nixsight

American Gangster

It probably won’t be a surprise, looking across the films I watched this week, to guess that this was the one that I expected the most from.

Having said that, I knew very little about the film, beyond the obvious basic concepts put across by the name, and the posters.

In fact, there’s a story about that – on the way into work, there is a peculiar billboard poster, which bends around a corner – not a curve, a hard bend. This means that as you walk along the road, the last two-thirds of the poster are visible, while the third remains around the corner, out of sight.

When this film came out, it was advertised on that billboard. But what you could actually see, for the majority of your morning journey, was a sign with a grainy black and white picture of Russell Crowe, who out of context looks a little gormless in it, and the words “ICAN GANGSTER”.

Now, I knew full well what the whole title of the film actually was, but it amused me – for quite some interminable time, I suspect Girl One might say – to imagine that this was the actual name of the film. The premise of this more unusually named movie was that Crowe plays a mentally retarded man, who despite his disability has the lifelong ambition of being a powerful gangster – as you know, a way of life not known for it’s inclusive employment policies.

What followed was a heartwarming drama about one man’s trials and triumphs as he fights to reach his goal, through adversity and prejudice – there would be danger and heartache, but there would also be thrills and laughs, and even a promise of romance – before the tense and poignant climax. Not one – NOT ONE, you understand? – member of the audience would fail to be moved, and everyone would leave the cinema with a smile on their face, having learned a valuable lesson about themselves and the world around them.

A life-changing movie about violence and beauty. And retards.

Although the name has stuck around these parts, I was a little shocked to find that the actual film that Ridley Scott made wasn’t anything like the one I’d imagined.

Viewed from a distance, Scott has made a fairly typical “Based on a true story” gangster movie. The elements are all there – we see the rise of Washington’s character as he develops a power-base, played alongside the less glamourous life of Crowe’s detective, as he finds himself on the bad end of police corruption, but still seeking to put the bad guys behind bars. The era-specific and well picked soundtrack is also a trademark of the genre, and it’s also present here.

But what makes this a quite peculiar and demanding film is that Scott and screenwriter Zaillian have eschewed typical Hollywood storytelling conceits almost completely. Although the timeline of the movie is linear, we aren’t shown a particularly obvious trail of action/repercussion, and we aren’t shown the traditional “rise from nothing” of the central crook.

In fact, we are thrown into the story with Washington’s Frank Lucas already well-placed to take over when his mentor dies of natural causes – and many of the key players in the crime world are already familiar with Lucas. Scott gives the sense, by never going to any effort to really introduce us to anyone, of a complete world, already in motion, and with all exposition stripped from the script, the viewer finds that they have to keep a close eye on what is going on, and collate information on the fly.

This ties in to another trademark of the genre that is missing here – similar recent films have either had a narrator, normally the key protagonist, or some other mouthpiece mechanism to help give the audience an in to what is going on. But that doesn’t happen here, and there’s also very little external moralising done – that is, the film delivers scenes and characters’ actions with no real direction to the viewer of how they should process the data beyond how other characters within the movie react.

Scott is obviously trying to deliver his story as neutrally as possible – perhaps out of a desire to show that these are events that actually happened, and that should be enough to make a movie out of, or perhaps because, as in the film “Syriana” that I reviewed a couple of weeks back, he wants the audience to realise that not everything can be boiled down to black and white decisions, or good and evil.

It works, as far as that goes. You know Crowe and Washington, so you know that they have the ability to carry off a job like this. And the film’s visual style, which in contrast to Scott’s other films is also very neutral and muddy – in fact, like the film “Zodiac”, this may well be intended to reflect the media of the period that the film is set in – helps the film establish this “real” look.

Despite all that, it’s still a pretty harsh film, and it’s long and sometimes wearing approach and running time is leavened by moments of quite shocking violence. Which is good, because otherwise it might feel a little too much like work.

Sex And The City

I haven’t got nearly as much to say about “Sex And The City”, but the surprise here is that I didn’t hate it, although there were times when it almost begged me to.

Girl One watches the tv series a lot, and at first I found myself utterly repulsed by it, but after awhile I found myself able to stay in the room when it was on. In fact, as with Ally McBeal – and even to some extent my first go round with Buffy – I found that while I still couldn’t work up any sympathy for the central character, and in this case couldn’t find anything funny or interesting in Samantha (the character that is clearly supposed to be the shocking one that provokes the “oh no she didn’t?” reaction in audiences), I really grew to enjoy the supporting performances around that rotten core.

And in fact I actually started to find Miranda quite appealing, when I suspect that she is meant to be the one that you relate to least if you’re a go-getting, positive, independent but bright and fun woman, who likes getting laid.

