'The Wages of Fear'/ 'Le Corbeau' & 'Lord of War'

If Henri-Georges Clouzot were directing films today, it seems to me that he would make the same films that he made back in the 1940's and 1950's. There is an uncommon contemporary feel to specific films in his oevure - films like 'The Wages of Fear' and 'Le Corbeau'. Today he would have made a film similar to 'Lord of War', the new film by Andrew Niccol.

The primary difference would be that the human element would have been larger and the scope smaller.

But let me backtrack for a minute.

Clouzot, who worked at the same time as Alfred Hitchcock, specialized in that same sort of film. The difference is that Hitchcock is a household name in America, and Clouzot is probably known to filmmakers and those who have heard of the remake of his film 'Diabolique' with Sharon Stone.

In France, during the time of the Nazi occupation, he made a fascinating film about the nature of accusations or snitching on your enemies. At the time, the film fell under extreme scruntiny from both the Nazi sympathizers as well as the loyal French Resistance. This placed him in the awkward position of being played against the middle.

All this notoriety obscured the film. The film works as a scathing attack on the nature of conformity of the very people who despised it. Thus, all the people who critiqued the film were, in a way, guilty of the crimes the film was leveling at the public. How else could it be explained.

The plot of the film is fairly simple. A doctor comes to town from Paris. He keeps to himself, outside of an affair with a local woman and his work. His doctoring leads him into quite a dilemma. After saving too many women from problematic births (the babies die), he is labeled an abortionist by a letter writer who names themself The Raven.

The letter writer writes to everyone in town and, after a short time, The Raven starts writing to everyone in town about gossip involving there neighbors, lovers, and rivals.

Everyone in town starts suspecting each other, and it's not long before some innocent is fingered as the culprit.

In another of Clouzot' films, 'The Wages of Fear', a band of rough necks, from all-over-the-world are contracted to move nitroglycerine to an oil field. An international group of four is selected by an American company to drive the nitro to the oil field. The trick is that the path to the oil field is a bumpy one and there is a good chance that one if not both trucks will explode.

In this film, over an hour and half is dedicated to the trip. The slow and meticulous trip includes a stop to blow up a rock, a tight turning point that includes a perilously positioned half bridge, and an oil slick that stops one truck dead in its tracks.

In Niccol's 'Lord of War', he uses international gun running to pint a portrait of a man, who truly believes that he's good at one thing. To linger to long on the fact that this man is a bad man would defeat the purpose. Of course he's bad, he's sells guns to war lords (a nice inverse of this phrase and 'blood bath' are included in the film).

It's sort of like getting lost in the fact that 'Le Corbeau' created a fury in France. It did so because while the director has a point of view about the character and the film, it isn't the most important part of the film. The most important part of the film is how the character acts in the situation he finds himself.

Niccol's hero views his work as a business. A business that he tries not to take home.

In 'Le Corbeau', Clouzot's hero tries to do the same. He attempts to brush off the fears of the public.

There is a difference between the characters that is important, but you have to watch the films to see what that is.

Both characters find varying degrees of success in their pursuits. Both find that outside obstacles will influence those you live with. That without place there is no home.

The films can be viewed as attacks on the systems of government or the nature of people (which are virtually the same thing). But mostly they are discussions of character, who has it, what it takes to have it, and how you live with it.

Intimate Strangers (Confidences trop intimes)

Intimate Strangers (Confidences trop intimes) (Zero SK)


It is really hard to classify a Patrice Leconte film properly. They dwell in the gray area between bad French films and wondrous character studies.

It is not accurate to say that his films are an acquired taste; the taste is already there if you like to go to the cinema. It is more accurate to say that you will like them if you let yourself. Leconte’s films are films that wander into the stories and take their time once there. Mostly, his films will not accept an outside agenda.

What this all breaks down to is that his films are complete, confident works. They are crafted and completed exactly the way that he wanted them.

Intimate Strangers is a great example of this. The film works like all of Leconte’s films: characters meet, find that they have something in common, and try to examine what it would be like if their life was a little different.

