82nd Academy Awards to Feature 10 Best Pictures and What I Think of That

82nd Academy Awards to Feature 10 Best Picture Nominees

82nd Academy Awards® to Feature 10 Best Picture Nominees

Beverly Hills, CA (June 24, 2009) — The 82nd Academy Awards, which will be presented on March 7, 2010, will have 10 feature films vying in the Best Picture category, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis announced today (June 24) at a press conference in Beverly Hills.

“After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year,” said Ganis. “The final outcome, of course, will be the same – one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009.”

For more than a decade during the Academy’s earlier years, the Best Picture category welcomed more than five films; for nine years there were 10 nominees. The 16th Academy Awards (1943) was the last year to include a field of that size; “Casablanca” was named Best Picture. (In 1931/32, there were eight nominees and in 1934 and 1935 there were 12 nominees.)

Currently, the Academy is presenting a bicoastal screening series showcasing the 10 Best Picture nominees of 1939, arguably one of Hollywood’s greatest film years. Best Picture nominees of that year include such diverse classics as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach,” “The Wizard of Oz” and Best Picture winner “Gone with the Wind.”

“Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize,” commented Ganis. “I can’t wait to see what that list of ten looks like when the nominees are announced in February.”

The 82nd Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Tuesday, February 2. The Oscar® ceremony honoring films for 2009 will again take place at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center® in Hollywood, and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network.


Eh.

Year One (Harold Ramis, 2009); Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2008); Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975)

One year

I didn't mean to watch Year One (2009)--it seemed to be the least repugnant choice available at the local multiplex--and was surprised to learn that it was directed by Harold Ramis.

One has expectations of Ramis; one can't help having them. He is, after all, the director of Groundhog Day (1993), one of the finest films of the '90s, one of the finest metaphysical films ever made, and about as near-perfect a comedy as anything I can think of in the past sixteen years. Daunting standards to hold a man up to, but Ramis, while never quite reaching so high again, has made a few decent attempts: Stuart Saves His Family (1996), for example, takes an unpromising Saturday Night Live sketch and turns it into a quietly desperate, ultimately moving film about the pleasures and perils of self-affirmation; Multiplicity, made the year after that, posits multiple copies of Michael Keaton scurrying everywhere (a hilarious or horrifying idea, depending on how you take to Keaton). Analyze This (1999) seems like the ultimate idea of the psychiatric patient from hell--it's only halfway realized, but at least the idea had something of the absolute about it.

Judging from the cries of blood surrounding Ramis' latest (Roger Ebert gives the picture one star, spends a whole paragraph discussing the movie's poster, and sums it all up as a "dreary experience"--one gets the impression the man could barely bring himself to engage with the movie, much less like it), Ramis has failed yet again to touch the comic heights of Groundhog (But what else does?). He has failed but surprisingly, despite the unpromising trailer and the generally negative outcry, he does leave an indelible mark.

It's a cross between Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I (1981) and Monty Python's The Life of Brian ((1979)--Brooks for the formless, across-the centuries format, Python for the subject matter (religious hypocrisy and faith). It's not laugh-out-loud funny, even if it does have more than its share of flinch-worthy gross-out moments; fact is, it's remarkably thoughtful in its treatment of and attitude towards religion and faith. It has a handsome look for a comedy, mostly burnished desert sun and torchlight interiors (checked out cinematographer Alar Kivilo, and the only work of his that stuck out were Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998) and some Sandra Bullock vehicle called The Lake House (2006)), and is competently edited (one expects no less from the director of Groundhog, which is all about editing).

The climax, strangely enough, bears some passing resemblance to that of Ishmael Bernal's Himala (Miracle, 1982)--I'm sure we needn't accuse Ramis of stealing from Bernal, though.

So. Find myself in the strange position of recommending a solidly Hollywood summer movie, and a comedy to boot. Goes to show how accurate 'common consensus' can be, in gauging a picture's quality--sometimes you just have to go and see for yourself. 

Icewater

Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008) is despite its bleak setting a lovely film. Hunt captures the essence of lower-class living in the colder Northern states--the prefab houses, the junked cars, the temp jobs, the pinched-face people struggling with one scam or another (as either victim or perpetrator) and earning a meager wage, all under the gray skies and endless snowdrifts of upstate New York (some of the scenes look exceptionally difficult to shoot--not only are you dealing with a whitened ground that often radiates more light than the sky, you're dealing with the shifting, often treacherous conditions of the eponymous river itself).

