Marley & Me

The other day we bought a puppy, a Pomeranian cross.   For some reason by the time I got home from work he'd acquired the name, Marley, which seemed to suit him just fine, in spite of the fact that at present he's little more than a couple-of-hands-lengths piece of creamy brown fluff. 

My daughter had a book called The Dog Whisperer, by Jan Fennell.   My wife has been reading it and picking up tips about training the puppy.   So far things are going well, helped by the fact that the little bloke is pretty amenable anyway. 

A friend of ours called up to see the puppy.  She's a great dog lover herself, and brought with her a DVD of a movie called Marley & Me.   Our friend probably enjoyed the movie a good deal more than we did, but we cringed at the way in which the labrador in this film is allowed to wreck everything in sight, chewing up furniture, books, carpets, floors, walls, and more.  Kathleen Turner, who gets fourth billing in the cast, has a three minute scene as a dog trainer.   This dog is even too much for her.   (Why they don't try another dog trainer is beyond me.)  This dog is never given the slightest bit of discipline.   The married couple, played by Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, react to his every piece of wrongdoing with mild expressions of surprise, and seem won over by his (very) occasional moments of tender loving care for them and their kids.

Apparently this movie was based on a bestseller in which just such a dog featured.   The book was based on bi-weekly columns in which his exploits were given prominence, and won for the newspaper a huge following.  (This must have been some time ago; newspapers are lucky to increase their readership at all these days.)  I can only think that the columns/book must have been a good deal more amusing than this movie.  It never knows whether it's supposed to be a comedy (dog pulling owner through all sorts of 'funny' settings), a schmaltzy piece of family history, a story about the ups and downs of marriage (nothing particularly drastic), what happens when a person writes a column but wants to be a reporter (Wilson's character seemed particularly dense at this point) or...who knows?   My wife asked: who is this film meant for?  

I checked out what Roger Ebert had to say.  He coped with it, but I don't think it's his favourite movie of all time.   But I was amazed by Stephanie Zacharek's review (she writes for Salon.com).  Normally this woman will see through anything that's intended to pull the audiences' heartstrings in a cheap fashion, and she begins her review by discussing that.   But perhaps she's lost an important pet at some time; whatever the reason, she gives the thumbs up to this movie.

Well, we can't agree all the time, Stephanie.

Bright Star

Jane Campion has annoyed me as a movie-maker for many years. I thought The Piano was highly overrated - well-made, but all rather silly. The only good thing it did was introduce me to Holly Hunter, who later made such an incredible job of Mrs Incredible in The Incredibles.

Campion's earlier movie, An Angel at My Table had come off better, because she held to the New Zealand focus of the book, and Janet Frame really was a character who suffered (but also triumphed). The film that annoyed me most of all was Campion's version of The Portrait of a Lady, in which she not only turned the self-assured Isabel Archer into a total wimp (Nicole Kidman at her most pathetic), but made all the male characters venomous and domineering. And allowed John Malkovich to do his most extreme version of his own persona. He was totally out of control in this movie.

Henry James' book had been one I really enjoyed; to have it turned into a suffering-woman piece of nonsense, was insulting to James - and to the viewers. (And don't talk to me about the opening in which a random bunch of females sit in trees staring at us. Absolute piffle.)

I haven't watched any of her movies since, but I was nevertheless interested to read what people had to say about her latest, Bright Star, in which the story of John Keats becomes somewhat eclipsed by the story of Fanny Brawne.

The reviewer who most interested me on the subject was Stephanie Zacharek, a writer I read as much for her wit as for her view of a movie. I don't always find Zacharek and I see eye to eye, so I found what she had to say about Campion and her movies intriguing (and affirming of my own opinion, of course!):

I feared I was in for a treatise on the drudgery and heartache of the lives of women, a theme Campion has visited and revisited too many times for my taste. In fact, "Bright Star" is the first Jane Campion I've ever liked, and that includes "Sweetie" and the oft-praised "The Piano." I've always found her movies pretentious and heavily annotated, like the work of a theory-bound academic who fills pages and pages with copious, scribbled footnotes. For me, Campion's filmmaking has always groaned under the weight of her recurring "Oh, how we women suffer!" message.
But "Bright Star" has no obvious agenda. It appears that Campion was simply struck by the tenderness, and the tragedy, of the story, and that has freed something in her storytelling style.

Well, there you go. "Pretentious and heavily-annotated." Yup, that pretty much sums up a good deal of Campion. So it looks as though Bright Star might be worth a visit. Maybe. I still haven't quite got over what she did to Isabel Archer.

Incidentally, Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, was familiar to me when I saw his face in the promo photos. I realised he'd played a wet young man who was sent to a harsh British prison for a murder he either did or didn't do (I never actually got to see the end of the thing) in a series called Criminal Justice. I first saw this mini-series being advertised in Britain when I was there in late 2007 - I think. Anyway, it turned up in New Zealand last year, but I missed bits of it - the beginning, and the end (!), and found Whishaw's soppy performance a real turn off.

Talk about suffering women - Whishaw would have done as good a job as Kidman in Campion's Portrait. Sorry, Ben.

Taken

The only time I've been disappointed by a Liam Neeson performance was in the dreadful '1st' episode of Star Wars in which he and Ewan McGregor slept-walked their way through what should have been mysterious, action-packed and superb. I'm willing to allow Neeson one error of judgement in his film career, however, because I suspect most of the blame for the problems with that episode of Star Wars has to be laid at the feet of the director.

Which leads into my saying that Neeson manages to invest even more than his usual depth into his role in the extremely violent Luc Besson movie, Taken, and avoids being dull for even a fraction of a second. Not that he gets many seconds to be dull in. He plays an ex-'Preventer' (which apparently means someone who 'stops bad things happening' - whatever that actually means) and when his utterly naive 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped in Paris before she's had a moment to do any Green shopping let alone ordinary shopping, he's on her trail so fast he doesn't have time to pack a spare pair of socks.

Of course, being the world-wise Preventer that he is, he did warn his ex-wife, and his daughter, that it was a big nasty world outside of the good old US of A, but they, being so full of their big plans pay absolutely no attention, and deserve almost everything that happens.

Once he's in Paris, the place piles up with dead and maimed bodies until the cost of employing bodyguards inflates exponentially. Neeson, playing Bryan Mills, is a one-man destroyer of bad guys - and the film gives him umpteen bad guys to destroy. He's not to be messed with. Even Bond wouldn't stand a chance against him.

It's all ridiculous, of course, and it's only the fact that Neeson plays his character with such integrity and emotional depth that you sit and watch the thing. Did I say 'ridiculous?' His gun never runs out of bullets; he dodges machine-gun fire with a flick of his head, he always knows who's on the other side of the door - unfortunately for the aforesaid bad guys; he can drive a car while spending most of the time looking in the rear-view mirror, and/or while driving the wrong way down a one-way motorway. And if he gets injured, well, he'll be all right in the next scene.

Stephanie Zacharek, on Salon.com, says: "Taken" is the latest hyperkinetic chicken to emerge from the semi-cracked egg that is Besson's brain, " and she's right. Besson co-wrote it, and produced it. He's an entertainer, first and foremost, but he's never logical, and he's often extraordinary, as the superb Bruce Willis movie, The Fifth Element, attests.

So don't expect a movie that requires debriefing afterwards; and be warned that there are an awful lot of fairly grim deaths (rather too many broken necks for my liking). On the plus side, it's a thriller that carries you along without missing a beat - and you can tell what's going on in the action sequences, which is more than can be said for Quantum of Solace.