Hulk, Jeanette MacDonald and two men who would be king - Reviews #219

Oh, the usual.

FILMS:



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003)

"So, Ang, the film's due tomorrow. Obviously we know your reputation as the director of The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so we've been happy to just leave you to it. How's it all looking?"
"It’s looking great... Let me just say, I think you're going to be very pleased."
"Fantastic – just what I wanted to hear! Is there lots of action?"
"Yes, there's lots of action."
"Great."
"At one point a psychotic old man sets three rabid dogs on the love interest and they try to rip off her head."
“Err… OK. That’s not exactly... but, yes, as long as there’s lot of action. That’s not the only bit, is it?”
“No, of course not. Do you like bouncing?”
“In what way?”
“You know, people bouncing a lot?”
“No, why?”
“No reason.”
“Erm, right. Now you mentioned a love interest. That’s great, we need that.”
"Yes, lots of love in there."
"Well, so long as the hero’s girlfriend doesn't betray him to the military for no reason!"
"[nervous laughter]"
"So, lots of action, lots of romance, sounds like a lot of fun."
"Yes, it's very fun, it's just a fun summer popcorn movie about a man trying to come to terms with watching his dad stab his mum to death as a child."
"Wait, what?"
"Yes.”
"Why've you done that?"
"What?"
"Made our big, green movie a horrifically gruelling Freudian drama about domestic abuse."
"Action figures?"
“It's frankly a long shot, Ang. Have you seen the Nil by Mouth merchandising numbers? I have, and... oh no, I've just thought of something."
"Go on."
"Eric Bana. We gave you Eric Bana. There's no way he'd be able to pull off a role of this complexity. Is there?!"
"No. He couldn't do it."
"Oh, well that’s a relief, I suppose. But I didn't hear anything about re-casting. Who did you get instead?"
"No-one. We just have Eric Bana not being able to do it. Jennifer Connelly can't do it either. And Nick Nolte does what he can, but his character makes no sense - he'll reach some point of pathos or resonance and then just start screaming abuse or electrocuting himself. To be honest, the premise was kind of spoiled by all of the dialogue and also the cast.”
“I thought you said it was great.”
“No, I said it’s looking great. I’ve got this really cool gimmick where the movie frames look like comic book panels.”
“Is that all?”
“No, Danny Elfman’s written me a nice score. Sam Elliott isn’t bad, I suppose, and Jennifer is gorgeous.”
“And I bet Hulk himself looks great, given that Terminator 2 came out 22 years ago, and even since that landmark in visual effects we’ve had massive advancements in technology.”
“No, he looks like a fat cartoon Jeffrey Hunter.”
“You know I’m going to lose my job, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Bye.”

(2)

***



The Cat and the Fiddle (William K. Howard, 1934) - A delightful, marvellously inventive if not quite classic musical-comedy about operetta writer Ramon Novarro and Tin Pan Alley-style tunesmith Jeanette MacDonald meeting cute in Brussels, falling in love through their overlooking windows, then breaking up when he decides he needs to make it by himself before they can be happy.

That stock ‘30s rom-com device is the only thing formulaic or over-familiar about this charming concoction, which weaves in its tunes in the same naturalistic but knowing style as Mamoulian’s classic Love Me Tonight (also starring MacDonald), reunites Novarro and Jean Hersholt in a similar master-pupil relationship to the one they enjoyed in Lubitsch’s immortal Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, and casts a certain dizzy Pre-Code spell, by turns romantic, moving and quite preposterously sexy. The moment where Novarro throws his career to the wind, then takes MacDonald back to her room is close to perfection.

Like The Merry Widow – made by Lubitsch and MacDonald the same year, such was the incestuousness of such films – it spends too long being too gloomy after a bewitching beginning, but like that film it’s full of bright music, amusing supporting performances (special mention for the hilarious Charles Butterworth, another Love Me Tonight alumnus) and ineffable old fashioned movie magic, not least when it bursts into colour for the final reel! The leads are simply irresistible. (3.5)

***



Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (Jeanie Finlay, 2015) - A fantastic story, told almost as well as it could be, about a masked Elvis soundalike who was marketed to a public that didn’t want to believe the King was dead. That man was Jimmy Ellis, an unhappy, womanising, frustrated, ultimately tragic artist who made a Faustian pact for fame, and unsurprisingly struggled to live with the consequences. Working with a limited amount of archive film, director Jeanie Finlay weaves this stranger-than-fiction tale with the use of talking heads, intelligent reconstructions, melancholic bucolic footage and audio interviews, and while a few interesting eyewitnesses are absent – including Ellis’s various wives – and it doesn't always delve as deeply as it might, the result is a compelling, fascinating film with a couple of devastating late twists. (3)

***



Samurai and Idiots: The Olympus Affair (Hyoe Yamamoto, 2014) - This insightful documentary is flawed filmmaking but offers a rare, fascinating glimpse of how Japan sees its companies, its visitors and itself, with echoes of Kurosawa’s classic indictment of corporate power, The Bad Sleep Well.