The two protagonists, Ray Eddy (an amazing Melissa Leo) and Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) make a good odd couple--they embody their respective social classes (poor white trash, Native-American destitute), they have a genuinely spiky chemistry that makes any possibility of collaboration or friendship seem less than certain, more the result of life's strange vicissitudes than of opportunistic plotting.

The river itself becomes a visual metaphor (a nicely unforced one) for the women's lives--for the kind of fragile, uncertain ice they skate on, struggling to keep their balance, hoping to God the surface of things holds and doesn't drop them into the cold water.

One of Ebert's worst films ever

I remember Roger Ebert granting Richard Fleischer's Mandingo (1975) not one but zero stars--apparently the eminent critic, harumphing about "taste," was shocked at all the decadence and exploitation going on, not to mention the sultry, sensual ambiance.

Recommendation enough. It's a startlingly beautiful to look at and despite--or precisely because of--its trashy, melodramatic roots, full of unwholesome energy. It's also declared to be (by film critic Robin Wood, among others) "the greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood." There's always Roots, of course, which aired on broadcast television two years later, but that well-made production doesn't have the inimitable image of James Mason as Southern plantation owner Warren Maxwell, planting his feet on a black boy's belly in the hopes of drawing the rheumatism out of his aging body into the healthy child.

The film is more than the sum of its grotesqueries; Fleischer has taken a Kyle Onstott's pulp potboiler, pruned some (but not all) of the more extreme sadism, given (with the help of writer Norman Wexler) the blacks in the film a social and historical consciousness, overall fashioned a distinctly gothic tragedy. With the help of cinematographer Richard H. Kline (they've collaborated on films like The Boston Strangler (1968) and Soylent Green (1973)) Fleischer has conceived of a doomed, decadent South: the Maxwell mansion is a brooding presence full of huge, shadowy rooms and, despite their wealth, dirt-stained walls (mansions of other families, particularly those with womenfolk, are noticeably better kept); the surrounding forests are lit by dustmote-thickened sunbeams and teem with tropical plants that thrive in the Southern heat.

I can't help but think that the film's violent setpiece, a no-holds-barred bareknuckled fight between two black men with bets placed, may have been the inspiration for the duel to the death in Mario O'Hara's Bagong Hari (The New King, 1986). Other than the common premise, the two sequences couldn't be more different--Fleischer stages his fight as a claustrophobic battle, with teeming crowds on the sidelines and a handheld camera lunging in for closeup shots; O'Hara's is more of an arena event, with tiers rising above and away from the circular floor, torches bordering the battle area, and the camera confining itself to more aloof medium and long shots. Preference for one over another may be a matter of taste--I love O'Hara's cool appreciation of the desperation far below, same time as I like Fleischer's sense of immediacy; I was startled by Fleischer's bloody conclusion, same time I appreciate O'Hara's one wince-inducing moment, involving a meat hook. Both worked with small budgets (O'Hara's being the far smaller), both show a distinct flair for and understanding of violence.

At the film's center is Warren's son Hammond (Perry King), an angel-faced, ostensibly kindhearted plantation owner who at the same time feels more comfortable bedding and deflowering his black 'wenches' than he does bedding Blanche (Susan George), his upper class white wife. Yet he's not above stringing up an old black slave upside-down, and having another slave beat the man's naked bottom bloody with a paddle drilled with holes (to reduce air resistance and speed up the swing). The old slave's crime? Learning to read.

Hammond is in the classic mold of the tragic hero--like, say, Macbeth he is basically a good man, a promising catch for Southern women what with his money and his progressive attitude towards slaves; like Macbeth he never fully realizes the precariousness of his position, never learns that unlimited access to power can lead to its unlimited abuse, and eventual payback. Robert Keser in The Film Journal argues that when matters come to head, when "the crisis peels away Hammond’s velvet glove, revealing his essence as he reverts to violence," he precipitates "the final wave of tragedy." Keser goes on to conclude that "A benign despot with an attractive smile and surface compassion is a despot nonetheless."

