PARANOID PARKPlot in a Nutshell
A teenaged skateboarder accidentally kills a guy. And skates around a lot.
Thoughts
Sorry for the paucity of posts lately, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been in southern Ontario, visiting my parents and grandparents, many of whom are currently in the hospital, so I haven’t had much time to spare for movie-watching. I’ve managed to squeeze in three titles over the last few days, though—and I’m not sure whether that makes me look admirably committed to this blog, or dismayingly inattentive to my relatives. Anyway, I’ll try to keep these entries short for a change.
I spent much of my time in waiting rooms trying to decide if Gabe Nevins, the nonprofessional actor who’s in pretty much every frame of Gus Van Sant’s latest film, Paranoid Park, gives a good performance or not. A lot of critics seem to be giving him the benefit of the doubt—on a recent episode of the online movie-review show Filmspotting, for instance, Matty Robinson and Adam Kempenaar echoed a popular critical sentiment by arguing that Nevins was fine and that Taylor Momsen, the only professional in the entire cast (she played Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and currently plays the Kewpie-doll social-climber Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl), gives the movie’s only bad performance.
This is obviously incorrect. Momsen gives a perfectly adequate performance in her small role, while Nevins is clearly in over his head playing “Alex”—he’s unsure of himself in front of the camera, inexpressive in his body language as well as his voice. Even in the many extended sequences where he does nothing but ride his skateboard, it’s the contributions from Van Sant and cinematographer Christopher Doyle that make them memorable, not Nevins’ athleticism or his screen presence. I can’t imagine another director wanting to cast him in another role. (Well, maybe Larry Clark, but that’s about it.)
And yet, paradoxically, he seems to be giving exactly the obviously amateurish performance Van Sant wanted from him. There are several moments during Nevins’ voiceover narration where he stumbles over his words, as if he’s reading the script for the very first time. He’s not even a “raw” talent (like, say, Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight); he’s... man, I don’t even know what the word would be. Uncookable? But it’s this guileless quality, this inability to put up any kind of front for the camera, that makes Nevins unusually convincing as a teenage protagonist. He reminds me of so many kids I went to high school with, coasting along, letting momentum carry them forward as if on polyurethane wheels, waiting for their personalities to kick in. Perhaps over the next hill?
Maybe that’s why Alex is never caught for the murder he accidentally commits down by the train tracks: if this kid were really a killer, wouldn’t he make a stronger impression?
RATING: 4/5
DOOMSDAYPlot in a Nutshell
Directly Neil Marshall’s over-the-top sci-fi action flick about a team of commandos who become the first outsiders to venture into Scotland in the 30 years since it was walled off from the world in order to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.
Thoughts
While my mother was undergoing knee-replacement surgery, my dad and I passed the time in the cafeteria by watching Doomsday on my laptop. I thought Dad would go for it—he loves movies with lots of car chases and tough-guy action—but I think I may have miscalculated. I didn’t realize Doomsday was as gleefully violent as it turned out to be (was Marshall trying to break some kind of hand- and head-chopping record?), and he tells me he still hasn’t gotten over the gleefully sadistic moment where a bunny rabbit gets machine-gunned to smithereens right there on camera.
Doomsday is such a disreputable movie that I felt a little embarrassed to be watching it with my father (let alone laughing at some of its sicker jokes, like the grisly scene where a gang of cannibalistic punk rockers carve up the corpse of one of the heroes, like a roast beef at a hotel smorgasbord). But if I tried not to let it show outwardly how much I was enjoying this movie, inwardly I was having a ball. Doomsday may not have gotten terribly good reviews when it played in theatres, but on home video, where a coherent screenplay matters less than a brisk pace and sheer filmmaking gusto, I suspect it’ll find a very eager audience.
Sure, it’s a bit of a shame that Marshall doesn’t try a little bit harder to imagine how Scottish society might have realistically evolved after the world turns its back on them—I like The Road Warrior as much as the next guy, but to serve up nothing more than a cartoonish hordes of hooting, elaborately costumed and mohawked punks feels like a bit of a lazy move on Marshall’s part—but the presence does set the stage for a pretty spectacular car chase, where the punks, using nothing more than a few clubs and some Molotov cocktails, require only about 15 minutes to overpower two heavily armoured British tanks.
