Hey folks, Harry here with Anton's Day 5 & 6 of the Toronto International Film Festival. His take on THE COOLER is radically different from most of the reviews I've seen that loved it. But hey... to each their own, ya know? I'm sort of morbidly looking forward to THE SINGING DETECTIVE, I honestly can't imagine they did the mini-series justice... that thing is ungodly brilliant in every facet. Anyway... here's Anton...
The stories coming of the Underworld screening Monday night are pretty grim (I wasn't there - nothing against the film, but I had to make an appearance at a few parties, and one thing led to another... you know how it goes). The Sony folks in attendance were apparently on paranoia overdrive, having visions of those unruly Midnight folks making 900 pirated copies of their precious film, so instead of discreetly using the technology everyone else does to spot active camcorders in the dark they made asses of themselves dashing around the aisles and harassing anyone committing the perfectly legal act of taping the introduction of the film's stars pre-screening.
Let me offer a word of advice to future studio folk who bring a film to Midnight Madness. A Midnight crowd is the world's best test audience; if the film is the least bit entertaining and fun you will have a packed house rocking and rolling, spreading some impressive word of mouth after the fact. If the film is as good as Ong-Bak this year, or Cabin Fever last year, they will blow the roof off.
On the other hand, if you treat them like criminal scum and piss them off before they even see your movie... well, every coin has two sides, and the other side of this one is pretty ugly. There is nothing so vicious as a geek scorned, Sony. Remember that next time.
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Bright Future (2003, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
A bit of a departure from Kurosawa's usual fare, Bright Future tells the story of Mamuro and Yuji, two factory workers who's malaise and barely controlled anger is matched only by the drab and degraded Tokyo in which they tenuously exist. When Mamuro in thrown into prison after slaughtering their boss' family, it's left to Yuji to tend his pet jellyfish, a rare poisonous ocean species. At Mamuro's urging, Yuji starts forcing the jellyfish to try and adapt to fresh water; meanwhile Yuji, left to his own devices on the outside, befriends both a gang of Che Guevara t-shirt wearing punks and Mamuro's estranged father.
Bright Future features all the weirdness Kurosawa is noted for - the image of a Tokyo river filled with red, luminous jellyfish, all escaping out to sea, is as unsettling and gorgeous as anything he's ever filmed - but instead of folding it into a nominally genre-constrained plot, he simply lets his characters loose. There are neither easy answers nor familiar footing in Bright Future, just a drab and conflicted present with moments of beauty peeking in at the corners.
If all you know of Kurosawa is films like Pulse or Cure, Bright Future might be a bit of a curveball, but it's a solid entry in his canon.
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Cheeky (2003, directed by David Thewlis)
The directorial debut from Thewlis, one of (in my own humble opinion) the five best actors working in the biz today, Cheeky is a goofy and touching romp through the aftermath of tragedy.
Harry's (Thewlis) wonderful life is shattered into a million pieces when his wife Nancy dies in a house fire. He completely shuts down, leaving their son lost inside his own grief and rage, until a letter arrives in the post - his wife, just before she died, had signed him up for a wacky game show called Cheeky that involving alternately beating your opponents at a trivia quiz and then besting them in an insult duel straight out of National Lampoon's Dune parody. The grief-stricken Harry excels at the former but just doesn't have the heart for the latter, especially when his main rival on the show happens to be named Nancy as well.
Cheeky is, well, a cheeky film - it dances from whimsical to gut-wrenching to hilarious on a whim, never going exactly where you expect it to. Thewlis, who also wrote the script, does a fantastic job juggling three jobs. The film drags a bit towards the middle, but otherwise his behind-the-camera work is top-notch, and his performance in the lead is of course superb. In fact all the acting is great in the film - Lesley Sharp and Ian Hart flash their considerable comic chops as Harry's sister and brother-in-law while Trudie Styler is perfectly cast as the game show hosebeast Nancy.
This is more than just an impressive debut from a new
filmmaker; it's an impressive film, period.
then Anton said...
This has been a horrible, horrible week for people passing on. Leni was ancient, of course, and her time had come, and Warren Zevon's death, while not unexpected, was still saddening; but John Ritter was a shock, and really none of those matter anyway because now Johnny Cash has left us.
At sometime in the next week I'll have to learn Sunday Morning Coming Down for karaoke. In the meantime I'll just listen to the man's incredible catalogue and his incredible voice, and thank every deity there is that I got a chance to see him live a few years ago. I - we - lost a personal hero this morning, and I'm not sure how many more we have left to lose.
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Singing Detective (2003, directed by Keith Gordon)
Dennis Potter's original Singing Detective mini-series (all his signature work, really, from Pennies from Heaven on up) is a television landmark - bold, bizarre and utterly unique, Potter's work mixed autobiography and fiction, tragedy and comedy, past and present, reality and imagination in surprising and endlessly entertaining ways. This adaptation of the Singing Detective - Potter's own transplant of his mini-series from England to America - features the same potent mix of elements.
