Brünowear

I haven't seen Brüno but neither Anthony Lane or A.O. Scott were too amused. I'm seeing it anyway. I do have problems with Sacha B. C. picking easy targets but I think he is a comic genius and deserves to be watched.
In any case, let's praise the guy who designs the clothes for Brüno and for Sacha Baron Cohen's characters. He is a genius too.

ps: I'm loving the ümlaüt thing.

Public Enemies

Some American film critics love to love two film directors that I find grossly overrated. One is Clint Eastwood and the other one is Michael Mann. Of the latter, who is much better than Eastwood, I have liked Manhunter, which was the first Hannibal Lecter movie, Ali, which is underrated as biopics go, The Insider, a decent conventional film, and Collateral, which was a stylish, entertaining, modern noir. I like his movies grudgingly; I always find them dry and unsatisfying. And I hated Heat.
To judge from Mnaohla Dargis's review in the New York Times, you'd think Mann's latest movie, Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp, is an American masterpiece. I was very disappointed: lots of slick style; not enough substance.  
Public Enemies is a gangster biopic about the legendary John Dillinger. It doesn't work as a biopic (not enough bio) and it doesn't work as a gangster film (not enough thrills).
I think there are two reasons for this. One, as much as I like Johnny Depp, this is not the role for him. It is impossible to believe for a minute, despite his honest and restrained (and maddeningly mumbling) performance, that this man with the most perfect face in the history of the movies is the daredevil sociopath that Dillinger was. The casting of Christian Bale as his FBI nemesis does not help matters. I am still trying to figure out his accent, which sounds like a mix between Louisiana and Romania. But I don't blame the actors. They seem to have been directed to be no one in particular. So much more could have been made out of Dillinger's crazy narcissism, yet it is hard to understand why he does what he does. The only sign of life in this film is a brilliant turn by Peter Gerety as Dillinger's lawyer, in a courtroom scene where he chews the scenery and resucitates the movie.
Two, the source material is fascinating, but somehow, the way it is written, it is not interesting enough. The dialog is forgettable. The actors are ciphers. The love story is none too credible. Everything seems too cold and composed and bloodless. There are plenty of cinematic acrobatics, but no real flair, no panache, no pizzazz. Compare this leaden, joyless film with Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, not to mention Bonnie and Clyde or The Godfathers or the Gangster films of yore. It is dead on arrival.
Now, that is not to say that it doesn't have its moments. I was trying to understand what the point of it was in this day and age. Sure, Dillinger is the great anti-hero that we need to cheer us up now that the robbers ARE the banks. In this movie the bad guys are no worse than the good guys, whose leader is none other than J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), standing in for Dick Cheney, with Christian Bale standing in for George Bush.
There are two instances of torture in this film. Both are shocking and both are committed by federal agents. One is against a wounded person in a hospital and the other one is against a woman. Quite plainly, they are instances of what our government today euphemistically calls enhanced interrogation. This gives the film a raison d'etre.
Dillinger is shown almost as a historical curiosity in his own time, strangely enough, as a man of certain principle, of a quaint individualism. At one point, even the mafia refuses to have anything to do with him (provide him with shelter, arms, whores, etc) because he's bad for business. What he makes in one very dangerous day, they make every day over the phone with gambling rackets. So, he is a heroic sociopath, fighting against both legal and illegal institutions, all alone.
Dillinger loved the movies. He loved that the movies were about him. So he goes to see a gangster flick with Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with this movie: they don't make them like they used to.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is a great war movie and probably the first serious action war movie ever. There have been many action war movies, most of them ridiculous male revenge fantasies, like The Dirty Dozen or the Rambo saga. There are also American war movies that trumpet their anti-war indignation by portraying war as a surreal hell, like Jarhead or Apocalypse Now. The Hurt Locker (I love the title) is the first existential action war movie and if this scares you off, it shouldn't. It is a tense, suspenseful and unconventional film, as American war movies go. It presents the taut realities of war without sermonizing, yet it summons the bewilderment and rage of the best antiwar films by basically portraying the reality of this particular war as it is. It's probably one of the best written recent American movies I've seen, with a realistic, non formulaic screenplay by Mark Boal. Immediately one notices that even though the soldiers use soldierly jargon, this movie is discreet with the cartoony macho posturing of war movie dialog. These soldiers need to use language as precisely as possible, because language is their best tool for staying alive. They only engage in making it fancy, either before they are about to possibly blow up to pieces, or at the end of the day, when they come back to headquarters, exhausted but alive. Everything else is the minimum needed to communicate and survive. For this only, this movie deserves a medal, or more likely, an Oscar nomination for writing.
The Hurt Locker follows a trio of bomb diffusers in Iraq as they go about a dangerous and relentless routine of contending with lethal explosives hidden in all kinds of increasingly bizarre sources. The battlefield, except for one amazing sequence in the desert, is the city, full of menacing garbage, antsy children, families, cars, alleyways and buildings where danger lurks. From the start, it's clear that the soldiers have not been trained for this kind of combat nor do they have the right equipment for what amounts to urban guerrilla warfare. Subtitles make clear the amount of days left in this particular tour of duty in hell, and we know it's not going to be the last one. The young specialist, the excellent Brian Geraghty, indignant with fear and despondency, says, "What are the tanks for? To wait for the Russians?" Tanks are useless in a place where, as he says, you can be sitting in your (windowless) Hummer and blow up to pieces. This movie doesn't broadcast its complaints about the absurdity and injustice of this war with grand, sweeping gestures or speeches; the reality of the action and the place is enough to foster a growing sense of disbelief and despair, not only in the soldiers, seemingly left to their own devices by a gung-ho and abusive military (represented briefly by one asshole general nailed, as always, by the great David Morse), but in the audience too. As the excruciating routine of bomb diffusing continues day by day, over and over, the movie forces us to wonder, as I'm sure the soldiers wonder, simply, what the fuck are we doing here? Why are we here? That's enough to bring us back straight to the culprits of this misadventure, who instead of impeachment, deserve to be thrown into the action in Iraq and left to fend for themselves.
I will avoid repeating the general amazement at the fact that the person at the helm of this action packed, suspenseful, very male movie is a woman. But I will say that I am amazed by the way she keeps sentimentality, or many of the dangerous pitfalls of war movie clichés away from her film. There are moments in the script that could fall into that trap, but she and her main actor, the incredible Jeremy Renner, refuse to give themselves to cheap manipulation, and together they fashion one of the most fascinating American action heroes, let alone characters, to ever grace the screen. Renner is a bracing antithesis to any other male actor you have ever seen in a heroic role. The greatness of his performance lies in that he avoids being the cliché. His character is one: a reckless, genius bomb diffuser, who loves the excitement and the adrenaline rush of his job. You can already imagine what this would be like in the hands of any movie star. But Renner is a character actor, and so he is all character. It is important that nobody has really seen him before (he's been in many good movies and he once played Jeffrey Dahmer, quite well). The casting of the three leads (Anthony Mackie, also excellent, is the third) is right, for more "name" actors would destroy the illusion of realism of the film.
In fact, I have only two pet peeves with the film and one is its use of recognizable stars in minor roles. The other is a very good looking explosion in exquisite detail in slow motion. It is gorgeous, but it detracts from the illusion of realism and "you are there" that Bigelow sustains for the rest of the film (even though I can imagine that life seems in slow motion when you witness a comrade blow up to pieces).
Renner doesn't act like a soldier in a war movie, he is a soldier in Iraq. The difference is at once subtle yet too enormous to comprehend. It's an acting achievement. He is cocky, relaxed and likable, yet he never abuses these qualities for amusement. At first, he seems just reckless and arrogant, but he evolves into a complicated human. This is the first war movie I see where characters are not preceded by their moral choices, but they are made of instinct, reasoning and emotion. Most of the time they don't know why they act like they do. They don't think about it. They just are. Mackie is the soldier that likes to go by the book. He is exasperated to the point of despair with Renner's antics, but in the end, in a haunting, magnificent shoot out in the desert, he and Renner calmly, professionally, collaborate to stay alive. I can't stop thinking about this scene. Everything is honed to the most elemental, to a beautiful minimalism in which every action is poignant not because it is a character flourish, but because it is character. And it is deeply, quietly moving. This is a great, brave, fantastic film. People should see it.

