Old and new

I can't remember if I've ever seen The Seven Samurai before; if I have it didn't leave any visual impressions.  However, it's been on my 'would-be-good-to-see' list of movies for decades, and the other night I discovered by chance that it was available free online at something called liketelevision.com.  The quality of the video wasn't ideal - in some sections it almost became like watching a bunch of pixels without being able to discern what they were showing, but in general the film's impact remained.  This is sometimes a problem with these films that are free online: the quality can be very poor, though usually only in sections rather than as a whole.

Anyway, I watched all 200 plus minutes of the movie, with a couple of tea breaks.  It hasn't lost any of its power to engage the viewer, and the performances haven't dated in any way.   Toshirô Mifune plays Kikuchyiyo, the last one of the samurai to join the group, and he plays him as the ultimate wild man, sometimes verging on the crazy, completely careless of his life.  He's both a child and a man, the source of much amusement to the more serious samurai, but also a man of bravery.   


We first meet Kanbei, played by Takashi Shimura, who is quickly acknowledged as the leader of the samurai, when he's cutting off his hair (including the distinctive samurai knot at the back) in order to disguise himself as a priest, so that he can unman a thief who has taken a child as hostage.  His wonderful priest-like serenity, even throughout the battle between the farmers and the bandits that takes up much of the second half of the movie, is a total contrast to Mifune's character.  Isao Kimura is the young 'disciple' who is accepted as one of the samurai, and even though he was 31 when he played the role, he comes across easily as a naive youth in his late teenage years.  


The cast is full of wonderfully-played characters, every one of them distinctive (at least once you get to grips with who's who).   The story, which is basically a matter of a battle to the death between the farmers trying to protect their village (aided in due course by the samurai), and the bandits who come every year and carry off food (and women, apparently), is simple enough, but the scriptwriters weave a number of other elements into the tale so that complications arise from the personalities of the characters as well as the plot.  


Not surprisingly, it's a violent film, and there are a number of deaths on both sides.  It shows the awfulness of battle, particularly when you're not experienced, and shows how easy it is to move from cowardice to heroism, from fear to fighting mode.  The last section of the battle, which takes place in pouring rain, has the actors and horses struggling in ever-increasing mud, with swords and spears and arrows flying everywhere - as well as the gun that causes ultimate havoc.

For a more detailed review, check out Roger Ebert's one here.

Onto the new: How to Train Your Dragon is a fairly straightforward rendering of the ancient plot in which a (Viking) father doesn't understand his son (or read daughter, in the case of the even more recent, Brave), and the son has qualities that are at odds with the community.   Of course the father will continue to misunderstand his son until the latter proves his worth.  In fact there are a lot of similarities between this movie and Brave, not least the Scottish accents (Vikings with Scottish accents?).  In both cases the father is very capable in his own compartment; he just doesn't realise there are other compartments.

Hiccup, the hero of this film, is that sort of age that you can't quite pin down: according to Roger Ebert he's ten, but if that's the case he's a very competent ten-year-old (when he's doing what he does well).  However, the dialogue he's given is rather too smart for a ten-year-old, and sometimes so undercuts the warmth of the character that he doesn't become particularly endearing.   His female counterpart is feisty, as you'd expect in the 21st century, although she does have a brief moment when she succumbs to the boy's charms (her usual response to him is to thump him on the arm).

The story is about a Viking village, which at first appears to have a tiny population; our view is significantly altered towards the end when it's plain that it's a much bigger place, with a lot more people, than the filmmakers first implied.  Dragons continually carry off the sheep (they're the equivalent of the bandits in Seven Samurai, perhaps), and the Vikings, including Hiccup, continually devise ways to kill them, because that's what Vikings do.  However, Hiccup inadvertently captures one, tries to kill it and can't.  This leads to a delightful friendship, and the big showdown when it's discovered that the dragons themselves aren't actually the problem.

There are some good comedy moments, and the main characters are fairly sharply drawn - the lesser characters quickly lapse into 'flat' characters - although the overweight boy who seems to have no brains is the one who's actually read the manual on dragons, unlike the others in his group.  The film would be better on the big screen: as a DVD it seemed too busy at times.   Perhaps a second viewing would improve that, as it often does.   (Is it me, or do animated movies tend to include far too much detail?)

Krishna Shanoi

A wonderful online children's book about grief, fathers, sons, a book that will speak to any boy or girl who has lost their father at a young age and never known whether they were loved or not.   It's called Glasses, and it's by Krishna Shanoi

Make sure you view it on full screen....wonderful detailed drawings, and concise, moving text.