I suppose I’m just not enough of a go-getting gal to get it, really.

So I didn’t hate the idea of watching the film as much as one might expect, although I was rather concerned that it might focus far too much on the cadaverous Carrie Bradshaw.

And the bulk of the film does spend too much time on her. But the fact is you probably don’t care about this – you either have no intention of watching the film, or aren’t going to listen to any criticism of it anyway. So I should press on.

Although the series often raised a laugh out of me, the movie doesn’t really manage to do that, but even I had to admit that it was nice to see the characters I liked on screen again. I think the remit of the piece was more about exploring some of the situations that viewers of the show never got to see, though, so gags aren’t really that much in evidence, with heavy character plots like adultery, impending marriage and discontent in relationships taking centre stage.

Where the film totally loses me is in the middle act, because it is just horrible. Having taken great pains to establish that each male character’s actions are happening for very specific and understandable reasons, the halfway point is swamped out by the female characters – even the ones who know that it’s unjustified – pulling apart the male ones without mercy. For a good chunk of the film, it is difficult to believe that any men were even present on set, let alone that the film was written by one.

Unfortunately, everyone does a pretty good job of delivering their character’s arcs, and so you don’t find yourself blaming the script, you find yourself feeling uncomfortable with the misandry of the characters, instead.

Luckily, everyone ends up taking responsibility for their own actions in the final act, and there are some quite satisfying scenes of resolution towards the end.

Everyone in the film does a pretty good job, although there are points when the writer’s inability to stretch some of the show’s voice-overs fortune cookie moments out into the movie length, and some of the resultant schmaltz is trite and bordering on painful. A particularly strong performance from David Eigenberg as Steve Brady marries well with Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda, and makes their arc the strongest and most nerve-wracking. And I always love seeing Evan Handler.

The Other Boleyn Girl

Girl One read the Phillippa Gregory novel that this film is based on recently, and was really looking forward to the film, and that, and the fact that I always feel a little bad about not loving a Natalie Portman film, makes me feel guilty that I pretty much disliked this movie from beginning to end.

I’m not a history buff by any stretch of the imagination, and I have no idea how accurate the film is, but despite that, I found myself railing against the depiction of history taking place in it.

Maybe it was the melodrama, and the various other problems with the script.

Throughout the first half of the film, I found myself thinking that, despite the foreign actors’ commitments to their accents, people just wouldn’t have talked like that. It wasn’t anything really obvious, like actual slang or Americanisms – everyone’s sentence structure just seemed way off, and words were compressed together in ways that really didn’t sit right with me. This isn’t a problem in a “Moulin Rouge” or “A Knight’s Tale”, but this film pretends really hard to be authentic.

That problem seemed to settle down by the end of the first act, but the melodrama persisted throughout, and permeated the whole screenplay to the extent that it made me think that the film probably had “incompetent” written through it like a stick of rock from the start, and no amount of work by the crew and cast could have fixed it. The uncomfortable mapping of modern Hollywood/media morality onto the period setting kept finding me wriggling in my seat with irritation, and the willingness that the screenwriter had to reduce characters to extreme characteristics, and have their behaviour just sit there was a constant frustration. Poor Portman was reduced to a Joan Collins circa Dynasty performance for much of the film, and David Morrissey only had two settings throughout his performance – scheming and angry.

“The Other Boleyn Girl” makes “The Tudors” look like documentary film-making, and while it clearly appears to be trying its hand at a similar ideal of humanising a remote period in history, the melodrama and flatness of the performances break the effort badly.

Even the camera work and editing seem to be conspiring against the end result – long and stolen shots that are clearly meant to suggest that we have come upon a scene that we are not supposed to be privy to and are ducking out of sight have their intended effect ruined by the decision to cut between them and dull, neutral shots – if the desired effect was the impression of reportage, it hasn’t worked. The only thing that the camera gets right is it’s occassional instinctive understanding that in close-up, both Johansson and Portman have the lines of classical portraits, and as such there are probably a handful of stills from the film that could genuinely be classed as beautiful.

In fact, the only saving grace is Scarlett Johansson. Often not as good as her success implies, here she is a calm and measured centre to the unfocussed, over-delivered and bewildering mess of the rest of the film – and as such provides the only character that you find yourself remotely caring about. And normally I have the “Portman love” real bad.

(To be fair, Kristin Scott Thomas does pretty well here, too, but unfortunately her character is written with such a distracting vague protofeminist slant that I couldn’t be convinced by her.)

Anyway, so this is late, which is rubbish. And also, I think I may have gotten a bit unreasonable about that last film, because we only finished watching it a little while before I started writing the post. So sorry if I’ve been mean.

As always, your comments are welcome – let’s have a debate!