miscellaneous factZ

5/10. After the excellence of Gondry’s last outing (The Science of Sleep) this was a real disappointment.

6/10. This latest outing from Sidney Lumet is an unusual combination of family melodrama and crime-gone-wrong Greek tragedy. Unfortunately, though ticking all the boxes (acting, script etc) it left one rather cold, largely due to the absence of any character who merited the audience’s sympathy. After all, for tragedy to work must care about the character whom it befalls — even if their downfall is principally the result of their own actions or their own failings.

6.5/10. The latest Coen brothers outing is well-made and as dark as one would expect a film derived from a Cormac McCarthy novel to be. However this darkness presents difficulties: in a film in which the only main surviving characters are a sheriff losing hope in humanity and a psychopath[^1] who are we left to care for?

[^1]: A psychopath whose resemblance to Death in his fundamental amorality is so striking that it must surely be intentional. The character provides yet another opportunity for a standout performance by Javier Bardem.

7.5/10. A worthy (Rumanian) winner of the Palme D’or at Cannes. This film records with washed out hues and hand-held cinema verite style camerawork the travails of two students on the day that one of them is to obtain an illegal abortion in 1987 Rumania. Compelling throughout, with powerful central performances, this isn’t exactly an easy film to watch at the best of times — quite apart from the subject matter the behaviour of most of the ‘peripheral’ characters, from desk clerks to the abortionist, varies from the unhelpful to the downright unpleasant. The final shot (again beautifully composed), situates the two friends in an isolated restaurant late at night, the scene perfectly echoing their emotional isolation and exhaustion (”Let’s never talk about this again” says one, in the final line of the film).

6.5/10. Gus Van Sant’s latest outing into the disaffected and disconnected world of modern American teendom is not as engaging as it might be but has much of interest, particularly when read in the wider perspective of his other recent work especially films such as Elephant.

Similar, in many ways, to the work of contemporary US novelists such as David Foster Wallace, Van Sant is attempting to convey something about the fundamental disconnection and alienation of modern (US) society — which is most sharply manifested among its youth. Here, for example, it is noteworthy that Van Sant almost never shows the faces of the Alex’s parents — Alex being the middle-class teen skateboarder protagonist. Instead he chooses only to have the mother seen from the back or out of focus in the distance, or to have the one scene containing Alex farther commence with a long shot of Alex while his father talks to him off-screen and unseen.

Furthermore, at a crucial moment, in Alex’s hour of need he thinks of calling his father (and uncle) but hangs up before they answer and subsequently brushes off his mother’s hesitant enquiries. Alex is equally removed from his girlfriend, who in one telling scene, after having sex for the first time with Alex (at her insistence) immediately phones her friend to share the information — the implication being that, as Alex perceives more generally, he is a means to an end rather than an end in himself (the player of the role of boyfriend rather than a person in his own right).

The one exception to this basic pattern is the relationship between Alex and Macy. From her first appearance Macy differentiates herself by a sharp insightful empathy. As the film develops her budding friendship with Alex moves to centre stage, providing the means for Alex to redeem himself via the one genuine connection he has in a lonely world.

6.5/10. Well-written and slickly put together with some nice comic set pieces. Nevertheless the film never managed to really get beyond this (did it even intend to?) to the larger, and more important, themes; be these the emptiness of Charlie Wilson’s hedonistic personal life (and the mirror it holds up to the US in the 80), the way in which politics get done (lobbying, horse-trading of votes, off-the-record committees), or the causes and (unintended) consequences of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan (which despite the film’s pretension to more serious engagement is still so over-simplified as to border on caricature).

7/10. Beautifully shot, intelligently scripted and well-acted this was a revisionist western where shootings, including that of James himself, were in the back and outlaws aren’t romantic heroes but incompetent psychopaths living out dull existences while the law, betrayal or poverty slowly catches up with them.

5.5/10. The latest outing from Werner Herzog features Christian Bale in the based-on-true-life story of a German-born US pilot who escapes from a hellish NV/VietCong prisoner of war camp after being shot-down and captured over Laos during the early stages of the Vietnam War. While better than Herzog’s last fiction outing (the abysmal Invincible) this is still is a long way from Herzog’s brilliant and haunting best as found in the likes of Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo.

6/10. While not actually bad, given the quality of the original books, this was a rather disappointing effort.

6.5/10. Another of Anderson’s whimsical outings with many of his regular cast in tow (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, and even Bill Murray there for a cameo). This was far better than Anderson’s previous effort (The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou), which despite having what seemed like the right ingredients completely failed to cohere into anything interesting or funny, but doesn’t quite reach the brilliant heights attained in The Royal Tenenbaums.

After a slightly mystifying ’short’ featuring Schwartzman and Natalie Portman (as his girlfriend) in a hotel room in Paris, the film gets into its swing as the three Whitman brothers begin their travels across India in the eponymous Darjeeling Express. Despite Owen Wilson’s exhortations regarding ‘bonding’ the existing tensions between the brothers immediately surface, and there’s much to interest us (where are they going, will they actually connect etc) as well as some brilliantly funny moments (the best of which involves a brotherly quarrel and some pepper spray).

However once they’re booted off the train things don’t quite fit together so well. While the sudden twists and turns, and general kookiness, continue there’s a growing sense that they don’t really lead anywhere — either in terms of conventional plot of in terms of the characters themselves. While, in this kind of enterprise this isn’t necessarily a fatal fault it does lend the second half of the film a slightly deflationary aspect, and by the end when the brothers, instead of getting on their planned flight home, repeat the film’s initial slow-motion dash to catch a train, one starts to feel that the writers had simply begun to run out of ideas.