Month: July 2005

Solaris / Trials of Henry Kissinger

What a double bill.

Solaris – reams have been written about it, and I don’t need to add more really, but it was an interesting reaction to 2001, which Tarkovsky apparently thought was “cold and impersonal.”

I had trouble with the reactions of the characters to the events taking place – they just didn’t seem to be plausible. Especially since the pilot who had originally seen the manifestations years earlier, and tries to tell Kelvin about them on earth, seemed very believable in his reactions, both in the archive footage of his report and his meeting with Kelvin. Continue reading Solaris / Trials of Henry Kissinger

character actors

hijacking the brief nicky katt sidebar in the “layer cake” discussion and opening it up to other people we don’t see very often or in very large roles but would like to see more of.

(katt, by the way, is very good in “boiler room” and in a brief appearance in “school of rock”. he’s one of those people who disappears into his characters and i’m often surprised to see his name in the credits.)

i would add mark rufalo to the list but he’s in a lot lately. he was also wasted in “collateral”. how do you lot feel about giovanni ribisi? he was also excellent in “boiler room”–then again whoever directed that film also drew solid performances out of ben affleck and vin diesel. ribisi was also good in “the gift” which features a shockingly good performance by keanu reeves (who i don’t wish to see very much more of). has he been in anything which doesn’t feature crap actors acting unfeasibly well?

Layer Cake

Quick recommendation: A return to the pleasures of the British gangster film. I think this is far superior to Guy Ritchie’s stuff, because both more brutal and more attentive to the consequences of brutality. The best antecedent, although some are naming The Long Good Friday (also great, but a different kind of flick), is Mike Hodges’ great Get Carter. Very entertaining.

I Don’t Know Jack / Team America

I’ve seen a wealth of incredible documentaries over the past year or so. In fact, I’d say each of these was better than almost any current-run feature films I’ve seen in the same time frame:
Rivers & Tides
Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns
Riding Giants, and perhaps the best of the bunch:
Stevie .

So maybe I was getting suckered into thinking that docs these days are just really good. Well, in any case I was excited to see I Don’t Know Jack appear at my local video store. It’s about Jack Nance, who died after a fight at a donut shop in South Pasadena. Nance was Eraserhead, and had roles in almost all of David Lynch’s films. Continue reading I Don’t Know Jack / Team America

After Life (2003… I think)

This flick was mentioned some time ago–but I just saw it, and at the least thought I’d throw up another nod. The scenario is a post-death fantasy where the recently-departed are asked to pick a single memory which they will inhabit (or something–we’re never really sure) from thereon out. What I liked especially was the rigorous sidestepping of whimsy or fantasy; the afterlife is a very solid place, the workers there follow a specific bureaucracy, and–nicest touch–the memory chosen is then reconstructed on film, a material re-enactment which the workers undertake very concretely (location scouting, sound effects, etc.).

Memory, Kincaid (aka Marco) will be glad to hear, is examined with both compassion and a shrewd dispassion. Everyone is making up what they need, and part of the bureaucrats’ job is to get people to recognize how they’re shaping, reshaping, fabulating a past…. But fabulation is not explicitly challenged or mocked–the “real” (material) re-enactment is itself explicitly a construction, but one consciously chosen and shaped…

Smart, engaging, very recommended.

Spielberg

War of the Worlds was 2/3 of a great movie. For the first hour, hour and fifteen minutes, the film creates a pervasive sense of dread and hopelessness, the gee-whiz special effects always coincident with aw-shit discomfort. By that I mean the razzle-dazzle of the special effects, or even more the precision of Spielberg’s direction, never outweighs a sense of fear, of terror–of awe. That is exactly what an alien invasion film ought to do; there is a sense of inconsequentiality to the choices the characters make, a sense of hopelessness, of the inefficacy of the individual against much larger forces (bug-eyed monsters here, awe-inspiring aliens in Close Encounters, history in Schindler or Private Ryan).

But that version of Spielberg’s humanism–compassion for the small and helpless (which is why he’s so damn good with the child’s point of view)–unfortunately runs up against his other, more conventional rah-rah version of humanism, where can-do spirit and gumption make things work, by jiminy. And War gets stuck when it tries to graft the two together. Continue reading Spielberg