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Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Multitasking directors see film success
Acting, writing and directing all require major efforts in the
creation of a successful motion picture. Three of the films this
month have one person carrying out all three tasks, and in the
other, one man is both writer and director.
Appaloosa
Ed Harris, together with Robert Knott, wrote the screenplay for
Appaloosa, using the original novel by Robert B. Parker. Harris
directed the film, stars in it and co-produced. This New Mexico
western is named after a small town that has fought back from
oblivion after its copper mines were closed by attacks from hostile
Apaches.
Now it faces another threat—a British entrepreneur named
Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) who has eliminated the sheriff and
his deputy and plans to take over the area. The city council,
in response, hires two professional lawmakers (i.e., gunmen),
Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen). The
men establish their rules, disarm or kill any opposition, and,
when the opportunity arises, try to bring Bragg to justice for
the murder of the previous sheriff.
Cole and Hitch have been traveling together, fighting outlaws
and backing each other for more than a dozen years. They know
each other so well they can anticipate each other’s actions.
They seldom need to talk; the dialogue between the two is minimal,
but there is ongoing humorous word play in which the less literate
Cole gropes for a Latinate word, and Hitch, a West Point graduate,
supplies it for him. In spare moments, Cole also is working his
way through a volume of Emerson, sometimes quoting passages to
Hitch.
As one might expect of a professional gunman, Cole is subject
to bouts of sudden rage. Hitch spends most of his time watching
the other characters and polishing his eight-gauge shotgun. Into
this comfortable relationship comes Allison French (Renée
Zellweger), a piano-playing widow short on money, but long on
ambition. Cole secures a job for her at the local hotel in return
for room and board, and, in no time, he is sharing her bed and
building a house for her at the end of the street.
Women in westerns traditionally are wives (e.g., Shane, High Noon),
whores (e.g., McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Ride the High Country) or
schoolmarms (almost every other film), but Allison French won’t
stay categorized, and part of the interest of the film is watching
her change as the situation changes, and watching how Cole and
Hitch react to her changes (Cole acknowledges that whores and
a non-English-speaking Indian woman he lived with for a year constitute
his only knowledge of the opposite sex).
Cole is successful in having Bragg convicted and condemned to
hang, but then he has to transport him to the place of execution—no
small task. The ensuing gunfights, Apache encounters, kidnappings
and double-crosses lead to various complications and a major gunfight.
An unexpected arrival late in the film leads to an ending that
seems almost anti-climactic, since it occurs some months after
the major gunfight. But this western prides itself on being realistic,
and this type of convolution, where politics and justice meet
and justice almost always loses, occurs often enough in real life
today, and probably was beginning to occur in the 1880s. The conflicts
are resolved, however, in a temporary and somewhat surprising
way, and the film ends with the obligatory exit into the sunset.
The acting is excellent across the board, from the four principals
to Timothy Spall as councilman Phil Olson and Lance Henriksen
as a gunfighter. The sets and costumes are beautifully done, the
pace is leisurely and the cinematography by Dean Semler is spectacular.
I especially enjoyed a completely unnecessary high-angle shot
in which a cougar stands and watches a train go by in the valley
below.
Appaloosa may not be the greatest western ever made, but its action,
attention to period detail and developed relationships among the
characters establish it as a solid entry in the genre. Top
Tropic Thunder
Tropic Thunder is the first film Ben Stiller has co-written,
produced, directed and starred in since Zoolander, and this film,
like that one, is a satirical comedy. Thunder, however, is a big,
bold, brash parody of Hollywood in all its overblown glory, and
especially its war extravaganzas—e.g., Platoon, Saving Private
Ryan, Apocalypse Now and even Bridge on the River Kwai. Even the
opening music has a pseudo-elegiac, epic quality as the choppers
come in over the jungle-covered mountains.
The film itself is about the making of a great war epic, also
called Tropic Thunder. Based on the memoirs of Four Leaf Tayback
(Nick Nolte), the film is directed by a young Englishman, Damien
Cockburn (Steve Coogan), who, after only a few days of shooting,
has lost control of his prima donna cast and is way over budget.
