We do the same. – The same? – Exactly the same. (pause)
I’d be curious: did Michael Caine and Jude Law talk about Alfie on the set of Sleuth? Did they compare performances? Did they get drunk and watch the Stallone version of Get Carter? Or did they just stare at each other threateningly until Kenneth Branagh shouted “Roll camera”?
The Sleuth remake sounds like quite a compelling proposition at first: one of the grand old English actors facing off against a glittering, promising young guy. (Admittedly, Jude Law hasn’t quite followed up on the promise of his early films, has he?) Directed by Kenneth “Four fucking hours of Shakespeare” Branagh, who has a deft hand behind the camera when he isn’t trying to showcase his own thespian ego. And the original play and film adapted by Harold Pinter, master of intellectual menace and keeper of the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.
In practice, though, Sleuth is dead as a film. It has occasional moments where the individual contributors flare up and come to life, but it’s like putting an electrical current into a dead frog. Its twitches are easily mistaken for signs of life, but the poor little green guy is still as dead as, well, a dead frog.
Michael Caine probably fares best. He slips into the Pinteresque dialogue with ease and manages to make it sound relatively natural. Caine comes closest to convincing us that the film has a beating heart – but even he cannot sustain this against the wooden staginess of the proceedings. The script might work on stage, with the immediacy that a live performance brings to things, but if some scripts jump off the page, this movie lurches back onto the page.
I’ve liked Jude Law in a number of films, first and foremost Gattaca, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and The Talented Mr Ripley, and he’s got moments in Sleuth where he shines – but all too many of his line deliveries sound as if he imagined that This Is What Pinter’s Supposed To Sound Like. It gets worse in the second part of the film, after the first major twist, which I felt was badly handled; I sat there wondering whether it’s a genuine twist or whether the film suddenly decided to go all post-modern on us. I would have prefered the latter, since the twist made the characters even less credible. In any case, after half an hour Law turns up as a new character, but while his body language is convincing, his accent couldn’t be more fake. Yes, he’s supposed to be fake, but if it’s so transparent to us that this is Jude Law in disguise, it makes the Michael Caine character look stupid if he doesn’t get it… and since the film tries to convince us that the characters aren’t stupid while showing them doing utterly stupid things, it’s difficult to take anything happening on screen seriously.
The third act introduces a homoerotic component that seems to have popped in from a different film altogether. While the casting should work brilliantly here – Law has always had a peculiarly feminine quality – seeing Michael Caine trying to get his menacing paws on the younger man rarely feels anything other than awkward because the development comes out of left field, from another game, in a different country altogether.
Would the film have worked better for me if I’d seen the original? Perhaps – but I doubt it. Branagh’s main mistake in the end was to think that the staginess of the script could be counteracted by ‘clever’ (read: obvious) cinematographic choices. However, no weird camera angle will distract from the script and the performances if they’re geared towards the stage. Seeing this live might have been riveting. Seeing the film? Well. Dead frog.
Princely update
In case anyone’s interested, Rock Paper Shotgun has a “Wot I Think” on Prince of Persia. They say much of what I think about the game, putting it much more succinctly. I guess that’s why they are professional games journalists who get paid for this sort of thing, and I’m a lowly fan with a big mouth.
Also, after seven games and two reboots, the Prince of Persia series gets a movie version, which will make any film afficionado rejoice. Or regurgitate. It’s one of the two. In any case, it’s got proper actors and even a director who’s made good films – which is more than most video game movies can say for themselves. It even features good ol’ Satipo:
Could this be an actual video game movie that is worth the admission? Or will we be wishing afterwards that we could use the Sands of Time to rewind the previous two hours?
He may be easy, but he’s a prince
What makes a video game enjoyable? It’s obviously different things for different gamers: some like non-stop action, while others prefer games to be slower, more cerebral experiences. Some are graphics fetishists, while others say that gameplay complexity trumps visuals every time. Myself, I like a good narrative in a game, but I also want the gameplay and storytelling to be intertwined.
In the end, however, what it boils down to for most people, and in the most circular fashion at that, is that most people want games to be fun. They want to be taken out of their everyday lives for a while. Obviously that’s one of the reasons why so-called ‘casual games’ have been a major success in the last few years. Whether it’s Peggle or Plants vs. Zombies, or indeed one of the gazillion variations on the theme of Mah Jong, they’re all making money compared to what they cost that make most ‘non-casual’ games cry into their DVD boxes.
