The Conspirator

The Conspirator   Abra-sham-Lincoln

Director Robert Redford

Starring Robin Wright, James McAvoy and Tom Wilkinson 

 

I’m sorry, I’ve been spoilt. I’ve watched Al Swearengen feed dope fiends to Chinese pigs and Cy Toliver put out cigars on a whore’s left hand, all the while pontificating on life’s existential dilemmas of the hopelessness and fatalistic nature of maggots swimming in dead women’s eyes . The Conspirator chases up the same muddied alleyways of the late nineteeth century world of Deadwood, but seems to fall considerably short on the master work that has come before it. Give me any day of the Christian week, a strung out hustler being drowned in a bathtub over a period melodrama with too many tv actors and an even greater surplus of fake moustaches.

The Conspirator follows hard on the Hollywood tradition of painting by numbers. It is a well intentioned and an oft times, almost substantial reach into civil war complications and contradictions that make up the better angels of American ideology. Better to sacrifice a life for an idea, better to sacrifice a brother tomorrow for a mother today, better to fight for an impossibility and die, rather than live in emptiness and submission.  Unfortunately The Conspirator simply falls too short of its grand ideal.  Although it tries hard and as mentioned, nearly succeeds in portraying a gritty, nineteeth century landscape, all too often the illusion is ruined by the lighting, which looks like it is off the set of Six Feet Under as well as a barrage of lowbrow actors including Justin Long, Tom Wilkinson and Irish favourite Colm Meaney. The opening scene, which is supposed to set the tone for the film, looks like a parody outtake from a parody film, where you expect a director to yell cut and walk across screen yelling into his Blackberry at an unseen camera assistant.

I wanted to love this film as much as it’s poster but alas “Thus always to tyrants” and the tyrant in this case is Robert Redford, who has turned nationalist passion and bloodthirsty conviction into stale courtroom melodrama. It’s like an episode of LA Law without good writing or Corben Bernstein. The one redeeming feature of the piece is an unrecogniseable Robin Wright (nee Penn) who I last saw slow dancing with Irish gangster Terry Noonan in the near perfect State of Grace (1990). She is fantastically wasted. She is like a few actors we all see now and then, wandering amidst what looks like the prehistory of a film age yet to be ushered into the mainstream. There’s very little reality here, the standards are appallingly low. The dialogue is pedestrian, the actors seem to be chosen to simply make do and one of the most dramatic episodes of the formation of modern America is reduced to paltry and predictable slops.

The Consirator is okay. Okay like a Sandra Bullock movie is okay. It turns at the right moments and has a decisively cute arse, but when you get stuck in and have a good look, there’s little more than a Southern tale fondling with its own importance, but ultimately delivering none of its intended promise. If you’ve never seen any television or film in your life, The Conspirator will probably make you cry, if you have seen any television or film before, it’ll do the same.

Potiche

Potiche (The Trophy Wife)-Bring Your Mum

Directed by Francois Ozon

Starring Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini

 

Young gentlemen of Perth, have you been meaning to take your mother out for a nice lunch and pay her the attention she so richly deserves. Have you been thinking her kind hearted ways of consummation, delivery and decades of painful tutelage entitle her to a day-out with her self loathing, slightly intellectual and melancholy son? Well this is your moment to treat that woman to a small portion of what she not only deserves but what she is entitled to. That is a rare French farce concerning female political liberation, enchanting seventies soundtracks and watching Gerard Depardieu do the wild thing in a rural French provincial nightclub.

Potiche is a little charmer of a film. This is no A Pure Formality (1994) or Cyrano de Bergerac (1990). This is a film version of a stage play that at times appears like a pantomime. The seventies setting renders the unusual film a bit like a porno without the sex scenes until of course we are greeted with sex scenes in the form of a flashback of a young Gerard and Catherine Deneuve playing the cardboard cut out characters of the wealthy besotted Mayor and the even wealthier housewife to the insane and determinedly capitalistic factory owner, Luchini. From the opening it appears as it will be nothing more than a door slammer and landing crosser film, which will do little than bore the audience to small French tears. However it leaves the genre heavy introduction of the film and takes us into the plot which we care only slightly about. But caring slightly, is enough to take us through the rest of this little and intriguing picture.

