Category Archives: Gorgeous George Clooney

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (106-91)

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Longtime readers will know that I’m a fiend for lists the way Sonny Crockett is a fiend for mojitos. Don’t believe me? Check out this blurry video:

My Best of 2009 movie list has been percolating for a while now, with only a few contenders for best or worst film to come before I shut things down at the end of December (oh yes, I won’t stop watching until I’m sure I have it right). Meanwhile, even though I’m uncomfortable with the idea of this decade being 1999-2009, I’ve been pondering my own best of the decade list. This should be something to be excited about, and yet until last week I just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. When I search my soul I come to the uncomfortable but inescapable conclusion that it’s because any list I would come up with would both be horribly incomplete and would betray my populist taste. What makes me more uncomfortable than that is realising that such an admission makes me uncomfortable at all.

Any list I could make for this decade is already off to a bad start when I admit that I’ve yet to see many of the best reviewed and most beloved movies of recent times. The gaps in my viewing history include Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, and anything by Wong Kar Wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or the Dardennes. I’ve also only seen a couple of (terrific) movies by Claire Denis and a single, memorable one by Michael Haneke. Some film buff I am. This short list is merely the tip of the iceberg. According to this list, I might as well not consider myself a film lover at all, as I’m not looking for movie excellence in the right places (though the entire list is invalidated by the praise for Woody Allen’s technically disastrous and intellectually vapid Cassandra’s Dream: surely one of the ten worst films of the decade).

All of that shame over my taste is wrapped up in feelings of mortification over class and intellectualism and authenticity and so many other things. I know that none of it is important but the expression of some kind of discernment in my opinion helps to legitimise my amateur film criticism, something I take very seriously even when I talk about things that readers might consider beneath contempt (my defence of Michael Bay, for instance, or my enthusiasm for The Dark Knight). Therefore it scares me to openly admit that I’m a sucker for a well-choreographed action scene with some pretty explosions included. No one wants to admit to enjoying those movies without losing their credibility, so why should I be the one to stick my neck out?

Maybe it’s time to get over those silly fears and say it loud: I’m a fan of populist cinema. Yes, I can appreciate works of cinematic art on many levels, though perhaps I might have greater difficulty expressing that appreciation or placing those works in context with works by other artists. However, when I talk about how much I love Joel Silver movies of the 80s and 90s, or Bruckheimer’s output in the late 90s to the current day, I’m on firmer ground. Perhaps this is why Shades of Caruso concentrates on those movies: it’s safer to talk about the joy I get from seeing a movie by the Wachowski Siblings than it is to attempt to unpick the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Any list I would make for the past decade would skew heavily towards populist movies, partially because most of the movies I’ve seen were major releases by Western writers and directors, but also because these are the movies that speak directly to me.

It was upon staring at that shame, and the shame I feel for having that shame, that I said bollocks to it and compiled this list. I hereby reject that shame, expel it from my soul, and embrace the movies that filled my soul with joy or heart-ache. The construction of this list is helped by the clear cut-off point in my past: 1999 was the year I moved out of my hometown for the second time and headed to London, where I found enough time and opportunity to attend more movies. As a result my enthusiasm increased, until I had no choice but to start a blog to use as a pressure valve for this energy. I’ve seen hundreds of movies in that time, and so I expect this list to be incomplete and filled with egregious misses, plus some movies have been missed off (Pan’s Labyrinth) or put low on the list (No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood) because I’ve only seen them once. I’ll need to revisit them with a clear head, free of hype, to do them justice.

One more caveat: I’ve not included films from this year. I know, this seems to make the whole process pointless, but I like to have at least a little gap between seeing a movie and putting it in a list this big. The End-Of-Year lists are made with the proviso that I understand how my opinion will change over time, and watching films right up until Dec 31st means I will be cramming in movies even though my opinion of them has yet to settle. Who knows whether time will be kind to these movies or not. I’ve certainly been surprised with how some movies I initially loved have dropped out of my favour, and others that I enjoyed well enough on first viewing are not breaking into the top fifty. For the record, at least three from my forthcoming 2009 list would definitely qualify for inclusion here, but I don’t want to add them now as the year has yet to finish, and I’m hoping two or three more will qualify. Perhaps when I’ve finished compiling my 2009 lists, I will write an addendum explaining where they would go in this list.

And so, here is the first part of my list of the best 106 movies of the period 1999-2008. Why 106? Because I just couldn’t leave the last six movies off without writing a little bit about them, as I enjoyed them greatly and felt they would never in a million years get any list love otherwise. As this post has already run on, I’ll only list the first 16 here, and the next 90 films will be revealed as the week progresses. Yes yes, there are simpler ways of doing this, but anyone who knows me will understand that when there is an easy way and a hard way to do anything, I will ignore both and then do something completely self-indulgent that makes a mockery of my original goal. Just play along. I’ve kept my explanations for why I love these movies as short as I can. I hope I’ve lauded a secret favourite of yours, dear reader, one that has been snubbed by every critic in the land.

Honorary Bad Movie Inclusion — The Room

It is quite simply the worst movie ever made, but its rewatch value, its quotability, and the fearless depiction of the dreadful inner life of its emotionally immature writer and director make it almost infinitely fascinating. Its inclusion here is no reflection of its quality, but of the hold it has over anyone who watches it. It’s a true curio.

106. Avalon

After leaving a screening of Avalon, my viewing companion commented that there is good boring and bad boring, and this was a perfect example of the former. Starkly beautiful and glacially paced, Mamoru Oshii’s ode to the power of gaming predicts a future where our desire to transcend our mundane world will drive us to abandon it.

105. Kung Fu Hustle

What made me love Stephen Chow’s madcap martial arts comedy wasn’t the expertly choreographed actions scenes, great though they were. Neither was it the broad humour, though I enjoyed that too. The best thing about it was how the wacky tone morphed into effective dramatic energy. At first you laugh at the caricatures, but by the final act you fear for their safety.