Now, old-school gamers like myself, who remember the times when a pixel was bigger than your head and the height of gaming was yellow pill addicts running through mazes and frogs crossing the street… Many of those gamers have nothing but disdain for casual games. Why? Because they’re easy. There’s little to no challenge in Puzzle Quest, they claim, so even your grandmother can play them and succeed. The most embarrassing examples of such old-school gamers will then go on a rant about the evils of instant gratification and those horrible people who feel entitled to winning a game every now and then without serious training.
Myself, I like a challenge every now and then – but to be honest, next to working 100% and having a relationship, I definitely see the appeal of games that are not punishingly hard. I see the fun in games that you can pick up, play for 15 minutes and drop again feeling that you’ve had a good time and cleared your mind.
However, there is such a thing as a game being too easy. I’m currently playing Prince of Persia, a reboot of a reboot of a classic gaming series back from the days when computers were big as houses and joysticks had one button. It’s a beautifully crafted game: it looks and sounds gorgeous, and it tells a nice story to boot. But, honestly: if I wanted a game that practically plays itself, I’d watch a DVD.
It’s a real shame, because the game could easily have been as much fun or more while still providing a bit of a challenge. As it is, you never feel like you’re controlling your character – and for me, that’s one of the big things when it comes to good games. If it’s there, you never think about it, but the moment that control is taken from you, you can’t help noticing. In previous incarnations of the Prince of Persia series, your character performed the most amazing free-running acrobatics, but the controls were tight enough to make you feel that you were the one making the Prince run along walls, parkouring his way through Arabian Nights-inspired worlds. In this game, however, it’s enough to run roughly in the right direction and press a button at roughly the right time, and hey presto! you’re running along walls as if gravity was completely optional.
Without a bit of a challenge, without the feeling that you’re actually controlling your character, the gameplay actually becomes a bit of an annoyance much of the time. It’s like watching a film on DVD (or Blu-ray, of course!), and every time you get to a new scene you have to play Tic Tac Toe against an idiot. You’re sure to win, but it breaks the flow of the game. At what point does a game become so easy that it might as well consist of one button: “Press X to watch the next cutscene?”
But yeah… the game is oh so pretty. Behold (and if you’re a fan of the final episode of Six Feet Under, you may want to brace yourself for a tune you know very well – once you’ve accepted this as something other than utter blasphemy, it actually works quite well):
Habemus PS3…
… and a stomach bug brought home from Egypt. All in glorious HD.
So why have I, a stalwart PC gamer (with a PS2 obtained originally for entirely academic purposes, I swear!), got myself one of those newfangled PS3 Slims? Two reasons, really: 1) Blu-rays and 2) The Last Guardian. Obviously I had more reasons than that, but they’re the main ones.
1) When we originally got digital TV, I was told that our connection was fast enough for HD channels. And yes, it was pretty glorious (in a nerdy way) to be able to record and watch both volumes of Kill Bill in high-def. Even boring old football (that’s “soccer” for y’all yanks out there) just popped off the screen in a way that made it watchable. For five minutes. At most. But you could see every blade of grass, and every pore on people’s faces! (Makes you feel all Walt Whitmanesque…)
But then our digital connection was downgraded. Why? They couldn’t tell; in fact, they were pretty mystified why I’d been told to begin with that the connection was fast enough. Guess I imagined all those red pixels in Kill Bill…
In any case, yesterday we watched our first complete Blu-ray disk, Sunshine. To paraphrase another brainy sci-fi flick, “My god, it is full of details.” While I still have problems with the film’s ending, this visually stunning film becomes doubly so in HD. Almost makes you want to dive into the sun yourself… in a good way.
(If you’re interested in seeing a good comparison of DVD vs. Blu-ray, check out this YouTube video. Make sure to watch it in HQ though.)
