Weekly round-up

>> A sinking city, vigilante justice
and a Beatles musical

by CHRIS BARRY,
JASON BOGDANERIS
and HILLARY BRENHOUSE

Still Life

Jia Zhang-Ke’s drama captures the last breaths of a resilient Yangtze town that’s slowly sinking. Han Sanming, a withdrawn miner, comes to Fengjie in search of the ex-wife he hasn’t seen in 16 years, only to discover that her home has been completely submerged by the Three Gorges Dam. Old Fengjie—and its 2,000 years of history—is already underwater, and the buildings that still stand are being demolished one by one. The catastrophe is beautiful and grandiose in all of its ugliness.

Zhang-Ke brings us images of a people drowning in nostalgia that are so human, so true-to-life, it’s as though he decided at the last minute to abandon his script and lay bare Fengjie’s most honest moments.

The controversial social drama is drawn out, but you won’t want it to hurry. Still Life plays like a documentary, portraying with candour a scrawny, all but tone-deaf youth howling Chinese love songs, half-naked workers with leathery skin sharing cigarettes, the weary passengers of an overcrowded boat gliding across the river that will soon turn Fengjie into a memory—the ones who’ve been displaced, and those who are desperately seeking them out. You’ll be compelled to keep very quiet, not only because you’re sitting in a theatre, but because you’ll feel like an intruder who’s stumbled into their lives by accident. It’s almost as if the stories that colour Still Life are not intended for an audience; strangely, it’s this quality that makes it so compelling. (HB)

The Hunting Party

BOSNIAN HIJINKS: The Hunting Party

In Richard (The Matador) Shepard’s film, Richard Gere plays an eccentric former network war correspondent who, after an on-air meltdown, has been reduced to freelancing for whoever will take him. Now back in Bosnia five years after the end of hostilities and his resulting breakdown, he meets up with his former cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) and Duck’s apprentice Benjamin (Jesse Eiesenberg), and convinces them he’s got a huge story they’re going to want to be a part of. They reluctantly agree to track down the country’s most notorious war criminal for an interview, but soon learn that Gere has other ideas, intending to capture the guy and turn him in for the $5-million price on his head. And this time, for Gere at least, it’s personal.

Judging by this film, Bosnia seems like a very pretty country to visit, war ghosts and unexploded landmines aside. That’s the most striking thing I came away with from this movie. It’s being billed as a suspense/black comedy/adventure kind of thing, but I’m still not sure where the humour was. And it’s not because a film about chasing genocidal war criminals in a country still licking its wounds after a nasty civil war couldn’t be without its wistful ironies; it’s simply that all the humour here is character-driven, and, well, the characters just ain’t much to write home about. And as far as suspense is concerned, again, it’s hard to break a sweat over characters this clichéd. (CB)

The Brave One

Wow, this movie is all kinds of terrible. Jodie Foster stars as a mild-mannered public radio host turned vigilante, but she’s not the problem. The problem is the utter lack of imagination the director displays in resorting to every filmmaking schematic in the well-thumbed-through book.

Inside-outing her role in Taxi Driver, where she played an adolescent hooker prematurely corrupted by New York’s mean streets, here Foster is a middle-aged innocent who’s shocked into cynicism by one random act of violence that claims her fiancé. As she witnesses the wheels of justice grinding along ineffectively, Erica Bain makes a decision to take the law into her proverbial hands. She buys a gun in a Chinatown back alley, and then faces down danger like a modern-day Bernhard Goetz. And danger lurks on every corner of a New York that seems to be wearing its throwback jersey. Meanwhile, as she starts getting all Travis Bickle, she befriends Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), who is of course pursuing a killer that’s right under his nose!

The story has a seen-it-once, seen-it-a-million-times-ness to it, but in the hands of someone else, the chemistry provided by Foster and Howard might have worked. When danger looms, the camera has a familiar tilt, and long-bowed stringed instruments pulse. If it’s an “emotional” moment, a piano tinkles—but never loud enough to drown out the awful dialogue. These two fine actors never had a chance, but what’s director Neil Jordan’s excuse? (JB)

Mr. Woodcock

COACH COMEDY: Mr. Woodcock

Maybe it’s because I had such low expectations, and yes, Mr. Woodcock is certainly not without its flaws, but overall this is a surprisingly fun movie. I even laughed out loud a couple of times—which, trust me, is not something that happens very often when I’m watching Seann William Scott up on the big screen. But Scott, and to an even greater extent Billy Bob Thornton, manage to take Mr. Woodcock’s ultra-thin premise and turn it into a fairly enjoyable picture.

Thornton is Mr. Woodcock, the nastiest, most hard-ass gym teacher a kid could ever dread getting stuck with. Scott is John Farley, a popular self-help book author who, as a sensitive, fatherless fat kid, was mercilessly abused in Woodcock’s gym class—so much so that he’s spent his entire adult life trying to get over the trauma. So far, so funny, eh? Anyway, Farley returns home to Nebraska to collect an award, only to discover that his mom (Susan Sarandon) and the evil Thornton have recently become an item—and worse, are intending to get married. Horrified at the prospect, Scott decides to stay in town for a while and do everything at his disposal to convince his mother that Thornton is not the hero that she, and seemingly everyone else in town, thinks he is.

Hey, I told you the premise was lame. Still, the jokes are occasionally funny, and Thornton does such a great job with his character that it’s easy to forgive the film’s obvious weaknesses. (CB)

Across the Universe

FAB FILM: Across the Universe

I suppose it’s possible to really not like the Beatles, but I can’t see how. Besides being my own personal sentiment, that seems to be the guiding principle behind this musical nourished exclusively by their songs. Predictably disjointed in bits and ever so slightly contrived at others, it survives these quibbles to burst off the screen.

Like Baz Luhrmann’s grating Moulin Rouge, Across the Universe is an attempt to remake the genre, adding doses of self-awareness and music-video flourishes. But unlike that hyperkinetic self-indulgent flick, Julie Taymor’s minor masterpiece knows the value of restraint.

The story is simple enough—boy from Liverpool meets girl from Princeton and together they fall in love, experience the ’60s and drift apart for a couple of heartfelt songs before the big, tear-welling climax.

Jim Sturgess is the boy, sporting a mod ’do that calls to mind Paul McCartney circa ’67. Evan Rachel Wood is the Ivy League princess with perfect skin and perfect pitch. They’re joined by her brother (Joe Anderson) and a cast of characters who sing and dance their way through Greenwich Village as Vietnam casts a dark shadow over the psychedelic ’60s. Taymor has a conjurer’s instinct to keep upping the ante whenever the pace threatens to slacken and she has crafted a fantastic-looking film. She’s equally adept at creating a convincing fantasy world as she is at providing an immediacy to the era’s images that have become clichés. Having the most famous song catalogue in the universe helps too. (JB)

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