fresh movie reviews and yum cha daily

dir: James Mangold
May you be reunited in death so you can use drugs together again, June and Johnny
Johnny Cash. The Man in Black. An icon and a music legend. Contemporary of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, and a stack of others, influenced by and influential to them all. Could a two and a half hour film do him and his life justice? Can Joaquin Phoenix and the toothsome Reese Witherspoon do the story of the Big Big Love between Cash and June Carter justice? Or even get close?

Someone as simultaneously recognisable and mysterious as Cash needs a twenty hour film about his life. With a squillion dollar budget, all the CGI in the world, and the best actors and production people alive or dead (resurrected) to work on it. It would need a director who combines the spirit and ability of Leni Reifenstahl, Sergei Eisenstein, Otto Preminger, Carl Dreyer, John Ford, John Huston, Akira Kurosawa and Jean Renoir to get it right. It would need the greatest actors culled from history, put into a blender until gooey, with their DNA spliced and respliced until the mixture was just right, re-coded up into the greatest actor possible, which would then be discarded anyway in favour of a resurrected, young, vital, dangerous Johnny Cash to play the lead.

Clearly such a collaboration and combination of events will never happen anywhere apart from in my fevered, amphetamine-fuelled imagination. Such is life. Long ago, whilst working as a scullery maid for a cruel mistress, I’d realised life for me was going to be a perpetual sequence of disappointments punctuated with mere moments of mirthless pleasure. So I’m not surprised that this film doesn’t meet the meagre criteria I magnanimously set forth for it.

That doesn’t make it any the lesser. For what it is, Walk the Line is an enjoyable and competent enough film. Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny, and Witherspoon as June Carter put in decent performances. But the film is still a superficial look at the Man’s life, hobbled by the same problems that neuter most biopics about musical, genre-straddling legends.

dir: Liev Schreiber
Not as quirky as it looks
A film can be crafted with care, and attention. It can be visually arresting, thematically complex, and cover intense, powerful events. It can have decent acting performances, and a literate script with a non-conventional narrative and a story that is anything but formulaic. And it can still do nothing for me.

I’ve heard tell that Jonathan Safran Foer is a good writer, and I have no real reason to dispute that until I read at least a few of his books. There are already plenty of books on my to-be-read list, so it might be a while before I get to him. All I can say is that the screenplay, based on his book of the same name, is interesting.

The film, directed by Liev Schreiber, just doesn’t grab me. I’ve watched it twice now, and it just doesn’t grab me at all. I watch it at a cold remove, distanced from what happens even as I contemplate what is going on.

The protagonist, played by Elijah Wood, is a deliberately ambiguous character. He is a pretty repressed kind of guy, with one suit of clothing, slicked down hair and a pair of glasses whose lenses magnify his eyes to the point of enormity. He may be the protagonist, but he doesn’t do or say too much.

The narrator and the protagonist are not the same person. The narrator, ever-present with his little explanations and elaborations, comes into it down the track.

The protagonist’s name is Jonathan Safran Foer. He collects stuff. We see him as a child popping odd things into snap-seal plastic bags, with a little note on their provenance. As an adult he has a huge wall of stuff, from the seemingly important to the banal. It is not valuable things that he collects: they seem almost random in their qualities and importance.

dir: Mary Harron
Notorious for very good reasons
It's a crime that it's taken this flick so long to get distribution in Australia, because this really contained probably the best performance by an actress in a film released in 2006. Sure, there's no way Gretchen Mol could have beat the murderous juggernaut that was Helen Mirren, but she deserved some recognition at least. It's only been released here yesterday (8/3/2007), and will probably have an ignominious two-week run before disappearing into DVD obscurity.

Which isn't the worst fate in the world. It's kind of appropriate, considering the subject matter. And what is the subject? Why, it's the notorious Bettie Page, of course!

Bettie Page, for her time, was probably the main lust object and idealised non-attainable masturbation aid for squillions of men, lonely and otherwise, across America. She has probably been responsible for more shameful, furtive, blind-making male orgasms than Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and the Virgin Mary combined.

But practically no-one could tell you anything about her apart from the fact that she was in millions of smutty, smutty pictures.

She's not a real person: she is an icon. An icon loses its origins and enters the realm of the purely symbolic at the point where the line between the source and the image disappears. All you can glean is in the expression on the face, the stance used to playfully hold the whip, with nothing else as background. As symbol, not person, she comes to symbolise a pure, perversely innocent sexuality to the masses.

Even when she was decked out in the most cumbersome and painful fetish wear on the planet, there was something about her which will make her memorable long after Anna Nicole Smith's breast implants have finally broken down in her grave. Which should be thousands of years from now.

As the film alludes to with the title, sure, she was infamous, but none of the jerk-offs jerking off to her knew anything about her. You can't really call the 50s an innocent time, but it's not like nudity, smut imagery or boobies were invented then. But it was a strange time where the normally Puritanical States was still trying to stem the tide in terms of what the US would become: the biggest producer and consumer of smut in the world. USA! USA! USA!

dir: Jeff Feuerzeig
Oh, Daniel
Documentaries are great for finding the true stories behind people known for something they did or something they were. Documentaries are also great at illuminating the stories of people for whom obscurity and anonymity would have been a blessing.

