Category: Reviews

There’s a montage in Blade: Trinity during which Jessica Biel and Wesley Snipes go out hunting for information. It’s really skillfully handled, with nimble wipes and split-screens and it conveys a lot of action in a very short amount of time. Truly, it’s one of the better montages I’ve seen in a while.

It is not the coolest thing Jessica Biel does in the movie. In her other fight scenes, she emotes in a way we don’t see often enough in action movies. She frowns in concentration, she grins to herself when she does something cool, she gets worried when her opponents are bigger than she is. It grounds her fights in reality, because she’s acting like they’re real efforts. I liked that a lot.

Also, it does not have any Ryan Reynolds, who carries off the neat trick of being both a smart-ass and a bad-ass throughout. He’s not a smart bad-ass, nor is he a bad smart-ass. He’s a smart-ass who kicks ass, authentically. And he’s a sidekick, which means he has to be a bad-ass without overshadowing the hero. I was impressed by him, and there’s none of him in the montage.

However, the montage was the best part of the movie and it is not a sufficient reason to see the movie, which is all I want to say about Blade: Trinity.

You know, for about the first half an hour or so I didn’t think I was going to like Garden State. Natalie Portman was doing such a great job of playing Sam, who was being a terribly annoying character. No, thought I, please no, please do not try to make me cheer for a relationship between this person and the affable Zach Braff, whom I am becoming fond of both for his portrayal of this Andrew Largeman and for his deft touch with suburban absurdism. I was saddened, because she was grating on me something fierce. I have little room in my heart for anyone who believes being cute excuses being obnoxious.

On the other hand, Natalie Portman can act. And Zach Braff can act. And a little while further on, as Andrew slowly came out of his tranquilizer-induced haze, and as Sam slowly became comfortable with him and stopped poking at him, I wound up cheering. I think I blame the overhead shot of the swimming pool, if I had to pick an exact moment, because she didn’t have to come back to the shallow end but she did anyhow. The tap dancing was gravy.

OK: it’s a first film, and that shows. Three big emotive speeches at the end, two of them to the same person? That’s a screenwriter who didn’t know how to finish his movie. Howling in the rain as a transformative moment? Come on. But I forgive; of course I do. The rest of the movie is so eloquently deft. Braff uses quirky to his advantage, and never slips into quirk for quirk’s sake. Early on, he finds a gas pump nozzle sticking out of his car. He’s driven off without removing it, which is quirky. But it tells a story about his mental state, which propels the story onward. Good stuff.

Didn’t hurt that the supporting cast is strong. Peter Sarsgaard is a treasure. With this performance plus his turn in Kinsey, he’s a shoo-in for the Oscar for Best Body of Work as a Supporting Actor In A Single Year. Ian Holm is Ian Holm. I wouldn’t say that his father/son moment measures up to Liam Neeson and John Lithgow, speaking of Kinsey, but that’s an awfully tough standard. Holm does an awful lot in Garden State with a few lines and a quiet mastery of expression.

I wondered a bit about Natalie Portman’s costuming and some of the set design. She’s young-looking anyway, and to have someone who looks that young bringing a guy who’s in his mid-twenties home to the house where she’s still living with her family — I found it distracted a little, particularly since Andrew is returning in so many ways to his high school years by returning home. He’s seeing the same people, and none of them have moved on from what they were. They’re still hanging out with high school girls. It’s not until later that we know for more or less sure that Sam’s not in an inappropriate age bracket. Perhaps that was intentional, but it jarred me.

So a gem with a few flaws. It won’t make my top ten for the year, but it’ll stick with me for a while.

Kinji Fukasaku is infamous in the United States for Battle Royale, a painfully cynical Lord of the Flies turned up to eleven. Among the actors in that movie, we find Chiaki Kuriyama, who later appeared in Kill Bill: Volume 1. Tarantino’s grindhouse epic draws strongly on Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Papers, a series of five movies which begins with Battles Without Honor and Humanity — which, of course, is the title to the Tomoyasu Hotei song on the Kill Bill soundtrack. No mistake, that. Despite this circular dance of interconnections, the IMDB page listing movie links for Kill Bill does not list Battles Without Honor and Humanity as of this moment. Such is the fallibility of voluntarily edited databases.

