Funerals & Snakes

Two significant candidates for a 2007 Top Ten have appeared this week and are both fine examples of what modern, mature, dramatic film-making can be - either independently or via the studio system. While the splendid and fearless Notes on a Scandal is essentially an indie product, distributed by a major, Clint Eastwood’s majestic Letters from Iwo Jima simply wouldn’t exist without tens of millions of dollars of corporate investment. Sometimes the system works.

Iwo Jima is a companion piece to last year’s Flags of Our Fathers and the two films are so closely related that together they form a considerably greater whole. By February 1945 the Allies had advanced successfully across the Pacific and Iwo Jima was the first (tiny, volcanic) territory of the Japanese homeland to be fought over. Tactically and emotionally significant beyond its size, Iwo Jima was defended by a hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered collection of Japanese who tried to defend the island from caves and tunnels as supplies and ammunition quickly ran dry.

Moving and elegiacal, Eastwood’s Iwo Jima duet is in the very top drawer of anti-war films: essential viewing.

Judi Dench raises the bar for screen acting once again with her performance as the bitter, lonely, lesbian teacher Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal. All involved (including luminous Cate Blanchett and unimpeachable Bill Nighy) are brilliant in support of a great script by Patrick Marber (Closer), adapted from the novel by Zoe Heller.

Blanchett plays art teacher Sheba Hart, a middle-class fish out of water in an inner city comprehensive school. Her foolish and impulsive affair with a 15 year old pupil puts her in the power of the manipulative older woman who discovers her secret and uses it to advance her own infatuation. Philip Glass’s excellent music helps ratchet up the tension nicely.

Running With Scissors is about coping with mental health issues in the same way that Weekend At Bernie’s is about dealing with death. Based on Augusten Burrough’s Burroughs’ best-selling memoir of a childhood surrounded by wacky eccentrics after his mother had him adopted by her therapist, it’s yet another portrait of psychotherapy as comedy - and therapists as charlatans and frauds or buffoons.

In the affable French drama Orchestra Seats, half a dozen successful but unhappy people have their lives gently improved by one unsuccessful but happy person - like a less metaphysical Amelie - the message being, basically, “get over yourselves” and we can’t hear that enough, can we?

Eddie Murphy proves his Oscar nomination was no fluke by playing three characters in his latest film, an extended fat and fart joke called Norbit. It’s as bad and as good as that description makes it sound — if you are in the market for inane and insulting you’ll be well served by Norbit.

Finally, in Hannibal Rising the young Hannibal Lecter escapes from his post-war Lithuanian work camp/orphanage and trudges across Europe to learn the way of the Samurai from his Aunt in a French chateau. So far, so ludicrous. He uses these new found skillz to wreak revenge on the sadistic thugs who killed his parents and ate his sister. Hannibal Rising is so wrong on so many levels and poor Gaspard Ulliel is hopelessly miscast as the young Lecter, but you might get a laugh or two out of Thomas Harris’ moronic script.

Printed in the Capital Times, Wellington, Wednesday 28 February 2007.

This week Wellington gets a chance to farewell one of the titans of world cinema, an inspiration to many, derided by a few; an icon who walked his own idiosyncratic path. I am, of course, talking about Rocky Balboa, kind-hearted dim-bulb and possessor of one of the great loves in cinema: his adoration of Adrian (Talia Shire) remains undiminished even though her cancer left him a widower a few years between Rocky V and this new one.

The Rocky of I and II was always a great character, led astray during the blockbuster years, and Rocky Balboa gives him back to us. It’s well written and self-aware and, as a bonus, there’s hardly any boxing in it.

Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion is too nice a film to divide people the way that it does. Having said that, if you are one of those people who switches off National Radio whenever genial raconteur Garrison Keiller Keillor introduces his legendary live radio show then you will find the film version an awful trial. Thrown together in typically-Altman, ramshackle, style and shot, it appears, with no more than half an eye on the finished product, APHC is a delightful, wistful, appreciation of community, nostalgia and the passing of time, the finality of things if you will. It’s only fitting that Altman’s final film, shot while he was riddled with the cancer that would kill him, should be about letting go. I loved it, but then I was probably always going to.

In Hollywoodland Ben Affleck is perfect as wooden actor George Reeves who found fame as television’s first, portly, Superman in the 1950s but who ended up dead of apparently self-inflicted gunshot wounds after a failed attempt at a comeback. The film brings life to the persistent rumours that Reeves’ death was the result of foul play - courtesy of a jealous husband with friends in Hollywood high places.

Adrien Brody plays a fictional gumshoe on the trail of the mystery and the film tries hard to ride the coat-tails of classics like Chinatown but is too darn slow to keep up, even though it looks the part.

Will Ferrell plays a slightly less demented version of his usual emotionally-retarded man-child in Stranger Than Fiction, a slender but likeable fantasy about a man who discovers he is a character in a novel being written by Emma Thompson. It’s her voice in his head, narrating his life, and no one else can hear it. This is annoying and inexplicable at first, but gets serious when he discovers she wants to kill him off. Chicago looks great (and so does Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Raucous kiwi documentary Squeegee Bandit follows Auckland street-corner window washer “Starfish” around for a few months, getting to know him, his transitory life and his turf. There’s some interesting meat buried inside this film but the MTV editing, bothersome soundtrack and general “noise” levels make it harder than it should be to get at. It’s an interesting documentary but difficult to recommend as entertainment.

The Last King of Scotland is a fictionalised portrait of Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979 and self-appointed “Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular”. To fully appreciate Forest Whitaker’s superb performance check out the real Idi’s eyes in the archive footage at the end of the film and you can see the genuine bat-shit insane paranoia of the man.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 14 February, 2007.