Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Tony Barbieri
Star: Cody Morgan, Nastassja Kinski, Robert Forster, Jason Cairns

I will admit to knowing next to nothing about this one going in. It involves a kid and a sailboat? Sounds like some kind of uplifting family flick. There’s probably an adorable dog involved. I suspect these preconceptions were colored by my previous Kinski film, A Storm in Summer, and I was expecting this to play out along similar lines. In reality? Yeah, there’s a kid and a sailboat. But the adorable dog? Not so much. Instead, are you looking for abuse, mental illness and a broken family? This has you covered, in spades.

James (Morgan) is a bright and imaginative kid, who lives with his devoted waitress mother, Katie (Kinski) and her abusive, loser boyfriend, Curt (Cairns). James is befriended by retired widower Henry (Forster), whom he sees down at the dock working on his boat, and becomes Henry’s assistant. Curt is run out of the house by Kate at gunpoint after his abuse turns to her son, and James tries to match his mother up with Henry, hoping for a brighter future. However, Katie has issues of her own, her mental instability finally bursting out after Curt comes back, and leaving James at the not-so tender mercies of the child-care system.

Yeah, not exactly the heartwarming story I was anticipating, though that’s more on me than anything else. Can’t doubt Barbieri’s earnestness – he wrote the screenplay as well as directing it, and it’s clearly a topic about which he feels strongly. It manages to avoid most of the pitfalls, though some of the characters are rather too obvious – Curt, in particular, could not possibly be be more of a cliched asshole if everyone involved had tried. Fortunately, Morgan delivers a natural and unaffected performance, which matters, because he’s in virtually every scene and is the film’s emotional heart. It appears his only other role was an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, which is surprising, since he shows no small promise here.

James uses his imagination as an outlet from the rough world which he inhabits, such as riffing off an ancestor – the Marciano of the title – who was a diplomat, but is elevated to the King of Italy in the boy’s mind! Though this also takes him down some dark paths, most notably, the sequence where he fantasizes about shooting Curt with the gun he finds in his mother’s drawer. [As an aside: mental illness and firearms are never a good combination…] I’d perhaps like to have seen that aspect drawn out and explored more, not least because James has a good deal from which to escape. His generally upbeat and optimistic nature is in stark contrast to the intensely bipolar personality of Katie, who can flick from loving mother to scary, scary person in an instant. Mind you, her history – not least with regard to her son – appears to be a sad saga in itself, and she’s never other than someone for whom you feel sympathetic.

It’s certainly a meaty role for Kinski and she does well with it. If the overall moral here may be, “Loving someone isn’t necessarily easy,” part of it may also be, at least from Curt’s perspective, “Don’t stick your dick in crazy.” Admittedly, you can hardly blame him or anyone else – since Curt is not the only one to share her bed – for overlooking Katie’s personality quirks. In Henry, she’s back to the “older man” scenario familiar from much of Kinski’s career, with Forster virtually two decades her senior, though in this case, it perhaps make sense, as he can offer James the father figure he has been missing his entire life, for reasons which are perhaps the most tragic thing in the entire movie. She’s less present in the second-half; after her mental implosion, Katie is committed to a psychiatric facility, and James has to negotiate, more or less unaided, the tricky world of care homes and foster families, a task with more than its own share of potential issues. He clings to the illusion that his mother is not mentally ill, and when that is crudely shattered, runs off to the only truly happy place he has known – Henry’s boat.

The film received next to no theatrical release, and still remains hard to locate. That’s a shame, as it’s a solid and well-made production, that deserves to be better known than its near-obscurity (it has less than 200 votes on the IMDb at the time of writing. You get the feeling Barbieri is perhaps writing about a topic of which he has personal experience, and there appears to be genuine passion brought to the results. This applies equally to Morgan and Kinski, who seem to be fully invested in their characters, and mention should also be made of Harry Gregson-Williams’s score, which does a good job of emphasizing the emotions involved, without overwhelming them. I must confess, I did find the ending a little too convenient for its own good, leaping straight into an ending that is also happier than much of the film would suggest. Although you are left uncertain as to whether Katie is “cured”, drugged into oblivion or merely enjoying one of her periodic upswings, as she stares out at the horizon from the boat.

In less sensitive hands, this could easily have toppled over into over-earnest schmaltz, or unconvincing soap-opera. Barbieri and his cast avoid either direction, and treat a sensitive topic with the necessary care to take the film’s somewhat clunky tagline, “Sometimes you must lose what you have… to find what you need”, and turn into something that actually makes sense by the time the end-credits roll.

Dir: Robert Wise
Star: Peter Falk, Aaron Meeks, Nastassja Kinski, Andrew McCarthy

This TV movie was the last thing to be directed by Wise before his death, and while it’s a long way short of the work for which he won multiple Oscars, running the gamut from The Haunting to The Sound of Music, it’s competent enough, helped immeasurably by a strong performance from Falk as grumpy deli owner Abel Shaddick. It’s a remake of a 1970 film; the original had Peter Ustinov in the central role, with the script for both written by Rod Serling, best known as the creator of The Twilight Zone. This is certainly nowhere near as dark or twisted; might have been kinda fun if there had been a reveal at the end, such as – oh, I don’t know – Shaddick being the Devil or something.