I watched Battles Without Honor and Humanity because I’d heard it was a seminal moment in Japanese yakuza films, and I liked Battle Royale a lot. Now that I’ve seen it, there’s a clear electric connection between Fukasaku’s desperate gang epic and the brutal yakuza movies of Takashi Miike. I can’t imagine how liberating it must have been to see a movie as direct and honest as this at the time, in 1973. It casts a shadow.

When I step back and consider the movie as a whole, I’m left with a sense of a profound anger. Image one: the atomic bomb exploding in the heart of Hiroshima. Image two: American soldiers raping a Japanese woman. Then we’re plunged into the tensely muted world of the yakuza, but the bomb stays with us. It’s the original sin which informs this new generation of yakuza.

Not much else does. There’s a scene where Bunta Sugawara, the protagonist, decides he must cut off part of his little finger as atonement. He doesn’t know how to do it; he’s new to this business. Neither do any of his friends. In the end, the only person who can help is the wife of the boss — “I saw it done once in Osaka.” The final scene powers home the point, as Sugawara literally shatters the symbols of tradition. “Do you know what you’re doing?” Of course.

Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is much like a Laurell Hamilton book, except that it’s suitable for people with good taste. The territory is familiar: more or less modern day, except there are creepy-crawlies (including vampires) running around and everybody knows it. Sunshine is set right after the war that occurred when that particular fact became public knowledge, I think — the timing is never made clear. There’s a young spunky heroine, there’s a vampire, there’s romance (not necessarily with the vampire), and so on.

The good: the prose is solid and Sunshine, the eponymous protagonist, is a fairly good character. Also good: the background doesn’t get drawn into place with a straight-edge. You have to pick up on what happened by paying attention, and I like a book that makes me think a bit.

The bad: weakish plotting in which characters don’t have to make choices. Inchoate ending, somewhat anticlimactic. It feels as though McKinley came up with an awesome setting concept and then wrote a documentary about it.

I liked it. The good is pretty good and the bad is forgivable.

A while ago I posted a review of K. J. Parker’s Colours in the Steel. I finally got around to reading the other two books in the trilogy. At the time, I said “I’m happy to have two more chunks of comfortable reading ahead of me.”

Two, yes. Chunks, yes. Reading, yes. Well-written, yes. Comfortable? Not to any notable degree. In the end, the Fencer trilogy is a tragedy about the Loredan family and their inability to love one another. I would still recommend them, but they are not in any way nice.

Closer is the movie that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance wanted to be: it’s a story about the pain humans cause one another. It succeeds where Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance failed, because the characters are people and not caricatures and because Mike Nichols recognizes that pain arises from the cruelties we deal one another. It’s very close to being a great movie.

The only flaw in the ointment is Julia Roberts, but let’s leave that for a moment. It’s the best Jude Law performance of the year, edging out his executive in I ♥ Huckabees. He’s still got that surface gloss which detracts a little from his performance, but like his executive, this is a role that fits that gloss. And his body language is a thing of beauty. Particularly during his scenes with Natalie Portman: the pair of them express themselves in exactly the way lovers interact. Not when they’re first meeting — that’s not so hard — but when they’re parting badly, and one of them wants to taste the other’s mouth, and there’s the moment of wanting to give in, to comfort, but no, you can’t —

They had that down perfectly. Body language was the key to both of their performances. If you see it, or see it again, watch how Natalie Portman moves. When she’s unhappy or uncomfortable she’s a feral jittery thing who can’t keep still. She moves, and tics, and tilts her head, and never comes to rest. When she’s on her home ground, she’s a feral calm thing who moves, well, like a woman who knows she has the edge. It’s a great transformation. It’s definitely nomination-worthy.

Apparently the studio is pushing Julia Roberts for the Best Actress nomination, while Natalie Portman is relegated to Best Supporting Actress, but that’s wrong. If I had to pick, and I’d hate to do it, I’d say Natalie Portman has the marginally more important role. Clive Owen is getting pushes for Best Supporting Actor and Jude Law for Best Actor, but that split makes more sense. And Jude Law was a touch better than Clive Owen, although there was nothing wrong with Clive Owen’s performance. He’s not as good an actor, but does he bring the heat? Yes, he brings the angry crude cunning heat. The scene in which he and Julia Roberts break up is so furious that the theater exhaled when it ended.

