toto-40 Reviews

Random Hearts (1999)

well somebody has to write seriously about films like this (contains spoilers)

[2 November 1999]

A Boeing 737 bound for Miami, takes off from Washington and promptly crashes into Chesapeake Bay killing all on board. Kay Chandler, a republican congresswoman finds out her husband was on the plane. Sgt. Van Den Broeck, a policeman who's name is so foreign his colleagues call him 'Dutch', discovers his wife Peyton died sitting next to Mr. Chandler, travelling as his wife. The grief of losing his beautiful, loving wife is combined with the dent to his ego from being made a cuckold, posthumously.

Obsessed with finding out what drove his wife to infidelity, he tracks down the congresswoman, and seduces her. But their affair is disturbed by the jealous memory of the dead lovers, of the lie that all four had been living before the crash. The byline reads: "In a perfect world they never would have met." In a perfect world filmmakers would think twice before embarking on adaptations of bad 80s novels, especially when they lack irony. This adaptation has the emotional realism and grittiness common to the NY film scene, but it is weighed down by too much plot, too many chapters and too much character which has to be condensed into 131 minutes. The result is an acceleration of narrative events that makes the relationship between Dutch and Kay improbably intense and unstable.

The ground covered by the film means its 131 minutes felt like three hours to the audience, who began laughing at all the wrong things, even groaning in disbelief as the chapters rolled on. But many of them were there because they'd been given free passes, and were seeking entertainment, not an extended exploration of a grief-stricken relationship. The film has some interesting elements, such as the class conflict between Kay, who got elected to Congress because her dad was famous, and Dutch, the paranoid internal affairs policeman who can't believe his wife got bored and fell for a toff who paid for regular first class trips to their Miami lovenest. There is an unusually raw, honest quality to the script, which has some tense exchanges full of wit and wounding unsophistication, but which is also padded out with inane smalltalk. The film relies too heavily on words to entertain its audience, and the only available subplot is Dutch's run-in with a corrupt cop, which proves so distractingly stupid and violent it cripples the entire movie, combining the high concept of the cop drama and airplane disaster, with the interior drama of two confused lovers. There was a palpable draining of interest from the cinema after Dutch and Kay's repressed sexuality erupts in a violent grope-session in the airport carpark. It seems letting a middle-aged couple engage in teenage sex is taking cinema one base too far for Australia's multiplex audiences. From then on, the audience's primary interest seemed to be "What time is it?"

Random Hearts suffers for its complex 'adult' concept - it fails to generate the appropriate audience expectations. It strives for a truthfulness that endangers its place on the romantic comedy shelf, and it attempts an intrusive action-based subplot that confuses the audience by stripping the film of any romance it had. Whilst it makes some bold political and moral statements, overall the film is a weak adaptation that lacks emotional integrity and popular characters. Pollack has honourable intentions, but the best he can do is go down swinging. His movie will translate better on the smallscreen when viewers can walk away from the parts they don't like to make some coffee, relieve themselves, even engage in some nooky themselves, before coming back to catch up with the plot. It's a mixed-up movie about a mixed-up world that should have been serialised and syndicated for the entertainment of bored housewives; not developed into a serious screenplay with multiplexes in mind.

Happiness (1998)

a ray of hope for cinema at the end of the millenium (contains spoilers)

[2 November 1999]

A better title would have been "Ugliness", but this is definitely a ray of hope for cinema at the end of the millenium - that there are still places we have not gone, people we have not seen, perversions yet to be shared and understood. Happiness is new territory in what filmmakers can do and get away with. It is a slow, long, messy film with several awkward contrivances, but it also has flashes of genius - the dog licking the ***, the final line of the movie "I came! I came."; the psychiatrist and the bravery to let him admit f****** young boys was great and he'd do it again; the self-obsessed writer who's conceit and disdain encourages the audience to identify with her detestable neighbour, to actually want him to f*** her - which really is a major achievement of charaterisation and positioning - to get an audience to identify with a murderer, a rapist, a pedophile, and a whole host of other hapless hopers. This film strikes a chord because it outs the world of the white lie, the secret desire, the dark thought, the nightmare and the fantasy. Like Freudian psychoanalysis it seeks to make the latent and the repressed real and recognised. "It's okay to be fucked up" is the element of catharsis in this film. And because it is so unashamedly perverse and disturbing it is a quality experience - it either drives people out of the cinema or it makes them think and talk about issues we as a society need to talk about but rarely do, except in simplified and dismissive moral cliches that let us escape the ugliness of the reality facing some people. It is not condoning the subject so much as broaching it - a "please consider" moreso than a "oh what a feeling". It elicits a strong emotional response, but by putting a human face to failure, frustration, self-hatred, and sexual urges, blurs the morality of our "hang 'em all/lock 'em up and throw away the key" mentality. As such, Happiness is an amoral film that elicits a sophisticated self-questioning moral response. It is investigative not exploitative, a comedy not a tragedy, genius rather than gratuitous.