Instead, it’s an almost entirely predictable relationship drama. Set in 1969, the irascible Shaddick runs his deli in Fairview, a small town in upstate New York, and has almost no friends or family, his wife having died and his son having been killed late in World War II. The only person who hangs around is his ne’er-do-well nephew, Stanley (McCarthy), who stays with Abel in between get-rich-quick schemes. Seeking to impress at a party, Stanley signs up for a charity scheme which sends kids from the New York inner city out to stay for a couple of weeks vacation in places like Fairview. However, he immediately bails for Jersey City, leaving Abel to handle both the child, Herman D. Washington (Meeks), and Gloria Ross (Kinski), the local organizer of the project. Oh, and the kid is black and has baggage of his own; or, as Abel puts it, “I don’t need a three-foot tall, Ethiopian anti-Semite.”

If you’ve seen enough TV movies – and more than three is probably sufficient – you’ll be able to guess where this going. Herman is going to soften Abe’s glacial heart, and the two will come to appreciate each other, both learning to accept alternative personalities and lifestyles, overcoming the prejudices both of themselves and the local community, etc. etc.  And you will be exactly spot-on with your assessment. There isn’t a single moment here which is not telegraphed way in advance, whether it’s swimming at the local country club, or Herman’s brother fighting out in Vietnam. Really, given Serling’s amazing track record of inventive work, it’s hugely disappointing, although the race relations theme is one which was a frequent aspect, particularly in The Twilight Zone.

Fortunately, it’s salvaged by Falk, who manages to glue the lumpy and cliched aspects of the script together through his portrayal, which contrast the spiky exterior of Shaddick with the lonely old man inside. The first scene has him closing up the deli for the day, and complaining to a local cop, who is laughing hysterically at the old man; I’m not sure if this reaction was intended by Wise as a deliberate mis-step, because it’s wholly inappropriate, since Shaddick is clearly not kidding. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense at the time, and it’s only later you realize he genuinely seems to loathe his life. Of course, it takes that three-foot tall Ethiopian anti-Semite to reawaken the kinder, gentler Abe, be re-introducing him to simply joys like fishing.

For Kinski, this is a little bit of a reunion, bringing her back on screen with Falk, whom she acted alongside in Faraway, So Close. Also present, though the two don’t share any scenes, is Ruby Dee, who was Malcolm McDowell’s house-keeper in Cat People, and here plays Washington’s grandmother and guardian. The highlight, dramatically, is probably a scene where Gloria returns to the deli, and gets into a verbal fire-fight with Abe, each mounting a stoic and intransigent defense of their respective positions. The grumpy old man spits out lines such as “An act of kindness is not such a big deal when it comes in fashionable spasms during the social season,” the charitable young woman volleying back equally as hard. But it’s one of the rare cases Nastassja is in a film where she has absolutely no love interest at all. I was half-expecting her and McCarthy to get together at some point, but after Stanley has kicked off the plot, he all but vanishes from the movie.

Technically, it’s likely better than normal, and Wise takes care of proceedings with a necessarily lighter hand, turning the soft soap of the script into acceptable drama. On the other hand Cynthia Millar’s score, produced by another man with whom the Academy Awards are familiar, Elmer Bernstein, seems about as unsubtle as the story, full of violins swelling heavily to indicate when we should have the feels. I guess that kind of thing goes with the territory, I suppose, when you have a co-production between Showtime and Hallmark Entertainment. I suspect retaining the era of the original might have been a mis-step, since it robs the story of whatever contemporary power it might have at the time; it would have been quite easy to update it, say making Abe’s son killed in Vietnam and Washington’s brother fighting somewhere else. Most of the other aspects would have needed little tweaking at all – though these days, a man in his seventies taking a little kid to the movies could provoke calls to the cops!

As these things go though, it’s by no means bad. Falk is a pleasure to watch, even when he’s doing nothing more dramatic than chatting to the photo of his dead son. If there are few if any surprises to be had here, providing you aren’t expecting them, that doesn’t necessarily make for a unenjoyable time.

Dir: Chris Menges
Star: Daniel Auteuil, Ciarán Hinds, Marianne Denicourt, Nastassja Kinski

With the recent, ongoing scandal in the UK over paedophile sex rings run by the powerful, this film has acquired a topical aspect not present on its original release. Based on the novel of the same name by Eric Leclere (available as a free download from the publisher), it’s the story of somewhat scuzzy private eye Xavier Lombard, who had to abandon his job as a Parisian cop under murky circumstances, and is now operating out of London. He’s contacted by a former colleague in the French force, Carlos (Hinds), who is now working for the wealthy Spitz family – as well as married to their daughter, Deborah (Kinski). They are in need of Xavier’s services, because the family scion, Leon, has vanished without trace. This might just be his drug habit kicking in, but when Xavier tracks down Leon’s very scared girlfriend, it becomes apparent the waters are a great deal murkier than personal addiction.

