(Roger Vadim, 1981)
A moderately entertaining piece of jet-setting hackwork, set in the glamorous and dangerous world of art forgery. Master forger Wayne Rogers gets mixed up with scheming dealer Samantha Eggar and her scalpel-wielding enforcer; battle of wits ensues. Directed as it is by old pro Vadim, this one exhibits a general tendency toward making sense, is presented without fuss or longeuers, and keeps the ensemble down to manageable numbers. Marie-France Pisier is resourceful and self-sufficient as well as gorgeous, Rogers is somewhat less cloying than usual, and Lloyd Bochner is quite enjoyable as the diabolical yet ineffectual enforcer - especially when he falls victim to the old hypodermic-needle-in-the-eye gag. That's a welcome punctuation point in what is ultimately a pretty dull affair - small moments do enliven most scenes, but the procedural detail around the act of forgery is mainly exploited for high-rolling glamour, and if you're going to ask me to succumb to escapist class fantasies then I'm going to demand climactic sequences that aren't art auctions.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
The Housekeeper
(Ousama Rawi, 1986)
Two really grave flaws here. The ill-conceived structure crams all the murder and mayhem save a couple quick hallucinations into the first and last ten minutes of the film; this leaves the middle section for character and plot development which are not forthcoming - Rita Tushingham starts as an unsympathetic biddy and stays that way throughout. Also, after a suitably bitchy intro, her wealthy employers are far too decent and reasonable - even the borderline-incest subplot is mild. This imbalance simultaneously skews the film toward bourgeois paranoia fantasy and creates unwelcome lulls in the camp nastiness. The latter is mainly provided not by Tushingham - though she has her moments - but Jackie Burroughs as the town crazy woman, a role she inhabits with alarming acuity. Ex-prostitute turned Christian soldier, domestic abuse victim and cackling survivalist, Burroughs is so compellingly obnoxious that she steals the movie. One is tempted to forgive the production its sins just for the opportunity to watch her tear up the scenery, but while scene for scene Rawi shows a nice flair for the grotesque - the church sequence is a riot - the whole lacks momentum and coherence, and the illiterate-as-monster premise fails to generate much pathos to balance the classbound revulsion.
Two really grave flaws here. The ill-conceived structure crams all the murder and mayhem save a couple quick hallucinations into the first and last ten minutes of the film; this leaves the middle section for character and plot development which are not forthcoming - Rita Tushingham starts as an unsympathetic biddy and stays that way throughout. Also, after a suitably bitchy intro, her wealthy employers are far too decent and reasonable - even the borderline-incest subplot is mild. This imbalance simultaneously skews the film toward bourgeois paranoia fantasy and creates unwelcome lulls in the camp nastiness. The latter is mainly provided not by Tushingham - though she has her moments - but Jackie Burroughs as the town crazy woman, a role she inhabits with alarming acuity. Ex-prostitute turned Christian soldier, domestic abuse victim and cackling survivalist, Burroughs is so compellingly obnoxious that she steals the movie. One is tempted to forgive the production its sins just for the opportunity to watch her tear up the scenery, but while scene for scene Rawi shows a nice flair for the grotesque - the church sequence is a riot - the whole lacks momentum and coherence, and the illiterate-as-monster premise fails to generate much pathos to balance the classbound revulsion.
Hot Money
(Selig Usher, 1983)
Usher gets director credit because Mr. Smithee was tied up that month; this movie was in fact removed from the creative ministrations of George McCowan by producer Zale Magder. McCowan is not the most reliable craftsman around, but compared to Magder he's Orson Welles. And speak of the devil, Welles himself shows up for several scenes as the sheriff, and in a quite hilarious turn of events is drunker than you can possibly imagine. It looks like he passed the bottle around, too; the entire movie proceeds at a disoriented, glassy-eyed stagger. Forensic study would turn up evidence that this script is supposed to be a comedy, but with subplots and seemingly pivotal characters evaporating left and right, the matter is strictly academic. The production shows comparable levels of virtuosity: lights glaring in the windows, long seconds of silence interrupted with blaring incidental music, random dialogue surgically grafted in crude simulation of flashback, several dialogue setups where the reverse shot seems to have been lost at the lab, agonizing wasted seconds ticking away at the end of every scene in an effort to pad the running time to 78 minutes. About the only incidents of note are one exploding VW and Bobby "Boris" Pickett singing "Feelings". In short, this is without question one of the worst films I have ever seen, and not in a fun way either. But let's give credit where credit is due: as a baldly craven money-laundering plot, this is a real triumph. Zale threw his own post house some much-needed work, he got to meet Orson Welles, and he bankrolled a completely useless trip to the Bahamas with his buddies, all for a measly four million bucks. Who am I to argue with success?
