Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Anton Sirius continuing kick-ass coverage of Toronto. Of the plethora of reviews below, I have to say I'm most happy about his ROMANCE & CIGARETTES review. The last one I posted wasn't too positive, which made me sad since this is one of my most anticapted movie of the year, however Mr. Sirius gives us a thumbs up, a very big thumbs up if you're a Walken fetishist like me! Enjoy the reviews!
Yesterday was one of those completely schizophrenic festival days I usually love. First off: I'll be interviewing Sammo Hung towards the end of the fest, so if you've got any questions for him post 'em in a TB or shoot me an email.
I also popped in on a luncheon celebrating the launch of Norman Jewison's new book, This Terrible Business Has Been Good To Me. He's such a sweetheart of a man - I'm glad I got a chance to shake his hand and say thank you. I haven't had time to do much more than flip through it, but when you open to a random page and find him chatting with Bobby Kennedy about how important In the Heat of the Night is gonna be (this before Jewison had even landed the job)... well, I suspect it'll have more than its share of great stories.
And then I go out and have one of my worst film days ever. The specific reviews are coming later, but it was like my instincts had gotten cross-wired - everything I thought had the potential to be a hidden gem, uhh, wasn't.
And THEN I get to wake up and hear about Robert Wise. To quote Slim Pickens, I am depressed.
A History of Violence (2005, directed by David Cronenberg)
There are two distinct types of Cronenberg films -- the ones in which a character or world's sickness is expressed externally (Videodrome, the Fly, Naked Lunch etc.), and the ones in which that sickness is locked inside, without Cronenberg's signature visuals to set them free (the Dead Zone, for instance.) Occasionally the two will intersect (most effectively in Dead Ringers, but also to an extent in Crash) but with his last two movies, it really felt like he was putting that first type of Cronenberg film behind him. eXistenZ at times bordered on gleeful self-parody, while the Cronenberg of the '80s might have used something far stranger than string to build those webs in Spider.
If A History of Violence is any indication of where Croneberg is going from here, I don't think anyone will miss that first type of film-making at all.
The film opens with menace - two Bad Men on a crime spree, preparing to move on to the next backwater town. It then jumps to a scene that's almost ludicrously saccharine - a little blonde moppet of a girl wakes up from a nightmare, worried that there are monsters in her room. First her father (Viggo Mortsensen), then her teenage brother, come in to comfort her with earnest platitudes and cliches. Last her mother (Maria Bello) joins the impromptu hug-in, her gentle, loving sarcasm providing the only hint of depth to the emotions being expressed n such a stilted fashion. You half expect to see Norman Rockwell in the corner of the room doing some preliminary sketches, the scene is so jarringly cornball.
Two scenes into the movie, and Cronenberg has already placed a seething ball of dread in your stomach... damn, the man is good.
From there A History of Violence proceedes towards a seemingly inevitable confrontation. Life in the Stall family's small town appears to be everything life in a small American town should be. Dad Tom (Viggo) runs a diner and greets everyone by first name. Son Jack gets bullied at school because he's smart and unathletic. Mom Edie finds the kids a babysitter and surprises Tom with her old cheerleading outfit. It all seems to be exactly what it seems to be... and yet, it feels wrong.
Then the Bad Men show up, and Cronenberg flips everything on its head. You see, there are Ban Men, and then there are BAD MEN. And Tom is one of the latter.
Y'know, this is going to be considered a 'spoiler'-type movie by a lot of people, but it isn't in the least. Once Tom's forced into action and his face gets on the news, and long before the roaches start crawling out of the woodwork of his past, his identity is never in any doubt. It's written so clearly in his body language and in his eyes that this is a man with a history, something terrible he wishes he could escape or unwrite, that Ed Harris calling him by his old name is almost redundant, just someone slipping off an innocuous dust jacket to reveal the book that's actually underneath. Tom/Joey's past is tangible, haunting every frame of film right up until the moment it ceases to be his past and becomes his present.
