Canadian Film Review: This Beautiful City (2007)

* *
Director: Ed Gass-Donnelly
Starring: Kristin Booth, Aaron Poole, Caroline Cave, Noam Jenkins, Stuart Hughes

This Beautiful City is lucky to have the actors it has because there isn't much else to recommend it. Clumsily constructed, the film meanders towards its depressing finale after making little more than a few shallow observations about Toronto and people within it. That I'm giving it two stars instead of one is a testament to the actors, who give the film much more than it deserves.

This Beautiful City takes place in two worlds that coexist uneasily in the same neighborhood. One world involves Carol (Caroline Cave) and Harry (Noam Jenkins), a married middle class couple who do middle class things like have dinner parties. The other world involves Pretty (Kristin Booth) and Johnny (Aaron Poole), who are both junkies. To support her habit Pretty turns to prostitution and carries out her work quite literally under the noses of Carol and Harry, in the alley that their balcony overlooks.

On the night of Harry and Carol's dinner party Carol falls from the balcony, perhaps by accident but perhaps on purpose. She lives but her recovery is painful both in physical and psychological terms, a pain which is no doubt exacerbated by the distance that has developped between herself and Harry. She begins an affair with Peter (Stuart Hughes), the man who found her after her fall and the person to whom she confesses that death might have been preferable to the embarrassment of having people think she had failed in a suicide attempt. Meanwhile, Harry develops a relationship, of sorts, with Pretty, who it just so happens is the daughter that Peter has been searching for.

To be entirely honest, Carol, Harry and Peter aren't particularly interesting characters, though Cave plays Carol with such intense vulnerability that she manages to make her more than a one-note stock character. The movie only really comes alive during scenes involving Pretty and Johnny, whose lives have long since spiralled out of control and who are living very much moment to moment. Booth and Poole play these characters with admirable abandon, never shying away from ugliness but also managing to steer clear of creating caricatures. If you've ever lived in a big city, you've encountered these two characters, though they play out on screen as more than just "types." Pretty and Johnny's relationship is complicated, one defined as much by moments of tenderness as moments of violence, and held together by a deep dependence on drugs. Their story is sad but they seem real and human, whereas the other characters, for the most part, seem to have slid out of a cookie cutter.

In its technical aspects, the film is lacking. It is very badly paced and the story, such as it is, relies too heavily on contrivance. You can see the wheels turning behind the scenes and the film itself isn't interesting enough to make you forgive it this fault. I spent a great deal of time after watching this movie wondering what it was even about, what message it was trying to impart. I suppose the film's message is that one community cannot simply continue trying to ignore the other, hoping that it will be swept away in due course through the process of gentrification. We all live together, and if we continue to pretend otherwise, we'll all be destroyed.

Review: The Good German (2006)

* *
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Toby Maguire

They don’t make movies the way they used to… and maybe they shouldn’t try. The Good German is designed as a throwback to classic cinema, marketed to draw comparisons to Casablanca, though it has much more in common with The Third Man. It’s an interesting film, but an interesting failure. It looks fantastic and the story in its bare outlines is intriguing, but the film just ultimately doesn’t pull it off.

The setting is Berlin in the days just after the end of World War II when the various Allied interests meet to decide the new boundaries of Europe. Into this comes Jake Geismer (George Clooney), an army journalist set to cover the story, who barely has time to set foot in Berlin before his driver, Tully (Toby Maguire), lifts his wallet. Tully's a shady character who loves the anything goes attitude of post-war Berlin and is deeply involved in the black market. He's also deeply involved with a German woman named Lena (Cate Blanchett), ostensibly as her boyfriend, though occassionally he acts as her pimp. When he learns that Lena’s husband, Emil – whom she insists is dead – is a valuable commodity due to the job he held with the Nazis during the war, he decides to make a deal with the Russians to hand him over, theorizing that he can get himself and Lena to London before they realize that he never had Emil in the first place. The next morning Tully shows up dead in a river with a great deal of cash strapped to his belt.

Geismer is suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Tully’s death, particularly the fact that Tully was his driver and was involved with Lena, who was Geismer’s girlfriend during an earlier stay in Berlin. Lena is close-lipped about everything to Geismer and wants only for him to go away, but he wants to help her and if he does go away, he intends to take her with him. His investigation puts him at odds with his superior officers, who want Tully’s murder to quietly go away so that they can get on with more serious business, and puts Lena in even greater danger. Also in danger is Emil, whom Lena has been hiding. He is the good German of the title and has information that he wants to hand over to the Americans. Lena helps him because he’s her husband, but also because by doing so she hopes to atone for her own actions during the war – a secret which is revealed only in the film’s final scene.

Director Steven Soderbergh achieves the 1940s look by filming in black and white with period lenses on the cameras. Shots are composed in the classic style and filmed entirely on studio back lots rather than on location. Visually, the film more than achieves its goal. The problems arise when you get beyond that surface element because aside from the visual aesthetic, the film doesn't adhere to the sensibilities and restrictions of the 1940s. The dialogue is thoroughly modern and so is the direct treatment of sex and sexuality. You never heard Bogart say “fuck” and what happened behind closed bedroom doors was left to the imagination – not so here. This uneasy mixing of the modern and the classic makes the film seem indecisive, like it kind of wants to be a 40s movie, but at the same time it kind of doesn’t.

