THIS CHARMING MAN Saw Breakfast on Pluto at the Landmark Century Centre a few weeks ago.

Ever like a film and not like it at the same time? That was my reaction to Breakfast on Pluto.

Plot: The ubiquitous Cillian Murphy play Patrick/Patricia “Kitten” Braden, found on the doorstep of the local church in a small, Irish town in the early 60s (?). Patrick grows up to be a young man with no doubt of his femininity and its power over men. After a particularly nasty quarrel with his foster mother, he decides to strike out on his own, and is immediately picked up by a glam rock band. Patrick becomes the lover of the lead singer of the band and even insinuates himself into the act, until the other band members rebel and kick him out. The lead singer of the band installs him in a remote hideaway, which we soon learn is an IRA weapons stash. Patrick is nearly murdered by some thugs after he throws the weapons into a lake, but is spared because he happened to go to high school with ones of their colleagues.

Patrick then moves on to London, in hope of finding his long lost mother. There he has a series of comic misadventures: He has brief stints as a children’s theater puppeteer, a magician’s assistant, a street hustler, and is even accused of being an IRA terrorist after he happens to be in a nightclub that is blown up by a bomb.

The latter incident underlines the recurrent theme of Breakfast on Pluto: the world of politics and violence intruding on happiness. Patrick just wants to be himself and live his life, but the rest of the world with its nasty seriousness keeps threatening to destroy him. However, Patrick will just not let that happen. This is a powerful idea, but I’m not sure I liked how it was handled by Neil Jordan. Patrick conducts himself with admirable dignity, even when he seems to know that he’s being slightly ridiculous. But we never get a sense that anything is a stake for his character. Even though the film has some very serious moments, it’s mostly played for laughs. I understand that it’s the point of the material to show us that Patrick will never give in to the seriousness of the world around him, that he will always hold his head high. The problem is that Patrick holds the rest of the world at such a distance that he seems almost inhuman by the end of the film. He remains untouched by life. If only one of those violent incidents had shaken or touched him in some way, instead of leaving his confidence untouched.

But still there is much to admire in Breakfast on Pluto, particularly, the performance of Cillian Murphy. All I can say is that he looked so much like a woman that it made me uncomfortable at times. Now, even though he looked like a woman, that doesn’t mean he acted like one. He acted like all drag queens do, like a man thinks a woman would act or perhaps, more accurately, what a man thinks a woman should act like. All I can say is that his Patrick/Patricia was a hoot from beginning to end. And hey, any movie that has the line, “Officer, would you marry me if I weren’t a transvestite, Irish terrorist?”, can’t be all bad.  ¶ 7:02 PM 0 comments

  NO GREATER SORROW Saw Brokeback Mountain with Viv about a month ago. Yeah, I know, that’s a long time, but you’re just going to have to trust my memory.

The film opens in rural Wyoming in the early sixties. (Actually, I suppose all of Wyoming was rural back then.) Two young men, Jack (Jake Gyllenhall) and Ennis (Heath Ledger), appear at the trailer/office of a rancher – nicely played with dyspeptic grumpiness by Randy Quaid – looking for jobs. They’re hired to herd sheep on the eponymous mountain for the winter.

Jack and Ennis are separated at first. They take turns staying at their camp and keeping watch on the sheep, only exchanging gruff words as they meet for breakfast. Neither wants to make the first friendly gesture for fear of seeming weak, but slowly, the isolation of the setting forces Jack and Ennis to reveal themselves to each other. Although both men gloss over it in conversation, we learn that they are not in touch with their families. We get the feeling that Jack and Ennis are holding back on the exact reasons why and, more importantly, we get a sense of utter loneliness and confusion emanating from them. Both young men seem completely alone, scared, and miserable. I don’t mean to downplay the fact that Brokeback Mountain is about two gay men who love each other, but as Jack and Ennis’s friendship continues to evolve, you get the feeling that what is most important about their relationship is not only that they are able to have sex with each other, but perhaps more importantly that, for the first time in their lives, they’ve each found someone that loves them.