One of the great strengths of this movie is the performances. Viggo's got a lot of his plate here, playing a character almost constantly at war with himself, and he nails it. There's no stupid tricks, where he changes his hairstyle or something when he goes back to being Joey. It's all done with the set of his shoulders, and his walk, and the look in his eyes, and it's chilling. Bello is the perfect foil for him, a smart confident woman who thought she was the strong one in the relationship. Her reactions to having her world ripped out from under her feet feel completely true. And the sex scenes between the two of them... whoa. Expect to have your heart rate at least doubled watching them, and guys? Don't plan on standing up or anything right afterwards.
(Speaking on which... at the end of one of those sex scenes, Cronenberg throws in the most political two seconds of his entire career. Not that the MPAA is a tough target, mind you, but it's still a tremendously brazen 'fuck you' directed at their institutionalized hypocrisy. I applaud you, sir!)
The other outstanding performance comes from Ashton Holmes as Jack. He's got almost as much going on under the surface as his father does, and provides an excellent counter-point to Viggo's walking time bomb act during the middle portions of the film. Here's another kid with chops - there seem to be a lot of those this year.
Above all though, this is Cronenberg's show. He's constructed a masterfully evil film here, one as riveting as it is unclassifiable. As with the Proposition, there's no showy action movie-style ass-kicking here. Violence is a sudden, horrific, brutal thing in Cronenberg's hands, and its echoes can reverberate for a lifetime.
A History of Violence is a masterwork from a master director, that can be read on any number of levels. (One could, for instance, construct a powerful argument that the film is a metaphorical illustration of the intelligence community's principle of "blowback".) Well worth seeing, and as soon as possible.
Romance and Cigarettes (2005, directed by John Turturro)
Walken does Tom Jones' Delilah.
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What, you need more? Are you kidding me? Those five minutes are worth festival priced tickets on their own (forget the rest of the awesomely, sweetly silly film around them) and easily landed this thing in my fest top ten if not higher. Let me repeat myself: WALKEN DOES DELILAH. Sings along with Tom. Acts out the song in a crazy musical fantasy sequence (one of many throughout the film - Romance and Cigarettes is, in its own deeply demented way, a musical), then after stabbing his lover at the door does a dance down the steps that can only be described as Walkenesque, before doing a Busby Berkeley style bit with the cops.
I mean, the rest of the movie is fantastic too. Everybody gets their moments to shine, from James Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon as the fractured couple at the film's heart to Aida Turturro (oh man, her "statement of feelings" speech slayed the entire crowd at the Elgin), Mandy Moore and Mary-Louise Parker as their daughters, to Steve Buscemi as Gandolfini's best friend (holy Christ, the hospital scene between him, Gandolfini and solid gold Broadway vet Elaine Stritch as Gandolfini's mother was a clinic in comic timing) to especially, especially, incredibly Kate Winslet as the world's sexiest, crudest bint.
You know, forget the Walken thing. Go see this film for Winslet. Her performance is so... I mean on the one hand it's so ridiculously over-the-top (the scene where she eats fried chicken in bed is going to be burned in everyone's heads forever) and yet she makes this completely fabulous character seem so completely natural that it's a work of sheer genius on her part. Regardless of what happens in February Winslet, here, gave the best performance by a supporting actress of 2005. It isn't even going to be close. And of course it won't get recognized because the movie is a crazy comedy/musical/love poem to New York, and the Academy never recognizes comedy performances unless they let an old man misread the teleprompter. God the Oscars suck.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Winslet. No, wait, on third thought go see it for the musical numbers. The film isn't afraid to let the actors sing themselves (whether they can sing all that well or not), but gives them all the help they need to sell the song, whether it be in the form of dancing garbagemen or a big church choir, as when Sarandon tackles Janis Joplin. The musical sequences are glorious, and fully understand just how silly they are. This isn't an attempt to revive the musical; Romance and Cigarettes instead trades off people's nostalgia for musicals to make its point. Beyond the Sea, this ain't.
You know what? Just go see it. You can thank me later.