I don't quite see it that way. Hammond's moments with his favorite 'wench' Ellen are about as touching as anything I've seen on film, his vow to her that "No one, black or white, gonna take your place" a far more real declaration of matrimony than anything he says to poor Blanche, who is in turn as much a victim as any of the wenches in the Maxwell plantation (she just has more bite, is all). I see Hammond as being an essentially tenderhearted, loving man, who unthinkingly embraces the violence inherent in the institution of slavery; any punishment he instigates is out of obligation, as in the bloodying of that old man's behind (when a cousin walks in and takes over the beating with greater relish, Hammond immediately objects). The real tragedy I think is that a loving heart is not enough; the institution victimizes blacks and their masters alike, robbing both of their humanity as Hammond is gradually robbed of his.



When push finally comes to shove, I don't see the event as Hammond reverting to a violence that was always there so much as it is a matter of a soft heart pierced to the quick, striking out in unaccustomed fury. It's a truism, I suppose, that the gentlest people when provoked express the most extreme reactions, but that's the truism I believe Fleischer had in mind for the film's climax. Hammond has the numbed face of one trying to hide his inner revulsion at what he intends to do, and he carries out his mission with the briskness of one who knows he has to do things quickly, unthinkingly--if he paused to consider, he would fail to go through with it.

In a kind of reverse trajectory, Hammond's favorite buck slave Mede (boxer Ken Norton) gradually gains his humanity. He doesn't have it at film's beginning; in one of his earliest scenes, he's examined and prodded and looked over like a prized racehorse. His preferential treatment is thrown at his face time and again; fellow blacks keep pointing out that on issues that matter, his benign white masters will turn on him. When a runaway slave is about to be hanged, the condemned man looks at Mede and declares "at least I die a free man." As push again comes to shove and Mede finds himself facing the unfortunate end of a rifle barrel, his eventual recovery of the dignity he had lost makes for a stirring counterpoint, a hopeful (if faint) note to contrast against Hammond's own despairing, downward spiral. A great film, absolutely.

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

Devil take the hindmost

You can imagine Sam Raimi on the set of his Spider-man films, viewing the various installments of the Hostel and Saw franchise and thinking: "I can do that; I can do better than that. Give me a chance, and I can show them how it's really done."

With Drag Me to Hell (2009) Raimi gets his chance, and how. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) hopes to impress her boss Jack (David Paymer), so she turns down a request for extension on a house payment from a Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), a decrepit, milky-eyed old Romany woman with a set of slimy dentures. Things go horribly wrong, and Christine finds herself on the receiving end of a particularly nasty curse: for three days she will be tormented by the Lamia, a demon with the head and hooves of a goat (originally, she's the daughter of Poseidon and Lybie, becomes a mistress of Zeus, and is turned into a half-woman, half-snake creature that eats small children), then dragged through cracks in the ground to the Infernal Pit, to suffer Eternal Damnation.

Bummer. Actually the whole thing is simply an excuse for Raimi, who has struggled with the Spider-man franchise for some six years, to relax and cut loose. The camera doesn't pan so much as whip from side-to-side; it doesn't truck so much as careen into an actor's face at bruising velocities (one hopes the performer has his or her health insurance premiums all paid up). Raimi enlists shadows, flames, flies, staplers (have to see this to believe it), creaks, whispers, embalming fluid, anything and everything under the sun (and a number of which are buried or hidden otherwise, under a full moon) to his cause, whirling them around poor Christine in a non-stop devil's twister of a comic-book ride.

I said "comic-book," not that more pretentious term "graphic novel." Raimi is no Zack Snyder, making a bid for artistic seriousness with an overproduced, thuddingly literal adaptation of a literary title. He evokes the term "comic book" in its old-fashioned sense, that is, a story told through a series of images with dialogue, full of graphic energy and inventiveness and wit (Raimi can teach Star Trek director J.J. Abrams a thing or two about coherent action sequences). Along the way we have belly laughs and in-your-face horror a-plenty, sometimes both at the same time, but we also sense a surprisingly subtle eye at work: in the film's rip-roaring opening, when a victim is dragged to his intended place, the camera rises from the floor up to the second floor terrace to move in on spiritual medium Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza); the shadow of the victim's outstretched hand falls on her face, summarizing the situation and what's at stake (and what will happen to Christine if San Dena doesn't do something) in a single image. Later Christine, desperate to fob off the curse on someone else, looks around at the people in a twenty-four hour diner in a funny yet graceful dumb-show parody of a morality play (Who to give it to--her work rival and backstabber Stu (Reggie Lee)? The annoying waitress who keeps hinting she should order something or leave her booth? The old man with the oxygen tank who obviously doesn't have long to live?).