2) This one is a bit more esoteric, perhaps. Two of my favourite games on the PS2 are called ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, and they may just be the main reasons why I got the PS2 to begin with. I was writing a paper on games as art (Et tu, Roger?), and both of these seemed to fit the bill, combining subtle storytelling, beautiful art direction and gameplay in ways that few other games have managed. The developer’s new project is called The Last Colossus, and the trailers definitely have left me more than curious:
Games and art – no Roger Ebert, though
Don’t worry – I’m not going to write another boring essay on whether games can be art. Instead I wanted to leave you with two videos; I’ll be away on holiday for a week, with no internet access or indeed computers. So, to make sure you don’t get completely bored, here’s a plug for a new adventure game called Machinarium. I don’t know much about the game, but the art direction is absolutely gorgeous. Check out the trailer:
Also worth having a look at are the developer Amanita Design’s earlier games, Samorost and the creatively named Samorost 2, both playable online.
Samorost 2 (demo version)
Enjoy, and see you next week!
Love, death, life and the silly sublime
To be fair: watching The Fountain recorded from digital TV, the compression turning any dark scene into black (“none more black”) with a handful of flecks of light, isn’t really the best way to see the film for the first time. Darren Aronofsky’s follow-up to his much-lauded Requiem for a Dream, the kind of film even I can’t describe as bitter-sweet, is intensely visual, and if the first five minutes turn into a frantic game of “It’s a… it’s an elephant, I think. A black elephant. At night. No, it’s a spaceship. At night. And it’s black. Is the TV on?”, the film suffers. (Or, depending on how you look at things, the audience suffers.)
The rare moments when I could not only see what was going on on-screen but actually saw enough of the image to appreciate it, the film definitely proved to be a feast for the eyes. And it wasn’t just pretty – much of what Aronofsky shows us is evocative and beautiful. (Pretty is to Beautiful as Liv Tyler is to Cate Blanchett, if you ask me.) There’s one image in particular, Queen Isabella’s chamber lit by hundreds of tiny lamps hung from the ceiling, that I found quite stunning.
But while some of the imagery is sublime, some – especially in the last half hour of the film – are plain silly. I don’t mind the latent (or not so latent) ‘New Ageyness’ of The Fountain, because as a visual poem on love, death and a man’s inability to let go the film works for me. But then you got bald yoga master Hugh Jackman in the lotus position, floating towards some cosmic birth canal, and awe is replaced by incredulous giggles. Same goes for the scene where Jackman, as a Spanish conquistador, is consumed by flowers sprouting from his torso as if he was the world’s sexiest, silliest Paul Daniels magic trick. I get what the scene’s trying to do, but it just looks… well, naff. Combine that with the film’s po-faced tone and the film doesn’t do itself any favours.
At some point I hope to watch the film again, with subtitles (so I can figure out what those Spaniards are shouting in the rain) and adequate visual quality. I expect that it’ll pull me in more, which in turn might make me forget (or at least forgive) the unintentional humour of scenes that would have had Dr Manhattan raise one implacable, blue eyebrow. Clint Mansell’s lyrical score will definitely help – it did the first time, to the extent that I was more captivated by the end credits than by what had been going on ten minutes before.
Right now, though, I think that The Fountain works much, much better as the comic book version, which the script was turned into after a first attempt to film it failed. It has all the elements of Aronofsky’s movie, but what looks silly in the film works much better in the stylised drawings (somewhat reminiscent of Dave McKean’s work on Arkham Asylum, although less abstract). It still borders on New Age kitsch, but as far as I’m concerned it pulls it off. Perhaps the best thing would be to read the comic while listening to Mansell’s soundtrack. And, if that’s your cup of tea, fantasising about Hugh Jackman.
P.S.: Much more nudity in the comic. (Both Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman remain chastely dressed throughout the film.) But it’s artistic nudity (“and in the end, isn’t that the real truth?”). And not even close to the full-on pornography of a Lost Girls.
Whatever happened to Steven Spielberg?
Yes, I’m a pretentious film geek who salivates at the sound of “Criterion Collection”. I like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (a little known Swedish children’s movie about a boy and a seal at the local circus – it’s basically Free Ølåf) and Fellini’s La Strada – but I love the great popcorn movies. For me, there are two almost perfect representatives of that hallowed group of films: Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws.