It’s superficially the story of Michael Woodford, a Scouse businessman who rose to the top of the Japanese camera company Olympus before being unceremoniously tipped out of his seat after asking a few awkward questions about dodgy accounting practices. I’d argue that he has surprisingly little news sense, though. He keeps saying he'll go public with "governance concerns" rather than $1.7BN FRAUD.

In some ways the film is a little disappointing – our apparently hero’s rather terrifying feudal adversaries are only given a voice in fascinating archive footage, and the movie could do a better job of both explaining the wrongdoing and remembering that it is not a PowerPoint presentation – and yet it’s ultimately so surprising and enlightening in its portrait of the Japanese national character that it’s almost great. (3)

***



Marked Woman (Lloyd Bacon, 1937) - A distinctive if not exceptional crime film, based on Lucky Luciano’s 1936 trial, about prostitute Bette Davis and her working girl pals helping to bring down a mobster (Eduardo Ciannelli), with the help of crusading assistant D.A., Humphrey Bogart.

This “ripped from the headlines” tale isn’t one of Warner’s gangster classics, being too pedestrian for the most part – cursed with a weak comedy interlude featuring Allen Jenkins and a lousy subplot about Davis’s kid sister (Jane Bryan) – but Body and Soul writer-director Robert Rossen and Abem Finkel contributes some superior lines, Bogart gives probably his best pre-High Sierra performance, and Davis is simply scintillating, finally given something proper to do after years of being taken for granted.

Even without those virtues, the premise would be sufficiently unusual to give this one a look, while director Lloyd Bacon also brings a verve and imagination to Marked Women that’s missing from most of his work (the mark of an uncredited Michael Curtiz, perhaps), including a blast of sickening off-screen violence and a brilliant downbeat ending far removed from Hollywood cliché. (3)

***

BOOK:



Josiah the Great by Ben Macintyre (2004) – This one didn’t quite do it for me. The story of Josiah Harlan, the 19th century American adventurer who became an Afghan prince (sort of) and provided the pattern for Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King, it’s written in a slightly less formulaic fashion than Macintyre’s later books (I’m not knocking him, he’s a compulsively readable writer, but he has certain stock devices he’s liable to lean on) but based primarily on Harlan’s unpublished memoir, which even in this edited form is long-winded, unfocused and often just about the fruits and flowers he’s seen. It’s also oddly paced and has no real dramatic peaks, with little of the suspense, dry humour or rich emotion that fill Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends, the author’s books on 20th century history. There’s none of the bromance, either, the primary currency of any Macintyre work. It’s a reasonably interesting tale, with some very valuable parallels to the present day situation in Afghanistan, but I wasn’t itching to pick it back up again and ultimately felt rather underwhelmed. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Sense and Sensibility, Kate Hepburn and whatever the opposite of a miracle is - Reviews #203

I read a book and went to a couple of shows, but you're here - if at all - for the film stuff, right? Film stuff:



*A FEW SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995) - It’s one of the defining scenes of ‘90s British cinema: a star on the cusp of supernova, accompanied by a stunning Patrick Doyle score and Michael Coulter’s sumptuous cinematography, all of it capturing a very old-fashioned sort of English vision. Kate Winslet’s Marianne walks purposefully, forlornly through the driving rain to a hill overlooking her lost love’s house. “Love is not love,” she says, leaning on Shakespearean sonnet in her hour of need, “Which alters when it alteration finds/Or bends with the remover to remove:/O no! It is an ever-fixèd mark/That looks on tempests and is never shaken…” Then the poetry dries up and she just breathes: “Willoughby, oh Willoughby... Willoughby... Willoughby.”

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the sequence is that it doesn’t appear at all in Jane Austen’s source novel. Marianne doesn’t walk to Willoughby’s, and she’s never swept up by a similarly sodden Colonel Brandon; her dalliance with death is inspired by sheer morosity and listlessness, not a second, unwise walk on the wild side. It’s one of innumerable smart creations and clever excisions made by screenwriter Emma Thompson, who spent five years on this – her first script – and subsequently scooped one of the more deserved Oscars of recent years. I asked her about her conception of the scene at a Q&A event held on Sunday to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, and she said this: “That just seemed obvious to me. What would be more natural than going to the place where your lover is and just repeating his name? That’s what love is”, adding self-mockingly of Marianne’s subsequent malaise that “people weren’t as sturdy then – it was ‘Oh, I’ve got a bit wet, now I’m nearly dead’.”

