Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men
5/19/2007 12:30:00 PM
If not for the bonehead mentioned in a previous post, who alerted me to the existence of a new Coen Bros. movie in this year's Competition lineup, I'm guessing the moment of revelation would have occurred roughly halfway through No Country for Old Men, in a scene that finds impulsive outlaw Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) sitting in his hotel room awaiting the arrival of the stone psychopath (Javier Bardem) who's been hired to find the suitcase of drug money Moss has stolen. Not that there aren't indications earlier, mind you — while much of the film's dialogue was presumably taken straight from Cormac McCarthy's novel, I sometimes fancied, in my involuntary foreknowledge, that I could hear the boys' distinctive brand of prolix sarcasm. But several wordless, impossibly tense set pieces, and particularly that hotel-room encounter, were conceived, shot and edited with a sadistic precision and bone-dry wit that's unmistakably Joel and Ethan's. Despite being their first literary adaptation, Old Men is as close as they've ever come to recapturing Blood Simple's virtuoso atmosphere of indolent mayhem. It's the rare movie so moment-to-moment riveting that you're sometimes in danger of forgetting to breathe.
People are going to be raving about Bardem's performance, and rightfully so: Without ever resorting to easy signifiers, and despite being saddled with a ludicrously unflattering and almost effeminate haircut, he makes Anton Chigurh one of cinema's most indelible and terrifying madmen. But even more remarkable is the commanding yet relaxed work the Coens have coaxed from Brolin, who between this film and his turn as a maniacal doctor in Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is having quite the breakthrough year. It's almost as if his long, unenviable career to date, consisting mostly of forgettable shlock, has emptied him of all affectation. Whatever the cause, his work here is old-school in the best possible way, focused and alert and free of any Method twitching.
For most of its two-hour running time, No Country for Old Men jangles your nerves so expertly that there's no time to consider what the film might actually be about. But adapting any novel involves making sacrifices, and that's doubly true in the case of an author as philosophically inclined as McCarthy. To their credit, the Coens make a concerted effort to preserve some of the novel's bone-weary pessimism; in the end, though, I suspect that it's just too deeply encoded in McCarthy's eloquent prose to survive the transition. The film's abrupt, deliberately unresolved ending, which I gather is quite faithful to the book, comes across here less as an elegy for civilization (as it was clearly intended) than as a mere failure of imagination. In a way, Joel and Ethan have succeeded all too well — they've made such a twisted corker of a suspense movie that their belated stab at profundity feels ad hoc, as if imposed from without. But it's not as if we're drowning in corkers at the moment, so let's not be overly demanding.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Olivier Assayas’s Boarding Gate
5/19/2007 10:00:00 AM
 | | Okay, all due respect to Mike, but this poster is a little too awesome to dismiss... |
The last time Olivier Assayas attempted a thriller, his fluid, sinuous camerawork and the cast's intense performances were very nearly swamped by a surfeit of philosophical, theoretical, technological and psychosexual implications. Unlike Demonlover, however, Assayas' latest film, Boarding Gate, doesn't seem to have much of anything on its mind. Asia Argento, more restrained than usual, plays Sandra, a young woman with a history of masochistic behavior; as the film opens, she visits her former lover, Miles (Michael Madsen), a business tycoon who used to regularly send Sandra out to ply information from clients and competitors, using, shall we say, whatever means necessary. If only Boarding Gate itself were even half that sordid. Instead, Assayas serves up a surprisingly lackluster series of betrayals, chases and narrow escapes, distinguished only by his sharp eye for color and his penchant for letting half the visual field remain out of focus. The action moves from Paris to Beijing, several characters wind up dead, and Kim Gordon makes a self-conscious cameo as some sort of mysterious fixer, all of which would be sufficient were this some straight-to-vid throwaway starring Misty Mundae and Gary Busey…or, hell, Asia Argento and Michael Madsen. But Assayas never seems remotely invested in this nonsense — not even in a subversive, strictly intellectual way. Should I annoy my friend Zach by suggesting that this is one flight you're better off missing?
— Mike D’Angelo
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Further Notes on American Cinema: James Foley [The Near Side of Paradise]
5/18/2007 5:30:00 PM
Part of an ongoing series. Go here for an explanation.