104. The Mothman Prophecies

Poorly marketed as a bog-standard X-Files-esque alien abduction flick, this dread-soaked thriller is more interested in dramatising our insignificance in the face of supernatural forces that move us around like game pieces. Strong performances and meticulous direction from Mark Pellington help to ground the potentially silly project.

103. Moulin Rouge

At his worst, Baz Luhrmann is a vulgar artiste who has zero impulse control, but when his approach works, it can wrench your heart open. This fearlessly sincere musical is the most successful example of the Luhrman effect. Though many have resisted its garish onslaught, my cynicism melted twenty minutes in and stayed that way.

102. The Rundown (aka Welcome To The Jungle)

What should have been the gateway drug to the paradise that is Loving The Rock instead faltered at the box office, but who cares? For its sheer exuberance and demented asides — not to mention a totally hatstand performance by Christopher Walken — this Midnight Sprint shall be remembered and adored.

101. Solaris

Though Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Stanislav Lem’s SF classic fails to capture the essence of that novel (as does the previous version by Andrei Tarkovsky), the result explores equally interesting philosophical questions. Clooney excels as a bereaved astronaut forced to confront living memories of his dead wife, a celestial manifestation distorted by his yearning and twisted perceptions of reality.

100. Mushishi

Katsuhiro Otomo’s live-action adaptation of Yuki Urushibara’s manga is a curious beast. Though overlong, the tale of Mushi master Ginko’s journey through a polluted and hostile pastoral land is a feast for the eyes. The gloomy atmospherics and cascade of ideas more than make up for any flaws.

99. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Kevin Smith’s low-budget comedies often fail to fly thanks to their self-imposed parochial restrictions. His ambitious and controversial religious satire Dogma was an improvement upon those early movies but this self-lacerating road-movie was the one that really worked, and well enough to finally make me appreciate his scatological shtick.

98. I Heart Huckabees

It achieved an awful notoriety as the movie where director David O. Russell lost his mind on set and bollocked Lily Tomlin, but I Heart Huckabees was also a disorienting blend of philosophy and Dada-esque nonsense, often incomprehensible but almost always entertaining. However, unlike many chaotic cult movies (ahem, Richard Kelly), this actually made sense if you unfocused your brain while watching.

97. Shanghai Knights

Shanghai Noon was fun, and the pairing of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson was more successful than the tiresome team-up of Chan and Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour movies. The London-set sequel was a massive improvement, mostly because helmer David Dobkin was the only US director who seemed willing to spend time with Chan to create fights almost as complex and funny as his classic Hong Kong work.

96. Michael Clayton

Clooney again in full force, this time as a corporate fixer who gets messed around once too often. What could have been a rote corporate thriller instead becomes a fascinating character study, one where terrible decisions are made in good faith, and good decisions happen for the wrong reasons. It also propelled Tilda Swinton into stardom: for this I am eternally grateful.

95. Mulholland Drive

Is it poor form to admit that upon first viewing I didn’t understand anything about David Lynch’s tinsel-town nightmare? All that I knew was that the final scene was almost unwatchably terrifying. Days later, the mood of dread still lingered. That residual horror — and Naomi Watts’ excellent star-making performance — is enough to justify inclusion on this list.

94. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Easy to forget how big an impact this movie had on first release. Even though the final installment of the trilogy ripped all of the fun from the franchise, the first is still a near-perfect swashbuckler. The first appearance of Captain Jack Sparrow is a contender for Best Entrance of the Decade.

93. The Prestige

Initially the blatantly obvious “twist” at the end of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation soured an experience that had been extremely pleasurable. Upon repeated viewings, it becomes apparent that the Transported Man trick is not the point of the movie. Instead, Nolan is more interested in painting a picture of a man driven to unthinkable acts because of his thirst for revenge. Compared to dreadful fallout of that psychological damage, magic is nothing.

92. The Chronicles of Riddick

Many choose to focus on the flaws and hubris of David Twohy’s Space-Conan-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings hybrid, but that occasionally inspired vision – and that amazing twist ending — are enough to justify the entire ambitious, galaxy-hopping project. Another film where the cult grows every year, with the prospect of a continuation of the saga now tantalisingly close.

91. eXistenZ

Arriving between the reality-warping brain food of Alex Proyas’ Dark City and The Wachowski’s Matrix, Cronenberg’s only self-scripted film of the decade was greeted with an initial burst of excitement and then seemed to be forgotten. A shame. It’s his most playful movie since Naked Lunch, skipping gleefully between levels of reality and throwing in traditionally unpleasant body horror with abandon.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Keep checking back to see more updates as the week progresses.

Announcing The Return of the Full-On Cage Experience

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Recently I defended Michael Bay (while simultaneously expressing how odious his movies can be), and now I rush to the defense of another man used as a lazy punchline to a billion deeply unfunny jokes about bad cinema: the acting colossus called Nicolas Cage. As with Bay, Cage is treated like a cautionary tale about how that vile, Chthonic monolith called Hollywood can drive people insane with greed, how talented individuals can lose their way and begin a descent from making art to making dross. He is accused of sleepwalking through films, cashing checks, appearing in unworthy crowd-pleasing dreck, and working with anti-cinematic infidels. His personal life is raked over (he keeps impulsively marrying women! He calls his kid a silly name! He buys too much crap!), his eccentricities treated as signs of mental illness, and his success used as example number two in the case against modern culture (example one being the success of Bay). Only Ben Affleck is treated with less respect, a fact that I intend to address in a future post where I defend him too. (I’m serious about that. Affleck is awesome.)

