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Tell No One

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Tell No One (2008)

Tell No One (2006/2008) is a classic thriller, a fine French rendition of the novel (2001) by American crime writer Harlan Coben. It grabbed my attention even with the poster which went something like “Eight years ago, Alex’s wife was brutally murdered . . . today she sent him an e-mail.” I loved the complex plot. As some conversations on the internet reveal, some people have trouble following it. But all the information is there, you just have to stay alert and pay attention for two hours. The tension in the plot comes from an innocent man being squeezed from both sides. We know that Alex did not kill his wife, but the police have long suspected him and they have new evidence that sends them looking to convict him. At the same time, some ruthless thugs are after Alex for reasons that slowly become evident. He’s pretty much on his own, and if he does rendezvous with his wife, it may be the end of both of them. The intricate plot leads to a final confession which explains everything. This is a worn out way to wrap things up, but in keeping with the high quality of this movie, even the confession has a second version, an intelligent touch.

The acting is excellent. I suppose it is fair to say that only Francois Cluzet, as Alex, has a meaty role, a part that require real depth and complexity. He manages beautifully that difficult acting challenge of being reserved and manly yet very expressive. Not surprisingly he won a Cesar for Best Actor. But the other parts are acted with as much care. I like to be able to relax and know I will not be suddenly slapped in the face with an amateurish turn.

Although this is a thriller, the pace is not frantic. Unlike, say, the latest James Bond flic Quantum of Solace, the editing allows things to happen in what feels like a real-life pace. While the plot reminded me of The Fugitive, the pace reminded me of The Bourne Identity, as opposed to The (hyper) Bourne Ultimatum. This more natural pace allows you to follow the plot and even to think seriously about what might be going on.

The movie is not perfect. I can think of four shortcomings, not crucial but worth mentioning. First, there is one terrible edit where a man suddenly appears out of nowhere with a huge bouquet of flowers. I mention this because the editor won a Cesar for Best Editing. Just as the editor for The Departed won an Oscar and had two scenes completely out of sequence. Once awards enthusiasm gets going for a movie, there is apparently no stopping it. Second, the scene where Dr. Alex, the paediatrician, is teaching a pre-schooler his colours as the cops close in, is terrible because Alex is not teaching the kid anything, there is no expertise, no technique, just a bunch of nonsense. I hope that in the novel Alex actually teaches the kid something worthy of a child development professional because Harlan Coben’s wife is a paediatrician. Third, in a plot that is, as Ebert says, more than air tight, there is one element that could have been explained better: Why are the deadly thugs suddenly so interested in Alex? After the fact, you can sort of figure it out: The guy who hired the thugs was one of only two people who knew that Alex’s wife’s murder did not go as planned, and given his ubiquitous corrupt influence in the police department, he would have known why the police were suddenly expressing renewed interest in Alex. Neither of these is brought out, and thoughtful viewers may be wasting energy trying to figure it out for themselves. Finally, while the original music is fine, the songs layered onto the movie do not work. While Director Guillaume Canet loves some of my favourite musicians—Janis Joplin, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield—the soulful and English tunes work against the illusion that we are in France. At other times, the tunes (again in English) are coordinated with the cinematography in a way that reminds you of early rock videos. For example, during Jeff Buckley’s “Lilac Wine,” Alex takes another shot of hard liquor just as Jeff sings about drinking too much.

But these are quibbles about a movie that is a delight to watch and easy to love. Do you think Alex and his captivating wife get together in the end? And if they do, will it be a joyous reunion—will they run across the fields by their favourite lake and fall into each others arms? Or, maybe, given all that the two have been though, they have lost so much innocence that a Hollywood reunion is impossible? Maybe she walks timorously across the grass, uncertain about what she will meet? Maybe he turns his back and crouches down, overcome with sobs? Maybe they still have the enthusiastic love but will have to work diligently to rediscover the purity?

Posted Wednesday, January 28, 2009 3:08 AM by JimBell | with 0 comments

The Film Club

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The Film Club: A True Story of A Father and Son (2007) is one of the most engrossing reads of the last year for me. Here’s the real-life set up: David Gilmour, a creative writer and television personality, is seriously out of work, and his son drops out of school in Grade 10. But there are two conditions to quitting school: young Jesse has to watch at least 3 films a week with his dad, and no drugs or the entire deal is off. A creative and risky arrangement. Obviously, there are three things you can be interested in—father, teenager, and films. I found the growing and evolving father-son relationship the most interesting, and it pulled me through the book in three days.

