Illusive Tracks.  Dir. Peter Dalle. (Sweden, 2003).  I saw this at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, and it was a packed house.  I enjoyed the film, but at the end I felt disappointed that all of the set-up, carefully worked out early in the film, did not pay off.  Instead, the film ends with a series of plot twists that trivializes character development.  The film combined a black and white film noir look with a slapstick style.  This combination worked for me early in the film.  All of the characters get on the same train from Stockholm, at the end of WW II, headed for Berlin.  The main character, a Jeff Daniels look-alike, is a first-rate klutz.  Several times he bumps into one character after another, particularly a poor wounded soldier.  At first this slapstick is funny, but eventually it goes over-the-top and becomes predictable.  That’s when my interest began to wane.  Of course, there are two lovers on the train, and they plan to kill a man’s wife so that they can live together. They are from film-noir-central-casting, but they really are not interesting characters.  As I watched the film, I kept thinking that the klutz, who at one point does meet the wife (intended murder victim), would somehow connect with that woman by the end of the film.  Well, forget that idea.  The film dissolves into one crazy situation after another, especially those relating to the intended murder plan—which goes awry like a Roman candle gone haywire.  But oh, there were some funny moments.  In one scene the klutz enters a car filled with starving refugees.  All of them are sick.  We learn from one of the attendant nuns that some jackass gave the refugees chocolate.  Of course, because they had been starved, the chocolate caused them all to get violently ill.  We realize, as we watch our hero walking through the car, that he is that jackass!   This interaction leads to more humor and finally one of the nuns realizes she has lost her faith in humankind and has a great humorous monologue.  Just imagine: a fallen nun!  Yes, there was humor in this film.  But all of the characters, including our klutz, are one-dimensional, flat characters.  And that’s why the ending of the film is so disappointing.  Take a lesson from Kung Fu Hustle. Sometimes a character that looks flat, is really round.  Get that character to become round, and you have a satisfying climax.  

In Her Shoes. Dir. Curtis Hanson. This film was entertainment enough to be watchable, but it was by no means a noteworthy achievement. I found the first few scenes, focusing on the relationship between two estranged sisters, played by Toni Colette and Cameron Diaz, as remarkably dark in tone. But that shadowy tone soon was replaced as the plot kicked in, and soon the self-destructive sister was headed off to a romanticized version of an assisted-living community in Florida—where she meets her long-lost grandmother (Shirley MacLaine), and everything thereafter is sweetness and light for her. The grandmother knows how to deal with her sneaky ways, she meets the perfect resident of an assisted-living facility (and her disability is suddenly cured), and apparently there are no men between the ages of 20-40 anywhere to be seen! (And her attraction to men has been the source of her undoing, of course). At least the old people are not caricatures or stereotypes of silly old people. At the same time, there is no attempt to make them anything more than one-dimensional as characters. Meanwhile, Toni Colette does her usual yeoman’s work of creating a believable, three-dimensional character. The secret is easy. The more I looked at Toni Colette, the more attractive she became to me—because the more real she became to me. And the opposite holds for Cameron Diaz—whose unbelievable—and apparently perfect—body shape (more like an idealized mannequin than a woman’s actual body shape) is distracting and decidedly uninteresting. I have decided that Toni Colette simply has what it takes to realize a character. She is, to use an old-fashioned word, an actor. She inhabits the character. She can do with her eyes and facial expression what Diaz just cannot draw upon in her repertoire of acting tricks. This film had its heart in the right place. We wanted to believe that these two young women could renew their close-knit bond they once possessed in childhood. But too much was left out in the film to make that regeneration credible.