Krishna Bala Shenoi is a name entirely unfamiliar to me, and I was only alerted to this book by a tweet from Roger Ebert, the film critic.   Shenoi's website, Artistic Scrapyard. has a wide range of artistic work.  Glasses is finely finished, compared to some of the other material showing, but you might also like to check out the video, Tissue - a love story, which is a video using a combination of animation and live action.  (It also has a surprise ending - and is beautifully matched to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.)

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.

Blade Runner re-viewed

I watched Blade Runner again last night - seems to be a season of catching up on older movies. It was listed as the 'Final Cut' and certainly, even though it's quite a few years since I first saw the film, there were scenes that didn't seem familiar at all. Whether that was just memory or alteration I'm not sure.

The story, when you think about it, can be summed up very easily. Four baddies on the loose. Kill them. The Harrison Ford character, Deckard, changes very little from the beginning to the end - if anything, he's even less enamoured of the job than he was at the beginning (we're not given any indication as to why he should have to go ahead with his particular job, since he's 'retired'). He has a sort of relationship with a girl, who is a 'replicant' - or human-like robot of the most sophisticated kind - and it kind of goes somewhere, but really has to struggle to hold its own with the violent episodes that are required to dispose of the four nasty replicants who are on the loose and shouldn't be.

The hunting down of the four replicants is pretty haphazard when you think about it. Deckard somehow finds a bit of reptile skin which he knows is synthetic, and this somehow leads him to the first of the replicants, a woman (Joanna Cassidy) doing some kind of sleazy act with the synthetic, but very lifelike snake. (Fortunately we don't get to see the act.) She cottons onto his cheesy performance as some kind of pervert inspector, and lands him a couple of solid blows to the neck (I think). But Deckard is a Dick Francis type of hero: you can mutilate him to within an inch of his life and he'll be back on his feet in minutes. He chases her and shoots her. Hmm, not much detective work there. The second replicant then finds him, and again practically kills him, and is shot in turn by the 'good' replicant girlfriend. Seems she can do anything if she's programmed for it, even things she didn't know she could do, like playing the piano.

The last two nasties, played by Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer (whose English varies between clear and incomprehensible) are the strangest of the lot. Hannah's character is plain oddball, and, if I got it right, a kind of killing machine. Hauer has a bit of a poet's heart, but isn't averse to doing the nastiest murder in the film. Hannah meets a frenetic, screaming end - and boy are we glad to see the end of her. She's just creepy.

Hauer is perhaps creepier, sometimes seeming to have popped over from the set of some horror movie, like the Friday the 13th series, but winds up, in the version I saw last night, dying quietly in the rain because his time has run out. (The replicants only get four years of 'life' - a rather short period of time, considering how superbly constructed they are.)

The film is full of oddball characters: William Sanderson as J F Sebastian, a genetic something-or-other who makes human-like toys; and Joe Turkel as the father/creator of the replicants, to name just a couple. Sanderson plays the most endearing character in the movie, but comes to a probably nasty, but thankfully unseen, end.

The thing that makes the movie most striking, perhaps, is the film noir approach: most of it takes place in a kind of perpetual night, with searchlights flicking across the screen for no apparent reason, and lots of neon lighting, and a kind of endless drizzle, (and sometimes it's pelting down). Chinese seems to be the prime language (though not for any of the main characters) and apart from advertising (Budweiser and Coca Cola in full view) most of the signage is in Chinese, and most of the food being served on the usual best fat burner from the street stalls is Chinese - and most of the lesser characters are Asian. It's a crowded noisy world, obviously unpleasant to live in, but taken for granted by the characters.

It's set in 2019, which isn't that far away now (the film was made in 1982), and while we have the usual flying cars and video phones and a few other clever futuristic things, the Internet is noticeably missing - to viewers in 2009. Barely thought of at that time, of course, and perhaps almost inconceivable.

There's one odd scene with a unicorn in the middle of the movie: perhaps Deckard is having a dream of some sort, but its pastoral tone comes out of nowhere, and vanishes almost as quickly. What was that about? And why does Darryl Hannay spray black stuff across her eyes (not a particularly healthy thing to do, I'd think) at one point? There are quite a few unanswered questions here...

Plainly the various versions of the film have had to be reassessed by reviewers: Roger Ebert has four reviews on imdb.com, the Guardian two, and BBCi films three. One or other of them might give me a clue as to the various shape-shifting this film has had.