The film discussions were interesting in a weird way: David takes an entirely different approach to critiquing films than I do. To oversimplify, I take a macro view, he a micro. At the base of all my viewing is Aristotle. The old Greek scientist wonders why all those people are so crazy about seeing plays, so he goes out and watches the crowd and the plays, and he decides in large part that it is the plot—what will happen next in the action, and what will happen next with the characters? It’s the emotional roller coaster the audience goes through watching these changes. David, who has reviewed for national newspapers and other media, favours the specific. Before watching Hitchcock, he might ask Jesse to watch for the most foreboding image. Another time the scene with the best dialogue. He discusses in some detail a sequence of wide, medium, and close-up shots of Audrey Hepburn sitting on a balcony. The scattering of film comments are perceptive and are accessible to film buffs because David chooses his movies from the canon—The Bicycle Thief, The Exorcist, The 400 Blows, Fistful of Dollars, True Romance, On the Waterfront, and two more pages of movies. For me, David’s most revelatory comment on film occurs when he is planning a second look at some films: “We’d . . . take another look at Pulp Fiction (1994), making clear, though, the distinction between fun writing and true writing. Pulp Fiction, immensely entertaining as it is, spiffy and glittery as the dialogue is, doesn’t have a real human moment in it” (p. 232). Again this shows my preference for the broader critical comments. But the real star of the book is the relationship between father and son. It is Canadian, so eminently polite, but the feelings run ever so deep.

Posted Wednesday, January 28, 2009 1:47 AM by JimBell | with 0 comments

Last Chance Harvey

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Last Chance Harvey (2008)

Last Chance Harvey (2008) raises a fundamental question about watching films: Is a movie only excellent if it has substance and fine execution, or can you call it excellent if there is nothing new but it is executed extremely well? Your answer to this will determine in large part what you think of Last Chance Harvey. Which brings me to Turkish cooking. In North America we take our Chinese restaurants and Mexican take-outs for granted, and in Australia, where non-white immigration is newer, the population says the number one benefit of increased immigration is the increased diversity of restaurants. So I was in for a shock when I asked a dozen people in Ankara, Turkey, to come over for supper and said I’d could East Indian food. There was a bit of a pause and one of the young guys said very seriously, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like Turkish food?” That was my glimpse into a culture that believed in cooking the same dishes over and over and over until you reached what you considered perfection—and, having reached perfection, no sensible person would want to change.

Last Chance Harvey is a plain old romance. The characters may be 40-something and 60-something, but it’s still boy meets girl, and you already know the ending. What writer and director Joel Hopkins tries to do is get it perfect. If you’re after new material, an edgy story, something going against the grain, you’ll be so put off by the age-old story you will not see Hopkins trying to polish a rough cut diamond.

But if you grant Hopkins the conventional arc of a love story, you can appreciate how well he tells the story. First he gets Emma Thompson on board and writes the role of Kate for her—frumpy middle-aged spinster gathering interview statistics at Heathrow Airport. Then after seeing Emma and Dustin Hoffman in Stranger than Fiction, he writes the other part for Dustin and gets him on board playing a jingle-writer at the end of his decaying career. A lot of the dialogue is pitch perfect. One way to test it is to imagine as a scene starts what those characters would say, and then see if what they say is consistent with their personalities. For example, when Harvey and Kate meet in the obligatory boy-meets-girl scene, he is at first a bit obnoxious and then quite charming, and she is at first stand-offish and then kind—perfectly in line with the characters as we know them. Another way to test the dialogue is to imagine at the start of a scene what you would write. For example, when Harvey interrupts his daughter’s wedding to make a speech, what will he say? What will the step-father who is supposed to be giving the toast do? Then watch the scene and ask whether you would change a word? A gesture?

But pitch perfect scenes do not a perfect movie make. Hopkins has said that rather than trying to avoid clichés, he “embraced a few clichés” such as the scene where Kate tries on dresses. But here the scene is ridiculous because the dresses are ridiculous, it is not the kind of shop she’d ever chose, she is not the kind to be a fashion horse, and the two characters are supposed to be in a hurry to get to a wedding reception. Similarly, the film uses the traditional fade away to schmaltzy music while we see a montage of the couple walking past some scenic sites. Although this keeps the old-fashioned tone that Hopkins wants, it temporarily puts the audience at a distance from the vary characters they’ve just become interested in.

Hopkins has also said that he tried constantly to maintain the balance between whimsy and pathos. A lot of the comic element comes from Kate’s neurotic mother who spies out her window on the Polish neighbour who she suspects is murdering people when he is, in fact, smoking sausages. Some people will object to this as irrelevant. For me, however, it worked because it reinforced the kind of life Kate lived. When Kate’s mother called yet again on Kate’s cell phone when Kate was out on a double-date, Kate’s friend fired off a great line about her mother being a human contraceptive device.

