Review - JCVD

It's always startling whenever a movie star famed for one type of film shows us another string to his bow, and produces the kind of performance we never would have expected from him. When the star is someone whose most recent films have been straight-to-video affairs with names like Until Death, The Hard Corps or Wake of Death (I'm sure at least one of those co-starred Troy McClure), the revelation of a sensitive, introspective side and some genuine acting ability is particularly noteworthy. The star of Mabrouk El Mechri's terrifically odd meta-drama JCVD is Jean-Claude Van Damme, and as you may have guessed from the title, he's playing himself – or at least, a self-lacerating version of himself – which has turned out to be the role of a lifetime. Not everything in JCVD works, but the film is an utterly fascinating piece of work, the kind of picture you can't drag your eyes away from because you have no idea where it's going to go next; and at the centre of it all is one of the bravest, most extraordinary performances you'll see this year. Just ask yourself this: When was the last time a Jean-Claude Van Damme film reduced you to tears? (And no, I don't mean tears of laughter, smartass).

JCVD certainly begins on familiar turf, before winding down some unexpected byways. The opening sequence finds Van Damme single-handedly defeating wave after wave of gun-toting soldiers as he makes his way through some kind of blandly generic warehouse. The camera follows him all the way, and as the shot continues we can see clues that this is mere moviemaking – the punches don't quite connect, the explosions are a little off the mark – until an extra finally exposes the artifice by knocking down a piece of the set, and ruining the whole take. "I'm 47 years old" Van Damme complains to the Chinese director, "I can't do it all in one shot", but his appeals fall on deaf ears. The Jean-Claude Van Damme we are presented with in JCVD is a pathetic figure – a has-been as an action star, and a failure as a father. While struggling to keep his career on some kind of even keel, he is also engaged in an ugly custody battle over his daughter, with his wife using Van Damme's own DVDs as evidence of his unsuitability as a parent. The guy needs a break to clear his head and refresh his spirits, so he heads home, which is where the trouble really starts.

In the small Belgian town where he was born, Van Damme finds himself in a post office just as a robbery is taking place, and as the police and curious onlookers gather outside, word quickly spreads that the star is the one orchestrating this hostage situation. JCVD is part heist movie, part biopic, and part postmodern, Kaufman-esque head-trip, and even if El Mechri always doesn't blend those unlikely ingredients as potently as he might have done, he still creates an intriguing and singular piece of filmmaking. The young writer/director is hardly lacking in confidence (he even sings one of the songs on the soundtrack), and he has a lot of fun playing with the structure of JCVD; cutting back-and-forth between the post office and various scenes from Jean-Claude's life, replaying key sequences from multiple angles, and frequently finding unusual angles on the action. His screenplay is full of details from Van Damme's real history, referencing his drug and marital problems, and dividing the film's chapters with some of the star's legendary Zen-like aphorisms ("Stone falls on egg. Egg breaks"); and he makes a number of comical stabs at the lowly state of the actor's career. Jean-Claude's conversations with his feckless agent are particularly amusing; he learns in one scene that he has lost a role to Steven Seagal, because "Steven has promised to cut off his ponytail".

These scenes are so much fun it's a shame JCVD tends to get bogged down in the hostage plotline – it lacks tension and feels overstretched – and El Mechri's taste for the unexpected has unfortunately extended to the lighting, which is harsh and garish throughout; but JCVD is almost always engrossing, and much of that is down to its leading man. This is a great performance from Van Damme, he's deadpan, appealing and unfailingly honest, and much like Mickey Rourke's recent turn in The Wrestler, he seems to feed all of his experiences, hopes and fears into this one defining role. He plays along charmingly with the joke, rolling with all of El Mechri's punches, but halfway through the film he suddenly breaks the fourth wall, and embarks upon an extraordinary six-minute monologue in which he bemoans the mistakes and embarrassments that have littered his career. As a tearful Van Damme floated towards the ceiling and delivered his soliloquy, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. Is this great acting? Maybe not, but maybe it's something even more commendable, because it takes a brave man to open himself up to this kind of naked self-analysis on screen, and Van Damme never flinches from the task in hand. I'm not sure if JCVD adds up to much in the end – its deconstruction of celebrity eventually gets lost somewhere in the hostage hubbub – but it is an enjoyable, endlessly surprising and occasionally astonishing picture, which cuts deeper than you might expect. "Nothing! I have done nothing!" Van Damme cries, with real tears running down his cheeks, "I truly believe it's not a movie" – and, for a few amazing minutes, so do we.