Ranking: The Near Side of Paradise
James Foley (1953- )
Reckless (1984), Madonna video "True Blue" (1986); Madonna video "Live to Tell"; At Close Range (1986), Who's That Girl? (1987), After Dark, My Sweet (1990; also screenplay), Madonna music video "Papa Don't Preach" (1990), Twin Peaks Episode 2.17 (1991), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Two Bits (1995), Fear (1996), The Chamber (1996), Gun (episode, "The Shot" 1997), The Corruptor (1999), Confidence (2003), Hollywood Division (2004 TV movie), Perfect Stranger (2007), Man and Wife (2008).
Has any directorial career begun as inauspiciously as James Foley's, yet advanced or improved so dramatically? He is the opposite of Carol Reed, evolving from a base beginning to helming some of the finest films soleils and arguably the best adaptation of a David Mamet play. Nevertheless, Reckless, an "other side of the tracks" teen romance, did establish one consistent facet to Foley's practice: an interest in young, up and coming actors. Reckless was not just Foley's first film, but Aidan Quinn's. His next movie feature an early performance by Sean Penn, paired significantly with Christopher Walken, and later he helped shape the screen persona of Mark Wahlberg.
But then Foley fell into the world of Madonna, unable to consolidate her auspicious big screen debut and in fact turning her into a big screen joke, a status she has been unable to shake. Foley also directed the video for her hits "True Blue" and "Papa Don't Preach." But he shook that off, and rebounded with After Dark, My Sweet, one of the first films soleils (and one of the few Jim Thompson adaptations that really understands the author), followed by one of his most beloved films, Glengarry Glen Ross, with the all male casting coup of Lemmon, Pacino, Baldwin, Spacey, Harris, Arkin, and Pryce all in one movie, doing beautiful work (especially Pacino). What's curious is how, ultimately, Glengarry Glen Ross is, on a thematic level, at variance with the rest of his movies.
It's possible that ultimately Foley is "better" with actors than actresses (or at least pop stars). Yet even in the music video for "Papa Don't Preach" he explores a theme that is consistent throughout most of his films, which is the loyalty demanded of children by their parents. It's present in Foley's illustrations designed to accompany the Madonna song, in embryonic form in Reckless, and there in some of his stronger films, such as At Close Range, in which a son attempts to evince kameradschaft-level loyalty to his father, in the trifling, bucolic and TV movieish Two Bits, wherein a boy attempts to honor his grandfather by acting as a go-between, in Fear, in which a father (William Petersen) copes with his daughter's straying from the fold with the worst possible choice, and even in the recent Perfect Stranger, in which the key to the mystery of Halle Berry's character resides in a long ago pact between a mother and daughter. Such consistency across a relatively broad array of films harks back to the studio directors who were able to invest something, anything personal into the projects handed to them. Of course, it is a different world now, but the values of professionalism that Foley brings to his diverse yet unified projects never goes out of fashion.
— DK Holm
Previous Entries in Further Notes on American Cinema:
May 11, 2007: John Flynn
March 30, 2007: Lucky McKee
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Love Songs
5/18/2007 4:45:00 PM
A Note on Cannes Coverage: Our reports and reviews from the festival will continue over the weekend, so be sure to check back regularly.
Well, it's official: Seeing movies without knowing who made them does indeed purify the viewing experience. This morning's Competition screening, Love Songs, turned out to be a musical — a genre rare enough, even in France, that you can't help but mentally designate the project a curiosity: "So-and-So attempts a musical." In this case, however, thanks to a retro-Godardian credit sequence featuring nothing but surnames (and no actual credits of any kind), I couldn't figure out who'd directed the thing, which freed me from struggling to incorporate this film into a known oeuvre. Instead, I was able to look at it simply and unconditionally as a musical — which made it easier to conclude, as I soon did, that it was rather a bad musical, replete with repetitive yet forgettable songs, halfhearted stabs at offhanded choreography, and cozy narcissism masquerading as ardor. Christophe Honoré turned out to be the guilty party, which makes perfect retrospective sense; I skipped his last two films, Ma Mère and Dans Paris, but his 2002 debut, 17 Times Cécile Cassard, struck me as a similar exercise in empty style. Furthermore, why do people keep hiring Louis Garrel, who has yet to force a credible human emotion past the armor of his self-regard? That said, I do wonder how I might have responded to 8 Women — a French musical I loved — had I not known it was François Ozon's 8 Women.