Lord of War. Dir. Andrew Niccol. I had some problems with the back story of this film—that is, the context for how our main character, Uri, became an arms dealer. There are scenes of him growing up in Little Odessa, a New York City neighborhood, and yet they were unconvincing to me. At one point the main character, who narrates the film, says, “It’s in our nature.” That did not help me understand his motivation. He just was an arms dealer, and that’s all there is to it. The opening segment of the film shows the life history of a bullet, from manufacture to the killing of an African boy—as seen from the bullet’s point of view (as we hear the famous song “Something’s Happening Here”). And then we learn he has a brother—and a loser brother at that! How many times have we had the story where the character has to pay for the sins of his loser brother! That did not bode well for this film. Here’s another issue. Throughout the film Nicolas Cage, as Uri, narrates his story—but he does it in a deadpan style of vocalization, as if nothing he does really matters. He simply is what he is. Are we to see him as an unreliable narrator? Or are we to trust him implicitly. He tells his autobiography, beginning in the 1980s. Soon he is running drugs as well as guns—partly because his brother is hooked on cocaine and he has this need to stick with his brother and be a good older brother in that traditional immigrant family value system. But here’s the trouble with this film: I was not moved by the story. I was not moved by his problems with his brother. All of it seemed too formulaic and too forced to be believable. And I was frustrated as well by the sound track—one song ticked off after another song, one montage after another montage, another track on the CD of the movie to be consumed. So then he gets married by fooling a beautiful model into thinking that he is some kind of international businessman. But I didn’t care about him or his model wife or his brother—and that made it difficult for me to get involved in the story. One thing we did not get enough of in the film were scenes of Uri alone, perhaps doubting himself, perhaps dealing with dark nights of his soul. Instead, as he become a better and better arms dealer, suddenly the attention turns to a personal competition with another famous arms dealer. And you know Uri will have to win that competition. I kept thinking to myself, “Who is this guy? Why should I care about him in any way?” He never gets it—he never figures out that he is one of the bad guys. He is the King of rationalizers. He always has the answer. He becomes an amoral monster because he accuses the world of being amoral. It’s never his fault. Then again, I wonder if I was supposed to think that or if I was supposed to sympathize with his plight in some way. I could not tell from the way the story was told. And then the film begins to move slowly—and I mean slowly. One conversation after another. And the loser brother returns to drugs, and I did not care one way or the other. Then there is a conflict set up between an FBI agent and our arms dealer, but clever Uri eludes his grasp, and soon he is facing another moral dilemma—his favorite African tyrant hands him over the rival arms dealer and expects Uri to murder him. All of this leads to a hard-driving and monotonous set of dark nights of the soul for our Uri. But nothing changes him.

As I watched this film, I often thought of Goodfellas (1990), a classic film because there we understood our character, the low-level Mafia guy whose life eventually unraveled before he ratted on his bosses and accepted survival through the witness protection program. We saw that man broken in a beautiful set of scenes near the end of the film. But in this film, after Uri’s dark night of the soul, he sums up his reason for continuing with the arms trade with a simple response: “I’m good at it.” This guy was clueless. By this time I was not clueless—and I was bored by the repetition of the storyline. But don’t forget the loser brother. He has to come back with Uri to make a big sale (here we are—brother working together: what a great bonding experience). Let me see if I get this straight. His brother is his conscience—the core of goodness in his being. That’s why he has to bring the brother with him. And guess what happens to his conscience. Right—nothing is going to stop him from continuing the trade. At the end of the film he pulls out his ace of spades from under the table: the American government supports his gun-running because it is politically expedient to do so. You see: it was never his fault. As he concludes, he is a “necessary evil.” But the real evil, the real bad guys, are the gun-running and weapons-dealing governments around the globe. Now if that’s the way I’m supposed to look at it, then why make a film about a bum who never figures out he is the one that embraced evil—nobody forced him into that life of crime. So at the end of the film, again I was troubled about the tone of the film (the director’s attitude toward the subject matter). Was Uri merely a victim of larger forces in the world? Was I supposed to forgive him for his complicity in evil because he is not the only evil one? No—I checked out on this one a long time ago.