There are millions who seem to love to take a short-cut in thinking and just refer to Cage as a has-been with no understanding of what a joke he has become, though Cage’s most famous critic has been Sean Penn, the former friend who once told the New York Times, “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he’s more like a…performer”. This was said around the time that Cage appeared in two Bruckheimer productions — The Rock and Con Air — which seems to be the one thing an artist can do that will sink his credibility. Why did Penn single out Cage for that and not Cage’s co-stars Ed Harris, or Sean Connery, or John Cusack, or John Malkovich? They’re respected actors who have won awards and are considered to be fine actors, but Cage falls into the line of fire for moving from carefully considered character pieces like Leaving Las Vegas to action movies, three of which he did in a row (the third being the classic John Woo SF actioner Face/Off). His wildly broad performances in those movies were almost certainly a factor, but then he has always given broad performances, within which lie subtle moments (see also Wild At Heart, Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc.). They’re entertaining displays of eye-rolling crowd-pleasing acting pyrotechnics, but there’s a soul there too. This is what I think of as getting The Full-On Cage Experience, with madness and soulfulness tied together. Penn could never pull off anything like that. When he mugs, he ends up wrecking the movie.

By all that’s holy and unholy, how much better was Penn in Milk, or Dead Man Walking (incidentally, that’s one of my favourite screen performances of all time)? It’s not even a fair competition. Besides, this accusation, insinuating that Cage is no longer an actor, is rich coming from someone who appeared in I Am Sam. I’ll take an entertaining and unpretentious actor having fun playing a demonic avenger with a flaming skull than some humourless chide wasting his talent on Oscar-baiting bullshit like that any day of the week. Sadly, Penn’s not the only one who thinks Cage has pissed his talent away. In this little essay, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman compares Cage to Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, which is prescient considering Cage’s current tax woes, but while Snipes has descended into Direct-To-DVD hell, Cage is still working on big-budget movies and smaller curios, still attracting the viewing public, and still cranking out performances that are — at best — thrilling, and — at worst — merely entertaining.

The one argument that genuinely annoys me is the one where Cage is cranking out piss-poor, lazy performances since his last truly astonishing performance in Jonze and Kaufman’s Adaptation. I’ve often said that I think his work in that (along with his work in Leaving Las Vegas and Raising Arizona) deserves a coveted Shades of Caruso Free Pass…

freepass

…but of all the movies he has made since, only three performances really disappointed me: his work as Benjamin Gates in the first National Treasure movie, where he seemed awfully tired; his creepy performance in Next, the empty action thriller adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s clever short story; and his catatonic turn as a greasy-haired loser assassin in the disastrous remake of Bangkok Dangerous, which I suspect he took so he could get a holiday in Thailand. That last one really did give me cause for concern, but Gleiberman likes to make out that Cage is regularly signing on for “grade-Z genre schlockers”, which apparently include Ghost Rider and The Wicker Man. Neither of them are good movies, but they were not developed as low-budget cash-ins. Ghost Rider was obviously meant to be a big comic book adaptation, with a pretty good cast and a $110m budget, and even if it was absolutely dire, it was made with love by fans of the character, of which Cage is one.

The Wicker Man is a dumb-ass movie by any standards, but it’s made by Neil LaBute, who was once a promising director. He could have turned in a thoughtless remake of the excellent original (which would fit under Gleiberman’s umbrella of “genre schlocker”) but instead made something personal, for better or worse. For all its faults it’s obviously of a part with his other movies, dealing with his favourite themes of misanthropy, deceit, misogyny, fear of opening up to others, and gynophobia. I’ve occasionally argued that The Wicker Man is a satire on male fear of impotence and castration, a paranoid comical fantasy about a scheming cabal of exaggerated feminist ballbreakers who are out to destroy the penis, turning all men into drones and semen-donors whose sexuality is merely a sacrifice of power to the almighty womb in order to replenish the earth with children.

Sadly, even if this was LaBute’s intention — and even if Cage was in on this project for that reason alone — it’s still ridiculous and poorly made and filled with wonderfully camp moments. Cage maintains that the comedic aspects of the movie were not lost on him. In an interview with Spike Jonze, Drew McWeeny discusses meeting Cage, and Jonze is full of praise:

Jonze: I love [Cage]. We had the best time working together. He really works and focuses.
McWeeny: His publicist was a little wary of me being there, I guess, because he doesn’t do a lot of press and he doesn’t allow press around a lot, but he really was very accessible once I’d been there for a few days, and he kind of warmed up to me. And he was really just fascinating. I loved chatting with him about stuff.
Jonze: Totally chill.
McWeeny: Yeah. And I think far more self-aware than most people think. Like I think some people think Nic is in this vacuum and doesn’t realize how crazy some of his performances are. I got the feeling he was totally aware of how people perceive things. We were talking about THE WICKER MAN, and he was like, “How do people call that an unintentional comedy? I’m in a bear suit kicking Lelee Sobieski in the throat. I know it’s funny.”
Jonze: He just takes it so seriously that nobody knows how to take him. Like PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, I was like, “What is that?” Like I was 15 so I didn’t really know.
McWeeny: I just love how you can always count on him to push things further, like VAMPIRE’S KISS. He ate a roach, man.
Jonze: And also just the insanity of that performance, just the balls-out fearlessness.

Is it enough that Cage is aware of the ridiculousness of the movies he is appearing in? For me it is. I strongly suspect Cage is the most easily bored person in the world, and unfortunately that is paired with the ability to get work in movies that pay millions of dollars for him to spend on cars and comics and castles. Some of the films he has been in lately are truly awful, and I would never argue that they weren’t. Neverthless, I watch them for those flashes of manic commitment from Cage — The Partial Cage Experience — that delight me so. Are they valid acting choices, or is he merely trying to entertain himself while he trudges through formulaic populist bilge? As far as I’m concerned, even if he’s merely trying to entertain himself, he succeeding in entertaining me, and surely that’s what counts.

