Short reviews

Hello!

Welcome back and sorry not sorry about the Quintet review, a post that received hundreds of comments far and wide, the verdict of which may be summarised as “you have produced a disastrously clotted gabble of half-formed ideas.” But I still like it.

Here now are some reviews of films I don’t feel strongly enough about to write full posts on.

Norma Rae (1979): This is really the epitome of the well-told take-it-seriously life-in-America film. People, me, talk about “70s films” but really there’s early 70s and there’s late 70s – this is a late 70s classic, so it has sentimental scenes, clunky bits, a couple of moments of over-acting but it is mostly persuasively acted, strongly directed, and builds to some real intensity. Exquisitely Tasteful-Hollywood work gives us the vitality and the flinching tameness of Tasteful-Hollywood at its best – lots of over-crafted dialogue and calibrated emotional arcs so we can suck our middle class thumbs happily. But it is also a very satisfying film just because of its topic, factory unionisation, and the subversiveness of choosing it at all. (Somewhere in the great beyond, poor Serge Daney is grinding his teeth at that sentence.) Over two hours, just giving itself the space it needs to work without rushing, Norma Rae feels like a nice cafe meal with a sweet dessert in the form of a very soft happy ending. But I do love the iconic “stand on a table”, it is brilliantly done, and I also love the loudness of the film, the sound of the machines throughout, and the pay-off from that at the climax when the machines go silent one by one. Sound is used extremely well all through the film, except the very catchy end-credits song doesn’t last until the end of the credits, which then just go to silence – bit weird. What are we supposed to do, whistle? Talk amongst ourselves? You couldn’t find something else to play? Oh, we’re supposed to leave.

It couldn’t be made today, obvs. This was still a time in America when a Jewish leftist could parachute in from New York and find common ground with a working class woman in North Carolina, that much would appear to be accurate. Today she wouldn’t stop spouting Fox News attack lines, so Norma Rae ends up, in effect, an unwitting document of how effective the right-wing propaganda machine has been since this came out. It never was realistic, though; there’s a few jolting moments when we’re surprised to the point of confusion by how bold the union rep’s recruitment drive is. Would they actually do it that way in real life? No, they would not, it is as dumb as it looks and shows an utter lack of basic unionisation strategy, which is a perilously delicate business. This is Hollywood’s fairy tale take on everything, this time in a left-leaning cause. And yet out of a period of films that swaggeringly set out to make truthful statements about American Society Right Now, this one has probably held up the best, since it is the most (literally) politically correct. And we on the left are entitled to a few bullshit happy endings too.

 

Fight Club (1999): Bret Easton Ellis loves this film, almost hailing it as, effectively, the last great moment in American film history (apart from Fincher's Zodiac), and I understand. If it had come out in the 60s or more likely the 70s, it would have been counted as a major cinematic milestone and been the centre of serious discussion, and Ellis loves not only its shock tactics but also Fincher’s visual flair. I haven’t changed my view of it since it came out, which is that it’s radical chic. In the novel, Project Mayhem wants to wipe out a natural-history museum, a weird Ballardian goal, fascinating and indefinable and deranged. It’s not the goal we want them to have, it’s not the one right-on readers can get behind. Oh, we say, Palahniuk wimped out, and if he was more politically educated and subversive, Project Mayhem would want to crash the credit-card system, man. And lo and behold, the Hollywood version has them doing just that instead. Precisely so that, in some cheap way, we can root for them, the very thing Palahniuk took pains to avoid. It was always a less than impressive change, but even less after ’08. People worried after 9/11 that Fight Club would age badly because it ends with them turning into a terrorist group that blows up a skyscraper. But that’s nothing compared to how it looks since we found out what it would be like if they actually caused a financial meltdown. It shows up the political cluelessness of Hollywood and their dumb movies about cool sexy rebels and the vast gap between that and real revolutionary politics. Palahniuk made none of those mistakes. Nor was it impossible for Fincher to get it right – just look at Dark Knight for Christopher Nolan’s answer to Fight Club, a much better portrayal of the futility of Project Mayhem style terrorism.

OK? Ok. Is this too boringly lefter-than-thou of me? Don’t tedious commie nerds churn out dozens of finger-wagging reviews like this, in a superior tone of dogmatic dismissal, very often giving the impression that they could have written it without seeing the film? Of course Hollywood didn’t make a proper Marxist film. No shit. We might have even guessed beforehand and not walked out crestfallen that, once again, capitalist Lucy moved the revolutionary football. It’s such a stupidly puritanical, boring, lazy way to not-engage with a film, like a Christian listing the moral faults of a rom-com with that skillful mixture of suppressed pissed-off irritation and smugness. “It glorifies adultery, it takes the Lord’s name in vain, it encourages lustful thoughts, it is undialectical about capitalism and it implies that adventurism can substitute for vanguardism.” Unfortunately, this captures how I feel about Fight Club. Palahniuk wrote a novel dedicated to making the point that Fight Club and Project Mayhem are not cool. Fincher read it and thought “they’re cool but I can make them cooler”. Perhaps, though, the dialectic of history has since rescued Fight Club and inadvertantly restored Fincher's Mayhem to its rightful stupidity in the audience's eyes. 