Raimi knows as any genre master will that to instill a sense of true horror in the audience you don't just assail them with intestines and decapitated limbs and instruments of torture. You build the story, you tease them, you distract them with sympathetic characters and brief bursts of visual beauty (Christine in a sunny yellow dress) and oddball touches (Mrs. Garush sucking on sweets from a dish on Christine's desk with repulsive relish), you soften them up and leave them vulnerable to attack from all and any direction, at any time.

The film is a homage to classics both under and over-rated (Raimi like Quentin Tarantino has collected a pack-rat's worth of influences; unlike Tarantino he has the visual and aural chops to fuse these influences into a distinct look), from William Friedkin's The Exorcist (grudge match between demon and demon fighter) to Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (desperate victim attempts to get rid of cursed talisman). It's an encyclopedia of Raimi-isms, from the floating ghouls and popping eyeballs of Evil Dead 2 to the stop-motion animation of Army of Darkness to the hauntingly beautiful transition from face in dismay to face in mourning hours (or days) later in Darkman. But the movie isn't some mere patchwork sum of its parts; the various appendages aren't sewn clumsily together, nor do they work clunkily against each other--Raimi has thoughtfully (That word! Applied to this movie!) laid each effect in its proper place, and the overall impression is of a smoothly rising swell. Well, not too smooth--Raimi has left in rough edges, has not completely finessed the handmade quality out of the special effects, has not made your standard-issue Hollywood horror flick, proper and essentially polite.

Are Saw and Hostel polite? Why--yes. They promise torture porn, they deliver. They don't renege on expectations aroused by their trailers; they don't surprise you, or unsettle you, or make you squirm in ways you don't expect (Watching these pictures is about as stimulating as a business transaction). Drag Me To Hell cleverly plays on our preconceptions of who is the heroine, who the villainess--pretty (but nevertheless morally weak) Caucasian girl from the banking industry (Raimi claims the relevance of her job to the present economic crisis is coincidental, but who is he kidding?), or aging Romany woman with a nasty propensity for casting curses? It delivers a cornucopia of surreal jokes, expertly timed "boo!" moments, fluids in a rainbow of colors (from bright red to chemical green) and textures (from arterial spray to chunky sewer sludge) squirted out of a variety of orifices into a variety of other orifices. More, a movie with a séance scene involving a nanny goat cannot be, by definition, bad.

Raimi has survived the worse that Tinseltown has to offer, the helming of not just one but three major movie productions, one of the more successful comic-book franchises in Hollywood, and made it out more or less whole, his voice, his distinct storytelling sensibility still intact. Is he an artist? Possibly not; he doesn't seem to have anything more substantial to say to us than "Hey! Look at this!" But he's a wonderful stylist, and a great entertainer, and he's back in a big, big way.

First published in Businessworld, 6.5.09

Himala (Ishmael Bernal)

Miraculous

During the IndioBravo Filipino Film Festival (June 11-14, 2009) I introduced Ishmael Bernal's Himala (Miracle, 1982), about a village girl who can do miracles, and the cult and industry that sprouts around her. I noted that the picture wasn't particularly well-liked by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (the country's most prestigious critic's group), that it's an easy target because of its rather stale canonical status ("It's been a classic since forever!") but that actually watching the film through unbiased (or as unbiased as one can be) eyes, one might realize that this was Bernal's most visually daring work-- an almost prescient picture of the desolation left by Mt. Pinatubo when it erupted in the early '90s.

Terminator Salvation (McG, 2009)

Terminator terminated

When I learned there was to be a fourth Terminator installment, first question I asked was "why?" When I learned this fourth Terminator was to be directed by the auteur responsible for the Charlie's Angels movies, I asked: "why him?" When I learned that the fourth Terminator was to star Christian Bale and run ten minutes past two hours, I asked: "why bother?"