It has suggestions of Clue (1985) in that although it's entertaining it never ever draws you in emotionally as the characters never appear genuine. We are watching high French soap comedy, with legendary actors in every role. Gerard Dep' looks like the largest man alive. And again if you are the aforementioned young man taking your mother out for an afternoon, you will be pleased that your mother will, at the very least, be more concerned for Gerard's health than yours. He looks like a man mountain who is in desperate need of a slow starting treadmill and a creative wig master. He also happens to be brilliant in every scene. A highlight which includes taking Travolta in Pulp Fiction at least half way to the cleaners.

There really isn't much to say about this little gem. Be careful what you expect because it isn't much more than a beautifully executed set design, wonderful costuming and again, some brilliant acting. A criticism may be, would it not be better to take actors of this caliber and production values of this expense and make something truly powerful and meaningful with the same resources. However it is what it is. And for what it is, it is enjoyable. It is by no means brilliant, but it is also by no means awful. It simply is what it is. A colourful, light, velveteen pantomime and another reason to wish the great, over weight Gerard, was in more scenes. Happy mothers day in advance.

The American

The American

International Man of Mystery, Murder and Boredom.

Directed by Anton Corbijn

Starring George Clooney, Paolo Bonacelli, Violante Placido

This is “A Man Comes to Town” movie, made in the vein of seventies paranoid crime thrillers such as 3 Days of the Condor, Marathon Man and The Conversation. George Clooney plays Jack, an assassin on the run from unnamed Swedish heavies. The film traces Clooney as he goes on the lam in the Italian countryside, along the way providing assistance to a fellow assassin in his organisation, falling in love with a middle aged prostitute and seeking counsel and companionship from an aging Italian priest.

From the promising opening scenes of the film we see Clooney appear like movie icons of the past such as Roy Scheider, Marlon Brando and Cary Grant, as the slow-burner beginning introduces elements of intrigue, mystery, double cross and cold professional murder. What begins as a potentially slick and beautifully shot crime thriller, under the direction of the more than capable Anton Corbijn, slowly crumbles and fumbles into a painstakingly, slow, mind numbing pastiche of bad 70’s cinema. Think of a tired Gregory Peck in The Omen crossed with a lack lustre episode of Thunderbirds. If you loved the Limits of Control (which nobody did) you’ll still hate The American.

We watch as Clooney murders some Swedes, murders some Italians, parks his run down Fiat sedan about 15 to 20 times and makes numerous phone calls from shabby pay phones uttering tiny lines of ambiguous dialogue. More murders, more car parking, some intimate love making under red lights, more phone calls, more parking, and on it goes. This is lazy and uninteresting film making. Atmospherics and moodiness are standing in for character and audience engagement. The American is a series of wasted opportunities delivering goliath clichés, scene after monotonous scene.

This film has postcard perfect scenery, shot exquisitely by Martin Ruhe, an artful and delicate director in Anton Corbijn, who together with Clooney, one of the more interesting leading men in mainstream modern cinema, should have delivered a brilliant and intriguing picture. However it is simply impossible to connect with characters who have no life. We are watching cut outs, outlines, the whisky priest, the wide eyed hooker, the lonely assassin, there is nothing more to any of them. Without character there is no suspense, no twists, no tension, nothing, because nobody cares what happens to people who don’t exist.

For a quiet study on good hearted, loner assassins, give me Ghostdog, give me Mr In-Between, give me The Matador, hell even give me Munich over this tiresome waste of a fairly large talent pool.

The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau -A Head Space Oddity

Directed by George Nolfi

starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, John Slattery

Matt Damon hits the streets of New York to take on an army of sharply dressed mind benders as he attempts to run for Senator and keep track of his one true love who he met in a mens room, on the night of his first election loss. This film wades into the murky waters of a concept movie, similar to Inception or the Matrix. It deals with ideas of freewill, fate, destiny and existence itself. With the Big Apple as the setting and the men in suits and dark fedoras playing out this bizarre game of a man losing himself to a organization he cannot name or understand, the film should have been cooler than Kafka on ice. It is however the most ram shackled, addled and confusing mess this reviewer has ever seen.

Just as Damon's David Norris struggles with his own identity, battling the possibilities of love and mediocrity, versus unbridled power and loneliness, so too does the film struggle to find out exactly what it is. It opens as a poorly lit political thriller, moves quickly into a poorly lit romance, then a poorly lit Hitchcockian mind trap and on and on it clumsily goes, drifting in and out of these and many other ill suited genres.

