Category Archives: Michael Douglas

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (90-76)

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As I said in my previous post, this list has been kinda rushed, due to initial reservations about the project. This has meant that I’ve missed some great movies off, and now that I’m committed to doing the list, these movies have to remain excluded so that I don’t invalidate the previous part of the list. Oh, it’s all so confusing! I shall endeavour to cover those missed movies as I go along.

Actually, my decision to leave off Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s US remake The Ring is because I can never decide which version is my favourite. I go back and forth on this one a lot. Nakata is better at generating an atmosphere of dread, and was the guy who kickstarted the popularity of the J-Horror genre. Nevertheless, Verbinski’s version is stronger than it has any right to be — partially because Naomi Watts is so good in it — and his interpretation of the dreaded video and the effect it has on its victims is more unsettling. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. The first time you see a victim slumped inside a closet, it’ll put the fear of God into you, it’s so horrifying. Unable to decide which version should be included, I chickened out and didn’t put either in. Terrible cowardice, really. Consider both movies “included”, in a sub-category or in some list-tesseract or something.

Anyway, here are the next 15 films in the list. As before, some of these movies are a little low because I’ve only seen them once and never really got to grips with them the way other people have. As my experience of them is limited I cannot figure out if this is because I don’t like them as much as everyone else or my initial opinion was adversely affected by the chatter surrounding them. In time, they may move up or down, but for now, as this is a snapshot of my opinion now, this is where they stay. Again, there are no movies from 2009 on here. I need some distance from them to know if they would qualify. Even the year’s worth of leeway I’ve given myself is not enough. While compiling this list The Dark Knight (my favourite movie of 2009)  has jumped up and down the high end of the list several times. I won’t be able to make a firm decision on that for a while. And so, with those caveats, here are numbers 90-76.

90. Spartan

Before co-creating The Unit with Shawn Ryan, David Mamet made this, a clenched fist pretending to be a movie. Val Kilmer is brutally effective as a man doing a job no one wants him to do, spitting Mamet’s truncated, macho dialogue with withering and riveting intensity. A manly, manly movie.

89. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut

The TV show still cranks out occasional classic episodes (Red Sleigh Down, Cartoon Wars, Imaginationland), but the big screen expansion of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s satirical universe might still be its finest hour. Brilliantly making fun of censors, prudes, and warmongers, it even manages to give us some of the best showtunes of the decade.

88. Curse of the Golden Flower

Critics seemed baffled by the lack of martial arts action in Zhang Yimou’s courtly drama, but who needs it? There’s enough intrigue, betrayal, madness and riotous colour here to fuel a dozen movies. Just for Gong Li’s incredible performance, this movie demands reappraisal, and that’s before we get to the ninja action and Chow Yun-Fat in Furious-Anger-mode.

87. Syriana

It’s a toss-up between this and Traffic for inclusion on this list. Stephen Gaghan’s complex multi-strand exploration of how our demand for oil affects all our lives does have a weak sub-plot featuring Jeffrey Wright, but that’s better than the ill-judged Michael Douglas thread in Soderbergh’s movie. Both are great, but Syriana – with its thrilling final act – just edges it. (Consider Traffic no. 107.)

86. The Matrix Reloaded

The Wachowski Siblings managed to alienate the majority of their fans by attempting to expand the initial Matrix movie beyond its resonant but uncomplicated monomythic plot. Though the franchise ran out of steam in the third installment, for the length of this hallucinogenic movie it still seemed like they were telling the best story ever told. Plus, you know, Morpheus used a katana.

85. Hot Fuzz

Enormously entertaining on first viewing, Edgar Wright’s pitch-perfect homage to hyper-aggressive US cop movies gets better with every rewatch. The effort put into its intricate plotting is a joy to behold, and the casting could not be more impressive. A Who’s Who of British character actors having the time of their lives = film heaven.

84. Jindabyne

Taking the same starting point as one of the threads from Altman’s Short Cuts (Raymond Carver’s short story So Much Water So Close to Home), Ray Lawrence spins a tale of marital discord and touches on themes of racial and gender politics with a deft hand. Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney give two of their most complex performances.

