King Kong - Finally got around to watching this as Netflix decided it had been out long enough for a frequent movie watcher like me to be allowed to see it. The special effects are as advertised, it's a beautiful film, more so than any of the Lord Of The Rings movies in fact. Naomi Watts is terrific and Jack Black's not too bad either. However, instead of thinking the movie was too long, as most commentators seem to, I think it was actually too short. I dug all the set-up in Act One, especially the idea that this trip to skull island to make this movie is fate, totally out of their control. The little subplots on the boat didn't work for me at all: the kid and the first mate, the Captain not wanting to got to the island, blah. Once they get on the island, everything's great again: spooky natives, cool effects, a lot of fun action (though does anyone else wonder why these people never get lost on that island?). It's Act Three that I have a problem with. None of the interesting themes for Act One are revived or concluded, it all becomes subservient to the (admittedly spectacular) action and the pseudo-love story. The final scenes at the top of the Empire State Building even managed to trigger my fear of heights, which kind of ruined the romance, I guess.
A summary of some plot holes: there's no explanation of why Watts and Adrian Brody are separated at the beginning of Act Three, after he spent the previous hour and a half fighting dangerous computer beasts to rescue her from the giant ape; there's no explanation for why the cowardly actor came to deus ex machina them back on the island (and where's his moustache?); there's no further elaboration, or even mention of the destiny theme. Maybe in a year Peter jackson will release the 5 hour director's cut and I'll be satisfied. As is, the movie has everything in common with Titanic but the massive box office gross: it's big, pretty and simple. The #18 film of 2005.
United 93 - Is this movie any good? The better question is is it possible for this movie to be good? What would a good movie about 9/11 look like? Paul Greengrass seems to think that a verité-style approach is appropriate. We get fly on the wall views of the events on the plane, intercut with scenes in various air traffic and military control centers. This style, and various comments about the film in advertising and some reviews, and the total lack of outside context in the film (no resolution, no mention of anything that happens after the plane goes down) seem to indicate a desire to take no political position on the events in order to avoid offending anyone, to not be seen as exploiting a tragedy for political purposes. However, I don't think it's even possible to make a film (certainly not a film like this) without being political, and Greengrass does seem to drive home the unpreparedness and inefficiency of our disaster-response system ("Where is the President?"). The idea that a film should be made of events like this at all is questionable: reducing a very real and very human tragedy to an anecdote, a simple narrative or even worse, and action movie is intrinsically distasteful. But at least when it's made with a political purpose, such a narrative has some kind of larger purpose. Without that, the narrative is just an action story, the real human tragedy is reduced to, well, a movie. It's similar to the Schindler's List argument: the quality of the film as a film necessarily trivializes the real experience of 9/11 or the Holocaust. At least if the narrative has some kind of context or political agenda, the skill in telling it can be seen as a means to education and the prevention of further tragedies. As is, this film, by doing everything it can to be non-political (and necessarily failing) does nothing to further or deepen our understanding of 9/11 and what it means. The best we can take out of it is sympathy and admiration for the collective hero of the airplane's passengers. But did we really need a movie to show us how heroic those people were? If so, doesn't that say something horrible about us and the way we deal with reality? Is it not really real until we've seen the movie (and wasn't 9/11 cinematic enough the first time)? Anyway, I don't think we've had a great film about 9/11 yet, but when we do I'm certain it'll look a lot more than Fahrenheit 911 than United 93.
Centre Stage - A funky biopic about Chinese silent film star Ruan Ling-yu played by Maggie Cheung and directed by Stanley Kwan. Ruan killed herself at age 25 after only a few years of making movies, most of which no longer exist. After reading Jonathan Rosenbaum rave about it in his Essential Cinema book (where it's called Actress, a much better title), I snagged it from Netflix. Problem is the Region 1 copy of the movie sucks. The subtitles are bad and absent at inconvenient times, the transfer is really bad and apparently 20 minutes have been cut out of the film. As is, there's enough to see what Rosenbaum dug about the film: Kwan mixes archival footage of the silent films with Cheung reenacting those same film scenes and interviews with actors in the film and some of the people they're portraying mixed with dramatic recreations of scenes from Ruan's life. Incoherence is a necessary part of the film because there are so many gaps in what we know of Ruan's life, but the cuts take it to far (not too mention that a key newspaper headline remains untranslated, not being able to read Chinese, I have no idea what the tabloids were attacking her about right before she killed herself. Seems like whoever subtitled this film would have thought that might be important. . . . Recognizing that it's incomplete, I'll rate it the #21 film of 1992.
Last Life In The Universe - A possibly suicidal Japanese librarian (he keeps failing to kill himself) hangs out with a Thai girl after his brother and her sister are killed. He's an obsessive compulsive neatfreak while she's a pot-smoking slob. He spends a couple days cleaning up her house (right by the beach), they fall in love and are separated and learn a lot about life and love and all that. Neither one speaks the other's language, so they spend most of their time communicating in English, and eventually each of them spends some time transformed into their deceased sibling, both of whom are cultural stereotypes (Japanese yakuza and Thai prostitute). It's Harold & Maude with the gap the lovers overcome being culture instead of age. It's a beautiful movie, some of Christopher Doyle's finest cinematography, though it's totally different than his work with Wong Kar-wai. It looks more like Danny Boyle circa Trainspotting. It's the only film I've seen by director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, though his film 6ixtynin9 has gone right into the queue. The #2 film of 2003.
Murder, My Sweet - Edward Dmytryk's adaptation of raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely stars Dick Powell as the detective Philip Marlowe. It's an odd choice for a hard-boiled film noir, as Powell was mostly known for his work in light musical comedies, and he doesn't entirely pull off Marlowe, at least not as I imagine him (that'd be Humphrey Bogart in the Big Sleep) but he's not bad. Marlowe's hired by a bulky thug to find his missing girlfriend and manages to get himself mixed up with a wealthy family that's being blackmailed. He gets beat up, a lot, which leads to one of the more unfortunate parts of the film, a cheesy pool of blackness that fills the screen every time Marlowe gets knocked unconscious (this many concussions in such a short period of time can be extremely dangerous, by the way, even if you're a hockey player) that was apparently greeted with guffaws when the film eventually played in Paris. More successful is a hallucination sequence when Marlowe's forcibly injected with heroin for some inexplicable reason. But really, the main attraction here is the Chandler dialogue. A nice, summarizing example: "'Okay Marlowe,' I said to myself. 'You're a tough guy. You've been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you're crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now let's see you do something really tough - like putting your pants on.'"
Gilda - Another mediocre film noir, this one featuring a superstar-making performance by Rita Hayworth as the title object of desire. Much like in Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight (#8, 1996), a young gambler is adopted by an older man and shown how to survive. This time it's Glenn Ford who's taken in by George Macready's Buenos Aires casino owner and would-be tungsten magnate. Things fall apart, as they must, when a woman gets involved, Hayworth in this case, Macready's new bride and Ford's ex-girlfriend. There's more than just a hint of a homosexual relationship between Ford and Macready that isn't exactly minimize by the hostility with which Ford treats Hayworth throughout the entire run of the film. Even after Macready fakes his death and he and Hayworth get married, he proceeds to lock her up in an apartment to punish her for her mistreatment of his "friend". Of course, they all live heterosexually ever after, but we know what's really going on. Hayworth, by the way, is as advertised, especially in her famous striptease in which all she manages to remove is a single glove. But I think she looked better in The Lady From Shanghai.