— Mike D’Angelo
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TAKE FIVE: Gambling Movies
5/18/2007 4:00:00 PM
Thanks to an interesting formal structure and a boost to its name cast from Oscar winner Forest Whitaker (man, it still feels odd to type that…), veteran director Mark Rydell's comeback effort, Even Money, is getting more attention than it might otherwise in a limited opening today. And while it's not likely to dethrone the big three part threes (Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Delta Farce, a.k.a. Larry the Cable Guy's Third Attempt to Make You Give Up Moviegoing Forever), it might just make some noise at the box office; America loves movies about gambling almost as much as it loves gambling itself. (Special bonus points for Hollywood Stock Exchange players, who combine movies with gambling into one of the biggest and most pointless timewasters since Tetris.) In case you were too busy at poker night or your weekly floating crap game to catch them the first time around, here's five gambling pictures we'll give you even odds you'll like.
BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955)
Everybody knows Bob. Like a lot of compulsive gamblers, he's everyone's friend when he's flush, and he has contacts everywhere from the street corner to City Hall. But, also like a lot of compulsive gamblers, he's reckless and desperate to the point of madness when he's on a losing streak, and he's just hit the worst of his career. Jean-Pierre Melville's classic New Wave noir is a classic in every way, from its intricate plot to its terrific lead performance by Roger Duchesne to its compelling portrait of a man who's doomed from the start, and everyone knows it but him. Bob Le Flambeur was cited by Paul Thomas Anderson as a major inspiration for his own Hard Eight — see below.
LOST IN AMERICA (1985)
Albert Brooks' savage yuppie satire isn't really about gambling, but as Linda Howard, the wife of director Albert Brooks' high-paid ad executive who quits his job out of peevishness and decides to cross the country in a luxury Winnebago, Julie Hagerty provides one of the most memorable — and hilarious — portraits of gambling addiction on film. She loses their entire savings (their "nest egg", as Brooks repeatedly puts it in one of the film's best scenes) at the roulette table, chanting like a lunatic for her one winning number to come up again; after the money is gone, Brooks tries to cajole a bewildered casino owner: "As the boldest experiment in advertising history," he says, "you give us our money back." Brooks insisted on dozens of takes of this scene, to the mounting frustration of Garry Marshall as the casino boss — frustration which translates on screen to pure comedic genius.
EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)
If vices had their own patron saints the way virtues do, the man that Satan would assign to watch over bookmakers and gambling dens would be Arnold Rothstein. The man who turned organized crime into a multi-million-dollar international business has been portrayed, more or less, in dozens of movies, but none of his schemes were bigger than fixing the 1919 World Series, and none of his portrayals were meatier than the toothy portrayal he was given by Michael Lerner in Eight Men Out, John Sayles' swell little picture about the Black Sox scandal. Charlie Comiskey's flat champagne may have spurred the fix, but Rothstein was there, just like he was at every other opportunity to turn a crooked buck, to take advantage of it.
HARD EIGHT (1996)
Paul Thomas Anderson's first film is probably his least-seen — which is a pity, because it's arguably his best. Working on a tight budget and with an extremely narrow focus, Anderson loses the wicked excess and lack of editorial restriction that derails his later, more well-known films and concentrates on bringing out the best in his extremely able cast (including Philip Baker Hall in the kind of stellar performance he turns out like clockwork, and a terrifically appealing lead turn by John C. Reilly) and some keen, incisive dialogue. Hall's Sydney is a perfect professional gambler: keen as a laser, but so tired from the constant need to be on his toes that his high-powered perception weighs on him like a millstone. His attitude towards the young, naïve and self-destructive Reilly is at once paternal and sinister, and when the two drift into the orbit of Samuel L. Jackson in a terrific villain's role, the stage is set for the grimmest surrogate showdown this side of The Grifters.
OWNING MAHOWNY (2003)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (who also played a minor role in Hard Eight) plays a real-life gambler in Richard Kwietniowski's effective indie film who may not have been nearly as famous as Arnold Rothstein, but bet with far higher stakes. Dan Mahowny, a bank manager for one of Canada's leading financial institutions, nearly single-handedly created a massive financial crisis north of the border when he swindled his own employer out of $10 million in order to feed his betting habit. Hoffman gives a sensitive and appropriately complex performance as Mahowny; in a very telling moment, after he's caught and the jig is well and truly up, he still can't admit that his favorite hobby is a harmful one. To the police detective investigating his fraud, he denies that he has a gambling problem; what he has is a "financial problem".
