Month: December 2004

Dir: Ole Bornedal
1997
Ewan McGregor plays a law student who gets a job as a night watchman in a very spooky medical center, where one of his nightly duties is to walk across the stiff-filled morgue and turn a key. If this building had been inspected by any state-run agency, it would have been shut down: faulty lighting, crummy-looking halls, and an open sewer nearby. Instead, this is a perfect place for a thriller. The best part of this remake of a 1994 Dutch film is the setup, where we are given a tour of the medical center and introduced to several upcoming plot points and red herrings. There’s even an alarm just in case a corpse revives and needs to call for assistance. Being left alone in a big spooky place with nothing but your mind to play tricks on you guarantees some jolts, but this is a thriller, and–just as in the original–there’s a serial killer out there, a number of bodies, and a young nightwatchman to frame for the murder.
There’s far too much music in this film, especially when silence would have done the job, and alert viewers will guess the killer in the opening scenes. All that remains is an effective scene with a prostitute in a restaurant, Nick Nolte’s weary cop (Nolte and weary like each other so much they should get married), and an early glimpse of John C. Reilly in a supporting role.

Dir: Paul Schrader
1991
Paul Schrader’s film of a drug dealer trying to get on with life though he knows it’s probably passed him by, is a lighter, NewAgey-er version of his Taxi Driver, with William Defoe keeping a diary and surveying the garbage that lies in his path, metaphorically and literally (there’s an interminable garbage strike that threatens to swallow New York throughout. Susan Sarandon plays his supplier, who also plans to get out and go legit with a makeup company. Pushing him to find a way out is the random appearance of his ex-wife (Dana Delaney) who knows she shouldn’t get involved again. This is a city of expensive apartments and restaurants, where even a ratty apartment looks nicer than anything in Taxi Driver. But, like that film, Light Sleeper will end in blood, something to wash away the streets.
It’s a very sad, hopeless movie, though the characters are more in-control and nobler. It still doesn’t help them out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.
The film is marred by a lack of momentum and a bloody awful song that plays throughout, which sound like Leonard Cohen crossed with Michael Bolton. It truly was cold-turkey music.

Dir: Olivier Assayas
1996
I had forgotten how much of this film’s ending I had ripped off for my film, so much that when it came I sat slightly embarrassed next to my wife, who just said, “hey, it’s Nowhereland!”
But it’s to the credit of Assayas’ film that all it took was one viewing and I immediately absorbed the ideas and lessons that the last 3 minutes teach.
That said, the film is both a love letter to Maggie Cheung (in a rubber suit! looking gorgeous!) and French film. For most of the film is about the latter and the problems of advancing the state of film from those who either want to pronounce it dead and nothing like America (the dumb journalist who interviews Cheung) or the others who want it to rehash what has come before (the remake of Les Vampires that forms the movie within the movie). Various positions are staked out, nothing gets consummated–from art to sex, life flows on continuous, and what is left is the most personal kind of film of all, an oblique experimental art piece inside a film that mixes the avant-garde with realism. All that and Luna covering “Bonnie and Clyde.” I love it.

Dir: Kuo-fu Chen
2002
Double Vision transplants a Seven-like serial killer tale into Taiwan and a strange Daoist cult. Victims believe themselves to be drowning or burning alive, and die appropriately. Could it be “pure evil” or some strange sort of science? Enter an American expert on serial killers (David Morse) and a workaholic cop (Tony Leung–the other one) who has been ostracized for exposing corruption. The buddy cop dynamics are out of an X-Files episode, as is the set-up, but Double Vision transcends its rather cliched beginnings and veers off into something dark and menacing. The truth here lies somewhere between science and religion, and both men are right in their own way while being wrong in more important ways (ie. those that would save lives).
I liked it more than I thought I would–a great pall of evil and corruption hung over the entire film, permeating even the police office where, supposedly, equilibrium can be found. There’s even a bloody massacre of cops’n’cultists in the third act that I never expected, but which have done Peckinpah proud. Morse, who is best known for being in nearly every Stephen King tele-movie, but who I know as the cop that Bjork kills in “Dancer in the Dark,” keeps his dignity throughout in a project that so desperately wants to compete with the West. But it succeeds on what makes it particularly Taiwanese: the Daoist angle, the audience’s knowledge of Daoist visions of hell, and a lack of Hollywood structure near the end. Even in its sillier moments, it takes itself seriously, and manages to be chilling.

Dir: Sidney Lumet
1976
Dog Day Afternoon was one of two DVDs I bought for Abel’s Christmas present (people always buy him food, not knowing what else to get him; Mom suggested DVDs), but being a used copy, we watched it before wrapping it up. Sidney Lumet’s job was to take a sensationalist story (two incompetents try to rob a bank, one of whom wants the money for his lover’s sex-change operation) and turn it inside out, making the outlandish universal. With Pacino, he succeeds, and then goes further into doom and despair. Sonny and Sal’s attempts are funny at first, but as the day wears on and the AC and lights go out in the building, death seems right outside the door, cheered on by the bread’n’circuses New York mob.
The film now is a documentary glimpse into a New York that opened up to us only in the 70s, before being reformed and reshaped in the 80s. DDA’s opening five minutes show life in the city, c. 1976 (set in 1972, nobody worries that 1976’s film “A Star Is Born” hangs on a marquee). It was a move borrowed from the New Wave, and rarely seen these days, but sets up the wider context for a film that mostly takes place in two locations: inside and outside the bank. And look closely, for wandering among the crowd is Sonny’s wife, who we won’t see till much later–fiction intermingling with fact.
Pacino’s performance is tempered here with equal doses of anger and passivity–and it’s his star power that allows us entrance into the more disturbed or delusional aspects of Sonny’s personality.
The film pulses along between slow pools of calm and thrashes of activity (the series of lightning fast cuts that follow Sonny’s gunshot out the back window shows that you can cut quick and still be comprehensible). The script has time for dialog that exists apart from furthering the plot. And the supporting cast stand out as real people, not central casting drones (in particular the frizzy haired teller who is always doing something idiosyncratic when the camera passes over her.
Lastly, we come to identify with Sonny so much that in the end we feel his sadness when the hostages–supporting characters in Sonny’s head movie–refuse to acknowledge us or him once he is arrested. He’s lost his chance, his friends, his family–and mostly he’s lost center stage.

Dir: F. Gary Gray
20003
The Italian Job remakes the Michael Caine vehicle and though it keeps the MiniMetro, much to Austin’s delight, it ditches Italy after the opening Bond-like sequence for less interesting Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. Throw into the mix some psychobabble thread about father issues (Donald Sutherland as masterthief–it’s his death that must be revenged for the rest of the film) and some attempts at light humor (mostly Seth Green), and each sort of outweighs the other. Edward Norton hangs around for a paycheck, which he admitted as much in an article around the time of the film’s release. His lack of joy at being on set certainly helps his dour character, and Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron have as much chemistry as an underfunded inner city science class.
Still, it proceeds at a quick pace and director F. Gary Gray knows how to shoot action for the most part. Don’t expect any of it to make sense, though.