Even the appearance of immortals like Terrence Stamp and John Slatterly are powerless against the awfulness of this enterprise. It looks as if it were made by five different directors, none of whom are even aware that the others exist. The main idea behind the concept is absurd, lazy and wafer thin. It is based on a Philip K Dick's novel which was first published in 1954 and it shows it's age, in scene after ridiculous scene. Men with magic hats making portals out of ordinary doors, people being freeze framed and having their minds re-calibrated, Orwellian heavies that look like they stepped off the set of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985). There are moments where the actors connect, where the good writing is delivered with a great speech and where the chemistry between Damon and Blunt actually sparkles but they are few and far between in this offering. You can see flashes of what the movie may have been, which only makes the majority of this sordid mess all the more unbearable.

The greatest crime however of this film is the music. Possibly the worst and most uneven score since Al Jolson put on the black face for the Jazz Singer. It meanders and turns without warning or reason from light romance to heavy thriller to sweeping grandiosity. It is, much like the film's other elements, utterly lost and at the cruel mercy of a complete lack of direction. With a different score, this film may actually have worked or at least been watchable to a degree.

Having just recently watched Damon in The Informant (2009) as well as revisiting Good Will Hunting (1997), this was a bitter disappointment. As I left the theatre, I found myself shaking my head and not laughing quite so much at the poster for Justin Beiber's new movie.

Outside the Law

Outside the Law   -Rage Born of Despair

Dir Rachid Bouchareb

Starring Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila

This fine epic traces the course of the Algerian resistance against the colonial French for the best part of forty years throughout the twentieth century. We see the story unfold though the eyes of three brothers whose Algerian family is forced from their homeland by a slip of paper and a God given right for French grandeur and prosperity. It is a sweeping grand scale piece of work shot, acted and costumed beautifully. Themes of justice, family duty and identity tension between that of the individual and that of the citizen are interwoven as we follow the three brothers, each with their own vision of freedom as well as the assumed price they each must pay to secure it.

The acting from the three leads is superb and as we see the resistance movement grow from a small band of men struggling to finance their operations, to a large scale, well organised and funded army we are reminded of both Coppola's Godfather (1972) as well as Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), both in story as well as style.

The theme of the displaced and unjustly removed rings very loud from an Australia/Aboriginal point of view. The absurdity of one nation claiming authority over another's land is made very clear with quick economy in the opening scene. Likewise the media reporting throughout the film via news and radio is hauntingly similar to our own unfortunate tendency to paint our modern day villains with a heavy handed brush. The film shows clearly the Algerian cause to be just and yet the media in the film portrays them with a similar hatred and fear mongering as the dreaded “boat people” and “foaming Muslims” are treated to in today's Australian mainstream media.

There are some moments of genuine nail chewing as police head quarters are infiltrated and suspects are interrogated and thankfully the inevitable torture scenes that must occur in these types of pictures, occurs mainly off screen. What is made very clear is the sacrifice the Algerian resistance fighters underwent in order to achieve the victory that came to them in the early part of the 1960's. Not simply sacrificing their lives in battle but sacrificing a normal life in order to maintain the struggle. In order to secure freedom and a homeland for their children, they deny the same children a father who is consistently present. For some in the film this leads to abandoning the idea of family altogether.

The piece lacks a certain amount of emotional depth and the viewer is at times left feeling detached from the characters. It doesn't seem to have the bite one expects from such a work. A further criticism may be that the political realities of the day are not abundantly clear for the uninitiated and perhaps it may have benefited from being an hour or so longer al le Malcolm X (1992).

What is clear is how awful human beings can be to each other and whether it's English bastards or French bastards or any other bastards, we still obviously have quite away to go before we reach our human potential.

The Double Hour

The Double Hour  It's All in Your Head

directed by Giuseppe Capotondi

starring Ksenia Rappaport and Filippo Timi

Where to start with this wonderful offering from Italian director Capotondi. The film is rich, multi layered and beautiful put together. It resounds with European charm and has an endearing 1980's visual quality. We follow the female lead Sonia (Rappaport)  as she winds her way through loneliness and solitude attempting to carve out a new life for herself in Turin. She is a pretty woman on the verge of being beautiful and we watch her quietly as she endures the averageness of her own existence. She struggles to learn Spanish in her small and inexpensive apartment just as she struggles in all aspects of her little life. A toilet cleaner by trade we see things are not quite right for her from the perfectly executed opening scene. When not working she spends her spare time swimming, speed dating and socialising with her equally loveless and soul-mate searching workmate Margherita.

