The Tourist

In 2006, the magnificently named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made ‘The Lives of Others’, a real labour of love which he’d spent five years bringing to the screen. It was released to almost universal acclaim, netted an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and announced the arrival of a major new filmmaking talent.

In 2010, von Donnersmarck made ‘The Tourist’, a Hollywood star vehicle in which he invested less than a year, only coming on board after Lasse Hallestrom and Alfonso Cuaron (among others) had come and gone. It was released to almost universal dismissal and the only thing it won was a couple of Teen Choice Awards. There seemed genuine surprise when its overseas box office took it into profit.

There’s no real critical love for ‘The Tourist’ – and it would be difficult to put a spin on the film worthy of a revisionist appraisal – but it’s not without a few hokey pleasures and it certainly isn’t the unmitigated waste of time and talent that most reviewers would have you believe. There are, however, a couple of problems which it struggles to overcome and with which it eventually reaches stalemate. Of which more, to use a pleasantly old-fashioned phrase, later.

‘The Tourist’ opens with Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) under surveillance in Paris by Interpol agents under the coordination of tenacious Scotland Yard detective John Acheson (Paul Bettany). Acheson is on the trail of elusive financial crook Alexander Payne, who owes Her Majesty’s government £744 million in taxes. Her Majesty’s government being something of a capricious entity, non-payment of £744 million is deemed a bad thing, while Acheson being allowed to run up an £8 million bill at the taxpayer’s expense for an operation that has produced exactly one lead is apparently quite acceptable. Well, maybe not to Acheson’s boss, Chief Inspector Jones (Timothy Dalton), who has to sign the receipts and is on the verge of pulling and plug.

Acheson’s single and highly tenuous lead? That’ll be the elegant Elise.

And when Elise receives a mysterious note and immediately quits the pavement café culture of Paris and hops a train for Venice, Acheson intuits that Venice is where he’ll find Payne and goes behind his superior’s back as he attempts to close the net. Meanwhile, a mole in his department blabs details of the Venice connection to mobster Reginald Shaw (Steven Berkoff). Payne might not have paid his taxes to Her Majesty’s government, but he’s actively stolen from Shaw and that pisses Shaw off right royally. And this point I’ll simply reiterate that Shaw is played by Steven Berkoff and leave it to your imagination.

En route to Venice, Elise meets widowed American maths teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) and part-seduces, part-confuses him and all-round plays him for a sap. You see, that mysterious note Elise received instructed her to find someone her pursuers would believe was Payne in order to distract them. Thus, spy novel aficionado Tupelo finds himself in a for-real web of intrigue and double-bluff when all he really wants is the affections of the alluring Elise. Instead, he finds himself targeted by Acheson and Shaw alike, as well as running afoul of the Venezian police. (Incidentally, if your idea of the Venezian police is formed by the novels of Donna Leon, check in your aesthetics at the popcorn stand. This lot are like the Keystone Kops with kanals.*)

This is where the film runs into the first of its problems. For the plot to work, Frank Tupelo has to be an everyman. A quite literal innocent abroad. A dupe with a streak of the hopeless romantic. You have to be able to – by turns – feel sorry for him, laugh at him, and root for him. Johnny Depp is a remarkably talented actor, but one so associated with quirky characters (indeed, someone so associated with quirkiness simply because he’s Johnny Depp) that it’s basically impossible to cast him in an everyman role. And his attempt to play Tupelo in said manner leads to a leeching of charisma and, crucially, a lack of chemistry in his scenes with Jolie.

Lack of chemistry between the leads is a deal-breaker for any movie, but doubly for a romantic thriller that’s so obviously patterning itself on the ‘To Catch a Thief’ model. Which is where the second problem comes strolling through the piazza. The script is credited to von Donnersmarck, Julian Fellowes and Christopher McQuarrie, based on Jerome Salle’s script for his 2005 French language film ‘Anthony Zimmer’. Although von Donnersmarck rewrote the script prior to filming, it’s very easy to delineate the individual contributions: anything elegant, witty and Hitchcockian probably came from the pen of Fellowes; the thrilleramics, double-bluffs and sadistic villain from McQuarrie; and the minutiae of surveillance from von Donnersmarck. ‘The Tourist’ could have been an immediately and infinitely better film had it settled on just one approach. In fact, I’d wager that if script duties had been solely left to Fellowes, it would have been a pure joy.

