Confidence (2003)

A dead man (Edward Burns, who really does act with all the expressiveness of a dead man throughout) tells a man with a gun to his head the story of his recent travails.

A successful con turns sour on con artiste Jake Vig (our dead man) and his team (Paul Giamatti, Brian van Holt and Louis Lombardi), when they realize their mark was working for a crazy, polymorphously perverse gangster boss who likes to be called The King (Dustin Hoffman). Even worse, the mark was paying them with the King’s money. After an unfortunate killing of a member of the team, Jake offers the King to work a con for him, to make up for their little differences, on the victim of the King’s choice. The King’s not going to make things easy, so the victim is one Morgan Price (Robert Forster), a man as difficult to get at as possible.

Still, Jake’s ego and those needs that must cook up a plan that might even work. He pretty randomly recruits hot pickpocket Lily (Rachel Weisz), because the film really needs a romance between two actors with zero chemistry (or rather, between a usually brilliant actress trying to get any emotional reaction from what might very well be a well-groomed rock) as well as the inevitable romantic betrayal.

Obviously, there will be twists as well, or did anybody expect the first person narrator of a movie about con artists to be telling the truth, and all of it?

Which does lead us neatly into Confidence’s main problem: a script that simply isn’t as smart as it believes to be, and so copies the surface level elements of other movies about cons, and a lot of the in 2003 inevitable Tarantino-moves without ever thinking about what they are actually good for in general or could be useful for in its own specific case.

But then, Confidence very much lacks in specificity as a whole. In part, this is the fault of very bland character writing where some verbal tics stand in for even the most basic of characterization, so much so that even great actors like Rachel Weisz and Andy Garcia can’t do much more than look sexy or wear weird clothes, respectively, while Dustin Hoffman simply pretends to be in a Tarantino film, alas not one with Tarantino’s hand for getting unexpected performances out of his actors. It does not help here at all that our viewpoint character as embodied by Edward Burns is quite so bland and lacking in personality; other characters tell us incessantly how cool he is, but assumed traits really don’t stick to a surface that boring.

In other ways, Confidence is nearly painfully of its precise point in time. James Foley’s direction is certainly slick, but it is slick in the manner of something shot with a “filmmaking styles of 2003” handbook in one hand. The score is exactly the sort of mutated Hip Hop Beat stuff you’d expect as well, the editing seems obsessed with having scenes ending on a quip or a one-liner (reaction shots are for losers, apparently) as if this were a TV show dragging us into an ad break, and so on and so forth. Everything here simply manages to be at once completely of its time and perfectly generic – one might call that an achievement, if one’s lifetime weren’t finite.

In short: The Mummy Returns (2001)

Some of what I said about the first Stephen Sommers The Mummy movie still goes. At the time when he made this sequel, he certainly still knew how to stage a series of awesome and escalating action set pieces created with CGI before CGI was automatically good looking once you’ve got a certain budget, and he also still realized he needed to ground the loud stuff in the human (though of course not the naturalistic), so we do join Rick and Evie (still Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz) as a still adventuring wife and husband duo with an only mildly obnoxious kid (Freddie Boath), the film really getting how you’d want things to have worked out for these two, boring realism be damned.

Sommers also hasn’t lost his feel for breakneck pacing, though the sequel’s middle part is a bit flabbier, though not terribly so, than the one of the first. That’s mostly on account of Sommers’s script containing quite a bit of backstory and side material that needs to somehow be provided to the audience. As a matter of personal taste, I’m not terribly fond of the whole rebirth and chosen one subplot for our heroic couple – I’d rather see people kick the bad guy’s ass because they are competent and heroic and willing to do the right thing instead of fated to do it – but I have to admit, the finale does use all of the elements Sommers has built before rather well, giving the whole silly affair a surprising feeling of the organic with an internal logic of its own, while also including enough awesome goofy nonsense like Egyptian pygmy mummies. Again, the film goes out of its way to have every character do something of import, giving the whole affair a surprisingly inclusive bent, too.


