John Travolta falls into a specific group of actors including Nicolas Cage and George Clooney. Movie stars with rabid followers that have never impressed me with their acting abilities. To be honest Cage was good in Leaving Las Vegas, but he stole Sean Penn’s Oscar so I can acquiesce. A Love Song for Bobby Long is about a drifter of a man living in a somewhat derelict house somewhere in the south. When a death leaves a brash, young woman – Purslane (Johansson) to inherit a share in the home it leads to some interesting situations. Purslane and Bobby Long do not hit it off, and the latter’s protégé Lawson played by the capable Gabriel Macht must play mediator. As the film gets on his feet it becomes shockingly non sentimental as we try to get the background behind Bobby Long’s strange character. John Travolta does not have half of the charm required to play the role nor does he succeed with his ludicrous concoction of a Southern Accent, but we manage to care about his Bobby despite all these faults. But the highlight of the film is not him.

A Love Song for Bobby Long earned one major award nomination. A Golden Globe Best Actress nomination for Scarlett Johansson. Her name is not in the title but Purslane is the main character of the film. Her Purslane just may be akin to the typical angst ridden teenager girl trying to find her way, with a pot mouth. She does not reinvent the wheel in her acting style but she’s not supposed to. This is not a tour de force role in any way. The writing is not the strong point of the film. The actors particularly Johansson and Macht try their best and their chemistry is undeniably affecting.

There are two surprises in A Love Song for Bobby Long. One concerns the lease of the house the three live in and the other concerns Purslane’s parents. Both do not work as well as they’d like to, but the former comes off better. This is so because of the main actor’s dedication and because of the general believability of the situation, the second is not as lucky. Most of the audience probably saw it coming and it seems a bit cut and dry. And Johansson is not as strong in that pivotal scene as she is in the earlier and brassier parts of the film. Still it could have been worse.

A Love Song for Bobby Long suffers because it does not know what type of film it is. Is it a coming of age drama about a lost girl, a film about forbidden romance, a teacher/student buddy film or a sentimental family drama….and the list goes on. They don’t know, and we don’t know. But for the most part, we do care…and it’s worth your time. Especially if you’re a fan of Macht or Johansson.

The Year 2004: Sideways (Alexander Payne)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:55:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes Pat, of the fabulous Doodad Kind of Town, back to the project with yet another brilliant submission, check out her blog for more of the same. This time round Pat takes on Alexander Payne's latest comedy-drama, Sideways, about two friends who take a week long road-trip through Santa Barbara wine country. Almost reinvigorating the wine industry single handedly and winning a host of awards for it's sharp script, Sideways became the darling of the independent cinema scene in 2004 and for Pat, the allure has remained but the original infatuation has waned to revel an engaging, heart-warming and good, but not great, movie.

There are some films you love the first time you see them; you come back to revisit them a few years later and are delighted to find fresh nuances, deeper insights, moments that touch your heart or your funny bone more deeply than you'd been able to appreciate in the first viewing.

There are some films you love the first time you see them; you revisit them a few years later and are dismayed to find that they don't live up to your happy memories. The moments you cherished on the first viewing seem curiously flat and disappointing the second time through.

And then there are movies like "Sideways."

I loved this film to pieces when I first saw it in 2004. After re-watching it for the first time in five years, I still enjoyed it tremendously, but can't say I found anything new or surprising within. It remains a solidly entertaining, well-acted, character-driven comedy that strikes all the right notes from pathos to raunchy humor. But it's not a classic for the ages.

All of which is not intended as damnation by faint praise. There's something immensely joyful and comforting in revisiting characters you've enjoyed spending time with before and finding them just as maddening and interesting and lovable when you re-encounter them again years later. "Sideways" achieved that for me, and that's not an achievement to be dismissed lightly.

For the uninitiated, "Sideways" is the tale of two longtime friends. Miles and Jack, making a last "bachelor's" trip together to California's wine country before Jack's wedding. In standard fashion, that trip will ultimately test their friendship and push them both to become a little better men by the time the closing credits roll. It's also a whole lot of fun to be along for that ride, not least because what constitutes a successful trip varies so wildly according to the two men's points of view.

Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a perpetually morose and miserable would-be writer and oenophile, still pining for his ex-wife. His agenda for the trip is to "drink some good wines, play some golf and relax" while teaching his buddy the finer points of wine appreciation. Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) on the other hand, is an affable, nearly washed-up actor and unrepentant ladies man who can't tell a pinot from a zinfandel and wants little more from the trip to get both Miles and himself laid.

There's an undeniably by-the-numbers yin and yang to these characters. (Miles is the pessimist, Jack is the optimist. Miles is the intellectual whose idea of good time is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, Jack is incapable of thought deeper than "Let's party!" Miles is the moralistic buzzkill, Jack is just wants everybody to have good time and deal with the consequences later.) It's to the credit of both Giamatti and Hayden Church (as well as writer/director Alexander Payne) then that these characters and their story arc never get stale or entirely predictable; their friendship feels real and lived-in. I like that we aren't given much back story on how these two became and remained friends, other than that they were freshman-year roommates at San Diego State. The actors, under Payne's skillful direction, fill in those blanks for us through the nuances of their performances.

Giamatti, with his sloping shoulders and basset hound eyes, is a perfect embodiment of the sad and beaten down Miles. He finds the subtle layers in Miles' arrogance, desperation and emotional pain and plays them so nakedly and honestly that his misery is sometimes painful to witness. (As in the scenes where Miles wrestles with his own self-loathing before getting up the nerve to kiss the woman of his dreams or drunk-dials his ex-wife. Or especially in the late scene where Miles, having learned that his ex-wife is not only happily remarried but pregnant, grabs his prized bottle of 1961 Chateau Cheval Blanc and sneaks it into a fast-food restaurant, swigging it between bites of a burger and onion rings; it's heartbreaking and squirm-inducing at the same time, and Giamatti doesn't back off from awfulness of it at all.)

For his part, Hayden Church brings to Jack both a breezy spontaneity and a lovable dufus quality that keeps you laughing out loud. Jack is loathsome and lovable in equal measures; he can charms the pants off you, but he's not to be trusted. And at the same time, we can't help but like him because -whatever deceptions he tries to pull over on the women in his life - he never gives up on Miles. It's the only evidence of depth and a capacity for commitment that the character evinces; thankfully, Hayden Church plays this unflagging loyalty lightly and unself-consciously.

The flaws in Jack, however, point to what could be considered the flaw in "Sideways": the female characters are a tad one-dimensional, and to my mind, not nearly as well-served by the film's script as as the travelling buddies. Virginia's Madsen's Maya, the waitress/graduate student with whom Miles briefly and tentatively finds affection, has a nice warmth and wariness. Yet for all the sweet soulfulness Madsen brings to it, Maya still feels like an undercooked Dream Girl role. It's never really clear why someone as beautiful and seemingly well-balanced as Maya would be drawn to such an unquestionably complicated and unhappy man such as Miles, although there's never a question as to what Miles sees in Maya.

The two characters connect most memorably in the scene where they share what they most love about good wine. Miles has an affinity for pinots, as he explains to Maya, because the grapes are so sensitive, requiring special, tender care and cultivation in order to produce good flavor (not unlike Miles himself). Maya talks glowingly about how when she drinks wine, she imagines all the people who have been involved in making it, and concludes by declaring "And it tastes so fucking good." Madsen, the blond curls framing her face subtly backlit as if a halo, is radiant as she delivers this monologue in a hushed and honeyed tone of voice, and we can see why Miles falls in love with her at that moment. And there's enough intelligence in Madsen's performance that we get a hint of why Miles erudition and articulateness might interest her. But even in this scene, the purported mutual attraction feels unbalanced.

Sandra Oh, the sassy wine pourer for whom Jack very nearly derails his engagement has a nice, peppery screen presence - but her character is even less dimensional than Madsen's. She's little more than a standard-issue Sexy Spitfire, an excellent foil for Jack but not around enough for us to see beyond that. I'd have loved for her to have more to do than just beat Hayden Church's face to a pulp with her motorcycle helmet after she learns he's getting married, bracing as that beatdown is to watch.

