I saw 32 films in March. 22 were for the first time. Thirteen were on the big screen.
A few highlights, lowlights, and general points of discussion:
Inland Empire David Lynch 2006 USA / Poland / France An actress in Hollywood may or may not have an affair with a co-star, and her persona splinters into several parallel dimensions. Lynch's most self-indulgent film is three hours long, and could quite have easily been double that without seeming it - there's absolutely no conventional narrative arc, no way of foreseeing where things are going or anticipating what's to come, so that it's impossible to measure how long it's been going on and how long it might continue to go on. It's incredibly innovative, a step forward in Lynch's personal ambitions: instinctive, imaginative, entrenched in its own world - its own worlds-within-worlds - so that any approach to it which might seek some kind of connection from the hermetic fiction to the environment in which it is consumed (i.e. anything outside of the film) seems to be missing the point. Indeed, rather than requiring active deconstruction (as almost all narratives do), it's a textural experience, a fabrication which is meaning, not an encoded narrative which has meaning. The move to low-budget DV has freed him up in two senses: visual expression and narrative flexibility. Lynch is a master of 'uncomfortable space': some of the shot compositions are frighteningly intimate; very few scenes have establishing shots, so that conversations, even presented in the most basic, shot-reverse shot fashion, have a disturbing edge; and each intra-scene cut seems to be ever-so-slightly delayed. It's erotic at times, funny at others, agreeably bizarre, and often terrifying: unique, original, and easily reduced to pathetic superlatives or wordy descriptions. A quote from Calvino's Invisible Cities might be telling: "I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language [...]".
The Illusionist Neil Burger 2006 USA In turn of the century Vienna, a stage magician meets a childhood love, who is about to be married to the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It begins with a "come on, let's get on with it" exposition, a flashback within a flashback, and unfolds finally as a piece of detective fiction, in which the detective is a secondary character yet the one through which we view events, in awe of the mysterious illusionist of the title. The middle third is the best bit by far - it creates great potential for a battle of wits between the master magician in love with the bride-to-be of the jealous, bad-tempered prince. Suggestions of a thriller, potential for a more exciting second half, though, are cut short, and it turns out to finally be rather quite ordinary. Oh well.
World Trade Center Oliver Stone 2006 USA Two Port Area policemen are trapped under the rubble of the Twin Towers, and keep one another alive until help arrives. Stone's film has no real energy, no real explosive or electric rhythm, no narrative drive. It's not a bad film by any means - in fact it's rather watchable - but it's decidedly ordinary. It looks like a TV movie, viewable to all, with intentions of inspiration and shortcomings in production value. Two moments of mild effect - when the first tower falls, with the men inside, and when the two survivors first hear help above on the ground. It's a conventional film, though, about an extraordinary event; and what is it that makes Nicolas Cage far more enjoyable to watch when he's deliberately and physically disabled under a pile of rubble, as opposed to a pro-active, no-shit member of the emergency services...? Flat.
Superman Returns Bryan Singer 2006 USA Five years after returning to his home planet, Superman comes back to Earth and saves the world from Lex Luther's plans. Action comedy, really, and it's good stuff. In fact, it's very good stuff, at times. A tad long, and the final quarter isn't nearly as good as the first three, but it boasts a shameless charm and succession of cheesy one-liners, a very old-fashioned goodie versus baddie plot with adequate enough romantic interest. A better lead could have helped, because this one is a bit cardboard, but the action scenes are really cool in an "I wish I was Superman" kind of way.
Rocky Balboa Sylvester Stallone 2006 USA Rocky, now widowed and owner of an Italian restaurant, wishes to take up boxing again. A lot more subdued than what might have been expected, and all the better for it. There's no real build up to the fight, here, no oppositional adversity for the hero to overcome; instead, his demons are entirely internal, and the character seems preoccupied by how his career is now perceived by others - and so, at times, it seems Stallone too is concerned about his own career, in view of the franchise for which he is famous. Possible routes of interest are suggested but never followed up on in any great depth: the real baddies here are those who organise the exhibition match, all in it for the money, with backstage sniggering going on about how much they're making from it. The fight itself is filmed in two styles: the introductions and first two rounds are all shot as if they are a real fight shown on pay-per-view television, with commentators, announcers, and all the expected camera angles (with a cameo from Mike Tyson at ringside), and so it is suggested that the film might finally be a comment on the state of modern boxing, all money and little heart; but thereafter it blends into an equally self-reflexive and intertextual, but very different, style, that of rapid montage, in which, with every punch absorbed, Rocky has flashbacks to other moments in the five preceding films. But it's less about the fighting, here, and more about upholding and revisiting one's own persona, fame and myth; and as a veteran action star now making films, Stallone is a lot more effective than Eastwood, at least.
A Prairie Home Companion Robert Altman 2006 USA The last broadcast of a live radio show, as seen onstage and backstage, through the eyes of the participants and a mysterious woman. Reductive, perhaps, but an initial point of reference: Altman's Nashville (1975), another multi-character musical had a lazy ending which brought everything together, whereas this is very succinct and satisfying, at once implicit and ambiguous; but whereas Nashville's three-hour duration gave an epic weight and allowed Altman to give a wealth and depth to each of his characters' personalities, because it is only two hours, A Prairie Home Companion is at times a little imbalanced. Another half-hour or so would have ironed its narrative out into a much more consistent rhythm and flow - and the writing and acting are both excellent enough to have made it quite watchable at a longer length. It's a brilliant film, though, full of laughs, full of wit, full of energy and colour and confidence, unfolding finally as a film driven by nostalgic characters caught up in a world slowly drowning in melancholy. Altman's camera is less casual, less roaming than his other films, but is riveting all the same - various pans and simultaneous zooms, difficult to describe but lovely to watch, bring us in and out of this conversation and that conversation.