As well as scripting, Thompson also stars: she is Elinor, a detached, unfailingly proper 19-year-old, who with flighty, tempestuous younger sister Marianne (Winslet) experiences love and loss in a vivid, irresistible Austenian world peopled by rogues, unhappily conflicted gentlemen and the odd thoroughly decent chap. In the past year, I’ve become a huge Austen fan, but Sense and Sensibility isn’t her best book: it’s romantic, clever and full of her usual understated wisdom, but its wit is so relentless – and so caustic – that at times the tone borders on smug superiority, and the pacing of the story is far less assured than in works like Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion.

Here, though, thanks to Thompson’s intelligent and exhaustive approach, its flaws becomes virtues: the flabbiness of the book allows her to slice away without losing much of real value (Willoughby’s fantastic monologue bites the dust, but its job is done by a line from Edward and a magnificent shot near the end), and her inventions both comic and dramatic succeed in matching the tone of what remains, ramping up the emotional resonance, retaining the dryness of the humour, and occasionally allowing the more caricatured comic elements passages of free rein, with hilarious bit-parts for Hugh Laurie (as the immortal Mr Palmer) and Imelda Staunton.

The cast is just about perfect: a who’s who of contemporary British talent, with Thompson giving arguably her finest performance, Winslet nailing Marianne’s combustible, impulsive nature – and eventual maturity – Hugh Grant displaying his astonishing comic timing (I’ll say it again – he’s a light comedian to match Cary Grant or Bill Powell) and Greg Wise rocking the cape, pointy sideburns and pouty, feckless caddishness you dream of when you read Austen’s words. Alan Rickman isn’t given a huge amount to work with as Colonel Brandon, but creates a handful of truly glorious moments, usually standing in doorways. And Imogen Stubbs? In the nicest possible way: what a bitch.

As I sat down to watch the film for the first time in almost 15 years, it took me a little while to settle into it. The opening scene seemed like a Comic Relief sketch, the villainess was played too broadly by Harriet Walter, and as the minutes rolled on, the film seemed oddly and unfortunately aloof. But with the arrival of Grant, it all clicks, then begins to build in resonance, before a succession of elegant emotional gut-punches to rival anything in director Ang Lee’s diverse and wonderful career. And it ends in the only way you’d ever want to, with Thompson playing the ending for both pathos and laughs, as she dissolves in wracking sobs. “Are you going to do that all the way through my speech?” asked Grant crossly on the set. “Yes,” Thompson replied. “It’s funny.” (4)

***



"The calla lilies are in bloom again..."
CINEMA: Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937) - I could only stretch to one movie in the BFI's current (and long overdue) Kate Hepburn season, so I plumped for this one, a long-time personal favourite.

It's a crackling feminist masterpiece that passes the Bechdel Test 90 times a minute, as a flawless ensemble cast trades blistering, bitchy, pitch-black wisecracks while hanging out in a theatrical boarding house for women.

Based on a Broadway melodrama by Edna Ferber and George Kaufman, in which the stage and screen battled for the souls of young actresses, La Cava and his writers chucked out everything except the character names and a couple of plot points, and devoted two weeks to improv-heavy rehearsal, creating in the process one of the fastest, funniest films of the 1930s, as well as the one that has the most profound emotional impact on me. Floods of tears. Floods.

Hepburn is Terry Randall, the well-off wannabe who turns up at the Footlights Club, hoping to turn her hand to acting. There she finds a multitude of cynical young women - among them Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball and a 13-year-old Ann Miller - hardened by Depression-era knockbacks and offended by her easy, affluent manner. The Footlights is also home to Kay Hamilton (Andrea Leeds), a painfully sensitive soul who a year ago was the next big thing.

A movie about a "different race of people" - actresses resistant to failure and oblivious to the charms of prospective family - it sees both Hepburn and Rogers in career-best form as the sparring, none-more-different roomies, and fosters a unique atmosphere, building to a genuinely gobsmacking climax that spotlights its stars to stunning effect, reaching an emotional apogee unparalleled in its era, and - to me at least - in cinema at large. (4)

***



"Whaddaya hear, whaddaya say?"
Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938) - One of the truly great films: a fusion of gangster picture and message movie, as career criminal Rocky Sullivan (Jimmy Cagney) returns to his old neighbourhood, where he reunites with his childhood pal - now a priest (Pat O'Brien) - and becomes an immoral mentor to a gaggle of impressionable adolescents.

