Father Geek posting another report from this years Edinburgh Film Fest. This report is from a keyboard fiend, CharteredStreets. Man I wish everyone sent in columns this detailed. There's alot here sooooo I'll just step aside and turn you over to our man at The Filmhouse Bar...
Okay, CharteredStreets here (I sent in a "Lost in La Mancha" review about a month ago? Remember? What do ya mean no?), and here I am in the Filmhouse bar, sipping a vodka martini, and writing my reviews of all the movies I saw at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Well, that is not entirely true. The last bit is, but I am at home, drinking semi-skimmed milk. Anyway:
I have been attending the film festival for three years now (in that this is the fourth time I have gone to films there). The first movie I saw there was the premier of the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair". Being a mere 12 years old, you can imagine my delight at seeing not only an excellent film, but Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, walking within reaching of distance of me (I never touched them though. Honest.) Of course, we don't go to film festivals to see stars (although it is a bonus). We go to see the movies. So here are reviews for the nine movies I saw at the 56th Edinburgh International Film Festival (NB: half of these movies are already out in America. Tough, you're getting the reviews anyway):
MY FAVOURITE MOVIE OF THIS YEAR'S FESTIVAL WAS THE FIRST ONE I SAW, MIKE LEIGH'S "ALL OR NOTHING". MY REVIEW:
Phil Bassett (Timothy Spall) is a sad, lonely middle-aged man. He is a taxi driver, and some of his best conversations are with the people he picks up. He tries to talk to people, he philosophises about fate and destiny, but there is no one around to listen to him. He is poor, as well; so much so that he resorts to borrowing money off his family when he needs it.
His wife is Penny (Lesley Manville), who is as unconnected and lonely as Phil. Phil talks to her at the dinner table and she seems totally uninterested. Even when she is out with her friends and neighbours, the alcoholic Carol (Marion Bailey) and Maureen (Ruth Sheen), she looks out of place.
They have two children, Rachel (Alison Garland) and Rory (James Corden). Rachel appears to be the most intelligent person in the entire family. She has a job as a cleaner at a nursing home. Rory is rude to his mother - which upsets her mother immensely - and lazy. He has no job, and lies on the sofa watching TV most of the time. At night he sneaks out to smoke cigarettes.
The Bassetts live in a housing estate in London, and their neighbours seem as lonely as they are. Carol is too drunk most of the time to have any idea of what is going on, and her daughter, Samantha (Sally Hawkins), just hangs around the flat, teasing a teenager who has a crush on her.
Maureen has no husband. When her daughter, Donna (Helen Coker), asks her how long she knew Donna's father, she says "about five minutes". Donna is in a relationship with a guy she dislikes almost as much as he dislikes her.
The loneliness of these characters is emphasised by the conversations and interactions they have. Take, for example, the scene where Samantha and Donna talk to each other in a café. They do not seem to be talking as much as playing a game. Each has had so much practice that they have comebacks for each thing the other one says. Their conversations are like games of chess, but sometimes the comebacks are too hurtful - sometimes the game goes too far.
Another scene - having arrived home from work, Phil goes into the kitchen clutching a pack of burger buns. Penny asks what they are for, and Phil says he got them as a tip. A guy bought them, he explains, for a barbecue (Penny is no longer listening), but no one turned up. A simple but oddly profound scene.
"All or Nothing" is written and directed by the British director Mike Leigh, whose other works have included "Secrets & Lies" and "Topsy-Turvy". He is a consistently good director who does not care about storyline as much as he cares about his characters. He experiments with them, he puts them into situations and see how they react, but like Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver", the photographer from "Blowup" and Charles Foster Kane from "Citizen Kane", the characters come first, story second.
There are those who argue that in a movie story is always the most important thing. I do not agree. I think that for different movies different elements are more important - sometimes it's the visuals, sometimes it's the humour. In a film like "All or Nothing" the characters take up centre stage, and the story evolves out of them. To complain that the story is not very good is like complaining of "Twelve Angry Men" that the special effects are not very good.
