The Academy Gets It Right (For a Change)

Posted 25 February, 2008 in Film | 3 comments

2007 was a good year for literary adaptations at the Oscars, Hollywood’s annual narcissistic stroke-fest, with Joel & Ethan Coen’s terrific film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair’s unfortunately titled Oil! (note to writers: exclamation points in titles are never a good idea — I’m looking at you, Dave Eggers), and Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s sombre World War II novel Atonement all being nominated for best picture. In addition, Canadian Sarah Polley was nominated in the best adapted screenplay category for Away from Her, an adaptation of Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”

In the end, the Coens’ film came home the big winner, taking four major awards: best picture, best director(s), best adapted screenplay, and best supporting actor (Javier Bardem). I’ll admit that I didn’t think the Academy would go for No Country, it being too subversive and nihilistic for their usual sensibilities. My money was on the historical epic Atonement, which, despite its Masterpiece Theatre feel and its interminable middle third, is the kind of romantic costume drama that Oscar usually rewards.

It may be indicative of the dark mood that has befallen not just the Hollywood establishment, but the entire United States of America that resulted in No Country’s Oscar win. Regardless, it’s nice to see the best picture in the Oscar slate get awarded with the title for a change. Looking back at the myriad goofs that Oscar has made in this category in years past (awarding Ordinary People over Raging Bull, Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, ignoring Citizen Kane, The Third Man, and Psycho), the 80th Annual Academy Awards will at least be remembered as one of the years the Academy got it right.

‘Tis the Season to Be Jolly … Or Not

Posted 3 December, 2007 in Film | 1 comment

Yesterday, your humble correspondent took in an afternoon screening of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning film about a Romanian college student in 1987 who helps her roommate procure an illegal abortion. The film is gritty, brutal, and absolutely uncompromising: it thrusts the viewer bodily into a world where everything — sex, life, morality — is negotiable. Mungiu uses static two-shots brilliantly to create a sense of creeping tension, and there is a dialogue in a hotel room that has to qualify as one of the most horrifying sequences I’ve ever sat through in a movie. The film’s quiet matter-of-factness only adds to the horror: this is a movie that sends its viewers out of the cinema afterward feeling pummelled, shocked, and drained.

It’s also one of the best films of the year.

This fall has been one of the strongest seasons in recent memory for cinema; week after week has offered thoughtful films for adults, films that don’t pander to their audiences or condescend or try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The crop of movies that are currently showing on cinema screens includes some of the smartest, toughest films to appear in a long time, and also some of the darkest.

Where American filmmakers are concerned, this is perhaps not surprising: given the backdrop of a disastrous war that has now dragged on longer than World War II, a faltering American economy, and broad domestic dissatisfaction with the current American administration, it’s understandable that U.S. filmmakers would not be in the brightest of moods. Once one accounts for the bread-and-circuses diversions of films such as Enchanted and August Rush, one inevitably runs up against a string of films that question moral certainty and hold a bright, unforgiving light up to the subject of human venality and its consequences. When even a bubblegum horror film like The Mist takes up themes of paranoia and the poisonous effect that fundamentalist rhetoric bred out of a climate of fear can have on group dynamics, you know that something interesting is going on.

Of course, it’s the bread-and-circuses fare that seems to be catching fire at a depressed domestic box office. Disney’s fairytale, Enchanted, spent a second weekend at number one, while the feel-good holiday film This Christmas and Robert Zemekis’s 3-D IMAX cartoon Beowulf were number two and three respectively. By contrast, Brian de Palma’s well-reviewed Iraq drama Redacted disappeared after only one week. To date, Enchanted has brought in $70,620,000 domestically, according to the website Box Office Mojo. Redacted has earned $48,368 to date.

It was ever thus: particularly at the holidays, filmgoers don’t tend to want to be reminded of the way the world really is; they want to escape, to feel good. Unfortunately, by resolutely chasing the cheery, upbeat offerings at the movies, people risk missing out on some of the best, most complex mainstream cinema to be released since Hollywood’s last golden age in the 1970s.