The Matrix (1999)

made in australia?

[2 November 1999]

Well there's been some mixed reactions to this film, with most reviewers conceding it an excellent special effects film, a popular film, but lacking substance and a coherent narrative. Yet The Matrix is a particularly important and seminal film, for our generation and especially the aspiring filmmakers and critics of Australia.

There are some reasons why The Matrix has not been celebrated amongst the informed film-going elite. Most of the tenured film critics are not in the target market for this film. Have they read William Gibson or Bruce Sterling? Are they excited by the use of electronic music? Are they young enough to get off on the film's kinetic energy and film quotations? I don't think so. They may have a good time with it, but it strikes them as too contrived, too derivative, too science-fiction and too much concept. Yet it is exactly the concept that makes it art. The Matrix is going to be one of the film-texts of our time, a cultural signpost of lasting influence and importance, yet reviewers have shown great reluctance to describe it as anything other than eye-candy - a spectacle-driven commercial prospect.

although you try to discredit ya still never edit the needle, i'll thread it radically poetic

Senior critics writing for traditional media have noted that certain scenes are similar to computer games and comic books, but none of them have noted the irony of using Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up" to end the film. I suspect the established culture-vultures do not own Rage Against the Machine's anarchic 1992 album, and subsequently are not sensitive to the generational injokes of this movie and the electronic soundtrack which excites us as we wait in the wings. I doubt these professional writers own Playstations or have ever played Syndicate on a PC, and I doubt many of them will ever come across this review because they do not frequent the net except to send emails. It seems to me that few in the art establishment have a realistic view of where all this technology is taking us. Few outside the IT industry have prophesised film and television converging with the interactive game and communal web experience. Yet talk to anyone under 25 and they is little doubt that soon we'll be kissing passive, linear lightshows goodbye as we plug into our boxes. How long? Not long, because what you reap is what you sow. The Matrix, along with Cronenberg's upcoming Existenz, Bigelow's Strange Days, and the tv miniseries Wild Palms are the precursors to this paradigm shift. Produced by Oliver Stone, Wild Palms had a cameo by William Gibson. Significantly, The Matrix lacks such an acknowledgement, which far from being a point of a criticism, is actually an inditement of the extent to which these ideas have been taken up by our generation, that distopian cyberpunk is a genre we are already familiar with whether we have read the books or not. We don't need to see William Gibson to know the filmmakers love the man and the genre he helped create, because these ideas are now taken for granted - to label them 'cyberpunk', 'postmodern' or 'Gibsonesque' is to state the b******* obvious.

In addition to c-punk, video games and comic books, the Wachowski's have gleefully incorporated a potpourri of film references, such as the Peckinpah inspired gatling scene, the Bruce Lee/Kung Fu signature shots and John Woo/Chow Yun Fat gunfights (choreographed by Hong Kong legend Yuen Woo Ping), the flight deck of the Millenium Falcon in the asteroid, the organic technology of Plasm (by Defiant comics), industrial terrain and micro-robots of City of Lost Children, the smashed sunglasses and invulnerable nature of the AI quoting Terminator 2 and many more.

In Projections 8, Peter Cowie, publishing director for Variety, laments that young people leaving film school today would much rather aspire to "Men in Black, the Usual Suspects or Seven than the cerebral cinema of Kieslowski, Bergman or Fassbinder." God forbid! The gulf between 'us' and 'them' is particularly evident in our celebration of The Matrix and the contrast it provides to their corrupt visions of the future as presented in the Fifth Element, Men in Black and the deplorable ID4. Like Southpark, Beavis and Butthead and hip-hop, most adults just don't get it ... and who can be bothered explaining it to them? The Matrix draws together disparate influences, demographic-specific quotations and references and attains a historical and social relevance greater than they realise. So be it. Just as Parker Lewis Can't Lose, time will show that these movies signify a new wave of filmmaking as exuberant and inspiring as any other - people will forget that they were once derided as rollercoaster rides, soulless FX, a cheapened artform.

