Lessons of Darkness

Take Six

My second end-of-the-year list appears in this week's edition of The Village Voice. I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the Voice's Take Six: The Sixth Annual Village Voice Film Critics' Poll, and below, you'll find links to my ballot - listing my various "best of" selections - as well as a link to the comments section of the poll that features a brief paragraph by yours truly.

Nick Schager's Take Six Ballot

Nick Schager's Take Six comment on Dogville (found about 1/5 down the page)

As usual, I've also got new reviews posted below - for Infernal Affairs, Mona Lisa, and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! - and I'll return in the next few days with my final 2004 film reviews (only three to go!) and a tally of my moviewatching stats for the year.

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004): D+

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! regurgitates the hackneyed ‘50s romantic comedy formula in which a pretty, naive waif (Kate Bosworth’s country bumpkin Rosalee) meets and wins her dream guy (Josh Duhamel’s movie star Tad Hamilton), only to realize that her one true love has been right beside her all along (Topher Grace’s nerdy Piggly Wiggly manager Pete). And in the process of mechanically adhering to genre conventions, Robert Luketic’s drearily unfunny film fails to produce one single convincingly realistic moment. Grace, left with the thankless role of pining over Bosworth like an insecure loser while cracking wiseass sarcastic comments like his That ‘70s Show alter ego Eric Foreman, makes a wimpy leading man, while Bosworth smiles like a cheery idiot as the moronically oblivious Rosalee. That former soap star Duhamel never comes close to approximating superstar charm is little surprise given the film’s overwhelming ineptitude, nor is there little shock in seeing Nathan Lane and Sean Hayes – two gay comedians shoehorned into sorta-straight roles – wasted as Hamilton’s bitchy, money-grubbing handlers. But the shallow “California materialism vs. down-home West Virginia coziness” peddled by Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! is so painfully clichéd and unsophisticated – West Coasters love booze and babes, Virginian hillbillies love debating the merits of different Pringles flavors – that after a while, I began yearning for the ditzy charm of Luketic’s middling Legally Blonde.

Mona Lisa (1986): B+

An atmosphere of desperate neediness permeates Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, the story of a recently paroled criminal underling named George (Bob Hoskins) and the sleek, imposing black prostitute named Simone (Cathy Tyson) he’s ordered to chauffeur to and from high-class establishments. Jordan shoots nocturnal London in scraggly, hard-edged shadows, transforming the city into an empty, lonely place where the compassionate company of others is a rare commodity. George, denied a relationship with his daughter by his ex-wife, finds in Simone a female to protect and love, while Simone – like the titular painting’s subject, an alluringly mysterious beauty – finds in her new driver a guardian who doesn’t use his fists to make a point. Jordan’s razor-sharp film initially centers on this odd couple’s contentious relationship – George finds Simone uppity and cruel, she finds him déclassé and unmanageable – before segueing into George’s search for a young friend of Simone’s who is being forced to work the streets by a ruthless pimp. The real drama, however, stems from each character’s frustrated attempt to transcend his or her lousy lot in life. Facades figure prominently in Mona Lisa, with George, Simone and their menacing boss Mortwell (Michael Caine) all trying to project the dignified, respectable refinement they crave – George as a well-dressed gentleman and suitor, Simone as a regal call girl, Mortwell as an honest businessman. And what makes Jordan’s underrated gem so affecting is the recognition, found in George and Simone’s downcast faces, that such pretenses are likely little more than fanciful, futile delusions.