The girlfriend gives Xavier a video tape, that starts out as an innocent fairy-tale, before suddenly becoming something far more sordid. He discovers Leon, a photographer, had rescued a young boy from a child sex ring, and sent him to the safety of his girlfriend, before vanishing entirely off the grid. With the help of a high-class call-girl he knew in Paris (Denicourt), our hero poses as a paedophile interested in the ring’s “product”, and finds himself crawling down into the sewers of that appalling and highly suspect, world. It’s a journey which will take him from London to Mexico and back, expose his past and put his friends in serious danger, because the people that run this kind of thing do not take kindly to outsiders. Especially when, like Lombard, they are trying to interfere with their highly lucrative business, or worse yet, expose it to any kind of public scrutiny. Even when the Spitz’s fire him, after discovering the nature of his Parisian history, Xavier won’t quit until he finds and stops both Friedman (Bruce Greenwood), the man behind the ring and ‘The Austrian’, the worst paedophile of them all.

All told, this is probably a movie which is better at descending into hell than in climbing out of it, reaching its likely nadir, emotionally, in a scene where Xavier has just rescued another victim of the ring, only to be confronted with a dead body of someone he knows. The difference in reactions between him and the boy, the latter completely burned-out of all human emotion, is utterly chilling; he just stands there, playing Tetris on his hand-held console, while that catchy little electronic ditty plays. I’ve now had the tune stuck in my brain for about the past three days, which keeps reminding me of the movie. And it’s not the kind of film you want to be reminded of, because it’s dealing with possibly the nastiest of topics, in a fairly unflinching and generally disturbing way.

Less convincing is the way Xavier turns into some kind of Charles Bronson, Death Wish, wannabe, trotting the globe to clean up the mean streets of Nogales, where Friedman has a farm devoted to his “cash crop.” The problem is, we first see Xavier following a man’s wife. When he finds out she is indeed having an affair, rather than reporting to his client, the husband, he blackmails the woman, causing her to conclude, “You’re not a very nice person.” Since it seems she’s right, his transformation into a moralistic avenging angel seems forced. Yes, his Parisian history and the events of the film provide a certain justification for it; however, there’s no obvious point at which he is faced with putting aside his previous self-interest, and it just happens, which renders it some way short of ringing true. He either needs to be more altruistic to begin with, which would likely ring false to the original source, or go through a bigger arc to get to the point where personal safety is no longer a concern.

According to the novel, Deborah is “as proud as her looks and as cold as the family’s money,” and Kinski certainly delivers on both those counts, playing the haughty, well-off daughter, whose relationships, both with her brother and her husband, are more complex than they initially seem. She attempts to take a moral stand against Xavier, citing his history as proof of his unsuitability for the task, but by this stage, he has his suspicions about her hidden agenda, and (as shown above) doesn’t fall for it. Right up to the end, the questions remain with regard to Deborah; how much does she actually know about what is going on? Is she the innocent she professes to be? As characters go, it’s one of her smaller roles, yet is certainly pivotal to proceedings, and helps to illustrate that outward appearance is no guide to true moral character.

Director Menges is better known as a cinematographer, having won an Academy Award for his work on The Killing Fields, and also worked for the likes of Neil Jordan, Sean Penn and Ken Loach. While he unquestionably brings a photographer’s eye to proceedings, he avoids the trap, which I’ve seen a few times with cinematographers turned directors, over valuing style over substance; it perhaps helped that this was his fourth (and so far, final) film as director. There’s a feeling of Gallic intensity to this, obviously powered by Auteuil, in his first fully-English language role, though it extends to the overall feel. Not quite sure about the Irish Hinds playing a supposed Brazilian. Still, all told, this is a solid piece of new noir, picking away the scab on a thoroughly unpleasant aspect of society, and doing so without resorting to sensationalism.

Dir: Willard Carroll
Star: Gillian Anderson, Ellen Burstyn, Sean Connery, Nastassja Kinski (uncredited)

The film admits the difficulty of what it’s trying to accomplish in the opening monologue, given by Angelina Jolie’s character, the punky extrovert Joan: “Talking about love,” she concludes, “Is like dancing about architecture.” [The latter provided the film’s original title, when it was playing the festival circuit] The film then spends the next two hours doing exactly that: talking about love. It’s certainly a challenging task, but the film approaches it from a plethora of different angles, which is probably a wise move: you may not find all of them interesting or relevant, but the odds are that a number will resonate with your personal experiences in some way. Much credit, I think, to Carroll for the script he also wrote, which does an exceptionally fine job of keeping its numerous balls in the air, and switching between them without losing narrative coherence, before bringing them all together for the final scene.

To get the (low) Kinski contribution out of the way before embarking on a more general coverage of the movie, she plays a lawyer who crosses paths in an upscale bar with Hugh (Dennis Quaid). He spins her a story about being a TV executive, whose wife and children have just left him, and whose life had revolved around a failed effort to revitalize the Thursday night schedule for his network. Which is odd, because the last time we saw him, he was in a different bar, spinning an entirely different tale of woe to another woman, about how he killed his wife and child in a car-accident. Hmmm. Odder still, the same lady who was watching in the bar there, is now also watching him here. Hugh then moves on to a drag bar, and tells a third different saga there. What the heck is going on?

