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All words posted on this blog are the sole property of Michael Duffy (except where noted). Images are collected from the web and are shared herein to illustrate film reviews and opinions. If you are the owner of an image and do not wish to see it used for these purposes, please email me and I will remove it. |
Monday, September 19, 2005
 Nick Nolte and Maggie Cheung at 2004's Cannes Award Ceremony, where Cheung was named Best Actress for her lead role in Oliver Assayas' Clean There are some films that seep into your soul in a way you can't describe, or even understand. Sometimes you make more sense of these films later in life, when events transpire which put more meaning and perspective into these films of the past, sometimes you don't make sense of them at all -- you just feel. Clean is, for me, one of these movies. It's the kind of film that used to come out in the 1970s (I'm thinking of movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and The French Connection), a film with rare emotional, physical honesty and compassion for the human existence, the kind of which you rarely see these days. To save you a needless plot summary that you can simply read here, I'll tell you only that, if you treasure true emotional honesty in films, then find this film on television or at your video/electronics store, and rent it or buy it -- you won't be sorry. Maggie Cheung, one of the world's most celebrated actresses (even though you may have never heard of her) delivers a real, unglamorous performance as a woman who has nearly lost it all through drugs and a life of mistakes. When her rock musician husband dies of a drug overdose, she must find a way to make sense of the rest of her life, which includes a set of grandparents she barely talks to, and a son that she barely knows.  Traversing Canada, Paris and London, the film isn't so much a travelogue as a journey to locate a soul. Cheung's performance, on a surface level, reflects the real-life Cheung's state of existence -- an actress born in England, and raised throughout the world, she speaks at least three languages: English, French and Cantonese. All three are used in Clean; there are no flashy transitions, no weighty justifications for the shifts in cultural and societal sensibilities -- the world is as it is, free-form, baseless, and forever wanting.  Nick Nolte delivers a blistering, downtrodden, magnificently levelled performance, as a grandfather who must take on the burden not only of his son's complicated royalty legalities and re-issue art conundrums, and his wife's sudden worsening of a terminal condition, but also, and perhaps most significantly, becoming an emotional olive tree to a damaged daughter-in-law whom he never really knew. On every whisker of Nolte's unshaven face, you see and feel a lifetime's worth of regret and grizzled world-weariness. It's an amazingly nuanced performance, one of the best in what continues to be a wildly unpredictable career. The film's director and writer, Oliver Assayas, is French, and was for a few years married to Cheung. Their union has produced a fruitful cinematic relationship, beginning with Assayas' essay in filmic-self-reflexiveness, Irma Vep. Their work together in Clean shows how special this relationship has become, whether there is harmony in marriage or not. All that matters is that there is a marriage of shared sensibilities, cinematic approaches, and stylistic, emotional and thematic cohesiveness. Clean is a film that should be seen by everyone, yet strangely enough it is not getting a wide release.  Another film whose moments have stayed with me in recent weeks is War of the Worlds, which, while not extraordinarily groundbreaking, I felt, still left me battered and bruised enough psychologically by its many haunting images, that I felt I should mention it. My favorite sequence in the film, and the one I find most meaning in, is surely when the Cruise, Fanning and Tim Robbins characters find themselves stranded in a basement through a deadly overnight massacre on their town by unrelenting aliens. As the Cruise character slowly begins to realize he is living with a madman (an eerie, psychologically challenging performance from Tim Robbins), he strives to do whatever he must in order to protect his daughter and himself from being "found out". The sequence has strong allusions to Orson Welles for me, in both Robbins' performance (which I felt could have been a role a latter-day, Touch of Evil-era Welles might have really done something with), and in the claustrophobic nature of its atmosphere and cinematic style. Spielberg really captures some of the essence of suspence, mystery and horror here, not through gore and explosive grandeur, but purely through mind-numbing terror of the psychological kind. Also worth noting this week is the great opportunity I had to view Los Angeles Plays Itself, a film seemingly only on festival release, in which Cal Arts professor Thom Anderson theorizes the cinematic and social significance of Los Angeles as a city, image and character in fictional film. Peppered with clips of everything from Blade to Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Plays Itself is, while seemingly academic on the surface, actually a telling, funny and brilliant take on Los Angeles as a cultural object. Anderson interrogates theories as to why Los Angeles 'means' what it does in films, and why we accept it as such. Well worth your while, even if you don't know much about cinema. Speaking of "California Dreaming", just because I like you, a 'Hello' from Faye Wong in Chungking Express.  Still as wonderfully invigorating ten years on... Friday, September 09, 2005
Remembering The Big Easy In better times...  Do Something For the People! Here's How You Can Make an Immediate Difference in Louisiana And all the up-to-date information and counter-mass media views here. Not to get political, but... "There have been a lot of failures at a lot of levels -- local, state and federal," Powell said in an ABC interview for the "20/20" program. "There was more than enough warning over time about the dangers to New Orleans. Not enough was done. I don't think advantage was taken of the time that was available to us, and I just don't know why," Powell said in excerpts on ABC's Web site. "I don't think it's racism, I think it's economic," Powell said. "But poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor." And because we need to laugh at a time like this (and yes, this is probably in poor taste), I give you what I deem to be the funniest small story of the year: ----------------- >> Smells Like T Spirit <<> New Order played T In The Park festival this summer. Singer Bernard Sumner decides to take a dump before going on stage so heads to the backstage portaloos. When he emerges, Bernard is conscious that he's left a terrible smell, so tries to escape unseen. Unfortunately, he bumps straight into Godfather of Soul James Brown, who is heading for the same toilet. Sumner runs off giggling, but before gets out of earshot, hears the door lock and a muffled cry of, "Good GOD!" ----------------- In other worthless news at a time like this: I'm placing my bets on Casino Royale -- Yes, I'm staking my claim that Pierce Brosnan will indeed be back as 007. I've got 4-1... More film reviews coming next week, including the amazing Clean, starring 2004 Cannes Best Actress winner Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte. |