For those who may be feeling a bit more adventurous this holiday season, or those who might need a break from all the sweetness and light, here is a quick look at some of the most impressive cinematic fare currently in theatres:

• No Country for Old Men. The Coen brothers return to form after a disappointing couple of outings. Their brilliant realization of Cormac McCarthy’s crime thriller actually improves on the book by opening up the Texas landscapes that seemed oddly constrained on the page. Long, languid pans of the Texas plains give way to sequences of intense, graphic violence that explodes without warning. The Coens use silence as eloquently as sound, and create a world in which morality is a movable feast, and even the most seemingly innocuous actions can have catastrophic consequences. A brilliantly edited film (one of the best I’ve ever seen), and almost bereft of music, No Country for Old Men is spare, lean, and tough. Not just the best American film of the year, it’s one of the great American films, period.
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. At eighty-three years old, Sidney Lumet bursts back onto the American cinema landscape with his best film since 1982’s The Verdict. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are dynamite as two down-on-their-luck brothers who plan the perfect jewellery heist, only to have their entire scheme unravel around them. What starts out as a generic, Reservoir Dogs-style crime thriller turns into a dark morality tale that leaves none of its characters unscathed. Lumet’s understated direction proves that a master filmmaker doesn’t need a lot of flashy camerawork or CGI to create a brilliantly taut piece of cinema.
• Michael Clayton. George Clooney is spectacular as a fixer for a large law firm, who is called in to clean up the mess when one of the firm’s senior litigators melts down during a deposition. Tony Gilroy’s smart script blurs the line between good and evil, moral and immoral, focusing on the compromises we are willing to make to get what we want. Clooney and Tom Wilkinson have a knockout scene in an alley that effectively pulls the rug out from under characters and viewer alike, and underscores that in a venal, corrupt world, the man whom everyone labels crazy may indeed be the sanest person around.
• Gone Baby Gone. In its advertising campaign for this film, Miramax assiduously avoided mentioning director and co-screenwriter Ben Affleck, presumably to avoid being tainted by the whole “Bennifer”/Gigli/Jersey Girl association. They needn’t have worried. Affleck’s directorial debut is a dark morality tale about the search for a missing girl and the diverse, often competing, interests involved on the parts of the police, the girl’s wayward mother, and the two private investigators hired to augment the official hunt. A tough, violent, uncompromising film that ends on the kind of morally ambiguous note — in which one of the characters does (arguably) the wrong thing for the right reasons — that most Hollywood films run screaming from.
• Lions for Lambs. Robert Redford’s film is a potent, surprisingly even-handed look at American policy in the post 9/11 era. Redford has never been a particularly adventurous director visually, and the film’s war scenes are fairly lacklustre. But it raises some compelling questions, and ends up …(read more)implicating its audience in its rousing condemnation of all of us who sit on the sidelines doing nothing while the world burns.

In addition to these American releases, the aforementioned 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, from Romania, and Control – Anton Corbjin’s biopic of troubled Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis — from the U.K., are both well worth your time.

So in this season of goodwill, don’t forget to check out some of the provocative, challenging, intelligent cinematic fare on offer. It’s box office dollars that will convince studio executives that it’s this stuff — rather than bloated, cartoonish fare like Are We Done Yet? or Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – that audiences are really interested in.

Cormac and the Coens

Posted 24 October, 2007 in Film | 2 comments

Time has an online link to a transcript of a discussion between Cormac McCarthy and Joel and Ethan Coen, who have just filmed McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. (Which opens in limited release on November 9, then opens wide on November 21. Go see it to remind yourself that American cinema — albeit very occasionally these days — can aspire to the level of art. Just see the damn film. That’s all.)

The discussion covers a number of topics, including an adaptation the Coens wanted to do of James Dickey’s novel To the White Sea,* Joel’s assessment of Miller’s Crossing as “just a damn rip-off,” McCarthy’s admiration for the films of Terrence Mallick, and his feelings about the vicisstudes of writing dialogue:

David Mamet has a collection of essays called Writing in Cafés, or something like that. He says that the ideal venue for a playwright is to write radio plays, because then you have nothing, just–this is what somebody said. That’s it. You have nothing to fall back on. That’s quite interesting. Plays are hard, and I suspect that a lot of people who write plays don’t really know how it’s going to play. I mean, how do you know? Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.” Now how did Will know that was going to happen?

One small note here, slightly off topic. Why is it that major newsmagazines like Time are so timorous when it comes to printing profanity? If one of the great novelists of our time said “shit,” then just print the fucking word. It’s not like he tore open his shirt and exposed a nipple or anything really shocking like that. We’re all fucking adults here, after all, know what I’m saying? Fuck me.

*This is a movie I’d love to see. If Brad Pitt is too old to play the part now, might I suggest Ryan Gosling? No Country for Old Men has no music (except for one very brief scene), so can a movie with no dialogue be far behind?