There is actually a solid enough explanation, though to be honest, it perhaps backfires a bit, since it casts more than a little doubt on the emotional honesty of everyone else. That impairs the effectiveness, since the audience needs to buy into these characters, rather than be wary of them. I think Carroll is perhaps being over cautious and hedging his bets, as with the opening monologue, basically apologizing for the rest of the film. He needs to be more confident in his characters and the script and performances abilities to make them interesting. Indeed, the sheer volume of different angles also perhaps suggests something similar, along the lines of, “Don’t like these characters? Wait, wait – there’ll be some other ones along in just a minute!” And that isn’t actually the case, because the majority have something interesting to say.

Which ones work, however, is almost entirely subjective, since as already noted, some will be closer in line with your own thoughts, expectations and romantic history. Interestingly though, despite the drag queen’s presence, it is entirely about male-female relationships. There is one guy who is dying of AIDS, but that one is focused on his relationship with his mother [As an aside, what was it with Kinski and movies in which people get AIDS? I lived in London for the entirety of the nineties, and as far as I am aware, never knew anyone who was even HIV positive. Yet her characters appear to share movies with them frequently. Guess I was just moving in the wrong circles. Or, possibly, this is a case of film makers liking to make a drama out of a topical crisis, especially one affecting many people in its own house.]

Personally, the pairing which I liked best – and which I would have been happy to see as the focus of a standalone feature – was Paul (Connery) and Hannah (Gena Rowlands). They have just received some devastating news of their own, but Paul insists that life goes on, exactly as before. Their relationship is one born of decades of familiarity with each other. It’s not perfect, and has static – there is clear indication of that, based on simmering resentment over an incident a couple of decades ago- but no relationship ever is, and they clearly do love each other very, very much. That’s clear when they exchange vows during their marriage renewal ceremony at the end, having been told to come up with one sentence to sum up their relationship.

Hannah: “You are the tenant of my heart: often behind in the rent, but impossible to evict.”
Paul: “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it any different.”

I’ve been married for 14 years now, and I wouldn’t do it any different either: I hope that remains the case when I become Connery’s age then, in another 14!

That is just one of the range of stories present here. Other run the gamut from the young and photogenic, such as Jolie and Ryan Phillipe’s tale of damaged people finding each other, through a married woman (Madeleine Stowe) having an affair with a man (Anthony Edwards) for purely physical reasons, only for him to want more, on to the previously mentioned thread about a mother (Burstyn) and hers AIDS-stricken son (Jay Mohr). It certainly qualifies as looking to have something for everything, and I think it works, though it’s arguably rather too talky – most people I know would rather gnaw their own limbs off than talk about their feelings, or worse still, listen to someone else do so. But, hey, I’m British, so what do I know? Much credit is due to Carroll for putting together one hell of a cast, even including Jon Stewart, in a rare “acting” role; given this was only the director’s second movie, I’m nor sure how he managed that, though he does seem to have been in the business, mostly as a producer for a lot longer.

Kinski’s brief presence, while welcome, is odd because it’s entirely uncredited, and I’ve not been able to shed any light on the reason why, or how she became involved in the project either. No matter, for after the previous couple of entries, it’s a refreshingly warm look at human nature and behavior, rather than trying to rub our noses in the grubbier side of relationships and the actions they provoke.

Dir: John Landis
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Billy Zane, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rob Schneider
a.k.a. Dying to Get Rich… Susan’s Plan

If you can imagine a comedic version of Your Friends and Neighbors, you will be somewhere in the ballpark as to how much of an abject failure this is. You have virtually the same level of repellent characters, only instead of offering an unpleasant and acerbic commentary on the shallow and banal nature of modern life, they are mugging it up and playing the situation in increasingly desperate attempts for laughs. The aim appears to be “black comedy,” with Susan (Kinski) and her pals plotting the murder of her ex-husband, Paul (Adrian Paul), in order to profit from the insurance. However, the incompetence of the two hit-men (Schneider and Michael Biehn) leave their target only wounded, and potentially able to identify his attackers to the cops who are investigating the shooting. To avoid this, they engage the services of biker Bob (Dan Aykroyd), only for him to demand an increase in his fee when he discovers the incompetence of those who have hired him.

If you want to see this kind of thing done right, watch Fargo – either the movie or the surprisingly impressive TV series. The key difference is that there, significant effort is first made to make the characters performing these reprehensible deeds, sympathetic to the viewer. Jerry Lundegaard is, at heart, a good man, doomed by bad choices. Susan Holland, on the other hand, is first introduced planning Paul’s demise, with no background or motive for this offered, leaving her to come across as a scheming bitch, and given the lack of justification for her kill order, a borderline psychopath. No-one else appears to have any other significant motive apart from money, though sex may be a secondary consideration for some, mostly keyed off Betty Johnson (Boyle) who appears to have bedded the majority of men here, at some point or other. This relentlessly shallow depiction of womanhood could be seen as misogynistic – except, the men are no better.