83. Once

The most grounded, unspectacular musical ever made, John Carney’s tale of two musicians making music amid the urban isolation of Dublin won the hearts of audiences across the world. Its ambitions were slight, but Hansard and Irglová’s gorgeous music gave Once an emotional heft that dwarfed almost everything else released that year.

82. The Hunted

Before Bourne, there was this William Friedkin-helmed cat-and-mouse actioner, pared down to the bone in much the same way as Walter Hill’s action classics. Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro are near-silent killing machines destined to fight to the death, with all other considerations ignored. Easily Friedkin’s best film since The Exorcist.

81. The Orphanage

Conjuring the same atmosphere of impending dread as Robert Wise and Jack Clayton did with classic ghost movies The Haunting and The Innocents, Juan Antonio Bayona’s directorial debut managed to provide chilling scares and heartbreaking tragedy in equal measure.

80. The Constant Gardener

On the surface Fernando Meirelles’ environmental thriller was just another tale of corporate intrigue, but Rachel Weisz’s Oscar-winning performance — and Ralph Fiennes’ superb turn as her bereaved husband — turned it into something more interesting and melancholic: a meditation on how love can ruin a life once the object of adoration has gone.

79. [Rec]

Of all the camcorder horror movies of this decade, perhaps the most successful was Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s claustrophobic virus-zombie effort. Though less wide-ranging than Cloverfield, Blair Witch, or the thematically similar 28 Days/Years Later movies, it did one thing better than all of them: it was scary throughout, and utterly terrifying at the end.

78. No Country For Old Men

The Coens hewed so close to their source material that it would have been hard to mess it up, but even so, their direction was exemplary, conjuring up numerous exhausting setpieces and an iconic representation of chaotic evil from Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. It managed something you would think impossible: improving on the work of Cormac McCarthy.

77. There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson deserves plaudits for taking such overwhelming thematic material and boiling it down into a tale of how greed can ruin one man’s soul. What makes Daniel Day Lewis’ work as Daniel Plainview so special is not the pyrotechnics, but the hint that by the end of his life he is so lost that he doesn’t care. It’s as chilling as a horror movie plot.

76. The Darjeeling Limited

A trek across India by three estranged brothers tested the patience of many viewers, either by presenting a view of American obliviousness abroad that lacked necessary satirical pointers, or by relying on too many Andersonian tics. To this viewer, the jokes, the narrative gameplaying, and Robert Yeoman’s gorgeous photography, were enough.

Okay, that was a bit less overwrought. More to come, if WordPress will ever stop crashing. ::grumble grumble::

Stringer Bell and Sasha Fierce in: Futile Attraction

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In the 80s and 90s Michael Douglas was the go-to guy to play men harassed, used, abused and manipulated by women, as seen in the White-Men-Under-Attack trilogy of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure. After his screen avatar’s bad luck was purged by David Fincher in The Game his screen appearances have become sporadic. The next generation demands a new macho hero who can be hunted by the kinds of obsessive, dangerous women that only exist in movies. In Obsessed, the man attempting — and failing — to fill Douglas’ shoes is Idris Elba, who plays executive Derek Charles with a relentless and tiring intensity the movie doesn’t warrant. Happily married to his former assistant Sharon (Beyoncé Knowles), Charles is stalked at work by a temp assistant, Lisa (Ali Larter). At first she merely seems infatuated with Elba, but after he rebuffs a couple of aggressive approaches she becomes crazed, interpreting his rebuffs as evidence of his love for her, prompting her to insinuate herself into his life a la Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Jessica Walters in Play Misty For Me.

Those movies showed the male protagonist’s culpability, with the message being “Mess around, and you will suffer for it.” Here writer David Loughery and director Steve Shill seem to be saying “Guys, there are some crazy women out there, and they’ll fuck up your life for no reason.” This doesn’t even pass muster as a morality play. It’s just another movie stating that there is no such thing as the Other any more. No matter how well you live your life, people are going to hunt you down, drug you with Rohypnol, rub up against you while you are in a fugue state, and listlessly kidnap your child, though “relocate” seems to be a more accurate description for what she does, as the nefarious Lisa merely moves Derek and Sharon’s son from his crib to their car.