The immortal Cagney is in the form of his life here, drawing on characters from his own, impoverished youth to create one of the indelible characterisations of '30s cinema. O'Brien too gives by far the best performance of his patchier career, exuding a Spencer Tracy-like essence of quiet authority that, coupled with intelligent writing, makes his character's speechifying immensely affecting, rather than patronising or heavyhanded.

For though Angels does present Sullivan as a sympathetic character - one to admire in some ways, and pity in others - it also shows the consequences of its hero's actions in a more explicit and far-reaching manner than any earlier crime classics attempted to; this is Warner holding its former glorification of gangsterism to account, without an ounce of the sanctimoniousness that sunk less assured productions.

The film is frankly littered with unforgettable sequences, from the gutting prologue to Cagney's reunion with O'Brien and his first meeting with the Dead End Kids, and if their cartoonish antics grate - and serve to stall the film's momentum - there's such greatness in the script, Curtiz's stylish, magnificent direction and the chemistry between Cagney and O'Brien, that you can forgive it almost anything. There's also iconic imagery to spare - not least in a shootout sequence strewn with sweat, bullets and exploding tear gas canisters - and an important early showcase for Ann Sheridan, as a bruised widow drawn to Rocky despite her better judgement.

It all leads, fatalistically, to a denouement forever etched on the mind of anyone who's seen it: an ambiguous climax that still engenders fierce debate, intense emotion and a sense of awe at the sheer artistry involved, whilst offering a treatise on redemption and making an enduringly relevant, humane argument about the manner in which criminals are created.

Yes of course Leo Gorcey is really irritating, but in this case that's honestly OK. (4)

***



Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961) - Sam Fuller's gloomy gangster tale deals with lowlife crook Cliff Robertson, who tangles with crime kingpins as he seeks to avenge his father's death. As with all of Fuller's films, it starts brilliantly - conjuring an atmosphere not experienced on screen since Warner's '30s crime wave - but sadly this one rather loses its way, due to a B-grade script and cast, despite a clutch of spectacular sequences in the director's familiar, sensational style.

On a personal note, I just upgraded from the secondhand TV I got in 2007 to a sleek Samsung widescreen thingymabob, so when Fuller was on form, it looked utterly delicious. (2.5)

***



The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986) - Earlier this month, I went to see Ennio Morricone in concert. Among the innumerable delights of the evening – which included bumping into Elizabeth McGovern mere minutes after hearing her Once Upon a Time in America theme song – was the performance of three numbers from The Mission, the 1986 film that boasts an erratic reputation but a devoted and sizeable following. As a huge Morricone fan, I've listened to the soundtrack many times over the years, but I'd never actually seen the movie, so I thought I better remedy that.

Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Robert Bolt (who went to my school, *high five*), it turned out to be an extremely slow, ponderous Aguirre/Fitzcarraldo hybrid (not *high five*), based on a true story, about a Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons), who takes a lushly-bearded former mercenary (Robert DeNiro) under his wing, whilst running a remote South American mission. As the church moves to close the progressive outpost, violence returns to the jungle and DeNiro reverts to type in the defence of his adopted home. What could be beguiling and fatalistic is instead portentous and remarkably dull, as Bolt alternates between profundity when considering personal duty and the battle between church and state – subjects he dealt with in his legendary work, A Man for All Seasons – and complete ineptitude when trying to write anything else, including small talk. There’s also the issue of De Niro’s changeable accent, which moves between New York and generic “foreign”, the absence of insight offered into these pale characters, and a climax that manages to be completely underwhelming despite featuring fiery bows and arrows that you shoot with your feet, and Liam Neeson in a canoe chase.

There are utterly wondrous things about the film – De Niro’s facial acting, Chris Menges’ breathtaking cinematography and one of the finest scores ever composed – but they’re in the service of a script that manages to take a potentially fascinating story and bore you half to death. (2.5)

***



The Time Traveler's Wife (Robert Schwentke, 2009) - This glossy adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s staggeringly popular 2003 sci-fi romance takes a couple of ludicrous liberties and botches the central relationship, but has a handful of hugely persuasive moments all the same.

It tells the cyclical, ingeniously-conceived story of time-traveller Henry (Eric Banana) and the titular character, Clare (Rachel McAdams). She meets him for the first time when she is six and he is 38; he meets her for the first time when he is 28 and she is 20. And, as in the book, they fall in love, quarrel, search for a cure and try to conceive (cue the most unrealistic fake tummy of all time: it looks like a papier mache-covered balloon, then coloured in with a felt tip).