Not a character in "All or Nothing" is less than believable. Almost every single character seems just as lonely when standing alone as when being with friends and family. Mike Leigh has proven once again that he is one of the most important directors in Britain with what may well be one of the best movies of the year.
OKAY, THE NEXT MOVIE I SAW WAS THE COMEDY "THE GURU". IT WAS THE WORLD PREMIER, BY THE WAY. HEATHER GRAHAM WAS THERE. JUST THOUGHT YOU'D LIKE TO KNOW.
Comedy and sympathy go hand in hand. We laugh at comedy when there is a victim of the comedy; someone we can sympathise with. "The Guru" starts off far funnier than it ends, because at the start we can sympathise with the main character - Ramu Gupta (Jimi Mistri), and towards the end his character becomes less likeable.
In his hometown, Ramu is popular, he teaches dance classes there and is highly thought of by his female students. He goes to America to be a star, but the only job he can find (and soon after, lose) is as a waiter in an Indian restaurant.
He goes to an audition for a movie, in what is the funniest scene in the entire film. The director doing the auditions is Dwain (Michael McKean, hilarious as ever). This scene works so well because we the audience quickly pick up that he is a director of porn movies, but Ramu has no idea. I will not spoil the scene, but it is almost worth the price of admission alone. He eventually gets a job in a porn movie, acting along side (or rather, on top of) Sharonna (Heather Graham). Unfortunately, he cannot achieve the one thing that a male actor in a porn movie needs to achieve most of all, and is thrown out.
We meet Lexi (Marisa Tomei). She is a spoiled rich kid, who does not like her parents much and is obsessed with Indian culture. Her mother, Chantal (Christine Baranski) hires her an Indian philosopher, but he passes out from drinking too much in the kitchen and Ramu, being in the right place at the right time, takes his place. Not much of a philosopher, he talks about only two things: dance, which he knows well, and sex, which he learned from Sharonna. Lexi beds him before telling all of her friends he is the "Guru of sex". He realises, then, that he could go from being a nobody to being a somebody, and could fool people into thinking he is, in fact, the "Guru of sex", but first he needs to learn more about sex from Sharonna. She is getting married and Ramu promises her that if she tells him all she knows about sex, he will buy her the $800 wedding cake she covets. She agrees, providing he does not tell anyone what she tells him. Of course, he does tell people what she tells him, and makes a lot of money out of it.
At this point I was trying to guess which way the movie would go - would he end up with Lexi? Or perhaps with Sharonna, who is engaged? I was unsure, but when it became clear what was going to happen, I found that the movie started to lose my interest a little. Unfortunately it all becomes a little predictable and it ends with what is, essentially, the ending from "The Graduate". I am still recommending "The Guru" though, because of its sense of fun and its humour, most of which lies in its first half (Ramu's transition from nobody to somebody seemed to happen too fast for my liking). The thing about the first half that I liked so much is its sense of realism, lost in its latter scenes. The basic premise of an Indian going to America to become famous in movies and ending up making porn, but some other little things - like when Ramu and his flatmates celebrate his coming to America with a toast, a moment which seems perhaps too sentimental until, a saving grace, the neighbour bangs on the wall and says "shut the f--- up!".
"The Guru" is basically trying to bring the Bollywood movies more to the attention of the average English-speaking viewer. The mix is almost successful, if the movie relies more on the type of humour suited best to Hollywood movies than the colourful, musical style of Bollywood, which is just touches upon.
Any attempts at sentimentality fall flat on their face, though "The Guru" is still worth seeing, if only for its first half.
NEXT I SAW "TADPOLE":
"This is all so. The Graduate," says Stanley Grubman, father to the central character in "Tadpole". And oh, how right he is.