The only other popular actors that delight me as much are Clooney (who can do pathos and comedy equally well), Streep (who is always the best thing about everything she has ever been in), and maybe Jeff Bridges. Even those fine actors have not given me as much pleasure as Cage does, even when you forget about his early, golden years and concentrate on this bizarre stretch of poor movies. Since Adaptation we’ve had the insanity of Not The Bees…

…a literally hysterical fiery transformation…

…a Shout-Off with Rose Byrne (who is utterly overmatched, despite her invention of the word “chuldren”)…

…a run in with an obnoxious know-it-all child (the best part of which is how he treats the kid like an adult for most of the scene)…

…and a frustrating teaser of what could be his finest hour, if ever Rob Zombie got the money to make it…

His willingness to make fun of himself is the thing that keeps his crazy public and professional persona viable, and though many of his actions seem completely deranged, I honestly believe he’s playing a trick on us. Can someone who makes a series of adverts like these really be unintentionally weird?

(N.B. Anyone who has a sense of humour about themselves gets a break from me. Even the reportedly tyrannical and insensitive director Michael Bay gets points for playing up to his image with this commercial for Verizon:)

I’m a fully paid up Cage fan. For entertainment value, he can’t be beat. To see a person with such intelligence, quirkiness, restlessness, fearlessness, and energy do his thing in such big-screen movies is a rare thrill. If I squint I can see why Cage is now considered a hack by critics and film-watchers, because it’s easy to confuse being in a terrible movie and actually being terrible, but I worry that maybe people are also turned off by his intensity and his allegiance to the weird. The odd soporific performance aside, perhaps what baffles people the most is seeing him devote so much energy to projects that they feel don’t deserve it. Personally, I think that’s admirable. He’s getting paid enough, after all. Dance, you fucking monkey! Dance for your millions!

And yet even though I revel in his passionate and unpredictable work in crud, I’ve become concerned that we would never get another performance out of Cage that is as electrifying as his best work (disclaimer: I’ve not seen Lord of War or The Weather Man, and some have said he gives solid, rounded performances in both). Once upon a time he would work with Lynch and Scorsese, and the performances he gave were over-the-top yet grounded in some kind of emotional profundity, but lately those performances — while entertaining, memorable, and stronger than popular wisdom would have you believe — are lacking that extra fire. Well, I’m happy to report the return of The Full-On Cage Experience, as he takes on the task of being the 21st Century Klaus Kinski. More on that tomorrow, when I review Werner Herzog’s excellent Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

The Wahlberg Awards – Michael Clayton

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Ostensibly a run-of-the-mill corporate thriller, with the morality of beat-down corporate lackeys compromised by fealty to the faceless shareholder and terrible things done to the environment in the name of profit, Michael Clayton is lifted above the other movies in this sub-genre not only by the excellent performances of everyone involved (especially Gorgeous George, Tilda Swinton, the much-missed Sydney Pollack, and Tom Wilkinson), but by Tony Gilroy’s beautiful script, concentrating more on the motivations and fears of the players in the game than on the game itself. Even if it’s a story we’ve seen told before, Gilroy’s attention to character detail transforms the movie into something more than its parts, allowing us to use our knowledge of the sub-genre’s ins and outs as a subconscious baseline while layers of emotional meaning are piled on top. Plus, we get a great WTF expression from Gorgeous George Clooney, and as a result wins a Wahlberg Award for Best Response To Having Your Car Blown Up By Inept Assassins Hired By An Academy Award Winning Superlady Who Should Win Awards On A Regular Basis.










I loved how Clayton is kicked about through the whole movie to such an extent that at the end he does the right thing not because it is the right thing to do, but because he’s so pissed off he wants to make someone pay, and the fact that the person who ordered the hit on him is also a total craven weakling he can push around makes it even better (at least, that’s one reading of his motivation; the film invites multiple different interpretations). There’s barely any nobility in the entire movie (for example, Tom Wilkinson’s character only does the right thing because he’s off his meds and fancies the girl who was in Studio 60), and yet it’s still satisfying at the end when he gets his (wo)man. The final shot, of Clayton in the back of a cab, just pondering his life, is one of my favourite final shots of recent years.

Man, when I saw this I just kinda liked it, but the more I think about it, the more I love it. Canyon is cleverly using my fascination with Tony Gilroy to lobby for a Chez Canyonneck screening of The Cutting Edge, a film I’ve avoided not because it’s about a subject I have no interest in, but because it was directed by Starsky, and the only other film by him I’ve seen (The Running Man, obviously) didn’t exactly light my fire. Plus, Moira Kelly is lemon juice on a split lip. Figuratively speaking.

Ironically, Gilroy’s next directorial venture, Duplicity, stars Julia Roberts, who makes Canyon’s brain pulsate with intense dislike, so there’s a good chance she will duplicate my Gilroy-project apathy. It sounds mighty good to me, though, featuring as it does Hunky Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti (a Shoot ‘Em Up reunion!), Billy Bob Thornton, and Tom Wilkinson, now happily back in our good graces following his terrific performance in HBO’s Recount, which made us momentarily forget the debacle that was his disastrous appearance in Cassandra’s Dream. Sadly, no role for Tilda, though. The Tilda Swinton Fanclub is very angry about this turn of events!

RIP Tootsie’s Agent / Michael Clayton’s Boss

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A little while ago Canyon and I were discussing Sydney Pollack, and if I recall correctly I went on at length about a documentary I had seen broadcast on BBC2 (it might have been an installment of Naked Hollywood, though that doesn’t sound quite right). Sydney Pollack was interviewed about his directorial method, along with Joe Dante and John Sayles. I told Canyon about how I had come away from it with far more respect for Dante and Sayles, as the former was hilarious and unpretentious, and the latter was stoic even while seemingly exhausted by his attempts to create difficult and politically distinct movies outside a studio system that would never let his movies get released. They were inspiring, talking about low-budget filmmaking and how hard it was to get funding, but Pollack seemed to be a bad fit for that show, being part of the system that Dante and Sayles had railed against.