Usher gets director credit because Mr. Smithee was tied up that month; this movie was in fact removed from the creative ministrations of George McCowan by producer Zale Magder. McCowan is not the most reliable craftsman around, but compared to Magder he's Orson Welles. And speak of the devil, Welles himself shows up for several scenes as the sheriff, and in a quite hilarious turn of events is drunker than you can possibly imagine. It looks like he passed the bottle around, too; the entire movie proceeds at a disoriented, glassy-eyed stagger. Forensic study would turn up evidence that this script is supposed to be a comedy, but with subplots and seemingly pivotal characters evaporating left and right, the matter is strictly academic. The production shows comparable levels of virtuosity: lights glaring in the windows, long seconds of silence interrupted with blaring incidental music, random dialogue surgically grafted in crude simulation of flashback, several dialogue setups where the reverse shot seems to have been lost at the lab, agonizing wasted seconds ticking away at the end of every scene in an effort to pad the running time to 78 minutes. About the only incidents of note are one exploding VW and Bobby "Boris" Pickett singing "Feelings". In short, this is without question one of the worst films I have ever seen, and not in a fun way either. But let's give credit where credit is due: as a baldly craven money-laundering plot, this is a real triumph. Zale threw his own post house some much-needed work, he got to meet Orson Welles, and he bankrolled a completely useless trip to the Bahamas with his buddies, all for a measly four million bucks. Who am I to argue with success?
The Hotel New Hampshire
(Tony Richardson, 1984)
A comedy about tragedy, this film features the unpredictably timed deaths of many major characters, a rape revenge subplot, a revolutionary bombing subplot, lots of sex including a prominent incest theme, and a running gag involving a farting dog who is stuffed and mounted. Yet it is an A-list production with an all-star cast and generous production values. This sets up a tension which the film resolves with an evenness of tone and mildness of effect that softens the subversive impact - it doesn't break the taboos, it just sort of taps them on the table. One wonders whether this toning down was imposed rather than conceived, because the film's considerable craft disintegrates whenever we approach a big payoff - the bimbo in the bathroom, the cop's heart attack, and the car bomb detonation all look like they've been inexplicably edited for TV. All sequences involving Rob Lowe running around in fast motion are instant death - a ghostly echo of the farce the movie secretly wants to be but doesn't quite have the stomach for. And without big laughs, you wish there was a little more space to get to know the characters in this all-star crowd - the ensemble is right into it, but the narrative-cramming is apparent even if you don't know the source novel. I doubt John Irving was quite so belligerent with the catch-phrases either.
A comedy about tragedy, this film features the unpredictably timed deaths of many major characters, a rape revenge subplot, a revolutionary bombing subplot, lots of sex including a prominent incest theme, and a running gag involving a farting dog who is stuffed and mounted. Yet it is an A-list production with an all-star cast and generous production values. This sets up a tension which the film resolves with an evenness of tone and mildness of effect that softens the subversive impact - it doesn't break the taboos, it just sort of taps them on the table. One wonders whether this toning down was imposed rather than conceived, because the film's considerable craft disintegrates whenever we approach a big payoff - the bimbo in the bathroom, the cop's heart attack, and the car bomb detonation all look like they've been inexplicably edited for TV. All sequences involving Rob Lowe running around in fast motion are instant death - a ghostly echo of the farce the movie secretly wants to be but doesn't quite have the stomach for. And without big laughs, you wish there was a little more space to get to know the characters in this all-star crowd - the ensemble is right into it, but the narrative-cramming is apparent even if you don't know the source novel. I doubt John Irving was quite so belligerent with the catch-phrases either.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Hostile Takeover
(George Mihalka, 1988)
For the first hour, this seems to be an reasonably honest and engaging piece of social commentary with something lacking dramatically. An early flashback implies that meek hostage-taker David Warner is weighted by childhood trauma, and his reactions imply that the toxic power-mongering of his office environment is acting as a trigger. There are indications that the filmmakers mean to extend this to a general critique of the corporate mentality; where Warner's actions imply the lack of an ongoing release valve for his daily traumas, his coworkers/hostages take refuge in regimentation (Jayne Eastwood), craven ambition (Kate Vernon) or greed (Michael Ironside, wonderfully cast against type as an ineffectual nebbish). The problem is that everything these people do or say seems to be keyed to their single character hook; there's a lack of complicating detail, so that the roles don't feel lived in. Andy Thompson's disorienting, discordant musical score adds texture though, and you bear with it out of curiosity over where it is all leading. And in the third act you find out, as things spiral straight down into an incomprehensible morass of showboating metaphor. From the moment the drunken 'trial' breaks out, all the characters suddenly stop operating as characters and instead become projections of a theme - a theme that the film is not even kind enough to articulate - and things become intensely mannered and obscure. Maybe they thought that undermining the police procedural with a T. S. Eliot read-in was acerbic or subversive, but the result is painfully twee, an early entry in the post-tax-shelter Canadian cinema of willfully obscure posturing.
