Deja Vu

Ten minutes into watching The Assassination of Richard Nixon (TAORN), it occurred to me – haven’t I seen this film before? The more I watched, the more it became apparent – I’ve definitely seen this film before: its title then was Taxi Driver.

The similarities are too apparent to be ignored: both protagonists are demented, but this is not immediately apparent; just for fun, they play about with hand guns; politicians become convenient scapegoats for rage and social ineptitude; both films culminate in bloody shoot outs. There are also comparable scenes of toe curling embarrassment: in Taxi Driver, Travis takes Betsy to see a Swedish sex education film (not exactly your ideal first date movie); in TAORN, Sam heads over to a local Black Panthers office and tries to join up, suggesting that they change the name of the organisation to ‘the Zebras’, to reflect the supposed black and white membership. You watch both scenes through your fingers.

Even the names of the protagonists are similar: Bickle and Bicke, anyone? That said, TAORN is based on a true story: in 1974, Samuel Byck did indeed attempt to hijack an airliner with the intention of flying into the White House. The alternate spelling of Byck’s name was apparently made so as not to upset living relatives (huh?), so Bicke it was. The fact that Taxi Driver was released in 1976 with Robert DeNiro in the lead role of Travis Bickle is surely not coincidental. Weirdly enough, it seems that things have come full circle: a film based on a true story looks and feels remarkably similar to a film made nearly thirty years previously that was probably based on the same true story. Of course this tells us nothing except the fact that Taxi Driver is by far and away the better film.

So why does TAORN get a showing now, and with Sean Penn in the lead role, no less?

Something I’ve been hearing a lot of recently is contemporary relevance. A friend of mine recently pitched an idea for a documentary to the Beeb, who simply said: Why now? What relevance does this idea have to the way we live today? The answer is not as difficult as you might think: even something simple like the anniversary of some significant or meaningful event is good enough. Problem was, my friend was pitching an idea about a series of events that occurred in the late-eighties with seemingly no link to the present day, no matter how hard he looked. So that was the end of that.

In TAORN, contemporary relevance seems to be contained in the idea that the real life Byck was prepared to use a jet airliner as a weapon. Shades of 911 of course, and even though TAORN is set in 1974, I guess as an idea it made the whole thing easier to pitch (the last shot of the film is Bick playing with a toy airliner). That said, with Sean Penn on board (and onscreen for the vast majority of the movie’s running time), perhaps a sense of contemporary relevance isn’t important. And besides, we’re talking fiction here. If the drama’s good enough, who cares? In TAORN’s case, it’s OK – but that doesn’t mean it’s a whole lot of fun to watch.

Navel Gazing for Fun and Profit

Contains spoilers for Hellboy II - The Golden Army

Hmmm – I’m not quite sure what to say about Hellboy II – The Golden Army, which is a peculiar position to be in. Perhaps it’s something to do with the film’s two extremes cancelling each other out in a kind of yin/yang implosion – visually, it’s incredible; screenplay-wise, it’s clunky and illogical. However, it’s witty and at least moves along at a fair old lick, which is more than The Dark Knight did. Strangely enough, the one aspect that Hellboy II and The Dark Knight have in common is a whole load of reflective navel gazing: does Gotham need a masked vigilante? Does the human race really deserve to be saved time and time again by Hellboy and his band of assorted freaks? Will Luke Goss ever consider reforming Bros (for the love of god, nooooooo!)? Questions, questions...

Even if Mark Ravenhill feels that Batman should spend more time punching people in the gob and less time philosophising about it, at least the script was consistent. Guillermo del Toro is obviously too enamoured of his often outré visuals to spend much time worrying about narrative logic or coherent sub-plots. Hmmm – maybe ‘coherent’ is the wrong word. One intriguing sub-plot – about how Hellboy and his chums in the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense are called upon to rescue a human race that’s just downright ungrateful – is dropped as soon as another big ass action sequence lumbers into view. There's nothing wrong with the action sequences in Hellboy II - far from it, they're great - but they tend to trample on anything that just happens to be in the way.

