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dir: Walter Salles
Just can't wait to not get on the road again
Unfilmable books make for interesting films.

On the Road has been on that list of “Great” American Novels like Tropic of Cancer, Catcher in the Rye, Pale Fire, The Sound and the Fury, a bunch of others, that people never thought could be adapted to the big screen.

But then you think of the flicks made from Naked Lunch and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or further afield to the flicks made from otherish books like Perfume or Cloud Atlas, and it makes it more the question of not “whether” but “how well”, as in, anything can be adapted, but not everything is adapted well, just like with any book.

Kerouac’s classic novel would always have made a good film, if the people involved knew what they were doing, and what they should avoid doing. The biggest problem it would have had is that even in a quality realisation, the flick would always (now) look just like every other road movie that’s ever come out in the last fifty years.

The majority of the flick isn’t, perhaps, on the actual road as the travellers travel down that road, but it certainly feels like it, and where it almost glows with purpose. Far more, comparatively, is spent watching these people smoke, drink and fuck in scummy apartments and dishevelled domiciles across the Americas as these people, these people, live their lives in the pursuit of life itself.

Sal Paradise (Sam Reilly) is, essentially, Jack Kerouac, the author of the novel of the film that bears its name, but the clever conceit the film uses in its adaptation of the book is that it’s not the ‘book’, per se. It’s like a depiction of the experiences, the impressions, the heady moments that eventually got Sal / Jack where he needed to get to in order to be able to write On the Road.

The recent death of his father leaves Sal at something of a loose end. He lives with his French-Canadian mother, working a sequence of shitty jobs, but he has the desire, the intention, the pretentions to aspire to write. Like many people who want to write but don’t know what to write about, he thrills at any opportunity to absorb what he can from fellow contemporaries. He has a somewhat unlikely friendship with a very exuberant gay poet called Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge) amongst a bunch of others, but essentially what this then connects him to is Dean, Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund).

In case you know something about the Beats, the Beat Generation, all those jerks, Carlo is Allen Ginsberg of Howl fame, and Dean is Neal Cassady of being Neal Cassady fame.

Dean’s the man, the absolute Man. Every woman wants to fuck him, and every man, including Sal, wants to be him. And in plenty of cases throughout the film, the men want to fuck him too.

dir: Phyllida Lloyd
Rawrr, this kittie's got claws
Damn, that Maggie, she was a bit of a saucy tyrant, eh? Sorry, that’s Baroness Thatcher to the likes of you and me, fellow bloody peasants.

It’s still a freaky occurrence that Maggie, or any woman for that matter, rose to power to lead the Tory party to successive victories at Britain’s polls, and was, for various reasons, one of the most powerful persons in the world, let alone powerful women. For various reasons, the leadership of Golda Meir, or Indira Ghandi or any other women who’ve risen to (elected) power is more explainable than Maggie’s seizure of the reins.

Those driving forces, personal and societal, will remain a sweet mystery for you, perhaps even becoming more mysterious for you, after having watched this flick, because it never comes close to giving us an inkling of how or why any of it happened.

That’s not entirely fair. Maggie, as portrayed here, is possessed of implacable ambition and an iron will. She’s also highly intelligent, and deeply committed to her father’s conservative views about the wonderfulness of hard-working middle-class people, and the worthlessness of the lower orders of society.

Scratch that, I just remembered that Thatcher once famously said that there was no such thing as society. So there’s no society to speak of. However, if such a thing actually existed, then Maggie would be against it, not for it.

Meryl Streep won the Academy Award for this role, and it’s hard to argue that it’s not a great performance. It is. It truly is. Her rendering, her recreation of the woman is nothing short of frightening. She imbues her with far more than just a competent impression would. She summons up this horrible / admirable creature from the abyss for all of us to behold, in all her ignominious glory.

Wait, what? Maggie’s not dead yet? I know that, I’m just saying that the Maggie Meryl summons for us is from a time when Maggie was still lucid, and fearsome. She is neither now, having long ago fallen down the dementia rabbit hole, possibly some time in the 1980s. I kid, I kid, she’s great, she’s all right.

dir: Lee Tamahori
Golden boy
Jesus Christ, or maybe by the grace of Allah, this Uday Hussein was a sick fuck!