I Was Wrong

Posted 24 September, 2007 in Film | 1 comment

Boy, was I ever.

At the end of last week, I predicted that the Brad Pitt western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford would knock The Brave One out of top spot at this weekend’s box office.

I should have known better.

The combination of a title that most people won’t be able to remember and the three-hour running time should have clued me in.

The Brave One was indeed kicked out of the top spot, by Resident Evil: Extinction. Number two went to the Dane Cook comedy Good Luck Chuck. Both films received dismal reviews. Resident Evil: Extinction, which as of this morning scored 28% fresh on the Web site Rotten Tomatoes, made $24 million at the box office, according to the tracking site Box Office Mojo. Good Luck Chuck, which scored a disasterous 3% fresh, raked in $14 million.

By contrast, In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis’s Iraq-themed drama, which scored 68% fresh, finished in seventeenth place with a total haul of $1,257,000, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which also scored 68% fresh, made a disasterous $144,000, failing even to break the top twenty-five in its first weekend. The only potential bright spot here is that David Cronenberg’s masterful thriller Eastern Promises (89% fresh) had a strong second-week showing with $5,747,000 in fifth place.

But the one-two punch of Resident Evil: Extinction and Good Luck Chuck displays the wisdom of crowds, and it sucks.

Books on Film

Posted 10 September, 2007 in Film | 4 comments

Today was a very literary day at the Toronto International Film Festival. This morning, I attended a screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. This afternoon I saw Nothing Is Private, Alan Ball’s adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel, Towelhead.

On the surface, both books seemed ideally suited to their respective filmmakers. The Coens’ debut film, Blood Simple, shares both its Texas setting and a kind of unresolved existential dread with McCarthy’s tale of stolen money, revenge, and retribution. And Erian’s story of a thirteen-year-old half-Lebanese girl’s sexual awakening at the hands of a classmate and her racist — and very adult — next-door neighbour seems tailor made for the creator of American Beauty and Six Feet Under. Plus, both novels are extremely dialogue-heavy, rendering them obvious candidates for film treatments.

So why is it that the Coens’ film works so brilliantly, while Ball’s categorically doesn’t?

I suspect that the first and perhaps overarching reason is that the Coens are better filmmakers than Ball, whose directorial debut this is. In films such as (the aforementioned) Blood Simple and Fargo, the Coens have used landscapes to brilliant effect, such that the setting becomes an integral part of the story, indeed, becomes almost a character in itself. No one can convince me that the opening shot of Fargo, with William H. Macy’s car appearing wraithlike out of the blowing snow that envelops the screen, is not one of the most startling and effective opening shots ever inserted into an American motion picture. Similarly, the sweeping vistas of the Texas plains that dominate the opening scenes of No Country for Old Men provide a sense of hardness and alienation, even before the plot starts to kick in. This gives the film an advantage over the book, where the Texas landscape seemed oddly constrained and muted, particularly when compared to the epic grandeur of earlier McCarthy works such as All the Pretty Horses and — especially — Blood Meridian.

Tonally, the Coens’ film resembles McCarthy’s novel in its spareness, its complete lack of ornament. The storytelling is brutal in its efficiency, with not a wasted shot or line of dialogue and, except for one very brief moment, there is absolutely no music in the film. It takes a great deal of confidence and skill to pull off an entire feature film without a score, but the Coens’ decision to let the story propel itself is unquestionably the right one, as it simultaneously builds tension and inculcates in the viewer a sense of alienness and uncertainty. It’s often not apparent how a musical score can affect the experience of watching a movie until it’s taken away.

The film is also brilliantly edited: fluid pans of the Texas skyline are juxtaposed with short, sharp jump cuts during the action sequences; moments of calm quiet give way without warning to startling, graphic violence. The editing of a film determines its pace (which is something so obvious it’s often overlooked), and the Coens modulate No Country for Old Men magnificently, creating the visual equivalent of a symphony.

They’ve also taken the important step of casting the film flawlessly. There is not a false note in it, from Tommy Lee Jones as the laconic, world-weary sheriff Ed Tom Bell to Josh Brolin as the hapless antelope hunter who stumbles on a cache of money to Woody Harrelson in an inspired cameo as a gun-for-hire.