Hellboy’s fight with a giant forest elemental – essentially an enormous piece of CGI celery – is a case in point. The visuals are often too strong for the narrative to withstand, so something’s gotta give: the twin annoyances of logic and plausibility are ditched, the idea being that you’re so overawed by del Toro’s newly minted ‘visionary’ status, you won’t even notice. Maybe some more navel gazing could have saved the day, but I doubt it.

I am the Knight who says ‘Meh’

Contains spoilers for The Dark Knight

If an analogy for mainstream cinema is the three minute pop song, then The Dark Knight is a fifteen minute progressive rock epic, complete with harpsichord solo, spoken word interlude and a huge bag of whizz-bang pyrotechnics – with is another way of saying it’s very long. According to my bony backside (always a good arbiter of cinematic quality), its 150 minute running time seemed like five hours – too much dialogue, slow pacing, two endings, scenes that simply go on and on and on. To be honest, I’m surprised that any backside could take it (perhaps there’s a marketing opportunity here for the Chip Smith ‘Numb-o-meter’ – just don’t ask me how it works as I haven’t invented it yet).

So, The Dark Knight. Mark Ravenhill thinks this. On the other hand, John Truby thinks this. In all honesty, I suspect the reason this film has been so stratospherically successful is down to one thing: Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. It really is a tour-de-force, as if Ledger has somehow managed to channel the craziest bits of Jack Nicholson through a dilapidated mental asylum. Not that either John Truby or Mark Ravenhill is wrong, of course: Ravenhill thinks there’s too much dialogue and not enough action, and he’s right; Truby believes that “The Dark Knight proves that a movie can be a huge hit because of theme, not in spite of it,” and he’s right as well. And yet strangely I find myself disagreeing with both of them.

Ordinarily, the more complex a plot, the happier I am, and the series of constant moral conundrums that The Dark Knight throws at you are more than welcome – this is a film that the term ‘blockbuster with a brain’ was invented for. However, this narrative and moral complexity tends to disguise the fact that there isn’t really a great deal of emotional content at the movie’s core. The narrative is technically proficient – perhaps overly so – but within its complexities, something gets lost along the way.

Compare The Dark Knight with Tell No One, a superb French film from Guillaume Canet, adapted from the novel by Harlan Coben. Although the narrative of Tell No One is complex, the central spine of the story is simple, and focuses on Beck’s frantic search for his supposedly dead wife. The Dark Knight has a complex narrative and a dizzying array of themes, the combination of which seem to squeeze all the humanity out of the film.

Interestingly, The Dark Knight is unusual as far as Christopher Nolan’s usual modus operandi goes, inasmuch as it’s told in a linear fashion. The narrative cut ups of Following and The Prestige are nowhere to be seen, mostly because things are complicated enough. However, what the linear narrative does expose here I think is the fact that at its heart, The Dark Knight feels a little empty. Unwind The Prestige and Following and you might even find something similar – that their complex narrative structures successfully disguise the fact that neither of them really entirely manage to engage the viewer on an emotional level. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both great films, but like The Dark Knight, the overall feel is of movies that have been ruthlessly designed, much like a Swiss watch or a formal garden where messy, unpredictable nature doesn’t really have much of a place.

The film’s politics seemed a bit skewed to me as well: mass surveillance of Gotham’s citizenry which is justified by the fact that a single terrorist might be caught at some future point (hmm, sounds familiar); the cover up of Harvey Dent’s crimes due to the fact that the people of Gotham ‘need a hero’. The Dark Knight doesn’t spend too long pondering these uncomfortable questions, which are arguably more interesting than the moral conundrums that John Truby points out.

Anyway, it’s probably pointless arguing with box office receipts in excess of $300 million. Let’s hope that Christopher Nolan does something outside of the Batman franchise next time out...

Treasure/Trash

Contains spoilers for No Country for Old Men

This is from Frank Cottrell Boyce’s thirteen golden screenwriting rules published in The Guardian on June 30th:

No one leaves the cinema saying: I loved that character arc. They come out saying: I loved the swordfight, or the bit with the bloated cow, or whatever. The manuals emphasise the flow of a narrative, but it's better to think of a film as a suite of sequences. That's where the pleasure is.

