Pride Unprejudiced: Fish Tank, The Lovely Bones and more ...

	..MCN Weekend
	..Movie City Indie

Fish Tank, The Lovely Bones, Daybreakers and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Bleeding love - Fish Tank (****)

From its opening minutes of anger expressed by its teen protagonist, director Andrea Arnold's second feature, Fish Tank, is an electric slice of elevated everyday life. Luckily, Arnold amasses her own idiosyncratic observations, different sensations from other English filmmakers who trouble to traffic with class, more tender than Loach and Leigh, and also with a more kaleidoscopic eye than the Belgian brothers Dardenne, mingling the funny, the sorrowful, the sad, the melancholy and the intimate without a solitary note of false uplift. She's a poet, really.

The intent simmer of her cop-turned-sexual stalker of the dark, winding streets of Red Road is displaced by a 15-year-old's negotiation of council flats and encroaching womanhood. As Mia, newcomer Katie Jarvis, discovered on a subway platform, is a find: an uncultivated natural playing a council-estate teenager attracted to the handsome new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) of her single mom (Kierston Wareing). Many gray areas will be colored in. The language is scouringly profane and the suburban landscape is the scorched earth of J. G. Ballard-land. Yet Arnold's characters are living in the moment, breathing each second.

Music offers fleeting freedom (and sweet commentary an audience can take home). Mia's energy comes out in dancing with herself to hip-hop in an abandoned space: she's as fierce in her private choreography as Arnold is unrepentantly unsentimental. Arnold makes many quiet creative choices that enrich her loving, lovely tapestry, but her preference for shooting in the almost square, old-fashioned 1.33 ratio and the snapshot esthetic of some of her lighting suggests memories built from a shoebox of poignant Polaroids. The world is not bleak: there is dance and there are dreams and even in the most dangerous moments, Arnold implies Mia will survive; thrive.

Arnold does extraordinary work with actors but she creates a lived-in, to-be-lived-through world for their characters to battle against. In the end, Fish Tank is kilometers away from social realism: it's a blooming nightmare that life's experience one day will shake this obstinate, gifted director's characters away from. [Arnold chose to shoot the film full frame, or 4:3, rather than any wider/narrower ratio.]

King Kong behind the camera - The Lovely Bones (1/2 *)

Start with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, move on to King Kong, and now there's Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's unlikely bestseller, The Lovely Bones," written with his usual collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. Things have not gotten smaller, despite the scale of the source material.

The Lovely Bones is narrated from beyond the grave by young Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), watching over her parents (wan Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg) and her rapist-murderer (Stanley Tucci), trying to make sense of what's happened to her so she can move beyond the strange limbo she's in. In concept, Susie's surroundings are limited to the experience and emotions of a girl of her age in that time and place, but the imagery seems like a Google image-search fever dream built off some psychotic algorithm. The riot of stylized color and garish digital backdrops is less evocative of pictorial masters of subjective delirium such as the great Powell and Pressburger Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes than of IMAX-scale screensavers. Fields and skies that resemble ads for over-the-counter antihistamines do the tale no favor, either. I can see Claritin, now.

You wonder where the bold yet delicate director of Heavenly Creatures could be vacationing. That memorable film's depiction of prehensile sexual and emotional stirrings between its young female characters is epic in its compact concentration compared to Lovely Bones. Another choice by Jackson, to leave the novel's version of Susie's rape and murder off-screen, seems extremely well-judged in retrospect. It'll be interesting to see if the marketing shift from Oscar voters to Twilight repeat viewers could work as a grave, small Silence of the Lambs for girls, missing only ponies and unicorns and strapping, celibate vampires.

Ronan, the cold, vengeful heart of Atonement, pale blue eyes flint for fire, is terrific within the blankets of CGI design. Stanley Tucci is impressive as the creep neighbor who kills, banal and frightening enough to give the actor himself nightmares. (He's as good as he is in comedy, but you miss his adroit timing playing off other actors at his level.) The thinning blonde hairpiece, aviator glasses and other bits of dress make him look enough like a man on a city bus you'd either not notice or take precaution not to sit beside, depending on how alert you are on a given day. As for Susie, she reflects, he "gives me the skeevies." "My murderer was a man from my neighborhood" is a line that ought to chill, but it takes Ronan's eyes, not her inflections, to bring the pain to life. Susan Sarandon's bravura eccentricity as drinking, chain-smoking Grandma Lynn belongs to another movie, perhaps something after the style of John Cassavetes, peopled by meth-addled drag queens.