Very little happens in the way of convetional storytelling, there are no reversals or recognitions. Everything is more or less, as it seems. Still, the story and objectives of the characters are clear, without being straight forward. Leconte deftly uses the MacGuffin, a concept that Hitchcock used, in which the main action of the piece is skewed by an item of importance that all the characters would kill for.

Where in Hitchcock the MacGuffin would be classified information or a missing package, for Leconte, the MacGuffin is the intentions that the characters bring in the room.

In Intimate Strangers, Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) wanders into what she believes is her psychiatrist’s office and sits down Monsieur Faber (Fabrice Luchini) to tell him her problems. He is not her psychiatrist, but a tax lawyer.

This, eventually, comes to light, and still Anna visits Faber. Why she continues to visit the lawyer, tell him her problems, and disturb his work life, are what the main structure of the film hangs on and the MacGuffin.

These scenes, between Luchini and Bonnaire, are wondrous. Leconte and his cinematographer Eduardo Serra, let the camera hang on the characters, drifting around necklines and mouths like a kiss dreaming of a home.

In the office, the film is made. Without effort, these scenes play and develop.

Finally, Intimate Strangers boasts one of the most vibrant scenes in recent memory. Monsieur Faber dances exuberantly to a record of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”. This sequence lasts only a few moments, but is as close to ‘truly cinematic’ as anything I’ve seen. Pure emotion, expressed by someone that you’d never expect to express it in the way that they do. The scene is the mixture of surprise and expectation. Luchini brings an energy and enjoyment rarely seen in the movies.

What the rest of the film is about and what happens is best discovered by the audience; writing about it makes the joy it brings too mundane. Intimate Strangers is very good. It is a film that is at once complicated and incredibly simple.

Ju-On (The Grudge)

Ju-On (The Grudge) (1 SK)


This is the type of film that will drive rational people out of their minds. Why? In the world of the film, apparently the most effective way to hide is to pull your bed covers over your head. When I was five that worked, well, that and my Mom sitting on the bed next to me, but as an adult I have grown past that phase and have moved on to finding some sort of weapon.

Characters in horror films are not that evolved. They still wander into stupid locations and announce their presence by some ridiculous method, but that is why audiences go to see them. People want to see them die. And they want to get scared.

Great horror films use intelligent people in situations that work when rationale will not. Think of The Exorcist. What rational person could deal with that situation? Most horror films fall into the category just below this one, where not-so-smart characters find themselves in situations they could easily dislodge themselves from by running or going on vacation.

(If Laurie Strode had just bought a plane ticket and moved to Europe, Michael Myers would have had a hell of a time finding her. It is not like the security would have let him through customs. Imagine that interaction:

Passport Agent: Ok, Mr. Myers. What’s the purpose of your visit?
Michael Myers: (kicks ground with foot) Kill Laurie Strode.
Passport Agent: Guards!

Maybe include some banter about how he looks like a bleached William Shatner mask... Of course, all of these situations would end up with Michael killing people and eventually being deported, but Ms. Strode would be fine.)

The point of this meaningless diatribe is that the situations these characters find themselves in are as irrelevant as the conversations about what they should have done.

Ju-On is a film on the verge of being very good, but it falls short in the third act. Instead of everything coming together, the answer seems either idiotic or incomprehensible, depending on your mood, but one way or another the audience leaves scratching their head trying to figure out what happened to the film they had been watching.

The film is a variation of the new wave of horror coming out of Japan, films like Hideo Nakata’s Ring or the work of Takashi Miike (Audition). Ju-On steals from Ring in the same way Quentin Tarantino steals from everyone, right out there in the open so you can call them on it. Though, it is important to point out that they both steal for the improvement of their own films.

In Ju-On, there is a sequence where a character looks through a security monitor and sees a ghostly shape moving towards the camera. For everyone who has seen Ring or the American remake, this scene might ring a bell. But the end to this scene in Ju-On is different enough to be original and more importantly, creepy.

The story involves a curse, or grudge, that a dead family places on a house. Anyone who become associated with the house either dies or becomes part of the curse. It is a sort of “tag, you’re it” style of storytelling. The film jumps from story to story, through time and back again, to come to its conclusion. It is not a precise method, but it does not hamper the film in the obvious ways, that is to say, there are still some very good moments of terror, such as the lady who crawls and the boy in white face are both creepy. (Despite, or maybe because of, the bad make-up.)