Tugg Speedman (Stiller) is an action star who is fading after
doing five sequels to his original hit (can anyone say Sylvester?).
His attempt to break into serious acting died after his performance
as a young man named Simple Jack, who thinks he can talk to animals
(the title tells it all), and Thunder is his last chance at a
comeback.
The biggest star is Australian Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.),
who has won five Oscars (can anyone say Russell Crowe?) and who
is so into his part as a black soldier that he has undergone skin
pigmentation.
A supporting role is played by Jeff “Fats” Portnoy (Jack
Black), whose fame rests on a film about a family of flatulent
fat people (can anyone say Eddie Murphy?). The fourth member of
the quartet is Alpa Chino (say it quickly) (Brandon T. Jackson),
a black rap singer who has made a fortune advertising soft drinks
and power bars with obscene names.
To give the film some authenticity, the director decides to dump
the actors into the jungle and let them find their way out through
fake hostiles while hidden cameras capture the action. Unfortunately,
the men get dropped into an area controlled by a drug cartel whose
guns fire real bullets. Although the plot wanders now and then,
the momentum carries it on to the next funny part, and there are
many funny (and often gross) parts.
Stiller’s role as Speedman involves his parody of Willem
Dafoe’s character in Platoon (it will be difficult to watch
certain scenes from that film again without seeing the parody),
and the film opens and closes with those scenes.
In addition, Stiller relentlessly parodies films in which actors
play “retards” (his deliberately chosen word), but,
as he points out, responding to some picketing of the film, he’s
ridiculing not the handicapped themselves, but actors who imitate
mentally challenged people, e.g., Dustin Hoffman, Leonardo de
Caprio, Billy Bob Thornton.
Speedman and Lazarus have an ongoing discussion of the way to
play such people and of the reasons for Speedman’s failure
in Simple Jack, even though the performance saves him in the drug
camp.
About as politically incorrect as “retard” discussions
is a white man in black-face, but Robert Downey, Jr., amazing
actor that he is, manages to walk the fine line of making Lazarus
believable as a white man doing his very best to imitate a black
man but still coming up with racial stereotypes. As Alpa Chino
(the only black man in the cast) tells him, what he knows about
black behavior and language he learned from the Jeffersons.
Black is given less opportunity to exhibit his comic talents,
but he does a nice takeoff on the addict trying to detox, playing
off everything from Odysseus tied to the mast to keep him from
the sirens through Sinatra in Man with the Golden Arm to any number
of contemporary films. Nolte is fine as the veteran who wrote
the original story, but Tom Cruise completely steals almost every
scene he is in. Fat and balding, he struts through the end titles
in a parody of his underwear dance scene in Risky Business.
Don’t miss the opening fake previews with Speedman, Black,
Lazarus (with Toby McGuire’s help) and Alpa Chino showing
excerpts from the roles that made them famous. These may be the
funniest parts of the film. The more you enjoy war movies and
Hollywood taking itself far too seriously as it goes for “realism,”
the funnier parts of this film will be. Top
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Woody Allen has been writing and directing (and, until recently,
acting in) films for so long that most people know by now whether
they like his films. Anyone who likes Allen will find Vicky Cristina
Barcelona to be one of his better efforts, although probably not
up to his masterpieces (I hesitate because it often takes more
than one viewing and sometimes the passage of a few years before
I feel I have come to grips with a film—the current and past
evaluations of other filmwriters indicate they have similar problems).
On the other hand, this film is unlikely to convert anyone to
Allen who hasn’t found the earlier films interesting. You
know who you are.
The plot is simple. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett
Johansson) go to live at a friend’s house in Barcelona where
Vicky plans to study the culture and work on her thesis, and Cristina
plans to sightsee and wander. They encounter Juan Antonio (Javier
Bardem, the Academy Award-winning villain of No Country for Old
Men), who sweeps them off in a private plane for a weekend in
a nearby city to see the sights and meet his father and maybe
hop into bed together. The plan has to be altered when Cristina
gets sick, and they return to Barcelona. Cristina finally sleeps
with Juan and meets his wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz),
whom he loves, but can’t live with, and before long the three
have formed a triangle.