Doomsday could have been an authentic B-movie classic if only the star, TV actress Rhona Mitra (a dark, sultry beauty who’s had regular roles on Nip/Tuck, The Practice, and Boston Legal) had more screen presence. Ben Howard and Dan Auty got it right on the Mondo Movie podcast when they said Marshall was hoping to turn Mitra into another Linda Hamilton or Sigourney Weaver, but wound up instead with something closer to Kate Beckinsale in Underworld. Here character, Eden Sinclair, has been conceived as sort of a female Snake Plissken (she even has only one eye; her other one has been replaced by a robotic version that she can pop out of her socket and send out on brief reconnaissance missions), but while Mitra is physically convincing as an action heroine in her skin-tight uniform, there’s no texture to her performance, no stubble on her chin... er, metaphorically speaking. In a movie with all these entrails flying around, she comes off as a bit of a vegetarian.
RATING: 3/5
RECOUNTPlot in a Nutshell
Directory Jay Roach’s comic docudrama (made for HBO) about the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the efforts of Democratic and Republican strategists to make sure the Florida recount favoured their candidate.
Thoughts
I watched Recount a couple of nights after Sydney Pollack died, and felt a second twinge of sorrow at his loss when his name appeared in the opening credits—I hadn’t realized that he was one of the film’s executive producers. (Apparently he was originally slated to direct it too, but I’m not sure whether he ceded the assignment due to health problems, or for some other reason. According to the IMDb, there are two more Pollack productions still slated for release, and both of them bear his usual stamp of class: Margaret, writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s followup to the sublime You Can Count on Me; and The Reader, an adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel, directed by Stephen Daldry, written by David Hare, and starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes.)
It’s gratifying to see how many of the newspaper tributes that have appeared this week make special mention of Pollack’s acting—indeed, I suspect that if it hadn’t been for Pollack’s string of wonderful supporting roles in movies like Tootsie, Husbands and Wives, Eyes Wide Shut, and Michael Clayton, those obituaries probably would have been considerably more unkind. Or at least they would have been forced to make more of the fact that after he won the Oscar for Out of Africa in 1986, Pollack worked less and less frequently as a director, with less and less successful results. Does anyone even remember Random Hearts and Sabrina even exist? Does anyone remember Havana as anything other than a punchline on an episode of Seinfeld? (When Elaine returns a videotape she borrowed from him, Jerry grumbles, “Oh, thanks. Only two weeks late. Now that costs me $35 to see Havana.”)
My favourite Pollack film by far is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which may be the most watchable completely depressing movie ever made. I pull out my They Shoot Horses DVD at least once a year just to savour its artfully grim, grimy atmosphere, the brilliantly edited “derby” sequences, the sharply etched characterizations, and Pollack’s ability to portray a sadistic, exploitative environment without becoming sadistic or exploitative himself.
And speaking of rigged contests... here I am, finally getting around to talking about Recount. It’s the kind of movie critics like to denigrate as a way of demonstrating how much more nuanced and sophisticated their understanding of current events is compared to the director and screenwriter, but I thought this was a pretty satisfying, responsible movie, with a script that skillfully condensed a complicated story and a lot of potentially dull, uncinematic information into an entertaining two hours, marred mainly by some unconvincing Gore/Bush voice and body doubles but redeemed by the presence of character actors like Gary Basaraba, Bruce McGill, Bob Balaban, and especially Marcia Jean Kurtz (one of my favourites!) as a no-nonsense Florida election official who’s one of this story’s few islands of sanity and straight thinking.
The film’s sympathies are obviously with the Gore team, but it resists the temptation to demonize the Republicans, portraying their victory not as a triumph of evil but as a result of having a more skillful, savvy team of strategists.
And, of course, of having Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris on hand to undermine any gains the Democrats are able to achieve. Man oh man, we need to see Laura Dern in more movies. Her performance as Harris is, by necessity, the broadest one in the entire film, but it stops just shy of caricature—her Harris is both aware that she’s in over her head, and yet serenely eager to assume her place in American history. I can think of no higher praise than to say it’s a performance worthy of Sydney Pollack himself.
RATING: 3.5/5
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