As a horror film, it works well enough. If you let it tell its story, it will scare you. Or it will scare you long enough to see its American remake, which hits theaters this fall, directed by Takashi Shimizu, who did this version as well, and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1/2 SK)


The third installment of the Harry Potter series is arguably the best of the three, while simultaneously being the most incomplete. To be sure, the acting and cinematic craft of the film has reached a new high, but the story has suffered. It is the classic damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

My view of the film has been tainted by the fact that I have read the books and know what has been omitted. I know and accept this flaw in my reasoning, but I also contest that the film still fails in certain other tangible places.

The best example is Gary Oldman as the madman Sirius Black. Why is his arrival in the film so belated? He is such an interesting character, a character that screams for more screen time than he is given. While always in the shadows, the director never makes Oldman’s presence felt.

The film is misleading in this manner. It is not really about the Prisoner of Azkaban, but the adolescence of Potter and his friends. Which is fine, it just does not fully represent the intentions of the plot.

The slight of hand would be more successful if in fact Sirius Black surprised the audience with his appearance, instead of just materializing when and where he is suspected.

This is not to say that the film is bad. By all means, it is a good film and all of the surrounding puzzle pieces fit in seamlessly. It is easy to criticize a film for what it does not have. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban might have been better with a talking giraffe, but it does not have one and that is an unfair criticism. In the same way, the series has created such rich characters that the reduction of screen time might also be seen as a negative.

Alfonso Cuarón and his crew have done a wonderful job adapting a novel into a moving picture. Cuarón has crafted some wonderful performances out of the Daniel Radcliff and Emma Watson. (I would include Rupert Grint, but he has been good in all three.) Wonderful British actors like David Thewlis and Timothy Spall have rounded out the cast of characters nicely, but all of this does not solve the Oldman problem.

Why does it seem that Oldman is the ood man out? Most likely, it is because his character rests inside the largest of the plot holes. In the book, Professor Lupin(Thewlis) has been helping Black in his return to Hogwarts. Lupin has helped Black search the campus for his betrayer.

But in the movie there is no explanation for Black’s apparent ease in avoiding capture, or how he gets in and out of the castle. It is not that the book’s way of dealing with this problem is the best, but that it deals with it at all. It is easy to concede to a film’s logic when it is present, but hard when the audience has to figure it out themselves.

For goodness sake, the film title specifies what the film is about. How can there be any confusion on the “how’s” and the “why’s” of Sirius Black’s relation to the world that he embodies?

Maybe the fourth film will answer the questions that the third raises, but it that fair? The audience for these films is built in, so whether or not these questions are answered will become futile.

Dead End

Dead End (3 1/2 SK)


The fact is I’m a sucker for a bad movie. If I can sit down and watch a bad film with terrible acting and a predictable plot, I’m usually a happy camper. That said, I do have standards. I need to be entertained. There is pulpy enjoyment level that can be achieved by an entertainingly bad film.

Somewhere between incomprehensible and mediocre, these very bad entertaining films lie. Urban Legends or Deep Blue Sea are films who take logic into their own hands and the world around them abides. It is the Michael Myers factor (the killer from the Halloween films). No matter how fast you run, Michael will be right behind you, if not in front of you, and it is that sort of relation to reality which I’m getting at.

That said, Dead End starring Ray Wise and Alexandra Holden, is not an entertaining bad film in any sense of the word. Oh, it is a bad film, but not an entertaining one. It falls into the category just beyond affectionately bad: Actually Bad.

I get ahead of myself. The film has a plot, a long and excruciating plot. It involves a family that is going to Christmas Eve dinner at Grandma’s house. They’re late, and while the family falls asleep in the car, the father decides to take a shortcut. Soon after, he falls asleep. He wakes up just in time to avoid a car accident. Suddenly, weird and mysterious things start to happen.

Ok, how is it bad? In creative writing courses the first rule is you never end with: and then he woke up. Dead End breaks that rule. The film doesn’t even have the decency to give its characters the deaths they deserve, or even show them die at all. Which screams of low budget filmmaking. Literally.