Firmly, firmly within the tradition of doco subjects such as Robert Crumb and his insane brothers in Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, the eccentric mother and daughter of Albert Maysle’s Grey Gardens and the indulgent, excruciating self-laceration of Jonathan Caoutte’s Tarnation, The Devil and Daniel Johnston reveals the life and times of an absolute nutter.

Daniel Johnston enjoyed a certain kind of notoriety in the late 80s-early 90s when too-cool hipsters and try-hards like Sonic Youth and the shmucks from Nirvana raised him to public consciousness. Of course he was oh-so-famous in his home town and around his family, but this virtually unknown singer-songwriter became famous mostly because he is crazy.

He started off with promise, of some kind that I can’t really figure out, but degenerated into the darkest pit of manic-impressive madness. He was obsessed entirely with music and becoming a famous musician, but never really seemed to achieve the goal of learning how to actually write or play music properly.

dir: Michael Winterbottom
Sex on the beach is not all it's cracked up to be
The film is exactly 69 minutes long. It consists of a smattering of banal dialogue between two people, they also do some drugs, squabble a bit, and they go to some great gigs. They also fuck. They fuck a lot. The weird thing is, they really are having sex. We see it in all its messy glory.

This isn’t meant to be a porn film. And it’s not a porn film, really. Most porn films have better production values. But their soundtracks usually aren’t this enjoyable. And they don’t usually have scenes from actual gigs at Brixton Academy, the Forum, Hammersmith Odeon, or the Empire in between the sex scenes.

I’ve used this gag many times in my reviews and conversations with people about films, where I say stuff like, “By Lucifer’s beard, the plot of that film was so bad that even porn films have better and more coherent plots”. Now I’m going to officially retire that gag and never use it again. I realised that porn films haven’t had plots for years, and anyone that watches them thinks “What the fuck you talkin’ about, Willis?” whenever I say it in a review.

See, I come from a naïve, innocent time, when “actors” like Christy Canyon, Ginger Lynn and John Holmes would chew over some pretty cheesy and sometimes funny dialogue in between getting down and dirty. Porn films these days, from what I gather, predominately have people going at it like coked-up steel rabbits, with barely any time for an introduction or so much as a “how’s your father?”. It’s a production line mentality. Economies of scale. More bang for your buck.

Even then, even then, and this is the last time I’m ever going to use this gag, contemporary porn films have more of a plot than 9 Songs does. Pool boys, mechanics, pizza delivery guys, nurses, sexy secretaries; they’re all entirely absent from here. Which is a shame. I think the film could have done with some characterisation. Some depth.

dir: Hideo Nakata
Stay down the well until you learn how to comb your hair properly
The onslaught of Japanese horror remakes marches inexorably on. Strictly speaking this is a sequel to a remake, but there’s a Japanese Ringu 2, and it was directed by the same guy that directed this, but it’s a different story (kinda) and, oh fuck it, it’s making my head hurt already. Look, it’s a sequel to the Hollywood Ring film, that’s all you need to know at this stage. It has nothing to do with the Lord of the Rings movies, The Ringmaster, Postman Always Rings Twice, Ring of Fire, Ring King, Ring Ring, or Ring-a-Ding Ding. So don’t be too disappointed.

This nasty little ghost story has come a long way from its modest origins as a schlocky novel by Koji Suzuki. The original Ring managed to be creepy and somewhat fairly entertaining. It represents the starting point for the wholesale adoption of these flicks as the new face of cinematic horror, with highly variable results. Of the recent sequence, Ring, Ju-on: The Grudge and Dark Water have been remade, with Dark Water yet to be vomited upon cinema screens yet. Presumably The Grudge will get its sequel. It seems there’s a little way to go before people get thoroughly sick of this crap and move onto the next place to plunder “Ooh, look, Mongolian films are the next big thing. Let the milking commence!”

dir: Brian W. Cook
Spitting image
Don’t, whatever you do, mistake this flick for a biography of the great Colossus of the cinema that was Stanley ‘Grumpy Pants’ Kubrick.

No, John Malkovich plays the unbelievable role of a crazy conman who used to tell people he was Stanley Kubrick, despite the fact that he looked nothing like him, didn’t try to sound like him, and didn’t even know what films Kubrick directed.

He is so bad at impersonating him that it becomes more a reflection on the people who get sucked in rather than an example of his skills as a charlatan. It is both their gullibility and their simplemindedness in the face of potential celebrity that renders them ripe for the picking.

Of course, the other element that favoured Alan Conway’s deceptions was the fact that Kubrick himself was a bit of a recluse, and there weren’t many photos of him in common circulation. Looking at the extravagant lengths to which Conway virtually begs to be caught out makes you wonder just how gullible people are out there.

