Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

May 30, 2003

God, in the details

A second Bruce Almighty press kit thumped into the mailbox the other day, with a letter from Universal publicity. Seems the thirty-six page 8x10 glossy booklet, with twenty-five black-and-white photos were in error, and Universal suggested substituting the new copy for the flawed one. Why all the expense? A less-than-thumbsized logo on the back of the booklet, erroneously indicating the film had been produced by Imagine, rather than Spyglass Entertainment. Hell hath no accountant like a producer scorned.

Fish wish

Pixar: bottom-line behemoths who do no wrong fiscally or funnily. The top-of-the-line, terabyte-heavy animation of the comic creatures under Finding Nemo's sea is a joy unto itself: an ever-undulating Lava Lamp tapestry suitable for moppets and potheads alike. The keenly-cast voices include Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres, and both are swell, writers and directors alike adept at exploring and exploiting the contours of their comic personalities, as much for range as for possible familiarity to an audience. The jokes are terrific, families are reunited, the gags continue through the end credits, and the corporate stock should remain buoyant.

Beano fino

Confined to a big-budget movie, the scarifying weirdness of Rowan Atkinson's bumbling, muttering, rodentile Everyfuckup Mr. Bean was diminished; on A&E's three-disc DVD, his fourteen-episode TV series (with four extra skits and a doc) is almost too stupid to be true. It's settee-wetting hilarious. Not for those who are afraid to giggle.

See the sea

Baltasur Kormakur's first feature, the 2000 Icelandic slacker comedy 101 Reykjavik was a loopy delight. For his follow-up, the bleak, savage and often very, very funny The Sea takes on Scandinavian family drama with a vengeance. Ibsen? Strindberg? The Celebration? Bah. Kormakur, working from a stage play by Olafur Haukur Simonarson, delineates the decline of family and industry in a distant town by the sea through a single, brutally angry family. He's in Bergman territory, if not Bergman-on-speed territory. They've gathered because their father, keeper of the family's fishing rights, who believes in the survival of the village more than in his irresponsible brood, has news for them. They're all anxious for the divvying up of what they presume will be a sizable estate. Some reviewers have leapt upon the convulsive soul-baring as contempt toward the characters--notably LA Weekly's Ella Taylor--but the story's point-of-view is so consistent and corrosive I couldn't help but enjoy the thrashings. And you get to witness some of the most gloriously diverse weather on screen in ages: ice, sleet, snow, rain, volcanic springs loosing mist into the forbidding night. Kormakur, an actor turned stage director turned film director, bites off as much as Chekhov or even Shakespeare might care to chew, and while he's nowhere near that good, he's the real thing.

Slippery cons

A man with a gun takes your wallet and runs into a nearby alley.

Not much of a story, you have to admit. A man with a terrible temper, unreliable collaborators, stylish clothes, and an underworld lifestyle dependent on an artfully crafted plan of pursuit and escape? You're getting there.

Heist movies are one of the rarest of genre styles to pull off. Which is why it's usually scary to hear the announcement of a remake like The Italian Job, which requisitions the contours of a likable if convoluted 1969 English Michael Caine vehicle that had some pretty terrific chase scenes.

But, against the odds, The Italian Job is a remake that does justice to the modest charms of its predecessor while working in a contemporary style. It also doesn't hurt that it's a remake of an imperfect movie. Director F. Gary Gray is onto something much like Doug Liman was with The Bourne Identity: instead of exuding the callous cool of 1990s hits, the characters are sincere short of earnestness. It partakes of an earlier, more European sense of gangster cool.

Whether through characterization or casting, there are a handful of concerns that make movies like this work. Are we sympathetic to who robs whom? Is justice served and how brutally? Where'd you get that hat? It's easy to make a bad heist film. It's also easy to make a strange one. While it's easy to admire the almost Martian weirdness of David Mamet's House of Games, with almost no recognizable human psychology or behavior, that writer-director's continuing fascination with the bare mechanics of cons can do him in, such as in a convoluted movie like The Heist.

Michael Mann may be the director who most consistently teeters near the pretentious edge of cool. In his painfully stylish 1981 Thief, the details of the robberies are told with an almost clinical precision while threats of obscene violence against a family make us root for James Caan's bad guy. In his epic 1995 Heat, which Sight & Sound editor Nick James has memorably called "a slippery behemoth," Mann again uses the heist as a backdrop for an examination of gangland ethics, threatened masculinity and the city at night. But for a larger audience, The Italian Job will be the summer's unexpected lark, as concerned with the fun of the faces and the lure of the game as the history of genre. How pretentious could you get with the director of Set It Off and a cast that includes Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Seth Green, Jason Statham and Mos Def? Edward Norton, reportedly cast to redeem his contract with Paramount for his debut, Primal Fear, is good, but less-than-fresh as a twisty bad guy like a couple he's played before. Gray, unlike Jonathan Demme and his Wahlberg-starring The Truth about Charlie (another, less-than-involving caper remake), understands what makes that admittedly limited actor attractive and appealing, and uses his combination of ugly-prettiness, naivety and street wariness to useful effect.

