Midyear Reckoning
"It's biorhythmic!" That's how producer Brian Grazer described the filmgoing habit to the New York Times last month. Grazer, money man behind those awful Ron Howard movies, promotes the Hollywood rationale for garbage. On the occasion of Cinderella Man's deserved flop, Grazer confessed, "I feel like crying." His complaint? "It's almost a scientific equation, the summer movies are big, exciting, fun events." He thinks twaddle like Cinderella Man is weighty and thoughtful; my immediate response to it was, "Wow, we usually get movies this fatuous only during Oscar season." It's a hole Hollywood has dug for itself-and us.
There's no reason filmgoers should be programmed for mindlessness specifically during the summer months. That's why July is always a good time to look back at how the year's releases so far have enabled moviegoers to get past Grazer's Pavlovian notion of movie taste. It's too soon to determine between the top two, so I'll list them alphabetically.
Kung Fu Hustle shows actor-director Stephen Chow's supreme evolution of the martial arts movie. Chow redeems a corrupted film genre by reviving its mythic significance. Remember how the Landlady's special gift, "The Lion's Roar," summons up the spirit of an aspiring people asserting their reawakened pride. At first a figure of laughable and frightening bourgeois power, she later exhales, blowing back her community's foes. Her righteousness is funny, and like Chow's approach to cinema, it has cleansing force. And to think, there was a time when we were encouraged to take hack John Woo seriously.
War of the Worlds is Steven Spielberg's equivalent to Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. It's an apocalyptic vision based in how we live today, amidst worldwide trauma, but every astonishing sequence demonstrates the hard psychic work of civilized man forced to rehumanize himself. This challenge to good-time filmgoers' expectations is the latest example of the 70s modernist urge to revise genre in order to face life more knowledgably. Weekend was based in theoretical political disillusionment; Spielberg's road movie has the taste of bitter experience.
The Best of Youth, Giordana's six-hour epic review of two Italian brothers (Luigi LoCasio and Alessio Boni), encapsulates boomer history from the 60s to the present. His long view is sustained by frequent, reflective reference to the history of family and social films by Visconti, Coppola, Pasolini and Bertolucci. It's a reunion and a banquet.
My Mother's Smile by Marco Bellocchio left town quickly, but Castellito's resistance to Catholicism (and the Church's impending beatification of his late mother) is a lasting memory. More fashionable films (The Holy Girl, My Summer of Love) confused solipsism and facile atheism with religious struggle. None had Bellocchio's farcical wit or blissful camera moves.
Palindromes is the frank, funny and unsettling look at race and sex that made cowardly moviegoers run scared. They clung to Crash's complete denial. Todd Solondz knows how America ticks; his eight-character tour de force is unafraid of satire or compassion.
In My Country by John Boorman is about a miracle: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliaton Commission bringing full disclosure and repentance to the dismantling of Apartheid. Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson played shocked and awed witnesses-thus a big-L love story that small-minded reviewers arrogantly misread as lust.
Fever Pitch is the Farrelly Brothers' most successful love story. As a baseball fanatic and his businesswoman fiancée, Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore perfectly complement each other's "normal" neuroses. Marge Simpson said she hated the tautology "boys will be boys"; she'd love the Farrellys' fresh approach to that problem.
Unleashed, directed by Louis Letterrier, has important collaborators: producer Luc Besson and star Jet-Li, who combine their action-movie skills to make a perfect, meaningful genre movie. How Danny the Dog breaks from the leash of slavery and animalism to reject violence is a lesson in humanity. It's a Sam Fuller film from beyond.
Après Vous has a plot like the American stage play Luv, in which a man rescues a potential suicide and patches up his love life. This time brotherhood becomes edifying rather than comically annoying. It's the love triangle Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her should have been.
Sahara shows how a pre-summer action movie can entertain historical and political issues. Matthew McConnaughey's adventurer brings U.S. Civil War consciousness to modern African politics. Brett Eisner's debut is both spry and perspicacious-the least that Hollywood should offer.
Other good '05 movies include such superb documentaries as Tell Them Who You Are, Murderball, Gunner Palace and Werner Herzog's White Diamond. The best remaining fiction included Nobody Knows, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Robots, Because of Winn Dixie, Harry and Max and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Not a Brian Grazer dog among them-enough to keep a filmlover's metabolism steady.
Happy Endings
Directed by Don Roos
My mid-year review last year coincided with the drab, smug Before Sunset-a film that flattered straight wannabe hipsters. This year I have to rebuff Happy Endings, a film designed to flatter gay wannabe sophisticates. Writer-director Don Roos has made 2005's most loathsome film so far (out-stinking Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Crash) by also indulging contemporary narcissists. This comedy of bad manners displays three sets of hateful Los Angeles egotists: a closeted rock drummer (Jason Ritter) uses a gold-digging singer (Magie Gyllenhaal) to deceive his widowed father (Tom Arnold); a gay couple (Steve Coogan and David Sutcliffe) deceive a pair of lesbians (Laura Dern, Sarah Clarke) who lie about using them as sperm donors; a psychotherapist (Lisa Kudrow) is deceived by both a young filmmaker (Jesse Bradford) and Mexican masseuse (Bobby Cannevale) who hide their own private schemes.
Just when I was willing to credit Ross with discrete storylines, he connects Kudrow to Gyllenhaal (clinic counselor to abortion applicant), providing the film with contrived linkage. It proves Roos isn't really observing life but gleefully endorsing a world where duplicity is not just coin of the realm but a standard. (Gyllenhaal sings her credo: Billy Joel's "Honesty"-"such a lonely word/ everyone is so untrue.") Roos aims at being a West Coast Neil LaBute, except his sophomoric idea of truth is openly tied to a pretense of gay candor. He's developed a facetious style of camp melodrama where title cards comment on the action and characters. (CHARLEY IS GAY NOW. WHO ISN'T?)
Smugness like this makes you despair about film culture's pandering to a select, fragmented audience. Like the Before Sunset crowd falling for fake Rohmer, Happy Endings spins a roundelay for audiences ignorant of Max Ophuls' LaRonde yet proud of what they presume is their own original sin. (One of Roos' intertitles uses the word "Ovarian" to describe an unseen character and her fate. Would Roos let "AIDS" define mortality without offering insight into a character?) Roos' chic liberalism is more hateful here than it was in The Opposite of Sex. Hollywood's attitude toward sexuality is not improved through insidious teasing. It's merely a way of force-feeding attitude. Ophuls' tragic realism is replaced with smirky reassurance that meeting dishonesty with dishonesty is acceptable entertainment.
-A.W.