Film Reviews

112 posts

Western Art

Film Film Reviews

McCabe & Mrs Miller (Robert Altman), 1971)

When Robert Altman made McCabe & Mrs Miller, he wasn’t the stereotypical New Hollywood director. In his mid forties, with many years in the industry (obscure B-pictures in the fifties, and television throughout the sixties), he was an emerging talent but still a product of the system. Yet McCabe & Mrs Miller is nevertheless classic New Hollywood: it takes an established Hollywood genre and deconstructs it; it focuses on amoral (or at least non-heroic) protagonists; it’s downbeat; and it’s photographed and constructed more like a European art film than American genre films typically had been until that point. You can see why canon-building critics like Pauline Kael, eager to welcome in a new wave of filmmakers, flipped for it. Kael wasn’t wrong – it is a great film. Yet I think it’s worth another look because the response to it is very telling about the way audiences and critics respond to the collision of art and genre.

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Hot Cops

Film Film Reviews

Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)

The team of actor / writer Simon Pegg and director / writer Edgar Wright immediately established a huge cult following with their first film, the zombie / romantic comedy hybrid Shaun of the Dead. Their core audience of fans will need no encouragement to see their new film, the cop movie spoof Hot Fuzz. Yet Hot Fuzz looks likely to both consolidate and broaden their audience; while it is not quite as bold as its predecessor, it is nonetheless hugely enjoyable and is sure to expand their following.

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It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

Film Film Reviews

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006)

Sylvester Stallone’s new Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa, is an experiment in the power of sentiment. To what extent can our years of association with a character transform our experience of a movie? Can a major motion picture get by on nostalgia alone? The answer, in this case, is that yes, it can.

The original Rocky was a fairy-tale, but it was a gritty one, set in a run-down, semi-deserted Philadelphia. Like a lot of late-seventies proto-blockbusters, it paired the simple genre narrative that would define eighties blockbuster filmmaking with the realist edge of seventies New Hollywood; in doing so it got the best of both worlds. So while the story is pure fluff, the film was built on solid elements such as the performances of Stallone and his costars, and the character of its Philadelphia locations. After the founding film the series fell apart in small increments, with each instalment becoming more cartoonish, overwhelming the simple dignity of the title character. By Rocky IV, as Stallone faced off in a symbolic cold-war bout between America and Russia, the series was a joke.

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Ticking

Film Film Reviews

Little Children (Todd Field, 2006)


Todd Field’s Little Children is an impressive film that jumps off from a potentially hazardous premise. A known sex offender, Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley), moves into an upper-middle class community, and the local parents are scared and outraged. Flyers with the man’s photo are distributed, and some of the parents resort to harassment and vigilante behaviour. Contrasted against this is the unfolding soap opera of the bookish Sarah (Kate Winslet), who starts an affair with the hunky stay-at-home father Brad (Patrick Wilson). As the relationship unfolds, other forms of social dysfunction, less serious but more prevalent, are explored. Field contrasts reactions to the ultimate, unforgiveable transgressions (represented by the fear of what Ronnie might do to local children) with the more everyday neglect and manipulation of children by parents preoccupied with their own gratification. The children in the film are all too often props in their parents’ lives, used as excuses to socialise, alibis to cover illicit meetings, or as sources of information about their spouse’s actions.

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Quest for Truth

Film Film Reviews

The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)

I mean, The Thin Blue Line is very influenced by noir. It is, in its essence, a noir-like story… if you asked me, “What are the main ingredients of noir?”, I’d say that it’s not the moody lighting, it’s not the canted Dutch angles. To me it’s the feeling of inexorability, almost the form of Greek tragedy, the feeling that things inexorably move towards some disaster without the ability of anyone involved to change the outcome, to do otherwise.