What happened to the man who made those films, though? Spielberg is still one of the best craftsmen in Hollywood, but the thing that was exhilarating about his early films was their sheer energy. There was a joy to the filmmaking, a childlike sense of fun, that made Spielberg unique. It’s there in the two films mentioned, and it’s also there in E.T. (mixed with a generous dollop of sentimentality) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind – but the biggest failure of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was that it was tired and felt forced. There was little of the exhilaration of the earlier films in the series, especially of the first. Obviously this could be attributed to Indy having aged himself, but that’s a disappointingly humdrum explanation that pretty much begs the question: why have a fourth Indy movie in the first place?
More than that though, rewatching Jaws over the weekend I was made aware of how Spielberg in his early days was much more ruthless. He didn’t have qualms about having a young boy be chomped by a shark, he didn’t think twice about having a number of pretty gruesome deaths in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It wasn’t the childish sadism of Temple of Doom, but it basically meant, “Yes, horrible things can happen. Anyone can get it in the teeth.” And as a result the films were more exciting. If even a kid can be eaten by a shark, well, then nobody’s safe. (Compare Jurassic Park, where the kids and the heroes are never really in jeopardy – it’s pretty much nobodies and evil lawyers that get eaten. It’s amazing that a cheesy, bad film such as Deep Blue Sea gets this better by making it clear from the first that anyone can die – even Samuel L. “Badass” Jackson.)
The much-ridiculed CGI retouching of E.T., replacing guns with walkie-talkies is symptomatic of this fretful, overly squeamish Spielberg. The BMX chase in the original version of E.T. is exciting, and the moment when they get out the guns, we know: Uh oh. Something bad could happen. Compare the same moment in the ‘remastered’ version, where the impression we get is that the worst that could happen is, they might be caught by the grown-ups and given a severe talking-to. Where’s the danger? Where’s the sense of actual risk? If you take that away, characters that we care about become invincible video game characters with the god mode turned on.
I’m in a minority in that I quite liked much of War of the Worlds, but it’s a prime example of a film that suffers from Spielberg’s “playing it safe” doctrine. It’s pretty clear, in every single scene, that he wouldn’t kill off Dakota Fanning – and while her brother puts himself in a situation where he’s almost sure to die, we get an unbelievable, corny deus ex ending that many filmmakers who are much less skilled than Spielberg would have scoffed at.
Obviously Spielberg isn’t the young man he was when he made Jaws or Raiders. He’s older now, so it’s only to be expected… but did he have to become so damn po-faced? Where’s the glee? Reduce Spielberg to his (considerable) skill while taking away his sense of joy and adventure, and you get Zombie Spielberg.
And everyone knows that only Godzilla Lucas can fight Zombie Spielberg.
Late Nate and the Swedish vampires
While I still don’t see why there needs to be a US remake of Let the Right One In, it seems that at least they’re getting an interesting cast. Richard Jenkins, Nathaniel Fisher Sr. (and Walter Abundas, Scarlett Johannson’s narcoleptic dad in The Man Who Wasn’t There – “Reidenschneider!”) himself, will be playing the old man who is the girl vampire’s familiar. My problem is that when I look at him, I see sardonic Late Nate, always just a moment away from an inappropriate remark – but at least they’re getting someone who has repeatedly proven himself to be interesting and different.
But will they be able to match the sheer horror of all things Swedish?
P.S.: When I read the headline (“Richard Jenkins cast in Let Me In“), I was sure it was either a romantic comedy or an indie drama. Perhaps both. Obviously child vampires and indie rom-com can go together pretty nicely. Or something.
E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L…
In the hands of a different cast and crew, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon) could have been bad – or worse, it could have been absolutely nothingy. Of course the real-life premise is memorable and impressive – locked-in syndrome, being a prisoner inside your own body – but making this work as a magazine article or even a book is very different from making it work as a film. Without a keen directorial vision, this would’ve turned into the worst kind of movie-of-the-week.
I’ve never seen any other films by Julian Schnabel (the sheer silliness of his name may have kept me from watching his earlier work), but based on this film I’m definitely going to keep my eyes open for Basquiat and Before Night Falls. The movie isn’t overburdened by directorial flourishes, but Schnabel has a strong sense of the visual, in the real scenes as much as in those that take place in Jean-Do’s imagination or are inspired by his words. Talking of which, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir (the film could be described as a sort of making-of of the memoir, but that would be far too banal a description for what Schnabel achieves), strikes a deft balance between the visual and the verbal. It hums with the energy of words – Jean-Do is filled with language, even if his condition doesn’t allow him to express them easily. Each word is a battle, each phrase is a war – at least at first, but one of the refreshing aspects of the film is that the women who help the man express himself are all French beauties of the Emanuelle Seigner type (and one of them looks like a Gallic dead ringer for Naomi Watts), and Jean-Do is the kind of man who falls in love, at least a bit, with every woman he sees.