— Leonard Pierce
Previous Take Fives:
May 11, 2007: Hip Hop Documentaries
May 4, 2007: Posthumous Movies
April 27, 2007: Wrestling Pictures
April 20, 2007: Directorial Brothers
April 13, 2007: Hitchcock Remakes
April 6, 2007: Rappers Turned Actors
March 30, 2007: What’s That Strange Music I Hear?
March 23, 2007: Both Sides of the Camera
March 16, 2007: Meta Serial Killers at the Movies
March 9, 2007: Cash Rules Everything Around Me
March 2, 2007: What’s Your Sign?
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Video of the Day: On the Waterfront Performed by Kids
5/18/2007 3:15:00 PM
It's a total lark, but damn, those kids at the San Francisco Children's Theater do an impressive job overdubbing Marlon Brando's famous "I Coulda Been a Contendah" scene from Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. Are they taking requests? I wanna see them do Dr. Strangelove!
— Bilge Ebiri
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Flight of the Red Balloon
5/18/2007 2:30:00 PM
No matter how fervently festival heads Gilles Jacob and Thierry Fremaux insist that films programmed in Un Certain Regard shouldn't be thought inferior to those selected for Competition, one can't help but feel apprehensive when a world-class director like Hou Hsiao-hsien winds up among — let's face it, folks — the also-rans. Commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay, set in Paris, and loosely inspired by Albert Lamorisse's classic short "The Red Balloon," Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon boasts intermittent moments of lyrical beauty and even the occasional hiccup of violent emotion, courtesy of Juliette Binoche. But in its stubborn commitment to patiently observing the mundane and quotidian, it most closely resembles Hou's 2004 film Café Lumière (another special commission set outside of Hou's native Taiwan), which Cannes passed on entirely. Much like the titular balloon, this wisp of a movie wafts gracefully to and fro, untethered to anything remotely Aristotelian. We meet a cute little boy (Simon Iteanu) who spends most of his free time with his Playstation; his harried, bleach-blonde mother (Binoche), who performs voices for a puppet show and is desperately trying to evict a freeloading tenant (Hippolyte Girardot), and the impassive, unfailingly polite Chinese student (Song Fang) who's just been hired as the boy's nanny. Together, they must defuse a dirty suitcase bomb hidden at the top of the Eiffel Tower…or maybe they'll just make tea, wander the streets, get the piano tuned, talk long-distance to an ex-boyfriend who's now in Montreal, etc. For me, a little of this unemphatic, anti-dramatic naturalism goes a pretty long way — I'm still hoping for an entire movie by Hou as impassioned and beguiling as the lovely first section of his last feature, Three Times. But if you're content with a surpassingly thin slice of contemporary Parisian life, as viewed by an outsider, Flight of the Red Balloon will likely be a whole lot cheaper than round-trip airfare.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Cinema de Look, Part Deux: IFC's Cannes Cam
5/18/2007 1:45:00 PM
And it's back! The IFC Cannes Cam , the 27/7 camera pointed at the red carpet leading up to the Grand Théâtre Lumière at the Palais, captures the doings in the south of France non stop, which can include drunken revelers wandering past the ropes at four am, or the rise of traffic sounds about two hours later. Depending on your time zone you can view the action as it's happening, or get up at three in the morning to see the celebs walking on needle thin heels up the precarious steps to the grand entrance. (Those with Macs who use Safari will have to download Flip4Mac, a small program that makes Macs able to play Windows movies.)
In addition, there is an archive of past Cannes cams from three different angles that gives you a summary of a day in the life of the Cannes festival in about a minute.
