LATAURO @ MIFF #6: EDMOND, A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, SEVEN SWORDS
Given how quickly the first five MIFF reports came on the heels of the last one, there was a bit of a gap between five and six. I can attest that the hundreds of emails I got over the past week were quite insistent that I allow a banker on the Ivory Coast to put six million dollars in my account, which I presume was designed to make me write some more MIFF reviews.
This will be the penultimate report. Tonight (Sunday), MIFF comes to a close, which is fairly bittersweet. I'll miss the intensity and discovery of several new films per day, but it'll be nice to get back to the "sleep" thing I read about on Wikipedia. Oh, and there should have been a review of 13 (TZAMETI), but... well, read my most recent column for the story on how I missed it. Now that's cross-promotion!
LATAURO @ MIFF #1: THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED, RED, BUBBLE, MIDNIGHT MOVIES
LATAURO @ MIFF #2: TAKESHIS', AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE SUN, TIDELAND
LATAURO @ MIFF #3: SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS, THE WILD BLUE YONDER, SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE
LATAURO @ MIFF #4: FEARLESS, HUNT ANGELS, THE GREAT YOKAI WAR
LATAURO @ MIFF #5: REMAIN UPRIGHT!, FANTASMA, THE PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES, LUNACY, MARY
EDMOND
Mamet is the man. There's an otherworldliness to his writing; characters talk in a way that doesn't quite ring true, and yet that's what works about it. I'm not telling you anything you don't know; if you love your cool dialogue, you already love David Mamet's work.
EDMOND, adapted by Mamet from his own play, is directed by Stuart Gordon. Yes, Stuart "REANIMATOR" Gordon. I assumed that it would be a change of track, one of those "horror directors wants to try something new" deals, but I was wrong. Stuart Gordon's strength in REANIMATOR was taking things that shouldn't be funny and making them very funny. It's exactly the type of approach that EDMOND requires, and it's one of the best Mamet adaptations not directed by Mamet.
William H. Macy is a guy who gets fed up with his life. It's not clear exactly what pushes him over the edge, but he spontaneously decides to leave his wife and go out on the town. In what is probably the film's highlight, he winds up at a bar and chats with a stranger, played by Joe Mantegna. From there, he goes on a quest to get himself laid. Yes: this is David Mamet's middle-aged AMERICAN PIE.
As with all Mamet's work, it's an exploration of what it's like to be a middle class, emasculated white man... but that's underselling it. The big questions dealing with why Edmond is breaking out his life mold, how he chooses to do so, whether he's able to at all, all come at us with every decision he makes. Every line and every choice gives us a deeper insight into his character, and when the film comes to its unexpected and strangely satisfied ending, you're left trying to figure out if it's a happy ending or a sad ending. Twenty-four hours later, I still don't know.
The supporting cast is really impressive particularly Mantegna and Rebecca Pidgeon. The temptation is to make jokes about how Pidgeon keeps getting roles in her husband's films, but she's so damn good, I can't figure out why she's not in everything else. William H Macy is, as always, brilliant, and grounds the character in a way that few other actors could. It might not be what you're expecting, but it's a work of brilliance that you'll be glad you saw.
A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
This was my most blatant I-know-it's-getting-a-wide-release-but-I'm-going-anyway booking. It's a new Altman film, you don't mess around with that.
The film was introduced by its editor, Jacob Craycroft. There are some amazing editors out there, but you get extra respect for someone who has to edit the excessive and over-lapping footage that Altman shoots. Having heard a bit of Garrison Keillor's stuff when I was a kid, I was surprised at the direction they went with it. I guess I was expecting a few more fireside-like stories, and some references to Lake Wobegon. Instead, the film is told over the course of the final broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor's long-running radio programme. Acts include Dust and Lefty, two cowboys whose songs are almost unfit for radio play, the two remaining Johnson sisters, and Keillor himself, who spends most of his time working in bizarre product endorsements between songs. We're introduced to the programme by Guy Noir, head of security, who fancies himself as a Raymond Chandler-esque detective. Noir has discovered a strange woman in a trenchcoat wandering around the set, and spends most of the film trying to track her down.
This isn't going to come as a huge shock to anyone familiar with Altman's work, but the cast is brilliant. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as the Johnson sisters are probably the highlights of the film. Streep in particular seems to be getting even better with age, and turns out to have an amazing singing voice (given Streep tends to do anything for a role, you wonder if she's ever cast as someone who can fly if she'd go the whole hog and learn to). Kevin Kline is really, really funny as Noir, and Keillor himself proves to be a natural on-screen. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are hilarious as Lefty and Rusty, Virginia Madsen is perfectly mysterious as the trenchcoat-clad woman, and Lindsay Lohan is much better than I was admittedly expecting, fitting quite naturally into Altman's world.
It's everything I was hoping for; a minimalist narrative driving a two-hour character piece that was never short of entertaining. Personally, this will rank very high on my Altmanmetre. It doesn't quite match the dizzying heights of MASH or THE PLAYER, but it's easily the best thing he's made in over a decade.
SEVEN SWORDS
After the bar had been so highly set for martial arts films with FEARLESS, I was quite excited to see Tsui Hark's SEVEN SWORDS. I knew practically nothing about the film going in, although titular comparisons with SEVEN SAMURAI were inevitable.
The thing started well. Martial arts has been outlawed, and groups of vigilantes are being rewarded for bringing in the heads of those who are found to break this decree. One man attacks the vigilantes and manages to escape with nothing but a near-fatal wound, and he warns a neighbouring village. One of the villagers recognises the man as someone who once tortured him, and they decide to hang him without properly heeding his warnings. A young man and woman facilitate his escape, and he takes them to a mountain for some reasons. Then a bunch of meteors fall, I think a reel is skipped, and suddenly there are these magic guys with incredible swords running about the place.
I'm not kidding when I say I think a reel was missing. Either I missed something here, or we jump from one of main characters being buried alive, to her suddenly okay while these new magic guys stand around. It's a shame this happened, as it threw me way off the rest of the film. I will admit to having no real overall sense of where the film was going, so from this point on I was pretty much just enjoying the fight scenes.
And as far as fight scenes go, they're pretty good. There's a lot of imaginative stuff in here, and most fans of the genre are going to find a lot to enjoy here. It does go on a bit long, however, and there's a lot of really weird stuff that looks like it belongs in another film. I still want to know whether I nodded off for a moment or whether there was actually eight odd minutes of disappeared footage, but it'll be a mystery I can solve one day with the DVD.
On the whole, it's a pretty entertaining film and while it didn't reinvent the genre, there's more than enough in there to recommend giving it a shot.
Peace out,
Latauro
AICNDownunder@hotmail.com