Beyond my affection for these characters, "Sideways" is a treat from me - someone who knows little about wine - just to be drawn into the esoteric, slightly exotic world of wine appreciation. There's an early scene in while Miles teaches Jack how to taste wine: how to swirl it in the glass to "open it up," how to sniff the bouquet. Miles finds all sorts of notes in his glass of pinot: "citrus, strawberries, oak, a soupcon of a nutty Edam cheese," where Jack just looks confused and keeps sniffing earnestly until he can at least detect "Strawberries, yeah." This scene and others like it tickle me silly. Many have tried to educate me about wine, but I have no nose whatsoever. I'm just as likely to be satisfied with a bottle of Three Buck Chuck as a fine pinot, but I'm always fascinated by the people who can make the distinction. Thankfully, you don't need an appreciation of wine to have an appreciation of "Sideways;" its tart humor and bruised heart are accessible to all.

The Year 2004: Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Rick Olson of the superb Coosa Creek Cinema is back at Counting Down The Zeroes with this great review of Bad Education, his second submission to the project on the films of Pedro Almodovar, the other being Talk to Her. Bad Education opened the 57th Cannes Film Festival back in 2004 and became yet another art house hit for the Spanish auteur in a film that appeared to be the director's most deeply personal work to date.

Although hardly a model of restraint, 2002's Talk to Her is one of Pedro Almodóvar's more subtle outings. Every bit as subversive as, say, All About My Mother or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! it nevertheless works more around the edges, more in the realm of growing disquiet. Not so his followup, 2004's Bad Education (La mala educación): floridly melodramatic, it delights in a style that might be called gay grand guignol.

Underneath all the baroque shenanigans lie Almodóvar’s usual thematic suspects: identity, marginality, and the place of the outsider in the world. Outsiders like the director himself: from the opening credits we are encouraged to regard this as having an autobiographical component. The final card of the opening credits – "Escrita y Dirigida por Pedro Almodovar" – dissolves into a title placard on the wall of the fictional director of the Education storyline: "Escrita y Dirigida por Enrique Goded." We are advised, right up front, that this indeed may be about the Spanish director himself.

Or maybe not. How much of it is autobiographical is an open question, but ultimately not a very interesting one. We do know that Almodóvar went to a Catholic boarding school, and that he’s not too fond of the Church. And the action of Education revolves around what may, or may not have, happened at such a school. Actor Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael García Bernal) – who now wants to be called “Ángel” – shows up at the production offices of director Goded (Fele Martínez) looking for work. He and Goded have a past: they were lovers in a Catholic boarding school. Only problem is, Enrique doesn’t recognize him – cue music – but it has been a long time.

Ignacio does not come empty-handed: he is bearing a story, based on the shared experiences of the two former lovers. Goded is between projects, so he takes it home, despite his reservations about Ignacio. As he settles in to read, we experience – apparently in flashback – the narrative in his hands. A drag queen named Zahara (also played by García Bernal) picks up a guy at a club and takes him back to her hostel with robbery on her mind. As she picks though his wallet, she discovers he’s old friend and lover Enrique Serrano, so she forgoes the theft of his money and scooter, and embarks on her original plan: the blackmailing of Fr. Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the priest who abused her/him and Enrique at that boarding school.

Are you with me? Good. What we appear to be seeing is Bad Education's depiction of the story Ignacio brought to Goded, the one based on their shared experiences. But is it really? It has the feel of a cinematic flashback, but it clearly is not: while Zahara is played by García Bernal, this Enrique is played by another actor (Alberto Ferreiro). Further, it can’t be a dramatization of what really happened between the two, because we just saw objective reality: that Ignacio and Goderd first met, after two decades apart, in the prosaic environs of a production office.

So from the outset, Almodóvar is up to his old tricks: the systematic destabilization of our expectations. He uses the trope of the flashback to mess with our heads. At the same time, as he does so often, he infuses a soapy melodramatic structure with outrageously transgressive behavior. The sex between Zahara and the flashback-Enrique is not only hilarious but hilariously obscene. And because it is between two men, it fans the flames of homoerotic nervousness that reside in all but the most sexually secure heterosexual breast.

But wait! There’s more! We are already suspicious – as is Enrique Goded – about the true identity of Ignacio/Ángel, and now we see him in woman’s guise, and we wonder: just who is this guy? Is he Ignacio or Ángel? Male or female? Gay or straight? And lest we forget, this is a film about film-making: how much of what we’re seeing is meta, part of a film-within-a-film, and how much is objective reality?

Well, none of it, of course. It is all a lie ... 24 lies a second, as Brian de Palma famously said. And nobody uses that notion with more brio than Pedro Almodóvar. After Zahara corners Fr. Manolo in his office, demanding blackmail, we see a flashback of what happened to Ignacio and Enrique at his hands. When it ends, the face of the child Ignacio dissolves into that of Bernal, reinforcing his identification with the child. It throws us off balance. Even though we are pretty sure that Bernal's character isn't who he claims to be, we expect a certain kind of relationship -- of "likeness" -- to be explicated by a match dissolve. In this case, though there is a relationship, it is not what is implied by the cut.

Almodóvar has remarked that he based Ignacio/Ángel/Zahara/Juan on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley: a completely amoral force with an angelic face. Perhaps his insistence upon being called "Ángel" reflects how he wants to portray himself. Whatever the case, none of it would work without a strong central presence: in a sense, the figure of Ignacio/Ángel represents all the thematic obsessions of our intrepid Spanish director– Almodóvar, that is – rolled into one. And García Bernal plays him with gusto: one moment the wide-eyed young actor, eager for his first big break, and the next a nihilistic, pill-popping drag queen, damaged literally beyond recognition. Later, after all the story lines come together, we see him as "Juan," and it is a darker version still. It is a bravura performance that establishes García Bernal in the pantheon of top film actors of any nationality.

The remainder of the cast is solid, especially Martínez and Giménez Cacho, and as in all of Almodóvar's later output, it is beautifully shot and edited. Although there are elements of film noir at work, it is all wrapped in Almodóvar’s day-glow sensibility, with its pastel art direction and Douglas-Sirk beat. Coupled with cinematographer José Luis Alcaine's beautifully saturated photography, the director's compositional precision produces startlingly beautiful images.

But as in all of Almodóvar's films, the tale is in the telling -- and the subverting. His power as a filmmaker resides in his ability to take socially-accepted notions of reality and propriety and turn them gleefully on their heads. That he makes the process wildly entertaining is the key to his success. In some ways, he's like an impish child: he may do the most outrageous things, and manipulate us in the most shameful ways, but you can't stay mad at him. All you can do is go along for the ride.

The Year 2004 - Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:10:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes has the pleasure of welcoming Bob Turnbull of the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind, his classy film blog that's currently taking in the sights at the 4th Toronto After Dark Film Festival, do yourself a favour and check it out. In Bob's first submission to the project, he takes on Steven Soderbergh's sequel to the successful crime bud-fest Ocean's Eleven, starring pretty much everyone ever, Ocean's Twelve and what Bob finds, he likes.

The shifting rainbow of colours over the Warners logo signals the intent right away - Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's Twelve" is not going to be a simple heist movie follow-up to "Ocean's Eleven". All the players are indeed back from the original, new stars have been added and there's all those heist components and con games that run through the movie, but the style has been augmented past a simple riff on 60s cool. It morphs into and becomes part and parcel of the story itself. Though by no means realistic, it is at least logically consistent within the world of Danny Ocean (George Clooney) - a world where he and his co-leader Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) are smarter than everyone else, know what everyone else is thinking before they think it (including the audience) and can make things happen in incredibly short turnaround times. Accept that and you'll enjoy the twists and turns of the plot while Soderbergh plays with techniques and creates more than a heist picture. He's made a full bore art film.

The story starts some time after the squad of the first film has divvied up their ill-gotten gains from the big heist of the Vegas casinos. They've begun their lives anew and we get reintroduced to each one in turn. In each case though, it happens right at the moment that casino owner Terry Benedict (played again by Andy Garcia) has tracked them down and given them a single ultimatum - pay back the entire amount that was stolen, plus interest, or suffer the consequences. It comes out to roughly $100 million dollars, so Benedict gives them ample time to come up with the cash: 2 whole weeks. This sets off the plot as the gang reconvenes, figures they need a big score to pay him back and decide to go to Europe to begin looking for "jobs". The only thing they can find pays only a fraction of the full amount, but they can't even collect it since they've been beaten to the punch by The Night Fox - a master criminal who is at the root of Ocean's problems. It turns out that he's the one who ratted out the group to Benedict in order to force them into a position where they would have to agree to his own demands: have a competition to see who is the best criminal mastermind in the world. If Ocean can steal the Faberge Egg, The Night Fox (played in fine fashion by Vincent Cassel) will repay their debt in full. If not, he'll steal it, prove that he is the best and leave Ocean's gang to the hands of Benedict. It's patently absurd of course, but if you accept the reality the movie carves out, the pieces actually fit once all the elaborate schemes, ruses and cons have played out.