That was not, I think, a spoiler. Then again, it is, but you would be poorly served if you entered into an act of commerce involving Closer without the awareness that this is a movie about people who hurt other people by granting and withdrawing and withholding their love. You want to brace for it.

And Julia Roberts? She’s a cipher. She is the actress who is boldly playing an older woman, but not really. No crows-feet. The role was originally going to Cate Blanchett, which would have worked out better. There’s nothing horrendous about Julia Roberts, but she’s such a passive actress. Even when she’s playing heated, it’s hard to believe her. The other characters have emotions, but she drifts. This is perhaps in some part the character. It still weakens the film to a degree.

At one level, the movie is about two men fighting; they use their relationships with two women as the battleground. This is exactly as un-feminist as it sounds. Natalie Portman undermines that, though. It’s not that she’s admirable, it’s that she understands the battleground as well as the men. So do they use her as a place to fight? Yes. But she is using them in other, more subtle ways. She’s a person, not an object. I’m not sure I can say the same about Julia Roberts, whose Anna is so passive that at times it seems like she just follows the last man who seduces her, in whatever sense of “seduces” one likes.

Perhaps, again, this was the point of the character. But if so, all I can say is that Julia Roberts was born to play that role.

In the end, mind you, it doesn’t matter because everyone else brings enough anger and passion and desire to the screen to more than make up for any lack on her part. It’s a fine movie which will be on my top ten list in a month or two. I should also caveat that my distaste for Julia Roberts may be irrational; if you would agree with that statement, feel free to disregard the last three paragraphs. A lot of critics really liked her performance.

Instead, consider the elegant cool greys and blues of the film, and don’t be put off by the contrived slow-motion opening sequence which seems so much like just another bad romance opening. The bookend closing sequence parodies it ruthlessly, up to and including the mawkish song. It is a meticulous movie, and I liked it very much.

Embarrassingly, up until very recently I had not seen a lot of Wong Kar Wai. By which I basically mean none. But I am determined to correct my cinematic errors and last night, desperately needing something to clear my brain from the mediocrity that was Alexander, I dug around and came up with Days of Being Wild. It was the right choice; it’s haunting me.

It reminds me of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wong flattens out the passage of time, deliberately eschewing conventional sequential techniques. There’s no build-up, no climax to the scenes. Things happen, flat against the backdrop of the world. The four protagonists shuffle around, touch each others lives, talk in pairs, and shuffle again. Time passes like a metronome, without emphasis.

It reminds me of the 60s, not just because it’s set in the 60s, but because it breathes cool with every understated frame. Wong’s camera, aided and abetted by Christopher Doyle, glides from shot to shot. He has an unerring eye for the significant angles of everyone’s face. Maggie Cheung’s in particular, of course, but he doesn’t stint on Leslie Cheung’s spoiled handsomeness either. Set the pop star actors against Christopher Doyle’s superb cinematography, and you’ve got the most elegant movie in the world.

There’s this fine line Wong walks there: the actors are filmed as beings of glamour, but their characters are bit players living out ordinary lives. Which does not, mind you, deprive them of importance. That’s another underlying truth to the world Wong creates: people are important because love is important because connections are important. They recur, no matter how much one might hide from them. Wong’s a romantic.

In the end there’s a climax to the movie. It only resolves one story, though. Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau and Carina Lau and Jacky Cheung, they’re still floating in 60s Hong Kong, looking for ways to connect, finding little hope.

Days of Being Wild will be playing at the MFA in Boston, February 25 through March 1, 2004. Or cut to the chase and get it from Kino, either alone or as part of their Wong Kai Wai box set.

I have this picture of Oliver Stone going “Yeah, so we’ll do the entire thing in narration, Anthony Hopkins will just tell us what happened, and then we’ll sort of intersperse moments where Alexander says something glorious and inspiring.” Then for some reason everyone else said “Good idea!” It was not, in fact, a good idea.