The script isn’t as dumb as it pretends to be in other regards too. At the very least, the film very consciously builds up a contrast between a healthy Big Love as embodied by Evie and Rick and the rather destructive one between Imhotep (still Arnold Vosloo) and Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez). It’s not terribly deep, but it’s neither dumb nor hollow either, and that’s really the thing that surprises me most about Sommers’s Mummy movies when watched fairly: they may be big dumb fun, but they are not stupid.

In short: The Mummy (1999)

Growing into one’s middle age is a curious and sometimes disturbing process. Case in point: one day, you wake up and find that you have actually grown to like Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy rather a lot – a film you’ve held up as a great example of really dumb and incompetent blockbuster filmmaking for nearly two decades. Worse still, I’d even call the film pretty damn good instead of just “entertaining”. Clearly, either wisdom or a slow decay of mental faculties comes with age. At least I still have Michael Bay to look down upon.

But seriously, if you go in expecting to see all kinds of silly nonsense, and stop taking yourself so damn seriously (I may or may not be speaking to myself) Sommers’s Mummy is the epitome of an effective and charming, efficiently and really rather cleverly written big loud entertainment. Sommers, while certainly not a visual artist, makes the best out of all the glories late 90s CGI can buy, and puts his characters through one exciting and pretty damn awesome action sequence after the next.

However, director and film never forget that you do need some human grounding to your awesome spectacle, so they treat the romance between hero Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and heroine-librarian Evie Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) not just to get a checkmark on the list of mandatory plot elements, but as if they actually meant it. It may not be a deep, believable portray of actual human romantic interaction, but the film is full of the sort of snappy, glowing banter between lovers old Hollywood loved, resulting in a leading couple you actually root for during the film’s breathless series of set pieces. Which is only right and proper, giving how old Hollywood the film’s obvious other influences also are.

Adding to the film’s huge charm is how many things of import it actually lets characters do who aren’t the male lead, so Evie actually does quite a bit more than your typical blockbuster heroine (that Weisz is charming as all get-out while actually doing shit is certainly not to the film’s detriment either), Evie’s comic relief brother John Hannah never becomes obnoxious and useless as is tradition, and the traditional brown sidekick (Oded Fehr) might even be the actual hero of the piece.


Honestly, I have no idea what was wrong with me not liking this one.

Three Films Make A Post: Sometimes love is a strange and wicked game.

Atomic Blonde (2017): This action-heavy spy movie is a pretty big disappointment, managing to waste the enormous talents of a great cast (though the usually great Charlize Theron is about as British as Donald Trump, but then, her character never feels British in any way either), and a seldom used setting on a series of empty gestures that suggests the film wants to be a smart, POP! version of the spy genre but only ever reaches the smug and the arbitrary. The setting of Berlin just before the fall of the Wall is neither authentic nor inauthentic in interesting ways, instead a series of lame clichés presented with the same self-congratulatory gestures the film uses for everything. Unfortunately, there’s really no substance here, no point, no philosophy, no interesting character arcs; and when it comes to the style and surface values, director David Leitch is clearly trying but it doesn’t come much of it.

The Constant Gardener (2005): This John le Carré adaptation by Fernando Meirelles on the other hand has substance, style and actual British people and combines an angry anti-colonialist subtext with deep and complex characterisation, excellent acting not just by leads Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, and the quiet desperation you often find in le Carré. It’s particularly admirable how elegantly Meirelles mixes two very different genres, the conspiracy thriller and the scenes of a marriage type drama in a way that suggests – but never actually states – commonality between private failings of trust and public corruption and lies that goes beyond the more simple game of betrayal.


Mausoleum (1983): If you’re making it through Michael Dugan’s very silly yet highly entertaining possession horror movie (made in a time when possession horror wasn’t necessarily about exorcisms and the possessed hanging out on the ceiling) you’ll become highly acquainted with the breasts of lead actress Bobbie Bresee, in their traditional state as well as dolled up with John Buechler devised demon mouth nipples (with teeth), you will believe that eyes glow green, as well as that cursed-based possession is best cured by elderly doctors putting a crown of thorns on the possessee’s head. You will also witness Marjoe Gortner’s hilarious death face, a bewildering twist ending, and all the latex and rubber Dugan could get out of Buechler. In between, there’s even more nudity, characters who all act as if they were in a porn movie, and some pretty damn funny 80s style deaths. Obviously, it’s not a good movie in a traditional sense (at least if you’re like me and expect mood, character or narrative of one) but it certainly never bores even for a second.