Still, there’s enough to like. The sheen of artifice suits the Hitchcockian elements well, and DoP John Seale shoots everything in a sun-dappled palette that has probably earned him a crate of champagne from the Venice Tourist Board. (Here’s a quick game: write down all the movies set in Venice you can think of, and give them a 1 – 5 rating based on how desirable a holiday destination they portray the city as. I’m guessing you’ve got ‘Death in Venice’, ‘Don’t Look Now’, ‘The Comfort of Strangers’, the last scene of ‘Casino Royale’ and a handful of gialli and you’d run a mile rather than ride a gondola. Now watch ‘The Tourist’; you’ll be looking at travel agents’ brochures before you know it.)

The few action scenes that the movie delivers and well constructed, and a rooftop chase nicely punctures the free-running extravaganzas that Hollywood usually delivers when characters race across the skyline; here, tiles give way, characters stumble and the pace is hilariously (and realistically) slow.

Apart from Depp’s somewhat wooden turn, performances are generally good. Dalton takes what is essentially a glorified cameo and has great fun with it. Rufus Sewell turns up for all of a minute and a half and damn near steals the show. Berkoff reins in his usual manic twitchiness and Shaw emerges as all the more dangerous for it. But the jewel in the crown, the shining star of ‘The Tourist’ is Angelina Jolie. I don’t think she’s ever looked more the old-school effortlessly elegant movie star than she does here. Her English accent, while a tad more cut-glass than even the most upper class British inflection, is much more convincing than in her outings as Lara Croft. But mainly it’s the air of intrigue, allure and teasingly aloof sophistication that virtually emanates from her as she glides seductively across the screen. I’ve always associated Jolie with an earthier, raunchier persona and to see the transformation wrought here is to be mesmerised. Hmmm, maybe the Venice Tourist Board owes her a crate of bubbly as well.



*I apologise unreservedly for that so-called joke.

Corpse Bride

The obvious approach to take in reviewing ‘Corpse Bride’ – and it’s so obvious there probably ought to be a law against it – is to observe that Tim Burton depicts the world of the living as grey and inert, and the world of the dead as colourful and lively, therefore yada yada yada blah blah blah upload student paper to blindingly_obvious_critiques@agitation.net.

This is what ‘Corpse Bride is really about:

Class.

The basic set-up (established in a musical number that comes across like Gilbert & Sullivan after a few G&Ts too many) has upper crust but penniless couple Finis and Maudeline Everglot (voiced by Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley) scheming to marry their winsome daughter Victoria (Emily Watson) off to Victor (Johnny Depp), the hapless son of nouveau riche parvenus William and Nell Van Dort (Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullman).

The names are just too priceless: Finis (as in “the end”) and Maudeline (maudlin) are the stuffed shirt aristocratic types drifting stoically towards their own personal financial Gotterdammerung, their stately home crumbling around them. Their nemeses/saviours are William (you can imagine he’s “Bill”, an archetypal working class diminutive, to his mates) and Nell (a name inevitably evocative of a nobleman’s consort). The romantic couple in waiting are called Victor and Victoria. The obvious filmic homage notwithstanding, both are reticent, gauche, clumsy and socially inept: there’s nothing victorious about either.

Victor, reeling under Pastor Galswells (Christopher Lee)’s admonition at being unable to memorize his wedding vows, takes a sheepish walk into the dark forest just on the outskirts of town and practices the lines and the giving of the ring. In the kind of innocent misunderstanding that could easily befall any young man, he finds himself betrothed to the titular Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter).

[Parenthetically, the following exchange, which took place at chez Agitation while watching the DVD last night, might be worth recording:

ME: Okay, so she’s dead, crawling with maggots and has a detachable arm, but the lass has a decent figure.

PAULA: Hmmm, I don’t know. Could do with some meat on her bones.

ME: High five.]

Hooked up with Deadgirl Corpse Bride, Victor finds himself in a bustling, variegated underworld where money and social standing don’t mean squat, where a Napoleonic general and a Rhett Butler-type suth’un gennulman hang out in the same bar with a group of pool-playing skeletons and an equally fleshless jazz band. Death the great leveler, indeed.

‘Corpse Bride’ – released the same year as Burton’s overblown remake of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ – is a curious film. Clocking in at just an hour and a quarter, its slender plot nonetheless feels dragged out in places. There are only two real set-pieces: Victor’s half-delirious half-terrified waltz through the underworld (incorporating the marvelous title song in swing band style), and the wedding finale at which arch-villain Barkis Bittern (Richard E Grant) threatens the celebrations of both the living and the dead. (We were talking about character names earlier. Barkis Bittern. Geddit? Geddit?) It packs in a vocal cast of staggering quality – in addition to the above named, Michael Gough, Jane Horrocks and Enn Reitel lend their dulcet tones – some of whom only get a line or two. The songs probably account for over a third of the screen time. Visually, it’s kind of like the characters who didn’t make the cut for ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ decided to put on their own show and to hell with it.