— DK Holm
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews The Banishment
5/18/2007 1:00:00 PM
Wanting to keep my slate as blank as humanly possible, I tried not to compile a mental list of filmmakers who might show up in this year's Competition. Even had I done so, however, and even had that list grown to several dozen names, I doubt I would have remembered Andrei Zvyagintsev, the Russian director whose debut feature, The Return, took the top prize at Venice four years ago. "Huh," I muttered noncommittally when his a-film-by credit appeared at the top of The Banishment. Two-and-a-half portentous, undernourished hours later, I turned to my friend Stephen and mimed shooting myself in the head, a gesture he understood perfectly. Adapted from William Saroyan's The Laughing Matter, The Banishment's humorlessness is matched only by its bloated self-importance; every take clearly ended with the instruction "Let's try that again, but with more brooding this time." How Saroyan filled 250 pages with his fairly simple story — wife abruptly confesses her infidelity; husband responds with 57 varieties of volcanic stoicism — I have no idea, but it certainly took a Herculean effort by Zvyagintsev to transform it into this sodden, almost comically grim epic, with every frame carrying the maximum legally permissible weight of unacknowledged shame and anger. Also, attention, filmmakers of the world: The Arvo Pärt moratorium is still in effect! Appropriating the mournful tinkling of "Für Alise" won't lend your film a touch of extra gravity; it'll only reveal that you didn't see Gerry, or Tom Tykwer's Heaven, or Since Otar Left, or any of the dozen other recent movies that had the very same idea.
— Mike D’Angelo
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More on The Lives of Others: The NYRB and Sight and Sound
5/18/2007 12:15:00 PM
When The Lives of Others came out, one of my first thoughts was, "I can't wait to read what Timothy Garton Ash has to say about this." Ash is a British writer with a special interest in Germany, and especially the old East Germany (or GDR), where he lived for several years at the height of the Cold War. In fact, Ash was spied upon much like the characters in the movie, and in his book The File (1997), he describes returning to Germany after the fall of the Wall and looking up his own Stasi file.
With the characteristic lack of timeliness that is the flip side of the New York Review of Books' patience with its writers' cogitations, the paper has finally published a review of the movie, and it is indeed by Ash. By a curious coincidence, the May issue of Sight and Sound has finally made its way to the United States and it contains an equally detailed and historically oriented cover story on the film, by Anna Funder.
Ash's review, which is positive with qualifications, is a creative essay that strays well beyond the borders of a typical write up. He points up some of the historical inaccuracies (some of which, he learns from director and writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, were intentional for dramatic purposes), and the paradoxes of recent German history. "One of Germany's most singular achievements is to have associated itself so intimately in the world's imagination with the darkest evils of the two worst political systems of the most murderous century in human history," Ash begins, and he ends by pointing out that " In this good land, the professionalism of its historians, the investigative skills of its journalists, the seriousness of its parliamentarians, the generosity of its funders, the idealism of its priests and moralists, the creative genius of its writers, and, yes, the brilliance of its filmmakers have all combined to cement in the world's imagination the most indelible association of Germany with evil."
Like many other reviewers, Ash admires the artistry, the writing and directing that announces that this is a work of art. "In the role-reversing culmination of an intricate and gripping plot, the playwright's girlfriend betrays him to the Stasi but the Stasi captain saves him from exposure and arrest — at the cost of his own subsequent career." At the same time, like the reviews of others, he frets over the plausibility of a Gerd Wiesler really existing.
Ash also notes that the playwright talks more like "a West German intellectual from Schwabing, a chic quarter of Munich, not an East German." And that a Stasi surveillance team "would have been most unlikely to install itself in the attic of the same building." He adds, too, that "some of the language is also too high-flown, old-fashioned, and simply Western."
Interviewing the director, Ash learns that two of his favorite films are Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley and in his view Lives is a blend. "It is just because he is not an East German survivor but a fresh, cosmopolitan child of the Americanized West, a privileged Wessi down to the carefully unbuttoned tips of his pink button-down shirt, fluent in American-accented English and the universal language of Hollywood, that he is able to translate the East German experience into an idiom that catches the imagination of the world."
Meanwhile, S&S's Funder is equally admiring, from a distance, but much harder on the film's inaccuracies, and on the question of whether a Wiesler could really exist. In her view, no, because the Stasi's checks and balances, its internal surveillance, and its compartmentalization would not have put a real Wiesler into the situation in which the film version finds himself. Funder is also very good at pointing out certain different historical inaccuracies, and on the modern role of ex-Stasi members in contemporary society, where far from being humble lowly workers they are private sector surveillance experts and public protestors against their portrayal in society, where they are casually vicious about torturing (again) their former victims.
— DK Holm
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