It’s possible this could have worked, with the right cast, but virtually no-one has any feeling or flair for humor, or the necessary sense of timing to nurse the pitiably weak material to life. [There’s a major set-piece based around farting in a closet. Oh, hold my aching sides, for I fear they may split…] While far from Landis’s first stab at comedy, his other forays such as Trading Places or National Lampoon’s Animal House were blessed with far better comedic talent, in Eddie Murphy and John Belushi respectively. The chasm between those two and Rob Schneider hardly needs to be detailed. About the only person here who has any kind of feel for the genre is Aykroyd, reunited with Landis after their previous work together on The Blues Brothers and Spies Like Us, as well as Places. He brings Bob to life, in a way that makes the character far more memorable than anyone else in the cast, even though his screen time is trivial in comparison.

About the only chunk which works, semi-successfully, is the use of dream sequences to show how Susan and her collaborators fear things will go down. These are seamlessly integrated into the film, in a way not dissimilar to the classic example in Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, and is actually moderately effective the first time it’s used. Unfortunately, like the painful characters and the nonsensical plot, it’s a device that outstays its welcome.  Otherwise, this was the second horrendous misfire of 1998 for Landis – he also directed Blues Brothers 2000 the same year – this ended up being dumped straight to video 18 months after its premiere at the AFI Film Festival. It may also be indicative that Susan’s Plan was also the director’s last foray into narrative features for more a decade, not returning until 2010’s Burke and Hare.

As for Kinski… Well, let’s just say, there’s good reason her career has focused on drama. To her credit, though, she seems to have realized that comedy is not her strong suit, and this failure remains a nearly unique aberration in her filmography. While there are the occasional other attempts at the lighter side of cinema, these were mostly early in her career, such as Passion Flower Hotel, or where she was playing a straight foil to the funny guys, e.g. Billy Crystal and Robin Williams in Fathers’ Day, or Dudley Moore in Unfaithfully Yours rather than having to do the heavy lifting. For comedy is not easy: I know this, courtesy of a son who has dabbled, semi-professionally, in stand-up, and so I have some awareness that, while the best may make it look effortless, that’s along the same lines as figure-skating and lion-taming. Not everyone can be a great, or even good, comic actor; fewer still can manage to be great at both comedy and drama.

And you know what? That’s perfectly okay. Being aware of your weaknesses, as well as your strengths, is an essential part of a successful acting career – though there’s nothing wrong with stretching yourself, and going outside your comfort zone. What’s painful, is an actor or actress who refuses to acknowledge their limits, and continues ramming their head into them like an aggrieved billy-goat: think Keanu Reeves’s frequent attempts to be a Serious Actor, when he is far better suited for action films like John Wick. Kinski’s subsequent career made no repeat of the questionable choices we see here, heading back into the dramatic territory for which her talents are undoubtedly better-suited. Fair enough. She gave it a shot, it didn’t work out, and we’ll all move on. If Nastassja ever thinks of trying her hand in the genre again, 90 minutes spent watching this should dissuade her, and will be time admirably well-spent.

Dir: Neil LaBute
Star: Amy Brenneman, Aaron Eckhart, Catherine Keener, Nastassja Kinski

“What are we looking at here, huh? Lace and language aside, in the end, it’s actually men and women. Right? Just like any other story. Like every story, ultimately, what do these characters want? I know. It’s embarrassing for you to say, but let’s be honest. They wanna… Fuck. Correct? It’s always about fucking.”

The movie’s second scene has college drama professor Jerry (Ben Stiller) breaking down a restoration comedy for his class, but it might as well be LaBute talking directly to the audience, and telling them what the rest of the movie is going to be about. And, Christ, is it a soul-sucking experience. Not that this is a “bad” film: you can see why Stiller, Keener and Eckhart have all become much more famous than they were at the time this was made. LaBute, too, is certainly one of America’s foremost dramatists, though his movie work has been, to be kind, uneven, as anyone who sat through his re-invention of The Wicker Man can attest. This certainly isn’t anywhere near that. However, In ten words or less: this is unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other.

Make no mistake though: this is what LaBute does, has done and, I’ve little doubt will continue to do. LaBute’s cynical dislike for humanity – one critic called him “a misanthrope who assumes that only callous and evil people who use and abuse others can survive in this world.” – shines through virtually every frame of this 100 minutes. But this doesn’t mean I necessarily want to wallow down there with him, venomously scripted and vengefully acted this may be. Now, it’s not as if I require all my films to be Disney-fied, or anything close to it: I could happily come up with an eloquent defense of some utterly brutal movies like Martyrs [though you’ll have to look elsewhere]. But if I’m going to peer into the abyss, I want to be repaid for my time with some kind of insight into…. something. I’m really not too picky. Yet I come out the end of this no better informed, lacking in education and certainly not entertained.

I’m sure it was intended as some kind of scathing critique of self-absorbed assholes, whose interests are largely limited to themselves. But merely depicting self-absorbed assholes, of a kind with which I am quite familiar [I worked for the IT department of a stock trading company in the City of London during the ‘Big Bang’ of the 90’s; I know a thing or two about self-absorbed assholes], does not count as any kind of critique, let alone scathing. As well as Jerry, there is his wife Terri (Keener), and the first thing we hear from her is complaints about Jerry’s vocal tendencies during sex, which she finds distracting. She ends up cheating on him with artist’s assistant Cheri (Kinski), on whom all the male members of the cast also hit, in the same place, to somewhat different effect. These variations on a theme is about the only sequence which seemed to have a demonstrable point.