I have nothing against low budget filmmaking, The Evil Dead films are greater for their budgetary shortcomings. Sam Raimi and cohorts used this obstacle as a means of inspiration. But inspiration is foreign to this project.

All the deaths occur miraculously off screen, and when the family happens upon the dead relatives, there is never a shot of the remains, only reaction shots. While the use of the reaction shoot or cut aways from the violence works in many films (just watch the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs) it does not work here.

Why? To start, the film never builds up the credibility to make the horror seem real. It never seems that anyone is in danger. There are times when the film builds a small sense of suspense but the audience is more relieved that “shocks” come at all.

There are other things that puzzle me about the plot:

By the end, the audience is suppose to believe that certain things have happened and others did not. This leaves the audience questioning everything about the plot, which in this case is not a very good thing. Things I wondered about: Were any of the family secrets actually revealed? Were these just the psychosis of main character? Who green lit this project?

Other bad choices: Dead End introduces a character, the Lady in White, and misuses her vengeance to the point of stupidity. Passing on the fact that she is one of the most ineffective villains in recent memory, the film never elaborates on why, when she had the chance, she did not kill everybody?

*Spoiler Alert* I am assuming that I will be the only person who saw this film or is going to see this film, so I really don’t have a problem ruining the end.

Everyone dies in a car accident, the same car accident that the film misleads you to believe they avoided. This is where the Lady in White comes from; she was a passenger in the other car who also dies. When this is “revealed”, it comes across as head slappingly stupid. What the film wants you to believe is that the Lady is killing these innocent people, when in fact she’s killing her murders.

It is not as if the concept is flawed, just the execution. By the time that this revelation occurs, the audience is far beyond caring.

Furthermore, the characters are attributed with personal histories that do not add up to anything. It’s as if the filmmakers pulled characteristics out of hat. Why is it that the pot smoking son has a better grasp of reality than the psychiatrist daughter? Is that a social comment? If so, why kill him and spare the daughter?

The filmmakers do not seem to understand the effects of drinking or smoking pot. In this film, smoking pot is similar to morphine, and drinking does not impair you ability to drive.

Dead End is the type of film that you can hear the filmmakers talking about how the audience missed the hidden meaning. Maybe we did, but I do not think I want to have them explain it to me.

*Note* As I’ve already explain, I love bad films. So I knew what I was getting in for when I rented Dead End, for it had no theatrical release in Ireland, though it was made in France, with American actors. Why would it have been made with American actors in France, you might ask? And it would be a good question. My thought is that Ray Wise, who starred in Twin Peaks, is probably a sort of cult figure in the same way that David Lynch is in France.

Summer Films: Take 2

Films Reviewed:



The Day After Tomorrow (2 SK)
Van Helsing (2 1/2 SK)
Troy (3 SK)



Now to the bad:
1. Van Helsing (or, WHAT?)
2. Troy (or, God Damn It!)
3. The Day After Tomorrow (or What Happened to Europe?)

Out of these three bad movies, only Roland Emmirch’s The Day After Tomorrow seems like somebody on board was willing to ask the important questions, such as: Why are we making this film? or Who really wants to give two and half hours of their life for this? or Maybe we should have Eric Bana act by himself and then we’ll enter a digital representation of Orlando Bloom in Post-Production?

I really disliked all of these films, but I’ll spare The Day After Tomorrow for now... expect to say, “What happened to Europe?” I mean, we get Japan and some English guys in the Atlantic not to mention the scene in New Deli where it’s snowing, but what about Europe? Apparently, they didn’t notice. Or were on their lunch breaks. (Having lived here now for a year, I can say that they do take long lunch breaks, so perhaps...) Maybe they just gave up? “Look,” they might have said if they have been given screen time, “a huge snow storm is coming. Shit. Well, I’m not moving until I’ve finished my tea!” Or something.

Oh, one more question: What about the weather in New Deli? At the Climatologists seminar in New Deli, it is snowing, yet only a reporter comments on this fact. I find it strange that a room full of weathermen don’t find it remarkable enough to mention this little gem. Not Dennis Quaid, not Ian Holm. It might have come in useful in that whole, the-climate-is-changing-and-we’re-all-gonna-die scenario they find themselves in later.