And while there is product placement by Nokia, Fed Ex and various banks, the film hardly belongs to the league of big blockbusters that threaten national and boutique cinemas with their titanic marketing budgets and cross-over appeal. Shot in Sydney with a B-cast already says something about the budget constraints, as does the simple locations and unsophisticated furnishings eg. the city phone books, the 'marble' in the lobby shootout which wobbles like polypropylene when the girl headbutts a sheet whilst taking cover. Seeing Sydney on the screen was both gratifying and enervating. Constantly distracted by trying to locate the streets and buildings they had used, I was simultaneously riled that several locations I frequent have now been appropriated by Americans with the money with the tech - wynyard station alleyway, eddy ave central, anzac bridge. At least Alex Proyas (the Crow, Dark City) is Australian. These guys from Fox are stealing our landmarks and recasting them as American, populating this captured landscape with imported american cars, cops and payphones. The film co-opts Sydney as exotic scenery for America's consensual hallucination, reconstructing our territory as a virtual space, a matrix in itself. There were some shots taken of Martin Place, looking down from the MLC building, which was amusing if you knew that's where the American Consulate is located. Visiting filmmakers and studio bigwigs are often invited over for lunch in that boardroom with its amazing views.

Am I wrong to be irritated by our virtual colonisation? I don't know what the rules are on making films in Australia, but there seems to be some quota on usage of local talent. Hugo Weaving was astounding as a menacing AI agent, adopting this incredibly sharp articulation of words that suited his role as an imitation human, but he obviously had American accent written into his casting contract. The only Australian accent in the film belongs to one of the Oracle's potentials - a nice little piece of Orientalism in a half-pint white Aussie kid sitting in lotus position with a shaved head and kimono, spouting mystic easternisms like "Do not think of bending the spoon, but know that there is no spoon." Whatever happened to "my dad picks the fruit..."? I guess Cottees couldn't afford the product placement.

The Hi-Lo Country (1998)

a big-hearted film

[2 November 1999]

People walked out of this film, presumably in disgust, perhaps because they were too hip for woody harrelson. I'm glad this film pissed people off - it proves it was stupidly honest, stupidly nostalgic, stupidly big-hearted and not cynical, clever, PC nor anti-PC, not a mockery of anything. It's an American film by a British director, and like Lolita, boils thick Americanisms down to crystals of statement, taste, elan. How could anyone walk out on the fat man yodelling as the camera dollied in to that tight close-up?! It was a gem of a shot, a little gauche perhaps, not unlike the marlboro country the film rolls through, and the naked desire for the days when men were MEN - with winning hands, whiskey shooters and a tasty redhead named Mona... But this isn't leering masculinity bristling with three day growth! There is a notable absense of guns (for a western), and when they appear they are not sharp and shiny but heavy, tarnished and chunky. This is MC Solaar's nouveau western - cutting up slow shy grins, dusty scuffles, mewling coyotes and a lugubrious soundtrack heavy with sentimental strings, trumpets and the convenient pause for punctuation. This is true Hollywood, and I mean that as a compliment. It was one of those rare occasions where suddenly you see the film as more style than substance. That's why it was showing in Darlinghurst and not the multiplexes! Because of Woody Harrelson - so stupidly generous, stupidly the big man with his big scruples and big square jaw - it is a film that could so easily slip by, scoffed at, discounted for wearing its heart upon its sleeve, pinned not far below the stars and stripes and the silver star for service to country, mateship as tight as knuckles, horses with bottom and all that glory.

It's a movie for Kerouac, he loved this kind of carousing and childishness. Here, life is Hi and the cattle lo, plain Lo, yet another adopted child of Scorsese and his deep deep pockets. "From the depths of my reputation I bring you..." How dare he! Kidnapping the history of American film, like he was god's gift to world cinema, doing it all as a public service. But its worth it for Billy Crudup with his old man's shoulders, Billy with his switchblade, Steve with his necktie, straight six and coronary, LB and Bigboy - it all comes down to Bigboy - the backbone of the film, the gut-feeling and laboured gasp of this weighty piece of cinema.

It's old-school treatment, all sinew and gristle, bloody hooves; pretty dresses, buddy bottles and mexican girls who visit fortune-telling witches. It's a film which doesn't teach America's children to express their anger with words not weapons. No, like Apache tank-killers and cruise missles flattening Serbian houses, it tells Americans to go hard or go home - take it square on the chin, tear those clothes off and take whatever gratification you can get whilst still being the best man, the best friend, a good man with a natural feel for horses. It's homestyle American apple pie, all fragrance and warm pressure, like a horse nibbling oats out of the palm of your hand. So rope em and rape em cause nothing's keeping a good man down cept for a bullet in the chest or a pair of wide open thighs... And while I bluster, it's all poetry in the Hi-lo country, with its bloated cattle and californian dreams, snow on the ranges and the good ol' boys, we're just telling it like it is...

Further notes. The preview contains many scenes that are not in the film : wartime footage, bigboy coming back for pete in the blizzard. In fact the preview contains all the elements superfluous to the film. It is not the story of a woman coming between two friends, it's a story about a way of life coming to an end, a coming of age, and the quality of relationships.

And returning to the generic music score I criticised earlier, from the preview I have identified (some of) it as sounding very similar to the opening to Fargo! What is this piece of music?