The Spanish Prisoner – “Excuse Me!”

The Spanish Prisoner 

David Mamet, director/writer, 1997

John:  This is the second or third time I’ve seen this movie. About three-quarters of the way through it, I think this is one that will out-Hitchcock Hitchcock. Then it goes wrong and I remember why I was disappointed before. Mamet is a great writer and the cast is good, but…

Spanky: I know what you mean, and I think the problem has to do with our expectations which extend beyond the movie.  Steve Marin plays it straight, and we expect him to betray us (hasn’t he already done that “playing it straight.”) But its Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon―cast as a naïve, but trusting female confident―who we can’t accept as evil.

John: All of a sudden this is another twist and turn in a movie of twists and turns, but this is one too many. She has been the central character’s, and our, one fixed point in an ever-changing perspective.

Spanky: Part of the problem is I’m sure Mamet didn’t want Pidgeon to be the heroine and Martin and Ben Gazzara, the losers. And he knew he could write clever dialogue to cover the sleight of hand. He does. But emotionally, cleverness is not enough.

John: I love the way he plays off of Chinese tourist stereotypes, but you’re right. The Campbell Scott character (he is the son of George C. Scott, by the way) is our stand-in, not knowing what to believe or who to trust, but Pedgeon seems all that is right in a confusing, greedy world. To throw her out, with the bath, is to throw the movie away too.

GO (1 GO out of 4)

Spanky: If wishing could make something better, I would have been satisfied. John you may not be Mamet, and are certainly not Steve Martin, but for once I agree.

BARK (1 BARK out of 4)

Columbus Circle – “Round and round.”

Columbus Circle, Director:  George Gallo, 2012

John: Maybe I’ve been watching too much TV and my standards have gone to hell, but I found this (particularly the second half gripping and surprising. I’ll admit the ending seems a bit farfetched, but it is perfect.

The story begins with the murder of an old lady, but focuses on her acrophobic neighbor across the hall. The dynamics are between her and a new couple who move into the dead woman’s apartment. The plot presents different stereotypes and then shows things are not what they seem. I don’t want to give too much away, but I think Hitchcock would be proud of this one.

GO, GO, GO, (3 GOs out of 4)

Spanky: You’ve got to be kidding. You can spot what is going to happen miles away. I did like the ending line, and it was good they could find a role for Beau Bridges. He makes us want to trust him and appearances. Big mistake.

John: But that’s a foreshadowing of the other character reversals. This is a poker game in which the director is playing, not the cards, but the audience.

Spanky: John, I’ve got a great Brooklyn Bridge to sell you. Or maybe a NY condo, cheap.

BARK (1 BARK out of 4)

 

Skyfall – “Resurrection”

Skyfall, Director:  Sam Mendes, 2012

 

John: What is it like to live your life in parallel to a fictional character? Oh, often it mayb be misplaced wish fulfillment and played by different actors…, but aren’t we different people at different stages of our lives and doesn’t fantasy give us clues as to who we really are?

This is the one Bond film (and I’ve seen them all) that makes us think about him and about our lives watching him. But it doesn’t skimp on the essentials either. The title sequence is spectacular; and I challenge any 007 fan not to have chills run down your spine when our hero unearths his old Austin Martin and the theme pounds in your ears.

The payoff isn’t this film, but the new beginning it promises…all of us.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

Sparky: I don’t know if any of the other Bonds could have pulled this off. Craig, Judi Dench and Bardem are such fine actors, allowed by a super-thoughtful script to do just that. Sure the special effects are spectacular, but so are the settings, such as Shanghai.

And the theme of resurrection—so welcome to older guys like you, John—is also one that applies to movies. This one shows them how.

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK (4 BARKs out of 4)

Brothers Bloom – “Game within a Game within…”

 Brothers Bloom – Rian Johnson, director, 2009

“Pick a con, any con.”

JOHN: When I watched this DVD I had no intimation that the same director had done Looper (recently reviewed here).Spanky thought that film, “frantic and confounding.” This one has a bit more structure, though and the overall effect was designed to freak out audiences of all ages. Though that playing with our expectations—con within a con—is what I find most annoying. Adrian Brody is perfect, the settings in other countries— spectacular, and the ending, though predictable, discussion provoking (What is the nature of the relationship of brothers in a scripted or unscripted life?). I think it could have ended sooner and been a little less self-explanatory.