I remember the stories from back in the day, around the time of the first Iraqi Adventure, where the tales of Saddam’s sons being monsters were coming out, and I just thought, “Eh, they’re just being mean.”

And then the many and varied stories of what a demented sociopath he was, to the extent where he shamed his own tyrant of a father, slaughterer of innocents and torturer of people who disagreed with him, and there was little doubt.

Of the many controversies regarding the second Iraqi Adventure Part II in 2003, one of the only aspects that has never troubled me were the reports of the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. See, in my limited knowledge and understanding of history, and especially history as it applies to people, the only monsters often worse than the despots and tyrants who seize power in bloody times and rule their people with an iron fist caked in shit, are their sons.

See, Saddam was as bad if not worse than everything ever said about him, obvious even to someone who’s village didn’t have nerve gas dropped on it. But he’s the one who seized power. He’s the one who maintained complicated social – tribal – regional ties intact in order to maintain his steely grip on power. He’s the one who earned the fear that his name invoked. He’s the one who sent people to Abu Ghraib to be tortured to death, who invaded Kuwait, who started the war with Iran and sent a millions souls to their doom. He earned the fear his name engendered.

Shitbirds like his sons, bored feckless fuckwits, got away with all their numerous, icky crimes against their own people, worked only on their sense of unique entitlement, and exhibited no control over their own impulses because their father’s power kept everyone else in check.

dir: Danny Boyle
Rock and Roll
Whatever problems I might have had with Danny Boyle’s films in the past, whatever misgivings I might have had dwindled to nothing fifteen minutes into this film. In the first few minutes I was worried that I was going to be watching something closer to The Beach or Life Less Ordinary end of Boyle’s oeuvre, rather than the actually watchable, decent end of the Boylian spectrum (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire).

But then something happened at exactly 15 minutes in, and the title flashed up on the screen, and I realised that Aron Ralston’s (played by James Franco) real story had just started.

And oh holy fuck what a story it is.

That it’s a true story, and a very narrowly defined story, based entirely on the relevant 127 Hours in question of Ralston’s life, would almost make you think that telling this story in movie form would be impossible. Telling it well, at least. Telling it poorly would seem to be piss-easy. Telling it so that it’s heroically bad would take real hack skills, some of which Boyle has hinted at in the past.

Instead, they (all the people involved, like Boyle’s longtime writing collaborator Simon Beaufoy, but especially Danny Boyle, but especially James Franco, but Especially Boyle!) make a lot of good, strange decisions in order to make a story about a guy trapped under a rock interesting.

When I say interesting, that’s not to say that there aren’t moments where I felt frustrated and trapped. But imagine how this poor bastard felt! Isn’t it fair that we, too, experience some of that feeling?

dir: Michael Mann
Sometimes it's a burden being so wonderful
John Dillinger is not really one of those names that lights up the night sky or the imagination, at least anywhere apart from the US. I’m sure he’s Robin Hood and Ayn Rand all rolled into one in the States, but to the rest of the world, if we know anything about him, it’s that he was alive at some point in the past, and is now dead.

And in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “If he’s so smart, why is he dead?”

Well, Johnny Depp, the dapper gent himself, and Michael Mann, the cop and crim obsessed-director, thought it was time to resurrect the tale of the Depression era populist ‘hero’, and his subsequent demise. Mann puts his particularly Mannish spin on things by emphasising the cool professionalism with which Dillinger and his crew conducted themselves. And, of course, the professionalism of Dillinger’s main opponents, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), also have to act as a parallel counterbalance.

Of course, all of this occurs independent of, and, in most cases, in direct contradiction to the established history of these events.

But, let’s be serious about this, does it really matter? Do I really care that the real Melvin Purvis was nowhere near Dillinger when he kicked the bucket, or that they never met in reality in order to have one of those “we’re so similar despite being on opposite sides of the law, I could almost respect you, but I’ll kill you given half a chance” moments that Mann has loved having in his films since Heat?

No, I don’t. I don’t want this to be a documentary. I couldn’t care less about the facts regarding Dillinger’s life previous to watching this flick, and I care even less now. I wanted to be entertained. And I was, for a good long while. The problem is that this flick, for no discernible reason, goes for two and a half long hours. I can honestly and accurately say that I was entertained for its first 90 minutes. I can’t say that about the rest of it.