The worst that happens to Derek is that he is accused of having an affair. The evidence for this is entirely provided by Lisa, and yet despite the flimsy nature of it (for example, listing him as an emergency contact number, or writing about the imaginary affair in a diary), at least two women automatically believe he is in the wrong. In one of the stupider scenes of the year, a police detective (Christine Lahti) investigating a suicide attempt by Lisa interrogates Derek in the crowded waiting room of a hospital with Sharon sitting next to him. As the scene descends into incomprehensible histrionic chaos, we see Elba desperately trying to prove his innocence while both women irrationally dismiss his pleas. The movie seems to be saying that it just doesn’t pay to be honourable, because women will always distrust their man.

It’s tempting to think Obsessed is intentionally trying to trade in the most witless and offensive gender stereotypes possible, as some kind of poorly signposted satire on gender politics. The male characters (including Jerry O’Connell and Bruce McGill) are either flamboyant homosexuals mincing around the office or leering sexist pigs whose idea of small talk is to discuss how sexy women love to extort money from them with their feminine wiles. Still, at least gender politics are addressed, albeit ineptly. The potentially inflammatory racial implications of having the only black characters in the film threatened by a predatory and insane white woman are ignored altogether. Apparently, this was to avoid repeating the themes of Loughery’s previous movie Lakeview Terrace, which featured a racist black cop menacing a white family.

It quickly becomes clear the filmmakers are only interested in cranking out the least provocative thriller possible. With a blameless hero victimised by a villain who has no recognisable human qualities, even the dependable nightmare scenario of being framed and losing everything is diluted by the vast amount of contrivance needed to place our hero in jeopardy. We’re merely expected to wait — unmoved and unoffended by the mild PG-13 thrills — for the villain to get her comeuppance, which comes in a protracted and absurd finale, when Sharon returns home to find Lisa in bed. The poorly choreographed catfight that follows is violent but bloodless, and finally provides Knowles with something to do other than chide Elba. After mouthing some unconvincing threats and killing Larter, Knowles is comforted by her husband, and the last shot is of her, not the man who has been onscreen for most of the film. I’m not the only person confused by this shift in focus. Did Knowles — who co-produced the movie with her father Mathew – sign on just so she could film a long fight scene? Why would that appeal to her? Did she hate the third season of Heroes even more than I did? This mystery is the only aspect of the movie that invites further reflection.

Obsessed is as dreary and toothless a thriller as you’re ever going to see. Unimaginatively plotted by Loughery — the man who wrote Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — the viewer waits for anything shocking or interesting to happen and gets little more than some one-note shouting from Elba and some lazy misogyny. All that’s left for the viewers to occupy themselves is mockery of the risible dialogue (“I’ll take up that slack. That is one smoking hot piece of ass!”) and direction. TV director Shill has worked on almost every notable show of the past ten years, including The Wire and Deadwood. However, he started out with EastEnders, Emmerdale, and The Bill, and it is these uncinematic melodramas that provide the closest link to his work here. Overlit, poorly blocked, and littered with even more establishing shots than in Tommy Wiseau’s notorious bad movie classic The Room, Shill fails to transform Loughery’s script into even a passable movie. Apparently the working title for Obsessed was Oh No She Didn’t. It’s a pity they went with the straight-to-DVD-esque title it now has. If they’d retained the original title, at least the laughs elicited by this dismal failure might have seemed intentional.