It's not as if the franchise were all that good. The first, written and directed by James Cameron, was by far the best, taking as it does elements from two of Philip K. Dick's short stories, "Second Variety" and "Jon's World." The first story proposes a constantly developing robot series, designed to imitate human form and infiltrate organizations and communities accordingly (Cameron's original idea was to tell the story of a killer robot that resembled an ordinary human, and was to have Lance Henriksen play the terminator); the second story is a sequel, a time-travel tale where men attempt to go back to try prevent the invention of the robots in the first place (and here you see the seed of the idea that eventually became both Terminator and Terminator 2). Daniel Gilbertson, who was developing a script adaptation of "Second Variety" for Hemdale (his script eventually became the movie Screamers (1995)) claimed (in the January 1998 issue of Cinefantastique) that Cameron had a look at the script back when he was developing The Terminator.

(Yes, Cameron did openly admit that he was partly inspired by two Outer Limits episodes written by Harlan Ellison--"Soldier," and "Demon with the Glass Hand;" yes Ellison sued and got his names on the movie's final credits. But Dick had died two years before Cameron's movie was released, and (unlike Ellison) was in no condition to bring suit against Cameron for copyright infringement.)

Cameron went for gigantism in the sequel (a mega-sized version of "Jon's World," in effect) with a dubious anti-violence message grafted on; he abandoned the franchise (he'd since won gold doorstops for Best Picture and Best Director for Titanic (1997)), handing over directing reins to skilled craftsman Jonathan Mostow for the third picture in the series.

Unlike the previous three movies, where cyborgs and humans from the future invade present-day Los Angeles, the fourth picture foregoes the present altogether and is set entirely in the future. McG has opted for a washed-out cinema verite look--plenty of handheld shots, a gritty desert palette (you can see the attempt to evoke the Iraq war). Thank goodness the shaky-cam footage doesn't involve too much shaking--the action sequences are blessedly shot and edited with an attempt at coherence, and you can follow what's happening without suffering too much of a headache (though McG is apparently far more skilled at depicting machine-on-machine or machine-on-human action than he is at depicting simple hand-to-hand combat). Plus there seems to be a partial return to puppeteered machinery (a la the late Stan Winston, to whom this movie is dedicated), as opposed to your boringly standard-issue digital effects.

To say the script has problems is to put matters too kindly. The picture seems to break down into two main lines of action: one involves killer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) who is executed in present-day and resurrected in the future; is captured by the rebellion; is possibly a terminator sent to kill John Connor. The other involves the legend himself, John Connor (Christian Bale, who seems to be taking himself entirely too seriously) trying to find his father/friend Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin).

I understand why Wright is here and why what he is trying to do is important--in effect, he's our eyes and ears, a figure from our times thrust into this unfamiliar world. But what about Connor? Aside from testing out a signal that might shut down Skynet machines and (when he remembers to do so) worrying about his unknown father, Connor seems pretty much relegated to the bench, constantly waiting to be called into play (there's this visually impressive sequence where Connor boards a copter, takes off, is buffeted in-flight by an explosion, crashes. All happening within a single lengthy shot that unfortunately also seems to sum his problems in a nutshell). When Marcus escapes the rebellion and heads into Skynet headquarters, Connor defies orders and does the same, and you want to ask: couldn't the two have simply joined forces and gone to the Emerald City--sorry, Skynet headquarters--together? That would have cut, oh, maybe twenty minutes of unnecessary parallel action right there.

(Apparently (skip the next two paragraphs if you plan to see the picture) there was an original script that envisioned Christian Bale as the terminator (talk about typecasting) not Connor. John Connor was to make a brief appearance in the picture's final moments, having kept himself hidden for most of the film (which would have made sense, considering all the robots that have traveled through time to try kill him). Bale signed on wanting to play Connor, not the terminator, and demanded that his role be built up accordingly, hence the narrative fat.

None of which is necessary to appreciating--or deprecating--the film. All one needs to realize is that the picture seems to wander aimlessly here and there, trying to find something to do; there's none of the hurtling, race-against-time quality that made Cameron's original B movie so memorable)

But issues with script and director and unnecessary leading man aside, the picture is really struggling with two more basic issues. First: setting the story in the future instead of present robs the picture of whatever sense of evocation and poetry it might have had. Seeing the future through glimpses and brief flashes (as we did in the first three pictures, but most effectively in the first) actually increases our interest in it, makes us want to see it; any attempt to actually show said future kills the fascination right there. Think of a striptease--it's the dance that excites and arouses; when the last piece of clothing falls, so does your interest. The final revelation can only be an anti-climax no matter how much money you throw at it.

