The Matador; Someone to Watch Over Me

Sometimes movies show up in the mail and we're not sure why. Sometimes Joe gets carried away with his browsing and sometimes I read about some film that seemed interesting at the time. Maybe the director did something else that we liked. Now, The Matador (2005) was one of those films that might have sounded good on paper: an oddball comedy thriller that turns into a buddy pic, with Pierce Brosnan as a hitman who befriends Greg Kinnear as a suburban businessman. Only, as Joe says, the screenplay seemed as though it was written from a book about how to write screenplays. The camerawork and editing felt as though the director came straight from doing music vids and commercials, all showy tracking and zooming and panning. "Is it really homoerotic, or is it just me?" asked Joe. Indeed, Brosnan smokes a lot of fat cigars around Kinnear and seems intent on seducing him, though under the aegis of friendship. In the end, The Matador wants to be a slick, quirky British comedy/gangster thriller like Guy Ritchie's Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but ends up feeling empty and soulless, just trying too darned hard. "No," said Joe, "it was just a stupid stupid film!"

Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) was next, another Ridley Scott film, coming just after Alien, Bladerunner and Legend. Right off the bat, we had Sting warbling the theme song, and later, that 80s saxophone music. So many movies don't age well because of the music! A working class cop falls in love with the socialite he has been assigned to guard after she witnesses a murder. "Competently done is all you can say about it," said Joe. By the book and bland. Next!

The Duellists (1977); Lady Vengeance (2005)

Every time I see Keith Carradine in a movie, I always, without fail, ask Joe, "who's that actor? He looks familiar." Each and every single time, Joe replies, “It’s Keith Carradine.” I asked this question through all the Alan Rudolph films we watched, as well as Nashville. Why can’t I remember who he is? So, again, when we were watching Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (his first feature). The film follows Carradine and Keitel throughout the years as they challenge each other to duel after duel. “Who is that guy?” I said to Joe. This time, he just laughed. In any case, the film is beautifully, stunningly shot, and even though at first I made fun of Carradine and Harvey Keitel’s costumes (the sidebraids and foppish hats made them hard to take seriously at first), I eventually ended up enjoying it. The ending made revenge a very dignified, gentlemanly affair.

For Park Chanwook, however, revenge is a dish served best to your nemesis-turned-victim while he is still conscious, so that you can both fully savour the torture. Lady Vengeance is the third in his revenge trilogy, of which Oldboy is probably his best work. We loved Oldboy, but none of his other films have come close, save J.S.A.:Joint Security Area (not part of the revenge trilogy, but a tense political thriller set on the border of North and South Korea). Lady Vengeance has been at the top of our to-rent list for a long time, and it finally arrived to much anticipation. Hooray! The same kind of lush stylistics, over-the-top camera work and intense violence. I was into it, savouring the twists of plot, the crazy digital edits, the cartoon-like action scenes.

But then, in the flow of the gorgeous credit graphics, remarkably inventive camerawork and editing, and twisty, harrowing plot turns, came one scene that just made Joe and I turn the movie off. It was too much! The scene shows children in what are practically snuff films (a child murderer films his victims crying to their parents for help), which is worse than gratuitous, it’s seriously cretinous. Even if it’s not real. Granted, Joe and I might be particularly sensitive because we’re parents, but come on! One kid was in a noose, crying that he couldn’t breathe. “Think about those child actors!” Joe said. “Imagine having to be in a scene like that? They’re not old enough to not be affected! How could any cretin let their kid do that? WHAT’S WRONG WITH PEOPLE TODAY?!”

The next evening, we fast-forwarded through the objectionable parts, as well as much of the rest of the film. We watched the ending, just to see what would happen. Lots of blood and some slapstick, none of the choreographed grace that marked Old Boy’s hammer scene. In the end, it might have been not a bad film, but it was just ruined by intolerable excess. I don’t like kids in my violence, nor do I like too realistic violence, and that brings me to a whole other can of worms: what is the point of realistic violence? Why do people get off or otherwise feel they should endure depictions of other people’s pain? Is it cathartic, or masochistic, or an attempt to look at the world’s horrors in the face? Why does it need to be so unrelenting? But that’s a tangent that is too off-course to get into here. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I’ll pursue it elsewhere else.

The Black Castle; Permanent Midnight; The Poseidon Adventure

It’s well into July and I haven’t yet posted! I have much to catch up on. Briefly, then, let me enumerate our recent films. Most recently, Joe and I watched Boris Karloff in The Black Castle (1952) with our friend Day, but I remember only that Lon Chaney Jr. stole the show as the monstrous, gigantic and massively scarred henchman. “His name is Gargon!” Day exclaimed. Of course, what else could it be? And before that, we watched Permanent Midnight, a dark comedy/schlockfest starring a very sinewy Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl (based on Stahl's autobiographical book about being a television writer hooked on junk). The first half was the dark comedy, which was actually not bad, featuring the memorably shocking line uttered by Ben Stiller’s blond mistress when they first screw: “Ohmygawd, I’m f**king a Jew!” The second half descended into schlockfest with every cliché in the book, so to speak, and it might have been funny had it been done ironically. Alas! It didn’t seem ironic in the least. It felt instead like a studio ending cooked up by executives welding focus group tests. “They really messed that one up,” Joe said.

And before that… The Poseidon Adventure! The 1972 version,and don’t even talk to me about the remake. Along with The Towering inferno (which I saw as a kid and it scared the shit out of me), this is Seventies Disaster Movie at its best! It’s got religion in the form of Gene Hackman as an arrogant and buff preacherman battling to lead his flock of survivors up to the hull of a cruise ship after it gets hit by a tidal wave and turns over. Lots and lots of bodies. Big cheesy fun acting. Big cheesy but pretty good effects. The new version only had lots and lots of bodies and cheesy but too CGI-ey effects, no character whatsoever. However! We do have an odd story associated with the remake. While in New York last year, when Poseidon was in theatres, Joe and I saw a giant billboard advertising the movie, just across from the cruise ship that we were about to board. Was it a joke, we wondered?