Matthew McConaughey and the Genre of Potential Doom

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Matthew McConaughey is one of those actors I can’t help but like. He’s a man who — in the real world — seems like a perfectly affable party fiend who would be fun to hang around with. Someone who doesn’t really give a damn, who makes movies to fund his lifestyle, and only gets to make movies because he’s just popular enough to justify a continued career. He’s famous for pot-smoking, naked bongo playing, and anecdotes about goat sex. His website is so completely “him” it’s as if he has been reduced to a computer echo of himself, a la Jeff Bridges in Tron, and then blasted onto our screens as a series of chill statements and photos of him on mountains, complete with lazy faux-dub rhythms in the background. The most lovable things on the site are the randomised “McConaughey Facts” that pop up at the bottom of the screen. Sample McConaughey Fact: “In my most recent trip to Papua New Guinea I was inducted into the Kuppa Tribe of the Malagan Clan.” That’s just so McConaughey.

As I’ve said many a time, anyone who can laugh at himself is all right in my book. When presented with footage of Matt Damon doing an impression of him on Letterman…

…he seemed to take it with good humour. (It’s about two minutes from the end of the clip.)

My favourite thing about that clip is that at the end of the interview, as the presenter is trying to wrap things up, he goes off on a tangent about spending his Christmas with a family he once visited as an exchange student. It’s right out of nowhere, but that burning need to communicate some random fact about himself for no reason other than that he seems to be looking forward to the excursion is something I — a notorious blabbermouth — can really relate to.

Even though I find McConaughey the Man endlessly entertaining, McConaughey the Actor is another matter. Watching one of his movies is a bit of a crapshoot. Will we get one of his committed performances, such as his delicate turn in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, or as the demented Van Zan in Reign of Fire (which he was easily the best thing about)? Or will it be a frustratingly light but not particularly funny effort, as in Ron Howard’s instantly forgettable EdTV? For every Frailty or Lone Star there is a Wedding Planner, a Fool’s Gold, and probably a Failure To Launch to boot. Appearing in disposable romcoms might work to keep him in sex wax and bandannas, but it makes following his career difficult. Any hope that he might become Brad Pitt to Richard Linklater’s David Fincher fell apart when The Newton Boys came and went without making a ripple in the popular consciousness. He’s doing better than former girlfriend and fellow romcom stalwart Sandra Bullock right now, but it’s becoming touch and go.

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He doesn’t even have an action career to fall back on. U-571 is only memorable for the shameful lies about the Enigma decoding effort, and Sahara — a film I quite like — is notorious for being one of the rare projects whose financial workings have been put on display for all the world to laugh at. Though not me. Seriously, I liked it. It was refreshingly irony-free, just a big crazy adventure about guys who get into scrapes for fun and do the right thing with no soul-searching. It was not of its time, sadly. It’s another film used as a short-hand for excessive Hollywood trash by people who haven’t seen it. Yes, it was obscenely expensive, and there’s no argument for that, but it’s got some charm. With about 20-25 minutes lopped out, it would’ve been treated with a lot more affection.

Unfortunately Ghosts of Girlfriends Past sees too much of the coasting McConaughey, with only hints of his real film-star energy. In a very loose adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore aim for easy emotional targets and don’t bother to complicate the story too much. McConaughey plays Connor Mead, a photographer with Austin Powers’ hunger for consequence-free sexual encounter but none of the dental problems. Forced by a flicker of conscience to attend his brother’s wedding, Mead quickly upsets and alienates the wedding guests with his cynical anti-marriage attitude, until he is visited by the ghost of his lothario uncle Wayne, played as a Robert Evans/Hugh Hefner hybrid by Michael Douglas. Wayne warns his Scrooge-like nephew that he will be visited by three “ghosts” (though at least one of them is still alive; the movie ties itself in knots trying to be light while addressing themes of death and loneliness). These apparitions — who enjoyably treat the “visions” like interactive videos — show Mead the miserable consequences of his actions, and reveal the reason he’s so emotionally disconnected: as a teenager, he was snubbed by his true love, Jenny Perotti (Jennifer Garner). It broke his heart and sent him to find solace in the dubious wisdom of Uncle Wayne.