Second: this particular tomorrow is so damned grim. Cameron had many flaws as director and writer but at least he had a sense of humor. Probably the best dialogue scenes in his Aliens (1986) are of the space marines indulging in sophomoric quips; possibly the best dialogue scenes in the original Terminator was between Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) and Det. Vukovich (Henriksen)--Cameron seems to have a gift for depicting working-class camaraderie. Unrelenting gloom doesn't enhance intensity, it just enhances boredom; McG in his bid for dramatic greatness might have done better to remember this, and allowed the audience a bit of fun along the way.

First published in Businessworld 5.29.09

Philippine Customs lifts taxes on imported books; "Up;" "A Woman Cut in Two;" "Sunshine"

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo lifts taxes on imported book

Some thoughts on this whole brouhaha:

1) Shouldn't have happened in the first place. I understand the government scrabbling to find ways to earn revenue, but if it had encouraged in itself and in the country a culture that valued education and literacy, then a tax on books would have been unthinkable. As is, one wonders what other unpleasant elements are to be found in its mindset.

2) Let this be an object lesson: vigilance, always vigilance. One needs to watch little encroachments on freedom like these. It would have been all too easy to just shrug one's shoulders and say: "So it goes."

3) If the government is still desperate for cash, couldn't they keep the tax on Twilight?

Peter Doctor and Bob Peterson's Up (2009) is pretty much standard-issue Pixar. You have your crusty old man being taught a lesson by a dewy young boy; you have your dreams (in this case, a house beside a waterfall falling from a plateau straight out of Willis O'Brien's The Lost World (1925)) being pursued no matter what the cost--either the film encourages this pursuit, or urges the hero to abandon his dream for a more achievable goal (in this case, returning an avian mother to her children). Along the way Doctor and Peterson openly celebrate their inspirations--not just O'Brien, but Hayao Miyazaki, particularly his Laputa, Castle in the Sky (1986) and many flying sequences in various pictures (Miyazaki, as his fans know, is a master of the aerial flight sequence).

This is a cartoon, of course. We aren't asked to wonder why the hero manages, seemingly overnight, to conceal thousands of balloons in his house (Where did he get the money? Why are they strong enough to lift the house, with what looks like common string? (Wired.com has something to say about this)? Why haven't they lifted the building even before they're released from his attic?). We aren't asked to wonder how he manages to construct not just sails for forward propulsion but a mechanism for steering said sails. We aren't asked to wonder how a long-lost explorer manages to amass so many dogs, and how they managed to develop an obsession for squirrels (in South America, no less).

Too sentimental for my taste, though I'm sure this will be a big hit for people who still believe animation is strictly for the kiddies. For my money the year's best animated feature to date is Henry Selik's Coraline, from the novel by Neil Gaiman, which admits to the possibility that childhood isn't just full of wonders, but terrors as well.

Claude Chabrol's La fille coupee en deux (A Girl Cut in Two, 2007) invites, as usual, comparisons to Hitchcock, but from where I'm sitting the most distinctive quality the two share, at least at this stage in Chabrol's career, is elegance in storytelling, elegance in all elements of storytelling, from characterization to dialogue to mis-en-scene to soundtrack (the opening credits roll to the strains of Puccini's Turandot, the plot of which suggests interesting sidelights to the plot of Chabrol's film). Even the title works overtime to raise questions in the viewer's mind--just why is the eponymous girl (local TV weather girl Gabrielle, played by Ludivine Sagnier) cut in two? Because she's of two minds? Because she's desired by two men? Because a whirling blade literally cuts her in two?

One often thinks when thinking of Hitchcock of visual challenges solved with brilliantly, sometimes breathtakingly elegant solutions (the problems of confined space in Lifeboat or Rope or Rear Window; of a shower-stall murder in Psycho; of wide-open spaces and sustaining tension through a cross-country odyssey in North by Northwest). Chabrol in this case solves one kind of challenge: the suggestion of perverse sexual appetites with the least amount of fuss (a head sinks below a table; a girl crawls on all fours in shadow; a private club is visited, and one member asks another a pointed question: "does she know what goes on here?").The story is loosely based on the killing of architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw, for a long-ago affair White had with Thaw's wife Evelyn Nesbit, updated with a bit of class rivalry.