This little film is directed by someone who actually knew and had worked with Kubrick in the past, which means he is eminently unqualified to make a film about a flimflammer he never met. But at least he can ensure Malkovich looks and acts nothing like Kubrick to make the illusion complete.

dir: Sydney Pollock
Enjoy the afterlife, boys
Friends making documentaries about friends sounds like mutual masturbation, but it can work, if you’re into that sort of thing. Your interest level in this movie is pretty much dictated by whether you can enjoy a doco about a famous architect who has designed some pretty kooky buildings. Or not. My guess is that a lot of eyes glaze over before you even finish saying the word architectu….zzzzz

Can you really imagine something as staggeringly dull as a doco about an architect? Unless it’s the architect of the Third Reich, Albert Speer, maybe, or the architect of some badly negligent buildings that fall down and kill people. Otherwise it’s a date with dullsville, you’d be forced to think. Well, force yourself to think a little more, ya deadbeat.

Frank Gehry has architected up some pretty freaky looking buildings. Even if his name doesn’t ring any of your bells, you’ve probably seen images of his crazy constructions all the same. I can’t pretend I knew anything about the guy beyond images of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, that I’d seen, and the kooky episode of The Simpsons where Gehry guest stars and designs a new building for Springfield that gets turned into a surrealist prison. Snitch 4 Life indeed.

Further to that, the great man designs the building by scrunching up a piece of paper that becomes the blueprint for the whole shemozzle. Anyone who’s ever seen one of his buildings knows how arbitrarily chaotic they look, and through this doco they can see the inspired process he and his crew go through to get to the magical final design.

It’s very light, very easy-going, and Pollock and Gehry, old friends from way back, chat like old friends rather than as interviewer and subject. This isn’t a confrontational doco attacking the guy and his treatment of prostitutes, or his hundreds of illegitimate syphilitic children, or rampant drug use and multiple arrests. It’s not that kind of doco.

dir: Me

Each year there are nincompoops who'll say it was the worst year in film ever, and each year they'll be wrong. The worst year in terms of cinema was the day Jim Carrey started acting, but other than that,
every year since and after has had plenty of decent stuff to watch, whether it's homegrown, from the States or from the more obscure heathen corners of the world. And for someone like me whose main hobby

dir: David Cronenberg
Under the gun
Two men casually prepare to leave a fleabag motel in the morning. They are unhurried, a little drowsy, probably thinking about the long drive ahead. We don’t sense that there’s anything wrong until everything is so wrong that even I was surprised by their brutality.

In the next scene, a father comforts his daughter, who’s had nightmares about monsters in her closet. He keeps telling her repeatedly that monsters don’t exist, despite our recent evidence to the contrary. It is so overplayed that you know it’s not meant to just be foreshadowing. It’s meant to be Ironic.

There are monsters out there, but they’re not always the ones we expect them to be.

David Cronenberg, Canadian auteur and primary exponent of the ‘body horror’ genre, makes films too infrequently for my liking. All of his films, including the ones that don’t entirely work, are worth watching, His weakest films are better and more interesting than the best work most other directors are capable of.

Here he’s gone with the premise that seems like the most simple, or the ‘straightest’ of the films throughout his career. The complexity could be solely what we are projecting onto the screen, because the film lends itself to multiple interpretations and subtexts. But I think it’s a credit to his work that it can go in so many directions with such a solid yet familiar concept.

It’s Smalltown, USA. A peaceful place with quiet, decent people. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is one of these quiet, decent people. He runs a diner in this town, pays his taxes, loves his wife and kids, and is lucky enough to have his attractive wife (Maria Bello) dress up in her cheerleader outfit and perform 69ers on him.

dir: Tim Burton
Stop it, Johnny, you're scaring and scarring the children
When I heard the film was going to be remade, I had a sick feeling in my gut. When I heard Tim Burton would be the one helming it, that sick feeling grew to full blown, explosive nausea.

Maybe it was the hangover, maybe it was the dodgy curry. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. But I can say that see the finished product was a decent cure.

It is a good film. It’s not great, but then having seen the original a few weeks ago as well, neither is that one. Johnny Depp is no Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, but then again clearly no-one wanted him to be.

Instead of going down the track of trying to replicate that experience, Burton has done to this what he mercilessly did to Planet of the Apes: he’s “re-imagined” the character of Willy Wonka. Instead of being a mysterious Wizard of Oz type, eccentric aristocratic figure such as in the book and (to a lesser extent) in the first film, here Wonka is just an out-and-out freak.

Much has been made in the press of the idea that Wonka as played by the deathless and ageless Depp is reminiscent of Michael Jackson and Peter Lorre (the bug-eyed German actor from such classics as M, Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon). There’s none of the former and more of the latter, in my estimation.

Depp does play Wonka as a freak, someone with no social skills, who hasn’t progressed beyond the oral stage of development, or puberty, for that matter, and who is a chocolate maker who hates his primary market: children. The kids in the film, naturally all loathsome except for Charlie (Freddie Highmore), all clearly hate Wonka as well. They are there out of greed and have nothing but sneers and contempt for Wonka.

And so they should. If you saw this guy offering your kid any candy, you’d beat him to death with the nearest Oompa Loompa. There is a significant story-based reason why such a difference has been made in the script.

It’s because he doesn’t have a loving family, you see. Orphans, hearken to Tim Burton’s word. He is here to heal the pain.