It looks like it’s set in a woodcut illustration from a book of German fairy tales, yet comes on as a black valentine to Englishness. It puts up an English rose against a pretty freakin’ hot (and decidedly non-living) goth chick. (And you can’t get much more goth than actually being six feet under.) It doesn’t just laugh at the Reaper, but chortles along with him. It’s glib and sardonic and takes its leave of you with a scene that’s authentically and throat-tighteningly beautiful. Well played, Mr Burton, well played.

Dead Man (guest review by Bryce Wilson)

Thanks my good friend Bryce from Things That Don’t Suck for the following article.

‘Dead Man’ is an astoundingly pretentious movie. But don’t hold it against it.

Every now and again you come across a film that has seems not just odd but to have genuinely evolved along a separate evolutionary track. And that’s ‘Dead Man’ all the way, just your average Saturday Matinee on Alpha Centuri, where everyone watches B Movie Proto Mumblecore westerns that mix arch black and white style with, meandering quasi formed ideas about Native American Spirtuality and William Blake.

Even comparing it to Jaramusch’s other work offers little help. While his other movies inseredt sly signposts letting you know what level Jaramusch was putting you on, ‘Dead Man’ offers no such cheat sheet. Even comparing it to ‘Ghost Dog’, which has a similar schism between its offering of austere meditations on Bushido and its weird riffs on Seijun Suzuki and Tarantino, offers little help. It’s as if Jaramusch has gotten deeply invested in his mumbo jumbo, but is kind of embarrassed about it. It’s like having a conversation with someone who puts mocking air quotes around everything he says, and then concludes by going “Seriously though it was pretty deep.”

‘Dead Man’ follows Johnny Depp as a milquetoast accountant from Cleveland, who ends up on the run after killing the son of Robert Mitchum. Hunted by a gang of killers, and guided by the Native American Nobody who takes him for the (short lived) reincarnation of William Blake. However this makes the movie sound like it has a lot more form then it actually does. Most of the film consists of Depp simply wandering into weird shit.

‘Dead Man’ is at its best when it’s at its least self conscience, which isn’t often. There are the scenes with Robert Mitchum in full force of nature/wrath of God mode. Perpetually framed by a cheeky Jarmusch in front of stuffed Bears, Displays of guns, Giant Portraits of himself and other things that reflect what a bad motherfucker Robert Mitchum is. As well as the scenes following the trio of bounty hunters Mitchum hires to assassinate Blake, including a shockingly funny Michael Wincot, and Lance Henrikson as a man with more dark secretes then seem possible. Their sections resemble nothing so much as the laconic naturalistic bickering between the principles in the early Jarmusch masterpieces, like ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ and ‘Down By Law’. If one makes allowances for the fact that they occasionally kill people and eat one another. The particular punch line to their scenes is exceedingly dark.

This is one of those frustrating reviews. I know it doesn’t sound like it but I have some very real affection for this weird little mutant of a movie. Much like the Neil Young score that haunts it, the quality of ‘Dead Man’ all depends on your point of view. It’s either a sparse and haunting meditation, or as Ebert suggested the sound of a man dropping his guitar for two hours.

Then again who is to say that it can’t be both?

PERSONAL FAVES: Ed Wood

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 96 of 100

Halfway through ‘Ed Wood’ – a film I saw at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema when it was first released in 1994 and have reapproached every three or four years since – I grabbed a pen, jotted a few words down and congratulated myself on a nifty opening line for this review:

“ ‘Ed Wood’ is what happens when a capable director makes a film about the life of an incapable director.”

Might need tightening, but hey-ho, good opener. I settled down to finish the movie, which has become like an old friend to me over the years, then fired up the laptop to start this review. I took another look at the sentence I’d jotted down and it struck me as inappropriate; a glib generalisation.

Tim Burton a “capable” filmmaker? Talk about damning with faint praise! Excuse me while I put my sniffy, academic, middle-aged Sight and Sound critic’s hat on!

Tim Burton, for want a better all-encompassing, single-word description, is an inspired director.

Nor is it completely accurate to deem Edward D. Wood Jnr “incapable”. Ed Wood was a man who made movies for virtually no budget, their runtimes padded with stock footage, his scripts tortuously contrived to incorporate said elements or explain away the non-existent production values; a man who peopled his opuses with actors who couldn’t act simply because they’d appear for free or they were his friends. A man who didn’t – unlike certain directors (no names mentioned, but dude your car insurance adverts are freakin’ annoying) – start out with the backing of a studio, some semblance of a budget, a script that could actually have worked and cast members who had proved themselves admirably elsewhere and still emerge with a stinker of epic proportions. Wood, too, can best be described as inspired – just in a different way.