Review - The Wrestler

It has been said that 90% of a director's job is casting, but in the case of a film like The Wrestler, it's tempting to nudge that percentage up a little. After watching Darren Aronofsky's picture, it's impossible to imagine anyone other than Mickey Rourke taking on the role of Randy "The Ram" Robinson and dominating the picture in the way he does. This is one of those cases where the performance is about more than mere acting, and we can see a whole lifetime of regret and sadness pouring out through the actor's eyes, which still occasionally sparkle under that swollen face. Rourke's visage has changed a lot over the past twenty years, and he barely resembles the sleek, handsome young actor who briefly blazed a trail through the 80's, but he has never been more compelling or empathetic than he is here, as a self-professed "broken down piece of meat".

Rourke anchors The Wrestler, and without him (and without Marisa Tomei, who offers sterling support) the movie would barely exist; for aside from the commanding performances on show, The Wrestler is pretty thin stuff. It's the kind of story we've seen a dozen times before done in a dozen different ways, and Aronofsky doesn't have much to bring to the scenario that's fresh, with the film finding and embracing every hoary old cliché a picture like this could possible throw up. Rourke's Randy was a big name in the 80's – his bout against his nemesis The Ayatollah has passed into legend – but now he's getting by on whatever he can scrape together from a part-time supermarket job and the bruising wrestling matches he still takes part in. One of The Wrestler's chief pleasures lies in the way Aronofsky acknowledges the fakery surrounding the sport without short-changing the brutality and physicality of events inside the ring. We see the fighters in the locker room before their matches, choreographing their moves and deciding the outcome before the first bell has rung, but when they take a hit during the bout, they get hit hard.

The Wrestler is good at capturing the sense of camaraderie that exists between these men, as well as the bleak futures that lie ahead for most of them. In one scene, Randy attends a fan convention, and between signing autographs, he casts an eye over his fellow veterans – one is in a wheelchair, another has a catheter bag poking out from under his trouser leg. These peeks backstage are far more interesting than the fights themselves, which are bloody and hectic, but not shot with any kind of imagination by Aronofsky, although this film does mark a real change of pace from the director after three films in which his aesthetic grew increasingly stylised. Shot on a tiny budget with handheld cameras and natural lighting, the film is a far cry from his last feature – the dazzling but baffling flop The Fountain – and his unadorned vérité style actually recalls the Dardenne brothers rather than any standard Hollywood fare.

Unfortunately, Robert Siegel's screenplay is pure Hollywood, and the clunky, obvious manner in which it deals with the story's themes is often excruciating. It's not enough for us to pick up on the religious imagery for ourselves, someone has to say to Randy, "You look just like that guy, from The Passion of the Christ"; and if Randy's earlier quote about being a piece of meat wasn't blunt enough, he later underlines it by pushing his finger into a bacon slicer. The whole film is riddled with cheesy, trite dialogue, never more so than during the underwhelming scenes between Randy and his estranged daughter (a shrill Evan Rachel Wood), which is a subplot the film doesn't need, and which could have easily been jettisoned without making the slightest difference to the picture's emotional wallop. There's already enough pathos in Randy's story as it is, the film doesn't need to strain for tears in such a hackneyed fashion.

After all, it's hard not to be moved by this character – an essentially decent man forced to batter his ageing body to earn a crust, unable to establish a meaningful connection with anyone outside of his sport – and when Randy suffers a heart attack halfway through the film, he looks like a man staring into a deep void. What does the future hold for a wrestler who can't wrestle anymore? In his despair, he tries to reach out to Marisa Tomei's Cassidy, a stripper who enjoys Randy's companionship but who insists on maintaining strict boundaries, and there's a genuine chemistry between these two actors that lights up the film. Aronofsky continually tries to draw unsubtle parallels between the pair – they're performers who use their bodies to create a fantasy for the audience, they have fake public personas, they're trying to fight the ravages of time (although I'd argue that Tomei looks more radiant with every passing year) – but Rourke and Tomei manage to slip out of their boxes to become living, breathing people. It's a shame the film can't find a way to do something more interesting with them, though. The Wrestler falls into a predictable formula as it approaches its climax, and one can almost begin to anticipate the story beats right on cue (I groaned inwardly as Cassidy fled the stage for Randy's all-or-nothing final bout).