It was weird hearing the other two talk about their troubles while Pollack chatted amiably about how he had edited scenes in Havana, the boring, bloated, and pricey Robert Redford vehicle he had been working on at the time, seemingly taking for granted that he was in a position to make films that were expensive award-baiting prestige projects while other artists were struggling to get films made to the extent that Dante had to don scuba-diving gear for a shot in Piranha even though he had had no training with it. I came away thinking ill of Pollack.

It wasn’t really fair of me to do that, and I feel pretty crappy for not giving him the benefit of the doubt already, and even more so now that he has sadly passed away. I doubted him for not having the political commitment of John Sayles, but even if I never could understand why something as slick and empty as Havana needed to be made, this is the guy who directed Three Days of the Condor, one of my favourite thrillers, which has a paranoid plot that, when I rewatched it recently, amazed me with its accidental topicality (CIA ineptitude, oil wars, assassinations, etc.). He also directed Absence of Malice, a terrific drama about journalistic ethics. I could only have thought of him as being a glossy Hollywood director if I decided to ignore the more challenging films in his filmography, instead focusing on his bland dramas, like Random Hearts and Sabrina.


That said, as a director I sometimes found his choices perplexing. Why make Havana? Why remake Sabrina? Why bother adapting The Firm? I remember the film critic for The Mirror once referring to that movie as “Two hours of Tom Cruise running towards the camera while looking worried”, which sums it up perfectly. Also, why did he get Dave Grusin to do the soundtrack? It needed more than tinkly pianos to create tension in that most flaccid and uninvolving of legal dramas (I place the blame at John Grisham’s feet, not Pollack’s. He did his best with some dreadful material). It was all very peculiar.

Perhaps those movies are other reasons why I had my silly preconceptions, but I should have been more forgiving. While he was directing movies that seemed worlds away from his early, challenging work (e.g. Jeremiah Johnson, Castle Keep, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They), he was also one of Hollywood’s most interesting producers. Just this week HBO showed Recount, the dramatisation of the theft of an entire country (figuratively speaking) that he had produced. In recent years he had teamed up with Anthony Minghella to produce a series of interesting (or potentially interesting) films; Minghella’s own post-English Patient movies, Philip Noyce’s Catch A Fire and The Quiet American, Kenneth Lonergan’s forthcoming Margaret, and Tom Tykwer’s Heaven, not to mention his solo work on Ira Sachs’ Forty Shades of Blue and George Clooney’s Leatherheads. His support for outsider movies made within the studio system (or rather their “independent” production houses) was commendable. How many of these unorthodox projects would have been made without his clout behind them?


Even while being foolishly dismissive of his fascinating work as a producer, I still derived pleasure from his acting work, especially when playing seemingly approachable authority figures who have a sinister heart, as in Eyes Wide Shut, Changing Lanes, and Michael Clayton. As shown in those movies, his forte was the role of the pragmatic, seemingly down-to-earth managerial type who would eventually stab you in the front and then passionately explain why he was in no way responsible for your death, blaming it instead on your inability to understand the corporate line. That said, my favourite performance is from his most entertaining movie, Tootsie, which is one of those movies I would include on my “Perfect” list. Here is his funniest moment, tearing a strip off pre-drag Dustin Hoffman.

It’s a testament to his gift for comedy that he had several guest roles on sitcoms to his name. So what am I saying here? That I feel really really bad for not giving the guy the benefit of the doubt while he was alive. Good director with a fascinating filmography, terrific and likeable actor, defender of offbeat “independent” cinema. It’s a shame I’m only just realising that now. RIP, Sydney Pollack. You shall be missed.

Things I learnt today (Oct 16th 2007)

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1. Michael Clayton opened in the US last Friday, and box office pundits are shocked and horrified to find that it failed to secure the number one spot. IMDb said:

Michael Clayton, which had been the odds-on favorite among movie pundits to win the weekend box-office crown, not only didn’t finish in first place — it didn’t even make third place, as studio estimates had initially indicated. Clayton, it turns out, earned $10.37 million, putting it slightly behind the crime drama We Own the Night, which took in $10.83 million. Equally surprising to some writers was that the film that did top the box office charts was the low-budget Why Did I Get Married, from writer-producer-director Tyler Perry. The film raked in $21.35 million, about twice the earnings of The Game Plan, which placed second with $11.04 million.

Really? This is surprising? I’m psyched that Gorgeous George is committed to making challenging, intelligent, adulty films (not counting Danny Ocean’s European Vacation and Danny Ocean and the Amazing Xeroxed Plot From Two Films Ago), and grateful to him for having that ambition, even when it doesn’t quite work out: Good Night, and Good Luck was a terrific hour of cinema with an extra pointless 20 minutes bolted onto it. Wow, making even the mildest criticism of Clooney makes me feel like I’m kicking a handsome and debonair puppy. I’m sorry, George! Good Night looked beautiful! And it was really well cast! Please don’t hate me! Anyway, Syriana was good enough for two films, so it evens up.

Sadly, his smart, liberal, humanist movies tend to make very little money, and even taking into account the often limited release, the audience for these films is large enough to make the odd small profit, but not big enough to make waves in the turbulent box office waters. Solaris only made $14,973,382 in the domestic market, and $30,002,758 overall. It would have to sell a shitload of DVDs to make up the rest of the budget. Syriana did a lot better, with a worldwide gross of $93,974,620, but it had an opening weekend of $11,737,143. Not earth-shattering. That said, it only opened on about 1500 screens, and Michael Clayton opened on 1000 screens more, but the fallacy is that the relative, small-scale success of his smart movies can be expanded when released on a larger scale remains.

I remember noticing this error years ago, when big and successful action movies (usually those produced by Joel Silver), would often gross around £100-120m, domestic box office. No matter what the budget, the final figure was often the same (and significantly less for the failures). No-brainer jokey action movies would often top out at the same number, but budgets were busted chasing a finite audience. Sure, there were variations from that; Lethal Weapon 2, 3 and 4 could top that (by about $30m), as could the Die Hard movies, and Terminator 2 broke that barrier and then some, but they had a wider appeal. Bog-standard action movies had a fixed audience, and trying to get bigger box office by spending more money was foolish.


