2004: Year in Review

Kevin Spacey's musical biography is corny - no other word for it. Spacey directed, co-wrote and stars as Bobby Darin, the swinging hepcat of the 50s and 60s nightclub scene who brought us such hit songs as "Splish-Splash," "Mack the Knife," "Dream Lover," "Beyond the Sea" and "Goodbye Charlie," among many others, a kid from the Bronx who had Rheumatic fever at age 7, was given a cut-off point of age 15, grew up to be a decently popular teen icon, an Academy Award nominee, a two-time Grammy winner, met plucky Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth), his future wife, on the set of his first film, and died young at age 37. Spacey's performance, and those of his cast, are quite good. He sings Darin's old songs (and some standards) and does it beautifully. The material is here, but it is somehow dramatically inert and sort of stiff at times, with a framing device that might fit the material, but which never quite feels authentic, and which separates the audience from truly engaging with it; the results are less like "Ray", and more akin to "De-Lovely". As a huge Kevin Spacey fan and a lover of Bobby Darin's music, I found this a bit of a letdown.

Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's harrowing documentary is alternatingly heartwrenching, inspiring and deeply disturbing. Zana Briski is an American photographer who went with collaborator Kauffman to film prostitution in Calcutta, India's red light district. What she discovered was a far more unsettling subject for exploration: the exploitation of the children of sex workers. She met tons of bright, motivated, unsupported children who, in some cases desperately, wanted out of the slums and beatings and forced prostitution they were made to endure. She started teaching them her craft (photography) and gave them all cameras. Then Zana got an idea: what if she could possibly get the children out of their current living conditions simply by getting them into good schools? The all but inevitable obstacle: for one, children of sex workers have an undeserved stigma attached to them and they are automatically assumed to be inferior and, apparently, are not worthy of a proper education. Zana teaches and inspires the kids to reach for their dreams, and the photos they take are stunning - portraits of bleak, dire circumstances and horrid living conditions; in many cases, reflective of their own. Briski and Kauffman's documentary is fascinating and powerfully affecting, getting us involved in the efforts of these people to make these kids' lives vastly better. The results are tremendously angering and moving.

NOTE: This, of course, won the 2005 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

"We're happy. ...Aren't we?"

Mike Nichols' intelligent, wicked, tough, sardonically-witted yet oddly romantically-tinged character study examines the dynamics between four rotten people who seek happiness and cause each other nothing but pain in the process. Dan (Jude Law) is a London obituary writer who is walking down the street and meets the gaze of Alice (Natalie Portman), who is then hit by a car. Taking her to the hospital, they get to talking and the conversation just flows, revealing among other things that she's a stripper who has come over from New York City to finish a messy relationship. They get together, time passes, and Dan writes a novel about their relationship. Anna (Julia Roberts) is the photographer who takes Dan's picture for the book jacket. Immediately, Dan is drawn to her and both women sense it. In the film's single funniest scene, Dan goes to a chat room, pretending to be a busty blonde called "Anna." Like a moth to a flame, he draws in Larry (Clive Owen), the fourth side of this sexual triangle, a dermotologist who is intrigued by the shamelessly forward sexual nature of "Anna" and agrees to meet "her" at an aquarium. And thus the real Anna happens to be there and through serendipity meets Larry. Over the years, these characters will circle in and out of relationships with each other, committing adultery, deceiving well and then opening up with excessive candor about the successful nature of their deceits. This is a film above all about four fiercely articulate (or just plain fierce) and brutally honest people who never learned the word "tact," or achieved a sense of "good timing." They fall in and out of love. When they are scorned, they go for the jugular. They pound each others' buttons into submission, and emotionally and verbally eviscerate each other. At one point, a character asks how another man tastes to his wife and she says, "Like you, but sweeter." He responds, "That's the spirit." This film could've been called "Adults Behaving Badly." Mike Nichols is no stranger to the field of battle between the sexes, having made "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966) so many years ago. Like that film, this is based on a stage play, adapted by its author Patrick Marber. His characters are intelligent and literate, cruel and cold. Their words cut through flesh with razor-sharp precision, and they have no conscience about who they hurt or how badly. The film this most reminds me of is Neil LaBute's "Your Friends & Neighbors" (1998). That great film had similar shiftings of sexual relationships, adultery, deceit, brutal honesty (when the time came), and self-centered characters who didn't appear to care who they hurt. It was called "the kind of date movie that makes you wanna go home alone." So is this one.