For all of the violence in The Wrestler, for all of the harsh truth and tears shed, my favourite scene in the whole film occurs in the unlikely surroundings of a deli meat counter, behind which Randy reluctantly stands and takes orders. Gradually, he begins to warm to his role, and he strikes up some banter with the bemused customers as he serves them slices of ham. The scene is a standout because it has a freshness and vitality that is absent from most of the film, and the way Rourke interacts with the real people he encounters is a joy. In these scenes, the actor's unmistakable charisma shines through, and there's something deeply touching about this small moment when he seems to have found a role away from the ring that he can similarly make his own. We know it can't last, of course, but we really want him to make it work, and that's why we stay with The Ram all the way to the bitter end, as he prepares to take a final leap from life's top rope, knowing it could be his last.

Review - The Spirit

Frank Miller has been riding the crest of a wave in Hollywood recently. His graphic novels Sin City and 300 were brought to the screen with a reverence and fidelity that was almost unheard of in previous film adaptations, and now he has been handed the directorial reins on another comic book project, although the abomination he has produced should curb his filmmaking ambitions for a while. The Spirit is adapted from a 1940's comic by Will Eisner, Miller's friend and mentor, who died in 2005. The title character (played by the vapid Gabriel Macht) is an ex-cop who was murdered and resurrected as a near-indestructible crime fighter, and who stalks the rooftops of Central City in his trademark black suit, mask and hat, with his red necktie providing the only dash of colour as he moves through the shadows, rescuing damsels in distress. The Spirit has a thing for the ladies, you see, and they have a thing for him; and in the course of this movie he'll cross paths with half-a-dozen scantily clad women, some of whom love him, and some of whom want to kill him.

His ultimate enemy is The Octopus (played by Samuel L Jackson in possibly the loudest and most irritating performance of his career); a mascara-wearing, gun-toting madman who wears flamboyant costumes and shouts about eggs a lot. He's eager to get his hands on a vase containing the blood of Hercules, and he is assisted in this aim by Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), who doesn't really do much aside from standing around awkwardly at the edge of the frame. Of course, The Spirit is ready to do battle with this dastardly foe, but what's surprising about the film is that their first confrontation with each other occurs within the opening fifteen minutes. The pair face off in a swamp and begin beating each other over the head with whatever comes to hand, but as both are seemingly invulnerable, the conflict just resembles a particularly long-winded and unimaginative episode of Itchy & Scratchy. At one point, The Octopus picks up a toilet and smashes it over Spirit's head, pinning his arms with the seat. "Come on!" Jackson cries, "Toilets are always funny!" No Sam, they're not.

It was around this point, as I tried valiantly to figure out what the hell was going on in front of me, that I suddenly had a startling thought – Frank Miller has no idea what he's doing. Miller already has one directing credit to his name – as a co-director on Robert Rodriguez's Sin City – but I'm guessing that was just a token gesture from Rodriguez, an appreciation of the man whose work he so obviously admires. In flying solo on this project, Miller quickly shows himself to be completely incompetent; a lifetime of filling static frames has not prepared him for the fact that movies actually need to move, and whenever he is faced with any kind of dynamism in this picture, he loses it. He cannot compose a shot to save his life, and he doesn't seem to know what his actors should be doing as they deliver their lines, leading to one embarrassing scene in which Jackson and Johansson walk back and forth across the screen for about two minutes while spouting expository dialogue. I should point out that they are dressed in traditional Japanese dress at the time, and later, when they capture and torture The Spirit, they both appear on screen clad as Nazis. The reasoning behind all of this escapes me.

In fact, there seems to be very little reasoning behind anything in The Spirit. The clothes and decor suggest the film is taking place in the era that Eisner originally set his comic in, but the mood is spoiled by mobile phones, laptops and enormous guns. Miller's plotting is practically incomprehensible, with flashbacks and weird fantasy sequences (featuring Jaime King as, I'm guessing...Death?) piling up on one another as Macht's ceaselessly dour narration drones on all over it. At least the flashbacks do feature the film's single commendable performance, from Seychelle Gabriel, who plays the teenage version of the character later portrayed by a wooden Eva Mendes, and she seems to be the only person in the film who has some grasp of her character. Everyone else just appears to be lost.