The central character in question is Oscar, played by twenty-five year old Aaron Stanford. He is fifteen, we are told, although he looks about, oh, twenty-five (why do so many movies resist casting teenagers as teenagers?) Oscar has a crush on his stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver), because she is, like Oscar, intelligent and grown-up, yet the movie manages not once to use the word "incest". He is so much in love with her, in fact, that he daydreams about her with one of those white cloud things round the edge of the frame, just to tell the audience "HEY! THIS IS A DREAM!" Oscar, you see, is way beyond his peers, mentally speaking, and he does not want a girlfriend of inferior intelligence. He gets drunk one night and ends up sleeping with his stepmother's friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth), because she is wearing Eve's scarf. He immediately (well, the next morning, when he is sober) regrets the decision, and is even more worried when he learns Diane is coming to dinner with Oscar, Eve and Oscar's father Stanley (John Ritter).
The whole movie to this point is basically setting up for this scene. Oscar is afraid that Diane will tell Eve of their night together. The scene is supposed to be funny, because we are supposed to feel sorry for Oscar. We are supposed to worry about Diane blabbing, and this is where the comedy should come from. There is a fundamental problem though: Oscar is immensely irritating. He is arrogant. He is a snob. He looks down on everyone else of his own age. And therefore how can we feel sympathy for him? I actually found myself wanting Diane to tell Eve about them sleeping together.
Back to the "The Graduate" reference - basically, this is the same story. Watching "The Graduate" today, it still has some brilliant humour, although Benjamin is not as rebellious as he may have seemed in the '60s. In fact, he is somewhat un-likeable; I find Mrs Robinson a far more sympathetic character. "Tadpole" has the same problem, but it does not have that rebellious quality "The Graduate" may once have had, it just has a frustrating character having a relationship with an older woman. There is a scene where we see Diane's friends all fall to the feet of Oscar, admiring his intellect and, in one case, giving him her telephone number. I may not be an expert on what women look for in men, but I found it difficult to believe that women would be so attracted to a character I would happily punch across the face.
But, like "The Graduate", the woman is more interesting than the teenager. Diane is not nearly as un-likeable as Oscar, and because she did not irritate me I found that she was, indeed, a funny character, and I did laugh in a number if scenes she was in. I kept wishing the camera would go back to her when it was lingering on Oscar. Eve is also far more likeable. I am not suggesting that Bebe Neuwirth and Sigourney Weaver are better actors than Aaron Stanford, but I do think that Diane and Eve are better characters than Oscar.
Another problem - why was this movie filmed on digital cameras? I can understand a movie like "Tape" being filmed this way - indeed, the use of digital cameras enhanced "Tape" - but here it just created a wall between the audience and the characters. Its graininess and blurriness seemed unnecessary and distracting. Okay, I understand this was shot on a very tight budget, so perhaps it was unavoidable, but I found it difficult to completely ignore it.
I still did find many moments of "Tadpole" funny, and at the end Oscar was a far more likeable guy than during the rest of the movie, and hell, I may have given it a positive review, but I had to knock an extra half star off, for a pretty simple reason: I saw "Lovely & Amazing" a couple of weeks ago. If you have not seen it, there is a thread of story in it where a main female character is having an affair with a teenage boy and is arrested for statutory rape. This was refreshing, to me, having seen so many movies with the sexist idea that an older woman with a younger boy is a comic idea, but if the genders are switched, it is very serious indeed.
I saw "Tadpole" at the first screening outside of the United States, and the director, Gary Winick, attended. He took questions at the end, but I could not stay because I had to rush off to another movie. If I did stay, though, I may have asked him either:
1) If "The Graduate" is one of his favourite films.
2) Why he felt it necessary to shoot on digital film.
3) If Oscar was based on someone he severely disliked.
THAT WAS, BY THE WAY, THE ONLY MOVIE I SAW AT THE FESTIVAL THAT I REALLY DISLIKED. THE NEXT FILM I SAW, "FRAILTY", WAS ONE OF THE BEST:
I imagine that, in 1968, people walked out of "2001: A Space Odyssey", went into cafés and talked and talked about its meaning. More recently, this was the case with "The Usual Suspects". I walked out of "Frailty" desperate to talk to my companions about its technicalities, question the characters' sanity and try to understand exactly what was and what was not real. At the start of the film, Matthew McConaughey walks into a police station, and asks to talk to Agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe). He claims to know who the "God's hand" killer is, someone Doyle has been after for some time.