Oh, how I struggled with this film! Writer-director Kevin Willmott's second feature, his breakthrough of sorts, is a satirical mockumentary masquerading as a documentary made for British television. Its subject is the hypothetical conceit of the South winning the Civil War (or as they called it "The War of Northern Agression"). Willmott goes way back to the beginning of America, and uses such inflamatory images as Abraham Lincoln (in blackface) using Harriet Tubbman's underground railroad to flee after the Civil War, fake film clips of "classic" racist films, alarmingly realistic newsreel footage, and faux historians in present day interviews, and intersperses it with commercial breaks which advertise horrifically racist programming such as "Better Homes and Plantations" (a Martha Stewart knockoff of sorts), a sitcom called "Leave It to Beu'lah" and "Runaway" (a "Cops" clone with a redneck theme song) as well as racist products such as Darky toothpaste ("It'll leave 'em Jiggaboo Bright!") and Coon Chiken Inn. Now back to the "struggle" I had with this film: Within about 5 or 10 minutes, I thought I might be violently ill and thought of shutting it off. By the halfway mark, I hadn't laughed at any of the supposed satirical material, nor had I expressed much more than shock and disgust at it. As the film went on, however, a curious thing occurred: I found myself beginning to be in sympathy with the film. I remembered suddenly that the film is really, afterall, taking a pretty broad swipe at the Confederacy and at the racist history of America in general, not trying to ellicit approval with its offensive stereotypes and imagery. I was reminded of Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" (2000), an overlooked gem in the director's oeuvre, which was also labled a "satire" (the definition is in the opening dialogue!) but which I failed to laugh at. I admired that film for what Lee was able to accomplish on a much smaller scale. Attempting to mount a bigger canvas, Willmott achieves a similar effect - he satirizes, but rather than inspire laughter, he provokes thought and the potential for discussion. Similar to Lee's film, at the end we get a dose of reality by finding out what was really part of American history, and the truth is disturbing and sad, but honest. I wouldn't want to see this again, except perhaps to gauge further my reaction to it, but this is worth seeing for what it's trying to do and for the responses it ellicits, if not so much for its quality as a mockumentary. I DID laugh once: One of those "classic" film parodies I alluded to earlier was the horror-style 1955 gem "I Married an Abolitionist." NOTE: In the end credits, the film is credited as "a Spike Lee presentation."