In a way, you’d think that film would be the ideal medium for a novel that had a great premise and some moments of real visceral, emotional impact, but a rather weak writing style, its clunky copy peppered with tedious detail about meals and outfits. Apparently not. One issue is that the meticulous plotting had to inevitably be picked apart in order to fit a 528-page book into 107 minutes, another is that the film opts for soft focus romanticism instead of kicks to the guts (even the way Henry disappears: gradually ebbing away rather than being dragged into another time-frame, arriving in a sea of vomit, is soft-pedalled), and a third is that the central relationship just doesn’t work.

I’m not one of those who fell head over heels for these characters, but they had a certain something on the page. Not here. The presentation is pure patronising chick flick, the leads are completely miscast (with McAdams lacking in any perceptible dynamism and missing Clare’s defining characteristic, red-blonde hair, while Bana rarely looks interested), and the script does a frankly risible job of articulating the depth of feeling between the pair that Niffenegger, for all her linguistic failings, gets dead-on. The writers’ lack of understanding about why the book works is evidenced by two idiotic inventions: in the first, McAdams essentially rails at Bana for grooming her as a child, in the second, the film manages to incinerate the novel’s famous coda, replacing it with a running-through-the-fields bit of faux-tearjerking nonsense that has no place in cinema at all, let alone in this film.

Where the movie does score, oddly enough, is in its articulation of the relationship between Bana and his mother (Michelle Nolden), who share one extremely touching scene that doesn’t appear in the novel, and in the sequences featuring Alba (no spoilers), which are often very moving. Sometimes it pushes too far, but mostly it works; ironically, the film even managed to make me cry – a feat the book didn’t approach. It’s a shame that those moments shine out like rare jewels in a wasteland. A glossy wasteland made of chick flick. (2)

***


Aled Jones and his bird.

Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951) - The Bicycle Thieves' silly little brother, incorporating a three-minute tongue-in-cheek remake of that earlier masterpiece, an endless parade of L'Âge d'Or-apeing surrealistic gags and almost no story.

There are a few laughs at the beginning, but it gets very old very quickly, its trivial, one-dimensional approach and gimmicky fantasy sequences failing to successfully spear any of its apparent targets, from supercilious capitalists to traitorous proles.

If there's a point to any of it, then I'm afraid it rather escaped me. (2)

***

Thanks for reading.

Ten things I learned about Sense and Sensibility

Yesterday I went to a screening of Sense and Sensibility, Emma Thompson and Ang Lee's peerless adaptation of the Austen novel. It was part of the Tricycle Theatre's ongoing British Screen Classics programme, curated by Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton, and came with a post-film Q&A featuring Thompson and her co-stars Greg Wise and Alan Rickman. The highlight was probably Mrs Rick telling Alan Rickman that she had learned to raise one eyebrow after watching him as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (and getting a round of applause for her troubles), but I also learned 10 (exactly 10!) things about the production. Which is great, because that means it fits into my occasional 'Ten things I learned...' series. A review of the film will follow - the movie's a stone-cold masterpiece - but first, here are the revelations:

1. Emma Thompson spent five years working on the script. She was encouraged by producer Lindsay Doran, who had enjoyed a sketch that Thompson had written about a man whose genitals were a small creature, and suggested that the logical progression was to adapt Sense and Sensibility.

2. She began the process by scripting the entire book, then chucked out anything that didn’t work. She tried countless times to perfect the scene in which Willoughby justifies his past actions – after turning up unexpectedly at Barton Cottage – but felt that it just didn’t work, clashing unreconcilably with the final shot of the character. An American member of the Jane Austen Society told Thompson that she couldn’t wait to see how she brought Anne to the screen; when she found out that the character had been excised entirely, she immediately walked off.


That scene.

3. The near-legendary scene in which Marianne (Kate Winslet) walks to Willoughby’s house in the rain – which doesn’t appear in Austen’s novel – was added at an early stage. “That just seemed obvious to me. What would be more natural than going to the place where your lover is and just repeating his name? That’s what love is.” (This was from my question, as it's one of the movie's great moments and I wanted to know when she conceived it and whether the finished article matched what she had imagined when writing it.)

4. She knew that Ang Lee was the right director when she realised that the line: “What do you know of my heart?”, spoken by her Marianne, also appears in Eat Drink Man Woman, his 1994 Taiwanese film.

5. Thompson’s abiding memory of the shoot is “trying not to get found out”, as she was engaging in a passionate affair with Wise, now her husband. “Ang would say to me every morning: ‘You look tired, a heavy night?’ and I was thinking, ‘You have no idea’. Then he'd say: 'Let's pull the camera back.'"

6. Her favourite scene is the first meeting between Elinor, Edward, Lucy and Marianne, in which none of them can say what they really mean.

