Youth Without Youth (and Funny Games, briefly)

Francis Ford Coppola is a name we all respect. Why? Because of "The Godfather. "

Last night I watched "Youth Without Youth" which was billed as Coppola's comeback film. I didn't say it; some high-falutin' film critic did. Or more accurately, several high-falutin' critics. You know, the professionals. They build 'em up, they knock 'em down. That's what they did in this case. Told us he was a master, told us this was the master's comeback, then told us the master's comeback was crap. What happened to the respect? the adulation? Hmmmm?
What I want to know is, why didn't they like the film? I suspect it's because they raised their collective expectations too high. Waaaaay too high.

Anyway, I liked the film. Sure, it has some extraneous and confusing stuff in it. But on the whole, it was a beauty. Here you have two characters. One is an old man, who represents age [read: time passing] and wisdom [read: benefit of time passing]. One is a young woman, who represents beauty and youth [the opposite of age, of time, of wisdom]. Yes, they are symbolic characters.

The old man (Tim Roth) participates in a miracle. His youth is restored to him. He is able to gain time, in other words. When you're 70 you don't think you have that much time left. If you were suddenly made 35 again, you've gained exactly 35 years (wow, I can do math). Why would this happen?

The reason he gains the time is because he's overly ambitious. He wants to learn the whole of human knowledge. He's writing a book that can never be finished. He's a student of languages but hasn't got time to learn all the languages of all the periods of history. Until!

Enter the second character, Young-Girl-Youth-and-Beauty. She participates in a miracle too. She is able to channel the languages of all time, and hopefully can take Old-Man back far enough in time so that he can discover all of human knowledge. Problem is, while he remains young, she enters into a rapid aging process because of channeling all that ancient history. He had to get younger to have more time to write the book. She had to get older to feel the weight of ancient time. It's all very beautiful and poetic, magical and metaphorical. You must see this coming: Old-Man falls in love with Young-Girl and he has a choice to make.

Let her turn into a 25-year-old with wrinkles? Let her descend into death long before her time, for the sake of knowledge? Or... leave her and restore her youth and beauty. Abandon knowledge and wisdom (and love! which is evidently the fruit of wisdom). Abandon the value of expanding time, embrace the value of the finite, accept that life is short for a reason.

I found it beautiful. We didn't need Hitler's goons chasing Old-Man down with a gun. That part was a little ridiculous and quite unnecessary. There were some other tossed-in scenes that may have added to the confusion some of the critics apparently felt. (Even Almighty Ebert used the word "confusing!" It's less confusing than "Inland Empire," man.) But it was still very powerful. I can forgive Coppola these little mistakes. He's only human, after all.

Tim Roth, coincidentally, has been on my screen a lot recently. I also watched "Funny Games" the other day. It's a thriller - no one would dispute the label in this case - and a dark one. Ask yourself: Do you want to watch Tim Roth and Naomi Watts be tortured? That's all it is. The end was surprising, but not in a good way. All I can say is, this was a ride I really wanted off of. But I am starting to understand Tim Roth. I used to think of him as simply a Tarantino man, for obvious reasons ("Pulp Fiction," "Reservoir Dogs"). Now I'm understanding that Roth'll take anything that might be unnerving -- he's simply confrontational, as an actor. He must be a very interesting person to talk to.

Twelve Angry Men

"Twelve Angry Men" does exactly what it's supposed to do. An amazing feat for a movie, I say. So often we start out with high expectations and we're disappointed. We balk at a movie that claims it will provide us with a profound experience.

Here, You start out with one juror who believes the boy is innocent and you know he's supposed to convince all the other jurors. They are ready to send the boy to the electric chair. It's the proverbial lone juror. Ay ay ay.

So you know the situation immediately. You know what is supposed to happen. You know that, by the end, all the jurors will be persuaded to change their minds. You know too that, this will have implications beyond the personal, beyond the political. It will teach us something about the quality of humanity.

However, it seems impossible! Both for Henry Fonda and for the movie. How can one man persuade all these other men (who are not just angry, but sweaty, impatient, bullying, rude, and exhausted, who have people to see and places to go) to change their position on something so serious as a murder? This is an old-fashioned, deeply serious, moral movie. Yet how can one little movie teach us something truly profound about the humanity in all of us? Wow. Even as I write the words, it sounds like too much to take. "Give me a break!" I might say. Or "Don't give me that!" Sounds overbearing, over-profound, too much for this movie to shoulder.