Many complaints aimed at the film point out that the audience is left out of the loop. There's no way, they claim, that the viewer has a chance of figuring things out before all is revealed towards the end. True enough, but so what? It's not all about the heist. The enjoyment is the ride and the view from your seat along the way. Soderbergh is a master at creating great looking visuals (the film couleur of "The Underneath", the different film stocks of "Traffic", the recreation of a 40s film in "The Good German", etc.) and he reaches deep into his bag of tricks throughout this entire movie. He uses cinematography, editing and music with controlled abandon to experiment with ways to avoid exposition, create mood, introduce new characters and simply tell his story. Freeze frames, chopped timelines, black and white to colour transitions, on screen titles describing time or location changes (e.g. half second shots introducing the city of Amsterdam), tilted camera angles, colour filters and reference points from film history all take their own turns. An example of the latter is from the opening scene when we get some back story on Rusty Ryan. Three years earlier he was living with an up and coming young detective named Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and as he realizes that she may have found clues that would implicate him in a recent theft, he runs out on her as she sleeps. In a steal from a famous sequence in Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood", the shadows of raindrops are cast over Isabel's face like tears. My favourite visual treat though is Soderbergh's choice to work predominantly with a contrasting colour palette of blues and oranges. It's gorgeous.

Another key element of the film is David Holmes' terrific score. Chock full of wakka-chukka wakka-chukka funky guitars, bongos and other modernized 60s sounds, the music is an essential component linking everything together. Early in the film, there's a great shift from the playful tone of Ocean and his wife (Julia Roberts) chatting on the phone to the desperate on the run situation he finds himself in when Benedict shows up. Holmes' driving rhythm follows him onto a speeding train and it captures the urgency, slight panic and churning thoughts of Ocean as the camera shows him from a variety of angles. It's an "OK, here we go..." moment. The dance through the lasers during The Night Fox's theft of the Faberge Egg is another moment - but this time it's pure art. Orange and blue is the colour scheme of course, but the scene is made by Holmes' accompanying slightly funky tune. It's a great match of the visuals to the music as it truly feels like the master criminal is dancing through those random laser beams while that music plays in his headphones. The scene, of course, is ridiculous if you read the film as a pure heist picture. Physically impossible. And yet it brings a smile to my face every time because it is such a joy to watch.

The characters in the film depend heavily on the performances and the actors themselves. It's hard to separate Ocean from Clooney, Ryan from Pitt and the other team members from their respective famous actors (Carl Reiner, Elliot Gould, Bernie Mac, etc.). Soderbergh's not looking to do that though since much of the humour (and there's a good deal of it) consists of in-jokes, specific acting quirks and well-timed pauses and beats. Many have complained that the entire enterprise is just a bunch of friends making themselves laugh. Perhaps, but at least there's no pandering for broad appeal or attempts to explain everything. As well, it gives them the freedom to be relaxed and confident as they work through getting the rhythms of a scene (Matt Damon in particular is very adept at hitting his beats on the nose). If you don't get the "Kashmir" joke that's OK, maybe you'll love the Topher Grace cameo ("I totally phoned in that Dennis Quaid movie") or the Bruce Willis surprise visit or the left in outtakes (Scott Caan cracking up at a tossed off Elliot Gould line while they wait for the bathroom). It's not smarmy - they genuinely look like they're having fun, so it's easy to ride along with them. Is the Julia Roberts storyline a bit too self-aware? Maybe so, but given the nature of the rest of the story, reading too much more into it then the fact that it's just a clever way of playing up her celebrity would be a mistake.

It doesn't matter though. Soderbergh is using the medium and a fun story to play and create a work of art that can be rewatched and enjoyed time and again for all of its style, techniques and compositions as well as its story, script and characters. It's got it all - style AND substance.

The Year 2004: SARS Wars (Taweewat Wantha)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:30:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes has the pleasure of welcoming back Peter Nellhaus of the superb Asian cinema centric blog Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee, who once again shines light on a film from a corner of the globe that doesn't feature that prominently at the western multiplex. Having created something of a cult following, the Thai comedy-horror SARS Wars, in which the virus SARS has mutated and the infected turn in to rampaging zombies, is significent, according to Peter, 'for the changes within the Thai film industry' that took place after its release.

Just viewed on a superficial level, Sars Wars might be judged simply as one of the more entertaining films to combine horror and comedy. A shorthand description might be to think of the film as Land of the Dead as re-imagined by Mel Brooks. There are the usual hallmarks of a zombie film, the slow walking zombies hungry for human flesh and brains, exploding heads, geysers of blood, a flying zombie baby, sliced off body parts, and a sense of inescapable doom. Add to that a plethora of jokes about sex and sexuality that are often the staple of Thai films, but may also cause those attached to consistent political correctness some discomfort. In the years since Sars War was released, the film has more significance in light of the career of the director, and also with changes within the Thai film industry.

Taking place during the time when Sars was a genuine concern in Asia, the film begins with a government spokeswoman stating that Thailand has remained untouched by the virus and will remain so. Of course that changes when an infected flying insect travels from Africa to Asia, has a close encounter with an airplane, and lands on the back of the neck of Andrew Biggs. This is one of the film's in-jokes, as Biggs is an Australian who is also a Thai television personality and journalist. Gradually infected, Biggs finds his way back to the parking space of the apartment building he lives in. Provoked by a neighbor, he bites the first of several neighbors in the building where most of the action takes place. Concurrently, Liu, the daughter of a wealthy man, is kidnapped by a team of inept criminals on the streets outside Bangkok. One of the kidnappers is dressed up in a bear costume, while Liu's chauffeur is distracted by a loitering babe in a bikini, who unmasked turns out to be Yai, a transsexual. Yai is played by popular Thai comic actor Somlek Sakdikul, who is as homely as he is hilarious. Liu's father hires the virtuous Khun Krabii to rescue his daughter based on the advice of the aging martial arts master, Thep. Everyone meets up at the apartment building which is soon sealed off to contain this new version of Sars.

Taweewat Wantha pokes fun at Thailand and the sometimes misguided sense of Thai pride, first with the government spokeswoman assumption that Thailand is safe from Sars, but then her solution to the problem. After surrounding the apartment building with troops and closing off the exits, she announces that a cure is available, made in Thailand. A television reporter questions is addresses his concern only to be made the first victim of the cure. It is soon revealed that the actual cure is to kill everyone in the building. Dr. Diana appears, claiming she has a real cure to the virus and is allowed one hour to prove herself. Among those infected by the virus are the patrons of a nightclub at the base of the building, a large ladyboy's cat, and a snake that eats part of the cat, growing giant sized in the process. Khun Krabii finds Liu, while Master Thep joins forces with Dr. Diana.

During the course of the proceedings are jabs at Star Wars, Anaconda, The Matrix, Thai censors, some internationally famous Chinese language martial arts movies, Thai attitudes towards non-Thais, and the movie itself. The narrative begins with an animated introduction of the characters and breaks into animated flashbacks, similar to Kill Bill. Within the context of the film, I view this as Taweewat's love of other films, especially those with a heightened unreality, rather than laziness, as all of the elements work together within a relatively unified whole.

As it's turned out, Sars Wars has been Taweewat's most successful film. Following some screenings at film festivals, Sars Wars is the only one of Taweewat's films to be internationally available on DVD. I was lucky enough to be in Thailand and see his second film, The Sperm. Even more challenging to traditional good taste, The Sperm is about a young man who, in a moment of unrelieved horniness, relieves himself in an alley. The sewer in the alley contains water contaminated by a failed scientist. The young man soon finds that he has fathered hundreds of clones. Aside from showing a couple of years ago at the Philadelphia Film Festival, The Sperm would remain little seen. Perhaps turned off by the title, the film was shunned by Thai audiences, and I was alone at the showing I attended. Taweewat's most recent film, Dek Khong, about the friendship between a high school girl and a very big five year old boy, also failed to attract viewers. That Taweewat's last two films flopped, even when he deliberately set aside his more satiric leanings for something more audience friendly, is not encouraging for a filmmaker who works in an industry where the cost of film production cannot be supported by home audience alone.