Flashback to 1979. We see McConaughey as a child, with his brother walking home from school. The children are called Fenton (older brother) and Adam (younger). They live with their father, who is played by Bill Paxton. He cares about his children, and they trust and respect him. One night he wakes them up and tells them he has had a vision: an angel sent down from God, telling him that the end of the world is near, and demons are walking amongst them, and it is his job to kill them. Adam, young and easy to manipulate, trusts his dad completely. Fenton, on the other hand, is older and thinks that his dad has gone insane. One of the things I admired about "Frailty" is that it doesn't tell us whether he has or not.
He finds a weapon, an axe, and a pair of gloves. He thinks that these have been sent down from God, to kill the demons with. He writes a list of people's names, which he says are demons. Fenton knows, though, that they are people and that if his dad killed them it would be murder.
And it would be, by definition, murder, and yet, the movie adds a level of intrigue by not telling us if they are terrible sinners or not - it only hints. This is the type of film that - like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Halloween" - you may remember as being more violent than they actually are. Most of the violence happens offscreen, but the way it is filmed makes it scarier than any excessive gore could have.
"Frailty" not only stars Bill Paxton, but it is also his directorial debut, and what an impressive debut it is. Not only does he prove his acting talent onscreen, but he directs with the skill and craft of someone who has been doing it for years. His use of light and sound is often ingenious.
The two lead performances are very memorable here. McConaughey looks melancholy and tortured telling the truth about his father to the agent, but the performance that will really stick with you is that of Paxton. He is a very sympathetic villain. We know that he believes every word he is saying about his visions, and we know that he loves his sons. It is difficult to think of religious fanatics without thinking back to last September. There really are people like the father in "Frailty" - people who think they know so much about religion and the afterlife that they can kill people that they believe have sinned; that they believe deserve to die.
"Frailty" is the best horror movie in years, yes, but it is more than just a horror movie. It questions our morals. It does not follow the typical Hollywood horror slasher because it creates characters we care about and worry about, not the mundane, black-and-white, paint-by-numbers characters of movies like "Jason X", killed for entertainment. "Frailty" has, we feel, real characters, and real situations. It is unsettling and disturbing, but not disgusting or shocking. Was I on the edge of my seat? I was practically clinging onto the person beside me.
NEXT UP, "THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING":
"What do you want?" asks Patricia (Amy Irving) to Walker (John Turturro).
"What everyone wants," he replies. "To experience life. To wake up enthused. To be happy." And happiness is the "one thing" of the title - how we try to be happy, how easy it is to make others unhappy, and how quickly happiness comes and goes.
Patricia and Walker are just two of a host of colourful characters. Among the others are Gene (Alan Arkin), Troy (Matthew McConaughey) and Beatrice (Clea DuVall).
Gene is a claims adjuster for a big firm. He is a hard worker, but he is also unhappy. His wife left him, and his son, whom he rarely talks to, is constantly being thrown into jail. One of his workers at the firm, Wade, annoys him, because Wade is always happy. He has a smile on his face no matter what the circumstances, and is always able to find the bright side of things. Gene finds this attitude very suspicious.
Walker is a teacher of physics at a school. He too has left his wife (Amy Irving), and is trying to get his life worked out. He has no idea how to do this, though. He has become bored of his scheduled, predictable life, and wants to try and live life spontaneously; to experience all the things that he wished he had before.
Troy is a hotshot lawyer, very good at his job, and very determined. In the movie's opening scene he sees Gene at a bar, sees how unhappy he is, and attempts to cheer him up. He is young and ambitious, and does not realise that when he leaves the bar and drives off, something will happen that will drain the happiness out of him like water from a sponge.
He drives around that corner, having drunk a little too much, and knocks a pedestrian down. The pedestrian is Beatrice (see how this all ties together?), and he is smart enough to know that his career - and lifestyle - could be seriously jeopardised if it was found out what he did. He drives off, thinking he has killed an innocent. He has done something that he would have previously been glad to send someone to jail for, and he spends much of the movie saddened and feeling guilty.