Infernal Affairs (2002): C+

Infernal Affairs’ cinematic family tree isn’t hard to trace – start with American crime movies from the ‘40s to the ‘70s, then look to John Woo and the Hong Kong cop-yakuza flicks of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and finally to Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, and the crime epics of the past decade – but it is difficult to find anything new or inspired in Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak’s flashy 2002 hit about dueling undercover agents in Hong Kong. Lau (Andy Lau) is a drug dealer’s underling who’s infiltrated the city's law enforcement ranks, Yan (Tony Leung) is a cop working as a mole in Lau’s nefarious boss’ narcotics operation, and both have the same assignment: to discover and expose the other’s identity. As is always the case in such films, the two men are so deep in disguise that they’re beginning to forget which side of the law they’re on, but Infernal Affairs’ primary schizophrenia is caused by its chaotic homages to every crime film since Pulp Fiction. Familiarity breeds boredom in Lau and Mak’s derivative directorial hands, with the filmmakers attempting to obscure their story’s predictability and frequent hokeyness – especially during introspective scenes set to Japanese pop ballads and a painful subplot involving Lau’s girlfriend, who’s writing a book about ambiguous identity – with Lai Yiu-Fai’s and Lau Wai Keung’s sleekly superficial cinematography and Danny Pang’s anxious editing. It’s not infernally bad, but this stab at duplicating Heat’s examination of the distinctions between cops and crooks is ultimately quiet tepid.

The Parent Claptrap

Ben Stiller and Robert DeNiro recruited Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand for Meet the Fockers, the sequel to their 2000 hit Meet the Parents, but more starpower doesn't result in more laughs. My take on this visit to the in-laws is now up at Slant magazine.

Meet the Fockers (Slant magazine)

Meanwhile, Sean Penn is driven to Taxi Driver extremes by Richard Nixon in The Assassination of Richard Nixon. My filmcritic.com review sifts through the carnage.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon (filmcritic.com)

Also, new reviews of My Boss's Daughter, Unforgiven, and A Love Song for Bobby Long can be found below.

And later this week, I'll be back with my second, more high-profile Top Ten list.

A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004): B

Everything and everyone has gone to seed in A Love Song for Bobby Long, Shainee Gabel’s drama about betrayal, redemption, and the ghosts that continue to haunt a trio of down-on-their-luck Southerners. After learning of her estranged mother’s death, Pursy Will (Scarlett Johansson) returns to Louisiana to take up residence in the house she’s inherited from mom, only to find it already inhabited by a crotchety old souse and former English professor named Bobby Long (John Travolta) and his apprentice Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht). The three headstrong misfits caw and cackle through Nawlins’ scorching summer and frigid winter while attempting to come to grips with their traumatic pasts, and Gabel’s script (based on Ronald Everett’s book) slowly unfolds like an inviting novel. The story’s surprises ultimately turn out to be as predictably hokey as one feared, while moronic, metaphor-laden narration regularly interferes with the film’s swampy New Orleans atmosphere. But in a film filled with potentially showy roles, A Love Song for Bobby Long’s trio of lead performances are surprisingly believable, and in his finest work in at least a decade, John Travolta goes to work chomping on the picturesque scenery as the titular Long, a larger-than-life figure convinced that atonement is achieved only through self-destruction.

Unforgiven (1992): A

Clint Eastwood’s defining commentary on – and deconstruction of – the gunslinger persona that made him an icon, Unforgiven remains, a decade after it nabbed 1992’s Academy Award for Best Picture, the actor/director’s crowning Western achievement. The solemn tale of retired outlaw William Munny (Eastwood) and his final murderous act against a duo of cowboys who’ve mutilated an innocent whore, the film exhibits Eastwood’s trademark directorial classicism (expert framing, sharp editing, quiet grace without a showy moment to speak of) and a soul-wracking despair born from Munny’s acknowledgement that killing is “a hell of a thing.” Unforgiven conveys the power of the Western genre’s myths (dramatized most vividly through the character of Saul Rubinek’s reporter) as well as the ugly, unromantic realities that lurk behind them, and the film’s overpowering tragedy is brought to heartbreaking life by the terrific Eastwood, Morgan Freeman (as Munny’s compassionate former sidekick Ned Logan) and Richard Harris (as ruthless bounty hunter English Bob). Yet the film belongs to Gene Hackman, who, in a superbly chilling performance, makes the corrupt, gregarious sheriff Little Bill infinitely more frightening by imbuing his arrogant villainy with a hint of rationality.

