Change Your Image
JoeyStobart
Reviews
Trees Lounge (1996)
Hats off to Buscemi
Watched this with some trepidation, having seen the absolutely excellent trailer. So few movies live up to their trailers, especially indies. Anxiety increased by having read Buscemi's fairly harrowing account of making the film in one of those 'The Directors' books.
Shouldn't have worried. Great flick. Totally engrossing, especially to a *cough* former *cough* barfly like myself. Beautifully understated, funny, very sad, nicely paced and Buscemi very wisely NOT trying to dominate every scene, although he certainly dominates the movie.
Movie appears on first sight plot less but actually it isn't at all: Buscemi's search for a second chance to escape from the morass of his own making is riveting. Everyone involved seems to have had a good time and the beautifully relaxed performances are the reward. Only the two knucklehead goombahs fall below the otherwise uniformly excellent level.
A real treat, and thoroughly watchable-again able. My DVD was in TV format, which sucked, but otherwise the low budget doesn't really intrude.
Nearest movie to it I can think of offhand is KILLING OF A Chinese BOOKIE. Radically different subject matter but similar bittersweet texture.
A slightly, but only slightly, generous 9/10 from me.
Road to Perdition (2002)
Puzzlingly unsatisfying movie [SPOILERS]
Mendes' second outing does not lack for cinematic rhetoric, theatrics, fine performances, a compelling central theme, directorial assurance or epic ambitions, but it remains strangely less than the sum of its extraordinarily fine parts. The problem is it never quite becomes the epic it so badly wants to be (the film wears its aspirations on its sleeve).
The problem is that it is neither armageddon nor, despite the title, armageddon of the heart. Hanks never really appears to question his life as a hitman nor, in a bizarre choice clearly shared by director and actor, does he ever really confront the reality of killing people. It is as if murder takes place somewhere else. Even the murder witnessed by his son is committed by Daniel Craig's character and though Hanks joins in it is essentially played offscreen. This soft-pedal destroys the film. It is a moment a director as flawed as Pekinpah would not have missed and one can only wonder whether Mendes fought any battles over this.
This difficulty destroys the film because it leaves Hanks nowhere to go in his character except seek revenge for the death of his family. He never, apparently, considers the possibility of doing anything other than killing Daniel Craig, the culprit. In the dialog with Paul Newman in the crypt of the church we are led to believe that Hanks considers himself beyond redemption, and yet we never really feel that he needs it, because he is, after all, Tom Hanks.
The ripple effect is devastating in terms of the dramatics, because his son's idolization of him simply does not trouble him as it should, not do we really feel that he is on a mission to prevent his son following the same path (although that is in fact the motor of the third act).
There are other problems. Daniel Craig's character is so thinly written that we never even glimpse the psychosis that drives him to commit the acts that set the movie in motion. A tragic waste of a marvellous actor. We are led to believe that he commits serial murder to cover up the fact that he has been stealing from his father, and yet all the evidence is that he knows his father would put up with anything from him.
Only Newman's character is truly satisfying, because he confronts the fact that he is damned in a way that Hanks never does.
(A small irritation is that "Perdition" turns out to be a small town. I am so sick of this device. It's a pretentious TV way of making your film sound more interesting than it is.)
I really wonder if half the problem wasn't that it comes from a graphic novel. It is astouningly easy to be seduced by graphic novels, because they are by their nature so cinematic. You read it and see the movie in your head, and if you're Sam Mendes then WHOOMPH suddenly Paul Newman's attached and you have your money. In the process you tend to overlook the narrative problems and the nitty gritty of development that any other script would be forced to go through.
That said, I have the sense that there was a greater movie in the material. A different piece of casting than Hanks, or a more challenging characterization of the protagonist would have made a huge difference. As, indeed, would have been a more realistic depiction of the era, which though faithfully reproduced in terms of architecture, costume and music, has nothing whatever of the grime and grit you see in newsreels of the period. A different textural context would have made a vast difference.
I've written at length because I liked this movie: it has many fine things in it, not least the cinematography and Thomas Newman's extraordinary soundtrack. I like Mendes for his obvious ambition, but he needs more steel in his backbone if he is to not fall into the traps so elegantly laid for him by Hollywood.
The Untouchables (1987)
[SPOILERS] Massively over-rated, gruellingly bad movie
DePalma's leaden direction meets Mamet's (unusually) risible script. Great actors have seldom been so cruelly wasted (HEAT being an exception, I guess). Only Costner seems to have the vaguest idea what he's meant to be doing in the movie. DeNiro's scenes amount to a series of cartoonish cameos. Garcia is completely wasted on a character who has no function and no trajectory. Connery works valiantly with the thinnest of material.
The script is so bad one can only imagine the pain Mamet must have suffered having to concoct this tripe and incorporate the hopeless suggestions of the (one imagines) producer, director and executives. I hope he got paid a LOT. A successsion of kiss-the-dog (or is that pat-the-wife?) scenes are probably the most embarrassing thing but really one is spoilt for choice.
I guess the most ludicrous of many ludicrous things is that the 'untouchables' are portrayed as consisting of exactly four men, two of whom are killed, leaving exactly two people to bring Capone down. Despite the massive over-spending on scenery and sets, the movie never has the slightest feeling of epic scale that it oh-so-badly wants to have.
I came away with new respect for Costner's ability after this movie, because alone among the cast he seemed to have some focus on his role. The rest seemed understandably adrift, caught between the clear and complete inability of the director to think in anything but cinematic cliches, and the absence of any kind of causal or emotional logic from the script.
Mamet, Garcia, Costner, DeNiro, Connery... all very gifted and capable of greatness. Which leaves us with 'Snake Eyes' DePalma. How does this man get his movies made? My mouth hung open in awe (the bad kind) at his travesty of the Potemkin Steps sequence. What kind of arrogance leads directors to think "hey, that's a great idea"? It's like deciding to record Beethoven's Fifth on the banjo and call it an improvement.