Beatrice is not killed. For the second time in her life, she survives an accident against the odds. She is a very lucky girl. We see her, in flashback, before the accident. She is as cheery and optimistic as Gene's co-worker, Wade. She is a maid for an architect that she has a crush on, and she cheers up the maid she works with no end. And then, as quick as it takes for a car to hit someone at a normal speed, her happiness is knocked out of her.
"Thirteen Conversations About One Thing" is about luck, and most of all, about happiness. Happiness leaps from character to character like some kind of energy. Through conversations and interactions, happiness can leave one person and find another, unexpectedly for both.
It is directed by Jill Sprecher, and written by her and her sister, Karen. Their last movie they worked on, "Clockwatchers", was a critically acclaimed satire about office workers, and this is like an expansion. It studies office workers, with Gene and his co-workers, but makes them only part of an elaborate web of fascinating characters, that anyone can sympathise with. At the end of the movie, everyone finds some amount of happiness, if only a shred for some. Most of them find, though, that it did not take a great event to give them happiness (one of Gene's co-workers wins the lottery, quits his job, and comes back a year later with his tail between his legs). They discover that they find the greatest happiness and satisfaction from making others happy. The happiness did not have to find them, they were able to find it.
Unfair things happen. Good people sometimes do not get the life they deserve and the same goes for the bad ones. The world is not an entirely logical place, and justice is not always served, just ask McConaughey's character, Troy. If you dream too much, you will only find disappointment, and if you do not dream at all, you have no hope. Yet we can all find happiness, though we can only be truly happy when those around us are too. Cheering people up is one of the greatest satisfactions you can find, and you may be surprised to know that the happiness was in you all along. Sometimes it just gets knocked out of the limelight.
NOW THE NEXT MOVIE WAS TOTALLY UNIQUE. I SEEM TO REMEMBER MR. KNOWLES SAYING HOW GOOD THIS LOOKED AND BOY, WAS HE RIGHT. "INTACTO":
It is almost impossible to classify "Intacto". On its genre label at www.imdb.com it is listed as merely a thriller, but that is a bit of a lame excuse for a genre. I am thrilled by all good movies, but you would not call "The Wizard of Oz" a thriller, would you? It borders upon science fiction and fantasy, but since there is nothing in the movie that is not theoretically impossible, that does not seem fair either. It is set on Earth and its characters are all merely human. The only genre it fits is the crime genre. "Intacto" is, you see, about thieves. Not thieves of money, or thieves of power. These people steal something far more personal - your luck.
Leonardo Sbaraglia is Tomás. He is the sole survivor of an airplane crash. What luck he has. He is discovered by Frederico (Eusebio Poncela), who thinks he might be the person he is looking for. Frederico, you see, used to be a very lucky man. He worked at a casino for an old friend of his, Sam (Max von Sydow), who is described as the "god of chance" - he is the luckiest man in the world. He plays a version of Russian roulette that makes the regular version seem easy-peasy.
How can these people be so lucky? The answer is ingenious. They steal other people's luck. They gamble for other people's luck (and you ought to see some of the games they play). People with "the Gift", as it is called, can make other people's luck theirs. Sam, his gift far more powerful than Frederico's, touches him when Frederico says he wants to leave the casino and this causes Frederico's luck to travel into Sam. Now if anyone touches Frederico they get bad luck.
Luck travels by touch, but also by photos - give someone with the Gift a photograph of another and the luck from the photographed person is taken by the holder of the photograph. Sound complicated? It is. There are two other characters I should mention. Mónica López plays Sara, a cop on the search of Tomás (he was being questioned by police in hospital when Frederico got him out). Her character, like Sam, seems simple but, like Sam, she has emotional depth, as we learn about a tragic event in her life. Another character is Alejandro (Antonio Dechent). He is a bullfighter. I say no more.
