Movies: July 2006 Archives

With Mel Gibson and Lindsay Lohan making spectacles of themselves in the news this week - he for drunk driving and spewing the anti-Semitic bile we always kinda knew was in him, her getting publicly scolded by the producer of her latest film for her "heat-related" (read: mojito-fueled) work absences - I couldn't help think that there's a great father-daughter road comedy somewhere in their mutual future.
It could end in a teary reconiciliation at a halfway house. Or maybe on a beach in Beirut, with her in a bikini while Mel rants about the airstrike at their hotel.

Critics have generally been kind to the concert documentary “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,�? but I think they may have feared that slagging the movie meant slagging the man. Speaking as a huge Cohen fan, I found it an almost perfectly thorough disappointment.

Some critics did note that for a film ostensibly about the singer/songwriter/poet, he sure didn’t figure much in it. Cohen’s best moment comes when he reads the wry, generous introduction he wrote for the Chinese translation of “Beautiful Losers,�? his (one presumes) drug-fueled, stream-of-consciousness, utterly unhinged ’60s novel about a love triangle. The rest of what he has to say covers pretty familiar territory if you know anything about the guy.

(Interestingly, in the film, Cohen concedes that revealing that his song “Chelsea Hotel No. 2�? concerned a tryst with Janis Joplin was “ungallant,�? making his later explication of the song “Suzanne�? – that not everything in that song really happened – seem a bit disingenuous.)

So most of the film is given over to a tribute concert in which a number of singer/songwriters perform sort of Vegas-y, overwrought versions of Cohen tunes. Cohen’s material works precisely because he largely presented it in such a subtle, unadorned fashion; he never tried to sell the hell out of it. Cohen, who doesn’t even appear at the concert, performs but one song live, a fairly rote reading of “Tower of Song�? with U2 noodling away in the background.

Additionally, many of the songs chosen, curiously enough, are rather minor offerings from his canon, with a shocking number of his undisputed masterpieces overlooked. No “Joan of Arc?�? No “Famous Blue Raincoat?�? or “Take This Longing?�? No “Democracy�? or “The Future?�? Neophytes encountering Cohen for the first time, based on the bulk of the songs presented juxtaposed with the fawning hagiography, will be right for wondering what all the fuss is about.

Finally, this may be, visually, the most unintentionally ugly film I’ve ever seen – with its limited color palate, its intense close-ups and its wan, uninspired efforts to juice up the imagery, this may be the first movie to look better on an iPod than it does on the big screen.

How utterly wrong-headed are the visuals? The song "Sisters of Mercy" is accompanied by images of religious iconography; the song itself is about a threesome.

Given all this, perhaps Antony shouldn’t have accentuated so intensely the final lines of his song: “End this night/if it be your will.�?

While Roger Ebert recovers from surgery, it has been announced that noted film historian Jay Leno will replace him in the balcony for a week on "Ebert & Roeper." Slacker auteur and noted visual stylist (ahem) Kevin Smith ("Clerks II") will follow him in the second week of Ebert's recuperation, with other people (including an actual critic or two) being considered for future installments.

A show about about movie criticism without any movie critics? Brilliant!

It's been apparent for quite some time that that show isn't about film criticism anymore. Bringing in Roeper, who isn't a film critic (but plays one on TV), was like having that weasly little Alan Colmes as the voice of the "left" on Fox News Channel's "Hannity and Colmes" -- it's simply intended to make ultraconservative Sean Hannity look better. And so Ebert's ego is assuaged because he's assured to look like he knows what he's talking about compared to his little sidekick.

Of course, if the big cheese and his ego are gone, no one's gonna watch Roeper flail about on his own. So naturally they have to tart it up with celebrities. Which, in the end, only serves to feed Ebert's ego (which, while bedridden, remains healthy) all the more: It takes someone with the stature of Jay Leno to replace Roger.

Those two big thumbs are up, all right -- someone's backside.

I would admonish anyone in the minority who found “United 93,�? a film I quite admired, to be manipulative and exploitative from seeing even a frame of the trailer for Oliver Stone’s 9/11 film, “World Trade Center.�? We’re talking aneurysms all around.

It’s hard to say what’s most offensive about the trailer (which drew catcalls at the theater where I saw it, more, even, than the indisputably execrable-looking jackass-o-rama’s “John Tucker Must Die�? or “You, Me and Dupree�?), but here are a few nominees:

* Nicolas Cage’s New York accent. It might actually be fairly accurate, but it just sounds stupid emanating from his lips, and at the very least it’s distracting, at least in the trailer. He plays a heroic New York cop, who at one point portentously declares, “We’re prepared for everything, but not this. Not for something this size.�? Which sounds like something that’d come from the mouth of Mr. Exposition than from anyone forced to endure that awful day.

* The scene of Cage’s colleagues, at his stern challenge, stepping up to help him evacuate the building. This represents the sort of Hollywoodization of the tragedy that “United 93�? so assiduously avoided, cheesy myth-making that feels false even when we instinctively understand and recognize the courage of the men who perished that day.

* The slo-mo shots of firemen running about heroically and/or embracing loved ones, placed in no context whatsoever. Further crass hagiography where none is needed. And to make matters worse – or, at least, more manipulative, we see a cop trapped in the rubble, realizing his end is likely near, scribbling “I [heart] U�? to a loved one on a scrap of paper.

* Cage, pinned beneath horrific debris, imploring a similarly imperiled colleague: “Can you still see the light?�? What, you mean under all the oppressive gloom, dust and destruction? Is this film really going to attempt to posit 9/11 as a feel-good film? Really?

* Apparently, yes. Its tagline: “The world saw evil that day. Two men saw something else.�?

* The music. Oh, my god, the music. The trailer’s untenably soaring, angelic choirs not only seek to uplift easily moved boob viewers, but to uplift monumental scads of mastodons bogged in subterranean tar pits to the aerie of the vast cosmos. Guys, tone it down a degree or two, or three. Or three-hundred.

On the other hand, there’s this New York Times story, suggesting that even if Oliver Stone is the director, it just might not suck so much.