The counterpoint is another loose triangle of rhyming names: husband and wife Barry (Eckhart) and Mary (Brenneman), plus defiantly single Cary (Jason Patric), a ruthless predator. That married pair is no happier, and Jerry puts a tentacle out to Mary, leading to an assignation in a hotel room, although this doesn’t go well or bring either party the slightest bit of happiness. Jerry is unable to perform sexually, and Mary is dismayed when her husband subsequently brings her to exactly the same spot, hoping to rekindle their romance – apparently at the suggestion of Jerry. Cary, meanwhile, may be the biggest turd of them all; during a discussion with Jerry and Berry, he virtually boasts about raping a (male) schoolmate, calling it the “best fuck” he ever had. While extreme, that’s another pattern here: none of the characters demonstrate the slightest regret about their actions, regardless of their impact on anyone else. There’s no karmic retribution to be found here either; the film ends with the deck of relationship cards somewhat shuffled, but no suggestion anyone has learned anything from their experiences.

It does possess an unblinking ferocity, mostly in Cary’s character, who appears about the thickness of a Phil Collins’ CD from going entirely American Psycho, as in when he berates for of his conquests for getting blood on his high thread-count sheets. He does, at least, have an honesty about him, and does not care what you think. Compared to him, the rest of the cast are milquetoasts.  LaBute appears to be aiming to occupy similar territory as David Mamet, another director whose true passion appears to lie in live theater, but who can unflinchingly turn an extremely chilly eye on relationships and the carnage which results from them. However, he is far less cynical, and is willing to depict the good as well as the bad: in his films, people may do bad things, but their motivations are not so arbitrarily selfish as here.

I note the careful lack of any specific location for this: it could be New York, Los Angeles or anywhere in between, and the title appears to be suggesting that the people portrayed are just like the viewers. Their names are not even revealed during the film, not that they matter. I read some reviews which described this in terms like, “savagely funny,” which seemed so incredibly wide of the mark I had to check there weren’t two films with the same title. Because I actually found this entirely joyless and mostly depressing, a bleak nihilistic experience provoking as much genuine emotional reaction as a porn loop. The late Roger Ebert said of this, “It’s the kind of date movie that makes you want to go home alone.” Alternatively, it’s the kind of date movie that makes you very glad to be in a relationship which is absolutely nothing at all like those pictured.

Dir: Peter Antonijevic
Star: Dennis Quaid, Nataša Ninković, Sergej Trifunović, Nastassja Kinsi

Nastassja’s character dies in this one. That doesn’t count as any significant spoiler, since her death takes place a scant four minutes and thirty-eight seconds after the production company logo appears on the screen, about three and half minutes before her name has even appeared in the credits. There, her name appears immediately after Quaid’s, and as shown below, in virtually the same size font: given this, I spent the rest of the film waiting for her to make a re-appearance, perhaps in some kind of flashback sequence. I needn’t have bothered. She gets exactly two scenes: one in a church, listening to a sermon, immediately followed by the other in a Parisian restaurant. There, her embassy-employed husband Joshua Rose (Quaid) shows up, for a family outing, only to be called back to work. Barely is he inside the door of the embassy, however, when a bomb explosion tears apart the restaurant, killing both wife and son. Exit Nastassja, likely wondering if she can reach the bank to cash her check before it closes.

The incident unhinges Rose, and he subsequently shoots up a mosque, blaming Muslim terrorists for the incident. Whisked out of Paris, he joins the French Foreign Legion under an assumed name, and is sent to the disintegrating state of Yugoslavia, where he can continue killing Muslims to his heart’s content. However, the atrocities committed by fellow soldier Goran (Trifunović) prove too much, even for Rose: when Goran brutally assaults a pregnant woman (Ninković), Rose shoots him. The woman, Vera, gives birth shortly after, but refuses to care for the baby, because it’s the result of her being raped by Muslim soldiers. Rose, thus, finds himself the unwilling foster parent of the newborn child, and has to tend the infant while taking both it and Vera through the war-torn countryside, in search of a secure place where he can leave both mother and child, without feeling too guilty about it. That task is made much trickier, after Vera is rejected by her family.

Yeah, if I seem kinda bitter, it’s the bait and switch performed by the movie. Is this site called dennis.quaid.us? I think not. So, watching him stagger around the disintegrating Balkans, wailing baby in tow, is not something which would generally be high on my list of chosen leisure activities. It’s such a painfully earnest and obvious film, especially once the baby shows up: Rose’s path to redemption will be strewn with dirty diapers. This is a shame, since the start certainly packs a wallop: I can’t say the restaurant blowing up came as an enormous surprise, there’s something about the way the scene is set up, and the almost saintly way in which Nastassja is depicted, that is close to painting a bulls-eye on he back. It’s similar to the way, when a soldier in a war film starts showing around photos of his wife and kids back home, you just know they’re not going to make it to the end of the movie. Still: less than five minutes? Should have merited an “and Nastassja Kinski,” or even a “with Nastassja Kinski” in the credits, not second billing. This is me shaking my fist in disapproval.