Anyway, back to more important crap: Van Helsing. Please keep in mind that I’m a fan of both The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, but not Van Helsing. Stephan Sommers, the director of all three of these films, had a sort of absurd glee in The Mummy films. That glee has been lost here.

It has been replaced by a film that assembled all the waste of other bad movies, and made a pie. A crap pie. And who wants to eat crap pie?

There is one good thing about the film. The cinematography is very good. The matching of CGI and human action is, for the most part, very good. But the film makes the worst mistake in all action films that use CGI: an all-CGI final fight sequence! I’d rather have the bone crushing goodness of Kill Bill vol. 1 than watch CGI critters smack each other in a fight scene that make the WWE seem realistic.

This doesn’t even begin to touch the problem with casting. What was Hugh Jackman thinking? Well, I know what he was thinking, but how did he believe that this film would actually help his career as an action hero. He was better in Kate & Leopold. He’s good as Wolverine, but very, very bad as Van Helsing. He delivers his lines as if he’s acting in another dimension. I’m reminded of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode, in which the hero holds a befuddled look when held in close-up, to which the hecklers (the robots and Mike) scream “Help me, I’m stuck in another dimension.” I believe this same principal applies to Hugh Jackman in this movie.

He is so out of sync with the tone of the Sommer’s film that it becomes distracting. As for the tone, only one actor gets it right: Richard Roxburgh as Dracula. You may remember Roxburgh as the evil prince from Moulin Rouge or the Dougray Scott’s sidekick in Mission Impossible II. He is a phenomenal character actor, in the fact that you could see him again and again and only kind of recognize him from the last part that you saw him in. Here he nails the ludicrous nature of the part, half over acting and half measured. Such a good performance is wasted in a film like this.

But such is the fate in a film as uneven as this. When action sequences are overshadowed by the acting of the villain, then you’re in trouble.


Speaking of being in trouble, Troy is full of so many errors, that it never seems to get on the right footing. From the very beginning, when Achilles is late for war, the film seems doomed to failure. (What!?! Achilles is late for war? The guy is full of rage and fury, two things, that if I’m not mistaken, don’t allow for peaceful sleep.)

The only item of praise could be Eric Bana as Hector, but even he is saddled by the ineffective Orlando Bloom. As Paris, Bloom shows no signs of waking from the slumber that has affected him since the Lord of the Rings trilogy ended. In fact, I would wager a guess that Bana would have had a better time acting without Bloom standing next to him. If Bloom had been added in post to the scene in which he was required, the other actors might have had a better time of it. (In this scenario, it would have been fun to place different sized Bloom’s all over the film. In scenes where his services weren’t even required, as a sort of game: Where’s Orlando? But that would have required a sort playfulness that these filmmakers entirely lack.)

The other faults are so numerous that it’s better just to make a list:

1. Brad Pitt as Achilles. Pitt is a fantastic modern actor, but that’s it: he’s a modern actor. He is too nuanced and subtle to play a man of rage. The part would have been better played by someone like Stellan Skarsgård or a young Nick Nolte, someone capable of broad strokes.

2. The CGI. I would rather watch a million crabs walk on a deserted beach than watch another mass of CGI warriors do battle in an “epic” film.

3. Julie Christie as Achilles mother. Wasn’t Achilles mother a God? Christie’s scene is so bizarre that omitting it would have been better, a theme I would have liked to introduce to the entire film. Anyway, everyone knows Achilles story, why do we need anybody to tell us that he’s doomed to immortality if he goes to war. Or if you don’t know it, for whatever reason, why have it ruined by such a crappy scene?

4. Where are the Gods? I mean, come on. If you’re gonna spend this much time on developing the story of Achilles and the Greeks, why aren’t the Gods introduced as an important part of life?

5. Why is everyone white? Troy is located in the Middle East, and yet it’s populated by Western Europeans. Are we so short on African-American or Arabic-American actors that we have to populate the film with white guys with dark hair? Come on, you could throw the Wayan’s family a bone. This question of course opens a bigger question, which I don’t wish to address here.

Troy is over two hours long, and now I’ve wasted a page of clean paper on discussing it. That’s quite enough.