All of this begs the question – why on earth did nobody step in at any point in The Spirit's production when it became clear that Miller was producing the most amateurish superhero movie since Batman and Robin? I have no idea, but I'm guessing the line among the producers was something like "Hey, it looks a lot like Sin City and it has loads of half-naked women", so they let Miller get on with it. Sin City is obviously the model that Miller is aping here, but at least Rodriguez knows how to edit, how to shoot, how to direct, and that movie had fleeting moments of visual magic. Throwing gaudy flashes of colour and inconsistent silhouettes together in a nourish milieu does not amount to the same thing, and by the time the nonsensical finale arrives, Miller's desperation is almost tangible. The Spirit is empty of any logic, feeling or intelligence; it is visually and morally ugly, and the fact that this ineptly made garbage has been released in such a state is an insult. Some films are just plain bad, but The Spirit feels like nothing less than a crime against cinema.

Review - Che

The Che I saw, and the film I'm going to write about here, is not the Che that most people will experience. My review is based upon the viewing of the whole 4+ hours in one sitting, with a 15-minute interval between segments, while the picture has been divided into two parts for mass consumption, with the first being released in the UK in early January, and the follow-up arriving in February. Part One details the Cuban revolution, while the second instalment focuses on the failed attempt to repeat that feat in Bolivia, and perhaps that's the best way to experience Steven Soderbergh's epic account of Che Guevara's rise and fall, because as a single cinematic experience I found it all a bit indigestible. I wonder, though, if I would still have the same doubts about the whole enterprise even if I had watched them separately, as there appear to be some fundamental flaws in the way Soderbergh has brought this story to the screen.

It's a strange thing, to watch a film and admire almost every decision the filmmakers have made, while simultaneously finding very little to really care about in what I was seeing. Soderbergh has admitted he wanted to avoid any "biopic moments" in his telling of the Che story, but he fails to give us anything in place of those moments, and at times he seems perversely determined to prevent any kind of audience engagement with the story. His direction is detached and objective as he maintains a consistently muted tone throughout, using Che as an examination of the process of revolution, and the nuts and bolts of guerrilla warfare, but he seems oddly uninterested in the man at the centre of these two films. Soderbergh and his screenwriters Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen have adapted their screenplays from Guevara's own diaries, but while the resulting films never feel anything less than utterly authentic, the coldly clinical nature of them fails to sustain the mammoth running time.

Of course, that might not be such an issue for the majority of viewers, who will be viewing Che as separate two-hour pictures, but I think the first half feels like the most satisfying and complete of the pair. The film introduces us to the young Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara (Benicio Del Toro) in 1956, when he first encountered Fidel Castro (a fine impersonation from Demián Bichir), and then the pair take a boat to Cuba, where they will begin their rebellion against the Batista regime. The ensuing scenes are fascinating to watch, as Che slowly begins to build an army in the hills, delivering rousing speeches, and training and educating the men around him into real soldiers. Che's narrative doesn't exactly flow in a smooth manner, but Soderbergh's nimble editing ensures the progression of events still hangs together, while his cross-cutting between Che's 1964 appearance in New York acts as a kind of narration. We see how Che insisted that his men be disciplined and literate, and we see how he won the hearts and minds of the villagers he encountered, and the film builds steadily to the Battle of Santa Clara in 1959; a battle which effectively toppled the Batista government, and which is presented here as a thrillingly immediate, brilliantly sustained set-piece.

Che: Part Two is a very different film. From the start, Soderbergh highlights the difference by downsizing the aspect ratio to 1.85 and employing a jumpier handheld style, while the digital cinematography – so vivid and lush in the first film – is more washed-out. If the first segment was about the success of Che's ideology in Cuba, then the second is about him failing to impose that same ideology on the Bolivian people, and as such the film becomes a slow study of failure, which lacks the variety or tonal shifts that kept the first instalment interesting. Again, one should bear in mind that I was about three hours into my Che experience at this point, but halfway through the increasingly turgid second film my attention began to waver. For all of the conviction and authenticity of these movies, the lack of a real emotional centre begins to tell the longer they go on.

That's why I think Soderbergh's dismissal of "biopic moments" is misguided. In the hands of a skilled filmmaker – which he undoubtedly is – those moments can be a useful shorthand to help draw the viewer into the life of the man whose story is being told. Soderbergh doesn't do himself any favours by skipping over the most controversial part of Che's life – the years when he was in power – which opens him up to accusations of making a hagiography, but while Che isn't quite a hagiography, it never develops into more than a one-dimensional portrait of the men either. The tragedy is that Benicio Del Toro is perfect for the role; a commanding presence who holds our attention through his understated intensity, it's so easy to believe in him as a leader of men. Occasionally we get peeks inside Che – his vulnerability is suddenly exposed when he is felled by an asthmatic attack in the second picture – but for the most part this figure exists totally on the surface. After watching Che, I came out of the film knowing a lot more about the details of the Cuban revolution and its ill-advised Bolivian counterpart, but the film taught me next to nothing about the man behind them. Perhaps that was exactly what Soderbergh was going for, and in that case these two films can be considered an unusual success, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that some kind of opportunity has been thrown away here.