While I’m here, I suppose I might as well mention the rest of the film. When your hero walks into a mosque and opens fire on innocent Muslims, it certainly digs a deep hole for the audience’s sympathies towards him, and I was curious to see how the script would get him out of it. The solution was mostly to put him beside someone even worse, in the shape of Goran, who thinks nothing about cutting off the finger of an old, bed-ridden Croatian woman, because he wants the ring she has on. Or repeatedly kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach, because she has been “defiled” by being raped. Yeah, that makes him a much worse person than Rose. But, conversely, it also makes him a much more interesting one. We know why Rose is the way he is. What could possibly have brought Goran. to a point where these kind of actions are something he can perform without a second thought? Well, we’ll never know, as a burst of gunfire from Rose draws all speculation to a premature close, and we’re left to follow the path taken by second-most evil person in the movie instead.

I have a cheerful aversion to babies – I was fortunate enough to marry someone whose kids were already in progress, so I happily got to miss out entirely on the stage where they are basically machines for generating excrement. Initially, Rose seems to share this disdain, but inevitably, his heart eventually melts, and he shows himself prepared to risk his own life to save that of the child. Though personally, I’d have been more impressed, had he taken responsibility for the act of mass slaughter which he committed in Paris, and accepted the consequences: saving one kid doesn’t seem to me to be more than a token gesture at balancing the moral scales of his previous acts. As Shakespeare put it, “I am in blood stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Except, Rose decides to return, and yeah, the journey back does turn to be largely tedious. The only sequence with any power has a Serbian militia stopping a bus, escorting the passengers off and… It’s not pleasant. Let’s leave it at that. The feeling this atrocity is an everyday thing for the perpetrators, is chilling indeed.

It doesn’t seem particularly even-handed, concentrating more on the Serbs, with the Croats mostly the victims. But that’s not among the film’s major flaws, when put beside its simplistic morality and unengaging execution, in which men are little more than Neanderthals, and women saintly baby-producers. Produced by Oliver Stone, a man not exactly noted for subtlety [much though I live the polemic shriek that is Natural Born Killers], I didn’t reach the trite and implausible ending feeling enlightened or emotionally challenged in the slightest. War is hell, m’kay? But anyone with two brain cells to rub together doesn’t need a Dennis Quaid, even one seeking redemption for a dead Nastassja, to tell you that.

Dir: Erich Breuer
Star: Axel Jodorowsky, Nastassja Kinski

This 17-minute short film took three years to produce, with over 20,000 images being manipulated to create the animation, with no computer effects. It’s part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What’s it about? I told you: it’s about 17 minutes. You want more? For safety, I think I will defer the synopsis listed in the IMDb, as being more likely accurate than anything with which I could come up.

On stormy night in an ugly urban landscape, Ciro Norte (Jodorowsky), a scientist with wild hair and thick glasses, straps himself to a chair he’s has fashioned with wires: lightening strikes, convulsing him. It seems his experiment has not worked. The next day, he drives his jalopy to a bar, sits alone, and weeps. But suddenly, a vortex sucks him into a dream state where he wanders, escapes man-eating fish, confronts his doppelganger, walks through a field of giant flowers, and comes upon Venus herself (Kinski), buried up to her shoulders in sand. She is a giant, and she takes him to her breast. He wakes from the vortex, back in the bar, his mood transformed.

Yeah, it’s kinda like that. Jodorowsky is the son of infamous film-maker Alexander Jodorowsky, maker of impenetrable cult epic El Topo (as well as the somewhat more accessible Santa Sangre, which starred Axel). Jodorowsky Sr was also at one point during the seventies, working on an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which would certainly have been… interesting. There’s a sense of the same surrealist approach here, though Breuer is perhaps equally inspired by the works of German expressionist cinema such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. This may be simply a result of the black and white, siilent approach Breuer uses in the early going. Things get a lot more colorful, once Norte is sucked through into the other world – as an aside, I didn’t particularly get the impression it was a dream state, it felt more like another dimension [with Norte being chased by giant, predatory fish creatures, I got more of a From Beyond vibe, to be honest]

Quite how or why this becomes Attack of the 50-foot Nastassja, I’m not sure, and I would clarify that the “takes him to her breast” mentioned is intended as much in a spiritual sense, fitting in with her character being Venus, the goddess of love. It’s an odd if memorable piece of work, working much better as a visual tour de force, than anything resembling narrative coherence, and is best approached in that manner, as a 17-minute helping of eye-candy. That running time probably represents the limit of my attention span for this kind of thing, and I’ll confess to having checked a couple of times here to see how much longer there was left to go: a feature-length movie in this style would be hard pounding indeed. Mind you, I never liked El Topo either. The film is, for now, available on Vimeo, and has been embedded below. Your mileage may vary…

Dir: Mike Figgis
Star: Wesley Snipes, Nastassja Kinski, Ming-Na Wen, Kyle McLachlan