Central to the film is the mystery of Gabrielle: is she corrupted innocent or cruel sadist? Middle-class victim or social-climbing instigator? In Turandot, the two main female characters are the eponymous princess and the slave girl, Liu, and Gabrielle seems to embody qualities of both women--she is by turns loyal and loving to her elderly lover, cruel and distant to her young husband. By combining the two in one woman, does Chabrol make his heroine more or less convincing, more or less complex--both, maybe? Sagnier plays her as a cool blonde in the best Hitchcockian tradition (I have to take back I suppose what I said earlier about Chabrol's resemblance or lack of to Hitchcock). Towards the end she's revealed as more innocent and less guileful than she seems--or is she instead completely at the mercy of her own inner demons? She's the lure, the McGuffin, the enigma that draws both men--and herself--to their irrevocably entangled dooms.

Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007) for the first hour manages to make you forget all the scientific inaccuracies it so blatantly presented. Boyle wears his influences on his sleeve: the heavy-breathing spacemen and extra-vehicular activity (EVA) from Kubrick's 2001, including one sequence involving explosive decompression (silly it seems to worry about freezing in outer space when the human body loses its heat so slowly); the dripping water and marauding predator in Scott's Alien (1979); the haunted space station in Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).

Hard to take this wannabe science-fictional philosophical treatise seriously, when it doesn't do its homework. The sun is dying, but no mention is made of the fact that its death occurs some five billion years too early (in the DVD commentary physicist and film advisor Brian Cox mentions the possibility of the sun capturing a Q-ball, dark matter in a specific supersymmetric form--though reportedly the sun isn't dense enough to capture so massive an object). The story's set fifty years into the future but already we have artificial gravity, with no explanation how this miracle comes about.

In one of the deleted scenes they did mention that their payload, a 'stellar bomb' meant to rekindle the sun's nuclear fusion processes, has the mass of the moon compressed into the size of a football field--but this raises more questions than it answers. Why, if the payload generates enough gravity to create one-gee conditions throughout the ship, can people walk on its surface without being crushed (the gravity on the surface would be greatest, less so for objects further away)? Why, if the payload generates gravity, does weight turn on and off like a light switch in the airlock? Why if the payload generates gravity do men in spacesuits float around when stepping outside the ship?

All this can pretty much be forgiven if Boyle had given us a reasonably plausible drama, but late in the game Boyle introduces an incredibly silly supervillain with heavily scarred skin that we see mostly through a distorting lens. The lens gimmick is a terrible idea; Boyle's action sequences are never the most coherent, but the addition of a lens only makes the action even less so. Worse is the gobbledygook that comes out of the villain's well-roasted lips--"When he chooses for us to die, it is not our place to challenge God." The man is crazy, the laziest excuse for villainy in all of storytelling (he's nuts, ergo he's capable of anything). For all the sunlight in Boyle's picture he does little to illuminate human nature through his villain, or through the conflicts his villain creates.

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009)

Doubletalk

Tony Gilroy's sophomore effort Duplicity (2009) is that fizziest of genres, the romantic spy thriller--basically about a CIA officer named Claire (Julia Roberts) and an MI6 operative named Ray (Clive Owen) who conspire to steal a supersecret formula from under the watchful eye of Burkett & Randle's Chief Executive Officer Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson). Plots and counterplots ensue; bedroom couplings, secret meetings, surveillance operations, and so on; twists within twists within twists within. There's story enough for half a dozen less generous thrillers, and sufficient chemistry between the two stars to keep us listening to their fairly witty repartee.

One does not suspect this of Gilroy--he had previously been known as the scriptwriter of the supergrim Bourne movies, Robert Ludlum's humorless attempts to supplant Ian Fleming's James Bond novels (to be fair, Fleming's books are every bit as unfunny as Ludlum's; the sly humor came from the movie adaptations, especially those starring Sean Connery); he later debuted as a writer-director with Michael Clayton, a dramatic thriller. The introduction of comedy has greased the gears spinning in Gilroy's mind--this time the plot is improbably intricate, the improbability matched by the cast and movie's sleekly stylized glamour. This isn't real life, Gilroy seems to be saying, and thank God for small blessings.