Before long Sonia meets the charming and slightly mysterious Guido (Timi). An ex-cop widower  who likewise wanders through his own life looking for meaning and love. The film has touches of  Mike Leigh as it seems to be a sober character study of two very ordinary people traversing the simple act of living. However what The Double Hour achieves, and hints at achieving early on, is that this is no ordinary film and the viewer is warned not to get too comfortable in their expectations and be prepared to be taken on a very curious ride.

Being careful not to give any of the wonderful plot away, the film insists the viewer pay attention as it constantly suggests different experiences and does so in an extraordinarily subtle fashion. Themes of guilt, fate, madness and meaninglessness glide in and out of this intriguing tale and as they are explored we are treated to shades of Lars Von Trier's Kingdom (1992) as well as Krzysztof Kieslowski's  Three Colours Blue (1992).

As a reviewer it is a real pleasure to watch a film which will not allow you to get comfortable and settle in. With The Double Hour there is a sense that the mysteries will all become clear in the next scene.  Or the next or the next. Although it moves slowly at it's own pace, it is never abstract or boring, but rather intriguing  and somewhat magnetic. The viewer wants to know exactly what it is that they're watching and it is a fascinating exercise to be both out of the loop and simultaneously engaged at the same time.  

It is a small but very effective film which comes from an Italian tradition of telling everyday stories through rather unusual methods. The results are both unique and highly compelling. It would be hard to see such a film being made in Australia with this much precision and originality. This is champagne Euro existentialism, thrown in with mild elements of suspense and just a hint of horror. It really is something quite unique and with a few extra watts on the lighting every now and then, it could have been perfect.  

The Housemaid

The Housemaid-The King and I and I

Directed by Im Sang-soo.

Starring Jeon Do-yeon, Lee Jung-jae  Seo Woo and Yoon Yeo-jeong

First off let me say loudly, this thing is a sizzler. This film is worth twice the price of admission and although you’ll pay for a whole seat, you’ll probably just use the edge of it. The latest work from the “South Korean Oliver Stone” Im Sang-soo, The Housemaid, is a refreshing, engaging and often times hilarious exploration into class, power and intensely sweaty sex scenes between Asian Übermensches.

The film opens with a glorious tour of South Korean nightlife where food, live produce and menial workers all intertwine to form the engine that drives the rest of the hungry polis. The look and feel of the film is sharp and sparklingly clear. It has touches of the above mentioned Stone in it’s camera work and seems to tip it’s bamboo Gat to the flowing and gliding cinematography of Kubrick’s The Shining and Scorsese’s Goodfellas. There are no gangsters present, but the use of the techniques, give the very ordinary settings a virulently sexy and vibrant feel.

We follow Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon), a permanent and obscurely happy member of the South Korean working class as she leaves her job as chief bottle washer and floor scrubber to become the live in Nanny of two of the wealthiest and most glamorous people on the face of the Asian peninsula. She is to be mother to the couples young daughter and fast approaching twins, who wait patiently inside the enormous belly of the tiny and mesmerizingly beautiful Hae Ra (Seo Woo). Hae Ra is married to the wealthy and mysterious Hoon (Lee Jung-jae)  who is a devoted, egomaniacal high achiever, whose chief interests seem to be Beethoven, red wine and extra marital affairs.

Eun-yi is paired with an older female servant and master cook, Byeong-sik, (Yoon Yeo-jeong) whose delicious performance goes very close to stealing the entire film. We then watch as Eun-yi settles into her new role in a very foreign world. What follows is a film noir pyschological power play between the characters who drift in and out of control, of both themselves and with each other. People creep around in the night, hover outside bedroom doors, turn blind eyes to things they shouldn’t see and turn themselves over (sometimes literally) to things they really shouldn’t be turning themselves over to.

The film does have a slight drop in pace over the half way mark, which turns the otherwise slick and enchanting picture into soap opera territory. This is a shame as the delicateness and unique human characteristics shown by the individual players throughout the majority of the film, really serves to lift it beyond a “run of the mill” thriller. It could perhaps have benefitted from being trimmed ever so slightly before the last act in order for it to consistently maintain the bizarre and unusual qualities it otherwise displays.

But we are not weighed down for long as the curious film steams ahead with full force and reckless abandon to deliver a mind blowing ending, full of madness, desperation and intrigue, worthy of everything that has come before it. A Sizzler.