The lightness that the film has, derived equally from Bauby’s ironic tone (he isn’t afraid of laughing at himself and his situation) and Schnabel’s visual idiom, doesn’t detract from its darker side, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The horror of Jean-Do’s situation makes especially the first twenty minutes almost unbearable at times. Schnabel doesn’t need to emphasise this – he shows, quite simply and unflinchingly.
I’ve only just finished watching the film about an hour ago, so my first impression is still fresh and might change. However, throughout the movie I kept thinking of another film, this one by Alejandro Amenábar: The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro), also a true-life story, based on the struggles of a Spanish quadruplegic fighting for his right to die. Both films are centred on men who have been taken prisoner by their failing bodies; both men are full of life, yet have been deprived of the ability to life as fully as they desire; and both The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Sea Inside use similar imagery, especially the ocean and seaside. To some extent they feel like a French and a Spanish take on similar issues and would make near-perfect companion pieces.
On a different note: we’ve added another HBO series to the already considerable list. It’s called Wome, at least if you ask Michael Palin:
And like so many HBO series, it’s got a pretty cool title sequence. Enjoy!
Better than being hit over the head with a baseball bat
Quentin Tarantino loves cinema. If anyone ever doubted that, fifteen minutes of Inglourious Basterds should put that doubt to rest.Also, Quention Tarantino knows cinema. He knows its history, he knows films, he knows how to construct a scene, how to film it, how to make it work. As I’ve argued before, he is in control of his material like few other directors.
He may also just be the most radical of the big-name film makers working in Hollywood today.
Now, “radical” does not mean “independent” – or, more aptly, “indie”. The current indie film scene in the US, while gems keep coming out of it, is disappointingly generic, with quirky comedies about geeky weirdoes we’re supposed to love having become as predictable and stale as mainstream romantic comedies. What makes Quentin Tarantino radical is he doesn’t pander to his audiences. In the end, he makes films entirely for himself. If the audience enjoys them, all the better, if not, well, fuck them.
Which may go some way towards explaining why Tarantino is one of the filmmakers who is either loved or hated. If you don’t like what he’s doing, his films will grate like mad. There are no compromises for a broad audience. Tarantino is a lucky bastard (or “basterd”) who can be indifferent to what test audiences may say about his films. (Actually, I’d be curious as to what test audiences would make of his movies.)
One of the things that is most striking about Inglourious Basterds is how little the Basterds are actually in the movie, and how, in the end, they are not the heroes of the film. That honour goes to Shosanna Dreyfus, played to perfection by Mélanie Laurent. The Basterds themselves are pretty much a team of goons and thugs, a bunch of self-admitted terrorists, and they are only seen as the good guys because they go after Nazis (or “Nat-zees!”, as Brad Pitt insists with over-the-top relish), perhaps the easiest target in cinematic history.
And that’s where the second intriguing thing comes in: while the Basterds remain cartoony and one-dimensional, Tarantino takes a number of “Nat-zees” and humanises them. He doesn’t make them into the good Nazi, they’re not Germans with hearts of gold who happened to end up, against their will, wearing Wehrmacht uniforms – but they become human beings. While the surface of the film is all about Our Heroes wreaking terrible, deserved revenge on the Hun, the subtext – which may even be more prevalent than the text – is much more ambivalent.
And that’s what may be most radical about Tarantino: he’s managed to fool a large part of critics and audiences into thinking he’s a B-movie geek with an affinity for trash and violence, when his films are intricatedly crafted, wittily written, much more complex (and much less violent) than they’re given credit for. Many people have watched his films and seen only slickly made trash. He’s been hiding with incredible success that he’s that most elusive of cinematic beasts: an auteur. God bless his narcissistic, self-centred, infuriatingly post-modern little heart – and may he make many more films!