Errol Morris, interviewed by Tom Ryan for Senses of Cinema

Errol Morris stumbled into the subject of his best documentary, The Thin Blue Line. In 1985 he was researching a documentary about Dr James Grigson, a psychiatrist notorious for giving testimony in court cases that led to death sentences for the accused. The research included speaking to those who had been the subject of Grigson’s testimony, and one of the prisoners he spoke to was Randall Adams, then into his seventh year of imprisonment after being sentenced to death for the 1976 shooting of police officer Robert Wood in Dallas. Adams’ death sentence had by that time been commuted, but he was still in jail and protesting his innocence. Morris started looking into the case and quickly became convinced that Adams was indeed innocent. More than that, it became very clear who had killed Robert Wood. Morris abandoned his original project and turned his efforts to building the case for Adams’ innocence. The resulting film was The Thin Blue Line, still the definitive example of an investigative documentary. The film would be important if only for its impact on that case. Yet it’s much more interesting than a simple exploration of a particular crime and its consequences; it is a triumph of execution that has been enormously influential on both documentaries and fiction films since.

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Cold Feet

Film Film Reviews

Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006)

Happy Feet is a computer animated film about a free-spirited penguin, Mumble, who dances when all around him only sing. Watching it, I felt a sense of disconnection from my fellow filmgoers that matched that of its protagonist. This was a feel good dancing penguin movie, right? One which has been met by widespread audience and critical acclaim. One which, the ads insist, has “audiences floating out of the cinema on feel good clouds.” So what was the Happy Feet I saw? The film I saw was obviously well-intentioned, but it was poorly made, lamentably unmusical, and, well… depressing.

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Franconoir

Film Film Reviews

Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)

Original French Title: Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes

Note: This article includes some moderate spoilers.

As a French-made noir by an American-born writer-director, Jules Dassin’s Rififi is an example of the film noir movement coming full circle. The genre had been kicked off, in part, by the arrival in Hollywood of directors fleeing wartime Germany, such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder. Just a few years later, though, the flow of talent had been reversed. American-born Jules Dassin was blacklisted in the anti-communist hysteria of the early fifties, and was forced first to Britain and then France in the search for work. Rififi, his first French film, folds a Gallic sensibility back into the American / German generic hybrid of noir: it anticipates the French obsession with gangster pictures that emerged a few years later in New Wave films such as Godard’s Bande à part / Band of Outsiders. The result is a fascinating blend, and a definitive example of a classic film emerging from enormously difficult personal circumstances.

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S-Bend Adventures

Film Film Reviews

Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006)

In the opening minutes of Flushed Away, the rat Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman), who spends a life of leisure as a solitary house pet, gets flushed down the toilet. He enters the sewers of London where he finds a whole society of rats: initially horrified, he wants nothing more than to escape from the proletarian rats (proletarirats?) and to reach the surface. But with the help of the attractive Rita (voiced by Kate Winslet) he comes to savour the company of his fellow rats.


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Bond is Back

Film Film Reviews

Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)

The crucial line in the opening credits: “Based on the novel by Ian Fleming.”

Ian Fleming’s credit on the film Bond series has for years been simply “Ian Fleming’s James Bond in…” and then the title of the movie. There hasn’t been a Bond film that stayed anything close to one of his novels since 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: in the seventies, the producers generally threw out Fleming’s plots, while by the 1980s the Bond films were taking the titles and a few incidents from his short stories but little more. All this time Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, remained unfilmed. The film rights were owned by different people to the rest of the series: they provided legal cover for a Bond spoof under the title in 1967, but yielded little else. In retrospect, given the level of farce the Bond series was reduced to through this period, the legal circumstances preventing an adaptation virtually amounted to protective custody. Now, though, corporate mergers and legal horse-trading has allowed its use as part of the “official” Bond series. And after the series hit a recent low with Die Another Day, the timing could not be better for a reintroduction of Fleming’s spirit to the series.


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Time to Leave

Film Film Reviews

Time to Leave (Francois Ozon, 2006)

The latest film from prolific French writer-director Francois Ozon is Time to Leave, a sensitive, low-key drama exploring themes of mortality and interpersonal relationships. It centres on Romain (Melvin Poupard), a somewhat self-centred photographer who discovers that he has terminal cancer. Already somewhat aloof from those around him, he withdraws further, concealing his illness and lashing out at family and his partner Sasha (Christian Sengewald). As the illness progresses, however, Romain is transformed.

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