For the first hour, this seems to be an reasonably honest and engaging piece of social commentary with something lacking dramatically. An early flashback implies that meek hostage-taker David Warner is weighted by childhood trauma, and his reactions imply that the toxic power-mongering of his office environment is acting as a trigger. There are indications that the filmmakers mean to extend this to a general critique of the corporate mentality; where Warner's actions imply the lack of an ongoing release valve for his daily traumas, his coworkers/hostages take refuge in regimentation (Jayne Eastwood), craven ambition (Kate Vernon) or greed (Michael Ironside, wonderfully cast against type as an ineffectual nebbish). The problem is that everything these people do or say seems to be keyed to their single character hook; there's a lack of complicating detail, so that the roles don't feel lived in. Andy Thompson's disorienting, discordant musical score adds texture though, and you bear with it out of curiosity over where it is all leading. And in the third act you find out, as things spiral straight down into an incomprehensible morass of showboating metaphor. From the moment the drunken 'trial' breaks out, all the characters suddenly stop operating as characters and instead become projections of a theme - a theme that the film is not even kind enough to articulate - and things become intensely mannered and obscure. Maybe they thought that undermining the police procedural with a T. S. Eliot read-in was acerbic or subversive, but the result is painfully twee, an early entry in the post-tax-shelter Canadian cinema of willfully obscure posturing.
Honeymoon
(Patrick Jamain, 1985)
Not exactly tragic, but certainly sad, and more so for being so predictable - almost as soon as the premise is set up you can guess where it will go wrong. The direction does wring a nice crescendo of entrapment from the marriage-of-convenience-gone-awry premise, and does an adequate job at sleazing up the New York setting. The actors are capable too, although they suffer when the volume rises. It doesn't matter though - as soon as John Shea's twinkly Zoo Story psychopath forces his way into Nathalie Baye's apartment, you know that she will be obliged to develop feelings for the shmuck. And as soon as Shea drags Baye down to Coney Island to re-enact the murder of his first wife, you know that she's going to only tap him once lightly with that baseball bat and leave the straight razor lying at his side. Why, God, why? You can't blame it on the genre, because Jamain has spent the whole movie actively exploring the theme of misogyny as psychosis - it's self-aware, and so your brain is on, and so the stupid stuff is no fun. Thus, you're stuck with your abiding desire to kick Shea's character (not Shea, who does his best) in the balls. This movie's pedigree may be more French than Canadian, but it does carry the torch for our national mini-tradition of transcendently obnoxious male leads.
Not exactly tragic, but certainly sad, and more so for being so predictable - almost as soon as the premise is set up you can guess where it will go wrong. The direction does wring a nice crescendo of entrapment from the marriage-of-convenience-gone-awry premise, and does an adequate job at sleazing up the New York setting. The actors are capable too, although they suffer when the volume rises. It doesn't matter though - as soon as John Shea's twinkly Zoo Story psychopath forces his way into Nathalie Baye's apartment, you know that she will be obliged to develop feelings for the shmuck. And as soon as Shea drags Baye down to Coney Island to re-enact the murder of his first wife, you know that she's going to only tap him once lightly with that baseball bat and leave the straight razor lying at his side. Why, God, why? You can't blame it on the genre, because Jamain has spent the whole movie actively exploring the theme of misogyny as psychosis - it's self-aware, and so your brain is on, and so the stupid stuff is no fun. Thus, you're stuck with your abiding desire to kick Shea's character (not Shea, who does his best) in the balls. This movie's pedigree may be more French than Canadian, but it does carry the torch for our national mini-tradition of transcendently obnoxious male leads.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Home Is Where the Hart Is
(Rex Bromfield, 1987)
A fusion of amiable and sick humour modes, or should I say a fusion of British and American humour modes; how Canadian. It's never in a hurry, shambolic and measured, but it keeps veering between cute old men muttering non sequiturs and drunk biddies strapping dynamite to their legs. In either mode, the sporadic payoffs are damnably mild; I laughed out loud precisely once, when the rich old guy makes his prison bed. Still, the direction is assured in its imperfection, the performers are fully on, and only rarely does a gag overstay its welcome (that means you, nun; that means you, "banana"). Unfortunately, the delicate balance between modes keeps getting torn asunder by an aggressively charmless, bellicose display in the central gold-digger role. In a part that could have carried the movie with a little finesse, she drags it down instead. Why on earth might director Rex Bromfield have allowed actress Valri Bromfield to be so woefully miscast in this role? Hmmmmmm.
A fusion of amiable and sick humour modes, or should I say a fusion of British and American humour modes; how Canadian. It's never in a hurry, shambolic and measured, but it keeps veering between cute old men muttering non sequiturs and drunk biddies strapping dynamite to their legs. In either mode, the sporadic payoffs are damnably mild; I laughed out loud precisely once, when the rich old guy makes his prison bed. Still, the direction is assured in its imperfection, the performers are fully on, and only rarely does a gag overstay its welcome (that means you, nun; that means you, "banana"). Unfortunately, the delicate balance between modes keeps getting torn asunder by an aggressively charmless, bellicose display in the central gold-digger role. In a part that could have carried the movie with a little finesse, she drags it down instead. Why on earth might director Rex Bromfield have allowed actress Valri Bromfield to be so woefully miscast in this role? Hmmmmmm.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