“The woman she plays resembles a star, With one look, she lights up Wesley’s night. She is fragile and yet a hunter, dominating and perhaps dangerous.”
— Mike Figgis

The original idea for the film was by notorious sleaze-master Joe Eszterhas, who sold a four-page outline for $4 million in 1994, at a point when his star was still high after the huge success of Basic Instinct. Initially, the plan was for Adrian Lyne to direct but he bailed the following year, opting to kill his career with Lolita instead. Mike Figgis, then a hot property after Leaving Las Vegas. came on board, and with Eszterhas no longer in Hollywood’s good graces, after bombs like Jade and Showgirls, Figgis was given permission for a rewrite. And I mean, a radical one. According to the LA Times, the first 65 pages of Eszterhas’s version”are given over to an Olympic decathlon-style sexual encounter between the couple, with almost as much trash talk about sex as sex itself.” After reading the final shooting script, the original author requested the removal of his name – though Eszterhas kept the cash, naturally.

The final version had advertising director Max Carlyle (Snipes) on business in New York, when he encounters a literal rocket-scientist, Karen (Kinski), by chance. After he misses his flight, he ends up attending a concert with her, and the pair then have to handle a mugging attempt on the streets back to the hotel. Max chivalrously agrees to sit with Karen, but the inevitable happens: which would be the film’s title, if you hadn’t already guessed. Returning to Los Angeles and wife Mimi (Wen), Max is restless and distracted, though keeps quiet about his East coast escapade. However, he can’t hide forever, and when he and Mimi return to New York, where Max’s former best friend Charlie (Robert Downey, Jr.) is dying of AIDS, it turns out Karen is now married to Charlie’s brother, Vernon (McLachlan). Awkward…

There’s a three-act structure here. The first depicts the combination of circumstances which lead to Max and Karen hooking up. The second has the impact of this on Max, as he gradually realizes he is not as satisfied with his life as he initially states in his opening monologue to the camera. The third is, by and large, an extremely extended death scene for Charlie, stretched out over more than 30 minutes, and the impact this has on Max, who comes to the conclusion that existence is too short to spend with the wrong person, and seeks to rekindle things with Karen. Everything comes to a point at Charlie’s wake, where that spark becomes a bit of a raging inferno, but there’s a twist which, it has to be said, did not ring true, and seems like the kind of thing which only occurs in Hollywood movies [the same goes for Karen marrying the brother of Max’s best friend. Really, what are the odds?]. It does, however, set up a final coda, that tidies up the loose ends of the various relationships adequately, though I fear for their longer-term survival chances.

If I’ve some doubts about the plot, these are somewhat countered by fine performances all round. It’s a fairly high-profile cast assembled by Figgis, likely helped by his recent Oscar nominations for writing and directing Leaving Las Vegas: Downey was at the height of his legal troubles, but was, according the director, no problem on the set here. Other names you may recognize include Julian Sands. Amanda Donohoe, Ione Skye, Xander Berkeley and Saffron Burrows – Figgis himself cameos as a hotel clerk. Good performances from these names are unsurprising: getting them from Snipes is rather more so. Much as I love Wesley – Blade 2 is one of my favorite action/horror movies of all time and Demolition Man is another classic – he’s likely known far less for his acting, than his conviction on federal tax evasion charges. Here, he is certainly portrayed in a sympathetic manner – not that you could really blame any man for cheating on his wife with Nastassja – and I liked how the script took its time putting him in bed with Karen. It wasn’t a case of just a drunken fumble, but the glacially inevitable result (given the film’s title) of a number of unfortunate decisions, each of them likely entirely innocuous on their own.

Kinski was always the director’s first choice, and if anyone is going to be the agent that could destroy a marriage, albeit unwittingly, she’s a fine selection. But I wonder about the wisdom of the choice somewhat, paired with an African-American actor like Snipes. This introduces an inter-racial element to proceedings, enhanced by Wen’s presence as Max’s wife, to which the film is completely oblivious. While refreshing in many ways, it’s an elephant in the room which needed to be addressed. Instead, the film heads off into a lot of footage of Charlie sinking into death: at the time this was originally released, as a young and single man, this was the segment that stuck with me most. However, in hindsight, and now as a happily-married person, it seems unnecessarily melodramatic, though Downey’s performance remains good. From my current perspective, it’s Max’s decision to sabotage everyone else’s happiness in pursuit of his own which is most troubling, coming over as selfish, and only salvaged by the freakishly convenient way things turn out.

Despite solid acting, it’s not much of a surprise the film was a critical and commercial flop. While Leaving Las Vegas is 89% fresh at RottenTomatoes.com and made back nine times its (small) budget at the North American box-office, Stand took in barely one-tenth of its $24 million cost, with only 28% of reviews being positive. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it , “an astonishingly dopey middle-age male fantasy,” and that’s fair criticism. Whatever flaws may have been in the original script submitted by Joe Eszterhas, they can hardly have been any more glaring that the ones present here. This demonstrates one of the potential problems when directors decide they can write better than writers, especially when no-one apparently dares yank the reins and tell them otherwise.