Dan Dark, played to the hilt by Robert Downey Jr., is a novelist trapped inside the diseased husk of his own skin. Barely able to move and with no defense against the world except his vitriol, Dark lies in a hospital bed and hallucinates the plot of his novel the Singing Detective, with he himself as the gumshoe trying to solve the mystery. Of course, the mystery he's really trying to unravel is that of his own past.
In taking the story across the pond, Potter's script retains all his signature motifs - the lip-synched musical numbers, the fragile jumble of the main character's mental state etc. - but sets them in a slightly more misogynist version of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, embodied in the form of two nameless, purposeless hoods played by Adrien Brody and Jon Polito. Really, the whole cast does a top-notch job, from Downey and Mel Gibson on down to Katie Holmes. The story is still compelling, the conceits still carry the same emotional logic...
...and yet somehow the whole just doesn't take flight. Dark's noir hallucinations are just a little bit off, seeming to be from the brain of an outsider looking in, not from a native. (Of course Potter was an outsider, but Dark shouldn't be). Polito and Brody's quest for meaning likewise is just too precious, especially when they stumble into what appears to be the set for a production of Waiting for Godot. This is no knock against Potter, who earned his genius label, or Keith Gordon's direction (his lack of condescension at the end of the film is refreshing); rather it just seemed to me that beyond introducing a whole new audience to Potter's distinct oeuvre, there was just no reason to retell this story.
The Singing Detective is a very good film, and if you've never seen anything from Potter before it should be an eye-opener; it's just not a great film, and in that sense, does Potter no justice at all.
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The Cooler (2003, directed by Wayne Kramer)
What the hell Bill Macy was thinking is beyond me.
The Cooler really wants to be an elegy for old Vegas, a nostalgic last look at Sin City back when it stood for something, and wasn't just a slightly naughty family vacation spot. Instead the movie's a racist, sexist, misanthropic mess, a movie that spits upon every remotely great recent gambling flick, from Casino and Sydney/Hard Eight to even last year's the Good Thief.
Let's get rid of the good parts of the movie first. Maria Bello gives the best performance I've ever seen from her, which isn't saying much when the competition is Payback and Coyote Ugly. Adam Baldwin also deserves some note. Not that he's great - he isn't, as he goes so far over the top he flies around the planet just so he can lap the top - but the film is so close to parody anyway that in a slightly different film, Baldwin's performance would have been one of comedy genius. That's about it.
Now the bad. William H. Macy gives the *worst* performance I've ever seen from him. It's not his fault, really, as the dialogue is a hackneyed dung heap, and given some of the clunkers from the supporting cast (particularly Shawn Hatosy as his estranged son Mikey) it's pretty obvious he wasn't getting much help from the director, but a pro like Macy should still know better. He's practically mugging towards the end of the flick, for pity's sake. You get embarrassed for him just watching.
And that script... where do I start? The "those damn Jews are stealing Vegas from the Italians" subplot that wastes Ron Livingston's talents (I can't tell which is the bigger crime)? The terrible, terrible dialogue, best summed up by a Maria Bello line that to all appearances was supposed to carry an emotional punch: "I think I'm in love with you... no wait, I don't think - I'm pretty sure"? The fact that the film spends 90 minutes painting Baldwin's Shelley as the most loathsome example of humanity possible, then gives him a moment of redemption? News flash folks - you can't redeem a character who's kicked an apparently pregnant woman in the stomach. (Oh, did I mention that there's scene where an apparently pregnant woman gets kicked in the stomach?)
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Ju-on: The Grudge (2003, directed by Takashi Shimizu)
Based on a manga, and two direct-to-video films, Ju-on is a deadly simple little story. A house is cursed, and everyone who steps foot in it suffers a horrible fate. From that premise a surprisingly creepy little horror film emerges.
Ju-on is told in a series of vignettes that criss-cross through time. Each vignette highlights a specific person - who they are, how they ended up in the house (usually for the most mundane reasons) and what the tormented souls possessing the house (who hold a 'grudge' against the living, hence the title) do to them. These ghosts aren't trapped in the house either; they hunt down their prey no matter where they run. Once the curse is laid on someone, there is no escape.
Much like Ringu, Ju-on relies more on the creep factor than mind-melting special effects. The implacable and arbitrary nature of the evil being faced gets under your skin, and adds weight to the various dooms being visited upon the living.
Given that Sam Raimi is in Japan right now producing an English remake, with Shimiku directing, it's worth your while to check Ju-on out now. It's not quite on a par with Ringu or Uzumaki, for instance, but it's not far behind.
Anton Sirius