PS. Here's what the Guardian has to say about the various versions of this movie:
You've probably seen Blade Runner: in 1982, on the release of the International Cut, or, if you happened to be in North America, the Domestic Cut. Then there was the Director's Cut, which actually had very little to do with the director. The one he did approve is called the Final Cut, which is the newest version - although it's not as new as the Workprint, which is the earliest one of all.
Confused? Warner Brothers feels your pain. As well as a new two-disc DVD of the Final Cut, they have issued a five-disc box set that includes every incarnation of Ridley Scott's film known to man, plus a multitude of extras. But why did we end up with so many versions? And is it worth shelling out for what sceptics may suspect is, essentially, the same film five times over?
This review is worth checking out if you want to have some idea which version is worth watching - I don't think it's really the one I saw last night.

Latest Harry Potter - spoilers

After seeing Notes on a Scandal the other night, I checked out what James Berardinelli had to say about it, he being one of the reviewers I find gives good straight reviews of movies. (Roger Ebert didn't review the movie, apparently.) James thinks it's a great movie except that it has a flaw in the third act - I can only think this is the bit where the Cate Blanchett character discovers the diary with all the negative information about her. It's possibly a bit improbable, and it's certainly not well-signaled as to why she should find the diary. Nevertheless, like some moments in Hitchcock, the director gets away with it.

We went and saw the latest Harry Potter tonight. Don't read this if you don't want to know what it's like. I suspect it's going to go down in my book as the one I've least enjoyed. I couldn't particularly remember the story, except the ending of course (which no Potter fan could forget), and the stuff about the horcruxes. And I certainly don't remember the relationships side of things being so much to the fore. Rowling is cleverer than that, I suspect. Here we're treated to relationship problems almost continually, as though everything hinged around them. Perhaps on the page they didn't take your attention so readily; here it's all a bit soap-opera, which is a great pity, because there are much more important things at stake here than the ups and downs of teenage relationships. (And talking of teenagers: the two main boys in particular have turned into hulking twenty-somethings; both of them look as though they've been to the gym - their shoulders are too big somehow, for teenage boys.)

Ginny Weasley proves herself to be a strong character, which is good, but Neville Longbottom, who is the one of the cruxes of the whole saga, barely gets a look in. He's seen a few times, and speaks in about one scene. Lavender, the girl who plagues Ron Weasley, gets an awful lot of screentime, even though she's a minor character, and we barely get a glimpse of some of the other longstanding people: Wormtail, Crabbe and Goyle, Remus Lupin, and Molly Weasley. Jim Broadbent, on the other hand, turns in a fine performance as Slughorn.

It's interesting that the director, David Yates, regards The Prisoner of Azkaban as the best HP movie so far: it still stands out to me as the one with the most style and flair. And that's the problem with this one: I found it slow (as though the director was pacing everything for some electric moment that never quite comes) and the climax is muffed, somehow. Maybe it's the fact that the books became increasingly complex; yet some of the other films have managed to pack a huge amount in without overloading the works. Here you keep wondering when something significant is going to happen. Let's hope Yates, who's directing the last two episodes, will pull things together in those.

The film was preceded by two or three trailers for other fantasy films. Such is the power of CGI now that we accept everything on screen as being real enough, and more, we believe that anything is possible. When anything is possible, then it takes a good deal to make us excited by what we see. It isn't necessary to have lots of explosions and cameras racing all over: even in a film filled with special effects shots, it's the actors who carry it, who grab our emotions. The idea that actors wouldn't be needed in movies (as was briefly mooted a couple of decades back) went the way of the dodo very quickly. People don't just go to see special effects; if they're not integral to the story, then we lose interest quickly.

And there's a difficulty in the fact that the special effects have to be very good now: there was a scene in one of the trailers (I think it was for GI Joe) where the Eiffel Tower came crashing down. It was too much altogether and didn't seem to work (apart from acting as a spoiler to a scene from the movie). On the other hand, there's a moment early on in The Half-Blood Prince where a London bridge that my wife and I walked over only a couple of years ago is ripped apart by the Deatheaters; this is extraordinarily well done and scarily believable. The Half-Blood Prince is certainly full of such moments.