Why We Fight (2005, directed by Eugene Jarecki)
Here's a question for the peanut gallery: if the pro-Bushies (or "right wing", to use the quaintly obsolete term) are so correct in their worldview, why can't any of them make a decent documentary defending their position? Leave Michael Moore out of the equation for a moment; from Outfoxed to the Corporation, the last few years have seen plenty of shots taken (with varying degrees of accuracy, granted) at the Bush administration, its allies and the very underpinnings of its New American Century-derived philosophy. What have you got in the opposite column? A couple of amateurish hatchet jobs of Fahrenheit 9/11, and one glorification of Bush's post-9/11 "heroics" that would have made Stalin grimace at its clumsiness had it been about him.
Well, if you don't like the way those scales are tipping, don't worry - Why We Fight pretty much breaks them entirely. The film looks back at President Eisenhower's farewell address, the prophetic speech in which he gave the military-industrial complex its name, and skillfully examines the rise of the M-I complex both on the largest (the sweep of US foreign policy after WWII) and smallest (a retired NYPD sergeant who lost a son when the towers fell, or the pilots who dropped the opening salvos of round two of the Iraq War) levels. It also tries to come up with an answer to the question in the title, an answer which has grown far more complicated since Frank Capra's day.
Covering as it does US history since Eisenhower, the film gives every modern president a deserved smack, regardless of party. Each one, after all, found an excuse to use our might, found some little country somewhere worth invading or bombing or sending troops into for one reason or another. But the current administration, along the current situation in Washington, get dissected to the bone. Eisenhower's warning went unheeded, and as a result the US government has effectively been taken over by the unelected and unelectable. The cycle is now locked in: the war machine begets think tanks to justify its use; the think tanks beget politicans who tow their policy line; and the politicians beget the war machine through the ridiculous defense budget. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle et al are just the devolved bastard by-products of a process that has been churning for decades - removing them from power would simply be attacking the symptom, not the cause.
At its core, Why We Fight is not an "anti-This Guy" or "anti-That Party" doc. It's a terrifying clear portrait of a democracy in crisis, a democracy that is teetering on the brink of irrelevance, rot and collapse (which is pretty much the order Rome had them in too). It's also one of the best films of the year, doc or otherwise.
(Oh, and the answer to my question is that they don't need to bother, since they have other ways of preaching to their choir. It was more of a rhetorical device than anything.)
If it'll make you feel any better, you can now resume bashing Michael Moore. Me, I've got some thinking to do. Why We Fight doesn't seem to leave much room for hope, but these days I get my hope from south of the border anyway.
Banlieue 13 (2005, directed by Pierre Morel)
A reasonably entertaining trifle from Luc Besson's adrenalin factory, Banlieue 13 has exactly one thing going for it, the new "urban" "extreme" sport of parkour. The stunt work on display here is extraordinary, which makes sense when you realize that parkour basically involves people doing for fun what Jackie Chan does for a living.
Beyond the awesomely fun stunts and foot chases though, the fight scenes are fairly meh, and the rest of the film is distinguishable from Gymkata only by its production values. It does feature the quickest heroin withdrawl in film history, which I guess counts for something.
There's nothing really wrong with Banlieue 13. It just got made too late. A few years ago, it might have been considered revolutionary. In the wake of some of the other efforts from the Besson team that have come out recently, like the Transporter - much less Ong Bak! - Banlieue 13 just feels like it's playing catch-up, not blazing any trails.
Stoned (2005, directed by Stephen Woolley)
A tired retread of Performance with cliches replacing Nic Roeg's more interesting observations on human nature, Stoned attempts to recreate the final days of founding Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Despite getting the surface details more or less right, the film completely misses in almost every other respect, from its slavish devotion to the Rock Star Myth and British class stereotypes, to its total failure to portray Jones musically as anything more than a guy who happen to know both Mick and Keith before they became big. About the only thing that does work is Monet Mazur's performance as Anita Pallenburg (and not just because she's naked a lot), a woman inpressive enough to get both Jones and Richards to fall for her. But even that just unbalances the film further - while we have no trouble understanding what they would see in Anita, the only reason really offered in the film as to why she would be drawn to Jones is that he's famous and has a big cock.
Let me sum up the film thusly. When Jones goes off on his first acid trip, the song that kicks in on the soundtrack is... White Rabbit. You know, the only psychedelically-themed song ever recorded in the '60s.
White. Fucking. Rabbit.
Brian Jones deserves better.