Furthermore, while the elements of the plot are intriguing, the characters are ultimately underdevelopped and the actors seem out of place in the setting. Clooney and Maguire, in particular, have acting styles that are very modern and don't really mesh with the style of filming. If The Good German had been made without the gimmick, I don't doubt that they could have made their characters work but as it is, the performances just don't seem authentic and come off as pale imitation. The only exception is Blanchett, who is able to effectively evoke Dietrich and rise above the narrowness of her character. Played by Blanchett, Lena fits the setting and is rewarded by getting the only line that really stands out: “An affair has more rules than a marriage.”

The Good German is a difficult film to dislike because for all its faults, at least it's trying to do something and it's taking chances. I admire it for what it wants to do, but find that it falls far short of its objective.

Great Last Scenes: Charade

Year: 1963
Director: Stanley Donen
Great Because...: Well, for one thing you can't go wrong with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn - two of the most effortlessly charming actors ever to grace the screen. For another, it contains one of my favourite last lines ever. After discovering (finally) Grant's real identity, Hepburn exclaims: "Oh I love you, Adam, Alex, Peter, Brian, whatever your name is! I love you! I hope we have a lot of boys so we can name them all after you!"

Reggie Lampert is in a whole mess of trouble. Her husband has just turned up dead, several nefarious characters are after her for some money her husband supposedly had, and a tall, dark and handsome man who is not what he seems has recently entered her life. At first this man claims to be Peter Joshua, later Alexander Dyle, Adam Canfield, and finally Brian Crookshank (Regina: "Serves me right if that's the one I'm stuck with"). All Regina knows for sure is that there's a Mrs. Joshua/Dyle/Canfield but they're divorced (but then again, maybe there isn't or maybe they aren't).

In the midst of all the turmoil in her life, there's no one that Reggie can really trust or turn to. Certainly she probably shouldn't trust the man with the ever shifting persona and yet she does, even as she's questioning his motives, even as she's questioning whether or not he's responsible for the dead bodies that have started to pile up. As she peels away layer upon layer of his identity, she's vindicated in the trust she has for him - it's the trust she places in someone else that nearly gets her killed.

If there was ever any doubt before, the final scene lays bare the fact that the plot is really secondary to giving two charismatic actors a chance to play off each other. The question of how it is that the bad guy was able to pose so successfully as a good guy is dismissed with a pretty lame explanation (it basically comes down to an embassy building with such lax security that someone could waltz in and take over an office while everyone else is ouut to lunch) and the film quickly moves on to what is really important: getting Grant and Hepburn together. The scene plays out with romance and humor (love the face Grant makes when Hepburn see him sitting behind the desk), giving two delightful characters an ending they absolutely deserve, with the added bonus that the scene is still able to incorporate the "is there a Mrs.?... but we're divorced" running gag into it. It's the perfect ending for an uncommonly charming thriller.

Review: The Informant! (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Matt Damon

The Informant! tells a story so ludicrous that it has to be true because no one would make up something so absurd. In it an executive at a Fortune 500 company becomes an FBI informant, gathering evidence of a global price fixing scheme, and is rewarded by ending up with a prison sentence 6 years longer than the superiors he exposed. Of course, there is the small fact that while he was helping the FBI, he was also embezzling from the company to the tune about $9 million dollars. Like I said, you’d never believe it if it wasn’t true.

It’s all about corn. Corn makes the economy go round and Mark Whitacre’s (Matt Damon) company, ADM, is in the corn business. When the company starts losing somewhere in the neighbourhood of $7 million a month due to a virus affecting the product, Whitacre is tasked with fixing it, which becomes considerably difficult when he starts receiving phone calls from a Japanese competitor who knows all about the problem and demands $10 million to keep quiet about it. ADM decides to bring the FBI in to investigate this extortion only to abruptly pull the plug when they learn that the agency has tapped Whitacre’s private phone – which he uses to arrange the price fixing scheme – in addition to his business line. What the executives couldn’t have anticipated was that Whitacre would have a crisis of conscience and decide to confess about the price fixing anyway.

For two and a half years Whitacre records conversations and meetings, helping the FBI build a case against the company. When the raid finally goes down, however, the Feds realize that Whitacre may not be the best person to have on their side. He’d tipped a few people off about the raid beforehand, for one thing – important allies, he insists – and then there’s the small matter of some money he’s taken in the form of kickbacks – a figure which starts out as $2.5 million and steadily grows to $9 million... and may actually have been as much as $11.5 million. Suddenly the federal investigation shifts away from ADM and towards Whitacker who is, as his wife points out, much easier to take down than an entire corporation. He’s done a bad thing but should he really be considered the bad guy?