7. Ang Lee’s direction included (to Winslet, on the first day): “Don’t worry, you’ll improve”; (to Thompson): “Be less old” and (to Alan Rickman) “Be subtler. Do more”, which apparently meant: “Do more subtlety”. The director was troubled by the absence of his wife during shooting. On one day, Thompson found him sitting on a chair in the middle of a field, holding his head. “Tide go in, tide go out,” he lamented, “but still no sex.”


Superman.

8. Greg Wise gave the costume designers clear directions regarding his first appearance in the film. “It has to be like Superman appearing,” he said. They obligingly gave him a cape. “He does have to be a superhero, because he’s this mythic figure,” he says today. “And he is mythic, in that he doesn’t exist. He’s a creation of Marianne’s.” That’s the actor’s favourite scene; Alan Rickman is fondest of the sequence in which his Colonel Brandon gets to gallop away at speed. “It must be something about men and horses.” (Rickman said his biggest challenge was playing "a thoroughly good person", as he likes to alight upon a character's imperfections, but feigned outrage at the idea that this wasn't his usual type, exclaiming that Snape "was a hero".)

9. The reason Kate Winslet is screaming hysterically in the sequence where she gets a high-octane buggy ride, is because Wise had accidentally taken the previous corner on just two wheels.

10. Hugh Grant complained about the climactic sequence in which Thompson weeps constantly during his confession of love, asking her: “Are you going to do that all the way through my speech?” “Yes,” she replied. “It’s funny.”

***



Thanks for reading.

Crouching Tiger, Thora Birch in a hole, and still more from ClintFest '13 - Reviews #152

I watched a few movies over the Easter break. Now I'm going to tell you about them.

A couple of rewatches:



Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) - I hadn't seen Ang Lee's metaphysical, phantasmagorical epic kung fu love story since it blew me away at the cinema as a 16-year-old; remiss of me, I know. Twelve years on, and fuck me it looks good. Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh play quiet, lovelorn warriors, kept apart by a shared sense of honour, whose tentative steps towards romance are interrupted most abruptly by highly-strung, arse-kicking governor's daughter Zhang Ziyi, and the high-pitched psychopath she calls master.

The script is blessed with a rare profundity, dealing with massive themes in a way that's elliptical yet grounded, and the methodically paced story - which includes a ludicrously ambitious half-hour flashback sequence dealing with Ziyi's formative romance - is offset by exuberant fights of fancy in which Yun-Fat or Yeoh zip skywards to pad speedily across rooftops in pursuit of the excitable, foul-mouthed little tyke, trading kicks and punches with her as they go. There are also more earthy - though no less remarkable - skirmishes that take place at ground level, including fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping's nod to his own work in The Matrix, as Ziyi firmly grasps her stolen sword, the Green Destiny, and Yeoh goes at her with everything she can find: a lance, a pole, a big ball on a stick (sorry to get all technical on you) and finally a dock-off sword of her own.

These fight scenes attain a breathless intensity, especially when the remarkable Yeoh is involved, fuelled by a pounding traditional score and their timeless context: if you feel inexorably tied to these characters, weighed down as they are by these emotions, then it matters more when they're fighting for their lives. There's also something truly fantastical about that first action sequence, as if Jet Li had suddenly turned up in A Short Film About Killing: 20 minutes of steady, timeless talkiness and then an explosion of wonder, as Ziyi's masked thief heads for the clouds. Having said all that, Crouching Tiger didn't reinvent screen action in the way that prissy critics claimed back in 2000. They'd just been too sniffy to watch a wired-up wuxia film - like Once Upon a Time in China or Iron Monkey - until the director of The Ice Storm deigned to make one.

What Lee does bring to the genre, though, is a serious-mindedness and a firm grasp of mythology that's too often missing from kung fu films. When the film wants to be funny, it is (well, apart from that completely incongruous gag in the middle of the frenzied Yeoh-Ziyi HQ battle), but it has little of the mugging and none of the weak comic interludes that drag down too many martial arts movies. Its characters are remarkable, their thoughts concerned with lofty ideals, but they are also recognisable human beings, played to a tee by proper actors.

When you cast Chow Yun-Fat in a kung fu film, you forego a certain skill and athleticism (I think he's doubled in some long shots exhibiting Li Bu Mai's technical prowess), but gain immeasurable weight and authority. Ziyi is a trained dancer, not a martial artist, but she has an acrobatic grace, and negotiates her character's dramatic complexities with admirable skill. And Yeoh, well, she's both a great actress and the definitive female action star of the last couple of decades, so she's alright. I've always held that Armando Ianucci was correct, and that a man has truly reached adulthood when he knows what a radiator bleed key is. Perhaps, though, it's the moment when he watches this film and thinks that while Zhang Ziyi's not bad looking, she's no Michelle Yeoh. (Last time, it was: "Wowsers, that Zhang Ziyi is gorgeous; who's that old woman?") In support, Chang Chen is good as "Dark Cloud", the bum-fluffed desert bandit who engages in a Bringing Up Baby/Ashes of Time hybrid of a burgeoning love story with Ziyi that fuses the battle-of-the-sexes, period romance and "I've-got-your-comb"/"Fuck off, give it back" genres.