Additionally, new rules regarding what is allowed in Thai films would seem to disallow making another film like Sars Wars. In the past year or so, there has been more censorship of on-screen violence, with increased pixelation of scenes of violence. The change in the Thai government that took place in 2006, as well as the rules in the new Thai rating system suggests that even good natured ribbing of the Thai government might not be allowed on films seen by the Thai public. That Thailand film companies have virtually discontinued having English language subtitles on their DVDs severely limits the viewing and appreciation of Thai films, due to a short-sighted need to cut costs and supposedly undermine piracy.

At the very least, Sars Wars should be appreciated for what it is, a genial, goofy riff, that isn't scary, but is at times very funny. Even if a verbal joke about Andrew Biggs being part Alsatian doesn't translate culturally, it does not take much to appreciate seeing Lena Christensen fighting zombies wearing black leather hot pants, or Suthep Pongam on the attack with a light sabre powered by batteries that seem to fail at the worst possible moment.

The Year 2004: Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:34:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes the Film Dr, of the marvellous The Film Doctor, to the year 2004, where he takes on the highly successful sequel to the equally lucrative movie rebranding of the superhero Spider-Man. Set two years after the original, Spider-Man 2 not only outshone it's predecessor at the box-office but was extremely well received by critics and audiences worldwide. Although not a fan of the superhero genre the Film Dr seems as surprised as the rest of us when he declares this as 'one of the best films of 2004'.

I am not usually a fan of superhero films. I never read action comics much as a kid. Even while watching the otherwise thought-provoking Watchmen, I found the brightly-colored costumes distracting and implausible, and I’ve long since gotten bored with the conventions of the genre--the formative superhero myths (irradiation, the fall into acid), the damsels in distress, the flamboyant iconic villains, the use of animal imagery (Aardvarkman, Armadillogirl), the secret identities, and the superpowers that make for gee whiz fight scenes (such as in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) where often nothing can be resolved because both fighters cannot really get hurt. These films often seem swollen with exaggerated and simplistic characters who can personify rage or the desire to fly or adolescent dreams of instant power, but not much else. So I’ve never entirely understood why Spider-man 2 immediately struck me as one of the best films of 2004. It contains many of the same aforementioned cheesy elements, but director Sam Raimi and his crew managed to transcend them by skillfully dramatizing the conflict between Peter Parker’s human concerns and his superhero imperative, by including a plausible love story, by having all of the major characters grow and change in some way, by neatly integrating state-of-the-art action into the narrative, and by retaining enough of Raimi’s signature B-movie horror effects to keep things lively. Throughout, Raimi uses Peter Parker’s inner conflicts to make the film emotionally more plausible than most superhero films.

In the first Spider-man, Peter walks away from Mary Jane with the resolve to pursue his heroic mission without her. He says, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but in Spider-man 2 Peter does not balance the demands of work and school and superhero status at first. Instead, he’s a mess. In the opening scene, he attempts to deliver pizza under a deadline, but due to his need to save some kids who run in front of a truck, he loses his job. In dramatic contrast to his ability to swing through the urban canyons of New York, he drives a scooter haplessly in traffic until it gets smashed by a car. He lives in a cruddy apartment near the roar of a subway and has a landlord who constantly harangues him for rent money. (By the way, Wesley Gibson, the hero of Wanted, also has a similarly located apartment, an even more pitiful lifestyle, and a Spiderman-esque ability to jump onto the roofs of subway trains.) Peter’s grades are suffering. He can’t even manage to make it to an 8 o’clock showing of The Importance of Being Earnest where Mary Jane performs. For much of the first hour of the film, Peter suffers one loss after another, to the point where one forgets his superhero status, and Tobey Maguire’s haunted and stunned expression conveys Stan Lee’s dictum that “Life isn’t easy for anybody.” In the supplemental materials that go with the DVD, Sam Raimi makes it clear that one of his goals was to “beat up Peter Parker,” and the strategy works (one thinks of Hitchcock’s cruelty to Cary Grant in North by Northwest). Fate becomes cruel enough to cancel out any possible smugness and complacency Peter may feel due to his superpowers.

Other characters vary. As Mary Jane Watson, Kirsten Dunst is deified on billboards and posters, but she also gets understandably impatient with Peter’s inability to confess his painful love for her. As Harry Osborn, James Franco feels a Hamlet-like rage (complete with dagger) at Peter for not helping him avenge his father’s murder (I prefer Franco in stoner mode). And Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) is initially a very genial scientist with a loving wife (Donna Murphy). He even discusses T.S. Eliot (!) with his wife and Peter as they sit around the cozy kitchen table. His high-profile science experiment in fusion goes awry quickly, thereby turning him into a monster with evil sentient metallic snakelike arms that take over his brain (a bit like Adam seduced by the serpent Satan in the Garden of Eden), but he quickly develops an intriguing way to lurch around the Manhattan skyline when he’s not robbing banks or building a new reactor inside an abandoned warehouse on the river. In comparison to the more baroque Green Goblin of Spider-man, Doc Ock has a brooding noir persona with his trench coat and shades, giving him a sense of intellectual weight that makes up some for his bad guy behavior.

As the film goes on, Peter experiments with dropping his Spider-man persona altogether, and I liked the Burt Bacharach “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” montage, a reference to another goofy scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Peter kind of enjoys his ability to be simply human (with the parallel ethical realization that others may suffer and die without his help). But what really gets to me are two key scenes later in the movie. The first occurs after Peter finally confesses to his Aunt May Parker (the excellent Rosemary Harris) that he was responsible for her husband’s death. In the bleached out cinematography of her dining room, May just walks off, leaving Peter feeling worse than ever. But later he returns to find her moving out of the house. Perhaps because she has figured out that he is Spider-man, she says nevermind about Peter’s role in her husband’s death, and gives this speech:

“ . . . Lord knows, kids like Henry need a hero. Courageous, self-sacrificing people. Setting examples for all of us. Everybody loves a hero. People line up for them, cheer them, scream their names. And years later, they'll tell how they stood in the rain for hours just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them how to hold on a second longer. I believe there's a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady, and give up the thing we want the most. Even our dreams.”

One could say that this speech is the tritest crap, but somehow it works in part because she can’t tell him directly, and because of the way she universalizes the hero as a principle that can underlie everyone’s behavior. She ties in her own concerns by mentioning how heroes can “save an old girl like me” (as Spider-man did earlier) and by mentioning how someone older can “die with pride.” Aunt May utters the main insight of the film just as Mary Jane provides the final point in The Graduate-esque conclusion. How many other superhero films give over the best speeches to the female characters?

Lastly, soon after the scene that equates a kiss with Mary Jane with a large car thrown into a restaurant (cars get thrown around a lot in this film), Doc Ock sets up a fun action sequence that leaves Spider-man scrambling to save everyone in a subway train hurtling to its destruction. I like the way Spider-man tries and fails to stop the runaway train with his feet, and by sending out too few web strands to neighboring buildings (the scene was shot in Chicago because the buildings are closer to the tracks there), all the while with passengers making rude cracks at his failures. Finally, Spider-man hits upon sending out many web strands to buildings on both sides and thereby gradually stopping the train. He loses his mask in the process, and when he passes out from the strain, the passengers gently pull his body into the car and lie him on the floor with something akin to religious wonder. “Why, he’s just a kid,” says one man. This scene works in part due to the unexpected nobility of the everyday subway riders. In real life, they might have taken pictures of him with their cell phones, torn off portions of his clothes as souvenirs, and acted unnatural around him as he if he were a celebrity, but in the movie they basically let him be with appreciative restraint. One kid hands him back his mask, and says “We won’t tell nobody. It’s good to have you back, Spider-man.” In this scene, after much struggle throughout the film, the human and the superhuman meet. Raimi demonstrates how the two can complement each other, and how heroism becomes an option, and even a moral imperative for all involved.

The Year 2004: Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back Jason Soto of the Invasion of the B Movies, the master of the second rate, the king of the macabre, the wacky and the down right bizarre, who takes on Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's 1978 horror classic Dawn of the Dead. Modified for modern audience attention spans, Snyder's zombies no longer shuffle along in a sleep like daze but run at full speed in this fast moving adaptation that Jason believes 'isn't THAT bad'.