Spoilers Galore

I didn’t read Roger Ebert’s review of Derailed before I watched the movie, because he said there’d be spoilers in his review; the same applies to this one. If you haven’t seen the movie, and want to, don’t read any further.
Derailed takes a good deal of time to set itself up, and for quite a bit of its first twenty minutes or so, doesn’t seem like much of a thriller. However, all the set up is essential for the later part of the movie, and is in fact the most logical section of the movie, all up. Derailed is exciting enough in its own unusual way; certainly every time the villain (Vincent Cassel) appears things turn pretty scary. He’s one of those uninhibited creatures who can walk into the hero’s home without batting an eyelid and set about charming the wife and the daughter as though this was all perfectly normal. And then, as soon as the wife and daughter are out of the way, he literally grabs the hero by the balls and threatens him again. Nastiest of all, he manages to survive being shot late in the movie in order to turn up for the final scenes.
Derailed is one big scam: both the audience and the hero are fooled by it for a good deal of time, but it’s when the scam is finally revealed, and the hero (something of a worm) turns and becomes proactive that things cease to hold together. A major shoot-up late in the piece that leaves four characters dead is dramatic, but almost as full of holes as the characters; and the possibility that the villain could survive this without the hero knowing, or, apparently, the police (!), is absurd in hindsight. This section is a bit of a cheat really. But then the whole thing is about cheating. Jennifer Aniston plays a woman who’s job is to ‘cheat’ in the financial area – or so she tells us. In fact, she’s cheating the hero and the audience rather than anyone financial. The hero cheats on his wife – almost – and gets himself into big blackmailing difficulties as a result. We find out late in the piece that he’s cheated on his boss, by ‘borrowing’ some money from the firm, but he’s also cheated on his wife in a different way by siphoning off the hard-earned savings they’ve put together for their diabetic daughter’s future. While his intentions are good – in a sense – they just put him and his family into deeper and deeper holes. And even the boss cheats, by allowing a big account holder to walk all over the hero in an early scene without supporting him in any way. There’s another piece of cheating gone on before the movie starts too: the hero has covered up for an ex-con who’s working in his firm. Again his intentions may have been honourable, but they seem unwise in hindsight.
In spite of my quibbles, this is a satisfying movie to watch: it’s well put together, the cast are excellent (Clive Owen has the worn-out and sometimes bewildered face of Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man, and Aniston is miles away from her Friends character); the photography, design and direction are all top quality, and even with the cheating ending, it still works. Some of the minor characters are a bit underwritten: Owen’s lawyer never seems to get off one note, and the black detective who turns up late in the proceedings might seem threatening, but Owen gives him the brush-off in every scene they have together. Equally, we never know why his boss appears to be so unsupportive, or why Owen’s wife (who seems young enough to be his daughter) is apparently remote.
Obviously I’m pretty much alone in liking the movie (Ebert says it’s okay); however, there’s a fairly friendly interview with Clive Owen on the movie here.

