I got a bit 50's the other day. Went to a diner with my girl, had shakes and a burger, and then went to the cinema for a comedy double bill. Thankfully my girlfriend ain't as frigid as they were in the 50's and doesn't mind if I play the old popcorn trick (see
Diner [1982]). She also pays for her half. Actually, most of the time she pays for my half too.
First up was the Coen brothers latest effort
Burn After Reading, which has been getting a bit of panning by the critics. Is this just a
No Country For Old Men backlash? Well, no. It's not that it isn't funny, there are some laughs to be found, though not in Brad Pitt doing a stupid dance. It's just the cynicism of the thing. The whole plot revolves around Linda Litzke's (Frances McDormand) desire to have plastic surgery. She and fellow gym employee Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) find a CD containing, what they believe to be, secret CIA files. They then try to blackmail CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) for money to pay for said surgery. Things go badly and another couple of A-list stars are thrown into the mix in the shape of Tilda Swinton and George Clooney. What the film seems to be telling us is that society is a vacuous shitheap run by idiots, driving the intelligent to murder and the innocent to the slaughter. It's a world view that I have a lot of sympathy with. The problem is that getting some of the best acting talent around to play dumb, to critique a dumbed down culture, well, it just seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me. (Is it an oxymoron to use the word oxymoron to sound intelligent but use it incorrectly?). It's my opinion that if we want to get out the shit swap that is contemporary celebrity culture it might just be best to stop satirizing it and get on with making art that, kinda, means something . After all it might not take a lot of talent to be Kerry Katona, but it takes even less to take the piss out of her.
Next up, after a short break, and change from salt to sweet popcorn, was Ghost Town, which is basically a totally bullshit film thats had Ricky Gervais surgically grafted onto it. The results are pretty good. If you were a burns victim and this was how the grafting of your new skin went you'd be pretty happy. Not too happy, I mean your still a burns victim, but you get the picture. Gervais plays a misanthropic dentist, Dr Pinkus, who thanks to some bodged colon surgery can 'see dead people' who, luckily, teach him a lesson about loving life and that. Gervais has obviously been given room to improvise and it pays off, there's some great observational comedy here. Gervais also gives Pinkus's loneliness a real tragic depth that almost brought tears to my eyes. However a few jokes do fall flat, one about torture techniques especially. But the beauty of Ghost Town is all the crap can be blamed on Hollywood. It bodes well for Gervais's directorial debut
This Side of the Truth, out next year.
Jake Garriock
This is a film, mainly, about ballet. Yeah ballet, what of it ? Think I can't sit alone, with the curtains drawn, and watch a film about ballet ? Well I can. This is supposed to be a classic of British cinema, and, well, it's pretty good. It's basically about a bunch of people who are quite into ballet. They're making a dancing version of Hans Christian Anderson's 'The Red Shoes' in which a ballerina gets some magic shoes that help her dance. Unfortunately the shoes don't let her stop dancing, thus making friends/having a boyfriend pretty tricky. (Imagine having a girlfriend that wouldn't stop dancing, it would get old pretty quick.) Eventually the shoes dance her to death. Bummer. But as the film progresses we realize that star dancer Victoria Page's (Moria Shearer) life is coming to reflect that of the character she's playing. Its like a less creepy David Lynch film, all about obsession with art and the blurring of lines between reality and fiction and that sort of thing. The story is compelling but the real strength of the film comes from its visuals. Directors Powell and Pressburger draw from an impressive range of filming techniques, most powerfully exhibited in a hallucinatory dance sequence, which give the film a poetic subtlety. God I sound like a prick.