I'm gonna assure most of you right now that the only similarities between this supposed "remake" and the kickass original is the title, they're in a mall, and maybe one similar scene. Everything else is pretty much just the writers going "Hey, we wrote a zombie movie and it takes place in a mall...wait, that was done before? Shit. Well, let's just call it a remake." So with George A. Romero's blessing (I'm assuming), they slapped the title on this little zombie flick.

Let's be honest though, any zombie movie anyone will make is gonna basically just be a rip off of the Romero's films. Sure I've heard of the Italian version, but would it exist without "Night of The Living Dead"? Probably not. Even "28 Days Later" was "Night" with fast moving zombies.

We meet Ana, who is played by the one blonde chick from "Go", and she's a nurse. She's leaving her shift at the hospital and arrives home. Her and her boyfriend/husband (It wasn't really clear) Luis immediately start fucking in the shower. While they're boinking (I have my own thesaurus of words similar to "sex"), the news report that some serious shit is gonna go down.

The next day at (sigh) "DAWN" (Hey, at least they tried), the happy recently gotten laid couple wake up to a little girl busting down their bedroom down. Luis treats this has normal, even though the girl is the neighbor across the street. The girl looks like she was smacked across her face with a anvil, so Luis wakes Ana up. While doing so, the girl jumps across the bedroom and bites Luis in the throat.

Ana doesn't seem too confused that the girl across the street from her suddenly attacked her boyfriend/husband at 6:15 in the morning and instead locks the girl out of the room. Luis doesn't make it and he raises from the dead and starts attacking Ana. Yet again, she doesn't react to this and immediately escape. Honestly, I'm glad cause I'm sick of women in movies being stupid and going "Honey, what's wrong?" then getting chomped to death. But on the other hand, Ana has no idea there's a living dead epidemic going on, so to think nothing of her boyfriend/husband suddenly waking up is kinda off-putting.

Ana escapes through the bathroom (It's suppose to be "she came IN through the bathroom window) and about 10 minutes into this epidemic, it's fuckin' armageddon! Everything is on fire, people are being eaten left and right, and other people are shooting other people.

Fifteen minutes into the end of the world, Ana is attacked by a paramedic (I'm thinking she knew the guy, but the movie wasn't too clear), and this causes her to crash her car into a tree. Twenty minutes into the movie, we get the opening credits and shots of news reports and whatnot. None of this is important so I'm skipping it.

Sometime later, Ana is still in her car somehow still alive despite her car door being open and zombies like 15 feet away from her. This is where Officer Ving Rhames comes in. He goes half the movie nameless (even the captions called him "OFFICER"), so just for fun I'm gonna call him Officer Ving, also because he's pretty much just playing himself in a zombie movie.

Officer Ving finds Ana and she tags along. About 10 feet away we find Andre, his very pregnant girlfriend Luda, and Michael. After Andre and Officer Ving saying to each other "Wait, we're both black people in a horror film? How did that happen?" they decide to head to....

Ok you guy's saw the original, guess where they go to?

Yep. Disneyworld! A zombie Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck chase them around the Matterhorn for 2 hours. Ok, not really, but I plan on writing that movie soon.

No, they go to the mall. Everyone separates to check to see if any zombies are inside. Andre finds one at the door, Michael finds another in a sporting goods store. They head upstairs to see what's up there and to make this totally different than the original, upstairs are three asshole security guards. They steal Andre's and Ving's guns and pretty much treat everyone like shit. The main security guy, C.J, is possibly the biggest asshole and what's weird is he looks like Morgan Spurlock. Hm, that'd be an interesting episode of "30 Days", 30 days trapped in a mall full of zombies.

And actually one of the security guards aren't really assholes, and his name is Terry. C.J locked the gang into a store but Terry let them out. Outside they hear a truck squealing around in the parking lot. C.J refuses to help, so Terry becomes a traitor and knocks him and the other guy, Bart (really? Bart? Ok...) out and they lock them into a little holding cell.

After some drama with "how are we gonna get the people in the truck in the mall", they do and we get a whole new crew. Glad this "remake" is adding characters not seen in the original. Anyway, we meet Norma, a trucker, Glen, a gay organ player (wow, that was a subtle joke I didn't get until now), Steve and his girlfriend, who are the inspirations for SNL's "Two A-Holes" characters, Nicole and her father Frank, played by Matt Frewer, who you know as Max Headroom and the other father on "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids". Oh and a fat dying chick. Well, she dies and is now the worlds first overweight zombie.

Everyone finds out that Frank got bitten and since that's how this "virus" is transferred, they have to shoot him. After a drawn out "goodbye" from Nicole, Ving shoots him.

Andre and Luda, meanwhile, are locked in a toystore. Luda is a full blown zombie because she got bit before entering the mall, so Andre kept her chained down so she can give birth. Well, Luda does in fact give birth...holy shit I can't believe I'm gonna say this...it's a MOTHAFUCKIN' ZOMBIE BABY!! HOLY FUCK!!! Andre has gone mental and shoots Norma for trying to kill Luda and an odd Mexican standoff ensues with Norma and Andre shooting each other. Ana and the gang find them and the mothafuckin zombie baby and Ana shoots it. Damn, that would've been awesome for the rest of the movie. Just a zombie baby running around, biting people. Man, I need to get into the movie business.

Anyway, everyone decides it's time to get the fuck out of the mall, so they take two mall shuttle buses that are in the parking garage and reinforce them so the zombies don't attack.

I should point out a few things quickly. They let C.J and Bart out of the holding cell, but Bart gets eaten by some zombies in the parking garage. There's a montage of the gang doing shit in the mall, with Steve and his girlfriend boffing and filming it. Officer Ving has spotted a dude named Andy across the street from the mall and they communicate by holding up signs to each other. They all decide to save Andy since he lives in and owns a gun shop, so he'll have plenty of ammo and he's a good shot. Oh and there's a dog that Nicole calls "Chips". I dunno why.

Ok, we're caught up. Andy complains of being hungry, so Ving suggests they send the dog over since the zombies aren't interested in the dog (zombie dog! FUCK YEAH!) with food and a walkie talkie. When Andy lets the dog in, some zombies get in too and attack him. Nicole gets all worked up about the dog so she steals a truck and hightails it over there. Andy is a zombie and is attacking Nicole. The cameraman is scared of zombies too so we can't get a shot of any of this happening. Terry (who has been sporking Nicole) decides to plan a rescue mission...for the rescue mission.

Now, I don't know what happened next. Why? Because you fuckin' people don't know how to take care of DVD's!! Seriously, what the fuck do you people do with rental DVD's, give them to your kids to play with or something? JESUS!!

So I'm assuming they find Nicole alive and they climb onto the roof somehow and C.J throws a propane tank and blow up some zombies. This gives them plenty of opportunity to climb through the sewer to get back to the mall. One of the dudes, some guy named Tucker that I completely forgot about until now cause he wasn't important, gets bitten in the legs, so Ving drags him along while Tucker holds two guns and shoot at zombies. Sound familiar? This was in the original when the one dude is in the wheelbarrow and the other dude (I think it was the black guy) is pushing him. Yep, there's your remake. Well, anyway, Tucker Carlson is toast so they leave him behind.

They get back to the mall and get into the buses and hightail it out. They barely can get past the mob of zombies in the parking lot, so C.J climbs up, throws out another propane tank, and in one of the coolest scenes, blows it up, taking about 300 million zombies.

So they take a lovely tour of Zombiopolis when one of the buses, the one carrying Glen, Steve, his girlfriend, and Terry, gets attacked, so Glen pulls out the chainsaw, but when Terry makes a hard left, the chainsaw falls out of his hands and cuts Steve's girlfriend's arm off (another cool scene), then the bus crashes. Everyone inside dies except for Steve, who because he's another asshole, makes a run for it. But he doesn't last long, a zombie eats him. Ana takes great pleasure in shooting him. Then she steals the keys to his boat and they take off to the pier.

They arrive, but Michael has to stay behind cause he got bitten, and this is after he and Ana just cemented their relationship after farkin'. So Ana, Ving, Nicole (and the damn dog), and C.J get on the boat and leave. Michael shoots himself and the credits roll.

BUT! During the credits it turns into "The Blair Witch Project" when Nicole finds a camera on Steve's boat and films every little damn thing. They find an island but it too is full of zombies. Then the camera falls to the ground and the rest of it is the camera being past through the zombies. I dunno if this means they escaped or what. And there's an extra on the DVD that shows things from Andy's point of view but it's done in V-log style, so it's like watching a boring video on "youtube". Apparently we get from this is that the world eventually got returned to normal, so if Ving and his crew didn't get attacked on Zombie Island (another horror movie reference), they eventually survived. I guess.