Well, as we all know, Paradise cannot last forever. The herding season comes to an end and Jack and Ennis have to part ways. The sad thing is that a film Paradise begins to crumble too. It’s not that the rest of Brokeback Mountain is bad, it’s just not as good as the beginning. The film becomes cluttered with too much stuff, too many things happening: Ennis has actually had a girl all the time he was herding, and he promptly marries her. Jack, meanwhile, tries his hand at rodeo riding and meets a vivacious, Annie Oakley-type on the circuit. They get married too.

The film proceeds to cut back and forth between the lives of these two young families. There’s so much cutting back and forth that the film’s narrative practically comes to a halt. Jack and Ennis meet up every few years, Jack tells Ennis that they should be together, Ennis says that they can’t, and the cycle repeats itself. I’m not saying that it couldn’t happen like that, only that what had been an exciting film, open to observing human behavior, becomes dull and repetitive, and then some big speeches and big moments creep in. Not a lot, just enough to make you feel like you’re watching an important film.

However, some good stuff comes out of this. Both actresses that play the wives acquit themselves well, particularly Michelle Williams as Ennis’s wife. It may be just a trick of casting, but when you see her girlish face prematurely aged by the pressure of being a young mother with an evasive, remote husband, your heart practically cries out in empathy.

Now, I know it’s not exactly fair to wish for a different film than dealing with the one that was made, and Heath Ledger’s Ennis is clearly the main focus of Brokeback Mountain, but I wish the film had focused on him exclusively. The scenes in the film that concentrate on his life are the strongest after those at the beginning of the film. It’s particularly harrowing to see how Ennis is unable to make emotionally meaningful contact with his wife, children, or anyone else over the course of his life. Again, not to downplay the character’s gayness, but you wonder if Ennis could ever be in a caring relationship with any human being. I suppose many would say that’s the point, that because of the time that he lived in, there was no hope for Ennis, that for fear of persecution, and more insidiously, because of the seed of self-hatred that had been planted in him by his culture, Ennis could never return Jack’s love. I’m not so sure about that, given what we see of Ennis’ character. All I can say is that it’s a relief when the end of the film offers some small hope that he will finally be able to make contact with another human being.  ¶ 6:24 PM 0 comments

  TALKIN' THE TALK Hey, back again. It's been a busy time of the year for me with the new job and the holidays, but my New Year's resolution is to see and write about a lot more films. On to the review!

Saw Walk the Line with Viv a few weeks ago in Evanston.

Apparently, this is the story of Johnny Cash's life: He had a mean old Daddy whom he could never please, especially after a tragic incident involving the death of his older brother. Then, years later he joined the Air Force where he spent his time messing around with a guitar. This was thoughtful of him, as he was going to become a country music star in the future. Then he came home to the U.S. and married his high school sweetheart who turned out to be the most godawful, ballbreaking shrew that ever lived. He messed around with guitar some more and then auditioned for Sam Phillips of Sun Records. Sam liked what he heard and soon Johnny was on the road with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. (Hey, they're famous! You've heard of them!) More importantly, Johnny was on the road with June Carter of the singing Carter family. Johnny was sweet on June, but they were both married and she didn't much care for him anyway, with his weird, uncouth ways.

Well, Johnny started to make it big, but he wasn't very happy because his sourpuss wife still took every chance she could to kick him in the nads. So, he started doing drugs, which, shockingly, only caused his life to unravel that much more quickly. His wife left him and took the kids, wouldn't you know. It gets to the point where you're thinking, "If only something could save Johnny, you know, like the love of a good woman." Well, thankfully, there is a good woman that can save Johnny, June Carter! She seems to hang around in the background of Johnny's life a lot, so she's there to help him straighten himself out. She and her parents even come over to Johnny's place for Thanksgiving and Johnny finally confronts his Scrooge-like father. Then Johnny and June go play a concert at Folsom prison because Johnny's felt like a prisoner his whole life. There's even a saw at the prison just like the one that killed his brother! The Circle of Life! After Johnny's prison liberation, he proposes to June at a concert. She finally says yes and the end-titles tell us that they lived happily ever after.

I wish that I could say that I was exaggerating the small-mindedness of the screenplay for Walk the Line, but, alas, I'm not. It really was that schematic and formulaic. I can't quite understand why anyone would want to be involved ina project like this: taking the life and work of one of America's greatest popular musicians and reducing it to the stuff of a bad T.V. movie of the week.