Yet, it succeeds 100% and there isn't an overblown moment in the whole darn thing. It is one of those extremely rare things - the perfect movie.

Takes you for a ride, entertains you, lets you coast while it does all the work (another rare feat for a movie, at least these days), keeps you guessing, you're in suspense - you think you can predict it but you can't, keeps you emotionally involved - you actually care about each and every character! - and keeps you at the center of the issue, never leaves you bored or yawning, it makes you laugh, makes you think, makes you re-evaluate your own certainty about whether certainty is possible. Makes you re-evaluate what it means to be a human being, what is at the heart of all of us. And lets you do all this without getting irritated with yourself. What a treat.

Eyes of Laura Mars

What a hoot! Watch this and tell me how long it takes *you* to recognize Tommy Lee Jones. Seriously. This is a classic 1970s thriller which puts all the fun back into thrillers - for those of us who have grown weary of seeing Jodie Foster or anyone else trapped on an airplane.

Faye Dunaway, once again. I'm becoming a fan of hers. In this movie she's so convincing as a photographer whose vision is interrupted constantly - even when she's behind the camera! - by the vision of murder, seen through the eyes of the murderer! Hold on models, stop posing! Stop the shoot! It's also great when Laura's fumbling around in her apartment, trying to feel her way to the telephone, as if blind! Meanwhile, with her eyes open, she's actually watching her friends be killed - one by one, and she can do nothing about it!

Mostly, this was just pure fun to watch. Fun to play "who's that actor" with some recognizable but much-younger faces. (It's like a reverse version of "where are they now?") Fun to get swept away by the pounding, overly melodramatic music score. Fun to watch Tommy Lee Jones running down the street in a typical 1970s chase scene. Really fun to laugh your head off at the close-up shots of Faye Dunaway's eyes. Yep. Get this one from Netflix. It's a joy.

Network

"We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore!"

Oh, so that's where that line came from!

What an incredible, scary, prescient, bizarre film this is. I almost don't know what to say. When I read the description I thought it would compare to "Broadcast News," another of my all-time faves. It did start out like that (the end of unchoreographed old-fashioned news reporting on television). But then, "Network" spirals downward into surreal, almost science-fiction, very dark territory more closely resembling a film like "Naked Lunch" than "Broadcast News." No kidding. It seriously freaked me out. But it got its point across. Everyone should watch it.

I've been on a bit of a Faye Dunaway kick lately, having also watched "Three Days of the Condor" and "Chinatown" (for a second time, each) within the past month. She's really something in "Network," though; I think it beats those other two performances by a landslide. She's gorgeous, robotic, driven, heartless and completely believable. She's raving, while having sex (!), about network television series ideas such as "the Mao Tse-Tung hour" featuring acts of terrorism by radical left-wing militants. The moment when William Holden tells her he can still feel emotions, he's got to leave her, she's nothing but a humanoid? Unforgettable. It feels so, so...True. So much like everybody I see around me all the time. What has television done to us?

Interiors and Cassandra's Dream

Looking at the poles of Woody Allen's career is unsettling. At least, it is for Woody Allen fans. "Annie Hall" is one of my all-time favorite movies (as it is for millions of people -- it's a classic), and "Hannah and Her Sisters" is a film I never get tired of watching! Even "Melinda and Melinda" was pretty entertaining. So what the heck happened with "Cassandra's Dream?" This is a pretty standard Allen theme (cf. "Crimes and Misdemeanors," or "Match Point") -- it's basically about murder and guilt (or the lack thereof). We're supposed to see characters so changed (or not) by what they've done that it forces us to reflect on the great existential meaning of life, and so on.... Yet Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell) are never really in our hearts to begin with, even before they take a life. Ian has absolutely no interesting qualities. So he likes a girl and wants to get away from it all. Big whoop. Who is he, as a person? Who is this Ian guy? His brother Terry's mildly more interesting but in a cliched way -- he's got a gambling problem. OK, and? They're such boring characters in fact, it doesn't seem surprising when they decide to commit murder. Why? Because they don't seem like real people. (And these are not totally untalented actors or anything. Witness Ewan McGregor in "Young Adam!" Or "Trainspotting.") So it doesn't seem like that big a deal what these two guys are doing -- I'm sitting there thinking, just another variation on the standard, but noticeably this time it doesn't call into question any existential truths, nor make me think about the value of life. Could it be that I'm just getting tired of Woody Allen? Have I seen the same plot too many times? Or is it over for him, has he "lost it"? One looks for a career trajectory...