Honestly, this movie isn't THAT bad, but I think they shouldn't have claimed it was a remake of "Dawn of the Dead", because in case anyone forgot, "Dawn" was a sequel. Why anyone would remake a sequel is beyond me. If you wanna make a zombie film, fine. Have it take place...at Disneyland! Like I said! And have zombie Mickey, Goofy, Minnie! OH! And zombie babies!! AND DOGS!! WOO!! Oh, right, this movie. Ok, this movie showed us some tits, so that gets some points, and the story was slightly interesting. I'll pretend this isn't called a remake and rate it like an original movie, cause it basically is.
Ok, back to my movie. DISNEY ZOMBIES!

The Year 2004: Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes Allan Fish, co-creator and scribe of the highly influential and inspirational film blog Wonders in the Dark, where you can catch Allan's top 50 countdown of his favourite films of the 1980's and even vote for your own top 25 on their online poll. Allan's first submission to the project covers one of the year's biggest international hits, Downfall, which focuses on the last ten days in the life of Adolf Hitler, as witnessed by a young woman in his employ, and according to this submitter, features 'one of the greatest performances of our era'.

(Germany 2004 155m) DVD1/2
Aka. Der Untergang
We aren’t always masters of our own time

p Bernd Eichinger d Oliver Hirschbiegel w Bernd Eichinger book Joachim Fest ph Rainer Klausmann ed Hans Funck m Stephan Zacharias art Bernd Lepel

Bruno Ganz (Adolf Hitler), Alexandra Maria Lara (Traudl Junge), Corinna Harfouch (Magda Goebbels), Ulrich Matthes (Josef Goebbels), Juliane Köhler (Eva Braun), Heino Ferch (Albert Speer), Christian Berkel (Schenck), Thomas Kretschmann (Hermann Fegelein), Mathias Habich (Haase), Ulrich Noethen (Heinrich Himmler), Birgit Minichmayr (Gerda Christian), Anna Thalbach (Frau Reitsch),

We live in an age where information about Nazism, its horrific acts and its fall are commonplace, almost to the point of information overload. Not only in films such as Schindler’s List and The Pianist, but in the occasional masterful TV documentary. Even now, I can hear the cultured tones of Sam West narrating Laurence Rees’ monumental works The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz. However, when it comes to making a drama out of this final crisis, no-one had succeeded. There had been various impersonations of Hitler, including Frank Finlay, Derek Jacobi, Robert Carlyle and Alec Guinness. Fine actors though they all are, something essential was lacking, and perhaps that essence was a sense of perspective, and more importantly a sense of a performance, not just an impersonation. The actor had to perfectly embody the speech mannerisms of one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, and that required a German actor speaking in his native tongue. After all, can one imagine a German playing Churchill?

Hirschbiegel’s film covers the last few days of the Third Reich, beginning with Hitler’s last few days in the bunker, continuing with the disintegration of the armies and ideology outside the ruins of Berlin. The iconic shots of Hitler standing outside the bunker and warmly greeting the last traces of the Hitlerjungen are well known, but no film before has captured the sense of desolation of the time. The entrance to the bunker looks like the entrance to hell, above which one would expect to find an adornment of Dante’s immortal words. Yet in actuality, the entrance to hell is from the inside. It’s the Berlin above ground that is the hell and the bunker is merely the waiting room. A fact well illustrated by the army officers, adjutants, even simple domestics pacing its corridors and passageways. Der Führer is stubborn to the point of insanity, and the film perfectly demonstrates the loss of reality of not only Hitler, but many of the simple civilians who arm themselves to defend the crumbling city. Yet in truth the whole atmosphere is a surreal one, with Eva Braun organising parties as the chandeliers quake under the Allied onslaught, like the Ruff-Diamonds at the regimental dinner in Carry on Up the Khyber, and the officers at the brothel recalling the orgiastic revelry of Gance’s La Fin du Monde. In the end Hitler himself, irrespective of his beyond evil doctrine and acts of mass genocide, becomes an almost pitiful, shambling wreck whose hour upon the stage, to quote Macbeth, is coming to a close. Even so, some of the most emotional sequences take place outside the bunker, perfectly showcased in a montage that accompanies Eva Braun’s last letter to her sister, where a young girl in pigtails asks to be shot rather than live to the end and Henry Purcell’s immortal “When I am Laid in Earth” deftly undercuts the action, and her younger brother dodging bullets like a Gavroche for the 20th century.

I could write pages on the physical recreation, photography and design, but one cannot sign off without mentioning the cast. Matthes, Kohler, Harfouch (chilling as she calmly murders her children) and Ferch are superb, while Lara provides a serene beauty to the emotional bystander that is heart-rending (one recalls her reaction as she learns of the Goebbels’ intention to kill their whole family). Yet it’s Ganz who haunts us, a Hitler for all time, from his smile of recognition at Lara’s Munich fraulein to his resignation to his fate. He and Hirschbiegel dare to make him a human monster, and in doing so we observe one of the greatest performances of our era. Astonishing.

The Year 2004: Collateral (Michael Mann)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:00:00 +0000

Counting Down The Zeroes has the pleasure of welcoming another new face to the project in the guise of Yeali, who hails from the superb blog, My First Farce, an account of her attempt at writing a screenplay and a log of the many distractions along the way, mostly consisting of good movies. In her first submission she takes on Michael Mann's return to his forte, compelling, unique and stylish thrillers, with Collateral, which featured Tom Crusie, sporting a fine grey head of hair, as an assassin hired to murder five people in one night, whisked around the neon skyline of Los Angeles by Jamie Foxx's unsuspecting limo driver.

Director Michael Mann loves sending helicopters to the dark Los Angeles sky. He did it in his 1995 movie "Heat", and he does it again nine years later in "Collateral". "Collateral" is the only film Mann directed but hadn't written or co-written, and his greatest box-office success to that date. It was written by Sidney-born Stuart Beattie as a New-York based story, only to be relocated by Mann to Los Angeles. Filmed mostly with high-definition cameras, this movie is about L.A. at night, about nocturnal city creatures, about choice and chance.

In interviews, writer Beattie explains he got the idea for "Collateral" when he was 17, riding a cab alone for the first time. Chatting with the driver, he couldn't help thinking – what if I was a homicidal maniac sitting in the back seat? His basic notion was that you're always told not get in a car with a strange person, and not to pick up hitchhikers, yet that is exactly the premises of cab transactions.

"Collateral" happens during the course of one night. Max (Jamie Foxx) is a taxi driver who works night shifts. Right from the start we learn all there is to know about him: He keeps his car clean, and keeps his act clean. He'll get you to your destination faster than you expected and he won't cheat you. Max is also a dreamer: he keeps a postcard of his favorite getaway, Maldives Islands (although it's safe to assume he's never actually been there), where he vacations "a dozen times a day" while driving his cab; and he plans on opening a limo company called "Island Limousines", which he hasn’t done yet because it "has to be perfect".

Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a contract killer who arrives to L.A. for one night, to execute five murders, all related to a big federal case that's about to open in court the following morning. Vincent enters Max's cab right after Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a pretty lawyer who gave her card to Max after the two shared an intimate conversation, gets out. Vincent, impressed by Max's decency and punctuality, convinces him to be his driver for the entire night, promising to double his average night wage. He's in town to close a deal, he has five stops. A few minutes after Max agrees, a dead body falls on the roof of the taxi. That's when Max realizes his customer is a hit man, and it's too late to cancel their deal. From this moment on, it's a story about the dynamics between Max and Vincent. Vincent has four more destinations, four more murders to commit. Max is forced to drive Vincent around town, and in return Vincent will change Max's life.

"Collateral" is about night creatures. Max enjoys driving his cab at night. Vincent, who kills people at night, is quite explicitly compared to the coyote– an animal he and Max encounter at one point during their ride. The coyote is a nocturnal predator with a grayish pelt, who adapted well to human environments and is often seen in big cities in North America. Vincent looks like a coyote - Tom Cruise in a rare appearance with grey hair, eyebrows and beard, topped by a grey suit. He also has the instincts of a predator. This is evident towards the end of the movie, when Max and Annie run away from Vincent. Leaving her office building, they have to choose between the street and the subway. Max chooses the subway, thinking Vincent will look for them in the street. When Vincent arrives at the same spot, he considers both options, then without hesitation runs towards the subway. This repeats itself when Vincent has to guess on which train they boarded, and guesses right again. By the time he's on the train, there are close ups of Vincent where it looks like he's sniffing and tilting his ears like an animal.