Another objection to the movie will be the age difference between the two characters. The wrong argument is that Thompson is 49 (?) and Hoffman is 71, and this just shows how sexist Hollywood and our society is. The right argument is that Kate is maybe in her late-40s and quite matronly and frumpy—except for her footwear. (The “matronly” comment is not me wanting Thompson to look like a 20-year old starlet. Quite the contrary. Just as critics compliment actors for bulking up for fighting parts or getting ugly for nasty parts, Thompson is perfectly built for a middle-aged statistics collector who dreams of writing a beach novel.) Harvey is 60-something, I’d say early sixties. He’s got a lot of energy but has lived a pretty stressful life. So now that we are talking about the characters rather than the actors, does it make sense for them to start a relationship—more specifically does it make sense for her? That’s a tough one. And I guess the bottom line is that in a classic romance we should not have doubts in our minds. Yet when we analyze it, the relationship makes sense for her. While physically he is a bit beaten up, look what he will do for her socially. On the one hand, she could go back to reading novels, collecting statistics, and answering her mother’s neurotic calls, but on the other hand, she could get some fun out of life. Furthermore, she has seen Harvey suffer a string of humiliations and come out with pride and joie de vie—the kind of guy she’s like to spend time with.

Posted Sunday, January 18, 2009 12:19 PM by JimBell | with 1 comments

Three Monkeys review

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Three Monkeys (Uc Maymun) (2008)

Three Monkeys (Uc Maymun) (2008)Three Monkeys (2008) is Turkey’s submission for an Oscar in the Foreign-Language Film category. Obviously, the Turks think it is excellent. The film is a professional work with top-notch cinematography, a sparsely sophisticated sound track, and impeccable acting. But once the film makers decided to create a heavy drama about the stresses, strains, and disintegration of a working-class Istanbul family, they had three major challenges to meet to keep us riveted, and they met the challenges with mixed results.

The three monkeys are a husband who is the driver for an aspiring politician, a wife who works in a commercial kitchen, and their post-high-school son who cannot pass the national university entrance exams. Each of them in turn makes a major “stupid” decision at great cost to their own psychological health and to family unity. How are we to care for three people making reprehensible and self-destructive decisions? The film does little to engage our concern. It might have shown us the family in happier times, but instead it begins with crisis. It might have made them victims of circumstance, and this is hinted at but not developed because, as the movie tries to point out, they delude themselves if they think their circumstances forced their hand. The husband does not really need the money he agrees to go to prison for: The family is getting along reasonably well. The wife does not need to have an affair while he is in prison, although it probably guaranteed that the family got the money. The son did not have to take the drastic action he did—it was entirely his free choice. The film might have generated sympathy for the family by having other characters say nice things about them, but there are almost no other characters. The film focuses relentlessly on the three monkeys.

In focusing on the family, the film tries to portray their inner thoughts and feelings and runs into the age-old problem of how to use a medium that is action—motion pictures, move-ies—to portray inner states. Excellent acting helps. When, for example, the son discovers his mother’s affair and then visits his father in prison, the young man says there is nothing wrong but the subtle downward tilt of his head and his slightly evasive eyes engender doubt in his father. Top-rate cinematography also helps. Characters are often shot as almost-silhouettes as the camera focuses on the Bosporus or something else in the background. This has an unsettling effect, an approximation of what the character is feeling. The shots also vary from intense close-ups to wide-angle takes that make the characters inferior to the environment. For instance, when we see the wife at work, she is initially dwarfed by cooking tables and pots and pans. And when she phones, in vain, to find her son a job, she is a relatively small figure at the end of a long hallway. But the bottom line is, when you have moving pictures of things that don’t move, the audience spends a lot of time looking at faces and wondering what the people are thinking and feeling.

The film meets its third major challenge much more successfully. After viewers have stuck with three difficult-to-like characters and tried to figure out what they were thinking and feeling, there has to be a pay off, and Three Monkeys has an effective ending. I don’t want to give away the ending, but I will say that the husband, who seems to have learned little from his ordeal, tries to strike a deal with a poor, minor character. Does the young man accept the deal? Should he? What would you do? The low-key and ambiguous ending is forcefully thought-provoking.

Posted Monday, January 12, 2009 11:20 PM by JimBell | with 1 comments

Wall-E

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Wall-E (2008)

Movie awards season is silly season. Tunnel vision is the common perspective—people talk about fewer and fewer movies until the awards seem a foregone conclusion. We all believe that Wall.E is the only animated feature worth considering. We believe it is so good that discussion about the film centers on whether it should also be entered in the Best Picture categories. So with this much tunnel vision behind Wall.E, I’m probably wasting my breath to argue that the movie is not particularly good.