There is quite a difference between a director who seeks bad laughs and one who attains them unintentionally. John Waters stands, alongside his 2004 film, scraping the bottom of the barrel while seeking bad laughs - and failing miserably. This completely unfunny, offensively stupid and ultimately pointless garbage scow of a film is Waters' attempt to regain his title of King of Shock (or is it Shlock?). First, a little history: Waters shot to infamy in the 1970s with films like MONDO TRASHO, FEMALE TROUBLE (which is actually good!) and DESPERATE LIVING. He hit paydirt (cult classic, that is) with PINK FLAMINGOS, his notorious, surrealist excursion into the depths of human depravity. Then came the 80s, where he hit moderate success and mainstream acceptability with films like POLYESTER, HAIRSPRAY and CRY-BABY. In the 90s, he continued in this vein with SERIAL MOM and PECKER before beginning the current decade with CECIL B. DEMENTED. These were watered down Waters, but still better than they needed to be. Unfortunately, along came this execrable (something it would probably enjoy having done to it) wad of cinematic trash. The film is essentially a clothesline from which to hang every goofy, moronic, mildly depraved and ultimately made-up (I think) form of kinky sex and sex play that Waters and his characters can drum up. The plot, such as it is, is about an everyday housewife (the previously inoffensive Tracy Ullman) who gets hit in the head and is revived (and reinvigorated?) by Ray-Ray, the tow-truck guy (Johnny Knoxville from JACKASS), thus sending her headlong into a sea of free sex and hedonism the likes of which her hometown of Baltimore has never seen (even though Waters has made a career the past 30 some years of exposing and exploiting it). This film didn't even make me scoff, I just sat there in dumb silence with a deadpan look on my face: THIS is a FILM?!? By the time David Hasselhoff shows up going to the bathroom on an airplane, resulting in maybe the STUPIDEST deux ex machina ever devised (!), I wanted to go and collect every single DVD and warn people not to watch it or else - what? I'd burn it! But I think that's Waters' point, and it's a vaild one: stupidity, crassness, obscenity, etc. have a place in our culture and our national consciousness and he has as much a right to make such garbage as this as I do to vent my annoyance and, yes, anger at wasting the time I spent (maybe 90 minutes) watching it. That being said, I want to make one thing clear: I like John Waters. Do I admire his craft as a filmmaker? No. Do I think he's a talented writer? Not especially. But I LIKE him. His strongsuit lies in shock value for shock's sake (read: sophomoric, immature jokes and sudden, awkward cuts made to thrust the audience headfirst into something "obscene"). He has the look of the nicest pedophile you'd ever wanna meet. That being said, he should NOT have made this film. Not this way. Not at all. Let's hope he doesn't do it again.

Here is an omnibus film from three of our greatest living filmmakers that fails to live up to its full potential. The idea is to explore eroticism in many forms, and what we have here then is one story that is sexy but enigmatic, another story that is humorous and not really erotic at all, and finally, a blatant depiction of the misguided belief that nudity and sex in graphic detail equals a good time. Wong Kar-Wai, from Hong Kong, is known for his hyperkinetic, luridly stylistic portraits of romantic souls, occasionally involved in the criminal underworld ("Chungking Express"), sometimes not ("In the Mood for Love" and its follow-up "2046"). With "The Hand," Wong has created a short story that is as hot as it is perplexing. Miss Hua (Gong Li) is a prostitute who hires Zhang (Chang Chen), a tailor, to design her dresses. She's at the top of her gang, but is fading little by little. When he first meets her, he hears loud, vigorous sex through the wall of her room. He's intrigued, but shy. She engages him in a vigorous encounter he won't soon forget. Steven Soderbergh's "Equilibrium" stars Robert Downey Jr. as Nick Penrose, a neurotic ad man who has come to therapist Dr. Pearl (Alan Arkin) to report of an adulterous fantasy dream he's been having about a mysterious woman in a hotel room. The running gag is that Pearl is distracted the entire time by an unseen figure (we assume, a woman), who he clearly is attracted to and who is enflaming his own imagination. He lets Nick drone on and on about his fantastical dream, all the while trying to prolong the description from his patient so he can get a better look at the girl out the window. Finally, the legendary Michaelangelo Antonioni ("L'Avventurra," "Blow-Up") who, I hear, instigated this project, brings us "The Dangerous Thread of Things" - a title both enigmatic and fortuitous. This is a long, boring slog through a couple's relationship troubles resulting in the female partner encouraging a sexual fling with a girl the guy finds intriguing on a beach. The couple, played by Christopher Buchholz and Regina Nemni, is about as bland as a piece of blank paper against a white wall. The woman (Luisa Ranieri) is a piece of work. The film, based on a novel by Antonioni, is perplexing for one reason - how could this material inspire a short film, let along a novel? So, to sum up: Wong Kar-Wai has created a haunting and effectively erotic film that is also mysterious and beautifully shot by longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Soderbergh, who wrote, directed and (pseudonymously) photographed his tale, pulls the rug out from under his own story at least one two many times. And Antonioni, a once great filmmaker, is reduced to vague recollections of what once was. See the first two stories and then subtly allow yourself to doze off...or turn it off, or walk out or something.