As shot by Wally Pfister, cinematographer of Christopher Nolan's Memento and Insomnia, Gray's direction makes The Italian Job a sleeker, slicker version of the lighter-than-air intrigues of Ocean's Eleven. While the commercials and word-of-mouth will focus on chases with the newly reminted Mini Cooper cars, there's also homage to the greats of the genre, such as The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi and the work of Jean-Pierre Melville. Jules Dassin claims he didn't see John Huston's 1950 classic until after making Rififi. Another director working in France, Jean-Pierre Melville, who idolized that film and its director, was scheduled to make Rififi, and when Dassin made it, he went on to Bob le flambeur, (Bob the Gambler), which covers similar ground, as well as his epic heist swan song, 1970's The Red Circle. Melville said that The Red Circle, which will be issued as a Criterion DVD in a few months, incorporates all nineteen facets of the heist film, a list which, unhelpfully, he took to the grave. But Gray's work, on the streets of L.A. and even inside its gleaming new subway tunnels, tick off a few basics that have worked for fifty years.

In a movie like The Italian Job, honoring its cinematic forebears, charm and betrayal, cool places and cooler toys add layers to the game. But the elegance of the heist genre comes down to one sustained element. Process. A description of actions, more baroquely detailed than in the world of someone like the French minimalist Robert Bresson, say, yet a depiction of process that shows theft to be a job requiring intense cleverness and innovation. It's like making a mass audience movie: it's only work.

The enemy of "Friends"

The Manhattan-centric friends of Friends  would probably hate the Euro-diverse friends in L'auberge espagnole.  

Cedric Klapisch's earlier features include the delightful When the Cat's Away, one of the great comedies about how lives overlap and intersect in the modern city, and Family Resemblances, an agile comedy of family life told within the confines of a restaurant. With L'auberge espagnole (The Spanish Inn), the 41-year-old French filmmaker works with material of such sitcom-y promise that the characters even remark on it at one point.

Still, it's unlikely that all but the best directors can avoid the standard conflicts that emerge when eight dissimilar people are stuck under one roof. For instance, while Klapisch is no Robert Altman, Altman has never demonstrated a particular interest in coming-of-age stories (let us not speak of the almost unspeakable O.C. and Stiggs).

Xavier (Romain Duris, a Klapisch regular) is a 25-year-old economics student who leaves his life and girlfriend, (a sullen Audrey Tautou) in Paris behind to study for a year in Barcelona through an intra-European exchange program. His father's pulling strings, encouraging him to study economics and learn Spanish, which would make him an ideal Eurocrat in the bowels of the new economics of the European Union.

Xavier, to note again, is 25. After a few false starts, he finds himself with seven roommates in one bustling household, within his own virtual E.U., where every language is spoken and few emotions are held in reserve. One of the delicious felicities of L'auberge espagnole, once entitled Euro Pudding, is its effortless cosmopolitanism. Euro Pudding would have been too much of an in-joke; it's a derisive bit of jargon for a film with financiers of many nations and thus no identity. Klapisch himself has a walk-on in one street scene, with the self-deprecating "What a fucking mess!" being his most memorable line.

Even when characters are underdeveloped and Dominique Colin's sometimes-muddy shot-on-video images diminish the brilliant blues of the sea and sky and mosaics of the Catalan capital, languages and cultures jostle fruitfully. Even noting its limitations while watching it over the weekend with a notably white-haired audience, I was pleased. There are only a handful of films I know that mess with language and the overlap of nationalities so playfully, most notably Wim Wenders' 1977 thriller The American Friend, which took as its subtext the Americanization of European culture and movies.

Duris, who has also played a winsome Gallic charmer in movies like Tony Gatlif's Gadjo Dilo, is Klapisch's Everyboy. Hair cut short, unlike his goateed and maned hipster in When the Cat's Away, Duris is cute but, when his character is frustrated, manages to looks like an utter doofus, which is, of course, part of his charm. While his roommates-an English woman, a Belgian lesbian, Italian, German, and Danish men and a single Catalan woman-are indicated with swift comic strokes, the women in Xavier's life are less well-drawn. Audrey Tautou continues to play surly, sullen variations on her charming turn as Amelie, and as Anne-Sophie, a young, neglected wife whom Xavier beds, the estimable Judith Godreche, playing a simple, unthoughtful woman, has little to do but look stricken or gratefully orgasmic. (There is one sustained comic and erotic frisson, when the husband returns home and Xavier wants to flee; all Anne-Sophie wants is to continue to run her hands along Xavier's hands, his arms, his body. It's a very funny scene.)

Twenty-five is probably the oldest characters are allowed to be in movies and still ask themselves such questions about identity and the meaning of life unless they're in period costumes, nibbling on rinds of cheese in a chalky garret. Some grownups might not give a good merde about Xavier's inner struggles about kisses, longing, how we read city streets and, in general, his emerging world view. But important questions get tossed into the air, even if some are underlined with all the dramatic subtlety of a soccer ball being booted straight up in the air. Klapisch wrote the script quickly when a since-finished heist movie fell through. The video production allowed for a lower budget, but it also allows for a spontaneity and briskness that keeps the cliches, both old and new, from wearying. Still, the charm of its notebook form pales besides Godard's snapshots of French youth in the 1960s, particularly in Masculin-Feminine. Charm is not beauty; observation is not literature.

After spending a couple of weeks surveying Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films (notably The 400 Blows, Antoine and Colette and Bed and Board), it's shocking to realize how difficult it is to make lasting romances. Equally shocking is how simple the means can be to pull it off. There are a busy range of devices in L'auberge, many of which are drawn from its video origins, and it weakens the movie's achievements. When you call a movie like L'auberge espagnole a tasty soufflŽ, you are also saying that it is quickly digested as the next meal approaches. Or the next episode of  Friends, the one about the French guy who doesn't realize just how lucky, lucky, lucky he is.

 

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