My Boss’s Daughter (2003): D-

Few films are as consistently pathetic as My Boss’s Daughter, an Ashton Kutcher-Tara Reid vehicle (that says it all, doesn’t it?) directed by David Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun). Kutcher stars as Tom Stansfield, a goody-two-shoes roped into house-sitting for his boss (Terrance Stamp) by the domineering old man’s blandly sexy daughter (Reid). Insanity of the lamest variety ensues, including an owl flying high on cocaine and Reid’s platonic strip-tease for Kutcher that occurs because she thinks he’s gay. The film’s problems are overwhelming – an endless parade of poorly executed slapstick gags, flat performances from Kutcher and Reid (an actress who gives new meaning to the term “vacant”), grating peripheral characters (thanks Andy Richter, Michael Madsen, Molly Shannon and Carmen Electra!), and a strict adherence to the most basic juvenile comedy conventions – but writing about them in detail might take a week, and just continuing to think about this fiasco is beginning to make my head hurt.

Top Ten 2004, Part I

The first of my end-of-the-year lists has hit the Internet over at Slant magazine. You can read all about my (and my editor Ed Gonzalez's) choices for best and worst of the year right here (and yes, I also wrote the piece's intro):

Slant magazine's 2004: Year In Film

And in case you missed them, I've got new reviews of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Million Dollar Baby, Twentynine Palms and The Life of Jesus below.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

With each successive film, director Wes Anderson pushes his idiosyncratic, painstakingly meticulous vision to the breaking point of preciousness, and Anderson’s latest gem, the imaginatively titled The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, comes closest to crossing that boundary between endearingly eccentric and suffocatingly studied. In a tour-de-force performance of droll wit dampened by melancholy, Bill Murray is Steve Zissou, a Jacques Cousteau-type oceanographer renowned for his documentary films about Team Zissou’s adventures on the high seas aboard the sea-faring Belafonte. In his latest film, Zissou’s best friend and right-hand man Esteban (Seymour Cassel) is eaten by a mysterious beast dubbed (by Zissou) the “jaguar shark” which, it soon becomes clear, may or may not exist. Heartbroken over his comrade’s demise, Zissou vows to hunt and kill the mysterious jaguar shark, and along with his wacko crew, a pregnant reporter, and his long-lost son Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), sets sail in a quest to conquer his own personal Moby Dick.

Summarizing any more of The Life Aquatic would be futile, as Anderson packs his rollicking comedy with an abundance of side-stories, the best of which include a Filipino pirate attack on the Belafonte that devolves into a campy action movie shootout and an ongoing feud between Ned and Willem Dafoe’s jealous deckhand Klaus. As usual, the director populates his film with an abundance of static, symmetrical medium shots featuring characters centered in the middle of the screen, and his frame remains cluttered with all sorts of strange, hilarious, details such as a Steve Zissou pinball machine and a goofy self-portrait of the submariner. Anderson’s script (written with Noah Baumbach) is layered with bizarre ironies and humorous awkward pauses that add to the carnival-esque atmosphere, and Wilson, as Steve’s Kentucky bumpkin son, brings a warmth and innocence to Ned that transforms the film’s central father-son relationship into something more heartfelt than a flippant joke.

While undeniably funny, gorgeous, and touching in spurts, The Life Aquatic does suffer from being a bit too freewheeling. More a collection of amusing, semi-related vignettes than an involving narrative, Anderson’s comedy can, at times, seem more concerned with its copious asides, peripheral visual minutiae, and art design (such as Zissou’s Yellow Submarine-ish mini-sub and Henry Selick’s stop-motion underwater creatures) than with fully fleshing out its themes of vengeance, hubris, and maturation. Yet watching Murray’s Zissou – a buffoonish man fearful that his heyday has come and gone, and desperate to find love and professional fulfillment despite his underwhelming intellect and emotional remoteness – as he shimmies to the Mark Mothersbaugh ditty piped into his scuba helmet’s stereo, one hardly feels compelled to complain about the minor shortcomings of such a delightfully peculiar, ingenious film.