You had to appeal to people outside that box to do it. It wasn’t just spectacle that made Terminator 2 such a hit; it was the message of hope within it (and the CGI, which drew oohs and ahhs of amazement from the audience when I saw it. Ah, the 90s!). In today’s money, the same holds true; Bad Boys II and The Rock, for example, both stopped at about $140m, and Con Air and Gone In Sixty Seconds made $100m each. In the end they’re profitable, but the larger the budget, the smaller that profit. It’s science. Or maths. Whatever.

So yeah, putting Michael Clayton on more screens and pushing it with more publicity was not going to work. SmartClooney has a fanbase, and they came out this weekend, probably grateful for the release of something meatier than family comedies starring a wasted The Rock. But that’s the ceiling for these movies. So why did pundits miss this? And why the hell did they think the new Tyler Perry movie would make less money?


I know very very very little about these things, but right now that guy guarantees boffo box office (yeah, I went there). His films cost a few cents and make around $50-60m each time out. His opening weekends are between $20-30m. His last film opened bigger than this one, in fact, so why would this one not be a big hit? Did they really think the Tyler Perry bubble had burst? He’s not going anywhere any time soon. So anyway, I have learnt that box office pundits can often make terrible gaffes, and I have also learnt that the international gross of Diary of a Mad Black Woman was $19,104. I doubt the new film will be appearing in our local Vue any time soon. I’m sure the studio would love to up their take by releasing his films internationally, but I get the feeling they have no idea what the hell Perry’s appeal is, so how would they be able to market it? Best to just let it make the modest money it is, rather than admit his unusual shtick perplexes them. (Almost all of the figures here are from Box Office Mojo.)

2. I may love Institutionalised by Suicidal Tendencies (which I first heard on the stunning Repo Man soundtrack many years ago), but playing that shit on a plastic guitar while sleep-deprived like I did this morning can actually cause you to get so addled you might actually end up actually literally instititutionalised, for realsies. It may have snapped my brain right down the middle. Now all I can see when I close my eyes are the coloured dots of Guitar Hero II, relentlessly descending, forever falling, like day-glo blobs of concentrated hand-cramp juice dropping into my eyes. It’s a miracle I can type anything other than “Bzzzzt”, because of all the rhythm-game induced mind-static. But I cannot stop until I better my score. Is crack this addictive? I doubt it’s as entertaining.

3. Two reports on immigration were published yesterday, and while the left wing press focussed on the positive, the right wing press, predictably, concentrated on the negative. This is, of course, nothing new, but yesterday I found out that the reason the paper prints such skewed garbage is that Paul Dacre and his vile minions know for a fact that the core readership of the Mail is obsessed with Anti-Logic. This letter is, I promise you, absolutely real.


I have it on good authority that the majority of letters sent to the Mail offices are even more insane than the ones that make it into the paper, but this one must have slipped through. Oddly, there is no evidence of this mountain of work on the internet. Someone should tell this guy that he can publish his staggering, world-changing work on the internet, where it will be lauded and coveted for the rest of time. I mean, what did Einstein ever do for us, other than pull that funny face they keep putting on posters? Screw you, Einstein. Go back to the patent office and shuffle your papers. Did you ever make all of life’s intrinsic paradoxes perfectly rational? No, you made them worse! Overrated big-haired jerk.

4. ZOMG NEW LOST PHOTO!!!


What’s going on? What does it mean? Is that the cockpit of Oceanic 815? Desmond has resurfaced? How did they get so far into the island since the season 3 finale? Where’s Hurley and Jin? Is that writing above the windows of the plane? Why does the clapperboard guy look so pissed? Is he working for The Dharma Initiative? If not, why doesn’t he realise he’s a lucky son of a bitch to be working on the best show currently on TV, even though it’s not actually on TV right now? And what’s going to happen with new cast member Andrea “Rescue Me” Roth? She’s just been hired to play a therapist, according to TV Guide. I guess she’s situated off-island. If she was on the island she’d have been dealing with multiple daddy issues, which would be even less fun than being repeatedly slammed into the ground by Ol’ Smokey.

5. Viggo Mortensen is a fascinating son of a bitch, and I can’t wait to see Eastern Promises.

Mortensen plays a mobster working for a Russian gang in London, and to hone his portrayal he travelled to Moscow, St Petersburg and the mountain villages of the Urals.

He refused to take an interpreter, relying on gestures and his own facility for languages – he speaks Danish and Spanish fluently and can get by in four other languages.

“I know everyone was a little bit worried because I disappeared for two weeks,” he said. “They said I should have someone go with me into the underworld, but the whole point was not to get a filtered version of what Russians do and what they’re like.

“I just wanted to draw my own conclusions. I met a lot of people and talked to them. I met people who had experiences in prisons and understood more about street slang. They helped me tweak some of the dialogue.

“Then I found someone who had a car and he took me into the countryside and to these villages. There I saw how these mobsters looked at each other and how they lived. I also drank a lot of vodka.”

It was not until the last day of his trip that his cover was blown. “A little boy started staring at me, then he pointed and whispered, ‘Aragorn?’”

All this and his Amazing Flying Balls of Doom. Counting the days until it comes out.

6. The cook in the canteen where I work is the worst cook in the world. I ended up with a piece of peri-peri chicken that oozed blood when cut into, and after taking it back and having it cooked for a while longer (15 minutes), it had brown skin but pink flesh. I’m amazed I’m not doubled over in agony right now. A colleague bought some scrambled eggs, and they were off. Yesterday this guy made baguette halves with oily, droopy roast vegetables and nuclear-orange cheese. Just thinking about it is making me woozy. Time to start bringing sandwiches in again.