Crouching Tiger is one of the great films of last decade, often claustrophobic in scale, but epic in its treatment of human emotion, and chock-full of magic, magnificence and good old-fashioned fucking mayhem. It looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful - hell, it is beautiful - and where it's going, we don't needs roads, or even floors. Goodness knows how it took me 12 years to rewatch it. See you in 2025, when I'll probably think Jade Fox is hotter than Michelle Yeoh and be begging her to stick her poisoned dart in me. (4)

***



Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012) - A film so great that even Chris Tucker is good in it. I loved Silver Linings to pieces when I saw it at the cinema - entranced by its originality, performances and rich sense of character - and it's even better second time around. I wondered if there might be padding somewhere, but there isn't: every scene serves the story and that dramatic spark lit in the opening scene never fades. Bipolar Bradley Cooper is released from a psychiatric hospital eight months after almost beating someone to death, and tries to get his life back on track, looking to overcome his illness by finding "silver linings" in the everyday. Meeting self-confessed "slut", Jennifer Lawrence, the two strike up a bargain: she'll get a letter to his estranged wife (thus sort-of-circumventing a restraining order), if he'll be her partner in a dance contest.

For all the praise heaped on Lawrence, an actress of almost supernatural talent, I think she was lucky to get the Oscar ahead of Wallis - I suspect it has something to do with the old "I fancy her" criterion. She's excellent, but not Hushpuppy-excellent, and really it's Cooper's film. He dominates the movie with a complex, layered and ultimately unforgettable characterisation that does everything you want it to, and then some, never crossing into melodrama or cliche; always ringing true. There aren't many such revelations in cinema: where apparently limited, one-note performers suddenly rip off the lid, and out pours this explosion of talent - Ben Stiller in Tenenbaums and Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love are other rare examples - and so when it happens, it's invigorating to witness.

The supporting cast is also superb. De Niro is better than he has been in years and Jacki Weaver (looking a lot like Brigitte Mira) gives a superb performance as Cooper's mum - it's nice to see the Academy nominate such an unshowy performance - while Tucker, appearing as a nervy patient who's obsessed with a) The law, and b) His hair, confounds all those who thought he was a load of old rubbish. Like me. I suppose I better add him to that "revelations" list. Tentatively.

Silver Linings is a bold film and a brilliant one, expertly walking a tightrope, as it neither mythologises mental illness nor mines it for cheap humour. Yes, the gnawing unhappiness of Melancholia may be more akin to most people's experiences of depression (not the bit where the world ends or where she shags someone on a golf course, the other bit), but I find Silver Linings an inspirational and captivating film: funny, romantic and blissfully entertaining, yes, but with a point and a purpose that makes it truly great. That and the fact that Chris Tucker is good in it. (4)

***

ClintFest '13

Yeah, this is still going on. You can join in if you want. You just have to watch some Clint Eastwood films. That's it.



Two Mules for Sister Sara (Don Siegel, 1970) - A mercenary (Clint Eastwood) and a sweary, resourceful nun (Shirley MacLaine) - who he rather fancies - try to outwit lowlifes, Indians and the French, and so make his fortune, in this Mexican-set Western. The episodic story, by B-Western legend Budd Boetticher, is good but erratic, and the same goes for Ennio Morricone's score (which includes an earworm of a theme for MacLaine) and Siegel's direction - a sumptuous tracking shot one minute, a clumsy, uninteresting composition the next. It's good fun, though, with some nice moments of pathos and comedy, and excellent chemistry between the leads. Eastwood is excellent, gradually expanding his familiar, taciturn persona with flashes of vulnerability and even a nice little song, but MacLaine is even better, and I mean Apartment-good, tackling her character's intentional contradictions, and very real faith, with intelligence, imagination and great beauty of spirit. (3)