In short: Page Eight (2011)

MI5 analyst Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) is among the last of a dying breed. Despite certainly being the public school bred upperclass type you'd expect in his position and age group, he's also not really part of any old boy's network. Johnny has too large of a moral streak for that, and still lives by the conviction that the ultimate goal of intelligence work is finding the truth, something that doesn't make him too popular among his more modern colleagues.

One would expect a man like that to have grown quite cynical over the years, but what the life of a spy has made Johnny, is lonely. Four ex-wives - one of whom (Alice Krige) is now married to his best friend and boss Benedict Baron (Michael Baron) - and an alienated daughter (Felicity Jones) are a pretty good demonstration of the spy's difficulties in opening up emotionally.

Johnny's life gets more exciting again when his decidedly younger neighbour Nancy Pierpan (Rachel Weisz) begins to show an interest in him. Not surprisingly, Johnny's a bit sceptical about Nancy; he does know a lot about ulterior motives, after all.

That feeling of something not being  quite alright around Johnny is not exactly decreasing when Benedict dies of a heart attack shortly after he revealed a file containing proof of the Prime Minister's (Ralph Fiennes) undisclosed knowledge about US torture camps to the Home Secretary (Saskia Reeves).

As if Ben's death weren't bad enough, someone in MI5 seems to want to use the opportunity to get rid of a fossil like Johnny. The spy is convinced that his dead friend wanted him to do the right thing with the information about the PM, but finding out what "the right thing" actually entails and surviving the politics surrounding it is quite a different thing. Ironically, Johnny might even need to begin to trust people again to survive.

If you've seen Red, you know that a (kinda-sorta) spy movie about an aging intelligence officer can be generic action crap like any other blockbuster. If you watch David Hare's BBC production Page Eight, you'll realize that a semi-realist spy movie about an aging intelligence officer can also still be thoughtful, quietly funny, and working inside the borders of its genre without wallowing in the obvious.

Hare - who also directed - is responsible for a tight script that prefers to be sly and seemingly unassuming, even though it is thematically quite rich. It's probably as good a film about an aging spy as I've seen, using the spy genre tropes of a man alienated from his surroundings and emotionally distant (though Johnny is neither in a spectacular way - this is not the sort of film that tries to lay anything on thick), to explore how growing old and lonely might feel to someone who is too intelligent not to know that he's wasted many of his chances and new ones might not come along anymore.

At the same time, neither its main character nor Page Eight are as dark or bitter as they could be: although it shows a lot of scorn for people playing politics and the hypocrisy of that particular game, there's also an honest strain of hope running through it that avoids kitsch and too easy ways out as much as it avoids cheap cynicism.

As a director, Hare is never flashy, but is pretty good at just stepping back and letting his script and his actors carry the weight of the story and the characters; that's what the film's brilliant cast, lead by an especially brilliant Nighy, is there for after all.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,british tv,in short,spies,david hare,bill nighy,rachel weisz,michael gambon,alice krige

Three Films Make A Post: The first 11 minutes will absolutely shock you. The last 11 minutes will rivet you to your seat.

The Brothers Bloom (2008): I suspect there's only two ways people can go with this one - either they'll fall in love with Rian Johnson's highly stylized and playful film about lies and stories so good they can become the truth, or they'll call it pretentious and be annoyed by its obvious cleverness. Me, I'll never be found among those saying even a single bad word about a film that can pull off a karaoke version of the Band's "Sleeping".

Man of Vendetta (2010): The directorial debut of Woo Min-ho has most of the qualities I associate with South Korean thrillers: it's as slickly directed as any major Hollywood film, but much more willing to go into really nasty and unpleasant places without needing to wallow in the nastiness more than is necessary. It's acted excellently by a cast that knows the difference between "sparse" and "wooden". It has a script that doesn't feel the need to always add another twist if that twist would be to the detriment of mood and characters, yet still knows and uses all the tricks of its genre.