I would actually go a little further than this and state that a single image can occasionally have a lasting effect, and be eminently memorable to boot. No Country for Old Men is a case in point. The pleasures of this film are almost entirely visual (which is a bit of a given seeing as much of the narrative unfolds without dialogue or even music): scuff marks on a linoleum floor, the aftermath of one of Chigurh’s brutal murders; the slow seep of blood across a motel floor; Chigurh checking the underside of his boots after killing Moss’s wife; all beautifully written and executed visual moments, the undoubted signifiers of (overused word alert) a masterpiece.

If only the story mechanics were as well considered.

I’d been warned by a friend that the ending of the film was a little disappointing, and that it didn’t really make much sense. Er, hello? Everything made perfect sense to me, so I can only assume my friend had nodded off at some point. The only thing that irritated me about the film (and it’s a pretty major thing) was that it was brought to you by the crap power of co-incidence, that hoary old screenwriting shortcut/standby. Characters had a habit of simply blundering across each other in a most convenient fashion. One such co-incidence I could probably buy, but when they’re mercilessly piled high (much like the bodycount), you realise that No Country for Old Men is not a masterpiece: it’s an high falutin’ genre film with superior visuals that feel as if they’ve been hijacked from a eminently better, more interesting movie.

Which is a shame, as the Coen brothers get everything else right: a meticulous attention to character, fantastic dialogue, believable relationships – it’s all here. The problem is that it’s wrapped up in a genre that has to rely on some pretty creaky co-incidences in order to keep things moving.

The Kingdumb

Contains spoilers for The Kingdom

With Michael Mann producing, the one thing you’re guaranteed to get with The Kingdom is an honest to goodness lorry load of shoot ‘em up action. The action sequences in Heat – the heist and the concluding gun battle – are probably some of the best ever filmed, and The Kingdom does its damndest to ensure that its two big action sequences are structurally almost direct lifts from Mann’s undoubted masterpiece. Thing is, exploding Range Rovers, ferocious hails of bullets and the sight of Jennifer Garner holding a gun like it’s about to chip her nail polish does not make a great movie. A good one, sure – but not a great one.

If you're expecting another Syriana, you will come away disappointed. You don’t even have to scratch the surface to find an almost wholly conventional thriller here. And whatever you do, don’t dwell too long on the machinations of the narrative – it is utterly preposterous. Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) leads a small team of FBI agents into Saudi Arabia to investigate the indiscriminate bombing of an American housing compound. Five days later, the team are out (not a bullet wound between them, although poor Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) almost suffers a burst eardrum, bless her) and the crime has been solved. The Kingdom has been criticised for being revisionist, and you can certainly see why. This is the way the US would like to see things done. The reality, of course, is entirely different.

You want more preposterousness? You got it! In order to get ‘in country’, Fleury has to rely upon a friendly journalist, who sows a series of half truths with the Saudi ambassador to the US that Fleury is then able to leverage to get what he wants. Got that? Good. Now forget all about it. If this was Syriana, Fleury’s actions – essentially a man driven by a vague sense of vengeance – would have tragic and probably fatal consequences. But they don’t, purely because all the guff about getting the team into Saudi is nothing more than exposition. The political storm that Fleury stirs up by acting unilaterally simply falls away, to be replaced by big guns and even bigger explosions.

The political and personal relationships that the first hour of the film spends time exploring are quite intriguing, if only for the fact that you expect some sort of concluding pay off later in the film. Haytham, the Saudi police officer who stops the first attack on the compound is initially suspected of being involved, and is mercilessly interrogated as a result. As Haytham ends up being part of the joint US-Saudi team who set out to kick some major terrorist butt, you’d half expect this piece of intrigue to have some sort of bearing on how the team ultimately fare. It doesn’t, which means that The Kingdom doesn’t really have sub-plots – it has a lot of narrative loose ends that ultimately get swallowed up by impressive explosions and gun battles.

All that said, I quite enjoyed it. Even though The Kingdom thinks it’s intelligent, it isn’t really. Treat it like a big, dumb generic thriller and you can’t go wrong.

(The screenwriter of The Kingdom, Matthew Michael Carnahan is at the helm of the US adaptation of State of Play, which is slated for a spring 2009 release. Quite what he does with Paul Abbot’s BBC mini-series remains to be seen, but if The Kingdom is any indication, he’ll turn in something efficient and effective, but pretty unremarkable).