Guillermo Del Toro's adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic book character, a literal demon child who is first discovered in the aftermath of a battle with Nazis and raised to fight paranormal villains in New York City (played as an adult by Ron Perelman, in pitch perfect casting). He pursues his lonely vocation, pining away for pyrokinetic kindred spirit Liz (Selma Blair). Cheeky, hyperkinetic comic book action in a sleek, stylish package.

Andrew Wagner wrote, produced and directed this bizarre, often funny and affecting take on his family, which feels like it could be reality, but which Wagner described as a "fiction film using the materials of a documentary." His family must be good sports! Andrew's mother Judy is a very tough old broad - she balks incredulously at the suggestion that she may have been a less-than-decent mother, and she wonders why she hasn't heard from her son in months. Her husband Allen, a former Wall Street stock specialist, has suffered a stroke, and his speech is impaired, but if you listen long and hard enough he comes to be understandable. They decide to buy a van and drive cross-country to visit their teacher/screenwriter son Andrew in Los Angeles. Along the way, they pick up their daughters Maggie and Emily (you may remember her as Doris, the paramedic on TV's "ER"), and make it into a family outing. Along the way, old wounds are addressed, past indiscretions discussed, in-jokes are indulged, and plans for the future are made. It's all a bit surreal, actually, because with Andrew doing the cinematography - though you only see him at the end - they are not "aware" of his presence as they go to see him, and are presumably playing versions of themselves that he has written with him filming it all; this is like ultra-metafiction. My favorite "character" was Emily, who dreams of getting liposuction so that "when a guy is fucking me, some of the stuff won't hang out." The film is odd, funny, a little sad in some ways, but moving. NOTE: Wagner went on to direct "Starting Out in the Evening" (2007), the acclaimed film about a writer, his daughter, and his relationship with a young student, featuring a much-acclaimed performance by Frank Langella.

Writer-director Mike Leigh's ninth feature is a harrowing, absorbing emotional drama set in 1950 London. The film stars the plum-pudding-faced Imelda Staunton in the title role as a housekeeper and devoted wife and mother. Her husband (Phil Davis) works in a garage with his brother (Adrian Scarborough). Their son (Daniel Mays) works in a tailor's shop. Their daughter (Alex Kelly) is a factory worker who is being courted by a mild-mannered and quiet young man (Eddie Marsan) who has the family's blessings. Vera has a secret: she "helps young girls out" when they "can't manage." This, in her case, means she provides a service to young girls, giving homemade abortions. Vera doesn't see what she's doing as wrong (she doesn't accept money for her trouble), she simply sees it as doing a good deed for someone who has noone else to turn to. One of her most affecting clients is a young rape victim (Sally Hawkins) who is the daughter of her well-to-do employer. Unfortunately, not only was all of this illegal at the time, but her methods are...less than sanitary. I will tread lightly here so as to avoid the proverbial political football: Vera is a good woman. The film is not about the rights and wrongs of abortion, about the legality or illegality of Vera's methods, or about the politics that such things can involve. This film is about a profoundly good woman, nothing more. That being said, it's only a matter of time before the long arm of the law stretches to the Drake family's door. Mike Leigh started in the English theatre world before turning to filmmaking with "Bleak Moments" in 1971. His method is unnusal: he likes to form a cast of actors, and a basic rough concept. He then improvises and rehearses with them to contrive dialogue and scenes. Then he fashions a formal screenplay and films it. Not easy to get financial backing when you don't even have a proper ending to your film before you start. No wonder Leigh hasn't made more films in the thirty-odd years since his debut effort. Leigh's work varies from the light-hearted ("Life is Sweet," 1991) to the bleak but darkly funny ("Naked," 1993) to the dramatic ("Secrets & Lies," 1996) and sometimes he mixes the two ("All or Nothing," 2002). With this film, he has crafted his bleakest work to date. Staunton gives a remarkable performance as Vera, leaving an indelible impression; she's a marvel. Leigh's film has a profound sense of time and place and that is reflected in the art direction and in Dick Pope's creamy cinematography (it's their first period effort since 1999's grand Gilbert & Sullivan biopic "Topsy-Turvy"). This is, above all else, a moving and thought-provoking film, not to be missed.