The lovely music is advertised as a score by Brian Eno, but it's at its most aggravating when it recycles older themes, from albums that would be familiar to any of Eno's listeners, but less so the characters in the story or the now-targeted 'tween audience, and more likely Jackson's own 48-year-old ears. The foraging and pillaging of Michael Nyman's back catalog for the soundtrack of Man on Wire, music equally familiar to me, didn't cause this kind of aggravation, although I remember Godfrey Cheshire writing that he had to walk out of that amazing film after twenty minutes because of its familiarity. Still, I can imagine Eno was great music to listen to while editing yet one more interminable draft of The Lord of the Rings screenplay. But it's one more little thread of exasperation in a wildly overproduced film. Scottish director Lynn Ramsay developed a version of The Lovely Bones and considering her substantial talent for sound and music, as in her most recent feature, Morvern Callar, you have to wonder what sonic landscape Susie would have lived and thrived and mourned in if that version had come to pass.

"I remember being really small" is a line in Ronan's voiceover as the raped, murdered girl that evokes grim laughter in recollection. Susie wanted to be a "wildlife photographer," she says, and Jackson shows her with a slim wand of a 126 camera with flashcubes, a flash and a flash sound going off even when there's no flash. She's grown up to be a production designer with a $65 million budget instead. Jackson's Kiwi eye produces a 1970s United States that's more Pennsyl-tucky than sociologically apt or iconically adroit. Still, the director of movies like Brain Dead does pop up now and again, such as in a mall bookstore stacks copies of Germaine Greer's Feminine Mystique near posters for the novel, The Lord of the Rings. It's a gesture like Richard Donner putting a Superman pinball machine in Lethal Weapon: leaden.

The lovely fangs - Daybreakers [***]

Daybreakers, written and directed by twin brothers Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig (makers of 2003’s outback zombie tale Undead), is set in 2019, when most of the world has "turned" after a plague, taking the offer to become vampires (or "vamps," as the script has it). The new, unreflective flesh is dependent on an ever-decreasing population of humans for blood to put in their morning coffee. (Plasmaccino vente, please?) Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a vamp scientist researching a blood substitute for his boss Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), head of the Bromley Marks Corporation, "World Leader in Blood Pharmacy."

The yellow contacts Hawke wears are almost unnecessary, set against his impressively high, gaunt 40-year-old cheekbones. He carries survivor’s guilt, wishing he could be dis-infected, to become human, mortal, again. The opposition is represented by a cross-bow wielding human with a secret (Ebert neatly dubbed him the Dr. Salk of vampirism) named Elvis (Willem Dafoe): vampiric even when playing ordinary humanity, Dafoe’s cracker Van Helsing drawls the bulk of the movies’ punchlines ("Bein’ human in a world full of vampires is as safe as barebacking a five-dollar whore.") While there are sleek Chrysler coupes retrofitted for "daytime driving" for vamps, most of the action takes place by night.

The look is of the same fluorescent cast and grainy pallor of Minority Report with modest design elements suggestive of Blade Runner. The lines of the production design are clean and gratifying to watch. Someone's had a lot of chewy, doodley fun: Boxes within boxes appear as grids of surveillance screens and on carpets and curtains and similar paintings, distant relations of Mondrian’s "Broadway Boogie Woogie," hang on boxy apartment walls, much as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House was used in Ridley Scott’s design for Blade Runner.

Other citations are equally unfussy: the cream-in-the-coffee-cup sneak zoom, first familiar from Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her, cited in Taxi Driver and more recently, Observe and Report, is seen here as java juiced with a swirl of red, human blood, used to indicate one character’s resistance to its power. The immortals also have a habit that never fails to elicit a smirk: chain-smoking with eternals' abandon.

But Daybreakers‘ vigor is elsewhere. The real business is spatter. Once the confrontations kick in under blue penumbral light, the detonations of the vanquished are satisfying, silly sanguinary excess: vamps concuss in a splendor of cherries jubilee and black granular muck. It’s crowd-pleasing B-movie fun throughout. There’s a neat shot near the end of the film rich with implication, as soldiers tumble over each other in slow motion, as if from George A. Romero’s "All Undead on the Western Front," but it’s just one more burst of clever shorthand, even as it suggests possibilities for a sequel. The supposed American city and countryside are shot in Brisbane and Queensland, leavened by the smallest details, such as a single shot of a U. S. flag, to pleasingly unearthly effect.