7. Studio 60 just arrived on UK terrestrial Channel 4, and I see that the oleaginous praise has continued. As we’ve said before, it’s not so much the praise that bothers us (everyone is, of course, entitled to their own opinion) [Hold on there -- the praise definitely bothers me, and if you like the show, your opinion is wrong -- Canyon], it’s the relentless carping that it failed because the audience (i.e. everyone who watches TV who isn’t a fan of the show) killed it. They mean you, if you’re not watching it. And if you are watching it, you’re not watching it enough! You should be transformed by it like someone rising from their wheelchair at Lourdes, and then you should badger all of your friends and families into watching it. If you’re not walking down the high street wearing a sandwich board showing a picture of Danny and Matt treating their womenfolk like teeny tiny toy people who should just damn well shut up and worship their glorious alpha male genitalia, then you are scum! SCUM!!! Much to our amusement/horror, we saw that Andrew Mueller was up to his old tricks at the weekend:

West Wing auteur Aaron Sorkin’s series set in the milieu of a late-night chat show is possibly the greatest example of a show out-clevering itself. As well as being a superior soap opera, an intelligent comedy and a brilliantly acted ensemble piece, Studio 60 functions as an insidious critique of a televisual culture in which anything intelligent is hunted down and killed by the agents of mediocrity – as Studio 60 indeed was, cancelled by its network inside its debut season. These first two episodes, which have finally landed on terrestrial, are a tantalizing hint of what’s to come.

If he thinks TV is so bad now, how about this 70s gem, from The Laurence Welk Show:

In comparison, I think we’re doing okay nowadays. Yes, there is a lot of crap on TV now, and networks are run by craven cowards with no understanding of counter-cultural ideas. We get that. However, there’s good stuff too. Someone please hand Mueller (and several other UK TV critics) a few boxsets. Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, Arrested Development, everything by Whedon. Then you have the shows on cable: Battlestar Galactica; The Daily Show; The Colbert Report; all of the shows on the HBO roster. There is a point to be made that there isn’t enough biting satire on US (or UK) TV, or enough investigative journalism, but it’s not like there is no important, worthy work on TV, and besides, Sorkin making obvious points in his risible Studio 60 sketches is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Plus, it was often as emptily jingoistic as a Fox News broadcast, which was either Sorkin speaking from the heart or an attempt to placate his network masters in order to get more “subversive” stuff into the show. Like Crazy Christians. So much for Sorkin’s supposed moral courage.

Mueller and his ilk are right; the medium that is TV has an enormous hole in it, and Studio 60 tried to fill it. We will always need intelligent daring comedy and brave satire. But Studio 60 was. not. that. show. Which is why it was such a painful, frustrating, upsetting failure. Dear God, I have to let this go or I’ll go crazy. It never seems to end!

ETA: I can’t stop watching that Laurence Welk clip. Flap those arms in the xenon-rich air like you and your robot helper just don’t care! Then kick, Bobby and Cissy! Kick! Kick! Spin! Flap! Kick! Interpretive brilliance. Why was Spielberg so eager to get an Oscar for all those years when this superb tribute was out there? That’s just ungrateful.

CSI: Miami Watch: "High Octane"

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We’ve fallen behind with CSI recaps already, with High Octane aired on UK’s five last week, and Darkroom airing last night, but luckily for us, the latter was very bland, except for the odd moment of deranged insanity. Gives me time to have a crack at the nutty jet-fuel intensive installment from two weeks ago. The opening scene is a classic of OTT editing, noise, and outlandish crime. Street racers having a drift race near one of Miami’s many marinas are coming up to the finish line, when one of them, a cocky son of a bitch, sticks his body out of his car’s sunroof and steers with his feet. Very dramatic, until his head is sheared clean off by a stream of lightbulbs going across the street. It’s wonderfully gruesome.

Even though it has all the hallmarks of a dumb stunt gone wrong, H knows better, and soon his team have to figure out whether he’s right or not. Those H hunches, you’ve gotta love ‘em. Well, either he is a precog a la Screaming Samantha Morton in Minority Report, or the crime rate in Miami is so out of control even human rights lawyers would recommend instigating martial law. Considering his 100% strike rate for appearing in front of the elevator at CSI HQ just as someone who needs to speak to him steps out, I’d say it’s the former. And when he’s finished solving crimes and filling bad guys full of lead, he goes home, puts on a skintight swimming costume, and sits in a bath of weird conductive goop. That’s why he’s so wrinkly now.

While inspecting the crime scene, Delko and Wolfe are approached by a documentarian who has been given permission to film our heroes. Perhaps it’s easier than setting up stunts for Candid Camera. The top hunky crimestoppers are non-plussed about this, especially Wolfe, even though he spent season 4 hanging out with Erica Sykes, a stereotypical journalist with zero scruples, so hungry for a headline that she would sell out her own grandmother to the cops and then film the arrest. So of course he then agrees to help the journalist out. Whuh? This plotline is dropped almost immediately, but not before he can tell Natalia about it and then bring up her former career as a mole. Again. Natalia wears two fierce things in this episode. One, the worst blouse ever. Two, this bitchface.

God, I hate Wolfe. After being a pissy little bitch to her, he goes off to interrogate someone who sells tyres for drift-racing cars. One of the weird things about this show is how it accidentally portrays everyone in Miami as being morally compromised. The guy who sells the tyres sells them to teenagers, something Wolfe picks up on immediately, and makes a big obnoxious point about it. While he’s talking to the evil tyre salesman he suddenly manifests Clooneyface. He does the thing where he swallows the latter half of his line and then stretches his neck upwards while pulling in his chin. You know the move I mean. Clooney does it all the time! He did it so often on ER it looked like he was addicted to eating really spicy burritos and had gas all the time.