GO, GO (2 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: This sounds weird but a deciding factor for me was one of those special features on the DVD called “In Bloom.” I am amazed how much work goes into shooting a single scene. We, in the audience, take so much for granted. And if it is edited together and doesn’t quite make it plot wise, it is incredible that emotionally this film does work. Part Wes Anderson, Part Terry Gilliam this contrived film is unique, but less would have been more.

BARK, BARK (2 BARKs out of 4)          

 

LOOPER– “Future Noir”

Looper – Rian Johnson, director, 2012

Film making is a kind of time travel, and audiences figuratively murder actors.

JOHN: This might very well be the future of film noir. The movie is set in 2044, the period of the younger Joe who opens the movie by informing us that “Time travel hasn’t been invented yet. But in 30 years it will have been.” The practice is immediately outlawed, except criminal syndicates of the future begin sending their victims back in time to 2044, where Joe and other “loopers” can blow them away without anyone knowing or caring. There is, however, one catch: In order to tie up loose ends, the crime syndicates that employ the loopers eventually require them to kill their own future selves.

The retro-futurism on display reminds me of Blade Runner, and maybe that’s what Willis brings with him to the part as the older Joe. High-tech hover bikes are rare; old-school shotguns are everywhere.

The first quarter, is over the top guns and camera movement. The next quarter has some slow, interacting scenes between Willis and Gordon-Levitt (his younger self). Then we get a segment of “The Omen” followed by a conclusion that has (and I balk at saying this) genuine shock.

I wouldn’t want to sit through this again, but it was certainly something to try to figure out on the way home.

GO, GO, GO (3 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: I thought it was frantic, confounding and the overall effect was designed to freak out audiences of all ages. There is a crazy mixture of city and rural, plus I have to admit an incredible ending. But, really, is this where films are going or an example of where they have gone that no one wants to admit.

The best part: what it would be like for the old you to be talking to the young one. And the dilemma the film poses when comparing these two lives is not a simple one. On those grounds, I give it an extra “bark.”

But as a movie we want to experience that fulfills needs we have that life can’t satisfy, I’d agree with Bruce when in a diner talking to his younger self he says, “I don’t want to talk about time-travel shit, because if we start, we’re going to be here all day, making diagrams with straws.”

BARK, BARK, BARK (3 BARKs out of 4)

MOONRISE KINGDOM – “Go There!”

MoonRISE Kingdom – Wes Anderson, director, 2012

JOHN: There’s a recent New Yorker review of Nathan Lane as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh that makes an interesting distinction between a performer and an actor. In this film we see the difference between actor and celebrity. It starts with a cozy, perhaps claustrophobic, interior of an old island house in which young kids are listening to a record of Benjamin Britten’s The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra. But, in contrast this is a movie about children not playing together.

Edward Norton as the surreal boy scout leader is right, right, right. He is an actor in the defining role of his life. But a movie is also about how the audience gets caught up in it. We empathize with the young boy and girl―and the adults searching for their own Moonlight Kingdom―and recall our own dreams of what we thought life would be.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOS out of 4)

SPANKY: And, John, you are probably going to say celebrities like Bruce Willis (because he treated Demi and the kids so well after she took up with that younger guy) and Francis Fargo Woman, who always seems realm, if not fallible, and Bill Murray, forever trading on his angry looser temperament, bring these identities ready-made to the movie so Wes Anderson can concentrate on the marriage of two twelve year olds. Or so we think. As the bits and pieces come together we realize, in the very last minute of the very last scene, that this is an allegory. Like a good poem, it sends us back to the beginning (and title) and we, in the audience have something to ponder beyond a movie. Stunning!

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK (4 BARKs out of 4)

DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID – “A Painful Death”

 Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid – Carl Reiner, director, 1981

JOHN: I saw this when if first came out and thought it deserved a second viewing. It is a clever idea – using bits of old movies integrated into a Steve Martin/Carl Reiner new plot. But…. It doesn’t work (if it ever did). Why? The actors are good; the conceit, praiseworthy, the interjection of old footage, flawless; but it reminds me of someone trying to write a poem in the form of a sonnet. It is way too self-conscious. Just write the goddamn poem.

GO (1 GO out of 4)

SPANKY: If anything it makes me wish I were seeing the original films. Sure there are some clever one-liners, like audience banter in the old “Mystery Theater” TV program. But, this is wasted talent and the fact that so much effort has gone into it makes the waste seem even greater. To give it some credit, when it first came out people weren’t into old noir movies. Maybe this helped bring that about, I don’t know. However, we might say about some films, “They don’t make them like they use to.” Let’s hope they never make them like this again.