2008 Review - Part Two: The Best and Worst

Best Picture

1 – There Will Be Blood
A film whose ambition and execution dwarfs 90% of what American cinema has produced in the past decade

2 – No Country For Old Men
This is simply a flawlessly crafted picture at every level

3 – 4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 Days
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a stunning work; it is filmmaking stripped to the basics and yet it manages to be as gut-wrenchingly gripping as any thriller

4 – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
One of the year's most uplifting and exhilarating cinematic experiences

5 – Man On Wire
One of the most gripping, emotionally involving films of the year

6 – Gomorrah
Rarely has a single film provided such a vivid and engrossing portrait of an organised crime network

7 – Persepolis
Persepolis is a totally unique cinematic experience

8 – The Silence of Lorna
This is ultimately another rich and nuanced character study from two of the most valuable filmmakers in world cinema

9 – Hunger
There's something special going on in almost every scene

10 – Taxi to The Darkside
An alarming and gripping piece of filmmaking

Honourable Mentions
The Edge Of Heaven
Far North
Happy-Go-Lucky
Iron Man
My Winnipeg
Of Time And The City
The Savages
Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber Of Fleet St
WALL•E
XXY

Worst Picture


1 – Blindness
If the ghastly cinematography doesn't drive you from the cinema, then perhaps the crushingly unsubtle allegory will

2 – Rambo
It's jaw-dropping in its tastelessness

3 – Three And Out
A depressingly lame British picture that completely fails to capitalise on the meagre potential of its premise

4 – The Happening
The Happening is an indefensibly stupid film in every single way

5 – Righteous Kill
The whole movie just feels like straight-to-DVD junk

6 – Cassandra's Dream
The fact that Allen has signed this package off as being fit for release suggests a filmmaker bored by his own work
7 – Charlie Bartlett
Charlie Bartlett is stupid, derivative and empty
8 – Never Back Down
A soulless experience
9 – Savage Grace
At times the film became so boring I genuinely began to fear for my sanity
10 – Zack And Miri Make A Porno
Shabby, unimaginative and juvenile

Dishonourable MentionsAustralia
Changeling
Cloverfield
Diary of the Dead
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull
Juno
Quantum of Solace
Semi-Pro
Step Brothers
Zoo

Best Actor


Daniel Day-Lewis – There Will Be Blood
Javier Bardem – No Country for Old Men
James Franco – Pineapple Express
Michael Fassbender – Hunger
Robert Downey Jr. – Iron Man

Best Actress


Anamaria Marinca – 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Arta Dobroshi – The Silence of Lorna
Sally Hawkins – Happy-Go-Lucky
Tang Wei – Lust, Caution
Inés Efron – XXY

Best Supporting Actor


Max von Sydow – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Eddie Marsan – Happy-Go-Lucky
Vlad Ivanov – 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
Jérémie Renier – The Silence of Lorna

Best Supporting Actress

Kelly MacDonald – No Country for Old Men
Marie-Josée Croze – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Laura Vasiliu – 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Vera Farmiga – The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Anne Consigny – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Best Director


Paul Thomas Anderson – There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen – No Country for Old Men
Julian Schnabel – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Cristian Mungiu – 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Steve McQueen – Hunger

Best Original Screenplay


4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
The Silence of Lorna
Happy-Go-Lucky
The Savages
Pineapple Express

Best Adapted Screenplay


The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Gommorah
No Country for Old Men
Persepolis
There Will Be Blood

Best Cinematography


The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
There Will Be Blood
No Country for Old Men
Far North
The Dark Knight

Best Editing

No Country for Old Men
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Hunger
Gommorah

Best Musical Score


There Will Be Blood
The Dark Knight
WALL•E
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Australia

Best Visual Effects

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
WALL•E
Iron Man
The Dark Knight
Hancock

Best Production Design

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
There Will Be Blood
Quantum of Solace
WALL•E
The Dark Knight

Best Costume Design

The Last Mistress
There Will Be Blood
Lust, Caution
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Surprise of the Year

Hunger
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Iron Man
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
XXY

Disappointment of the Year

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Righteous Kill
Quantum of Solace
Step Brothers
Changeling