Vicky’s fiancee joins them in Barcelona, but she still has
a secret itch for Juan, an itch which she valiantly resists, but
then Cristina, for reasons never clear (probably not even to her),
breaks up with Juan and his wife, leaving them to squabble and
threaten each other. A silly incident brings the idyllic summer
to a close, and the three Americans head for home.
The acting is solid, with Bardem a handsome leading man once he
gets rid of the bad haircut from the Coen film. Cruz is nominated
this year for a Supporting Actress Oscar for her role. Hall effectively
portrays a woman whose emotions are at cross purposes with her
brain, and Johansson is fine as the unfocused Cristina who knows
only what she doesn’t want.
The ending is somewhat downbeat, but then coming back to almost
anywhere after a summer spent in Barcelona hopping into and out
of bed with Bardem and Cruz would seem...well...at least downbeat,
if not down right depressing.
But Allen’s characters carry on, as he does, and after his
New York period his England period, and now one film in Spain,
it will be interesting to see where he goes next. The odds are
it will be somewhere interesting and that a high-caliber film
will result. Top
Roman de Gare (Crossed Tracks)
The literal translation of “Roman de Gare” is something
like “train station novel” or “airport novel,”—one
you buy to read to distract your mind from whether the train is
taking the curves too fast or the wings on the plane seem to be
wobbling or the person across the aisle is staring at you.
As such, the novel must be suspenseful, a page-turner that keeps
you riveted to the story through thick and thin. The title given
to the film for its American release, Crossed Tracks, may describe
some aspects of the story, but “airport novel” better
captures the essence of this film that keeps giving the viewer
information and then letting other information undercut the original
accounts.
The film opens with a writer of best-sellers, Judith Ralitzer
(Fanny Ardant), being questioned in a police station. Then the
film moves to a gas station and rest stop along a major French
highway as a young couple pull in, and their car radio announces
that a notorious killer of young girls known as “The Magician”
has escaped from a nearby prison. The couple have an argument,
and the man drives away, leaving the woman, Huguette (Audrey Dana),
stranded at the gas station. A mysterious stranger, Pierre (Dominique
Pinon) offers to give her a lift (as he does a magic trick for
her), but she refuses and decides to spend the night sleeping
in the gas station.
In the morning, she finds him still there, he renews the offer
and this time she accepts, since her parents’ farm is not
far away. Then she asks a favor of him, and he agrees. Is Pierre
the notorious Magician, or is he simply the ghost writer for Ralitzer,
as he first states and then denies? Or is he someone else? Is
Huguette the hairdresser she pretends to be or is she the prostitute
that her daughter accuses her of being and which she doesn’t
deny?
A third story intrudes about a man who has been missing from his
home for several hours; his wife confides to the police investigator
she thinks he has run away; then she offers the policeman other
confidences.
These stories all intertwine with each other and with Ralitzer,
but just how they connect keeps the viewer guessing, especially
when Huguette’s teenage daughter disappears for several hours
with Pierre just after he does a magic trick for her.
Claude Lelouch, who wrote and directed the film, also kept his
identity secret for some time, listing the director as Herve Picard,
and only admitting the truth when the film played at Cannes. Lelouch’s
prizewinning hit, A Man and a Woman, occurred many years ago,
and his recent releases have not fared well in France or anywhere
else, so he wanted to see whether this film would succeed on its
own, and it has.
Some critics have compared the film to Hitchcock’s work,
but it lacks the obsessive precision and elegance of Hitchcock’s
best plots; nonetheless, it works well enough, the sets are interesting
and the acting is handled nicely, especially by Pinon, who succeeds
as a leading man despite his very ordinary appearance. All in
all, it’s a good read for an airport novel.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or
VHS from local stores. Reviews of some earlier films cited can
be found at www.mmnow.com
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