So many of the characters feel like cardboard cut-outs. The stern, distant father who only serves to provide a CONFLICT in Johnny's life. The misery-inducing first wife who would even convince the Pope of the necessity of divorce. The cameos by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Waylon Jennings whose only purpose seems to be to make the viewer feel good about him or herself for recognizing them.

There are some good things about Walk the Line, the things that Hollywood does well now. The production deign and the actors. The hair, the clothes, and the sets all look period perfect, especially the scenes in and around 50s and 60s Vegas.

The actors are good too, expecially Joaquin Phoenix. He does a good job of fleshing out the script's thin characterization of Johnny Cash, so well indeed that you're almost tempted to buy its inanities. His brooding, tortured Cash suggests someone much more complicated than the one we see in the film, it's as if the film-makers forgot to provide him with the necessary lines to express himself, which, I suppose, they did. The overall effect of Phoenix's performance is a little jarring; it's as if a character from a Dostoevsky novel has wandered into a soap opera.  ¶ 11:09 AM 1 comments

  DESTINATION: NOWHERE

Saw Antonioni’s The Passenger at the Music Box on Thanksgiving night with Vivian and Amy, her partner in academic skullduggery.

Plot: Jack Nicholson plays David Locke, a British-born, American-raised journalist. As the film opens, Locke is in an un-named African country, to cover some sort of insurgency or civil war. We see him attempt to find some information about the situation by driving out into a mountianous, desert area, presumably to locate some rebels, before he skulks back to his hotel in frustration. After a shower, Locke discovers that, Robertson, the man in the room next to him, has died. As a tape recording of a conversation with Robertson plays in the background, and as we see flashbacks of the dead man from Locke's point of view, Locke fixes his own passport photo to Robertson’s. He then tells the unwitting hotel employees that Mr. Locke has died.

After returning to England, Locke casually decides to live Robertson’s life. He flies to Frankfurt to keep one of the dead man's appointments. In a meeting there with two somewhat sinister men, Locke discovers that Robertson is an arms dealer. This doesn’t seem to trouble him very much, as he continues to use Robertson’s identity, raising the issue that locke might be looking for trouble. Locke eventually winds up in Barcelona, striking up a relationship with an aimless young woman, played by Maria Schneider.

I really enjoyed The Passenger. I've always been a sucker for film-makers that emphaize character and mood over plot, and Antonioni is certainly that style's master.

It was also amazing to see a young, slim Jack Nicholoson that refrained from hamming it up like the "Jack" we all know now. In The Passenger, Nicholosn is a sharp as a razor. He plays Locke with a self-hatred that's so intense it's hard to watch. Maria Schneider was a revelation too. Like many, I'd only seen her in Las Tango in Paris, where, at best, I thought her inadequacy as an actress matched up well with the character of the confused young woman that she played. Here, she's amazing. She plays her character with such calm and assuredness, that she seems one of those people that has known and seen more than us. She seems older and wiser than Nicholson, making his character's ultimate decision that much more plausible.

And speaking of that crucial decision, I apologize to all two of you who read this blog, but I’m going to cut to the chase and talk about the ending of the film.

Since Locke’s wife, the arms buyers, and the Spanish police are all after him, Locke and the woman go on the lam in Spain, moving from seedy hotel to seedy hotel. Finally, the woman convinces Locke that he shouldn’t hide from his pursuers anymore. Locke agrees, knowing that the arms buyers will ultimately find him. He then waits in his hotel room.

In one of those extraordinary Antonioni shots, the camera slowly moves from one side of Locke’s hotel room toward the window. The camera stops at the window, and for about five minutes, focuses on the action in the hotel’s courtyard. We see various passers-by, then the woman, (walking around purposelessly,) and finally a man that looks like he might have been one of the arms buyers. We see him go toward the hotel entrance. The camera stays at the window, looking out, while we hear a brief, very muffled struggle in Locke’s room. Then Locke’s wife shows up and she, the woman, and the hotel staff discover Locke’s dead body.