So I also watched "Interiors" - it's not like any of the others. It's not about romantic relationships and it's not about murder. It's one of his earliest films, deeply psychological, and not funny at all (I don't think there's a single moment of comedy in it). It's not about New York, and doesn't use any music. It's different. However. Turns out, I didn't like this film either. It was boring! It consisted of one dreary, weary, life-is-weighing-us-down moment after another... It's supposed to be about a family in crisis, but if I don't care about the characters (the family members), how can I care about the family? And each of the sisters was more boring than the next. I could've taken a snooze while the film was on, and opened my eyes and not missed a thing. Lots of dark, dark shots where you can't see what's going on, anyway.

Also, lots of unfinished business. Did one sister's husband rape (or molest) her sister? (I thought I saw that, but it was so dark I couldn't tell.) What happened there? And what about Michael (Sam Waterston)? He opens the movie; he seems to be an important character - he has a very revealing dialogue with the mother and apparently loves one of the sisters - but he disappears entirely in the final sequences. What happened to him? Where did he go?

So one is forced to ask oneself if Woody Allen was ever that good? Maybe "Annie Hall" was just a fluke? Maybe the only reason I love "Hannah and Her Sisters" is the music? (Count Basie and the like)? It's unsettling.

Delirious

Wow, that movie was slow to get going. Sloooooooooooooow.

The only thing that's wrong with this script is the timing of it. Which is, of course, everything.

Ach, it's such a bummer because there were so many things I liked about it!

It takes a long time to get into the characters (and consequently, a long time before the viewer cares about them. After 19 minutes I was about ready to turn off the movie for lack of interest in the characters). Then, once you do start getting to know them it takes a long time for a major plot point to occur (so now we know who they are, but is anything going to happen in this movie?). Then, after quite a few good scenes where the action picks up and we're finally getting involved in the story, there's this weird lull, a slow-down accompanied by some strange tangential filler material. Calm before the storm? Nope. Instead we get a bizarre character twist that feels like we're suddenly watching a different movie.

I guess that means there are two big flaws in the script. One, the timing (pacing) is all wrong. Two, our main character turns into someone else after we've invested a lot of time getting to know him.

Steve Buscemi has appeared in a lot of great movies (Reservoir Dogs, Barton Fink, Fargo) and quite a few terrible ones. Unfortunately "Delirious" goes in the terrible category - but it's not Buscemi's fault! It's all about the script. Buscemi makes us feel weird emotions. That's what he's great at. We can look at him and think, 'Man, you're a weirdo' or even 'You're creepy, dude!' and still be able to relate. He does it again quite skillfully here. He plays a guy who wanted to be a photojournalist and wound up being a paparazzo. He obviously inflates the importance of his work in order to make himself feel better about it. He's got a precarious hold on self-esteem. The smallest insult makes him crumble into misery. Buscemi does a beautiful job making us sympathize with someone who's extremely unlikeable.

Thing is, this character is pathetic in the original sense of the word. Inspiring pathos. So why would he turn psycho killer in the end? Of course he doesn't, really, turn psycho killer (thank goodness). But why does the movie try to make us believe that he would? Why, why, why?

All along the movie is about a friendship. Well, it's also about obsession with celebrity, and feelings of self-worth, and whether or not fame and success are the only thing that will make these characters feel OK about themselves. But it's a friendship. For the first time in his life, Les (Buscemi's character) feels like he's gotten himself a friend, a companion. He's got someone who makes him feel good about himself -- even his dubious career. And when that guy turns out to have a heart, actually caring about celebrities as people, we don't blame him for wanting to turn away from the paparazzo lifestyle. The sad thing is we've come to care about Les, and we don't want to see him abandoned. There's a poignant scene where Les is in a bathroom trying to compose himself so that he can speak articulately to his idol Elvis Costello. This is the Les we know and love.

This is the heart of the movie. His friend will move on without him, precisely because he doesn't have Les's insecurities. This is the story of Les's life. It's realistic. It's human. So why, why, why did someone decide that, after a long lull, Les was going to go psycho killer? Sure, he doesn't actually pull it off, but I'd swear the last sequence belonged to another movie altogether - not the one I was patiently watching, and finally beginning to enjoy. Oh, well.