Reviews
Panic Room (2002)
PANIC FRIDGE, or Son of HOME ALONE
Why did I go see this? The only thing subtle about this movie was the fridge in the kid's bedroom, right beside her bed no less. When I first saw that I thought "that's unbelievable, ugh, what a spoiled brat, and what a lousy set decorator" but then later as things unfolded I got the picture loud and clear - ah ha! - and I became quite enamoured with the fridge.
I liked the mom/daughter thing above anything else in the movie, not enough of that these days and those were my favourite parts in the movie. So if I were the KING OF HOLLYWOOD I would have decreed the script to include more of that mom/kid stuff (I'm a sentimentalist, why not?)and exclude...if I had a bottle or 2 of white out handy I'd blot out the villains, dab a few drops on the whole panic room idea itself. OK, maybe not get rid of it altogether, I'd keep it as the focus but shrink it down to something more compact...how about "Panic Refrigerator" (did I tell you that I thought the kid's fridge was a nice touch? The kid has a fridge in her bedroom, mom has a panic room, hmmm...anyone care enough about this movie to take this further?) I'd change the three robbers into a trio of Japanese concert pianists who sleepwalked into rich people's fridges to dip their fingers into tubs of cavier and whatnot the night before the big recital because this was their way of purging themselves of their pre-concert panic and post-concert anxiety over reviews. Critics these day can be so brutal y'know...whoops, that would have made this into a more interesting film, my mistake.
David Fincher made Aliens 3 so maybe he wanted to do HOME ALONE 3 or something, because the girl does look like Macaulay Culkin (well maybe only for that scene where she raised her hands to her ears to block out a loud noise) but casting dept definitely should have gotten Joe Pesci to play one of the robbers. It would have been hilarious if it were Pesci who got his hand stuck in the door. I'd be rolling in the aisles to this day as they say. Bring in the Home Alone gang I say, bring in stunt co-ordinators too, to make the action sequences more like gags, more zany. Poke-you-in-the-eyes-if-I-don't-punch-you-in-the-belly. That kind of thing is pure gold. Keep it simple, smartguy.
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Multitude of Mulhollands
I try to watch movies differently from other people. I will rate them good or bad like everyone else but for me that is probably the least important reason to watch a movie. I'll say that that sucked or that was awesome but I don't stop there.
Recently I am increasing unable to watch a movie as a thing in itself.
Watching Mulholland drive is like gazing hypnotically at contents overflowing the container or the container imploding into the contents - in either case your willpower is trying to stuff everything back in but nothing ever goes back to the way it was. You wind up with a movie that has a different ending and beginning everytime because the middle self-destructs. Is that what happens? I don't know, I haven't watched every movie that has ever been made in the world, but in Mulholland Drive I have watched a movie that unmakes itself and is therefore constantly reinventing itself into anything, even becoming something contrary to what it started out being, there are a multitude of Mulhollands.
Well, originally I wanted to make something like:
Mulholland Drive made me think of Crime Wave - which I recommend you look up if you like Lynch's films - because that is where I think Lynch got the idea for that scene with the cowboy.
But, ach, I don't watch movies anymore, it's all ONE BIG MOVIE to me with a million directors and the credits fill up a multilingual telephone book, everybody in the book working on the same film.
Crime Wave (1985)
Mulholland Drive's Cowboy is here: Crime Wave by John Piazs
I only saw this movie once on CBC years ago so it's fuzzy, but the scene with the cowboy and the main character has stuck with me because it has the kind of creepiness that leaves the mouth dry.
Okay, Lynch may not have "ripped" the scene from this movie but when I saw the scene in Mulholland Drive with the cowboy I only took me a fraction of a second to drag out this little scene from Crime Wave which was lost somewhere in my memory banks. I think this is a good thing, because how else could I have reclaimed my interest in Piazs' film, introducing it to you now and maybe even getting you to be interested in it too?
Both scenes have similar settings, a failing light from above, and both involve a meeting with a menacing character in a cowboy hat. When I saw Mulholland Dr. I just KNEW Lynch had to have seen this movie too.
Anyways, you all inspire me: Maddin, Paizs, Lynch, Georges Melies, Miranda July, Godard...
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Uh.....Hotel New Hampshire?
The brother/sister happy/sad relationship, child prodigies, the family portrait as a Dorian Gray time-lapse photograph, beating nostalgia like a dead mule, the fur coat/bear suit...