But more than that, just as the coyote is a counter intuitive byproduct of the city, an animal that is mysteriously, unpredictably, drawn to cities, so is Vincent, as are all professional killers - a byproduct of society who is an unwanted force roaming the city, an outsider to "normal" human life.

Two other leading night creatures in "Collateral" are Annie, the lawyer who always stays up the night before the opening of a big case to go over her speech, and detective Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), who enters the story after discovering Vincent killed one of his informers, and insists on exploring the murder even though his partner insists there is nothing to explore and goes home to bed. Restless at night, Fanning is always craving for action.

Vincent is a philosopher of the night. He lectures Max about life, about chance and about choice. He mocks him for dreaming and talking instead of doing. His pompous speeches verge on the ridiculous ("Improvise. Adapt to the environment. Darwin. Shit happens. I Ching, whatever. Roll with it"), but the film uses that to fuel the amusing moments in which Max repeats Vincent's words, with much less confidence, first when faced with Felix (Javier Bardem), who hired Vincent for that night's killings, and later when resisting a cop who tries to handcuff him, stuttering while holding a gun at the cop: "when did this become a negotiation?"

Vincent's didactical philosophical outbursts are the film's most problematic moments. But at the same time, you can look at them as yet another attribute of the night. Haven't you ever found yourself in a bar, having to listen to a guy who had too much to drink, giving you a bullshit lecture about life?

Vincent talks about chance, about the universe's indifference - and the film demonstrates it. There are many "what if" moments throughout the story, where things almost happen or almost don't happen: What if Vincent didn't enter Max's cab?; what if that first body didn't fall on the taxi's roof?; what if the cops who stopped them over a broken window opened the trunk and found the body?; What if the jazz player answered Vincent's riddle correctly?; What if Vincent didn’t run out of bullets at the end of the movie?

On his third stop, Vincent takes Max along with him to a jazz club. Max is not into jazz. In another one of his overly self-explanatory outbursts, Vincent says that jazz is behind the notes, it's about improvising, about the unexpected – just like their night. At the beginning of the night Max is lost, impotent. He expects to be saved. When he tries to get people's attention in the street while Vincent is out of the cab, he ends up being robbed. A minute after detective Fanning finds Max and tries to get him out of a shooting scene in a club, Vincent kills Fanning. Max learns that in order to be saved, he has to save himself. Vincent teaches him how to improvise, giving him the squeals to overpower him. This is how, after throwing Vincent's suitcase from a bridge, Max manages to trick Felix into believing he's Vincent, and giving him the lost information. By the time they get to Vincent's fifth stop, in which he has to kill Annie, the lady lawyer Max met at the beginning of the night – Max is squealed enough to save Annie and kill Vincent. At the end, it seems that Max wins precisely because, unlike Vincent, he does believe that there's meaning to life.

Both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx deliver remarkably restrained performances. Cruise abandons his signature-gone-caricature laugh for a surprisingly effective villain role. Foxx was nominated for two academy awards in 2004: best performance by a supporting actor for "Collateral", and best performance by an actor for "Ray". It was his role in "Ray" that he won the award for, a much more manneristic performance than his performance as Max. But it is Los Angeles at night who's the leading actress in "Collateral": the lights, the sky, the roads, the bridges. Visible from every apartment window, beautifully shot, the city at night sets the mood for the entire movie, making even its weaker moments poetic.

"Collateral" ends with a shot of Max and Annie stepping out of the train after Max had killed Vincent. They are safe now, but there is no sign of relief on their faces, no romantic kiss in sight. They walk towards the highway, still shaken and disturbed, as if they were a couple leaving a movie theatre, unable to get the movie out of their heads.

The Year 2004: The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:00:00 +0000

This post was submitted by Stephanie Lundahl of the brilliant The Flick Chick

The Passion of the Christ is a difficult movie to approach, seeing as it comes with so much baggage. Hailed in some circles as a masterpiece, reviled in others as being anti-Semitic and excessively violent, it is a film that can never be fully divorced from the controversy that it engendered. If it is anti-Semitic, does that necessarily make it a bad film? Should art be judged on its message or the skill of its construction? On the flip side, just because it’s a film about Jesus Christ and purports to be faithful to the Scriptures, does that in and of itself make it a good film? The Passion of the Christ is almost impossible to consider solely on its own merits.

The film chronicles the last 12 hours in the life of Christ (James Caviezel), including his arrest, trial, torture and finally crucifixion. At certain points the film flashes back, showing key moments in the life of Christ that parallel or otherwise inform his current state. There isn’t a lot to the film plotwise, much of the running time is devoted to scenes of Christ’s torture and death. It is a brutal, blood-soaked film, but that is of course its intention. Writer/director Mel Gibson has said on many occasions that one of his objectives was emphasize Christ’s suffering and it is, indeed, inescapable here. However, it isn’t the blood that makes these scenes so disturbing, but the sadism of the Roman soldiers and the indifference on the part of the crowd. His wounds neither satisfy them nor give them pause.

Christ’s travails are witnessed by those who want him punished as well as those who want him saved, including Mary (Maia Morgenstern), Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci), and John (Christo Jivkov). Of the supporting performances Morgenstern’s is the most moving. I would even venture to say that hers is the best performance of the film period, trumping even Caviezel. As Christ suffers, so does Mary, who watches her son condemned to death, mops up his blood and at last watches him die. In one scene she watches him fall to the ground in pain and recalls a moment when he fell as a child and she was able to make it better simply by holding him in her arms. There can be no more of that; his problems are beyond the scope of maternal comfort and assistance and her pain comes not simply from his suffering but from her complete helplessness in the face of it. The mother-child connection really grounds the film and gives it a human element that is absolutely crucial.

So, the big question: is the film anti-Semitic? I’m inclined to say no. I think that if you walk away from this with anti-Semitic feelings, you went into it predisposed to that particular brand of lunacy and I doubt that any person of even moderate intelligence could be inspired to hate anyone based on this film. It is true that the Jewish priests led by Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia) are shown in a negative light, but so are the Roman soldiers. I would argue that the Roman soldiers are portrayed worse, since they seem to revel in inflicting pain for the sake of inflicting pain, whereas the priests have motives that go beyond simply wanting Christ to suffer. Their actions are characterized in political terms as Christ’s teachings threaten the status quo and their power. In the same way, the actions of Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov) are informed by politics and his shaky relationship with the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Unlike the Jewish priests, however, Pilate is allowed to have more than one dimension and he is allowed to express his conflicting feelings about the situation. It’s a failing of the film that the villains (Jewish priests and Roman soldiers alike) are portrayed in such a thin way, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it hateful.

As a director Gibson strives for realism – that’s the justification for the graphic nature of the film – but makes stylistic choices that undermine that sense of realism. I’m surprised that there’s any slow motion in movies anymore, seeing as this one tried so hard to use it all up. I’m of the belief that, like most things, slow motion is most effective when used sparingly. Mel Gibson obviously disagrees. The effect becomes less meaningful each time it’s used and it gets used so much that by the end you’re completely desensitized to it when it should be making its greatest impact. The film undercuts itself through this repetition and puts a greater burden on the actors to forge an emotional connection between the audience and the action on screen.

In the final analysis, The Passion of the Christ is a decent film but its craftsmanship is ultimately not equal to its notoriety. Because it focuses so wholly on the negative – the agony of Christ’s death – and pays only cursory attention to his ideas and teachings, the film fails to be as thought provoking as films like The Last Temptation of Christ or The Gospel According to Matthew. As it stands, the conversation very nearly begins and ends on the controversy rather than the content of the film. As the controversy fades, so does the film’s significance as a work of art.

The Year 2004: The Aviator (Martin Scorsese)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 10:10:00 +0000

This post, subtitled The Aviator: A Tribute to the Golden Age of Cinema, was submitted by Andrew Kendall of the great Encore's World of Film & TV

Martin Scorsese holds a strange place in Oscar and film history. He has been touted as the front runner in the 1976, 1980, 1990, 2002 and 2004 Oscar races and save for 2002 it’s probably arguable that his film has endured more than the eventual winner. 2004 was m first serious bout with the Oscars. As a 12 year old future film enthusiast I had not een any of the major films nominated but are following each of the major precursors [BAFTA, SAG, FPA, FCA, PGA etc] I was certain that The Aviator was the best of the bunch. Leo, Cate and Scorsese who I all loved at the time, and still do couldn’t do any wrong in my eyes. And Cate was playing Kate Hepburn who I had just begun an obsession with. I knew I was going to love this movie.