Here’s what I want to know about the ending: Does the woman know that she is helping Locke on his way to death? I think that she has to understand that when she tells him to commit to being Robertson that there’s a lot of danger involved with that choice. Or does she not understand? Does she still really have no idea what it means for Locke to be come Robertson? Forgetting the woman for a second, I think the important thing is that Locke understands what it means for him to choose to keep Robertson's appointment. He knows it means his death. But whether his decision to choose death is a good or bad thing remains an unanswered question.

  ¶ 4:22 PM 0 comments

  THE LIFE AQUATIC Saw Noah Baumbach's The Squid and The Whale at Piper's Alley about a week and a half ago. Hadn't been there in about ten years. It's in the same complex as Second City, Tony and Tina's wedding, a running store, and a bunch of other crap. Needless to say, it's not the most impressive venue in which to see a movie in Chicago.

Plot: The film takes place in Brooklyn in the mid-80s. Kaura Linney and Jeff Daniels are Joan and Bernard Berkman, the Jewish intellectual parents of two boys, Frank, about sixteen, and Walt, about thirteen. Early on, Joan and Bernard announce that they're getting a divorce. The rest of the film chronicles how the family deals with this.

I liked S & W, but probably not for the same reasons as other people. I'm guessing that many liked the film for the performances of Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, and I'd be partly in agreement there. I thought Jeff Daniels was very good at portraying a man who's a bastard, but has enough intelligence and charm that he could fool some people into sympathizing with him, particularly his elder son. Frank idolizes his father, parroting his opinions on art and literature, blaming his mother for the divorce. Daniels does an epert job of showing us how Bernard 's simmering resentment at his lack of recognition from the world has corroded his soul.

However, I didn't care for Laura Linney as Joan. Has an actress ever received such a free pass? She's consistently in films that critics and and Academy Award voters like, so she's built up a reputation as a very good actress, but I don't see it. She's just pleasant and adequate. She never does anything that interests or surprises. I thought she was awful in this film in particular. I don't believe her Joan, don't believe that Linney knows anything about her. When Joan affectionately calls her sons "Chicken," it sounds repellently false in Linney's mouth.

What I liked about S & W was Baumbach's sentiment and self-pity free portrait of himself. Frank, in his desire to be his father, becomes just as much of an asshole. He provides put-downs of books he's never read, pawns off a song by Pink Floyd as one of his own, and contemplates cheating on his girlfriend because he thinks he can "do better." Frank's deplorable behavior is tempered by the fact that he's a teenager. He doesn't really know how much of an asshole he is, he thinks that he's acting like an adult. I'm not saying that his behavior is that much worse than many adults, only that what makes it poignant is that Frank thinks that he is being mature. I appreciated how matter of fact Baumbach was about his treatment of Frank. He doesn't make Frank into a villain and doesn't empathize with him too much. Indeed, the film could just as well been called "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Douchebag."  ¶ 7:00 PM 1 comments

  NOTHING LIKE THE SUN Saw Chris Marker's Sans Soleil at Facets...about two weeks ago. First of all, Facets blows. The theaters are small, dingy, and threadbare. You can hear people walking on the floors above the them. Facets also seems to attract the weirdest crowds. They're people beyond the pretentiousness of the typical art house theater. They're just full-blown weirdos. People that seem to think that a viewing of a movie must involve an odd hat or coat.

Anyway, on to the film. I don't know what to say. San Soleil was one of the strangest and most fascinating films I've ever seen. We hear a woman's voice offscreen reading the letters of a man who appears to have travelled extensively in Japan and Africa. We are shown film shot in the countries that the man has written about. Mostly Japan.

What I found fascinating was that San Soleil did not make an attempt to be a typical travelogue. There were no comforting explanations of the local customs. Everything was strange and bizarre, but without being condescending or racist. The film just tried to show us that travel often involves engagement with an alien culture and that we try to explain away all that we cannot understand. This film showed an intellect trying to grapple with another culture, to figure it out. Or, at least, to realize that it could not be understood. Something that most of us do not do. In fact, I think that while many of us tell ourselves that we're going to learn something through travel, we only do it for some minor diversion and to feel good about oursleves.