Must Love Dogs.  Dir. Gary David Goldberg.  Diane Lane and John Cusack.  Probably the two of them are worth watching.  Each is talented, quirky, humorous, with unique moves as actors.  The whole idea of romantic comedy—again I repeat myself—is to put two stars together and see if they spark a chemistry between them that wows the audience.  I do not care how good these two are—individually—but in this film they lack the chemistry that makes their performances memorable.  So often one film comes out, like Sleepless in Seattle, and everyone wants a piece of that action.  But even Nora Ephron doesn’t have the magic every time she come forth with a new romantic comedy!  So much of this film seems to be based upon the pitch.  Hey!  Imagine two 40-something divorcees who meet by chance and fall in love.  Hey!  Imagine that her friend sets her up on an internet dating service, and imagine that the guy answers her ad.  But watch out!  He has to bring a dog along.  So he does, and yet this cute scene (with the lovely white Yorkie) is meaningless, because the idea of “must love dogs” is never played out afterwards in any significant way.  How about a dog lover falling in love with a cat lover.  Now then the sparks would fly!  Here’s the problem with a film like this.  I have a rule that if I am not interested in the characters after the first four scenes, I will never become interested in those characters.  That’s what happened here.  I watched Diane Lane tick off the requisite behaviors of the  newly divorced woman in her prime.  In the first couple of scenes she was made up to look like she did not wear makeup.  So that must be the sign that she is a “real woman.”  I never believed that for a minute.  I also was disappointed that characters in romantic comedies seem never to have to work long hours, never suffer financially, and always live in Bohemian digs that would make anyone proud.  No worries about the American Dream for them.  She is a kindergarten teacher, and she lives where?  He builds wooden boats, sells none of them, and yet he is not worried about making ends meet (the real world—monthly payments, dental bills, dents in autos, etc.)  I just wrote a review of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.  What that film was for 13-year-old girls this film was for 40-60-year-old men and women.  Neither film had a shred of reality to it.  Each instead provides images of a reality the target audience would like to believe in.  But I am frustrated with formulas and predictability and the marketing of human emotions.  Give me real characters any time.  In this case, I blame partly the screenplay, and especially lines that characters were forced to voice—and yet sounded as if they were reading what had just been written down by the wittiest of writers.  I’m sorry, but real people do not talk that way.  Real people do not always have the perfect comeback, the brightest and pithiest repartee.  Scenes unfolded according to expectations—for instance, the dating montage with the lonely divorcee.  Then the two intended lovers meet, but their first date is incredulously botched because of the poor writing.  I almost sensed that the actors phoned in their lines in this scene because they saw right through it.  Then there is the terminal cuteness in a film like this—the “My Kingdom for a condom!” scene, the Partridge Family sing-a-long, the divorced man’s romantic obsession with Dr. Zhivago (we learn nothing about him based on that obsession), and the gay friend whose relationship is a perfect model for all relationships.  Through it all I felt the characters (channeling the writers) were world-weary, tired of the emotional life, ready to cast aside the delicacies of the give-and-take of conversation and the revelations of feelings. In other words, viewers could see the artifice of the comedy if they looked hard enough.  All of the lines sound written—and all of the artifice is forced and required in order to meet the needs of the screenplay.  The film even follows the age-old formula of having backdrops that suggest Halloween and Thanksgiving.  But let’s skip Christmas, because that might offend someone.  Stick with the neutral holiday backgrounds. And the moment of greatest wisdom is a bunch of hokum.  The endearing father figure, played well by Christopher Plummer, tells his daughter that he goes out with all these older women because that way he covers the grief he would otherwise feel for his dead wife.  You see, he had a long-lasting relationship of 40+ years with his wife.  No divorces for him.  His relationships were as good as gold.  I would say that his rationale for his dating is bunk.  Utter nonsense.  And yet we are to believe that his reasons are emotionally satisfying, and even emotionally moving.  All that’s left is the ending—and we get to that through another awful plot twist that involves the father again.  But by this time I had already made up my mind.  This was not a romantic comedy for the ages.  Pardon me while I get out my DVD of Notting Hill. 

Average Fare N-Z