Terry Gilliam's Museum of "Me" - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus [** ½]

A compact magic circus pulls to the corner, a horse-drawn wagon bursting with cut-out scenery and backdrops, a cutaway forest in illusionist's space, framed by swaddling hushes of drapery as much dust as velvet, as well as naked clear light bulbs, that could have rolled up in earliest Panto days, an "Imaginarium" that is the bailiwick of one Dr. Parnassus.

In modern-day London, Parnassus, Christopher Plummer in dotty autumnal bluster, more leer than Lear, is an old man. This old man is older than old, older than dirt, old as Mr. Nick (the Devil, a husk rasped full by Tom Waits) with unsettled wagers between immortality and youth. Valentina, his daughter, is about to turn 16. Valentina. The so-tall Lily Cole, a model making her acting debut, has a round face that's pre-Raphaelite apparition by way of painter John Currin's habitual cheeky fantastication of the rubicund, childlike female face, as round and pretty as the moon, almost as if made for Terry Gilliam to set in his pageant of tatterdemalion.

Gilliam's latest film (written with Charles McKeown, Brazil, Baron Munchausen) nearly collapsed, as his projects seem always to be in danger of doing. In this case, it was the sudden death of Heath Ledger with the film half-finished. The script's a steamer trunk stuffed with omen and portent: Ledger's character first appears as a figure from Tarot, a striating shadow figure against the bulwarks of a long modern bridge in the deep of night, The Hanged Man.

Tony is a Trickster, a fancy-pants and escapee from the higher reaches of society (as well an actor with only weeks to live, we know). After the abrupt heartbreak, Gilliam's solution to a missing leading man was simple and works unexpectedly well: the scenes that had not yet been shot all took place behind the mirror of Dr. Parnassus' Imaginarium, so the writer-director divided the three scenes between Ledger's colleagues, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Each actor wears their own fitting of the costume that Ledger wore, with a carat-inverted carat goatee, mascara and lank oily hair pulled back in a thin, prideful queue. Waits' Mr. Nick is also an armor of caricatured strokes, louche in a bowler and a John Waters-stripe-'stache. Without the charisma of the actor(s), Tony would be a sorry sight, a shabby self-delusion. Attractively, as in another feature film in current release where his supporting role is unbilled, Farrell performs with unpretentious dash. He's the least tony of Tonys.

Law's brief segment is set in the most Gilliamesque of imaginary worlds, on a ladder that reaches the clouds in the sky, which, when its slats are sawn, becomes a set of stilts that plunge forward and advance across the landscape at great height, epic against blue sky and mad tufts of white cloud. Other visual elements lurch in the rash direction of John Boorman's immortal mess, Zardoz. And as always, being on-the-nose seems to be one of the joys Gilliam takes in screenwriting. A club with multiple threats is called Medusa, an unlucky pub, The Horseshoe. "Don't believe what you read in the papers—especially the Mirror." (Rimshot.) One of the travels behind the mirror considers the "immortality" of Valentino, James Dean, Princess Di. There's no reach for nuance, only essence, when Depp's Tony observes, speaking words the late Ledger would have, had he lived, "Nothing's permanent, not even death."a

But what truly is being enacted behind the mirror in good Doctor Parnassus' mind is what is surely on Gilliam's: the nature of storytelling, the vulnerabilities of advanced age, the notion of legacy. Parnassus is fixed on "The story that must be told forever to sustain the universe… You can't stop stories being told." Dear, dear Dr. Parnassus, dear, dear Mr. Gilliam: You're telling your own story, aren't you? There is also the elder man's melancholic plaint, of how he met Valentina's much younger mother: "I was a thousand years old, how could I woo her?"

Verne Troyer is underfoot as Percy, Parnassus' mandarin, impatient helper. If Gilliam were God and Gilliam had made the world, on the fifth day, he would have said, "Let there be midgets! Many, many midgets! Where are my midgets? Where are they? Running between my legs to-and-fro?" Then Gilliam would have pitched his high, antic giggle and all would be right in His World. Everything that would be small to other imaginations is writ large in Dr. Gilliam's.

The opening credits include Gilliam's take-the-piss company name, "Poo Poo Pictures Productions Ltd," but the film's ending, its very, very final post-credits ending, is something else altogether, a gift, not a jape. And I'm not talking about the card, "A Film From Heath Ledger & Friends." No, it's after that. Catch your breath, rest your eyes, linger through the credits. At the true, truest final seconds you will hear a sound, a sound drawn that repeats in the fabric of the movie, and a sudden welter of suggestive meanings will crash in your ears on so many levels I dare you not to have a short, sharp intake of breath and tear up just a little just as I am while remembering and typing this. It's my favorite split-second of cinema from 2009.