3-D Fun*

Contains Spoilers for Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Some films are, well, all right – they’re simply OK. They’re entertaining and diverting inasmuch as when you walk out of the cinema you think, “That film was all right. Hmmm – I hope it's onion rings for tea.” Welcome to the (interior) world of Journey to the Centre of the Earth (in 3-D no less). It’s an all right type of film – seriously: it’s OK. The narrative is workmanlike, the dependable Brendan Fraser is likeable enough, and there’s some truly fun 3D moments: an ocean full of killer fish, the odd dinosaur, a plethora of characters pointing at things for inordinately long periods of time.

That said, there must have been an awful lot of work involved in making this film simply OK (which to my mind means it’s determinedly middle of the road – nothing wrong with that of course, especially if you like getting run over on a regular basis). The rather neutral emotional content seems entirely deliberate, if only to cater for what the film’s target demographic want – a shed load of CGI and spiffy 3D effects, not uncomfortable moments where a bit of drama might break out (and by drama I mean interaction between living, breathing human beings, not collisions of CGI and chase sequences). In fact, given the pedigree of the script, it’s no wonder the whole thing seems curiously undercooked (the following is from IMDB):

Indie film maker Paul Chart ('American Perfekt') was originally signed to write and direct the picture and penned the original script. Chart left the project, however, after a decision was made to shoot the film in 3-D, uncomfortable with the possibility it would become more 'theme park ride' than the epic action-adventure film he envisioned. The Jules Verne novel was apparently one of his favorite pieces of literature. Chart was ultimately replaced with effects specialist Eric Brevig and the script was heavily retooled to emphasize the new 3-D format.

In retooling the script to shoehorn in the theme park aesthetic, all the drama has been lost, along with any uncomfortable moments that might have upset its tweenie target audience. Hannah (a foxy Icelandic guide – grrr!) happens across the body of Trevor Anderson’s (Brendan Fraser) brother Max, who went missing some years before whilst searching for the mythical ‘centre of the earth’. Cue one tearful burial scene. However, since the search for his brother was the thing driving Trevor in the first place, simply happening across his body seemed undramatic – which is of course the whole point. In order to cram as many 3D effects in as possible, something had to give – in this case it was the script, rewritten countless times to expunge as many dramatic moments as possible. I'm sure that Paul Chart’s script was infinitely superior, but market forces are at play here – so chop back the story and stuff in a theme park ride.

However, what you end up with is a film that is merely all right: entertaining but forgettable, pure brain candy. And when you start to ponder why Brendan Fraser’s moobs are so pointy, you really know you're in trouble.
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* I don't think I was the only person in the cinema who looked at the person I was with with my 3D glasses on and said, "My god - you're in 3D."

What's the Deal with Planet Terror?

Contains Spoilers for Planet Terror

Hmmm – Planet Terror: a fun, fast and furious homage to the old b-movie schlock movies.

One problem here: doesn’t Robert Rodriguez make B-movies anyway (El Mariachi, Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn)? So Planet Terror is a homage to... Robert Rodriguez movies? I’m confused, but let’s face it – it doesn’t take much.
There’s nothing wrong with Planet Terror as such, discounting of course Quentin Tarantino’s role as Rapist #1 (subtle it ain’t). The thing that intrigued me most about it was Rebel Rodriguez’s (Robert Rodriguez’s son) resemblance to Danny Lloyd in The Shining – it really is quite startling. Robert Rodriguez makes a throwaway comment about it here, but I’m sure there’s more to this than meets the eye. The only evidence that the reference to The Shining was deliberate is that Rebel’s character in the film is called Tony, which was the name of Danny Torrance’s alter ego. Also, given the fact that Planet Terror is a homage to the exploitation movie (many of these released at around the same time as The Shining) it might have been possible for Danny Lloyd to bag a part in one of these flicks (the fact that he didn’t is neither here nor there). If you’re in the habit of ascribing a huge degree of intelligence to a movie when in reality there’s probably none, you might come to the conclusion that Rodriguez enjoys fucking with his audience’s collective head – until the point that Tony shoots himself with the gun that his mother has entrusted to him, leaving that particular narrative thread to go nowhere. Even weirder is that the film ends with a shot of Tony, frolicking on a beach with various survivors in some kind of weird idealised daydream. I no understand.