Les Enfants du Paradis

I ‘d think it was in the early sixties that I first saw Les Enfants du Paradis. It must have made an enormous impression on me, because when I watched it the other night, scene after scene was familiar. It was as if I’d seen it only last year.
I’d forgotten how long it is: virtually two movies in one, with a first and a second half. (In the DVD I watched, the entire credits are repeated at the beginning of the second half.) But it never suffers from a feeling of being too long. The story, on the surface, is fairly simple. A man (Baptiste) loves a woman (Garance) who loves him in return, but initially no more than she loves others; another woman (Nathalie) loves Baptiste, but is unrequited. The famous actor (Frederick) has a casual but unsustainable love for Garance; Pierre, the strange interfering thief and murderer may or may not love Garance, and perhaps loves himself a good deal more; and then there’s the Count who doesn’t really love anyone, but still manages to add Garance to his trophy collection for several years.
If that helps you understand the story, well done. What seems simple is made wonderfully complex by a literate script and subtle performances from every member of the cast. We’re never completely in the know as to what’s going on with these people, because we’re party only to some aspects of what they’re thinking. Why they do what they do would fill volumes, and yet watching them is immensely satisfying. The actors bring such underlying depths to their roles that you could speculate on all sorts of motivations.
Marcel Carné directs without effects: everything is given over to the actors, and often scenes are played out at length with few cuts. There’s a heap of dialogue, but it’s rich and full of detail. Two wonderfully luminous women play the main female roles: Arletty and Maria Casares, the former exemplifying how to be in love with life and with the moment, and the latter perpetually torn by loving someone who doesn’t love her.
Jean-Louis Barrault (pictured at right) is endlessly expressive, whether he’s playing the young man who makes one mistake in his life (leaving Garance behind when he has the chance to stay with her) or in his extended mime scenes, which comment in their own way on the rest of the story.
Pierre Brasseur is Frederick Lemaître, the over-the-top actor who can pick up a woman with a few charming words, who can turn a awful tragic script into a high comedy, and who’s never sick of the sound of his own voice. Marcel Herrand is the strange criminal character who dresses as a dandy and has no apparent scruples. The world is under his thumb, so he imagines, and in the end he is the one to release Garance from the Count – by murder.
Louis Salou plays the Count, the only main character to appear late in the proceedings. He is seen to be increasingly sour, grim and selfish. It doesn’t help, of course, that no one, particularly Garance, loves him.
The film begins and ends with a huge crowd scene: the streets of Paris are packed with people. It must have cost a fortune to have had so many extras on board. The ‘trivia’ section on imdb.com notes: The production ‘involved building the largest studio set in the then history of French cinema - the quarter mile of street frontage, reproduced in scrupulous detail, representing the Boulevard du Crime, the theater district of Paris in the 1830s and 40s. This would have been a daunting prospect at the best of times but in Vichy France, when all artisans, transport, materials, costumes and film stock were all in short supply, it was a miraculous achievement.’
Because I know these actors only from this movie, though many of them were well-known in their time, it’s as if they inhabit the characters completely. And the remainder of the cast as just as good as the principals: Fabien Loris as Avril, Pierre’s simple accomplice, somehow dressed like a perpetual youth; Jane Marken as the landlady; Pierre Renoir as Jericho, the ragman, a kind of prophet, mover of fates, jack-of-all-trades; the various stage managers and theatre directors, and the three authors – two of whom invariably talk at exactly the same time and bring some light relief.
Here’s some more background on it, from Roger Ebert: ‘All discussions of Marcel Carne's ''Children of Paradise'' begin with the miracle of its making. Named at Cannes as the greatest French film of all time, costing more than any French film before it, ''Les Enfants du Paradis'' was shot in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and released in 1945. Its sets sometimes had to be moved between the two cities. Its designer and composer, Jews sought by the Nazis, worked from hiding. Carne was forced to hire pro-Nazi collaborators as extras; they did not suspect they were working next to resistance fighters. The Nazis banned all films over about 90 minutes in length, so Carne simply made two films, confident he could show them together after the war was over. The film opened in Paris right after the liberation, and ran for 54 weeks. It is said to play somewhere in Paris every day.’
Wonderful, wonderful movie. Need to see it again!

More grumpy reviews on Mumma Mia

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian failing to realise that Colin Firth was supposed to be gay until ten minutes after the movie. In Mamma Mia! Abba is everywhere and nowhere. This is Planet Abba or Abbaworld. The characters are forever dancing and smiling and bursting into Abba songs like Stepford cyborgs when you flip the secret panel behind their heads and press the Life-Affirming Behaviour button.

Philip French, also in The Guardian, can be pretty tart at times, but here he holds in it somewhat - generously.

Roger Ebert is no worse than me in his assessment of the movie; 'It would be charity to call the plot contrived,' is about as severe as he gets.

James Berardinelli is even kinder, which just goes to show what a good bloke he is. (And he's changed the look of his page; no longer something that appears to have been typed onto the page directly from an old electric typewriter; now there's a flashy banner heading and even flashier ads.

And one last, from Salon.com. If there's going to be a sassy review with plenty of spit and bite in it, it'll be the one from this source. And I haven't even checked it out yet as I write this. But, here, as I expected:

"Mamma Mia!" is the debut feature film of British stage director Phyllida "Keep Your Day Job" Lloyd, but it feels more like a movie made by a karaoke machine than a human being: We're constantly being reminded what a great time the cast is having, particularly the women, as they cavort and mug before us, swinging their swishy skirts and throwing their heads back as if they truly believed they were channeling Dorothy Dandridge in "Carmen Jones." But it doesn't take long -- about 10 minutes, I'd say -- before their aggressive, you-go-girl joyfulness becomes outright oppression.

Two movies

We last saw Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River in Melbourne, when we were visiting there about four years ago. It’s a powerful and disturbing movie that keeps on uncovering more layers just when you think you’ve got it sussed out. The acting is uniformly superb, especially amongst the three male leads, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon, and the two wives: Laura Linney and Marcia Gay Harden.. With a kind of gritty almost documentary look to the photography, none of the actors are allowed to look like ‘film stars’; every crease and crevice in their faces is visible.