I have yet to entirely grasp the story of "Intacto". I am desperate to see it again, to confirm what I think I know and to figure out all of the plot's intricacies. At no point does the movie patronise you; the movie is aware of its characters and situations, and forgets about the audience. We are left to look on and try our best to understand exactly what is going on.
The film is in Spanish, mainly (Max von Sydow's scenes are in English), and is directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who directed the Oscar-nominated short "Esposados" ("Linked") in 1996. As far as I am concerned, he is one of the most promising directors around - I eagerly await his next film. "Intacto" has outstanding cinematography and is beautifully shot throughout - its brilliant visuals carry a moody, melancholy feel. It cries out to be remade by Hollywood (although I doubt Hollywood would have the guts to make a movie like this in the first place), so make sure you see this version first, as I expect a remake would patronise its audience and spend too much time explaining the plot.
I should mention what was, for me, the high-point of the film: its climax. I found myself gripping onto the armrest of my chair - it's so exciting and suspenseful. I will say nothing of the scene, except that it is set in the casino. It is a stunning climax to a movie quite unlike any other I have seen before.
FOLLOWED BY THE UK PREMIER OF "CHANGING LANES". NOW I KNOW THIS MOVIE CAME OUT AGES AGO IN THE STATES, SO WHY THE HECK DID IT TAKE THIS LONG TO COME OUT HERE (ACTUALLY, IT STILL ISN'T OUT HERE). I DOUBT IT WAS WAITING ESPECIALLY FOR THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL.
This could have been a much worse movie. It could have been a two-dimensional revenge film about an incident where a good guy is trying to settle the score with a bad guy. But, luckily for the viewers who are tired of payback action thrillers, "Changing Lanes" is far smarter.
It is the story of how two people, who were running lifestyles which would suggest they would never have reason to meet, crash into each other while driving along a freeway. One of them is Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck). The other is Doyle Gibson (Samuel L. Jackson). Doyle's car is immovable, but Gavin's is okay. They are both in a rush to get to court - Banek for his job and Gibson for his family. Gavin can't be bothered running through the proper procedures, and he writes Doyle a blank cheque. Doyle wants to do this the right way, though, and rejects it, asking Gavin to get his insurance card out. Gavin, losing patient, gets in his car and drives off. "Better luck next time!" he shouts to Doyle, stranded in the middle of the road.
Gavin is a lawyer who was trying to settle a case, which involved a dying old man signing his money over to Gavin's law firm. He gets to court (late) and starts unpacking his papers. He knows he will win the case with these papers, which prove that the millions signed over by the dying man belong to the law firm, but it is only when he gets to court he realises his mistake: he accidentally left a crucial file with Doyle Gibson, a man Gavin would be happy never to meet again.
Doyle was trying to get to court because of a divorce lawsuit that he and his wife were trying to settle. Without his car, he arrives twenty minutes late. The case is over, and his wife has his two boys. They are moving to Oregon. This, of course, upsets Doyle immensely, especially since he just bought a flat in Queens for them all, even if he were to live separately. The judge tells Gavin that he needs to get the file back by the end of the day. He finds Doyle, and asks him for it but Doyle is in no mood to talk to him. Gavin offers him money for the file. "You think I want money?" Doyle replies. "What I want is my morning back. I need my TIME back. Can you give me my time back?"
What follows is, essentially, a war between the two men. Gavin needs the file, and Doyle has no intention of giving him it, after the way Gavin treated him. This is where the movie could have gone the wrong way, but it doesn't. It is not just about the action as they try to settle the score, or the fights, or whatever. We see the two men wonder how far they can go to hurt the other person, but they also face moral dilemmas, which I will get back to.
They are both flawed, and the flaw is the same: both have a very short fuse. They go from attempting to do the right thing, and be nice, to exploding and hurting the other person as much as they can. The thing that complicates this is that every time one is trying to do the right thing, the other - not realising - does something to hurt him. For example, Gavin meets a computer hacker (Dylan Baker), who hacks into Gibson's bank account and renders him bankrupt, just after he has bought the flat for his family and needs the money. Gavin leaves a message on Doyle's telephone, which he gets just at the moment when he was about to send the file back to him.