But the revelation of the film is the great Javier Bardem as Chigurh, the sociopathic killer who pursues the satchel of lost cash. Bardem has been terrific before in roles both large (Before Night Falls) and small (a chilling cameo that constitutes what are arguably the five best minutes in Michael Mann’s Collateral), but here he inhabits his character so completely that it almost appears he is channelling him. Bardem’s performance is largely in his eyes, which are watchful and intense, whether they are scanning a room for evidence of his prey, or focused unblinking on an incipient victim. Like Meryl Streep in last year’s The Devil Wears Prada, Bardem cleverly underplays a role that could easily have devolved into caricature, and in the process creates one of the most indelible screen villains in recent memory.

Casting is absolutely essential to any movie, but the irony is that when it’s done right, you don’t notice it. It’s only when it’s done wrong that it calls attention to itself, and this is one of the signal problems with Ball’s adaptation of Erian’s novel. In the key role of Rifat, the protagonist’s domineering Lebanese immigrant father, Peter Macdissi is so miscast that he ends up torpedoing the entire film, or at least those scenes in which he appears. Macdissi, who also appeared in Six Feet Under, proves congenitally incapable of manifesting the tonal modulations the character requires. The actor who plays Rifat must be charming one moment and vicious the next, but Macdissi can’t seem to pull off these one-eighty-degree turns; his performance is forced and artificial throughout.

Another problem with the movie is its unwillingness — or inability — to retain the edginess of its source material. This starts with the title, which has been softened from Erian’s deliberately provocative one-word epithet, perhaps as a balm to mainstream movie audiences who are presumed to be too easily shocked. But part of Erian’s project in the novel was precisely that: to shock people as a means of providing perspective on matters of race and a young girl’s burgeoning sexuality. This is not a story that is supposed to make its audience comfortable, and sugar-coating the title strikes me as just a bit cowardly on the part of the filmmakers.

To give Ball credit, he has set himself a challenging, not to say insurmountable, task. The central event in the novel involves the statutory rape of an underage girl, and it’s probably not possible to deal with this directly onscreen in the manner that Erian deals with it in the book. However, by diluting this material in the process of translating it, Ball has drained it of much of its potency.

Finally, Ball is simply not as good a director as the Coens. Much of the visual grammar in Nothing Is Private is pedestrian and uninspired; much of what is not is stolen from Sam Mendes’s suburban alienation film American Beauty, which Ball also wrote. Ball does not have a visual style or cinematic sensibility of his own, so what he’s left with is a straightforward adaptation that basically just photographs as much of the book as he thinks he can get away with.

In No Country for Old Men, by contrast, the Coens remain faithful to the source material, while simultaneously making it their own. The film has a distinct cinematic style and a unique visual approach, from bird’s eye panoramas of the Texas landscape to a low shot of a killer standing behind a motel-room door, his face half-illuminated by a beam of light from the outside. The poetry of McCarthy’s prose is seamlessly replaced by the poetry of the Coens’ camera.

There is an old saw that says you should never judge a book by its movie. This holds true for Nothing Is Private. No Country for Old Men, by contrast, is one of the best films of the year, and might also have the happy effect of driving more people in the direction of McCarthy’s book.

Cinema Loses Two Giants in Two Days

Posted 31 July, 2007 in Film, Obituaries | No comments

Yesterday, it was Ingmar Bergman, who died at his home in Sweden at 89 years of age. Today, I read the news that Michelangelo Antonioni has died at age 94.

Liam Lacey’s tribute to Bergman in today’s Globe and Mail quotes Bart Testa, the University of Toronto film professor, who wrote in 2005, “Paradoxically, he was always the film artist most apart from movies, and yet a magnetic pole of modern cinema’s ambitions to seriousness. As a consequence, his idiosyncrasy and simultaneous centrality mean that Bergman disturbs, even warps, the trajectory of cinema since The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.”

Jack Nicholson, star of The Passenger, presented Antonioni with an honorary Academy Award in 1995. Nicholson said of the director, “In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places [of] our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting.”

Cinema has lost two of its masters.

The Best Review of Live Free or Die Hard I’ve Yet Read

Posted 23 July, 2007 in Film | 1 comment

From the Calhoun Tribune:

i just saw John McClane Blows Shit Up, Part 4: Live Free and Blow Shit Up. A lot of stuff was blown up. And crushed. And set on fire. And shot. And then they did that a bunch more times for two hours. The “I’m a Mac” kid was super cute but used P.C.s the whole movie and may be outta that commercial gig.