In one sense Gilroy does retain a distinctive feature from his previous feature effort, the fractured time scheme. Duplicity starts in the tense present, with Burkett & Randle CEO Tully facing off against Equikrom CEO Richard Garsil (Paul Giamatti) in front of their respective corporate jets, under the pouring rain. The story veers off into the past, and we learn that Claire and Ray have met before, have in fact scammed each other before, alternately taking off with the prize while leaving the other holding the proverbial bag.

The movie proceeds on two levels--well, maybe three. There's Burkett & Randle constantly trying to get the better of Equikrom and vice versa; there's CIA trained Claire trying to get the better of MI6 operative Ray and vice versa; and then there's poor Claire trying to ascertain whether or not Ray is worth trusting, perhaps even loving (and vice versa).

Gilroy keeps it all moving along at the required brisk pace; he also manages the more difficult challenge of keeping the complex plot coherent (more or less--it lacks the one indispensable quality of the very best complex plots: it doesn't all boil down to one elegantly simple structure); and finally he manages the most difficult of challenges, to keep all this consistently interesting, if not amusing.

He enlists a fine cast of characters to his cause: Owen, who after a series of somber roles in heavy drama films reveals himself here to be a fine comic actor; Giamatti and Wilkinson, who play to the hilt the pair of business rivals literally at each others' throats.

Roberts, the heavyweight Hollywood star who balances out the movie's outsized share of testosterone, is an oddly unexciting choice for me. One really wants Claire to be smart, funny, sexy--Owen's match in every respect only wearing garters, if possible. Roberts is smart and funny (she's improved immeasurably since her days as America's sweetheart), but the word 'sexy' doesn't readily come to mind. She's played wholesome roles for far too long (remember her Wonderful World of Disney interpretation of a prostitute in Pretty Woman (1990)?), the same time her physical resemblance to her less famous brother is far too strong. Most viewers today may have forgotten Eric Roberts; I remember his various turns as the sweetly goofy Paulie in Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), his hapless corporate executive distracted by the lovely Greta Scacchi in The Coca-Cola Kid (1985), his punk sidekick trailing behind Jon Voight's outsized convict in Runaway Train (same year). Most memorably, there's Eric's ferocious performance as the unlikeable, near-unwatchable Paul Snider in Bob Fosse's Star 80 (1983). Every time I look at Julia, in effect, I keep seeing murderer-rapist Snider in a fright wig.

That aside (couldn't they get, oh, say, Mira Sorvino?) it's a good if not great confection.

A great confection--isn't that a contradiction in terms? Not really; if anything, great confections are far more difficult and demanding to create than great dramas. You needn't hold back when doing great drama; anything and everything is open to you, from the very heights to the very depths of the human heart. With a great confection, however, you need to meet all those requirements plus you need to make it all seem effortless, lighter than air (a confection is not a confection when it drops on your lap like a load of Wagnerian concrete).

Take the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Many of his early British pictures are prime confections, arguably the best of which (my favorite, anyway) is The 39 Steps (1935). Talk about deadly conspiracies and hairbreadth escapes and sexual chemistry--Robert Donat with Madeleine Carroll had plenty of the last, but better than chemistry is Hitchcock's prankish, malevolent mind. He conjured up a love interest for the hero (the John Buchan novel had none), has them dislike each other intensely at first, then hits upon the device of handcuffing them together--an idea so effective, so brilliantly simple, any number of thrillers and action flicks have been cuffing people (odd couples, mixed racial pairs, comedy duos, what-have-you) to each other for decades afterwards.

Hitchcock, of course, helped matters along--story goes that when Donat and Carroll first met they rehearsed a scene cuffed together, after which Hitchcock confessed to having lost the key. Donat and Carroll were forced to wait while everyone searched; they eventually found themselves talking to each other about friends, films, experiences. Whereupon Hitchcock declared: "Now that you two know each other we can go ahead," and produced the key from a waistcoat pocket. The 39 Steps is arguably an early high water mark in the genre of romantic spy thrillers, or espionage/suspense films with a strong romantic element (another would be Hitchcock's North by Northwest, made twenty-four years later--but that's material enough for another article). I wouldn't say Duplicity comes anywhere near Hitchcock's level, but it does lunge at that general direction--that's the highest praise I can give the picture.

First published in Businessworld, 5.22.09