It didn't hit me until a couple of days after I'd taken in Royal Tenenbaums that Hotel New Hampshire was slowly chewing its way up one end of my noodle while Royal was doing the same from the other end and then when finally I realized the similarities between the 2 films it was as if these two dogs kissed somewhere in my skull.
Rushmore: endlessly cool, like running your hands over the wads of chewing gum stuck underneath your desk that had come from the mouths of kids who'd sat at spot from decades past.
Royal Tenenbaums: it's a half-a-movie now that I can't get Hotel New Hampshire out of my head and scenes from these two movies point to each other, not in competition but in blending, in losing borders and in melting into one NewRoyalTenHotelHampenshirebaum, to be lost in the other in an attempt at mutual completion - for I do feel that they both need each other for completion.
And clumping these two mediocre works together as ONE MASTERPIECE (an idea I got from David Lynch in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) my rating is thus:
10(5+5) out of 10
Kiss of the Dragon (2001)
Nikita/KOD cut and paste
***********SPOILERS**************
If you are comparing KOD to previous Jet Li films it will seem like a quantum leap. In terms of style and content, set-design, make-up, acting, even make-up, in almost every aspect it speaks to on a higher level than his work before. However, if you have seen Luc Besson's work, in particular Nikita, then you will know that this "new" Jet Li is really just old Luc Besson.
Marc Barr, who played the dolphin boy in Besson's Big Blue, once said in an interview that Luc was self-cannibalistic, that is, he just makes the same movie year after year. But, I say, So what? If he does it better than anyone else why not keep truckin the stuff out.
This film is amazing - in itself, as a Jet Li experience to surpass all Jet Li experiences, both in terms of giving us one helluva ride and also in giving us a Jet Li with complex emotions and who does the subtle things just right in those scenes with Fonda and with the old shopkeeper that he is finally as compelling to watch acting as when he's doing his wushu moves, remarkable for a Jet Li movie because this kind of scene, ie. non-fighting and especially anything remotely intimate, though not necessarily romantic, usually flops for him IMHO. Credit the Besson touch again, he knows how soft to go without fluffing it and how hard to go without bringing it all down.
BUT if you watch it with Nikita in mind, KOD then tunnels out of itself and it becomes a fascinating alternate-universe. What Besson et al have done with KOD is create a variation on a theme of Nikita. Maybe to some this is another way of calling it a rehash, but I don't think so.
It's like listening to a fugue unfold into different keys, different voices. The fugue is an example of how you can have something recurring that isn't boring. So we see the recurring set design, similar set peices, and the same city, Paris- all photographed again by the same man, Thierry Arbogast (who probably enjoyed returning to this scale after the mega-projects, The 5th Element and The Messenger - Besson at this stage probably felt he needed to return to his roots too, though perhaps not as director - doing Nikita again would not have been challenging enough for him, to say the least).
We also see Tchéky Karyo and Fonda again, their roles are all rearranged in a delightfully discordant way - Karyo is still a cop but now a villain, Fonda is not Nikita but Karyo is her devil, but she has her soul, or at any rate more soul than that robot that she played in Point of No Return. And though Anne Parillaud is not here, throughout this movie there are scenes where I see the ghost of Nikita shadowing Jet Li's every move (when Jet Li discovers the bars blocking the window, I see the image of her frantically pounding the bricked window - some intense acting on Anne's part, having to show shock and disbelief at the discovery of the unexpected, then utter devastation at the unthinkable of being shafted by her mentor, before pulling herself together, and swiftly recovering her killer instinct, the will to kill her way out - Jet Li has a less demanding role in this respect, his responses rarely have to be this complicated thanks to physical skill and mastery over the environment).
One funny thing both Anne and Jet Li get to do is kiss Tchéky Karyo. There are other moments of intersection but this one's pretty wild. Nikita kisses him goodbye, Jet Li "kisses" him goodbye. In Nikita, Tchéky receives the kiss ambivalently because it is the first from her and also the last, as she promptly informs him afterwards. It had taken him years of longing and self-repression to reach this moment, and when it finally comes, he is told nothing is possible after it. The painful look on his eyes as she closes the door in face, he's almost bleeding at the eyes. Can this guy act or what? He stands in the corridor almost in convulsions, the gutted Svengali, split apart by the ecstacy of attaining what he'd been longing for and the agony of having it vanish in a second.
In KOD Jet Li's acupuncture kiss also leaves Tchéky in convulsions, it physically causes the blood to go to his head. Isn't falling in love metaphorically described as the heart going to the head?
A real treat for Jet Li and Luc Besson fans, something radically harder and yet subtler for the former, while for the latter it is good to see Besson and the gang together.