Summer Films: Take 1 June 28, 2004

*A reminder. The Sarcastic Kitten system of film reviews is the reverse of most starring systems. The less you get, the better you did. Films are graded zero to four.*

Films Reviewed

Japanese Story (1 SK)
Mean Girls (1/2 SK)



The summer so far... has been a disappointment. There haven’t been any exuberant or awe-inspiring spectacles that have littered the cinemas to this point, instead we’ve been ‘entertained’ by the less than original melodrama’s of Troy, Van Helsing and The Day after Tomorrow. (As of now, I’ve yet to see Shrek 2 or Spiderman 2 because they have not arrived on this side of the Atlantic.)

This is not to say that I’ve bided my time on less than worth-it films. On the contrary, I’ve seen good films but not the kind of popcorn fare that one wishes to find in the summertime.

Japanese Story, a film from New Zealand starring Toni Collete, was a good surprise. It’s ending lacked the punch that the film deserved, but Collete and her costars brought depth to their characters and believability to the situations.

June also saw the release of Mean Girls. Out of all the films I’ve seen this summer, Mean Girls is by far the best. It sounds kind of dumb, I know, but Mean Girls powered by the very talented Lindsey Lohan, is very good.

It suffers from the same lack the Japanese Story does, neither seem to know the best way to end the film. Not a problem they share alone. It is probably the hardest thing to do: end the story right. Becoming so invested in the characters and the film, sometimes the writers/directors/stars fail to see the best way out.

SPOILER ALERT!
*I promise that the following comments on the ends of these films will not destroy the enjoyment of seeing them.*

Japanese Story overstays its welcome. It becomes too heartfelt and loses its objectivity. The film, until the end, keeps its distance, so that the audience can judge the characters for themselves. In the conclusion, it tells the audience how to feel about them. By that time the audience already knows. It comes across as if the director didn’t believe that the audience could fully commit to the emotion that they(the director) felt it deserved, so they employed the over used technique of musical manipulation to help to underscore their points. A technique that in lesser films fills the audience with pseudo-emotional ties, but in this film comes across like the director doesn’t trust the audience with the information that they’ve been given.

This is not to say that objectivity is better than the subjectivity, manipulation has always been the Cinema’s primary job. It simply would have been a better film if it had stuck to one theme.

Sticking to its theme would have helped Mean Girls as well. It starts off as a commentary on social structure of High School, and it is in good hands until the last act, when moralizing gets the upper hand. I understand why it moralizes. It is a film for teenagers and Lohan’s primary audience is in fact seventeen-year-olds. My problem is that I’m 26, and looking for the level beyond. That is my problem, not the film’s (a fact that I’ll reiterate until I’m dead, if that’s what it takes to get my point across). It’s not Heathers, but it is Bring it On. I believe that if the film had ended differently, that it might not be as good a film.

I know that’s contradictory.

I think the filmmakers (Mark Waters, director and Tina Fey, writer) knew exactly what they were doing and that what they wanted came out in the final product, but it still left a bitter taste in my mouth. Specifically, Waters and Fey want a film that is marketable to teenagers. While they’ll happily take adults money, they aren’t interested in opening up a discussion about High School. The easiest way to do this is end the film happily; no moral ambiguity. This is where it becomes contradictory. I think the film is right in doing this, it is not af is the filmmakers were striving to make another Elephant. As in Water’s previous film, Freaky Friday, he’s made good entertainment for parents and children. Unlike Freaky Friday, Mean Girls does not allow for conversation once the audience walks out of the theatre.

Welcome to the Sarcastic Kitten's Film Reviews!

In this fine black space, I will review films as I see fit! Sometimes daily. Sometimes weekly. Sometimes I won't. Sometimes I'll use this space as a forum to make fun of Ryan Dobosh. Because I can. (Also, what's he gonna do. I'm in Ireland where the sun never shines and he's in LA. Sucka! (beat) wait a minute...hmmm?)

Here are the rules:

Each film may receive zero to four Sarcastic Kittens. Consider this the opposite of how most reviewers rate films. If a movie receives no SKs, then it was good. Very good. If it receives one SK than there were a few, but not many problems...and so on. If a film receives FOUR SKs...I shake my fist at it! (insert fist shaking, and scowl)

That's all I feel like writing...for now.