That's it all I can say, the film was too complex and my memory has faded.  ¶ 6:31 PM 1 comments

  BACK Hey, everyone! I know I haven't posted here in quite a while, but I've got my reasons. Like getting a new job and celebrating the Vivster's 30th birthday. I promise I'll be back this week with reviews of films by Marker, Godard, Malle, and maybe Ophuls. So stayed tuned and, in the meantime, I'd like to give a shout out to "The Interpreter," the most self-important, self-serious film that I've seen in quite some time. It was a lot of fun to watch Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn constantly one-upping each other in intensity. I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if they had broken into a old school Conan-and-Andy staring contest. Oh, and by the way, did I mention how fucking boring it was? For fuck's sake, is this really the best Hollywood can do?  ¶ 10:01 AM 0 comments

  CONFOUNDED I'm sure you've all had the experience of defeated expectations, well I got it in spades this weekend.

Saw Wallace and Gromit: Curse of The Were-Rabbit in Evanston on Friday. The Vivster was in attendance with me. We both expected to like this movie, as we're dog-lovers and had heard good things about it, but it wasn't meant to be. Not only did we not like the film, we actually found ourselves dozing off during it. It was just dull. The story wasn't interesting and the jokes weren't funny. My theory is that clay-mation is such a long, painstaking process that it's just too difficult to pack a lot of interesting material into a feature length film. It would take decades to complete. Were-Rabbit wasn't even bad, it was just boring.

So, on to Saturday. Viv and I met up with our friend Emily in Hyde Park for dinner at the Med. We then went over to Doc and took in a screening of War of the Worlds. Not even my four dollar ticket could get me excited about seeing this film. Well, imagine my surprise when I found it to be quite riveting.

I think you all know the story, so we'll skip to what I thought was interesting:

The Set Pieces. Partcicularly the first one, when the aliens attack Tom Cruise's New Jersey town. There's nice build-up to the catastrophe. We get to know Cruise's character and his family before the shit hits the fan. Then these extremely ominous clouds show up. Cruise's character notices that the wind is being sucked into them and all hell breaks loose. From the much talked-about 9/11-ish human ash, to the collapsing buildings and bridges, I thought this sequence was genuinely frightening. The other set-pieces - a crashed airplane, a capsized ferry, and a basement visit by the aliens - are also well-executed and disturbing. My particular favorite was a flame-engulfed train hurtling through a crossing. I liked that the film provided no explanation for it. You just have to assume that you would see bizarre, terrifying events like that in this situation.

On the other hand, I had some reservations about the set pieces, which led me to a more critical response to War of the Worlds overall. I thought it was more than a little preposterous that Cruise and Co. could live through so many catastrophes. I can see them living through one of these disasters, maybe even two, but not through five or six of them. Isn't the point of the film that most of the people involved in these events die? Shouldn't Cruise and his family be dead too? I know, I know, there wouldn't be much of a movie if the main characters either died immediately, or avoided all contact with the aliens. But I think the film could have still been interesting if Spielberg could have resisted the urge to keep piling on more bravura, knock-'em-dead spectacles. Perhaps instead of the ferry turning over, we could have had more of Cruise chasing after his wayward son. I mean, the film keeps hammering into our heads that Cruise is a flawed, selfish guy, who's not much of a father. What better way for his character to demonstrate his worth than risk life and limb tracking down one of his children?

The eventual overkill of the set pieces and the corresponding lack of development of the human story got me thinking about War of the Worlds. What is the purpose of this film? I suppose most people would say that it's just summer blockbuster entertainment. But since when has light entertainment been associated with depicting the shockingly gruesome deaths of thousands of people? Is this really how we want to enjoy ourselves? And what about Spielberg? I get the sense that he really enjoys the carnage and, looking back on his career, I think I'm right. From Jaws, to Schindler's List, to Saving Private Ryan, to War of the Worlds, Spielberg seems to delight in finding new and spectacular ways to mangle and destroy human bodies on film. If Spielberg's private fantasies involve mutilation and mayhem, that's fine, but what I object to is that he has nothing to say about the violence he depicts. He just wants to impress us with his film-making skill. Even someone like Brian DePalma is more sophisticated than this; DePalma tries too go too far with the violence in his films and, I think, implicate us in it, as silent accomplices. I find no similar sense of purpose in Spielberg. He needs to find his outlet for violence in socially acceptable frameworks, like his World War II films and this disaster flick. I think that Spielberg has it in him to make a very sick, perverse, violent film (his Peeping Tom, if you will), but he's much too concerned with taste, decorum, money, and awards to do that. It's a shame, because I think there could be a much more interesting film-maker lurking behind the virtuoso.  ¶ 9:01 AM 1 comments

  STAN THE MAN Long time, no see. As the two of you who read this blog may have noticed, the Exterminating Angel was on a bit of a hiatus, preparing for and running the Chicago Marathon. Well, I finished the race, although not with a very good time. However, on the upside, I did get to see more women urinating in public than I ever thought I'd see in my life.