I don’t know why it’s such a moving film, considering that it’s violent and has a murderer at its heart, paedophilia as one of its subject matters, petty criminals acting as though they’re pillars of society, a wife who dobs her husband in and another wife who turns out to have an incredibly warped view of morality - and policemen who can’t pin down at least two murders because they’ve been so well covered. And then there’s the ongoing silent phone calls from Bacon’s wife, which becomes the only thing to be resolved by the end of the movie. (The murders and murderers are resolved but not at all comfortably.)

Somehow Eastwood makes us have sympathy for these people: Penn’s attempts to repress his sorrow for his daughter, the way Robbins has the incident from his childhood hanging over his whole life, Bacon’s disillusionment with his job. It’s a man’s film, about tough men, but it’s not a blokey one. There are genuine tears aplenty. These are tragic characters fit to stand alongside some of the great tragic characters of famous dramas. They may not be as articulate, but their sorrows and pains are as deep.

Curiously Laura Linney appeared in the film that followed Mystic River on TV last night. It was an odd piece called You Can Count On Me, and somehow, in spite of excellent acting from Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and yet another of the Culkin clan - Rory – it never really took off. It was hard to figure what writer/director Kenneth Lonergan was trying to do. It’s billed as a comedy, but it’s seldom laugh-out-loud funny, in spite of some humorous scenes. Lonergan himself appears as a priest in it, and it’s hard to tell whether we’re supposed to take the guy seriously or see him as a bit of a fraud.

Linney’s character accuses her somewhat shiftless brother of hypocrisy, but this comes oddly out of her mouth when she’s having it off with the boss, and her boyfriend, and telling lies to her child and brother. We never quite know what to make of her: does she know what she wants and can’t find it, or is she just confused. Perhaps her brother is the one who’s really alive by contrast? None of these things are clear enough to make sense for the viewer.

Leonard Maltin calls it ‘a wonderful comedy-drama about the peccadilloes of sibling relationships, the workplace, and life in general, sparked by great performances and an unusually perceptive script.’ Ebert calls it one of the best movies of the year, saying that it’s rare ‘for the director to be more fascinated by the process than the outcome.’ Unfortunately while that might be fair enough, it’s very unsatisfying for the audience, and the lack of any sort of denouement leaves the viewers up in the air.

Salon.com gets closer to how I felt about the movie: ‘All the praise being heaped on "You Can Count on Me," the filmmaking debut of New York playwright Kenneth Lonergan, may say more about the tepid state of American cinema in 2000 than about this wry, modestly appealing small-town drama.’

It could have been a good comedy; instead it shifts back and forth between serious drama and hurts, and never quite makes up its mind where it wants to wind up.

Ebert and Berardinelli

Two of the film reviewers I trust in most respects are Roger Ebert and James Berardinelli, whose film reviews nearly always top the list of reviews on IMDB.com.
Occasionally I’ve disagreed substantially with them – for instance, I still think 2001 is a dud of a movie, overlong, and full of its own bombast, while Berardinelli thinks it’s wonderful – but in general I find their reviews are worth reading because they think along the same lines as I do. By that I don’t mean they have to agree with my view, or I have to agree with theirs, but it’s good to know that the way you feel about a movie will find resonance with the way they feel.
I don’t know how long Ebert’s been going – it’s a long time, something like thirty years or more – and Berardinelli has been visible on IMDB pretty much since it started. Berardinelli isn’t a professional reviewer, as far as I’m aware, but he’s obviously well regarded on the site.
While I was looking up the details on What’s Love Got To Do With It? - the biopic of Tina Turner that I caught the last half hour of the other night – in order to find out who played Ike, Turner’s abusive husband (it was Laurence Fishburne and he was very good), I came across Ebert’s latest book: Your Movie Sucks. It sounds like a lot of fun. Here’s what’s on the back cover, apparently:

Roger's review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (0 stars): "The movie created a spot of controversy in February 2005. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year's Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were 'ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that . . . bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.'
"Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: 'Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. . . . Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers.'
"Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks. But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo while passing on the opportunity to participate in Million Dollar Baby, Ray, The Aviator, Sideways, and Finding Neverland. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

I read Ebert’s Awake in the Dark earlier this year. There were some films he loved that I can’t recall thinking were great, but he also made me keen to see a number of films I’ve missed over the years. I’m not sure that Your Movie Sucks would make me want to see too many of the movies mentioned in it, but it sounds like a great read all the same.