Ed Wood (played with wide-eyed gleeful empathy by Johnny Depp) genuinely loves cinema; it’s something he aspires to even as his off-Broadway play (a belaboured wartime morality tale) dies a quiet death in a dingy theatre, its cast significantly more populated than the audience. The play’s a three-hander, by the way.

Encouraged by his long-time (and long-suffering) girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), Wood battles to get his hastily penned genre scripts into production. As his bounces from commercial failure to critical failure (usually within the scope of the same movie), collects an entourage of fellow oddballs including supposed psychic Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), voluptuous late-night TV host Vampira (Lisa Marie), camp transsexual Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray in excelsis) and faded horror movie star Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau).

It’s the friendship between Wood and Lugosi that forms the emotional core of ‘Ed Wood’, Martin Landau bringing a heartfelt gravitas to his Oscar-winning performance as the elderly Lugosi. Landau provides the anchor upon which Depp’s typically expressive performance is held.

Late in the film – with Lugosi’s health failing and Dolores leaving Wood for the heinous sins of giving a lead role to another actress and having a penchant for wearing her undies and angora sweaters – Wood strikes up a tentative romance with the starry-eyed Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette), a relationship which counterpoints Lugosi’s eventual and inevitable death. It’s from the last bit of footage he shot of Lugosi that Wood crafts his “masterpiece”, ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. Funded by a religious organisation deluded enough to think they’re putting their funds into an educational and gently improving blockbuster that will spread the word and swell their ranks, the title is hastily changed from the original ‘Grave Robbers From Outer Space’ when his backers express outrage at the concept of grave robbing.

Still, after much wrangling and a few inspirational words from his hero Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio), Wood gets to make his movie – suffering his entire cast to be baptized in order to secure the funding – and declares it, as he and Kathy head to Las Vegas to get married, “the one I’ll be remembered for”.

He wasn’t wrong.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There’s a scene in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ where Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) – thinly fictionalised versions of Hunter S Thompson and Samoan attorney Oscar Acosta – are driving through the neon-lit artifice of Las Vegas in a convertible. They pull up next to a car full of straight-laced, middle-aged, middle-class white people (let’s call them ‘squares’ for short). Duke is hunched over the steering wheel, under the influence of just about every narcotic substance known to mankind; Dr Gonzo is hanging out the window, whining and blubbering pathetically, his moustache and the side of the car pebble-dashed with vomit.

The squares try heroically to ignore him. Then Dr Gonzo addresses them directly: “You folks wanna buy some heroin? God damn it, I’m serious. All I’m trying to sell you is some pure fucking smack. This is the real stuff. You won’t get hooked. I just got back from Vietnam ... I wanna sell you some pure fucking smack ... puuuuure ... fuuuuuuck ...”

One of them snaps: “God damn it, you bastards!” he yells, hammering on the car window with his fist. “Pull over! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you.”

Which was pretty much how the critics reacted when ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ was originally released in 1998. “Simply unwatchable” opined Mike Clarke in USA Today and he wasn’t alone in that opinion. The majority of the film-going public didn’t even have an opinion – ‘F&L in LV’ did about $10 million at the American box office, earning back just over half of its budget.

I saw it on the big screen back in ’98 and loved it. Bought the video – loved it. Wore the VHS out and bought the DVD – still love it. And yet most people I talk to haven’t seen it; many have never heard of it. It came as pleasant and long-awaited validation, when I started the new job a few weeks ago, to find that one of my colleagues had not only seen the film but loves it wholeheartedly, and we had a grand time comparing our favourite scenes.

‘F&L in LV’ is zonked-out, screwed-up film-making with an emphasis on self-destructive behaviour, illicit substances and the over-consumption thereof. Politically incorrect? Hell, yeah. Irresponsible? Probably, but who’s counting? Not me. There’s a case to be made that we need a few more films to be irresponsible and politically incorrect – otherwise cinema, as with any art form that’s not given a thorough shaking up every so often, stagnates.

‘F&L in LV’ sets out its stall in the first scene, Duke and Dr Gonzo cutting through the desert in a big open-top car with fins and whitewall tyres and a flame red paint job. They’re on the outskirts of Barstow and the drugs have just kicked in. “We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers and laughers,” Duke enumerates (Depp’s pitch-perfect voiceover is one of the chief joys of the film). “Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into locked a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”

By this time the pair have hallucinated a sky full of attacking bats. It gets worse: checking into a plush hotel, Duke’s base of operations while he ostensibly covers a motorcycle race in the desert, the psychedelically patterned carpet comes bleeding to life. A lounge full of bloated gamblers turns into a rutting grotesquery of giant lizards.