Going back to the moral dilemmas. Gavin works at the company for his stepfather, Stephen Delano (Sidney Pollack), who suggests that they forge another file using another version of the old man's signature. Gavin wonders at this point whether or not what he is doing is right - was it fair to get the dying man's signature for the money, or was he conning him, abusing their friendship and his illness. He is married to Stephen's daughter, Cynthia (Amanda Peet), but he is having a relationship with Michelle (Toni Collette), another worker at his firm.
Doyle is a recovering alcoholic. We see him at an AA meeting, near the film's start, talking about how happy he is now that he has not been drinking. The Sponsor of the group is played by William Hurt, who Doyle phones after walking into a bar at the movie's midpoint. He orders a drink, does not drink it, and eventually gets into a fight with two other drinkers at the bar. William Hurt says to him "you know, alcohol isn't your drug of choice: you're addicted to chaos." We understand that he loves his two sons, and he loves his wife. She left him because she could not stand his bad temper.
Gavin and Doyle would not have confronted these issues had they not met. These are issues they were turning a blind eye to in the past, but now they are looking at themselves and trying to see if they are doing what they ought to be doing.
The trailers for "Changing Lanes" suggest it is a different movie. They show the movie's action sequences, and the fight sequences, without suggesting anything about the characters questioning their morality. Those who see the trailer and seek an action thriller will be disappointed, and those who see the trailer and are put off may discover, as I did, that the movie has more depth than it lets on in its advertising campaign. It contains the two best performances to date from both Affleck and Jackson, which is reason enough for seeing it.
THIS NEXT MOVIE, DAVID CRONENBERG'S "SPIDER", WAS PERHAPS NOT QUITE AS GOOD AS I HAD HOPED, BUT WAS NONETHELESS THRILLING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING:
I can't believe it happened again. How could I be so stupid? I watched the new David Cronenberg film thinking "well, I ain't looking forward to giving this a negative review". I walked out the cinema, thinking how it could have been better. Then I sit down for five minutes, think about it, and realise that is was actually very good.
I do not know if it is just me, but this happens when I watch almost any Cronenberg film. He makes movies you want to watch again, but not until you're well away from the cinema. I felt this with "Crash", "eXistenZ" and "Videodrome" - all movies that grow on you over time.
The main character's real name is Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), but because of his ability to spin 'webs' out of string, and because of his obsession with creatures of the eight-legged kind, his mother calls him "Spider". At the start of the film he has just left a mental institution. He gets off a train and makes his way to a home for ex-asylum patients, which is run by the less-than-professional Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). Among the other patients is Terrence, played by the ever-good John Neville. He wanders around mumbling to himself and writes in a notepad in bizarre figures that have only a very small similarity to the alphabet.
We discover that Spider was brought up in this area. He wonders around the streets right into flashbacks of his childhood. As a child he was a cold, seemingly emotionless boy. His father, Bill (Gabriel Byrne) goes out for drinks a lot. When he pays attention to him, Spider just ignores him. He loves his mother, and does not care for his father. His mother is played by Miranda Richardson, who also plays Yvonne, a "thick tart" who hangs around the pub Bill often goes to, and tempts him to betray his wife. The old Spider remembers his youth, and even, as it is played out before him, takes notes on it.
The end is the bit that will get you talking. As I was watching it, I still could not make one hundred percent certain what was going on, but had a reasonably good idea. It is not really a twist as much as it emphasising what has been there all along.
The movie takes you on a journey with Spider, and his insanity starts to make perfect sense. We accept his bizarre logic, which is an achievement for Cronenberg, Fiennes, and Patrick McGrath, the screenwriter (and author of the book it is based on). He occupies almost every scene, even when we see flashbacks not concerning him as a child. Ralph Fiennes was attached to this project for five years, and we can see how hard he has prepared for the role. The moment he steps off the train at the beginning he has an amazing presence. You give him your full attention immediately. His mutter, as he talks to himself, his walk and movement, his nervous eyes and his bizarre handwriting are perfect. If there is one thing I am sure you will admire of this movie, it is Fiennes's performance.