Well, if you know Oscar history you know that The Aviator lost to Million Dollar Baby. I was pissed. Really pissed. Anyhow, going into The Aviator one month later I had pretty high expectations, expectations that were not smashed. Up to 2004 The Aviator was Scorsese’s most financially successful film. A retrospective of sorts it tells the story of the eponymous aviator Howard Hughes, a somewhat prolific aviator and celebrity of the 1930s – 1950s. The film is over 160 minutes so it’s not exactly short, but it’s beautiful. There is an obvious line between the first half [pre and during Kate] and second part [after Kate] of the film. The film begins with a childhood Hughes being bathed by his mother as she warns him about the cholera in a haunting spelling recitative. It’s the only childhood scene of Hughes so it’s probably important…but why? Did Hughes inherit his OCD tendencies from his mother? it’s interesting to consider, but Scorsese doesn’t give us the answers.

The OCD tendencies aren’t that profound in the first half. It takes a look at Hughes the film maker. He is a bit idiosyncratic, spending an unprecedented 4 million and 3 years on his film debut Hell’s Angels. This takes up the first half hour of the film and is a true showcase opportunity for Leo who is in almost all these scenes. And boy does he sine. Leonardo DiCaprio has always been good at playing young upstarts [Gangs of New York, Catch Me If You Can even Titanic] and young Hughes fits right in. He’s hilarious, ingratiating, edgy, annoying and energetic all at once. Hughes is a bit bossy and but we’re on his side anyway.

With the success of Hell’s Angels and his star power solidified he begins carousing the town and his eyes set on young Katharine Hepburn played by the wonderfully effervescent Cate Blanchett. This film is not a recreation of Kate’s life, something people need to realize. As an over zealous Kate fan I know she would not have been out batting eye lashes for the press or carousing the town so publicly with Hughes, but it’s all good for the movie. After all, as Cate/Kate says movies are movies, they’re not real. I loved Cate’s performance as Kate. If her Kate was one of Kate’s film roles it would be Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. What makes me sad though is that I don’t believe persons have ever appreciated Kate’s dilemma in playing this role. She is forced to play a lady so iconic in our minds but who rarely gave interviews in her youth. It wasn’t until her middle aged days that she mellowed and began giving interviews. It is incredibly rare finding any unscripted clips of her anywhere. Thus Cate must rely on Katharine’s film roles. And seeing the resemblance to The Philadelphia Story Kate, it’s unsurprising because this role was based on the real Kate. Scorsese directs her so beautifully as if he were a director of yore, Cukor or Ford…

As we know, Cate Blanchett to some extent steals the show in her eclectic performance so the film falters a little when she leaves. Kate Beckinsale gives a valiant effort, but she is not substitute. The final half does boast a great performance though – Alan Alda as the villainous Senator out to get Hughes. Alan Alda is devilishly good and he deserved that Oscar nomination. Towards the middle the film does lag, but it picks up steam as it gets back on track.

The Aviator was the best film of 2004 for me. In addition to Leo, Cate and Alan there's Alec Baldwin and John C. Reilly who are both dependable in their roles and Jude Law in a stunning 5 minute cameo that make me wish he'd do a biopic of Errol Flynn. The film was like a tribute to the golden age of cinema in Hollywood and it marked my complete devotion to Scorsese from hereon. In the next 20 years I am certain that The Aviator will be a go to film for good film making and these same persons will be asking Million Dollar Who?

The Year 2004: The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass)

noreply@blogger.com (Ric Burke) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

This post was submitted by Tom Hyland of the superb Cinema Directives

The Bourne Supremacy takes us on a journey quite similar to that of its predecessor, The Bourne Identity of two years earlier; a fast-paced spy thrilled in which we watch Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) try and figure out why he is where he is and why so many people want him dead. Both films are successful, but what lifts Supremacy above the previous work can be summed up in two words: Paul Greengrass.

The first film, competently directed by Doug Liman, set that stage for this series, as we follow Bourne across Europe, aided by a young woman, Marie (Franke Potente) to whom Bourne pays $20,000 for a ride to escape from a difficult situation to head back to places he encountered in the past during his work for the C.I.A. He can’t quit recall why he was there or who he is looking for, so that element of the story, combined with the slowly developing relationship between Bourne and Marie gave Identity a nice complexity.

That film ended on an island in Greece, as Bourne is rescued at sea and is reunited with Marie in a relatively happy ending. Supremacy picks up soon afterwards, as we are now in the Indian town of Goa, where the two lovers now reside; they clearly have been on the run from Jason’s pursuers. Only a few minutes into the film, they are chased by an assassin, who kills Marie and believes he has done to same to Bourne. This sequence – where the jeep Marie and Bourne are riding in plunges over a bridge to a watery grave – is one of the film’s most exciting and chilling moments. Especially moving is the way Bourne tries to save Marie from drowning; as his attempts with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation fail, he gives the dying Marie a final kiss and then pushes her body away to float in the deep, murky waters of the river.

Marie’s death means that Supremacy will take a more direct route to its finish; this is both good and bad. We miss the humanity and sensuality of Marie, as she is able to lift Bourne from his self-introspection and gloom when she is around (if only temporarily); now with her departure, we are thrust further into the story line of new assassins as well as Bourne’s past. He recalls murdering someone (or was it more than one person?) in a hotel room in Berlin and he knows he must return to that hotel to unravel his personal mystery.

Of course, the C.I.A. operatives who programmed Bourne to kill know this as well and chase him from Napoli to Amsterdam to Berlin to find him; their pursuit now a result of a conspiracy by other spies to frame Bourne for murders he did not commit. Joan Allen and Brian Cox – excellent as always – portray these government agents and the powerplay between themselves is another positive to this film.

Thus Supremacy is largely about the search and director Paul Greengrass gives us an abundance of exciting chase sequences; in some ways, this is, at its most basic, an intelligent “give the audience a thrill every ten minutes or so” type of film. That usually spells disaster for me, as films like this too often use multiple action sequences to cover up flaws in their screenplay, but here the first-rate action fleshes out Bourne’s confused state of mind and gives the audience a sense of the edginess of his existence.

Much has been made of Greengrass’ use of hand-held cameras in Supremacy; indeed this camerawork does add a lot of gritty reality to the story. But this is not just a case of pointing these cameras and letting the action flow. It is the director’s sense of claustrophobia that gives an unsettling, nervous edge to the film. Look at the way Greengrass shoots the sequnce of Bourne fleeing his pursuers through a train station, then a river barge and finally an elevated train. His camera follows Bourne grabbing onto the support of a bridge above the river to stay out of sight; this is a wonderful sequence to watch, as is the climactic car chase through the wintry streets and tunnels of Moscow. The cameras are so tight on these cars during part of this chase that you’re often not certain as to what driver is crashing into what car. Clearly, Greengrass directs this film with a sense of Bourne’s character being trapped as a prisoner of space; he can move across a continent, but he is never far from the technology and eyes of those who require his capture or death.

But what few have noticed is the way Greengrass and his director of phtotography Oliver Wood focus on Bourne. Rarely do we see a shot of his face in full, rather it is often in shadows, as we see one side of his face; at other times, we see only a profile. Take a look at the fight sequence in the kitchen of a house where Bourne sees an agent he once worked with. As these two characters battle each other, it is difficult at times to make out which character is which, much as in the car chase in Moscow. By filming Bourne in this fashion, Greengrass is deliberately keeping Bourne’s identity a mystery. This is a major point of this film, that these agents are faceless individuals who act on orders, not on emotion.

The film begins with Bourne running on a beach in Goa; this is the one instance we see sunlight on his face. The film ends with Bourne walking from an apartment in Moscow in the middle of a frigid winter; here we see his entire face for one of the few times in the film. Though he has embraced his muderous past and confessed his sins to the daughter of the couple he killed, this is not a moment of self-satisfaction or joy for Bourne; his expression in both sequences is virtually the same. John Powell’s beautifully sad theme sets the mood and Greengrass for one of the few times in the film, pulls his camera back while filming Bourne, as we see him isolated on the snowy sidewalks of Moscow. His journey has – at least for a short while – come to a conclusion.