Damon plays Whitacre as a veritable Jeckyll and Hyde, a man who both is and is not what he seems to be. He’s a narcissist who buys completely into his own lies and flounders whenever he’s called out, partly because he’s managed to divorce himself from his own actions. At one point he forges a letter from his psychiatrist to back up his claims that the FBI investigation has deeply damaged his psyche. We watch him cut and paste the letterhead and the doctor’s signature to a letter he’s written himself and yet we believe that he’s shocked at the news that it’s a forgery. Damon is able to sell the idea that Whitacre is so fully invested in his lies that he believes them to be the truth even as he’s constructing them. He should not be a likeable person and yet he kind of is because Damon gives him an affable, everyman kind of quality. Of course it also helps that the film makes him out to be a bit of a buffoon, which has the effect of making him seem relatively harmless.

I think it’s a gamble in the current economic climate to take story of capitalistic greed and turn it into a comedy, but Steven Soderbergh makes it work. Given the general absurdity of Whitacre's situation, I suppose that making this into a straight drama would be somewhat difficult. Certainly this could have been an angry film about how the little guy (relatively speaking) becomes the fall guy while the giant corporation carries on unscathed, but that would have necessitated toning down Whitacre by large degrees. He calls himself 0014 because he's "twice as smart as 007" but this spy story has less in common with James Bond than Austin Powers - an allusion I think Soderbergh is deliberately drawing through his use of 60s style bubble lettering in the titles that indicate time and place. This is ultimately a joyful film and very funny even when it starts to take on increasingly dark undertones. It's a great time at the movies.


LAMBscore:

Canadian Film Review: Fido (2006)

* * *
Director: Andrew Currie
Starring: Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, K'Sun Ray, Dylan Baker, Henry Czerny

The key to Fido’s success is that it plays things straight. It believes fully in the world it has created, one in which domesticated zombies perform household tasks and a person's greatest ambition is to save enough money to get a double funeral upon death - one for your head, the other for your body (to avoid becoming a zombie, natch). With a sharp wit and delightful performances from Billy Connolly and Carrie-Anne Moss, Fido makes for an immensely enjoyable film.

Fido seems to take place in the 1950s, though it’s difficult to say exactly since it takes place in an alternate reality where zombies are commonplace. Years earlier, a mock educational video explains, radiation from space caused the dead to rise as zombies, creating chaos across the globe. The solution was to build large fences around towns, effectively turning them into city states with large no-go zones in between where zombies still roam free. In the town of Willard, zombies have been turned into servants thanks to special collars created by scientists at Zomcon, which render the creatures harmless. If the collar is turned off, however, the zombie becomes “wild” again, likely making the person who was once its master into its next victim.

Zombies are of great interest to young Timmy Robinson (K’Sun Ray), a social misfit who wonders whether the dead who didn’t rise are still in their graves, struggling to get out. His questions are dismissed and ignored at school when Zomcon’s security chief (Henry Czerny) comes to speak to the class, further alienating him. Things aren’t much better at home, where he tosses a baseball to himself in the front yard and is admonished by his mother (Moss), who tells him not to play by himself because then neighbours will think that he’s lonely. When she brings home a zombie (Connolly) so that the family will cease to be the only one on the block without one, it becomes Timmy’s companion, whom he names Fido. Fido becomes an increasingly important part of Timmy’s life as well as that of his mother, making for a very odd love triangle that leaves Mr. Robinson (Dylan Baker) increasingly marginalized.

The world of Fido is one preoccupied with death not as a danger, but as a business. In the film, the only thing that prevents a corpse from becoming a zombie is to separate the head from the body and bury them separately. To afford such a burial means scrimping and saving for a lifetime; Mr. Robinson’s proudest achievement is that he’s put away enough money to ensure that he, his wife and their son will all be able to be buried rather than become zombies and when he learns that his wife is pregnant, he looks at her plaintively and declares that he just doesn’t think he can afford another funeral on his salary (and he says this while reading a magazine called “Death,” which is my favourite sight gag from the film). Why should funerals be so expensive if the alternative is more zombies and their inherent dangers? The collar eliminates that danger and turns the zombies into a massive source of free labour. Since the zombies are no longer “people” in a technical sense, they can be used, abused, and discarded without penalty. This is as much a film about corporate greed and corruption as a comedy about zombie movie conventions.

The film has a lot of fun playing 1950s style wholesomeness against an ironic humour. “Now I know you’re not supposed to have a handgun until you’re twelve,” Mr. Robinson tells his son, “but it can come in real handy.” Of course, since the school’s curriculum includes time at the shooting range, it’s not as if Timmy will encounter any zero tolerance policies. The actors play these scenes with a degree of sincerity that helps keep the premise afloat - this wouldn’t work if you felt like the characters knew, on some level, that the story is silly. Of the actors Moss has to do the most heavy lifting and does it with ease, breezing through the film’s most defined character arc and becoming a thoroughly rootable heroine. Her relationship with Fido becomes increasingly complex (and bizarre), but she and Connolly - who makes Fido a surprisingly lively zombie - manage to pull it off and make for a rather charming couple, for lack of a better word. The whole movie, in fact, is charming (despite a bit of gore) and definitely one of the better zombie comedies to come out in the last few years.