It gets worse: Duke and Dr Gonzo freak out, run up epic room service bills, destroy said hotel rooms, skip paying for both, damage cars, terrorize the innocent, insult authority, brandish weapons, rail against a government and a country going to hell, and merrily drink, snort and in any way possible ingest everything they can get their hands on, all the while encountering any number of other oddballs from an underage and possibly mentally deficient artist (Christina Ricci) who paints nothing but portraits of Barbara Streisand (Duke warns Dr Gonzo off her thusly: “in a few hours, she'll probably be sane enough to work herself into some kind of towering Jesus-based rage at the hazy recollection of being seduced by some kind of cruel Samoan who fed her liquor and LSD, dragged her to a Vegas hotel room and then savagely penetrated every orifice in her little body with his throbbing, uncircumcised member”) to a traffic cop (Gary Busey) who enthusiastically pursues a way over-the-limit* Duke only to let him off with a warning and ask for a kiss (“I’m very lonely here”).

For all that the critics didn’t get it and the majority of cinema-goers didn’t bother with it, ‘F&L in LV’ achieves a perfect marriage of source material, cast and director. It’s a blast, a trip and a head-fuck. Anyone whose sensibilities are easily offended would do best to avoid. But to anyone who likes cinema in the fast lane, 100mph, drunk in charge and not wearing a seatbelt, all I can say is: buy the ticket, take the ride.



*In both senses.

Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson

Having gone out to bat against corporate evil and political evil in, respectively, ‘Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room’ and ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, documentarist Alex Gibney’s latest is a change of direction – a celebration of someone who was on the side of the angels … if, that is, your definition of the side of the angels is elastic enough to admit a heavy-drinking dope fiend with a predilection for political agitation and gun ownership.

‘Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson’ is about … well, the clue’s in the title. Hunter S Thompson was the enfant terrible of American journalism – and the patron saint of Gonzo journalism. He didn’t coin the term, but he certainly invented the concept. Gonzo is a style of reporting where the reporter is at the centre of the story, their experiences reported subjectively, in the first person and informed by personal opinion, instead of objectively and in the third person.

Thompson made an early impact with a non-fiction book on the Hell’s Angels, research for which entailed ingratiating himself into a local chapter and immersing himself in their lifestyle, but it was his article “The Kentucky Derby is Depraved and Decadent” – with illustrations by the incomparable Ralph Steadman – that truly defined his literary style.

It opened the door for his key works, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ and ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail’, the former a thinly fictionalised account of Thompson’s hallucinogenic attempt to find the American dream (he finds fear and loathing instead), the latter an account of the 1972 election campaign – one of the most coruscating and jaw-droppingly brilliant pieces of political writing in print.

Then there was the little matter of Thompson’s own electoral campaign, when he stood for Sheriff of his home town of Aspen, Colorado. He shaved his head just so he could refer to his opponent, who sported a sharp military buzz-cut, as “a long-hair”, and went after what he called the “freak power” vote, ie. appealing to the sensibilities of students, hippies, dopers and basically anyone from whom the prevailing white middle-class Aspen citizenry would run in fear. The surprise is not that he lost, but that he lost by such a small margin.

Of course, there was a price to be paid. You don’t bait the establishment for most of your career without becoming a legend – and it’s awfully hard to remain a legend unless you die young. Thompson was defined by his Gonzo image, and the line between the man and his public persona quickly blurred. There were those who thought he’d done his best work by the ’70s and what remained was a cliché of himself.

I’ve probably not read enough of Thompson’s work to call it. What I will say, on the basis of Gibney’s documentary is that he was a complete one-off: by turns a man of great integrity and a raving loon, a liberal and gun nut, penetrating insightful and fiercely dedicated to proscribed substances, a man of the people and a collector of celebrity friends.

It was one of the most iconoclastic of these friends, Johnny Depp, who paid for Thompson’s typically flamboyant funeral, his ashes fired from a 150ft tube amidst a blaze of fireworks.

Depp also contributes to the documentary, giving wonderfully resonant readings from Thompson’s work. Footage of the good doctor is plentiful, friends and family are forthcoming, colleagues are candid and the Hell's Angels (in the form of Ralph “Sonny” Barger) are hellishly antagonistic. There are anecdotes, particularly from Ralph Steadman and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, that are screamingly funny. A sense of the absurd lingers over the entire film.

And the soundtrack - featuring just about the best of everything from the ’60s and ’70s - is freakin’ awesome.