Both major themes in Wall.E are hackneyed. Humans so abused Earth that they left it a sterile junk yard and had to live in space. Have you heard anything like that before? But then the trite theme gets worse. Space-dwelling humans, who are obese, ignorant, and lack the bone structure to function in gravity, can find a green plant and re-establish life on earth. One plant does not sustain a population. OK, there’s a few other plants popping up among the garbage. Could they be contaminated? Inedible? And, come to think of it, is that all you need for life on earth? What will these people do for shelter? Clean water? Clean air? It gets ridiculous trying to talk about it.

The second element of Wall.E is the hackneyed love story between Wall.E and Eva. Boy sees girl—love at first sight. Girl is not interested, but she is slowly won over by good deeds. But, no, she rejects him, then quickly sees the error of her ways and acknowledges her love. But then the trite theme runs into more trouble. Wall.E, the mobile garbage compactor, is unable to show much romantic emotion. His replaceable metal and glass eyes are not expressive. Emotion is often shown by what is reflected in his glass plates. Not touching. Eva, the sleek white pod of a robot, has eyes which are blue dots on her screen face. She is unable to show romantic emotion, except in the last half of the film, her eyes take on various shapes that indicate emotions somewhat like emoticons on your computer. The film-makers try to counteract this serious shortcoming by building up the hand-holding motif. From a Hollywood musical on a salvaged television derives the idea that hand holding is love, and Wall.E and Eva do their best to interlock metal fingers. This might work for some people, but it seemed awkward to me.

Wall-E might be worth watching, but it is not in the league of Finding Nemo or The Incredibles. Actually, it is not as good as the other animation I’ve seen recently: Bolt—a movie with a great theme, wonderful characters, and heart-grabbing scenes.

Posted Sunday, January 11, 2009 9:19 PM by JimBell | with 2 comments

The Princess Bride

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The Princess Bride (1987)

The Princess Bride (1987; USA) is a romance and one of the best pictures ever made. But it is not the kind of romance that we nowadays think of, and we should rehabilitate the old term “romance.” For one thing, we would understand why this is such a powerful film. Today we define romance very narrowly as some kind of love relationship between two people. But The Princess Bride is a romance in the broader, richer, classic sense—with a great sense of humour as well.

A romance has a virtuous hero and a beautiful (and virtuous, of course) heroine who represent ideals, and there are always villains threatening their ascendancy. The hero starts off in an idyllic setting but then must go on a quest. There is death involved—the hero, villain, or both—and sometimes the hero comes back from his ritual death, saves the day, gets the girl, and the society is healthy and happy. William Goldman, who wrote the book and the screenplay, channels this archetypal story into The Princess Bride. Wesley, the farm boy (Cary Elwes), and Buttercup, the farmer’s daughter (Robin Wright Penn), live in an idyllic setting, slowly fall in love, but are torn apart as teenagers, Wesley vowing to always be there for Buttercup. But several years go by and the evil and talented Prince (Chris Sarandan) of the land has chosen beautiful Buttercup for his bride—only to have her kidnapped by three rascally guys. Wesley undertakes his quest to defeat the three—brilliant swordsman (Mandy Patinkin), mighty giant (Andre the Giant), and scheming genius (Wallace Shawn)—and survive the fire swamp, and rodents of unusual size . . . But the Prince captures Wesley and tortures him relentlessly in the Pit of Despair, leaving him apparently dead but actually “only almost dead.” It takes a miracle pill concocted by the old wizard Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) to revive Wesley—sort of—as he wobbles off to storm the castle with his two new friends, the brilliant swordsman and the mighty giant. Well, enough, you know how a classic romance ends.

Quite apart from Rob Reiner’s excellent direction, Mark Knopfler’s great soundtrack, and costumes that are so good you take them for granted as perfect for a fairy-tale world, The Prince Bride is comic—not in the one-liner, laugh-out-loud sense, but in the sense that everything is playful and done is good spirits. As an additional touch, the story is told as a story within a story, as a grandfather reads the book to his fidgety grandson who has a cold and has to stay in bed. The modern kid is sceptical, but he is promised that the book has a bit of everything, and he is slowly won over. Similarly, it is almost as if the writer Goldman is teasing us—he will interrupt the movie to remind us that it is just a story, and he will tell us a classic romance but make it tongue-in-cheek, yet we’ll be won over—and we are. Enjoy!

Posted Sunday, January 04, 2009 2:28 PM by JimBell | with 1 comments