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Mead’s dark night of the soul forces him to accept the idea of true love just in time to help his brother (Breckin Meyer) marry his long-term sweetheart (an unbearably whiny Lacey Chabert), and to rescue Jenny from a relationship with potential suitor Brad (Daniel Sunjata). This last task is the most problematic one in a movie that otherwise has too many easy answers. Though we’re meant to side with Mead as he throws off his selfish persona, he’s also trying to ruin a potential relationship between Jenny and a scarily handsome volunteer with Doctors Without Borders who seems to be a really sweet guy. Mead, on the other hand, is intolerably arrogant and thoughtless, though he maintains the same level of oily charm throughout. McConaughey isn’t given enough room to adequately show his conversion to the cause of love, so that while Dickens did a thorough job of showing how Scrooge could change from curmudgeon to saint, Mead’s post-revelation persona seems much like his previous personality, except more manic.

This isn’t the only problem. Lucas and Moore’s script holds few surprises and fewer laughs than even their inexplicably popular breakout hit The Hangover. Director Mark Waters, whose work on The Spiderwick Chronicles was so impressive, manages to bring some life to this formulaic project, with the added bonus that he lights the movie with something other than a very very bright light — a concept that seemed to elude the directors of other 2009 romcoms, especially the biggest romantic comedy hits of the year, Robert Luketic’s The Ugly Truth and Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal. Waters also gets entertaining performances from Michael Douglas and Emma Stone as the “ghost” who deflowered Mead in college. Garner is given less to do, but she sells her big emotional moments, including a moving bedroom scene midway through. It’s also McConaughey’s best scene, with Mead forced to watch his past self mistreat the woman he loves simply because he’s scared of his feelings. In moments like that, the conceit of making the romcom Christmas Carol seems more inspired than it actually is.

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My affection for Garner is even greater than my support for McConaughey. Ever since her career-making turn in Alias, I’ve been a huge fan, obnoxiously maintaining that she would get an Oscar nomination (at least!) by the end of the decade. Unless the Academy is going to surprise me and give her a nod for her extremely entertaining turn in The Invention of Lying, I think I’m going to come up short on that one. Her decision to cut down on film roles while raising her children is an understandable one, but I wish she made more movies. There hasn’t been a single film featuring Garner that wasn’t massively improved by her presence — even something as weak as Daredevil occasionally flies thanks to her. In fact, the only thing that didn’t suck about Electra was her performance as the titular assassin; she brought far more pathos and commitment to the project than it deserved.

Compare Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to The Invention of Lying, which was even more fascinated with the interplay of honesty and self-deception. After a brilliant riff on belief and religion, it spends a long, entertaining time banging its head against the disparity between the concepts of love and biological necessity, playing games with the conventions of the genre while at the same time pointing an accusing finger at the audience for expecting such cliches. (500) Days of Summer plays a similar trick; a love-struck Joseph Gordon-Levitt is beguiled by a romantic vision of life soundtracked by The Smiths and Belle & Sebastian and then left crushed by the realisation that he’s been deluding himself as much as he has been lied to by Zooey Deschanel’s idealised Summer. Compared to those two movies, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has no big ideas to share, other than that love is all you need.

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Maybe it’s unfair to give Ghosts of Girlfriends Past a black mark for not matching up to the ambition of Gervais and Robinson’s high-concept fantasy or Mark Webb’s deconstruction, but now that filmmakers seem eager to break the genre down in order to build it back up, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past might end up being the last even vaguely entertaining traditional romcom made. Surely we can at least give it gold stars for being a more involving, charming, and imaginative movie than those flat and cynical laugh-free disasters The Proposal and The Ugly Truth. Where they trade in cheeky, strained jokes about sex and modern gender politics, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has more luck focusing on the people in the relationship than the gimmicks that get in their way, and then trounces those films completely by casting two charming actors who seem to have some sparks together. Though McConaughey’s performance is disappointing and lacks modulation, the relentless charm that stops him from hitting a deeper note still has its uses. More so than many male leads in recent romcoms, at least he can flash a winning smile and drawl some flirty come-on with naughty aplomb, and when he’s matched with Garner’s wholesome persona, it’s hard to dismiss the rote shenanigans completely. Sometimes, making a reasonably successful movie really is that simple.