Anyway, on to the review.

Saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Music Box last night. It was a 70 millimeter print, shown on the big screen. Which was nice. Since, I'm sure most of you have seen the film, or are familiar with it, I'm not going to do a regular review, but will just provide some thoughts, Larry King-style:

Kubrick's use of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathrustra sets the tone for the film. The music is stately and impressive, but also cold and bombastic. It has a bullying self-importance that practically dares you to not be intimidated by it...like the film itself.

I've always liked the opening sequence, The Dawn of Man. Who were those actors who played the apes? They were fantastic. Whenever I watch this sequence, I always find myself believing that I'm watching real apes. Really good use of sound here. The ape grunts are thick and primal. A soundtrack in their own right.

And then the monolith showed up...and I found myself supressing the urge to giggle. I've probably seen 2001 too many times, so it's lost its ability to surprise me, but I just can't understand how anyone ever took that piece of black cardboard seriously. I mean, yes, I suppose it does look eerie, just being there, doing nothin', but it is kind of silly. And then we get that creepy, choral bee-hive music, just to underline that we're seeing something really weird. Together, the monolith and the music do create a sense of the uncanny, but it's all slightly ridiculous.

Well, we know what happens next, don't we? That's no ordinary monolith, but the Monolith of Knowledge that precipitates the fall of the apes. They quickly figure out how to use bones as weapons and go from generally peaceful herbivores to murderous meat-eaters. Yep, that's right, the birth of the Republican party. Ha, ha! Take that Dubya!

So that one ape throws his bone up into the air and it becomes a spaceship and it's on to the dreaded middle section of the film. It's not that this part of the film is bad, but it's pretty dull. Just a lot of ships and people floating around to waltz music. This was probably a lot more impressive in 1968. I don't mean to be condescending when I write that. I just think that these visual effects were a lot more surprising back then.

The monolith reappears at the moon base and lets out a burst of radio energy as the American scientists are attempting to take a see-what-I-found-on-my-trip-to-the-moon group photo. You can almost hear a pissed off monolith shouting, "Hey, I'm the monolith here, goddamit! This isn't a joke! Put that fucking camera down!"

So then we jump to Jupiter and the best part of the film. How great is HAL? He's got to be one of the most memorable characters in film history. Is HAL a conscious being? Is he more human or more machine? He certainly acts more human than the two astronauts, Dave and Frank. Talk amongst yourselves.

As I've noted before, one of my favorite film moments is Dave Bowman shutting down HAL. Hearing HAL sing "A Bicycle Built For Two" is funny, chilling, and sad.

Then it's on to the groovy, far-out, mind trip. This part of the film is exciting and embarassing at the same time. I've gotta give Kubrick some credit for his guts. Can you imagine him telling studio execs in the late 60s that he was going to end the film with a special effects light show? This sequence is visually stunning, but it's also empty. Yeah, yeah, I suppose the monolith is showing Dave the beginning of the universe or something like that, but so what? The film has nothing to say about why Dave is being shown all of this or what it all means. I don't expect to be told the meaning of a work of art, but I get the feeling that the emperor has no clothes here.

And then the three different Daves in the overlit Louis XIV room. And let's not even talk about that giant space-fetus.

Overall, I felt curiously nostalgic and sad while watching 2001. Nostalgic for the recent past, for that time just before my birth. When Kubrick made this film there were no cell phones, or fax machines, or internet, or SUVs. I kept thinking that a lot of other people back in the 60s thought that something interesting or wonderful could happen to mankind in the future. That man would gain some sort of knowledge or insight about his position in the universe. Well, I've lived through 2001 and beyond and, as I'm sure a lot of you will agree, we haven't learned anything.  ¶ 6:40 AM 1 comments