Jonathan Togo, you may have worked with Clint Eastwood in Mystic River, but you are not, and never will be, even a billion quintillionth as cool as Gorgeous George. It’s that simple. His interrogation leads them to the organiser of the race, played by Samaire Armstrong, who stunk up several episodes of The O.C., getting in the way of Summer and Seth’s eternal true love yay! For this she gets no love from us. Calleigh interrogates her at CSI HQ, and even though Samaire’s character is probably responsible for the murder, the thing she does that pisses Calleigh off most of all is leaving her phone on vibrate on the desk and then getting pissy because she’s not allowed to answer it. This happens every time Calleigh interrogates her (about three times), and is a signifier of Samaire’s guilt. Anyone thoughtless enough to leave their phone on vibrate and then insist on answering it during a police investigation must be a murderer! This may sound like I’m joking, but I’m not. This is the way the show rolls. Coincidentally, the building used for the HQ external shots was used for the external Newport Group shots in The O.C. Probably because it’s all bendy and pretty.

After that Calleigh visits Delko, who has been tasked with fingerprinting every bottle of beer found at the race track. There are dozens, so he fits them on a rack in a smoke chamber. Boring enough, but there follows a gloriously stiff dialogue exchange between him and Calleigh that has to be seen to be believed.

Emily Procter’s hair is a lot better than her fake laugh, I have to say. Once the hilarity is over, the bottles bring up the prints of a young kid who gets pressured to give up names of everyone involved in the crime, but even Horatio’s patronising threats do nothing. Through some top detective work they find out the kid’s dad, who I shall refer to as Suspicious Dad, called the cops about the drift race, ostensibly to save his ass. Good work, Suspicious Dad. H is thrilled by this and patronises him a whole bunch about looking after his kid. H, how about you get some kids of your own and see how hard parenting is instead of judging all of Miami. Ass.

Through lots of really uninteresting police work, the team come to the conclusion that not only were a lot of the drift cars stolen and sold by a snotty young guy called Luke (there are only victims and hoodlums in CSI: Miami), the death was staged by Samaire Armstrong, using a radio controlled doohickey to trigger the shocks on the car to raise it 16 inches, thus bringing the poor guy’s head in line with the wire. Why did she do such a gruesome and ambitious thing? Was he cheating on her? Did he assault her years ago? Was he responsible for the death of one of her friends? No. She just thought footage of him having his head removed would increase awareness of the sport if she put the clip online. Damn you, YouTube! Is no one safe from your corrupting influence?!

Cut and dried, except that H has a hunch. He has no proof of any other crime being committed, but somehow he knows there’s something else going on. Perhaps it’s because there’s still 20 minutes left in the episode. He sends Delko and Wolfe to talk to the kid with the Suspicious Dad, thinking he’s involved with the radio controlled doohickey, and while they bicker between themselves in an incredibly unprofessional manner, a car bursts out of the garage behind them, with the hapless kid trapped inside!

Exciting! Turns out the car is being propelled by jet fuel, a fact illustrated by more whizzy special effects. As jet fuel is hard to come by, they realise someone is siphoning it off from, get this, high-pressure pipes that are situated five feet under the city. Jet fuel. Five feet underground. Hey everyone, let’s all move to Miami. It’s (potentially lethally) hott!

So who could be stealing $47000 worth of jet fuel? H and Tripp ponder this, and Tripp reels off a bunch of facts about how it couldn’t possibly be Suspicious Dad, even though he excavates pools and has been implicated by a witness. He’s so dumbfounded by the conflicting facts that he opts to wear this memorable face.

Inspiring. The cameras hold on him for so long it threw us totally. Ah, God bless you, you dumbass. Anyway, H doesn’t need evidence. He knows it’s Suspicious Dad as he dreamt it in his goop pool the night before. The rest of the team do a bunch of basic forensic work and find out that Luke is involved, and even worse, listens to Chamillionaire in his flash car! Why is it that, oftentimes, upon seein’ me rollin’, they are also, at the same time, hatin’? Only Chamillionaire knows. H tails Luke to an airfield, and there gets his first man.

That smile is a thing of beauty. During the arrest that implicates Luke with Suspicious Dad, H figures out that Suspicious Dad is not only stealing jet fuel, he’s using it to power a plane filled with cars stolen by Luke that he then sells internationally. And, worse than that, he’s a Bad Dad! H told him to look after his kid, but he actually doesn’t care about his kid at all, only phoning the police about the race to distract Miami Dade PD while he siphoned off literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of fuel. AND he’s transporting illegal goods while his son lies in hospital after driving out of his garage at a billion miles an hour. What a heartless bastard. Meanwhile, as H does his thing, Tripp goes into his fugue state again.

I’m beginning to think he needs help. They arrive at SD’s plane, and upon seeing all of the police, SD does a brilliant, “DAGNABBIT!” gesture of frustration that I would put on here if I could figure out how to stream to YouTube. H tells him off for being a bad parent (that seems to be a worse crime than anything else), and as he is taken away by police, the camera rises up in triumph. H gets every man. You can’t escape his vengeful, obnoxiously judgemental wrath.

High-Octane Stats:

Horatio’s Send-Off Into Credits:

Wolfe: “Well, if this was a stunt gone wrong, how come everyone took off?”
Horatio: ::puts on glasses:: “Because this…was not an accident.”
Roger Daltrey: “YEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!”

Ripped-Off Plot of the Week: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, The World Is Not Enough, Highlander II: The Quickening.

Horatio’s Most Patronising Line:

Luke the car thief: It’s business. I fix cars.
Horatio: You fix up stolen cars, Luke.

Number of Caruso Two-Steps: 5

Snottiest Behaviour From Wolfe: Ignoring Natalia’s friendly chit-chat about evidence so that he can bring up her past as a mole AGAIN, even though in season 4 Wolfe kept accidentally leaking information to the press. Ass-hat.

Most Ineptitude From Delko: A good week for Delko. He even managed to put out burning jet fuel with a bog-standard fire extinguisher. Minus points for wearing awful white shoes with his grey jacket and pants combo. Miami Vice was cancelled about 20 years ago, Delko, and that look is not coming back.