Die Große Stille Into Great Silence Philip Gröning 2005 France / Switzerland / Germany Documentary on the silent Carthusian Monks in the Grande Chartreuse, France. Like the monks themselves, Gröning goes about his business in a very humble, almost silent fashion, with no music, no voice-over, almost no interviews. It's an interesting premise because the subject matter is so unique, but it's a complete waste of an opportunity; to be frank, it is one of the most annoying, dumbfounding and frustrating documentaries made. In fact, it lacks the required insight to be classed as a documentary, and certainly isn't expressive enough to be a feature in its own right - it captures various activities without any insight as to why they go about what they do, why it is that these men have chosen a life of complete seclusion; it only serves to mystify these monks further, instead of de-mystifying them, so that anybody coming into the documentary not knowing who they are or what they do leaves the theatre having endured three hours of point-and-shoot filming of various religious rituals which aren't given any context at all. It defeats its own purpose: Gröning apparently waited close to two decades to get permission to film there, and the final product falls way short of revealing anything interesting about a potentially fascinating subject. The time-lapse shots, of the entire vicinity in the snowy mountains, are effective in their tranquility, but are completely undercut by inconsistent transitions (the film has no rhythm at all) and lazily assembled intertitles, quotations from the Bible. These quotations have some sort of obscure connection to the footage surrounding them, a bit like the Victorian quotations preceding each chapter in Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman; but while Fowles did immense research in assembling an eclectic, convincing range of quotes from all kinds of different sources, Gröning uses two or three and peppers them throughout his documentary as if to hammer the same point home time and time again, to the effect that, by the end of the film, you know what each intertitle says in French and German before the English subtitles come up translate it for us.
The Set-Up Robert Wise 1949 USA An ageing boxer fights his last bout despite angst from his girlfriend, and the fact he's supposed to lose in a staged knockout. One of those rapid, brief B-movie productions made on an assembly line of forgotten masterpieces, by Wise, who here shows himself to be a very efficient, economic filmmaker - in the implicit, exciting exposition of narrative, in the tense, atmospheric bulk of the boxing fight itself, in the succinct, satisfying climax. Studio-bound, of course, but with an air of sweaty, dingy seediness hanging over it; you can't help but imagine that the sweat, blood and tears are in some way inherited from the rapid, low-budget production itself.
La science des rêves The Science of Sleep Michel Gondry 2006 France / Italy An insecure, Mexican artist moves to France and falls in love with his neighbour in his dreams. This and Eternal Sunshine share a common emotional impact in the way they unfold: in a very casual manner, strikingly original in form and hilariously written and performed, so that any real emotional weight is accumulated as the narrative progresses in its deceptively nonchalant manner, and, come the climax of both films, an attachment has formed between viewer and film which seemingly wasn't on the cards at all. It's utterly refreshing stuff, energetic and perceptive, and determined to subvert expectations, from things such as overall narrative pattern to smaller details such as conventions of fictional character. At first, the ending might seem abrupt and unsatisfying in confirming that the narrative has been overwhelmed by its own fantasies ("when is it going to go back to reality?"), similar to, say, Videodrome, but it's written so as to be open to a hell of a lot of interpretation - what seemingly takes place during one night of dreams might actually be a collection of memories of real events, filtered into one dream-like narrative... that's the science of sleep, after all. Visually meticulous, emotionally complex, sharply written and excellently performed.
Iklimler Climates Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2006 Turkey A university lecturer breaks up with his younger wife when the two become bored by marriage and commitment. Ceylan's films are obviously very personal; and all share the same world, the same vision, you see the same core entourage of actors from film to film, many of whom are friends and family. Here, in perhaps his most personal film yet (dedicated to his son), he and his real-life wife star as a couple whose marriage has already crumbled when the film begins, and generally dives into further despair as it goes along. His style is very unique and very difficult to describe - it doesn't resemble anybody else's, it's visual without being excessive, and his way of editing from scene to scene is very ambiguous. There is a scene early on, for instance, at the beach, in which the director watches his wife swimming in the sea and talks to himself, imagining that he is breaking up with her... only, he moves and behind where he was we see his wife is really next to him (a bit like the mirage scene in Gerry), and she begins to talk back, and so you'd expect to cut to a wide shot at the end of the scene, showing him alone again, with his wife in the sea, so that the conversation is confirmed to have been a dream, an illusion. But it doesn't, it cuts to the next scene, and it's very ambiguous and effective, the way things happen - similar to Julio Medem's dives in and out of realities, but a lot more subtle and casual. Climates is a fantastic film, full of great, individual scenes which unfold in lengthy bouts of silence, of emotional constipation, of lingering looks and close-ups. There are two incredible, ambiguous sex scenes, one in which two-way seduction turns into aggressive lust verging on rape, the other shot in out-of-focus, slow-motion close-ups, so that the intimacy is held at a distance. Tracing his work as a whole, Ceylan seems to have become more controlled, more disciplined with each film he's made; this shows signs of a more deliberate, self-aware and excessive self-indulgence (as opposed to the seemingly natural, instinctive way his previous films unfold), and it's his best film yet.
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