 

The Last New Year’s Eve (1998): Italian comedy tend to be pretty broad even when it thinks it’s being relatively subtle, and this one is not trying to be subtle, with an additional 90s noisiness, copying the aggression, over-insistence and knowingness of American indie comedies from the same period like Very Bad Things but still recognisably from the same culture as opera and Argento. But of course you have already noticed that we have just enjoyed a well-informed if not well-formed introductory sentence that yet avoids paying due respect to the largesse this film bestows and the only reason for my acquaintance with it, so without further delay it is my honour to announce the presence in this motion picture of Signora Monica Bellucci. I feel like not seeing this in my early 20s was a missed appointment with fate, as I would have had an embolism and died happy, one trembling hand stretched out to reach for the impossible. She’s not in it all the way through, but it’s too much to ask me to follow the rest of it, a typical “lots of hilariously overblown characters in their own sub-plots that eventually converge” Euro-com. Her sub-plot is about her husband cheating on her. Cheating on Monica Bellucci. Is this plausible in her native land? For clearly it blasphemes all we hold true in the developed world. The film never implies it’s not plausible so I suppose it might be. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by anything that goes on in Italy but this particular possibility takes some processing. She was about 33 or 34 in this film and her looks test the limit of what one’s eyes can believe. But Italy is evidently a rich and fascinating culture as there’s another actress in this film who could also stir the hearts of the poets and she only has a bit part. Myself, I would stay faithful to Monica but admittedly 34 is getting on a bit. So, were an entirely superfluous reason to uphold the vows needed, I mention only in passing that when she finds out she’s been betrayed, her murderous vengeful Italian rage seems rather believable. Like all the other deafeningly loud, shrieking anti-good-taste comedies which have brought such joy to audiences across multiple continents, this is pretty inconsequential stuff but its lack of importance is not important to me on this occasion. 

 

Triple 9 (2016): One thing I always want more of is the “self-consciously well ‘ard urban action film about criminals getting into shoot outs” like The Town or Sabotage or Run All Night, and this is exactly that. When it came out, it was hyped as “the most intense action-thriller ever.” Not sure I’d go that far. Not sure I’d even stretch in that direction but it’s ok, someone has clearly decided they like the idea of making a film that reviewers will call “nihilistic” and it’s pleasant enough watching them dutifully go through all these mean dark plot-twists like good little nihilists. The basic plot is a bunch of corrupt cops in Atlanta do bank robberies (is there no decency any more?) and come up with a plan to sacrifice an officer as a distraction for the rest of the police while they get up to no good (triple 9 is code for "officer down"), all for a Russian mob boss played by Robert de Niro. Wait, no, Al Pacino. Wait, no, actually played by Kate Winslet because why the fuck not, are you sexist. We also get a pointlessly overdone “weird” performance by Woody Harrelson who is evidently doing his own take on Bad Lieutenant and should really have been told to pull it back a bit. Despite the film’s fairly scattered explanation of the plot, we do get some quite impressive surprises but it still ends up with a “crime don’t pay” ending that then has the nerve to play out with Cypress Hill’s “Pigs” to tell us how streetwise it is. Guys, only Republicans would do anything you’ve done here. About two thirds of the way through, the film raises a genuinely important question, “is this whole thing just boring?” but it picks up again for the last stretch, so in the end I put it about equal to Rise of the Footsoldier 2 which sounds like a putdown but I quite liked ROTF2.

 

A Dangerous Method (2011): Not to be confused with Dangerous Liaisons although I would love for that to happen to someone. This is a quite short film about Jung meeting Freud and arguing about their respective theories and then Sabina Spielrein (who has already had a couple of films made about her) shows up and Jung gets all fucked up about it, Freud is cool beans. It’s from a 2 ½ hour play, so I don’t know what was cut out, but it holds your attention. It’s a surprisingly disturbing film on two counts, one because Freud’s ideas are pretty disturbing anyway, and two the solemn title cards right at the end, “Freud driven out by Nazis, Spielrein killed by Nazis, Jung died peacefully in Germany in late middle age.” That pretty much sums up what I think of Jung so at least the film basically gets it. Now then, Keira Knightley – really good in it, or no? I think really good in it, this was the film that stopped me turning things off when she was in them. However, my most abiding memory of it is a scene where two characters are talking in a park, and there are some people in period costume walking in the background, and the extras are so obviously staged and choreographed, Godard himself could not have upended a film so decisively.  

Some other “Dangerous Method” mix-ups to avoid:

On Dangerous Ground (Steven Seagal action movie)

Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara movie with Madonna in it)

Dangerous Minds (Michelle Pfeiffer teaches inner-city kids, but who is tougher?)

Method Man – Dangerous Ground (hip hop track)

Risky Business (1983 comedy with Tom Cruise and Rebecca de Mornay)