Tightrope (Clint Eastwood, 1984) - There's a sign on a nightclub door in this film that says: "If nudity offends you, don't come in", and it's good advice, what with all the clothesless women slinking around, getting into jacuzzis or oiling themselves up and wrestling on stage as a midget referee adjudicates and Clint watches. (Yes really.) He plays a cop, divorced and with two young kids, who's trying to track down a sex murderer, while accidentally getting really horny every time he has to go and interview anyone. All that changes when he strikes up a genuinely affecting friendship with tender, understanding anti-rape activist Genevieve Bujold. This creepy thriller is tawdry, sordid and often just plain old horrible, but it's also very well-acted - particularly by Eastwood and his real-life daughter Alison - features a distinctive jazzy score and offers some interesting insights into love, lust and "the darkness inside all of us". Like Sudden Impact, it shows that the mid-'80s Clint just couldn't keep away from fairground equipment at night. And like so many of the star's later movies, it studies and subverts the prejudices rife in his earlier work - in this case the way that films like Coogan's Bluff and High Plains Drifter took rape so alarmingly lightly. (2.5)

***

Other stuff:



Police Story 3: Supercop (Stanley Tong, 1992) - Hong Kong "supercop" Kevin Chan (Jackie Chan), who as you'll know alternates incredible feats of derring-do with getting whacked in the balls, takes on his most OTT assignment yet, battling drug traffickers with the help of high-kicking Chinese military official Michelle Yeoh. They go deep undercover, getting involved in a prison break and a hilariously excessive jungle shoot-out, and the result is one of the most purely enjoyable actioners of the '90s. In its shortened US cut (which contains incongruous hip-hop and dubbing, though at least the stars do their own voices), the film consists of a string of astonishing action set pieces, held together by the merest suggestion of plot, and interrupted only occasionally by some surprisingly bearable comedy. Jackie is great, being swung across the city by a helicopter at the climax - only to end up atop a moving train, like his hero Buster Keaton - but Yeoh completely steals the show, offering a series of staggering stunts and fight scenes. Like Jackie at the start of the original Police Story, she latches onto a lorry and refuses to be budged, but that's only the start of it: there are artful leaps through windows (another Keaton speciality), split-kicks at head height, and a gobsmacking piece of daredevilry near the close, as she lands a motorbike on that speeding train. I'm keen to see the authentic HK version of the movie, but this isn't bad for now: a popcorn movie of the highest order, and perhaps the only time Jackie's been bested on screen since he stopped working with Yuen Biao. (3.5)

***



The Hole (Nick Hamm, 2001) - Wooden teenagers play out Rashomon very badly in this risible horror-thriller, which is clunky and embarrassing in that special way that only British films can be. Thora Birch - speaking in a very Aussie "English" accent - emerges from a disused bunker covered in blood. She'd climbed in to try to snare the emo of her dreams, but her three companions - rounded out by long-headed rugger player Laurence Fox and the 16-year-old Keira Knightley, flashing her tits for no discernible reason - had put their lives in danger to avoid a geography field trip. What an extremely credible set-up; now let's find out who's telling the truth about what went on down there: Birch or a potentially malevolent nerd who sounds like Tony Blair. Birch - who gave such an extraordinary performance the same year in the decade's best film, Ghost World - is quite good, and there's a well sexy scene where a green-faced Knightley vomits profusely into a toilet, but The Hole is a thin, unrewarding and ultimately pointless exercise entirely lacking in thrills, scares and, in its second half, anything even resembling real human emotion. (1.5)

***


Oh look, it's the back of Olivier Gourmet's head again.

The Son (Dardenne brothers, 2002) - A fastidious, haunted carpenter (Olivier Gourmet), who helps young offenders, takes on his son's murderer as an apprentice in this draining, often stunning drama from the Dardenne brothers. That fascinating premise is given mature and unsentimental treatment that compares favourably with the similar In the Bedroom. While, in my limited experience, the Dardennes' films tend to end with a fraught confrontation in a wood, followed by a brief, understated moment of catharsis, it's never quite clear where this story is heading or what the protagonist's plans are - if indeed he knows. Their movies are so richly realistic as to sometimes appear humdrum, providing a meticulous presentation of everyday monotony. And here some of the photography choices are downright peculiar: I've certainly never been better-acquainted with the back of an actor's head. But they clearly believe that you can only understand a character by understanding their way of life and the rhythms within it, and that you can only observe such things properly by literally following them around.

They also clearly feel a great affinity with young offenders, unusual in today's world, repeatedly portraying them as victims of society, so it's interesting to see the story told from their victims' side. My only complaint is that the film, while startlingly original and beautifully acted, is ultimately too restrained for its own good - certainly its selfish, unrepentant teenager is harder to side with than Rosetta or The Kid with a Bike. The decision to have him lament only the time he spent behind bars is a curious one that fatally undercuts the denouement. There's a feeling that this should have been a truly great film, whereas it's only a very good one. Actually, that's not my only complaint. The idea that a table football champion would play without keeping one hand on the goalie is ridiculous. What do they take us for, idiots? (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.