Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Kim Ki-duk’s Breath
5/20/2007 3:00:00 PM
You know, it's hard enough for those of us who admire the much-derided (among the cognoscenti) Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk without Cannes repeatedly selecting his very worst films, suggesting by the imprimatur that they're among his very best. Breath, Kim's latest effort, isn't as blatantly ludicrous as The Bow, which opened Un Certain Regard two years ago, but it'll likely be remembered as the movie in which his predilection for mute protagonists officially became intolerable even to his fans. Here, the hero, a condemned killer played by Chang Chen (who doesn't speak Korean), keeps attempting suicide by stabbing himself in the throat, which conveniently leaves him unable to speak. But he can still gaze with longing at the unhappy and equally laconic housewife (Zia) who sees him on television, impulsively shows up at the prison, and proceeds to guide him through a year-long relationship in four visits, using seasonally-themed wallpaper and pop songs to denote the passing of time. These musical interludes have a gutsy, am-I-really-seeing-this? vigor that the rest of the picture sorely lacks, and Kim's enabling conceit — he appears as the prison's warden or something, seen only in reflections on a monitor, and inexplicably permits the couple's improper rendezvous — may be the most feeble instance of director-as-God since Ed Harris in The Truman Show. The less said about the sub-Genet homoerotic nonsense back in Chen's cell, the better. How the festival could prefer Breath to Kim's last film, the superb and richly allegorical Time, which screened here only in the Market, is beyond my comprehension. It's as if they'd turned down Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, then programmed It's All About Love.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Michael Moore’s Sicko
5/20/2007 1:00:00 PM
Hey, did you know that the Canadian health care system is far superior to its American counterpart — compassionate rather than cutthroat, guaranteeing every citizen the medical assistance they need regardless of their income? And did you know that the British health care system is also far superior to its American counterpart — compassionate rather than cutthroat, guaranteeing everyone the medical assistance they need regardless of their income? And did you know that the French health care system is also far superior to its American counterpart — compassionate rather than cutthroat, guaranteeing everyone the medical assistance they need regardless of their income?
Sicko isn't a bad film, exactly, but anyone who's seen even one of Michael Moore's previous screed-cum-documentaries could probably give a fairly accurate summary of its content, sight unseen. As in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore leans heavily on admittedly affecting but patently manipulative sob stories, introducing us to various ailing Americans whose claims were inexplicably rejected, denied or even rescinded by their insurers. Trouble is, he has fewer facts and arguments to buttress the human-interest element this time — or, rather, the problem with the U.S. health-care system is so obvious (in a word: capitalism) that even the for-Dummies version requires only a few minutes of screen time. And so Moore drags us to country after country, so that we can see for ourselves the deductible-free paradise in which the rest of the civilized world lives. He's right, of course, but that doesn't make it any more illuminating to be told the same thing repeatedly for two hours.
Also, I must say that I'm starting to sympathize with the anti-Moore faction. Late in Sicko, Moore reveals, with audible self-satisfaction, that he anonymously sent $12,000 to pay medical expenses for the wife of Jim Kenefick, the guy who runs the anti-Moore website Moorewatch.com. Which seems like a remarkably generous and altruistic act, until it dawns on you that its primary purpose was to make Moore look remarkably generous and altruistic, since his "anonymous" donation is now the last-laugh climax of a major motion picture. Stunts like this, and like the film's much-discussed trip to Guantanamo Bay (which is like taking people who can't afford a TV set to federal prison and demanding that they be allowed to watch the season finale of Heroes there), make me wish all the more fervently that the left had found a less Coulteresque demagogue.
— Mike D’Angelo
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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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