It is not a perfect movie, though. It has one flaw. It is not, as you may expect, that it is overly complicated, it is - surprisingly - that it is overly simple. When you figure it out, it is very easy to reduce the entire movie into a single sentence of summary (I am not going to, of course). It's a complex telling of a relatively straightforward story, but given its subject matter, that is maybe the way it ought to be told.
Still, it is an intelligent movie that does not patronise its audience. It is not up there with Cronenberg's best work (the three films I mentioned earlier), but it is still atmospheric, moody, melancholy and memorable. And if you're sitting in the cinema thinking it is poor, prepare to change your mind half an hour later.
AND FINALLY (YES, I'M RUNNING OUT OF INTRODUCTIONS), "ONE HOUR PHOTO":
Loneliness often leads to obsession. Lonely people need something to do with their time. If you have no friends and no family, you need to do something to keep your mind busy, right?
In "One Hour Photo" Robin Williams plays Seymour "Sy" Parrish. He has greying hair and wears big spectacles. He works at a one hour photo stand for a supermarket. He is a good worker, determined about his job. In the voiceover, he talks us through the "art" of developing pictures, and how careful and precise you must be to be good at it.
He says of photograph development "like most things, it's more than meets the eye" - he is referring to himself as well. He seems like a nice guy, but he is also very lonely. We get the impression that if he left the supermarket and walked in front of a moving bus, few people would take much notice. He has an obsession: the Yorkin family. The Yorkins are, to Sy, a seemingly perfect family: there is the pretty wife, Nina (Connie Nielsen), the hard-working husband, Will (Michael Vartan), and their son, little Jake (Dylan Smith). They take their photographs to Sy, who calls Nina one of their "best customers". When he learns it is Jake's birthday he gives him a free disposable camera. Soon, though, we learn just how far Sy's obsession goes.
He makes an extra set of photos from the Yorkins' negatives. Not for the Yorkins: for himself. He does this with every single one of the photos he develops for them, takes them home, and sticks them onto his massive wall display of Yorkin pictures.
We learn Sy has no real friends. He lives alone. He does not even have any family that we are told of. His dream is to be a friend of the Yorkins. He says to Nina that he has known them for so long he "feels like Uncle Sy". He really wishes he was.
If Sy is a 'baddie', then he is one of the most sympathetic I have seen. We, the audience, care about him while no one else seems to. How often do you speak to the guy who develops your photos?
Robin Williams gives an extraordinary, haunting performance as Sy. Usually when Robin Williams is given a role, he gets to know the character, gets into the characters shoes, tries to get us to laugh, tries to get us to cry, and usually makes us want to run to the nearest bathroom. Patch Adams, in the movie of the same name. Professor Philip Brainard in "Flubber". Dale Putley in "Fathers' Day". Jack Powell in "Jack". All played by the Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams, and all disposable rubbish, unfunny at best, sickly sentimental at worst. With Sy as well as killer Walter Finch in "Insomnia" in his recent filmography, is it possible that Robin Williams has finally grown up? One thing's for sure: he's trying to change his image, and the way he is thought of. This is certainly a wise choice.
"One Hour Photo" is suspenseful, but not a thriller. It is horrific, but not a horror. While hardly flawless, it works so well because of its central character, and because of Williams's devastating performance. Remember the tagline on the old "Taxi Driver" posters? It read:
"On every street there's a nobody who dreams of being somebody. He's a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove he's alive."
****
Phew. Well there you have it: nine movies, and only one bad one amongst them (although I hear a lot of people liked "Tadpole", so maybe it was just me). I am going to an interview with Christopher Nolan tomorrow (the British premier of "Insomnia" is on tomorrow but, darnit, I never got a ticket in time). After that I will go to my bedroom and sit in seclusion for another year until EIFF 57.
Catchya later, CharteredStreets