BARK (1 BARK out of 4)

CHICAGO – “My Kind of Film Musical”

Chicago  – Rob Marshall , director, 2002

JOHN: Ever wonder why a Broadway show is better than the movie, than local productions of the same play, than just about anything outside of the theater that night? Good songs, fast pacing and a clever plot help, as do great actors, but it’s more than that. I would have said that it’s because you only get to go to one every ten years or that the actors have to prove themselves at each live performance, but watching movies like this and Moulin Rouge, even at home, even for the fourth or fifth time, make me feel it’s because everything is right. The story, the songs speak to us watching as audience who wants to participate. We’re cheering for ourselves.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: Roxie (Renee Zelwiger) sees her life through musical sequences—like we do—and why wouldn’t some lawyer (Richard Gere) take advantage of this—like we do—or Catherine Zeta Jones resent the attention Roxie gets instead of her—like we do? And let me mention the sequence in which John C. Reilly sings “Cellophane.” It is Bergman and  Fellini. A moment that encapsulates the people sitting out there alone in the dark. Sure, everything has become show business (he criminal justice system, news reporting, fake reality shows on TV), but how many pieces of art take that on as a theme in such a way that we are caught up in it? “Chicago”! Watch it again and again and again.

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK(4 BARKs out of 4)

THE PLAYER – “You’re the Movie”

Altman at the 1992 Cannes Festival

THE Player  – Robert Altman , director, 2011

JOHN: Fun to revisit  one of Altman’s best, and see it stand up so well. Tim Robbins is fantastic. And a couple scenes, real classics: he asks a table full of hangers-on if they can talk about anything but Hollywood (they can’t), the murder itself and his cold blooded look as he sits on a couch dressed in black and tells his girlfriend (Bonnie Sharon), she has been replaced—in a way that brings out the smarmy side in all of us.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: Don’t forget the ending which cleverly brings this full circle (we are watching the movie Graham Mill is blackmailed to make). And the opening 7 minute, 47 second tracking shot—an homage to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.  Almost as much fun are the guest appearances of famous people playing themselves—Angelica Huston, Elliot Gould, Steve Allen, Jack Lemmon, Jeff Goldblume, Joel Grey, Sidney Pollack, etc. It’s almost like being in Hollywood and spotting these people on a street corner yourself. Then there’s the irony of Bruce Williams and Julia Roberts starring in the movie within a movie of how the rich (and we know that’s the Robbins’ character) never get prosecuted. Wow!

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK(4 BARKs out of 4)

In November 2000, Altman claimed that he would move to Paris if Geroge W. Bush were elected, but joked that he had meant Paris, Texas when it came to pass. He noted that “the state would be better off if he (Bush) is out of it.”

THE ARTIST – “Beyond Golden”

The Artist, directed by Michael Hazanavicius, 2012

SPANKY: John, you seemed to like this movie a lot more than I did. It started out well, then began to drag (except for the RCA Victor dog) only to pull around at the end. I think if we are judging a film on its worth, not on the meaning we can attribute to it or our personal film-going history, this one is, at best, an oddball that slipped into the Oscar mainstream because it ostensibly had something to do with the development of cinema.

2 Barks out of 4

JOHN: I saw this after the reviews were in and the film won “best picture,” but I think most people, including the Academy, missed its point.  Sure  the advent of talkies was a convenient metaphor, but this is about an artist who can’t communicate directly with the man on the street. An artist who doesn’t want the pity or support of those who can.  And, literally, the French director lets us in the audience experience this silence. We feel this disappointment (that is the let-down in interest you complain about, Spanky). The solution, is not to give up, or become a crowd pleasing talker. He is an “Artist.” The answer is to adapt his art to the times and be new and fresh all over again.  He and his love do this through tap dancing (with sound) and we feel the joy. We can’t dance, but he can for us.

In 2010r, a brilliant film that spoke to who we are and what our world has become, Social Network, was just a little too edgy for an Academy Award. This film succeeds because it is subtle and misleading. But its message is particularly meaningful for the floundering movie/television industry. And as a writer, I found it more real, more touching, more meaningful to me than any “entertainment” has been for a long, long time.

PS. Words on the page don’t talk either. Or do they?

4 GOs out of 4