Still, while I can and do admire these achievements, Man of Vendetta never clicked with me emotionally. It might be that the film's keeping of its child-kidnapping and murdering psycho something of a cipher without backstory makes it difficult for me to be all that frightened of or shocked by him, or just that the "lone civilian fights psycho for his little daughter" format is quite played out, even if its realized this technically proficient. For whatever reason, my admiration never turned into actually caring, and a film that was supposed to have an emotional impact just didn't.

Cyborg Girl (2008): Speaking of movies that don't have the emotional impact their directors seem to want them to have easily leads to this Japanese science fiction comedy romance melodrama (no, really) with Haruka Ayase and Keisuke Koide, directed by South Korean Jae-young Kwak whom you might know from My Sassy Girl. Guy falls in love with a time-travelling android built by his own future self to safe himself from serious bodily harm and a major disaster that is pretty uncomfortable to watch this shortly after the Japanese earthquake. Hilarity, a bit of friendly violence (yay!) and cloying, overly drawn-out sentimentality ensues. And no, there's nothing at all creepy about the film's set-up, at least nothing Kwak (also responsible for the script) knows of. Though the two leads really do their best with what they are given, Cyborg Girl is just too overloaded to get the tears out of me that it wants its audience so badly to cry. I'm perfectly willing to be moved by a weirdly artificial tragedy, but the film's tendency to just wallow in it all the time feels cynical and manipulative where it's supposed to be sad and heart-warming. The here melodrama just feels terribly artificial in all the wrong ways.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,south korean movies,comedy,romance,thriller,sf,melodrama,rian johnson,adrien brody,rachel weisz,mark ruffalo,rinko kikuchi,haruka ayase,keisuke koide,jae-young kwak

Three Films Make A Post: That's not the victim screaming - it's you!

The Fountain (2006): Take one part pretty good melodrama, one part utter, brain-curdling weirdness and one part horrible 70s airbrush poster art, and you pretty much have The Fountain. It's a film where earnest artistic ambition dances with kitsch so closely that nobody involved - surely not director/writer Darren Aronofsky and certainly not this writer - seems to be able to tell where one begins and the other ends anymore. It's certainly a film worth experiencing, but it's also a film to which the often misused description of "pretentious" fits perfectly, in that it just isn't as clever and profound as it pretends to be.

Can you really watch naked, bald, lotus-seated Hugh Jackman float through golden-ish space in a bubble and not giggle?

 

Death Journey (1976): I'd be glad if there were much of anything to giggle about in this Fred Williamson-directed part of the Jesse Crowder series of films (it might be the first one or the second - the Internet is divided, and I'm not going to watch the additional material about the production, because this thing has already stolen enough of my life), starring Williamson, and nobody else of consequence. A private eye carting a mafia bookkeeper willing to sing from LA to Chicago while the man's former bosses are doing their best to kill them may sound like the perfect set-up for a low budget action movie, especially with a guy like Williamson who always seems to have fun when doing anything physical in the lead role. Williamson the director, however, has no idea how to stage an action sequence interestingly or even just effectively, leading to a film so bland it would probably still be boring if half of it didn't consist of filler and scenes that go on much longer than they should. Even the soundtrack gives the impression of being a collection of outtakes from a a handful of other blaxploitation soundtracks.

On the positive side, there's only a sex scene realized so hilariously wrong-headed that Williamson and his partner seem to possess two or three heads each.

 

Ricco The Mean Machine (1973): Christopher Mitchum takes his dear time to take vengeance on the mafia boss who murdered his mafia boss father while Barbara Bouchet undresses or under-dresses to distract the parts of the audience receptive to her charms from the utter vacuum that is Chris. The sleaze for a good Italian crime movie is certainly there, sometimes in hilarious and embarrassing ways (turns out the best way to steal mafia money in a film that isn't supposed to be a comedy is to let Barbara Bouchet dance naked in front and on top of a car). From time to time, Tulio Demicheli's film breaks into fits of pretty nasty violence, but even then, Mitchum's complete lack of personality in his role as Hamlet's more boring brother undermines much of the emotional punch of those scenes. Not to speak of the scenes where the script wants him to act.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,sf,melodrama,action,blaxploitation,eurocrime,darren aronofsky,hugh jackman,rachel weisz,fred williamson,christopher mitchum,barbara bouchet,in short