Celebrity Sightings in Paris

Movie stars do ads in Europe that they wouldn't be caught dead doing in America.
At the movies there is a ridiculous ad for Schweppes with Nicole Kidman as some sort of Indian Bollywood princess in an uglyass fantasy sequence done by total hacks. I'm sure she got paid handsomely to look like she cares for Schweppes (as she slurps noisily from the bottle) but it is one of the most unconvincing ads I've ever seen in my life. It misses its own punchline, that's how bad it is.
Then there is the George Clooney Nespresso coffee machine. There is one chez nous and let me tell you, it is astonishing. It makes espressos in seconds. Even a fool like me can operate it. They use Clooney and the tagline in English "What Else?" and apparently this is the most popular product in the history of Europe. For mysterious reasons, in the poster someone decided to obscure Clooney's handsome face with a cup (doesn't he look like he could be an espresso himself?). Mind you, he is not holding the cup, as far as I could tell, there just happens to be a cup floating in front of his handsome face.
This is where the French and les Americains differ. The French just adore les movie stars. They could not care less whether they have affairs, or they do drugs or they have pigs as pets. Hence, it's easier for a celebrity to endorse things here.
And last but not least, as we are walking by the river Sunday afternoon, we see an impressive deployment of cops and closed streets and a very eerie calm as if there was a coup d'etat and nobody told us about it. Absolute, chilling calm and then a motorcade. We actually saw the tinted windows behind which sat our darling President Obama. I'm still reeling from the excitement.

Looking for Eric

As we plodded through the mess that is Looking for Eric, I remembered why I never see movies by Ken Loach. In contrast to his fellow ham directors who also love a sermon, like Oliver Stone or Spike Lee, he just doesn't have the pizazz or the chutzpah to compensate for the extreme heavyhandedness. Except for a hilarious scene involving group therapy for Mancunian postmen, this comedy falls as flat as soccer star Eric Cantona's boring performance. It's some sort of a working class weepie, soccer romantic comedy with a strong undercurrent of depression. None of those things jell. And I'm still trying to figure out why it got made. As an ad for Manchester United? Because Eric Cantona has too much time and money in his hands? Because half of Europe gave funds to make this film? Why?