Val Kilmer was pretty good as Phillip. Hopefully Oliver Stone’s failure will brighten up the prospects for Baz Luhrmann’s Alexander movie. No other silver linings are visible.

House of Flying Daggers is the latest movie from Zhang Yimou, the guy who directed Hero. Depending on how much you counted on Zhang Yimou to keep making beautiful art movies, it’s either the final step in his commercialization or a slam-bang action movie without all that complex flashback stuff. Either way, those who complained about the politics of Hero will hopefully be relieved to find that House of Flying Daggers is light on the political subtext.

What you get is, really, a Shaw Brothers movie for the new millenium, with superb production values. There are rebels and an empire in decay and lovers and jealousy. There is not extended meditation on the nature of truth and lies, and while honor is important, it’s important as the substrate for the passions of love and lust.

Andy Lau really is a pretty good choice for that particular kind of story, too. He’s cute and roguish and all. I’m kind of wishing that Zhang Ziyi wasn’t in all the kung fu art flicks we get on these shores, but I have to admit she’s doing a good job with the roles.

Back to the kung fu: if Hero was Zhang Yimou’s practice run for a kung fu movie, then House of Flying Daggers is where he cuts loose. There’s stuff in here that’s going to be remembered for a while. In particular, there’s a fight scene towards the middle of the movie in a bamboo forest which is startlingly fresh and new, not so much in the actual kung fu but in the way in which he uses the environment. Nobody’s ever done quite that with trees before.

If you’re in LA or New York, you can see it on December 3rd. Everyone else is waiting till the 17th, or you can be a region-free liberated DVD watcher like me and get it early. I’ll see it again on the big screen, though, you betcha.

If Bill Condon’s going to keep making such great movies, I guess it’s OK that he only makes ‘em once every six years or so. Kinsey was awfully good. Not perfect, but awfully good.

You have to start with Liam Neeson, who turned in a brilliant performance, not stinting on either Kinsey’s flaws or his strengths. Laura Linney is the obvious key co-star, but I gotta say nice things also about John Lithgow, who was perfect as Kinsey’s father. The movie explores, briefly, the way in which Kinsey became as much a preacher as his father was, and that would not have worked half so well if Neeson and Lithgow hadn’t worked so well together.

Not that Linney and Neeson weren’t great in conjunction. They’re young together and middle-aged together and old together and the passage of time is sketched out by the way the pair becomes comfortable with one another. If they gave Oscars for best joint performance, these two would get one. Since they do give out SAG awards for best cast, maybe that’ll make up for it a bit. I hadn’t realized how good the cast was: Oliver Platt, Tim Curry, Dylan Baker, Timothy Hutton, yum.

What you get out of such a good cast, in part, is the ability to create yet another brief focus of Kinsey that I really enjoyed. I think Condon absolutely nailed the tension that arises from attempts to liberate sex from emotional ties. There’s a strong taste of this in Kinsey’s own personal life, and later on, when his staff slips into polymorphous sensibilities, there’s a great five or ten minute sequence which eloquently shows the problems that can arise. Couldn’t have worked without such a strong cast.

You know, it’s a real stocking full of presents, this Kinsey. There are a lot of fairly brief brilliant explorations of various subjects — the realization that one’s bi-sexual, Kinsey’s relationship with his father, the tension of polygamy, the competition between Kinsey and Tim Curry’s character, the way Oliver Platt’s character comes to appreciate what Kinsey brings to the university… and yeah, this is about the only quibble I had with the movie. Condon’s good enough to hit each topic with unexpected depth, but you get to wishing he’d linger more. Whoops, Kinsey’s had his realization about sex with other males; time to move on to the next topic. Bit of a whirlwind.

On the other hand, the underlying themes — Kinsey’s emotional life and the celebration of diversity — continue throughout. And man, are they ever worth it. What a tremendously cool movie.

Anything else? I didn’t think the framing technique quite worked. The movie starts with Kinsey training his students on interview techniques by making them interview him, and that’s filmed in black and white. This is interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood, in color, which threw my time sense off. (“Shouldn’t the flashbacks be black and white?”) Then midway through the movie the flashbacks catch up with the frame and the frame vanishes. Didn’t work for me.

Still — pretty minor caveats. I enjoyed Kinsey a lot.